Record Heat Is Your Climate Chart of the Year

The lasting legacy of climate change will be heat. The land, the oceans, all of it. It’s the tie that binds and while the global average temperature is the defining metric, the increasing incidence of heat waves and longer lasting extreme heat is how the world will experience it. All eight papers dealing with extreme heat events in this year’s

Residents of much of the eastern U.S. spent November wondering if they had been transported back to September, as temperatures for much of the month were decidedly un-November-like. In fact, several cities in the East saw their warmest November on record, flipping on its head the “warm west, cold east” pattern that dominated the first half of the

The U.S. West was once again a land of extremes in July. From Alaska to the Pacific Northwest, July was unusually hot, with some spots recording daily and monthly heat records, while other parts of California got a rare deluge. The heat across much of the West has done no favors for the deep drought and has helped to fuel a surge in wildfires

Extreme weather events such as droughts, heat waves and torrential rainfalls are the most powerful and obvious reminders that the climate is changing. These disasters were happening long before humans started pumping heat-trapping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, but global warming has tipped the odds in their favor. A devastating heat wave