FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

Tech

The Cool Breeze of the Hottest August in Recorded History

The warmest August in recorded history felt to me like a breezy afternoon in the middle of fall.
Image: Flickr

Most of the hottest August in recorded history felt to me like a breezy afternoon in the middle of fall. I was comfortable in jeans most days. My shirt didn't cling to a sweaty swamp of my back after a walk to the deli. It only got too hot not to want to venture outdoors a couple times. The infamously moist, stinking, and smog-laced New England city summer was elusive, and thank god.

But this is the vicious sporadicity of climate change, that tempts the scientifically resistant into cognitive dissonance. It was still the hottest August in recorded history, worldwide, according to NASA, according to facts. The temperature records date back to 1880, and August 2014 was the hottest August in at least 134 years, probably more.

Advertisement

It was hot in the American Southwest, where record drought was busy baking California like a carwash rag left out on the sidewalk all day. But the hottest heat was elsewhere—in the Middle East, where intense heat wrapped itself around the most brutal conflict in the world; in Australia, where Perth saw the hottest August on record; in western Mexico, Saharan Africa, and the Caucasus.

NASA

Places like those are where the records broke; in Antarctica, they shattered. There, in the great icy south that isn't quite as icy as it used to be, temperatures climbed to 8˚C hotter than usual. It's hot enough in the region that massive, once-permanent ice sheets are melting. Some scientists say 10 feet of sea level rise is inevitable from that melt alone.

That is the climate reality, my idyll was a stroke of luck.

Parts of the Eastern Seaboard were spared, as were swaths of China and Japan, even bits of Australia. While the Aussie's south was hotter than ever, the north was colder than usual—again, it's the cruelty of climate change.

In East Coast cities like New York, it wasn't uncommon to hear people remarking on the delightful, uncharacteristically cool weather. But it isn't strange. The physicist and climate advocate Joe Romm points out that it wasn't even uniquely cool at all—it was "just 'normal' or very close to the 1951-1980 average over most of the US," he wrote. "But we've become so used to the 'new normal' of global warming that when the old normal returns locally, it feels unnaturally cool."

Climatologists have called the withering droughts and the raging wildfires a window into the climate-changed future. This mild, cool-feeling summer, then, was a window into a quickly-fading past. I'm going to miss the old normal. I'm going to miss the cool breeze of the hottest August in recorded history.