You Have Officially Lived Through the Hottest May Ever Recorded

Congratulations: If you are reading this page and you are not a spambot, you just lived through the hottest May ever recorded. Today, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration became the third major climate-monitoring agency to confirm that last month was the most scorching May, globally, on the books. There was a little confusion over some omitted data from China, but NOAA's analysis confirms the gloomy milestone.

It was hotter than average on both the East and West Coasts of the US: In California, drought and aridity had already been the norm for months; West Coasters had some unhappy prep time for the burning May. On the East Coast, it seemed like a dreary, neverending winter skipped spring altogether and lurched directly into a humid, armpit-resembling summer.

Either way, it was hot. And it's not just the US that saw the record fry, by a long shot. Parts of Europe, the Middle East, Australia, and the planet's poles were also hosts to the unwelcome warm.

According to NOAA, "the globally averaged temperature over land and ocean surfaces for May 2014 was the highest for May since record keeping began in 1880." This follows similar findings from both NASA and the Japan Meteorological Agency, the latter of which declared the whole of spring 2014 the hottest ever.

This isn't surprising, of course. Records like this are broken with a regularity that we could almost call mundane if the implications for a cooked planet weren't so persistently disturbing.

For a frame of reference, NOAA reminds us just how typical this hotter-than-average month procession has become: "It also marked the 39th consecutive May and 351st consecutive month with a global temperature above the 20th century average. The last below-average global temperature for May occurred in 1976 and the last below-average temperature for any month occurred in February 1985."

It has been nearly 30 years since the world experienced a cooler-than-usual month (measured against the 20th century average), and nearly 40 since we saw a cooler May. This is the sweat-stained face of climate change—robbing us of spring and parching our throats, and promising a lot more where that came from.