The hottest days on record have been this week

“It was getting hotter.”

-Kim Stanley Robinson,
Ministry for the Future (2020),
opening line

Greetings from early, very hot July here in the eastern United States.

My apologies for not blogging much the past few weeks, but things have been chaotic here. My wife and I celebrated our 30th wedding anniversary. My father died in Michigan at 91. A series of professional projects grew in size and complexity.

And around all of this wildfire smoke spread, and then the temperature rose. This week the University of Maine’s Climate Reanalyzer project tracked the hottest global temperatures on record:

As always, I turn to the climate crisis’ essential bard, Bill McKibben:

Monday July 3 was the hottest day anyone had ever measured on planet earth. True, our system for measuring the global average temperature — a network of weather stations, ocean buoys, and satellites — only dates back to 1979, but that means that at a bare minimum it was the hottest day a large majority of the earth’s population had ever been alive to witness. And in truth, we have good proxy records — things like ice cores and tree rings — that take that record far back in time.

Put another way:

The best estimate of climate…