Page 5 - A Hot Mess: How the Climate Crisis Is Changing Our World

spent many years and many millions of dollars trying to spread
skepticism, and social media algorithms have made it easy for bad
actors to pass along lies and misleading information. (Don’t worry;
we’ll debunk a lot of that throughout this book.) While this chapter
will be brief, it’s worth providing a quick overview of the science.
Climate change is real. Humans are causing most of it and are
making it substantially worse as time goes on. And even in a best-
case scenario, it’s going to dramatically change the way we live.
If summers feel warmer to you now than they did when you
were a little kid, that’s not your memory playing tricks on you. The
twenty hottest years on record in human history all happened after
1998. The ten hottest have all come since 2005 and the top seven
since 2014.
That research comes directly from the National Aeronautics
and Space Administration (NASA) and the National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the US government agencies
that track climate change. The reality is that since people started
studying the annual global temperature in the late 1800s, it’s gone
up dramatically. And in 2018, the United Nations Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warned that the worst impacts of
climate change will definitely occur if we allow the planet to get more
than 2.7°F (1.5°C) hotter than it was before the Industrial Revolution
started in the 1700s. We’re already past 1.8°F (1°C) hotter, or about
two-thirds of the way there. Don’t forget; that warning is about
preventing the most catastrophic outcomes. Plenty of awful things
have already happened, and more will happen even if we manage to
avoid the catastrophe level.
The summer of 2019 brought unprecedented temperatures,
with June and then July setting records for the hottest month yet.
A heatwave in Europe that summer broke national records in at
least five countries, killed more than twenty-five hundred people
and thousands of farm animals, and overheated much of the

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