Hot sunshine with just a whisper of a faint breeze just short of the noon hour here in California’s Central Valley — we’re still rocking along with a prolonged heat event (now a couple of weeks old) expected to last until this coming weekend.
Although cooler today — 109 degrees vs yesterday’s 111 — the air still feels like you’re wading through a weird, abstract oil painting with colors melting into each other. Yeah, too much outside time can erupt logical thought.

In the wake of historic high temperatures (PBS):

An excessive heat warning — the National Weather Service’s highest alert — was in effect for about 36 million people, or about 10 percent of the population, said NWS meteorologist Bryan Jackson. Dozens of locations in the West and Pacific Northwest tied or broke previous heat records.

That was certainly the case over the weekend: Many areas in Northern California surpassed 110 degrees F (43.3 C), with the city of Redding topping out at a record 119 F (48.3 C). Phoenix set a new daily record Sunday for the warmest low temperature: it never got below 92 F (33.3 C).

A high temperature of 128 F (53.3 C) was recorded Sunday at Death Valley National Park in eastern California, where a visitor died from heat exposure and another person was hospitalized, officials said

And only to get worse:

Excessive Heat Warnings continue for California, Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Nevada, Arizona, & Utah as a relentless heat dome continues across the Western US.#ClimateShiftIndex shows this extreme heat was made 3x-5x more likely due to climate change
?? https://t.co/BeVqyJ4CFm pic.twitter.com/LgjfzX6yUZ

— Climate Central (@ClimateCentral) July 8, 2024

All part of a horrible future — via Reuters this morning:

Last month was the hottest June on record, the EU’s climate change monitoring service said on Monday, continuing a streak of exceptional temperatures that some scientists said puts 2024 on track to be the world’s hottest recorded year.

Every month since June 2023 – 13 months in a row – has ranked as the planet’s hottest since records began, compared with the corresponding month in previous years, the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) said in a monthly bulletin.

The latest data suggest 2024 could outrank 2023 as the hottest year since records began after human-caused climate change and the El Nino natural weather phenomenon both pushed temperatures to record highs in the year so far, some scientists said.

“I now estimate that there is an approximately 95% chance that 2024 beats 2023 to be the warmest year since global surface temperature records began in the mid-1800s,” said Zeke Hausfather, a research scientist at U.S. non-profit Berkeley Earth.

[…]

C3S’ dataset goes back to 1940, which the scientists cross-checked with other data to confirm that last month was the hottest June since the 1850-1900 pre-industrial period.
Greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels are the main cause of climate change.

Despite promises to curb global warming, countries have so far failed collectively to reduce these emissions, pushing temperatures steadily higher for decades.

In the 12 months ending in June, the world’s average temperature was the highest on record for any such period, at 1.64 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial average, C3S said.

Further insight on this terrible shit from Brenda Ekwurzel, a senior climate scientist with the Union of Concerned Scientists (LA Times, also this morning): ‘“It is worth noting for humanity — for all life on the planet — that we have been hovering around what the Paris agreement set as a threshold, and this may be the first year of that 10-year average … It means that we have already logged one year in that logbook … The Earth and ocean and atmosphere are telling us that we have to act really fast if we have any chance, and many, many, many people are losing hope … We’d better be adapting to this 1.5-C world. Many people say this is the coolest decade, probably, of the 21st century.”‘

Video per the Associated Press:

Sinking in, or some CGI for the future in non-CGI:

Canary in boiling water, or not, yet here we are once again…

(Illustration out front: Salvador Dali’s ‘Soft Watch at the Moment of First Explosion,’ found here.)