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. The best estimate of climate scientists is that Monday was the hottest day since sometime in the last interglacial period 125,000 years ago, right about the time that other scientists think humans etched the first symbols onto bone and started wearing shells as decorations. In other words, a pretty significant record.
A pretty significant record that lasted 24 hours.
As of now, July 4 is the new record holder, (editor’s note: a record July 5 tied), with 57 million Americans under an extreme heat watch, China enduring an epic heat wave, and temperatures in North Africa nearing 122°F. Saudi authorities had been reporting scorching heat for the hajj all week, the mercury was spiking in Greenland, and at least one research station in the Antarctic was reporting a new July record as winter temperatures there reached well into the 40s.
We also got the news that June 2023 was the hottest June ever recorded on our Earth, crushing the old record (set in 2019) by what one scientist called a “staggering” 0.16°C, and likely putting this year on the path to being the warmest ever measured. June found both ice caps setting new records for the lowest sea ice ever measured, and sea surface temperatures were at an all-time high. Canada’s wildfires were already smashing annual records with many months yet to burn; in Siberia authorities declared a state of emergency as blazes spread.
All of this is unprecedented, shocking, insane—“clearly out of the envelope,” as one scientist put it.
And all of it was entirely predictable and completely unmysterious. Human beings have burned enormous amounts of fossil fuel, producing great quantities of carbon dioxide; it has accumulated in the atmosphere (the most recent readings are about 420 parts per million, almost exactly 50% higher than before the Industrial Revolution). Since we know that the molecular structure of CO2 traps heat that would otherwise radiate back out to space, the heat we’re seeing is the simple result of physics at work. Our Earth has great forces at work (the jet stream, the Gulf Stream, the trade winds) and it runs on a series of cycles (the El Niño Pacific warming currently ramping up, for instance) but behind it all is the fact that our centuries of burning coal and oil and gas have, in effect, made the sun a more powerful force.
In effect coal and oil and gas have moved us closer to the center of our solar system. This has now—in the spring and summer of 2023—reached the entirely predictable point where it constitutes a grave emergency. And it will—beyond any doubt—get worse; if Tuesday’s record isn’t broken in the coming days, it will almost certainly fall in the next few weeks, and then again next summer, in a year when the Earth seems likely to breach the 1.5°C temperature increase that we set, just eight years ago in Paris, as a kind of red line to avoid.
But as the heatwaves have revealed the new power of the sun to inflict enormous human suffering, they’ve also revealed the power of the sun to come to our rescue.
Back in 1978, as scientists were cobbling together the Earth’s temperature measurement system, the first solar-powered calculator was introduced; we knew the sun could provide power, but… not much. In the years since, though, there’s been steady progress, and by now we live on a planet where there’s no cheaper way to make electricity than to tilt a panel in the sun’s direction. (The only challengers are wind turbines, which—since breezes are born from the different heating of the planet—just represent a different form of solar power.)