Year 2, Month 6, Day 22: I’d Like To Sup With My Baby Tonight…

June 8: Boston’s in the middle of a heat wave. Tomorrow (the 9th) it’s supposed to go up to 100 — a little weird for early June, don’cha think?

WASHINGTON—The mercury climbed into the 90s across more than half the country Wednesday in an early-June blast of August-like heat, forcing schools with no air conditioning to let kids go home early and cities to open cooling centers. And scientists say we had better get used to it.

A new study from Stanford University says global climate change will lead permanently to unusually hot summers in the coming years.

Temperatures around 90 and higher were recorded across much of the South, the East and the Midwest. By 2 p.m., Washington had tied the record high for the date of 98 degrees, set in 1999, according to preliminary National Weather Service data. The normal high is about 82. Philadelphia was at 94, one degree shy of the record. Chicago reached 94 by midafternoon.

The hook for a standard “denialists suck” letter, sent June 8:

And so it goes. Much of New England is experiencing record high temperatures for early June. Before that? Tornadoes — hardly a regular feature of this region’s climate. Meanwhile, other parts of the world are setting records of their own. Once-in-a-century floods, droughts, snowfalls, heatwaves — all coming more and more frequently. Is it really “once-in-a-century” when it happens twice in a five-year period?

For decades, climate scientists have forecast exactly this sort of weather behavior as a consequence of the greenhouse effect. They’ve been proven right over and over again — except when they’ve been too conservative in their estimates of climate change’s speed and severity. The one thing they couldn’t predict was the vehemence and stubbornness of climate-change denialists in our media and politics — qualities which are now preventing us from taking the necessary actions to deal with the storms that loom over our grandchildren’s futures.

Warren Senders