It’s not just you — the United States is going through a record-bustingly hot summer.
According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the contiguous US averaged 76.89 degrees Fahrenheit in July, which is even hotter than the July 1936 Dust Bowl, an environmental and agricultural disaster marked by devastating dust storms.
Much like the Dust Bowl, which was the result of both natural and human-made factors, this year’s record-breaking temperatures are the result of a strong El Niño — a naturally occuring weather pattern — exacerbating the calamitous effects of human-caused climate change.
“It’s not good when you’re breaking records from the Dust Bowl, which we are in this case,” Yale Climate Connections meteorologist Jeff Masters told the Associated Press. “And that was a crazy sort of situation where you put tens of millions of people in motion. You had this great migration because of the drought and the heat that hit the center of the US — just a cataclysmic event in US history.”
