The Locke Foundation will tell you that it’s all the fault of sun spots (or, alternatively, that it’s not happening at all), but this piece from The Nation and Common Dreams.org is pretty darned sobering and a reminder of the fact that wishing it weren’t true won’t make our enormous common problem go away.

Here’s the lead:

“90 degress in winter: This is what climate change looks like
By Bill McKibben

The National Weather Service is kind of the anti-Mike Daisey, a just-the-facts operation that grinds on hour after hour, day after day. It’s collected billions of records (I’ve seen the vast vaults where early handwritten weather reports from observers across the country are stored in endless rows of ledgers and files) on countless rainstorms, blizzards, and pleasant summer days. So the odds that you could shock the NWS are pretty slim.A view of the Runge reservoir in the town of Runge, some 37 miles north of Santiago February 3, 2012. (REUTERS/Ivan Alvarado)

Beginning in mid-March, however, its various offices began issuing bulletins that sounded slightly shaken. “There’s extremes in weather, but seeing something like this is impressive and unprecedented,” Chicago NWS meteorologist Richard Castro said. “It’s extraordinarily rare for climate locations with 100+ year long periods of records to break records day after day after day,” the office added in an official statement.

It wasn’t just Chicago, of course. A huge swath of the nation simmered under bizarre heat.”

Read the entire article by clicking here.