Publication Date January 16, 2015 | New Yorker

Our hottest year, our cold indifference

PHOTOGRAPH BY KADIR VAN LOHUIZEN / NOOR
PHOTOGRAPH BY KADIR VAN LOHUIZEN / NOOR

2014 was the hottest year on record, and those records go back to 1880. The ten hottest days have all been since 1997 (and, if you don’t count 1998, the ten hottest have been since 2000). Congressmen may work on the East Coast [one of the few parts of the world that wasn't unnaturally hot in 2014], but some of them have to go back to California, which was wracked by drought and had areas that, as the Times noted, “had basically no winter last year, with temperatures sometimes running 10 or 15 degrees above normal for the season.” Neither Alaska nor Nevada has ever been known to be as warm as it is now.