You Just Lived Through the Three Hottest Days on Earth—and More Is Coming

What’s difficult about living through history is you often don’t know the magnitude of it all until it’s over. But at this rate, things being “over” might mean us not being around to look back at it at all.

In this particular case of living through history, Earth just logged the hottest global temperature ever recorded three days in a row—and perhaps the hottest it’s been in some 125,000 years. The earliest-known human use of symbols dates to around the same time.

On Monday, the average global temperature reached 62.62 degrees Fahrenheit (17.01 degrees Celsius). On Tuesday, it went even higher, reaching 62.94 degrees Fahrenheit. And that number continued to climb into Wednesday.

Those numbers come after June was already the hottest month on record—and experts predict things will only get worse.

The temperatures recorded over the last week, from the University of Maine’s Climate Reanalyzer, are the highest in the tool’s 44-year history. The European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service has since confirmed that Monday and Tuesday’s temperature readings broke the records in its own data, which spans back even further, to 1940.

Data collected from tree rings, ice cores, coral reefs, and other sources strongly suggests that the temperatures are indeed the hottest in more than 100 millennia.

“These data tell us that it hasn’t been this warm since at least 125,000 years ago,” Paulo Ceppi, climate scientist at London’s Grantham Institute, told The Washington Post.

Jennifer Francis, senior scientist at Woodwell Climate Research Center, affirmed Ceppi’s claim, saying the records were likely the warmest in “at least 100,00 years.”

The heat is part of an ongoing and increasing threat. Copernicus said Thursday that last month was the hottest June since its records begun. “The month was the warmest June globally … exceeding June 2019—the previous record—by a substantial margin,” the organization said.

This extreme heat is partially caused by a regular El Niño weather pattern, which is helping temperatures to surge across the globe. But the skyrocketing temperatures are also thanks to human fossil fuel use and excess carbon emissions. Measurements of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere averaged a whopping 424 parts per million in May—yet another historic peak in a steady climb scientists have recorded for decades.

It cannot be overstated how very real the misery of climate change is. The impacts are being felt worldwide; if you haven’t felt them, you can just ask a longtime resident of virtually any city what the weather was like years ago versus today. But the effects, of course, are much more than people needing to tug at their collar a bit more than before.

Seminole County, Florida, has already exceeded last year in the number of days it had to activate an emergency weather plan—something only initiated when the heat index is 108 degrees or higher. Texas and other Southern states have reached such dangerous levels repeatedly. On Tuesday, at least 57 million Americans were exposed to dangerous levels of heat.

In China, historic weeklong heat waves have scorched millions of residents; days inching toward 110 degrees have halted outdoor work, and initiated heatstroke and even crop-protection measures.

Parts of North Africa peaked up to 122 degrees, while Antarctica’s temperatures inched toward 50 degrees. Chari Vijayaraghavan, a polar explorer and educator who has visited the Arctic and Antarctic regularly for the past 10 years, told the Associated Press that global warming is obvious at both poles, existentially threatening the lives of wildlife like penguins.

By mid-June, at least 96 people in India had died from heat-related conditions—in just two of India’s 28 states.

With all that being said, the heat may only dial up, unless we make dramatic changes to how society runs and who gets to run it.

Robert Rohde, lead scientist at environmental data science organization Berkeley Earth, urges us to consider what it means for a record to break, and break again, and continue to stay at that record-breaking level. “We may well see a few even warmer days over the next six weeks.”

Nearly 200 people from across the country who were charged for participating in the January 6 riot have said they were responding to a callout by former President Donald Trump.

More than 1,000 people have been arrested for taking part in the insurrection. Thousands of people went to Washington, D.C., after Trump tweeted there would be a “big protest” and told people, “Be there.” On January 6, 2021, he spoke to the rally, which quickly turned into a deadly mob that swarmed the Capitol in an attempt to stop the certification of the 2020 election results.

An investigation by the nonprofit Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, or CREW, has found that 174 defendants explicitly said they were responding to Trump’s tweet when they descended on Washington. Of those people, 94 specifically said Trump’s speech to the crowd was what prompted them to storm the Capitol. These numbers could be even higher because they do not include people who participated in the riot but have not yet been arrested.

On December 19, 2020, Trump tweeted, “Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!” Many of his supporters apparently interpreted the post as marching orders.

One defendant, Nicholas Languerand, tweeted a video of himself a few days later saying, “We’re picking up your messages, and we’re listening. We’re ready to do this thing. We’re ready to fight to defend our republic against all enemies, foreign and domestic.”

Trump’s fans also included members of the extremist groups the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys.

Oath Keepers Florida leader Kelly Meggs said in a Facebook message, “He called us all to the Capitol and wants us to make it wild !!! Sir Yes Sir !!! Gentlemen we are heading to DC pack your shit !!”

The group’s founder, Stewart Rhodes, repeatedly called for the “violent overthrow” of the government. Rhodes was ultimately sentenced in May to 18 years in prison for seditious conspiracy, the longest sentence yet handed down in connection to January 6. Meggs was sentenced to 12.

Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio coordinated with Trump ally Roger Stone and members of the pro-Trump Stop the Steal campaign to have members of his group attend the January 6 rally. He also worked with Rhodes on a “proposal to storm Congress.” Tarrio was convicted of seditious conspiracy in May, but he has not yet been sentenced.

When Trump addressed the crowd, he urged them to “walk down to the Capitol” and “fight like hell.” Soon after, the angry mob stormed the building. One rioter, Douglas Austin Jensen, later told investigators that Trump “got us all fired up to go to [the Capitol].”

Another defendant, Stephen Ayres, told the House committee investigating the insurrection that the only thing that got the crowd to finally disperse was Trump’s tweet telling them to “go home.”

The House January 6 committee has laid the blame for the riot squarely at Trump’s feet, recommending the Justice Department pursue him on four criminal charges. Special counsel Jack Smith is also currently investigating Trump for his role in trying to overturn the 2020 election, including whether he incited the insurrection. But Trump seems to have no regrets.

You can read CREW’s full report here.

Congressman George Santos has gotten all the attention for being the liar extraordinaire of New York’s political scene, but Mayor Eric Adams is giving him a run for his money.

The New York Times reports that Adams has misled the media about a photo of a fallen police officer that the mayor suggested he’s been carrying in his wallet for decades. In fact, Adams allegedly instructed his staff to print the image after he first alluded to it last year, as a way of covering his tracks.

The deception began in January 2022, after two NYC cops were killed in action. Adams told reporters of another officer who had faced a similar fate in 1987: his friend Robert Venable. “I still think about Robert,” Adams said at a City Hall press conference. “I keep a picture of Robert in my wallet.”

A week later, Adams posed for a photograph for the Times, holding said photo. And he has repeated the story over and over since, even showing his apparently long-held photo of Venable at a Police Academy ceremony last year.

“I carry around a picture of Robert Venable, my close friend, that was shot several years ago during my early days of police, and I always have Robert’s picture,” Adams said on News 12 last April. “The pain never dissipates.”  

And apparently it’s all just a sham, the Times reports. According to close sources, Adams’s staffers were directed to produce the photo after the mayor’s news conference. They printed a black-and-white photo of Venable off of Google, and then made it look worn—even apparently splashing some coffee on it, to get that nice aged look.

“The Times’ efforts to attack the mayor here would be laughable if it were not so utterly offensive,” Adams spokesman Fabien Levy said in a statement on Wednesday, criticizing the newspaper’s reporting as part of a “campaign to paint the mayor as a liar.”

Levy did not, however, respond to any questions from the Times regarding the authenticity of the photo, or about whether it was manipulated to look older.

The tale adds to the long list of “contradictions,” as Politico calls them, or downright lies from Mayor Adams. He’s a self-proclaimed strict vegan who apparently also eats fish at high-end New York City restaurants. It wasn’t clear he actually lived in New York City when he running for mayor. He has said New York City schoolchildren “start their day going to the corner bodega buying cannabis and fentanyl,” and recently said that nearly half of the city’s hotel rooms were occupied by migrants, implying that asylum-seekers were hurting tourism.

And that’s just a taste of all the hyperbole or downright lies Adams has peddled—often for no apparent reason. “Stretching the truth in this context does question an elected official’s credibility, and that might be a problem for voters,” Betsy Gotbaum, executive director of Citizen Union, told the Times. “I don’t see why he does it. He doesn’t need to do it, so why does he do it?”

It’s Hunter’s. It’s Jack Smith’s. It’s laced with fentanyl. It’s something else entirely.

Republicans are pushing theory after theory about the cocaine found in the White House earlier this week—and each idea is more bananas than the last.

A small amount of a white, powdery substance—first feared to be anthrax and later identified as cocaine—was found over the weekend in a busy area of the West Wing that both staff and visitors have access to. The Secret Service is investigating, but an anonymous law enforcement official told Politico that it’s unlikely the drug’s owner will ever be identified, given how highly trafficked that area is.

That hasn’t stopped right-wingers from speculating. Many have sought to pin the cocaine on President Biden’s son Hunter. Biden “continues to have somebody with a history of drug addiction in the White House,” Republican California Representative Darrell Issa told Fox News on Wednesday. “It is not a small problem that we find cocaine after Hunter Biden has been in the White House.”

Many right-wing activists have also shared an undated video of Hunter Biden scratching his nose while standing on the White House balcony. They either rhetorically ask who the cocaine might belong to, or they claim the clip shows Hunter actively snorting cocaine.

Some people are casting a slightly wider net. Conservative commentator Dan Bongino did not try to explicitly blame Hunter, but he did insist that a member of the Biden family brought in the cocaine. “There’s absolutely ZERO chance anyone other than a family member brought that cocaine inside the White House complex. No chance that would make it past the mag/security checkpoints. Family bypasses those,” he tweeted Wednesday night.

Former President Donald Trump had a different theory: “Has Deranged Jack Smith, the crazy, Trump hating Special Prosecutor, been seen in the area of the COCAINE?” he demanded Wednesday on Truth Social. “He looks like a crackhead to me!”

Trump has repeatedly tried to smear Smith since he was appointed to investigate Trump for allegedly mishandling classified documents and for his role in trying to overturn the 2020 election.

Fox News joined the reckless speculation race on Thursday, positing that the cocaine may have been laced with something more deadly. “We don’t know if there’s fentanyl in that cocaine too, that’s the problem,” Fox & Friends host Brian Kilmeade said Thursday morning, citing zero evidence.

“It’s scary!” former White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany agreed. “This is a huge national security threat, and the press, well, they’re just laughing it off. But what would you expect?”

Last weekend, Ron DeSantis’s rapid response team shared an insane manospheric video going after twice-impeached and twice-indicted former President Donald Trump for his previous expressions of support for the LGBTQ community—proudly contrasting that record with DeSantis’s own relentless crusade against LGBTQ people in his home state.

The incredibly weird ad featured headlines like “DeSantis is evil” interspersed with recognizable pop culture figures, including Cillian Murphy as Thomas Shelby in the popular Netflix show Peaky Blinders. Murphy and his team say the footage was used without permission and that they “do not support nor endorse the video’s narrative.”

Murphy himself has not been too active in the political arena throughout his career, save for a few notable exceptions, including on the topic of abortion. The Peaky Blinders star strongly urged men to “come out and support women” by voting to affirm abortion rights in Ireland’s 2018 abortion referendum.

Earlier this year, DeSantis signed a six-week abortion ban in Florida, one of the most extreme bans in the country, which applies before many people even know they are pregnant.

Who would’ve thought the star of a show depicting the rise of fascism and nationalism, and the literal and psychological ravages of war and violence, might not be totally aligned with DeSantis?

The Florida governor is standing by the ad. Going after Trump in the video was “totally fair game,” he told conservative commentator Tomi Lahren in an interview.