Chart of the Week: Hottest July Since '36

The rhyming of history as Mark Twain put it is pretty hard to deny. With the current economic contraction rivaling the Great Depression, Midwesterners now have a taste of the Dust Bowl in their mouths, and it's official: out of the vault of weather records comes this chart showing that the average temperature of 77.6 ℉ to be the hottest ever in the US, besting the previous high set in 1936. More significantly from a climate change standpoint, this July was the fourth time in the past twelve months that temperature records have been broken:

NASA scientists have concluded that heatwaves over the past thirty years are statistically attributable to anthropomorphic climate change. The likelihood of extreme heatwaves has increased 50 to 100 times over a 1951-1980 baseline. Earth has not had a single year since 1975 when the average temperature was below the 20th Century average. 63% of the contiguous US is now in extreme drought conditions.