The last time the Earth was warmer than it is today was at least 125,000 years ago, long before anything resembling human civilization emerged. Since 1970, the Earth's temperature has risen faster than in any comparable forty-year period in recorded history. The eight years between 2015 and 2022 were the hottest on record. In 2022, 850 million people lived in regions that experienced consistently high temperatures. Globally, killer heat waves are longer, hotter and more frequent. One study found that a heat wave like the one in 2021 cooked up the pacific northwest, it is 150 times more likely today than it was before we created a CO2 atmosphere at the start of the industrial age. ((JEFF GOODELL, TIME)