News stories about the Arctic always seem to say either that the Arctic is warming twice as fast as the global average, or that it’s warming nearly twice as fast as the global average. That’s not correct.

Arctic warming is more like three to four times as fast as global warming.

I want to feel safe.

When I walk home late at night.

When I sit on the subway.

When I sleep at night.

But I don’t feel safe.

It’s already bad. But when will things get so bad that it is obviously — obviously — the worst problem in the world? How long until we go over the cliff? That depends on how much we’ve heated up already, and how fast we’re getting hotter.

We have already reached dangerous levels. The heat waves throughout the northern hemisphere this summer have cost plenty, to the economy, in human suffering, ill health, even lives lost. The wildfires in California this year were much worse than they would have been without global warming. Just last year we set a new record for the total cost (adjusted for inflation) of billion-dollar climate-related disasters. They cost the U.S. over $300 billion.

As bad as it is already, extremely bad is yet to come. Some say it’ll be when total warming since pre-industrial times reaches 2°C, others say — and I agree with…

Suppose I wanted to convince people that temperature in the USA wasn’t going up, it was going down. What would I show? Let’s try yearly average temperature in the conterminous U.S., also known as the “lower 48 states” (I’ll just call it “USA”):

Pay careful attention to Mike Mann; when asked about “this is the new normal,” he replies “It’s actually worse than that.”

With the devastating wildfires terrorizing California, climate deniers are doing everything they can to try to persuade people that it’s no big deal, and even the big deals have nothing to do with man-made climate change. To believe them, you have to believe some ridiculous things — like the notions that hotter temperatures and more drought have nothing to do with wildfires.

As bad as this is … it’s going to get worse.

We’ve been looking at patterns of climate change in the conterminous USA (the “lower 48 states”) recently. Let’s see what’s been happening in the different seasons of the year.