September arrives this year in the northern hemisphere with less regret than usual that summer is ending—instead, there’s a surge of relief that the searing temperatures of the last few months may finally be over. As you have undoubtedly heard, 2018 is shaping up to be the fourth-hottest year on record, with the first three being 2016, 2015, and 2017, in that order. While the privileged among us sweated mainly as we scurried between our air-conditioned offices, cars, and houses, elsewhere, people were dropping dead in extreme heat, not only in poorer countries like Pakistan—where an all-time record temperature for April on the planet was set at 122 degrees Fahrenheit—but in places like Japan, where more than 80 people died in July (and where another record, of 104 degrees, was set), and Canada, where unusually hot summer weather has cost at least 70 people their lives.
And while California was fighting the biggest wildfire in its history, the Mendocino Complex, forest fires in drought-ridden Sweden were breaking out even above the Arctic Circle, where high temperatures had baked the land and turned the woods into kindling.
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