2021 was hot as hell, NASA confirms

Trees charred by wildfires on the outskirts of Lytton, British Columbia, on September 1, 2021. Lytton, located 250kms (155 miles) northeast of Vancouver, gained international attention for setting a new Canadian heat record of 49.6 degrees Celsius (121.3 Fahrenheit) before being ravaged days later by a fire that killed at least two residents. | Photo by Cole Burston/AFP via Getty ImagesThe last eight years have been the eight hottest years on record, NASA and the National Oceanic Administration (NOAA) confirmed today. 2021 ranks as the sixth hottest year on record, the agencies said, as global average temperatures trend upward. Rankings aside, there were plenty of red flags throughout 2021 to show us how remarkable the year was for temperature extremes.
“The fact is that we’ve now kind of moved into a new regime … this is likely the warmest decade in many, many hundreds, maybe 1000s of years,” says Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies. “There’s enough change that it’s having impacts locally.”
In North America, those local impacts included epically bad summer heat, even for typically…

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