It's not just your imagination.

It's not just your imagination.

Heat waves are actually getting hotter.

They're also happening more often, lasting longer, and starting

earlier in the year. For Scientific American Science Quickly, I'm Rachel

Feldman. Today I'm talking to Associate Editor

Andrea Thompson who covers the environment, energy,

and Earth Sciences for Siam.

She's here to tell us why we're not likely

to beat this heat anytime soon.

And give us some tips on how we can keep each other safe

even on the most sweltering days. So it feels like summer has gotten a lot worse since I was a kid.

Honestly, since I first moved to the New York City area, like a little more than a decade ago.

Is there data to back that up?

There absolutely is. I know exactly what you mean. I grew up in Atlanta and moved to New York 15 or so years ago and

summers now feel more like the summers I remember in Atlanta

growing up which is not as far as I can start not a good thing but there is a

ton of data backing up that summers really do. They are as bad as they feel like they are.

Temperatures are actually some of the most robust trends we have in terms of climate change. We have much longer data. It's very good quality data that's taken especially in the US from all over and

it's very clear that summers are getting hotter sort of at every scale so

from the scale of the globe down to the local

level you know you see more year-to-year variation from the weather at the local

...