So the climate thing wasn’t a joke?

The planet just marked a “shocking” new milestone, enduring 12 consecutive months of unprecedented heat, according to new data from Copernicus, the European Union’s climate monitoring service. Every single month from June 2023 to May 2024 was the world’s hottest such month on record, Copernicus data showed.

The 12-month heat streak was “shocking but not surprising” given human-caused climate change, said Carlo Buontempo, the director of Copernicus, who warned of worse to come. Unless planet-warming fossil fuel pollution is slashed, “this string of hottest months will be remembered as comparatively cold,” he said.

Is planet-warming fuel pollution going to be slashed? Hahaha that’s a good one. The planes fly, the cars zoom, the cruise ships go north and return, the air conditioners struggle to keep up. No we’re not slashing our fuel consumption.

Copernicus released its data the same day as United Nations Secretary General António Guterres made an impassioned speech in New York about climate change, slamming fossil fuel companies as the “godfathers of climate chaos” and, for the first time, explicitly calling on all countries to ban advertising their fossil fuel products.

Guterres urged world leaders to swiftly take control of the spiraling climate crisis or face dangerous tipping points. “We are playing Russian roulette with our planet,” he said Wednesday. “We need an exit ramp off the highway to climate hell.”

Mixing metaphors, but he’s not wrong.

Dozens have died in India over the past few weeks as temperatures pushed toward 50 degrees Celsius (122 Fahrenheit); brutal temperatures in Southeast Asia have caused deaths, school closures and shriveled crops; and as heat surged in Mexico, howler monkeys dropped dead from trees.

Wellll that’s all far away.

“Extreme events turbocharged by climate chaos are piling up, destroying lives, pummeling economies and hammering health,” Gutteres said.

Humanity is having an outsized impact on the world, he said, likening it to the meteor that began the process of wiping out dinosaurs 66 million years ago.

“In the case of climate, we are not the dinosaurs,” Guterres said. “We are the meteor. We are not only in danger. We are the danger.”

We are the meteor. That’s a good way of putting it.