This summer, the United States roasted like never before. People got third-degree burns from simply falling onto hot pavement in Arizona, filling up all the beds in Maricopa County’s burn center. High humidity teamed up with the Midwest’s worst heat wave in years to send the heat index, or the “feels like” temperature, soaring above 130 degrees Fahrenheit in parts of Kansas, sending record numbers of heat-stricken people to emergency rooms. Off the coast of Florida, the ocean warmed to hot tub temperatures, leading to mass death in the coral reefs.
Catastrophes have become a familiar aspect of summer, which some scientists now call “danger season,” but the disasters of the summer that just passed seemed to have reached a new level. A flash drought in Maui turned invasive grasses into kindling, priming the way for a fast-moving blaze that…