It was the hottest August ever recorded on our precious planet, a thoroughly unsurprising statistic capping months packed with shattered records and deadly extremes through the Northern Hemisphere summer.

More surprising, and ominously so, is the fact that the world’s oceans have been driven to record temperatures. Surprising because most seawater is in the Southern Hemisphere, so ocean heat peaks late in the austral summer. But the ongoing fossil frenzy is such that this year has even turned the record books upside down.

Averaged across the entire globe, August was 1.65 C higher than pre-industrial temperatures — well beyond the symbolic 1.5 C target. And, as we have all heard by now, an anomalously intense and likely unprecedented El Niño is now emerging from the Pacific.

It was a summer that underscored the grim saying that “climate change will manifest as a series of disasters viewed through phones with footage that gets closer and closer until you're the one filming it.” That is, of course, assuming that you have time and distance enough to be pulling out the phone.

In our strange modern cyborg lives, even the most extreme events quickly disappear over the horizon of the infinite scroll. If you, yourself, did not lose a home, a livelihood, a friend or family member, it might take real effort to recall brutally intense scenes even just days or weeks later — the residents of Collins First Nation fleeing in their boats, the CN workers trapped by fire, the convoy evacuating Summerland or the ashen remains of Spokane, even before we widen the lens to disasters further around the globe.

The onrushing wall of liquefied Himalaya. A catastrophe that seemed unimaginable in its violence just a couple of weeks ago when that five-storey building was obliterated in an instant, caught on security camera footage and shared around the world. Well over 1,300 people are confirmed dead and more than 5,000 are still missing.

It was widely reported as a “flash flood” in Nepal. A description akin to calling Godzilla a lizard. The mountain broke with such force, it was initially thought to have been caused by an earthquake. Scientists quickly........

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