The summer of 2023 is behaving like a broken record about broken records.

Nearly every major climate-tracking organization proclaimed June the hottest June ever. Then July 4 became the globe’s hottest day, albeit unofficially, according to the University of Maine’s Climate Reanalyzer. It was quickly overtaken by July 5 and July 6. Next came the hottest week, a tad more official, stamped into the books by the World Meteorological Organization and the Japanese Meteorological Agency.

With a summer of extreme weather records dominating the news, meteorologists and scientists say records like these give a glimpse of the big picture: a warming planet caused by climate change. It’s a picture that comes in the vibrant reds and purples representing heat on daily weather maps online, in newspapers and on television.

Beyond the maps and the numbers are real harms that kill. More than 100 people have died in heat waves in the United States and India so far this summer.

Records are crucial for people designing infrastructure and working in agriculture because they need to plan for the worst scenarios, said Russell Vose, climate analysis group director for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. He also chairs a committee on national records.

In the past 30 days, nearly 5,000 heat and rainfall records have been broken or tied in the U.S. and more than 10,000 records set globally, according to NOAA. Texas cities and towns alone have set 369 daily high temperature records since June 1.

Since 2000, the U.S. has set about twice as many records for heat as those for cold.

“Records go back to the late 19th century and we can see that there has been a decade-on-decade increase in temperatures,” said Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, keeper of the agency’s climate records. “What’s happening now is certainly increasing the chances that 2023 will be the warmest year on record. My calculations suggest that there’s, right now, a 50-50 chance.”

The larger the geographic area and the longer stretch of time during which records are set, the more likely the conditions represent climate change rather than daily weather. So the hottest global June is “extremely unlikely” to happen without climate change, as opposed to one city’s daily record, Texas state climatologist John Nielsen-Gammon said.

Still, some local specifics are striking: Death Valley has flirted this summer with the hottest temperature in modern history, though that 134 degree Fahrenheit (56.7 Celsius ) record is in dispute.

Phoenix grabbed headlines among major U.S. cities on Tuesday when it marked a 19th consecutive day of unrelenting mega heat: 110 degrees Fahrenheit (43.3 Celsius) or more. It kept going, reaching a 22nd straight day on Friday. The daytime heat was accompanied by a record stretch of nights that never fell below 90 Fahrenheit (32.2 Celsius).

“Everybody’s drawn to extremes,” Vose said. “It’s like the Guinness Book of World Records. Human nature is just drawn to the extreme things out of curiosity.”

But the numbers can be flawed in what they portray.

The scientific community “doesn’t really have the vocabulary to communicate what it feels like,” said Stanford University climate scientist Chris Field, who co-chaired a groundbreaking United Nations report in 2012 warning of the dangers of extreme weather from climate change.

“I don’t think it captures the human sense, but it really does underscore that we live in a different world,” Field said of the records.

Think of the individual statistics as brush strokes in a painting of the world’s climate, Cornell University climate scientist Natalie Mahowald said. Don’t fixate on any specific number.

“The details of course matter, but the thing that really matters, especially for the impressionist painting, is when you step back and take a look at everything that’s happening,” Mahowald said.

She and other climate scientists say long-term warming from burning coal, oil and natural gas is the chief cause of rising temperatures, along with occasional boosts from natural El Nino warmings across parts of the Pacific, like the planet is experiencing this year.

El Nino is a natural temporary warming of parts of the Pacific that changes weather patterns worldwide and adds an extra warm boost. An El Nino formed in June and scientists say this one looks strong. For the previous three years El Nino’s cool flip side, La Nina, dampened a bit of the heat humans are causing.

A super El Nino spiked global temperatures in 1998, then was followed by less warming and even some flat temperatures for a few years until the next big El Nino, Mahowald said.

Weather won’t worsen each year and that should not become a common expectation, but it will intensify over the long run, she said.

The University of Michigan’s Richard Rood used to blog about climate records for Weather Underground, but in 2014 he got sick of continuously new extremes and stopped.

“I think we need to get away from that sort of record-setting sensationalism at some level and really be getting down to the hard work,” he said, addressing the need for people to adapt to a warmer world and get serious about slashing emissions causing hotter, more extreme weather.

NOAA tracks weather observations from tens of thousands of stations throughout the U.S. and its global calculations incorporate data from more than 100,000 stations, Vose said.

When those records come in, the agency checks their quality and calculates where the numbers fit historically. NOAA’s National Center for Environmental Information in North Carolina is the arbiter of national records, while the local National Weather Service offices handle those for individual cities, Vose said.

A special international committee deals with world records and, at times, scientists disagree on the reliability of 100-year-old data. Those disagreements come into play over questions such as determining the hottest temperature recorded on Earth.

Validating records takes time. Because of a backlog of extreme weather events to analyze, officials haven’t finished approving 130 degree Fahrenheit records from 2020 and 2021 at Death Valley, Vose said.

“Our primary job is keeping score, meaning what happened? How unusual was it?” he asked. “It’s not like we take great joy in saying it was the warmest year on record. Again.”

It’s the bigger picture that matters, Northern Illinois University climate scientist Victor Gensini said.

“Look at them all together in the aggregate sense of the atmospheric orchestra,” Gensini said. “There are so many clear signs that we are just not living in the same type of climate that we were.”

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PHOENIX (AP) — A project that maps the bodies of border-crossers recovered from Arizona’s inhospitable deserts, valleys and mountains said it documented 227 deaths in 2020, the highest in a decade after the hottest, driest summer in state history.

The previous annual high mapped by the Pima County Medical Examiner’s Office in Tucson and the nonprofit Humane Borders was 224 migrant deaths in 2010.

Enforcement efforts in California and Texas over the years have pushed migrants into dangerous terrain in Arizona without easy access to food and water. Humanitarian groups like No More Deaths leave water jugs and other provisions in remote parts of southern Arizona in hopes of saving lives in a region where nearly 3,400 migrant deaths have been documented since 2004.

Despite the increase in deaths, U.S. Border Patrol apprehension figures suggest that the number of migrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico border illegally in Arizona has actually fallen by almost 50% over 10 years.

There were 131,759 migrants apprehended between Oct. 1, 2018, and Sept. 30, 2019, in the Border Patrol’s Yuma and Tucson sectors, which cover the entire Arizona border, compared with more than 248,624 in the same 12 months from 2008 to 2009.

Immigration scholars say they expect a wave of people from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador to try to cross the U.S.-Mexico border this year following a pair of disastrous hurricanes in Central America and with a Joe Biden administration after four years of hardline policies under President Donald Trump.

“Heading north will continue to be seen as an option,” Andrew Selee, president of the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute, wrote in November in Americas Quarterly magazine. “President-elect Joe Biden has promised to do things differently, treating migrants and asylum-seekers with dignity.”

Selee warned that sudden policy changes could encourage would-be border-crossers to flood north.

Dr. Greg Hess, Pima County’s medical examiner, and Michael Kreyche, mapping project coordinator with Humane Borders, have said they believe the summer’s record heat and dry weather were the main causes of the unprecedented number of deaths in 2020.

The National Weather Service in Phoenix says the average high temperature was nearly 110 degrees (43 degrees Celsius) in July and nearly 111 in August, helping make it the hottest summer in history. Phoenix’s highs tend to be similar to those in Arizona’s Sonoran Desert north of Mexico, forecasters say.

The weather service said July and August also were the state’s driest summer months on record.

While many remains recovered last year were weathered, partial skeletons that indicated older deaths, there were considerably more recent deaths in 2020 than in previous years, said Dr. Bruce Anderson, forensic anthropologist with the Pima County medical examiner’s office.

Some officials and activists working near the Arizona border, including recently retired Santa Cruz County Sheriff Tony Estrada, have said they believe border wall construction also pushed migrants into riskier places to avoid workers.

The Border Patrol keeps its own border death statistics, counting the remains of suspected migrants it learns about in the course of its duties, according to its parent agency, Customs and Border Protection.

From January to September 2020, the Border Patrol listed 43 deaths in the Arizona border area. The mapping project tracked 181 deaths over the same nine-month period.

The Border Patrol, which operates on a federal fiscal calendar that ends Sept. 30, has not yet released figures for the last quarter of the 2020 calendar year.

Arizona is not the only place with fluctuations in border deaths over the years.

While migrant deaths are now down in South Texas, eight years ago, the mass graves of border-crossers were being discovered after people began trekking through isolated ranches to avoid the official checkpoint by the small town of Falfurrias.

The Brooks County sheriff’s office said this week that migrant deaths in its jurisdiction fell to 34 last year from 45 in 2019.

In Arizona, a passer-by discovered the last migrant remains of 2020 in the remote southeast corner of the state near New Mexico.

Hess, the medical examiner, said nothing is known so far about the person, whose skeleton was discovered in the uninhabited area east of Douglas, a few miles from Guadalupe Canyon. Work crews there are rushing to complete as much of Trump’s signature border wall as possible before he leaves office.

Hess said autopsy results aren’t expected for several weeks but that the person probably won’t be identified — just like a third of the human remains that turn up in Arizona’s borderlands.

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