The town of Gallargues-le-Montueux, on the ride from Montpellier to Marseille along France’s Mediterranean coast, got the worst of the heat: over 114 degrees Fahrenheit, even hotter than during an infamous 2003 French heat wave. The whole country—the whole continent—sweltered through eye-popping, Aperol spritz–defying, asphalt-crumbling temperatures this past week, capping a month that European satellite data showed was the hottest June in Europe since people started keeping track. France cooked; Spain hunkered down under wildfires that burned thousands of acres.

Meanwhile, Antarctic sea ice is melting faster than anyone predicted. The region around the Mississippi River in the midwestern United States is still dealing with floods on a scale unseen since the catastrophic levels of 1993. A heat wave in Northern California roasted tens of thousands of Bodega Bay mussels in their shells. It’s not just about blistering heat: In Guadalajara, Mexico, a freakishly large hailstorm followed by torrential rains left the mountain town digging out from under three feet of ice. And after Seattle endured a month of unhealthy air quality due to wildfires last summer, this year the city announced that it would open “clean air shelters” when the fires start again, five buildings kitted out with expensive filters, open to people who don’t have a safe place to, you know, breathe.

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If a movie started with that montage of news broadcasts, you’d know what kind of movie it was. It’d cut right to the part with a truck-driving, robot-prosthetized Charlize Theron, and you’d say, “Well, I saw that coming.” Because it is indeed coming. In many ways, it’s already here. As almost every report and scientific article about climate change has foretold, what was once abnormal has become normal. Or rather, if you’re looking for a new normal, you’re not going to find it. There isn’t one. And that’s going to be the hardest part about life on a climate-changed world.

So wait wait wait. One might ask, reasonably, if all the weird weather this summer was, in fact, due to climate change. And sure, a rapid-response team of climate scientists ran the numbers and estimated that the European heat wave was five times as bad as it would have been without human-emitted greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. But maybe that’s not the right question. “Who is that useful for? It may be useful in litigation, if you’re interested in how much additional risk has been created by emissions activities,” says Bob Kopp, a climate scientist at Rutgers University and an author on several national and international climate change studies. But as Kopp says, you don’t need formal attribution to confirm the general trend. “It’s not your imagination,” he says.