Let’s be honest: “Last year was one of the hottest years ever recorded” has become a common story. It’s news in the same way the most popular boys’ baby names are news. (Wow, dear, did you see James won again?) The climate scientist Joseph Majkut quipped that the tone of this year’s announcement was less “See, see we told you” and more “Well, duh.”

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Schmidt, the NASA scientist, nodded at this during the briefing. “The fact is, the planet is warming, and every year we add one extra data point to this graph, which may not seem like a terribly important thing, but people seem interested,” he said. “The main thing here is not the ranking … but the consistency of the long-term trend we’re seeing.” Virtually every important climate record has been broken and re-broken over the past few years: The past five years are the five warmest years on record, the past six the warmest six, the past nine the warmest nine. Since Donald Trump rode down his gilded escalator and announced he was running for president, the world has experienced its hottest recorded version of each individual month, according to NOAA.

So it’s worth going back in history to see just how outlandish our current situation is. The median American is a little more than 38 years old. The year before she was born was 1980. It was, at the time, the hottest year ever measured. A July heat wave that year killed 1,265 Americans and caused more than $20 billion in damage nationwide.

The larger significance of this milestone was not well understood at the time. In an op-ed that summer, a weatherman in Westchester, New York, expressed so much regret about giving in and buying a car with an air conditioner that he wondered whether Americans of his demographic were “less tolerant of extreme heat than our parents and grandparents.” His parents’ generation made do without air-conditioned cars, he figured, and his grandparents didn’t even have electric ceiling fans. Were they a tougher breed?

They were not, he learned: The weather had gotten warmer. He was shocked. “It came as a great surprise to discover that during the first three decades of this century there were fewer heat waves (27) than during the last three (49),” he wrote in The New York Times. “My hat is off to the present generation … If we create our own cooler environment with air conditioners, well then, we deserve it.”

His editorial did not mention global warming or “the greenhouse effect,” as it was then called. And the hottest-year record probably did seem like a fluke: 1980 was the first time the record had been broken in 35 years.

In 1981, the median American was born, a happy and healthy statistical girl. The planet inched even hotter, setting a new all-time record a few hundredths of a degree Celsius warmer than 1980’s. Then, in 1983, as she learned to string sentences together, the record was smashed again. The global hottest-year record had now been broken three times in four years.