The July 4 holiday weekend wasn’t just a scorcher — it was so hot it disrupted public events and strained power grids as temperatures soared into the triple digits.

Across the pond, Europe is bracing for yet another devastating, record-breaking heatwave. And it’s barely out of the last one, which was responsible for at least 1,300 excess deaths.

Even climate scientists, who have long watched as global warming rears its ugly head, are astonished at the accelerating trend. As Bloomberg reports, their models have long predicted rising temperatures due to human activity and the burning of fossil fuels. Yet the trend is speeding up to a degree that has caught even experts off guard.

The year 2023, in particular, was so far off the charts that researchers are still trying to make sense of what exactly happened. Even when adjusting for extra water vapor from volcanic eruptions, or natural climate variability, the month of September of that year was such a spike, it bored a hole through even the most pessimistic climate models.

“We could call them super-extremes or mega-extremes,” University of Exeter climate change and Earth system science chair Tim Lenton told Bloomberg. “We’re starting to see extremes on a spatial scale and a magnitude that’s really surprising.”

“Extreme events are so far outside anything we have expected,” Imperial College London climate scientist Friederike Otto added. “It’s not so important whether it’s what we expected as experts. It’s whether it’s what we expect as people on the ground.”

If there’s one certainty, it’s that it’s bound to get worse. A slowing of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, a system that circulates warm ocean water northward, where it cools back down, could mean even more extreme heat for Europe. Scientists fear that a collapse of the AMOC is no longer a matter of if, but when.

Meanwhile, despite a global shift to renewable energy and major growth in solar electricity generation, much of the world is still moving in the wrong direction. Major corporations are abandoning their climate pledges thanks to the current obsession with AI.

Even the World Bank is giving up on its climate targets as it comes under pressure from the Trump administration, which has been hellbent on dismantling climate initiatives and atmospheric science funding while going all-in on the burning of fossil fuels.

More on climate science: Scientists Horrified by Record-Breaking Ocean Temperatures