The Fourth of July holiday just passed was an extraordinary one, and we're not talking about the quality of the burgers, brats or fireworks. Tuesday was, globally speaking, the hottest day since modern record-keeping began. Scientists believe it may well have been among the hottest days in something like 125,000 years. And then Wednesday matched it.

The global average temperature Tuesday hit 62.92 degrees Fahrenheit. That may sound mild but is an average that takes in everything, the Arctic and Antarctic included.

In short, the modern world has never been this hot.

This isn't entirely about human-driven global climate change, but a perfect storm of multiple factors. These include the return of El Nino, the multi-year cycle of warm air over the Pacific, as well as the Azores High, a subtropical pressure system that impacts ocean temperatures.

These and other natural phenomena have routinely heated and cooled the Earth over eons — a fact that the climate-change denial movement even now likes to hold up as proof that human activity has little or no impact on the change we're seeing all around us. This is a little like saying that if hard rain is worsening a flood caused by a levee break, then the levee break has nothing to do with the flood. It takes a special kind of self-delusion to reach conclusions like that.

Scientists say that what El Nino and the rest are doing is exacerbating global-warming trends that are undeniably caused by human activity, including the burning of fossil fuels, modern mega-agricultural operations and deforestation.

The data underlying increasingly dire warnings about climate change is real, and not that complicated: For at least 800,000 years, carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere never rose above 300 parts per million (PPM), according to ice-core samples that allow scientists to assess what was in the air in the distant past. In just the past 60 years, however, carbon dioxide levels have soared, crossing the 400 PPM mark as a monthly average in 2014 for the first time in recorded history — and probably in close to a million years.

Here are some of the other things that were happening during that blink-of-an-eye (geologically speaking) half-century: Human activity that produces carbon dioxide was producing it as never before, on scales that dwarf even the Industrial Revolution. Average global temperatures were breaking record after record, year after year, culminating with last week. Arctic ice was melting, sea levels were rising, storm cycles were becoming less stable and predictable, wildfires and floods were raging in unprecedented ways.

And through it all, a significant portion of America's political system continued to insist — based on what can only be termed wishful thinking — that none of these incontrovertible facts were related to one another.

While the Biden administration has made strides in addressing the reality of climate change, the likelihood of a Republican successor in the White House again reversing those advances, as the last administration did, is as predictable as fireworks in July. That's because, as with too many scientific issues today, this one has been engulfed in political debate that is separated from science and fueled by ideology and partisanship instead of facts.

The Independence Day that America just observed was a celebration of a country that has weathered some of the greatest challenges ever to confront a nation, from civil war to world wars to a Cold War. The threat to the planet's climate is every bit as dire as any of those challenges. Until Americans set aside the distractions of domestic politics and lead the world — as only America is capable of doing — toward a unified goal of combating climate change, our annual birthday celebration will be conducted under increasingly sweltering skies.

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