Essayist Lance Morrow once wrote, “A snowstorm in mid-April is a kind of outrage. It is a minor perversion of nature. It makes hairline fractures in the order of things. The earth has schedules … [and] nature has mood swings.”

Old Mother Nature sure must have been in one foul mood last month, or else global warming is upon us with a serious vengeance.

The Huffington Post reports today that August was the toastiest month since they started keeping records of this kind of stuff in 1881. According to NASA, the latest readings continue a series of record or near-record breaking months, with May of this year also going down as one warmest in recorded history.

Dr. Gavin Schmidt, a climatologist and climate modeler at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, told the online publication that while the agency’s data does indicate that this August was the hottest on record, the difference falls within a few hundredths of a degree compared with previous Augusts.

Schmidt cautioned against focusing on any one month or year, but instead on the fact that “the long-term trends are toward warming.” A very hot August, he said, is just one piece of the data that “point[s] towards the long-term trends.”

In Seattle, meanwhile, the average temperature in July and August in the Seattle area this year was a record-setter, according to the National Weather Service. We hit an average temp of 80 degrees for those 62 days, just shy of the record set in 1967.

The average daily temperature measured at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport from July 1 until Aug. 31 was 69.2 degrees. The previous highest average temperature for the same period was in 1967 with 68.8 degrees, says the Weather Service.

Time to chill out.