“The climate crisis is tightening its grip on us” as summer 2024 is declared the hottest ever. The news comes from European climate service Copernicus. Director Carlo Buontempo, like some other climate scientists, was undecided on whether 2024 would be the hottest year on record because August 2023 was so enormously hotter than average. But then this August 2024 matched 2023, making Buontempo “pretty certain” that this year will end up hottest on record. “In order for 2024 not to become the warmest on record, we need to see very significant landscape cooling for the remaining few months, which…