In the wake of the economic crash of 2008, the resilience of millions of Americans’ personal finances collapsed in the face of unexpected stresses — loss of a job, collapse of a home’s value, decline in stock prices, or a medical emergency. Personal bankruptcy filings accelerated from just under 600,000 in 2006 to over 1.5 million in 2010.

Sometimes the stresses piled on one another, as when the loss of a job deprived a family of medical insurance and then a medical emergency hit. The financial woes that led to the wave of bankruptcies took most of us by surprise, even though iconoclasts in the banking industry had been warning of looming disaster for months or even years. And in the wake of the bankruptcies came a wave of homelessness, suffering and anxiety.

In just the same way we were warned of the subprime mortgage bubble, we have been warned of climate change’s looming impact. And this summer is driving home the need to be concerned about looming climate bankruptcy.

Just as unsustainable debts and freewheeling lending practices reduced the resilience of personal and national financial systems, so our mounting climate debt is warming the earth and reducing the resilience of our food, water and social systems. Much like an overdrawn bank account, we are rapidly depleting the carbon storehouses of our forests, and the deposits of coal and fossil fuels underground. By releasing all this carbon dioxide into the air, we are tipping the atmosphere’s balance sheets into the red — too much carbon in the atmosphere for our forests and oceans to absorb it all. The more CO2 we pump into the atmosphere, the further in debt we go, and the more sacrifice we’ll need to make to balance our carbon budget in the future.

And this summer the impacts of our mounting climate debt became clear. July was the hottest month ever in U.S. history (3.3°F above the 20th century average). Drought has reduced water levels in soils and rivers across much of the country, and spectacular and unprecedented heat has evaporated what little water is available, baking our soils and forests. With the natural resilience of our forests and watersheds reduced, climate bankruptcy hits home, yielding charred homes from fires in Colorado; suffering in stifling, power-less homes across the East; and reduced yields in the parched breadbasket of the Midwest.

We have been told that climate change is coming and will have big impacts. But this summer has made many Americans wonder if it isn’t here now. And new research from NASA scientists shows they’re right: climate change is likely responsible for the destructive heat waves we have experienced over the past decade.

And extreme temperatures are occurring faster than scientists anticipated. Extremely hot summers — warmer than virtually ever occurred during a base period of 1951-1980 — have occurred across more than 10% of the world’s lands during the past several years. Extremely hot temperatures are more than 10 times more likely to occur now than 50 years ago.

You have likely felt the heat this year — which has broken tens of thousands of heat records across the U.S. But do you also recall the heat wave in Texas and Oklahoma just last year that killed 100,000 cattle and 500 million trees? The Russian heat wave two years ago that killed 56,000 people? The European heat wave in 2003 that killed [at least 35,000] people? The new research shows that this is not just year-to-year variation in weather, but almost certainly due to global climate change causing warmer temperatures.