When given the choice between an inconvenient truth and a reassuring lie, the polls show most Americans will opt for the reassurance. But sometimes, inconvenient truths have a way of intruding on our comfort zone.

Just ask the folks in Texas and Oklahoma, a region that is experiencing what can only be described as slow-motion incineration. Three-quarters of the state of Texas and most of Oklahoma are currently in exceptional drought, the most intense category of drought. Many cities in that region have experienced unbroken weeks of high temperatures in excess of 100 degrees and the forecast calls for more of the same as far as the eye can see.

We all know it gets hot in Texas in summer, but here are the forecast high temperatures from Intellicast for the next week in Crawford, the Texas town made famous by George W. Bush: 105˚, 105˚, 104˚, 105˚, 106˚, 107˚ and 107˚. To make matters worse, unusual humidity is expected to accompany the heat. And this isn’t an unusual week. It’s just more of the same weather that has gripped the region for more than a month.

While drought cripples one part of the country, other regions are experiencing unprecedented flooding. And it isn’t just in the U.S. From Australia to Pakistan, to Russia, extreme weather has become the norm across the globe.

We’re told by the overwhelming majority of climate scientists to expect more of the same… much more, in fact, as the concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere continue to rise at accelerating rates due to the increased burning of fossil fuels.

That’s the inconvenient truth that most Americans seem unwilling to accept. Of course, they’ve had plenty of help along the way, from a well-funded and effective public relations effort funded almost entirely by the oil, gas, and coal industries—one that has tried to raise doubts about the reality of climate change in hopes of forestalling steps that could actually lessen the impacts.

Critics dismiss any attempt to link extreme weather events to climate change, even though climate change models have pointed to more frequent outbreaks of drought, excessive heat, flooding, and severe storms. That is, until the Northeast gets hit by a big snowstorm in January. That always gets the critics harrumphing. “Look, it snowed two feet. Climate change is a fraud!”

While it’s true that attributing any one weather event to climate change, or the lack thereof, is questionable, the latest data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration makes an undeniable case that our climate is warming, and dramatically so.

Unlike day-to-day weather events, the data recently released by NOAA is part of the once-a-decade updating of climate “normals.” These normals are based on a thirty-year average, so every ten years, a decade is added and the oldest one is dropped from the mix.

And because the data reflects a decade’s worth of records from thousands of weather stations across the country, it doesn’t track changes in day-to-day weather, it tracks the longer-term weather patterns we refer to as climate. And as we reported last week, the NOAA data shows that average temperatures increased in all 50 states, particularly in the northern tier of states, like Minnesota. In Minnesota, January nights are now nine degrees warmer, on average, than they were in the 1970s. That’s a dramatic difference and its part of a global trend of warmer temperatures, particularly in the overnight hours.

And it’s not as if the latest data is the only evidence. Climate normals have increased for three straight decades now in the U.S., and similar increases have been documented globally. We can argue about why that’s happening, but there is no longer any argument about whether the climate is changing.

Critics have tried suggesting the change is part of a natural trend. Yet they have developed no credible theory that can account for the steady rise in CO2, a trendline that is linked closely with the increased burning of fossil fuels.

As for the basic science of the so-called “greenhouse effect,” it isn’t subject to debate. Carbon dioxide does trap heat, like an insulative blanket. That’s been an accepted scientific fact since the 1800s. While it might be reassuring to convince ourselves otherwise (who wants to believe that our energy-intensive lifestyle is contributing to the problem, after all?), you may as well believe in a flat Earth.

If we know that carbon dioxide traps heat, and that we’re putting more and more of it into the atmosphere, why would predictions of a warming climate be the least bit controversial?

This is especially so, given that the observed data (steadily rising temperatures and more extreme weather) conforms very closely to the climate models developed by scientists. And it’s much more than temperature data. Across the world, researchers have documented the accelerating rates of melting of glaciers and permafrost and sea level rise. Sea ice in the arctic is disappearing rapidly and more than 80 percent of it could disappear in summer within just ten years at current rates of melting, according to researchers.

Despite the growing mountain of evidence, and the now nearly unanimous agreement of climate scientists, public attitudes about climate change have moved in direct opposition to the facts. Recent polls have shown that public acknowledgement of climate change in America has been on the decline, evidence of the effectiveness of the fossil fuel industry’s public relations efforts— and of the nature of so many of us to believe in reassuring story-lines that are convenient, even when false.

Of course, eventually, reality catches up. In the case of climate change, the longer we cling to industry-funded fiction, the harsher that reality is going to be.