Los Angeles County just broke its all-time high temperature record which was set just 14 years before. | Photo by FREDERIC J. BROWN/AFP via Getty Images

The deadly impacts of climate change on a hot city were clear 15 years ago. On July 16, 2006, a sticky, searing air mass parked itself over Southern California and stayed there for almost two weeks, creating one of the worst heat waves in Los Angeles?s history. For ten days, most parts of L.A. were dangerously hot, including record-high overnight lows, making it physiologically impossible to cool down without a window AC unit trained with laser precision onto your bed. On the evening that Woodland Hills, the hottest pocket of the city, hit 119 degrees, shattering L.A. County?s all-time-high temperature record, I gave up and slept on the floor of my Hollywood apartment, a frozen washcloth molded to my forehead. Last Sunday, that record was broken when the same weather station in Woodland Hills clocked in at 121 degrees. The changed climate was not, as predicted, a few decades in the future: It was here, with nearly two decades of advance notice. The wildfires in California ? particularly the ones ignited by gender-reveal parties ? will snag all the headlines this summer, but the state?s record-breaking heat will end up being more deadly. Extreme heat kills more Americans each year than any other weather-related disaster combined ? the number of heat-related deaths from the 2006 heat wave was later determined to be t...