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heatwaves
It's About to Get Even Hotter—Can We Learn From It?
The next six months could be the ultimate in teachable moments, with rapidly rising prices for oil, and rapidly rising temperatures.
Mar 14, 2026
I am (mostly) going to take a break from writing about the war for a day, because big though it is, it’s not quite the biggest thing happening on our planet. Or rather, its widespread destruction is taking place inside a larger context.
President Donald Trump’s endless folly (first tariffs, now a desperately stupid war that has closed the Strait of Hormuz) has caused what everyone is beginning to understand is widespread economic damage. As The New York Times reported today, “This is the big one,” and “the fallout is rattling households and businesses in neighborhoods all over the globe.”
On a stable planet, though, the damage might be contained and repaired; someone as incompetent as Trump (who is now describing his war as a “short excursion” and insisting that the Strait is in “very good shape”) will eventually (please God) burn himself out. Our bigger problem, as we’re about to be reminded, is that the planet is the furthest thing from stable. The backdrop is about to become the foreground, and with that the drama will shift once more.
It’s already hot, all over the world and here in the United States. That’s been a little hidden these past months, because the country’s population and power center—the northeast corridor from Boston to DC—has had a cold winter; until the last few days of rapid-onset mud season it’s felt like an old-school winter in New England (with sublime skiing, which has kept me sane). And Minnesota, the source of much of the year’s news so far, was cold too, at least in bursts. But we’ve been the exception: in fact, it was the second-warmest winter on record in the continental US, and that’s because the West broke every possible record, usually by a mile:
Several cities can now claim winter 2025-26 as their warmest on record, including locations with over a century of data, like Salt Lake City (152 years of data), Tucson (130 years of data), and Rapid City, South Dakota (114 years of data).
Phoenix, Arizona, obliterated its previous record (a record that was only a year old, mind you) by almost 3°F, a pummeling of a record in the realm of three-month temperature data.
Albuquerque, New Mexico clobbered its previous record warmest winter by 3°F, according to the Southeast Regional Climate Center. Helena, Montana, Las Vegas, and Lubbock, Texas were among the other cities record warm this winter.
I don’t want to brush by those numbers. Phoenix and Albuquerque have temperature records going back more than a century. If they were going to beat the old record for a three-month stretch, something that shouldn’t happen very often, it should be by a tenth of a degree. That’s how statistics work on a set that large—or it’s how they did work on a stable planet. Three degrees is insane. And if that’s insane, then what’s going to happen in the next week is truly bonkers. A giant heat dome is set to settle in over the Southwest, bringing new temperature records. As The Washington Post reported Thursday, Palm Springs California is projected to reach 104°F on Monday; the old record for the date is 95°F. Again, that’s statistically bizarre in a way that makes my head hurt:
This record-breaking heat dome will contribute to worsening drought conditions across the Intermountain West.
In Utah, snowpack remains at record low levels according to Meyer. He said that it would take a foot of snow in Salt Lake City for the season to catch up with even the second-lowest seasonal snowfall total—and that a storm of that magnitude isn’t expected to come.
“The knockout punch comes in the form of Utah’s reservoirs, which are only at 40% of capacity right now,” Meyer said. “All this means we are likely going to see some very tangible water supply cuts and conservation efforts by the state this year.”
The weather forecast and climate outlook community in Utah was “filled with trepidation” because drought relief looked unlikely, added Meyer, stressing that much more meaningful impacts were possible for agricultural communities as water conservation efforts grow.
“Right now, every drop is going to count this year,” he said.
Across the region, New Mexico was also reporting its lowest snowpack on record and Colorado was in a similar situation.
Here’s how Daniel Swain and the good folks at Weather West described the heat dome that is forming as of Friday morning:
In fact: the strongest mid-tropospheric ridge ever observed in the southwestern US in March is expected to develop by Friday, and then will probably go on to break that new record (set this week) when it re-organizes into an even broader and stronger ridge next week.
In case you’re wondering, this heat is in no way confined to land. The oceans, which have soaked up most of the planet’s excess warmth, are crazily warm right now too:
Sea surface temperatures off the coast of Southern California have risen as much as 5°F above average for the time of year, causing a strong, Category 2 marine heat wave to develop.
These unusually warm waters will provide a boost to air temperatures near the coast, especially at night, preventing them from dropping off as much as they otherwise would.
“A strong to severe marine heatwave is ongoing off the coast of California,” wrote Colin McCarthy, a storm chaser affiliated with the University of California at Davis.
In early March, ocean temperatures reached the mid- to upper 60s at Scripps Pier in La Jolla, California.
“That’s the average ocean temperature for mid-June,” McCarthy said.
And here’s the kicker. All this is happening during a La Niña “cool phase” of the Pacific, something that will soon change. I alerted you exactly a month ago to the likelihood we were going to see an El Niño kick off sometime this summer; in the last few weeks the chances of that have grown stronger, and more to the point it looks like it could be an exceptionally strong “super” version of the warming current. The normally cautious-almost-to-a-fault climate scientist Zeke Hausfather came out with his new forecast Thursday afternoon, and it was a doozy:
I’ve collected 11 different models that have been updated since the beginning of March. Each of these in turn features a number of ensemble members, so that we end up with 433 total ENSO forecasts…
These clearly show that a strong El Niño is indeed likely to develop later in the year. While I’d probably discount some of the higher values (much above 3°C) as outliers here, the median and mean across all the models still gives an estimate around 2.5°C, which would put it notably stronger than the 2023-2024 El Niño and close to if not matching what we saw back in 2015-2016.
So what does this mean for global temperatures this year and in 2027? All things being equal, the lag between peak El Niño conditions and the global surface temperature response would result in the largest impacts on 2027 temperatures (as El Niño events generally peak between November and January). It would still boost 2026, but probably not enough to set a new record this year.
However, I have to be a bit cautious here. Long time readers may remember my post in May 2023 where I deemed it unlikely that 2023 would set a new record (given this historical lag in global temperature response to El Niño) and argued that 2024 would instead. I was partially wrong–2023 was weird, and the heat came much earlier than expected. We think the extended triple-dip La Niña event between 2020 and 2023 may have primed the system for more rapid heating, something absent this time around. But we don’t know for sure. Fool me once, and all that.
Either way, this means that 2027 looks increasingly likely to set a new record, perhaps by a sizable margin if we end up on the high end of the range of El Niño forecasts.
That Hausfather and the brasher Jim Hansen are in basic agreement here should terrify us. We’re going to see temperatures unlike any that humans have seen before, which means we’re going to see chaotic weather unlike humans have seen before. If you think this is some kind of lefty enviro fantasy, check out this source:
“Due to the increasing concentration of greenhouse gases, the climate system cannot effectively exhaust the heat released in a major El Niño event before the next El Niño comes along and pushes the baseline upward again,” Defense Department meteorologist Eric Webb said.
Therefore, a super El Niño in 2026-27 would disperse more heat than other very strong events in 1982-83, 1997-98, and 2015-16.
And were not going to know what hit us, in several ways. The substack Future Earth Catalog published an interview Wednesday with veteran Florida weatherman John Morales which was the best account I’ve seen yet of what the Trump cuts to our scientific system mean in real time:
The cuts to NOAA and the National Weather Service have been devastating. If you look at the statistics of forecast accuracy for tropical cyclone tracks and intensities from the National Hurricane Center, they were off in 2025. And anecdotally, I’m not the only meteorologist who will tell you that day-to-day forecasting has become more challenging. The weather models are flip-flopping from one solution to the next.
Think about how many times TV meteorologists in the fall of 2025 had to show you two or three models with different solutions and say, “Well, this is what this model says, but yesterday it was saying something different.” That leads to more confusion among the public—and it makes our job of saving life and property more difficult.
We’ve been missing 15 to 20% of our weather balloon data. And those missing balloons are upstream—out West, in the Plains, in the Intermountain West, and especially in Alaska. That’s where our weather comes from. We’re no longer able to really know what’s going on out there. And nothing provides the detail weather balloons can: every 15 feet, all the way up to 100,000 feet.
So we may not know what’s coming, but we can guess it’s going to be bad. For instance, I noted before that the Western snowpack is at record low levels. Even in California, which, due to a couple of record-level atmospheric rivers off the warm Pacific saw lots of midwinter snow, the early heat in the Sierras has already led to widespread melt. I do not think it’s fear-mongering to warn that fire may be a serious danger this season in the West.
And what’s happening in the US will be paralleled in places around the planet as El Niño takes us up the escalator. A new study just found that rising temperatures are already taking many humans past the point where they can live with any kind of comfort. As Todd Woody reports:
The number of days where extreme heat makes it too dangerously hot to walk the dog, sweep the porch, and engage in other ordinary pursuits has doubled around the world over the past 75 years, according to new research.
Scientists determined that on average, those 65 and older experience a month a year when heat prevents them from routine activities. Parts of Asia, Africa, Australia, and North America are becoming unlivable for senior citizens, the researchers said. Younger adults also are losing time as climate-driven heat restricts their lives for 50 hours a year.
Overall, more than a third of the global population resides in regions where heat severely affects daily life, according to the peer-reviewed paper published Tuesday in the journal Environmental Research: Health.
But it may be getting too hot for some key physical systems too. It seems likely that this is the year the Colorado River system may finally have to deal with the fact that it simply can’t provide the water people have been counting on. A new study last week found clear signs that the Gulf Stream is beginning to drift northward, a “clear sign” that worries about the collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Current (AMOC) are no mere phantasm:
The findings indicate that the movement of the Gulf Stream could be a “canary in the coal mine” for the AMOC’s collapse. According to their analysis of satellite data, the Gulf Stream has already been nudged northwards from the coast near Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, since the early 1990s. This is likely to be the result of the AMOC dwindling and losing its grip.
We don’t know for sure how the Iran war will play out, nor the El Niño; at the moment, though, things look ominous. All I’m saying is, the next six months could be the ultimate in teachable moments, with rapidly rising prices for oil, and rapidly rising temperatures. And what do you know, we have a midterm exam coming up on November 3.
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Trump’s Climate Policies Could Cause Mass Death of Global Poor, Analysis Warns
"These are people with lives," said a spokesperson for the US Climate Action Network. "They are people like us, even if they happen to live in a different part of the world."
Nov 19, 2025
As he skips out on this year’s annual climate summit in Brazil to the chagrin of world leaders, a new analysis shows that President Donald Trump’s climate agenda will cause a massive increase in excess deaths in the poor nations least equipped to deal with—and least responsible for—rising temperatures.
The analysis, published Wednesday by The Guardian and ProPublica, found that the emissions released over the next decade due to Trump's acceleration of fossil fuel usage, combined with his killing of renewable energy, will result in an estimated 1.3 million more preventable heat-related deaths worldwide over the next 80 years.
Most of them will occur in poor, hot countries in Africa and South Asia, which the report notes "emitted relatively little of the pollution that causes climate change," but "are least prepared to cope with the increasing heat." On the contrary, the US, which has just 4% of the world's population, has emitted around 20% of the world's greenhouse gases.
The estimate of excess deaths is based on a widely recognized peer-reviewed metric known as the "mortality cost of carbon," which finds that every 4,434 metric tons of greenhouse gas released into the atmosphere translates to about one additional excess death. Notably, that metric only includes direct temperature-related deaths from conditions like heat stroke, while not taking into account indirect deaths from drought, famine, disease, wildfires, and other disasters that climate change is worsening.
An analysis from Carbon Brief, based on modeling from Princeton University, found that an additional 7 billion metric tonnes of carbon—roughly the equivalent of Indonesia, the world’s sixth-largest emitter—will be released through 2030 as a result of Trump’s policy actions. These have included the shredding of pollution regulations; the near-total elimination of investment in wind, solar, and electric vehicles; and the dramatic expansion of oil and coal extraction.
As the rest of the world makes great strides toward a renewable future, the global Climate Action Tracker says Trump is carrying out “the most aggressive, comprehensive, and consequential climate policy rollback” it has ever analyzed.
"We are quickly emerging as the planet’s rogue nation, determined to deny climate and slow the energy transition as best we can," wrote environmental journalist Bill McKibben last month in Common Dreams.
The new analysis follows research published last month by the University College of London, which found that the climate crisis has already led to a huge spike in excess deaths. An average of more than half a million preventable heat-related deaths occurred globally each year between 2012 and 2021, a 23% increase since the 1990s.
While still an unfathomable loss of life, the 1.3 million projected to die as a result of Trump's climate policies are a drop in the bucket on top of the 83 million excess deaths that the mortality metric predicts if emissions continue at the same rate.
“The sheer numbers are horrifying,” Ife Kilimanjaro, executive director of the non-profit US Climate Action Network, told The Guardian and ProPublica. "But for us, they’re more than numbers. These are people with lives, with families, with hopes and dreams. They are people like us, even if they happen to live in a different part of the world."
The report comes amid the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP30) in Belém, Brazil, which the US was one of only four nations in the world to skip, drawing condemnation from numerous world leaders.
One of them was Maina Vakafua Talia, the climate envoy from Tuvalu, the small Pacific island nation that is expected to be one of the first countries to become uninhabitable due to sea level rise and fiercer storms, and has already begun planning for mass evacuations over the next two decades. Trump's pullout from the Paris Climate Accords, he said, demonstrated a “shameful disregard for the rest of the world."
But while the brunt of the climate emergency will be felt by the Global South, Americans will not be spared. Annual deaths from heat in the US have already increased by 50% since the year 2000, according to a recent Yale University study. A Texas A&M University study from 2023 projected that if global temperatures exceed 3°C above preindustrial levels, an additional 200,000 Americans could die annually due to changes that cause both hot and cold temperatures to become more extreme.
In an interview at COP30 with Amy Goodman of Democracy Now!, Dutch climate envoy Prince Jaime de Bourbon de Parme likened Trump's denial of the climate emergency to ignoring an illness.
"If I’m sick, and I take my temperature, and I’ve got facts and figures that I’m sick, I can ignore it or not," he said. "So, it’s up to him to listen to the doctor or not. But it’s wise to listen to the facts. The science tells the story. I’m not telling it. It’s not my opinion. It’s just listening to the experts that tell us that climate is a fact."
The Guardian and ProPublica analysis came a day after the Brazilian COP30 Presidency released a draft text that campaigners warned did not go far enough in demanding a roadmap to transitioning away from fossil fuels. More than 80 countries at the conference on Tuesday joined a call for leaders to include tangible metrics and plans for the transition in the summit's final agreement.
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'Time to Make Polluters Pay': Study Ties Fossil Fuel Pollution Directly to Deadly Heatwaves
"We're talking about real people who died, real crops that failed, and real communities that suffered, all because of decisions made in corporate boardrooms," said one campaigner.
Sep 11, 2025
A study published Wednesday in the journal Nature establishing "that the influence of climate change on heatwaves has increased, and that all carbon majors, even the smaller ones, contributed substantially to the occurrence of heatwaves," is fueling fresh calls for fossil fuel giants to pay for the deadly impacts of their products.
With previous "attribution studies," scientists have generally looked at single extreme weather events. The new study, led by Sonia Seneviratne, a professor at the Swiss university ETH Zurich, is unique for its systematic approach—but that's not all.
"Past studies have mostly looked at emissions from people and countries. This time, we're focusing on the big carbon emitters," explained lead author Yann Quilcaille, a postdoctoral researcher in Seneviratne's group, in a statement.
"We are now at the point where we recognize the serious consequences of extreme weather events for the world's economies and societies—heat-related deaths, crop failures, and much, much more," he said. "People are concerned about who contributed to these disasters."
The researchers found that climate change made 213 heatwaves from 2000–23 "more likely and more intense, to which each of the 180 carbon majors (fossil fuel and cement producers) substantially contributed." They also found that global warming since 1850-1900 made heatwaves 2000-09 about 20 times more likely, and those 2010-19 more likely.
"Overall, one-quarter of these events were virtually impossible without climate change," the paper states. "The emissions of the carbon majors contribute to half the increase in heatwave intensity since 1850-1900. Depending on the carbon major, their individual contribution is high enough to enable the occurrence of 16-53 heatwaves that would have been virtually impossible in a preindustrial climate."
Anybody surprised? Emissions from 14 fossil fuel giants drove 213 major heatwaves since 2000, making >50 deadly ones 10,000× more likely and adding up to +2.2°C increased intensityAll while knowing the impact of GHG emissionsCorporate negligence =Human costwww.theguardian.com/environment/...
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— Ian Hall (@ianhall.bsky.social) September 10, 2025 at 12:37 PM
While the study highlights the climate pollution of "14 top carbon majors," including the governments of the former Soviet Union, China (coal and cement), India (coal), and the companies Saudi Aramco, Gazprom, ExxonMobil, Chevron, National Iranian Oil Company, BP, Shell, Pemex, and CHN Energy, Quilcaille said that "the contributions of smaller players also play a significant role."
"These companies and corporations have also primarily pursued their economic interests, even though they have known since the 1980s that burning fossil fuels will lead to global warming," the researcher added.
In a review of the study for Nature, climate scientist Karsten Hausten from Germany's Leipzig University pointed out that "Quilcaille and colleagues' results, as well as the attribution framework that they have developed, provide a tool to continue the legal battle against individual companies and countries."
"This study is a leap forward that could be used to support future climate lawsuits and aid diplomatic negotiations," he wrote. "Finally, it is another reminder that denial and anti-science rhetoric will not make climate liability go away, nor will it reduce the ever-increasing risk to life from heatwaves across our planet."
Hausten was far from alone in recognizing how the new research could contribute to climate cases. Jessica Wentz, senior fellow at the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University, pointed to the International Court of Justice's landmark advisory opinion from July that countries have a legal obligation to take cooperative action against the global crisis.
"Initially, when a plaintiff needs to show that they have standing in a case, they have to allege that they have an injury that is traceable to the defendant's conduct," she told CBC, suggesting the new study will help establish that connection.
"The methodologies that underpin these types of findings can also be used in more fungible ways to look at not only the contributions of the carbon majors, but presumably you could use a similar approach to start looking at government," Wentz said.
Christopher Callahan, a scientist at Indiana University Bloomington who has published research showing that economic damages from rising extreme heat can be tied to companies such as Exxon, said that "this study adds to a growing but still small literature showing it's now possible to draw causal connections between individual emitters and the hazards from climate change."
"There is a wealth of evidence now that major fossil fuel producers were aware of climate change before the rest of the public was and used their power and profit to undermine climate action and discredit climate science," he said, adding that it is "morally appropriate" to hold companies accountable for the emissions of their products.
Callahan also gathered some of the relevant research in a series of posts on Bluesky, noting that on the same day that this new study was published, another team "quantified the thousands of heat-related deaths in Zurich, Switzerland that can be attributed to climate change—and showed that dozens of these deaths are due to the emissions from these individual firms."
"Together, this science—and the broader attribution science that preceded it—are building a clear scientific case for climate accountability," he concluded.
Several US states and municipalities in recent years have launched lawsuits and passed legislation designed to make Big Oil pay for driving the deadly climate emergency—and earlier this year, drawing on an essay in the Harvard Environmental Law Review, an American woman filed the first climate-related wrongful death suit against fossil fuel companies.
In a Wednesday statement to The Guardian about the new study, Cassidy DiPaola, a spokesperson for the Make Polluters Pay campaign, said that "we can now point to specific heatwaves and say: 'Saudi Aramco did this. ExxonMobil did this.'"
"When their emissions alone are triggering heatwaves that wouldn't have happened otherwise," she added, "we're talking about real people who died, real crops that failed, and real communities that suffered, all because of decisions made in corporate boardrooms."
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