Now comes the heat

Add it to the war, and maybe we have a teachable moment

An image of the expected high-pressure ridge that will bring record-breaking temperatures across much of the West over the next week

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. 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 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 U.S., 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 degrees, a pummeling of a record in the realm of three-month temperature data.

Albuquerque, New Mexico, clobbered its previous record warmest winter by 3 degrees, 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 today, Palm Springs California is projected to reach 104 degrees on Monday; the old record for the date is 95 degrees. 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 percent 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 this morning

In fact: the strongest mid-tropospheric ridge ever observed in the southwestern U.S. 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 five degrees 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 this 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 3C) as outliers here, the median and mean across all the models still gives an estimate around 2.5C, 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 today 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 percent 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 U.S. 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.

In other energy and climate news:

+NPR reports that across the country utilities are using spurious arguments about safety to try and block “balcony solar” bills in half the nation’s legislatures. The good news is that Virginia seems poised to pass theirs soon, and it seems likely four or five other states will do likewise—which should be enough to establish a nationwide market that really gets this technology cracking in America as it has across Europe (where—no safety problems have appeared despite millions of installations). Still—utilities are terrible.

"They don't want anyone messing with their business model," Cora Stryker of Bright Saver says. "Kicking up dust regarding safety concerns is definitely a strategy that is being used by people who don't want this for their own self-interested reasons."

NPR asked utilities mentioned in this story, as well as their trade groups, to comment on Stryker's "kicking up dust" allegation, but they did not respond beyond saying that safety and reliability are their primary concerns with plug-in solar.

+We’re starting to get a pretty good sense of which governors are rising to the occasion with solar, and which aren’t. Over at Climate-Colored Goggles, which is running a subscription drive this week, Sammy Roth tells the sad story of Gavin Newsom slashing rooftop solar incentives, something that the courts sadly upheld this week.

Newsom will be out of office in less than a year, and it’s possible his successor will be less in thrall to the utility companies — and the utility labor unions — that have made the policy landscape so inhospitable for the rooftop solar industry.

Emily Atkin, meanwhile, has a spirited interview with Tom Steyer, the longtime and merrily earnest climate advocate seeking to replace Newsom. It’s a great conversation, because Atkin asks what any sane person would when confronted with a billionaire in 2026: “Do you think it is ethical that you exist?” And Steyer handles it well, and they go on to a profound talk about the future…and the past. My favorite part is about a trip the two of them took up to the tarsands in 2014 because some of us had kicked up a fight over the KXL pipeline

Emily: I don’t know if you remember this, but I’ll give you credit here for being somebody who’s been doing this for a long time. Back in 2014, I was a 24-year-old reporter, and you went on a trip to the Canadian tar sands—

Tom:
God, I remember that so clearly.

Emily:
—to talk with Indigenous communities affected by tar sands development, because that was really the height of the Keystone XL pipeline fight—

Tom:
Which I was strongly fighting against, and which we did stop.

Emily:
—and there was an extra spot on your plane.

Tom:
Was that you?

Emily:
That was me. I was the reporter who came with you to report on it.

Tom:
My God, Emily. That was such an epic trip for me.

Emily:
It really was. It was a trip that made me fall in love with climate and environmental reporting — getting to talk to communities affected downstream by oil development.

Tom:
It was incredible. I went up there so people couldn’t say, “You’re just some jerk running your mouth who doesn’t know what he’s talking about.” And what we saw looked like the mountains of the moon.

They were creating a massive amount of runoff after mining and refining the oil, and they put it in these tailings ponds with gravel on the bottom. So it went right into the water system. All of the toxicity in that slurry went right into the water system, and it was a cancer cluster.

Every fish, every deer, every drop of water had massive amounts of toxicity in it. I was just like, my God.

Emily:
Yeah. I remember talking to people about how their way of life was being taken away from them — their hunting, their fishing — because of the pollution from those tailings ponds.

I remember someone getting teary-eyed talking about how fishing wasn’t just a source of sustenance; it was part of the culture they wanted to pass down to their kids. And they couldn’t do that anymore. It was really painful.

Tom:
It was incredibly painful. I’d gone to Alaska in 2006 to see what the land and animals and birds and fish looked like before Europeans showed up. And then we went there and saw what happened when industry arrived and devastated the people who had been living there.

Anyway, two good people in a good conversation. Meanwhile, on the other side of the continent, Kathy Hochul, the governor of New York, is doing what she can to erode New York State’s climate law—even though she faces no credible challenger in this year’s gubernatorial race. And so three state elected officials, led by the redoubtable Liz Krueger, took her on in the Daily News yesterday, using language that for fellow pols of the same party is pretty straightforward.

Right now Gov. Hochul is laying the groundwork to roll back one of New York’s best tools for lowering energy costs — our nation-leading climate law, the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act, or CLCPA — joining President Trump’s war on renewable energy that continues to drive up energy costs for everyone.

The reality is that renewable energy is the only path forward. It is well-established that new renewable power is consistently cheaper than new natural gas generation. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, renewable power will account for more than 99% of new electric generation in the U.S. in 2026. From Texas to Florida, renewables are winning on economics, not environmentalism.

The governor claims that implementing the CLCPA costs too much for New Yorkers. But here’s the truth: this administration has largely failed to implement the climate law for as long as she’s been in office. New Yorkers’ bills aren’t rising because of a law that hasn’t been implemented — they’re rising because the oil and natural gas status quo is too expensive.

Rising electricity prices are being driven principally by rising prices for fossil fuels, especially natural gas. That’s a fact recognized by administration officials themselves and the nonprofit corporation responsible for operating the bulk electricity grid, the New York Independent System Operator (NYISO).

If the administration actually wants to lower New Yorkers’ energy bills, we must not back down from our climate law…There is no doubt that we are behind on our climate targets — but when you’re behind, real leaders don’t quit, they work harder.

Meanwhile, an excellent letter to Hochul also urges her to keep the climate law intact, in particular by not imposing her own views on how methane works in the atmosphere (which is a thing you think a governor might defer to scientists on). If I was a governor and got this letter, I would say…thank you

We ask that you actively resist efforts to weaken the CLCPA. Many of us would be pleased to talk with you further about the CLCPA’s greenhouse gas accounting methodology. The views we express here are our best professional judgment and are based on a large body of peer-reviewed science. As a group, we represent some of the leading national and international thinkers in climate science and sustainability engineering.

+By law, the EPA has to name one medical doctor to its panel that sets pollution limits. Normally, it picks, say, a pulmonary specialist, who understands what particulates do to lungs. But in our brave new world, the EPA this week chose…an opthamologist, who in Maxine Joselow’s well-chosen words has

never published a peer-reviewed paper dealing with air pollution. He has coauthored a handful of peer-reviewed papers about eye diseases, as well as dozens of opinion pieces in conservative publications, many of which praised President Trump’s style of governing and foreign policies…

In videos on TikTok, Dr. Joondeph has described his recent mission trip to El Salvador and vacations to various destinations. And in a wide-ranging collection of columns, he has criticized President Joseph R. Biden Jr. for using an autopen to sign official documents, accused nurses of being biased against Mr. Trump and argued that concerns about climate change are overblown.

In another unusual move, the administration also selected two members for the air pollution panel who have worked in industries that the E.P.A. regulates. Katherine Kistler is an environmental manager at the steel manufacturer Nucor Corporation, and Sidney Marlborough was an executive at Orion Engineered Carbons LLC, a company that makes carbon black, an industrial material used to reinforce rubber in tires, at the time she was nominated. (He has since left the company.)

+The irreplaceable Antonia Juhasz, on Democracy Now, on fossil fuel and the war

I think what we’re seeing is just one of the clearest depictions yet of the frailty of a global order that is grounded in fossil fuels. All sides in this war are using fossil fuels as a weapon of war. The Iranians are, of course, retaliating against the Israelis and the Americans by targeting energy infrastructure, by blocking the Strait of Hormuz, by saying, “We’re going to drive up the price of oil, and we’re going to try to cut off supply, to make this an unbearable war for you.” The Israelis, backed by the Americans, have retaliated, directly targeting oil depots, directly targeting oil infrastructure.

+It’s good to have an accounting of the billions of dollars spent annually by the fossil fuel industry to demonize renewable power. It comes from David Hochschild, the chair of the California Energy Commission:

“You know, I just got this statistic a few weeks ago in the United States, the fossil fuel industry budget for Communications and Public Affairs is $US4 billion a year.

“The entire renewable energy industry is $US150 million okay … we’re getting outspent like 27 to one … And so we have a lot of work just to get the message out about the basic facts.”

+What do you know, the Trump administration claims that offshore wind farms were somehow a threat to our military security were…overstated. In fact, a new analysis finds that the reality is just the opposite. Peter Fairley writes:

When the Trump administration last year sought to freeze construction of offshore wind farms by citing concerns about interference with military radar and sonar, the implication was that these were new issues. But for more than a decade, the United States, Taiwan, and many European countries have successfully mitigated wind turbines’ security impacts. Some European countries are even integrating wind farms with national defense schemes.

In fact, wind farms are increasingly being tapped to extend military surveillance capabilities. “You’re changing the battlefield, but it’s a change to your advantage if you use it as a tactical lever,” says Lippert.

In 2021 Linköping, Sweden-based defense contractor Saab and Danish wind developer Ørsted demonstrated that air defense radar can be placed on a wind farm. Saab conducted a two-month test of its compact Giraffe 1X combined surface-and-air-defense radar on Ørsted’s Hornsea 1 wind farm, located 120 kilometers east of England’s Yorkshire coast. The installation extended situational awareness “beyond the radar horizon of the ground-based long-range radars,” claims Saab. The U.K. Ministry of Defence ordered 11 of Saab’s systems.

Putting surface radar on turbines is something many offshore wind operators do already to track their crew vessels and to detect unauthorized ships within their arrays. Sharing those signals, or even sharing the equipment, can give national defense forces an expanded view of ships moving within and around the turbines. It can also improve detection of low altitude cruises missiles, says Bekkering, which can evade air defense radars.

+A somewhat foreboding report from the UK, where an expert panel has concluded that war or climate shock, or some combination, could set off a real food crisis in the British isles

The first UK Food Security Report in December 2021 found the country was 54% food self-sufficient. Other rich countries such as the US, France and Australia are all food self-sufficient, meaning they grow enough food to feed their populations without imports if required.

The UK is one of the least food self-sufficient countries in Europe. The Netherlands, for example, which is densely populated, is at 80%, and Spain is at 75%.

“We’re not thinking about this adequately. We’re ducking it,” Lang said, speaking at the National Farmers’ Union conference in Birmingham.

“The default position that others can feed us is hardwired into the British state system, and indeed into the nature of how agrifood capitalism works in Britain. Others are wiser. Other countries are stockpiling,” he said. “Other countries have much more flexibility in their systems than we do. What we glorify as efficiency is now vulnerability.”

Other countries have emergency stockpiles in case of war, food contamination or climate shocks. Switzerland still has a stockpile sufficient to feed its entire population for three months and is increasing it to a year. The UK government’s advice to households is to have three days’ worth of food in their cupboards.

+Writing in the Arizona Daily Star, Rick Rappoport explains why data centers and deserts are not a perfect combo—at least if you use fracked gas to power them

TEP’s cooling processes evaporate about 200 gallons of water per megawatt-hour of energy produced. So, multiplying 19.7 million by 200 to calculate the gallons of water used in one year by TEP to produce the energy required by these two data centers results in the staggering figure of about 4 billion (with a “b”) gallons of water evaporated in the process.

Now, compare that water intensity (industry term for gobbling up water) with the water intensity for solar power — which Arizona has in beaucoup abundance. Aside from using water to occasionally clean off the solar panels, there is hardly any water consumption. Industry estimates range from 0.1 to 2.0 gallons per megawatt-hour. Using the median number results in 19.7 million gallons of water to produce the solar energy required by those two data centers.

+If you’re in Australia and record rains produce record floods, please watch out for crocodiles

The NT incident control acting commander, Shaun Gill, urged residents not to venture into flood waters after reports of people swimming.

“There are crocs absolutely everywhere … please don’t go in the water,” he told a press conference on Sunday morning. “Don’t swim in the water for two reasons. It’s because it’s a fast-flowing river, and also this is when crocs are most active.”

Gill said there were about 1,000 people in shelters after “a very difficult day” of evacuations on Saturday from Nganmarriyanga (formerly known as Palumpa), Nauiyu (the Daly River community), Katherine and Jilkminggan. Six aircraft and 18 helicopters were used in the rescues.

+Finally, in considerably better news, we’re seeing more of the remarkable technological progress that sometimes sounds almost like science fiction. At MIT, researchers have come up with extremely thin perskovite solar films that may allow “peel-and-stick” solar panels

The finished solar film generates as much electricity as an equivalent surface area of silicon cell, and the confirmed durability under realistic temperatures and humidity exceeds 10 years. The lightweight, mechanically robust solar film is easy to install—an advantage that brings the overall cost way down compared to the cost of silicon solar. For a conventional rooftop silicon system, as much as half of the total cost is often for installation. “That’s because those panels are not designed to be easily deployed through general construction,” says Swartwout. “A flexible solar panel is much more in line with how we do construction. To put it on your roof, you would just unroll it like you would unroll an asphalt shingle or a roofing membrane.”

In addition, the flexible films can be fabricated by a cost-effective mass-production method called roll-to-roll manufacturing in which material is continuously unrolled from one spool and rewound onto another. The machines operate at high speed, and the capital investment required is low. As a result, says Swartwout, “there isn’t much benefit to having centralized manufacturing, so you can think about a distributed manufacturing model.” That solves another problem with the current silicon solar technology: China now manufactures almost all solar cells, and, notes Swartwout, “many countries don’t want to have their energy supply chains totally dependent on China. With our technology, you can have regionalized manufacturing locally…more like today’s auto market.”

Meanwhile (and I wouldn’t actually mortgage my house to invest in this one, but still…) a Spanish research institute says its solar panels can…also generate energy from raindrops bouncing off the glass.

ICMS researchers created a thin film that not only protects the perovskite cell but also enables it to generate electricity from falling raindrops. The team used plasma technology to build this film, which is no thicker than 100 nanometers. In comparison, an average human hair is 80,000 nanometers thick.

This extremely thin film plays a dual role. First, it acts as an encapsulant that protects the perovskite cells’ chemistry while also increasing their light absorption. In addition to this, the layer acts like a triboelectric surface – one that can convert kinetic energy into electrical energy.

In experiments conducted at the ICMS facility, the researchers found that a single raindrop could generate a potential difference of 110 V, sufficient to power a small portable device.