We're in for some heavy weather

This spring, this year, and this eon

Chris Farley, in a memorable SNL role

Every once in a while I have to snap out of the hypnotic grip of the bizarre news cycle and remind myself—and you—that there’s something even more important underway than the obvious mental and moral decline of the president: the relentless rise in the temperature of the planet. So here’s my latest occasional update from the physical world, and I fear the news is not good.

Let’s begin with the immediate past, and stay close to home, because the U.S. has been the center of some of the most extreme meteorological action on planet earth recently. Consider our winter: though it was chilly in the Northeast, if you averaged the temperature across the lower 48 it was the second-hottest winter on record. Thats because nine states had their hottest winter ever and five their second-hottest. As Andrea Thompson pointed out in Scientific American, “nowhere in the U.S. had a record cold winter this year. Nowhere even came close.”

That winter, by the way, was December, January, and February—what we call “meteorological winter” because it coincides with the coldest quarter of the year. It was outrageously hot and very dry, with severely shrunken snowpacks across the mountains of the West, which made Westerners nervous about the chances for wildfire as the summer wore on.

And then came March.

March was the single craziest month in U.S. weather history. Here’s how Seth Borenstein put it in the lede of his account for the Associated Press

March’s persistent unseasonable heat was so intense that the continental United States registered its most abnormally hot month in 132 years of records, according to federal weather data.

The federal government is still collecting weather data (though far less than it used to) and so we know the following remarkable fact according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration,

The average maximum temperature for March was especially high at 11.4 F (6.3 C) above the 20th century average and was almost a degree warmer than the average daytime high for April.

As Bob Henson points out in the Yale-based blog Eye of the Storm,

In 35 of the 48 contiguous states, the statewide average reading was among the top-ten warmest for any March. Not a single contiguous state was cooler than average.

Henson also points out that a lack of rainfall meant it’s so far been the driest year in American history

The nationally averaged precipitation total for 2026 to date is an ominous one: a mere 4.79 inches. That’s the lowest value on record for any January-to-March interval, including such notoriously dry periods as the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. The previous record low was 5.27 inches, set in Jan.-Mar. 1910.

As Henson’s colleague Jeff Masters succinctly told the AP:

Climate change is kicking our butts

And I fear it’s barely begun the beating. Because over the last two weeks, even as the world has fixed its gaze on the Middle East, meteorologists have been staring in some awe and terror at what appears to be a rapidly building El Niño. I’ve been telling you this is on the way for some months, but it’s coming into ever-clearer focus. NOAA again, in its April forecast, put the odds of a El Niño beginning this summer at better than sixty percent. More to the point, the wide array of computer models around the planet are beginning to predict a so-called “super El Niño,” when temperatures in the critical region of the Pacific shoot up far far far higher than in the past. Henson and Masters again:

For October, roughly half of the ECMWF ensemble is calling for sea surface temperatures in the main El Niño region (Niño3.4) to exceed 2.5 degrees Celsius above the seasonal average. Such values would correspond to what’s loosely referred to as a “super El Niño.” Though there’s no official definition for a “super” event, the term is often attached to El Niño when its peak anomalies reach at least +2.0°C. Since 1950, the only El Niño events that have hit this threshold for at least one three-month interval were in 1972–73, 1982–83, 1997–98, 2015–16, and 2023–24. Only one of those events, in 2015–16, pushed all the way past +2.5°C.

Here’s a useful graph of the various estimates from the computer modelling, courtesy of Zeke Hausfather

Basically it reads: a world we haven’t seen before. Because remember, El Niño comes on top of the steadily rising temperature of the earth. If these forecasts bear out, then possibly 2026 and certainly 2027 will be the hottest years ever recorded on this earth. As the atmospheric scientist Paul Roundy put it, there’s a “real potential for the strongest El Niño event in 140 years.” We don’t know, of course, exactly how this will manifest, but as Gabrielle Cannon wrote yesterday in the Guardian

A super El Niño that occurred in 2015 brought severe drought in Ethiopia, water supply shortages in Puerto Rico, and smashed records after unleashing a vicious hurricane season in the central North Pacific, according to an analysis by US federal scientists.

The cycle tends to create drought and heat across Australia, around southern and central Africa, in India and in parts of South America, including in the Amazon rainforest. Heavy precipitation, meanwhile, could hit the southern tier of the US, parts of the Middle East, and south-central Asia.

I think it’s safe to say that we can expect more weather chaos than we’ve ever seen before (the good folks at Covering Climate Now put together a useful briefing for reporters last week). Here’s my prediction, since my job is to figure out how the physical and political worlds intersect:

The havoc unleashed by a super El Niño will coincide with the havoc unleashed by Trump in the Gulf to produce a perfect storm of support for rapid action on getting off fossil fuels. Our brief vacation from thinking about climate change as a crucial fact of life on this planet will be over; the conjoined fears of the next months will combine to put us in a very new place politically.

My main fear is that this useful moment is coming very late in the game.

And by that I mean that the last few weeks have also produced a new round of research on the damage that human warming of the earth is doing to its most basic systems. For simplicity’s sake let’s concentrate on one big system, the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Current or AMOC, that system of currents (like the Gulf Stream) in the Atlantic that are the planet’s biggest heat distribution system.

The collapse of the AMOC has been a recurring nightmare in the climate literature—I first wrote about it in The End of Nature in the 1980s. But the prevailing theory was that it would take a good long while, probably more than a century. In recent years that consensus has been weakening, and the fears of a much more rapid failure of these currents—which keep Europe far warmer than it would otherwise be—have grown rapidly. We’re about a decade out from an ominous paper in Nature that warned that an anomaly in the north Atlantic—a “cold blob” in an otherwise rapidly warming global ocean—could signal that melting ice pouring off Greenland was fatally weakening the currents, by changing the salinity and hence the density of seawater. Research since them has not been comforting, with at least one prominent paper warning the collapse could come as early as the 2030s. Last year Iceland declared an AMOC collapse as a “national security risk,” since the disappearance of the current could turn the temperate country into what one of its foremost experts called “one giant glacier.” It would certainly be a civilizational event for all of Europe.

Anyway, a new paper last week in Science seemed to indicate, with data gathered from four mooring buoys along the western edge of these currents, that there is

a meridionally consistent decline in deep western overturning transport across these latitudes over the past two decades. This decline, observed at the western boundary, may serve as an effective indicator of AMOC weakening

Here’s how Alec Luhn explained the significance in New Scientist

The study’s analysis of the latest RAPID-MOCHA data shows that the flow of the AMOC is declining by about 90,000 cubic metres of water per second each year, a faster rate than what has previously been observed. That means between 2004 and 2023, the AMOC weakened by about 10 per cent.

But the uncertainty range of this change in flow is almost as large as the change itself. For this reason, Xin’s study also analyses pressure changes at three mooring arrays that have been installed since 2004 in the western Atlantic off the West Indies, the US east coast and Nova Scotia, Canada. There, it finds an even greater weakening of the AMOC, with much less uncertainty.

“It is the strongest direct observational evidence so far” that the AMOC is weakening, as models have long shown, says Stefan Rahmstorf at the University of Potsdam, Germany, who wasn’t involved in the research.

Meanwhile, another new and equally ominous paper in Nature late last month showed that a collapsing Atlantic current system would release prodigious amounts of carbon into the atmosphere, thus dramatically increasing overall global warming even as Europe froze. As William Hunter helpfully explained in (of all places) the Daily Mail

The scientists’ computer simulations revealed that halting this key current will release vast stores of carbon currently trapped deep beneath the ocean.

This would increase the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere by 47 to 83 parts per million, triggering up to 0.27°C (0.5°F) of additional warming worldwide.

'Our study shows how an AMOC collapse could flip the Southern Ocean from a carbon sink into a carbon source, releasing vast amounts of CO2 and fuelling further global warming,’ said Johan Rockström, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, 'The ocean has been our greatest ally, absorbing a quarter of human–made CO2 emissions.

The scariest piece of the puzzle in the new study may be the profound, and completely opposite, consequences for the two poles. As the authors put it,

regional temperature anomalies are pronounced: Arctic temperatures cool by ~ 7 °C (60 °N–90 °N), while Antarctic temperatures warm by ~ 6 °C (60 °S–90 °S).

A world in which the Arctic quickly cooled 12 degrees Fahrenheit just as the Antarctic warmed by ten degrees Fahrenheit would be a very very different world indeed, one capable of violent change on a scale I don’t really want to imagine. In any event, as Potsdam Institute director Johan Rockstrom explained

“The more CO₂ in our atmosphere at the stage of shutdown, the higher the likelihood of additional warming. Put simply, rising emissions today increase the risk of a stronger climate response down the line."

And that’s the one part of the equation we can do something about. We have one tool to keep carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere: the substitution of clean energy for fossil fuel. Our weapons in this fight are solar panels, wind turbines, and batteries. We need to crash them into place before these systems crash down upon us. That’s the job.

In other energy and climate news:

+The ongoing effort of Donald Trump to lead the world off fossil fuel by showing their unreliability continues, as the Strait of Hormuz remains essentially closed (double-closed!) and the effects reverberate around the world. The European think tank Ember has the most comprehensive assessment, in a sweeping new report on how the Iran war will speed the rise of electrification, especially coming on the heels of the Ukraine war, when the world’s largest fossil fuel exporter irreparably damaged its connections to its largest customer.

One shock is an event. Two is a pattern. To the extent history persuades, it is by repetition.

The wider pattern is that fossil fuel trade has never been riskier. The world is increasingly unstable – global armed conflicts are at their highest in decades, and the weapons needed to close a chokepoint have never been cheaper. A $20,000 drone can stop a $150 million tanker dead in the water. Furthermore, in 2019, the United States became a net fossil exporter for the first time since World War II. Its incentives have changed accordingly. For the three-quarters of the world living in fossil fuel-importing countries, that means, at best, a receding guarantor at the very time maritime dangers rise. At worst, the US has moved from guarantor to disruptor. For this importing majority, decades of fossil import dependency accumulated under the Pax Americana are now a glaring strategic vulnerability.

The report points out the glaring similarities to the twin oil shocks of the 1970s, which produced an effective end to burning oil for electricity. This time, they say, the result will be much larger, because the world has, close at hand, the solutions needed to move on

A solar farm takes 18 months. A rooftop system, a couple of weeks. An EV can be bought and driven home that afternoon. This time, cutting dependency does not require permission: it can run at the speed of consumer choice, not bureaucracy. And the supply chain is ready. China already has the factory capacity to more than double 2025 sales of solar, batteries and EVs. What was once seen as “overcapacity” is now just capacity.

So—though the immediate impulse is to reach for palliatives, like new sources of fossil fuel supply—they predict the ultimate effect will be a decisive push towards clean energy.

These reflexes were built for a world without alternatives. By the time new fossil supply comes online, it will be outcompeted by cheaper electrotech. Subsidies entrench the dependency that caused the crisis. Even diversified fossil imports will always be less dependable than the sun rising.

And we can see that impulse starting to kick in around the world. For example, word comes today that France had announced a ban on gas boilers in new buildings, and would double support for heat pumps

“As long as we depend on oil and gas, we will continue to pay the price for other people’s wars,” Lecornu said in a recorded address from the prime minister’s residence. He outlined initial steps in a plan to electrify heating and transport.

The war in the Middle East “is not our war, yet it affects us very directly. Fortunately, France has an asset: electricity produced on its own soil.”

Meanwhile, according to Time, in Asia, which gets 80 percent of its oil through the Strait of Hormuz,

​​South Korea reported that registrations for electric vehicles more than doubled in March compared to the prior year, due in part to rising fuel prices and government subsidies. In Malaysia, Chinese EV company BYD’s distributor told Reuters that it observed an uptick in enquiries and customer interest in March compared with the first two months of the year. In Pakistan, electric rickshaws have been selling out, according to Bloomberg.

And Wanjira Mathai, daughter of environmental pioneer Wangari Mathai, writes in Kenya’s Daily Nation that this is becoming a “defining moment” in Africa’s energy history:

Across the Global South, the industrial-scale solar revolution is happening. In Pakistan, a country the world mostly associated with energy poverty and grid dysfunction, 32% of its electricity is now coming from solar. The transition was not built in Islamabad. It was built on rooftops, by ordinary people and small manufacturers who could no longer afford to wait for the grid.

Solar is no longer only for lighting and charging. It is powering steel mills.

In any event, Deutsche Bank is already ready to declare the winner of the war, and it’s…China. As Ishika Mookerjee reports,

As war injects extreme volatility into oil and gas markets, the global race for energy security is making China stronger, according to Jacky Tang, emerging markets chief investment officer at the private banking arm of Deutsche Bank AG.

“China is the winner in this war from an economic standpoint, from an energy mix standpoint,” he said in an interview.

The prediction feeds into a complex picture. Bruegel, a think tank, says China’s reliance on oil imports from Iran is set to pose a “severe test” for its energy strategy. At the same time, the country’s status as the world’s largest producer of clean tech puts it in a unique position to help governments now desperate to wean themselves off Middle East imports, according to the Deutsche Bank executive.

+Excellent explainer in Nature from David Ho, who walks through the math of why carbon dioxide removal technology makes no sense on a planet that is still burning massive quantities of fossil fuel

To understand why, think of CDR as a time machine. Take the proposed US direct acir capture hubs, for example. Each facility is eventually expected to extract one million tonnes of CO₂ each year.

At that rate, for every year of operation at its full potential, each hub would take the atmosphere back in time by almost 13 minutes, but in the time it took to remove those 13 minutes of CO₂, the world would have spewed another full year of CO₂ into the atmosphere.

By contrast,

If we reduced emissions to around 10% of current levels — 4 billion tonnes of CO₂ a year — a DAC plant capable of removing one million tonnes would be a time machine taking us back just over 2 hours instead of 13 minutes. At that point, it would take 4,000 facilities to reach net zero in any given year, presuming they were fully powered by renewable energy.

In other words, if we’re going to get to use the shiny new tech of the future, we better use the sturdy tech we have right now: solar, wind, batteries

+In the Guardian, Mark Hertsgaard and Kyle Pope set the ground for what could be a truly important meeting at month’s end in Santa Marta, Colombia

At the UN Cop30 climate summit last November, Saudi Arabia led a group of petrostates in vetoing calls to develop a “roadmap” to phase out fossil fuels globally; indeed, the words “fossil fuels” were not even mentioned in the final text agreed at Cop30. But the 85 countries on the losing end of that veto may soon turn the tables.

Many of those governments will gather in Colombia on 28-29 April for a conference to begin a global transition away from oil, gas and coal. Critically, the First International Conference on the Just Transition Away from Fossil Fuels will not be governed by UN rules, which require consensus, but by majority rule, thus preventing a handful of countries from sabotaging progress as petrostates did at Cop30. What’s more, the underlying terrain of this conference will no longer be principally politics, but economics: not the words that canny negotiators can keep in or out of a diplomatic text, but the implacable market forces that shape the world economy, including the potential emergence of a de facto economic superpower.

At least 85 countries at Cop30 backed developing a roadmap to phase out fossil fuels. Included among them were the global north powers Germany, the United Kingdom, France and Spain – the world’s third, sixth, seventh and 12th biggest economies. The major global south countries Brazil and Mexico, the world’s 10th and 13th biggest economies, also backed the measure.

Combine the gross national products of those 85 countries and the total is $33.3tn. That’s larger than the $30.6tn GNP of the US, the world’s biggest economy, and considerably larger than the $19.4tn GNP of China, the world’s second-biggest economy.

+At Inside Climate News, Kiley Bense has the scoop on how the natural gas industry is buying Democrats to try and influence the energy debate

Sitting on a dais at the private Fitler Club for what was billed as a discussion about “the Path to a Clean Energy Future,” former Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter played to his audience.

“We have seven, eight seasons of an incredible comedy with some really great actors. You know, ‘It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia,’” he said. “Well, it’s not actually always sunny in Philadelphia, and it’s not always windy either, right?” The crowd laughed.

Energy “has to be reliable, it has to be affordable,” he added, one theme of an argument made throughout the evening that the path to a clean energy future should be built on gas. “It has to be there when people need it. It’s not a sometime thing.”

That messaging is favored by the event’s sponsor, Natural Allies for a Clean Energy Future, a coalition formed in 2020 to “educate and inform about the central role natural gas and natural gas infrastructure play in the clean energy future and as a partner to renewables.” Natural Allies’ goal is to redefine gas as “the most affordable and reliable energy source.”

Natural Allies—whose funders include the fracking company EQT, gas utility Enbridge and Venture Global, a liquefied natural gas provider—woos left-leaning and moderate voters in blue and purple states by hiring Democratic leaders like Nutter to share their message. Nutter’s advisory firm was paid $240,000 in 2024 for his work on behalf of the group, and he sits on its leadership council with other Democratic politicians like former Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe and former Ohio Congressman Tim Ryan.

Eugene DePasquale, the current chair of the Pennsylvania Democratic Party, is the state chairman for Natural Allies. He appeared on the panel alongside Nutter.

“It’s always been focused on, ‘How do we convince Democrat officials to stay onside to support fossil fuels?’” said Charlie Spatz, a research manager at the Energy and Policy Institute, of Natural Allies’ mission. “They exclusively exist to influence Democrats, in my opinion.

+The always-reliable Dharna Noor, with an account of students at Columbia University describing new student complaints about the ethics of its in-house enerty thinktank

A thinktank at Columbia University is engaging in deceptive trade practices by hiding the extent of its financial ties to the fossil fuel industry, according to a first-of-its-kind administrative complaint filed by student activists and shared with the Guardian.

Columbia’s Center on Global Energy Policy (CGEP) describes itself as an independent organization producing research on energy policy. But that representation is “misleading”, alleges the complaint to the New York City consumer protection bureau, filed Monday by Columbia’s chapter of the youth-led environmental justice organization the Sunrise Movement.

Publicly disclosed donation documents and academic studies’ conflict-of-interest statements show that CGEP has accepted millions of dollars in funding from big oil companies, including ExxonMobil, Shell, BP, Occidental and Tellurian. By presenting its fossil fuel-funded work as neutral, CGEP is misleading the public, the students allege.

One would think that Columbia, already bruised by its accommodations to the Trump administration, might want to steer clear of too much involvement with the world’s dirtiest industry.

+A UK government study committee has found that the cost of transition to a net zero economy is less than the cost of the energy shock from the invasion of Ukraine. That seems useful to know amidst a much larger oil shock! As the Belgian energy analyst Serge de Gheldere puts it,

The money’s leaving our pocket anyway, with the difference that moving off fossil fuels is an investment, whereas dealing with our current fossil system is a cost. Quite literally: building the future instead of burning it.

This is the OpEx trap: every gas boiler, every fuel import is a recurring invoice payable to geopolitical instability. Renewables and renovation are CapEx — you pay once, the exposure disappears.

+The Trump administration has unwisely used emergency powers to keep coal plants open, as as Dan Gearino expertly explains, but Canary Media reports that the plants are, among other things, losing large sums of money

It’s difficult to predict how much more expensive power could get if the DOE forces additional fossil-fueled plants to stay open. But Gabriella Tosado, a senior associate on RMI’s carbon-free electricity team, offered an estimate using the think tank’s modeling for states where data is available.

RMI ran a ​“100% self-commitment” analysis to calculate the increase in customer costs that would come from running all coal plants at ​“maximum availability” throughout the year, using 2024 data. ​“Nationally, running coal plants more often last year would have increased customer costs by $15 billion,” or a roughly 3% increase in total annual U.S. power-sector costs, she said.

“If operators of coal plants could make more money by running coal plants more often, they would,” she said. ​“Running them more will only distort market prices and drive up costs for families and small businesses.”

+Remember Coalie, the DOE’s friendly mascot for its favorite energy source? He’s got a new friend, Fossi, who TJ Jordan at DeSmogBlog described as the “new cartoon character who wants to make kids feel sorry for fossil fuels.”

Tentatively stepping into a classroom as a new pupil, Fossi is rejected by his peers, who each represent a different form of clean energy. No one wants to sit next to the smelly, smokey fuel that has caused the planet to heat up and “become sick”.

Fossi gradually wins the admiration of his classmates, however, when he offers to use his “wealth of experience” to help them plan a shift to cleaner energy sources and solve climate change.

“In a way, I’m a hero too,” Fossi thinks to himself at the end of the story.

The book comes from a company that builds geothermal plants, but is partly owned by Chevron, which “plans to increase oil and gas production up to three percent each year until 2030.”