You’re out of free articles.
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
Sign In or Create an Account.
By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy
Welcome to Heatmap
Thank you for registering with Heatmap. Climate change is one of the greatest challenges of our lives, a force reshaping our economy, our politics, and our culture. We hope to be your trusted, friendly, and insightful guide to that transformation. Please enjoy your free articles. You can check your profile here .
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Subscribe to get unlimited Access
Hey, you are out of free articles but you are only a few clicks away from full access. Subscribe below and take advantage of our introductory offer.
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Create Your Account
Please Enter Your Password
Forgot your password?
Please enter the email address you use for your account so we can send you a link to reset your password:

Extreme heat is the deadliest weather phenomenon in the United States. It's also one of the easiest to underestimate: We feel it on our skin, or perhaps see it shimmering in the air around us, but it doesn't announce itself with the destructive aplomb of a hurricane or wildfire. Still, heat waves are becoming practically synonymous with summer.
Climate change is only making heat waves worse. They're getting more frequent, up from an average of two per year in the United States in the 1960s to six per year in the 2010s and '20s. They're also about a day longer than they were in the ‘60s, and they're more intense; those two factors combined, in particular, make them more deadly. This year's expected El Niño will bring even more heat with it: NOAA's summer outlook for the United States, shown below, paints a swath of above-average temperatures across much of the country.

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how to cover heat waves. Each is unique — suffering of any kind is always unique, even if the broad strokes are not — yet the things one can say about them are, for the most part, largely the same. Records will break, power grids will strain, and people will be hurt: This is the reality of climate change.
So this year, we are trying an experiment: We will document particularly notable heat waves around the world as they happen, but rather than devote separate stories to them, each heat wave will get a short entry within this larger page. We will call out especially vivid details or statistics and include links to local outlets that can provide more information to anyone looking for it.
The goal here is to create a record of the very real impact of climate change today. By the end of the summer, this page will likely be filled with entry after entry showcasing the ways heat affected people around the world over the course of a few months. This is, I am aware, potentially fertile ground for climate anxiety, but our hope is that the project can help us recognize how our lives are changing and allow us to refocus on what we can do to adapt to our new reality.
Each entry has its own URL. If you wish to share details of any particular heat wave, simply scroll to that entry and hit the share button on your phone or copy the link in your browser. If you'd like to share this tracker as a whole, scroll back up to this introduction. This timeline will be in reverse chronological order, or in other words the newest events will appear at the top of the page.
This project is publishing in the midst of a heat wave hitting multiple Asian countries, and we’ve also included a couple of heat waves that have already come and gone; as the summer progresses, you'll see updates from the entire Heatmap staff and the gradual shaping of a larger story of heat. Again, this is an experiment, and we'd love to hear what you think about it — if you have strong thoughts one way or another, please send them to neel [at] heatmap [dot] news. —Neel Dhanesha
September 6: As we near the end of the summer — though ambient temperatures this week may suggest otherwise — the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) has announced that Earth just had its hottest three-month period on record, and the year so far is the second-warmest after 2016, which saw an extreme El Niño.
“Climate breakdown has begun,” said UN Secretary-General António Guterres in a statement. “Leaders must turn up the heat now for climate solutions. We can still avoid the worst of climate chaos — and we don’t have a moment to lose.”
According to the Copernicus Climate Change Service, August is estimated to have been around 1.5°C warmer than the preindustrial average. Last month saw the highest global average sea surface temperatures on record, at 20.98°C, and Antarctic sea ice was at a record low for that point in the year. Those sea surface temperatures will have a significant impact on hurricane season; as we saw with Idalia, extremely high ocean temperatures can supercharge tropical storms.
These numbers are no surprise — scientists have, of course, been warning of these catastrophic impacts for years — and this report is just the latest in a long line of UN reports that catalog the ways our planet is changing. The question, as always, is if this report will spur any more action than the previous ones did, or whether it will amount to yet another howl lost in the wind. —Neel Dhanesha
August 23-28: On Thursday, record-breaking heat tied the hottest temperature ever recorded in Houston at 109 degrees. In Dallas on Friday, highs climbed into the high 100s. And in Austin on Sunday, the temperature climbed up to 109 degrees. From Thursday to Sunday, the Electricity Reliability Council of Texas issued a conservation request every day — asking Texans to lower their energy use as air conditioners blasted.
Texans will get a relative reprieve from the heat over the coming days: Dallas won’t cross back over the triple-digit mark until Saturday, while Houston won’t get hotter than 100 degrees this week. Still, temperatures remain high — a reminder that just because summer break is over in many places, summer weather isn’t, making air conditioning in schools and on buses more critical than ever. —Will Kubzansky
August 22: The Midwest joins the South and Southwest this week in pulling the short straw of weather forecasts. The National Weather Service projects a large heat dome will “persist in at least 22 states until the end of the week,” Axios reports, affecting 143 million Americans. Numerous cities are experiencing heat indexes between 110 and 115 degrees Fahrenheit; Lawrence, Kansas, even reached a “feels-like” temperature of 134 on Sunday.
Not only will the extreme highs endanger lives, the heat waves might threaten “a bumper U.S. harvest that’s key to keeping global inflation in check,” Bloomberg reports. The United States expects to reap its second largest corn harvest on record this year, but the upcoming heat might dry out fields that are already showing signs of being parched.
Over the weekend, relief for the Midwest will come from cooler winds flowing down from Canada, AccuWeather reports. Unfortunately, the welcome breeze might also come along with “bouts of poor air quality” and smoke from Canadian wildfires. —Annie Xia
August 16: With triple-digit highs, the Pacific Northwest has joined the ranks of states breaking heat records this summer. Portland, Oregon, hit 108 degrees Fahrenheit on Monday, a record for the month of August. Seattle, Washington, also set a new daily record on Monday when it reached 96 degrees.
Combined with strong winds and moderate to severe drought levels, high temperatures in the region also mean heightened wildfire risk. Almost 3,000 firefighters are already “battling the seven large fires burning across Oregon and Washington,” CNN reports.
The sweltering temperatures continue a streak of oppressive summers in the Pacific Northwest. Dr. Steven Mitchell, medical director of a Seattle hospital’s emergency department, told The New York Times that “he couldn’t remember treating a single case of severe heat illness or heat stroke” before 2021, when a deadly heat wave struck the region. —Annie Xia
August 9-11: Florida is often synonymous with heat, but the heat index in Tampa Bay climbed up to 112 degrees on Wednesday — flirting with 113, the mark at which an excessive heat warning is issued. The Tampa Bay Times reported that the warning issued Wednesday was possibly the area’s first excessive heat warning ever, with the caveat that records might be faulty.
While the heat has let up slightly, a heat advisory remains in effect from Fort Myers up to Chiefland, and the area has exceeded its electricity demand records twice this week. On Friday, the heat index at Tampa International Airport reached 110 degrees, and values are expected to climb up to 108 on Saturday, according to the National Weather Service. —Will Kubzansky
August 7: In places like New Orleans, the old adage applies: It’s not just the heat, it’s the humidity. The high is set to hover between 100 and 97 through Friday, but the heat index will sit between 116 and 111. Louisiana, like much of the country, is seeing an unusually hot summer: Baton Rouge experienced its warmest month on record in July. All the while, central Mississippi is experiencing highs between the high 90s and low 100s, with heat indices reaching 120 degrees, according to the National Weather Service’s outpost in Jackson.
The heat killed 16 Louisianans in June and July. And given that extreme heat causes the worst impacts for people experiencing poverty and creates particularly devastating effects for Black Americans, it’s worth noting that Mississippi and Louisiana have the two highest poverty rates in the country as well as the highest proportion of Black residents of any two states. —Will Kubzansky
August 2: Iran is shutting down. The New York Times reports that government agencies, banks, schools, soccer leagues are all closed Wednesday and Thursday, allegedly due to the heat, which is expected to reach 104 degrees Fahrenheit in Tehran. In Ahvaz, a southwestern city, the high on Wednesday is a blistering 123 degrees.
Per the Times, some Iranians have expressed doubts about the alleged reason for the shutdown — instead claiming that the country’s electric grid can’t meet demand. All the while, Iran faces extensive water shortages across the country, largely due to mismanagement of its resources. —Will Kubzansky
August 2: A deadly heat wave is striking both sides of the Sea of Japan.
In South Korea, two deaths were reported on Tuesday due to high heat — they were senior citizens working outside — bringing the death toll from the heat wave to 12. With temperatures above 100 degrees Fahrenheit in Yeoju, a city south of Seoul, the country has raised its warning system for heat to the highest level, the first instance since 2019.
And in Japan, a 13-year-old girl and an elderly couple died due to heat-related causes on Friday. Temperatures have climbed above 103 degrees this week in parts of the country, and 32 prefectures are under the government’s “special heatstroke alert,” according to The Washington Post.
Japan is coming off a brutal month of July, which included the longest run of 95 degree temperatures in Tokyo since records began in 1875. Heat waves are especially devastating for Japan, which has one of the world’s oldest populations. —Will Kubzansky
July 28: No American city has been more emblematic of this summer’s relentless heat than Phoenix, where the temperature has climbed above 110 degrees Fahrenheit for 29 consecutive days. That streak looks like it might finally come to a close, with highs ranging from 106 to 109 from Monday to Wednesday next week as the forecast calls for rain over the weekend. But by Thursday, the mercury will climb above 110 yet again.
With the heat showing no signs of truly relenting, Arizona Democrats have proposed a novel solution — calling on President Joe Biden to issue a presidential disaster declaration for extreme heat, unlocking the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s response capabilities. And all the while, more than 30 wildfires are blazing across the state of Arizona. —Will Kubzansky
July 26: For most of the summer, stories about extreme heat in the U.S. have been limited to the South and Southwest. That’s changed in the last few days, as heat is forecast to scorch the Midwest and Northeast this week. On Thursday, New York will see highs in the mid-90s and D.C. up to 99 — both with heat indexes in the mid-100s. In Kansas City, highs will sit in the 100s through Friday and climb back up into the triple digits again on Monday; Indianapolis will reach 99 degrees Friday.
Late July is an appropriate time for heat waves — and this burst does not look like a lengthy one, with the 10-day forecast dipping back into the 80s — but it’s also worth noting that cities like D.C. are less prepared for extreme heat than Miami or Phoenix. D.C. has entered a hot weather emergency, but in New York, some advocates have cautioned that the city is not ready for the challenges ahead. —Will Kubzansky
July 26: Devastating consequences of the climate crisis are playing out in Algeria, Greece, Italy, and Tunisia, as wildfires spread and take dozens of lives — more than 40 in total and 34 in Algeria alone. The wildfires are being driven in part by intense heat, up to 119.7 degrees Fahrenheit in Algeria and 120 degrees in Tunisia. While those temperatures have cooled slightly, they will reach up to 111 degrees in Tunis come Friday and already climbed into the triple digits in Greece on Wednesday. Meanwhile, Greek authorities have evacuated more than 20,000 people from Rhodes, a popular vacation spot. —Will Kubzansky
July 25: The summer has offered a deluge of heat headlines — scrolling through this page is the proof. But zooming out, the context matters: Has this summer’s heat been uniquely driven by climate change? The answer is almost certainly yes, according to a study from researchers at Imperial College London, the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute, and the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre.
The flash study is not peer-reviewed — it moved too quickly to go through that process — but it notes that “without human-induced climate change these heat events would … have been extremely rare.” The high temperatures in North America and Europe, it adds, would have been “virtually impossible” without climate change. Heat waves may have still occurred, but the key is the intensity: In the U.S., Europe, and China, climate change accounted for between 1 to 2.5 degrees Celsius (1.8 to 4.5 degrees Fahrenheit) of additional heat. —Will Kubzansky
July 17: Records are falling left and right in the Southwest. At 118 degrees Fahrenheit, Phoenix broke its all time high temperature record on Saturday. The city is also approaching breaking its record for the most 110 degree days in a row. In El Paso, the temperature at the airport has hit 100 degrees for 32 consecutive days, the longest streak ever. And according to The New York Times, the National Weather Service called for 45 record highs across the U.S. last weekend.
And as wildfires burn in Southern California, the heat wave is showing no signs of letting up. Phoenix will see highs in the 110s through Monday, as will Las Vegas. At this point, the heat wave has been classified as another heat dome, and Texas is feeling the brunt of it too, with San Antonio and Austin under excessive heat warnings. The heat wave is most dangerous for vulnerable members of society, especially people who are homeless and seniors — placing an outsized and crucial burden on cooling centers in the Southwest. —Will Kubzansky
July 14: A year after Europe saw 60,000 excess deaths due to heat waves, according to a study published by the scientific journal Nature Medicine, Southern Europe is scorching again. In Greece, the Acropolis closed midday Friday to tourists with high temperatures in Athens expected to reach 104 degrees. Parts of Spain saw temperatures going up to 113 degrees Monday, and another heat wave is expected to arrive Sunday. Italy, in the meantime, is expecting that next week could break the record for the highest temperatures ever recorded on the continent.
Europe has taken a new approach to heat waves — giving them names like hurricanes in an effort to raise awareness about their severity, an idea my colleague Neel Dhanesha wrote about last year. The first round of heat this week was dubbed Cerberus; the second round set to arrive this weekend is named Charon. —Will Kubzansky

Grant Faint/Image Bank via Getty Images
July 12: In a summer full of record-breaking heat, the fact that it’s hot in Death Valley is almost comforting. On Sunday, the national park in the Mojave Desert, known for being the hottest place on Earth, is projected by the National Weather Service to reach 130 degrees Fahrenheit, which would probably tie the record for the world’s highest temperature. The uncertainty stems from some controversy surrounding the record: While the valley was said to have reached temperatures of 134 degrees in 1913, experts have questioned the legitimacy of that reading. That leaves 130 degree days in 2020 and 2021 as the hottest temperatures on record — in Death Valley or anywhere.
While Death Valley’s heat is something of a novelty, it has catastrophic impacts elsewhere. Las Vegas’s high will only be 12 degrees cooler (118 degrees), and temperatures will reach 106 degrees on the same day in San Bernardino. —Will Kubzansky
July 10: After 10 days with high temperatures above 110 degrees, the highs in Phoenix are forecasted to eclipse that mark for at least the next nine days. According to the National Weather Service’s Phoenix office, the record for consecutive 110-degree days is 18; the office is placing the probability that the record gets shattered at 50%. And like Texas’ heat dome earlier this summer, evening temperatures aren’t declining as substantially as they usually do, leaving Arizonans without relief.
In New Mexico, the National Weather Service office out of Albuquerque is describing the week ahead as “near-record heat.” And temperatures in Las Vegas, Nevada, are set to get even more brutal over the course of the week, with the high going from 107 degrees on Monday to a forecasted high of 117 on Sunday. The heat will also lead to brutal temperatures in Death Valley — potentially up to 127 degrees on Sunday — according to the The Washington Post. —Will Kubzansky
July 10: Texas can’t catch a break this summer — and the South is catching yet another heat wave as well. Heat indexes in Dallas, Houston, New Orleans, and Miami are set to reach 107 to 108 degrees this week. Water temperatures around South Florida are well above average, and the chance that rain breaks the heat in the area is limited over the next few days. This year is already the hottest on record in Miami, according to WLRN. —Will Kubzansky
July 7: Phoenix and Tuscon are under excessive heat warnings for at least the next six days. Afternoon highs are projected to reach between 105 and 115 degrees Fahrenheit — Friday will get up to 112 degrees in Phoenix — bringing temperatures above average for early July, according to AZCentral.
It might last well into the month. According to the National Weather System’s warning: “We are still anticipating this current heat wave to continue through next week and likely beyond with it rivaling some of the worst heat waves this area has ever seen.” A big heat wave also brings pressure to the electric grid, particularly in heavily populated areas like Phoenix, as residents crank up their ACs. One study from earlier this year showed that a five-day heat wave and blackout would combine to send more than 50% of the city’s population to the emergency room.
It’s also not just Arizona that will catch the worst of this wave: New Mexico, Las Vegas and Death Valley all have scorching temperatures in store over the next week, The Washington Post notes. —Will Kubzansky
.
July 6: Outdoor work came to a halt in Beijing as temperatures reached 104 degrees Thursday in the Chinese capital. A heat wave is gripping parts of China, including the capital and the nearby Henan province. Before 2023, Beijing had experienced temperatures above 104 degrees six times, CNN reported. This year alone, the temperature has eclipsed that mark on five days. In Taiwan, temperatures are set to reach 104 degrees Saturday, according to the country’s Central Weather Bureau. All the while, flooding has also led to devastation in China, causing 15 deaths in Chongqing, Hunan province, and elsewhere. —Will Kubzansky
June 30 - July 5: In the Antelope Valley and Santa Clarita Valley, temperatures reached 105 and 101 degrees respectively Monday, the Los Angeles Times reported. David Gomberg, an NWS forecaster, told the Times that high heat is to be expected in Southern California around now — to some extent, the weather is “routine,” he said.
Still, temperatures climbed rapidly in the Los Angeles area beginning Friday, especially inland and in the desert. And because the rise came so suddenly following a temperate period, it may have posed an unusually high risk to Californians who hadn’t yet acclimated to the season’s hotter temperatures. Extreme heat can also create arid conditions begetting wildfires, though no reports of serious fires in California have emerged following July 4 fireworks displays. —Will Kubzansky
July 5: This year’s Fourth of July was the world’s hottest day on record, and that record will likely be broken again this summer. In Texas, the heat was nothing new: The last day El Paso recorded a high temperature under 100 degrees was June 15. Since then, every day has gotten up to the triple digits — with the heat reaching 108 degrees on June 26 and 27.
In other words, it’s still really, really hot in Texas as a heat dome remains firmly planted over the state. Some parts of Texas have seen a handful of cooler days — July 4 wasn’t quite as brutal in Houston, for instance, and San Antonio’s temperatures have largely fallen back into the ‘90s. But the southern part of the state is in what the San Antonio Express-News describes as a “rut”: Heat is giving way to marginally cooler temperatures but the weather is expected to get hotter and more humid again.
For older people or people who work outdoors, the sustained heat has proven especially deadly. The vast majority of Texas’s prisoners, meanwhile, are without air conditioning. —Will Kubzansky
The North Atlantic Ocean is in the middle of a startling heat wave that could have far-reaching repercussions.
The weeks-long marine heat wave broke records for the months of May and is expected to do the same in June. Sea surface temperatures around the U.K. and northern Europe are an astonishing 9 degrees Fahrenheit above average in places, The Washington Post reports.
“Totally unprecedented,” Richard Unsworth, a biosciences professor at the U.K.’s Swansea University, told CNN. It’s “way beyond the worst-case predictions for the changing climate of the region.” Scientists say the warming oceans could have significant consequences, from harming marine life to decreasing the sea’s capacity to absorb pollution.
Above-average heat has also hit the U.K. Temperatures are expected to hit 89 degrees Fahrenheit in southeast England over the weekend.
As a flotilla in the Atlantic searched for the missing Titan submersible, the prominent environmental writer Bill McKibben tweeted, “The truly terrifying news this week is not what happened deep beneath the sea, it’s what’s going on at the surface.” —Annie Xia
June 22: Texans will only get a brief reprieve from the most extreme highs of their heat wave before temperatures pick back up early next week. Notably, temperatures aren’t falling considerably at night, making the heat even more dangerous. North Texas will see the mercury rise up to 104 degrees through Thursday, with the small caveat that humidity will decline into a more comfortable range as the week goes on. In parts of Southwest Texas, the heat won’t let up at all: the high temperatures in Del Rio will hover between 107 and 110 through next Wednesday.
The Electric Reliability Council of Texas issued its first voluntary conservation notice of the heat wave this past Tuesday. While the utility was able to meet demand, it requested that all Texans, especially government agencies, reduce their electricity use.
Mexico is similarly seeing scorching temperatures, which have led to eight deaths already. And high heat in the Rio Grande Valley means that migrants who traverse the border in Southwest Texas could be left exposed to the same high heat, which can have deadly consequences. —Will Kubzansky
Week of June 19: Temperatures in the northern Indian states of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, two of the most populous in the country, reached as high as 115 degrees Fahrenheit (46 degrees Celsius), CNN reports. The extreme heat triggered power cuts, leaving people without running water, fans, or air conditioners.
The Associated Press reports nearly 170 people had died as of June 20, overwhelming hospitals, morgues, and crematoria — although state officials dispute the connection to the heat wave. Nearly half of the deaths came from a single district, Ballia, in Uttar Pradesh; officials say they have opened an investigation into the cause, which they say could be linked to contaminated water. Members of opposition parties blame the state government and its chief minister, Yogi Adityanath, for not investing enough in medical facilities or warning residents about the heat wave ahead of time. —Neel Dhanesha
June 19: The numbers from Texas’ heat wave are already striking: Dallas tied a humidity record on Thursday, and tens of millions of Texans woke up Friday to heat advisories or warnings. Temperatures will approach — and possibly break — records in Austin early next week, with highs between 104 and 106 through Wednesday. In the area, the heat indices will be highest over the Rio Grande plains and coastal plains, according to the National Weather Service’s Austin/San Antonio office.
Houston, in the meantime, saw its first excessive heat warning since 2016, with heat indices potentially breaking 115 degrees Friday and Saturday. Texas’ grid has held up (so far) — though the Electric Reliability Council of Texas has projected that next week will shatter the record levels of electricity demand that were just set this week, thanks to the number of air conditioners expected to be on full blast. —Will Kubzansky
June 14: Triple-digit heat has arrived early in Texas. Large parts of central and southeast Texas saw the heat index climb into the 100s Wednesday, topping out in McAllen at a searing 118. The heat wave is expected to spread and last through the week, hitting San Antonio, Dallas, Houston, and Austin, where it will feel like 112 degrees Thursday.
But while meteorologists watch for record heat and humidity, others will keep their eye on the state’s isolated electricity grid. Its operators, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, warned of record-breaking electricity use Friday, an ominous signal for a state that has struggled with deadly blackouts in recent years. But this is just Texas’s first test of the summer: The grid operators noted that the record-breaking demand will likely be surpassed later in the summer. —Will Kubzansky
June 7-11: As skies over New York and Washington, D.C., turned orange from wildfire smoke, Puerto Rico and nearby Caribbean nations sweltered under a heat dome. The Heat Index, which takes into account both heat and humidity, went as high as 125 degrees in parts of Puerto Rico — a number that Jeff Berardelli, chief meteorologist at Tampa Bay’s WFLA-TV, said was astonishing. Temperature records broke across the island.
The Puerto Rican power grid still hasn’t recovered after Hurricane Maria hit the island in 2017, and over 100,000 Puerto Ricans reportedly lost power (though, as Pearl Marvell pointed out in Yale Climate Connections, the exact number cannot be verified because the island’s power company asked PowerOutage.us, which tracks outages, to stop collecting data on Puerto Rico until it can “replace their technology and provide more accurate data”). As I wrote in May, the combination of extreme heat and blackouts has the potential to be incredibly deadly, though no deaths were reported from this heat dome as of publication. —Neel Dhanesha
June 5: Large parts of China have seen record-breaking heat over the past month, one year after the worst heat wave and drought in decades hit the country. This year, Yunnan and Sichuan provinces saw temperatures exceed 40° C (104° F); according to CNN, heat in some parts of the country was so bad that pigs and rabbits died on farms and carp being raised in rice fields "burned to death" as water temperatures rose. Henan province had the opposite problem; extreme rain flooded wheat fields there, ruining crops in the country's largest wheat-growing region.
Meanwhile, a prolonged heat wave in Vietnam is keeping temperatures between 26 and 38 degrees Celsius (78.8 and 100.4° F), prompting officials to turn off street lights and ask citizens to cut down on their power consumption to avoid blackouts. VNExpress reports that many Vietnamese citizens who can't afford air conditioners are seeking respite in public spaces like libraries, buses, department stores, and cafes. —Neel Dhanesha
May 12: Some 12 million people in Washington and Oregon were under a heat advisory for four days starting May 12 as temperatures in the region topped out at more than 20 degrees above the normal high at that time of year, which should have been in the mid-60s.
"It’s harder for people in the Pacific Northwest to cool down when it’s 90 out than for people in, say, Phoenix or Las Vegas — cities that were constructed with heat in mind," wrote Heatmap Founding Staff Writer and Washington native Jeva Lange in her larger story about this heat wave. "Seattle, for example, is the second-least-air-conditioned metro area in the country (behind only “the coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in” San Francisco). Just over half of the homes in the area have a/c, and many of them are new buildings." —Neel Dhanesha and Jeva Lange
April: A large, deadly heat wave baked much of Asia for two weeks in April, Axios reported. Parts of India saw temperatures beyond 40°C (104°F), while temperatures in Thailand reached their highest levels ever, breaking past 45°C (113°F) for the first time in that country's history. Thirteen people died in Mumbai, and hundreds of people across the Asian continent were hospitalized. —Neel Dhanesha
This article was first published on June 5, 2023. It was last updated on September 6, 2023, at 3:59 PM ET.
More about heat and how the world is coping:
1. The Deadly Mystery of Indoor Heat
2. Don’t Be Too Chill About Your Air Conditioning Dependency
3. America Is Depending on Renewables This Summer
4. Dermatologists Have Bad News to Share About Climate Change
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
Activists on both the left and the right are pushing back against AI development.
The techlash over data center development is becoming a potent political force that could shape elections for generations.
At a national level, political leaders remain dedicated to the global race to dominate artificial intelligence. But cracks are beginning to show when it comes to support for the infrastructure necessary to get there. Nearly every week now across the U.S., from arid Tucson, Arizona, to the suburban sprawl of the D.C. area, Americans are protesting, rejecting, restricting, or banning new data center development.
It’s also popping up in our elections. On Tuesday in Virginia, voters in the No. 1 state for data center development ousted their GOP political leadership, sending to the governor’s mansion a Democrat who promised to make the growing sector pay more for its electricity. In the run-up to Election Day, polling showed voters were hyperfocused on the risk that data centers could negatively affect their lives. Some candidates in local races campaigned almost entirely on the issue, while others pledged to new bans.
“There’s a lot of other things going on too, [but] data centers are much more important than candidates want to admit,” said Chris Miller, president of Piedmont Environmental Council, a conservation advocacy group in Virginia that tracks and fights data center development. “An industry that is used to moving fast and breaking things is moving up against a physical world they’ve never dealt with before.”
Meanwhile, in Georgia, two Democrats won seats on the Public Service Commission on campaigns that wound up focused on data centers and rising energy bills.
We here at Heatmap have gone to great lengths to better understand why this opposition is so widespread. In August, our data intelligence service Heatmap Pro conducted polling to figure out how Americans feel about the billions of dollars being poured into data centers for cloud computing and AI development. We found that the dislike is incredibly strong — less than half of Americans are willing to support a data center near them. The hostility crosses party lines, with Republicans nearly as likely to express disdain towards these projects as Democrats. The frustrations with these facilities are also poised to increase over generations, as data centers are most underwater with the younger cohorts, aged 18 to 49, who may be more familiar with AI.
The polling also showed that people are easily convinced to oppose data center development in their neighborhoods. Rhetoric in favor of data centers — how they contribute to tax revenue, create jobs, help the U.S. compete with China — might win some hearts and minds, but rhetoric decrying data centers consistently polled stronger than any of the supportive arguments we tested. This registered across party lines. And making matters worse for the tech sector, individuals who previously opposed renewable energy projects were more likely to be anti-data centers.
What you get in the end is a populist conflict appealing to younger people that bridges the ends of the political spectrum, connecting the left and right — and that should make developers very worried.
On one end of the spectrum, left-aligned activists and local leaders are raging against the energy and water system strain that’ll come from the data center boom. You have folks like Blake Coe, an activist fighting data center projects in San Marcos, Texas. Coe told me he began opposing data centers after being politically awakened by a totally different issue: the Israeli government’s offensive in Gaza and alleged genocide of Palestinians there. But as he told me, he didn’t have “the clout, the money, the whatever to work on fixing a genocide.” After learning about the project in San Marcos, he concluded that the community there was something he “can fight for.”
“There’s been this air of inevitability around data centers and AI and all this new tech stuff coming out — how it’s going to happen, so either get out of the way or get run over,” he said. “And our job is to try and remind people in power of their humanity, at the end of the day.”
At the same time, activists fighting renewable energy projects from the right are also lining up to fight data centers, echoing the same frustrations voiced by environmentalists while also tarring the infrastructure as part of a broader social change imposed by Big Tech elites. Take Indiana, one of the most popular data center destinations after Virginia, where the backlash is hitting Indianapolis and rural GOP strongholds alike. Or Missouri, whose Senator Josh Hawley summed up my story here in one post in October.
“These data centers are massive electricity hogs,” Hawley said on X, months after notably leading the push for the Trump administration to defund the Grain Belt Express, a large transmission line proposal that its developer said will help states meet data center electricity demand. “That’s why Silicon Valley wants more transmission lines, solar farms and windmills,” Hawley said. “Somebody has to pay for it all — don’t believe any politician who says it won’t ultimately be you.”
In Oklahoma, 21-year-old GOP organizer Kennedy Laplante Garza started fighting a nearby data center proposal known as Clydesdale after learning over the summer that it would be built a mile from her family’s farm. “I didn’t even know that much about data centers at that point,” she told me. “But I knew my friends across the state were fighting similar things, whether they were solar panels or wind turbines.” Garza wound up organizing a mass petition campaign against the project that ultimately proved unsuccessful — Clydesdale broke ground this week.
Out in Oklahoma there aren’t very many elected Democrats at all, just different shades of Republican. But because of that, Garza told me, party affiliation matters less to voters than whether their elected representatives are listening to them — meaning there could still be consequences for GOP politicians who side with tech companies over any populist revolt against data center development.
“We’d probably see our elections flip, too, if people started running on it,” Garza said, referring to data center opposition.
This brings us back to Virginia, where local races now hinge on data center conflicts. On Tuesday, Democrat John McAuliff — a former White House energy adviser who worked on the Inflation Reduction Act — flipped a seat in the state House of Delegates, taking out an incumbent Republican representing a D.C. ex-urb that went for Donald Trump in last year’s presidential election. McAuliff’s secret sauce? A laser focus on the Virginia data center boom.
“There’s the environmental impact these are having, and of course these are very large water users. But there’s also the cultural impact that they are having,” McAuliff told me in an interview after his victory. “And then of course, there’s the energy bills piece. Because we’re all here in Data Center Alley, we’re bearing the biggest brunt of the increase in transmission lines, the increase in substations.”
Representatives of the nascent data center sector are beginning to acknowledge that they have a PR problem, but they say the issue is one of education — Americans simply do not yet understand the tax and employment benefits that can come with new data centers. In an interview conducted before this most recent Election Day, Data Center Coalition Vice President for State Policy Dan Diorio told me that opposition has “cut across states,” and that protests have become “very much a learning experience.”
“There definitely is a need for better communication,” Diorio said, adding that companies need to be “responsive to things like aesthetics or sound,” while making sure their projects match “the economic development goals of a community.”
Whenever I asked Diorio about how the data center sector should respond to this political quagmire, he would pivot to education. In the industry’s view, people would be more supportive if they simply knew more about companies’ ongoing sustainability efforts.
This left me with the sense that the business sector does not fully understand the scope of the problem it’s facing. Bukola Folashakin, an analyst with Morningstar, told me that’s plainly evident from the sheer magnitude of money — billions — being invested in a new American data center boom without hesitation.
“The data right now, what we’re seeing,” Folashakin said, “is that it’s not clear if investors are concerned from a social perspective. If social issues were such a concern, you wouldn’t see capital going in that direction.”
One of the world’s leading climate scientists agrees with Gates in spirit, but thinks we can go much further in practice.
There are a lot of things I agree with in Bill Gates’ new memo on climate change. The recent cutbacks on international spending on vaccination, malaria control, feeding the hungry, and poverty alleviation by many of the world’s richest countries (driven in part by a desire for more military spending) are a catastrophe that will cost thousands, if not millions of lives. Adaptation is a critically important part of addressing climate change, and a world with more prosperity and less inequality is one where we can better deal with the impacts of climate change — at least up to a point.
But in other areas I feel that it needlessly sets up a conflict between laudable goals. We can both mitigate emissions and alleviate poverty, disease, and hunger. While there are some tradeoffs, it is more a question of policy priority than a zero-sum game. Similarly, I feel that Gates is a bit too cavalier in his treatment of climate risk.
Given the strong reactions to Gates’ memo on both the left and the right, I thought it would be helpful to provide a more measured reaction and critique, and give some thoughts on how to move forward to — as Gates suggests — have the most positive impact on the world.
Bill Gates — through his philanthropic work with the Gates Foundation — has done more than almost anyone else on the planet to meaningfully improve the lives of the world’s poorest. The Gates Foundation was the founding funder of Gavi, which helped expand vaccination in the global south and drive down prices. They did key work to help eradicate polio and combat HIV, tuberculosis, and malaria, as well as deliver sanitation and clean drinking water, and worked to raise smallholder farmer yields and income through access to agricultural technology.
The recent gutting of the United States Agency for International Development — and smaller reductions in aid spending by other countries — is a humanitarian catastrophe and threatens to undo much of the work that the Gates Foundation supported over the past few decades. I can see why, in light of these urgent needs, he is suggesting that resources to combat climate change be repurposed toward dealing with poverty, hunger, and disease.
But this assumes that funding for climate and development cancel each other out. Here I think that Gates errs in his analysis for a few reasons.
First, the vast majority of spending on climate mitigation worldwide is not in low-income countries, and there is little reason to assume that cutting it would free up resources for development aid. The world spent more than $2 trillion on clean energy technologies (albeit somewhat expansively defined) in 2024, but the overwhelming majority of this was spent by middle- and high-income countries (e.g. China, the U.S., the EU, the UK, India, Japan) to build domestic clean energy, build transmission, buy electric vehicles, electrify heating, etc.
The idea that spending less on domestic mitigation would create more budget space for international development is fundamentally misguided. It’s hard to imagine that the Trump administration will revitalize development spending based on savings from cutting domestic green energy subsidies. Both development aid and climate mitigation spending represent relatively small shares of GDP in higher income countries, and there is space for policy to be able to prioritize spending on both without trading them off against each other. It is much more likely that any reduction in mitigation spending will be repurposed for other domestic priorities — leaving the poorest and most vulnerable parts of the world even worse off.
Second, there are a number of ways that technologies can accomplish goals of climate mitigation and development simultaneously: solar and storage for electrification of more remote areas, clean cookstoves to reduce deforestation, and technologies to reduce both outdoor and indoor air pollution that kills millions per year globally are just a few examples.
That being said, we should take a hard look at international spending priorities for programs in the poorest countries, which, in turn, are the least responsible for global emissions today. Here adaptation should be strongly prioritized, and restrictions around finance for some fossil fuels (e.g. natural gas development in Sub-Saharan Africa) that could help support greater clean energy deployment should be reconsidered. We should generally spend more than we are today on adaptation and development (though the two are strongly related), and mitigation should be less of a priority in low-income countries.
Richer countries should be the ones taking the lead on emissions reductions — and paying a premium that will help drive down the costs of clean energy technologies so that they can be adopted cost effectively by lower income countries. Indeed, that’s largely been the story of our successes here to date, with countries like China, India, and Brazil adopting ambitious net-zero goals in part because they see the cost of meeting them as modest and not trading off against their development priorities.
Third, the idea that we should “spend less” on climate adaptation is a dangerous misunderstanding of the problem. There is no world where we don’t spend money dealing with climate impacts. Rather, our choice is between spending money now, e.g. to build a seawall, or spend money later to rebuild the city after it floods. Our choice here should be guided by the fact that adaptation in advance is cheaper than adaptation after the disaster. In other words, spending money today on adaptation is the cheaper option that will better promote health and welfare of the world’s poorest citizens.
In his memo, Gates highlights the progress we’ve made on climate change to-date, noting that:
Ten years ago, the International Energy Agency predicted that by 2040, the world would be emitting 50 billion tons of carbon dioxide every year. Now, just a decade later, the IEA’s forecast has dropped to 30 billion, and it’s projecting that 2050 emissions will be even lower.
Read that again: In the past 10 years, we’ve cut projected emissions by more than 40%.
This progress is not part of the prevailing view of climate change, but it should be. What made it possible is that the Green Premium—the cost difference between clean and dirty ways of doing something—reached zero or became negative for solar, wind, power storage, and electric vehicles. By and large, they are just as cheap as, or even cheaper than, their fossil fuel counterparts.
Gates is right that cheap clean energy represents a remarkable success story, and is one of the reasons why projections of future warming have fallen from around 3.5 degrees Celsius a decade ago to around 2.7 degrees today.
But focusing on these precise temperature outcomes in 2100 is problematically reductionist. Our emissions are just one of three factors that will determine the future warming of the planet. (And we should remember that current policies represent neither a ceiling nor a floor on current emissions, particularly at a time when some governments are actively rolling them back.)
Even if we knew future emissions precisely, the warming in 2100 remains highly uncertain. It depends both on the sensitivity of the climate to our increased atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations — the response of various climate feedbacks like clouds and surface reflectivity — and how the carbon cycle responds to both our emissions and the changing climate.
Due to the combination of these uncertainties, it’s possible that we could think we are heading for 2.7 degrees of warming and stop at 3.7 degrees (or even 4+ degrees) even if we roll 6s on the proverbial climate dice. And we won’t know precisely how sensitive the climate is (despite some recent progress) until it’s too late to avoid where we’ll end up.
This means that we should think of mitigation less as targeting (or avoiding) a particular outcome and more as hedging against risk. We should do more mitigation — all things considered — than if we had certainty in the climate response because of the high damages associated with less likely but still quite possible tail risks. Or as the late climate economist Marty Weitzman memorably put it, when it comes to climate change “the sting is in the tail.”
Gates is right to note that climate change “will not lead to humanity’s demise,” but I’d suggest that this represents a bit of a straw man. Outside a fringe community of climate doomers, there are few who think that climate change could realistically threaten the extinction of the human race (though some folks need to be a bit cautious about throwing around the term “existential threat” willy nilly). As the climate scientist Steven Schneider was fond of saying, for climate change, “the end of the world and good for you are the two lowest probability outcomes”.
But not being an existential threat does not tell us all that much, as almost nothing aside from a planet-killing asteroid or (possibly) an all-out global thermonuclear war rises to that highest of bars. Every other problem humanity deals with — war, violence, famine, poverty — is not existential but is still critically important. This is more or less Gates’ point, that climate should be treated as one of many problems we need to solve rather than an all-encompassing ur-problem. But by and large, the majority of people and policymakers have been treating it as just that.
Gates posits that society can best address climate change by working to reduce the green premium associated with clean energy technologies.
The idea of the green premium is compelling. As noted earlier, a lot of the progress that society has made on reducing emissions over the past 15 years has come on the back of near-miraculously rapid declines in the cost of clean energy technologies. Cheaper clean energy in turn enables more ambitious policy adoption, as the costs of getting to net-zero emissions turn from astronomical to manageable.
But I’d suggest that it is somewhat incomplete, at least in its more straightforward interpretation. There is an idea that innovation and markets alone will necessarily solve the problem in the absence of policy interventions — that if we can just make clean energy cheap enough, the world will sufficiently decarbonize to avoid potentially catastrophic impacts from climate change.
This may be the case, but it also may not. Innovation cuts both ways — the success of hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling technology has drastically reduced the cost of natural gas and oil production. There are lots of resources going into producing fossil fuels more cheaply, and while I’m hopeful that the cost of solar, batteries, wind, nuclear, geothermal, and other clean energy technologies will fall faster, there is no law of physics that says it will inevitably be cheaper.
Hoping that clean energy will be absolutely cheaper than fossil fuels at a scale needed to decarbonize our energy system is a gamble — and one with loaded dice. There are real costs associated with fossil fuel use — from air pollution, from climate change, from local environmental damage. These are currently borne by the public and not by the companies producing fossil fuels. As long as the costs remain socialized while the benefits are privatized, the market alone will not lead to the optimal level of deployment of clean energy technologies.
This is where policy comes in: We either need to include the “brown costs” of fossil fuels in their market price (e.g. a carbon tax, something that has been not very politically palatable to date) or be willing to pay some ongoing green premium in cases where clean energy remains more expensive to account for the real costs of climate and pollution.
Policy also plays a key role in technology. The rapid and amazing drop in the price of solar energy over the last few decades has been driven to a large extent by government support of the technology. The free market may have done this by itself, but it would have likely taken many decades longer.
I don’t think Gates would necessarily disagree with any of this, but it’s an important rejoinder for those who assume that innovation alone is sufficient to address the problem.
The reception of the Gates memo was an unfortunate reflection of our extremely polarized politics. Some climate advocates dismissed it as denialism or the second coming of Bjorn Lomborg, while those on the right (including President Trump) portrayed it as proof that the science was wrong and climate change was actually a hoax.
Gates tried at length and upfront to make his position clear that climate change is a big problem, and that his interest is on near-term prioritization of resources. But most interpreted the memo through their ideological priors (many likely without actually reading it).
To be clear: Climate change is a very important problem. It needs to be solved, along with other problems like malaria and malnutrition. Every tenth of a degree of heating that we prevent is hugely beneficial because a stable climate makes it easier to improve people’s lives.
Our inability to have nuanced discussions about these matters is detrimental to the broader societal discussion about serious issues like climate change. The portrayal of climate as an all or nothing problem, coupled with the U.S.’s thermostatic politics where control of government commonly switches between parties, is a recipe for a lack of clear long term action on climate or any other big societal problem that gets caught up in the politicized culture wars. While I don’t know how to change society to make science less politicized and to center the debate around the best solutions rather than the physical reality of the problem, a change is sorely needed.
Ultimately Gates’ memo is making the case that we need to set a higher priority on helping the world’s most vulnerable in a time when aid to them is being cut. I broadly agree. But deprioritizing mitigation spending is not a very effective way to accomplish that goal, outside of the relatively modest amount of money the world spends today on mitigation in the least developed countries.
When there is an option to spend money already going to these countries in a way that provides the greatest benefits for the population even if it does not reduce (or even increases) emissions, we should probably do it. But the vast majority of the resources we spend on decarbonization today in middle and upper income countries will not magically be repurposed for international development aid if we deprioritize climate change as an issue. And deprioritizing climate change as an issue risks substituting near-term benefits for long-term harms that are nearly impossible to reverse.
A world of unabated climate change will impact the poor most severely. Addressing it requires two strategies in tandem: prioritizing development and poverty alleviation to build adaptive capacity (and human flourishing), and reducing emissions rapidly in middle and upper-income countries to mitigate future climate impacts and drive down the cost of clean energy technologies so they can be more readily adopted by low income countries. Perhaps I’m unduly optimistic, but I think that society should be able to do both.
Editor’s note: A version of this article originally appeared in the author’s newsletter, The Climate Brink, and has been repurposed for Heatmap.
Current conditions: A sharp dip in the jet stream will channel Arctic air from the Plains to the Northeast, with snow expected this weekend in Minneapolis, Chicago, and Detroit • Northern California is bracing for potential power outages amid winds of up to 90 miles per hour • Temperatures of about 91 degrees Fahrenheit in Jerusalem just broke records for November temperatures dating back nearly 150 years.

The world’s most important climate summit is set to begin. The first phase of the 30th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change — better known as COP30 — is slated to kick off this morning with a Leaders’ Summit that will bring together 143 delegations, including 57 heads of state and 39 ministers in Belém, a bayside city near Brazil’s northern coast. Negotiations over how to tighten ways to implement global emissions rules and hasten the speed of cuts are set to begin officially on Monday. COP30 President André Corrêa do Lago on Wednesday unveiled a $1.3 trillion climate finance roadmap to fulfill promises made at last year’s meeting in Azerbaijan, but told reporters that “there is no plan” for the roadmap even to be discussed at the summit, let alone formally adopted, according to Climate Home News.
Taking place against the backdrop of the United States’ withdrawal from climate negotiations and pullback of ambition from many other countries, the confab comes as the latest modeling from Rhodium Group consultancy shows the world is now on track to blow past the Paris Agreement’s 2-degree Celsius target but avoid the cataclysmic warming once forecast. The data projects the world will warm between 2 and 3.9 degrees above pre-industrial averages by the end of the century. As Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo wrote this week, that range is largely unchanged from Rhodium’s 2023 forecasts, suggesting that, “in the long run,” the Trump administration’s policies “might not mean much for the climate’s trajectory.”
Stardust Solutions, the U.S.-based, Israeli-led geoengineering startup just raised $60 million to commercialize technology to reflect the sun’s heat back into space, has quietly begun lobbying the U.S. government for contracts. In the first quarter of this year, the company hired law firm Holland & Knight to start appealing to Congress, but didn’t disclose its efforts “due to a clerical error,” the lobbyist told E&E News on Wednesday.
To many scientists, geoengineering is too dangerous to even study, posing a moral hazard to decarbonization by offering a temporary solution to the effects of warming. But, as I reported exclusively in this newsletter in September, more than 100 scientists — including former President Joe Biden’s science adviser — signed onto a public letter calling for a publicly-accountable research program to start now in case global warming gets bad enough that a country or corporation tries to unilaterally carry out geoengineering before it’s fully understood. The emergence of a major commercial contender such as Stardust suggests the tides are turning in favor of the technology. As Heatmap’s Robinson Meyer reported last month in a scoop about Stardust’s fundraising, the company claims its technology will be ready to go by the start of the next decade.
Meanwhile, data center companies are sparking a boom in Beltway influence-peddling. The four largest cloud providers — Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Meta — have all “reported tens of millions of dollars in federal lobbying in 2025 alone,” according to a new analysis from the federal records nonprofit OpenSecrets. The number of lobbyists per data center has also increased. Meta hired 21 more lobbyists this year than last year, and ChatGPT-maker OpenAI increased its stable of lobbyists nearly sevenfold since 2023.
The lobbying push comes amid mounting backlash. A Heatmap poll published in September found that only 44% of Americans would welcome a data center near their homes.
Taiwan this week took what may be its most significant step yet toward restarting its nuclear reactors. In May, the island became one of the only countries in world history to abandon nuclear power entirely after shutting down its final reactor. The move rendered the self-governing republic, which China claims as a breakaway territory despite the Communist Party never ruling there, almost entirely dependent on imported fossil fuels for its energy. Electricity prices are soaring — the domestic rates the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, the country’s national industrial champion, now pays are the highest of any of its global operations — and outages have grown. Worse yet, Taiwan is now vulnerable to blockades by the Chinese military that could weaponize blackouts in much the same way Russia has against Ukraine. Despite this, the ruling Democratic Progressive Party in Taiwan, which nominally supports independence from China, has opposed nuclear power since its inception. While Taiwanese President Lai Ching-te struggled to halt the final shutdown in the year after he took office, his administration has expressed an openness to nuclear power again.
On Wednesday, the state-owned utility Taipower submitted its assessment of how to restart shuttered reactors to the Ministry of Economic Affairs. In a referendum in August on whether Taiwan should restart its most recently closed plant, a majority of voters who cast ballots approved the measure, yet the plebiscite failed because it did not attract a large enough share of eligible voters. But the United Daily News reported that Taipower’s top boss said “there are opportunities and conditions” for restarting not just that last plant but the country’s second station, too. The news comes just days after Spain, the only country still pursuing a nuclear phaseout plan, officially started the paperwork to reconsider the policy, as I reported in Monday’s newsletter.
The new generation of geothermal startups promising to use novel drilling techniques to expand the energy source’s footprint get a lot of attention. But Ormat Technologies dominates the U.S. industry with conventional operations. In August, Ormat entered a strategic partnership with one of the next-generation companies, Sage Geosystems, in a move analysts told me at the time amounted to the giant in the space picking a “winner” among the newcomers. Yet Ormat’s latest earnings suggest it’s found a new area for growth: storage. Revenue from energy storage deals skyrocketed 108% year over year thanks to good weather conditions and higher capacity prices in the PJM Interconnection, the nation’s largest grid. The company said it expects annual growth in the sector of up to 17% over the next three years, Utility Dive reported.
Depending on how you feel about arachnids, this will either horrify you or delight you. Scientists just discovered the world’s biggest spider web, a subterranean “megacity” spanning nearly 1,080 square feet in a sulfur cave on the Albania-Greece border. Attached to a wall near the cave’s entrance, the colony — much like our own urban dwellings — has a large and diverse population. Roughly 69,000 Tegenaria domestica, known as the domestic house spider, call the web network home, along with 42,000 Prinerigone vagans spiders. Researchers believe this to be the first documented case of a colonial web formation for both species.