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:
Will America’s luck hold in 2024? The oddsmakers — that is, scientists — have a bad feeling.
Are you feeling lucky?
Americans are. Close to two-thirds say they’ve gambled in the past year; the sports pages are filled with headlines detailing the fallout of various investigations and scandals. But while there isn’t exactly a bookmaker for something like the Atlantic hurricane season, meteorologists around the country are feeling pretty good about their bets this time around.
“We could be extremely wrong and only have two hurricanes,” Philip Klotzbach, one of the authors of the Colorado State University’s 2024 forecast, which came out earlier this month and predicted a whopping 23 named storms, told me. “But I think the odds of that this year are very low, just because the Atlantic is so warm.”
Traditionally, early spring is when Americans begin to hear from agencies and universities about the upcoming Atlantic storm season. That won’t peak for another four or five months, and from the safety of April, it can be tough to muster concern about what late summer might yet inflict upon the nation’s coasts.
Still, the trickle of headlines this year has been nothing short of alarming. In addition to CSU’s prediction, North Carolina State University issued a forecast of between 15 and 20 named storms in 2024, meaning we could potentially tick well above the 1991-2020 average of 14 per year. On Wednesday, the Weather Channel upped the ante with a new estimate of 24 named storms. AccuWeather Lead Hurricane Forecaster Alex DaSilva told me his team estimates there is a 15% chance of 30 or more named storms this year — enough to break the record set in 2020 and exhaust the World Meteorological Organization pre-prepared list of 21 storm names, forcing it to dip into its new and never-before-used “supplemental” list.
Meanwhile, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is busy putting together its own forecast, a massive, multi-agency collaboration between the National Climate Prediction Center, the National Weather Service, the National Hurricane Center, and NOAA’s Atlantic Oceanographic & Meteorological Laboratory. While the government’s final prediction is still a few weeks away from being made public in May, Matthew Rosencrans, the lead hurricane season forecaster at NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center, told me the agency’s ocean team has been providing monthly briefings on the Atlantic’s record warmth to the forecasters. Of particular concern to the teams is the fact that even if the summer sea surface warms at the lowest rateof any year since 1980, 2024 will still be in the top four of all sea surface temperature years since then.
Michael Lowry, the hurricane and storm surge specialist at Miami’s WPLG Local 10 News, told me this is what has him the most alarmed. “I struggle to find a good language to say how extreme and unprecedented it is, but it’s extreme and unprecedented and almost scary, the amount of warmth that we’re looking at in the Atlantic,” he said.
Warm water, of course, is hurricane Red Bull — it can increase a storm’s destructive potential, taking forecasters by surprise. In addition to the waning El Niño and the likely start of a La Niña — which will make the wind conditions more favorable to Atlantic storm formation — all the agencies I spoke with cited the sea-surface temperatures as a concerning complication in their predictive models. Klotzbach, the CSU researcher, told me the record-warm water gives him more confidence in his models than he would otherwise have this early in April because of the strong correlation between warm waters and storm formation; DaSilva, at AccuWeather, told me it is these same temperatures that have made him concerned about the potential for rapidly intensifying storms like Hurricane Ian in 2022.
Kerry Emanuel, professor emeritus in atmospheric science at MIT, was not as impressed by the predictions, however. Putting a numerical estimate on how many hurricanes will form in the North Atlantic in a given season is “not really very interesting or practical,” he told me. “If you’re a gambler, and you’re placing a bet, OK — but if you’re a coastal resident, what you really care about is relatively intense landfalling storms.”
The more storms there are in the Atlantic in a given season, the more likely intense storms will make landfall — “but not a lot” more likely, Emanuel stressed. Because of that, when it comes to making hurricane season predictions, “I wish NOAA would knock it off because it’s intentionally misleading,” he said.
Emanuel wasn’t alone in his dismissal of the seasonal forecasts. “I’ve got to be straight with you: I think they have limited utility,” John Cangialosi, a senior hurricane specialist at the National Hurricane Center, who focuses more on tracking storms as they form, told me. “It’s sort of like in Powerball, when someone sees $30 million and is like, ‘I’m going to play if it’s $5 million or not,’” he added. “It’s so damn silly. You need to worry about this no matter what.”
That’s because describing hurricane seasons as “quiet” or “active” is really a matter of perspective, even if it makes for good headlines. For example, most people consider 2023 to have been a quiet year since almost no major storms made landfall on U.S. coasts. “But it was a very busy season; just fortunately, most of the storms stayed out at sea,” Klotzbach, of CSU, told me.
In a sense, America merely got a lucky break. While Hurricane Idalia, the strongest storm to hit Florida’s Big Bend region in 125 years, made landfall in 2023, its greatest impact was in a sparsely populated area, leading to limited damage and loss of life. On the other hand, 1992 was technically a “quiet” year for hurricane formation, but all it took was one storm — in that case, Hurricane Andrew, which killed over 60 people and was one of the costliest storms in U.S. history — to cement it in our collective memory.
Further complicating the picture that hurricane forecasts paint is, of course, climate change. The combination of record-warm Atlantic waters and a forecast for an active year makes it tempting to tie the two together. “The human mind is so good at pattern recognition that it wants to attribute a cause to every effect,” Emanuel, the MIT professor, said.
But there’s a whole cocktail of factors driving the Atlantic’s bonkers-warm temperature, including the aforementioned El Niño, which is just part of a naturally occurring global weather pattern known as ENSO; the decreasing presence of sulfur dioxide aerosols, which have a cooling effect; the Tonga volcano eruption, which might have had a temporary warming effect; and yes, greenhouse gas emissions. The lack of clarity around this larger picture has led some researchers to sound an alarm about the urgency of sharpening our understanding; climate change, however, can only confidently be credited with a small portion of the current anomalous spike in sea surface temperatures, which in turn only explains only about 35% to 40% of the changes in tropical cyclone activity.
“It’s not fair to say climate change has caused record warmth, which has caused record hurricanes,” Cangialosi, at the Climate Prediction Center, said. “Because, guess what? Next year we could be in a cool phase — and then where did climate change go?”
That’s far from saying climate change isn’t a factor at all; we just need to be careful with our scales. Besides, there are things we know are directly connected to climate change — like rising sea levels and increased rainfall — that will make hurricane landfalls deadlier in the coming decades.
Hurricane forecasts aren’t totally useless, either. For one thing, they have enormous scientific value, helping researchers better understand the amalgamation of conditions that go into the formation of a major tropical storm. Lowry, the Florida-based meteorologist, also joked they can help confirm that “my job may be a lot busier in the next few months.”
There is a public value, too: Headlines inarguably help keep the approaching season top-of-mind. This is especially important for the masses of new residents who have recently moved to the Gulf Coast and Southeastern shores — undeterred by subsidized insurance rates that don’t properly warn of the region’s risk — and might lack knowledge of how to prepare for the season.
After all, Mother Nature ultimately has the house advantage. And while America was spared a catastrophic storm in 2023, luck has a funny way of running out.
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
It will take years, at least, to reconstitute the federal workforce — and that’s if it can be managed at all.
By anyone’s best guess, there are — or soon will be — 284,186 fewer federal employees and contractors than there were on January 19, 2025. While Voice of America and the U.S. Agency for International Development have had it the worst, the Trump administration’s ongoing reductions have spared few government agencies. Over 10% of the staff at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, including at critical weather stations and tsunami monitoring centers, have left or been pushed out. Layoffs, buyouts, and early retirements have reduced the Department of Energy’s workforce by another 13%.
The best-case scenario for the civil service at this point would be if the administration has an abrupt change of heart and pivots from the approach of government “efficiency” guru Elon Musk and Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought, who has said he wants government bureaucrats to be “traumatically affected” by the funding cuts and staff reductions. Short of that unlikelihood, its membership will have to wait out the three-and-a-half remaining years of President Trump’s term in the hopes that his successor will have a kinder opinion of the federal workforce.
But even that wouldn’t mean a simple fix. In my effort to learn how long it would take the federal workforce to recover from just the four-plus months of Trump administration cuts so far, no one I spoke to seemed to believe a future president could reverse the damage in a single four-year term. “It will be very difficult, if not impossible, to restore the kind of institutional knowledge that’s being lost,” Jacqueline Simon, policy director of the American Federation of Government Employees, the largest union of federal government workers, told me.
There are three main reasons why restaffing the government will be trickier than implementing a simple policy change. The first is that the government had already been strugglingto fill empty posts before Trump’s layoffs began. “For a considerable period of time, the biggest challenge for the federal government, in personnel terms, has been getting talented people into government quickly,” Don Moynihan, a professor at the Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan, told me. “That was already a problem preceding the Trump administration, and they just made it a lot worse.”
Before Trump’s second term, an estimated 83% of “major federal departments and agencies” struggled with staff shortages, while 63% reported “gaps in the knowledge and skills of their employees,” according to research by the Partnership for Public Service, a nonprofit supporting the civil service. Even President Joe Biden, who’d promised to restore a “hollowed out” federal workforce after Trump 1.0, struggled at the task, ultimately growing the number of permanent employees by just 0.9% by March 2023. (He eventually saw 6% growth over his entire term; a bright spot was hiring for roles necessary for carrying out the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.)
Still, as I’ve previously reported, many hard-to-fill roles in remote locations or that required specialized skills were empty when Trump came into office and ordered a hiring freeze.
The second challenge to rebuilding the federal workforce is that many employees who have left the government may not be able to — or may not want to — return to their previous roles. Staff who have taken early retirements will be permanently lost or have to return as rehired annuitants, which Simon of the American Federation of Government Employees noted has “a lot of disadvantages,” including, in some cases, earning less than the minimum wage. Other former employees, particularly in the sciences, may have been enticed abroad as part of the U.S. brain drain. Still others may have found enjoyable and fulfilling work at the state level, in nonprofits, or in the private sector, and have no interest in returning to government.
It certainly doesn’t help that the Trump administration has made the federal government a less competitive employer. Abigail Haddad, a data scientist for the Department of the Army and, until recently, the Department of Homeland Security’s AI Corps, wrote for Moynihan’s Substack,Can We Still Govern?, that she’d been hired for a fully remote job, only to be told “we would be fired if we did not immediately return to office 9 to 5, five days a week.” Rather than make a two-and-a-half-hour round-trip commute to “an office that was never mentioned when I took the job,” Haddad quit. “It was clear to me that the people making these decisions about my work conditions were not only unconcerned about my ability to be productive, but were actively hostile toward it,” she wrote.
The last obstacle to reversing the Trump administration’s cuts echoes Haddad’s experience — and is, in my view, the most worrisome of all. That is, the current landscape will almost certainly dissuade future generations from pursuing jobs in the government. “There will be some opportunities in states and nonprofits,” Simon noted. “But as far as an opportunity for public service in the federal government — they’ve made that an impossibility, at least for the next many years.”
Moynihan, the public policy professor, added that while it’s still early to predict what students will do, he’s heard worries in his classrooms about “what future job prospects look like, given the instability around the federal government.” But the crisis goes beyond just hiring concerns.
“There’s a whole generation of public servants who would say they were inspired to go into government because they heard John F. Kennedy say, ‘Ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country,’” he said. “There is a genuine value in elected leaders calling on people to serve and presenting that service in noble terms.” Most people don’t join the public sector for the paycheck, after all — it’s for the “opportunity to do meaningful work, and for job stability and security,” Moynihan went on. The Trump administration has gutted the promises of both.
So then, how long would it take to restaff the government? Simon told me that since it was an executive order that directed the cuts, they could be functionally undone by another executive order, though the rehiring process itself “could take years.” Moynihan used the metaphor of a muscle, rather than a switch that gets turned on and off, to answer the same question. “The Trump administration is cutting a lot of muscle right now, and so the next president will not be able to simply, on day one, bring that back,” he told me. “They’ll have to be able to persuade people that the workspace is no longer going to be toxic, is going to be more secure, and will allow them to do meaningful work — and they’re going to face a fairly skeptical audience, given everything that’s going on.”
But that’s if things hold as they are. They could still get worse.
As the administration continues its attack on the civil service, it seems all but sure to be cueing up an eventual Supreme Court case over the legality of reclassifying federal employees so that they can be easily fired if they’re perceived as not loyal enough to the president. And if the court rules that the president can do so, “any sort of law that Congress might put in the future that constrains those powers is unconstitutional,” Moynihan said. In that scenario, the government would no longer be able to provide “any sort of long-term credible commitments to potential employees that four years down the line or eight years down the line, any new president could just rip up their workplace” or lay them off for arbitrary reasons.
The answer to how long it would take to restaff the federal government after Trump, then, takes on an entirely different tenor — it may never be the same again.
Smothered, covered, and recharged.
Picture, if you will, the perfect electric vehicle charging stop. It sits right off a well-traveled highway. It has decent bathrooms, preferably ones that are open 24/7. It gives drivers and road-tripping families a simple way to occupy themselves during the 15 to 30 minutes it takes to refill the battery, the most obvious solution being a meal that can be consumed within that time window.
In other words, it is a Waffle House.
The beloved chain of budget restaurants spread across the American South said last week that it would begin to install DC fast chargers in 2026. Built by BP, the charging stalls will be able to deliver up to 400 kilowatts of electricity and will include plugs with both the Combined Charging System standard (the plug used by most non-Tesla EVs to date) and the North American Charging System standard (the formerly proprietary Tesla plug that is slowly becoming the standard for the industry at large). At last, Americans can get their hash browns smothered, covered, and recharged.
We won’t see every Waffle House in the country become an electron depot overnight. BP said it is planning installations at about 50 sites right now; Waffle House has around 2,000 locations in the United States. Yet the addition of charging — and not just charging, but high-speed charging — at the Waffle House is just what the American EV experience needs.
Where fast chargers are built has been driven by a few factors. Notably, there is necessity from the EV driver’s point of view and practicality for the charging company. Charging depots along major highways and interstates make electric road trips possible, but many prime pit stops between big cities are in the middle of nowhere, which makes it a challenge to provide amenities to resting drivers. In the empty California desert between L.A. and San Francisco, for example, Tesla built Superchargers at iconic steak restaurants and at existing travel plazas with your expected array of gas stations and fast food restaurants. I’ve also stopped numerous times at an impromptu, formerly unpaved site rushed together to accommodate holiday traffic; for months it featured nothing but plugs and portable bathrooms sitting in the dirt.
In cities and suburbs, it’s not uncommon to find charging stations at outlet malls and shopping centers. It makes sense: These places have lots of parking spaces, room for the necessary electrical infrastructure, and stores and restaurants to provide some level of amusement or distraction. If it so happens that you need to go to the REI or Sephora anyway, then so much the better. Mercedes-Benz is trying to class up this setup by putting its luxury charging sites at high-end malls and providing primo, covered parking spaces.
But the game changer is the Waffle House. Businesses have long realized the benefit of adding EV chargers, either as a serendipitous perk for customers who arrive in electric need, or as an enticement for EV owners to patronize their business rather than the competitor with no plugs. Mostly, though, those businesses install Level 2 “destination” chargers that are roughly equivalent to what drivers get in their garage if they pay for the upgrade: 240 volts, or enough to provide 20 to 30 miles of range per hour.
That’s perfect for a hotel, where patrons who snag a charger can wake up the next morning with a full battery, just as they would at home. I made it across sparse Utah country this way. At a grocery store or a restaurant it’s less useful. It’s a pleasant bonus to add a few miles of juice during an errand. What would be better would be filling up the whole battery while you’re inside the Whole Foods.
The problem, however, is timing. Chargers are a shared resource. For optimal EV charging that works for everybody, drivers move their cars as soon as they’re done to open the stall for someone else, which is why many fast-charging operators ding drivers with idle fees if they stay plugged in. So not every activity is a perfect match. It’s pretty annoying to leave your half-filled cart inside Trader Joe’s to go move the car, or to rush through shopping so you finish by the time the battery does. I’ve been through plenty of situations where I couldn’t get back to my Model 3 right away, and so even though it was about to finish charging at 80%, I used the phone app to bump up the limit to 90% or higher to keep the session going.
You know what is a decent match? The Waffle House. You can probably finish your All-Star Special in time, and if you can’t, no problem. This isn’t fine dining; you can leave the table a moment to hop out to the parking lot and unplug the EV.
Putting chargers at the places Americans love to go anyway, whether road tripping or not, would be a wonderful little way to boost their desirability. My native Nebraska has Superchargers co-located with Runzas at towns along the interstate, a welcome trend that must expand. Let Wisconsinites fill the battery while crushing a frozen custard at Culver’s. Give us chargers at the Cracker Barrel so I can finally solve that unholy peg game. Continue the California trend of putting plugs at the In N Out. If the charging stop is someplace you want to go anyway, the minutes required melt away.
Current conditions: The first U.S. heat wave of the year begins today in the West, with a record high of 107 degrees Fahrenheit possible in Redding, California • India is experiencing its earliest monsoon in 16 years• Power was largely restored in southeast Texas by early Wednesday after destructive winds left nearly 200,000 without electricity.
The global average temperature is expected to “remain at or near” the 2-degree Celsius threshold within the next five years, the World Meteorological Organization shared in a new report Wednesday morning. The 2015 Paris Climate Agreement set a warming limit to under 2 degrees C above pre-industrial times, although the WMO’s prediction will not immediately mean the goal has been broken, since that threshold is measured over at least two decades, the Financial Times reports. Still, WMO’s report represents “the first time that scientists’ computer models had flagged the more imminent possibility of a 2C year,” FT writes. Other concerning findings include:
You can find the full report here.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency has been in disarray since its acting administrator was fired in early May for defending the agency before Congress. His successor, David Richardson, began his tenure by threatening staff. According to an internal FEMA memo obtained by The Handbasket, however, the picture is worse than mere dysfunction: Stephanie Dobitsch, the associate administrator for policy and program analysis, wrote to Richardson last week warning him that the agency’s “critical functions” are at “high risk” of failure due to “significant personnel losses in advance of the 2025 Hurricane Season.”
Of particular concern is the staffing at the Mount Weather Emergency Operations Center, which The Handbasket notes contains the nuclear bunker “where congressional leaders were stashed on 9/11,” and which, per Dobitsch, is now “at risk of not being fully mission capable.” FEMA’s primary disaster response office is also on the verge of being unable to “execute response and initial recovery operations and may disrupt life-saving and life-sustaining program delivery,” the memo goes on. Hurricane season begins on Sunday, and wildfires are already burning in the West. You can read the full report at The Handbasket.
The Supreme Court on Tuesday rejected a religious liberty appeal by the San Carlos Apache Tribe to stop the mining company Rio Tinto from proceeding with its plan to build one of the largest copper mines in the world at Oak Flat in Arizona, which the Tribe considers sacred land. Justices Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas said in a dissent that they would have granted the Tribe’s petition, with Gorsuch calling the court’s decision a “grave mistake” that could “reverberate for generations.” The Trump-appointed justice argued that “before allowing the government to destroy the Apaches’ sacred site, this Court should at least have troubled itself to hear their case.”
I traveled to Superior, Arizona, last year to learn more about Rio Tinto’s project, which analysts estimate could extract enough copper to meet a quarter of U.S. demand. “Copper is the most important metal for all technologies we think of as part of the energy transition: battery electric vehicles, grid-scale battery storage, wind turbines, solar panels,” Adam Simon, an Earth and environmental sciences professor at the University of Michigan, told me of the project. But many skeptics say that beyond destroying a culturally and religiously significant site, there is not the smelting capacity in the U.S. for all of Rio Tinto’s raw copper, which the company would likely extract from Oak Flat and send to China for processing. According to court documents, Oak Flat could be transferred to Rio Tinto’s subsidiary Resolution Copper as soon as June 16. In a statement, Wendsler Nosie Sr. of Apache Stronghold — the San Carlos Apache-led religious nonprofit opposing the mine — said, “While this decision is a heavy blow, our struggle is far from over.”
MTA
New York won a court order on Tuesday temporarily preventing the Trump administration from withholding funding for state transportation projects if it doesn’t end congestion pricing, Gothamist reports. The toll, which went into effect in early January, charges most drivers $9 to enter Manhattan below 60th street, and has been successful at reducing traffic and raising millions for subway upgrades. The Trump administration has argued, however, that the toll harms poor and working-class people by “unfairly” charging them to “go to work, see their families, or visit the city.”
The Federal Highway Administration warned New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority that it had until May 28 to end the program, or else face cuts to city and state highway funding. Judge Lewis J. Liman blocked the government from the retaliatory withholding with the court order on Tuesday, which extends through June 9, arguing the state would “suffer irreparable harm” without it. Governor Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, celebrated the move, calling it a “massive victory for New York commuters, vindicating our right as a state to make decisions regarding what’s best for our streets.”
European Union countries agreed on Tuesday to dramatically scale back the bloc’s carbon border tariff so that it will cover only 10% of the companies that currently qualify, Reuters reports. The scheme applies a fee on “imported goods that is equivalent to the carbon price already paid by EU-based companies under the bloc’s CO2 emissions policies,” with the intent of protecting Europe-based companies from being undercut by foreign producers in countries that have looser environmental regulations, Reuters writes. The EU justified the decision by noting that the approximately 18,000 companies to which the levy still applies account for more than 99% of the emissions from iron, steel, aluminum, and cement imports, and that loosening the restriction will benefit smaller businesses.
The famous “climate stripes” graphic — which visualizes the annual increases of global average temperature in red and blue bands — has been updated to include oceanic and atmospheric warming. “We’ve had [these] warming estimates for a long time, but having them all in one graphic is what we’ve managed to do here,” the project’s creator, Ed Hawkins, told Fast Company.