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:
Maybe you’re reading this in a downpour. Perhaps you’re reading it because you have questions about the upcoming hurricane season. Or maybe you’re reading it because you’re one of the 150 million Americans enduring record-breaking temperatures in this week’s heat dome.
Whatever the reason, you have a question: Is this climate change?
There’s an old maxim — that, like many things, is often dubiously attributed to Mark Twain — that goes something like, “Climate is what you expect and weather is what you get.” Weather refers to the event itself, while climate refers to the trends (averaged over 30 years or more, usually) that might make such an event more or less likely.
Climate change is almost always an exacerbating factor in the case of something like a heat wave or a heat dome. In other situations, the picture is far more complicated and uncertain. It can take years to understand if and how climate change made an extreme weather event more likely, and while organizations like World Weather Attribution work hard to provide quick and accurate estimations, getting the science wrong can fuel climate skepticism and bolster deniers’ arguments. While it might be tempting to pin all extreme weather on climate change, the truth is, not all of it is.
Still, we do know a lot about how climate change influences the weather — and we’re always learning more. While this guide is far from the be-all and end-all of attribution and should be referred to with caveats, here is what we know about how climate change is shaping the extreme weather we see today.
“When you’re looking at heat extremes, there is almost always a climate change signal,” Clair Barnes, a research associate with World Weather Attribution, told me. “I don’t think there’s ever not been a climate change signal since I’ve been doing it in the last couple of years.”
As the planet warms, local temperatures respond everywhere. There are not as many complicating variables in this relationship as there are with something like drought. “With heat waves, it’s the same answer every time: It got hotter because it’s got hotter,” Barnes said.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has found that the kind of heat waves that would have occurred once in a decade before the Industrial Revolution now occur almost three times more frequently and are 1.2 degrees Celsius (or 2.2 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer. The most extreme examples — like the 2021 heat dome over the Pacific Northwest — appear to have been possible only because of warming caused by greenhouse gas emissions. Additionally, about 37% of global heat-related deaths, which amount to tens of thousands of deaths per year, are attributable to climate change.
There have, of course, always been heat waves. But it is with high confidence that scientists say they are hotter and last longer now than they would otherwise because of climate change.
Did climate change do it? It is “virtually certain” that heat waves are more frequent and hotter than they otherwise would be because of climate change.
WWA doesn’t specifically study wildfires since they aren’t technically “weather” (though once they form, they can make their own). Instead, the organization studies the conditions that make a fire more likely. In the American West, this deadly combo usually involves high pressure, extremely dry air, and some wind.
Globally, burned areas decreased between 1998 and 2015, but that isn’t because fire-weather conditions are improving — rather, regional leaders have gotten better at things like land use and fire management. Fire weather, meanwhile, is increasing and lasting longer due to climate change. In particular, hotter temperatures — especially hotter overnight temperatures — make it more difficult to combat the fires that do ignite. (Most fires in the U.S. start due to human negligence or arson, rather than by natural causes such as lightning strikes.)
This is especially the case in California, where 10 of the state’s largest fires have occurred in the past two decades, with five in 2020 alone; a 2023 National Integrated Drought Information System-funded study further found a 320% increase in burned areas in the state between 1996 and 2021 due to contributions of human-caused climate change, with that number expected to grow in the coming decades.
On average, wildfire weather season lengthened by two weeks around the globe from 1979 to 2019. The IPCC has medium confidence in the claim that fire weather has become more probable in the U.S., Europe, Australia, and parts of Europe over the past century, and high confidence that fire weather will increase regionally due to global warming in the coming years.
Did climate change do it? Climate change has almost certainly exacerbated the heat, humidity, and drought conditions necessary for wildfires to start. The actual ignition of the fire is frequently human-caused, however, and complicating variables such as local vegetation, forest management, and land use can also muddle the picture.
Tropical cyclones are large and complicated storm systems. Ocean temperatures, the El Niño-Southern Oscillation, wind shear, barometric pressure, atmospheric moisture, the shape of the continental shelf, emergency preparedness measures, and pure luck all affect how destructive a given storm might be — when or if it makes landfall. Climate change can put a thumb on the scale, but it is far from a lone actor.
Hurricanes — the strongest manifestation of a tropical cyclone — essentially work by transferring heat from the ocean into wind energy. Because the ocean absorbs excess heat from the warming atmosphere, scientists expect to see more “major” hurricanes of Category 3 or above in the coming years.
The storms aren’t just getting more powerful, though. Because of the interaction between ocean heat and energy in a hurricane, the storms also intensify more rapidly and are “more than twice as likely to strengthen from a weak Category 1 hurricane to a major Category 3 or stronger hurricane in a 24-hour period than they were between 1970 and 1990,” according to new research published last year.
WWA says it cannot attribute the intensification of any individual storm to climate change due to relatively limited modeling so far, so the organization instead looks at how climate change may have amplified associated rainfall and storm surges. Rainfall and flooding are, in fact, more deadly than high wind speeds in hurricanes, and both are understood to be increasing because of climate change. Put simply, a warmer atmosphere can hold more water, which means worse deluges. Researchers linked extreme rainfall during Hurricanes Katrina, Maria, and Irma to climate change; Hurricane Harvey, which flooded up to 50% of the properties in Harris County, Texas, when it made landfall in 2017, had a rainfall total 15% to 38% greater than it would have been in a pre-industrial world, researchers found. Additionally, rising sea levels caused by climate change will worsen coastal flooding during such events.
However, “trends indicate no significant change in the frequency of tropical cyclones globally,” according to the IPCC. That is, there aren’t more hurricanes; the ones that form are just more likely to become major hurricanes. Scientists understand far less about what climate change means for the smaller Category 1 or 2 storms, or if it will impact the diameter of the storms that do form.
Did climate change do it? The greenhouse effect is making the atmosphere warmer, and in a warmer climate, we’d expect to see more major hurricanes of Category 3 and above. Evidence also points to hurricanes intensifying much more rapidly in today’s climate than in the past. Climate does not seem to play a role in the overall number of storms, though, and other critical factors like the path of a storm and the emergency preparedness of a given community have a significant impact on the potential loss of life but aren’t linked to a warmer atmosphere. Hurricanes are complicated events and there is still much more research to be done in understanding how exactly they’re impacted by climate change.
In the winter, your skin might feel dry, and your lips might chap; in the summer, many parts of the country feel sticky and swampy. This is simple, observable physics: Cold air holds less moisture, and warm air holds more. The “Clausius-Clapeyron” relation, as it is known, tells us that in 1 degree C warmer air, there is 7% more moisture. All that moisture has to go somewhere, so quite literally, when it rains, it pours. (That is, when and where it rains: WWA notes that “an attribution study in northern Europe found that human influence has so far had little effect on the atmospheric circulation that caused a severe rainfall event.”)
Like heat, the relationship between warm air and rainfall is well understood, which is why the IPCC is highly confident in the attributable influence of climate change on extreme rain. While it may seem confusing that both droughts and intense rainfall are symptoms of climate change, the warming atmosphere seems to increase precipitation variability, making events on the extreme margins more likely and more frequent.
Increased precipitation can have counterintuitive results, though. Rain occurring over fewer overall days due to bursts of extreme rainfall, for example, can actually worsen droughts. And while it might seem like more water in the atmosphere would mean snowier winters, that’s only true in certain places. Because it’s also warmer, snowfall is declining globally while winters are getting wetter — and as a result, probably more miserable.
But what does “more rain” really mean? Rain on its own isn’t necessarily bad, but when it overwhelms urban infrastructure or threatens roads and houses, it can quickly become deadly. Flooding, of course, is often the result of extreme rain, but “the signal in the rainfall is not necessarily correlated to the magnitude of the floods because there are other factors that turn rain into a flood,” Barnes, the research associate with WWA, told me, citing variables such as land use, water management, urban drainage, and other physical elements of a landscape.
Landslides, likewise, are caused by everything from volcanic eruptions to human construction, but rain is often a factor (climate-linked phenomena like wildfires and thawing permafrost also contribute to landslides). The IPCC writes with “high confidence” that landslides, along with floods and water availability, “have the potential to lead to severe consequences for people, infrastructure, and the economy in most mountain regions.”
Did climate change do it? More extreme rainfall is consistent with our understanding of climate change’s effects. Many other local, physical factors can compound or mitigate disasters like floods and mudslides, however.
When I spoke with Barnes, of WWA, she told me, “It’s really easy to define a heat wave. You just go, ‘It was hot.’” Droughts, not so much. For one thing, you have to define the time span you’re looking at. There are also different kinds of drought: meteorological, when there hasn’t been enough rain; hydrological, when rivers are low possibly because something else is diverting water from the natural cycle; and agricultural, when there is not enough water specifically for crops. Like flooding, many different infrastructural and physical factors go into exacerbating or even creating various kinds of droughts.
Drought as we mean it here, though, is a question of soil moisture, Barnes told me. “That’s really hard to get data on,” she said, “and we don’t necessarily understand the feedback mechanisms affecting that as well as we understand heat waves.” As recently as 2013, the IPCC had only low confidence that trends in drought could be attributed to climate change.
We have a better understanding of how drought and climate change interact now, including how higher temperatures drive evaporation and cut into snowpack, leading to less meltwater in rivers. The IPCC’s most recent report concluded that “even relatively small incremental increases in global warming (+0.5C) cause a worsening of droughts in some regions.” The IPCC also has high confidence that “more regions are affected by increases in agricultural and ecological droughts with increasing global warming.”
WWA’s attribution studies have, however, found examples of droughts that have no connection to climate change. The organization flags that it has the highest confidence in the climate affecting droughts in the Mediterranean, southern Africa, central and eastern Asia, southern Australia, and western North America and lower confidence in central and west Africa, western and central Europe, northeast South America, and New Zealand.
Did climate change do it? Maybe. Some droughts have a strong climate signal — California’s, for example. Still, researchers remain cautious about attribution for these complicated events due in part to their significant regional variability.
Tornadoes are extremely difficult to study. Compared to droughts, which can last years, tornadoes occupy a teeny tiny area and last for just a blip in time. They “wouldn’t even register” on the models WWA uses for its attribution studies, Barnes said. “It would probably look like a slightly raised average wind speed.” The IPCC, for its part, has only “low confidence” in a connection between climate change and “severe convective storms” like tornadoes, in part due to the “short length of high-quality data records.”
But we are learning more every day. This spring, researchers posited that Tornado Alley is moving east and “away from the warm season, especially the summer, and toward the cold season.” Though it’s not entirely clear why this is happening, one theory is that it relates to how climate change is affecting regional seasonality: winters and nights are becoming warmer in certain areas, and thus more conducive to tornado formation, while others are becoming too hot for storms to form during the normal season.
Did climate change do it? Researchers aren’t entirely sure but there doesn’t appear to be a correlation between tornado formation and climate change. Still, warmer temperatures potentially make certain areas more or less prone to tornadoes than they were in the past.
We say “it was a dark and stormy night” because “it was a severe convective storm” doesn’t have the same ring. But an SCS — which forms when warm, moist air rises into colder air — is the most common and most damaging weather phenomenon in the United States. You probably just call it a thunderstorm.
Severe convective storms cause many localized events that we think of as “weather,” including heavy rainfall, high winds, tornadoes, hail, thunder, and lightning. Because heat and moisture are necessary ingredients for these kinds of storms, and because the atmosphere is getting both warmer and wetter, climate models “consistently” and confidently predict an “increase in the frequency of severe thunderstorms,” the IPCC notes — but, “there is low confidence in the details of the projected increase.” Trends remain poorly studied and highly regionally dependent; in the United States, for example, there is still no evidence of a “significant increase in convective storms, and hail and severe thunderstorms.” Still, other research suggests that for every 1.8 degree F of warming, the conditions favorable to severe convective storms will increase in frequency by up to 20%.
Hail forms during severe convective storms when the hot, moist air rises to a region of the atmosphere where it is cold enough to freeze. Like thunderstorms more generally, data is fairly limited on hail, making it difficult to study long-term trends (most climate models also do not look directly at hail, studying convective storms more broadly instead). However, it’s been hypothesized that climate change could create larger and more destructive hail in the future; if thunderstorm updrafts grow stronger, as projected, then they could hold hail at freezing high altitudes for longer, allowing individual hailstones to grow larger before falling back to Earth. One study even suggested that with continued warming, there could be a 145% increase in “significant severe hail” measuring at least 2 inches in diameter — that is, a little smaller than a tennis ball.
Did climate change do it? Everything we know about thunderstorms suggests that a warmer, wetter atmosphere will mean severe convection storms become both more frequent and more intense. But there is still very little available data to track the long-term trends, so attributing any one storm to climate change would be nearly impossible.
Just as virtually all heat waves worldwide are worsened by climate change, “nearly every instance of extreme cold across the world has decreased in likelihood,” according to the WWA. While the organization has run attribution studies on “a few” heavy snowfall events, it has either found no link to climate change or has been unable to state a conclusion confidently. On the other hand, the loss of snow cover, permafrost, Arctic sea ice, and glaciers has a high-confidence link to human-caused climate change in the IPCC report.
Just because climate change makes extreme cold and snowstorms less likely does not mean they won’t happen. Research published in Nature earlier this year suggests climate change could bring more snow to certain places, as extremely cold parts of the world warm to snow-friendly temperatures, and increased precipitation from a warmer atmosphere results in more flurries. Parts of Siberia and the northern Great Plains are even experiencing a deepening snowpack.
Did climate change do it? Probably not — though there are notable exceptions.
An earthquake is usually caused by the release of energy when two tectonic plates suddenly slip past each other (though they can also be caused by fossil fuel extraction). But before you dismiss earthquakes as having no connection to climate change, there is one place where there could be a link: water.
As Emily Pontecorvo wrote for Heatmap this spring, “Changes in surface water, whether because of heavy rain, snow, or drought, could either increase or relieve stress on geologic faults, causing them to shift.” Admittedly, even if there is a relationship between climate change, water, and earthquakes, it appears to be small — so small that humans probably can’t feel any resulting quakes.
Did climate change do it? It’s highly unlikely.
Earlier this year, extreme turbulence on a Singapore-bound flight from London killed one person and injured at least 20 others. While such events remain rare — the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board recorded just 101 serious injuries caused by turbulence on millions of flights between 2013 and 2022 — extreme turbulence appears to be increasing, potentially because of climate change.
According to one study, severe turbulence is up 55% between 1979 and 2020, seemingly due to an increase in wind shear at high altitudes caused by the temperature contrast between the equator and the North Pole. (This relationship is a little bit complicated, but essentially, at higher altitudes, the temperature over the pole has been declining due to rapid Arctic temperature changes even as it’s increased at the equator; lower in the troposphere, the opposite is happening). Other studies have similarly shown that doubling the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere could increase moderate-to-severe turbulence by as much as 127%.
Data, however, is limited and fairly subjective, leading to some skepticism in the scientific community and inaccurate dismissals by climate-change deniers. As with many complex weather phenomena, our understanding of how climate change interacts with turbulence will likely grow in the coming years as the field of research develops.
Did climate change do it? Potentially in some cases, but there is still much to learn about the connection between the two.
Desertification differs from drought in that it describes a decline in soil fertility, water, and plant life to the point of total “land degradation.” (In contrast, land can become productive again after a drought.) Like other compound disasters, desertification results from natural processes, climatic conditions, and land management practices such as grazing and deforestation.
According to the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, land degradation is “almost always” the result of these “multiple interacting causes,” and the warming climate certainly isn’t helping. Heat stress can kill off vegetation, making landscapes more prone to desertification, as well as drive aridification.
In the resulting drylands — which comprise about 46% of global land area — you can expect dust storms (also known as haboobs), and sand storms resulting from the wind kicking up loose soils. While there have always been sand storms, one study suggests that climate change is one of the critical drivers of global annual dust emissions increasing by 25% between the late 19th century and today.
However, “climate change impacts on dust and sand storm activity remain a critical gap,” writes the IPCC, and more research is desperately needed to address this. By the UN’s estimate, dust storms were associated with the deaths of 402,000 people in 2005. As many as 951 million people, mainly in South Asia, Central Asia, West Africa, and East Asia, could be vulnerable to the impacts of desertification if climate change continues.
Did climate change do it? It was potentially a factor, but we have lots more to learn.
Are locust swarms technically “weather”? Not really. But so long as we’re on the topic of weather events of Biblical proportions, locust swarms might as well be addressed, too.
And the answer may surprise you: Climate appears to be a driver of locust swarms, which threaten food security and exacerbate famines throughout Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia. Locusts prefer “arid areas punched by extreme rainfall,” according to one study that looked at the connection between swarms and climate change, and while much of that pattern is fixed in the natural El Niño–Southern Oscillation cycle, a warming climate will also “lead to widespread increases in locust outbreaks with emerging hotspots in west central Asia.” In particular, the research found that in a low-emissions scenario, locust habitat could increase by 5%, while in a high-emissions scenario, it could increase by 13% to 25% between 2065 and 2100.
Did climate change do it? It’d likely be tricky to attribute any one locust swarm to climate change, but as with many other natural phenomena, climate likely plays a compounding factor.
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
Half of all Americans are sweating under one right now.
Like a bomb cyclone, a polar vortex, or an atmospheric river, a heat dome is a meteorological phenomenon that feels, well, a little made up. I hadn’t heard the term before I found myself bottled beneath one in the Pacific Northwest in 2021, where I saw leaves and needles brown on living trees. Ultimately, some 1,400 people died from the extreme heat in British Columbia, Washington, and Oregon that summer weekend.
Since that disaster, there have been a number of other high-profile heat dome events in the United States, including this week, over the Midwest and now Eastern and Southeastern parts of the country. On Monday, roughly 150 million people — about half the nation’s population — faced extreme or major heat risks.
“I think the term ‘heat dome’ was used sparingly in the weather forecasting community from 10 to 30 years ago,” AccuWeather senior meteorologist Brett Anderson told me, speaking with 36 years as a forecaster under his belt. “But over the past 10 years, with global warming becoming much more focused in the public eye, we are seeing ‘heat dome’ being used much more frequently,” he went on. “I think it is a catchy term, and it gets the public’s attention.”
Catching the public’s attention is critical. Heat is the deadliest weather hazard in the U.S., killing more people annually than hurricanes, floods, tornadoes, or extreme cold. “There is a misunderstanding of the risk,” Ashley Ward, the director of the Heat Policy Innovation Hub at Duke University, told me. “A lot of people — particularly working age or younger people — don’t feel like they’re at risk when, in fact, they are.”
While it seems likely that the current heat dome won’t be as deadly as the one in 2021 — not least because the Midwest and Southeastern regions of the country have a much higher usage of air conditioning than the Pacific Northwest — the heat in the eastern half of the country is truly extraordinary. Tampa, Florida reached 100 degrees Fahrenheit on Sunday for the first time in its recorded history. Parts of the Midwest last week, where the heat dome formed before gradually moving eastward, hit a heat index of 128 degrees.
Worst of all, though, have been the accompanying record-breaking overnight temperatures, which Ward told me were the most lethal characteristics of a heat dome. “When there are both high daytime temperatures and persistently high overnight temperatures, those are the most dangerous of circumstances,” Ward said.
Although the widespread usage of the term “heat dome” may be relatively new, the phenomenon itself is not. The phrase describes an area of “unusually strong” high pressure situated in the upper atmosphere, which pockets abnormally warm air over a particular region, Anderson, the forecaster, told me. “These heat domes can be very expansive and can linger for days, and even a full week or longer,” he said.
Anderson added that while he hasn’t seen evidence of an increase in the number of heat domes due to climate change, “we may be seeing more extreme and longer-lasting heat domes” due to the warmer atmosphere. A heat dome in Europe this summer, which closed the Eiffel Tower, tipped temperatures over 115 degrees in parts of Spain, and killed an estimated 2,300 people, has been linked to anthropogenic warming. And research has borne out that the temperatures and duration reached in the 2021 Pacific Northwest heat dome would have been “virtually impossible without human-caused climate change.”
There’s link between climate change and heat domes is now strong enough to form the basis for a major legal case. Multnomah County, the Oregon municipality that includes Portland, filed a lawsuit in 2023 against 24 named defendants, including oil and gas companies ExxonMobil, Shell, and BP, seeking $50 million in damages and $1.5 billion in future damages for the defendants’ alleged role in the deaths from the 2021 heat dome.
“As we learned in this country when we took on Big Tobacco, this is not an easy step or one I take lightly, but I do believe it’s our best way to fight for our community and protect our future,” Multnomah County Chair Jessica Vega Pederson said in a statement at the time. The case is now in jeopardy following moves by the Trump administration to prevent states, counties, and cities from suing fossil fuel companies for climate damages. (The estate of a 65-year-old woman who died in the heat dome filed a similar wrongful death lawsuit in Seattle’s King County Superior Court against Big Oil.)
Given the likelihood of longer and hotter heat dome events, then, it becomes imperative to educate people about how to stay safe. As Ward mentioned, many people who are at risk of extreme heat might not even know it, such as those taking commonly prescribed medications for anxiety, depression, PTSD, diabetes, and high blood pressure, which interfere with the body’s ability to thermoregulate. “Let’s just say recently you started taking high blood pressure medicine,” Ward said. “Every summer prior, you never had a problem working in your garden or doing your lawn work. You might this year.”
Air conditioning, while life-saving, can also stop working for any number of reasons, from a worn out machine part to a widespread grid failure. Vulnerable community members may also face hurdles in accessing reliable AC. There’s a reason the majority of heat-related deaths happen indoors.
People who struggle to manage their energy costs should prioritize cooling a single space, such as a bedroom, and focus on maintaining a cool core temperature during overnight hours, when the body undergoes most of its recovery. Blotting yourself with a wet towel or washcloth and sitting in front of a fan can help during waking hours, as can visiting a traditional cooling center, or even a grocery store or movie theater.
Health providers also have a role to play, Ward stressed. “They know who has chronic underlying health conditions,” she said. “Normalize asking them about their situation with air conditioning. Normalize asking them, ‘Do you feel like you have a safe place to go that’s cool, that you can get out of this heat?’”
For the current heat dome, at least, the end is in sight: Incoming cool air from Canada will drop temperatures by 10 to 20 degrees in cities like Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., with lows potentially in the 30s by midweek in parts of New York. And while there are still hot days ahead for Florida and the rest of the Southeast, the cold front will reach the region by the end of the week.
But even if this ends up being the last heat dome of the summer, it certainly won’t be in our lifetimes. The heat dome has become inescapable.
On betrayed regulatory promises, copper ‘anxiety,’ and Mercedes’ stalled EV plans
Current conditions: New York City is once again choking on Canadian wildfire smoke • Torrential rain is flooding southeastern Slovenia and northern Croatia • Central Asia is bracing for the hottest days of the year, with temperatures nearing 100 degrees Fahrenheit in Uzbekistan’s capital of Tashkent all week.
In May, the Trump administration signaled its plans to gut Energy Star, the energy efficiency certification program administered by the Environmental Protection Agency. Energy Star is extremely popular — its brand is recognized by nearly 90% of Americans — and at a cost to the federal government of just $32 million per year, saves American households upward of $40 billion in energy costs per year as of 2024, for a total of more than $500 billion saved since its launch in 1992, by the EPA’s own estimate. Not only that, as one of Energy Star’s architects told Heatmap’s Jeva Lange back in May, more energy efficient appliances and buildings help reduce strain on the grid. “Think about the growing demands of data center computing and AI models,” RE Tech Advisors’ Deb Cloutier told Jeva. “We need to bring more energy onto the grid and make more space for it.”
That value has clearly resonated with lawmakers on the Hill. Legislators tasked with negotiating appropriations in both the Senate and the House of Representatives last week proposed fully funding Energy Star at $32 million for the next fiscal year. It’s unclear how the House’s decision to go into recess until September will affect the vote, but Ben Evans, the federal legislative director at the U.S. Green Building Council, said the bill is “a major step in the right direction demonstrating that ENERGY STAR has strong bipartisan support on Capitol Hill.”
A worker connects panels on floating solar farm project in Huainan, China. Kevin Frayer/Getty Images
The United States installed just under 11 gigawatts of solar panels in the first three months of this year, industry data show. In June alone, China installed nearly 15 gigawatts, PV Tech reported. And, in a detail that demonstrates just how many panels the People’s Republic has been deploying at home in recent years, that represented an 85% drop from the previous month and close to a 40% decline compared to June of last year.
The photovoltaic installation plunge followed Beijing’s rollout of two new policies that changed the renewables business in China. The first, called the 531 policy, undid guaranteed feed-in tariffs and required renewable projects to sell electricity on the spot market. That took effect on June 1. The other, called the 430 policy, took effect on May 1 and mandated that new distributed solar farms consume their own power first before allowing the sale of surplus electricity to the grid. As a result of the stalled installations, a top panel manufacturer warned the trade publication Opis that companies may need to raise prices by as much as 10%.
For years now, Fortescue, the world’s fourth-biggest producer of iron ore, has directed much of the earnings from its mines in northwest Australia and steel mills in China toward building out a global green hydrogen business. But changes to U.S. policy have taken a toll. Last week, Fortescue told investors it was canceling its green hydrogen project in Arizona, which had been set to come online next year. It’s also abandoning its plans for a green hydrogen plant on Australia’s northeastern coast, The Wall Street Journal reported.
“A shift in policy priorities away from green energy has changed the situation in the U.S.,” Gus Pichot, Fortescue’s chief executive of growth and energy, told analysts on a call. “The lack of certainty and a step back in green ambition has stopped the emerging green-energy markets, making it hard for previously feasible projects to proceed.” But green hydrogen isn’t dead everywhere. Just last week, the industrial gas firm Air Liquide made a final decision to invest in a 200-megawatt green hydrogen plant in the Netherlands.
The Trump administration put two high-ranking officials at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration on administrative leave, CNN reported. The reasoning behind the move wasn’t clear, but both officials — Steve Volz, who leads NOAA’s satellites division, and Jeff Dillen, NOAA’s deputy general counsel — headed up the investigation into whether President Donald Trump violated NOAA’s scientific integrity policies during his so-called Sharpiegate scandal.
The incident from September 2019, during Trump’s first term, started when the president incorrectly listed Alabama among the states facing a threat from Hurricane Dorian. Throughout the following week, Trump defended the remark, insisting he had been right, and ultimately showed journalists a weather map that had been altered with a black Sharpie market to show the path of the storm striking Alabama. NOAA’s investigation into the incident concluded that Neil Jacobs, the former agency official who backed Trump at the time and is now nominated to serve as chief, succumbed to political pressure and violated scientific integrity rules.
In March, North Carolina’s Republican-controlled Senate passed a bill to repeal the state’s climate law and scrap the 2030 deadline by which the monopoly utility Duke Energy had to slash its planet-heating emissions by 70% compared to 2005 levels. Governor Josh Stein, a Democrat, vetoed the legislation. But on Tuesday, the GOP majorities in both chambers of the legislature plan to vote to override the veto.
Doing so and enacting the bill could cost North Carolina more than 50,000 jobs annually and cause tens of billions of dollars in lost investments, Canary Media’s Elizabeth Ouzts reported. That’s according to a new study from a consultancy commissioned by clean-energy advocates in the state. The analysis is based on data from the state-sanctioned consumer advocate, Public Staff.
For years, a mystery has puzzled scientists: Why did Neanderthal remains show levels of a nitrogen isotope only seen among carnivores like hyenas and wolves that eat more meat than a hominid could safely consume? New research finally points to an answer: Neanderthals were eating putrefying meat garnished with maggots, said Melanie Beasley, an anthropologist at Purdue University. “When you get the lean meat and the fatty maggot, you have a more complete nutrient that you’re consuming.”
Oregon’s Cram Fire was a warning — the Pacific Northwest is ready to ignite.
What could have been the country’s first designated megafire of 2025 spluttered to a quiet, unremarkable end this week. Even as national headlines warned over the weekend that central Oregon’s Cram Fire was approaching the 100,000-acre spread usually required to achieve that status, cooler, damper weather had already begun to move into the region. By the middle of the week, firefighters had managed to limit the Cram to 95,736 acres, and with mop-up operations well underway, crews began rotating out for rest or reassignment. The wildfire monitoring app Watch Duty issued what it said would be its final daily update on the Cram Fire on Thursday morning.
By this time in 2024, 10 megafires had already burned or ignited in the U.S., including the more-than-million-acre Smokehouse Creek fire in Texas last spring. While it may seem wrong to describe 2025 as a quieter fire season so far, given the catastrophic fires in the Los Angeles area at the start of the year, it is currently tracking below the 10-year average for acres burned at this point in the season. Even the Cram, a grassland fire that expanded rapidly due to the hot, dry conditions of central Oregon, was “not [an uncommon fire for] this time of year in the area,” Bill Queen, a public information officer with the Pacific Northwest Complex Incident Management Team 3, told me over email.
At the same time, the Cram Fire can also be read as a precursor. It was routine, maybe, but also large enough to require the deployment of nearly 900 fire personnel at a time when the National Wildland Fire Preparedness Level is set to 4, meaning national firefighting resources were already heavily committed when it broke out. (The preparedness scale, which describes how strapped federal resources are, goes up to 5.) Most ominous of all, though, is the forecast for the Pacific Northwest for “Dirty August” and “Snaptember,” historically the two worst months of the year in the region for wildfires.
National Interagency Coordination Center
“Right now, we’re in a little bit of a lull,” Jessica Neujahr, a public affairs officer with the Oregon Department of Forestry, acknowledged to me. “What comes with that is knowing that August and September will be difficult, so we’re now doing our best to make sure that our firefighters are taking advantage of having time to rest and get rejuvenated before the next big wave of fire comes through.”
That next big wave could happen any day. The National Interagency Fire Center’s fire potential outlook, last issued on July 1, describes “significant fire potential” for the Northwest that is “expected to remain above average areawide through September.” The reasons given include the fact that “nearly all areas” of Washington and Oregon are “abnormally dry or in drought status,” combined with a 40% to 60% probability of above-average temperatures through the start of the fall in both states. Moisture from the North American Monsoon, meanwhile, looks to be tracking “largely east of the Northwest.” At the same time, “live fuels in Oregon are green at mid to upper elevations but are drying rapidly across Washington.”
In other words, the components for a bad fire season are all there — the landscape just needs a spark. Lightning, in particular, has been top of mind for Oregon forecasters, given the tinderbox on the ground. A single storm system, such as one that rolled over southeast and east-central Oregon in June, can produce as many as 10,000 lightning strikes; over the course of just one night earlier this month, thunderstorms ignited 72 fires in two southwest Oregon counties. And the “kicker with lightning is that the fires don’t always pop up right away,” Neujahr explained. Instead, lightning strike fires can simmer for up to a week after a storm, evading the detection of firefighting crews until it’s too late. “When you have thousands of strikes in a concentrated area, it’s bound to stretch the local resources as far as they can go,” Neujahr said.
National Interagency Coordination Center
The National Interagency Fire Center has “low confidence … regarding the number of lightning ignitions” for the end of summer in the Northwest, in large part due to the incredible difficulty of forecasting convective storms. Additionally, the current neutral phase of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation means there is a “wide range of potential lightning activity” that adds extra uncertainty to any predictions. The NIFC’s higher confidence in its temperature and precipitation outlooks, in turn, “leads to a belief that the ratio of human to natural ignitions will remain high and at or above 2024 levels.” (An exploding transformer appears to have been the ignition source for the Cram Fire; approximately 88% of wildfires in the United States have human-caused origins, including arson.)
Periodic wildfires are a naturally occurring part of the Western ecosystem, and not all are attributable to climate change. But before 1995, the U.S. averaged fewer than one megafire per year; between 2005 and 2014, that average jumped to 9.8 such fires per year. Before 1970, there had been no documented megafires at all.
Above-average temperatures and drought conditions, which can make fires larger and burn hotter, are strongly associated with a warming atmosphere, however. Larger and hotter fires are also more dangerous. “Our biggest goal is always to put the fires out as fast as possible,” Neujahr told me. “There is a correlation: As fires get bigger, the cost of the fire grows, but so do the risks to the firefighters.”
In Oregon, anyway, the Cram Fire’s warning has registered. Shortly after the fire broke out, Oregon Governor Tina Kotek declared a statewide emergency with an eye toward the months ahead. “The summer is only getting hotter, drier, and more dangerous — we have to be prepared for worsening conditions,” she said in a statement at the time.
It’s improbable that there won’t be a megafire this season; the last time the U.S. had a year without a fire of 100,000 acres or more was in 2001. And if or when the megafire — or megafires — break out, all signs point to the “where” being Oregon or Washington, concentrating the area of potential destruction, exhausting local personnel, and straining federal resources. “When you have two states directly next to each other dealing with the same thing, it just makes it more difficult to get resources because of the conflicting timelines,” Neujahr said.
By October, at least, there should be relief: The national fire outlook describes “an increasing frequency of weather systems and precipitation” that should “signal an end of fire season” for the Northwest once fall arrives. But there are still a long 68 days left to go before then.