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If you’ve had the uneasy sense that winter weather isn’t what it used to be, you’re not alone — and you’re probably right. The everyday effects of climate change on the year’s coldest months are quickly becoming too blatant to dismiss.
As annual heat records continue to topple year after year — 2023, now officially the hottest year on record, came terrifyingly close to averaging 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial temperatures — winter weather is responding. In some places, it’s turning snowy days into rainy ones. In others, it’s turning cold days bitterly so.
So — what, exactly, is going on? Let’s start with the basics.
The main thing is that climate change is pushing winter temperatures higher. In fact, the average winter temperature is rising faster than that of any other season. Average temperatures in the lower 48 U.S. states from December through February rose by almost 3 degrees Fahrenheit between 1896 and 2021, compared to 2 degrees in spring and 1.5 degrees in summer and fall, federal data show.
The number of days below freezing each year is also on the decline across the country and across the planet. A decade ago, the U.S. was already seeing two weeks less snow cover, on average, than it did in 1972, according to federal data. And parts of the country, including cities in the Northeast and Northwest, are on track to lose over a month of freezing days by midcentury.
But in many places, daily highs and lows aren’t shifting at the same rate. Winter nights, for instance, are warming even faster than winter days — the total number of freezing nights has been dropping in the U.S. since the 1970s. Colder places are also warming more quickly, with the northern U.S. and especially the Northeast experiencing the most significant rise in average winter temperatures.
That dreary, muddy weather that most of the U.S. saw this past Christmas does, admittedly, happen sometimes for natural reasons. Same with the incessant rain that fell (and then turned to ice) across the Midwest and Northeast in mid-January. With every fraction of a degree the planet warms, however, events like these become more likely — or, at least, that’s what hundreds of the world’s leading climate scientists concluded in the United Nations’ latest synthesis report on the state of the global climate.
Bingo.
Some evidence suggests that climate change is actually making cold shocks more likely by destabilizing the polar jet stream, which keeps the frigid air in the far northern hemisphere from moving too far southward (and keeps warm air in the tropics from moving too far northward). As a result, the polar vortex that’s normally confined to the Arctic is liable to stretch south and blast bitterly cold air into the contiguous U.S. That’s what happened in mid-January, when temperatures in Montana and the Dakotas dropped as low as -30 degrees Fahrenheit and the wind chill bottomed out at -60 degrees. Cold air from the same weather system blew all the way to Texas.
That said, this evidence is not rock solid. Whether or not it bears out in the long term, it’s important to remember that a warmer world doesn’t mean it will never be cold.
Recent experience notwithstanding, cold snaps — short periods of abnormally cold weather — are going away, too. Their average duration dropped by six days between 1970 and 2021, a Climate Central analysis found.
One of the most predictable consequences of climate change is that, as year-round temperatures soar, an increasing share of annual precipitation will fall as rain rather than snow. That’s just what you get when it’s too warm for water vapor to freeze.
One of the less obvious consequences, it turns out, is that a warmer atmosphere holds more moisture, enabling it to dump more precipitation — whether that comes as rain, snow, or wintry mix — during a single storm. As a result, even though climate change is making certain places drier, the biggest winter snowstorms are becoming, well, bigger.
This apparent contradiction had a major impact on the parched West in 2023. Drought is expected to become the norm there as the planet warms, fueling epic wildfires and straining already limited water supplies.
But a string of record snowstorms across the West last winter replenished the region’s dwindling snowpack, feeding mountain streams and helping keep drought conditions at bay (and creating a really good year for ski towns). In California, meanwhile, a barrage of atmospheric rivers drenched lower elevations and broke snowfall records in parts of the Sierra Nevada mountains.
California and its neighbors got off to another rainy (and snowy) start in 2024 — though the recent reprieve from years of severe drought isn’t expected to last.
The best answer we can give you today is to say that yes, snow will most likely still exist. But rising generations probably won’t be able to count on snow falling — and sticking — with the regularity it did when you were their age.
Climate scientists don’t have a perfect picture of how quickly the winters we grew up with will give way to a string of months that are rainy, slushy, and unpredictable, but that’s the direction the evidence is pointing. As global temperatures continue to rise, the trends we’ve seen in winter weather over the past couple of decades aren’t expected to reverse course anytime soon.
Many of the ways climate change affects winter are hard to miss. Snow falls later and less often, and when it does come, it doesn’t last as long. That comes with a few perks for the average American — such as fewer frigid winter days — and huge downsides for the communities, ecosystems, and industries that depend on winter being snowy and cold.
The ramifications of warming winters across the U.S. also extend far beyond the end of the season. Accelerated snowmelt causes plants to green and bloom earlier, which can have cascading effects on soil moisture and drought, as well as on the wildlife that depend on these plants for food and habitat. If snowpack fails to accumulate or melts too early, streams will run dry during the hottest months of the year, when animals, plants, and people need them most.
Traditional strains of some fruit crops — like blueberries, cherries and peaches, for example — don’t grow properly in the spring and summer if the preceding winter was too warm. The increasing volatility of winter weather is also affecting the success rate of wintertime crops, especially in the South. By some estimates, the agriculture sector’s biggest companies could lose tens of billions of dollars in value by 2030 because of climate change.
And pests like ticks and mosquitoes are not only expanding northward, they’re also surviving the winter more easily in their historical range, causing their populations to grow and rates of disease transmission to climb.
Unfortunately, that’s one question we can’t answer — not for every instance of unseasonably warm temperatures everywhere in the world. What we do know for sure is that warmer average temperatures make unseasonable and extreme weather more likely. So in that sense, yes, odds are very good that climate change is playing a role in that thermometer reading.
But also, events rarely have just one cause. Climate change could be exacerbating a natural weather phenomenon, or you might just have gotten a brief winter reprieve. Whether one sultry February day is “because of climate change” isn’t really the point. The point is that, unless and until we stop emitting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and start pulling them out, the weather will just keep getting weirder. There is no new normal.
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Current conditions: The southwest monsoon known as “hagabat” has started in the Philippines, dumping up to 4 inches of rain on the archipelago • A strong geomagnetic storm, ranked just two levels below the most powerful type of event of this kind, is underway, threatening radio signals, GPS, and other human instruments that are sensitive to shifts in the Earth’s magnetic fields • San Antonio, where the glorious New York Knicks defeated the Spurs last night, is bracing for rain through the weekend.
To put it in terms a movie lover could understand, President Donald Trump’s Iran War is drinking the U.S. government’s milkshake. Federal stocks of oil have dropped to their lowest level since 2004. Commercial crude stocks fell by 8 million barrels to 433.7 million last week, according to The Wall Street Journal. Unless the Strait of Hormuz reopens soon — which looks less likely now that Iran has called off negotiations with the U.S. and Israel — prices could hit $200 per barrel by summer, said Bob McNally, president of the Rapidan Energy Group consultancy and a former White House adviser. “You start to raise the risk of spillover into other sectors, the economy and financial system … it detonates fragilities in the broader economy and financial system,” he told the Financial Times.
Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond has filed a lawsuit to block construction of the United States’ first new aluminum smelter in half a century over concerns about the project’s ties to the United Arab Emirates and risks it poses to the state’s cattle industry. Century Aluminum had planned to build the smelter with $500 million from the Biden administration. But in January, as I told you at the time, the company overhauled the deal to partner instead with the Abu Dhabi-based Emirates Global Aluminum, which said it became interested in the project after Trump slapped 50% tariffs on the metal. The move comes after Trump endorsed Drummond’s opponent in this year’s Republican primary for Oklahoma governor.
In the 12-page litigation, the state’s top cop alleged that the smelter, planned for a site 30 miles east of Tulsa, would “leach air and water pollutants that would injure the health, comfort, repose, and safety of the people in the region,” Mining.com reported. “A primary aluminum smelter does not belong in a community’s backyard and its emissions do not respect property lines,” Drummond wrote in the lawsuit, which asks the court to block the project. His lawsuit also refers to the UAE, a close ally of the U.S. and by far the most liberal of the Gulf Arab kingdoms, as an “Islamic foreign monarchy.”
The Electric Reliability Council of Texas, the state’s grid operator, approved what E&E News called two “landmark sets of rules of rules” this week that would “shape the future of data centers in the state if finalized.” One package sets up new criteria and processes for bringing big electricity users onto the grid by reviewing them in batches. The other requires data centers and crypto mining operations to remain online during brief grid disruptions in a bid to avoid the cascading outages that downed the electrical system during 2021’s deadly Winter Storm Uri.
The changes come as opposition to data centers reaches critical new heights. Seven in 10 Americans now oppose server facilities built near their homes, according to a new Heatmap Pro released a poll this week that my colleague Robinson Meyer wrote up here. The backlash has grown so severe that former Representative Ben McAdams, a Republican from Utah, is facing serious pushback from his Democratic opponent for the state’s new 1st Congressional District over his small stake in the renewable energy component of a proposed data center in the area, according to the Salt Lake Tribune.
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Taiwan, if you’ll forgive the pun, is in dire straits. The self-governing republic that has functioned as an independent country since the losing side of the Chinese Civil War fled there in 1949, is almost entirely reliant on imported fossil fuels to keep the lights on and semiconductor fabricators churning out the hardware that makes the island so valuable to the global economy. That reliance only grew last year when the ruling Democratic Progressive Party, which has opposed atomic energy since its founding in the 1980s, completed the country’s nuclear phaseout, shutting the last of the island’s three functioning plants. The government in Taipei is now considering starting back up at least one of the old nuclear plants. But, as I told you earlier this year, it’s also looking to geothermal to make up the difference. On Wednesday, the Ministry of Economic Affairs announced the first government-led tender for geothermal, Think Geoenergy reported. The six-month process is meant to develop geothermal zones in Taitung County, on the island’s southeast coast.
The Iran War isn’t just draining America’s crude stockpiles. It’s also spiking gas prices — and spurring a hybrid boom. Sales of hybrid vehicles revved 33% in May compared to the same month last year, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of Motor Intelligence data. “The hybrids have been a godsend,” Mark Politte, the dealer principal at Stanley Subaru in Ellsworth, Maine, told the newspaper. They are “hotter than the non-hybrids.” While new vehicle sales are down 4.4% overall this year through May, hybrid sales are up 17% compared with 2025.
Meanwhile, autonomous electric vehicle company Waymo announced a deal on Thursday to recycle batteries from its nearly 4,000 operating robotaxis into battery storage for electric grids in California and Texas. Waymo’s fleet is made up mostly of Jaguar I-Pace EVs, which have 90-kilowatt-hour batteries. “Put a little haircut on that in terms of degradation and the effective capacity that would be left in those batteries when they’re suitable for repurposing, and we’re still talking about pretty significant capacity per battery,” Freeman Hall, CEO of B2U Storage Solutions, Waymo’s partner in the project, told Ars Technica.

The U.S. may be depleting its oil stockpiles, but it has increased its storage capacity for natural gas in the future. Underground storage capacity in the Lower 48 states increased slightly in 2025, growing mostly in the South Central and Mountain West regions, according to new data from the Energy Information Administration. “Underground natural gas storage provides a source of energy when demand increases, balancing U.S. energy needs,” analyst Jose Villar wrote. “We calculate natural gas storage capacity in two ways: demonstrated peak capacity and working gas design capacity. Both increased in 2025.”
I’m writing from Washington, D.C., today, after having the privilege of watching (and moderating) Heatmap’s second Energy Entrepreneurship Summit this morning. We heard from folks leading in a variety of technologies — geothermal, batteries, fusion, conventional nuclear — but I was struck by a few common themes.
The first was the new wave of excitement about fusion energy and how, in some ways, the artificial intelligence boom has reinvigorated the fusion conversation. Much like fusion, AI was a long-prophesied technology that made steady, iterative improvements over time — and then, one day, delivered a transformative product in the form of ChatGPT. I’m not sure if fusion has yet had a raw technological improvement on par with the transformer, the neural network innovation that preceded today’s AI chatbots and agents, but fusion startups have reported significant improvements in recent years. The industry believes — as do some fusion-pilled policymakers — that they will have commercial reactors on the grid by the mid-2030s.
The second is the degree to which surging electricity demand is pushing forward clean energy across the board. Although many (but not all) hyperscalers prefer to buy clean energy, the raw demand for power is fueling confidence among energy developers and technologists of all stripes. It’s great to make a commodity whose price is rising. At some point, this link between AI and electricity may become turbulent for developers — but we’re not there yet.
The final note is the degree to which U.S.-China competition now dominates conversations around the energy industry and the economy more broadly. I can remember a time when it was somewhat peculiar to point out that some forms of energy prowess strengthened the country’s national security — and that if the U.S. did not work those muscles, then China would. There was little overlap between the clean energy and security conversations. Now, the rise of globally competitive Chinese “electrotech” firms such as BYD, Xiaomi, and CATL has almost united the two discourses.
There is a growing recognition, too, that America will have to reindustrialize to compete. Policymakers sometimes talk about how the U.S. should use its (for now) still strong R&D apparatus to develop “leapfrog” technologies that can surpass Chinese products. But as America has by now repeatedly discovered, simply inventing a new technology is not enough. Creating an export industry — not to mention a business — actually requires commercializing that technology and scaling it. And that will entail the rudiments of an advanced industrial economy: more hardware factories, a larger grid, more manufacturing and process engineers.
These concerns over basic competitiveness colored discussions of even the most advanced technologies. Jackie Siebens, a vice president at the fusion startup Helion, said she was worried that fusion is going to “follow a story we’ve seen before,” where the United States demonstrates fusion first, “but China scales much more broadly.” Representative Don Beyer, a Democrat from Virginia who champions fusion, brought up a more fundamental concern: China is graduating hundreds of nuclear PhD engineers every year, he said, while America is only graduating a few dozen.
If affordability makes up one half of our new energy era, then these questions around competitiveness might be the other half. We’ll explore them, I’m sure, in the future. For now, thanks, as always, for reading.
Our latest Heatmap Pro poll found one big reason why public support for data centers has plummeted.
Americans’ support for data centers cratered over the past nine months. Rising electricity prices are a big part of the reason.
A Heatmap Pro poll conducted in May found that seven in 10 Americans would oppose a data center being built near where they live, up from four in 10 when we asked the same question in August 2025. We also polled people on mounting electricity costs, providing them with about a dozen potential explanations for the surge in prices and asking whether they blame each one “a lot,” “a little,” or “not at all.”
Here, too, the shift in sentiment was definitive. More than half of respondents blamed the construction of new data centers “a lot,” up from just 28% in August, making it the top concern on the list. In the earlier poll, “more demand for electricity overall” — a related issue — received the most blame, while construction of new data centers specifically sat near the bottom of the list.
Whether data centers deserve all this blame is complicated. Electricity prices were already rising before the race to power artificial intelligence began in earnest. According to Heatmap and MIT’s Electricity Price Hub, the national average price rose 21% from November 2020 to November 2022, when ChatGPT was first released to the public. Utilities have been raising rates to cover the cost of maintaining and upgrading the aging power grid, but the drivers are also region-specific. In the West, rates are rising because of wildfire insurance and mitigation efforts such as burying powerlines. (Interestingly, Americans blamed rising costs less on extreme weather, such as wildfires and heat waves, in our latest poll than they did last summer.)
As for what Americans think is driving those costs, our polling results were fairly consistent across regions. Construction of new data centers topped the list everywhere except in the West, where “the oil and gas industry” received one percentage point more blame, while the oil and gas industry came in a close second in the Midwest and Northeast. In the South, the war in Iran ranked second in respondents’ minds. We did, however, see a divide between urban and rural respondents, with slightly more urban residents who considered “the Trump administration and Republicans,” “the oil and gas industry,” and “the war in Iran” to be the major drivers of power prices than data centers.
Though data centers are not the only culprit, they have contributed to higher prices in a few areas, most notably in the PJM electricity market. Market experts warn that this trend will become widespread as the buildout progresses unless lawmakers and regulators make changes to protect residential customers.
“The projected growth in data center demand is beyond anything (short of wartime industries) ever asked of the American power sector,” Travis Kavulla, the head of policy at Base Power Company, wrote in a recent essay for American Affairs. That requires a new market structure, he argued at a Heatmap News event on Wednesday. Rather than the first-come-first served interconnection queue, he advocated for an “open season” model. “It’s a process whereby the incremental cost of building out the grid is mechanically assigned to the incremental load growth,” he explained, “whereas otherwise it might be socialized broadly across consumers — and in a time of increasing inflationary prices, that would lead to a lot of cross-subsidization. It’s both a speed to power thing and a customer affordability thing.”
As my colleague Jael Holzman has reported, state leaders have generally been more inclined to explore regulatory fixes to the problem of rising electricity prices than to enact moratoria on new data center construction, the preferred path for many grassroots activists who oppose data centers. States such as Oregon and Vermont have already passed rules that aim to protect ratepayers from data center expansion, and many more states have introduced bills to do the same.
“The public isn’t opposed to data centers, they’re opposed to paying for them on their power bill,” Sarah Hunt, the president and CEO of the right-leaning Rainey Center, told Jael in a separate story about how data centers are splintering the Republican Party. The Rainey Center’s own polling found that telling voters about policies such as President Trump’s Ratepayer Protection Pledge, a voluntary pact signed by big tech companies that agree to pay the full cost of connecting data centers to the grid, made them more likely overall to support AI data centers.
Heatmap’s polling found that blame toward data centers is escalating at about the same rate among all political parties, roughly doubling across the board. Among Republicans, 40% of those who identify as MAGA blamed data centers “a lot,” while 45% of those who identify as non-MAGA did. Democrats were generally more fervent, with 62% assigning major responsibility to data centers.
One other consistent feature in our polling is that both opposition to and blame for data centers is strongest among young people aged 18-34. Blame for data centers declined as respondents got older, with 67% of the youngest cohort pointing the finger most strongly at data centers compared to 44% of those over 65. (Aging Americans’ primary culprit for higher prices? An aging electrical grid.)
The Heatmap Pro poll of 4,118 American registered voters was conducted by Embold Research via text-to-web responses from May 15 to 28, 2026. The survey included interviews with Americans in all 50 states and Washington, D.C. The margin of sampling error is plus or minus 1.6 percentage points.