An Inconvenient Moment for an Extreme Global Heat Wave
The Trump Administration has cut much of the funding for the National Weather Service, which is now launching only about half as many weather balloons each morning as it used to. The result, meteorologists say, has been a degradation in our ability to forecast severe weather—late last month in Boulder, as smoke from the wildfire that killed three firefighters on the Colorado-Utah border hung in the air, I spoke with Daniel Swain, one of the country’s foremost researchers on the effects of climate change. “There have been essentially no weather-balloon launches in the interior West some days,” he said. “And we see efforts to completely dismantle oceanic monitoring systems, as a potentially historic El Niño emerges in the Pacific. We see the scrapping of climate-monitoring satellites before the end of their useful life for no economic reason whatsoever, but presumably for ideological ones.” The irony, as he pointed out, is that “you’re not really changing either the visibility of the impacts or changing the trajectory of what’s actually happening.”
Indeed, you really don’t need a weatherman to tell which way the temperature is going this summer—basically, up. A heat dome descended across Europe in June, producing truly wild anomalies: Paris reported two days above forty degrees Celsius (a hundred and four degrees Fahrenheit) in a row; it had only recorded three previous such occasions in the past hundred years. More than a thousand people across Europe are dead, often as a result of the fact that nighttime temperatures stayed high, robbing bodies of the chance to cope. The heat moved to the United States last week, as many millions of Americans experienced the hottest Fourth of July in history—parades in Philadelphia and in Washington, D.C., were cancelled because of the extreme heat. Now it’s back in Europe, where the organizers of the Tour de France are speculating whether they’ll have to cancel stages of the race, and wildfires are filling the air with smoke. There’s no wonder, of course, about what’s causing all this: as the nonprofit World Weather Attribution said of the first European wave, “In 1976, when some of the previous European records were set, the 2026 temperatures would have been virtually impossible to occur in June, while also highly unlikely at any time of the year. In 2003, the first major heatwave of this century, daytime heat like this would still have been very rare, about 10 times less likely than today, while nighttime temperatures such as this June would have been more than a hundred times less likely in 2003.”
But, if people have been suffering from the elevated air temperatures, the really scary numbers come from the ocean sensors. In the Mediterranean, just south of France and Italy, temperatures exceeded eight degrees Celsius (fourteen degrees Fahrenheit) above normal. In recent weeks, researchers announced that a marine heat wave is covering an area in the Pacific eight times the size of the contiguous U.S. That patch of warm water—a combination of a North Pacific heat wave and the burgeoning El Niño cyclical Pacific heat pattern now emerging in more southerly waters—will haunt the world for at least the year to come. It may coincide with another heat dome across the western U.S. in mid-July, for instance, bringing with it yet more fire danger; the whole region is already tinder-dry after the warmest winter in the region’s history left behind what some snow scientists called a “no-pack” in the Rockies and Sierras. As the year wears on, heat from the ocean increases the odds of flooding rains in California, and northward shifts in oceanic currents indirectly caused by El Niño will drive sea levels higher along the Pacific Coast. Swain, in his blog “Weather West,” has suggested that some locations might “break all-time historical coastal water height records given the additional contribution from global warming.” We can now take a daily average temperature for the world’s oceans, and it’s currently breaking all records. Remember, the oceans are storing more than ninety per cent of the heat that humans have caused with greenhouse-gas emissions; without that storage, air temperatures could have risen from a baseline average of about sixty degrees Fahrenheit, to a hundred and twenty-five degrees. And we’re stuffing more heat in all the time—in 2025, we increased the heat stored in the ocean by twenty-three zettajoules. A zettajoule is a sextillion joules, and the joule is a standard measure of heat or energy, but the figure might mean more expressed in other terms: as the thermal scientist John Abraham explained, it’s the heat equivalent of “12 Hiroshima bombs being detonated each second, for every minute, hour, and day for the entire year.” That ocean storage is temporary; events like El Niño are the functional equivalent of flinging open the sauna door and letting the warmth cascade out.
All this could not be happening at a more inconvenient time for political leaders. Some won’t be bothered, of course—the U.S. Energy Secretary, Chris Wright, said in May that global warming is “sort of a no-big-deal kind of thing,” the product of a “cult” bent on “scaring kids.” There are, however, politicians who have taken climate change more seriously in the past but who would like a pass at the moment, so that they can pursue projects they think are closer to voters’ hearts. New York’s governor, Kathy Hochul, recently put the state’s official climate targets on ice and plumped for new gas pipelines, insisting that “I refuse to let New Yorkers pay the price for a plan that no longer reflects the world we are living in.” New York has an economy roughly comparable in size to Canada’s, where Prime Minister Mark Carney has been struggling with the issue since he took office. Though a longtime climate champion—his 2015 speech to the insurance industry at Lloyd’s of London made the case that global warming threatened the planet’s financial stability, and was a truly prescient landmark on the road to the Paris Accords—Carney decided last week to blink. Canada, too, he said, would have to revise its climate targets, because the current plan was “too expensive for Canadians” who are “already struggling with affordability.”
One can sympathize with Hochul—Trump has, for the moment, shut off new offshore wind power along the Atlantic Coast, which would be the easiest way for New York to decarbonize. And one can truly sympathize with Carney, who is squeezed not only by Trump but by a rising separatist movement in the oil-patch province of Alberta. But that sympathy goes only so far: in many ways, these leaders have it easier than their predecessors, since the price of solar and wind power and of batteries keeps falling, and other states and countries are demonstrating how quickly and affordably they can move in the right direction. On July 1st, many Australians started getting three free hours of electricity every afternoon, the result of the abundant solar power that the nation has installed. And, in any event, the heat waves of the past few weeks and the heat pouring out of the world’s oceans remind us that humans don’t get to set the terms of their encounter with physics. The planet is refusing to postpone the rapid warming that we have triggered until an easier political moment. ♦