When I was a child, most of my summer mornings were spent at the ocean. My mom would grab an Entenmann’s coffee cake and we’d head off to the ocean for breakfast. If the surf was rough, it wasn’t necessarily a deterrent. My dad would strap on a life jacket and take me into the waves. On eastern Long Island, it was typically too cold to swim until early July. It became comfortable just in time to head back to school. Fast forward to today and I’ve seen people swimming comfortably on Memorial Day.

Late last week through the weekend, the oceans hit a new record high temperature. The old record was only broken by hundredths of a degree. While the margin might not seem impressive, when the record broke is noteworthy and honestly, a giant red flag. Climatologically, ocean temperatures peak in the Northern Hemisphere’s early spring or just after the Southern Hemisphere’s summer.

Yes, this super El Niño (should officially be classified as one soon) is helping us tip the scale, but our oceans absorb 89 percent of the planet’s excess heat. While water is slow to warm, it is also slow to cool. Each warm year we keep increasing the baseline temperature. Globally, the number of marine heatwave days during the year has more than tripled since the early 1990s.

Our oceans are home to more than 200,000 identified species of marine life, but scientists think there are millions more that remain undiscovered. Marine heatwaves affected around 82 percent of the global ocean during the first half of 2026. These marine heatwaves threaten ocean habitats. From 2023 through mid-2025, the planet experienced bleaching-level heat stress across 84 percent of the world’s coral reefs. NOAA began tracking these coral bleaching events in 2000 under their Coral Reef Watch, and we just concluded the fourth event. When NOAA officially declared the end of this most recent bleaching event, they warned about what’s ahead. Their June 2026 update flagged a high bleaching risk across much of the northern Pacific including Hawaii, plus Florida and the Caribbean. This would mark the fifth event on record. Using satellite technology available since 1985, the first documented bleaching event occurred during the 1998 El Niño event. And since 1998, every strong El Niño has coincided with a global bleaching event.

These reefs provide habitat to thousands of these marine species. They also serve as natural protection for coastal property from battering surf. If coral doesn’t bounce back after a bleaching event, the structure begins eroding. Sometimes coral will come back, but it’s not all good news. Coral that has grown back tends to be a type of coral that grows quickly but is extremely vulnerable to heat stresses. Essentially, it is quick to grow, but quick to die during the next marine heat wave.

There are times during the summer when the Atlantic waters aren’t refreshing. While those bone-chilling early summer days are a distant memory, I’d do anything to get them back.

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By Julie Gammack

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If you haven’t heard of the rule of threes, let me explain. You can survive 3 weeks without food, 3 days without water, 3 hours without shelter in extreme heat or cold and 3 minutes without oxygen. In the southwest, we are close to running out of water. Over the last two weeks, Lake Mead and Lake Powell in the southwestern United States have reached record low levels. 40 million people rely on the water through the Colorado River basin.

Lake Mead was created by the construction of the Hoover Dam in 1935. It was part of the Boulder Canyon Project Act for flood control, storage, and hydropower. Lake Powell was built in 1963 under the Colorado River Storage Project Act as a savings account so the Upper Basin states could bank water in wet years and still meet their compact obligation to deliver downstream. Lake Mead wouldn’t be used for a municipal water supply until the Colorado River Aqueduct to Los Angeles was built in 1941. Las Vegas draws water directly out of Lake Mead through its own intakes. Both Phoenix and Tucson connected in 1985 through the Central Arizona Project.

We are close to crisis mode. The 1922 Colorado River Compact laid the legal framework that divides the river’s flows between the Upper and Lower Basins, leading to the creation of Lake Powell upstream to store the Upper Basin’s allocation and release mandated water downstream into Lake Mead for the Lower Basin. This compact overpromised how much water could be supplied by the river. It was built on an average river flow between 1905 and 1922, which climatology shows was an abnormally wet period. It was assumed that too much water was constantly flowing through the Colorado River year after year.

Mead and Powell together held about four years of annual flow at full pool. That surplus was built between 1935 and 1980. It held at capacity through the 1990s. We start to overdraft in 2000, taking more than we were putting in. Unfortunately, if we have a “normal” rainfall year, we are technically adding to the deficit. We’ve been overdrawing water since the year 2000, which is what happens with a population boom, but there are weather and climate-related contributions to this crisis as well. Trends in the amount of precipitation, both rain and snow, are varied across the headwater region of the Colorado River. First, runoff efficiency has dropped by 19% since 2000, which means there is less snow melt and less excess rain making it into the river. Second, a longer growing season increases water demand from vegetation. Third, as temperatures go up, warmer soils also soak up more moisture.

As temperatures have increased, attribution studies have found that evaporation caused by the warmer air is to blame for between one third to one half of the decline in water flow since 2000. Evaporation plays a greater role than any long-term average precipitation decrease.

Peak snowpack in Colorado, for example, now arrives two to three weeks earlier than it did back in the 1970s. Researchers Hogan and Lunquist also observed that spring precipitation declines across 26 headwater basins, which dropped by 14%.

Arid landscapes kicking up dust and soot from regular spring wildfires has also made the snow darker, which increases the rate of melting. Increasing average temperatures through the year also increases the amount of evaporation off the reservoirs.

It’s a vicious cycle, which feels like a runaway train. This system provides water to 40 million people and hydropower generates enough electricity to power 500,000 homes. We are only 30 feet away from those hydroturbines not being able generate power.

I’ve said El Nino should be leading every newscast, but this story should also be a top story. Yes, I have friends in local television that are talking about it, but this is a national story and it’s a warning message. I’ll go back to the rule of threes. We can only survive without water for three days. If that happens, I am sure we will find ways to get water to residents, no matter the price tag. It always feels like we will do anything or spend anything but tackle the actual issue at hand, which is the climate crisis.

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Let’s rewind to the 1930s, because those same skeptics point to that particluar period of heat. The Dust Bowl ( in the Great Plains still helps account for some of the highest temperatures ever recorded throughout the contiguous United States. When soil moisture is gone, incoming solar energy goes into heating the air instead of evaporating water. During the 1930s, equatorial Pacific waters were cool and North Atlantic waters were warm, a combination that weakened the Great Plains low-level jet, the conveyor belt that carries Gulf moisture north into the central part of the country. The drought came in four rounds: the first between 1930 and 1931, the second in 1934, the third in 1936, and the fourth between 1939 and 1940.

The way the United States managed its agricultural practices helped compound the dry conditions. During the 1920s, the WWI wheat boom, a sharp inflation spike, mechanization, and the one-way disc plow led farmers to break up millions of acres of native shortgrass sod across the southern Plains. Fine, poorly aggregated soil, exposed ground, and Plains winds were enough to produce widespread saltation and suspension.

During my climate talks, I show a map of global temperature anomalies compared with the 20^th century baseline. The blue shades indicate below average temperatures and red shades indicate above. As the animation progresses, blue colors fill more space than red. By the end of the animation, it’s mostly red, with some exceptions (one being the land ice melt in Greenland dropping the temperature – which is a bad thing, not a good thing). The 1930s were a deep red over the contiguous United States, but the rest of the world was largely shaded in blue. The U.S. was the exception. Temperatures were warmer than average because the day time highs were so hot.

Today it’s the overnights that are warm. Record-warm overnight lows also help disprove claims that recent warming is driven by the solar cycle. We can see the greenhouse signal clearest at night, when the earth’s surface tries to release heat but that heat gets trapped by those gases. Globally, the spread between daytime highs and nighttime lows has been shrinking for decades. This is because greenhouse gases trap the heat at night, which helps warm our average temperature.

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April 17th was the first time I wrote about the impending super El Niño. I gave an update two months later, and it’s already worth another one. El Niño and La Niña are determined based on the temperature anomalies in the equatorial central and eastern Pacific. They help drive global weather patterns. La Niña is when temperatures are below average and El Niño is when they are above average in this part of the Pacific Ocean. For an El Niño event, temperature anomalies need to be greater than +0.5°C for an extended period.

El Niño is the Spanish word for “the boy,” however some meteorologists have started referring to this incoming one as El Hombre, “the man,” since it appears to be the strongest one on record. Thanks to our addiction to burning oil, coal and gas - we have raised the baseline.

The chart tracks daily sea surface temperature in the Niño 3.4 region, the stretch of equatorial Pacific that forecasters use to define El Niño and La Niña. The red line is 2026, and since roughly March it has run above every other year plotted. What stands out is not just the height but the shape. Niño 3.4 normally peaks in April or May and then cools through the second half of the year, which is the curve every gray line and the dashed 1991-2020 average trace out. 2026 climbed to around 29.4°C in June and simply stayed there, and the preliminary readings for early August are ticking up rather than down. That leaves the current water roughly 2°C warmer than the 1991-2020 daily average for this point on the calendar. For contrast, the orange 2025 line dropped below that same average by July, which is what the tail end of a La Niña looks like.

The progression has been the story. Back in the spring, a peak near +2.5°C was already enough to put this event in very strong territory. Then the runs came in at +3, and then +4, and the August 1 ensemble now tops out around +4.5°C. ECMWF has had to keep stretching the y-axis just to fit the forecast on the page. To put that in perspective, the strongest El Niño in the modern record, 2015-16, peaked at +2.6°C. The lowest member on this run, the single most conservative solution the model produced, still lands well above it.

Above is the ECMWF (European model) seasonal forecast initialized August 1, showing the 2-meter temperature anomaly for December through February. It is a textbook El Niño winter signature over North America. Record warmth dominates Canada and the northern tier, running 3 to 5°C above normal across central and eastern Canada, while a cool anomaly sits across the southern United States, most pronounced along the Gulf Coast and into Texas and the Southeast. That north-warm, south-cool split is what a displaced subtropical jet does: it drags storms and clouds across the southern tier and keeps Arctic air bottled up to the north. This usually ends up being a trigger for severe weather through the winter in the South.

With an active subtropical jet, the wetter signal runs along the southern tier, from the Gulf Coast through the Southeast and up the Eastern Seaboard, though it weakens considerably by the time it reaches New England. Southern California and the Southwest also tend to see more storms in an El Niño winter, which could bring some relief to the Colorado River basin, however a single wet season does not close a structural deficit two decades in the making. The Pacific Northwest is the other side of that coin. El Niño winters typically leave the Cascades milder and drier than normal, and a thin snowpack there is a problem that shows up the following summer, not in February.

The Hottest Year on Record

As of now, 2026 is running as the third warmest year on record globally. El Niño is already strong and will likely peak around New Year's, however the atmosphere does not respond instantly. Global temperature tends to lag the peak by several months, which is why the biggest thermal impact of this event will land after the calendar turns. That timing matters. 2026 could still finish at or near the top of the list, but the year that inherits the full weight of this El Niño is 2027, and it is hard to see how it does not become the warmest year on record.

What Can I Do About It?

I signed an open letter, along with a group of scientists, meteorologists, and public figures, addressed to governors, mayors, and anyone charged with public safety. It was the idea of Adam McKay. You can read it and add your name at yellowdotstudios.com/elninowarning.

Next, call your governor’s office and your mayor. Encourage them to take the necessary steps to keep their residents safe.

Fill up the voicemail boxes of your representatives in Washington. Tell them to fund NOAA and FEMA, and be specific about why. The forecasts in this newsletter exist because people at those agencies collect the data, maintain the buoys, and run the models.

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It was a late August weekend, and I figured that if my photographer and I could find higher ground, we could show people the wind coming off Irene even that far from the coast. We picked Thacher State Park, up on the Helderberg escarpment southwest of Albany. Until Hurricane Harvey in 2017, it is the wettest I have ever been outside of the times I was standing in the ocean on purpose.

Rain came down the park roads in torrents, moving fast enough to cut deep channels into the dirt paths. Then our assignment desk called and sent us to the Village of Schoharie. In my handful of years upstate, I had never had a reason to go there.

I-88 was a straight shot from our morning live location. As we came up on the exit, there were school buses sitting on the highway, full of evacuees. Officials were evacuating the evacuation center, because the evacuation center was flooding.

We took Route 30 off the interstate and into town. It crosses the Fox Creek, which was barely clearing the bridge. The Schoharie Creek cuts through town and then runs close to Route 30 south of it, closer than you would want. We stopped for some b-roll and decided to keep going south. That did not last long. The creek came over its banks and put the road under water, and we turned around and raced back north, getting over the Fox Creek bridge by the skin of our teeth, right before it went under.

There were towns along the Schoharie Creek that were washed downstream. We were close to becoming causalities of Irene, but somehow made it out alive.

That was fifteen years ago. This week it happened again, in the same region, and this time the storm didn’t have a name.

It was a slow-moving upper-level low that parked itself over eastern New York on Tuesday and would not leave. Locations near Albany, New York recorded just over eleven inches of rain in twenty-four hours, shattering the previous mesonet twenty four hour record of 9.4 inches set in August 2024. Three-day totals reached 11.8 inches at Schodack and 11.48 inches at Kinderhook, with widespread totals of roughly five to nine inches concentrated along the Hudson Valley. At Albany, where precipitation records run back to 1826, it was the wettest July day ever measured. The old mark was 3.49 inches, set in 1996 by Tropical Storm Bertha.

There is a trend. Most of the storms that produce flooding had a name. Bertha in 1996. Irene in 2011. Isaias in 2020. Meteorologists in Albany made the same point this week, that unlike those tropical systems, Wednesday’s rain came out of a strong upper-level low, which is not the kind of feature that produces this in midsummer. The rainfall that used to require the remnants of a hurricane arrived on an ordinary Tuesday in late July, and nobody had a reason to evacuate a valley in advance because there was nothing on the map to be afraid of.

Can you say the upper-level low was caused by climate change? No. However, you can say it infused the system with more moisture. Warmer air holds more water vapor, roughly four percent more for every degree Fahrenheit of warming.

The Northeast is where this shows up most clearly in the American record. The Fifth National Climate Assessment found that the amount falling in the heaviest one percent of precipitation days in this region has increased about sixty percent since 1958, the largest increase of any region in the country.

And that is the part that actually drowns people. Every storm drain, culvert, bridge opening and detention basin in the Schoharie and Hudson valleys was sized against a rainfall statistic, and that statistic was calculated from a record that assumed the climate holds still. It doesn’t anymore. We built a drainage system for a century that ended, and we are still adding to it using the same numbers.

River levels were low heading into this event. The ground was not saturated. This was largely driven by rainfall rate alone, water arriving faster than any surface could move it, and it still took out a gristmill in Castleton-on-Hudson that had stood since the 1640s.

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By Julie Gammack

Tuesday morning started early. Two hours in the car from Bethesda, Maryland to Cambridge, on the Eastern Shore.

Early in my television career I spent a few days a week working as a multimedia journalist, shooting, writing and editing my own stories. At my full-time job now, I volunteer to do project spotlights. They take me back to those TV roots. This one was different.

The Oyster Recovery Partnership uses our vessel monitoring services in their day-to-day operations. Our technology tracks exactly where they plant oysters across Chesapeake Bay.

The Oyster Recovery Partnership grew out of a crisis. By the early 1990s disease, overharvesting and decades of degraded water quality had gutted the Chesapeake’s native oyster population. Maryland convened a panel of 40 experts in the summer of 1993, the Oyster Roundtable, and that December the group released an action plan for bringing the oyster back. The Partnership was founded the following year to carry the work out. Three decades later it has planted more than 14 billion oysters across roughly 3,000 acres of rebuilt reef, working alongside the Maryland Department of Natural Resources, NOAA, the Army Corps of Engineers and the University of Maryland’s Horn Point Laboratory, which grows the baby oysters in its hatchery. The group also runs the largest shell recycling network in the country. Oyster shell is the best material for rebuilding a reef and it is in short supply, so since 2010 the Partnership has collected shell for free from roughly 200 restaurants and 70 public drop sites around the mid-Atlantic, more than 366,000 bushels so far, cleaning it, seeding it with spat and returning it to the Bay.

The campus sits right on the shore of the bay, and the operation is bigger than I expected. Getting an oyster from the hatchery to the bottom of the Chesapeake takes a lot of moving parts and a lot of people, and the full-time staff runs it like a well-oiled machine. Forklifts carried the spat from water-filled drums to a conveyor belt that loaded them onto the boat. Once the deck was filled to capacity, it was off to the planting grounds. The trip out took about an hour at full speed. Unloading took five.

These oysters provide habitat for aquatic life, they’re a good food source for us and they help with climate change.

The connection between a boat full of oysters and a warming planet is not obvious. It runs through water quality.

Climate change does not dump nitrogen into the Chesapeake. What it does is take the pollution problem the Bay already has and press on it from two sides.

Start with rain. Since 1958 the Northeast has seen more than a 70 percent increase in the amount of precipitation falling during the heaviest events, the steepest rise of any region in the country. A warmer atmosphere holds more water vapor, so when storms come through, they unload. That runoff sweeps across farm fields and lawns and pavement and carries nitrogen and phosphorus into the Bay. Those nutrients feed algae. The algae bloom, die, sink and rot, and the bacteria breaking them down pull the oxygen out of the water column. The result is a dead zone, and anything that cannot swim away from it does not survive it.

Then there is heat. Warmer water holds less dissolved oxygen to begin with, so the Bay enters every summer already short. Heat also sharpens the separation between the warm surface layer and the cooler, saltier water underneath, and that stratification keeps the two from mixing. Oxygen never reaches the bottom. The dead zone sits there.

None of this is theoretical. The University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science graded the Bay’s health at a C in 2024, down from a C plus, and pointed to a year of extreme heat, heavy rain and drought as the reason.

Oysters push back on all of it. They feed by drawing water across their gills and filtering out algae and suspended sediment, up to 50 gallons a day per animal under ideal conditions. The nitrogen comes out with the algae and gets locked into shell and tissue as the oyster grows. Restored reefs in Harris Creek now pull out enough nitrogen each year to equal about 20,000 bags of fertilizer, a service worth more than 1.7 million dollars, and they can filter the entire creek in under 10 days during summer. The Bay’s oysters could once have filtered all 19 trillion gallons of it in roughly a week. What is left would need more than a year.

The reefs earn their keep a second way. They are hard structure in shallow water, and they knock down wave energy before it reaches shore. Along a coastline where the water is rising, that is a form of protection that grows on its own instead of needing to be rebuilt.

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By Julie Gammack

I’ve been here before. In the summer of 2021, my first as chief meteorologist in Des Moines, smoke from fires in the Pacific Northwest and western Canada rode the jet stream east and then sank back to the surface under a ridge of high pressure. In central Iowa it was at times suffocating. You could smell it and you could taste it. Restaurants closed their patios. As an asthmatic whose primary trigger is smoke, those were tough weeks – each trip outside brought wheezing and coughing, and even puffs of my inhaler didn’t seem to do the trick. Meanwhile, the Delta variant was tearing through a state where only 64% of people were fully vaccinated. Doctors I spoke with at Unity Point Hospital told me wait times were long, rooms were full, and patients were lying in hallways waiting for a room to open. It was a surge on top of a surge. I offered to gather the interviews, write the story, and produce it on my own time. My news director told me it didn’t have a place in the newscast. Five years later, I’m standing on a beach on Cape Cod with the same taste in my mouth, and I’d like to make the connection this time.

Nearly 200 wildfires are burning across Northern Ontario as I write this, 148 in the Northwest Region alone, and 69 of them are not under control. Climate deniers are quick to say, “how stupid can you be? These fires were set by an arsonist.” This is where they lack critical thinking. In Canada in 2023, 93% of the area burned came from lightning. Seven percent came from people. However, even if every one of these fires were set by a human hand, it wouldn’t matter to the argument, because a match doesn’t care about the weather and a forest does. In college, I was a firefighter in New Hampshire. I remember helping battle brush fires in the White Mountains. There was a short fire season – after the snow melted and before the leaves turned green. During those four years, I never once fought a fire in conditions the atmosphere had spent a decade preparing.

That’s what has changed, and it’s the same thing I’ve written about in nearly every chapter of my upcoming book. Climate change is rarely the sole cause of a disaster. It’s a threat multiplier. Extreme heat pushed temperatures near 100°F across northwestern Ontario this week and drove the fire hazard to extreme across virtually the entire region north of the Minnesota border. Fires merged into larger complexes. One crossed the international border from Minnesota into Ontario. Armstrong, Collins First Nation, Lac La Croix and Gull Bay have been evacuated, some residents by boat, and homes have been lost. The research following Canada’s catastrophic 2023 season describes exactly this behavior. Scientists found that the day-night temperature cycle that once let fires lie down after dark is weakening, so fires keep running overnight – which is the mechanism that turns a fire crews can manage into the complexes now merging near Nipigon. Fire seasons are starting earlier and ending later. The number of fires isn’t climbing, a fact skeptics love to wave around, but the large ones are getting larger and annual area burned has been rising since the 1950s. Attribution studies of 2023 found that human-caused climate change more than doubled the likelihood of the extreme fire weather behind eastern Canada’s worst season on record, with some estimates running as high as sevenfold. The smoke choking the Great Lakes and New England right now is what that convergence looks like from 900 miles downwind.

There’s a rough way to translate what southern Ontario is breathing into something you can feel. Richard and Elizabeth Muller at Berkeley Earth worked out that a day spent in air with a PM2.5 concentration of about 22 micrograms per cubic meter carries roughly the mortality risk of smoking one cigarette. Monitors under this smoke have been reading near 380. That’s about 17 cigarettes a day, for everyone outside, breathing normally, doing nothing wrong. The average American smoker gets through about 14. Yes, you read that correctly – children on playgrounds this week are out-smoking the average adult smoker. And if you think that’s just an unpleasant statistic, consider what it does downstream. Epidemiological studies estimate the global mortality burden from landscape fire smoke runs around 339,000 deaths a year. Adults 65 and older face a 15% higher risk of cardiovascular ER visits on dense smoke days and a 22% higher risk of cerebrovascular emergencies like stroke. Those numbers are the difference between a hospital at capacity and one stretched past its limit. That’s the threat multiplier again, and it’s the story my station wouldn’t run.

Then there’s Texas.

This year, with the documentary I’m working on, I’ve spent a lot of time in Kerrville. I’ve had the opportunity to speak with first responders, local leaders and residents. Unfortunately, there is still a big disconnect between what’s happening and the idea that these are one-off events. A common theme I heard was “we don’t have to worry for another 1,000 years,” or “this is God’s will.” As a scientist, this makes me want to slam my head against the wall.

It has been one year.

As I write this Thursday morning, Kerrville is under a shelter-in-place order. The National Weather Service has flash flood emergencies up for Hunt, Kerrville and Ingram. The Guadalupe gauge at Center Point rose 32 feet in four hours, and forecasters expect a crest similar to the July 4, 2025 catastrophe. The Pedernales is running at its highest level since 1979. Kerr County has taken 8 to 10 inches of rain in six hours, while Uvalde County – a different river basin entirely – has taken nearly 20 inches in 48 hours. Crews are pulling people off rooftops. Last July the water came faster: 26 feet in 45 minutes at one gauge, 139 people killed, 117 of them in Kerr County. This time the rain has been slower, which bought people hours instead of minutes. That’s the only mercy in this, and nobody engineered it.

On my most recent trip back, they were rebuilding the Hunt Post Office, which was swept off its foundation. I asked leaders if we should reconsider building back in these areas and their response was that right now they are focused on getting people back into their homes. I understand that answer. However, I’ve also seen where it leads. I wrote about the house for sale in Sandwich, Massachusetts that washed away in a March 2021 nor’easter. It fell into the ocean, the lot was relisted, and in its place a new home was built. The new home nearly washed away again this past winter.

Here is what a “1,000-year flood” actually means: a 0.1% chance in any given year. It is not a box you check. It is not a debt the sky pays off. Worse, that number is calculated from a record of a climate we no longer live in, which means the odds printed on the map are already wrong, and they are wrong in only one direction.

I keep coming back to the man in Kerrville who told me we don’t have to worry for another thousand years. He wasn’t being glib, and he isn’t stupid. He was handed a number by people he had every reason to trust, and he understood it the way almost anyone would – as a promise that his turn had passed. It was never a promise. It was a probability, drawn from a world that doesn’t exist anymore.

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I did not block any of them; they blocked me, and they did it after I showed up beneath their posts with a citation and a genuine question about where their numbers came from. Every one of them has insisted, at one point or another, that the science is not settled, which has always struck me as a strange thing to say right before refusing to let a meteorologist reply. For a long time I treated the whole collection as a running joke, telling audiences that the fastest way to get blocked online was not to hurl an insult but to politely ask a contrarian to source his claim. I am not telling it as a joke this week.

This week, Politico and E&E News reported that one of those accounts belongs to a man who now runs the U.S. Global Change Research Program. Matthew Wielicki, a former University of Alabama geochemist who calls himself a “professor in exile” and who has spent years describing mainstream climate science as alarmism, is its new director, and his own bio on X confirms it in plain text: “Director - United States Global Change Research Program.” I want to walk through what that job actually entails, because the title alone does not begin to capture the stakes.

The office nobody talks about, running the report everyone uses

Congress created the U.S. Global Change Research Program through the Global Change Research Act of 1990, signed into law by President George H.W. Bush, and gave it the job of coordinating climate research across roughly fifteen federal agencies, among them NASA, NOAA, the EPA, and the Departments of Defense, Energy, and State. Its flagship product is the National Climate Assessment, a congressionally mandated report released every four to five years that draws on hundreds of peer-reviewed studies to lay out, region by region, how a warming planet is reshaping American infrastructure, health, water, agriculture, and the economy.

It is worth understanding how a person comes to run that program, because the mechanism is part of the story. USGCRP sits inside the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, under the umbrella of the National Science and Technology Council, which means the job of directing it is not a Senate-confirmed position. There is no nomination sent to Capitol Hill, no confirmation hearing, no vote, and no public vetting that the rest of us get to watch. The only Senate-confirmed official anywhere in that chain is the OSTP director, Michael Kratsios, who was confirmed in March of 2025; everything beneath that line, including the person who now steers the National Climate Assessment, is filled at the administration’s discretion. That is how someone who has spent years arguing the assessment should be scrapped can be installed to write it without ever answering a single question under oath.

That report is far more than a pamphlet gathering dust on a shelf. It is the document a town engineer reaches for when sizing a culvert, the reference a coastal planner leans on when deciding how high to build a road, and the justification an emergency manager points to when applying for the mitigation grant that keeps a neighborhood dry. I have relied on it in my own work more times than I can count, and so has nearly every serious planner, insurer, and public official who has to make a decision about a coastline or a floodplain. Now the person in charge of it has argued, publicly and repeatedly, that it should not exist.

When the Fifth National Climate Assessment was published in 2023, Wielicki reviewed it and landed on two words: good riddance. In his own newsletter, under his own name, he has described USGCRP, NASA’s climate office, and Climate.gov as institutions that manufacture fear in order to keep taxpayer grant money flowing. That is not my caricature of his views; it is his stated position, argued at length. So this is not a case of a skeptic being handed a seat at the table. It is a case of a skeptic being handed the pen that writes the record the table produces.

I flagged this a year ago, and his answer was an emoji

I did not come to this story because of a headline; I have been tangling with this particular person for well over a year. In March of 2025, a paper began circulating in denier circles claiming to be the first climate study ever written by an artificial intelligence, Elon Musk’s Grok, as its lead author. It carried the “peer-reviewed” label and appeared in a fringe outlet called Science of Climate Change, and among its co-authors was Willie Soon, a contrarian who has taken more than a million dollars in fossil fuel industry funding over the years. It leaned on a solar reconstruction that NASA’s Gavin Schmidt pointed out had been reexamined and found to be fabricated, AFP and France24 both ran debunks, and a microbiologist who tracks research fraud noted that the paper did not even disclose how the AI had been prompted, which meant no one could check its work at all. That was the caliber of “science” making the rounds, and it was being shared as though it settled something.

On the first of June, 2025, I said so publicly, writing that Wielicki had shared fabricated “AI peer-reviewed” articles, deliberately spread false data, and retweeted a post mocking the death threat I received in Iowa, the one that helped drive my family out of a state we had come to love. His entire reply was a single smirk/yawn emoji, and he did not deny a word of it. I raise all of this now not to relitigate a year-old exchange, but because it is the résumé, the demonstrated judgment and relationship to evidence that a person carries into the office that now writes the nation’s official climate record.

Why this is bigger than a fight about the weather

What the headlines are underselling is that the National Climate Assessment is no longer just a summary of the weather. Over the last decade it has quietly become a load-bearing legal citation, turning up in lawsuits against fossil fuel companies, anchoring the defense of federal climate regulation, and sitting underneath the 2009 Endangerment Finding, the EPA determination that greenhouse gases threaten public health and the legal keystone that allows the federal government to regulate carbon at all. Once you see that, the fight over who runs USGCRP stops looking like a dispute over temperature readings and starts looking like a fight over a legal instrument.

We have already watched the dress rehearsal. In 2025, Energy Secretary Chris Wright, a former oil and gas executive, quietly assembled five hand-picked climate contrarians into what he called a Climate Working Group, and they produced a report, titled A Critical Review of Impacts of Greenhouse Gas Emissions on the U.S. Climate, that broke from the scientific consensus and downplayed the severity of warming. The EPA then cited that report twenty-two times in its effort to rescind the Endangerment Finding. In February of 2026, U.S. District Judge William Young ruled that the group had been assembled illegally, in violation of the transparency requirements of the Federal Advisory Committee Act, and scientists whose research the report cited said their findings had been misrepresented, with one fact-check counting more than a hundred false or misleading claims. The judge declined to strike the report from the record, so federal agencies can keep using it anyway.

That is the template: a small, hand-picked group, a conclusion largely settled in advance, and a document engineered to be cited in court. Install that same logic inside the office that writes the official National Climate Assessment, and it becomes clear why this appointment matters far more than any block ever did. Michael Kuperberg, who ran USGCRP under two prior administrations, made the quiet point to Politico that an assessment written by a small, hand-picked group will not represent the wider field, and that is the whole strategy in a sentence: not to win the argument in the open, where it tends to lose, but to rewrite the reference itself so the open argument never has to happen.

Let me be precise, because precision is the point

As of tonight, this appointment has been reported by Politico and E&E News, confirmed through Wielicki’s own public posts and a second person familiar with the program. The White House did not make him available for an interview, though it did send a statement, and it has not yet issued a formal announcement naming him. I want to be careful about that distinction rather than paper over it, because careful is the entire point of the work I do. If you would rather not take my word for any of this, his own bio on X remains the simplest source imaginable. It says “Director.” I am not asking you to trust me; I am asking you to read him.

They did not win the argument

For years a handful of accounts told me the science was not settled and then blocked me so they would not have to watch it settle, and I wore the whole thing as a joke, saving the screenshots the way some people save ticket stubs. I am not laughing this week. The argument did not change simply because they stopped letting me make it. The carbon in our atmosphere still carries the isotopic fingerprint of coal, oil, and gas rather than volcanoes or the sun, the oceans are still absorbing roughly ninety percent of the excess heat we have trapped, and the last time this planet recorded a cooler-than-average year was 1976. None of that shifted when Wielicki updated his bio.

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This newsletter is a labor of love. Every week I dig through the data, check it against the primary sources, and work to get the science exactly right before it reaches you. That takes real time, and I want to keep it free to read, because the truth about our climate should never sit behind a paywall.

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So let me be straight with you, the way I try to be about everything here. I’m right at the threshold of keeping this publication’s paid-reader status, the thing that keeps it independent and able to bring on sponsors instead of leaning on any one of you. I hate making this call every week, so I’ll make it just once: if this work means something to you, a paid subscription is what keeps it alive.

And if that isn’t in the cards right now, you can help just as much without spending a dime. Share this post. Leave a comment or hit reply. Repost it. Send it to one person who should be reading it. Every share travels further than you’d think.

Thank you for being here. Now, to the weather.

In the seven days leading up to America’s 250th birthday, here is what the planet did.

• France recorded its hottest June day in history, about 110°F, and the night of June 22 was the country’s hottest since 1947.

• The United Kingdom set a new June record of 99°F at Cavendish, Suffolk, and Germany hit a provisional national record of 106°F near Saarbrücken.

• Switzerland set a June record of 100°F in Basel. Luxembourg broke its all-time record, passing the mark it set in 2017.

• The heat was lethal. Early estimates from the World Health Organization put the European death toll at more than 1,300 since June 21, including roughly 1,000 in France, and those counts will climb as the data firms up.

• Here at home, a heat dome settled over the central and eastern United States through the holiday weekend, with more than 230 million Americans under the heat. Extreme-heat alerts stretched across 31 states, with heat-index values reaching 115°F.

• In South Dakota, a thunderstorm threw down a preliminary 131 mph wind gust, the second-highest thunderstorm gust ever directly recorded in this country, behind only a 1983 microburst at Andrews Air Force Base.

• In Kentucky, 10 to 12 inches of rain fell in 48 hours, and flash flooding killed at least four people and washed out bridges across the state, the governor’s 16th weather-related disaster in six and a half years.

• On the Utah-Colorado border, three firefighters were killed battling the Snyder Fire as it burned more than 28,000 acres. In Canada’s Northwest Territories, wildfires forced evacuations.

  ---

When someone pushes an anti-immigration agenda, I dig into my family roots and push back.

This weekend, our nation celebrates its 250th birthday. I’m proud to say that my fifth-great-grandfather fought for our country’s independence as a lieutenant colonel in the Revolutionary War. Lt. Col. John Gloninger was a friend of George Washington’s, and my family was fortunate enough to inherit a family heirloom: a dinner invitation from Washington himself.

My family continued to serve this country, in Congress and on the right side of the Civil War, never having owned slaves and remaining vocal against slavery. I’m proud of this lineage, and I’m confident my ancestors would have encouraged a fair immigration system: one that offers those fleeing oppression an open door and an outstretched arm. And our changing climate will only become a bigger driver of that migration, as drinking water dries up, conflict spreads, and extreme weather grows more frequent and severe.

Being a history buff, I often wonder what the weather was like that first Independence Day. Thankfully, Thomas Jefferson took consistent weather observations. On July 4, 1776, while he was in Philadelphia for the signing, he bought a thermometer from a merchant on Second Street and recorded the temperature four times that day. At one in the afternoon, about an hour before Congress finished with the Declaration, he logged 76 degrees. And the man whose dinner invitation my family still keeps, George Washington, was himself a lifelong weather-watcher; the final entry in his diary, written the day before he died, was a weather report. The generation that founded this country was, almost to a man, obsessed with measuring the sky.

But here’s what their thermometers couldn’t tell them. The Philadelphia air that Jefferson measured that afternoon held about 280 parts per million of carbon dioxide, which is roughly where it had sat for thousands of years, through every generation before his. Today it’s around 430.

Official weather records in Philadelphia began in 1872, by which point the Industrial Revolution had already been reshaping the atmosphere for a century. The city’s climate has warmed measurably since, part of a global trend that has pushed Europe alone up about two degrees Celsius in the fifty years since its historic 1976 heatwave, making it the fastest-warming continent on Earth.

I’m writing this in the middle of a United States heatwave. Oppressive heat and humidity are taking hold, with another round of heat taking aim at Europe. My ancestors believed this country should keep an open door and an outstretched arm for anyone fleeing oppression. I think that promise still holds. The oppression just wears a different face now, and some of it we built ourselves. 250 years in, the most patriotic thing I can imagine is refusing to slam that door. On the people fleeing tyranny, and the people fleeing climate-fueled crises we helped create: vanishing water, failing crops, and weather that won’t let up.

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This week I spent a couple days in Washington for an event called Stolen Summers: The Next 250. Extreme Weather Survivors brought together people from all 50 states, survivors and artists alike, and set up in front of the Capitol Building right as the country approaches its 250th birthday. The premise is simple and hard to argue with: for millions of Americans, extreme weather has taken something that cannot be given back. A home. A business. A loved one. A whole way of life.

They turned that idea into 30 movie-sized posters lining the grounds. Each one pairs a survivor with an artist, and each one stands in for a million Americans who will tell you that extreme weather has significantly harmed their lives. You walk past them and the abstraction falls away. There was a woman from Montpelier who lost a restaurant and 40 employees’ paychecks the day the floodwater came in. A family outside Asheville whose home came down with the mountain when Helene hit. A young mother in Phoenix whose husband never made it back from a morning hike because the heat killed him. Floods, fires, hurricanes, heat that would not break. Different disasters, different corners of the country, the same loss. These are not statistics. These are our neighbors, and they came to Washington to be seen.

While I was there, I walked over to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. By now you have probably heard the story. A repair that was pitched at $1.8 million somehow ballooned into a roughly $14 million no-bid paint job, all so the pool could be painted “American flag blue” in time for the Fourth of July. The paint began peeling almost immediately. The water turned green with algae. And rather than simply fixing it, the administration sent in the National Guard.

I was standing at the edge of the pool when I watched a young boy crouch down and reach out to splash his hand in the water. That was the entire offense. A soldier walked over, stopped him, and then went to have a word with his mother. I took out my phone and filmed it, because I could not believe what I was seeing. I want to be careful about how I say this, and it is the same thing I said when I posted the video: this is not the fault of the troops. They follow orders. But somewhere up the chain, someone decided that the best use of an armed soldier in our nation’s capital was to keep a child from getting his hand wet.

A short distance away, people who had lost nearly everything stood beside portraits of the lives that were taken from them. They are still waiting to be made whole. They are still fighting insurance companies that are quietly walking away from them. They are still rebuilding out of their own pockets. We found the money and the manpower to guard a peeling paint job, and the people whose summers were stolen are told to be patient.

That contrast is the reason I keep doing this work, and it is why I was glad to be part of the panel discussion. I spent 18 years in television weather, and for a long stretch of that career I watched the language get sanded down to nothing. A historic storm became “unusual.” A once-in-a-generation event became a “freak” of nature. Anything but the actual reason. The people at this event refuse to do that. They name it plainly: the weather is getting more extreme, the burning of fossil fuels is driving it, and the companies that have known this for decades spent that time manufacturing doubt instead of leveling with the rest of us. None of this is an act of God, a great deal of it is the predictable result of a choice somebody made.

The point the survivors kept returning to, and the one I believe most deeply, is that none of this should be partisan. A flood does not ask how you voted. A fire does not check your registration. We also talked about something I have written about for years now, which is holding the insurance and big oil industries accountable for what they have done and what they continue to do. The systems that are supposed to catch people when the worst happens are failing at the exact moment more people need them than ever before.

I came home tired, and honestly, I came home angry, which I have come to understand is the correct response. There are 30 million Americans who will tell you that extreme weather has upended their lives. There are families still living in hotels, still fighting their insurance companies, still waiting to be made whole. That is where our attention and our resources should be.

Instead, this administration’s priorities are repainting the reflecting pool and paying our National Guard to stop children from harmlessly splashing the water.

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This week handed us a near-perfect snapshot of what a warming world actually looks like, and it is not subtle.

On one side of the map, the remnants of Tropical Storm Arthur stalled over the Gulf Coast and let go. At least two people are dead. Forecasters at NOAA’s Weather Prediction Center hoisted a rare, top-level high risk for flooding rain, the kind of alert they issue on only about four percent of days but that accounts for roughly a third of all flood deaths in this country. Some communities picked up more than a month of rain in three days, with water falling at three inches an hour.

On the other side of that same map, nearly half the United States is in drought. The latest U.S. Drought Monitor shows a country split down the middle, with severe and extreme drought stretching across the West, the Plains, and even into parts of the East.

Floods in one place, drought almost everywhere else, at the very same moment. How does that happen? The answer runs in both directions, and it comes down to physics.

The science of the whiplash

Warm air holds more water vapor. This is not a theory or a model. It is a law of thermodynamics that has been understood since the nineteenth century, and it is remarkably precise. For every additional degree Fahrenheit of warming, the atmosphere can hold roughly four percent more moisture.

That extra moisture has to go somewhere. When a slow, soggy system like Arthur parks over the coast, it has more water to wring out, and it wrings it out faster. The heaviest downpours keep getting heavier, and the flood maps keep filling in with colors we used to consider rare.

But that same thirstier atmosphere has a second effect that gets far less attention. When it is not raining, warmer air pulls moisture out of soils, plants, and reservoirs more aggressively. Scientists call it evaporative demand. You can think of it as the sky’s thirst, and a hotter sky drinks harder. That is how you get flash drought, a relatively new term for drought that sets in over weeks rather than months, and it is why so much of the country can dry out even in a year of dramatic floods.

So the wet places get wetter and the dry places get drier. Same warming, opposite extremes, often within a few hundred miles of each other. This is the fingerprint of a warming planet, and the science is no longer shy about saying so. Climate Central’s Climate Shift Index found that the warm Gulf waters feeding Arthur were made at least four times more likely by human-caused warming. That is not bad luck. That is a loaded die.

El Niño, the latest

If you have been reading along, you know I have been tracking this one closely for months. Here is where it stands now, because the story just took a meaningful step forward.

This month, NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center upgraded its outlook from an El Niño Watch to an El Niño Advisory. That is the difference between waiting and arrived. El Niño conditions are present, sea surface temperatures across the central and eastern equatorial Pacific are running above average, the atmosphere has responded in kind, and forecasters expect it to strengthen into the winter of 2026 and 2027.

The bigger headline is the strength. The Climate Prediction Center now puts the odds of a very strong El Niño at better than sixty percent for late this year, an event that would rank among the largest in the record going back to 1950. Some European models have gone further, suggesting it could rival the strongest ever measured, and the World Meteorological Organization has placed high odds on a significant event. We are no longer talking about whether El Niño shows up. We are talking about how big it gets.

That strength is what ties it to the whiplash, because El Niño helps decide where the wet and the dry land. It tends to push the Gulf Coast and Southern Plains wetter, the Pacific Northwest drier, and the Atlantic toward more wind shear, the kind that tears young hurricanes apart before they can organize.

You can see that last piece in Arthur itself. This was a storm with weak winds that never came close to becoming a hurricane, in part because that hostile shear was already in place. Colorado State University even trimmed its hurricane season forecast this month, down to eleven named storms, citing the developing El Niño. A wetter, weaker, water-dominant storm is exactly the kind of system a building El Niño favors. The wind goes down, but the water threat does not.

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Thursday night in Los Angeles, the 2026 FIFA World Cup kicked off in front of eighty thousand people and a global television audience somewhere north of a billion. By most accounts it was spectacular. What it wasn't, at least in any of the pre-match coverage I watched, was honest about where this tournament is being played and what the climate data says about those places.

I've been pulling historical temperature records for the eleven U.S. host cities for a few weeks now, working from NOAA's ACIS ThreadEx database, which has station records going back to 1869 in some cases. The story those records tell is consistent across every city on the list, which is that every single one of them is measurably warmer than it was when weather observations began. Seattle has warmed four and a half degrees Fahrenheit since 1945. Los Angeles is up four and a half degrees since 1878. Philadelphia has warmed three and a half degrees since 1874. These aren't model projections or future scenarios. These are what the thermometers recorded, year after year, at the same stations over generations of observations.

The cities I keep coming back to are Miami, Houston, and Dallas, because those are the ones already operating at temperatures that sports medicine professionals classify as genuinely dangerous for outdoor athletic exertion. Dallas averages 86 degrees Fahrenheit in the summer months and has warmed three and a half degrees since records there began in 1914. Houston averages 84 degrees and has warmed two degrees since 1889. Miami averages 84 degrees and has warmed more than three degrees since 1896. Those are the averages, meaning that's what you expect on a typical summer day in those cities, not the worst-case scenario.

Four years ago FIFA moved the Qatar World Cup to November and December because Doha summers regularly exceed 104 degrees and the organization concluded that staging a football tournament in those conditions would pose serious health risks. They have internal guidelines covering exactly this, specifying the thresholds at which cooling breaks become mandatory and the conditions under which matches should be postponed. So the institutional knowledge is there. The science is understood at the highest levels of the organization. And yet here we are, with matches scheduled in Miami in July.

Part of what gets lost in conversations about heat is that the temperature reading alone doesn't capture the danger, particularly for people engaged in strenuous physical activity. Your body has one primary tool for cooling itself in extreme heat, which is sweat evaporation, and whether that tool works efficiently depends almost entirely on how much moisture is already in the air around you. On a 95-degree afternoon in a dry climate, sweat evaporates quickly and does its job. In Miami in July, the air is already carrying close to as much moisture as it can hold, which means sweat evaporates slowly or not at all, and your core temperature keeps climbing without much to stop it.

The metric that accounts for all of this together is wet-bulb globe temperature, which incorporates air temperature, humidity, wind speed, and solar radiation into a single number, and it's the standard used by the IOC, the U.S. military, and sports medicine organizations when they're making decisions about safe conditions for physical exertion. Working from NOAA climate normals for the 1991 to 2020 period, my estimates put Miami at around 31 degrees Celsius WBGT during peak afternoon conditions, Houston at roughly 30.5, and Dallas at about 28.4, which is right at the threshold where FIFA's own guidelines say cooling breaks become mandatory. Those are averages on typical summer days. There's a threshold in heat physiology at 35 degrees Celsius wet-bulb where the physics of evaporative cooling essentially fail completely, meaning the human body cannot cool itself even lying still in the shade, and on the worst summer days in South Florida we're not particularly far from it.

Elite footballers generate internal heat at roughly fifteen to twenty times their resting rate during intense play, and their core temperatures during a match routinely reach 102 to 104 degrees Fahrenheit. Efficient sweating in low-humidity conditions keeps that manageable. In Miami or Houston in late June or July, the body is working against a much steeper gradient, and the margin shrinks considerably. This isn't theoretical. Heat exhaustion and heat stroke are documented outcomes from sporting events held in comparable environmental conditions.

The evening scheduling argument is worth engaging with because it's the one that comes up most often when I discuss this with people. Yes, a 7 PM kickoff is meaningfully cooler than a 3 PM match, and that matters. But players are warming up in the late afternoon when conditions are still dangerous, fans are arriving hours earlier and sitting in serious heat, and the thing that has changed about cities like Miami over the past few decades is that overnight temperatures don't recover the way they once did. The lows in July in South Florida now regularly stay above 80 degrees. The relief that used to come after dark is less reliable than it was. And the tournament runs through July 19th, so the later rounds, the semifinals and the final, are being played when summer heat across the southeastern United States has fully arrived.

Kansas City is the interesting outlier in the data. Its long-term trend line is essentially flat, which is a documented phenomenon in the central United States that researchers attribute to a combination of agricultural irrigation, aerosol effects, and atmospheric circulation patterns that have dampened the warming signal there relative to other regions. Even so, Kansas City's baseline summer temperatures still place outdoor athletic exertion in what WBGT standards classify as high risk. There isn't a city on this tournament's U.S. roster where climate is simply not a factor.

None of this means the World Cup should be canceled or that FIFA made a straightforwardly indefensible decision. What it does mean is that the climate context for this tournament is being almost entirely absent from mainstream coverage, and that absence has consequences. Real-time WBGT monitoring at every venue, transparent public disclosure of those readings on match days rather than just the air temperature, and pre-announced protocols for cooling interventions aren't radical asks. They're achievable with existing technology and organizational will. They just require treating the science as seriously as FIFA's own guidelines say it should be treated.

The broader question, the one that extends well beyond this particular tournament, is about where we're headed. Summer outdoor sporting events at this scale are going to require increasingly difficult decisions about which cities can safely host them and under what conditions as warming continues. The World Cup, the Olympics, grand slam tennis, marathon majors, all of it is going to come up against these questions more frequently and more urgently. The physics of evaporative cooling don't negotiate, and the atmospheric warming that has already occurred in every one of these eleven American cities isn't going to reverse itself between now and July 19th.

The games started Thursday. It was already hot. It's going to keep getting hotter.

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The ocean covers most of the planet and absorbs most of the heat we trap. When it shifts, everything downstream shifts with it: our weather, our coastlines, our future. Right now it’s sending three signals at once. Two are scientific warnings the ocean is generating on its own and the third is a political choice that may keep us from ever hearing the next one.

Signal one: the warming hole

Look at almost any map of how Earth’s surface temperature has changed over the last century and you’ll see a planet bathed in red…except for one stubborn blue smudge in the North Atlantic, south of Greenland. While nearly every other patch of ocean warms, this one has cooled. Scientists call it the “cold blob,” or, more tellingly, the “warming hole.”

It sounds like a paradox, and that’s exactly why it matters. The leading explanation is that the Atlantic’s great conveyor belt, the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), is weakening. That current carries warm, salty tropical water north, where it cools, sinks, and flows back south. As Greenland’s ice melts and floods the North Atlantic with freshwater, the water struggles to sink, and the conveyor slows. Less warmth reaches the region, and a cold spot forms in a warming world.

New 2026 analyses point to a long-term decline in that northward heat transport as the cause…a deep-ocean change, not just a quirk of surface weather. AMOC has a recognized tipping point, and a cold blob is precisely the fingerprint you’d expect from a conveyor losing steam. Its trajectory is still debated, but the direction of the evidence is not reassuring. A slowing AMOC would reshape weather across Europe and North America, shift storm tracks, and pile extra water onto the U.S. East Coast.

Signal two: the seas are rising faster, and now we know why

For decades there was a frustrating gap: scientists could measure the oceans rising but couldn’t fully account for every millimeter. This spring, a study in Science Advances closed that gap, and overturned a common assumption in the process.

Most people picture sea level rise as melting ice. But the single largest driver isn’t ice at all, it’s heat. As the ocean absorbs the warmth we trap, the water itself expands, and that thermal expansion alone accounts for 43 percent of the rise since 1960, which is more than mountain glaciers, more than Greenland, more than Antarctica individually. And it’s accelerating: from about two millimeters a year since 1960 to nearly four between 2005 and 2023, roughly double the pace. The authors say the process is now extremely hard to stop. It will continue for generations.

Two signals, then, both pointing the same way: the ocean is absorbing our heat, and it is straining under it.

Signal three: and now we’re ripping out the instruments

At the exact moment the ocean is flashing these warnings, the federal government is dismantling one of the systems we use to read them.

The National Science Foundation is taking apart the Ocean Observatories Initiative, roughly 900 ocean instruments that cost about $370 million to build. Crews have already begun hauling the first array out of the Pacific. For about a decade, this network has tracked marine heatwaves, ocean currents, and coastal flooding risk. It is run out of Woods Hole, in Massachusetts, and one of its arrays once sat just off Martha’s Vineyard.

Why tear down something that works? It lines up with Project 2025, the governing blueprint that singled out NOAA’s research office as “the source of much of NOAA’s climate alarmism” and recommended that the preponderance of its climate research be disbanded. Congress restored the funding twice. The decommissioning is moving ahead anyway.

The through-line

Here’s what connects all three: everything we know about signals one and two depends entirely on signal three. The warming-hole research, the sea-level budget that finally added up…none of it exists without decades of sustained ocean observation. You cannot diagnose a slowing current or a swelling sea from a satellite alone. You need instruments in the water, year after year, quietly taking the ocean’s pulse.

And this isn’t a one-off budget line. It’s a pattern: NOAA’s workforce gutted, the National Climate Assessment defunded, climate.gov shut down, and now the ocean sensors pulled from the sea. That’s the real danger of an anti-science movement. It doesn’t make the threat disappear, it tears down the tools that let us see the threat coming. Label the inconvenient data “alarmism,” unplug the instruments, and the danger doesn’t go away, you just lose the ability to prepare for it.

I spent years as a broadcast meteorologist turning data into warnings that gave people time to act. The lesson never changes: you can’t manage what you refuse to measure. We are choosing to navigate a more dangerous ocean with the lights going out, and that’s how people get hurt.

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Jim Steele is a retired biologist who spent nearly three decades directing San Francisco State University’s Sierra Nevada Field Campus before he traded the field station for the climate denial circuit, where he surfaced again this spring at the Heartland Institute’s annual conference. He also sits on the board of the CO2 Coalition, a group built to recast carbon pollution as harmless, with funding that has been traced back to the Mercer family and to fossil fuel interests.

I fact-checked 30 false or misleading claims in his 30-minute talk at the International Conference on Climate Change, roughly one a minute, and ever since I have had a target on my back. First came the seashells, an AI-generated graphic of shells arranged to spell “86 Gloninger,” the kind of stunt designed to bait me into calling it a death threat so he could turn around and play the victim. I know that game, and it is nothing like what I lived through with Danny Hancock at KCCI, so I will not pretend it is. What happened Saturday morning was different. To his tens of thousands of followers, Steele posted my home address and urged them to show up and protest my so-called climate lies in person, and Twitter let the post stand for a full 24 hours before pulling it down.

If a retired biologist and the people funding him are this rattled by one meteorologist with a newsletter, I have to be doing something right. So let me be clear. I will keep naming Big Oil and the people it pays. I will keep reporting the science as it is, not as they wish it were. I will not be silenced.

Now, onto the climate news of the week. Only about 5 percent of homes in the United Kingdom have air conditioning, and for most of British history they have not needed it, since summer there usually arrives gently and stays mild. This year it did neither. Summer came early, it came hard, and it broke records that had stood for more than a century.

This chart is the long view, and it tells the story better than any single thermometer can. It plots the daily mean temperature for every day in May across Central England since 1772, nearly 7,900 days drawn from the longest continuous instrumental record on Earth, and out of all of them only three have ever averaged above 21°C across the full 24 hours. The hottest of those three is 26 May 2026, the day that just passed, sitting alone at the top of a 254-year record. It takes more than a hot afternoon to push a daily average that high. It takes a night that never really cools, and that is exactly what happened, with overnight lows that refused to drop below the low twenties in parts of London. The headlines focused on the afternoon peaks, and they were staggering, with Kew Gardens reaching 34.8°C on 25 May and breaking the previous UK May record of 32.8°C from 1922 by a full 2°C, then climbing again to 35.1°C the next day. But the deeper signal lives in the black trend line on this graph, which held nearly flat near 11°C for two centuries and has bent sharply upward only in recent decades. Hot May days have always existed. What is new is the rising floor beneath them, and a record this far above everything that came before is what that rising floor looks like when it finally shows its hand.

A Met Office attribution study found that breaking the old 32.8°C May record is now around three times more likely in our current, greenhouse-warmed climate than it would have been in a natural one. Put in plainer terms, what was once roughly a one-in-100-year event has become closer to a one-in-33-year event. Scientists at World Weather Attribution and Imperial College London arrive at the same conclusion from the other direction, finding that early-season heatwaves like this one are being made hotter, longer, and far more frequent by climate change, with rising risks to public health.

It is also hot across the English Channel. The French Open opened this week at Roland Garros, and Paris greeted it with weather that belongs in the middle of July. On every one of the tournament’s opening days the temperature pushed past 32°C, roughly 90°F, far beyond anything normal for late May in the French capital. As an avid tennis fan, I know what it feels like to sit in the late-August sun at the US Open in Queens, but Roland Garros is supposed to be the comfortable one, the spring major played before real summer arrives. Not this year. Players said they had not faced conditions this hot at Roland Garros since the 2024 Paris Olympics, and those Games were held in the dead of summer. Daria Kasatkina put it plainly: “I don’t remember the last time it was so hot at Roland Garros.” Canadian Gabriel Diallo retired midway through his match and blamed the heat, while Ignacio Buse needed a medical timeout, with salts added to his water and a stethoscope pressed to his chest. The players were not the only ones suffering. The clay itself was at risk of cracking, with groundskeepers dousing the courts with water and salt to hold them together under the sun.

The through line this week runs from London to Paris. The same heat dome that rewrote England’s temperature books planted itself over the continent and turned a spring of tennis into one more entry in a spring of records.

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By Julie Gammack

I know what a real pay cut feels like. When I left broadcast television to do climate science full-time, I took a five-figure hit, and I’d do it again tomorrow.

85 of you pay to read this Substack. Thank you…genuinely. If you have the means, your subscription is how this work continues. If you do not, share it and engage with it. That is how independent climate communication survives without a check from ExxonMobil. I’m thankful for all of my followers - engaging and helping to spread the word means the world to me. Subscribe to other climate content accounts - it’s important, thankless work. That is the entirety of what I’m paid for any of this side work. The TikToks, the Instagram posts, the YouTube explainers, and the climate talks at libraries and Rotary clubs all happen on my own time, with my own gas money, using my own equipment. Every day, I produce this content on my own dime.

And every day, I get attacked for it. Climate deniers fill my replies wishing for my demise, calling me a grifter, and telling their followers I’m stuffing my pockets with money made on the “big green scam.”

So let’s talk about who’s getting rich off the climate fight, and who’s paying to be heard.

Woods is the celebrity face, not the entire economy. In 2013, Drexel University sociologist Robert Brulle published the first peer-reviewed analysis of climate denial funding in the journal Climatic Change. He identified 91 organizations with combined annual income exceeding $900 million. A 2021 follow-up in the same journal found that funding continues to grow, and that 74% of it now flows through dark-money pass-throughs like Donors Trust, where the original donors are deliberately untraceable. ExxonMobil’s own publicly disclosed giving reports showed grants to dozens of these groups for years, until 2008, when the company quietly stopped publishing them. The money did not stop, it simply moved into channels designed to be invisible.

Take Jim Steele, featured in the 90-second compilation below. He shows up in my replies regularly, name-calling, leveling personal attacks, insisting that climate communicators like me are paid shills. Watch it, then look at his own public record. Steele self-identifies on his X profile and on the CO2 Coalition’s own team page as a “proud member” of the CO2 Coalition. According to tax filings reported by BuzzFeed News, E&E News, and the Climate Investigations Center, the CO2 Coalition has received more than $1 million from conservative foundations and energy industry figures, including the Mercer Family Foundation, the Sarah Scaife Foundation, the Bradley Foundation, and the Charles Koch Institute. Steele’s X bio describes him as “World’s Most Honest Climate Scientist.” His biography on the CO2 Coalition’s own website lists a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in Biology from San Francisco State University. By his own academic record, he is an ecologist. The man calling working climate scientists shills is not, by his own bio, a climate scientist himself.

Steele is the recent example, but the playbook is older. Steve Milloy, who runs JunkScience.com and works the same beat, has a paper trail going back to tobacco. According to reporting by The New Republic, Mother Jones, Scientific American, and the Climate Investigations Center, all drawing from public corporate filings and court-mandated tobacco litigation documents, Milloy became executive director in 1997 of a front group created by Philip Morris to manufacture doubt about secondhand smoke. He remained a Philip Morris paid consultant through 2005, billing the company $92,500 in each of 2000 and 2001. As that work wound down, ExxonMobil’s own public giving records show grants flowing to entities Milloy operated from his Maryland home address. He is now one of the loudest voices accusing climate scientists of being on the take.

The loudest accusations of grift tend to come from people whose own funding has the longest paper trail. When someone in my replies calls me a grifter, I ask them to publish their funding sources. Substack shows my paid subscriber count. The IRS makes my employer’s nonprofit filings public. There is no mystery about where my money comes from, because there is no mystery about how little of it there is.

I left a six-figure broadcast salary because of a death threat and because I was directed not to say the phrase “climate change” on air. I have been threatened over my work in a case that is part of the public court record in Polk County, Iowa, where the defendant pleaded guilty. I post on my own time, drive my own car, and pay for my own equipment. I cannot match a $900-million-a-year denial machine. I do not need to. Independent voices, paid by their audiences rather than by industry, are what this network fears most. That is why they have to call us grifters. It is the only frame in which their own balance sheets disappear.

The grifters, it turns out, are the ones who can afford to be wrong.

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By Julie Gammack

“All of these projects you’re describing in Nevada have one thing in common…when the sun goes down, they produce zero electricity.”

That is a direct quote from Doug Burgum, delivered under oath to Congress on Wednesday.

He wasn’t done. Later in the same hearing, he told Representative Seth Magaziner of Rhode Island: “When the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine, they produce nothing.”

Representative Jared Huffman, the ranking Democrat on the committee, responded by formally submitting an object into the congressional record. “Mr. Chairman, I request unanimous consent to enter into the record this amazing new technology that apparently the secretary is unaware of,” Huffman said. “It’s a battery. China’s figured it out. That’s why they’re cleaning our clock on clean energy.”

Representative Magaziner offered a similar reminder. “We have these things called batteries.”

I want to be precise about what Burgum said and what he didn’t say, because his defenders will claim he was making a narrower point about grid reliability. He was not. He made the same error twice, to two different members of Congress. He was not describing a subtle policy argument about baseload capacity. He was asserting that solar energy doesn’t work at night, ignoring the existence of battery storage entirely.

This is not a subtle technical distinction. It is the foundational technology reshaping the American grid right now.

The United States installed a record-shattering 57.6 gigawatt-hours of new battery storage capacity in 2025, the largest single year of new battery additions in history. In 2026, developers plan to add 24 gigawatts of utility-scale battery storage, which is up from a record 15 gigawatts added in 2025.

In California, batteries have expanded nearly twentyfold, from 0.6 gigawatts in 2020 to 11.7 gigawatts in 2024. In April 2024, California batteries became the largest source of electricity on the grid during evening hours for the first time in history. Solar now accounts for a record 32% of California’s electricity generation. California has now gone three consecutive years without a Flex Alert for voluntary conservation. Renewable energy already supplies nearly 67% of in-state retail electricity sales.

But here is the fact that should end the argument in Washington: two-thirds of all utility-scale energy storage capacity installed in the United States in 2025 was built in states that voted for Donald Trump. This is not a coastal liberal technology. It is being deployed in Texas, Arizona, and North Dakota…the state Burgum governed before joining this cabinet.

When Representative Huffman mentioned that China had figured out battery storage, Burgum replied that China being the world’s largest emitter should be part of the record too. Huffman noted that China also produces “far more clean energy.” That is an understatement.

During the same hearing, a Democrat pressed Burgum on capacity figures directly. The United States added 53 gigawatts of new power generation in 2025. China added 543 gigawatts, of which 434 gigawatts came from renewables. China’s solar capacity has already crossed 1,100 gigawatts, making it the first country in history to exceed the 1,000-gigawatt threshold. In 2024 alone, China added more battery storage than the United States and European Union combined.

That gap, 53 gigawatts versus 543 gigawatts, is not an energy policy debate. It is a national security emergency being waved away by a cabinet secretary who doesn’t know batteries exist.

If I had been sitting on that committee, I would have asked one question: what happens when the Strait of Hormuz is closed?

We clearly have options when the sun goes down or when the winds are calm. But there is no option when a foreign nation has its hand on the controls. The intermittency of solar and wind is a solvable engineering problem. The intermittency of foreign oil is a permanent strategic one.

There is a real argument buried somewhere in Burgum’s testimony. Grid reliability is a legitimate concern. The transition from baseload generation to intermittent renewables requires investment in storage, transmission, and grid management. That argument deserves serious engagement.

Burgum did not make that argument, instead he made the argument that the sun going down means solar doesn’t work, which is the equivalent of arguing that a refrigerator doesn’t work because it isn’t plugged into the food it keeps cold.

U.S. battery storage capacity is expected to reach at least 600 gigawatt-hours of installed storage by 2030, the equivalent of 300 Hoover Dams, according to the Department of Energy. In California alone, battery storage now provides enough capacity to meet the equivalent of roughly one-quarter of the state’s record peak demand for several hours.

When Burgum was corrected, he did not acknowledge the technology. He did not adjust his position. He did not say he was making a narrower point. He said, in response to accurate energy data presented by Rep. Magaziner: “The data is lying.”

The data is not lying.

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By Julie Gammack

1. House Natural Resources Committee hearing, May 13, 2026. C-SPAN congressional record. Testimony of Secretary Doug Burgum.

2. Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA). U.S. Energy Storage Market Outlook Q1 2026. February 23, 2026. “United States Installs 58 GWh of New Energy Storage in 2025.”

3. U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA). New U.S. Electric Generating Capacity Expected to Reach a Record High in 2026. February 20, 2026.

4. Ember Energy Research. U.S. Electricity 2025 Special Report: The Rise of Batteries Plus Solar. February 25, 2026.

5. Office of Governor Gavin Newsom. Governor Newsom Announces California’s Record Growth in Battery Storage and Clean Energy Leadership at COP30. November 13, 2025.

6. Center for Western Priorities. Highlight Reel: The Five Most Bewildering Moments from Doug Burgum’s Congressional Hearings. April 2026.

7. International Business Times. Interior Sec Burgum Mocked in Congress After Warning Solar Panels ‘Produce Zero Electricity’ When the Sun Goes Down. May 13, 2026.

8. Politico / E&E News. Burgum: Interior Plans to Appeal Ruling on Solar, Wind Approvals. May 13, 2026.

9. U.S. Department of Energy. Battery storage capacity projections and Hoover Dam equivalency data.

10. China Energy Storage Alliance. Battery storage capacity data, mid-2025.

11. U.S. Energy Information Administration. China solar capacity data, 2025.

They want you to believe climate scientists just admitted the whole enterprise was a hoax.

Let me tell you what actually happened and why it means almost the exact opposite of what they’re claiming.

What ScenarioMIP Actually Did

The story begins not with the IPCC itself, but with a technical committee called ScenarioMIP, the Scenario Model Intercomparison Project, which operates under CMIP, the global modeling collaboration whose projections form the backbone of IPCC assessment reports.

Earlier this month, ScenarioMIP published the new scenario framework that will underpin the IPCC’s Seventh Assessment Report (AR7). Earth system model simulations are planned to start in spring 2026.

The new CMIP7 ScenarioMIP framework offers seven scenarios spanning a range from “VERY LOW” through “HIGH,” dropping the radiative-forcing target labels of the SSP era. There is no “8.5” scenario and no “7.0” scenario.

Critically, ScenarioMIP researchers wrote that the previous high-end emissions pathway “has become implausible” because of changing emissions trends, technological developments and existing climate policies.

The retired scenarios include RCP8.5, SSP5-8.5, and SSP3-7.0. That last one is worth understanding: SSP3-7.0 assumed a 2100 global population approaching 13 billion, well above any contemporary demographic projection, and a five-fold expansion of global coal use. Neither assumption survives current understandings of demographics or energy systems.

So the scenarios were retired because their underlying assumptions, runaway coal expansion, implausible population growth, no meaningful policy response, simply don’t reflect where the world is heading. That’s the science doing its job.

The Victory Lap Is Premature. Here’s Why.

Here’s where the denier narrative falls apart completely.

The warming projections from the new scenarios are still alarming. Roger Pielke Jr., whose analysis of RCP8.5’s flaws is legitimate and whose Substack post triggered most of the denier coverage, ran the new scenarios through the FaIR climate emulator used to characterize the CMIP7 set. His results: the CMIP7 MEDIUM scenario produces a 2081–2100 mean of approximately 2.56°C, and the new HIGH scenario is about 0.9°C cooler than SSP5-8.5 on an apples-to-apples comparison.

Two important caveats about those numbers. First, they come from a climate emulator, a simplified model, not from the full earth system model runs that will underpin AR7. Those full simulations are planned to start in spring 2026 and be completed about three months later. The official projections aren’t finalized yet.

Second, and this is a point Pielke himself makes, the center of the new CMIP7 scenario set sits well above current and announced policy trajectories. The new framework compressed the high end. The middle did not move far enough.

The scientist whose work deniers are amplifying is saying the new scenarios may still be too pessimistic at the high end but not pessimistic enough in the middle relative to where policy actually stands. That is not a vindication of complacency. It’s a call for more ambition.

While the new CMIP7 framework removes the most extreme pathways, debate remains over whether the replacement HIGH and MEDIUM scenarios are still too pessimistic compared with current emissions and energy trends. That debate is happening among scientists, not because the climate risk is overstated, but because the scenario architecture still needs work.

Meanwhile, the Actual Planet

While the deniers are doing their victory lap, let’s look at what the thermometers are recording.

According to ECMWF’s ERA5 reanalysis, global temperatures from the past three years, 2023 through 2025, have averaged more than 1.5°C above the pre-industrial level, marking the first time a three-year period has exceeded the 1.5°C threshold. The past 11 years have been the 11 warmest on record.

That 1.5°C three-year average does not mean the Paris Agreement target is permanently breached — climate scientists are careful to note that the target refers to long-term warming, not individual years or short windows. But it is a landmark. In Berkeley Earth’s analysis, the global mean temperature in 2025 was 1.44°C above the 1850–1900 pre-industrial baseline, the third warmest year directly observed using thermometer measurements.

When charted on a graph, 2023, 2024, and 2025 “seemed to jump up,” said NOAA climate monitoring chief Russ Vose. When averaged together, those three years shoot above the 1.5°C mark. “The last three years are indicative of an acceleration in the warming,” said Robert Rohde, chief scientist at Berkeley Earth. “They’re not consistent with the linear trend that we’ve been observing for the 50 years before that.”

Rising global temperatures intensify heat waves and other extreme weather, endangering people and causing billions of dollars in damage. Berkeley Earth calculated that 770 million people, one out of every 12 people on the planet, experienced record annual heat in 2025.

This is not the statistical signature of a problem that has been resolved.

What the Deniers Are Actually Doing

What’s playing out right now is textbook second-generation climate denial, not the crude “it’s not warming” arguments of 20 years ago, but something more sophisticated: using legitimate scientific updates to undermine the underlying science.

They can’t deny the thermometers anymore. Eleven consecutive hottest years is hard to argue with. So the new strategy is to take a methodological refinement — in this case, a scenario update that reflects real progress on clean energy and improved demographic modeling and spin it as an admission that the entire scientific enterprise was fraudulent.

Pielke’s substantive work on RCP8.5’s misuse in the research literature has been correct and important. His analysis of the new CMIP7 framework is worth reading seriously. But the outlets amplifying his findings, Climate Change Dispatch, Watts Up With That, Daily Sceptic, Principia Scientific, are not engaging with the science. They are extracting a useful headline and discarding everything that doesn’t fit the narrative they want to tell.

The Honest Bottom Line

Retiring RCP8.5 and SSP5-8.5 because their underlying assumptions were unrealistic is correct science. The scenarios were misused, including by researchers and communicators who should have been more careful, and the new framework is a genuine improvement.

But the new MEDIUM scenario still projects roughly 2.5°C of warming by late century, based on preliminary emulator analysis. Full model runs are underway. The official AR7 projections will tell us more.

And whatever those projections show, the observational record is unambiguous. The last 11 years are the 11 hottest ever measured. The three-year global average just crossed 1.5°C above pre-industrial for the first time. Scientists at Berkeley Earth, NOAA, and Copernicus are seeing signs of possible acceleration beyond the long-term trend.

Updating a scenario because the science got better is not fraud, it is science working.

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By Julie Gammack

Two weeks ago, I posted about the upcoming El Niño building in the Pacific Ocean. Since then, the forecast has become significantly more alarming, and two of the most respected climate scientists in the world are now publicly disagreeing about exactly how alarming. That disagreement is worth understanding, because both of them point in the same terrifying direction.

Climate Scientist Zeke Hausfather just updated his forecast on The Climate Brink. His 2026 estimate for the global average temperature has risen from 1.41°C to 1.46°C above pre-industrial levels, but the bigger number is 2027. His updated model now puts a 73% probability on 2027 being the single hottest year ever recorded, with a 77% chance of exceeding 1.5°C. The reason: the latest multi-model median is now projecting a peak ENSO3.4 anomaly of 2.7°C in the tropical Pacific, which is roughly on par with the catastrophic 2015-16 Super El Niño. Some models are pushing toward +4°C.

Another climate scientist, James Hansen, published separately Thursday morning with a starker near-term call: 2026 itself will be the hottest year on record. His physics-based approach accounts for what he argues is a systematically underestimated climate sensitivity and an Earth energy imbalance currently running at more than double its 2000-2014 average. And as for 2027? It will be hotter than 2026.

Both are serious scientists with serious methodologies. What they fully agree on: 2026 is virtually certain to be a top-four hottest year and 2027 is likely to shatter everything.

This newsletter will always be free. The science is too important to put behind a paywall. But if you find value in this work - fact-checking climate denial, translating the peer-reviewed literature, and doing it without a fossil fuel dollar anywhere near it - consider becoming a paid supporter. It's what keeps this independent. And right now, independence is everything.

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Why the 1877 Comparison Matters More Than Ever

The last time a monster El Niño of this magnitude affected the world was 1877. There were simultaneous droughts across India, China, Brazil, Egypt, Ethiopia, and southern Africa. Up to 50 million people died. Florence Nightingale, the founder of modern nursing, wrote to the Lord Mayor of London and called it “the most hideous record of human suffering the world has ever seen.”

That El Niño was a completely natural event on a cooler planet with zero fossil fuel emissions baked into the baseline.

Climate change doesn’t cause El Niño. But it does something more insidious - it raises the floor. Every El Niño now detonates on top of a planet already ~1.5°C warmer than it was in Nightingale’s time. The oceans hold more heat before the event even starts. The atmosphere carries more moisture. The droughts get drier. The heatwaves get more extreme. The same forcing produces fundamentally different, and worse, outcomes.

This is not a theoretical concern. Arctic sea ice set new record daily low values during January, March, and early April 2026. The Climate Shift Index from Climate Central shows dark red covering South Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, and South America. Dark red means areas of heat made five times more likely by climate change right now. Before El Niño has officially arrived.

The Al Gore AMOC Circus: What the Deniers Got Completely Wrong

Now let’s talk about what’s been flooding my mentions for the past week, because the climate denial machine has decided to make Al Gore the story and I need to put this to bed.

Gore appeared at a Hollywood event last week and warned that a Gulf Stream collapse - technically, an AMOC slowdown or shutdown - could occur within 25 years, potentially causing regional cooling in Europe and North America. Gore’s framing closely tracks what he said in An Inconvenient Truth. In this 2006 film, he described the North Atlantic as an area scientists were watching because the Gulf Stream carries heat toward western Europe.

The response from the denial ecosystem was immediate and predictable. Breitbart, The Washington Times, Lee Zeldin, and about ten thousand social media accounts declared that Gore had “switched from global warming to an ice age,” proving that climate science is a fraud and that he has now “admitted” warming isn’t happening.

This is wrong in a way that requires you to either not understand basic oceanography or be actively lying. Here’s a simple explanation.

The AMOC is a vast system of ocean currents that transports warm, salty water northward near the surface from the tropics to the northern North Atlantic and returns colder, denser water southward. One of its best-known components, the Gulf Stream, helps keep northern Europe much milder than other regions at similar latitudes. When the AMOC slows, it can alter weather patterns, influence sea level rise along the U.S. East Coast, and change heat and carbon uptake in the ocean.

The key point that every denier is deliberately ignoring is that scientists have observed signs of a gradual weakening in the AMOC, likely linked to melting Greenland ice and increased freshwater input into the North Atlantic - caused by global warming. The very thing causing the AMOC to weaken is the same thing the deniers say isn’t happening. You cannot use AMOC slowdown as evidence against warming when AMOC slowdown is a consequence of warming.

A weakening AMOC causing regional cooling in Europe while the planet continues to warm overall is not a contradiction. A strongly reduced AMOC state combined with intermediate global warming has a profound cooling effect on Northwestern Europe with more intense cold extremes, even as global temperatures continue to rise. Europe gets colder regionally. The planet keeps warming globally. These are not mutually exclusive. This is the same climate system, working as the physics says it should.

A new study published in Science Advances on April 15, 2026, suggests the more pessimistic predictions about AMOC weakening are likely the most accurate, with the chance of a shutdown now estimated at over 50%. This is not Al Gore going rogue. This is Gore tracking the published science, imperfectly, with some overstated timelines, as he has always done, but in the correct direction.

The “flip-flop” narrative requires you to believe that regional ocean circulation cooling and global atmospheric warming are the same thing. They are not. Pointing at a cooling Europe and saying “see, no global warming” is like pointing at the ice in your drink and saying the kitchen isn’t hot.

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By Julie Gammack

The turbines came down on a Saturday morning. A semiconductor company needed the land for a campus expansion. That is the entire story, as far as the facts go. What happened next is what I want to talk about.

What Those Two Towers Actually Did

Gloucester, Massachusetts is a working-class fishing city of about 31,000 people on Cape Ann, about thirty miles northeast of Boston. It is the kind of city where municipal budgets are tight, where the school department and the fire department are perpetually competing for the same limited pool of tax revenue, where a half-million-dollar line item in the annual budget is not a rounding error. It is exactly the kind of community that needed what those two turbines provided.

For over a decade, City Hall, seven schools, every fire station, the police department and the water treatment plant were powered by those turbines. They covered approximately 75 percent of all municipal electricity demand, purchased at a fixed, contracted rate that did not move with the natural gas market. Over their operational lifetime, they returned an estimated $3.5 million to Gloucester’s city budget — money that paid for teachers and firefighters and road repairs instead of going to a utility conglomerate.

This matters because of where Gloucester sits in the New England energy market. Massachusetts runs on natural gas. More than 60 percent of the grid’s electricity generation is gas-fired, and New England’s position at the end of the pipeline system makes it uniquely vulnerable to supply constraints and price spikes. Commercial electricity rates in Massachusetts have been running at approximately 30 cents per kilowatt hour, among the highest in the nation, and a rate that has climbed steadily over the same decade those turbines were running. Gloucester had a hedge against exactly that volatility. It was, in the language of energy economics, a genuinely good deal for a city that could not afford a bad one.

Now, Gloucester is back on the grid paying more than 30 cents a kilowatt hour. Back exposed to whatever natural gas prices do this winter, and the winter after that.

The Comment Section

Within the first hour of the story breaking, the comment sections looked like this. “Greatest scam ever.” “Eyesore gone. That’s a win.” “Nothing but a subsidy scam.” “The skyline looks SO MUCH better with it gone.”

Reading those as simple ignorance misses what is actually happening. Those comments did not emerge spontaneously. They are the output of a machine that has been running for decades and that has cost, by the most conservative academic estimates, over a billion dollars to build and operate. The Heartland Institute, the American Petroleum Institute, and the Heritage Foundation have each played documented roles in a coordinated campaign to manufacture public hostility toward renewable energy. The strategy, detailed in peer-reviewed research published in journals including Climatic Change and Environmental Research Letters, involves funding think tanks, creating front organizations designed to sound like grassroots citizen groups, and producing a continuous stream of content engineered not to win scientific arguments but to produce an emotional reflex in ordinary people. The reflex that says: clean energy is a joke. Clean energy is a scam. Clean energy is for elites who want to tell you what to do.

The goal was never to defeat wind energy in a debate. The science was lost by the fossil fuel industry decades ago, and they knew it. The goal was to make the people of Gloucester feel, in their bones, that those turbines were an insult - so that when the news broke on a Saturday morning, the reaction would be instant and free of charge. Just a comment section full of people performing a script that had been handed to them over twenty years of slow, expensive, patient cultural conditioning.

The Oliver Twist Problem

There is something darkly comic about watching Americans celebrate paying more for their own energy. What I keep landing on is Oliver Twist — the orphan boy holding out his bowl in the workhouse, asking for more gruel. Except in this version, the people holding out the bowl are not destitute children with no choices. They are adults with internet connections, cheerfully cheering for the industry that has been steadily increasing their utility bills for a decade, asking it to keep going. The gas companies did not spend a dollar on the Gloucester comment sections. The comment sections did it for free.

Those commenters were celebrating their school districts paying more for electricity. They were celebrating their fire stations paying more for electricity. They were celebrating the dismantling of the mechanism that had been keeping their property taxes marginally lower. They were celebrating a half-million-dollar-a-year transfer from the Gloucester city budget to an energy conglomerate. They believe they won something, but they did not win anything at all. The industry that wrote their talking points won, and the prize was their own money.

What This Actually Costs

The International Monetary Fund calculates that the global fossil fuel industry receives seven trillion dollars a year in subsidies and unpriced environmental and health costs - explicit government handouts combined with the costs of air pollution, water contamination, and climate damage that are externalized onto the public rather than priced into the product. Seven trillion dollars, every year, from governments and from people who breathe the air and pay the medical bills and watch their insurance premiums climb.

Twenty years in this field, and the precision of it still stops me cold — the patience, the extraordinary return on investment of spending a billion dollars to get millions of people to voluntarily act against their own financial interests and feel righteous about it. Whatever you think about the politics, that is a remarkable achievement. The most profitable magic trick in human history is convincing the people getting robbed to cheer for the robber, and the fossil fuel industry has been running it without interruption since the 1990s.

They Spent a Billion Dollars Teaching You to Say "Scam." Here's What They Didn't Want You to Know.

The most persistent talking point is intermittency - the argument that wind and solar are unreliable because the wind doesn’t always blow and the sun doesn’t always shine. What this framing deliberately ignores is that the grid has never run on a single source, and modern grid management already integrates variable supply across vast geographic regions. Wind is calm in one place when it is blowing hard somewhere else. Solar peaks mid-day when demand is rising. Battery storage, which has dropped in cost by more than 90 percent over the last decade, is increasingly filling the gaps that do exist. The grid that fossil fuel advocates implicitly defend is also intermittent - gas plants trip offline, pipelines freeze, refineries catch fire. The 2021 Texas winter storm didn’t fail because of wind turbines. It failed because natural gas infrastructure wasn’t weatherized. Intermittency is a grid management challenge that engineers are solving in real time. It is not an argument against renewable energy. It is an argument for better grid investment.

The cost argument has also quietly collapsed. The levelized cost of electricity from new utility-scale solar and onshore wind is now cheaper than new natural gas in most of the United States, according to Lazard’s annual energy cost analysis, which is not a climate advocacy organization…it is one of the world’s oldest investment banks. In many markets, building new renewable capacity is now cheaper than continuing to operate existing fossil fuel plants. The argument that renewable energy is more expensive was genuinely true in 2005. It is simply not true in 2025, and the people still making it either haven’t updated their information or are hoping you haven’t.

The subsidy argument is perhaps the most audacious, given who is making it. Yes, renewable energy receives government support. The wind production tax credit and the solar investment tax credit are real. What the fossil fuel subsidy argument omits is that oil, gas, and coal have received continuous government support for over a century - the intangible drilling cost deduction alone has been in the U.S. tax code since 1913. The International Monetary Fund, which is not a climate organization, calculates that fossil fuels receive approximately seven trillion dollars per year globally in explicit subsidies and unpriced costs - the health damage from air pollution, the flood damage from climate change, the military expenditures required to secure supply chains. Renewable energy subsidies are measured in billions. Fossil fuel subsidies are measured in trillions. Calling wind power a subsidy scam while standing on a century of oil industry tax preferences requires either extraordinary dishonesty or extraordinary ignorance.

Related to the cost argument is the claim that renewable energy raises electricity prices. In states and countries where renewables have reached high penetration - Texas, Iowa, Denmark, Germany before its recent policy complications - wholesale electricity prices have actually been pushed down during periods of high renewable output, because wind and solar have near-zero marginal cost once the infrastructure is built. The relationship between renewable penetration and retail electricity prices is complicated by grid investment costs, transmission needs, and policy design. But the simple causal story… more renewables, higher bills - is not supported by the evidence. Massachusetts has high electricity prices and relatively low renewable penetration.

What Can You Do?

I get asked this more than any other question. You don't need a solar panel or a Tesla or a protest sign. What the fossil fuel industry fears most is not the activist… it's the informed person with a phone who refuses to stay quiet. Read pieces like this one and internalize the facts. When you know that Gloucester's turbines saved half a million dollars a year for a working-class fishing city, that the International Monetary Fund puts fossil fuel subsidies at seven trillion dollars annually, that Texas failed in 2021 because of unweatherized gas infrastructure and not wind turbines - you are no longer a target for the reflex. Share these facts. Drop them in comment sections. The Big Oil machine depends on those comments going unanswered, on the impression that everyone already agrees. The fossil fuel industry spent a billion dollars manufacturing that impression. Your answer costs nothing but thirty seconds and something worth saying.

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By Julie Gammack

The EPA was that answer, and for more than fifty years, across Republican and Democratic administrations alike, the agency maintained a basic institutional commitment to its founding mission: to protect human health and the environment.

That Agency is under attack right now and the wrecking ball is Lee Zeldin, a puppet for the fossil fuel industry.

Before he was confirmed as EPA Administrator, Zeldin chaired the America First Policy Institute, a think tank co-founded by Tim Dunn, a Texas fracking billionaire with a net worth of $2.2 billion who donated $5 million to the super PAC supporting this administration’s election. Zeldin’s lifetime environmental voting score from the League of Conservation Voters was 14 percent. As a New York state senator, a statewide environmental group gave him its annual Oil Slick Award for legislation that would have cut transit funding and threatened clean water on Long Island. When he ran for governor of New York in 2022, his energy platform centered on reversing the state’s ban on hydraulic fracturing, building new gas pipelines, and expanding fossil fuel extraction. His very first hire to lead the EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation, the office responsible for setting the pollution limits for the air Americans breathe, was Aaron Szabo, a former lobbyist for the oil and chemical industries. The Sierra Club, through Freedom of Information requests, obtained Zeldin’s official EPA calendars. They document meeting after meeting with fossil fuel industry executives and their lobbyists.

This is the man the fossil fuel industry spent $219 million electing, through direct campaign contributions and nearly $240 million more in federal lobbying in just the first six months of this administration. When asked why the industry didn’t need to increase its spending despite the scale of what it wanted, one industry insider told reporters the answer was simple: when the White House has already committed to doing whatever you want, you don’t need to spend as much to get results.

On February 12th of this year, Zeldin signed the final rule rescinding the 2009 Greenhouse Gas Endangerment Finding. The Endangerment Finding was the administrative determination that greenhouse gas emissions from human activities endanger public health and welfare. It was the legal cornerstone upon which every major federal climate regulation built since 2009 rested. Without it, the EPA has no legal authority under the Clean Air Act to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from vehicles, from power plants, or from any other source. The rule Zeldin signed simultaneously repealed every vehicle greenhouse gas emissions standard the agency had issued since 2010. More than 570,000 Americans filed public comments opposing it during the required public notice period. The rule took effect the day before yesterday, on April 20th, 2026. Twenty-four states, led by California, have filed legal challenges. The litigation is expected to reach the Supreme Court, where its fate is genuinely uncertain.

On February 20th, Zeldin finalized the rollback of the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards, reinstating weaker limits from 2012 and abandoning more protective standards that had been finalized in 2024. Mercury is a neurotoxin and it causes permanent brain damage in developing children and serious developmental harm to fetuses when pregnant women are exposed to contaminated fish. The standards being reversed had, since their implementation, reduced mercury emissions from coal-fired power plants by 90 percent.

In January, his EPA announced that it would stop calculating the monetary value of human lives saved when evaluating air pollution regulations. For decades, Republican and Democratic administrations alike had used a metric called the “value of a statistical life” to weigh the benefits of clean air rules against their costs to industry. Under the Biden administration, the EPA’s analysis of its fine particulate matter rule found that for every dollar spent reducing PM2.5, Americans received up to $77 in health benefits, including thousands of prevented premature deaths, hundreds of thousands of prevented lost workdays, and dramatic reductions in asthma attacks and hospital admissions. Zeldin’s EPA has determined that quantifying these benefits involves too much scientific uncertainty. It will continue to calculate what pollution controls cost corporations to implement. It has simply decided that the lives those controls save, and the suffering they prevent, will no longer be assigned any value at all. A human life, in the regulatory calculus of this EPA, is worth zero - only industry costs count.

Beyond the regulatory rollbacks themselves, Zeldin has systematically destroyed the infrastructure that makes science-based regulation possible. He fired over a thousand scientists. He shut down the EPA’s Office of Research and Development, eliminating roughly two-thirds of its 1,500 positions. These were the researchers who first identified PFAS compounds as health hazards, who established the causal relationships between ozone pollution and asthma, who produced the peer-reviewed science underlying fifty years of clean air and clean water standards. He purged the agency’s scientific advisory boards. He placed 171 environmental justice staffers on administrative leave within weeks of taking office and then eliminated the entire Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights, the office designed to ensure that low-income communities and communities of color, which bear a disproportionate share of industrial pollution, received the agency’s protection. He cancelled over two billion dollars in EPA contracts across more than four hundred programs. He attempted to claw back twenty billion dollars in Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund money that Congress had already appropriated and that was already flowing to clean energy projects in communities across the country. Courts have repeatedly blocked this effort, but he has repeatedly tried again.

His own agency’s data shows that the rollback agenda will cause 200,000 additional deaths and 100 million additional asthma attacks by 2050. The money it saves industry amounts to $39 billion. The public health and economic costs it imposes on everyone else amount to $254 billion annually.

Last week, Zeldin traveled to Washington to deliver the keynote address at the Heartland Institute’s 16th International Conference on Climate Change. The Heartland Institute is a conservative think tank that has received funding from fossil fuel interests and describes one of its central goals as challenging the narrative that the world faces a climate crisis driven by the burning of fossil fuels. At that gathering, surrounded by the people who have spent decades attacking the scientific consensus on climate change, Zeldin told the crowd that this was “a day to celebrate vindication.” In his own EPA press release announcing his initial deregulatory blitz, he had described his mission as “driving a dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion.”

What he is doing, with the full backing of an industry that paid for the access to do it, is eliminating the government’s legal capacity to respond to what the science demands. He is not arguing that the science is wrong, rather he is arguing that even if it is right, the federal government has no authority and no obligation to act on it. The distinction matters, because the courts will ultimately decide whether that argument survives. But in the meantime, people are breathing dirtier air, mercury is going back into the water, children in communities downwind of coal plants are going to grow up with higher blood mercury levels than they would have otherwise. The families who live near oil refineries and chemical facilities have lost the office that was supposed to advocate for their protection. And the scientists who would have continued building the evidentiary base for future regulation have been fired.

This is what Earth Day 2026 looks like from inside the agency that was created to prevent exactly this. The EPA exists because Americans demanded it. What is happening to it right now is not an inevitable consequence of political cycles or economic forces beyond anyone’s control. It is a policy choice, made by specific people, funded by specific interests, producing specific and quantifiable harm. It can be reversed. It has been reversed before, when enough Americans decided that what they were watching was unacceptable and said so loudly enough that the political cost of continuing became greater than the political cost of stopping.

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Iowa Writers Collaborative Roundup

Linking readers and professional writers who care about Iowa.

By Julie Gammack