Eastern US swelters from heatwave as high temperatures affect half of country. Heat and humidity are stretching east from the Mississippi River valley, and some areas could see heat indices of 120F

A young boy plays in the splash fountain at the Christian Science Plaza in Boston, Massachusetts, on 16 July 2025. Photograph: Cj Gunther/EPA

 

 by Marina Dunbar

The eastern half of the US is facing a significant heatwave, with more than 185 million people under warnings due to intense and widespread heat conditions on Monday.

The south-east is likely to endure the most dangerous temperatures as the extreme heat spread across the region on Monday, spanning from the Carolinas through Florida. In these areas, heat index values (how hot it feels once humidity is accounted for) are forecast to range between 105 and 113F (40.5 to 45C).

Some locations in Mississippi and Louisiana face an even greater threat, with the heat index possibly soaring as high as 120F (49C).

Meanwhile, the midwest isn’t escaping the heat. Conditions there remain hazardous into Monday and Tuesday, after a weekend in which temperatures felt as if they were between 97 and 111F (36 to 44C) in areas from Lincoln, Nebraska, north to Minneapolis.

 

Cities such as Des Moines, St Louis, Memphis, New Orleans, Jacksonville and Raleigh are under extreme heat warnings. In these locations, temperatures will climb into the mid-90s and low 100s, with heat indices potentially reaching 110 to 115F.

The most dangerous conditions, classified as level 4 out of 4 on the heat risk scale, encompass much of Florida and extend north into Georgia and the Carolinas. A broader level 3 zone stretches from the eastern plains through the midwest and into the mid-Atlantic. This follows a weekend already dominated by extreme temperatures.

 

Tampa experienced an unprecedented milestone on Sunday when it reached 100F (37.8C). Other cities also broke daily temperature records, and more are expected to follow suit.

The dangerous heat and humidity are expected to persist through midweek, affecting major metropolitan areas including St Louis, Memphis, Charlotte, Savannah, Tampa and Jackson, Mississippi. Actual air temperatures will climb into the upper 90s and low 100s, while heat index readings are expected to remain between 105 and 115F for several days due to high tropical moisture.

Relief will be hard to find, even during the night. Overnight and early morning temperatures are forecast to dip only into the 70s or above, keeping conditions uncomfortable around the clock.

However, a cold front moving in later this week is expected to bring a drop in temperatures across the eastern US, offering a much-needed break from the extreme heat by the weekend.

Elsewhere, triple-digit temperatures will dominate the central US. The combination of soaring heat and dense humidity in the Mississippi River valley and central plains could make conditions especially hazardous, with some areas possibly seeing the heat index reach 120F.

 

Data suggests that there are more than 1,300 deaths per year in the US due to extreme heat, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. While no one single weather event can be blamed on the global climate crisis, the warming world is experiencing a greater frequency of extreme weather incidents.

According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa), excessive heat is already the leading cause of weather-related deaths in the US, and the problem is only intensifying. For vulnerable populations, such as migrants, prisoners or schoolchildren in under-cooled buildings, the burden of rising temperatures is compounded.

Despite the increasingly crucial need to find solutions for the rising temperatures, many US agencies are currently understaffed due to cuts from the Trump administration and the so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge).

Federal science agencies such as Noaa are now operating at reduced capacity despite the outsized weather threats. Hundreds of meteorologists have left the National Weather Service in recent months, and several offices, including Houston, have had to scale back the services they provide.

 

Thousands in Greece and Turkey evacuate as winds and heat fan wildfires. Czech firefighters and Italian aircraft join rescue effort in Greece, and firefighter among those killed in Turkey

 

Near Bursa, Turkey’s fourth-largest city, more than 1,700 people were forced to evacuate their homes as a wildfire approached. Photograph: Anadolu/Getty Images

 

by  Helena Smith in Athens

 

Thousands of people in Greece and Turkey have been forced to evacuate homes as firefighters in the countries battled to contain wildfires fanned by strong winds and searing heat.

As temperatures in south-eastern Europe exceeded 40C for a seventh straight day, the Greek prime minister praised rescue workers for waging “a titanic battle” to bring blazes under control.

“The state mechanism has been called to engage in a titanic battle, simultaneously responding to dozens of wildfires across the country,” Kyriakos Mitsotakis said in a statement. “To those who saw their properties destroyed by the fury of fire, know that the state will stand by your side.”

Eleven regions of Greece face a “very high risk” of fire, and the government has appealed for help from EU partners to help it deal with fires burning on multiple fronts.

Emergency services said that while a conflagration that had injured two firefighters in Kryoneri, north-east of Athens, had been successfully quelled, fires around Messinia in the south-west Peloponnese and on the popular island of Kythera had not been contained.

 

Helicopter crews try to control hotspots in Kryoneri. Photograph: Yannis Kolesidis/EPA

 The authorities were also battling flare-ups on the islands of Evia and Crete. In all of the stricken areas residents received messages to evacuate.

 

Several regions were placed under a red category 5 alert, the highest on the national scale, because of conditions exacerbated by the extreme weather that had turned terrain to tinder.

The National Observatory in Athens recorded a temperature of 45.8C (114.5F) in Messinia on Friday. On Saturday, the temperature reached 45.2C (113.4F) in Amfilochia, western Greece.

By late Sunday, as Czech firefighters and Italian water-bombers joined emergency teams in Greece, the focus turned to Kythera.

Describing the destruction as “incalculable”, the public broadcaster ERT reported: “The first images are resonant of a biblical disaster as huge areas have been reduced to cinders and ash.”

The island’s deputy mayor, Giorgos Komninos, was cited as saying: “Everything, from houses, beehives [to] olive trees has been burnt.”

Two teams of forest commandos, 67 firefighters and scores of volunteers backed by 22 fire brigade trucks, three helicopters and two planes were struggling to douse flames that had ripped through prime agricultural and forest land on the island fuelled by gale-force winds.

As flames approached, villagers were ordered to evacuate to safer areas, with 139 people, including tourists who were trapped on a beach, being rescued by the coast guard.

The aftermath of a fire on Evia island on Sunday. Photograph: Angelos Tzortzinis/AFP/Getty Images

The meteorologist Panagiotis Yiannopoulos told ERT: “We are expecting the winds to get stronger right over Kythera and Crete, winds of six-beaufort strength from this evening until Tuesday evening, so a lot of very strong wind over many hours.”

In Turkey, where a record temperature of 50.5 C was registered in the province of Şirnak, in the south-east – surpassing a previous heat record of 49.5C in August 2023 – more than 1,700 people were forced to flee their homes after wildfires barrelled towards Bursa, the country’s fourth-largest city. Orhan Saribal, an opposition parliamentarian, described the scene as “an apocalypse”.

More than 1,100 firefighters were battling the flames, with authorities saying that at least 76 blazes had broken out within a 24-hour period. Turkey has been hit by numerous heat-induced infernos for weeks.

On Sunday, Bursa’s mayor said a firefighter had died of a heart attack on the job, bringing the death toll to 14. Ten of the victims were rescue volunteers and forestry workers killed on Wednesday in a fire in the west of the country.

Dozens of fires were also reported in Albania over the weekend, where thousands were forced to evacuate homes in the southern town of Delvina.

 

 

‘Climateflation’ could push up UK food prices by more than a third by 2050, report says. Exclusive: Increasingly extreme weather a threat to production and supply chains in Britain and elsewhere

A dried out field in a heatwave. Price rises for food items risk pushing almost 1m people into poverty, the report says. Photograph: Simon Annable/Alamy

 

by Richard Partington Senior economics correspondent

Britain is at risk of a worsening “climateflation” crisis amid the fallout from increasingly extreme weather that could drive up food prices by more than a third by 2050.

Sounding the alarm over the financial impact for UK households, the Autonomy Institute thinktank said that climate-induced price increases for everyday food items risked pushing almost 1 million people into poverty without urgent government intervention.

It said the UK was at elevated risk – particularly from heatwaves and droughts – of food production and supply chains abroad and at home being disrupted, which would have a knock-on impact for consumers through higher prices in the shops.

Official figures earlier this month showed the UK’s headline inflation rate rose by more than expected to 3.6% in June, as fuel and food prices added to the pressure on households.

 

Britain’s largest retailers have warned hot, dry weather had reduced fruit and vegetable harvest yields, adding to last month’s inflation rate. The price of chocolate on UK supermarket shelves has also been pushed up by poor harvests linked to extreme temperatures in west Africa, while coffee prices have been pumped up by bad weather hitting production in Brazil and Vietnam.

Drawing together climate data, analysis of international and domestic trade flows, and economic modelling, the Autonomy researchers said that increasing numbers of heatwaves and droughts would imperil staple crops, disrupt supply chains and intensify inflationary pressures.

Scientists say climate breakdown caused by the burning of fossil fuels means more frequent floods and droughts are likely in the UK. Food prices worldwide have also been affected by poor harvests, conflict and Donald Trump’s trade wars.

With almost half of food consumed in the UK imported from overseas, British households are highly vulnerable to climate shocks hitting the price of groceries from key producers in countries including Spain, France and Brazil.

Domestic farming is also under pressure, with storms and floods slashing UK vegetable production by 12% in 2023.

 

Warning that rising temperatures affecting major food producers in Europe and beyond stood as a major risk to household finances, the report said by 2050, under a high-emission “worst-case” scenario, food prices could rise by 34%.

Under a “best-case” scenario, whereby global heating would be limited to 1.5C by 2100 rather than 4C in the worst-case, it warned that cumulative food price inflation could still reach 25% by 2050.

Lower-income households would be disproportionately hit because they spend a larger share of their monthly budgets on essential items such as bread, rice and meat. It said heatwaves in the UK, as one of several drivers of climateflation, could cost an average household between £917 and £1,247 by 2050.

 

Without government efforts to soften the blow for households from a 34% rise in prices, the leftwing thinktank warned as many as 951,383 more people could fall into poverty.

Will Stronge, the chief executive of the Autonomy Institute, urged ministers to consider a range of measures to protect families; including the introduction of public diners to mitigate the impact of food price volatility for vulnerable groups.

Price controls could also be considered, while the UK could look at introducing “buffer stocks” of key goods to ensure availability during supply chain disruptions.

“Climateflation is no longer a distant risk; it’s a present reality,” Stronge said. “We need to build real economic resilience – and that means rethinking what public service provision can and should provide in the face of climate disruption: from delivery of basic essentials to publicly funded diners and a national buffer stock.”

 
 

US heat dome causes dangerous conditions for more than 100 million people. High temperatures and humidity across north-eastern coast increase risk of heat exhaustion, illnesses and death

 

The view of New York City from along the riverfront amid an extreme heat warning, in Hoboken, New Jersey on 25 July 2025. Photograph: Eduardo Muñoz/Reuters

Nina Lakhani

 

More than a 100 million people in the US will face dangerous conditions over the weekend as a heat dome which has scorched much of the center of the country nudges eastward.

Heat advisories were in place on Friday all across the north-eastern coast from Portland, Maine to Wilmington, North Carolina, with the daytime heat index temperatures 10 to 15F above average in some places.

Overnight temperatures will also be very warm and oppressively muggy, according to the National Weather Service (NWS).

While thunderstorms, some of them severe, are expected to break the heat by Friday night for the north-east, heat and humidity will continue to build further south with the most persistent and dangerous conditions expected across the south-east and Tennessee Valley this weekend.

 

The heat index is what the temperature feels like when humidity is taken into account. New York City is forecast to swelter under a 106F heat index on Friday afternoon – slightly higher than Phoenix, Arizona, the hottest major city in the US.

In the south-east, the heat index could exceed 115F, risking the health and lives of people without access to sufficient cooling and/or adequate hydration, the NWS warned. “This will be a long duration heat wave, with little to no overnight relief and high humidity levels, leading to an increased danger,” the federal service warned.

High temperatures and high humidity increase the risk of heat exhaustion, heat illnesses and death, with children, older people and those with existing physical and mental health conditions at highest risk. Outdoor workers – gardeners, builders, farmers, and delivery workers – along with unhoused people and those with substance use issues are particularly vulnerable.

A heat dome is a particular weather phenomenon where hot air is trapped over a region by a stalled high-pressure system causing high temperatures on the ground. With little cloud cover due to the stuck high-pressure system, the sun’s rays directly hit the ground, further increasing the heat.

While heat domes cause heatwaves – which are becoming more frequent thanks to the climate crisis – there can be heatwaves without heat domes. Climate scientists have found that heat domes are getting hotter due to global heating caused by humans burning fossil fuels.

And while the latest dome in the US is moving slowly, it continues to cause dangerous conditions in parts of the mid-south to mid-Mississippi Valley, with heat alerts still in place from Oklahoma to West Virginia.

In the so-called corn belt, the midwestern and some southern states where most corn is farmed, a phenomenon known as corn sweat exacerbates the humidity, and can increase the heat index by as much as 10F. This is due to the pores on the underside of maize leaves, where oxygen – and water vapor – are released, Justin Glisan , state climatologist of Iowa, said in an interview with CBS News.

Meteorologists have also forecast flash flooding from north-east Kansas to much of Indiana, as well as possible scattered thunderstorms across parts of New England, the northern Mid-Atlantic, and North Dakota. Meanwhile dry, windy conditions have triggered a red flag wildfire warning for parts of Utah and Oregon.

Earth’s underground network of fungi needs urgent protection, say researchers. Study finds that only 9.5% of fungal biodiversity hotspots fell within existing protected areas

The researchers used machine-learning techniques containing 2.8bn samples from more than 130 countries to create the biodiversity maps. Photograph: Justin Long/Alamy

 by Taro Kaneko

 

The underground network of fungi that underpins the planet’s ecosystems needs urgent conservation action by politicians, a research organisation has said.

Scientists from the Society for the Protection of Underground Networks (Spun) have created the first high-resolution biodiversity maps of Earth’s underground mycorrhizal fungal ecosystems.

The research, published in the journal Nature on Wednesday, found that 90% of the biodiverse hotspots of mycorrhizal fungi were in unprotected ecosystems. Loss of the ecosystems could lead to reductions in carbon drawdown, crop productivity and ecosystem resilience to climate extremes.

Mycorrhizal fungi have “remained in the dark, despite the extraordinary ways they sustain life on land”, said Dr Toby Kiers, the executive director of Spun.

 

“They cycle nutrients, store carbon, support plant health, and make soil. When we disrupt these critical ecosystem engineers, forest regeneration slows, crops fail and biodiversity above ground begins to unravel … 450m years ago, there were no plants on Earth and it was because of the mycorrhizal fungal network that plants colonised the planet and began supporting human life.

“If we have a healthy fungal network, then we will have greater agricultural productivity, bigger and beautiful flowers, and can protect plants against pathogens.”

Mycorrhizal fungi are found on the roots of plants and help regulate Earth’s climate and ecosystems. Its underground networks provide plants with essential nutrients, while drawing more than 13bn tonnes of carbon dioxide a year into soils – equivalent to roughly one-third of global emissions from fossil fuels.

Spun launched the initiative in 2021 alongside organisations including GlobalFungi, Fungi Foundation, the Global Soil Mycobiome consortium and researchers from around the world to map out the under-researched network of mycorrhizal fungal.

Using machine-learning techniques on a dataset containing more than 2.8bn fungal samples from 130 countries, scientists were able to predict mycorrhizal diversity at a 1km² scale across the planet.

They discovered that only 9.5% of these fungal biodiversity hotspots fell within existing protected areas, revealing huge conservation gaps. The coast of Ghana was found to be a global hotspot for fungi, but with the country’s coastline eroding at a rate of 2 metres a year, scientists fear this crucial biodiversity will be washed into the sea.

This research marks the first large-scale scientific application of the global mapping initiative, which “are more than scientific tools – they can help guide the future of conservation”, said the study’s lead author, Dr Michael Van Nuland. “Given the impact of these fungal symbioses on the health and functioning of Earth’s ecosystems, continuing to ignore them could be a hugely missed opportunity.”

Nuland said the fungi respond negatively to human stressors, and without addressing the possible loss of these vital fungus, we could lose our ability to develop novel natural climate solutions.

Land use is a significant cause of mycorrhizal fungal degradation, and it is “frustrating that no action has been taken to prioritise conservation of it”, said Kiers. “The fungi is needed for agricultural productivity and human health.”

 

These fungal ecosystems were largely invisible in law and policy, said César Rodríguez-Garavito, a professor of law and the faculty director of the More-Than-Human Life (Moth) programme at NYU’s School of Law. “[The data is] incredibly important in strengthening law and policy on climate change and biodiversity loss across all of Earth’s underground ecosystems.”

The findings are accessible through Spun’s underground atlas interactive tool for conservation groups, researchers and policymakers to identify hotspots that require intervention.

With more than 400 scientists and 96 underground explorers from 79 countries, Spun’s international team is sampling the Earth’s most hard-to-access, remote underground ecosystems including in Mongolia, Bhutan, Pakistan, and Ukraine.

Spun is seeking new collaborators and funding to scale its mycorrhizal fungal maps, which cover only 0.001% of the Earth’s surface. The expansion of its fungal maps would guide decision-makers to start leveraging mycorrhizal systems.

The preservation and protection of mycorrhizal fungi could help to solve some of the world’s greatest challenges – biodiversity decline, climate change, and declining food productivity, said Dr Rebecca Shaw, the chief scientist at the World Wide Fund for Nature, who added that it had a direct benefit to people.

 

Climate Change Is Making Fire Weather Worse for World’s Forests. Forest fires are on the rise globally. An increase in severe fire weather is largely responsible.

 

Fires at Tatkin Lake in British Columbia, Canada, in July 2023.Credit...BC Wildfire Service/Anadolu Agency, via Getty Images

 

By Rebecca Dzombak

 

In 2023 and 2024, the hottest years on record, more than 78 million acres of forests burned around the globe. The fires sent veils of smoke and several billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, subjecting millions of people to poor air quality.

Extreme forest-fire years are becoming more common because of climate change, new research suggests.

“Climate change is loading the dice for extreme fire seasons like we’ve seen,” said John Abatzoglou, a climate scientist at the University of California Merced. “There are going to be more fires like this.”

The area of forest canopy lost to fire during 2023 and 2024 was at least two times greater than in the previous nearly two decades, according to a new study published Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The researchers used imagery from the LANDSAT satellite network to determine how tree cover had changed from 2002 to 2024, and compared that with satellite detections of fire activity to see how much canopy loss was because of fire.

 Globally, the area of land burned by wildfires has decreased in recent decades, mostly because humans are transforming savannas and grasslands into less flammable landscapes. But the area of forests burned has gone up.

 

Boreal forests lost more than two times the canopy area in 2023-24 compared with the period between 2002 and 2024, the study found. Tropical forests saw three times as much loss, and North American forests lost nearly four times as much canopy, mostly because of Canada’s wildfires.

Significant losses were in remote forests, far from human activities. That isolation suggests fires are increasing primarily because of climate change, said Calum Cunningham, a fire geographer at the University of Tasmania who was not involved with the study. “Chronic changes in climate are making these forests more conducive to burning,” Dr. Cunningham said.

Climate’s fingerprint on forest fires, particularly remote ones, can be obvious. That’s because fires are limited either by how much there is to burn or by how wet or dry the fuel is. So when scientists see more fires in remote forests, far from cities, infrastructure or other human activities, like logging, they look to climate for an explanation.

 

Fire weather encompasses all the conditions that have to be right for a blaze to take off. Unrelenting spells of hot, dry weather and high evaporation rates let plants and soil dry out. Local wind patterns can shift, potentially pushing fires across a landscape, up and over hills and roads. Longer, hotter, drier stretches of fire weather make fires more likely.

Climate change is making severe fire weather more common around the world, raising the chances of worsened forest fire seasons, a study in the journal Nature Communications found. Previous work has shown that climate change is in many places making the fire season longer. But many studies that attribute climate change to fires are regional, not global.

The study assessed globally how much more likely extreme fire-weather conditions are to occur in the modern climate, compared with the preindustrial period, before greenhouse gas emissions rose significantly. The researchers used satellite observations of burned areas, along with weather data, to connect observed fire weather with actual occurrences of forest fires.

The chances of seeing extreme fire weather are roughly double in today’s climate compared with the preindustrial period, the researchers found. Years with extreme fire-weather conditions had more forest fires and more carbon dioxide emissions than typical years without severe fire weather. Carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, acts as a blanket in the atmosphere, trapping the sun’s heat and warming the environment.

Neither study’s findings were particularly surprising to the experts, because most of the regions the studies highlighted have burned in recent years. Both studies add to a growing body of evidence that points to climate change as one of the main reasons the planet is experiencing more frequent and more severe forest fires, often overlapping.

“It really puts to bed any debate about the role of climate change in driving these extreme fires,” Dr. Cunningham said.

When more places are hit with fire weather at the same time, countries’ capacities for sharing firefighting resources drop. “You get stretched thin,” Dr. Abatzoglou said. Reduced firefighting can create a dangerous feedback loop: Bigger fires mean more emissions, which creates more fire weather and makes future fires more likely.

Budget and staffing reductions at science agencies in the United States, along with policy changes can exacerbate climate driven changes to fire trends, said Peter Potapov, an ecologist at the World Research Institute who led the PNAS study. For instance, repealing the “roadless rule,” which banned roads in some remote American forests could increase human activity there, along with fire risk. Terminated satellites could degrade fire forecasting. And funding cuts to the United States Agency for International Development, a State Department program that has been largely dismantled by the Trump administration, ended a program that helped other countries improve their fire monitoring capabilities.

The West’s Megadrought Might Not Let Up for Decades, Study Suggests. Clues from another dry spell 6,000 years ago are helping scientists understand what’s driving the latest one, and why it’s been so unrelenting.

 

Lake Powell in Glen Canyon National Recreation Area in Arizona, where July water levels are only at a third of capacity.Credit...Rebecca Noble/Getty Images

 

By Raymond Zhong

 

 

A megadrought has sapped water supplies, ravaged farms and ranches, and fueled wildfires across the American Southwest for going on 25 years. Not in 12 centuries has the region been so dry for so long.

Now comes worse news: Relief might still be decades away.

According to new findings published in the journal Nature Geoscience, the dry spell is no mere bout of bad luck, no rough patch that could end anytime soon.

Instead, it seems to be the result of a pattern of Pacific Ocean temperatures that is “stuck” because of global warming, said Victoria Todd, a doctoral student in paleoclimatology at the University of Texas at Austin who led the new research.

That means the drought could continue through 2050, perhaps even 2100 and beyond — effectively, Ms. Todd said, for as long as humans keep heating up the planet.

 Even in the arid Southwest, the long, chronic deficit of moisture since the turn of the millennium has exacted a heavy toll. The possibility of more parched decades ahead raises big concerns in a fast-growing region where agriculture and other industries, including computer-chip manufacturing, use lots of water.

 In their study, Ms. Todd and her colleagues set out to understand a different dry period in the region’s deep past. For clues, they looked to mud from the bottoms of two lakes in the Rocky Mountains: Stewart Bog in New Mexico and Hunters Lake in Colorado.

 

The waxy coating on a plant’s leaves preserves a chemical signature of the rain and snow that the plant absorbs. So by analyzing the vegetal remains that had accumulated on the lake beds and become entombed in layers of sediment, Ms. Todd and her colleagues reconstructed how wet the Rockies had been over the past 14 millenniums. They found that winters were dry for thousands of years in the middle of this period.

Scientists have long known that those were warm years for the planet. Earth’s orbit was in a phase that caused more solar radiation to reach the Northern Hemisphere in summer. The radiation melted Arctic sea ice and caused vegetation to flourish in Siberia and the Sahara. These changes darkened the planet’s surface and caused it to absorb more sun, raising temperatures further.

Ms. Todd and her colleagues ran computer simulations of the prehistoric climate during this warm time to see what might have led to such a severe drought in the Southwest. They found that the extra heat gave rise to something striking in the Pacific: a giant blob of warm water extending east from Japan and surrounded on three sides by cool water, including along the West Coast of the United States. The warm blob shifted the band of winds known as the jet stream and deflected storms away from the Southwest.

This kind of pattern isn’t unusual in and of itself: Today, it emerges in the northern Pacific every few decades, alternating with a cold blob that has the opposite effect, namely making the Southwest wetter.

But in the warm world of 6,000 years ago, the blob didn’t alternate, according to Ms. Todd and her colleagues’ simulations. It stayed put, drying out the Southwest for thousands of years.

And, when Ms. Todd and her colleagues ran simulations of the present-day climate, they found that the blob might be stuck in place again — only this time, it appears to be because humans are changing the atmosphere by burning coal, oil and gas.

A. Park Williams, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who researches water in the West, called the new study “thorough” and “convincing.” Still, he noted that researchers’ computer models underestimated how badly the warm blob — or, as scientists prefer to call it, the negative phase of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation — can dry out the Southwest. That means projections of future drought risk in the region are probably underestimates as well, Dr. Williams said.

Human-caused warming is creating conditions that can worsen droughts in many parts of the globe. The warmer air pulls more water out of the soil and vegetation. It causes more precipitation to fall as rain rather than accumulate in the mountains as snow. In the American Southwest, these factors come on top of natural climate fluctuations that have long shaped water availability.

Even so, events like the megadrought raise the possibility that greenhouse warming is starting to overpower certain well-established rhythms and patterns in nature, said Pedro DiNezio, a climate scientist at the University of Colorado Boulder who contributed to the new study.

For instance, El Niño, the cyclical temperature pattern in the tropical Pacific Ocean, typically leads to wetter winters in the Southwest. But that wasn’t the case during the most recent El Niño, from 2023 to last year.

“All these trends are starting to emerge recently that are very unlikely within our understanding of the climate system,” Dr. DiNezio said. These trends start to make sense, he said, only once you account for how much humans are now influencing the climate.

 

Steve Miller Band says extreme weather is so dangerous it’s canceling its tour

 

by Isabella O’Malley, AP

 Classic rocker Steve Miller has canceled his U.S. tour because he said severe weather including extreme heat and unpredictable flooding poses a danger to his band, its fans and crew.

The tour was set to kick off in August and run through early November, with nearly three dozen stops across the U.S. including cities in New York, Tennessee, Florida and California.

“The combination of extreme heat, unpredictable flooding, tornadoes, hurricanes and massive forest fires make these risks for you our audience, the band and the crew unacceptable,” Miller, 81, said in a statement posted on the band’s social media accounts Wednesday. “You can blame it on the weather. … The tour is cancelled.”

The Steve Miller Band, formed in California in the 1960s, has hits including “The Joker” (1973) and “Abracadabra” (1982).

A band spokesperson declined to provide additional details about the cancellation.

Miller’s decision comes as a stretch of extreme weather in the U.S. has made headlines. A sweltering heat dome that baked much of the eastern half of the nation in June and deadly flash flooding in Texas are some of the recent rounds of extreme weather. 

 Scientists say climate change is fueling extreme weather, causing storms to unleash more rain and sending temperatures soaring to dangerous heights, making it harder to plan outdoor summer events. The atmosphere can hold higher amounts of moisture as it warms, resulting in storms dumping heavier amounts of rain compared with storms of the past. 

 

“Everyone wants to see their favorite artist, and that’s still possible. You just have to best mitigate weather risks,” said Jonathan Porter, chief meteorologist at AccuWeather, a private weather company. “For example, the doors may open an hour late in order to ensure thunderstorms have moved sufficiently away from the venue so the show can go on safely.”

Music festivals have recently encountered extreme weather, resulting in cancellations or causing concertgoers to become ill. 

 

In June, the Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival in Tennessee was canceled partway through due to heavy rainfall. Last week, hundreds of people were treated for heat-related illnesses at the Rock the Country music festival in Kentucky, according to local officials.

In 2023, tens of thousands of Burning Man event attendees were stranded after heavy rain created thick mud in the Nevada desert and roads were temporarily closed.

A study published in 2020 reported climate change will increase the likelihood of extreme heat stress during the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival in California.

Tropical storms and hurricanes will soon contribute to the turbulent weather as activity peaks between August and October, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Brazil passes ‘devastation bill’ that drastically weakens environmental law. President has 15 days to approve or veto legislation that critics say will lead to vast deforestation and destruction of Indigenous communities

Deforestation in Kaxarari Indigenous land in Rondônia State, Brazil, in February. Critics of the bill say it will heighten the risk of human-caused climate disasters. Photograph: Ueslei Marcelino/Reuters

Undesignated public forests (in orange), conservation units (in light green), indigenous lands (in dark green), and deforestation by 2021 (red dots)

 

Tiago Rogero in Rio de Janeiro

 

 

Brazilian lawmakers have passed a bill that drastically weakens the country’s environmental safeguards and is seen by many activists as the most significant setback for the country’s environmental legislation in the past 40 years.

The new law – widely referred to as the “devastation bill” and already approved by the senate in May – passed in congress in the early hours of Thursday by 267 votes to 116, despite opposition from more than 350 organisations and social movements.

It now goes to the president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who has 15 working days to either approve or veto it.

Even if he vetoes the legislation, there is a strong chance that the predominantly conservative congress will overturn that, triggering a likely battle in the supreme court, as legal experts argue that the new law is unconstitutional.

 

“Either way, its approval is a tragedy,” said Suely Araújo, public policy coordinator at the Climate Observatory civil society group, arguing that the legislation would, among other serious consequences, drive large-scale deforestation and heighten the risk of human-caused climate disasters.

“There’s no precedent for how damaging this law is,” she said, describing it, as have several other environmental organisations, as “the greatest setback to Brazil’s environmental legislation” since the 1980s, when licensing first became a legal requirement in the country.

One of the main points of criticism of the law is that it allows projects classified as having “medium” polluting potential to obtain an environmental licence through a self-declared online form – without prior impact studies or regulatory review. Previously, this fast-track process was limited to low-risk activities.

According to Araújo, this will affect about 90% of licensing procedures in Brazil, including those for mining companies and the vast majority of agricultural activities.

“We’re seeing the implosion of Brazil’s environmental licensing system, that is going to become full self-licensing, where a company just clicks a button and the permit gets printed,” said Araújo, who served as president of Brazil’s environmental protection agency, Ibama, from 2016 to 2018.

The law also states that agencies responsible for protecting the rights of Indigenous and quilombola communities will only have a say in licensing processes for projects located on officially recognised territories – excluding more than 30% of Indigenous lands and over 80% of quilombola areas that have been awaiting official titling for years.

“Many of these lands are already under dispute or being targeted by exploitative companies,” said Dinamam Tuxá, executive coordinator of the Articulation of Indigenous Peoples of Brazil (Apib), who described the law’s approval as “the legalisation of a process of extermination of Indigenous peoples”.

Tuxá says Lula should veto the bill, but recognises that in a predominantly opposition-led congress, the president’s decision is likely to be overturned. “That’s why civil society must remain organised to pressure lawmakers not to overturn the veto,” he said.

If the law does come into force, it is likely to trigger a wave of legal challenges, as activists and legal experts argue that it violates the constitution and previous rulings by the supreme court.

Some activists have criticised Lula’s administration for not doing enough to prevent the bill’s approval, and even for giving it a free pass, as reported by the news outlet Sumaúma. Resistance to the bill was primarily confined to the environment minister, Marina Silva, who described it as “the burial of environmental licensing”.

According to the Climate Observatory’s Araújo, the law also creates a major embarrassment for both Brazil and Lula just months before the country is to host Cop30 in the Amazon in November. “This law is a serious setback and will shape how Brazil is viewed by those who see it as a potential environmental leader,” she said.

 

America was already losing to China on clean energy. Trump just sealed its fate

 by Ella Nilsen

The new clean energy regime can be summarized in one incredible statistic: China installed more wind and solar power in a single year than the total amount of renewable energy currently operating in the United States.

America was already laps behind China in the race to dominate the industry, new data from Global Energy Monitor shows. President Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful,” spending bill will secure its position as a clean-energy loser, experts told CNN.

The spending law Trump signed earlier this month knee-caps clean energy tax credits for wind and solar. Business leaders say it will raise electricity prices for businesses and consumers alike here, as the cheapest electrons on the grid (generated by wind and solar) become more costly to build and are replaced with more expensive gas.

At the same time, pulling funds from the clean energy industry puts it on its heels just as it was looking to make gains toward more efficient technologies and better battery storage.

Meanwhile, China is currently building 510 gigawatts of utility-scale solar and wind capacity, according to Global Energy Monitor. It will be added to the eye-popping 1,400 gigawatts already online — five times what is operating in the US.

In short, “the game has already been called,” said Li Shuo, director of the China climate hub at the Asia Society Policy Institute. 

Wind and solar, bolstered by giant batteries that can store their energy, are also becoming an increasingly dominant force in the US, but on a much smaller scale. Renewables generate the vast majority of new electricity that’s come online in the past few years in the US and make up about 85% of what is currently waiting to be approved in the nation’s permitting queue. 

The US had roughly 275 gigawatts of wind and solar operating at the end of last year. There are another 150 gigawatts of wind and solar planned for construction through 2031, according to the US Energy Information Administration — projects at risk with Trump and Republicans’ bill that quickly phases out subsidies for renewables.

In the US, wind and solar developers are running into the buzzsaw that is President Donald Trump. Trump pushed forcefully to kill tax credits for wind and solar development in his signature law, succeeding in curtailing the credits and vowing to hinder the industry in other ways. 

 The law effectively cuts planned renewables additions to the grid in half over the next decade compared to projections without it, according to modeling done by the non-partisan think tank Rhodium Group. That will mean rising electricity prices in every continental US state, due to the price of renewables increasing and more expensive gas filling the gap, as CNN has reported. 

 

Even with China’s blistering pace of installations so far, 510 gigawatts of wind and solar currently being built is astonishing. Shuo said the number seemed a little higher than what Chinese analysts have projected.

Mengqi Zhang and Yujia Han, the two Global Energy Monitor analysts who authored the report, told CNN that part of the reason the number is so high is that Chinese renewables developers were racing to build out quickly in order to claim government subsidies that expired in June.

“This is why the surge is coming before May,” Han said.

Most of China’s wind and solar farms are far away from its largest cities. But in China’s capital of Beijing, the country’s energy transition is apparent in another way – it is difficult to find a gas-powered car driving on the roads, Shuo said. Shuo recently visited Beijing and said nearly all Uber drivers there are driving EVs. 

A worker controls a robotic arm on the production line at an electric vehicle factory in Ningbo, China, on May 29.

Kevin Frayer/Getty Images

 

 

“All the drivers will tell you it just doesn’t make any economic sense for them to purchase another (gas) vehicle,” Shuo said. “Some of them told me that the fuel cost of driving an EV is about one sixth of an (gas)-powered vehicle.”

Climate analysts in China feel confident the nation has reached its peak oil use, given the dramatic uptick in EV use, Shuo said. But the outstanding question is China’s power sector, and whether all the wind and solar the country has installed over the last several years can displace coal-fired power. Over the few months, China’s increased demand for power has been met entirely by renewables, meaning the country hasn’t increased its planet-warming pollution even as it’s using more power. 

 

“There’s still a lot of entrenched interest to support coal, but overall what we’re looking at is renewable energy eating into the share of fossil fuel power generation,” Shuo said.

Meanwhile, in the US, more expensive electricity could significantly hamper economic development and discourage companies from building here, undermining one of Trump’s own priorities. With less wind and solar coming online due to the GOP law, plus long wait times to get new natural gas plants up and running, Rhodium analyst Ben King said some data centers and large manufacturing facilities may struggle to get enough power.

“Data centers, semiconductor manufacturing and other sources of new industrial load, that just might not be able to come online, because we may not have the generators to meet that demand,” King said.

‘Profound concern’ as scientists say extreme heat ‘now the norm’ in UK. Increasing frequency of heatwaves and flooding raises fears over health, infrastructure and how society functions

 

Weather records clearly show the UK’s climate is different now compared with just a few decades ago. Photograph: Geoffrey Swaine/Shutterstock

by Damian Carrington Environment editor

 

 

Record-breaking extreme weather is the new norm in the UK, scientists have said, showing that the country is firmly in the grip of the climate crisis.

The hottest days people endure have dramatically increased in frequency and severity, and periods of intense rain have also ramped up, data from hundreds of weather stations shows. Heatwaves and floods leading to deaths and costly damage are of “profound concern” for health, infrastructure and the functioning of society, the scientists said.

The weather records clearly show the UK’s climate is different now compared with just a few decades ago, the scientists said, as a result of the carbon pollution emitted by burning fossil fuels.

The analysis found that the number of days with temperatures 5C above the average for 1961-1990 had doubled in the last 10 years. For days 8C above average, the number has trebled and for 10C above average it has quadrupled. The UK has also become 8% sunnier in the last decade.

The assessment also reported that rain had become more intense. The number of months where counties receive at least double the average rainfall has risen by 50% in the last 20 years. Much of the additional rain is falling in the months from October to March. That period in 2023-24 was the wettest ever, in records that span back to 1767, and resulted in flooding in Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire, the West Midlands and elsewhere.

The sea level around the UK is rising faster than the global average, the report said, which worsens the impact of coastal flooding.

Six hundred people are believed to have died due to the heatwave that hit England and Wales at the end of June. The soaring temperatures were made 100 times more likely by global heating, the scientists calculated. Two more heatwaves have followed in quick succession.

The government’s preparations to protect people from the escalating impacts of the climate crisis were condemned as “inadequate, piecemeal and disjointed” by official advisers in April.

Mike Kendon at the Met Office, who led the analysis, said: “Breaking records frequently and seeing these extremes, this is now the norm. We might not notice the change from one year to the next, but if we look back 10 years, or 30 years, we can see some really big changes. We’re moving outside the envelope of what we’ve known in the past.”

“The extremes have the greatest impact for our society, if we think about our infrastructure, our public health, and how we function,” he said. “So this is really of profound concern.”

The assessment, called the State of the UK Climate 2024 and published in the International Journal of Climatology, found the last three years were in the UK’s top five hottest years on record. The warmest spring on record was seen in 2024 although this has already been surpassed in 2025.

The UK has particularly long meteorological records and the Central England Temperature series is the longest instrumental record in the world. It shows that recent temperatures have far exceeded any in at least 300 years. However, today’s high temperatures are likely to be average by 2050, and cool by 2100, the scientists said.

Sea level around the UK has already risen by 19cm over the last century, as glaciers and ice sheets melt and the oceans absorb heat and expand. The rise is accelerating and is higher around the UK than globally, although scientists are yet to work out why. It could rise by up to 200cm by the end of the century, said Dr Svetlana Jevrejeva, at the National Oceanography Centre.

Storm winds can push seawater surges on to coasts and are most dangerous when they coincide with the highest tides. “The extra sea level rise [due to global heating] is leading to an increase in the frequency of extreme sea levels and an intensification of coastal hazards,” said Jevrejeva. “It is only a matter of time until the UK is next in the path of a major storm surge event.”

While heat records are increasingly being broken, cold weather events are becoming less common. For example, days with air frosts have fallen by 14 per year in the last decade, compared with the 1931-1990 average.

The UK’s changed climate has also affected nature, the report said. The earliest ever frogspawn and blackbird nesting was seen in 2024, in records that began in 1999. All but one of the 13 natural events monitored were earlier than average in 2024, from the first lesser celandine flower to the first elder leaves. The changes mean species that depend on others, such as for food or pollination, risk getting out of sync, said Dr Judith Garforth at the Woodland Trust.

Prof Liz Bentley, at the Royal Meteorological Society, said the report showed the urgent need to make the UK resilient to climate-fuelled extreme weather: “This report is not just a record of change, but a call to action.”