Life in a heat dome: The American West is figuring out how to keep cool

Heatwaves are becoming more frequent and intense with climate change (Credit: Getty Images)

 by Lucy Sherriff

 

From planting trees to painting streets white, US cities are fighting extreme heat.

In 2013, Los Angeles became the first large city to pass a law requiring all new homes to have a cool roof. Since then, the city – where the number of days at 35C (95F) is expected to soar by 2050 – has rolled out numerous other keep-cool initiatives, including painting pavements white and expanding its Green Standards Building Code to include cool roofs on non-residential buildings and retrofits.

Despite the mitigation efforts, however, the population is still suffering from issues linked to excess heat. A study found the number of extreme heat-related emergency calls in Los Angeles between 2018 and 2022 directly correlated with the number of days that were 32C (90F) and above.

"The opportunities for heat mitigation in the US are huge," says Steffen Lehmann, director of the University of Nevada's Urban Futures Lab. "The knowledge is there, but the things that need to be done are not being done. It is extremely frustrating."

This year, extreme heat warnings are in place across much of the western US from 11 to 13 July, as a heat dome brings dangerously hot temperatures of 100-106F (38-41C). The extreme conditions come after a heat dome led to 4 July celebrations being cancelled in parts of the eastern US due to extreme heat.

 This latest heatwave is making it even more vital for cities to ready themselves for hot weather. But some experts say that cities are inadequately prepared – even though the science behind how to cool cities down is well known.

41 million Americans live in areas that experience extreme urban heat island temperatures (Credit: Getty Images)

Around 80% of America's population lives in urban areas – where the heat island effect can drastically worsen the impact of hot weather. Urban heat islands are densely populated, built up areas with few trees and large areas of dark concrete and asphalt that absorb the sun's energy. As the sun goes down, the manmade materials release the stored heat – ensuring that the city stays hot, even at night. Urban heat island temperatures can be up to 11C (20F) hotter than less populated areas.

Vulnerable communities, such as the elderly, children, and low-income populations, are disproportionately impacted by the heat – with hotter temperatures even taking a toll on newborn babies.

As US cities continue to experience record-breaking, life-threatening triple-digit days, researchers like Lehmann say many areas are still underprepared. In 2022, a group of scientists examined 175 municipal city plans from the 50 most populous cities in the US. Although the majority mentioned heat, "few included" strategies to address it, the report found.

 "If cities are not painting a complete picture of heat — how chronic it is, and its disparate impacts on the ground — we're not going to be able to fully protect residents, and we could end up exacerbating existing social and environmental injustices," says co-author Emma French, a doctoral student in urban planning at University College of Los Angeles.

 

Another study found 41 million people live in areas with extreme urban heat island temperatures. The report, by Climate Central, found 14 cities had an extreme contrast between temperatures in urban areas versus surrounding less-developed areas. These included Albuquerque, Bakersfield, Fresno and Las Vegas.

The problem is "too much talking and not enough action", Lehmann says. "It's extremely difficult to effect change." It is hard to hold one city up as a model case study when it comes to heat mitigation, Lehmann continues, because there's nowhere in the US doing it well.

"But", he continues, "I am optimistic. Because there are things cities can do to cool down. And I do think there is a mindset-change happening."

 

Green over grey

Tree-planting is widely known to lower surface and air temperatures by providing shade, and cooling by evaporation and transpiration. Research has shown that urban forests have temperatures that are on average 1.6C (2.9F) lower than unforested urban areas.

Planting shrubs on roofs can help reduce the overall surface temperature of the surface (Credit: Getty Images)

As a result, cities across the US have rolled out their own greening initiatives. Austin, Texas, requires 50% tree canopy coverage in the city by 2050. In Phoenix, Arizona – a place with the reputation for being the hottest city in the US – a tree-planting drive is bringing shade to some of the city's warmest neighbourhoods. More than $1.4m (£1m) has been approved to plant up to 1,800 trees across the city to provide cool corridors.

In Tuscon, Arizona, drought makes tree-planting even harder in low-income neighbourhoods, where residents often can't afford to plant or maintain trees in their gardens. The city runs a rebate programme to reimburse residents up to $2,000 (£1,563) for installing rainwater collection systems, where the water could be used for trees and green areas. This includes zero-interest loans and grants for economically challenged communities, as well as providing workshops in Spanish.

 

Plants are not just being planted on the ground, though, but also on roofs. In 2017, San Francisco mandated that at least 15% surface area of roofs on new buildings bigger than 2,000 sq ft (1,858 metres) must be covered by either solar panels or vegetation. A number of large buildings in the city have already installed green roofs, which not only remove heat from the air through evapotranspiration, but reduce surface temperatures of the roof surface. On hot summer days, a green roof's temperature can be cooler than the surrounding air, whereas a conventional rooftop can be over 40C (72F) warmer.

Paint it white

A recent study found that a clean white roof that reflects 80% of sunlight will stay about 31C (56F) cooler on a summer afternoon.

The idea isn't new – cities in North Africa and southern Europe have been doing this for centuries. Lehmann helped spearhead painting white roofs in Australia back in 2012, where community projects have been found to cool the insides of buildings by up to 2.5C (4.5F). Now, he says, the movement is finally making its way over to the US.

 

The city of New York has recently coated more than 10 million sq ft (930,000 sq metres) of rooftops white, which is reducing internal building temperatures by 30%. California, meanwhile, has updated building codes to promote cool roofs, which are seen as an important way to save energy.

Scientists around the world have been developing cool paint coatings for pavements, roofs and walls that contain special additives to reflect the sun's heat. White paint can reflect sunlight, but paint coating contains high concentrations of pigments which means the paint also has water-resistant and reflective properties. The coatings have been proven to help pedestrians feel 1.5C (2.7F) cooler.

The paint reduces surface heat absorption, meaning that at night, the lighter surfaces are not releasing heat they would have stored during the day.  Los Angeles has been trialling cool paint, but there are drawbacks; the paint the city is using costs $40,000 per mile (£31,268) and lasts seven years. Also, as Lehmann points out, "white roads don't stay very white for long".

Cooling a city down at night is extremely important because it gives residents a chance to cool down too – staying hot at night can lead to serious health problems. Night time is also when the urban heat island effect can be at its most severe.

For centuries, white paint has been used to cool urban areas (Credit: Getty Images)

Painting pavements with cool coatings is being trialled at various locations in the country. In 2020, a study in Phoenix found coating pavements with cool paint lowered the surface temperature of the streets. After the study's findings, the city made it a permanent programme.

But it's a complicated solution; reports also show white pavements can actually make people feel hotter, as the sunlight is reflected off the white ground, and is instead absorbed by the people walking on it. And although the surface temperature of the pavement in Phoenix was 5.5C (10F) cooler, the air temperature 6ft (1.8 metre) away from the pavement measured just 0.16C (0.3F) cooler.

 

Community participation

Data-gathering plays an important role in planning for the future when it comes to heat.

 

In 2022, 60 volunteers measured the morning, afternoon and evening temperatures across Clark County, where Las Vegas sits, as part of a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration-funded heat mapping study. The map produced from that data shows that elevated temperatures are worst in North Las Vegas, East Las Vegas and downtown, which can get up to 6C (11F) hotter than other parts of the city. The county is now using the data to inform heat mitigation policies which include community cooling centres and tree-planting initiatives.

In Albuquerque, New Mexico, the city worked with local volunteers to map temperature and humidity by handing out specially-designed thermal sensors. Residents drove or bicycled around prescribed routes twice daily to record more than 67,000 temperature points. The maps showed differences of up to almost 9.4C (17F) in different portions of the city, with hottest temperatures in downtown and neighbourhoods adjacent to highways. Again, the neighbourhoods worst affected were low-income communities. The city then teamed up with Nasa to take satellite images, which were overlaid with social vulnerability data to target frontline communities.

 

The city had never done something like this before, and the data allowed the city government to plan for heat accordingly, according to who needed help the most. "It led to two important strategies we're implementing right now," says Albuquerque's sustainability officer Ann Simon. One is a community energy-efficiency programme, where low-income families are helped to maximise their energy efficiency in their home and lower their energy bills by around £233 ($300) a year. To date, the city has made improvements in 104 homes.

"We're a small programme but we did just receive a large $2 million grant to help more families so we can help the number of families we serve by sixfold," says Simon.

 

Nasa will also be imaging the neighbourhoods again, which Simon hopes will inform future planning.

 

Planning for the future

Planning is also crucial for cities like Las Vegas, which is the second fastest-warming city in the US behind Reno, Nevada, and where temperatures this June hit around 46.1C (115F).

"Just a couple of years ago, very few cities were talking about preparing for rising temperatures, so it's an important step that heat is becoming a larger part of the conversation," says V. Kelly Turner, professor of urban planning and co-director of the University of California's Los Angeles Luskin Centre for Innovation.

 

Lehmann been working with Las Vegas city officials for the past six years developing a master plan for how to cool the city by 2050. In 2021, the city's Clark County released its 2050 Master Plan, which features plans to mitigate heat. Planting low maintenance and drought-tolerant plants to provide shade, reducing hardscaped areas, and designing buildings that provide shade are just some of the policies laid out. "But I believe we'll see change," says Lehmann, "now that the city wants it."

Las Vegas has already started on other initiatives, such as opening public cooling stations for the homeless during heatwaves, and beginning a project to plant 60,000 trees by 2050 to provide shade. At the parking lot of a large basketball stadium, 1,000 parking spaces are being removed in order to plant 1,000 trees. It's a controversial move though, says Lehmann, in a city that is so car-dependent. The city is also working with engineers at the University of Vegas to develop a reflective roof coating for the hundreds of casinos and hotels in Las Vegas – but its application will be voluntary, Lehmann notes.

There is certainly a plethora of science and research on how cities can cool down. However, as with most things, the science is complex; trees can make the air feel more humid­ ­– which can also lead to dangerous health impacts – and white paint on pavements can still leave streets feeling hot.

 

As always, it comes down to implementing a multitude of solutions, and thinking outside the box. Despite his frustrations, Lehmann remains positive. "As architects, our job is to reimagine the future," he says. "I don't need to see what Las Vegas looks like now, I need to see what it looks like in 20 years time."

--

This story was originally published on 13 June 2024, and updated with details of another heat dome over the western US on 10 July 2026.  

 

At least 25 people die in US as record heatwave scorches swaths of country. More than 20 states reported temperatures above 100F as heat dome sits over eastern US during holiday weekend

A woman grabs water from a bucket on the National Mall in Washington DC during 250th anniversary celebrations on 4 July. Photograph: Dominic Gwinn/ZUMA Press Wire/Shutterstock

 

 by Lucy Campbell

 

At least about two dozen people have died amid the perilous climate crisis-driven heatwave that has scorched swaths of the US with record temperatures.

As a huge heat dome sits over the county’s eastern half, extreme heat gripped millions of people in the days leading up to the US’s semiquincentennial on Saturday – and beyond it. More than 20 states experienced have reported stifling temperatures more than 100F (38C), marring celebrations. And more than 140 million people remained under active heat alerts across the US on Sunday.

Officials in New Jersey believe the extreme heat was a factor in the deaths of 22 people across 10 counties there, mostly in central and northern parts of the state. Many of the individuals were found in homes with no air conditioning, outside their residences, on the street and in parked cars, according to officials.

 

The first of those deaths occurred on Thursday, and the ages of the deceased in question mostly range from their mid-30s to their 80s. Preliminary findings cause investigators to believe the deaths are heat-related, though the chief state medical examiner for New Jersey would later determine the exact cause of death for each.

“This is not a typical summer heatwave,” the New Jersey department of public health said in a statement. “This type of heat can quickly become life-threatening to humans and to animals of all ages.”

 

The National Weather Service (NWS) has said cool air from the north in the coming days is going to lower some of the most extreme temperatures in the region, including New Jersey. The Fifa World Cup final is scheduled to be held in the New Jersey city of East Rutherford on 19 July.

Elsewhere, a heat-related death was reported in Cook county, Illinois, Natalia Derevyanny, a government spokesperson, told NBC News. The cause of that death was recorded as organic cardiovascular disease – with heat stress as a contributing factor.

Hinds county in Mississippi reported the death of 74-year-old Mitchell Ray Cooley due to heat exposure on Thursday, state officials said. Cooley had been reported missing, and his body was found the next day behind a gas station, the county coroner said in a statement.

 

People watch the Sail 250 parade of ships at Liberty State Park in Jersey City, New Jersey, on 4 July. Photograph: Adam Gray/Reuters

 

“Mr Cooley suffered from a medical condition that impaired his judgment,” the coroner’s office said. “Based on the investigative findings, scene examination, and subsequent evaluation, the cause of death has been determined to be weather-related heat exposure. At this time, there is no indication of foul play.”

Meanwhile, on 27 June, Martha Irene Van Egmond, 83, died in Bolton, Mississippi, after falling in her garden. When her husband, Rick, tried to help her up, he fell too. The couple were unable to get up and spent hours in the heat.

Rick Van Egmond said he and his wife called out for help, and eventually two men from a nearby apartment complex came – but it was too late for Martha. She died surrounded by flowers, doing what she loved, he said to local news outlet WAPT.

Jeramiah Howard, Hinds county’s chief death investigator, attributed her death to the heat combined with her age, WAPT reported.

A person cools off with water from an open fire hydrant during a heatwave on the West Side of Chicago, Illinois, on 2 July. Photograph: Octavio Jones/AFP/Getty Images

As Donald Trump spoke during rain-dampened celebrations in Washington DC on Saturday, emergency services there had treated 51 people with heat-related issues as of 8pm ET, with 12 taken to nearby hospitals, according to local emergency response officials.

Other events scheduled for Saturday – including the Independence Day parade in DC – were cancelled amid the blistering heat. Among other weather-related disruptions, Trump’s so-called Great American State Fair on the National Mall also temporarily closed down on Friday after reports that 44 visitors had been treated for heat-related illnesses.

The worst of the heat started moving out of the US’s north-east and midwest regions by Sunday, shifting farther south into the mid-Atlantic and south-eastern parts of the country.

But scientists warn that heatwaves with extreme temperatures are indications that the world must lower the greenhouse gas pollution driving the global climate crisis.

The NWS is urging the public to avoid heat sickness by drinking plenty of fluids as well as staying out of the sun and in air-conditioned environments. Officials have also asked people to check on relatives and neighbors

‘Point of no return’: New Orleans relocation must start now due to sea level, study finds. Louisiana’s cultural hotspot could be surrounded by Gulf of Mexico before end of this century, authors say

 

By Oliver Milman

 

The process of relocating people from New Orleans should start immediately, as the city has reached a “point of no return” that will see it surrounded by the ocean within decades due to the climate crisis, a stark new study has concluded.

Ongoing sea-level rise and the rampant erosion of wetlands in southern Louisiana will swallow up the New Orleans area within a few generations, with the new paper estimating the city “may well be surrounded by the Gulf of Mexico before the end of this century”.

Low-lying southern Louisiana faces multiple threats, with rising sea levels driven by global heating, compounded by strengthening hurricanes, also a feature of the climate crisis, and the gradual subsidence of a coastline that has been carved apart by the oil and gas industry.

 

Southern Louisiana is facing 3-7 metres of sea-level rise and the loss of three-quarters of its remaining coastal wetlands, which will cause the shoreline “to migrate as much as 100km (62 miles) inland”, thereby stranding New Orleans and Baton Rouge, according to the study, which compared today’s rising global temperatures with a period of similar heat 125,000 years ago that caused a rise in sea level.

This scenario makes the region the “most physically vulnerable coastal zone in the world”, the researchers state, and requires immediate action to prepare a smooth transition for people away from New Orleans, which has a population of about 360,000 people, to safer ground.

Louisiana has already experienced population loss in recent years, and this trend will accelerate in a disordered way, the paper warns, should no action be taken to confront the perils faced by its largest city and surrounding communities.

“While climate mitigation should remain the first step to prevent the worst outcomes, coastal Louisiana has evidently already crossed the point of no return,” added the perspectives paper, published in the Nature Sustainability journal. A perspectives paper is a scholarly article that provides an assessment, rather than new data.

Billions of dollars have been spent to fortify New Orleans with a vast network of levees, floodgates and pumps erected after 2005’s catastrophic Hurricane Katrina. But the growing threats to the city mean the levees, which already require hefty upgrades to remain sufficient, will not be able to save the city in the long run, the new paper warns.

 

“In paleo-climate terms, New Orleans is gone; the question is how long it has,” said Jesse Keenan, an expert in climate adaptation at Tulane University and one of the paper’s five co-authors.

 

Keenan said the timeframe available to plan a retreat isn’t certain but “it’s most likely decades rather than centuries”.

“Even if you stopped climate change today, New Orleans’s days are still numbered,” he added. “It will be surrounded by open water, and you can’t keep an island situated below sea level afloat. There’s no amount of money that can do that.”

City, state and federal leaders should begin work to help support people moving away from the New Orleans region in a coordinated way, starting with the most vulnerable communities, such as those in Plaquemines parish who live outside the levee system, Keenan said.

“New Orleans is in a terminal condition, and we need to be clear with the patient that it is terminal,” he said. “There is an opportunity for palliative care, we can transition people and the economy. We can get ahead of this.”

But, he added, “no politician wants to first give this terminal diagnosis. They will speak about it behind closed doors, but never in public.”

New Orleans faces obvious challenges – situated in a bowl-shaped basin below sea level, the city already has 99% of its population at major risk of severe flooding, the worst exposure of any US city according to a separate study released last week.

“Even compared to all other US cities, New Orleans really stands out, which is alarming,” said Wanyun Shao, a co-author of this study and a geographer at the University of Alabama.

“There is no specific timeline to how long New Orleans has left but we know it’s in big trouble. They are facing one of the highest sea level rises in the world and I don’t know how long human effort can fight against that tide. It’s like a timebomb.”

Shao said she concurred that relocation of people would have to take place. “I know it’s a politically and emotionally charged issue, there are people with a deep attachment to New Orleans,” she said. “But managed retreat, no matter how unappealing it may be, is the ultimate solution at some point.”

A major pressure upon this southern cultural hotspot is that its surrounding land is briskly receding. Since the 1930s, Louisiana has lost 2,000 sq miles of land to coastal erosion, equivalent to the size of Delaware, with a further 3,000 sq miles set to vanish over the next 50 years. The rate of land loss is so rapid that a football pitch-sized area is wiped out every 100 minutes.

To help counter this, Louisiana last decade settled upon a new sort of plan that eschewed building yet more flood defenses and instead sought to harness the Mississippi River’s natural ability to rebuild land. Levees and other infrastructure have, until now, straitjacketed the naturally meandering Mississippi and pushed the sediment it carries straight into the Gulf of Mexico, rather than replenish the coastal wetlands.

The so-called Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion project, which broke ground in 2023, would help restore a more natural flow in the Mississippi Delta and allow sediment to build up in coastal areas where it has been lost. More than 20 sq miles of new land would be created over the next 50 years under the plan, the project estimated.

However, Jeff Landry, Louisiana’s Republican governor, scrapped the project last year, arguing its $3bn cost was too high and that it threatened the state’s fishing industry. “This level of spending is unsustainable,” Landry said at the time, adding that the project imperiled the livelihoods of “people who have sustained our state for generations”.

Proponents of the project, which was funded via a settlement from BP over the Deepwater Horizon disaster in 2010, decried the decision as disastrous for the state, pointing out fishing communities will need to move anyway because of worsening erosion.

Garret Graves, a Republican former congressman who once led the state’s coastal restoration agency, said Landry was guilty of a “boneheaded decision” that would “result in one of the largest setbacks for our coast and the protection of our communities in decades”.

According to the new research paper, the loss of the sediment diversion plan “effectively means giving up on extensive portions of coastal Louisiana, including the New Orleans area”.

A legal effort to force oil and gas companies to pay for damage to Louisiana’s coastline, meanwhile, is also in doubt. This month, the US supreme court allowed the fossil fuel industry to federally contest a state jury decision that Chevron pay $740m to remedy harm caused to wetlands by dredging canals, drilling wells and dumping wastewater.

“The combination of these decisions is driving a scenario where the state has stopped trying to build land,” Keenan said. “That just accelerates the timeline. They could be buying time, but that option is foreclosed now, meaning it’s a certainty the New Orleans levees will fail again multiple times. The flood water will have nowhere else to go.”

While the US has never wholesale moved a major city before, numerous communities have relocated for economic reasons in the past, with some now being shifted due to the climate crisis, too. In Louisiana, the government could start planning and building appropriate infrastructure in safer areas on the other side of Lake Pontchartrain, the large estuary that sits to the north of New Orleans, Keenan said.

“This could be an opportunity for New Orleans to help migrate people further north, invest in long-term infrastructure and make that sustainable,” Keenan said.

“That exodus has already begun, so if nothing is done, people will just trickle out over time and it will be an uncoordinated mess. The market will speak as people won’t be able to get insurance. Louisiana has to stop the bleeding and acknowledge this is happening. But at the moment there is no plan.”

Timothy Dixon, an expert in coastal environments at the University of South Florida who was not involved in the new paper, said the study “does a nice job” of highlighting the challenge Louisiana faces with subsiding land combined with rising sea levels.

“New Orleans is not going to disappear in 10 years or anything like that, but policymakers really should’ve thought about a relocation plan a century ago,” said Dixon, whose own research has recommended a measured retreat from coastal Louisiana.

“Governments may not have the ability to just command people to leave, but people will volunteer to move and we are seeing that already. I’m not optimistic our political system is capable of dealing with this stuff, it will take leadership and unpopular decisions. Also, many people don’t want to move. They love where they are born.”

Landry’s office was contacted for comment but did not respond.

Quiet adapting - Climate change is a verboten topic in the Trump administration. But that hasn’t stopped the US military from continuing to prepare for it.

 

Tyndall is being rebuilt as a super-resilient “installation of the future.”

Photographer: Patrick Focke/US Department of Defense via Digital

 

 By Amanda Kolson Hurley

 

 

When Hurricane Michael, a Category 5 storm, tore through Florida’s Tyndall Air Force Base in 2018, it battered F-22 stealth fighter jets, destroyed hundreds of buildings and churned up 700,000 cubic yards of debris. The total cost of the damage approached $5 billion.

Now, Tyndall is being rebuilt as a super-resilient “installation of the future.” New buildings sit more than a foot above the ground, to remain dry through 75 years of sea-level rise. Their roofs are designed to withstand winds of up to 165 miles per hour. Manmade oyster reefs will protect coasts by breaking up waves.

The massive project will be 70% complete next year, said the officer leading it, Col. Robert Bartlow, chief of the US Air Force Civil Engineer Center Natural Disaster Recovery Division. “This is a first for the Air Force,” he said, with large-scale, cutting-edge construction taking place “on top of an existing base, while there was a continued flying mission.”

 

Storms like Michael are becoming more powerful and damaging as the world warms, and many military installations are exposed to them and other climate hazards. Still, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth vowed last year that the Pentagon wouldn’t do any “climate change crap” on his watch. Biden-era climate action plans were scrapped, and the 2025 National Security Strategy invoked climate change only to label it a “disastrous” ideology. Hegseth canceled nearly 100 research studies related to global warming and security, which experts say will compound the loss of climate knowledge across the federal government under President Donald Trump.

“Because ‘climate’ is a dirty word, we’re not investing in that predictive capability,” said Sherri Goodman, secretary general of the non-governmental International Military Council on Climate and Security and, from 1993 to 2001, the US deputy undersecretary of defense for environmental security.

But as Tyndall shows, the Defense Department is still engaged on one front of the climate fight: steeling its bases against the effects of a warming atmosphere, such as higher seas, fiercer storms and deadlier fires. A new flood wall is rising at the US Naval Academy in Maryland; a low-lying Air Force runway is being elevated in Virginia; and projects are underway to reduce wildfire risk around various military sites in Hawaii.

Work that was previously described as confronting the climate threat is now touted for ensuring “resilience” and “readiness.” The semantics are a nod to necessity: At stake are hundreds of billions of dollars of assets and the ability to launch missions quickly and smoothly.

Much of the military’s resilience work began years ago; construction timelines are long. The $900 billion 2026 National Defense Authorization Act, which Trump signed into law in December, includes measures that could be said to come under the umbrella of climate adaptation. The law bolsters the military’s ability to respond to wildfires; raises the cost limit for replacing structures destroyed by disasters; and requires military leaders to identify the biggest risks to water security on bases.

Close to $400 billion of federal government assets, most of them belonging to the Defense Department, are at high risk of being hit by a major coastal flood or storm in coming years, according to a Bloomberg Law analysis.

The Pentagon explicitly recognized the warming climate as a danger for many years. The 2008 National Defense Strategy flagged climate change as an emerging risk, and two years later it was named a national security threat in the Pentagon’s Quadrennial Defense Review. After that, the Defense Department and the individual armed forces put out a stream of climate and sustainability plans. (Some have now been removed from government websites.)

James Mattis, who served as defense secretary during President Donald Trump’s first term, described climate change as a destabilizing force in 2017. His Biden-era successor Lloyd Austin said in 2021, “We face all kinds of threats in our line of work, but few of them truly deserve to be called existential. The climate crisis does.”

Trump and Hegseth have made a sharp pivot. In a March 2025 memo to military leaders, Hegseth called climate change a “distraction” from fighting wars, ordered that references to it be removed from mission statements and barred any environmental initiatives from being included in the Future Years Defense Program, a strategic plan.

Hegseth also included a caveat big enough to steer an aircraft carrier through. “Nothing in this memorandum,” he wrote, “shall be construed to prevent the department from assessing weather-related impacts on operations, mitigating weather-related risks, conducting environmental assessments, as appropriate, and improving the resilience of military installations.”

The overarching goal at Tyndall, Bartlow said, is “preserving lethality in a high-end combat capability. When we talk about resilience, it’s focused on preserving that combat capability.” If another Category 5 hurricane hits, “there’ll be some interruptions, but the idea is you’ll be able to recover this installation quickly,” hesaid. “You can make that direct link back to readiness.”

‘On a whole other level’: rapid snow melt-off in American west stuns scientists Experts say brutal March heat has left critical snowpack at record-low levels – and key basins in uncharted territory

 

Nasa satellite images show how the snowpack in Utah has diminished between late February and late March. Illustration: Guardian Design/NASA Worldview

by  Gabrielle Canon

Snow surveys taking place across the American west this week are offering a grim prognosis, after a historically warm winter and searing March temperatures left the critical snowpack at record-low levels across the region.

Experts warned that even as the heat begins to subside, the stunning pace of melt-off over the past month has left key basins in uncharted territory for the dry seasons ahead. Though there’s still potential for more snow in the forecast, experts said it will likely be too little too late.

“This year is on a whole other level,” said Colorado State University climatologist Dr Russ Schumacher, speaking about the intense heat that began rapidly melting the already sparse snowpack in March. “Seeing this year so far below any of the other years we have data for is very concerning.”

 

Acting as a water savings account of sorts, snowpacks are essential to water supply. Measurements taken across the west during the week of 1 April are viewed as important indicators of the peak amounts of water that might melt into reservoirs, rivers and streams, and across thirsty landscapes through the summer.

It’s not just the amount of snow left on mountaintops that’s concerning experts, but the amount of moisture still frozen within them. “Snow water equivalent” (SWE), a measurement of what could melt off to supply natural and manmade systems, is exceptionally low.

Snowpack in California’s Sierra Nevada. Source: Nasa.

 

California’s Sierra Nevada had just 4.9in of SWE, or 18% of average, as of Monday, ahead of the state’s official 1 April survey, according to the state’s department of water resources. In the Colorado River headwaters, an important basin that supplies more than 40 million people across several states, along with 5.5 million acres of agriculture, 30 tribal nations, and parts of Mexico, had just over 4in of SWE on Monday, or 24% of average. That’s less than half what was previously considered the record low.

Schumacher said the incoming storm could slow the early melting but won’t be enough to pull the basins back from the brink. Snow water equivalent measurements going into April were at levels typically seen in May or June, after months of melt-off, according to Schumacher.

The issue is extremely widespread. Data from a branch of the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), which logs averages based on levels between 1991 and 2020, shows states across the southwest and intermountain west with eye-popping lows. The Great Basin had only 16% of average on Monday and the lower Colorado region, which includes most of Arizona and parts of Nevada, was at 10%. The Rio Grande, which covers parts of New Mexico, Texas, and Colorado, was at 8%.

“This year has the potential of being way worse than any of the years we have analogues for in the past,” Schumacher said.

The snowpack in the Colorado Rocky Mountains. Source: Nasa.

 

‘Nothing short of shocking’

Even with near-normal precipitation across most of the west, every major river basin across the region was grappling with snow drought when March began, according to federal analysts. Roughly 91% of stations reported below-median snow water equivalent, according to the last federal snow drought update compiled on 8 March. Water managers and climate experts had been hopeful for a March miracle – a strong cold storm that could set the region on the right track. Instead, a blistering heatwave unlike any recorded for this time of year baked the region and spurred a rapid melt-off.

“March is often a big month for snowstorms,” Schumacher said. “Instead of getting snow we would normally expect we got this unprecedented, way-off-the-scale warmth.”

More than 1,500 monthly high temperature records were broken in March and hundreds more tied. The event was “likely among the most statistically anomalous extreme heat events ever observed in the American south-west”, climate scientist Daniel Swain said in an analysis posted this week.

“Beyond the conspicuous ‘weirdness’ of it all,” Swain added, “the most consequential impact of our record-shattering March heat will likely be the decimation of the water year 2025-26 snowpack across nearly all of the American west.”

Calling the toll left by the heat “nothing short of shocking”, Swain noted that California is tied for its worst mountain snowpack value on record. While the highest elevations are still coated in white, “lower slopes are now completely bare nearly statewide”.

The snow is melting so fast in the Sierra that, if it continues at its current rate, little would be left by early April. It’s unlikely to keep up this astounding pace, but there’s still high potential for the earliest melt-off on record in the state, according to Swain.

“It is increasingly likely this season will be the one of the lowest 1 April snowpacks on record and one of the earliest peak snowpacks in the 21st century,” said Andy Reising, manager of California DWR’s Snow Surveys and Water Supply Forecasting Unit. “This year has featured many of the factors California is expected to see more of in the future: winters with more rain and less snow and stretches of hot and dry conditions.”

Snow around the Great Salt Lake seen between February versus March. Source: Nasa.

 

California’s reservoirs are nearly all filled beyond their historic averages, however, thanks to a series of robust rains. While this will help support water supplies, it will also mean fast-melting snow may be harder to capture.

In the Colorado River Basin, the situation could be even more dire. The two largest reservoirs on the Colorado River are Lake Mead and Lake Powell, which together account for about 90% of storage, are 25% and 33% full accordingly, as of 29 March, and there is little to fill them.

Already officials are in the process of relocating a floating marina on Lake Powell in anticipation of the quickly receding water levels, as experts warn the vital reservoir could drop to the lowest levels recorded since it was filled in the 1960s. If they fall far enough, the system would cease to function altogether. So-called “deadpool” – when water isn’t high enough to pass through the dams, generate hydroelectric power, and be distributed downriver – would be catastrophic.

 

The Colorado River has been overdrawn for more than a century but rising temperatures and lower precipitation are putting more pressure on the system that depended on by cities, farms, industries, and wildlife across the west. The extreme conditions have added more urgency and greater tensions to fraught negotiations over who will bear the brunt of badly needed cuts. Seven states that have blown past two key deadlines are still locked in a stalemate over how the river’s essential resources will be managed through a hotter and drier future.

But the dire snowpack numbers have pushed some municipalities to initiate early water restrictions. Local officials in Salt Lake City, Utah, have called on residents and businesses to begin conserving, with a goal to cut up to 10 million gallons, while city facilities will curb 10% of their use. Across Colorado, there are local orders that limit lawn watering, and in Wyoming residents were warned that full restrictions on outdoor irrigation could come as early as May. Farmers and ranchers across the west are also having to make hard decisions and big adjustments with smaller allocations of water and a recognition that supplies will be strained.

A troubling outlook for fire season

The fast-melting snow is expected to have profound impacts on drinking water supply, agriculture production, and outdoor recreation. It could also set the stage for bigger blazes.

“Unless there’s a major change in the weather patterns and we somehow pull out some sort of miracle springtime precipitation, we’re looking at an extended fire season,” said Dr Joel Lisonbee, senior associate scientist at the Cooperative Institute for Research at the University of Colorado Boulder, noting that there’s not a one-to-one relationship between snowpack and fire, but they are connected.

“In any sort of fire situation, you need some spark or ignition,” he said. Landscapes that would typically spend longer underneath a protective blanket of snow will become more primed to burn. Fire season may “begin weeks to months earlier than what we would usually expect,” he said. “These high temperatures and low snowpack will lead to a rapid drying of the vegetation that’s around, and that will lead to this early start.”

Dozens of large destructive fires have already erupted in recent weeks across the Intermountain West and the High Plains, spurred by extreme heat and low moisture. More than 1.5m acres have already burned this year across the US, more than double the 10-year average.

While Schumacher said he expects this year to be a standout one, the climate crisis is fueling warming trends that climate scientists have long warned will leave the west hotter and drier. Seasons with snow in the US west are shrinking while high fire risks stretch across more months.

“Climate change is going to result in a lot of these extreme events worsening,” said Dr Abby Frazier, a climatologist and assistant professor at Clark University, who added that compound events, where hazards overlap or occur in quick succession, are on the rise. The heat and the drought this year, served as a one-two punch, and will work together to produce greater dangers from fire.

She emphasized the need to take transformative action, and prioritize adaptation and mitigation. “It is heartbreaking to see it all playing out as we have predicted for so long,” she said. “The changes we have teed up for ourselves are going to be catastrophic.”

EUA e Japão anunciam projeto de energia nuclear de US$ 40 bilhões

Usina nuclear na Pensilvânia, nos EUA              

 

Washington | AFP

Os Estados Unidos e o Japão anunciaram nesta quinta-feira (19) um projeto de US$ 40 bilhões (R$ 210 bilhões) para construir reatores nucleares nos estados de Tennessee e Alabama, após uma reunião dos líderes dos dois países na Casa Branca.

Os diálogos entre o presidente americano, Donald Trump, e a primeira-ministra japonesa, Sanae Takaichi, ocorrem depois que Tóquio aceitou, no ano passado, investir US$ 550 bilhões como parte de um novo acordo comercial com Washington.

Na declaração conjunta desta quinta-feira (19) sobre os chamados pequenos reatores modulares (SMR, sigla em inglês) também foi anunciado um investimento de US$ 33 bilhões (R$ 173,5 bilhões) em instalações de geração de energia e gás natural na Pensilvânia e no Texas.

Em fevereiro, os dois países anunciaram a primeira parte de projetos por conta do novo fundo de investimentos, com compromissos de US$ 36 bilhões em três projetos de infraestrutura.

A declaração desta quinta-feira assinala que os projetos garantiriam a segurança, ao "acelerarem o crescimento econômico de ambos os países, abrindo, assim, caminho para uma Nova Idade do Ouro da sempre crescente Aliança Japão-Estados Unidos". Os SMR serão construídos pela empresa nipo-americana GE Vernova Hitachi.

 Estados Unidos e Japão também divulgaram hoje um plano de ação sobre o desenvolvimento de cadeias de suprimento de minerais críticos, em meio à preocupação com o papel dominante da China nesse setor.

Também foi revelado investimento de US$ 33 bilhões em geração de energia e gás natural nos EUA

Em 2025, o país asiático se comprometeu a investir US$ 550 bilhões nos Estados Unidos em acordo comercial