Union of Concerned Scientists Global Warming

Triple Danger Season is coming to a close, leaving broken heat records and dozens of heat-related deaths in its wake. These staggering numbers—even with undercounted heat-related deaths—bode badly for next summer, which could be hotter due to warmer global temperatures from a combination of fossil fuel-driven climate change and the Super El Niño.

This year, Phoenix, Arizona confirmed its first heat-related death in April. More than a dozen of the 29 people who died heat-related deaths in New Jersey over the Fourth of July weekend were unhoused, in what the New Jersey Coalition to End Homelessness called a “mass casualty event.” By early August, 50 people in Maryland had died due to heat-related causes, breaking the state’s record. And in early September, Obed Azahel Hernández Perez, a 24-year-old man from Mexico died in North Mississippi from prolonged heat exposure while harvesting sweet potatoes.

I don’t share statistics and news reports of heat deaths lightly. I’ve written before about my loved ones whose health and safety have been threatened by extreme heat exposure. The thought of my dad, a skilled tradesman, not coming home at the end of a day’s work is one of my biggest fears, and that fear has been reality for far too many families. In fact, the number of people who die in part because of heat has been vastly undercounted.

It’s worrying that, even as 2026 broke many heat records, 2027’s might be even worse. That’s why we need to do everything in our power now to protect people from extreme heat.

Record-breaking 2026 may be outdone by 2027 El Niño-charged heat

The months of July, August, and September 2026 each broke heat records, and summer 2026 was the hottest in the United States in the 132-years since records have been kept. Arizona tied for its warmest year on record, while New Mexico, Utah and Colorado had their warmest recorded summers.

On top of this, we can expect the combination of fossil fuel-driven climate change and the super El Niño to bring record-breaking, deadly heat in 2027 globally.

“El Niño events are characterized by warmer-than-usual ocean surface temperatures in the eastern Equatorial Pacific off the coasts of Ecuador and the Galapagos Islands… They affect weather patterns around the world,” explains Dr. Marc Alessi, UCS climate scientist.

“While El Niño is a natural cycle in Earth’s climate system, fossil fuel-driven climate change is not. When you combine an El Niño event with the overall warming of Earth due to emissions from heat-trapping fossil fuels, you get an exceptionally warm planet,” Dr. Alessi adds. We know that the planet will be warmer over the next year, which will increase the chance of heatwaves, and though we cannot pinpoint exactly where these heatwaves will occur in the world, we know we aren’t prepared for the heat we’re already experiencing in the US.  

https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/sites/default/files/inline-images/grid-ranks-tavg-202608.png NOAA One heat death is one too many

Heat is the leading cause of weather-related deaths despite the fact that heat illness and death are preventable with the right safety measures. Every heat death tells us that we are not doing enough to keep people safe from the dangerous heat we face today, and if we don’t act urgently and strategically at every opportunity, heat-related illnesses and deaths will continue to mount as our world warms.

A study by Boston University and NPR found that “on average between 2018 and 2025, we estimate that some 9,000 deaths each year in the country are impacted by heat—a factor of five higher than the official average over that same period. Some years, heat-related deaths can top 10,000.”

Extreme heat is taking an immense toll on human health and well-being, and human-caused climate change is increasing people’s risk. Climate change accounted for an average of 27% emergency room department visits for heat-related illnesses, suggesting that hospitals may need to plan additional staffing in ERs during heat season, a new scientific study found.  

To understand exposure to extreme heat, heat surveillance is a crucial baseline of information for local leaders to know what is happening in their communities so that they may identify and implement effective, tailored interventions to keep people safe.

Maricopa County in Arizona is leading the way in heat surveillance by tracking heat-related deaths and hospital visits on a public dashboard. You can see the staggering numbers of confirmed deaths and those that remain under investigation this year, and how those numbers compare with the date range in the previous year.

https://www.maricopa.gov/1858/Heat-Surveillance#annualreports Accessed Oct. 21

Health systems across the US should invest in tracking and investigating heat-related deaths and illnesses to the best of their ability to understand the complex health and socioeconomic factors putting people at risk.

Enforceable worker heat protections are long overdue

When the heat index—the combination of heat and humidity—is high, everyone including young, healthy adults can be at risk of heat illness or death. People who work in hot environments, both indoors and outdoors, are even more susceptible to heat illness and death.

Agricultural workers are 35 times more likely to die from heat-related occupational deaths and construction workers are 13 times more likely to die. Employers must provide employees with a workplace “free from recognized hazards that are causing or are likely to cause death or serious physical harm to his employees” per the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) General Duty Clause. Additionally, OSHA’s Heat National Emphasis Program (NEP) aims to reduce worker heat illness, injury, and death through inspections, employer outreach, and compliance assistance.

However, workers continue to get sick and die due to exposure to extreme heat on the job and worker advocates say that OSHA guidelines and the NEP are not a substitute for a permanent, enforceable standard—and they are significantly under-resourced. For example, there is only one OSHA inspector for every 84,937 workers.

Several states have enacted worker heat protection standards in the absence of a federal rule, and these standards vary in enforceability and effectiveness. At the recent Arizona State University Heat Health Governance Symposium, Dr. Vibhu Krishna, of the University of California San Francisco, told the story of Maria Isabel Vásquez Jiménez, a pregnant 17-year-old farmworker who died after her body temperature reached 108 degrees Fahrenheit.

Maria’s death came after California passed the most rigorous heat rules, but “state labor inspectors found more than half of the employers they audited were violating the rules.” Dr. Krishna emphasized the need for enforceable work standards because, “without that, people like Maria slip through the cracks.”

In fact, a new policy brief estimates that “extending California’s heat protections to the entire United States could prevent roughly 1,000 to 1,500 worker deaths per year.” Why should we choose California’s standard to follow? The key is in its enforceability. Researchers found that California’s protections have reduced heat-related deaths by an estimated 51 percent, only after the policy was updated to include enforcement and further revised in 2015. Clearly, enacting a standard is the first step, but it is crucial to enforce and revise implementation to ensure the intended benefits are achieved.

“Heat is everyone’s problem, but nobody’s responsibility”

Heat can affect us all, but we are not all equally affected. It is important for all of us individually to learn how to keep ourselves, our loved ones, and neighbors safe, but it is beyond time for policymakers to take responsibility and act.

“Heat is everyone’s problem, but nobody’s responsibility,” Dr. Jenni Vanos, Associate Professor in the School of Sustainability at Arizona State University, said during the same ASU symposium.

Here are a few urgent opportunities for leaders to act to keep people safe ahead of another hot and dangerous summer headed our way.

The Trump administration must finalize OSHA’s Heat Injury and Illness Prevention in Outdoor and Indoor Work Settings rule

In 2024, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) published the proposed rule: Heat Injury and Illness Prevention in Outdoor and Indoor Work Settings. This rule would “clarify employer obligations and the steps necessary to effectively protect employees from hazardous heat,” also stating that its “ultimate goal is to prevent and reduce the number of occupational injuries, illnesses, and fatalities caused by exposure to hazardous heat.” The rule has gone through years of development and extensive public comment with support from leading labor, union, and health advocates. After years of public comments, the OSHA standard needs to be rolled out as it stands to protect US workers. Instead, the Trump administration is delaying the rulemaking and narrowing it to be less protective and putting more workers at risk.

Congress must:

• Pass the bipartisan Asunción Valdivia Heat Illness, Injury, and Fatality Prevention Act

If the Trump administration fails to implement the OSHA standard, or weakens it, then Congress must pass the Asunción Valdivia Heat Illness, Injury, and Fatality Prevention Act. This bill would finally ensure that employers give workers water, rest, and shade among other commonsense safety measures to prevent heat illness and death. The legislation is supported by members on both sides of the aisle in the House and the Senate.

• Oppose H.R. 6213  

Some members of Congress are actively seeking to prevent OSHA from implementing a heat standard. H.R. 6213 would “prohibit the Secretary of Labor from finalizing, implementing, or enforcing a proposed standard with respect to heat injury and illness prevention.” UCS joins dozens of advocates in opposing this effort that would continue to put workers at risk. House Representatives of all stripes should care about this, as new research from Climate Central revealed that human-caused climate change has warmed every US congressional district since 1970. Every elected official should be doing everything to understand how their residents are at risk in a warming world, not blocking life-saving measures.

State and local leaders must pass heat policies

Policymakers across states and local governments can use the Heat Policy Agenda which provides hundreds of examples of actions to create, develop, and inform their own heat protection standards. Use this checklist for a model heat illness prevention rule.

Workers must hold employers accountable and advocate for each other

In 2023, I wrote about the Teamsters union’s campaign to get UPS to implement cooling equipment in their fleet vehicles to protect delivery drivers from dangerous heat conditions. The Teamsters successfully won a contract requiring UPS to increase air-conditioning available in vehicles, and to provide cooling stations and clean, cool drinking water. Unions across the country are working to win heat protections in their contracts and helping to train each other to stay safe in dangerous conditions. Learn more from the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health’s Fired Up! Workers for Heat Justice campaign and heat organizing toolkit.

The cost of inaction is too high

There is also an economic cost to killer heat. Research by UCS found that if we don’t take action on climate change, extreme heat would cause tens of millions of outdoor workers in the US to risk losing a collective $55.4 billion in earnings each year by midcentury. While lost wages and productivity costs are important and should motivate employers to do better on heat adaptation, people’s lives are invaluable.

Moreover, a new study suggests that the argument against heat standards is misguided: “Opponents of heat standards claim that such regulations will negatively impact outdoor industries…We found no evidence that California’s heat standard negatively affected the state’s construction or agriculture sectors.”

The cooler months ahead offer us a brief respite from the heat but are not an excuse for a break from action. We know that 2027 is going to be dangerously hot as we experience the combination of climate change and a super El Niño. As the death count rises in 2026, it is apparent that as a nation we are not doing enough to keep people safe from killer heat. Our leaders must pursue ambitious actions to protect people from heat in advance of next year. Every leader, from the neighborhood level to Congress has an opportunity to act. The time is now to assert that any heat death is unacceptable and put people’s lives first by enacting and implement lifesaving measures.

Today, California is releasing its Fifth Climate Change Assessment. Since 2006, the State has periodically gathered the best available science on how climate change is affecting California, and current law now requires these assessments at least every five years. The assessments are based on what we call “synthesis science”, which combines the most cutting-edge climate science into a set of reports written over several years by scientists with support from community members and Tribes and independently reviewed by experts.

Before I joined UCS, I coordinated the San Joaquin Valley regional report for California’s Fourth Climate Change Assessment, the first regional assessment ever done specifically for the Valley. Back then, we wrote about what might happen: longer droughts, less snowpack, more dry wells, more extreme heat, and drought-to-flood whiplash. Since then, we have watched much of it happen, sometimes more extreme and more frequent than we expected.

What we have witnessed recently

Since the Fourth Assessment, California has been hit hard by events that climate change caused or made worse. The 2020–2022 drought left thousands of domestic wells dry, mostly in disadvantaged communities. Then a winter of atmospheric rivers, including nine in just three weeks, flooded the state and brought Pa’ashi (Tulare Lake) back, flooding roads, farms, and homes in a lakebed that was drained a century ago. And this year, the snow drought that left California’s snowpack at just 18% of average by April 1 hit much of the West, and climate change made it about four times more likely. Our recent research shows that climate change caused by major fossil fuel polluters dramatically influences our water cycle. 

Nine of the 10 largest wildfires on record have occurred in the last decade, including Dixie and the August Complex fires that burned nearly two million acres combined. In the last decade, about 14 million acres have burned in California (an area equivalent to about 14% of the state burned in a decade). Our research at UCS found that emissions traced to the 88 largest fossil fuel producers and cement manufacturers are responsible for 37% of the forest area burned in the western United States and southwestern Canada since 1986.

In 2025, the Palisades and Eaton fires became the most expensive wildfire disaster on record (with losses estimated at up to $250 billion and more than 16,000 structures destroyed), killing 31 people directly and causing about 440 indirect deaths. Climate change made the fire weather 35% more likely and 6% more intense.

San Francisco on September 9, 2020, during the so-called “Orange Skies Day.” The thick wildfire smoke from the North Complex Fire and other concurrent wildfires didn’t allow sun’s blue light (shorter wavelength) to reach the Bay Area, allowing only warmer colors (with longer wavelengths that the smoke didn’t scatter). The 88 largest fossil fuel and cement manufacturers in the world are responsible for 37% of the wildfire area burned in the western U.S. and southwest Canada. Patrick Perkins/Unsplash

I guess we all have seen the effects of climate change everywhere.

In the United States in 2024, Hurricane Helene killed more than 200 people, mostly in North Carolina; climate change made its rainfall about 10% heavier and its winds about 11% stronger. In 2023, extreme heat killed 645 people in metro Phoenix, a record, in a month-long heat wave that scientists found would have been “virtually impossible” without climate change. In 2021, the Pacific Northwest heat dome killed hundreds of people in Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia; without climate change, this extreme heat dome would be at least 150 times less likely to occur, and if global temperatures increase by an additional 1.4°F, these heat domes that currently may happen once every 1,000 years, may occur every 5 to 10 years.

Around the world, climate change made the 2022 monsoon rains that flooded Pakistan up to 50% more intense, affecting more than 33 million people; made the 2023 rains that collapsed two dams above Derna, Libya, killing thousands, up to 50 times more likely; and made the rainfall that killed more than 230 people in Valencia, Spain, in 2024 about 21% heavier. By mid-2026, about 82% of the global ocean was experiencing marine heatwaves, with consequences for ecosystems and fisheries that are hard to predict. The oceans have absorbed about 90% of the excess heat trapped by climate change. That looks like a “ticking bomb”: that heat fuels stronger storms and marine heat waves today, and it will keep raising sea levels for centuries, even if we stopped all emissions now.

It is concerning, but if we know the predictions about it, we can prepare. But many scientists are very concerned about what we will not know, since the current US administration disbanded the author team for the sixth National Climate Assessment, the country’s main tool for understanding climate risks to every region and sector.

When a country stops measuring a threat, the threat does not go away. We just see it later, when it costs more, and the people with the fewest resources pay first, sometimes with their lives. In 2022, the White House Office of Management and Budget estimated that climate change could cost the federal budget up to $2 trillion a year by the end of the century.

That loss and destruction is what the California Climate Change Assessments are trying to prevent or minimize.

What makes this California assessment different from previous ones

Four things stand out:

1. Climate change is analyzed by warming level, not only by date. Instead of asking only, “what will 2050 look like?”, the reports also ask, “what happens to California when the world reaches 2°C of warming?” That focuses planning on how intense the impacts will be and what investments the state should make to protect communities.
   
2. Projections are more local. New downscaling methods translate global climate models into implications for California’s valleys, mountains, deserts, and coasts.
   
3. Tribes and communities shaped the science. Every regional report involved consultation with communities and Tribes. We did this for the San Joaquin Valley in the Fourth Assessment, the State saw that it made the report more connected to people’s reality, and now it is part of how every report is built. Tribes also had more support to develop their own research than in the Fourth Assessment.
   
4. The focus is shifting to solutions. We have a good idea of what kind of change is coming to California’s climate and its likely effects. Now we are focusing on the solutions that people on the ground want to see and, in some cases, are already testing.

California’s climate future, in a few numbers

The Statewide Summary brings together findings from across the assessment. A few that every Californian should know are:

• It will be much hotter. Average temperatures are projected to rise 3.5 °F to 4.3°F (1.9°C to 2.4°C) by 2050, and 5.7°F to 8°F (3.2°C to 4.4°C) by 2100, depending on the trajectory of global heat-trapping emissions.
  
• Our snowpack, which is an essential water reservoir, is shrinking too fast. April snowpack is projected to shrink about 40% by mid-century and about 60% by the end of the century.
  
• Weather whiplash will become the norm. Swings between very wet and very dry years will become more frequent. One in five Californians (about 7 million people) already live in areas at risk of flooding.
  
• Smoke will kill more people. California is projected to have the largest increase in wildfire smoke deaths of any state, more than 5,000 additional deaths per year by 2050.
  
• Heat waves will last longer. Under a high emissions scenario, the longest heat wave of the year grows from about three days across the state today to as long as 19 days in the Sierra Nevada and 17 days in the Inland Deserts by end-of-century. At present, people living unsheltered are 0.5% of Californians but represent 13% of heat-related hospitalizations.
  
• The coast is moving in. Sea level rise of 0.8 ft (0.2 m) by mid-century and 3.3 ft (1 m) by 2100, combined with a 100-year storm, can expose to coastal flooding 166,000 people and $60 billion in property (mid-century), and up to 310,000 people and $122 billion (2100).
  
• We are already paying for it. Home insurance premiums rose 85% on average between 2020 and 2026, and wildfire costs explain about 5 of the 6.2 cents per kilowatt-hour that electricity prices rose from 2019 to 2024.

Across all nine regions, the message is the same: farmworkers, Tribes, rural communities, renters, people living unsheltered, and low-income individuals and families face the most exposure and have the fewest resources to recover.

The San Joaquin Valley: water is the thread that ties everything together

I live in the San Joaquin Valley, and I coauthored the regional assessment again. The Valley is one of the most transformed landscapes in North America, with too many structural problems and injustices. That is why at UCS we focus a lot on this region, especially for all the relatively low-cost, high-reward opportunities to improve climate resilience, prosperity, and well-being.

The San Joaquin Valley is home to 4.4 million people, with a majority living in disadvantaged communities, and it includes dozens of Tribes that survived genocide and displacement over the last two centuries. The Valley is also the most profitable agricultural region in the United States. The Valley has lost 95% of its original wetlands and riverside forests, which has led to a massive loss of our natural climate resilience to cope with droughts, floods, and extreme heat. In some places the groundwater overdraft is so intense that the land has sunk more than one inch per month during droughts, permanently reducing the groundwater storage we need for future water and food security.

Here is what our report found:

• The Valley is warming fast. Temperatures have risen nearly 3°F (1.7°C) over the past half-century and could rise up to 5.5°F (3°C) more by 2100, a direct threat to the farmworkers and outdoor workers who feed the country, and also to livestock and crops.
  
• Winters are losing their chill. Much of the Valley has lost 160 to 400 winter chill hours over four decades, and models project about 20% fewer by mid-century, putting walnuts, pistachios, and stone fruits like cherries at risk.
  
• Water is becoming more volatile. Snow melts earlier, droughts are more intense, and the atmosphere is getting “thirstier”. The 2012–2014 drought was the most severe in at least 1,200 years, while extremely wet years are also becoming more likely.
  
• Groundwater, our “water savings account,” is overdrafted by about 2.2 million acre-feet per year, leaving thousands of dry wells and more concentrated nitrate, arsenic, and uranium in the communities least able to afford water treatment.
  
• Agriculture will look different. Irrigated acreage in the Valley could decline by up to about 40% under future climate projections. Our current agricultural system was built on water we do not have and on a climate that no longer exists.  

The same rural communities that breathe some of the worst air in the country are the ones most likely to lose their wells, work in dangerous heat, and wait the longest for help. Valley fever, which is increasing with wet-dry whiplash and can be lethal, hits the San Joaquin Valley and its farmworkers hardest.

Pa’ashi (Tulare Lake) reappeared in 2023 after heavy rains and floods. Angel S. Fernandez-Bou/UCS Solutions for the San Joaquin Valley that are already on the ground

The question is not whether the Valley’s landscape will change, but how, and who will decide. As our research shows, if we repurpose cropland strategically, in revitalization zones near communities and with communities shaping the plans, we can save water, reduce nitrate and pesticide pollution, restore habitat, and create better-paying jobs. These can all contribute to building communities that thrive even under extreme climate change. If we do it wrong, we could create dust bowls, ghost towns, and new injustices.

The Fifth Assessment documents solutions that work, in the Valley and across the state:

• Community-led land repurposing. In Allensworth, the Allensworth Progressive Association is building a community-owned Agroecology Hub with regenerative agriculture, agrivoltaics, and land access for farmers of color (watch Allensworth mini documentary if you haven’t). In Fairmead, residents are turning a 17.3-acre almond orchard into a stormwater basin with native habitat and a walking path. This approach is called creating buffers or revitalization zones around communities, and the State’s Multibenefit Land Repurposing Program funds this kind of transition that is already showing positive results.
  
• Managed aquifer recharge. About 3.6 million acres of agricultural land statewide could bank floodwater underground, turning the next flood into the next drought’s water supply, as long as we avoid contaminated sites.
  
• Floodplain restoration and smarter reservoir operations. Dos Rios State Park, guided by Mewuk and Yokuts Tribal communities, turned a former dairy into California’s largest floodplain restoration. Forecast-informed reservoir operations (FIRO) can keep more water in storage without increasing flood risk.
  
• Tribal stewardship. Prescribed and cultural fire can reduce the likelihood of catastrophic wildfire by up to 92% for a decade, and the removal of four Klamath River dams, after decades of advocacy by the Yurok, Karuk, and Klamath Tribes, reopened more than 420 miles of salmon habitat.
  
• Clean energy and climate-smart farming done right. Solar on repurposed farmland and agrivoltaics can create jobs and cut emissions with community support, while cover crops, compost, and diverse crops help farms hold more water and withstand heat and drought.

These solutions tackle climate change and also many of the root problems behind it, improving quality of life and, in many cases, our prosperity.

Aquifer recharge site at University of California Merced. Dr. Humberto Flores-Landeros. The importance of climate assessments for the future

California’s Climate Assessments are important to inform science-based, equitable resilience policies to help protect the State’s people, ecosystems, and economy from the impacts of climate change. Not every state has the capacity or resources needed to conduct this kind of assessment, but we all need it. We also need a robust National Climate Assessment, which is unfortunately under threat from the current administration.

Science helps us understand the challenges we face and points us toward the solutions that can help us build a safer, better future for people today and for generations to come.

That’s why I am grateful for California’s Fifth Climate Assessment.

Hoy California publica su Quinta Evaluación del Cambio Climático. Desde 2006, el estado recopila cada cierto tiempo la mejor ciencia disponible sobre cómo nos está afectando el cambio climático, y hoy la ley exige hacer estas evaluaciones al menos cada cinco años. Se basan en lo que llamamos “ciencia de síntesis”: se reúne lo más avanzado de la ciencia climática en una serie de informes que los científicos escriben a lo largo de varios años, con el apoyo de las comunidades y de las Tribus, y que después revisan expertos independientes.

Antes de llegar a UCS, coordiné el informe regional del Valle de San Joaquín para la Cuarta Evaluación del Cambio Climático de California, la primera evaluación hecha específicamente para el Valle. En aquel entonces escribimos sobre lo que podía pasar: sequías más largas, menos nieve en las montañas, más pozos secos, más calor extremo y cambios bruscos de la sequía a las inundaciones. Desde entonces hemos visto cómo buena parte de eso se ha cumplido, y a veces con más fuerza y más seguido de lo que esperábamos.

Lo que hemos vivido en los últimos años

Desde que se publicó la Cuarta Evaluación, California ha recibido golpes muy duros de eventos causados o agravados por el cambio climático. La sequía de 2020 a 2022 dejó sin agua miles de pozos domésticos, sobre todo en comunidades desfavorecidas. Luego vino un invierno de ríos atmosféricos, con nueve en solo tres semanas, que inundaron el estado y trajeron de vuelta a Pa’ashi (el lago Tulare): carreteras, campos de cultivo y casas quedaron bajo el agua en el fondo de un lago que fue drenado artificialmente hace un siglo.

Y este año, la falta de nieve que dejó la capa de nieve de California en apenas el 18% de lo normal golpeó a buena parte del Oeste, y el cambio climático la hizo unas cuatro veces más probable. Nuestra investigación más reciente muestra que el cambio climático causado por las grandes compañías de combustibles fósiles está alterando de forma dramática nuestro ciclo del agua.

Nueve de los 10 incendios forestales más grandes de la historia de California han ocurrido en la última década, entre ellos el Dixie y el August Complex, que entre los dos quemaron casi 2 millones de acres (810.000 hectáreas). En los últimos diez años se han quemado en California unos 14 millones de acres (5,7 millones de hectáreas), una superficie equivalente a cerca del 14% del estado. En UCS investigamos que las emisiones de las 88 mayores compañías productoras de combustibles fósiles y cemento son responsables del 37% de la superficie de bosque quemada en el oeste de Estados Unidos y el suroeste de Canadá desde 1986.

En 2025, los incendios Palisades y Eaton se convirtieron en el desastre por incendios forestales más caro de la historia (con pérdidas estimadas de hasta 250.000 millones de dólares y más de 16.000 edificios destruidos). Murieron 31 personas directamente y se calcula que hubo unas 440 muertes indirectas. El cambio climático hizo que las condiciones atmosféricas que aumentan el riesgo de incendios fueran un 35% más probables y un 6% más intensas.

San Francisco el 9 de septiembre de 2020, el día que se recuerda como el “día del cielo naranja”. El humo denso del incendio North Complex y de otros incendios al mismo tiempo bloqueó la luz azul del sol (de onda más corta), y solo dejó pasar los colores cálidos (de onda más larga, que el humo no dispersa). Patrick Perkins/Unsplash.

Pero todos hemos visto los efectos del cambio climático por todas partes.

En Estados Unidos, el huracán Helene mató en 2024 a más de 200 personas, la mayoría en Carolina del Norte, y el cambio climático hizo que sus lluvias fueran cerca de un 10% más fuertes y sus vientos un 11% más intensos. En 2023, el calor extremo mató a 645 personas en el área de Phoenix, un récord, durante una ola de calor de un mes que, según los científicos, habría sido “prácticamente imposible” sin el cambio climático. En 2021, el domo de calor del Pacífico Noroeste mató a cientos de personas en Oregón, Washington y la Columbia Británica. Sin el cambio climático, un calor así habría sido al menos 150 veces menos probable, y si la temperatura del planeta sube otros 1,4 °F (0,8 °C), estos domos de calor, que hoy podrían darse una vez cada mil años, podrían repetirse cada 5 a 10 años.

En el resto del mundo, el cambio climático hizo que las lluvias del monzón que inundaron Pakistán en 2022 fueran hasta un 50% más intensas, con más de 33 millones de personas afectadas; hizo hasta 50 veces más probables las lluvias de 2023 que reventaron dos presas sobre la ciudad de Derna en Libia, y mataron a miles de personas; e hizo cerca de un 21% más fuertes las lluvias que en 2024 mataron a más de 230 personas en Valencia, España. A mediados de 2026, cerca del 82% de los océanos del planeta estaba sufriendo olas de calor marinas, con consecuencias difíciles de prever para los ecosistemas y la pesca. Los océanos han absorbido cerca del 90% del calor extra que atrapa el cambio climático. Eso me parece una “bomba de relojería”: ese calor ya alimenta tormentas más fuertes y olas de calor marinas, y seguirá subiendo el nivel del mar durante siglos, aunque dejáramos de emitir hoy mismo.

Es preocupante, pero si sabemos lo que viene, podemos prepararnos. Lo que tiene a muchos científicos muy preocupados es lo que vamos a dejar de saber, ahora que el gobierno actual de Estados Unidos desmanteló el equipo de autores de la sexta Evaluación Nacional del Clima, la principal herramienta del país para entender los riesgos climáticos en cada región y en cada sector.

Cuando un país deja de medir una amenaza, la amenaza no desaparece. Simplemente la vemos más tarde, cuando sale más cara, y los que tienen menos recursos son los primeros en pagarla, a veces con su vida. En 2022, la Casa Blanca calculó que el cambio climático podría costarle al presupuesto federal hasta 2 billones de dólares al año (2 millones de millones) para finales de siglo.

Esas pérdidas y esa destrucción son justamente lo que las Evaluaciones del Cambio Climático de California buscan evitar o al menos reducir.

Qué tiene de nuevo esta evaluación

Hay cuatro cosas que destacan:

El cambio climático se analiza por nivel de calentamiento, no solo por fecha. Los informes no solo preguntan “¿cómo será 2050?”, sino también “¿qué le pasará a California cuando el planeta se caliente 3,6 °F (2 °C)?”. Así la planificación se enfoca en qué tan fuertes serán los impactos y en qué inversiones tiene que hacer el estado para proteger a las comunidades.

Las proyecciones son más locales. Con nuevos métodos de reducción de escala, los modelos climáticos globales se traducen en lo que significan para los valles, las montañas, los desiertos y las costas de California.

Las Tribus y las comunidades ayudaron a construir la ciencia. Para cada informe regional se consultó a las comunidades y a las Tribus. Nosotros lo hicimos en el Valle de San Joaquín para la Cuarta Evaluación, el estado vio que así el informe quedaba mucho más conectado con la realidad de la gente, y ahora forma parte de cómo se hace cada informe. Además, esta vez las Tribus tuvieron más apoyo para hacer su propia investigación.

El enfoque está pasando a las soluciones. Ya tenemos una idea bastante clara de cómo va a cambiar el clima de California y de lo que eso va a provocar. Ahora nos estamos enfocando en las soluciones que la gente en las comunidades quiere ver y que, en algunos casos, ya está probando.

El futuro climático de California, en algunos datos clave

El sumario de los informes reúne los hallazgos de toda la evaluación. Estos son algunos datos que todo californiano debería conocer:

• Va a hacer mucho más calor. Se calcula que la temperatura promedio subirá entre 3,5°F y 4,3°F (1,9°C a 2,4°C) para 2050, y entre 5,7°F y 8°F (3,2°C a 4,4°C) para 2100, según cuánto sigan aumentando las emisiones de gases que atrapan el calor en el mundo.
• La nieve de las montañas, que es una de nuestras grandes reservas de agua, se está acabando demasiado rápido. Se calcula que la nieve acumulada en abril bajará cerca de un 40% para mediados de siglo y cerca de un 60% para finales de siglo.
• Los cambios bruscos entre años muy secos y muy lluviosos serán lo normal. Una de cada cinco personas en California (unos 7 millones) ya vive en zonas con riesgo de inundación.
• El humo de los incendios causará más muertes. California será el estado donde más aumenten las muertes por humo de incendios forestales, con más de 5.000 muertes adicionales al año para 2050.
• Las olas de calor durarán más. Con emisiones altas, la ola de calor más larga del año pasaría de unos tres días en la actualidad en promedio en todo el estado, a hasta 19 días en la Sierra Nevada y 17 días en los desiertos del interior para finales de siglo. Hoy en día, las personas que viven en la calle son el 0,5% de la población de California, pero representan el 13% de las hospitalizaciones por calor.
• El mar le está ganando terreno a la costa. Si el nivel del mar sube 0,8 pies (0,25 m) para mediados de siglo y 3,3 pies (1 m) para 2100, una tormenta centenaria podría inundar zonas costeras donde viven 166.000 personas, con propiedades por valor de $60.000 millones (a mediados de siglo), y hasta 310.000 personas y $122.000 millones en propiedades (en 2100).
• Ya lo estamos pagando. El seguro de vivienda subió en promedio un 85% entre 2020 y 2026, y los costos de los incendios explican unos 5 de los 6,2 centavos por kilovatio-hora que subió la electricidad entre 2019 y 2024.

En las nueve regiones del estado, el mensaje es el mismo: los trabajadores del campo, las Tribus, las comunidades rurales, los inquilinos que rentan, las personas sin casa y las familias de bajos ingresos son los más expuestos y los que menos recursos tienen para recuperarse.

El Valle de San Joaquín: el agua lo conecta todo

Vivo en el Valle de San Joaquín y he vuelto a ser coautor de la evaluación regional. El Valle es uno de los paisajes más transformados de Norteamérica, y arrastra demasiados problemas estructurales e injusticias. Por eso en UCS trabajamos tanto en esta región, sobre todo por la cantidad de oportunidades de relativamente bajo costo y alto beneficio que hay para mejorar la resiliencia climática, la prosperidad y el bienestar de la gente.

En el Valle de San Joaquín viven 4,4 millones de personas, la mayoría en comunidades desfavorecidas, y también decenas de Tribus que sobrevivieron al genocidio y al despojo de los últimos dos siglos. El Valle es, además, la región agrícola más rentable de Estados Unidos. Ha perdido el 95% de sus humedales y bosques ribereños originales, y con ellos buena parte de su resiliencia climática natural frente a sequías, inundaciones y calor extremo.

En algunas zonas, la sobreexplotación de aguas subterráneas es tan grave que el terreno se ha hundido más de una pulgada (2,5 cm) al mes durante las sequías, y eso reduce para siempre la capacidad de almacenar el agua subterránea que vamos a necesitar para asegurar el agua y la comida en el futuro.

Esto es lo que encontramos en nuestro informe:

• El Valle se está calentando rápido. La temperatura ha subido casi 3°F (1,7°C) en el último medio siglo y podría subir hasta 5,5°F (3°C) más para 2100, una amenaza directa para los trabajadores del campo y quienes trabajan al aire libre, que son los que alimentan al país.
• Los inviernos ya no son tan fríos. En gran parte del Valle se han perdido entre 160 y 400 horas de frío invernal en cuatro décadas, y los modelos calculan cerca de un 20% menos para mediados de siglo. Eso pone en riesgo cultivos como la nuez, el pistacho y frutas de hueso como la cereza.
• El agua es cada vez más impredecible. La nieve se derrite antes, las sequías son más fuertes y la atmósfera tiene cada vez “más sed”. La sequía de 2012 a 2014 fue la peor en al menos 1.200 años, y al mismo tiempo los años extremadamente lluviosos son cada vez más probables.
• El agua subterránea, nuestra “cuenta de ahorros” de agua, está sobreexplotada en unos 2,2 millones de acres-pie (2.700 hm³) al año. Eso deja miles de pozos secos y más nitrato, arsénico y uranio en el agua de las comunidades que menos pueden pagar por tratarla.
• La agricultura va a cambiar. Según las proyecciones, la superficie de agricultura irrigada en el Valle podría bajar hasta cerca de un 40%. Nuestro sistema agrícola se construyó con agua que no tenemos y para un clima que ya no existe.

Las mismas comunidades rurales que respiran parte del peor aire del país son las que tienen más probabilidades de quedarse sin agua en sus pozos, de trabajar con un calor peligroso y de ser las últimas en recibir ayuda. La fiebre del valle, que va en aumento con estos cambios bruscos entre años lluviosos y secos y que puede ser mortal, golpea más fuerte al Valle de San Joaquín y a sus trabajadores del campo.

Pa’ashi (el Lago Tulare) reapareció en 2023 después de fuertes lluvias e inundaciones. Ángel S. Fernández-Bou. Soluciones que ya están funcionando en el Valle de San Joaquín

La pregunta no es si el paisaje del Valle va a cambiar, sino cómo va a cambiar y quién lo va a decidir. Como muestra nuestra investigación, si reusamos tierras agrícolas de manera estratégica, en zonas de revitalización cerca de las comunidades y con las comunidades diseñando los planes, podemos ahorrar agua, reducir la contaminación por nitratos y pesticidas, restaurar hábitat y crear trabajos mejor pagados. Todo eso ayuda a construir comunidades que salgan adelante incluso con un cambio climático extremo. Si lo hacemos mal, podemos acabar con tormentas de polvo, pueblos fantasma y nuevas injusticias.

La Quinta Evaluación documenta soluciones que funcionan, en el Valle y en todo el estado:

• Reúso de tierras agrícolas liderado por la comunidad. En Allensworth, la Asociación Progresista de Allensworth está construyendo un centro de agroecología que pertenece a la comunidad, con agricultura regenerativa, agrivoltaica y acceso a la tierra para agricultores de color (si no lo has visto, mira el minidocumental sobre Allensworth). En Fairmead, los vecinos están convirtiendo un huerto de almendros de 17,3 acres (7 hectáreas) en una cuenca de aguas de lluvia de tormenta, con hábitat nativo y un sendero para caminar. A esto lo llamamos crear zonas de amortiguamiento o de revitalización alrededor de las comunidades, y el programa estatal Multibenefit Land Repurposing Program (programa para el reúso de tierras con múltiples beneficios) financia este tipo de transición, que ya está dando buenos resultados.
• Recarga gestionada de acuíferos. Cerca de 3,6 millones de acres (1,46 millones de hectáreas) de tierras agrícolas en el estado podrían guardar agua de las crecidas bajo tierra, para que el agua de la próxima inundación sirva en la próxima sequía, siempre que evitemos los terrenos contaminados.
• Restaurar las zonas de inundación de los ríos y manejar mejor las presas. El Parque Estatal Dos Ríos, considerando la perspectiva de comunidades tribales Mewuk y Yokuts, convirtió una antigua lechería en la restauración de llanura de inundación más grande de California. Y operar las presas con base en los pronósticos del tiempo (FIRO, por sus siglas en inglés) permite guardar más agua sin aumentar el riesgo de inundaciones.
• El cuidado de la tierra por parte de las Tribus. Las quemas culturales pueden reducir hasta en un 92% la probabilidad de incendios catastróficos durante una década, y la eliminación de cuatro presas en el río Klamath, después de décadas de lucha de las Tribus Yurok, Karuk y Klamath, reabrió más de 420 millas (675 km) de hábitat para el salmón.
• Energía limpia y agricultura climáticamente inteligente, bien hechas. Los paneles solares en tierras agrícolas reusadas y la agrivoltaica pueden crear empleos y reducir emisiones, siempre con el respaldo de las comunidades. Y los cultivos de cobertura, la composta y la diversidad de cultivos ayudan a que la tierra guarde más agua y resista mejor el calor y la sequía.

Estas soluciones no solo enfrentan el cambio climático, sino también muchos de los problemas estructurales: mejoran la calidad de vida y, en muchos casos, nuestra prosperidad.

Sitio de recarga de acuíferos en UC Merced. Dr. Humberto Flores-Landeros. Por qué las evaluaciones climáticas son clave para el futuro

Las Evaluaciones Climáticas de California son clave para diseñar políticas de resiliencia justas y basadas en la ciencia, que protejan a la gente, los ecosistemas y la economía del estado frente a los impactos del cambio climático. No todos los estados tienen la capacidad ni los recursos para hacer este tipo de evaluación, pero todos la necesitamos. También necesitamos una Evaluación Nacional del Clima sólida, que lamentablemente está en riesgo por las decisiones del gobierno actual.

La ciencia nos ayuda a entender los retos que tenemos por delante y nos muestra las soluciones para construir un futuro más seguro y mejor, para nosotros y para las próximas generaciones.

Por eso agradezco tanto la Quinta Evaluación del Cambio Climático de California.

Why are we constantly trying to prove human influence in extreme weather events when we already know that fossil fuel-driven climate change has fundamentally altered the climate system?

In a Nature Climate Action comment released two weeks ago, my colleagues and I propose a significant normative shift in climate attribution science—and ultimately, in how we talk about climate change. Rather than repeatedly asking and testing for human influence in climate or weather extremes, scientists should begin by assuming that fossil fuel-driven climate change impacts every event to some extent.

Our climate system—the atmosphere, ocean, and land—has been fundamentally changed due to decades of fossil fuel-driven climate change. For example, due to warmer temperatures, the atmosphere can now hold more water, leading to an intensification of the global water cycle. In addition to an expanding Hadley Circulation, there is evidence of a poleward shift of the westerly jet streams, which changes weather patterns over the US. In the oceans, which have absorbed 92% of the heat added to the climate system from fossil fuel-caused warming, more frequent and intense marine heatwaves are occurring globally.

Given humans’ clear role in fundamentally changing the system, my colleagues and I attempt to shift the norms within attribution science and chart out a path that more directly achieves climate action and climate justice initiatives.

What is climate attribution science?

Climate attribution science is a mature sub-field of climate science that has been tested and perfected over the last two decades. For example, extreme event attribution answers the question in many instances, “how much more intense was this extreme event due to fossil fuel-driven climate change?” Or, “how much more frequent will this extreme event become due to fossil fuel-driven climate change?”

Scientists have now published hundreds of attribution studies, many finding conclusive evidence that extreme heat and rainfall, tropical cyclone rainfall, and weather conditions that produce wildfires in the western U.S. are exacerbated by human-caused climate change.

Yet still, scientists, journalists, and media frequently ask after an extreme event, “did climate change contribute to this?” The answer is yes. According to the latest IPCC report, “It is unequivocal that human influence has warmed the atmosphere, ocean and land… climate change is already affecting many weather and climate extremes in every region across the globe.” The emission of heat-trapping gases into our atmosphere has fundamentally changed how our climate system works. We no longer need to ask, “was this influenced by climate change?” We can instead assume there was some influence, and instead ask, “how? And to what extent?” And the urgent question, “what do we do about it?”

Big Oil learned from Big Tobacco

Why are we in this mess to begin with? It all has to do with “doubt” in the science, manufactured by Big Oil. According to a report released by my colleagues, Big Oil knew that the burning of fossil fuels would lead to climate change as early as the late 1950s, but instead of acting on this knowledge to change their business model to reflect the science, they began sowing doubt in the science in order to continue profiting off of the extraction and burning of fossil fuels.

Scientists have been in this position—where an industry spreads lies to confuse people about settled scientific facts—before. In the mid-20th century, a buildup of evidence linking smoking to lung cancer led tobacco companies to deliberately spread misinformation that cast doubt on the established medical science, allowing them to profit off the sale of their product despite known deadly health impacts.

Today, the fossil fuel industry is using the same methods as Big Tobacco, and today’s situation is actually far worse. Fossil fuel-driven climate change was well-understood in the 1980s, and President George H. W. Bush famously pushed for action on the climate crisis, contributing to the formation of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.

Big Oil responded by deliberately spreading misinformation, including questioning the scientific basis of climate science and citing the economic cost of switching away from fossil fuels without accounting for the costs of climate change itself. This was done through advertorials and the funding and amplifying of junk science, which Exxon and other companies were working to create and spread by the late 1990s.

Why does this matter for attribution science? The fact is that climate scientists are constantly held back by persistent disinformation spread by the fossil fuel industry. A substantial amount of resources and capacity have been spent to replicate and communicate the same research and conclusions that have been well understood for decades, when scientists could have instead been innovating climate science more rapidly.

It’s also clear that advancements in attribution science could strengthen climate litigation. In response, conservative groups are continuing to spread the lie that climate science isn’t settled, and legislators are openly questioning the validity of attribution science in proposed legislation that would grant Big Oil legal immunity.

The future of attribution science

With this NPJ Climate Action comment, we argue for moving beyond repeating well-established conclusions of climate change, which is exactly what Big Oil wants us to do. We don’t need to redo the science that a given extreme heatwave is influenced by fossil fuel-driven climate change when it already occurs in a changed system!

The message here is not just for climate scientists, but also journalists, opinion leaders, and the general public. We should begin all analyses of extreme weather events from the established physical reality that all events occur within a fossil fuel-altered climate system. We no longer need to question if each event was influenced by climate change.

This normative shift enables scientists to focus on opportunities for innovation in attribution science that more directly address equitable climate action. For example, more scientists could shift their focus to improving both impact and source attribution science. Impact attribution answers questions like, “how many more deaths or how much more economic damage resulted from this extreme weather event due to fossil fuel-driven climate change?” Source attribution studies quantify oil and gas producers’ individual contributions to climate trends and extreme events. As litigation pursues accountability for fossil fuel companies, source attribution studies can be key in informing these lawsuits.

As the impacts from fossil fuel-driven climate change continue to accelerate, it is up to scientists, communicators, and the public to break through the disinformation that bad actors continue to spread to slow down scientific advancement and climate action. Updating the norms of attribution science will allow for the science to continue to evolve and effectively respond to the climate crisis. Our climate science needs to be able to shed the dead weight of these tired, fossil fuel-interest-serving arguments, and instead to bring all its energy to helping create a lasting society for future generations.

Last week marked a watershed moment for climate accountability in two country’s highest courtrooms. In a landmark decision, the High Court of Australia ruled in favor of climate action in MACH Energy Australia v. Denman. Simultaneously, across the Pacific, the United States Supreme Court convened to hear oral arguments in Suncor Energy (USA) Inc. v. County Commissioners of Boulder County. For those of us working at the intersection of science, law, and policy, this convergence is not a coincidence, but evidence of a maturing field. Since 2015, over 215 climate cases against governments have reached these apex courts, with more than half resulting in outcomes positive for climate action.  

Together, these cases illustrate two increasingly important fronts in climate accountability: whether decision-makers must confront the full emissions consequences of fossil fuel extraction, and whether fossil fuel companies can be held responsible for the financial costs of climate harms linked to their conduct. For each of these, scientific evidence is helping define the questions courts can meaningfully answer. 

Importantly, the Australian case also holds some lessons for other high courts and shows that courts do have the skills and capacity to grapple with scientific evidence to help make informed decisions for our world.  

The Australian victory: Scope 3 emissions and legal duty 

The High Court of Australia’s decision is particularly significant because it is the first climate case to reach that nation’s highest court, and the first to acknowledge that all heat-trapping gas emissions, including those from combustion, must be assessed as part of efforts to minimize emissions. The Union of Concerned Scientists intervened in this proceeding to ensure the court had access to the best available science regarding heat-trapping gas emissions and attribution science.  

At the heart of the case was the Mount Pleasant coal mine expansion in New South Wales. The Independent Planning Commission had granted development consent, but the New South Wales Court of Appeal subsequently invalidated that consent. The Court of Appeal found that the Commission failed to comply with its statutory duty to consider whether conditions should be imposed to ensure heat-trapping gas emissions were “minimised to the greatest extent practicable.” 

The critical issue was Scope 3 emissions—the indirect emissions that occur when the coal extracted from the mine is burned, for example when the product is used as intended. These emissions represent 98% of the project’s total greenhouse gas footprint. The Commission had previously reasoned that because these emissions would be accounted for in the countries where the coal was consumed (under the Paris Agreement), they did not need to consider minimizing them in the approval process. 

The High Court, in a 3-2 majority decision, dismissed the mining company’s appeal, upholding the invalidation of the consent. The majority opinion clarified that the statutory requirement to consider minimizing emissions applies to all heat-trapping gas emissions, including Scope 3. A decisionmaker cannot simply defer responsibility to international accounting frameworks; they must actively consider how to minimize the full climate impact of a project to the greatest extent practicable. 

This ruling shows courts have the capacity to explore and engage with the complexities of climate science, and that science can inform better, safer decisions. 

The US context: liability and preemption 

While Australia was deciding a case about permitting and emissions assessment, the US Supreme Court began its new term last Monday hearing a different climate case: Suncor Energy v. Boulder County. 

The legal questions addressed in these two cases differ in key ways. Unlike the Australian case, which focused on administrative law and the duty to consider emissions during the approval process, the underlying issue in the Suncor case is a “polluter pays” liability suit based on whether fossil fuel companies misled the public about the risks of their products while knowingly profiting from activities that drive climate change. Local governments in Colorado are seeking compensation from fossil fuel companies for the costs of adapting to climate impacts—wildfires, floods, and heatwaves—alleging that these companies deceived the public about the risks of their products. This is really important to understand: fundamentally this case is about fraud, not emissions.  

During oral arguments, some of the justices did not seem focused on the central  question before SCOTUS: whether state courts have jurisdiction to hear these claims. The preemption argument advanced by fossil fuel companies rests on a misrepresentation of the case’s subject matter—one that, if accepted, would bar communities from bringing fraud cases in state courts regardless of the merits.  

Based on the oral arguments, several justices expressed skepticism toward the oil industry’s position, while others appeared to accept the premise that the case was primarily about reducing emissions. Justice Elena Kagan pressed the industry’s lawyers on where their preemption argument was grounded in law. Justice Sonia Sotomayor noted that the Clean Air Act does not regulate marketing or advertising. Chief Justice John Roberts pointed out that state courts have long allowed people to file suits for injuries occurring in their state. Justice Amy Coney Barrett characterized one of the oil companies’ arguments as “a little slippery.” 

Some justices also questioned whether the Supreme Court should even be hearing this case yet. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson asked why the Court shouldn’t wait for state courts to finish their work before stepping in. These questions suggest the Court may be hesitant to shut the door on climate accountability lawsuits before they’ve had a chance to be heard and adjudicated on the merits. 

If these cases move forward, the courts will have the opportunity to examine two distinct bodies of evidence. First, social science research documenting fossil fuel industry deception campaigns. Second, physical climate attribution science. As Jeff Goodell recently wrote in the New York Times, this science has oil companies “running scared” because it can inform questions about foreseeability, causation, and damages. When courts allow these cases to proceed, science can help inform judicial decision-making, like we saw in the Australian case.  

Courts as venues for science 

While the Australia case did show one way science can help to inform the courts, there is still room for improvement. When I was preparing the Union of Concerned Scientists’ intervention in the Australian case, I was struck by how much the attribution science had advanced between the initial planning commission decision and the High Court hearing. What we can say with confidence in 2026 is far more precise than what was available when the case first entered the court system. 

This pattern isn’t unique to Australia. Cases filed by Boulder and other communities and states in the United States have similarly moved through the courts while the underlying science has developed. Methods that connect emissions to specific climate impacts and quantify damages have evolved and improved. Yet our legal processes don’t always have built-in mechanisms to ensure judges have access to the most current science as cases progress. 

For scientists, this presents an opportunity. The legal questions being asked—about the minimization of emissions, the foreseeability of harm, and the allocation of costs—are fundamentally scientific questions wrapped in legal doctrine. When courts ask, “Did the decisionmaker consider the full scope of emissions?” or “Can we trace these damages to these actions?”, they are inviting the scientific community to provide the evidence needed to answer them and to help to intervene in cases to ensure the courts have access to the best science.  

What comes next? 

The outcomes of these cases will ripple far beyond their specific jurisdictions. The High Court of Australia’s ruling on considering Scope 3 emissions sets a powerful precedent for how projects are assessed globally. It informs litigators and policymakers that ignoring the downstream impacts of fossil fuel extraction is not legally tenable.  

Now, states and communities across the United States are awaiting the Supreme Court judgment in the Boulder case. But these lawsuits aren’t happening in a vacuum. As fossil fuel companies argue in court that they should be shielded from liability, their allies are simultaneously pushing state legislation to grant the industry blanket immunity—attempting to close courthouse doors through multiple channels. 

As Jeff Goodell noted, even an unfavorable ruling on the Boulder case won’t slam the door shut on climate accountability. The science informing these cases remains compelling. The communities seeking resources for damages will continue to fight for justice, and the need for climate accountability will outlast any single decision.  

Last week, the EPA held a public hearing on its proposal to entirely remove the agency’s authority to regulate the power sector’s heat-trapping emissions under the Clean Air Act. If finalized, this would be a huge blow to efforts to protect people from the rapidly worsening impacts of climate change. I testified at the hearing, alongside many powerful speakers including representatives of public health groups, environmental groups, community-based and environmental justice groups, and parents worried about their kids’ health.

This proposal was released alongside the agency’s final repeal of the power plant carbon standards, while earlier this month, the Trump administration also rolled back fuel economy standards. These attacks follow the agency’s repeal of the Endangerment Finding earlier this year, and are part of a series of dozens of key health and climate protection rollbacks by the Trump administration. EPA administrator Lee Zeldin has literally upended the mission of the agency: instead of protecting public health and welfare, based on the best available science, he is intent on boosting the interests of fossil fuel companies and other major polluters.

Here’s what I said in my oral testimony at the public hearing—you can also watch the whole recording below.

Good morning. My name is Rachel Cleetus, and I am the climate program director for the Union of Concerned Scientists.

I am testifying today in strong opposition to EPA’s egregious and dangerous proposal to entirely abandon its authority and responsibility under the Clean Air Act to set limits on the power sector’s global warming pollution. With climate impacts rapidly worsening—in some cases irreversibly—and proliferating data centers driving increases in fossil fuel-fired power plants, this move by EPA administrator Zeldin threatens to greatly exacerbate public health harms.

Coal- and gas-fired power plants are the United States’ largest stationary source of global warming emissions. Globally, the United States is the second-largest contributor of annual heat-trapping emissions, and the largest historical emitter. There is no question that U.S. power plant emissions are a significant contributor to the cumulative emissions that drive fossil-fueled climate change.

This proposal stands in direct contradiction to decades of scientific evidence underscoring the human health harms from heat-trapping emissions. A 2025 report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NAS) that synthesizes the latest science says that “… the evidence for current and future harm to human health and welfare created by human-caused greenhouse gases is beyond scientific dispute.” 

This proposal also contradicts established law, namely the Clean Air Act, a law passed by Congress. EPA’s authority to regulate GHGs under the Clean Air Act was confirmed by the Supreme Court in 2007 and upheld by courts repeatedly since then.

At a time when people across our nation are already experiencing costly and deadly climate-fueled disasters—including extreme heatwaves, floods, drought and wildfires—EPA should be doing everything it can to protect communities, businesses and our economy from the mounting toll. Instead, if this proposal is finalized, it would exacerbate the harms and costs to everyone.  

EPA should not be forcing a false choice between our health and our prosperity. In fact, it is abundantly clear that the economic costs and human toll from climate change are already rapidly escalating. As just one example, we are seeing the consequences in the insurance market where people are facing skyrocketing premiums driven in part by climate-fueled disasters.

Quite simply, the choices we make today about our carbon emissions will have profound consequences for generations to come. With the planet on the verge of breaching 1.5°C of global warming and with the US and the world just experiencing the hottest summer on record, it couldn’t be clearer why the EPA must act urgently to limit heat-trapping emissions. EPA should do its job and stop looking for dubious ways to abdicate its responsibility to protect the public while propping up the interests of fossil fuel polluters. 

I urge you to abandon this harmful proposal to gut EPA’s Clean Air Act authority to regulate power sector heat-trapping emissions and instead please fulfill your obligations to limit health-harming global warming pollution.  

Thank you for the opportunity to speak today.

The comment deadline for this EPA proposal is November 2, 2026. Please add your voice urging EPA to take back this reckless proposal and uphold its authority to regulate power sector heat-trapping emissions and protect public health.

As artificial intelligence booms, data centers—the physical infrastructure driving AI—have become a topic of concern for towns across the United States. Research shows that even the industry’s claims of modest economic benefits are overstated. They’re worsened by the staggering health and environmental costs. 

UCS has documented the wide range of negative ecological impacts associated with artificial intelligence, as well as the financial burdens placed-on ratepayers. These factors, coupled with health impacts, can feel overwhelming. But, cumulative impacts analysis, a framework used for evaluating all the way the decisions may affect the local environment and health, could help. Data-center-specific cumulative impacts analyses could give decision makers a more complete understanding of the plethora of potential health impacts from a proposed center. Ultimately, this could help us avoid, minimize, and mitigate some of these impacts, preventing them from further exacerbating existing inequities. 

Understanding Data Centers’ Public Health Impacts 

One of the most prominent environmental stressors associated with data centers is air pollution. Across the United States, around 60% of data centers’ exorbitant energy demands are met through fossil fuels, emitting massive quantities of particulate matter, sulfur dioxide, and heat-trapping greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and nitrous oxides. In fact, it was estimated that last year hyperscale data centers were responsible for up to 54 million metric tons of CO2 emissions—as much as 11.7 million cars.  

Many data centers also rely on diesel backup generators, which are even more polluting, releasing 200-600 times as much nitrogen oxide, for example, than even gas power plants. Air pollutants harm nearly every system in the body and have been linked to atherosclerosis, neurodegenerative disease like Alzheimer’s, decreased intelligence and cognitive processing, and increased stroke and cardiac mortality, among other conditions. 

But data centers are doing more than polluting the air. In fact, we’ve identified over six distinct pathways by which data centers threaten the health of their host communities.  

One of the most overlooked yet potentially deadly environmental health impacts of a data centers is thermal pollution. A preliminary study found hyperscale centers raised surface temperatures up to ten kilometers away by up to 16 degrees Fahrenheit.  For reference, a 16-degree temperature change is the same difference as that between the average US temperatures in July versus October. In Utah, a proposed data center known as the Stratos Project, could release thermal energy equivalent to the heat output of roughly 23 Hiroshima-scale atomic bombs every single day. This excess heat can accelerate already worsening extreme heat resulting in more rapid and frequent heat illnesses (heat stroke or heat exhaustion) on hot days. It would also worsen chronic conditions aggravated by heat including  asthma, acute kidney injury and preterm and still birth rates. 

Between loud cooling systems and brightly lit perimeters, data centers can also be significant source of noise and light pollution. In fact, research suggests a hyperscale data center can emit as much light as a small town. Both noise and light pollution have been linked to a plethora of health challenges as they trigger the body’s stress response which causes inflammation and high blood pressure, the leading contributor to heart disease, stroke, and kidney failure. 

In addition to air, light, noise, and thermal pollution, most data centers rely on toxic “forever” chemicals called PFAS to cool their computers, for fire suppression, and in the computers’ semiconductors. These chemicals can escape data centers as gas or enter waste-water or ground-water. Some PFAS are known carcinogens, and they’ve also been linked to reduced fertility and disrupted fetal neurodevelopment.  

Data centers can also indirectly threaten public health by increasing energy bills, which often forces many to make costly and difficult trade-offs such as keeping their homes at unsafe temperatures or foregoing healthcare to afford energy costs. In addition to contributing to energy insecurity, most hyperscale centers consume millions of gallons of water each day, worsening droughts and contributing to water scarcity  

Addressing and preventing these health harms

Without proper guardrails and regulations, data centers could become a public health nightmare. The limited research on how simultaneous exposure to these environmental health threats will impact communities is of deep concern. We know, for example, that exposure to noise and light pollution have separately been linked to hypertension—but how would exposure to both compound the health impacts?  

While we need more research to better understand how these threats interact simultaneously, communities should take immediate action to address independent impacts. Across the country, we’ve also already started to see data centers harm human and ecological health. Moreover, given the exponential rise in data center demand, we need frameworks for considering and protecting human and ecological health as new data centers are proposed.  

Enter cumulative impacts analyses.   

Cumulative impacts are defined as the totality of exposure to chemical and non-chemical stressors and their effects on health, well-being, and quality of life outcomes. Cumulative impacts analyses (CIAs) are a well-suited framework for addressing the health concerns associated with data centers. CIAs would not only facilitate the consideration of the total burden from the range of chemical (PM2.5, NOx, PFAS) and non-chemical (light, noise, heat) stressors from the proposed data center, but they’d also allow for the consideration of existing burdens such as current pollution levels from other data centers or nearby infrastructure.  

Currently, only a few states have cumulative impacts legislation, and none have data center-specific frameworks. Existing CIA legislation is imperfect and contains loopholes, allowing many data centers to avoid the process entirely. In Massachusetts, a state which already uses cumulative impacts in air quality permitting, residents of the city of Lowell were forced to take a data center to court after the center’s proposal to add eight additional backup generators and new cooling towers was approved without adequate consideration of cumulative impacts.  

In Minnesota, CIAs are only required if projects are proposed in environmental justice (EJ) communities in three of the state’s major cities. While a focus on communities that have already shouldered more than their fair share of impacts makes sense, data center-specific CIA requirements would help ensure that data centers don’t create new overburdened areas.  

Data centers are also often built in rural communities that may not be classified as EJ communities but still are more vulnerable due to limited access to healthcare. These communities have a set of unique considerations, such as being some of the only areas with minimal light pollution, where stars aren’t drowned out by urban lights. Under current CIA frameworks, these considerations often go overlooked.  

What would a Data-Center Specific Cumulative Impact Process Look Like? 

We can draw on existing CIA frameworks to imagine what a data-center-specific process could look like.  

First, a data center developer would be required to outline all potential and estimated chemical and non-chemical stressors based on a predetermined list that includes on-site stressors and stressors released elsewhere, including from secondary sites such as power plants.  

Second, for each category of stressor, the estimated impacts would be compared against current conditions. If the CIA finds there is already a higher density of pollution and health burdens, then that data center could be subject to more stringent regulations. This could help address the problem of multiple data centers compounding to worsen public health, ensure that overburdened communities aren’t further exposed to harm, and that unique ecological and cultural resources aren’t overlooked. Other elements of a community’s risk, including access to healthcare, linguistic barriers, and ecological importance, could also be considered here.  

Surprisingly, simply requiring companies to disclose emissions can motivate them—particularly if publicly traded via shareholder pressure—to minimize pollution. Beyond being publicly available, though, the completed CIA could be used by permitting agencies to deny or “condition” permits. “Conditioning” could mean that agencies approve permits only if data centers take additional specific steps, such as using battery backup options rather than polluting generators to avoid pollution. Conditioning could also mean requiring mitigation strategies, such as heat reuse, where excess thermal energy from data centers is redirected to heat nearby buildings. This could not only mitigate the “data center heat island” effect, but it could also lower community electricity costs. CIAs could also lead to discussions about community benefit agreements (CBAs).

CBAs are agreements between developers and community members that guarantee specific local benefits for the community.For many states, this wouldn’t require a whole new set of laws. States like New Jersey already use CIAs in the permitting process for certain facilities (including major air polluters, landfills, and sewage plants), ensuring that decisionmakers are thoroughly informed. Expanding these requirements to encompass data centers could be a step towards ensuring public health is considered in data center related permitting and decisions.  In states without CIA legislation, the creation of data center CIA laws—inspired by other states’ general CIA frameworks—could catalyze a broader advancement of environmental justice by bringing CIA’s to these states.  

 The unmitigated growth of hyperscale data center development and the associated public health impacts are not inevitable. A data center-specific CIA framework would ensure that decisionmakers and community members are aware of the many, simultaneous exposures associated with a proposed data center. Moreover, it would highlight the severity of potential health impacts by detailing baseline and existing community risk factors that could compound the data centers’ individual impacts.  

Ultimately, such a framework could facilitate the avoidance, minimization, and mitigation of data center pollution, improve public health, and could even foster more sustainable community relationships with industrial developers.  

Well, it’s official: we’re already observing the strongest El Niño on record. The ocean surface temperature in the Niño 3.4 region, an ocean area in the eastern Tropical Pacific where we track El Niño, reached a record high anomaly compared with its 30-year average. In other words, this region has never been warmer.

On top of this record-breaking news, California declared a state of emergency in anticipation of the upcoming El Niño. The declaration directs state agencies “to begin protecting vulnerable communities, prepare roads and critical infrastructure, stage emergency supplies, and help local partners reduce flood, landslide, and coastal risks.”

This Super El Niño will no doubt significantly impact the Southwestern US this winter, with effects from record-high sea levels and coastal erosion to the potential for excessive rainfall and consequent flash flooding throughout the southern half of the country.

And remember, what happens in the ocean doesn’t stay in the ocean: we’re seeing this El Niño impact weather patterns around the world, modifying where precipitation—and lack thereof—occurs, as I’ll discuss below.

Record-breaking El Niño according to ONI

We’re now observing a record El Niño, according to the Oceanic Niño Index (ONI), which measures ocean surface temperature anomaly (with respect to the 30-year average) in the Niño 3.4 region. This record is particularly striking because it’s only September— El Niño doesn’t typically peak until November-January. It would be one thing to observe a record ONI value in December; the fact that it’s happening in September is indicative of an upcoming El Niño that is truly off the historical charts.

But there is a nuance worth mentioning: while ONI does technically remove the effects of background ocean warming from fossil fuel-driven climate change, it does so in a way that can mis-define an El Niño event. ONI is literally the 30-year average ocean temperature (“climatology”) in the Niño 3.4 region subtracted from the values observed today.

However, this climatology is continuously changing due to fossil fuel-driven climate change, so the definition of an El Niño will change based on the climatology used. For example, something that may have been considered an El Niño in the 1950s may not be considered an El Niño in today’s climate merely because of the gradual warming of the oceans due to climate change.

NOAA scientists realized this problem over the last few years as the oceans continued to warm and the climatology increased. In 2024, they introduced the Relative Oceanic Niño Index (RONI). The RONI gives a more accurate picture of the strength of the developing El Niño: it removes the effects of a changing climatology, allowing for El Niños from different decades to be compared more directly. RONI became NOAA-official earlier this year.

A comparison of RONI vs. ONI daily values for the 1982, 2015, and current 2026 El Niño events, the strongest El Niños in the recent historical record. The darker, thicker lines represent RONI values, while the lighter, thinner lines represent ONI values. Data from The Climate Brink and NOAA OISST.

Believe it or not, according to the RONI, we’re still near record-breaking territory, meaning that even considering the different climatologies influenced by fossil fuel-driven climate change, we are still seeing a near-unprecedented El Niño (though 2015 and 1982 RONI values still remain more intense).

In other words, putting the different El Niños (1982, 2015, and 2026) on the same playing field by removing any background influence of climate change or climatological bias, puts the 2026 El Niño as the third strongest for any time of year in recorded history. It’s also the strongest El Niño for where we are now in early October, which is no doubt manifesting in the lack of hurricane season in the Atlantic, and the record hurricane season in the East Pacific.

A reason for this is that, as I mentioned in my April blog on the developing Super El Niño, there is evidence that, while El Niño is part of a natural cycle in our climate system, climate change produces more intense El Niño events. We also see this in a paleoclimate study looking at El Niños from the past thousand years.

How El Niño impacts global weather patterns

There’s a lot of talk of record-breaking El Niño, but why does this matter for you? This is what I mean by “what happens in the ocean doesn’t stay in the ocean,” and why it’s particularly true in the Tropical Pacific right now.

Believe it or not, the location of storms and precipitation in the Pacific actually follows the warmest ocean surface temperatures. When the area of warmest ocean surface temperatures moves, so too does the main development region of storms and precipitation.

Storms in the Tropical Pacific are powerful beasts: they send up an incredible amount of energy from around the equator to the midlatitudes—the area of the Earth between the equator and the North or South Pole—which directly impacts where weather sets up here in the US.

Check out these two schematics below. In the first figure, the “1.” indicates warm ocean surface temperatures over surrounding Indonesia and Oceania, which is a typical setup. In response to this warmth, storms and precipitation develop right over Indonesia and surrounding countries (denoted by clouds). These storms then send a wave of energy (the “2.”) to the midlatitudes (in this case, I’m just showing the northern midlatitudes). The energy then affects the position of the jet stream, basically a river of fast-moving air in the upper atmosphere, that guides our weather systems.

A schematic showing the typical setup of warm ocean temperatures and precipitation in the Pacific Ocean. UCS A schematic showing the changes associated with an El Niño in the Pacific Ocean. UCS.

The second figure shows what an El Niño does: it shifts the area of warm ocean surface temperatures to the Central or Eastern Pacific (“1.”). This then shifts the area of storms and precipitation, and therefore the energy being communicated to the midlatitudes (“2.”). The jet stream also shifts (“3.”), allowing for more moisture to be transported inland and more rainfall to be observed in southern parts of the US.

And the shifts shown in the second schematic don’t just stay in the Pacific and the US. They’re communicated around the world. We often see drought in Indonesia, Caribbean, southern Brazil, Mozambique, and Botswana; a delayed monsoon in India and Southeast Asia; and increased precipitation in Uruguay and Argentina.

Regional weather impacts this winter

So, since El Niño can impact global weather patterns through a shift in how energy is sent to the midlatitudes from the tropics, what does this mean for the US? As is hinted in the schematic, the forecast for California and the Southwest US reflects this shift in precipitation patterns: the current seasonal forecast for California and the rest of the Southwest is above average precipitation expected this winter.

Forecasted winter precipitation anomaly for the US Southwest according to 6 different seasonal prediction models. Green areas are likely to see more precipitation this winter. Figure from USGS.

However, just because there’s an El Niño doesn’t mean we’ll observe more precipitation than usual in California. For example, during the last Super El Niño in 2015-2016, California saw a slightly drier-than-usual winter. Yes, El Niño shifts weather patterns, but it doesn’t always do it in anticipated or predictable ways.

For this year, seasonal weather model forecasts are generally in agreement and calling for a rainy winter, which could bring some significant drought relief to the Southwest. There is, however, a point where too much rain can fall. As the California State of Emergency notes, there is a significant threat for floods and landslides similar to those experienced during the Super El Niño of 1998.

And then there’s the threat of sea level rise. Sea levels have already risen off the California coast about 8 inches in some areas due to fossil fuel-driven climate change due to heat expansion. During an El Niño, a giant “wave” of water, called a “Kelvin wave,” typically raises sea levels in California. In fact, sea levels could rise by a foot in the next few days.

On top of the thermal expansion from climate change and the Kelvin wave, tides are expected to peak around Thanksgiving and Christmas. Throw a few storm systems on top of that, and you get significant sea level rise in California. The Kelvin wave alone could add another 6 inches of coastal sea level rise.

Across the world, a threat to human food systems

Earlier in August, the World Food Programme released an analysis highlighting how this El Niño will affect global food systems. Tens of millions of additional people could face food insecurity over the next year as regions deal with drought, including Central America, the Caribbean, and eastern and southern African countries. El Niño is also expected to significantly impact global food prices over the next year.

Furthermore, this Super El Niño will release a significant amount of heat from the oceans into the atmosphere, allowing for global heat temperature records to be shattered over the next year. In fact, a new study from University of Chicago’s Climate Impact Lab suggests there could be over 451,000 excess deaths this year due to heat.

The reality of the world we live in

As a climate scientist, I find it harder and harder to share this reality and close on a high note or, frankly, even on a call to action. This Super El Niño is a global force of nature, wildly exacerbated by human-caused climate change, and nothing we do today is going to contain it. But we can prepare far better than we are preparing today.

That includes making sure FEMA and NOAA are fully funded for emergency preparation/response and weather and climate forecasting, respectively. As always, it’s important to hold the bad actors accountable who have been spreading misinformation around climate change for decades —the fossil fuel industry. Check out my colleague’s blog on three ways scientists can hold Big Oil accountable.

In the final months before our last national election in 2024, a vicious lie targeting Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, raced across social media and into the presidential campaign. Donald Trump repeated it during a nationally televised debate. JD Vance amplified it. Days later, Vance told CNN that if he had to “create stories” to force media attention onto Springfield, “that’s what I’m going to do.” Springfield officials said there was no credible evidence for the lie. Social media influencers and politicians spread it anyway.

I haven’t repeated the lie here. You may already know it. If you don’t, I’m not going to help it reach you. Not knowing more might make you feel curious, and that curiosity is exactly what those who generate disinformation intend to target. Disinformation targets all of us: around elections, extreme weather, and other events when we’re paying attention. Our attention is valuable. It can generate profit, shape public opinion, and swing votes. With the 2026 midterms approaching, we’re all targets. And we can all prepare.

We know when disinformation is coming 

Climate disinformation is my beat, and extreme weather has taught us something useful: disinformation is easier to fight when we prepare for it.

Earlier this year, I wrote about an anti-disinformation “safety chain” for Danger Season, the months when North America experiences its worst climate impacts. We know Danger Season is coming. We know people will be urgently seeking information. And we know bad actors will try to exploit their attention.

My colleague Jennie King has just published an excellent toolkit for information resilience amid disasters that takes this idea much further. Jennie tells us: Don’t wait until a crisis hits and then chase lies around the internet. Build trusted networks. Make reliable information easy to find. Anticipate the ways people are likely to be manipulated.

I’ve also written about what to do—and what not to do—when you encounter disinformation. Don’t repeat false claims. Don’t send them more traffic. Do look at who is spreading them, who benefits, and what they want you to do.

Prepare before someone wants your attention

1. Warn people before the lies arrive 

Start now. Share this post—or other reliable sources about election disinformation—with your friends, family, colleagues, and communities. Tell people what to expect: between now and November, people will deliberately try to capture their attention, provoke strong emotions, deepen divisions, and influence their votes. 

This is called “prebunking”: warning people about disinformation and the techniques used to spread it before they encounter them. Research suggests that advance warnings can help people recognize and resist manipulation when they see it. 

I won’t be limiting my warnings to lies about voting. Election disinformation can come at us sideways, through subjects people already care deeply about: immigration, LGBTQ+ rights, climate change, extreme weather, public health. The point may be to make us angry or afraid, to erode our trust in institutions or other people, to make money from our attention—or to affect what we do with our votes.

2. Choose your sources before you need them 

If we see a frightening claim about voting on Election Day, that’s a bad time to start figuring out whom to trust.  

Instead, we can find our state and local election officials now and use their official websites and published election information as primary sources for rules, deadlines, and procedures. Bookmark reliable local news sources. Do the same for other subjects where bad information can cause real harm: for instance, extreme weather; civil, LGBTQ+ and reproductive rights, public health, immigration. We can build ourselves a short list of places to check when something alarming appears in our feeds. 

Remember that expertise is specific. The person we trust for hurricane forecasts may know nothing about election administration. The person who understands election law may be a terrible source on climate science. Trustworthy information depends not just on who is speaking, but on whether they have a reliable way of knowing what they’re telling us. 

3. Learn the tricks, not the lies 

We don’t need to imagine every false claim we might encounter. We couldn’t if we tried. 

Instead, we can learn to notice how information is being manipulated. Sometimes evidence is fabricated. Sometimes real photographs, statistics, or events are stripped of context or given a false explanation. A genuine problem may be presented without the safeguards or remedies designed to address it. A small incident may be exaggerated into evidence of widespread failure. Intent may be invented and assigned to someone without evidence. 

And we don’t have to let spectacular AI deepfakes distract us from much cheaper tricks. A deceptively edited video, an old photograph with a new caption, or a real event presented as evidence of something it doesn’t show can work perfectly well.

4. Don’t help disinformation travel 

If something makes us instantly furious, frightened, or triumphant, let’s not immediately give it a larger audience. 

Repeating a false claim—even to debunk or ridicule it—can make it more familiar. Linking to it can send it traffic. Sharing it can expose people to a lie they hadn’t encountered before. Check first. When we do need to correct false information, lead with what is true and send people toward reliable sources.  

Remember when I didn’t tell you the lie about the Haitian immigrants? This is why I didn’t. 

The people who create disinformation don’t have to distribute every copy themselves, if they can get the rest of us to do some of the work for them.

5. Follow the money—and the power 

Your attention has value. That’s why we talk about an “attention economy,” and why corporations and political actors work so hard to capture it. 

Advertising helps finance the online information systems through which disinformation travels. In a new UN issue brief on advertising, artificial intelligence, and information integrity, my colleagues Harriet Kingaby, Charlotte Scaddan, and their coauthors point out that global advertising spending now exceeds $1 trillion a year. Advertisers’ decisions help determine what gets produced, amplified, and monetized online. AI is making it cheaper and easier to generate content at an enormous scale while becoming increasingly embedded in the systems that decide which content reaches us. 

Who makes money when we keep scrolling? Who benefits when we’re angry or afraid? Who paid to put something in front of us? Who designed the system that decided we should see it? Is what’s best for them good for us?

6. Know where the levers are 

Harriet and Charlotte make another important point: advertisers aren’t powerless passengers in this system. Their money gives them leverage. They can demand transparency from technology companies, support high-quality journalism and information, and insist on safeguards as AI becomes part of the advertising ecosystem. And we can demand the same thing of advertisers, social media platforms, and search engines. 

We have leverage too, but it looks different. We can support independent journalism, choose platforms and services with better practices where meaningful alternatives exist, pressure advertisers not to fund harmful content, and demand more transparency from the companies deciding what reaches us. 

We can also see that politicians, nations, and the fossil fuel industry work together to fund disinformation, promote authoritarianism, and fuel the climate crisis. Their lies do harm. The system that keeps producing and rewarding them harms us more. Please support UCS as we work to change that system. 

This piece originally was published by InsideSources on August 27, 2026.

Like so many others, I spent late July choking on smoke as wildfires, worsened by fossil-fueled climate change, raged across Canada and the United States, as well as France, Greece, Spain and Turkey. People, including firefighters, lost their lives.

Hundreds of thousands of people were forced to flee their homes, with many losing everything. And millions of people across the United States, many living hundreds of miles from the wildfires, experienced dangerous levels of pollution from wildfire smoke.

The undeniable fingerprints of climate change are all over recent extreme wildfire seasons. Across the world, unusually hot, dry weather, punctuated by extreme heatwaves, has dried out ecosystems, priming them for fire. In the United States, the burned area in 2026 is currently 168 percent of the 10-year average, while many fires continue to burn out of control.

Globally, burned area is decreasing, but not all fires are equal. Most of the reduction in global burned area comes from savannahs and grasslands, as changes in agricultural practice and land use reduce intentional fires and burned area.

In contrast, fire activity and burned area in North America’s forests continues to intensify, burning large areas with growing severity. These fires can burn so severely that they scorch the soil deeply, and some forests cannot regrow. In Canada’s boreal forests, wildfires also generate huge amounts of heat-trapping emissions, combusting soil that took decades or centuries to accumulate. In 2023, Canada’s record-smashing fire season emitted more carbon than every country in the world except China, India and the United States.

Wildfires in forests of the western United States are some of the most well-studied, and the effects of climate change are glaring across almost every metric scientists use to characterize wildfire. Relative to the mid-1980s, more wildfires are burning larger areas, at higher severity, growing faster, at higher elevations, over longer fire seasons, and under more extreme fire weather conditions. Wildfires also are burning later into the night and ramping up earlier in the morning, meaning less rest for the wildland firefighters who put their lives on the line to protect us.

Attribution science, which isolates and quantifies the contribution of climate change to observed trends, makes this point even more clearly, showing that climate-driven increases in dryness led to a near doubling of burned area in forests of western North America between 1984 and 2015.

Climate change also limits options to use existing, science-supported tools to reduce wildfire risks, like prescribed fire, by shortening the very narrow window in which these controlled burns can safely occur. While forest management can mitigate some effects, climate-driven extreme fire behavior can overwhelm these interventions.

Climate change further drives conditions conducive to wildfire beyond changes to forests, with reductions in snowpack and earlier melt providing more time for vegetation to dry out.

These climate-fueled changes have devastated communities, destroying homes, claiming lives and ending ways of life. The damage of these wildfires is escalating too — last year’s wildfires in Los Angeles killed at least 30 people and produced estimated losses of $140 billion, while property insurance skyrocketed, if it remained accessible at all. As global temperatures continue to rise, this destruction will keep mounting.

It didn’t have to be this way.

The dangers of burning fossil fuels, the primary driver of climate change, have been well known for decades, including by fossil fuel companies that publicly denied what their own research showed and deceived the public to protect their profits.

Research from the Union of Concerned Scientists has quantified how heat-trapping emissions traced to the largest fossil fuel producers and cement manufacturers, including ExxonMobil, BP, Chevron and Shell, have worsened these hot, dry and fire-prone conditions. From 1986 to 2021, nearly 40 percent of the area burned in forests of western North America can be attributed to their emissions. Our newest study finds that across the western United States, emissions traced to these entities reduced annual snowpack and stream flow by 15 percent and 6 percent, respectively, equivalent to nearly six times the annual water use of all California’s cities.

Wildfires have many contributing factors. Dismissing the role of fossil-fueled climate change in driving extreme wildfires is at odds with the best available science and only serves the interests of the fossil fuel industry. Instead, communities, firefighters and first responders need policymakers to advance real solutions­ — including measures to stop corporate deception, advance a phaseout of fossil fuels, and make polluters pay their fair share — to address this wicked problem.

The impacts of climate change have been on full display this Danger Season, from record-breaking heatwaves to devastating wildfires, making evident the urgent need for accountability for the harms caused by supercharged extreme events and long-term changes. These harms have been inescapable across the western US, particularly when it comes to water.  As fossil-fueled climate change continues to harm communities, scientists—now more than ever—can play a critical role in informing accountability.  

New study links emissions from fossil fuel producers to western water crisis 

Water in the western US is defined by widespread scarcity, in part due to a timing mismatch. Most water falls as snow in the winter, is stored as snowpack, and then melts during the warm season, when it can be used, primarily for agriculture. Major feats of engineering like canals, aqueducts, and reservoirs have buffered against this mismatch, enabling industrial agriculture and rapid population growth despite dwindling and overallocated rivers.  

Climate change is adding pressure to an already precarious situation, threatening the livelihoods, ecosystems, and economy of the region. The events of 2026 show the harms that climate change is already inflicting and the threat that unchecked emissions pose to our future.  

First, an extreme March heatwave decimated snowpack, meaning that a huge amount of water melted earlier than usual, and now is not available for the growing season. Of the five major basins in the region, three saw the lowest April 1st snowpack ever recorded , the time of year when snow accumulation historically peaks.  

A recently published paper dubbed these heat events ‘snow-eaters’ because of how they decimate snowpack The study also showed that these heatwaves have increased in frequency and intensity since the mid-1880s. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the global authority on consensus climate science, concluded with virtual certainty that extreme heat events are increasing in frequency and intensity due to climate change, suggesting that heat events which pose major threats to water availability will continue to occur into the future. 

Next, the region’s largest reservoir, Lake Mead—which supplies water to more than 25 million people throughout the western United States—has also hit a new low, falling several inches below the previous record set in 2022.  

While water has always been limited in the western US, these examples highlight the ways fossil-fueled climate change is pushing the system to the brink.   

Our new peer-reviewed research, Wringing the West Dry, highlights how for snowpack, streamflow, and irrigation demand in the Western US, nearly half of the impacts due to climate change between 2014 and 2024 can be traced to emissions from the 122 largest fossil fuel producers and cement manufacturers. This research adds to a growing body of evidence linking major fossil fuel companies—including ExxonMobil, Chevron, BP, and Shell—to the harms of climate change being experienced by communities around the world, and highlights the important role that scientists can play in informing accountability. 

1. Advance Legally-Relevant Research  

Scientific engagement is a key component of both litigation and legislation that seeks to hold major polluters accountable.  

Attribution science identifies and quantifies the contribution of climate change to global trends, extreme events, and their impacts, allowing scientists to quantify how climate change is directly shaping the lived experience of communities across the world. Source attribution, a subdiscipline and growing field that includes our newly published study, quantifies how specific sources of emissions, sectors, actors, or nations have contributed to climate change and its impacts. Research in this field has traced emissions from the Carbon Majors, the largest fossil fuel producers and cement manufacturers, to their consequences, including global temperature increase, ocean acidification, sea level rise, area burned in forests of the western US, and extreme heatwaves and their impacts.  

In pursuing accountability, attribution evidence goes hand-in-hand with social science and archival research that outlines how major fossil fuel companies deceived the public about climate change, even when their own internal research clearly showed the risks that continued use of their products posed.   

Our recent report, Research Priorities for Climate Litigation, identifies ten other types of research that lawyers need to advance litigation,  extending far beyond climate science. From public health experts to economists to stewards of Traditional Ecological Knowledge, well-communicated scientific information and insights are a critical component of ongoing and future accountability efforts.  

To learn more about how to use your expertise, sign up for the Science Hub for Climate Litigation newsletter and explore our Research on the Record toolkit. 

2. Stand up for science and democracy  

Scientists can be important advocates for evidence-based decision making, especially when it comes to accountability. Scientific research and scientists themselves have come under attack during the second Trump administration, threatening not only the advancement of critical research in the US, but also our ability to hold big polluters accountable. UCS has tracked the explosion of attacks on science, illustrating how sidelining scientists, rolling back regulations on forever chemicals, and degrading infrastructure to monitor and predict extreme weather can harm communities across the country.  

When it comes to climate accountability, the fossil fuel industry and its politically appointed allies are pulling out all the stops to intimidate scientists, manufacture controversy about widely accepted research, and block judges from accessing factual, reliable scientific information about climate change. These attacks follow the same playbook used by powerful industries for decades to distract, discredit, and deny research that threatens their bottom lines.   

In the face of this assault, scientists have stood up to these attacks and made a meaningful difference in resisting and reversing many of the anti-science actions of this administration. UCS has used the legal system to hold this administration accountable, including by securing the dissolution of the sham Climate Working Group led by well-known climate contrarians, and fighting against the administration’s goal of removing factual information from our National Parks.  

Join the movement of scientists pushing back on this administration’s anti-science agenda.  

3. Tell your Congressperson: No immunity for Big Oil  

Amidst these attacks on scientific evidence that can inform climate lawsuits, Big Oil is pursuing an even more brazen strategy to evade accountability: lobbying our elected representatives in Congress to pass immunity legislation, much like the liability waiver Congress passed to protect the gun industry in 2005. This would prevent science from being heard in court and impose barriers to justice for those harmed by the industry’s products and practices.  

Several state legislatures, including Utah, Tennessee, and Oklahoma, have already passed their own versions of liability waivers, and Representative Harriet Hageman and Senator Ted Cruz have introduced legislation on the federal level that, if passed, would eliminate pathways to accountability for the communities most harmed by the consequences of climate change.  

Scientists can reach out to their members of Congress to ensure that communities across the country have access to justice through the courts to hold the fossil fuel industry accountable for their deception and the harms caused by their products.  

When I was a kid, I didn’t think much about where our water came from. I’d turn the tap on and fill up to my heart’s content. Later, I learned that the water which flowed so reliably through my tap was thanks to one of the most intricately engineered water systems in the US, capturing snowmelt in our mountainous regions and rerouting rivers into concrete canals and aqueducts. Water in the Bay Area? That’s from snowmelt in the Sierra Nevada. In LA? That water made its way from the snowmelt of the Rockies into the Colorado River, to then be pumped nearly 250 miles in the Colorado River Aqueduct to reach the thirsty Southern California fields and the sprawling city of Los Angeles.

Water defines so much of our lives: what we plant, where we build, how we spend our leisure time. Here in the Western US, water is precious, as its supply has always been limited. Because of this, huge amounts of time, money, and labor have been poured into increasing water availability, resulting in aqueducts and canals that bring water from mountainous regions to otherwise dry regions for agriculture or cities, and massive dams that store water for the hot and dry months.

The often dramatic history of water management in the Western US has been a central part of our story, inspiring stories like the film Chinatown. But just like the movie, our waterways have aged, and perhaps not aged well. They were designed in an era of more plentiful water. Today, we face a very different reality. In recent decades, due to increasingly warmer temperatures leading to drier years, fossil-fueled climate change has brought in an era of even greater limitations to our water.

Our biggest reservoir: the mountain snowpack

While we do get water from some local sources in the western US (e.g. local groundwater or reservoirs), around half of runoff comes from winter snowpack. In mountainous regions like the Sierra Nevada or Cascades, it can be up to 75%. Except for the US Southwest—which gets summer rains carried in by the North American Monsoon—most of our precipitation comes in the cold, winter months. In California, most of our precipitation has historically come in just a handful of winter storms, some of which carry so much water that they can act as ‘drought busters.’

This fact is crucial to understanding our water supply: when that precipitation falls in our high mountain regions, it’s cold enough that it falls as snow. As such, our winter snowpack functions as our largest reservoir. Whereas rain requires an actual reservoir to hold that water for summer months, snowpack holds onto its water content until it gets warm enough to melt. That water content, or Snow Water Equivalent (SWE), generally peaks around April 1, after which, as winter gives way to spring, snow begins to melt, running off into our rivers and streams, meaning snowpack acts as a bridge between when the moisture comes in (winter), holding onto water until it’s needed (spring-summer).

We get in trouble when our snowpack fails, as we saw this year. Across much of the western US, our snowpack was abysmal—from California to the Colorado Basin to the Pacific Northwest, we experienced our lowest to second-lowest April 1 snowpack on record. This record-low snow drought was made 4 times more likely by climate change. Our warm winter meant that precipitation came in heavy and warm, at times falling as rain on top of the snowpack. This was followed by a warmer-than-average spring, including a record-breaking heatwave, leading to the rapid melt of the already small snowpack. While this year was remarkable, spring temperatures have been warming significantly over the past two decades, with an increase in these types of ‘snow eater’ heatwaves.

Dramatic reductions in snowpack mean we have a longer window of dry conditions, with huge implications for the health and wellbeing of our ecosystems, human health, and infrastructure. We’ve seen what this means when it comes to fire. Our forests are historically adapted to plentiful water supplied by a late-melting snowpack. When the snowpack fails to accumulate, or melts early, forests can become bone-dry, ready to burn on a hot windy day. Moreover, when wet winters are followed by hot summers, dry grasses become tinder. We saw how this can play out in Spokane, Washington, earlier this month.

And a low snowpack, crucially, spells trouble for water resources. Lake Mead just broke records by reaching its lowest level ever recorded. And the hot, dry season is when agriculture, which sucks up the most water, comes online.

Our biggest water user: agriculture

I learned from a young age to conserve water by taking shorter showers and turning off the tap while brushing my teeth. While these things matter, they are such a small slice of the (water) pie: Western US water is mostly used for industrialized, irrigated agriculture, ranging from 74% of developed water in the Colorado Basin to 80% in Washington to more than 90% in California’s San Joaquin Valley. This multi-billion-dollar agricultural industry produces crops consumed from the East Coast to China to Saudi Arabia.

In fact, much of the water infrastructure across the Western US was designed to bring agriculture to regions that were historically water-poor but have plenty of sun and fertile soils. Today, however, many basins in the western US are already overallocated, operating at the tail end of what they were designed for. And when those surface water supplies fail to materialize or when local demand surges, groundwater has been used to fill the gap.

In the agricultural-intensive San Joaquin Valley, so much groundwater has been used for the past century that groundwater declined by ~12mm/year during 1962-2021, leading to dramatic land subsidence (or sinking) of up to 30 feet in some regions.

Since the onset of the megadrought in the 2000s, groundwater decline in California has accelerated. This has been in part due to lower snowpack, and in part due to greater water demand from irrigation due to warmer temperatures from climate change.

Irrigation comes online in spring with the start of the growing season, and extends into summer until harvest time. As you may remember from biology class, plants need water to photosynthesize. They ‘breathe’ in carbon dioxide, then store that carbon and emit oxygen. As part of this process, plants move water up from the soil then out through their leaves through tiny pores called stomata. On a hot, dry day (i.e. low humidity), more water evaporates into the air due to a strong difference, or gradient, between the water content on the leaf and the water content in the air. This process—evapotranspiration—is strongly related to the temperature and water content of the atmosphere. The problem is that this demand for water or ‘thirstiness’ of the atmosphere rises exponentially with temperature, in fact by 7% per degree Celsius.

To visualize this process, think of the air as a giant sponge. When the sponge is dry (i.e. the humidity is low), it sucks up water from the ground below. Warmer air can hold more water, so as temperatures increase due to climate change, that sponge gets bigger and can draw even more water out of the land surface—including plants.

Therefore, as climate change increases temperatures—especially in the warmer spring and summer months—it also increases that thirstiness, which translates to greater demand for crop irrigation. That water has to come from somewhere, and if there isn’t enough surface water being delivered from snowmelt, farmers turn to groundwater.

Climate change is largely due to the combustion of fossil fuels, including coal, oil, and gas. Ironically, in places like the San Joaquin Valley, there are oil wells peppered throughout agricultural fields. In these places, the two industries compete for water: agriculture pumps water for irrigation while oil pumps use water to extract even more oil. Rural communities bear the brunt of these impacts since residential wells are shallower than industry’s wells and hence dry up first, and these communities then breathe in and drink up polluted air and water.

The full picture

This all adds up to a water system pushed to the brink. Declining snowpack means less water is available while a thirstier atmosphere means water demand will only increase. So what do we do? This is a problem with no easy fixes.

California Governor Newsom’s proposed to expand the state’s reservoirs, but reservoirs can increase downstream flood risk during wet years, which we expect to see more of with climate change, and even dispossess tribes of culturally important lands.

Other proposals tackle multiple issues at once, such as placing solar panels over canals or in agricultural fields (“agrivoltaics”), which both reduce evaporation of water by shading the area as well as help move us away from greenhouse-gas emitting energy sources.

Efforts to pursue climate accountability from major emitters, through litigation or climate superfund laws, also play an important role in ensuring that companies that have contributed the most to climate change pay their fair share.

Any effective measures to protect our water will require systemic changes and cooperation that aim much higher than our individual efforts to take shorter showers. However, water conservation on its own isn’t going to cut it if we don’t address climate change. It’s past time for our decisionmakers to be realistic about what our changing climate means for equitable management of and access to water.

Even if you have never been to L.A., you probably have seen the L.A. River. It is that wide concrete trench that Hollywood loves to film: drag races, chase scenes, countless commercials shot on the bare slab… But it’s strange. This river doesn’t look like a river.

After catastrophic floods about one century ago, the river started to be lined with concrete for most of its 51 miles. The river became a single-purpose concrete channel to flush stormwater from the mountains to the sea as fast as possible.

The Los Angeles River in its concrete-channel form, looking from downtown toward the south of the city over the bridges on 4th St and 6th St. After deadly floods in the 1930s, the river was lined with concrete designed to flush stormwater out of the city as fast as possible. Sean Pierce/Unsplash.

But in three stretches, the river couldn’t be lined with concrete. And in those stretches, something happened that no one had planned. Cottonwoods and willows came back. Herons, egrets, and the Santa Ana sucker (an endangered fish species) came back. And people came back too to enjoy the river that had become their neighborhood park, to ride their bikes or to use their kayaks.

A soft-bottom stretch of the Los Angeles River in Glendale Narrows, with riparian vegetation and the river flowing across a natural channel bottom. MattGush/Getty

Same river, two realities. Gray concrete infrastructure does one job at a very steep price. The soft-bottom stretches do multiple things at once: flood protection, habitat, public health, recreation, urban cooling, water quality… And the river runs through neighborhoods where nearly a million Angelenos live within a single mile. Luckily for our L.A. friends, the L.A. River is undergoing a restoration that will bring back many of the multiple benefits of the river such as habitat, cleaner air, and green areas in the city while improving water quality, reducing erosion, and of course, maintaining (or even improving) the much-needed flood risk control.

This restoration project in the L.A. River is an example of a nature-based solution. Nature-based solutions are approaches to adapt to challenging environmental conditions in ways that work with nature, not against it. Traditional infrastructure is often more expensive and provides fewer benefits with more negative impacts. Nature-based solutions are often cheaper and always more natural than concrete infrastructure to tackle the same problems but with many more benefits and positive side effects.

This is the first post in a series about what using nature-based solutions looks like in California. You can read our guide Working with Nature to Protect California’s Agricultural Regions: How Nature-Based Solutions Can Build Resilience, and you can also see our related first Instagram video below.

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A whiplash climate

Many public health and environmental problems we experience in California and in other parts of the world come from a legacy of unsustainable land management exacerbated by climate change. Extreme events that swing from one end to the other like a whiplash are now the new normal.

Effects of climate change on the water cycle in California. Source: Climate Change in the San Joaquin Valley: A Household and Community Guide to Taking Action. UCS.

Gray infrastructure was originally designed to control nature instead of working sustainably with the environment, as most Indigenous communities do. Climate change is making destruction more frequent and more expensive, and gray infrastructure cannot adapt to the new conditions in many cases. And our traditional response has been to react rather than prevent. California spends billions on fires, floods, and droughts after they happen, which is far more expensive than preventing them in the first place. Every dollar we do not invest in resilience today, we end up paying many times over in the near future.

And those costs are not paid equally. All Californians pay them through taxpayers’ money in disaster relief and emergency response. But frontline communities with limited infrastructure pay also with their health, their wellbeing, and the quality of their daily lives.

We need to prepare California for what is coming, but the answer is not just more gray infrastructure. Concrete dams, levees, and storm drains are expensive, brittle, and built to fight nature instead of working with it.

Nature-based solutions are a better (and cheaper) way.

Nature-based solutions and cropland repurposing in agricultural regions

Here where I live in Merced, in the middle of California’s San Joaquin Valley, agriculture is one of the main economic engines and represents the identity of a lot of people. But agriculture in California hasn’t been sustainable for more than a century, especially because of an inadequate water management and inadequate agricultural practices (like dry tillage of idle land, excessive pesticide use, monoculture, or irrigation of marginal lands), problems aggravated by climate change. Part of my work is to understand this system and find solutions that don’t create new problems. And since I love agriculture and the environment, and I have many friends who live in farmworker communities, I have been thinking of nature-based solutions for agricultural regions since years ago.

My work orbits around cropland repurposing to achieve a just land transition. Current water law in California requires local agencies to sustainably manage groundwater and avoid what the law defines as “undesirable results,” such as dry wells, soil sinking, and seawater intrusion. This legal framework has the potential to become a transformative power to change a system that wasn’t working. And to achieve water sustainability, California may need to repurpose about one million acres of irrigated agriculture to decrease our water footprint.

While this is a huge task, it is also a huge opportunity to correct a legacy of problems that started more than a century ago while adapting to climate change, adopting sustainable agricultural practices, and managing public resources sustainably. Nature-based solutions can tackle water sustainability in multiple ways, including aquifer recharge, floodplain restoration, and sustainable agricultural practices. And they can also take care of public health issues, such as flood prevention, erosion, dust prevention, pollution reduction, lack of green areas, and extreme heat. Nature-based solutions can also create local employment during the construction, for maintenance, or even tourism and other new, out-of-the-box ideas. However, Nature-based solutions are not a solution for everything, and we will need to create pathways to foster local, non-extractive economies to bring complete sustainability to agricultural regions. We call this a Just Land Transition, and along with on-the-ground grassroots partners like Allensworth Progressive Association, with nonprofits like Community Water Center and Environmental Defense Fund, and with agencies like the California Department of Conservation, we are supporting science-based policy and science-driven actions to bring sustainability to agricultural regions in California.

In this blog series, we will show the potential of nature-based solutions to become the best to-go tools to address cropland repurposing and to tackle climate justice in agricultural areas.

If you want to know more, you can read our guide: Working with Nature to Protect California’s Agricultural Regions: How Nature-Based Solutions Can Build Resilience. And if you want to know more about best practices in land repurposing for a just land transition beyond nature-based solutions, you can check UCS’s webpage Guiding California’s Land Transitions Toward Justice and Equity.

California has the tools, intellectual knowledge, and the funding to make this better choice happen. Proposition 4, the Climate Bond, has provided billions of dollars to use in climate resilience and land repurposing, and nature-based solutions can be one of the best ways to invest our taxpayer’s money to create sustainability and transform the system to work for everyone.

Tal vez nunca hayas estado en Los Ángeles, pero seguro que has visto el Río de Los Ángeles sin darte cuenta. Es esa zanja de concreto gigantesca que tanto le gusta filmar a Hollywood: carreras de autos, escenas de persecuciones, e incontables comerciales grabados sobre su superficie gris. Pero es extraño. Este río no parece un río.

Después de inundaciones catastróficas hace casi un siglo, el río comenzó a ser revestido con concreto en la mayor parte de sus 51 millas (82 kilómetros). El río se convirtió en un canal gris con un solo propósito: desalojar el agua de lluvia desde las montañas hasta el mar lo más rápido posible.

El Río de Los Ángeles en su forma de canal de concreto cerca del puente de la Calle 6, mirando hacia el sur. Después de inundaciones mortales en la década de 1930, el río fue revestido con concreto diseñado para desalojar el agua de lluvia de la ciudad lo más rápido posible. Sean Pierce/Unsplash

Pero en tres tramos, el río no pudo ser revestido con concreto. Y en esos tramos, ocurrió algo que nadie había planeado. Los álamos y los sauces regresaron. Las garzas, las garcetas y el matalote de Santa Ana (una especie de pez en peligro de extinción) también volvieron. Y la gente regresó también, para disfrutar del río que se había convertido en el parque de su vecindario, para andar en bicicleta o para usar sus kayaks.

Un tramo de fondo natural del Río de Los Ángeles en Glendale Narrows, con vegetación ribereña y el río fluyendo sobre un lecho natural. MattGush/Getty.

El mismo río, dos realidades. El concreto cumple una sola función a un precio muy alto. Los tramos naturales cumplen múltiples funciones a la vez: protegen contra inundaciones, mejoran el hábitat, la salud pública, la recreación, la calidad del agua, bajan las temperaturas locales … Y el río atraviesa vecindarios donde casi un millón de personas viven a menos de una milla (1,6 kilómetros) de distancia. Por suerte para nuestras amistades de Los Ángeles, el Río de Los Ángeles está en proceso de restauración que traerá de vuelta muchos de los múltiples beneficios del río, como hábitat, aire más limpio y áreas verdes en la ciudad, además de mejorar la calidad del agua, reducir la erosión y, por supuesto, mantener (o incluso mejorar) el tan necesario control del riesgo de inundaciones.

Este proyecto de restauración en el Río de Los Ángeles es un ejemplo de una solución basada en la naturaleza. Las soluciones basadas en la naturaleza ayudan a adaptarnos a condiciones ambientales difíciles trabajando con la naturaleza, no en contra de ella. La infraestructura gris (de concreto) suele ser más costosa y ofrece menos beneficios con más impactos negativos. Las soluciones basadas en la naturaleza suelen ser más económicas y pueden abordar los mismos problemas de manera más natural que la infraestructura de concreto y con muchos más beneficios y efectos secundarios positivos.

Esta es la primera publicación de una serie sobre cómo las soluciones basadas en la naturaleza pueden ayudar a California. Puedes leer nuestra Guía sobre soluciones-basadas en la naturaleza aquí. También puedes ver nuestro primer video en Instagram:

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Latigazos climáticos

Muchos de los problemas de salud pública y ambientales que experimentamos en California y en otras partes del mundo provienen de un legado de manejo insostenible de los recursos naturales, agravado por el cambio climático. Los eventos extremos que oscilan de un extremo a otro como un latigazo son ahora la nueva normalidad.

Efectos del cambio climático en el ciclo del agua en California. Fuente: Cambio climático en el Valle de San Joaquín: una guía para tomar medidas en el hogar y las comunidades. Crédito: Nick Iannaco/UCS.

La infraestructura gris fue originalmente diseñada para controlar la naturaleza en lugar de entender cómo trabajar sosteniblemente con el medio ambiente, como hacen muchas comunidades Indígenas alrededor del mundo. Y ahora que el clima y las condiciones están cambiando, la infraestructura rígida de concreto no consigue adaptarse en muchos casos. Su baja capacidad de adaptación y el cambio climático están haciendo que la destrucción sea más frecuente y más costosa, y nuestra respuesta tradicional ha sido reaccionar en lugar de prevenir. California gasta miles de millones de dólares en impactos de incendios, inundaciones y sequías después de que ocurren, lo cual es mucho más costoso que prevenirlos desde un principio. Cada dólar que no invertimos hoy en resiliencia termina costándonos unas seis veces más en el futuro cercano.

Y esos costos no se pagan de manera equitativa. Todas las personas pagamos con nuestros impuestos la ayuda para desastres y emergencias. Pero las comunidades en primera línea con infraestructura limitada además pagan con su salud, su bienestar y su calidad de vida.

Necesitamos preparar a California para lo que viene, pero la respuesta no es simplemente más infraestructura gris. Las presas, los diques y los drenajes pluviales de concreto son costosos, frágiles y están construidos para luchar contra la naturaleza en lugar de trabajar con ella.

Las soluciones basadas en la naturaleza son una manera mejor (y más económica) de enfrentarnos a estos desafíos.

Soluciones basadas en la naturaleza y el reúso de tierras de cultivo en regiones agrícolas

Aquí donde vivo, en Merced, California, en medio del Valle de San Joaquín, la agricultura es uno de los principales motores económicos y representa la identidad de mucha gente. Pero la agricultura en California no ha sido sostenible durante más de un siglo, sobre todo por un manejo inadecuado del agua y por prácticas agrícolas inadecuadas (como arar tierra seca, el uso excesivo de pesticidas, el monocultivo o el riego de tierras marginales), problemas que son agravados por el cambio climático. Parte de mi trabajo consiste en entender este sistema y encontrar soluciones que no generen nuevos problemas. Y como me encanta la agricultura y el medio ambiente, y tengo muchos amigos que viven en comunidades de campesinos, llevo pensando en soluciones basadas en la naturaleza para regiones agrícolas desde hace años.

Mi trabajo gira en torno al reúso de tierras de cultivo para lograr una transición justa de la tierra. La ley de agua vigente en California exige que las agencias locales gestionen el agua subterránea de manera sostenible y eviten lo que la ley llama “resultados no deseados”, tales como pozos secos, subsidencia del terreno e intrusión de agua de mar. Este marco legal tiene el potencial de convertirse en un poder transformador capaz de cambiar un sistema que no funciona para todos. Y para lograr la sostenibilidad del agua, California podría necesitar reusar cerca de un millón de acres (unas 400.000 hectáreas) de agricultura irrigada para reducir nuestra huella hídrica.

Aunque esta es una tarea enorme, también es una gran oportunidad para corregir un legado de problemas que comenzó hace más de un siglo, y a la vez adaptarnos al cambio climático, adoptar prácticas agrícolas sostenibles y gestionar los recursos públicos de manera sostenible. Las soluciones basadas en la naturaleza pueden abordar la sostenibilidad del agua de múltiples maneras, incluyendo la recarga de acuíferos, la restauración de llanuras de inundación y las prácticas agrícolas sostenibles. Y también pueden atender problemas de salud pública, como la prevención de inundaciones, la erosión, la prevención de polvo, la reducción de la contaminación, la falta de áreas verdes y el calor extremo. Las soluciones basadas en la naturaleza también pueden generar empleo local durante su construcción, mantenimiento, o incluso para el turismo y otras ideas nuevas. Sin embargo, las soluciones basadas en la naturaleza no son una solución para todo, y necesitaremos crear caminos para fomentar economías locales no extractivas que traigan sostenibilidad completa a las regiones agrícolas. A esto le llamamos una Transición Justa de la Tierra, y junto con aliados como Allensworth Progressive Association, Community Water Center y Environmental Defense Fund, y con agencias como el Departamento de Conservación de California, estamos apoyando políticas y acciones basadas en ciencia para traer sostenibilidad a las regiones agrícolas de California.

En esta serie mostraremos el potencial de las soluciones basadas en la naturaleza para convertirse en las mejores herramientas para abordar el reúso de tierras de cultivo y para enfrentar la justicia climática en las áreas agrícolas.

Si quieres saber más, puedes leer nuestra guía: Soluciones basadas en la naturaleza para crear resiliencia en regiones agrícolas de California. Y si quieres saber más sobre las buenas prácticas en el reúso de tierras para una transición justa de la tierra más allá de las soluciones basadas en la naturaleza, puedes visitar la página web de UCS (en inglés pero con multiples recursos en español) Guiando las transiciones de tierras de California hacia la justicia y la equidad.

California tiene las herramientas, el conocimiento intelectual y el financiamiento para hacer realidad esta mejor decisión. La Proposición 4, el Bono Climático, va a dedicar miles de millones de dólares a la resiliencia climática y al reúso de tierras, y las soluciones basadas en la naturaleza pueden ser una de las mejores formas de invertir el dinero de quienes pagamos impuestos para crear sostenibilidad y transformar el sistema para que funcione para todas las personas.

Earlier this summer, after a year of negotiation, a massive, bipartisan, bicameral package of federal housing legislation became law (despite President Trump’s refusal to sign it). At a time when housing affordability is top-of-mind for many people, this bill is a sign that progress is possible. Much more is needed—including investments in making homes more resilient to extreme weather and climate-fueled disasters—but this is an important step forward.  

The 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act is the biggest package of housing legislation passed since the Cranston-Gonzalez Affordable Housing Act became law in 1990. It sets the stage for more housing to be built by working across a suite of federal agencies: to change federal housing programs to enhance financing for housing production; support state and local governments’ initiatives to plan for more housing; and encourage states to re-think their approach to land use. Although resilience to climate impacts was not the primary focus of this legislative package, some important progress was made on improving the resilience of manufactured housing, expanding repair programs for homeowners and landlords of existing housing, and speeding up funding for disaster recovery efforts in low-income communities for the next three years.    

A package combining 60 bills, the 21st Century ROAD to Housing now requires dozens of next steps for the implementation of its provisions, which you can find in a section-by-section summary. In this post, I’ll unpack two federal processes—appropriations and rulemaking—which, together with actions taken at the state and local level, will shape the outcomes of this legislation for communities across the nation in the years to come.  

Appropriations shape impact

As passed, the 21st Century ROAD to Housing funded a few pilot programs but was budget-deficit neutral. Instead, this legislation overwhelmingly focused on policies that encouraged the private market to put more homes on the ground. This will certainly have an impact on the number of homes in a nationwide housing shortage, but the resilience of those homes and the impact on overall affordability for lower and fixed income households is still unknown.   

For this legislation to have maximum impact, federal lawmakers must demonstrate continued bipartisan commitment to addressing the housing crisis through the annual appropriations process. Subcommittees in the House and Senate authorize federal funding through the appropriations process each year by setting funding levels, rescinding previous appropriations or transferring unspent balances. Unless a meaningful level of funding is provided during the appropriations process, programs authorized by the legislation—such expanded home repairs, studying the impact of deadly residential extreme heat in public and subsidized housing, and planning grants to state and local governments to support housing development—will lack the resources needed to preserve and expand our housing supply.

Rulemaking amidst rollbacks  

The 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act will kick off several rule-making processes managed by different federal agencies, including several branches of the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Rulemaking involves substantive public engagement and can have an important impact on policy implementation, grounding government action in the public interest, fairness, and the best available science. Rules that guide where and how housing is built will last far beyond any presidential administration or Congress, and this process will be an opportunity to enshrine climate resilience policies and standards for the long term—instead of rushing to build without accounting for the risks of mounting climate extremes. Any new rules also need to rely on the best available climate science, and account for the myriad ways fossil fuel-driven climate change will re-shape our natural resources and built environment in the years to come. 

A few of the rule-making processes detailed below will be particularly important in shaping the climate resilience and energy efficiency of the new housing that this legislation will spur. One of the rules that will be developed pursuant to the new law will identify circumstances under which federally-funded housing projects will be excluded from the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). Changes to NEPA have long been suggested to speed up the construction of housing. The final rule must ensure that these exceptions, known as categorical exclusions, made today don’t exacerbate the harms of the past—a concern made all the more urgent given the attacks of the second Trump administration on federal environmental justice commitments. 

Another new rulemaking requires new energy efficiency standards for manufactured housing to be developed by the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Unlike other types of housing for which building standards are set by state and local governments, the code for manufactured homes is set by the federal government.  This process could shape the long-term affordability of manufactured housing amidst volatile energy prices and worsening heatwaves. For this sector of the housing market to be deployed at scale to fulfill its potential to provide safe and affordable housing, HUD must develop a rigorous standard that reflects the long-term benefits of energy efficiency for residents of manufactured housing.

The three-year authorization of HUD’s Community Development Block Grant for Disaster Recovery (CDBG-DR) program, intended to speed up and reform long-term funding to low- and moderate-income communities, after disasters occur, will also require a rule-making process by next summer. It’s an important step forward, and Congress should go further and permanently authorize this crucial program. As disasters grow in frequency and complexity, rules developed by the federal government must also require programs to address the long-term harms of disasters and use rigorous data to incorporate future conditions into their recovery programs.  

These and other rulemaking processes kickstarted by 21st Century ROAD to Housing are occurring at the same time as the federal government pursues repeal of the Federal Flood Risk Management Standard (FFRMS) across agencies. As my colleague Shana Udvardy has previously detailed, the HUD version of these standards ensured that HUD’s federally funded projects would be built to withstand current and future flood risks. The repeal of HUD’s FFRMS rule will mean that new buildings, facilities and homes could be at an increased risk of flooding from hurricanes and sea level rise: increasingly severe weather that is supercharged by climate change.  

Much of the rulemaking required by 21st Century ROAD to Housing will be spearheaded by HUD, an agency besieged by staffing cuts and struggling with capacity as it operates billions of dollars of critical programs.  The rulemaking process requires a well-resourced  and accountable federal agency to ensure that programs serve the public interest. HUD and other agencies must be funded not only to support their core mission and programs, but to shape much-needed new policy and programs such as those in the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act.

Congressional leaders must act to ensure this legislation benefits us

After decades of neglecting our housing crisis and ignoring clear warnings from climate science, no single legislative package from one level of government could have addressed our many needs.  As communities, policymakers, and advocates begin to make the most of this historic legislation, we must also fundamentally shift how we approach housing policy. We can’t afford to wait decades for the next major housing legislation and public investment. The climate crisis will increasingly require leaders to fund transformations in the built environment and social safety net to keep communities safe and manage the growing economic risk of climate change on our housing market.

We should consider the implementation of the ROAD to 21st Century Housing an essential and welcome opportunity for laying the groundwork for further progress. That this legislation was passed in the current political environment—despite the many threats to climate science,  resilience programs,  and a growing effort by the fossil fuel industry to avoid any accountability for its role in a climate crisis that destroys homes, contributes to homelessness, and decimates communities—demonstrates the necessity of climate resilient housing for all.

We’re in the middle of Danger Season, a time that spans May through October, when the worst extreme weather events and fossil-fueled disasters happen in a concentrated period. There are currently 86 large wildfires burning across 14 states, large swaths of the United States are experiencing another heat dome, and heavy rains have flooded multiple locations. Last week, Climate Central announced that the nation has already experienced 12 billion-dollar weather and climate disasters during the first half of 2026, which have caused $32 billion in damages and a loss of 183 lives—ranking fifth for the number of such events during this time frame since recordkeeping began in 1980. 

The nation has also gone the entire 18 months of the second Trump administration without a permanent administrator for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), and with major chaos plaguing the agency thanks to President Trump. The president failed to appoint an administrator, instead leaning on four plainly unqualified “senior officials performing the duties of the administrator” (SOPDA), one of whom was Cameron Hamilton, until he was fired on May 8, 2025. In the chaotic fashion typical of this administration, he was renominated to lead the agency a year after being fired. This week, the Senate voted to confirm him as the first permanent FEMA administrator under this administration.

Hamilton’s rocky road to permanently leading FEMA

Hamilton worked as FEMA’s SOPDA for roughly 3.5 months at the start of the second Trump administration until he was fired for supporting the existence of the agency during a congressional hearing a year ago (instead of calling for its elimination, which was the Trump administration’s preferred stance at the time).

While his tenure was brief, Hamilton implemented several controversial policies at FEMA including:

• Increasing the threshold by which the federal government would declare a disaster, meaning a reduction in critical federal assistance that states rely on for disaster response
• Halting the automatic approval of funds under the Hazard Mitigation Grant Program, limiting crucial funding that would help communities prepare for extreme events
• Canceling funding for the incredibly popular Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities (BRIC) grant program. A FEMA statement called the program “another example of a wasteful and ineffective FEMA program. It was more concerned with climate change than helping Americans effected [sic] by natural disasters.” After multiple court orders, FEMA reversed this decision and BRIC was reinstated on March 25. However, the program hasn’t been fully reinstated; grant awards that had funds already allocated to them can expend those funds, but grants that were selected but did not have funds allocated prior to the cancelation of the program have not seen those funds restored.

Since his nomination in May, Hamilton has been working at FEMA as a senior adviser. This allows the Trump administration to sidestep the Federal Vacancies Reform Act, which in most cases prohibits a nominee from serving in an acting role for the same position for which they’ve been nominated. This law is why the Trump administration created the SOPDA role.

Hamilton’s Senate testimony was short on substance

We’re dealing with a low bar when it comes to President Trump’s agency nominees. Even though it could be worse when it comes to Hamilton as FEMA administrator (think back to missing-in-action David Richardson and “the enforcer” Karen Evans), he will be the first FEMA administrator who lacks the qualifications and the five years of experience required by the Post Katrina Emergency Management Reform Act of 2006. Since that law was enacted, all five former FEMA administrators, including David Paulison, Craig Fugate, Brock Long, Peter Gaynor, and Deanne Criswell, had years or even decades of emergency management experience.

During the Senate Committee on Homeland Security & Governmental Affairs hearing on June 17, Democrats grilled Hamilton on multiple issues and Hamilton promised to conduct a review within the first 30 days on “areas where FEMA can reform.” Unsurprisingly, the committee voted largely along party lines to advance his nomination to the full Senate, with the exception of Senator John Fetterman (D-PA), who joined the Republicans.

Hamilton was well coached by two former FEMA administrators, Brock Long and Peter Gaynor, in preparation for his nomination hearing. His responses to senators’ questions, while respectful, were vague and noncommittal. Although Hamilton expressed his commitment to FEMA’s mission, it’s unlikely he’ll defy the vision of his bosses, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin and President Trump.

There are several points to highlight from the nomination hearing, including the objections raised on process, Hamilton’s brief and inadequate written testimony, and his noncommittal answers to the senators’ questions.

Hamilton’s written testimony is brief—a total of two pages. The first page expresses his gratitude for his family, President Trump, and the two former FEMA administrators who provided him with support and counsel. On page two, Hamilton outlines what he’ll accomplish in his role as FEMA administrator. He echoes the tired mantra of the Trump administration: “We must return to our roots where disaster response is locally executed, state led and federally supported.” As has been pointed out by emergency managers, this is what FEMA already does.

He also promises to “deliver assistance to survivors rapidly” with the caveat “when Federal assistance is warranted.” These two statements conveniently balanced Hamilton’s need to appease senators on the committee but also show allegiance to President Trump’s politicization of disaster aid and his campaign to push more of the disaster response and recovery burden onto local, state, Tribal, and territorial governments.

Democrats highlight broken process leading to a “rubber-stamped” nominee

In the first opening remarks of the nomination hearing that included 11 nominees, Committee Ranking Member Gary Peters (D-MI) spoke powerfully on the many problems with the hearing, including a rushed process, overcrowded panel, and harmful lack of transparency. Senator Peters pointed out that the chairman did not allow each nominee to make a public statement, and that the ranking member had not received the nominees’ written testimonies prior to the hearing.

Senator Peters also noted that Hamilton had not completed his FBI background investigation, calling it “unprecedented” that nominees were advancing without meeting the minimum requirements of a typical vetting process. Chairman Rand Paul (R-KY) promised that the committee would vote on the nominees only after the ethics and FBI review were complete, but it is not clear if that promise has been kept.

During the hearing, Democrats focused on several important concerns with the administration’s handling of FEMA and Hamilton’s past decisions.

• The politicization of disaster assistance. Senator Maggie Hassan (D-NH), among other Democratic senators, asked whether disaster survivors from blue states should be treated differently and receive less help than red-state survivors. She called the politicization of disaster assistance “shameful and unamerican.” Senator Hassan pressed Hamilton on what he would do if the president ordered him to withhold assistance to blue states. Hamilton replied that he would be sure that FEMA is “objective,” “fair and reasonable,” that he would “follow the law,” and would be “consistent in how [FEMA] adjudicates claims.” Senator Hassan closed her questioning by challenging Hamilton, noting that he was going “to have to think about what you are going to do when he (President Trump) reverses your recommendations.” Hamilton, however, did promise to speed up answers to disaster declaration decisions and reimbursements with the caveat of keeping a “close eye” on how states spend the assistance. The Trump administration has brazenly denied FEMA assistance to blue states and is continuing to do so.
• Hamilton’s April memo. Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) addressed an April memo in which Hamilton recommended raising the threshold for disaster assistance. Senator Blumenthal spoke to how this change would disqualify a lot of families in Connecticut and asked him whether he still supported this policy. Hamilton responded that the memo reflected a “pre-deliberative” and “pre-decisional” process for areas where disaster assistance could be reformed and that it was not ready for adoption. Hamilton’s evasive answer ignores the fact that the Trump administration has been advancing both unwritten and written policies that reduce disaster assistance to communities, including Trump’s preparedness executive order and the final report by Trump’s FEMA Review Council.
• FEMA staffing cuts. Senators also asked Hamilton about staffing cuts at FEMA and FEMA’s readiness. Hamilton’s response was noncommittal, stating he had “full faith and confidence in the FEMA workforce” but that “we can do better.” Missing from the answer was a commitment to fully staff up the agency in a timely manner.

Unfortunately, additional important issues, such as Hamilton’s position on climate change (which is directly contributing to worsening disasters), and his lack of qualifications for the job were not adequately explored by the committee.

Actions Administrator Hamilton must take in his first month in office

In January 2025 I wrote about the five things the nation needs from the next FEMA administrator, and these remain true today. While Hamilton’s pledge to update FEMA’s antiquated IT system is important, this will take time and there are other pressing needs. In the immediate future, here are the top five actions he must take in his first month in office:

1. Advance a robust hiring process to shore up the agency’s ability to deliver for the public and disaster survivors. Unfortunately, during the nomination hearing Hamilton praised the opening of 350 FEMA positions but did not commit to a more robust hiring effort as was outlined in a recent Government Accountability Office report. The GAO found that FEMA reduced more than 4,300 employees in fiscal year 2025, causing a loss in institutional knowledge and experienced personnel, and was told by FEMA officials that “they have been operating in uncertainty and confusion while still trying to meet the mission with the staff they have.” The GAO raises serious concerns about FEMA’s ability to meet its mission in the case of a catastrophe such as the back-to-back hurricanes in 2024, Helene and Milton.
2. Stop President Trump’s politicization of disaster assistance and ensure disaster relief is equitable and nonpartisan.
3. Ignore the Trump administration’s biased FEMA Review Council report recommendations and instead develop a strategic plan based on the latest science and staffing analysis, and work with members of Congress on bipartisan policies that can actually improve FEMA.
4. Reinstate FEMA advisory committees, including its National Advisory Council, Technical Mapping Advisory Council, and National Dam Safety Review Board, so the agency’s work will be informed by the best available science and expertise.
5. Defend against mis- and disinformation about disasters and advocate for robust funding for FEMA, the Disaster Relief Fund, and preparedness programs that will help communities get back on their feet in more resilient ways.

Cameron Hamilton is expected to bring stability to FEMA. But the nation deserves and needs more than just the bare minimum of bringing stability to a broken agency. We’re witnessing back-to-back fossil-fueled disasters on top of the affordability crisis. Communities that are still recovering from last year’s disasters—like the tragic Texas Hill Country floods—are being hit again this Danger Season.

Congress must continue its oversight of FEMA and press Administrator Hamilton to implement immediate actions that ensure FEMA is ready to serve people across the nation this Danger Season, and in the months and years ahead.

Unusually hot, dry conditions across many parts of the world—including in Algeria, Canada, France, Greece, Morocco, Spain, Tunisia, and the western United States—have set the stage for the catastrophic wildfire season underway now. Just over this weekend, rapidly spreading wildfires have exploded around Spokane, Washington, forcing nearly 65,000 people to evacuate thus far. Unrelenting hot dry weather, supercharged by climate change, is contributing to the dangerous conditions causing these fires.

The images of these fires are stunning, their scale terrifying, the human toll enormous already and mounting. And while the proximate causes of the fires, the types of vegetation burning, and nearby settlements differ greatly, the abnormal climatic conditions looming in the background everywhere are unmistakably clear.

Many lives have been lost, and precious communities razed to the ground. Hundreds of thousands of people have had to evacuate from fire zones and millions more have experienced dangerous levels of exposure to wildfire smoke. And, unfortunately, more heat is on the way—a deadly hazard on its own, and one that will also continue to fan the flames of this extraordinarily destructive wildfire season.

If these infernos don’t bring policymakers to their senses and force necessary changes to grapple with the fossil fueled climate crisis, what will?

Wildfire conditions in the United States

The 2026 wildfire season got off to an early above-normal start in the U.S. Thus far this year, nearly 5.3 million acres of land have burned across the country, well above the 10-year average of 3.7 million acres for this time of year. On July 18, the National Preparedness Level was raised to 5, the highest level, a sign of the extreme fire dangers and high level of resources committed to fight fires.

Colorado, Nebraska, and Utah are among the states that have experienced an incredibly challenging wildfire season this year. The Aspen Acres fire, covering nearly 102,000 acres in Colorado, has been burning for over a month now. And recent rains have led to heavy flash flooding in the burned areas, carrying ash and debris across roads and into waterways.

As of last week, Oregon had 31 large fires burning, across 1.6 million acres. They include the Rowe Creek Complex fire currently covering over 320,000 acres, the Big Grass fire with over 337,000 acres and the Coleman Creek fire covering over 251,000 acres. Despite the state being in such a dire situation, the Trump administration has denied FEMA Fire Management Assistance Grants (FMAGs) for two wildfires: the East Evans Creek Fire and Rowe Creek Fire Complex. State Senators Merkley and Wyden have strongly criticized the action and demanded answers from the agency.

Washington had 13 large fires burning over nearly 204,000 acres as of last week, including the Kaiser Canyon fire, which has burned over 128,000 acres.

The latest fuels and fire advisory for the Pacific Northwest notes that low snowpack and drought conditions in the region have led to fuels (i.e. vegetation) drying out much earlier than usual—all of which is ‘producing extreme fire behavior.’ This means intense fires that spread rapidly and are hard to control, putting people and infrastructure in danger.

And the most recent wildfire outlook for August shows continued elevated fire risks in the Northwest, the upper Midwest, as well as Texas, and southern Florida.

The world in flames

Numerous large wildfires (nearly 900) are also burning across Canada. Over 9 million acres (3.76 million hectares) have burned thus far this year as the nation experiences one of its worst seasons (with the province of Ontario experiencing its worst-ever season).

France and Spain are also in the throes of their worst wildfire seasons on record, with little let-up in sight as yet another intense heatwave rolls through Europe, the fastest-warming continent globally. Approximately 300,000 people have been displaced by the fires thus far, which are now approaching major cities. Firefighters have lost their lives. Homes and livelihoods are going up in smoke. New research from World Weather Attribution shows that climate change is increasing the likelihood of the kind of hot, dry conditions preceding the extreme fire weather that led to the wildfires in France and Spain.

Northern Africa, which has received far less attention, is also seeing major wildfires which have caused deaths, prompted evacuations, and are putting a big strain on local firefighting resources in Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco.

And earlier this year, Southern hemisphere countries, including Australia, Chile, and Argentina, experienced intense wildfires during their summer season.

While year-to-date carbon emissions from biomass burning in wildfires were at record lows in the first half of the year, that could change rapidly depending on how the next couple of months of peak fire season in the northern hemisphere go (especially boreal fires).

Dangerous wildfire smoke

Repeatedly this year, smoke from wildfires in Canada and the western U.S. has blanketed areas up to hundreds of miles to the east and south, reaching as far south as Florida last week. At times, over 100 million people were under alerts for pollution from wildfire smoke. Numerous cities—including Chicago, Detroit, Toronto and Milwaukee—experienced hazardous levels of particulate matter pollution, which can cause heart and lung ailments, worsen or trigger asthma, cause cancer, and even lead to death.

Research shows that the contribution of wildfires to PM2.5 pollution has been steadily growing in the U.S. One recent research article on the health impacts of wildfire smoke, driven by climate change, estimates that cumulative excess deaths caused by PM2.5 pollution could be as high as 1.9 million between 2026 and 2055.

Firefighters who spend extended periods of time exposed to hazardous smoke, often with little to no protection, face some of the most acute health risks. A 2025 investigative series by Hannah Dreier of the New York Times showed the harrowing toll this is taking on young firefighters who are getting sick and dying from the toxic substances they’re exposed to. The Forest Service and the Department of Interior have finally been forced to respond and start providing N95 respirator masks to frontline firefighters in 2026.

Fossil fuel companies and the Trump administration: making things much worse

Even as wildfires are raging, fossil fuel companies are raking in record profits, aided by craven politicians all too eager to give them free rein to burn down the planet. Fossil fuel companies and their political allies are now pushing for legislation to grant them immunity from legal and financial accountability for the climate damages they have caused. Join us in fighting back: Tell Congress: No Immunity for Big Oil!

And the Trump administration’s cuts to the US Forest Service staffing and budget, closure of research stations, and chaotic reorganization plans for federal firefighting efforts are also hampering efforts to address wildfire threats. News stories indicate that DOGE’s destructive actions also delayed grants for forest thinning and fuels management efforts in Minnesota, in an area that has now experienced major fires.

The climate future we feared is here

Whether it’s catastrophic wildfires or unrelenting heatwaves, this year has brought home the realities of climate change in ways that are hard to comprehend. Tens of thousands of people have died from extreme heat this year alone, with the highest toll in Europe and Asia. We’ve seen searing images of people fleeing for their lives, and firefighters bravely risking theirs, in the face of towering wildfires. Otherworldly, murky yellow skies and smoke-refracted sunsets signaling dangerous air quality have become all too common.

It’s almost unbearable to think that we knew the scientific facts decades ago and policymakers could have taken action to limit the harms so evident around us today. We can’t let greedy fossil fuel companies and spineless politicians decide our future. We owe it to people reeling from climate-fueled disasters today, and to the generations to come that will live in the shadow of our choices, to do what it takes to chart a different, safer path ahead.

Welcome to Townsville, a community located in California’s Central Valley. You have been tasked with working with a few of your fellow residents to implement cropland transition projects around Townsville. There are opportunities to protect the town’s drinking water, develop renewable energy, restore the environment, and encourage your neighbors to adopt more sustainable farming practices to benefit Townsville. Along the way, you must collaborate with your fellow residents to decide which projects to pursue and negotiate with the neighboring landowners to implement a vision for the future of Townsville while facing additional hurdles from extreme weather brought on by Climate Change. You also have to consider the side effects of the current land uses that often seem invisible but have real and ongoing consequences for your community.

This is the world of ‘Common Ground,’ a video game developed by a team of students at Harvey Mudd College in partnership with UCS, to explore just land transition, climate change, and the decisions involved in transitioning cropland in California’s Central Valley.

Drought, extreme heat, and floods

Townsville is fictional, but the problems players must grapple with are based on real challenges Californians are facing today.

California is home to more than 60 thousand farms, covering more than 20 million acres of land. Unfortunately, California’s highly profitable agricultural industry comes at a cost to water security, air quality, and health for nearby residents, farmworkers and small farmers.

Agricultural water demand has taken a toll on the long-term sustainability of California’s groundwater. During the 2012-2016 drought, surface water deliveries were restricted and groundwater pumping in the Central Valley increased, in part due to agricultural demand. Heavy groundwater pumping in the San Joaquin Valley caused thousands of private domestic wells to go dry and contributed to subsidence—a phenomenon where so much groundwater is removed that the land sinks.

The San Joaquin Valley faces challenges from poor air quality, exposure to pollution from pesticides and fertilizers in the air and water, and extreme heat conditions. With climate change, these challenges are becoming more pressing. We’ve already begun to experience the weather whiplash that will become more frequent from flooding in some years to California’s snowpack at historic lows in other years.

Addressing these challenges will require fundamentally changing the systems that govern how we use natural resources and transitioning to practices that rejuvenate, rather than strain, lands and water resources.

The Opportunity—just land transition

California’s commitment to groundwater sustainability means that cropland transition is already underway in California’s Central Valley.

Following the 2012-2016 drought, California adopted new laws and incentive programs to encourage sustainable water practices. In 2014, the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA), was passed to regulate California’s groundwater basins and require them to be managed for long-term sustainability. California has also committed to investing roughly a quarter of a billion dollars through the Multibenefit Land Repurposing Program to assist groundwater sustainability agencies with planning and implementing groundwater resilience projects, including groundwater recharge, stormwater capture, and cropland repurposing.

To accomplish California’s groundwater sustainability goal, more than 500,000 acres of irrigated cropland may be repurposed in the San Joaquin Valley alone. Where and how this transition takes place will shape the future of California’s agricultural industry and Central Valley communities.

Instead of allowing market forces to guide where and how agricultural land is taken out of production, a just land transition ensures that communities impacted by the transition are part of the decision-making process. A just land transition based on strategic and intentional cropland repurposing can help shift from practices and systems that are unsustainable and extractive, to those that support communities and local economies. By repurposing cropland inside and around rural communities, we can also reduce public health exposures and provide public benefits. In our recent report, “Working with Nature to Protect California’s Agricultural Regions,” we offered examples of how to use nature-based solutions improve water sustainability and increase public health, climate resilience, and economic benefits.

This transition has the potential to reshape the Central Valley and help communities adapt if public investment dollars are spent on projects that center community decision-making and provide direct and meaningful benefits to frontline communities.

UCS scientists have found that repurposing cropland near communities can produce multiple benefits for communities. Reducing pesticide and fertilizer applications, dust and emissions from agricultural operations, and groundwater withdrawals in proximity to communities can reduce the public health risks faced by frontline communities.

When land is transitioned to projects that provide multiple benefits, including, for example, energy reliability, habitat restoration, flood risk reduction, and groundwater recharge, communities can benefit from land transition. There is enormous potential benefit in exploring nature-based solutions to accomplish climate adaptation and resilience, along with groundwater sustainability.

A card from the Common Ground video game. Harvey Mudd College/UCS

Welcome to Townsville

In ‘Common Ground’ players can explore these challenges as they collaborate to implement cropland transition projects in Townsville. Players make spending decisions, negotiate with landowners, and work against unpredictable extreme weather to protect their community.

Players can explore different types of cropland transition opportunities and their benefits in a conceptual way and see how the community, environment, and economy of Townsville respond to their choices.

To develop this game, UCS partnered with an incredible team of students at Harvey Mudd College. Laura, Mia, Nicole, Ria, and Vibhu, led by Professor Kirabo, worked with us over the course of the academic year. We started out with a goal of creating a fun, multiplayer cooperative game, grounded in the idea of transitioning cropland around communities to reduce the negative externalities (e.g. pesticide exposure) and provide meaningful benefits (e.g. improved groundwater levels, access to parks and nature, renewable energy, etc.). The students learned about cropland transition and took on the task of adapting these scientific concepts into game mechanics.

Informed by the real-world effects of nature-based solutions, the students created a range of potential project types in the game, each with different benefits for the environment, community well-being, economy, and local farmers

Over the course of the year, the students sought more feedback through playtests with their peers, UCS staff, and even came to Sacramento to share an early version of the game with the State Agencies and staff working directly on groundwater sustainability and cropland transition.

After a year of hard work, we are so excited to be able to share Common Ground—which is now available for you to play online! This game is designed so that anyone can play—all you need is 3 friends and an internet connection. We hope that the game can be used as an educational tool for anyone and everyone to learn about cropland transition and nature-based solutions, to simulate collaboration and negotiation throughout the project design and selection process and see the benefits and tradeoffs of climate resilience planning.

In recent weeks, millions of people across the United States have faced the harsh extremes of Danger Season. A prolonged heat wave pushed ‘feels-like’ temperatures well over 100 degrees Fahrenheit in parts of the Midwest, Mid-Atlantic, and Northeast, while roughly half of the country was under heat alerts or warnings. Grid operators took emergency steps to maintain reliability as electricity demand surged and severe holiday-weekend storms left hundreds of thousands of households without power.  

Together, these events served as a reminder that during Danger Season—the period between May and October when North America is hit hardest by extreme weather, like heat, drought, wildfire, and hurricanes—electricity is about much more than keeping the lights on. Electricity is powering our air conditioners, fans, refrigerators for medication, and other essential services, all of which keep people safe during extreme heat. For older adults, young children, people with chronic illnesses, and many medically vulnerable individuals, access to cooling can mean the difference between remaining safe at home and experiencing serious heat-related illness.  

These events also illustrate a broader challenge. As the climate warms, households are increasingly relying on cooling to stay safe while electricity costs continue to rise. In other words, the need for cooling and the cost of cooling are increasing together.   

For many families, particularly those already facing high energy burdens, this creates a growing affordability challenge. Paying for electricity is no longer simply a question of comfort: it is increasingly a prerequisite for health and safety.  

Because no single dataset captures every dimension of affordability, the five figures below draw on multiple national datasets covering different time periods. Together, they illustrate long-term temperature trends, recent changes in household electricity costs, and the latest available evidence on energy burden and energy insecurity. They show how electricity spending during Danger Season has changed over time, how seasonal cooling needs have increased, how energy burdens remain concentrated among lower-income households, and how affordability is already affecting people’s ability to keep their homes at safe temperatures. 

Taken together, these figures suggest that affordability is becoming an increasingly important dimension of climate resilience. As extreme heat becomes more common, the challenge is not only whether households have access to cooling—but critically, whether they can afford to use it.  

The cost of cooling a home is increasing  Values represent estimated average household electricity expenditures for the May–October period each year and are calculated using EIA data on residential electricity sales, residential electricity prices, and household counts. 2026 values is a projection based on EIA estimates. Source: U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) Short-Term Energy Outlook. May-October household electricity expenditures, 2020-2026 (2026 reflects projected spending). Data accessed June 2026. 

As summers become hotter across much of the country, electricity has become one of the most important tools for protecting health during periods of extreme heat. But staying cool comes at a cost. Since 2020, the average household’s electricity spending during Danger Season will have increased by more than 30 percent, projections suggest. This increase reflects more than inflation alone. According to research from the National Energy Assistance Directors Association (NEADA) and the Center for Energy Poverty and Climate (CEPC), higher household cooling costs are being driven by a combination of rising electricity demand, increasing retail electricity prices, continued investments in grid infrastructure, fuel costs, and broader changes in energy markets. What may once have appeared to be a temporary increase is increasingly becoming the new normal.  

The need for cooling is growing 

Rising electricity bills are only one part of the story. Households also need more cooling than they once did. One helpful data set for understanding this long-term change is the Cooling Degree Days (CDD) from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA)—a standard measure used by climatologists and utilities to estimate how much cooling buildings require. Unlike measures that simply count extreme heat days, CDD captures the cumulative need for cooling over an entire season. Because climate trends are generally evaluated over periods of 30 years or more, this 50-year record provides a robust picture of long-term change. And despite the year-to-year variability, the overall trend is clear: people in the United States generally need more cooling today than they did five decades ago.  

Cooling Degree Days (CDD) measure cumulative seasonal cooling demand by comparing each day’s average temperature with a baseline of 65 degrees Fahrenheit.  Source: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, National Centers for Environmental Information (NOAA, NCEI), Cooling Degree Day, 1976-2025. Data accessed July 2026. 

Rising cooling demand does not necessarily translate into hardship for every household. But for families already facing high energy burdens, the need for more air conditioning can mean substantially higher summer electricity bills.  

Lower-income households were already struggling with costs

Higher electricity bills and greater cooling needs do not affect every household equally. Lower-income households were already spending a disproportionate share of their income on energy before this summer. That’s where an examination of energy burdens becomes important. Energy burden refers to the share of a household’s income spent on energy bills, and it is highest among lower-income households. In this analysis, lower-income households are defined as those earning 80% or less of their Area Median Income (AMI). AMI is the median income for a given metropolitan area or county. Because incomes and costs of living vary across the country, AMI provides a locally adjusted benchmark for comparing household incomes. 

Figure 3 presents the most recent national estimates available from DOE’s LEAD Tool and illustrates the substantial differences in energy burden across income groups rather than changes over time.  Source: U.S. Department of Energy, Low-Income Energy Affordability Data (LEAD) Tool. Household energy burden by Area Median Income (AMI), based on 2022 American Community Survey housing and income data and residential cost estimates Data accessed June 2026.  

The graph above, with data from the most recent annual estimates available from the US Department of Energy’s Low-Income Energy Affordability Data (LEAD) Tool, shows that energy burden is dramatically higher among lower-income households. Families with lower incomes have less flexibility to absorb rising utility bills because energy already consumes a much larger share of their budgets. For these households, even modest increases in cooling costs can force difficult tradeoffs between paying utility bills and meeting other essential needs.  

Affordability is forcing difficult, unsafe choices

Energy burden isn’t just reflected in household budgets—it shapes everyday decisions. Responses collected by the Census Bureau in late summer 2024 about experiences during the previous 12 months show that lower-income households are substantially more likely to reduce spending on essentials, such as food or medicine, in order to pay their energy bills. They are also much more likely to report keeping their homes at temperatures that felt unsafe or unhealthy. Households earning less than $25,000 annually, more than one-quarter reported keeping their homes at temperatures that felt unsafe or unhealthy. As household income increases, both of these hardships become steadily less common, suggesting that affordability increasingly shapes who can safely cool their homes during periods of extreme heat. 

Source: U.S. Census Bureau, Household Pulse Survey (2024) Phase 4,2, Cycle 09 (August 20—September 16, 2024 survey. Estimates are based on respondents’ reported experiences during the previous 12 months)  Affordability is driving increasing rates of energy insecurity 

These affordability challenges are becoming more widespread. Energy insecurity refers to the inability to adequately meet a household’s basic energy needs. It can include difficulty paying utility bills, keeping a home at safe indoor temperatures, or maintaining reliable electricity service.  

Source: National Consumer Law Center (NCLC) 2026, using data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration Residential Energy Consumption Survey (RECS), 2020 and 2024.  

New data suggest that these challenges are affecting a growing share of households. Comparing the 2020 and 2024 Residential Energy Consumption Surveys from the US Energy Information Administration shows increases  across every major indicator measured, includingutility disconnection notices, reductions in spending on food or medicine, and an inability to adequately heat of cool the home. . Together, these findings suggest that energy affordability is becoming an increasingly important public health and climate resilience challenge. 

Addressing the climate and energy affordability challenge 

Fortunately, there are solutions. Reducing heat-trapping emissions remains essential to limiting how severe, and how costly, future summers become. Investments in weatherization and energy efficiency can reduce household energy needs before temperatures rise. Utility bill assistance and stronger protections against utility disconnections can help families stay safe during periods of extreme heat. Community solar, resilience hubs, and distributed energy resources can also help communities prepare for, withstand, and recover from increasingly dangerous summers.  

Just as important, policymakers and regulators can and should evaluate energy decisions through an affordability lens. As electricity demand grows and investments are made to modernize and strengthen the electric grid, ensuring that electricity remains affordable, particularly for households already facing high energy burdens, will be critical. Affordability is becoming an increasingly important component of climate resilience, alongside investments in grid reliability, energy efficiency, weatherization, and consumer protections.  

The figures in this analysis point us toward important questions. Which lower-income communities face the greatest combined risks from rising cooling needs, high electricity costs, and limited household resources? Where are households already struggling to stay safe during periods of extreme heat? And which policies can ensure affordability keeps pace with a warming climate? As the climate changes, our understanding—and our solutions—must continue evolving too. 

Because when temperatures become dangerous, access to cooling is no longer simply a matter of whether air conditioning exists. It is increasingly a matter of whether people can afford to use it. 

In April, I blogged about the possibility of a super El Niño developing towards the end of this year. Well, not only has the El Niño already developed, but according to recent numbers from nearly all seasonal forecast models, there is now a roughly 90% chance of this El Niño becoming the strongest in recorded history. You read that right: nearly every seasonal forecasting model available to climate scientists and meteorologists is predicting an unprecedented El Niño event.

Earth is going to shatter global temperature records

A record-breaking super El Niño has a lot of implications for the world’s weather and climate system, and for the human systems that depend on them, like agriculture and food security. In a typical El Niño, the overall global average temperature is warmer than usual due mainly to warm ocean surface temperatures in the eastern Tropical Pacific. When ocean temperatures are warmer, they release a lot more heat into the atmosphere, warming up global air temperatures.

As I mentioned in my last blog, El Niño and fossil fuel-driven climate change together make a terrible team. While El Niño is a natural cycle in Earth’s climate system, fossil fuel-driven climate change is not. When you combine an El Niño event with the overall warming of Earth due to emissions from heat trapping fossil fuels, you get an exceptionally warm planet.

A super El Niño, which is a very strong El Niño event, would almost certainly push global temperatures into record territory. Check out the latest model forecast simulations from the North American Multi-Model Ensemble (NMME; below). The observed global surface temperature anomaly (compared with the 1850-1900 average) is on the left side of the graph. You can see that, so far this year, we’ve been above 1.0°C (1.8°F) warmer every single month compared with the same temperature values in the late 1800s.

Global surface temperatures from July 2025 to March 2027, showing observed temperatures up to July 2026 and projected temperatures after that. On the right, the thin orange lines show individual model projects, and the red line shows their average.  NOAA/University of Miami.

The right panel of the graph shows the forecast through March 2027: with a super El Niño, global average temperatures will skyrocket. Monthly temperature anomalies are expected to approach 2.0°C for January, February, and March 2027, with nearly half of the models forecasting well over 2.0°C values. A couple models are literally off the chart, over 2.5°C! That means there’s a possibility of reaching a monthly global average temperature anomaly of 2.5°C. This would be a shocking escalation of global warming, as we only just crossed the 1.5°C threshold (temporarily, in terms of yearly average) in 2024.

As a reminder, 1.5°C and 2°C are the internationally agreed targets, encoded in the Paris Climate Agreement, as the safer temperature limits that we should strive to remain below. Fossil fuel-driven climate change plus this Super El Niño are, at least temporarily, blasting well past these temperatures.

Climate change and El Niño

So what’s up with this record-breaking super El Niño? Is it related to fossil fuel-caused climate change? I have two responses for you:

1) In today’s world, every part of our climate system (ocean, atmosphere, land, cryosphere) is fundamentally different due to climate change in some way. This isn’t the same climate system as the 1950s. Therefore, every meteorological or climatological phenomenon that occurs, even if it’s a natural cycle like El Niño, is being affected by our changing system.

2) There is evidence that fossil fuel-driven climate change is directly influencing El Niño. As I mentioned in my last blog, one study found in recent observations that El Niño and La Niña events are becoming more extreme. Another study found that the impact of El Niño events on our weather patterns is getting worse with climate change.

The oceans are blazing hot

One would think we wouldn’t reach record-breaking ocean surface temperatures in the eastern Tropical Pacific until the super El Niño is in full swing, but that’s not the case. Ocean surface temperatures in the main development region for El Niño events are already at record levels for the date (below). And not just barely breaking the record, we are nearly 0.5°C (0.9°F) warmer than the previous record for mid-July, and over 2.0°C (3.6°F) warmer than the 1991-2020 average.

Daily sea surface temperature in the Niño 3.4 region, which is an area in the eastern Tropical Pacific where El Niño typically develops. The red line is 2026 values, the orange line is 2025. The dashed lines are 1991-2020 (thicker dashed) and 1982-2010 (lighter dashed) averages. ClimateReanalyzer.

Globally, ocean surface temperatures are also in record territory for this time of year, driven not just by the El Niño region but by marine heat waves currently affecting nearly 40% of the ocean. According to the marine heatwave tracker from NOAA, abnormally hot ocean temperatures are being observed in every ocean basin around the world (below). There’s a huge bullseye in the Pacific Ocean where the super El Niño is developing, but look at the Indian Ocean, Atlantic Ocean north of the Caribbean, and the Mediterranean. That patch of heat in the Mediterranean actually helped produce the heat dome leading to the record high temperatures Europe experienced last month, leading to over 20,000 excess deaths.

NOAA coral reef watch daily map for tracking marine heatwaves. The areas in yellow, orange, and red denote oceans currently experiencing a marine heatwave. NOAA.

It’s no surprise that the oceans are blazingly hot. They have absorbed over 90% of the heat added to the climate system from the additional heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels—a truly mind-boggling amount of excess heat. These marine heatwaves that we’re seeing covering 40% of the world’s oceans are yet another indicator of accelerating fossil fuel-driven climate change.

Climate change, El Niño and the heat dome in western US

What goes on in the ocean doesn’t stay in the ocean. If record ocean surface temperatures are occurring, whether it’s from El Niño or a marine heatwave, we’re going to feel those effects on land. Now, a heat dome has started in the western US which could last through the end of July for the west coast. And we’re seeing some unprecedented temperatures: both Salt Lake City, Utah and Helena, Montana have broken their all-time record high temperatures.

The fingerprints of fossil fuel-driven climate change are all over this heat dome. According to Climate Central’s Climate Shift Index, a broad swath of temperatures in the Mountain West (the day of the Salt Lake City and Helena record highs) were made 5x more likely due to climate change on Sunday, July 12.

The Climate Shift Index for Sunday, July 12, 2026. Places in dark red show areas that experienced temperatures made 5x more likely due to climate change. Climate Central.

You also might be thinking, “wait, are the developing super El Niño or the marine heatwaves related to this heat dome?” That is an excellent question, and most likely, yes. The weather of the western US is often directly influenced by ocean surface temperatures in the Pacific, as my own research showed in 2024. Another study released in 2024 found that anomalous storms/rainfall south of Hawaii, which develops from warmer ocean surface temperatures, influenced the Pacific Northwest heatwave in 2021. Record warm ocean surface temperatures as a result of climate change and the developing super El Niño are likely influencing the strength and duration of the current heat dome in the western US.

Earth’s climate has changed

We are now living in a dangerous new world thanks to the emissions of heat-trapping gases from the burning of fossil fuels. The climate of yesterday is no longer present. El Niños will look different, marine heatwaves will become more frequent and longer lasting, and heat domes that produce unprecedented heatwaves are here to stay. But there’s still hope. We know what to do to tackle the climate crisis we’ve brought onto ourselves. It’s time to take action.

Here are two things you can tell your Congressional representatives today.

• No immunity for big oil
• Protect FEMA and NOAA from budget cuts

Stay safe and fight on.