Weather

The Nation -   This week, a brutal heat wave is shattering heat records in Europe. It’s but it’s worth recalling however that last summer the same thing happened in Asia: China, Japan, and Korea suffered their hottest summers on record in 2025, the World Meteorological Organization noted in a new report. Now it’s France’s turn. And maybe Belgium, Spain, and Britain’s as well. As global warming driven mainly by burning fossil fuels continues to intensify, scientists say that record breaking heat will become increasingly frequent throughout the world.

Temperatures in France this week have been the hottest ever recorded, exceeding 44 degrees Celsius (112 degrees Fahrenheit) on June 23. French authorities placed more than half the country on “red alert” and warned that the extreme heat would continue for days to come, Agence France-Presse reported. The Guardian quoted the French health minister explaining that “many people are going to suffer, because bodies suffer from an accumulation of high temperatures.”

The intensity, scope, and projected duration of this extreme heat has drawn comparisons to the catastrophic heat wave that scorched Europe in 2003. That heat wave is a landmark event in the history of human-caused climate change for two reasons. First, it was the first extreme weather event that scientists authoritatively attributed to climate change; a team of British scientists published a study concluding that global warming was responsible for 45 percent of the excessive heat that punished Europe that summer. Second, the 2003 heat wave was global warming’s first mass casualty event: It killed a staggering 71,000 people in six weeks, considerably more than the number of US war deaths throughout all the years of the Vietnam War. (Initial reports estimated that 15,000 people died, a figure sometimes still repeated today, but subsequent epidemiological analysis concluded that the actual death toll was nearly five times higher.)

The Guardian -   This month, NOAA confirmed the formation of El Niño in the tropical Pacific and issued an official advisory. Forecasters expect it to strengthen through the winter of 2026–27, with a 63% chance it will reach the “very strong” threshold, placing it among the strongest events in the modern record dating back to 1950. In a world already experiencing record heat, such an event could bring more dangerous extremes: drought, wildfires, flooding, and in the Pacific, a more active hurricane season. And, as is always the case, these events disproportionately affect the most vulnerable.

In the face of this evolving threat, the Trump administration has sought to cripple our forecasting capabilities. This spring, the National Science Foundation (NSF) began “descoping” the Ocean Observatories Initiative, a network that delivers real-time ocean data from more than 900 sensors. “Descoping” is bureaucratic language for dismantling the program. The agency announced plans to pull all sensors, buoys and other equipment from four of the program’s five sites. These arrays span from the Gulf of Alaska to the Irminger Sea between Greenland and Iceland, and down to the waters off North Carolina. Built over a decade at a cost of approximately $386m, the system is among the most advanced ocean-observing networks in the world.

Make no mistake. Pulling these arrays was not a budgetary exercise. Rather, the NSF’s actions are more properly viewed as an extension of the Trump administration’s broader assault on federal climate science. The objective is apparently to weaken the programs that measure climate change and then claim the problem is “uncertain”. But turning off the alarm does not put out the fire.