Wildfire smoke engulfed the iconic skyline of New York, blotting out the Empire State Building in a dystopian orange haze. A massive heat dome broke temperature records in Texas, straining the power grid and killing 13 people. Torrential rain flooded the Hudson Valley and Vermont, washing homes off their foundations and forcing residents to navigate downtown streets by canoe.
This summer, the United States resembles the set of a blockbuster disaster movie.
As extreme weather engulfs almost every part of the nation — from intense precipitation in the Northeast to a sharp climb in heat and ocean temperatures in the Southeast and Southwest— even scientists who track climate change are startled.
“I’d say this is unbelievable, but that word has been losing its meaning lately,” Brian McNoldy, a senior research scientist at the University of Miami, said Monday as Miami’s heat index hit 109.9 Fahrenheit. It was the city’s 30th consecutive day of 100-degree weather.
With about 100 million Americans from California to Florida this week under heat advisories or extreme heat warnings, many are sheltering indoors.
Anyone hoping to escape the heat in the ocean found little relief: Sea temperatures off the Florida Keys came close to 97 degrees, not much cooler than a hot tub.
While heat waves are “typical summer stuff” in states like Florida, Benjamin Kirtman, professor of Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Miami and co-chair of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Climate Prediction Task Force, said he was most shocked by the rapidly warming seas. Surface sea water across a broad swath of the Florida Keys — and some parts of the Gulf of Mexico — is about five degrees warmer than normal for this time of year.
Smoke from Canadian wildfires, like this one north of Fort St. John in British Columbia, has wreaked havoc on air quality in parts of the northern United States.
(Noah Berger / Associated Press)
“The temperatures that we’re seeing in the global oceans have a one in a quarter-million chance of happening,” Kirtman said. “The magnitude of this ratcheting up is just mind-boggling to me. It’s completely out of bounds.”
Warmer sea waters threaten to bleach coral reefs — a vital habitat for fish, shrimp, crab sponges, oysters, clams, crabs and sea urchins — and encourage the forming of harmful algal blooms. They also create more energy to fuel hurricanes.
2023 is an El Niño year, which typically means weaker hurricanes in the Atlantic basin. But experts warn the El Niño effect could be offset by warming seas. Last week, Colorado State University climatologists factored in “record warm sea surface temperatures” as they predicted an above-average hurricane year with four major hurricanes of Category 3 or greater intensity.
A cyclist rides along the shore of Lake Michigan as Chicago’s skyline is blanketed in haze from Canadian wildfires.
(Kiichiro Sato / Associated Press)
The extraordinary U.S. weather comes as Earth experienced the hottest week on record last week. The World Meteorological Organization said preliminary data showed the global average temperature on Friday was 63.05 degrees Fahrenheit, surpassing the previous record of 62.49 degrees on Aug. 16, 2016.
“We are in uncharted territory and we can expect more records to fall,” warned Chris Hewitt, the WMO’s director of climate services.
In Southern California, the heat wave ignited wildfires Tuesday in Riverside County and the Moreno Valley. Wildfires also spread in Oregon and Washington, prompting evacuation orders and fears of an above-normal 2023 wildfire season in the Pacific Northwest.
A Los Angeles City Fire Department helicopter drops water on a brush fire that broke out Friday in the Elysian Park area.
(Mark J. Terrill / Associated Press)
In the Northeast, the unusually intense rain comes a month after thick smoke from Canadian wildfires billowed across the Midwest, Northeast and Mid-Atlantic. In New York, the smoke forced the cancellation of “Hamilton” on Broadway and postponed a Yankees vs. White Sox game. It seeped into Manhattan high-rises and Queens rowhouses, producing hazardous air quality for residents with asthma, according to a map of indoor air quality compiled of data from citizen scientists. Plumes of smoke from the wildfires returned Tuesday.
This week, after 9 inches of rain fell within the Hudson Valley in a 24-hour period, flooding homes and sweeping a 35-year-old woman to her death, New York’s Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul declared the intense weather afflicting her state “the new normal.”
People line the railing over the Ottauquechee River in Vermont to get a closer look as the river rises Sunday.
(Boston Globe via Getty Images)
A small tractor clears water from a business Wednesday in Barre, Vt.
(Charles Krupa / Associated Press)
But Michael Mann, a professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Science at the University of Pennsylvania, rejected that term: “‘New normal’ makes it sound like we’ve arrived at some other climate state and just need to adapt to it. But it’s worse than that. It’s an ever-moving baseline of more frequent and intense weather extremes as we continue to warm the planet.”
“I prefer to call it ‘a new abnormal,’” Mann said.
The acute warm temperatures, Mann said, stemmed from a combination of steady, ongoing human-caused climate change and natural variability.
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“We’re seeing the steady warming of the planet from fossil fuel burning and carbon pollution combined with a natural transition of the climate from a La Niña to El Niño state,” he said. “The latter adds as much as 0.3C or so extra warming and we can think of it as a bit of natural ‘fuel’ that is being added to the human-caused fire.”
While summer heat waves broke single-day temperature records last week in cities from Miami to Portland, Ore., most places have yet to break all-time records. The hottest place on Earth, Furnace Creek in California’s Death Valley, is forecast to reach 127 degrees Sunday, short of the 134 degrees recorded in 1913.
A woman walks with a child next to the Grand Canal at the end of another scorching day in Phoenix.
(Dario Lopez-Mills / Associated Press)
Phoenix, the nation’s largest hot city, reached 111 degrees Tuesday, slightly higher than normal, but short of the record for that day of 118 in 1958. The National Weather Service in Phoenix said temperatures in the city, which have endured 12 consecutive days of 110-degree weather, are expected to soar through the weekend as high as 118 degrees. If high temperatures persists for a week, they would break the all-time record.
Local governments across the U.S. are scrambling to prepare for hotter weather, issuing warnings. opening cooling centers and hydration stations, and checking on vulnerable residents who are unsheltered, living in mobile and manufactured homes, or without air conditioning. Some cities are also developing longer-term mitigation strategies.
In 2021, Phoenix became the first city to set up an Office of Heat Response and Mitigation, establishing a strategic plan to mitigate the growing risk urban heat posed to the city’s economy and residents’ health. The city is working to plant trees to produce more shade in disadvantaged communities and install heat-reflective pavement.
Still, Maricopa County reported 425 heat-associated deaths last year, a 25% increase from the previous year.
If living in the United States sometimes feels unstable and apocalyptic— as if Americans are auditioning for the Last Day of Tomorrow — many scientists stress that the ending is not predetermined.
Migrant farmworkers pick sweet corn in Waverly, Ohio. Climate change and extreme heat are increasing difficulty and danger for farmworkers and others who labor outside.
(Joshua A. Bickel / Associated Press)
“Humans have some ability to affect future trajectories of warming,” said Tom Knutson, a senior scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory. “We still have some ability to affect what level temperatures would get to, for example, by reducing our greenhouse gas emissions. So part of the answer there actually lies with us, and what we do.”
Even if temperatures rise, Kirtman said, Americans can put in place mechanisms to make the nation more livable and reduce the risk to human health.
“There’s no reason why we should lose a few thousand in Chicago, because they’re stuck in an apartment building and have no air conditioning.”
Governments can also work on adaptive measures to increase resilience in the face of more intense weather events, Mann said, by restricting construction in flood- and fire-prone regions, building coastal defenses against flooding, and developing cooling infrastructure to help people cope with extreme heat.
“Earth’s climate system is both fragile and resilient at the same time, and we can likely prevent truly catastrophic warming if we decarbonize the machinery of our civilization,” Mann said. “On the other hand, if we fail to do so, climate history teaches us that collapse is not out of the question.”
Lucas Harrington, 7, cools off in a mister at Kauffman Stadium in Kansas City, Mo., as temperatures approach 100 degrees before a baseball game.
(Charlie Riedel / Associated Press)
