A prolonged stretch of dangerous heat is forecast across the Southwest U.S. and northern Mexico this week, with temperatures up to 18°F above normal in some areas. The Climate Shift Index indicates that human-caused climate change made this heat at least five times more likely. Nearly 53 million people are expected to experience at least one day under these exceptional, climate-driven conditions.

High temperatures are expected to range from 94°F to 106°F (34-41°C) across much of the region, with even hotter conditions forecast in the desert Southwest. Parts of Southern California, southwest Arizona, southern Nevada, and Sonora (Mexico) could reach between 110°F and 116°F (43 -47°C).

Climate Shift Index (CSI) levels of 5 — the highest possible — are forecast across the Southwest, southern Plains, Intermountain West, and northern Mexico, meaning human-caused climate change made this extreme heat at least five times more likely. This signals an exceptional climate-influenced event.

What do you think is missing from climate communications today?

The oil industry and its fellow travelers, aiming to preserve the economic supremacy of carbon energy, have poured more than a billion dollars into erecting a powerful infrastructure of misinformation. They have built a false climate narrative to discredit the scientific consensus, abetted by the parallel ascension of Fox News.

The industry’s communications playbook, developed to undermine environmental concern, has like Frankenstein escaped from the lab and infected public discourse in almost every sphere. Their techniques of kneecapping facts have proven so effective that agnotology has become a subject of growing academic attention—agnotology being the study of the deliberate creation of ignorance.

American journalism at the local level especially has probably never been in such a weakened condition. It remains a dire national emergency. Yet this emergency is largely being treated as a business story, a form of “creative destruction,” a trend to adapt to rather than the existential threat to democracy that it is, even by many of those who are trying to rescue it.

The public square has acquiesced to the notion of a “post-fact world” far too easily and thoughtlessly, without a fight. Yet facts govern our lives, and will continue to do so, even if we lose the ability to recognize them.

In the case of climate change, what we refuse to know is already killing us. What’s missing from climate communications? Maybe that’s not the right question. Maybe the right question is how to flood the zone with truth.

‍2025 has been a disastrous year for climate science in America. The 47th presidential administration has fired hundreds of scientists, starved programs and departments of funding, rolled back dozens of environmental regulations, undermined the tracking of hurricanes and extreme weather, and has taken down hundreds of federal websites, pages, references and data sets related to climate change. This ideological purge of climate research aligns closely with the goals of the Project 2025 Mandate for Leadership.

There are some great organizations working on archiving this data, including the Public Environmental Data Partners, The Data Rescue Project, and the Southern Environmental Law Center. We're adding our site to the pile, as the more of us that download and share this information, the harder it will be to suppress.

Since most people won't be combing through these spreadsheets, we've also mapped several of these data sets, and provided commentary to help make sense of this data. You can view those here:

• NCA5 (1.5C)
• NCA5 (2C)
• FEMA Future Risk Index
• CDC Social Vulnerability Index

We've also compiled reports from both public and private institutions, as well as research papers with a focus on climate resilience and adaptation. If there are any reports or data sets you think we've missed, let us know and we'll add it to the collection!

Summers have been heating up for decades, and they’ll only get hotter if heat-trapping pollution continues — making future summers in Minneapolis feel more like current summers in Tulsa.

With high levels of heat-trapping pollution, future summer high temperatures in 247 major U.S. cities would heat up by an average of 3.6°F by 2060 and 7.9°F by 2100. This analysis shows how future warming could transport a city’s current climate to an entirely different part of the country — or the world — with reduced commitments to lower carbon pollution .

On average, summer high temperatures across the 247 cities analyzed are projected to increase 3.6°F by 2060 and 7.9°F by 2100. Mitchell, S.D. is projected to warm the most by 2100 (11.1°F), when it will feel more like Wichita Falls, Texas.

By the end of this century, summers in the cities analyzed would shift to resemble hotter locations an average of 437 miles to the south. For 16 U.S. cities, there is no equivalent in North America to how hot they’d be in 2100. Their future summers are more similar to current conditions in Pakistan, the Middle East, and North Africa.

When the Trump administration began taking down federal resources on climate change, I started pre-emptively archiving reports and data sets in the event that they're no longer accessible. That proved to be a smart move, as the NCA5 website just went dark this week. That's a huge blow to the layperson, as that was one of the most comprehensive resources on climate change for our nation. Thankfully I had the data backed up on multiple hard drives and cloud servers, so we can continue to provide this information to those who need it.

So far I've archived the following resources (which are no longer available from their official websites):

• CDC Environmental Justice Index | Google Drive | Proton Drive
• CDC Social Vulnerability Index | Google Drive | Proton Drive
• FEMA Future Risk Index | Google Drive | Proton Drive
• NCA5 Reports | Google Drive | Proton Drive
• NCA5 Data Atlas | Google Drive | Proton Drive

The following resources are still live, but I've archived them pre-emptively for safety:

• CDC Effects of Climate Change on Health
• EPA Climate Resilience Screening Index
• EPA Cumulative Resilience Screening Index
• FEMA National Risk Index
• NCICS State Climate Summaries

What other US government resources might be on the chopping block? I'm primarily looking for reports and data related to climate change, resilience, and adaptation, and ideally in a downloadable format (PDF, Excel, CSV, etc.).

For much of the 20th century, winter brought an annual ritual to Princeton, New Jersey. Lake Carnegie froze solid, and skaters flocked to its glossy surface. These days, the ice is rarely thick enough to support anybody wearing skates, since Princeton’s winters have warmed about 4 degrees Fahrenheit since 1970. It’s a lost tradition that Grace Liu linked to the warming climate as an undergrad at Princeton University in 2020, interviewing longtime residents and digging through newspaper archives to create a record of the lake’s ice conditions.

When the university’s alumni magazine featured her research in the winter of 2021, the comment section was filled with wistful memories of skating under the moonlight, pushing past the crowds to play hockey, and drinking hot chocolate by the frozen lakeside. Liu began to wonder: Could this kind of direct, visceral loss make climate change feel more vivid to people?

That question sparked her study, recently published in the journal Nature Human Behavior, that came to a striking conclusion: Boiling down data into a binary — a stark this or that — can help break through apathy about climate change.

A trifecta of crises—accelerating climate change, a scarcity of affordable housing and escalating insurance rates—are threatening the one place where people usually feel secure: their homes.

“The cost of property insurance was a topic most people ignored, but it’s now a kitchen table economic issue for many families, and a risk factor for the housing market,” said Sarah Edelman, former deputy assistant secretary for single family housing at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Current homeowners are more likely to become delinquent on their mortgages after an insurance premium increase. Prospective buyers can’t find or afford homes. Developers can’t bring new units to market. And operating costs for landlords can reach an unsustainable level, Edelman said, with effects trickling down to real estate agents, the lenders, mortgage services—the entire housing ecosystem.

Compounded by climate change, the insurance crisis could destabilize the entire financial system, said Anne Perrault, senior policy counsel for the Climate Program at Public Citizen. ”In some ways, it’s just the beginning of a death spiral for some regions of our country.”

When Sara Weaner Cooper and her husband bought their first home in Pennsylvania, they knew they didn't want a perfectly manicured front lawn like their neighbours. They wanted something that was more than just turf – a flourishing, wild meadow home to diverse species of plants and animals.

Weaner Cooper had always wanted to focus on native plants in her lawn and do less mowing, so rewilding their front lawn felt like the right move. But the Coopers' lawn is a different animal than her father's. It's in full Sun and consisted of over 1,500 sq m (16,000 sq ft) of turfgrass – narrow-leaved grasses designed to look uniform that had to be dealt with before a meadow could fully take over.

Rather than rip everything up and live with a drab, brown lawn for months, they decided to try strategically seeding and planting native plants into the existing turf, hoping it would eventually weed the turf out naturally. "It's easier in the sense that you don't need to be beating back as many weeds," explains Weaner Cooper. "The native plants came in so thickly that they outcompeted a lot of the weed pressure that would have been there if we would have just made it brown."

It took about two years, lots of planning, some careful weeding, and some trial and error, but eventually a medley of waist-high native plant species blanketed their vast front lawn.

https://archive.ph/fno9c

A huge 89% majority of the world’s people want stronger action to fight the climate crisis but feel they are trapped in a self-fulfilling “spiral of silence” because they mistakenly believe they are in a minority, research suggests.

Making people aware that their pro-climate view is, in fact, by far the majority could unlock a social tipping point and push leaders into the climate action so urgently needed, experts say.

The data comes from a global survey that interviewed 130,000 people across 125 countries and found 89% thought their national government “should do more to fight global warming”.

The existence of a silent climate majority across the planet is supported by several separate analyses. Other studies demonstrate a clear global appetite for action, from citizens of rich nations strongly supporting financial support for poorer vulnerable countries and even those in petrostates backing a phase-out of coal, oil and gas. A decades-long campaign of misinformation by the fossil fuel industry is a key reason the climate majority has been suppressed, researchers said.

Prof Teodora Boneva, at the University of Bonn, Germany, who was part of the team behind the 125-nation survey, said: “The world is united in its judgment about climate change and the need to act. Our results suggest a concerted effort to correct these misperceptions could be powerful intervention, yielding large, positive effects.”

https://archive.ph/hR3ws

In the summer of 2023, a dozen people willingly walked into a steel chamber at the University of Ottawa designed to test the limits of human survival. Outfitted with heart rate monitors and temperature probes, they waited in temperatures of 42 degrees Celsius, or 107 degrees Fahrenheit, while the humidity steadily climbed, coating their bodies in sweat and condensation. After several hours, their internal body temperatures began ratcheting upward, as the heat cooked them from the outside in.

“Few people on the planet have actually experienced temperatures like this,” said Robert Meade, a postdoctoral researcher in epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health who led the study. “Imagine moisture condensing on the skin like a glass of water on a hot day. That’s how hot it was, compared to skin temperature.”

Their experiment tested the body’s ability to cope with extreme heat by exposing participants to temperatures at which they could no longer cool themselves. Their study confirmed that this dangerous threshold is much lower than scientists had previously thought: a so-called wet-bulb temperature, which accounts for heat and humidity, of 26 to 31 degrees C.

https://archive.ph/Lj16Y

As storms and floods become more frequent, intense, and expensive in terms of finances and lost lives, city life is becoming more precarious.

Amit Prothi, the director general of the Coalition for Disaster Resilient Infrastructure, has spent decades working on making communities more resilient across more than 15 countries in North America, Asia, and Europe. He said that American infrastructure – like power lines, water drainage systems, and housing development – and building policies that govern such projects may not account for the changing risks brought about by climate change.

But there are several strategies U.S. cities can put in place to become more resilient. As a bonus, implementing these strategies can also make cities more beautiful and community-oriented – and in most cases, are also financial no-brainers.

In the U.S., coastal floods now happen three times more often than they did 30 years ago, and the frequency and intensity of coastal flooding are projected to increase into the future. By 2050, floods are expected to happen 10 times more often than they do today.

Climate Central’s Coastal Risk Finder provides maps and analysis of the people, homes, and land projected to be at risk from worsening coastal flooding. Around 2.5 million Americans in 1.4 million homes live in areas at risk from a severe coastal flood in 2050, with Florida, New York, and New Jersey facing the highest risks.

You can explore the data here: https://app.climatecentral.org/coastal-risk-finder