The White House, in coordination with 14 federal agencies, today released the Fifth National Climate Assessment (NCA), a comprehensive report on the impacts of climate on the United States and what future warming may hold for ecosystems, the economy, and communities across the country. 

The report establishes that the effects of rising temperatures are already “worsening across every region of the United States” sending ecosystems into death spirals, reshaping crops and forests, and fueling deadly heat waves. And without deeper cuts in global greenhouse gas emissions and accelerated adaptation to changes already underway, the report authors warn that “severe climate risks to the United States will continue to grow.”

Since 1990, Congress has required federal agencies to figure out how climate change will affect the country, with a report due at least every four years. Each assessment tallies up the latest damages, summarizes the newest science, and presents a sharper picture of the future. Unlike other major climate change reports, like those from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the National Climate Assessment is meant to explicitly inform policy and action, from interstate emissions trading rules to how many cooling shelters a city will need during a heat wave. 

The new assessment highlights how scientists have improved their ability to attribute signals of human-caused warming in extreme weather events like storm surges and heat waves. In addition, it tracks efforts to adapt to climate change, particularly incorporating traditional Indigenous knowledge. It also dedicates more space to racial and economic disparities in climate impacts. 

In a conference call with reporters, White House officials highlighted the new findings and used the report’s release to boast about their efforts to curb heat-trapping gasses, deploy clean energy, and adapt to warming through programs like the Inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. The presentation and release of the latest assessment stand in stark contrast to the last iteration of the report in 2018, when the Trump administration quietly posted it over a holiday weekend. 

The question, as always, is how much the report will change the country’s trajectory on climate change. Though US emissions are declining, they aren’t falling fast enough to stay in line with the country’s climate change commitments. As international delegates gather later this month for negotiations at the COP28 climate conference to further map out how they’ll address warming, the US will be one of many countries coming to the table with alarmingly little progress on a problem that the research continues to show is getting worse.

The National Climate Assessment is a scientific report with strong political implications

The National Climate Assessment has the dual remits of summarizing the latest in climate science and making it understandable for the public. Since the report is required by law, the whims of whoever is in the White House can’t quash it. But politics do change what’s emphasized and what’s downplayed. 

The last report cycle came under President Donald Trump, and scientists worried that the climate change denier would attempt to block its release. Though the report did publish, the administration dropped it on Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, in 2018. None of the federal agencies involved in assembling it helped publicize the release, and Trump afterward told reporters he “didn’t believe it.”

Now, the Biden administration is leading with a splashier release: The fifth assessment has new bells and whistles, including an accompanying podcast, art series, and even a poetry anthology compiled by two poet laureates and a climate scientist. There is a new atlas that allows users to explore their local climate impacts, and the full text is available in Spanish for the first time. We’re doing “whatever we can do to get this in the hands of people making decisions across the country every day,” Nature Conservancy chief scientist Katharine Hayhoe, a lead author of the NCA, said on a White House press call. 

More granularly relevant to the US than the scientific analysis of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the NCA will play an important role in the policies shaped by federal, state, and local agencies. Regulators can use it to guide future building standards, insurance policies, coastal development, and more. Even the buried assessment released by a reluctant Trump administration was cited thousands of times across the country. This time, the report will factor in the reforms spurred by new federal climate spending from the infrastructure law and the Inflation Reduction Act. 

The goal of public communication infuses the entire report because it is first and foremost intended as a decision-making tool.

To that end, one shift since the 2018 report is a greater emphasis on Indigenous people and racial justice, including dedicated chapters focused on the impacts of climate change on these groups. In the past five years, there’s been a surge in literature looking at climate change’s unequal burden from the lens of discrimination and historical practices like redlining, where lenders withheld services in communities of color. “There’s been a huge advance in our understanding of how impacts of climate change are felt disproportionately among our neighbors in cities in areas all over the country,” said Jeremy Hoffman, who led the Southeast chapter. “We’ve learned so much about how extreme heat disproportionately affects individuals with preexisting conditions or in outdoor work.”

In another example, the assessment observed that, by 2050, census tracts with a Black population greater than 20 percent were poised to experience almost twice the rate of losses due to floods as tracts where Black people made up less than 1 percent of the population. 

What the report makes clear is how the entire country now has to grapple with worsening heat, flooding, drought, and smoky days. This increasingly personal experience of climate change affects how the administration considers its communication. Young people today “have not just intellectually started to appreciate the concept of this crisis, it is their lived experience to see the sky turn orange or to breathe in the smoke from wildfires, hundreds of miles [away],” Biden’s national climate adviser Ali Zaidi said on a press call.

Authors hope the report will help alleviate the harms of climate change

Since 2018, scientists have learned a lot more about the consequences of rising greenhouse gasses and peered through a window into the future: The planet experienced four out of the five hottest years humans have ever measured, including 2023, which is on track to be the hottest year on record.  

Some of the biggest advances highlighted in the Fifth National Climate Assessment are in understanding the material ways that climate change has already started to affect us and how more warming will shape our future. 

For instance, the new report talks about advances in understanding individual extreme weather events, called climate change attribution. By measuring specific features like sea level rise or shifts in the probabilities of certain events, researchers can tease out how humanity’s appetite for fossil fuels has altered severe weather. 

Scientists can even perform these calculations during or shortly after a massive deluge, epic heat wave, or raging storm. For example, the report notes that 2017’s Hurricane Harvey, which broke a national rainfall record for a single storm as it drenched Houston, was about 15 to 20 percent worse due to climate change. Attribution helps scientists communicate the role of climate change in severe weather to the public. It also lays out how further warming will influence extreme events in the years to come. 

Scientists have also learned more about how rising average temperatures affect the ecosystems that we depend on for our health and our economy. Climate change is reshaping how vegetation clears the air, how soils filter water, and how forests drive regional rainfall cycles. 

Recent findings show that some ecosystems are close to tipping points, where the interplay between local plants, animals, microorganisms, and weather patterns will undergo unstoppable changes. Massive wildfires, for instance, can lead certain animal populations to permanently relocate. Others may go extinct. 

“In some cases, we as humans can adapt to those changes, but what’s really worrisome, for a lot of these changes, some of them are going to be irreversible,” said Pamela McElwee, who led the ecosystems chapter of the climate assessment. “We can’t ever go back, even if we were to stop all of our greenhouse gas emissions right now.” 

That’s alarming because these ecosystems provide benefits that scientists are only beginning to learn about and quantify. Coral reefs, for example, are not just popular tourist destinations but important shock absorbers for coastal storms. They help the US economy avoid about $1.8 billion in damages each year, explained McElwee, a professor of human ecology at Rutgers University. But coral reef ecosystems are facing enormous threats, from fertilizer runoff, from overfishing, from the changing chemistry of the ocean, and from warming water. 

The report then connects the dots between research on warming and how that in turn affects people. “Social science is predictive of climate change outcomes in a very serious way,” said Elizabeth Marino, an associate professor of anthropology at Oregon State University Cascades, who led the chapter on social justice. “It’s one thing to say there will be sea level rise and it’s another thing to say these are the processes that lead to who will move and who will not.” 

Scientists have begun to piece together how factors like race, income, construction techniques, and insurance rates can compound the effects of a disaster already worsened by climate change, creating social disruption and widening inequities. 

The hope is that flagging these interconnections can reduce the suffering that people experience as the planet heats up. “One of the famous sayings within hazards and disaster literature is ‘there’s no such thing as a natural disaster,” said Fayola Jacobs, an assistant professor of urban planning at the University of Minnesota and a co-author of the NCA’s social science chapter. While rising temperatures can fuel hotter heat waves and more damaging storms, the harms that people experience —injuries, illnesses, homelessness, stress, financial loss — are a function of decisions they make as individuals and as communities. 

The challenge is not only coming up with the decisions that maximize the benefits of addressing climate change and minimize its harms, but building public support for more aggressive actions on climate change. “While there is urgency to this, we can’t do it so quickly and carelessly,” Jacobs said. “We can only move at the speed of trust.”

For years on her popular cooking show, The French Chef, Julia Child used a crude, makeshift kitchen that she and her husband would haul to the set for each filming. When she returned to the screen for a  new, 13-episode series later in her career, she had one condition: She needed a kitchen that was her own to film in, one “that we could just walk into and work in and leave.”

Child got her wish — thanks to a generous sponsorship from the American Gas Association (AGA), a powerful lobby for gas utilities, which paid for a new kitchen, complete with a four-burner commercial range and a gas oven rotisserie. 

Her new show, Julia Child & Company, aired in 1978. “We have a new set, and a new theme song,” she said at the time. And each episode that theme music reached its crescendo, a slide noted a “special thanks to The American Gas Association.”

Child herself never endorsed products on her shows (regulations around public programming forbade it) and there’s no evidence to suggest that she was a willing shill of the AGA. But from the industry’s point of view, Child was potent product placement that could help establish the dominance of gas in the American home. “Millions of viewers week after week will be able to watch Julia Child as she stirs food simmering over a gas flame,” read an October 1978 article from the association’s monthly trade magazine.  

This was a continuation of a larger campaign called “Operation Attack.” Launched by the AGA in the late 1960s, it employed at the time some of the same experts and public relations firms as the tobacco industry to fend off growing threats to gas. The nation was becoming more environmentally conscious; the fossil-fuel industry feared heightened scrutiny from the newly formed Environmental Protection Agency, and energy price shocks had begun to make alternative fuels more appealing. To make matters worse, new research raised questions about gas stove emissions and impacts on public health. Gas was losing ground to electric competition, but the industry had plans to fight back. 

Child’s role in this industry battle would be largely forgotten if not for documents unearthed by the climate watchdog group Climate Investigations Center, which shared them with Vox for review. 

This history adds a new layer to the image of the late TV star, affectionately known as “Joooooolia” by her fans, who was dedicated to teaching. Julia Child was also a weapon wielded by the fossil fuel lobby. 

Reached for comment, the Julia Child Foundation, a grantmaking organization that Child established when she was still alive, expressed concern over the legacy of Child, who died in 2004. “We were unaware of the AGA’s misappropriation of Julia’s legacy for their own agenda,” Todd Schulkin, the foundation’s executive director, wrote in an email. “Julia’s legacy was about learning to cook and appreciating what makes for good food, which extended to an embrace of new technology.”

How the gas lobby infiltrated Hollywood

Child had many stoves over her five-decade career, but she was famously devoted to one in particular: the Garland, a squat, six-burner gas range Child used in her home kitchen that cemented gas as her recommendation for professional and home chefs alike. The stove was so iconic that the Smithsonian has dedicated an exhibit to it. “It was a professional gas range, and as soon as I laid eyes on it I knew I must have one,” according to her posthumous memoir published in 2006. “I loved it so much I vowed to take it to my grave!”  

Decades after Child’s glowing endorsement, gas appliances have come under scrutiny in light of new evidence that they produce pollution linked to asthma and cancer, especially when not vented properly. Climate activists have also put pressure on lawmakers to pass local and state-wide bans on expanding gas infrastructure, to curb harmful emissions driving climate change.

But in 2023, a mention doubting the safety of gas stoves made some politicians apoplectic. In January, the Consumer Product Safety Commission’s Richard Trumka Jr. set off a firestorm for raising the idea of a gas stove ban to which the Republican representative Ronny Jackson from Texas threatened “they can pry it from my cold dead hands.” 

How did the gas stove become such a trigger point? Julia Child’s endearing affinity for gas stoves may have had some influence, but the industry was also reaching deep into Hollywood during the 1960s and ’70s.  

As part of a larger campaign, the American Gas Association established a “Hollywood Bureau” staffed with agents whose job was “obtaining publicity favorable to the natural gas industry within the national media of television and motion pictures,” according to AGA Monthly, the trade publication read by tens of thousands of industry professionals.

“The fact that these shows make use of gas appliances is hardly an accident,” one of its trade magazine articles noted. The bureau took credit for gas appliances appearing regularly in 25 primetime television series, periodically in another 12, in eight television movies, and nine feature films. 

Throughout the 1970s, AGA launched in-show product placements and paid appearances at conferences with celebrities — a  kind of prototype of today’s social media influencer endorsements. The gas stove made appearances alongside stars Mary Tyler Moore and Doris Day. AGA brought football quarterbacks from the Dallas Cowboys and St. Louis Cardinals and famous French chef Jacques Pépin to homebuilders conferences to attract attention. Onlookers who stopped by Pepin’s cooking demonstrations received pamphlets from AGA.

The industry fought hard to win favor in American kitchens so that it could generate demand to ensure new homes were built equipped with gas. The industry took out advertising in magazines like Ladies’ Home Journal, House Beautiful, and Good Housekeeping specifically to target the American housewife.  

Of course, natural gas utilities weren’t the only companies pursuing celebrity endorsements; General Electric hired then-actor Ronald Reagan to appear in widely watched ads for the all-electric home. But the AGA kept an especially close watch on its image. 

According to an article in its trade magazine, AGA’s influence went so far as to alter scripts that made gas look dangerous. “This ‘watchdog’ function is aided by friends in the industry who alert the bureau to scripts that call for a gas explosion or an asphyxiation,” the article read. “As a result of the Hollywood Bureau’s efforts last year, four potential damaging and misleading portrayals of gas incidents never reached the air.” The group also detailed efforts  to land more pro-gas scripts, working with studios so “an environmentally conscious producer or director” might plug  the “non-polluting” aspects of “natural” gas in scripts. “If such a screenplay eventually appears,” AGA Monthly claimed, “it will not be entirely an accident of fate.”

In 1977, American Gas Association’s president gave a sense of the scale of these campaigns, writing “an estimated eight out of 10 Americans saw AGA commercials on major network television in which we appeared as the sponsor of TV spectaculars, major documentaries or sports events.” 

In the course of reporting this story, Vox reached AGA for comment. A spokesperson for the group declined to answer specific questions but provided a general statement. 

“The natural gas industry has collaborated with subject matter experts and credible researchers to develop analysis and scientific studies to inform and educate regulators about the safety of gas cooking appliances and ways to help reduce cooking process emissions, regardless of heating source, from impacting indoor air quality,” AGA spokesperson Emily Carlin wrote in an email.

Today, approximately 40 million homes, or about 38 percent of households, cook with gas, and 61 percent of households rely on gas for some other use that includes cooking, water, and space heating, according to the Energy Information Administration. 

How the gas lobby uses influencers now

Since at least 2018, gas interests including the AGA, which represents the vast share of the industry, and the American Public Gas Association have hired influencers — though not quite of Julia Child’s caliber — to promote gas stoves on social media like YouTube and Instagram. These ads have been filled with youthful women posing in their stylish kitchens, flaunting the sponsored hashtag #cookingwithgas. 

One of those influencers is Kate Arends, writer of Wit & Delight, a style website for “designing a life well-lived.” In a sponsored blog post, Arends defended her new natural gas fireplace: “We knew it would be safe and ventilated properly—a MUST if using natural gas anywhere in your home.”

After I first reported on these campaigns in 2020, Sue Kristjansson, who is now president of Berkshire Gas, fretted in an internal company email: “If we wait to promote natural gas stoves until we have scientific data that they are not causing any air quality issues we’ll be done.”

AGA’s efforts go beyond hiring influencers. Many of its campaigns aim to thwart environmental regulation. Last year, AGA hired a consulting firm, Gradient, which has a track record defending tobacco and chemical companies, to dispute research from scientists on gas stove emissions. 

Gas utility ratepayers ultimately help pay the tab for these efforts. State utility commissions allow the gas industry to add a fee — usually just pennies to every consumer’s gas bill — so it can recoup its membership fees to the American Gas Association. Though small in scale, these fees add up to an expansive war chest in the tens of millions of dollars annually, according to the utility watchdog group Energy and Policy Institute. Environmental groups have called on FERC, the agency that regulates interstate gas and electricity commerce, to close what they see as a loophole that holds ratepayers captive — using funds meant for consumer education, not “political activity that does not benefit them.” They are also pressuring AGA’s utility members to exit, asking seven CEOs to abandon AGA because it is undermining their companies’ stated climate goals.

In addition to hiring social media personalities and sympathetic scientists, AGA and gas utilities also seem to perpetuate disinformation. When the Department of Energy proposed new efficiency regulations for stoves, a process required by law, AGA suggested this spring it amounted to a de facto ban. In reality, a limited number of older, less efficient models would be phased out after 2027, with no effect on existing gas appliances. 

Even so, this June, House Republicans passed a bill prohibiting the federal government from issuing any kind of regulations around gas stoves, which would interfere with the Department of Energy’s ability to set new efficiency standards. 

The AGA submitted comments to the Department of Energy in response to a proposed regulation to strengthen stove efficiency standards, with a nod to Child: “Thankfully, Julia Child was able to cook her masterful creations and have her gas range displayed in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History before DOE had a chance to ban it.” 

“We are all here for one reason: to end fossil fuels around the planet,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) told a cheering crowd on Sunday. Some 75,000 were gathered for the New York March to End Fossil Fuels on Sunday, where Ocasio-Cortez urged on, “We must be too big and too radical to ignore.”

As world leaders are in New York City for the annual United Nations General Assembly and the Climate Ambition Summit, protesters hit the streets. Members of Extinction Rebellion, a climate group dedicated to disruptive civil disobedience, staged demonstrations at the Museum of Modern Art to highlight a board member’s links to fossil fuel projects. Nearly 150 activists were arrested for blockading the Federal Reserve in New York to call for financial institutions to stop funding companies that extract coal and oil and gas. Protesters also camped outside of Bank of America to criticize the $280 billion in loans it has given to oil companies since 2016.

These demonstrations are the biggest climate protests in years. But they are also bolder, more singular in focus, and have narrowed their attack on the fossil fuel industry in particular. Fossil fuels — and the companies that have profited mightily from extracting them — have long been the central villains in the climate crisis, but over the past decade or so, the movement’s message has been more diffuse. Consider the 2014 People’s Climate March, which didn’t focus specifically on ending fossil fuels but rather on broad global action and spreading awareness of global warming’s potentially devastating impacts. Today’s activists are angry. They want to name and shame.

“Many people don’t actually connect the dots between fossil fuels and the climate emergency,” Jean Su, a co-organizer of the climate march and energy justice attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity. “The purpose of the march was to make that message crystal clear.”

In the spirit of making the movement’s aims even clearer, what exactly do protesters mean when they call for an end to fossil fuels?

What protesters want, explained

Protesters have demanded that President Joe Biden, the United Nations, and corporations stop federal approvals for fossil fuel projects, phase out drilling on public land, and halt dirty energy investments abroad.

Activists are trying to push vested financial and political interests into reining in fossil fuel production, the primary cause of climate change. Environmental groups have traditionally relied on a mix of pressing for change from the outside and reforming financial and government bodies from within, and protests are just a slice of the organizing that goes on to enact climate policy. This week’s slate of events in New York — the protests, blockades, and demonstrations — are a show of the force that plans on pressing from the outside and a reminder that the clock is running.

The demands from Sunday’s march include asking Biden to phase out oil and gas drilling on public lands, reject permits for new fossil fuel infrastructure, and halt oil and gas exports. Many of these demands are hard to deliver on, not only for political reasons but also because government leasing practices would probably require Congress to change.

The underlying moral argument here is that the world needs to stop building new fossil fuel infrastructure and begin to phase out coal, oil, and gas before the end of this decade to prevent the worst-case scenarios of global warming. Plus, gains in technology in recent years have made the transition away from extractive energy and toward renewable energy far more accessible.

There are a lot of complications in getting there, but many politicians and business leaders still don’t want to concede the basic point that it’s the energy industry that’s driving greenhouse emissions that are trapping heat in the Earth’s atmosphere. Even during global climate conferences, the US and other oil-reliant countries have, as recently as last year, blocked language urging a phase-out of fossil fuels.

The climate movement has also evolved on this. Since 2014, there have been almost-annual climate marches, and in that time the aim has shifted from simply trying to raise awareness about the climate crisis to demanding that the world stop burning and developing new fossil fuels.

Longtime organizer and climate journalist Bill McKibben says fossil fuels have always been a key focus of the movement, remembering when activists demanded President Obama “keep fossil fuels in the ground.” But he does think there’s a change in who’s taking notice.

“The notion is working its way up the food chain,” McKibben told Vox, pointing out that more US politicians are naming and shaming fossil fuel companies. That recently included California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s lawsuit against oil companies for climate deception, significant from the state that is the largest oil and gas consumer in the country.

But Biden is taking less notice of fossil fuels than activists would like. While his administration has passed a historic climate law, as Su explains, Biden himself “needs to also stop his expansion of fossil fuels.”

Another example of Biden favoring the jobs-creation component of climate action is his announcement on Wednesday that his administration is moving ahead with a Civilian Conservation Corps, a green jobs program modeled after the original New Deal. The clean energy economy may score political points, but it means little for climate change if the fossil fuel industry continues to expand. Indeed, oil and gas are expanding, despite the US’s commitments on climate change. The US set a new record for petroleum exports this year and is the biggest natural gas exporter in the world. Oil companies are charting out big new expansions on public lands, including ConocoPhillips’ Willow Project in Alaska.

You see this tension even in his speech to the UN General Assembly on Tuesday. Biden said his administration “has treated this crisis as an existential threat,” pointing to the Inflation Reduction Act’s “largest investment ever anywhere in the history of the world to combat the climate crisis and help move the global economy toward a clean energy future.”

The law could get the US most of the way toward its goal of slashing climate pollution in half by 2030 from peak 2005 emissions, but its implementation will matter as much as whether those cuts are as large as promised. And while $369 billion is a lot of money, it still comes up short of the downpayment needed to handle climate change’s impacts. Compare the seemingly large sum to what governments put into the fossil fuels industry just last year: Fossil fuel subsidies grew to a new record level worldwide, at $7 trillion, according to the International Monetary Fund.

Activists recognize the US won’t end its production or consumption of oil in a single day. But they’re staking out a position that phasing out our dependency needs to get underway aggressively, and every domestic policy — from the implementation of the IRA to Biden’s interpretation of his executive powers — should reflect the ultimate goal.

Are the protests having an effect?

With an eye on Democratic turnout in 2024 as well as his legacy, Biden has responded to criticism from climate activists, even if he hasn’t gone as far as they would like. Last week, the administration announced that it was canceling the remaining leases in the Arctic Wildlife National Refuge while protecting new swaths of the National Petroleum Reserve, both important Arctic regions valued for their ecosystems.

Biden’s policies are also not the only measure of the climate movement’s success. In the last few years, climate activists have increasingly gone after targets that are less obvious than oil companies. Some groups like Just Stop Oil and Extinction Rebellion have gone after the rich individuals and institutions that enable fossil fuels by popping up at art museums and sports events.

“Everyone has different perspectives of who to target, and it’s all part of a tapestry of naming governments and corporations that haven’t been held accountable to the public,” Su said.

Lately, protesters have targeted the financial sector for its role in funding the expansion of oil and gas development. Private companies and central banks are still aligned around fossil fuels, which puts them at odds with their own climate commitments. But the increasing criticism has led banks and the energy industry to make scores of new net-zero commitments and pledges to fight climate change. How much these commitments translate into concrete action is debatable, as the corporate world chases quarterly profits instead of delivering on promises made in press releases.

Activists are sticking around to remind these industries that they are watching closely. This influence sometimes translates into change within the industry, such as the rise of shareholder resolutions pushing climate priorities at annual oil company meetings.

Biden’s comments to the UN General Assembly do hint at activists’ strength. He singled out fossil fuels a cause of the record-breaking heat waves, wildfires, and flooding throughout the world. “Taken together,” the president said, “these snapshots tell an urgent story of what awaits us if we fail to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels and begin to climate-proof our world.”

The wave of unusual disasters this summer now includes Hurricane Lee, a storm that swelled from Category 1 to Category 5 in just 24 hours as it barreled toward Canada. It’s a prime example of rapid intensification made worse by warming ocean temperatures. 

It will add to what’s already been an exceptional year of extreme weather. The US has set a new record for the number of billion-dollar disasters in a year — 23 so far — in its history, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). And this doesn’t even include the costs from Tropical Storm Hilary in California or from the ongoing drought in the South and Midwest, because those costs have yet to be fully calculated. 

“Seemingly no part of the country has been left unscathed,” Ko Barrett, NOAA’s climate adviser, told Vox. 

Globally, it’s a similar picture. The European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service recently determined that it’s been the hottest summer since records began, beating the last record set in 2019 by a significant margin. The group reported that both July and August reached global average temperatures around 1.5 degrees Celsius warmer than preindustrial times. These are the same average temperature increases that scientists have warned will mean irreversible, widespread crises around the planet.  

This summer has seen a rising number of “compound events,” disasters occurring simultaneously or hitting one after another, according to climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe. In some cases, one event might accelerate another. A heat wave, drought, and wildfire can conceivably all hit the same area, for example, and even raise the risks of flooding if a storm finally comes, because the ground is too parched to absorb the influx of water. 

And there may be worse to come. Disaster season — or at least, what we’ve historically thought of as disaster season — is hardly over yet. Summer and fall are typically prime times for extremes, but this year we also have El Niño, the natural cycle when Pacific waters reach higher-than-average temperatures, which is just starting to ramp up. This is why meteorologists expect an extraordinary fall to follow the unprecedented summer, likely filled with active hurricanes and warmer weather through the winter. 

With El Niño amplifying the effects of climate change, what we can expect from seasons is rapidly changing. Instead of a singular type of disaster any given region must prepare for, but places all over the world can expect multiple events at once. That means our traditional idea of disaster season no longer holds. What we now have is an extended practically year-round calendar of disasters, which often all hit at once. 

This summer, extreme weather became more personal

That disasters are becoming more extreme is obviously a problem, but the fact that they’re also compounding so they seem to be everywhere at once is arguably worse. It’s a particular challenge, because compound events can strain first responders and supplies. It’s also brought the destructive effects of climate change to billions of people globally.

In August alone, Hurricane Idalia overwhelmed southeastern Florida’s shores with a record-breaking storm surge of up to 16 feet, wildfires scorched an unusually dry Hawaii and Louisiana, and southern California saw mudslides and flooded roads from heavy rainfall (as well as an unusual tropical storm warning for Hurricane Hilary). A record number of Americans have also been exposed to more smoke in just the first eight months this year than they typically inhale in an entire year. 

Meanwhile, this summer has been one of the hottest ever recorded. In the US in July, a third of the entire population faced heat alerts at once. The science nonprofit Climate Central found almost half the world’s population experienced unusual heat attributable to climate change this summer — precisely, at least 30 days of hotter temperatures. And the poorest countries were three times more likely to be exposed to warmer-than-average temperatures than richer countries, meaning the people who contribute the least to the causes of warming are bearing worse impacts. 

“In every country we could analyze, including the southern hemisphere where this is the coolest time of year, we saw temperatures that would be difficult — and in some cases nearly impossible — without human-caused climate change,” said Andrew Pershing, Climate Central’s vice president for science.

While temperature fluctuations are a normal feature of the Earth’s climate, there’s ample evidence greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels are fueling these new extremes. And this summer is just a taste of what’s to come as crises multiply and seasons shift. 

Extreme weather is shifting geographically and in timing

September is supposed to be the start of the climatological fall, but the first couple weeks so far have ushered some of the hottest weather yet for parts of the US. Other kinds of extreme events, like wildfires and hurricanes, operate on a slightly different schedule. Hurricane season, as defined by NOAA, lasts from the beginning of June through November 30, and wildfire season can reach its peak in the fall, making September more of a mid-way point. 

All this is shifting, though. It helps to think of extreme weather as requiring a set of conditions that come together for a powerful result. In certain seasons, you’re likely to have all the ingredients — high heat, dry soils, high ocean temperatures, and so on — ready to fuel frequent, major disasters.  

Even without climate change, you can get the occasional May hurricane or disastrous winter wildfire. But climate change is cranking up the heat, making it more likely that all these ingredients can come together and do so outside of expected seasons. Warmer temperatures can create the perfect conditions for extreme weather at unusual times of the year. Indeed, the start of the hurricane season is actually trending earlier: Eight of the last nine years saw a tropical storm before the traditional June 1 start to the season. 

Wildfires have an even less predictable season than heat waves and hurricanes, but they have been more frequent throughout the year, burning more area in the past 20 years than in the decades that came before. And the smoke from these fires is having an even wider impact. Canada’s worst wildfire season on record, particularly in the eastern part of the country, has blanketed the Northeast and Midwest with smoke for parts of the summer.

“Extreme drought across Canada led to one of the worst wildfire seasons on record, with lots of fuel and prolonged dryness contributing to this set of events,” Barrett said. “All of which is associated with our warming planet. When combined with the right atmospheric set-up, a rarely seen extreme can occur.”

The atmospheric conditions this fall are still ripe for disaster — and the possibility that disaster season will linger long past its usual deadline. El Niño is also a multiyear event, scientists worry that next year may be even hotter. And with El Niño exacerbating the warming the world has already experienced, everyone should expect even more extreme weather. 

“El Niño is just ramping up,” Hayhoe said. “It’s like we’re a frog in a pot of slowly boiling water and somebody just poured a kettle full of more boiling water into the pot.”

When the El Niño cycle eventually ends, the world can’t expect a return to normalcy. We’re on a path for more extremes that will accelerate for decades to come. 

Just about every country in the world committed to keeping climate change in check in 2015. This week, the United Nations issued its first report card for this goal and found that the world is falling behind while time is running out.

Under the 2015 Paris climate agreement, countries agreed to pitch in what they could to slash greenhouse gas emissions. Their initial proposals were nowhere near enough, so the accord created a mechanism called the global stocktake to keep everyone accountable. 

Unlike other UN climate change reports that are meant to be informative and shy away from policy recommendations, the stocktake is explicitly meant to spur countries to act. It’s a blunt progress assessment, and it lays out how much further countries must go in their emissions commitments the next time they come to the negotiating table at COP28, which will be held in the United Arab Emirates this December.  

“The Paris Agreement has driven near-universal climate action,” the report notes, but “much more is needed now on all fronts.” 

The task ahead is immense: According to the report, global emissions need to be slashed 43 percent by 2030 to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, one of the main goalposts of the Paris agreement. But the world has already warmed about 1.2 degrees so far above preindustrial averages and is on track to pass the key threshold in the next few years. So when negotiators reconvene at the next climate summit, the stocktake will shape the discussion.  

“It carries a lot of weight,” said European Climate Foundation CEO Laurence Tubiana, who helped negotiate the Paris agreement. “The [stocktake] is looking backwards, but even more importantly setting the direction for the next phase of climate policymaking.” 

Among its recommendations, the report unapologetically calls for “phasing out all unabated fossil fuels” and for a “radical decarbonization of all sectors of the economy.”

But in a world facing economic turmoil, energy shocks, and unrelenting opposition from the biggest polluters, there are open questions about whether leaders will heed the message at all, and what they’ll actually do about it. 

Coal, oil, and natural gas need to go

The stocktake says in stark terms that there can be no new fossil fuel infrastructure in a world committed to keeping warming in check, including phasing out the existing coal industry before 2050.

The exact language here is important. At previous climate conferences, countries fought over every word around fossil fuels, whether they should call for a “phase out” or a more watered-down phrase like “energy transition.” The latter leaves room for new fossil fuels without looking like governments are going back on their word. 

But the stocktake, which will inform the political process from here on out, echoes the findings of other global bodies that no new fossil fuel infrastructure should be built in a world aligned with 1.5 degrees. 

There’s some vagueness in what “unabated” means, however, and it’s likely to be a contentious topic at the next COP. The language leaves room, Tubiana explained, for remaining fossil fuels to rely on technology like carbon capture and storage. “By 2050 we’ll still have fossil fuels in the pipeline, the question is how much,” Tubiana said.  

One key barrier to transitioning from fossil fuels is the trillions of dollars in subsidies that governments pour into the industry year after year. A recent analysis from the International Monetary Fund found these subsidies have only grown; they surged to $7 trillion last year, $2 trillion more than in 2021.

“The removal of fossil fuel subsidies is a key strategy for addressing structural economic barriers that can perpetuate inertia to change and prevent cost-effective low-carbon alternatives from being adopted at scale,” the report says.

The stocktake also emphasizes the need to address emissions across the entire economy. Governments can’t overlook the role of sectors like industry, which contributes to 25 percent of global emissions, and transportation, which contributes 15 percent. 

Reducing these emissions requires targeting the demand and the supply in these sectors. For example, in transportation, regulations and incentives will help to phase out the internal combustion engine and push manufacturers to offer electric vehicles at a vast scale, but governments also need to think about reducing the need for private vehicles altogether through tactics like public transit. This extends to sectors like international shipping and aviation, both areas that are hard to decarbonize and have often been ignored in international climate negotiations. 

The stocktake is clear that the time for small, incremental change is over: We need to think in terms of systems-wide change, and a wide breadth of policies to make deeper emissions cuts. “If you’re rowing and you can turn your oar faster and faster, but if it’s not really going deep enough, you won’t get anywhere,” said David Waskow, director of the World Resources Institute’s International Climate Initiative. “We need to think in pace and speed, of course, but we also need depth.”  

Everyone is doing something, but everyone needs to do more

The test now is whether countries will make the “rapid and deep” greenhouse gas cuts the report says are required, delivering more financing and even deeper emissions cuts in the next round of pledges in 2025. But countries are dealing with other challenges too, and that will also shape what they bring to the table at COP28.

Shocks to food and energy prices, along with inflation, may mean there is less money to invest in clean energy. Major fossil fuel companies are also trying to influence the discussions and maintain their market share.  

Meanwhile, many nations are still struggling to meet their own self-imposed pledges. The US, for example, has set a goal of slashing carbon pollution 50 percent from 2005 levels by 2030 while contributing $3 billion to the Green Climate Fund. But it’s struggling to meet both goals, even after the passage of historic climate legislation last year. Some countries have even seen their fossil fuel emissions go up.

So mustering the political will to make these drastic changes is going to be an immense challenge. But at the same time, cleaner energy is more affordable than ever and the stocktake says a transition away from fossil fuels is within our grasp. In many parts of the world, wind and solar power are the cheapest sources of new energy, sometimes undercutting existing fossil fuel sources. “There are now sufficient cost-effective opportunities to address the 2030 emissions gap,” the report says. The challenges are entirely political hurdles.