James' World 2

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On Labor Day, you could drive from Minnesota’s border with Canada all the way to where Louisiana hits the Gulf of Mexico and not encounter a high under 90 degrees. The heat hasn’t broken: Today, nearly a third of Americans are sweltering under heat alerts.

Such weather is a fitting end to a devastating season, the kind you run out of superlatives for. This summer, climate extremes suddenly seemed to be everywhere, all at once. It was the world’s hottest June since humans started keeping track. July was even worse. Phoenix—which averaged 102 degrees in July—got so hot that people received third-degree burns from touching doorknobs. In Iowa, livestock dropped dead in their pens. The disasters weren’t limited to heat: Canadian wildfires blanketed large swaths of the United States in smoke, flash floods thundered through Vermont, and wildfires reduced parts of Maui to rubble.

Pumpkin spice is already back on the Starbucks menu, but fall isn’t poised to provide a respite. El Niño, the warm phase of a naturally recurring cycle that can wreak havoc on global weather patterns, has officially returned—and it’s predicted to be a strong one. The southern U.S. will likely be wetter, while forecasts are for a warm winter in the North. These cycles always have some variability, but experts say that the climate crisis has now raised temperatures to the extent that they may also amplify El Niño. This summer has shown starkly how climate change can supercharge the weather. This fall, El Niño could further magnify the problem.

Although El Niño technically started in June, it likely didn’t contribute much to this summer’s extremes. That was the climate crisis. Across the U.S., hundreds of temperature records fell. Kansas City’s heat index approached that of Death Valley. Chicago had to reduce its trains’ speeds because high temperatures stressed the tracks. “Historically, El Niño events during the summer have very little impact over the United States,” Michelle L’Heureux, a climate scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, told me. “Climate change, however, is having an impact.” Scientists once hesitated to say how global warming might worsen weather. Now they can accurately measure just how much climate contributes to events such as heat waves. An international team of researchers found that climate change made July’s heat waves in the U.S., Europe, and China hotter by as much as 2 degrees Celsius, or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, as a result of climate change.

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