In the last weeks of August, a valley in the Himalayas and a post-industrial city in the U.S. Midwest found tragic commonality. In Gary, Indiana, a powerful “derecho,” a fast-moving band of damaging thunderstorms, tore across Lake Michigan producing straight-line winds as high as 110 mph. The widespread destruction left tens of thousands of peoplewithout electricity for over two weeks, bringing global relief organizations like World Central Kitchen to the area for the first time. In Nepal, an enormous 2,000 foot wide chunk of glacier ice sheared off a mountain and plunged to the river 7,000 feet below, tearing everyone off the mountainside with it, killing over 1,000 people.

Scientists agree that both catastrophes were caused by the rise in global temperatures.

Eight thousand miles apart, as historically and culturally distinct as two areas can be, both Nepal and Gary emerged as pawns in the same oligarchs’ game of chicken: Can big oil squeeze another decade of ROI on their sunk equipment costsbefore the earth’s post-industrial temperature increases by 3.6°F (2°C)? Scientists have warned since the 1970s that an increase of 2°C will be the tipping point beyond which life on earth will change irreversibly, yet the same game of chicken persists. Fossil fuel profits have continued to soar despite the warnings— now tipping $3,000 a second— with the costs of climate change projected to hit $38 Trillion annually.

The inhabitants of Gary and Nepal, like millions of people living in Miami, New Orleans, Houston, Asheville, Jakarta, Delhi, Lagos, and thousands of cities, towns, and rural communities around the world are sitting pawns in a deadly game they didn’t sign up for. No one other than industry titans, fossil fuel investors, and the politicians whose campaigns they bankrolled signed up for what is happening.

Gary’s steel still runs on coal, but it doesn’t have to

I used to live in Gary; full disclosure I ran for U.S. Congress in 2020, primarily to address climate change, and got my ass kicked. Although Gary is known as a post-industrialist steel mill town with an outsized carbon footprint, Gary is also home to rare and unexpected natural habitats and exceptional beauty. The sand dunes, lagoons, and oak savannahs are as pristine as they were when Potawatomi and Miami tribes lived there.

I ran for Congress with climate change urgency most residents weren’t happy to hear. Although Gary’s steel manufacturing relies on coke and coal to fuel blast furnaces, churning out 10 million metric tons of carbon every year, those furnaces could be converted to run on hydrogen produced via electrolysis powered by solar or wind, replacing coke as the reducing and heating agent. The steel could then be melted in an electric arc furnace (EAF). The whole process would produce water vapor instead of CO2 as a byproduct, which would save the steelworkers’ and the planet’s lungs.

Renewable-hydrogen steel plants also benefit from price stability, since sunlight and wind aren’t subject to the kind of volatility Trump is spreading throughout the Middle East. Early movers like Sweden’s HYBRIT project and Boston Metalhave proven that as the costs of renewable electricity keep falling, green steel will become not just cleaner but genuinely cheaper to produce at scale. This is especially true in areas with abundant solar or wind resources, and Gary is rich in both vacant land for solar and onshore winds from Lake Michigan. The only downside of converting to green steelmaking, outside the initial cost that will convert to profit in 10 years, would likely be to the local utility monopoly known as NIPSCO.

India also still burns coal, but Nepal does not

In the climate karma department, Nepal is as close to innocent as any emerging nation can be. Nepal contributes less than 0.1% of global greenhouse gas emissions despite bearing a disproportionate share of climate destruction. Nepal’s power grid is 95% supplied by clean hydropower, which is also supplemented by solar. Unlike neighboring India, the world’s third worst contributor to climate change after China and the US, Nepal does not operate coal-fired power plants.

In Nepal, traditional biomass including firewood and agricultural residue provide over 60% of overall primary energy. Biomass sources are the primary energy supply used for residential purposes including heating and cooking.

Despite their best efforts to burn clean fuel, the threat of renewed flooding still threatens Nepal, as scientists warn that debris and dammed up river channels could burst any day without warning, with over a thousand people still missing from the last event, including hundreds of foreign tourists.

Will we keep tuning out the obvious?

Every hurricane, flood, fire, disappearing habitat and river, and every sinking costal region, hastens big oil’s game of chicken toward its conclusion, one way or another. In the U.S., will the fossil-fuel aligned Supreme Court majority allow corporations to continue to destroy with no legal accountability? In India, will Prime Minister Modi continue to talk about climate justice, even as his policies create the opposite?

When my climate-focused run for office ended, a Chicago Tribune Metro editor asked if I wanted to write for them. I kept writing climate policy papers, why not use them to try to do some good? But I learned from the campaign that while many Americans are somewhat concerned about climate change, most don’t want to think about it. Six years, hundreds of columns, and a climate justice TedTalk later, an editor from a different national paper told me that climate change, as a topic, remains unpopular.

People tune out climate change because the human brain has evolved to react to immediate, visible threats rather than slow-moving, abstract problems. The lack of personal urgency converts it to a future problem, while fossil-fuel backed organizations blame “nature” for their own malfeasance. Contemplating what’s happening to the planet also causes cognitive dissonance: it requires acknowledging uncomfortable truths about modern lifestyles, which leads to more psychological numbing, and emotional shutdown instead of action.

Maybe this psychological numbing is the earth’s kindness, her way of anesthetizing us while she reduces our number. And maybe sending up a vindictive anti-science imbecile, a grotesque sadist hellbent on destroying everything— the planet, world peace, and the rule of law— is just nature’s way of thinning the herd.

Sabrina Haake is a political analyst and 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1st and 14th A defense. She writes the free Substack, The Haake Take.

By now, you’ve seen the headlines, and there’s more of them every day: It’s “jaw-dropping.” It’s poised to make global warming worse. California has just declared a statewide state of emergency. This year’s El Niño — a shift in Pacific Ocean trade winds that scrambles global weather patterns — has been hotly discussed as one of the strongest on record, and one that could bring about potentially disastrous consequences. One study projects that it may cause as many as 451,000 heat-related deaths around the world by February.

This story was originally published by Grist. Sign up for Grist's weekly newsletter here.

The current El Niño has also been given an array of eye-catching descriptors. When Jeffrey Shaman, a climatologist at Columbia Climate School, heard the phrase “super El Niño” for the first time earlier this year, he said, “I literally googled it.” The phrase isn’t officially used by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration or the World Meteorological Organization. But he still sees value in the label as a way of communicating the significance of this year’s likely unprecedented El Niño to the general public.

“It’s colloquial, and there’s nothing wrong with that at all,” Shaman said.

By all accounts, this year’s El Niño will also give the world a glimpse into a future of unabated warming due to the burning of fossil fuels — and an opportunity to change course before the worst effects occur.

Back up — what is El Niño?

El Niño is a naturally occurring weather phenomenon that begins when sea surface temperatures in the Pacific Ocean rise above average. Although it doesn’t occur on a set timeframe, it tends to happen every two to seven years. Typically, trade winds blow east to west across the Pacific and push warm ocean water along the equator toward East Asia. But during an El Niño year, these winds slow down and sometimes reverse. The warm water that typically gets dragged westward sloshes back, now toward the western coast of the Americas.

This change in sea surface temperatures has ramifications far beyond the Pacific. It drives extreme weather across the globe, threatening crop harvests in several key agricultural regions, as well as worsening both drought and severe rainfall.

The impact of climate change on El Niño is complex. Research has shown that global warming has led to more frequent El Niños. But El Niño events are also associated with jumps in global mean surface temperature — or the average temperature of the Earth itself, a measure commonly used as a stand-in for climate change. It’s not easy to delineate how much additional warming is from El Niño and how much is from climate change, but what is clear is that the combination will be devastating. This year may turn out to be the hottest year on record, and 2027 may be even hotter. It could be a preview of the typical levels of warming the world might see by 2040, according to one high-end estimate.

Scientists don’t know exactly how that combination will play out. “It’s going to be a very, very strong event occurring against a backdrop of very rapid global warming,” said Christopher Callahan, a climate scientist at Indiana University. “I think we’re going to, unfortunately, learn a lot this year,” he said.

What makes this El Niño ‘super’?

There are many ways to measure the strength of an El Niño event. (NOAA keeps track of several of them here.) Some measure the sea surface temperature in different regions of the Pacific; there’s also indexes that take into account atmospheric changes as well as oceanic ones. The one used most often today is called the “Niño 3.4 anomaly.” In the U.S., in order for NOAA to declare an El Niño event, warming in this region of the Pacific must be 0.5 degrees Celsius above normal. If warming is 1 degree above normal, that gets labeled as “moderate”; if it’s 1.5 degrees above normal, then it counts as “strong”; and if it’s 2 degrees above normal, then it’s considered “very strong.”

The term “super” is broadly considered to be synonymous with “very strong.” However, a recent analysis of sea surface temperatures by Carbon Brief, released this week, shows that as of Monday, warming in the Niño 3.4 region reached 3.11 degrees.

That number is significant, because it means this year’s El Niño has already broken the record for the strongest El Niño, which peaked in November 2015.

El Niño events typically peak around December or January. (Fun fact: The phenomenon was named El Niño by South American fishers who noticed its timing and associated the warmer temperatures with the story of baby Jesus.) It’s possible that sea surface temperatures in the Pacific will drop over the next few months. However, that looks increasingly unlikely. Sea surface temperatures in June, July, and August were the warmest we’ve ever seen, and forecast models show that there is now a 90 percent chance that this El Niño will stay “very strong” through the end of the year.

“I was a little bit skeptical earlier this year of some of the more dire predictions,” said Callahan. But as more data kept coming in, he said, it became clear “that we’re going to see a generationally strong event this year.”

Where did the phrase ‘super El Niño’ come from?

While it might sound like a phrase an overzealous journalist invented, “super El Niño” was actually coined by scientists — a fact that surprised Jovana Vurdelja, an ecolinguistics researcher in Serbia. “I really thought it was just media sensationalism,” she said. The phrase first appeared in a 2003 paper looking at how a strong El Niño can be followed by a strong La Niña, its cooler counterpart, according to Vurdelja.

“Super El Niño” has taken off in English-speaking countries but also across Europe, where it’s been adopted by speakers of Serbian, Norwegian, Italian, German, French, Croatian, and other languages.

When extraordinary weather is on the way, people reach for amped-up language to communicate the scale of the hazard. But finding the right word to match that danger is like trying to find the right shoe size, Vurdelja said. The language can be too small, minimizing the threat, or it can be too big — exaggerations that can lead to nihilism or desensitization. “It’s extremely important that the word communicates the seriousness, the magnitude, the severity of the event itself,” Vurdelja said. She thinks “super El Niño” hits the mark, since it’s been embraced by scientists and the media alike.

What comes after ‘super El Niño’?

If super El Niños become a common occurrence — that is, if warming in the Pacific regularly reaches 3 or more degrees above normal — the language we use to describe these events may need to evolve. Some scientists have already suggested that the phrase du jour doesn’t go far enough: “This is going to be so far beyond a super El Niño, if the models are right, that we sort of need a new term for it,” the climate scientist Zeke Hausfather said in the podcast Shift Key last month.

We’ll “need stronger words, stronger language, and that’s when we get into this spiral,” Vurdelja said. That’s how you end up with scientists reaching for words like “mind-bogglingly crazy” and “gobsmackingly bananas” (a phrase Hausfather coined) to describe record heat. The term “Godzilla” El Niño, now taking off in news headlines, was coined by NASA climate scientist Bill Patzert in 2015.

The official categories for what counts as a strong El Niño used to make sense. “We hadn’t gotten above 2 degrees Celsius except occasionally,” Shaman said, and so the language experts initially settled on “seemed like a reasonable place to be.”

Whatever you call it, the most important thing will be planning for the potential impacts of this very strong El Niño — to understand what it means for food production, hydropower generation, public health, and extreme weather in the coming year. Given California’s recent state of emergency declaration, for now, maybe “super” will do just fine.

This article originally appeared in Grist.

The New York Times editorial board issued a stark warning that President Donald Trump's "flailing presidency is leaving Americans with the thinnest of hopes" for negotiations with China. The Times editors hope he makes it through the summit without making anything worse.

In a column Thursday, the board explained that for more than 100 years the United States has taken a "leading role in the world." But that could be coming to an end, along with losing "expanded prosperity, security and democracy."

"Mr. Trump shows little care for these benefits," the board said. "He uses international relations to seek personal enrichment, praise from sycophants and equal standing with authoritarians. His flailing presidency leaves Americans with the thinnest of hopes for this week’s summit: that he does not further damage the national interest."

Chinese leader Xi Jinping arrived in Washington, D.C. on Tuesday, where he was greeted with a red carpet, military flyover and, on Wednesday, will have a state dinner.

Still, the Times said that the "low expectations for the visit" underscore "the damage that Mr. Trump is doing to American influence and global well-being. He is an undisciplined politician who puts his personal interests above the nation’s, running an administration that has no coherent strategy for solving major problems. He is instead often exacerbating the world’s biggest problems."

There are three leading crises facing the world, and no single nation can fix them alone, the board said. But, there is a low bar, the Times confessed. They hope that the world won't let Trump get away with "the benefit of low expectations." Then the board confessed it's low expectations.

Currently, the world faces potentially catastrophic risks from artificial intelligence, the escalating effects of climate change, and the economic damage from disrupted shipping through the Middle East. The board wants to see cooperation between the U.S. and China over the issues, but Trump doesn't believe in climate change, doesn't intend to regulate AI and he's the one who destabilized the Middle East with the Iran war.

The column laments an unfortunate reality of the two leaders. They explain that Trump’s erratic, self-interested approach to foreign policy has weakened U.S. influence and made serious diplomacy harder. Meanwhile, Xi has been a difficult negotiating partner for Trump, with authoritarian tendencies.

The board hopes that China will still cooperate with the U.S. While Trump said that Xi supports an unregulated AI world, they, too, have fears about AI run amok; they, too, need a stable oil supply, and they've made great strides in clean energy.

The column concludes that Trump’s focus on personal enrichment, flattery,and status leaves the United States unable to lead on global threats. So, the board said, the best hope for the summit is simply that Trump does not cause further damage.

President Donald Trump’s anti-environmental philosophy has led to many controversies, from his rejection of the scientific consensus about man-made climate change to spreading misinformation about wind turbines.

“During its first year, the second Trump administration used a “shock and awe” approach to environmental deregulation,” wrote Slate's Richard L. Revesz on Sunday. “In an effort to erase climate policies, the Environmental Protection Agency claimed that climate change was not a serious problem, pointing to a report by hand-picked climate skeptics.”

Revesz added, “The criticisms of the National Academy of Sciences and other prominent scientific organizations were so devastating that the EPA abandoned its reliance on the report when it eliminated key greenhouse gas standards, instead basing its decision primarily on shaky legal arguments.”

Slate goes on to explain how Trump has deregulated everything from greenhouse gas emissions to other forms of pollutants, all in the name of creating a more business-friendly environment at the expense of a healthy natural environment.

“The EPA is now routinely determining that the benefits of reducing air pollution—that is, life-saving health benefits for Americans—are too uncertain to quantify or value at all in regulatory decisionmaking,” Revesz wrote. “The administration is doing this without any analysis or citation to scientific studies. Extensive peer-reviewed science has used sophisticated techniques to quantify the impacts of pollution reductions and account for related uncertainty.”

Revesz continued, “And the EPA has relied on these findings for decades, including during the first Trump administration and other Republican administrations. But, beginning this year, EPA administrator Lee Zeldin has decided that every health benefit from air pollution reductions is too uncertain to count—and every regulatory cost dispositive.”

The result of this policy is that the EPA will no longer include estimates about how many lives were saved, how many diseases were averted and how many hospitalizations are not going to happen as a result of Trump’s anti-environmental policies. For this reason, Americans cannot learn about the health hazards posed by such measures as repealing a vehicle emissions rule, learning about the consequences of getting rid of air pollution regulations for wood products and eliminating emissions for coal and oil power plants.

“The EPA’s actions are plainly illegal,” Revesz pointed out. “Agencies cannot put a thumb on the scale by taking account of a rule’s costs but not its benefits, particularly when there are established techniques for valuing the benefits.”

He continued, “Because there is no ‘big ticket’ action like last year’s questioning of climate change, the EPA’s approach has largely gone under the radar. Zeldin appears to be following John Oliver’s adage that if you want to do something harmful, “put it inside something boring” to avoid public scrutiny. But the American people will suffer greatly as a result of these illegal actions, in the form of additional premature deaths, asthma attacks, hospitalizations, and other serious health consequences.”

Though not mentioned in the Slate article, one consequence of Trump’s anti-environmental policies is the return of an ecological disaster that previous administrations had gotten rid of — acid rain.

"Last year, [ecologist Gene] Likens told The Guardian that Trump’s current assault on clear air and clean water regulations could pitch the U.S. back into a new era of acid rain," The New Republic reported in March. "In the 2025 Guardian interview, he called acid rain a 'major environmental success story' and warned that if Trump relaxed controls on emissions, 'we are going to destroy that success story.'"

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney incited a MAGA meltdown after pointing out that the United States shared responsibility for the climate change currently dumping wildfire smoke all over the upper U.S.

Nearly 900 wildfires were burning without control in the north, as of Friday, in the wake of an abnormally dry and hot summer. This led to air quality alerts throughout the northeast and the Midwest, with Chicago and Detroit having the worst air of any major cities in the world — and more US cities due for pollution further east over the next few days.

But Republicans, who are loathe to admit that climate change is real and regularly jumps borders, prefer to blame whatever nation is currently suffering out-of-control fires, whether they are blue US states or neighboring ally nations.

However, Carney, while speaking of the disaster to Canadian citizens, pointed out in French that “We need a contribution from the Americans in the fight against climate change ... climate change is everyone's responsibility, including the US.”

This sent MAGA into even more of a fury.

“Canada is a doomed state. Can’t wait until their total economic collapse, and have to ask the US to buy them,” ranted one critic on X.

“Nice deflection while hiding behind the con that is ‘climate change,’ railed another MAGA heckler — while ignoring the vanishing US glaciers in Glacier National Park. “Dude is inept as hell and has no clue about forest management.”

“This climate change is a hoax,” blasted another critic on X, in contradiction to the majority of science. “Even Bill Gates had to admit that we are not dying from climate change. Now that they need extra energy that renewables can't produce for their data centers … [C]limate change doesn't start over 100 separate fires.”

President Donald Trump himself blasted the PM later on Friday, while denying the fact that the US has regularly been plagued by raging fires as well as temperatures rise and regions get less, more sporadic rainfall.

“We are holding Canada responsible for the fact that they are not properly maintaining their Forests, and Brush therein, and the United States is being unnecessarily invaded by filthy, polluted, and unhealthy air, the quality of which is dangerous, and totally unacceptable!” Trump posted on Truth Social. “I will call the Prime Minister during the day to find out what they are going to do about it. The cost is incalculable! Canada has refused to engage in basic Forest Management and Debris Removal, knowing that such refusal will lead to exactly this result.”

Last year, Trump lobbed many of the same accusations at California as that state burned under historic flames, accusing state leaders of not raking forests of debris and not maxing out the Colorado River to wet its dry areas — despite competition with other thirsty western states for the same water source.

A few months previous, in 2024, Trump had threatened to withhold federal aid for fighting California wildfires at a California rally.

A surprising new report has found agreement among both Democrat and Republican voters on key issues tied to some of President Donald Trump's biggest failings, per a report from SFGate, signaling more trouble to come for the GOP in the coming midterms.

In a report published Friday, SFGate broke down the findings of a new voter survey from the Public Policy Institute of California, which sought to map out "some core findings from California’s political divide," and in the process, affirmed "many long-held stereotypes" while also uncovering "some key surprises."

The survey that several of the state's traditional "conservative stronghold" counties have seen a marked shift to left politically, with Republican voters broadly agreeing with Democrats on "three key issues."

"The majority of Californians support action on climate change and abortion access, and view immigration positively, the study found," SFGate explained. "Only Shasta County and the central eastern border of the state (including counties like Inyo and Mono counties) have support for immigrants at less than 50 percent. The highest support for independent state action on climate change is around the San Francisco and Los Angeles metropolitan areas, but 65 percent of all state residents support it. Even abortion access, a perennially controversial issue, has most Californians in agreement — 70 percent support it without restrictions or with restrictions that leave it mostly legal."

While immigration has long been thought of as Trump's best issue with voters, the overt tactics of ICE and CBP during his second term mass deportation drive have soured many voters and sent his approval on the issue underwater in several polls. Abortion rights have also been a persistent thorn in his side since his three Supreme Court justices helped overturn Roe v. Wade in 2022. Republicans have attempted to hide from the issue ever since it was widely blamed for the party's underperformance in that year's midterms.

The survey also found an overall consensus on the negative state of the economy among both red and blue voters, with most believing that tough times are ahead. This is well in line with what poll after poll has found about voter sentiment heading into the midterms, with most voters saying that the rough state of the economy is their number one issue and a growing number blaming Trump for the situation outright.

"Overall, most Californians think rough economic conditions are ahead, though the liberal areas are the most concerned," SFGate added. "Over 80 percent of parts of the Bay Area and central LA predict bad economic times ahead, and more than 60 percent think that’s true in the far north and Central Valley."