Climate Central examined historical trends in fire weather — a combination of hot, dry, windy conditions — across the U.S.

This analysis uses data from 476 weather stations to assess fire weather trends in 245 climate divisions spanning the contiguous U.S. from 1973 to 2025.

On average, climate divisions in the western U.S. experience 32 fire weather days annually. That’s four times more than in the eastern U.S.

Wildfire seasons are lengthening and intensifying, particularly in the western U.S. Parts of the eastern U.S. have seen smaller but impactful increases in fire weather days.

Much of the country has seen fire weather increase the most during spring. The Southwest is also seeing more fire weather during summer.

Storm Daniel, which struck central Greece in September 2023, devastated the town of Palamas, leaving behind a chaotic mix of mud, debris, dead cattle, and shattered lives.

Vaios Giatropoulos moved with his family to a village where their home is on higher ground. Returning is unthinkable. “I don’t want to feel that sense of dread with every drop of rain. For several months, we feared it would flood again. I even thought about seeing a psychologist,” he recalls.

Giotopoulos belongs to a steadily expanding group of Europeans: the continent’s first climate migrants. Displacement within national borders is no longer an academic issue, as more people are affected by storms, floods, wildfires and droughts.

The Geneva-based NGO Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC) estimates that approximately 413,000 people were displaced in the EU between 2008 and 2023. So far, 2023 has been the worst year on record, with over 200,000 Europeans internally displaced, mostly due to wildfires and storms.

cross-posted from: https://sopuli.xyz/post/44834930

For a minute there in 2025 I actually stopped checking Climate Reanalyzer regularly, things felt like they weren't accelerating so fast for a bit.

That period is over.

Buckle up.... shit is hitting the fan.

We will not look at things ever the same after the destruction this summer almost surely brings is through with us.

If you have the possibility to move and you live there, get the hell out of the arid interiors of North America, they are a deathtrap waiting to spring on you.

We don't have scientific terms for the extended brutal droughts western north america is going into.

Climate Central analyzed average annual temperature trends since 1970 in 49 states and 242 U.S. cities to understand how temperatures across the country have changed as heat-trapping pollution has continued to climb.

The fastest-warming U.S. states from 1970 to 2025 are:

• Alaska
• New Jersey
• New Mexico
• Delaware
• Massachusetts
• Vermont

The fastest-warming U.S. cities are:

• Reno, NV
• Las Vegas, NV
• El Paso, TX
• Burlington, VT
• Tyler, TX

This Climate Matters analysis is based on open-access data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). See Methodology for details.

cross-posted from: https://sopuli.xyz/post/44290823

Fig. 1. a) Historical hurricane tracks that came within our search range (250 km of New York City: dashed circle). The categories shown are based on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale (Saffir, 1973, Simpson, 1974). Storm track color denotes hurricane category at a given location (see key). b) Inset showing tree-ring site locations for 1. Montauk, New York, 2. Mashomack, New York, and 3. Newport, Rhode Island. c) The scanned sample image (top) compared to the image that was produced using quantitative wood anatomy methods (bottom). d) Close up of cell detail for 1977 and 1978 with inset highlighting vessel tylosis and detail on earlywood and latewood separation within a growth ring. The base map for panel (a) and (b) was produced on NOAA's Historical Hurricane Track interactive mapper: https://coast.noaa.gov/digitalcoast/tools/hurricanes.html

Fig. 2. Left: Residual (RES) tree-ring width chronologies from Montauk, New York (panel a), Newport, Rhode Island (panel b), and Mashomack, New York (panel c). Dashed vertical lines denote years of the most significant hurricane events around New York City (i.e., Category 2 or higher within the search radius). Right: Superposed Epoch Analysis showing the response of the normalized tree-ring width chronologies to the hurricane events, with colored uncertainty envelopes surrounding the black line representing the 5th and 95th percentiles of the growth response. The dashed and dotted lines refer to the 5th/95th and 1st/99th significance thresholds, respectively, using a random bootstrapping approach.

...

Importantly, the coastal oak chronologies do not show a strong climate signal from 1902 to 1999, except for Mashomack with a weakly significant and positive current-year signal with May/June precipitation (r = 0.26/0.26; p < 0.05) and SPEI-1 (r = 0.22/0.24, respectively; p < 0.05) (Fig. S2). Montauk shows a weakly positive correlation with previous year November/December precipitation (r = 0.23/0.22; p < 0.05) and November SPEI-1 (0.24; p < 0.05). Newport has weakly negative correlations with prior-year September precipitation (r = -0.27, p < 0.05) and SPEI-1 (r = -0.34, p < 0.05).

This is in contrast to inland tree-ring studies within the region that show stronger sensitivity to summer precipitation or drought variability (Levesque et al., 2017; Pederson et al., 2013). While the sheltered nature of Mashomack may provide an environmental niche more similar to inland forests allowing for the emergence of a weak summer climate signal, Montauk and Newport, seem to be insensitive to summer climate variability. Overall, although there were some significant correlations (p < 0.05) between climate variability from individual months and RW variability, correlations were weak (r < 0.3), some occurring in the previous year (t-1), and there were no notable correlation commonalities shared by the sites.

Our results fall in line with prior research in the region indicating that regional-scale climate variability is not the strongest limiting factor of radial growth of coastal trees. Rather, other environmental factors and ocean effects (Pearl et al., 2020; Tucker and Pearl, 2021) may play a more important role in their year-to-year radial growth. These trees are growing in a highly disturbance-prone region, very close to the sea, and subject to strong winds and salt spray. Paleotempestological tree-ring studies from more climate sensitive regions had success isolating a hurricane signature after removing the climate signal from the tree-ring data (Collins-Key and Altman, 2021). This filtering was not necessary here given the lack of strong climate signals across the sites.

...

Our study demonstrates that ring-width records from oak trees (Quercus spp.) growing at several coastal sites in New York and Rhode Island, and one beech site (Fagus grandifolia) from Massachusetts, capture major historical hurricane events over the 19th and 20th centuries. This is manifested by severely reduced ring width and latewood width, and for the Montauk site, relatively high lumen area ratio values in the year following the storm. In combination, this multi-parameter approach could help us better pin-point hurricane events prior to the observational record, particularly the strongest storms–Category 3 and larger in the tree-ring record.

Our results also show that wood anatomy from white oak (Quercus alba) from coastal forests, has strong potential in terms of hurricane detection, providing a critical first step in developing a protocol for analyzing these forests. Future studies could benefit from additional parameters (e.g., stable isotopes, additional anatomical traits), and/or other paleotempestological proxies (e.g., sediment cores), to develop a better understanding of historical hurricane activity across the northeastern United States.

Our findings also indicate that these forests demonstrate a remarkable capacity for recovery following large-scale disturbances, such as hurricanes. Unlike studies of conifers (Tucker et al., 2018; Fernandes et al., 2018), we found that oak and beech trees from Montauk, Newport, and Naushon Island sites had fully regained their radial growth by the second growing season after a hurricane, with trees at Mashomack only slightly lagging this rapid recovery. This suggests a high tolerance to disturbance for oaks (4 sites) and beech (1 site). Future investigations require more sites from a variety of tree species to elucidate differences in hurricane response depending on forest types (e.g. conifers vs angiosperms).

Despite the resilience of coastal forests to hurricane impacts, these forests are increasingly at risk from storm damage and surges, and continued sea-level rise. We would expect that compound events and stressors, such as sea-level rise, storm surges, and physical damage from hurricanes, could further alter site conditions beyond the thresholds these ecosystems can tolerate. Our results show that forest growth is already negatively correlated with sea-level height anomalies. Given the critical role these forests play in the sustainability of densely populated communities—by buffering wind, supporting dune infrastructure, enhancing groundwater recharge, and sustaining wildlife—greater attention is needed to study and protect remaining coastal forests.

link to open access article..

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S092181812600144X

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/36310032

For example, under a plausible, moderately high emissions scenario, Phoenix’s available surface water supply was forecast to drop below the historical average by 2060. Even when we simulated higher participation in conservation programs, there was no noticeable change in the water availability, suggesting that any savings from reducing demand were counteracted by losses from upstream flow reductions. Encouraging people to use less water is a start, but there is a limit to how much people can conserve.

We found similar results in Denver under a moderate emissions scenario and in Las Vegas under a moderately high emissions scenario, indicating that even moderate climate change could lead to extreme scarcity conditions that are not manageable through demand-side changes alone.

cross-posted from: https://sopuli.xyz/post/42994044

Heatwaves of this scale, the report forecasts, are expected to occur just once every 500 years. Such rare occurrences make it challenging for researchers to estimate how often these events might happen if the climate warms further. But the current attribution study estimates that, if the climate warms another 1.3°C, heat events so extreme that they are forecasted to happen just once every 100 years will become 6.4 times more likely and 1.8°C hotter.

“Climate haven” is a bit of a contentious term. When we say “climate haven,” we’re referring to a town, city, or region that’s projected to experience less risk from climate-fueled crises.

But if we take “climate haven” to mean “someplace where we can escape the effects of climate change,” then the term becomes more problematic. And it understandably gets some pushback; if people believed they could escape climate change, they might be less incentivized to lower their consumption and emissions, or vote and advocate for climate-forward policies.

Since we've used this term in our posts, we thought it would be helpful to address it; what it means, if it’s useful or appropriate, and which risks we can (and can’t) avoid through our choice of location.

As the effects of climate change worsen, more people are wondering how it’s going to affect them personally. How is temperature and weather changing where you live? Is your home at risk from natural disasters, like wildfires and floods? And how will warming affect things like the economy, energy, health, and population trends?

We’ve gone through dozens of climate risk maps to identify the 5 regions of America which are facing the most overall risk. This is a quick way to check whether you’re sitting in the line of fire, so you can take steps to mitigate (or avoid) those threats.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/34758537

The paper is here

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/34757166

Over the past decade, southern Australia has suffered numerous extreme weather and climate events, such as record-breaking heat waves, bushfires, two major droughts and even flash flooding.

In the long run, the best homes to own will be the most climate resilient. (Boring take, but true.) The long run here means in 2100 and beyond when global temperatures are 3 degrees hotter, sea levels have risen higher, and weather disasters are even more destructive. Though 2100 may seem impossibly far off, today’s elementary and middle school students will, with a bit of luck, still be alive. In fact, 2026 is closer to the year 2100 than it is to the births of people who were in college in the 1960s.

But what about the less-long run? What if you’re 65 or 70, expect to live for 15-25 more years, and want to retire in Florida? Are there parts of the Sunshine State that while a bad bet for 2100 might be a reasonable option for 2040-2050? (For our purposes, “reasonable option” means a community where homes will gain, or at least maintain, their value in that window of time.)

One way to think about this question is: Will the dynamic of people fleeing climate vulnerable places tend to boost, at least for a while, the value of homes in nearby areas? There are two categories of evidence that suggest the answer is yes.