Last Updated on: 24th June 2025, 11:59 pm
The central and eastern parts of the US are experiencing unusually high temperatures this week. At times like this, my super annoying brother-in-law would greet me with an inane “Hot enough for ya?” Emily Atkin of HEATED reports, “It’s 20.6°F hotter than normal today in Concord, New Hampshire. Nearby, in Montpelier, Vermont, it’s 19.1°F hotter than normal. Further south, in New York City, it’s 13.6°F hotter than normal. Over in Philladelphia, it’s 13.8°F hotter than normal. It’s 14.2°F hotter than normal in Detroit; 10.9°F hotter than normal in Chicago; and 9.6°F hotter than normal in Washington, D.C.” But if we look outside the US, things aren’t much better. Western Europe is experiencing temperatures up to 28.6°F hotter than normal.
Atkin refers to the work of Climate Central and its Climate Shift Index. I am unfamiliar with this organization and expect many readers are as well, so I spent some time on its website to educate myself. Here’s what I learned:
Climate Central is an independent group of scientists and communicators who research and report the facts about our changing climate and how it affects people’s lives. We are a policy-neutral 501(c)(3) nonprofit. Climate Central uses science, big data, and technology to generate thousands of local storylines and compelling visuals that make climate change personal and show what can be done about it.
We address climate science, sea level rise, extreme weather, energy, and related topics. We collaborate widely with TV meteorologists, journalists, and other respected voices to reach audiences across diverse geographies and beliefs. We use science and technology to generate thousands of local storylines and compelling visuals that make climate change personal and show what can be done about it.
One of the things you can do at Climate Central is visit the Climate Shift Index page, type in a location and a date, and view a graphic that shows visually what the impact of climate change is on the weather there. The darker red areas correlate with the effects of a warming planet. Dark red indicates that climate change is 5 times more likely to be responsible for hotter temperatures than natural explanations. Conversely, the green areas relate to the likelihood that cooler than normal temperatures are related to climate change.
Climate Central explains: “The Climate Shift Index (CSI), Climate Central’s daily temperature attribution system, applies the latest peer-reviewed methodology to map the influence of climate change on temperatures across the globe, every day.” On its webpage, the organization says: “Climate change is not just a topic for the science or environment section. It’s the essential context for stories about extreme weather, energy, politics, business and finance, immigration, real estate, travel, health, food, sports, and the arts.”
Here is the climate shift graphic for the eastern US this week as posted by Emily Atkin on her HEATED Substack page. It shows the punishing high temperatures affecting much of the US are five times more likely than not to be associated with a world made hotter by human activity.
Credit: Climate Shift Index via HEATED.
Hot Weather And Stored Sunshine
Atkin spells it out clearly. Fossil fuels are nothing more than stored sunlight accumulated over millions of years. When it gets added back into the environment in just a few centuries — a blink of an eye in geological terms — it destabilizes planetary systems. She thinks the best time to educate people about climate change is when they are experiencing it personally. Many Americans are doing just that this week, particularly in so-called red states where burning fossil fuels is a religion.
“I’m willing to bet that loads of Americans who are theoretically in support of climate action have disengaged on the issue lately due to sheer overwhelm, which is exactly what the Trump administration has always intended to accomplish by ‘flooding the zone’ with controversy. So it is exactly now, as millions of Americans are suffering under the very real, very dangerous, and very scientifically well documented effects of climate change, that it matters most to remind folks about it.”
Atkin has a point, one that is echoed by Dr. Genevieve Guenther, an American climate communications specialist. She is the founding director of End Climate Silence, which studies the representation of global heating in the media and in public discourse. Last year, she published The Language of Climate Politics: Fossil Fuel Propaganda and How to Fight It.
Correcting A False Narrative
In an interview with The Guardian this week, Guenther talked about how scientists have identified at least 16 “tipping points” — tiny shifts in the environment that could lead to dramatically, irreversibly, and potentially devastating effects. Some of those tipping points may have already been crossed, which could partially explain the extreme heat covering much of the US and Europe this week.
“We need to correct a false narrative that the climate threat is under control,” she told The Guardian. “These enormous risks are potentially catastrophic. They would undo the connections between human and ecological systems that form the basis of all of our civilisation. If the risk of a plane crashing was as high as the risk of the [Gulf Stream] collapsing, none of us would ever fly because they would not let the plane take off.
“And the idea that our little spaceship, our planet, is under the risk of essentially crashing and we’re still continuing business as usual is mindblowing. I think part of the problem is that people feel distant from the dangers and don’t realize the children we have in our homes today are threatened with a chaotic, disastrous, unliveable future. Talking about the risks of catastrophe is a very useful way to overcome this kind of false distance.” Guenther said.
Recently, William Nordhaus argued that climate change will only have a slight economic effect by the end of this century. Guenther strongly disagrees. “The only way Nordhaus can get the result that he does is if he fails to price the risk of catastrophe and leaves out a goodly chunk of the costs of global heating…. The most shocking thing he leaves out of his models is the risk that global heating could set off catastrophes, whether they are physical tipping points or wars from societal responses. That is why the percentage of global damages that he estimates is so ridiculously lowballed.
“The idea that climate change will just take off only a small margin of economic growth is not founded on anything empirical. It’s just a kind of quasi-religious faith in the power of capitalism to decouple itself from the planet on which it exists. That’s absurd and it’s unscientific,” Guenther said.
Some compare climate change to a disease — like diabetes. You take your medications and life goes on — for the most part. That is all a bunch of hooey to Guenther. “This is not how climate scientists represent climate change,” she said. “Dr Joelle Gergis, one of the lead authors on the latest IPCC report, prefers to represent climate change as a cancer — a disease that takes hold and grows and metastasises until the day when it is no longer curable and becomes terminal. This is a fight for life. And like all fights, you need a tremendous amount of bravery to take it on.
“Before I started working on climate change, I didn’t think of myself as a fighter, but I became one because I felt I have a responsibility to preserve the world for my son and children everywhere. That kind of fierce protectiveness is part of the way that I love. We can draw on that to have more strength than our enemies because I don’t think they’re motivated by love. I believe love is an infinite resource and the power of it is greater than that of greed or hate. If it weren’t, we wouldn’t be here.”
Hmmm, the power of love. Is that not the core lesson of Christianity? It does seem the forces of hate are ascendant today, with people worshiping a false god in the White House and members of Congress reacting with glee when one of their own gets arrested for daring to do what he or she was elected to do. But isn’t love the product of a woke mind virus? Some certainly think so.
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