During March 2026, the western United States experienced ‟a full-on summer heatwave” in the winter, according to meteorologist Daniel Swain as quoted by Inside Climate News. The Atlantic notes that ‟a record-smashing heat dome has settled over a huge swath of the United States, from California to Montana and down to Texas.” The ridge of high pressure driving this heat wave is ‟the strongest ridge ever observed in March” according to Climate Central, which also concluded that ‟climate change is making this week’s western high temps five times more likely.” The Guardian reports on a study by the international research consortium, World Weather Attribution: “These findings leave no room for doubt. Climate change is pushing weather into extremes that would have been unthinkable in a preindustrial world.”

Bill McKibben describes what has been the second-warmest winter on record in the U.S., masked in the public perception by the cold and snowy conditions experienced on the densely populated east coast. But this cold (also experienced in Minnesota at the height of the public protests against ICE) was the exception, as the Weather Channel reports heat records fell across the western U.S. This winter was the warmest in Salt Lake City, Tuscon, Rapid City, Phoenix, Albuquerque, Las Vegas and Lubbock among other locations.

The heat wave comes at the end of a months-long ‟snow drought” across the west. New Mexico, Utah and Colorado have reported some of the lowest snowpack levels in history, which is particularly ominous for water availability in the snow-fed basin of the Colorado River. Water levels in Lake Powell and Lake Mead will drop, perhaps precipitously, and the aridity of this summer may lead to extreme fire conditions (the Denver metro area has already declared a Stage 1 drought, and a wildfire in Nebraska has become the largest in state history). The Atlantic notes that ‟from March 4 to March 16 in California, the snowpack melted at 1 percent a day on average,” and peak snowpack happened about 40 days earlier than normal. The New York Times points out the critical climate-science news of the snow drought: ‟in many places, it wasn’t necessarily a dry year. Instead, temperatures have been so warm that precipitation has fallen as rain, rather than snow, even at higher elevations.”

This very dry year should be seen in the context of the decadal-scale drying of the Southwest. Inside Climate News quotes a climate researcher: ‟scientists have documented an overall decline in rain and snowpack across the U.S. Southwest over the past 25 years — what some have called a megadrought.” This chart of the water level in Lake Mead over several decades makes the long-term drought clear. A 2025 study concludes that “the ingredients are there for the Southwest to continue to dry out from a water perspective. How rapidly it’s going to happen, we don’t know.” An op-ed in The Washington Post describes another looming problem from long-term drought and water diversion: the drying of the Great Salt Lake. If this cannot be reversed, Salt Lake City is destined for a future of more frequent toxic dust storms as the dry lake bed is exposed to wind.

The New York Times reports that the heating of the planet isn’t just showing up in air temperatures. NOAA states that half of the world’s oceans now experience heat waves in a typical year, and glaciers continue to recede. ‟For the second consecutive year in 2024, all 58 of the main glaciers tracked by the World Glacier Monitoring Service across five continents lost mass, the greatest average ice loss in 55-years of records. The European Alps lost roughly 10 percent of their remaining glacier volume in just two years, while Venezuela became the first Andes nation to lose all of its glaciers.” The heating of the oceans also diminishes their ability to absorb carbon dioxide. “Taken together, we see the first signs of a planet that is losing resilience, or losing strength to buffer heat stress,” said Johan Rockström, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. “The consequence of such loss of resilience will be increased rate of warming.”

The New York Times reports that ‟around the globe, anomalous weather and shattered records are sending new waves of concern through the scientific community, which was already well aware that some ecosystems are showing signs of intense stress.” A new research paper concludes that the rate of global warming has nearly doubled over the last decade, a finding that is being debated in the scientific community. The authors claim to have removed the influence of recent El Niño years in their statistical analysis, but Grist notes other scientists’ concern that it was really impossible to separate El Niño effects in such a short timeframe. Regardless, ‟Many of the consequences of global warming — such as more intense storms, warming oceans and melting glaciers — are arriving faster and more powerfully than many scientists had expected.”

In The New Yorker, Bill McKibben notes that the EPA’s decision to terminate the endangerment finding ‟has to rank as one of the signal moments in America’s descent into idiocracy.” Another moment: The New York Times notes that the EPA has ‟proposed to weaken limits on emissions of ethylene oxide, a cancer-causing gas, from manufacturing facilities that use it to sterilize medical devices.” Make America Poisonous Again!

In an effort to slow the descent into idiocracy, The New York Times reports that 24 states ‟sued the Trump administration over its decision to relinquish the government’s legal authority to fight climate change. It is expected to be consolidated with a case that environmental groups filed in February, making for one of the largest legal challenges to date against the Trump administration’s unraveling of federal climate policy.” If the lawsuit is unsuccessful, the EPA would have no legal authority to regulate greenhouse gases without a specific act of Congress in the future. The article notes that legal experts believe that the Trump Administration’s goal is to get the case before the Supreme Court, hoping the court will reverse the 2007 Mass. v. EPA decision that allowed for the endangerment finding.

The Guardian reports that, after a long period of drought, Kenya was struck by intense rainfall. A month’s worth of rain fell in Nairobi in one day. Inside Climate News notes that, despite drainage-system upgrades, countries in East Africa will be hard-pressed to handle the extreme floods fueled by climate change. A heat wave sent temperatures to record levels in Capetown, South Africa. On the other side of the extreme-weather carousel, The Washington Post describes the extreme snowfall in Providence, Rhode Island, in late February. ‟The city recorded 37.9 inches at T.F. Green International Airport, its official observation location. The tally demolished its old snowstorm maximum of 28.6 inches from the Blizzard of 1978 and may set a new state record.” The air pressure near the storm was as low as a high-end Category 2 hurricane, with the fast drop characteristic of a “bomb cyclone.” The San Francisco Chronicle reports on intense flooding in Hawaii. Oahu was the island hardest hit (aerial videos here), where mandatory evacuation orders were in place because of an imminent dam failure. One road had to close because there was a house on it. The low-pressure system then moved on to Maui, where additional precipitation records were broken.

The New York Times reports that ‟the Trump administration is reviewing proposals to break up one of the world’s leading climate and weather laboratories [National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR)], transfer its work to universities and private companies, take away its aircraft, and sell its property in Boulder, Colo.” The Times describes how NCAR, which was founded in 1960, ‟is responsible for many of the biggest scientific advances in understanding of weather and climate. Its research aircraft and sophisticated computer models of the Earth’s atmosphere and oceans are widely used in forecasting weather events and disasters.” The White House budget director called NCAR “one of the largest sources of climate alarmism in the country.”

According to a lawsuit filed by the NCAR’s leadership, the Trump Administration’s action is in retribution for the state of Colorado convicting a local election official of tampering with voting equipment during the 2020 election. The lawsuit also claims that closing the lab will ‟pose a direct threat to national security, public safety, and economic prosperity and risk setting back the country’s global leadership in weather and space weather modeling and forecasting.” This attack on NCAR comes on the heels of a similar attack on the Goddard Institute for Space Science. Over 95,000 employees have left government science agencies during the Trump Administration, and over 10,000 of these people had PhDs. The latest departure is Kate Marvel, a well-known scientist and public communicator, from NASA.

Inside Climate News describes how misinformation from the fossil-fuel industry, and the Trump Administration, leads to misunderstanding among consumers about the cost of EVs. But as gas prices rise because of the war with Iran, people around the world are taking a new look at EVs. Interest is increasing in China, the U.S. and elsewhere. Grist reports that ‟when gas prices top $4 per gallon, BloombergNEF estimates that the total cost of ownership for EVs becomes lower than for gas-powered vehicles. The exact crossover point depends on local prices for both gasoline and electricity.” Edmunds.com has reported an uptick in search traffic for EVs, and CarEdge says searches for EVs are up 20% since the war started.

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