"Events now move at a pace so exhausting that it's hard to remember that 2025 began with an epic climate-fuelled disaster: large portions of the nation's second-biggest city, Los Angeles, burned in a firestorm that lasted days, after a record-dry autumn. A succession of such tragedies followed-for instance, the killer floods along the Guadalupe River, in Texas, where atmospheric moisture off an overheated Gulf of Mexico had hit record levels."
"Or Hurricane Melissa, where wind gusts reached two hundred and fifty-two miles per hour, faster than ever measured in a tropical cyclone at sea, thanks to the superheated waters of the Caribbean. The same day that Melissa hit Jamaica, a storm dropped five feet of rain on central Vietnam in twenty-four hours, the second-biggest deluge in recorded history, and the start of a truly sodden autumn across Southeast Asia which has left more than a thousand people dead."
"The year 2025 seems nearly certain to enter the books tied with 2023 as the second-hottest ever measured, trailing only 2024. Since both of those earlier years were influenced by a strong El Niño event, this one will have the dubious distinction of being the hottest without such an extraneous force. This is apparently what business as usual looks like for a planetary climate carrying our atmosphere's current load of carbon dioxide and methane."
2025 began with an epic climate-fuelled disaster as large parts of Los Angeles burned in a multi-day firestorm after a record-dry autumn. A rapid succession of extreme events followed: killer floods along the Guadalupe River fueled by record atmospheric moisture, Hurricane Melissa with 252 mph gusts from superheated Caribbean waters, and a storm that dumped five feet of rain on central Vietnam in 24 hours, triggering a deadly monsoon across Southeast Asia. Global temperatures are closing on the 1.5-degree-Celsius target on a three-year moving average, with 2025 among the hottest years without El Niño. International climate negotiations in Belem produced outcomes favorable to oil producers while key delegations stayed away.
Read at The New Yorker
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