Exciting launch news from Berkeley Earth

Happy 250th birthday to the United States of America. A dream of freedom given form. An unfinished project carried forward by generations who crossed oceans and endured hardships to build better lives for themselves and their descendants in this beautiful land.

Back in April, we had the rare sight of dueling tropical cyclones less than 10° N and S of the equator in the Western Pacific warm pool. cimss.ssec.wisc.edu/satellite-bl... Has anyone tried to model the effect of this on El Niño? Is it just a coincidence or did it kickstart this event?

Heat waves are driven by weather patterns but occur on the backdrop of a rapidly warming world. Without climate change the current European heat wave would have been ~3.2 °C (5.8 °F) cooler. Heat impacts are non-linear, so this higher severity can lead to much greater suffering

Heatwaves are far more disruptive and dangerous in places not used to high temperatures. In Paris, where high heat and air conditioning are both rare, health risks increase sharply during heatwaves. By contrast, Texas has less impact from heat. From: ourworldindata.org/part-one-how...

Cooling Degree Days (CDD) is a measure of how much demand a place is likely to have for the use of artificial cooling. In Paris, CDD has doubled over the last 40 years and is expected to redouble this century under current emission policies (SSP2-45).

Apologies for the late notice, but @berkeleyearth.org will be holding our monthly climate press briefing looking at May temperatures starting in about 30 minutes. We'll also include some discussion of the current European heatwave. Registration link: us02web.zoom.us/webinar/regi...

The model spread for this year's El Niño forecasts remains insane. 11 of the 13 models expect a very strong (aka "super") El Niño. (rONI > 2 °C) 7 of 13 expect the strongest El Niño in modern history.

Not 2050. Today in France. Peak Temps. Every pink number is 40C+ (104F+) with many stations at 44C+ (111F+). A previously impossible heatwave, soon to be an annual tradition, only hotter. #heatwave #Europe

The world has warmed by around 1.4C since 1850. It took 148 years for the first half of that warming to occur, and just 27 years for the second half!

The heat will be brutal, and only ~27% of French homes have air conditioning.

People will die this week. The next few days will bring record-breaking heat to France, a country ill-prepared for widespread temperatures over 40 °C (104 °F). For the French: stay hydrated, stay in the shade, exercise due caution, and seek help if you need it.

Global CO2 emissions have plateaued since 2013, leading to a slower growth in atmospheric CO2 than would have otherwise been the case. In a new analysis at The Climate Brink, I've taken look at what would have happened if emissions had continued to grow: www.theclimatebrink....

A powerful El Niño Event is expected to develop during 2026. How powerful? Well the seasonal forecasting models are currently all over the place. So, somewhere between a Top 10 event in modern history and super-bonkers extreme crazy land. 🤔 🧪🌊

Does El Niño forecasting have their own version of a "hot models" problem? There are currently 13 seasonal forecast ensembles used to predict future El Niño / La Niña. Diversity is good, but there remains broad disagreement among them, with some suggesting all-time records. 🧵

I've never actually seen an ENSO Index chart that included error bars, so I made one. 😉

History of El Niño and La Niña events since 1850 by applying the Relative Oceanic Niño Index to Berkeley Earth data. The strongest El Niños on this index are 1982/83, 1997/98, 2015/16 and 1877/78. Forecasts suggest an El Niño at the end of 2026 could challenge the record.

"RCP8.5 leads to a forcing level near the 90th percentile" - written to introduce the RCPs in 2011. link.springer.com/article/10.1... That extreme emissions & warming scenario was always intended to be unlikely (while still possible), but too often it was misconstrued as a likely future.

"Australia has surpassed 400,000 home battery storage installations under the federal government’s Cheaper Home Batteries Program, reaching 11.2GWh of cumulative storage capacity in less than a year since the scheme launched." www.energy-storage.news/australia-hi... via George Heynes 🔌💡

Some of my tweets and other comments on the extraordinary nature of the March heatwave in the Western USA have been summarized in a PDF Report: berkeley-earth-wp-offload.storage.googleapis.com/wp-content/u...

😯 The ENSO modeling dashboard @hausfath.bsky.social created is showing a 50% chance of a very strong El Niño before the end of the year. dashboard.theclimatebrink.com#ensos These updates are helpful, as the monthly NOAA / IRI reports tend to lag behind the model updates.

It's not often that I look at a climate monitoring graph and go WTF?, but this is one of those moments. Did the land average temperature difference between daily maximum and daily minimum temperature really go sharply lower in 2025?

One frequently sees headlines that X is warming faster than the global average. That's true of nearly everywhere that humans live, but only because humans nearly all live on land. The process of global warming will generally warm land faster than the oceans.

Starting now...

New source of temperature data bias: Polymarket? Polymarket lets people bet on daily temperatures from some official weather stations. Now Meteo-France alleges someone used an artificial heat source to manipulate the readings at CDG and win bets. www.bfmtv.com/police-justi...

The transition last year from the old @berkeleyearth.org temperature analysis to the new high-resolution version doesn't make much difference for the global averages, but it is really useful when it comes to capturing local and regional details that would otherwise be missed.

Not the main point of the thread, but the Berkeley Earth to ERA5 comparison is interesting for another reason. ERA5 Reanalysis is generally very good, but it has some regional issues with long-term drift, likely due to changes in its inputs, especially prior to satellites.

The March heatwave in the USA set many impressive records. 21 weather stations recorded daily temperatures at least 40 °F (22 °C) above normal. For example, Centerville, South Dakota reached 93 °F (34 °C) on a day when the normal high would be 49 °F (9.4 °C).

We need to talk a bit about how utterly absurd the March heatwave was in the USA. This heatwave would have been impossible without a boost from climate change, but even with climate change it remains a deeply unlikely event. A thread looking at some of the numbers. 🧵

Probability of super El Nino vs probability of super duper turbocharged El Nino? Check out the strength forecast cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/ana...

The current heatwave in the US Southwest is utterly destroying many records for this time of year. Phoenix, Arizona has ~90 years of daily temperature data, and yet recent temperatures beat the previous March record by 5 °F (2.8 °C), and would actually tie the record for April.

February temperature briefing starting in 20 minutes.

Supertankers are actually very efficient. Shipping from one part of the world to another will rarely add more than a few $/barrel to the cost of crude oil. As a result, shipping can balance price differences, and US/EU/Asia oil prices all end up being similar.

I don't know how the current Strait of Hormuz crisis will end. But I am sure that many countries will be looking at this and thinking about how they can incentivize electric vehicles and reduce oil dependence for the future.

RIP Dana. Yesterday, my cousin's wife died after a two year fight with breast cancer. She leaves behind her husband and two young children. F-ing cancer. Remember to hug your loved ones while you have the chance.

NEW – Pace of global warming has nearly doubled since 2015, study says ✍️ @ayeshatandon.carbonbrief.org Read here ⬇️

The Guardian on our new study, which shows that global heating is significantly gathering speed. Our efforts to overcome our fossil fuel addiction should do the same. www.theguardian.com/environment/...

China knows the liability that oil import dependencies create, and how to play the long game. New car sales in China have gone from 6% electric in 2020 to 51% electric in 2025. This is large-scale industrial policy in service of national security goals.

2025 data quietly released by EPA shows harmful increases in dangerous air pollution attributable to Trump, personally, with 6 TX power plants that Trump exempted from stronger safeguards, for example, experiencing an astonishing 48% increase in sulfur-dioxide emissions collectively in 2025. 1/

While the US Government may have abruptly decided to ignore global warming, public sentiment remains largely unchanged. As of Dec. 2025, about 2/3 of the US public continues to be either somewhat or very worried about global warming. climatecommunication.yale.edu/app/uploads/...

So how is the fight against global warming going? Well, compared to a business-as-usual scenario made 30 years ago, we have slightly slowed the rate at which carbon dioxide is accumulating in the atmosphere. Technically that's progress, I guess, but we need it to stop increasing entirely.

Everyone always forgets to mention the other frog...

Human civilization arose under a stable atmosphere of 260-280 ppmv of carbon dioxide. Then, humans learned to utilize the power of fossil fuels. In a geologic blink, fossil fuel burning has increased atmospheric carbon dioxide levels by more than 50%.

Excellent @washingtonpost.com piece on the signs that global warming is accelerating by @shannonosaka.bsky.social and @johnmuyskens.bsky.social, featuring @hausfath.bsky.social @rarohde.bsky.social @cjsmith.eu www.washingtonpost.com/climate-envi...

New discussion paper just dropped that’s taken shall we say a little work to get this far … essd.copernicus.org/preprints/es... please be kind. Not on an at all sensitive topic in the slightest.

It is wild to me that in 2025 the question of how much does solar output change during a solar cycle still comes with a ~20% measurement uncertainty.

We're one year in. The speed, scope and severity of what's happening to American science is beyond anything we've seen before. The reliability of the Federal science and technology enterprise and the people within it, has been shattered. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

For 50 years, global warming had a very consistent trend (+0.19 °C/decade) with a boring, predictable range of natural variations around it. During the last three years, we've broken out above that range, suggesting the pace of change has quickened.

While the world sometimes seems metaphorically on fire right now, global warming is still progressing as well. In 2025, global warming delivered the 3rd warmest year since measurements began. A modest step down from 2024's records, but still well above 20th century norms. 🧪🧵

The US Government is literally saying that human lives have no value.