Fires, floods and record heat: This is the summer of compounding disasters

By Andrew Freedman, CNN

(CNN) — Putting your own mask on before assisting others was only supposed to be a safety instruction on an airplane, but it has applied to everyday life in the urban corridor from Washington, DC, to Boston where, for the second time in four years, smoke from wildfires in Canada turned skies an eerie shade of sepia.

The air smelled like smoke, even hundreds of miles downwind from the blazes. Sunsets were transformed into an ethereal red, while the sun was barely visible at noon through the pollution in Boston, New York and Washington. Midwestern cities suffered too: Chicago and Detroit had some of the worst air quality in the entire world. At one point last week, at least 120 million Americans from Minnesota to Massachusetts were under air quality warnings due to the wildfire smoke.

For decades, scientists have been warning us about the calamitous consequences of climate change. These warnings have often come in scientific studies using seemingly far-off years such as 2050 and 2100.

But this summer proves we don’t have to wait until the future for climate change to smack us in the face. From torrid heat waves, to deadly flash floods, to raging wildfires and their associated acrid smoke — the signs are all around us, right now.

The disasters of late are what global warming looks like: One piled on top of another, all occurring at about the same time.

“Climate change is a present threat, and it will become even harder to ignore as the impacts grow,” said Zachary Labe, a climate scientist at Climate Central, a nonprofit research group. “The burning of fossil fuels is already having a clear and significant impact on communities, and we do not have to wait until 2050 or 2100 to see the consequences.”

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Summer used to be a carefree time for vacations and camping in the United States. Now we have a smoke season to accompany a seemingly year-round wildfire season in the American West and parts of Canada. This is occurring as average temperatures climb and forests become more susceptible to ignition from lightning and human actions.

The extreme weather and climate events so far this summer read like an over-the-top disaster movie script, except this is reality.

Parts of Texas are reeling from flash flooding after a deadly, 1,000-year rainfall event — the second in just two years. Such events have a 0.1% chance of occurring in any single year, under normal circumstances. But extreme rainfall is becoming more common as planet-warming pollution pushes temperatures higher because warmer air holds more moisture.

In some parts of Texas Hill Country, nearly an entire year’s worth of rain fell last week, leading to dangerous flood waves coursing through the often-parched terrain. This swelled rivers and streams to near record heights and trapped people in their homes.

Meanwhile, hundreds of millions of people in the US and Europe have sweltered beneath relentless heat domes that have resulted in thousands of excess deaths in Europe alone. These sprawling areas of strong high pressure act like a lid on the atmosphere, trapping heat underneath and squelching clouds and precipitation with their sinking air.

In Western Europe, a succession of heat domes in May, June and July turned verdant landscapes into tinderboxes, with deadly wildfires sweeping across Spain, France, the UK and other countries where wildfires were once considered rare. Water shortages are emerging in the Netherlands and could soon manifest elsewhere.

America’s recent heat waves shattered a bevy of all-time, monthly and daily high temperature and overnight minimum temperature records, some by large margins. Thermometers in normally cooler states such as Montana and Minnesota have registered temperatures so high that they blasted through longstanding all-time records, with triple-digit high temperatures in mid-July extending all the way to the Canadian border. Temperatures in parts of Montana climbed into the 110s.

Scientists long ago sounded the alarm that when climate disasters come, they won’t necessarily happen one at a time. Instead, there would be an uptick in compound disasters, as one extreme piles upon another. And that is exactly what has happened this summer.

“These overlapping hazards can lead to greater economic losses, more serious health impacts, added stress on infrastructure, and further damage to ecosystems,” said Labe of Climate Central.

The heat, flooding, wildfires and resulting smoke have coincided with the release of a new, authoritative report from the National Academy of Sciences on attributing extreme weather events to climate change, and how far that research has come in just the past few years.

Researchers can now confidently and directly tie heat waves and precipitation extremes, as well as their impacts, to human-caused climate change, the report found.

It is possible that this cruel summer of floods, heat waves and wildfires will cause people to reevaluate their stance on climate issues. Some polls have shown movement toward greater support for climate action among survivors of climate disasters.

A 2025 Pew survey found that 74% of Americans said they’ve experienced at least one of five forms of extreme weather, such as heat waves and floods, in the past year. A majority of that 74% said they viewed climate change as a contributor to the extreme weather, and this was particularly the case for heat waves.

However, the same poll found partisanship shapes peoples’ perceptions. Republicans tended to be less likely than Democrats to see a strong connection between an extreme weather event that they experienced and climate change. And Republicans were also less likely than Democrats to report experiencing an extreme weather event in the first place.

In short, while this summer’s disasters may make people more aware of climate change, they’re unlikely to move the political needle.

But it’s just a preview of what’s to come if the burning of fossil fuels is not rapidly and drastically curtailed.

“We are indeed seeing the consequences of climate inaction,” said climate scientist Michael Mann of the University of Pennsylvania.

It would be a mistake to think that the climate crisis has reached a “new normal,” since the world continues to warm as fossil fuel pollution piles up in the atmosphere, Mann said. “It’s an ever-shifting baseline toward more extreme conditions as long as we continue to warm the planet with carbon pollution,” he said.

He prefers the term “new abnormal” instead.

“I use the analogy sometimes of a dangerous highway we’re going down, and we need to get off at the next possible exit before we crash.”

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