The main purpose of this ongoing blog will be to track planetary extreme, or record temperatures related to climate change. Any reports I see of ETs will be listed below the main topic of the day. I’ll refer to extreme or record temperatures as ETs (not extraterrestrials).😜
Main Topic: Vietnam’s Year of Floods, Mud and Death
Dear Diary. Happy Thanksgiving one and all. This Climate Guy is thankful that the United States did not have a major landfalling hurricane this year, producing awful death and destruction. A year ago on Thanksgiving 2024 the Ashville North Carolina area was having to contend with awful ramifications from Hurricane Helene that blasted the southern Appalachians due to its rapid speed moving inland. Some people and business are still contending with the aftermath of this climate change influenced storm.
Other countries during Thanksgiving 2025 aren’t so lucky. Vietnam was hit by 14 typhoons this year. I haven’t posted as the main topic of the day what has been happening to Vietnam this year, so I’m doing so today. Climate change is hitting hard there. Here are more details from the New York Times:
Images From Vietnam’s Year of Deadly Wet Weather – The New York Times
Vietnam’s Year of Floods, Mud and Death
Scientists suggested that climate change could make central Vietnam a global hot spot for destructive storms. This year has seemed to prove the point.
Floodwaters besieged Nha Trang, Vietnam, last week. Credit…Duc Thao/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
By Damien Cave and Tung Ngo
Damien Cave and Tung Ngo have witnessed flooding across Vietnam this year.
- Nov. 24, 2025
Central Vietnam has become the latest epicenter of a deadly rainy season in Asia that has been supercharged by climate change, and seems to drag on without end.
More than 90 people in the nation have been killed in the past week from flooding and landslides, and around a dozen more are missing, government officials reported Sunday.
In one province, more than six feet of rain has fallen over the past few days. Peak coffee harvesting has been delayed. One government report noted that at least 200,000 homes have been flooded from the weekend’s heavy rains.
Residents carrying food after a spate of heavy rain in Hoi An in October.Credit…Nhac Nguyen/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
“It’s never happened like this before,” said Dao Dang Cong Trung, 44, the leader of a small rescue team from Hoi An who took his speedboat to the most damaged areas. “Local residents told me the floodwater rose too fast and they didn’t have time to do anything, so the damage is severe to their houses and many people died.”
Vietnam has been hit by 14 typhoons this year. Five was the average a few decades ago. The rain from the past few days did not even come from a cyclone — but to add inundation on top of injury, a 15th major storm has just formed off the country’s south central coast.
Images of this year’s relentless battering — of thick, soupy brown water sloshing over homes, shops, coffee plantations, tourist hotels and family tombs — have become both ubiquitous and disorienting. They can be hard to place in time, for many, because even as the rainy season is supposed to fade (as of this month), the floods have spread.
Strong winds bent trees ahead of Typhoon Kalmaegi’s landfall in Gia Lai Province in early November. Credit…Nhac Nguyen/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Fallen trees blocked a road in Nghe An Province after Typhoon Kajiki hit in August.Credit…Nhac Nguyen/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Central Vietnam has been the hardest hit, from around Da Nang last month to more than 300 miles south, near Nha Trang, where the suffering is concentrated now.
But Ho Chi Minh City flooded in August and again in early November. Hanoi was underwater last month, in a two-week period when three typhoons hit Vietnam. The rivers around Hue, a onetime royal capital, rose by 17 feet during a wet stretch of October, carrying muck into carefully restored historic buildings.
Frequent wars and hardship, along with a forward-looking culture, have made the Vietnamese people extremely resilient. Standing on tables to stay dry and pushing motorbikes through sludge, few have complained or assigned blame.
A motorbike powers through a flooded in Ho Chi Minh City street earlier this month. Credit…Thanh Hue/Getty Images
Unloading a coffin ahead of a funeral for a flood victim in Hoa Thinh commune, Dak Lak Province, Vietnam, last week. Credit…Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Donors in drier areas have been quick to mobilize. In Ho Chi Minh City, metro stations became collection sites Sunday for mountains of food and clothing to help those farther north.
Online and in private, however, some Vietnamese have begun to criticize the government’s lack of preparedness and slow response. Natural disasters have left nearly 300 people dead or missing in Vietnam and caused more than $2 billion in damage between January and October, according to the national statistics office.
Why, many ask, aren’t alarm and evacuation systems providing more help to residents as rivers rise? Why aren’t mitigation systems stronger, guiding water away from population centers?
A man wading through a flooded street in Hoi An in October. Credit…Nhac Nguyen/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
A family having lunch inside a flooded house in Trieu Son Trung, a village in Hue, Vietnam, early this month. Credit…Thanh Hue/Getty Images
Huynh Ngoc Phuong, 51, said the discharge from dozens of reservoirs for irrigation and hydropower seemed to contribute to the flooding.
To save his family from waters that rose by three feet in 20 minutes on the night of Nov. 19, he said he had to punch a hole in the roof of his home in the central province of Khanh Hoa. One of his children almost drowned. At least three of his neighbors were killed.
“The whole village is destroyed — trash, TVs, fridges and mud are everywhere,” he said in an interview Monday after the waters receded but government aid had still yet to arrive. “Everyone was turned upside down. I don’t know where and how to begin to start life again.”
Officials say the government is investing in advanced weather forecasting and alert systems.
Climate scientists stress that Vietnam — along with many other nations — needs to move faster to get ahead of rapid change caused by global warming.
Inundated vehicles sit in muddy water in Nha Trang, Vietnam, in November. Credit…Duc Thao/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Floodwaters in a house in Trieu Son Trung. Credit…Thanh Hue/Getty Images
The old standards, for rain, storms or how high rivers will rise, no longer fit an era when research shows that once-in-a-century extremes can happen far more often than that.
Geographically, Vietnam is especially vulnerable. A 2024 study identified it as a climate change “hot spot,” showing that warming temperatures adding moisture to the atmosphere and heating up the South China Sea would combine with typhoon patterns to create a vortex of risk.
“We wrote that in 2024, thinking it would be something that would play out over the next few decades, not the next 12 months,” said Benjamin P. Horton, Dean of the School of Energy and Environment at the City University of Hong Kong, and a co-author of the report.
“You’d expect rain anyhow, but it’s becoming more extreme,” he added. “When you have natural variation, when it should be wetter, climate change takes it to the next level.”
Mr. Trung, the rescuer with the boat, said he was still trying to process the disasters that no longer seem natural.
“I didn’t know what to feel,” he said. “I tried to rescue as many as I could. But there were many that I was not able to help.”
A partially submerged corner of Hoi An in October. Credit…Nhac Nguyen/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Damien Cave leads The Times’s new bureau in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, covering shifts in power across Asia and the wider world.
Tung Ngo is a Times reporter and researcher based in Hanoi, Vietnam.
Here are some “ETs” recorded from around the planet the last couple of days, their consequences, and some extreme temperature outlooks, as well as any extreme precipitation reports:
Here is More Climate News from Thursday:
(As usual, this will be a fluid post in which more information gets added during the day as it crosses my radar, crediting all who have put it on-line. Items will be archived on this site for posterity. In most instances click on the pictures of each tweet to see each article. The most noteworthy items will be listed first.)