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).😜
Here is a new feature for this blog, which I will add daily. This is the latest inciteful Green News Report from my friends Desi Doyen and Brad Friedman at Progressive Voices. Hit ‘continue reading,’ listen, then hit return to see my daily topics:
Main Topic: Climate Change Is Still Dangerous, No Matter What Nonsense Trump Vomits
Dear Diary. If you think that weather is weird and dangerous worldwide at +1.4°C above preindustrial conditions for global averages, just wait until we cross the +2.0°C barrier going to about a +3.0°C figure if nothing more is done to mitigate the climate crisis problem. I like most climate experts think that civilization won’t survive all current coastal cities disappearing into the sea and heat becoming so extreme that large tracks of the planet become uninhabitable. Also, such extremes of heat and drought will cut agriculture and thus food supplies such that widespread starvation will be an offering instead of full dinner plates. Yet some people like Trump either want to ignore the climate problem and/or think that there is no such problem
Dr. Michale Mann and Dr. Guinevere Gunther have penned a good summary of the climate problem and why stances on it by our dear leader are so nonsensical. Here is their new article published in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists:
Sorry, climate change is still dangerous, no matter what nonsense Trump emits
By Genevieve Guenther, Michael E. Mann | Opinion | May 22, 2026
Photo by Alain ROUILLER on Unsplash
As the climate-change landscape evolves, new forms of scientific disinformation emerge. Just this week, President Trump spread one of the latest false claims: that the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) announced the world does not face climate catastrophe, and that it’s “alarmism” to acknowledge that currently projected amounts of global heating might be dangerous.
“After 15 years of Dumocrats promising that ‘Climate Change’ is going to destroy the Planet, the United Nations TOP Climate Committee just admitted that its own projections (RCP8.5) were WRONG! WRONG! WRONG!” Trump wrote, quite incorrectly, on Truth Social. “Unlike the Dumocrats, who use Climate Alarmism nonsense to push their Green New Scam, my Administration will always be based on TRUTH, SCIENCE, and FACT!”
Even in light of the Trump administration’s gutting of American science and the president’s well-documented reckless disregard for the truth, this post stands out as patently, particularly absurd. But Trump’s new climate-denial talking point is a weaponized version of new developments in climate science. Trump’s typically bombastic disinformation—if casually combined with a real debate within the climate community about one climate projection—will muddy the public understanding of science enough that Americans on both sides of the aisle might be left with an incorrect and dangerous belief that they no longer need to worry about the climate crisis.
So, what is RCP8.5? And why is the president claiming that the United Nations now says its climate projections are “wrong”?
RCP8.5 is a scenario that climate scientists have used in earth-system models to research possible impacts of global heating. A scenario is a hypothetical emissions trajectory anchored in socioeconomic projections, such as the future price of energy or the future enactment (or repeal) of climate policy. In these scenarios, a hypothetical emissions trajectory leads to a certain quantity of warming by a particular date. Scientists use scenarios to try to project what will happen if future emissions are low, medium, or high. RCP8.5 was a high-emissions scenario. It hypothesized that future emissions would lead to a lot of new energy being trapped in the climate system—8.5 watts per square meter of extra energy, to be exact—and a temperature rise of 5 degrees Celsius by the year 2100. This much heating would have been a result a dramatic rise in coal use—up to 6.5 times more coal burned in 2100 than today.
When RCP8.5 was first proposed, clean energy was expensive, and coal cheap. But since then clean energy has become very cheap. Between 2009 and 2024, the price of electricity generated by solar power plunged 88 percent, below that of coal and methane gas. So it no longer seems likely that developing nations will meet increasing energy demand with fossil-fuel sources like coal rather than solar, wind, and batteries. Globally, 86 percent of all added power capacity last year was from renewables. So when scenario modelers at the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP) released updated scenarios last month, in preparation for the development of a new generation of earth system models that will feed into the next Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, they lowered their high-emissions scenario.
The new high-emissions scenario hypothesizes a backsliding of progress, where current climate policies are rolled back, clean-energy development slows, and fossil-fuel use expands. This scenario leads most likely to a temperature rise of about 3.5 degrees Celsius by 2100, but the range of possible heating by that date spans from 2.5 degrees to 4.3 degrees Celsius. The scenario also projects more heating after 2100, since global emissions fail to shrink to net zero. Indeed, the new high-emissions scenario projects that the world could heat up to RCP8.5’s 5 degrees Celsius by 2150, just 50 years later.
The new suite of scenarios also has a “medium” emissions trajectory. This scenario assumes that currently implemented policies are not rolled back, but frozen in place, and it leads to about 3 degrees Celsius of heating by 2100, again with more heating in the 22nd century until emissions drop to zero.
Some scientists may wish to emphasize the positive in these developments. There is indeed value in showing that climate solutions exist, climate policy is being implemented to some degree, and that these incidents are already, at least hypothetically, making the future less dire than it might have been otherwise. But what we wish to convey to the public is that the future remains far more dire than many are acknowledging. As important as it is to acknowledge progress, it is equally important to counter the disinformation that says we no longer need to worry about the climate future—whether that disinformation comes from the president or from purported climate experts.
First of all, current generations are still at risk of seeing a temperature increase like the one projected under RCP8.5. Remember: Scenarios are hypothetical emissions trajectories that are fed into earth system models to study climate impacts. They do not in themselves include “climate sensitivity,” a measurement of how Earth responds to carbon emissions, or so-called “carbon cycle feedbacks” that can amplify this response. The lead author of the paper that announced the new scenarios, and the convener of CMIP, Detlef Van Vuuren, has said: “Even with a lower emissions scenario you can still end up with a forcing of RCP8.5, only as a result of having back luck on the climate feedbacks.” And it seems like climate sensitivity is not going to be low. This means scientists can’t rule out warming over 4 degrees Celsius in the next 75 years, which would be unimaginably catastrophic.
Second, 3 degrees Celsius, the 2100 outcome of the medium-emissions scenario, would also amount to catastrophic, civilization-threatening levels of warming. According to the most recent IPCC report, 3 degrees Celsius of heating would mean that, for around three months of the year, the entire East Coast of the United States—from Maine to the Midwest and the Great Plains—and half of California would be exposed to “hyperthermic conditions that pose a risk of mortality.” Southern California, the Southwest, the Deep South, and Florida would be this fatally hot nearly half the year.
Finally, although climate models have done a remarkably good job predicting the observed warming when fed the actual history of human carbon emissions, they have likely underestimated the effect global heating is having on critical impacts such as ice sheet collapse, sea level rise, and increasingly devastating and deadly weather extremes. It is becoming clear that climate impacts are emerging on the worse side of the range of possible outcomes. This means that even a world 2.5 degrees Celsius warmer could look much like the 4+ degree Celsius world of RCP8.5.
It would be quite the pyrrhic victory to celebrate the marginal bending of a hypothetical emissions curve only to find ourselves in a world where—among a multitude of other, interlocking, compounding disasters—it becomes difficult to grow food in Southeast Asia, Africa, California, and Europe; the world enters in irreversible economic crisis because the housing sector becomes uninsurable; and 4.7 billion people experience potentially lethal heat.
The world is making progress on climate change, but it’s wholly insufficient to the scale of the challenge. In a world where President Trump is trying to eradicate American scientific research into global heating, block the development of clean energy, and force aging and uneconomic coal plants to remain open—while Democrats are being counseled not to focus on climate change—it’s all the more important that we not allow ourselves to be lulled into complacency. Future carbon emissions scenarios will be determined by politics. But the warming associated with those emissions is determined by physics. Those who fail to acknowledge the fundamental difference between these two things, are as naïve or as mendacious as Donald Trump.
Climate change is real. And it’s dangerous. Yes, we can solve it. But later is too late. Even with the new scenarios, the need to drive emissions down to net zero and halt global heating remains as urgent today as ever.
Here are some “ETs” recorded from around the U.S. 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 Saturday:
(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.)