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:
Green News Report with Brad Friedman & Desi Doyen
Episode: 9/24/2026 — More info…
Main Topic: Travelers Are Reckoning with the Ultimate Disrupter: Climate Change
Dear Diary. Imagine if you were an American planning the trip of a lifetime to travel to Paris in the spring of 2026. You book a trip and hotel for a couple of weeks in Paris during the summer of that year. You go and have a miserable time because of record temperatures getting as high as above 100°F during most of your trip. You find that air conditioning, which you are used to during hot times in the States, is absent in some buildings across France. You are staying at an older boutique hotel just for the experience and are in misery. Walking around Paris during the day with a stroll to the Siene is not pleasant because of that record heat.
Most mid-range and upscale hotels in Paris do have air conditioning, especially newer hotels and international chains, but it is not universal. Older boutique hotels, historic buildings, and some budget properties may lack AC entirely, have it only in certain rooms, or use systems that are weaker than what many U.S. travelers expect. Due to climate change, it behooves the traveler to prepare for excess heat and any severe storm or flooding threats.
That is the lesson taught by the following New York Times article:
How Climate Change Is Disrupting Summer Travel – The New York Times
Travelers Are Reckoning With the Ultimate Disrupter: Climate Change
Once dismissed as occasional inconveniences, climate-related disruptions are now an inescapable fixture of summer travel. How will travelers respond?
In Michigan, drifting smoke from Canadian wildfires caused hazy skies on the shores of Lake Michigan. Credit…Don Campbell/Associated Press
Sept. 25, 2026
It was a summer defined by climate disasters.
In May, travelers expecting mild shoulder-season weather across Western and Central Europe were instead greeted by scorching heat topping 95 degrees Fahrenheit in parts of France, Spain, Switzerland and Britain. In Paris, operators canceled daytime walking tours, and attractions like the Louvre and the Eiffel Tower restricted their hours.
A second heat wave struck two weeks later. The extreme temperatures strained infrastructure and triggered storms, grounding flights and suspending rail services across France, Britain and Germany. At least 40 people drowned while trying to cool off in France’s canals, and in one scorching week in June, around 16,000 more people died than usual. As the heat spread across Eastern and Southern Europe through July, wildfires ravaged the continent.
A visitor cools off with a mini fan at the Louvre museum in Paris during a heat wave in June.Credit…Dimitar Dilkoff/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Heat records were also shattered across North America in July, fueling hundreds of blazes in Canada. Smoke from those fires engulfed the Midwest and Northeast United States, creating orange skies and hazardous air in cities including Chicago, Detroit and New York.
Once dismissed as occasional inconveniences, climate-related disruptions are now an inescapable fixture of summer travel, leaving vacations increasingly unpredictable and dangerous. For many people, the act of traveling has transformed the concept of “climate change” from an abstraction into something very real.
“Climate change is becoming something travelers personally experience rather than something they read about,” said Jenny Southan, the founder of Globetrender, a travel trend-forecasting agency. “The hotel room that is too hot to sleep in, the hiking trail closed because of wildfire risk, the lake affected by drought, or the afternoon sightseeing that becomes exhausting or potentially unsafe in extreme heat.”
The question is what they’ll do about it.
Lara Thornton, a nutritionist based in Toronto, spent years buying carbon credits to offset her carbon footprint, but she stopped after they came under scrutiny for being largely ineffective. “I know traveling is part of the problem, but I don’t know the solution,” she said. “With the world burning every summer, it really feels like we are too late and the damage is already done.”
Elisabeth Beckenbauer, 55, a social worker from Portsmouth, England, decided to stop flying four years ago after looking at a flight-tracking app that showed tens of thousands of planes in the sky worldwide. “Flying is one of the worst things you can do to the planet,” she said, “and I realized that I don’t need to do it anymore.”
Despite growing climate concerns and a contribution of around 7.3 percent of total global greenhouse gas emissions, the travel industry has remained resistant to change.
Global travel and tourism are on track to grow by 3.2 percent this year, outpacing the global economy, according to the World Travel & Tourism Council, an industry group. While at least two-thirds of travelers express an interest in lowering their carbon footprint, environmental impact is consistently ranked as having the least influence on destination choices, according to the 2025 Europ Assistance Holiday Barometer, a study conducted with the market research firm Ipsos that examines global vacation trends and consumer behavior.
“People just love going on holiday and getting a break from the daily grind,” said Caroline Bremner, a data insights specialist at Travel Forward, a nonprofit organization that focuses on sustainable tourism. “Even though we have this lived experience of climate change, which has brought awareness, there is still an enormous gap between what people say and do.”
An August heat wave in London kept both residents and visitors out of the sun. Above, an empty pedestrian area near Tower Bridge.Credit…Kirsty Wigglesworth/Associated Press
After fleeing wildfires in Crete last year, Lauren Flanagan and her family originally planned to stay at their home on the outskirts of London this summer. She hoped to save their beach trip for the cooler October school holiday.
But as record-breaking heat waves hit Britain, Ms. Flanagan booked a last-minute getaway to Sardinia, hoping for respite with an air-conditioned hotel room and a sea breeze. Instead, she and her two daughters were greeted with temperatures as high as 119 degrees Fahrenheit.
“I’ve never experienced this level of heat; it felt like my face was burning even in the shade,” Ms. Flanagan said. “The pools and sea were hot, so we spent most of our time taking refuge in our hotel room.”
Until recently, heat waves caused only temporary declines in travelers’ interest, with demand rebounding once temperatures cooled. But repeated and unusually early heat waves are beginning to leave an impact, according to a recent study by the Data Appeal Company, which provides insights on travel demand. France, for example, was perceived as being less attractive to visit because of the heat than destinations like Portugal, Italy, Spain and Greece, even though those countries are better known for high summer temperatures.
One of the biggest shifts has been an increase in shoulder-season bookings and interest in cooler destinations like Norway and Finland. The tour operator Intrepid noted a 25 percent increase in Americans traveling to Northern Europe in September and October compared with the same period last year.
But consumer behavior can be stubborn. “The reality is that people will put up with some of the climate impacts to make the once-in-a-lifetime trip to Italy or Paris,” said Leigh Barnes, president of the Americas for Intrepid Travel.
In Germany, people walk across a stone dam in the Rhine River that is normally covered in water.Credit…Michael Probst/Associated Press
Last summer, Edward Lancon, a lawyer based in London, traveled to Scandinavia to escape the heat, but returned “with an itch to lie on a beach in Greece or Spain.” So this year, he booked a September trip to Greece, hoping that the temperatures would be warm enough to swim and not too hot to go sightseeing.
While the increasing popularity of shoulder season puts less pressure on destinations during the summer, experts say the onus to take meaningful climate action falls largely on governments and tour operators, because consumers show little interest.
“It’s not necessarily that they don’t care,” Ms. Bremner, of Travel Forward, said. “It’s more that they don’t know what to do.”
Koray Arslan, 72, a retired data analyst who lives in Chicago and Istanbul, said that he had donated in recent years to climate-disaster causes, like the wildfires in Turkey, but that he was unsure how to contribute to prevention measures that will have a real impact.
Changing weather patterns continue to astound Mr. Arslan. On a June river cruise through the Rhine valley, he said that he and his girlfriend “were not prepared” for soaring temperatures in Germany and Switzerland. “I’ve visited Germany many times in my life, and I didn’t know it could get that hot, he said, adding that he did not feel safe walking under the sun in the sweltering heat during the excursions.
The excessive heat and drought this summer caused several European rivers to dry up in July, wreaking havoc on river cruises with ships running aground and passengers being shuttled to other vessels on hourslong bus rides.
Ms. Southan of Globetrender said that factoring the effects of climate change into travel decisions was the beginning of what is likely to be a fundamental change in travel behavior.
“Increasingly, climate adaptation will become embedded in travel planning in the same way that people currently think about price, flight time or seasonality,” she said, adding that “climate comfort will become a new dimension of luxury, alongside space, privacy and service.”
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 Monday:
(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.)