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As our Heat Week coverage continues, today’s newsletter looks at how hot the world can actually get, scientifically speaking. You can also read and share the full story on Bloomberg.com. 

Also, today we’re introducing a new weekly column, the Washington Diary, where we bring you recent news you may have missed on changes impacting climate policy and science under the Trump administration. Have tips for next week? Email Danielle Bochove dbochove1@bloomberg.net

How hot can it get?

By Eric Roston

How hot can a heat wave really get? Before June 2021, scientists thought they knew.

That’s when one of the most extreme heat spikes ever observed hit western North America, leaving at least 1,400 people dead. Lytton, British Columbia, smashed the 84-year-old Canadian heat record on June 26, reaching 46.6 C (116F). 

And it smashed that the next day by 1.3C. 

And smashed that the next day by another 1.7C. 

And the next day, Lytton burned to the ground

When a team of climate scientists assembled days later to analyze the heat wave, they found that the local historical weather data offered a paradox: Their standard approach for estimating a heat wave’s rarity concluded that the new records were too extreme to occur in the region where they actually did. They were in a sense “impossible” even though they actually occurred, as three American scientists put it earlier this year.

They adjusted their method to accommodate the new reality (and use that approach still), but noted that “follow-up research will be necessary to investigate the potential reasons for this exceptional event.”

In the four years since then, dozens of studies have taken up that challenge, with a tightening focus on a simple question that eludes easy answers: How hot can it get? The answer has grave implications for humanity, from those living in places where high temperatures are currently rare to those in places that are increasingly on the edge of habitability as climate change makes heat more intense and frequent. Everyone, everywhere, needs to know the risks about where they live.

There are as many answers to this question as there are thermometers around the globe. To make finding an answer slightly more manageable, scientists look not at absolute temperatures, as anybody would when leaving the house in the morning. Instead, they parse each weather station’s departures from the average. 

The 2021 event “shocked everyone, including specialists working on the subject. People were completely stunned,” said Robin Noyelle, a post-doctoral researcher in climate science at ETH Zurich.

Signs warn of heat in Death Valley. Photographer: Eric Thayer/Bloomberg

Heat can spike in any season or place. The most anomalously warm temperature was actually set in Antarctica, where temperatures rose 39C (70F) above average in March 2022. Temperatures at the North Pole surged 20C higher than normal in February, just past the melting point in the middle of winter. Those anomalies are particularly extreme in part because those areas are so dry, and also because it’s easier to heat something cold. But how much normal temperatures could deviate is arguably more pressing in places where people live and where heat is particularly acute in summer.

Years of poring over statistics and model output — on top of basic common sense — has taught scientists that there is a heat limit. 

“You can't have 500 degrees,” said Michael Wehner, a senior staff scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. 

That research has also shown which meteorological ingredients are most likely to fuel extreme heat. 

Cloudless skies and high pressure work to allow more of the sun’s energy to reach the Earth while dark surfaces keep it trapped close to the ground. Lower altitudes have higher pressure, which means they can get hotter. And lastly, a lack of water can allow heat to build unchecked. Places where these factors are in play are the most likely to see the hottest temperatures. 

Read More: Life-Threatening Heat Domes Are Confounding Forecasters

Many of these elements were in place during the June 2021 western North American heat wave, and they’re common in the hottest places on the planet. 

“Basically all of these conditions are met in Death Valley, but not in many other places in the world,” said Friederike Otto, a climate scientist at Imperial College London and co-founder of World Weather Attribution, a UK-based team of scientists who undertook the 2021 heat wave analysis. Furnace Creek in California's Death Valley set the highest-ever recorded temperature of 56.7C in 1913, according to the World Meteorological Organization.

And whatever the upper limit for anomalously high temperatures at a particular location may be, it too will rise with global warming, she said.

What role can artificial intelligence play in predicting maximum temperatures in the future? Read the full story on Bloomberg.com. 

Another big number

1 trillion
This is how much the US has spent (in dollars) on disaster recovery and other climate-related needs over the 12 months ending May 1, according to Bloomberg Intelligence analysis.

Preparing for disaster

"Well, if the risk weren't real, why would they be bothering? And if that risk is real, well, there goes your rhetorical platform that it isn't."
Sheldon Whitehouse
 US Senator, Rhode Island (D)
Whitehouse said President Donald Trump’s new tax and spending law tacitly acknowledged the risks of climate change. The law has a provision allowing so-called contract growers of broilers and laying hens “to receive index-based insurance from extreme-weather related risk, resulting in increased utility costs.”

Washington diary

A tally of recent news you may have missed on changes impacting climate policy and science under the Trump administration.

Another US federal website devoted to climate change has gone dark. The US Global Change Research Program’s website along with versions of the National Climate Assessment Report, have been taken offline. In April, hundreds of scientists working on the latest report were fired by the Trump administration. Their work tracked the impact of global warming on the country and was seen as key to helping prepare for worsening climate disasters.

Two scientific groups, the American Geophysical Union and the American Meteorological Society, announced in May that they would continue to publish their work independently. An archived version of the 2023 Fifth National Climate Assessment is currently available from an online NOAA repository

Meanwhile, the National Snow and Ice Data Center is switching to sensing equipment operated by Japan's national space agency to track sea ice, after being told that a data feed from the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program will end later this month. There have already been “unrecoverable gaps” in the delivery of data, NSIDC wrote on July 9. Moreover “with budget cuts from NASA for Sea Ice Today, we will no longer write mid-month analyses in the months leading up to the Arctic sea ice minimum.”

Finally, after being laid off in April, roughly 15 people, representing most of the staffers at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's climate and health program, were reinstated and some began returning to work in late June as part of a broader callback of hundreds of workers to the agency, according to three sources familiar with the matter.

Messages notifying employees about the reversed layoffs did not provide an explanation. However, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has previously said that some staffers were mistakenly cut. Not everyone is coming back, a person familiar with the matter said.

The climate and health group administered a $10 million program of grants to states and localities to build climate resilience, and worked on tools including for extreme heat. The HHS’ 2026 proposed budget calls for eliminating climate and health work at the CDC.

“While I’m very happy to see the reinstatements, we’re dealing with unprecedented extreme heat right now and we could have been in a very different place than we are,” says Grace Wickerson, senior manager of climate and health at the Federation of American Scientists. “I think what we’re hoping is that they can still do the critical work that they are being authorized to do.”

--Danielle Bochove and Emma Court, with assistance from Eric Roston and Brian Kahn 

What did we miss this week in Washington? Email dbochove1@bloomberg.net

More from Green

To protect your home from floods and fire, you can raise the house out of harm’s way or establish an ember-resistance zone around the dwelling. But how do you safeguard your home against extreme heat, an increasingly frequent climate-driven threat that now strikes historically temperate regions?

“Even here, it's definitely a leading concern,” says Chris Magwood, who’s an Ontario, Canada-based sustainable construction expert for RMI, a nonprofit that promotes decarbonization. 

If you’re building a new house, you can bake heat-resilience into the structure, while existing homes can be retrofitted with temperature-reducing features. Bloomberg Green has looked at some of the most effective steps you can take to keep your home cool. Read all of them here

Photographer: Rune Fisker

More than 240 bonds globally will face deadlines this year to either meet their sustainability performance targets or in many cases face a coupon step-up, according to the Anthropocene Fixed Income Institute. That’s up from the roughly 24 securities facing such deadlines last year, setting the stage for a potential rash of step-ups.

Bank of England Deputy Governor Sarah Breeden said some asset prices are already starting to reflect growing climate risks, warning that extreme shocks could speed up that process. Breeden, who oversees financial stability for the central bank, pointed to sovereign and corporate bond prices as evidence of such assets, she said.

The European Central Bank signaled that it won’t immediately hold lenders to strict demands as they prepare legally-mandated plans for how they will accompany the move to a low carbon-economy. The ECB will take a gradual, “pragmatic and targeted approach” to such transition planning when a relevant requirement takes effect next year, Executive Board Member Frank Elderson wrote in a blog on Friday. 

Worth a listen

The world’s militaries are incredibly polluting, collectively accounting for some 5.5% of global emissions. Western economies are now gearing up for a big expansion of their militaries, with members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) agreeing to increase defense spending to 5% of their gross domestic product by 2035. That will commit trillions of dollars more to an enormously carbon intensive industry, unless militaries can find a way to reduce their emissions. This week on Zero, Akshat Rathi asks retired Lieutenant General Richard Nugee, author of the UK Ministry of Defence’s climate change report: Can warfare go green?

Listen now, and subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or YouTube to get new episodes of Zero every Thursday.

Members of the Philippine Navy paddle through floodwaters in the Philippines. Photographer: Norman P. Aquino/Bloomberg

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