Summer 2026

Introduction

If you were to walk out onto my back porch right now here in Georgia, you probably wouldn't think the planet has a heat problem. It is late June in the summer of 2026, and it has actually been fairly normal where I live. We have had plenty of rain; in fact, the past month has set records for rain in many places. The grass is deep green, and the heat has not been nearly as relentless as it can be this time of year.

If you look west, however, you will find a very different story, as parts of the western United States are dealing with drought and extreme heat. Across parts of Europe, dangerous heat waves are putting millions of people under advisories and straining infrastructure that was never designed for temperatures like these. As a meteorologist, I look at this summer and see a lesson we have talked about before on this podcast: weather is local and short-term, while climate is the long-term pattern. Large-scale patterns, including El Niño and other shifts in the atmosphere, help explain why different parts of the world are having very different summers this year. But those heat waves in Europe also raise a larger question: if heat waves are a normal part of weather, is climate change beginning to alter the way we experience them? Welcome back to the podcast. I'm Dr. Mac, and this is The Climate Translation.

Moving the Floor

When I teach introductory meteorology, one thing I tell my students is that we often focus on the wrong question. We ask, "Did climate change cause this heat wave?" That is not the question you should be asking. Instead, a better question might be: "What kind of world did this heat wave happen in?" Weather events do not occur in isolation; they happen inside an atmosphere that already has certain temperatures, moisture levels, and available energy.

Imagine heading out to a gym. You drop a basketball on the ground and watch it bounce back to about an observer's eye level. Now assume you raise the floor you are standing on while your observer stays at the same level. If you drop the ball again with the same force and from the same distance, the ball appears higher off the ground to the observer. The ball is behaving exactly the same way it did before; the only difference is that the floor level beneath it has changed. Earth's climate works the same way, which is why climate scientists spend so much time talking about baselines. A baseline is the normal starting point. If you normally keep your house at seventy degrees and someone quietly sets the thermostat to seventy-five, the entire room starts from a warmer place, forcing your air conditioner to work harder. A small shift in the baseline can completely alter the outcome, even when the weather pattern itself looks familiar.

That is why scientists are paying so much attention to Europe right now. The heat dome affecting the continent is not a new phenomenon: air commonly flows out of North Africa, and atmospheric blocking patterns often trap heat for days. My home state of Georgia has always had heat waves, and the American South has been known as hot and humid for centuries. When news articles report that climate change causes heat waves, it can sound as though heat never existed before, but that is not what the science says. Rather, the same familiar weather patterns are operating in an atmosphere and ocean system that contains more heat than it used to, raising the floor and making it easier for temperatures to reach unprecedented extremes.

Why would a difference of only a few degrees matter? We sometimes hear a number like three or four degrees Fahrenheit and dismiss it because a three-degree shift in daily air temperature barely requires a change in clothing. But physical systems respond dramatically to small changes: water freezes at thirty-two degrees and melts at thirty-three, while a human body at ninety-eight degrees is healthy but at one hundred and four is in a medical emergency. A few degrees of baseline warming is the difference between a hot day and a dangerous one, between opening windows at night and needing emergency cooling centers, and between breaking a long-standing temperature record and simply having a warm summer afternoon.

The British Oven

Weather reports from London recently showed temperatures in southern England reaching around 36 degrees Celsius, or about 97 degrees Fahrenheit. In Alabama, Texas, or Florida, ninety-seven degrees is a typical July afternoon where life keeps moving because air conditioning is universal and the power grid is built for heavy cooling demand. In the United Kingdom, however, that same temperature created a very different experience: schools closed, hospitals saw a surge of heat-related illnesses, and rail lines slowed because thermal expansion threatened to deform the metal tracks.

The reason the exact same temperature hits so differently across the ocean comes down to an infrastructure blind spot. While climate change has moved the atmospheric floor, our infrastructure is still standing on the old one. Every house, bridge, railway, and electrical system was designed around historical assumptions regarding local temperature ranges, precipitation, and extreme event frequencies. In many ways, our infrastructure is frozen climate history built out of concrete, steel, and brick. For centuries, buildings in northern Europe were constructed with heavy, insulated materials designed to keep the cold out and retain heat during long winters, without widespread air conditioning. When a modern heat dome settles over the region, those design choices trap daytime heat and slowly radiate it indoors after sunset.

While people are beginning to install air conditioning, adaptation takes time. You can buy a fan tomorrow, but you cannot rebuild an entire nation's housing stock, replace thousands of miles of railway, or redesign entire cities in a single summer. Infrastructure changes slowly, but the atmosphere does not wait. Every society is built around historical climate expectations: the Gulf Coast prepares for heat and humidity, the Midwest plans for severe winter freezes, and the San Francisco Bay Area expects cool summers moderated by the Pacific Ocean. The difficult question climate change presents is what happens when those built-in expectations no longer match reality, because our cities were constructed for a stable climate that is now shifting.

The Danger of Warm Nights

When most people think about a heat wave, they picture the blazing afternoon sun beating down on city streets during the hottest part of the day. But the most dangerous aspect of a climate-altered heat wave often occurs after sunset. Many of us have experienced miserable summer nights tossing and turning in sweat without ever truly cooling off. Your body operates much like a car engine: it can handle running hot for a period of time, provided it has a chance to cool down and recover. If an engine remains hot all night and is driven again the next morning without resetting, cumulative stress builds up rapidly.

Nighttime serves as the human body's vital maintenance period where the heart works less, core temperatures drop, and recovery occurs. Climate change is actively interfering with that recovery, as nighttime temperatures are rising faster than daytime highs in many parts of the world. Meteorologists use the term "tropical nights" to describe conditions where temperatures never drop below 20 degrees Celsius, or 68 degrees Fahrenheit. In parts of France and Italy this month, nighttime temperatures remained as high as 30 degrees Celsius, or 86 degrees Fahrenheit, in homes without air conditioning. When nights stay that warm, the cardiovascular system continues working overtime to shed heat, preventing restorative sleep and creating dangerous physiological strain for older adults, young children, and vulnerable populations.

Emergency medical systems in parts of Europe have faced severe strain during recent heat waves because residents simply cannot find relief. This is another consequence of moving the floor: baseline temperatures remain elevated around the clock. Heat is dangerous not only because of how high afternoon temperatures climb, but because nighttime cooling is disappearing, leaving the body under relentless stress without the opportunity to recover.

The 2026 Contrast

This dynamic brings us back to the question of why summer conditions in Georgia have been green, rainy, and relatively mild in 2026 while Europe and the American West face intense heat and drought. The answer lies in how our planet distributes heat. Earth functions as a global heat distribution system where the atmosphere and oceans constantly transport surplus energy from the tropics toward the poles. Large-scale circulation patterns, including a strong El Niño in the tropical Pacific, act like large boulders dropped into a river, altering jet stream paths and pressure distributions worldwide.

This summer, those large-scale patterns have favored wetter, near-average conditions across parts of the American South while steering persistent heat domes over Europe and the western United States. A comfortable local summer does not mean climate change has paused; it simply reflects where a specific region sits within a broader global pattern. This highlights the core difference between local weather and global climate. Natural variability still dictates where jet streams bend, where storms travel, and where heat domes settle from year to year. What has changed is the underlying baseline: because the global atmospheric floor is higher, the heat domes that do develop are operating within a warmer background and producing more severe impacts.

A mild July in one region does not cancel out dangerous heat elsewhere. Weather remains local and variable, while climate represents the evolving global baseline. Recognizing the distinction between short-term weather fluctuations and long-term climate trends is essential for understanding the environmental changes unfolding across the planet.

Conclusion

It is natural to look out at a rainy summer morning in Georgia and feel as though everything is normal, because weather is an immediate, personal experience. But this summer provides a broader reminder: climate change is not eliminating natural weather variability, but altering the background within which those events occur. As the baseline floor rises, familiar weather systems produce unfamiliar consequences across unadapted infrastructure, unequipped homes, and dangerously warm nights.

Understanding the physics behind these shifting baselines is the first step toward making informed decisions about how we design, build, and prepare for the future. Climate change is ultimately a story of changing environmental assumptions, and distinguishing between daily weather and long-term climate is essential to navigating both.

I'm Dr. Mac. This has been The Climate Translation. If you have a question about the climate that you have been too afraid to ask, or if you have a differing opinion, I want to hear from you. I can use your viewpoints in a future episode. You can reach me at TheClimateTranslation@gmail.com. I'll see you next time.