By Alejandra Borunda , NPR.  Excerpt: The primary keeper of cause-of-death records in the U.S. is the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). It keeps an annual tally of heat-related deaths in the U.S., which is compiled from state reports based on whether heat is noted on individual death records. From 2004 to 2018, the national number of heat-related deaths compiled by the CDC was low: on average, around 700 a year . The number has crept up in recent years, averaging around 1,700 but sometimes topping 2,000, as heat risks grow and counting strategies evolve. But even that number is an underestimate, according to NPR and BU's analysis. On average between 2018 and 2025, we estimate that some 9,000 deaths each year in the country are impacted by heat — a factor of five higher than the official average over that same period. Some years, heat-related deaths can top 10,000. The true figure could be even higher, says Adams, because of some limitations in the data and the conse...

By Ryley Ober , The New York Times.  Excerpt: The first half of summer in Europe has featured a grueling series of heat waves and widespread wildfires, which have burned more than 1.3 million acres across the European Union. The Danube and Rhine rivers hit record lows caused by drought from the prolonged heat waves, upending river cruises and forcing operators to cancel or change itineraries with alternative bus transfers and hotel stays. ...Dozens of travelers told The New York Times that the sweltering season in Europe led them to reschedule travel dates, cancel tours of outdoor sites like the Roman Colosseum, leave trips early or plan future summer vacations to more temperate locations like Scandinavia or mountainous regions....  Full article at https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/12/travel/europe-travel-tourism-wildfires-heat-waves.html . 

By Grace van Deelen , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: Over the past 2 weeks, large wildfires in southwestern France and central Spain have burned 255,000 hectares, displaced hundreds of thousands of people, and created extremely poor air quality even hundreds of kilometers away. ...Climate change played a role in creating the conditions for these fires to burn and spread, a new analysis has found. The analysis, from World Weather Attribution, indicates that climate change made France and Spain’s fire-prone conditions much more likely: at least twice as likely in southwestern France and at least 20 times as likely in central Spain. Extreme heat and a widespread drought in Western Europe, both linked to climate change, created “tinderbox conditions,” the authors write....  Full article at https://eos.org/research-and-developments/climate-change-made-spain-wildfires-at-least-20-times-more-likely . 

By Emily Gardner , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: A few months ago, the University of Chicago’s Climate Impact Lab released a report that found that, by 2050, about 10 times as many heat-related deaths would occur in poor countries as in richer ones. Today, the same lab released a new report . This one found that the regions most affected by extreme heat are also the regions least likely to have increased levels of electricity to power the air conditioning that might provide relief. Use of cooling-related electricity is projected to grow seven times more in middle-income countries than in low-income countries in response to climate change....  Full article at https://eos.org/research-and-developments/a-changing-climate-will-lead-to-more-ac-in-wealthier-countries-and-more-deaths-in-poor-ones-new-report-suggests . 

By Julia Vaz , Science.  Excerpt: June’s European heat wave, in which temperatures above 40°C led to the deaths of more than 10,000 people, made headlines not just for its severity, but for what it said about climate change. Last week, a group called World Weather Attribution (WWA) linked it firmly to global warming, saying such a heat wave would have been “virtually impossible” 50 years ago. It was a high-profile claim from a field called extreme event attribution, which seeks to gauge how global warming impacted a particular heat wave, flood, or storm. The field is still evolving, according to a report released today by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM). ...In the past decade, attribution science has advanced rapidly , with the annual number of studies more than doubling since 2012, according to the report. Better climate models, longer observational records, and more sophisticated statistical techniques have all improved researchers’ abiliti...

By Arden Dier , Newser.AI .  Excerpt: The massive marine heat wave, formed as a North Pacific hot spot merged with warming tied to a developing super El Niño along the equator, covers about 13.5% of Earth's surface, stretching from the Philippines to Peru and toward Hawaii and California...the Washington Post reports. Forecasters say the heat is already helping fuel Super Typhoon Bavi in the western Pacific and could help set up a strong heat dome over the western US in mid-July, heightening fire risks from Arizona to Colorado. As the ocean absorbs heat, the water expands, with implications for global sea levels. ...sea levels this winter could run 6 inches to 2 feet above normal—with storms pushing that surge to 2 to 3 feet higher, raising the odds of disruptive coastal flooding, the Post reports. ...Globally, marine heat waves now cover more than 37% of the ocean, triple the share seen in the late 1980s....  Full article at https://www.newser.com/story/392288/pacific-ocean...

By Pragati K.B. and Anupreeta Das , The New York Times.  Excerpt: Severe heat waves have been hitting India since April, forcing many of the country’s essential workers to make tough decisions. ...For millions of workers like Mr. Rastogi — wage laborers, construction workers, street vendors, delivery drivers — the scorching summer in New Delhi often forces them into a bitter trade-off between health and income. They keep the machinery of this city running, and they are among the most susceptible to its harshest conditions. ...On the hottest days, the surface temperature of the ground can reach 140 degrees, according to the Center for Science and Environment, a New Delhi-based think tank. That is when tarmac starts to soften and barefoot workers risk blistering their feet....  Full article at https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/06/world/asia/india-heat-workers-health-income.html . 

By J. Besl , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: CalHeatScore creates heat wave warnings for every zip code in California, using temperature data, socioeconomic indicators, and the history of emergency room visits, to predict heat-related health risk....  Full article at https://eos.org/articles/new-tool-maps-the-overlap-of-heat-and-health-in-california . 

By Anupreeta Das , T he New York Times. Excerpt: India is getting hotter, faster. The grim present presages a grimmer future for the world’s most populous country, which is experiencing more frequent and severe heat waves. But India — with 1.4 billion people, many of whom are impoverished and particularly vulnerable to climate change — has yet to grasp the magnitude of the problem and may be underequipped to deal with it, public health experts and scientists say. ...Numerous studies suggest that India undercounts such deaths. In part, that is because most government doctors follow a narrow definition of what classifies as a heat-related death, sticking to easily identifiable causes like heat stroke, experts say....  Full article at https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/16/world/asia/india-heat-wave-deaths.html .  See also Women Toiling in India’s Insufferable Heat Face Mounting Toll on Health . 

By Robert Sanders , UC Berkeley News.  Excerpt: Sea urchins are a key but often destructive part of the kelp forest ecosystem along the Pacific Coast, and in boom years can often turn these forests into barrens devoid of marine life. But it remains a mystery what causes urchin boom and bust cycles and how sea urchins are affected by increasingly common marine heat waves. A new study by marine biologists at the University of California, Berkeley, now suggests that sea urchin populations along the Pacific Coast are more susceptible to heat waves than once thought, because the animals ramp down reproduction at temperatures substantially below levels that kill them. ...The study,  published last week  in the journal  Communications Biology , a  Nature  journal, was conducted in cooperation with the Hakai Institute in British Columbia, Canada, and UC Davis’s Bodega Marine Laboratory in California....  Full article at https://news.berkeley.edu/2025/11/14/ev...

By Hannah Richter , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: More than 75 million people work in the garment industry, many of them in the world’s hottest countries. As climate change warms the air and oceans, so too does it seep into the stuffy chambers of garment factories, where conditions are highly uncomfortable if not downright unsafe. In  research recently published in  The Lancet , scientists tested different interventions for protecting workers from rising temperatures in Bangladesh, a nation where 80% of its export revenue comes from the garment industry. The 4 million Bangladeshi people, mostly women, who sew ready-made garments often work 12-hour shifts 6 days a week in humid and poorly ventilated buildings. Prolonged heat stress can put strain on their cardiovascular systems and increase their risk of heat stroke, especially because many workers have existing kidney and cardiovascular issues....  Full article at https://eos.org/articles/garment-factories-are-heating-up-heres-...

By Michael Le Page , New Scientist. Excerpt: During the summer of 2024, six weeks of record-smashing heat led to a record-obliterating amount of ice melting on the islands of Svalbard in the Arctic. By the end of the summer, 1 per cent of all the land ice on the archipelago had been lost – enough to raise the global average sea level by 0.16 millimetres. “It was very shocking,” says  Thomas Schuler  at the University of Oslo in Norway. “It was not just a marginal record. The melt was almost twice as high as in the previous record.”.... F ull article at https://www.newscientist.com/article/2492842-unprecedented-arctic-heatwave-melted-1-per-cent-of-svalbards-ice/ . See also Washington Post article, A glacial flood was the biggest on record. But Juneau’s makeshift dirt wall held and Eos/AGU article   Glacial Lake Outburst Causes Record River Crest in Juneau .

By Giorgia Guglielmi , Nature.  Excerpt: Two intense heatwaves have swept across Europe, causing hundreds of heat-related deaths, fuelling wildfires and pushing power systems to their limit — and more are on the way. From mid-June to early July, Western Europe experienced its highest average temperatures for this period in decades, and the hottest June on record.... Temperatures soared above 40°C, and up to 46°C in Spain and Portugal, as a result of ‘heat domes’ — caps of high pressure that trap hot air in the atmosphere over an area, causing it to stay hotter for longer. ...Research suggests that heatwaves in the region are becoming much more frequent — London can now expect events such as this every 6 years instead of every 60, according to a  report published last month  by Imperial College London’s Grantham Institute. ...Across 12 major European cities this year, about 1,500 of 2,300 estimated heat-related deaths — 65% — were driven by the extra heat resulting from fo...

By Tianyun Dong et al, Science.  Editor’s summary: Ocean surface temperatures vary from year to year, experiencing heat waves like those felt on land, but 2023 saw an extraordinarily large increase in marine heat waves with no recent analog. Dong  et al . report that 2023 set new records in the duration, extent, and intensity of these events by as much as three standard deviations above the historical average of the past four decades. The increasing trends in marine heat waves present intensifying dangers to ecological, social, and economic systems. —Jesse Smith.  Full article at https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adr0910 .

 By Paul Voosen , Science.  Excerpt: Climate change is worsening many natural hazards, including droughts, heat waves, and storm surges. Now, a new one has joined the list: earthquakes. Researchers have found that as global warming accelerates melting of mountaintop glaciers, the meltwater, percolating underground, increases the risk of damaging earthquakes. The evidence comes from beneath Grandes Jorasses, a glacier-clad peak in the Alps that is part of the Mont Blanc massif, home to Western Europe’s tallest mountains. Precise seismic records show a heat wave in 2015 kicked off a surge of small earthquakes under the mountain. Although the tremors themselves were not damaging, the chances of large earthquakes are known to rise with the frequency of small ones. “It increases the hazard dramatically,” says Toni Kraft, a seismologist at ETH Zürich and co-author of the  new study , published this month in  Earth and Planetary Science Letters ....  Full article at ht...

By Grace van Deelen , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: Sixty-seven extreme heat events have occurred since May 2024. All of these events—including a deadly Mediterranean heat wave in July 2024, an unprecedented March 2025 heat wave in central Asia, and extreme heat in South Sudan in February 2025—broke temperature records, caused major harm to people or property, or did both. According to  a new analysis , each of these extreme events was made more likely by climate change. The number of days with extreme heat is now at least double what it would have been without climate change in 195 countries and territories. Climate change added at least an extra month of extreme heat in the past year for 4 billion people—half the world’s population....  Full article at https://eos.org/articles/climate-change-made-extreme-heat-days-more-likely .

By Melissa A. Versteeg et al, Science.  Abstract: Vertebrate growth is generally considered to be unidirectional, but challenging environmental conditions, such as heatwaves, may disrupt normal growth patterns and affect individual survival. Here, we investigate the growth of individual clown anemonefish,  Amphiprion percula , during a marine heatwave. ...Our results show that clown anemonefish shrink in response to heat stress.... Further, shrinking is modulated by social rank and size, and individuals that shrink more often and in a coordinated fashion with their breeding partner have higher survival during the heat stress event....  Full article at https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adt7079 . 

By Rebecca Owen , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: In consulting rainfall data from 2001 to 2020, the researchers designated a hazardous flood event as one that had an average recurrence interval of 2 or more years.... They compared their findings to the flooding events documented in the  NOAA Storm Events Database  and  Dartmouth Flood Observatory  (DFO) database. Their analysis captured 3 times as many flooding events as the DFO database did and identified an additional $320 million in damages. ...This study also considered heat events, or periods in which the wet-bulb globe temperature exceeds a  30°C health threshold  rather than a given percentile. Using this definition, the researchers determined that between 2003 and 2020, Texas experienced 2,517 days with a heat hazard event—nearly 40% of all days. Heat hazard events affected a total of 253.2 million square kilometers....  Full article at https://eos.org/research-spotlights/scientists-reveal-hidden-heat...

By Erik Stokstad , Science.  Excerpt: Rice plants usually love warmth. But when they start to flower, hot nights can result in meager harvests and chalky grain. So far, breeders have made slow progress in solving these challenges, which are becoming more urgent with climate change. Now, after searching for more than a decade, researchers in China have found a culpable gene, which they describe this week in  Cell . They also show that a  natural variant of the gene can preserve both yield and rice quality  when temperatures rise....  Full article at https://www.science.org/content/article/major-breakthrough-natural-gene-variant-protects-rice-heat-waves . 

By Anupama Chandrasekaran , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: When an intense marine heat wave sent ocean temperatures soaring in 2023 and 2024, coral reefs around the world bleached. New research on the Great Barrier Reef’s One Tree Island shows that more than 50% of surveyed coral colonies that bleached died of heat stress and starvation. And even heat-resistant corals weren’t immune. When corals are stressed by warm water, they can lose the algae that live in their tissues. This process turns the coral white, earning it the name “ coral bleaching .” Sometimes corals can recover, but if the stress is too intense, they die and eventually crumble into rubble and sand. “What we noticed in more recent times, when it gets really hot, they often die before they even fully bleach,” said marine biologist  Maria Byrne  at the University of Sydney....  Full article at https://eos.org/articles/great-barrier-reef-corals-hit-hard-by-marine-heat-wave .