The Trump Administration has cut much of the funding for the National Weather Service, which is now launching only about half as many weather balloons each morning as it used to. The result, meteorologists say, has been a degradation in our ability to forecast severe weather—late last month in Boulder, as smoke from the wildfire that killed three firefighters on the Colorado-Utah border hung in the air, I spoke with Daniel Swain, one of the country’s foremost researchers on the effects of climate change. “There have been essentially no weather-balloon launches in the interior West some days,” he said. “And we see efforts to completely dismantle oceanic monitoring systems, as a potentially historic El Niño emerges in the Pacific. We see the scrapping of climate-monitoring satellites before the end of their useful life for no economic reason whatsoever, but presumably for ideological ones.” The irony, as he pointed out, is that “you’re not really changing either the visibility of the impacts or changing the trajectory of what’s actually happening.”

Indeed, you really don’t need a weatherman to tell which way the temperature is going this summer—basically, up. A heat dome descended across Europe in June, producing truly wild anomalies: Paris reported two days above forty degrees Celsius (a hundred and four degrees Fahrenheit) in a row; it had only recorded three previous such occasions in the past hundred years. More than a thousand people across Europe are dead, often as a result of the fact that nighttime temperatures stayed high, robbing bodies of the chance to cope. The heat moved to the United States last week, as many millions of Americans experienced the hottest Fourth of July in history—parades in Philadelphia and in Washington, D.C., were cancelled because of the extreme heat. Now it’s back in Europe, where the organizers of the Tour de France are speculating whether they’ll have to cancel stages of the race, and wildfires are filling the air with smoke. There’s no wonder, of course, about what’s causing all this: as the nonprofit World Weather Attribution said of the first European wave, “In 1976, when some of the previous European records were set, the 2026 temperatures would have been virtually impossible to occur in June, while also highly unlikely at any time of the year. In 2003, the first major heatwave of this century, daytime heat like this would still have been very rare, about 10 times less likely than today, while nighttime temperatures such as this June would have been more than a hundred times less likely in 2003.”