29 July 23
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Israel hasn’t destroyed its democracy yet. But something similarly essential is already gone.
This did not happen. Instead, on Monday, in the final week of the Israeli Parliament’s summer session, the ruling coalition passed the least significant component of its proposed legislation: curtailing the Supreme Court’s ability to use the “reasonableness standard” when reviewing government decisions. Contrary to the far-right’s pledge, the government did not enact its plan to subordinate the appointment of Supreme Court judges to politicians. Nor did it grant the coalition the ability to override judicial decisions.
In other words, Israel’s democracy—flawed as it is—remains intact, for now. Far from incapacitated, the country’s highest court is already rushing to convene an unprecedented session to rule on the legality of this week’s effort to curb its powers. But whether or not Israel erodes its democratic guardrails in the months ahead, its people have already lost something similarly essential: basic social trust.
Israel’s warring camps are ostensibly fighting over the reasonableness doctrine, a technical tool inherited from British common law that allows the country’s high court to overrule certain government decisions, though not legislation. But fundamentally, this debate is not about the law itself, which few Israelis could easily explain. It is about whose judgment is trusted to safeguard the country’s democracy.
Put crudely, the reasonableness doctrine is a subjective standard that has allowed Israel’s justices to substitute their own considerations for the legislature’s when assessing the merits of certain government actions and civil-service appointments. Given that the members of Israel’s Supreme Court are appointed by a panel composed mostly of other judges and lawyers, a credible case exists for restraining this capacity, which lacks democratic accountability.
But this week’s reform did not take place in a vacuum. It took place in the context of a power grab by the most hard-right government in Israeli history—one that received only 48.4 percent of the vote in the last election. If Israel’s judges no longer get to decide which administrative decisions are “reasonable,” that means that the politicians in power do, even if they, too, lack a mandate. And today, those politicians include homophobes, convicted criminals, aspiring theocrats, and proud nationalist chauvinists.
Polls consistently show that two-thirds of Israel’s citizens oppose the ruling coalition’s unilateral overhaul of the judiciary. Put another way, most Israelis simply do not trust the intentions of their own government. They do not believe that Netanyahu, let alone the extremist allies he depends upon to maintain his power, will be more reasonable than the unelected Supreme Court. And they do not believe that the coalition will stop with this small salvo against the judiciary when it has already announced its intentions to deconstruct the entire edifice. The Israeli opposition has lost faith in its countrymen to act in the best interest of the entire nation, which is why its leaders now openly accuse the government of seeking to destroy democracy.
This rancor extends well beyond the usual partisan politics, and it runs both ways. Rather than attempting to calm the waters and reestablish civic trust, Netanyahu’s far-right ministers have rubbed their recent victory in the opposition’s face and promised more of the same. “The salad bar is open,” crowed Ben-Gvir on Saturday night, framing the impending reasonableness reform as merely the appetizer for a much more forbidding buffet. A cannier, more responsible politician would mouth platitudes about how This is a difficult time for Israel, but we are all patriots who want the best for one another and the country. Ben-Gvir does not believe that—and rarely feels compelled to pretend that he does. Instead, he and his allies have cast the hundreds of thousands of anti-overhaul street protesters as “privileged anarchists” and foreign-funded enemies, rather than fellow citizens expressing genuine concern. Something has gone terribly wrong in a country where this is how leaders speak about those they are supposed to shepherd.
Such an utter collapse of shared solidarity is unprecedented in Israeli history, which is why what happens next is so uncertain. In the days ahead, Israel’s Supreme Court may overturn this first strike against its authority, something it has never done before to a quasi-constitutional “basic law” of this kind. The justices may let the legislation stand but interpret it into irrelevance, coming up with new legal ways to get to the same results that the reasonableness doctrine previously provided. Or the Court may punt entirely, deciding that it lacks the power to overrule such a parliamentary prerogative.
If the Court does undo this decision, it may stall the overhaul, throwing the coalition into chaos and recrimination. Or the reversal may galvanize the far-right’s efforts to pass its entire anti-judicial package, by affirming its belief that small-scale changes will never be enough to change the Court’s jurisprudence. There is a reason, after all, that the right’s original plan included many more components than what has been passed: Removing reasonableness from the judicial toolbox still leaves the rest of the tools, not to mention those who wield them.
In the long run, the current coalition may use further legislation to cement its power, quash the courts, and marginalize its opposition. Or Netanyahu’s government, which is already polling poorly, may be crushed by the consequences of its own body blows to Israel’s economy, security, and internal cohesion, much as the ill-fated economic overhaul of British Prime Minister Liz Truss precipitated her exit. The fall of the reasonableness doctrine is the pebble that begins the avalanche, and the thing about avalanches is that they cannot be controlled.
Still, though the ultimate outcome of this week’s events remains in limbo, one thing is certain: Regardless of whether Israel loses its independent judiciary, it has already lost a core component of any functioning democracy—the sense of collective concern among citizens. And that is something that cannot be fixed by any legislation or court order.
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Pollution from a factory. (photo: Science Focus)
Rightwing groups penned a conservative wish list of proposals for the next conservative president to gut environmental protections
Against a backdrop of record-breaking heat and floods this year, the $22m endeavor, Project 2025, was convened by the notorious rightwing, climate-denying thinktank the Heritage Foundation, which has ties to fossil fuel billionaire Charles Koch.
Called the Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, it is meant to guide the first 180 days of presidency for an incoming Republican president. Climate experts and advocates criticized planning that would dismantle US climate policy.
The nearly 1,000-page transition guide was written by more than 350 rightwingers and is full of sweeping recommendations to deconstruct all sectors of the federal government– – including environmental policy.
“Heritage is convening the conservative movement behind the policies to ensure that the next president has the right policy and personnel necessary to dismantle the administrative state and restore self-governance to the American people,” the foundation’s president, Kevin Roberts, said in an April statement.
The guide’s chapter on the US Department of Energy proposes eliminating three agency offices that are crucial for the energy transition, and also calls to slash funding to the agency’s grid deployment office in an effort to stymie renewable energy deployment, E&E News reported this week.
The plan, which would hugely expand gas infrastructure, was authored by Bernard McNamee, a former official at the agency. McNamee was also a Trump appointee to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. He previously led the far-right Texas Public Policy Foundation, which fights environmental regulation, and served as a senior adviser to the Republican senator Ted Cruz.
Another chapter focuses on gutting the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and moving it away from its focus on the climate crisis. It proposes cutting the agency’s environmental justice and public engagement functions, while shrinking it as a whole by terminating new hires in “low-value programs”, E&E News reported. The proposal was written Mandy Gunasekara, who was the former chief of staff at the EPA under Trump.
The guide also features a chapter on the Department of the Interior written by William Perry Pendley, who controversially led the Bureau of Land Management under President Trump and worked to eliminate drilling regulations.
Before his time in the Trump administration, Pendley headed the Mountain States Legal Foundation, a conservative law firm where he advocated for selling off public lands. He also authored a book, Sagebrush Rebel, praising Reagan’s anti-regulatory policies.
“He did a bunch of terrible things,” said Kert Davies, director of special investigations at the Center for Climate Integrity, about Pendley’s time at the Department of the Interior. “He worked to dismantle [the Bureau of Land Management] while he was in it.”
The Heritage Foundation has enjoyed a longstanding influence in GOP politics, even helping Ronald Reagan win the presidency, authors Naomi Oreskes and Erik M Conway detail in their 2023 book, The Big Myth. Many of Reagan’s policy proposals were cribbed from the pages of the thinktank’s first Mandate for Leadership, published in 1980, which asserted that the US was in the middle of a “crisis of overregulation”.
“It doesn’t trouble me that any individual or institution would develop advisory plans for politicians. What troubles me is the Heritage Foundation’s long history … of working to undermine environmental protection at the expense of health and wellbeing of the American people, at the expense of life on Earth,” said Oreskes, a history of science professor at Harvard.
Meanwhile, House GOP members are also continuing to attack federal climate funding in their spending bill proposals, putting governmental functions at risk.
Earlier this month, the Clean Budget Coalition– – composed of more than 250 advocacy groups – warned that Republican representatives were slipping restrictions on climate spending into the government’s annual spending bills, bills that must be passed before current funding expires on 30 September to avoid a government shutdown. This week, the coalition found that House Republicans had added additional “poison pills” to spending bills, including ones that target environmental funding.
The spending bills are currently in the House appropriations committee, which is chaired by the Texas Republican Kay Granger, who is a top recipient of campaign funding from the oil and gas industry, the Lever reported this week. They will go to a full vote in the House, and then the finalized proposals will move into negotiations with the Senate. If Biden vetoes them, a government shutdown could be on the way.
“Republicans in Congress continue to show they will stop at nothing to undermine environmental protections and attack anything that would help addressing the climate crisis,” said David Shadburn, a senior government affairs advocate at the League of Conservation Voters.
Some of the provisions would hamstring the EPA’s powers, blocking the agency from enforcing new pollution limits on power plants and tailpipe emissions or from implementing controls on mercury and other toxic air pollution, and effectively shuttering a critical program for deploying carbon-free energy.
“House appropriations Republicans are abusing the appropriations process to impose a cycle of environmental injustice,” said Deanna Noël, climate campaigns director for the consumer advocacy nonprofit Public Citizen.
Other “poison pills” would prohibit listing the dunes sagebrush lizard under the Endangered Species Act, remove protections for the greater Yellowstone ecosystem’s population of grizzly bears, and bar the Department of the Interior from creating a working group to help restore bison populations. Still others would require the energy secretary to sell 1m barrels of refined petroleum from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, and block the implementation of a rule forcing federal defense contractors to disclose their greenhouse gas emissions and create emission reductions plans.
Every GOP representative can submit proposals to the House appropriations committee, and since no member is required to sign off on specific proposals, it is not clear who exactly is responsible for each “poison pill”. But as the Lever reported, many Republican representatives who have effectively championed the provisions are recipients of funding from polluting industries.
For instance, a proposal to halt climate-related fisheries research funding was written by a subcommittee led by Representative Hal Rogers of Kentucky, whose top campaign contributors include mining and fossil fuel interests. Another proposal would bar funding for the UN’s Green Climate Fund; it was buried in a bill being overseen by major energy funding recipient Representative Mario Díaz-Balart of Florida, the Lever reported.
“These disgraceful poison pill riders are nothing short of corporate giveaways to the corrupt fossil fuel industry,” said Noël.
The proposals come as waters off the Florida coast reach levels of heat more commonly found in hot tubs, and as much of the nation continues to swelter under triple-digit temperatures.
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Justice Samuel Alito. (photo: Eric Lee/ZUMA)
Alito, one of the high court’s leading conservatives, is just one of multiple justices who have come under recent scrutiny for ethics controversies that have fueled the renewed push.
“I know this is a controversial view, but I’m willing to say it,” Alito told the Journal. “No provision in the Constitution gives them the authority to regulate the Supreme Court — period.”
Although the Constitution enables Congress to structure the lower federal courts, it explicitly vests judicial power within a singular Supreme Court.
Alito and some legal observers argue that means Congress can’t prescribe certain regulations for the high court without running afoul of separation of powers issues.
Chief Justice John Roberts has also questioned Congress’s ability to act, but not as definitive as Alito’s new remarks. Many court watchers who disagree with the premise believe that Roberts’ questioning has given fodder to Republican objections.
“I don’t know that any of my colleagues have spoken about it publicly, so I don’t think I should say,” Alito told the paper. “But I think it is something we have all thought about.”
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.) was among the Democrats who rejected Alito’s reasoning, writing on X, formerly known as Twitter, “What a surprise, guy who is supposed to enforce checks and balances thinks checks shouldn’t apply to him.”
The piece also revealed Alito’s first public comments on the recent ethics push since he authored an op-ed for the same paper that was shared just before a ProPublica investigation into an undisclosed Alaskan fishing trip the justice accepted in 2008 paid for by a conservative donor was made public. Alito also conducted an interview with the Wall Street Journal in April.
One of the two authors of the piece, David Rivkin, is an attorney for conservative judicial activist Leonard Leo. Rivkin earlier this week penned a letter rebuffing Democratic lawmakers’ request for information about the Alaska trip, which Leo reportedly facilitated, and Rivkin also actively practices before the court. James Taranto, the other author, is the Journal’s editorial features editor.
“I marvel at all the nonsense that has been written about me in the last year,” Alito said.
The revelations about the Alaska trip followed a ProPublica investigation into luxury trips accepted by fellow conservative Justice Clarence Thomas. The Associated Press later raised concerns about an aide to liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor pushing book sales, and other justices past and present have also faced criticisms for a variety of other ethics dilemmas.
In the wake of the new reports, the Senate Judiciary Committee last week voted along party lines to advance a Supreme Court ethics reform bill, though the legislation faces slim odds of passage.
Republicans have portrayed the push as an attempt to tear down the court’s conservative majority, and some have similarly cited constitutional concerns.
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Created in the early 2010s, Wagner Group is a paramilitary mercenary group composed mostly of former Russian military personnel that trains local forces, conducts combat advising, and provides direct-action services. (photo: Creative Commons)
Lithuania says move may be needed as Poland warns mercenaries are in Belarus to bring crisis to neighbours
“The considerations are real. The possibility of closing the border exists,” Arnoldas Abramavičius told reporters.
Belarus has been hosting Wagner fighters after their short-lived rebellion against Russia’s top military brass.
Lithuania has repeatedly warned its western allies that Wagner mercenaries could disguise themselves as asylum seekers trying to cross Belarus’s borders with EU member states, or stage provocations involving refugees.
“It could be some groups of refugees, irregular migrants being transferred in order to cause some kind of unrest,” Abramavičius said.
Poland’s ruling party chair, Jarosław Kaczyński, said on Friday that Wagner fighters were “not in Belarus for fun”.
“They are there to create various types of crises, primarily directed against Poland,” Kaczyński said, adding that Poland had been building up its defence capabilities “so that these provocations, these activities, fail”.
Poland and Lithuania have both erected fences on their borders with Belarus and Russia, accusing Minsk and Moscow of orchestrating migrant influxes into the EU in order to destabilise the bloc.
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A police dog. (photo: Arterra/Universal Images Group)
An Ohio police officer filmed unleashing a police dog on an unarmed Black truck driver during a July 4 traffic stop has been fired. We speak with legal scholar Madalyn Wasilczuk, who has helped represent teenagers in Louisiana attacked by police dogs and who says that dogs do not receive the proper amount of scrutiny when used in policing. “They’re seen as these valorized K-9 cop heroes, and we don’t focus so much on the real violence that they do,” says Wasilczuk. “Videos like this really highlight the problems.” Wasilczuk explains that the use of police dogs in apprehension is part of a widespread pattern of racialized violence by police that dates back to slavery.
July is on track to break all records for any month, scientists say, as the planet enters an extended period of exceptional warmth.
A warning to our viewers and listeners: This next segment includes graphic details.
An Ohio police officer filmed unleashing a police dog on an unarmed Black truck driver during a July 4th traffic stop has been fired. The Circleville Police Department said actions taken by officer Ryan Speakman, quote, “did not meet the standards and expectations we hold for our police officers,” unquote.
Video of the incident shows 23-year-old truck driver Jadarrius Rose had his hands in the air when Officer Speakman directed the dog to maul him. Speakman released the dog even though state police officers repeatedly warned him not to.
HIGHWAY PATROL TROOPER 1: Do not release the dog with his hands up. Do not release the dog with his hands up! Don’t! Dude, do not! Do not! Do not! Get the dog off of him! Get the dog off of him!
JADARRIUS ROSE: Get it off!
HIGHWAY PATROL TROOPER 2: Get the dog!
JADARRIUS ROSE: Get it off! Get it off of me!
AMY GOODMAN: After being attacked by the dog, Jadarrius Rose was hospitalized with significant bleeding on his arms, then booked on felony charges of failure to comply. Prior to being pulled over and attacked by the dog, Rose had called 911 from his truck, saying he feared the police who were pursuing him were trying to kill him.
JADARRIUS ROSE: I don’t know why they’re trying to kill me.
911 DISPATCHER: They’re not trying to kill you.
JADARRIUS ROSE: Yes, they are, obviously. They’re throwing stuff on the ground, trying to explode the tire.
911 DISPATCHER: Right, so you’ll stop.
JADARRIUS ROSE: Right. So they are trying to kill me.
911 DISPATCHER: No, they’re not trying to kill you.
JADARRIUS ROSE: They are. Yes, they are, because I do not feel safe with stopping. I don’t know why they’re throwing stuff on the ground, trying to get me in an accident.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re joined now by Madalyn Wasilczuk, an assistant professor at the University of South Carolina School of Law, author of an article in The Georgetown Law Review headlined “The Racialized Violence of Police Canine Force.”
First of all, Professor Wasilczuk, if you can start off by talking about this horrific case? And for people who can’t see it, you have this police officer releasing a dog on a man whose arms — he had been instructed to put his arms in the air, and they were. You see a woman officer putting her hands over her face, running from the attack. You see the state troopers warning the police officer, “Do not release that dog.” But he does. How typical is this, not only of today, but of the history of the use of dogs, especially on people of color in this country?
MADALYN WASILCZUK: So, I think one thing that’s so disturbing is that we don’t know exactly how common it is, because no one keeps any statistics at all about — or at least not made public nationally, of how many dogs bite people every year, the races of those people, the reasons that the dog was set on them.
And this isn’t the only time where I’ve seen people, hands in surrender, have dogs set on them. I’ve seen videos of people holding their hands up and having the dog set on them, of having the dog set on — lifted through a window to be set on them. And sometimes police use dogs against folks who they don’t even know who the target is. So, Joseph Pettaway in Alabama was killed by a police dog when he was repairing a home, working as a handyman, and the police set a dog inside, and it killed him.
This is really an example of what Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls “racism’s changing same.” Dogs were used by militaries first, and this is another example of militarism. And when colonists came to the United States, they were used to terrorize the Taíno people, the Indigenous people of this country. And then they were employed in hunting enslaved people. And, of course, we’re — many of us, almost all of us, are familiar with the images of dogs attacking students during the civil rights movement, but we may be less familiar with the fact that police dogs were used that way across the country, including by white supremacist groups in Cairo, Illinois. So there’s a throughline of this militarize, racialized violence when it comes to police dogs.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about even the use of the language, the K-9 units, referring to them as “K-9s” as opposed to “dogs”?
MADALYN WASILCZUK: Yeah. So, I think when we talk about K-9s, there’s this euphemism. There’s also this belief that the dogs are specialized, that they’re almost like a tool that can’t be misused. So, dogs are set to track people, or dogs are set to, quote-unquote, “apprehend” people, which is what something like that mauling is called, especially if he had been running away, which he was not, of course, in this case. But that removal of both the animalistic and very violent nature of these types of attacks, and sort of trying to place it into euphemized and sanitized terms, I think, is where that “K-9” term comes from. And, of course, “canine” is changed from C-A-N-I-N-E to K-9, with this idea that these dogs —
AMY GOODMAN: The letter K and the number 9.
MADALYN WASILCZUK: — are technology. Right.
AMY GOODMAN: So, why do you feel that this use of police attack dogs — or, in a moment we’re going to hear the story of prison attack dogs — is not very much a part of the police reform discussion?
MADALYN WASILCZUK: I think, except for some videos that highlight this, it’s not as well known as it should be. When I started representing children in courts in Baton Rouge, we had kids coming in every three weeks or so with these really terrible bites and injuries. And that reporting was also followed up by The Marshall Project. And it was largely unknown in the public, outside of the communities that are most affected, outside of the kids that this happened to and their families. And I think the prison — the use of them for cell extractions in prisons is also widely unknown, even by scholars, and there’s just not much attention on it. I think videos like this really highlight the problems, and there’s been some outstanding reporting just in the last couple years across the country, in places like Indianapolis and the Bay Area, highlighting these problems. But we don’t know enough about it.
And I also think K-9s can be used as sort of fuzzy mascots. They’re brought on to morning shows. They get trotted out as a public relations tool. And so, there’s this warm feeling that many of us have for dogs. Of course, that has racial components, as well. But they’re used in that way, and we don’t focus on what they’re truly trained to do. And even in law schools, we really focus on dog sniffs, tracking, rescue operations. And so they’re seen as these valorized K-9 cop heroes, and we don’t focus so much on the real violence that they do when they’re used for, again, quote-unquote, “apprehension.”
AMY GOODMAN: So, finally, is there a call for police to stop using dogs around the country? You said in a recent study, conducted at your university and the University of Utah and Clemson, it was found that the sudden suspension of police K-9 units in Salt Lake City did not lead to a statistical increase in officer or suspect injury or suspect resistance during felony arrests. We just have a minute.
MADALYN WASILCZUK: Right. So, there was a bill that was pending in California this past term to ban the use of K-9s for apprehension. I haven’t seen that trend across the country. And it would be really helpful to know if there’s any benefit to these dogs. Of course, police believe there is, but I don’t see evidence that has borne that out. And I think if you’re going to use a tool that causes this much harm — and the harm is well known and documented — then it’s on the police to show why this is actually contributing to public safety. And if they can’t show that, then we should really reconsider this and stop using police as weapons in this way — police dogs.
AMY GOODMAN: Madalyn Wasilczuk, we want to thank you so much for being with us, assistant professor at University of South Carolina School of Law. We’ll link to your piece in The Georgetown Law Review headlined “The Racialized Violence of Police Canine Force.”
Coming up, we look at how attack dogs are terrorizing and mauling prisoners. Stay with us.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN: “My Darling Child” by Sinéad O’Connor. She has died at the age of 56. Her son Shane took his own life a year and a half ago.
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Armed forces patrol an area of state offices in Haiti's capital, Port-au-Prince. (photo: Odelyn Joseph/AP)
The State Department said U.S. citizens not working for the government should also leave Haiti as soon as possible "by commercial or other privately available transportation options."
"Kidnapping is widespread, and victims regularly include U.S. citizens. Kidnappers may use sophisticated planning or take advantage of unplanned opportunities, and even convoys have been attacked," the State Department said in a travel advisory.
Haiti has struggled to contain violence and chaos as heavily armed gangs drive a humanitarian crisis that has displaced tens of thousands amid frequent kidnappings for ransom, gang rapes, tortures and murders. read more
The Caribbean nation has not elected a new leader since President Jovenel Moïse was assassinated on July 7, 2021.
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Extreme weather events like heatwaves have increased in frequency and intensity partly due to climate change. (photo: NOAA)
Last month, the planet experienced its hottest June since records began in 1850. July 6 was its hottest day. And the odds are rising that 2023 will end up displacing 2016 as the hottest year. At the moment, the eight warmest years on the books are the past eight.
“The extreme weather which has affected many millions of people in July is unfortunately the harsh reality of climate change and a foretaste of the future,” Petteri Taalas, the secretary general of the World Meteorological Organization, said in a statement. “The need to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions is more urgent than ever before.”
The world has entered what forecasters warn could be a multiyear period of exceptional warmth, one in which the warming effects of humankind’s continuing emissions of heat-trapping gases are compounded by El Niño, the recurring climate pattern typically associated with hotter conditions in many regions.
Even so, when global average temperatures shatter records by such large margins, as they have been doing since early June, it raises questions about whether the climate is also being shaped by other factors, said Karen A. McKinnon, a climate scientist and statistician at the University of California, Los Angeles. These elements might be less-well understood than global warming and El Niño.
“Do we expect, given those two factors, the record to be broken by this much? Or is this a case where we don’t expect it?” Dr. McKinnon said. “Is there some other factor that we’re seeing come into play?”
Many parts of the world are continuing to swelter this week as July enters its final days. In the United States, a dangerous heat wave was taking shape on Thursday in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic, the National Weather Service said, and high temperatures remained a concern in the Southwest and Central States. It’s been scorching in parts of North Africa, Southeastern Europe and Turkey. Wildfires, amplified by heat and dryness, have raged in Canada and around the Mediterranean.
Researchers who analyzed this month’s punishing heat waves in the Southwestern United States, northern Mexico and Southern Europe said this week that the temperatures observed in those regions, over a span of so many days, would have been “virtually impossible” without the influence of human-driven climate change.
Still, scientists will need to investigate further to fully understand the “alarming” extent to which the entire surface of the planet has, on average, been hotter than usual this summer, said Emily Becker, a climate scientist at the University of Miami.
Fossil-fuel emissions, which cause heat to build up near Earth’s surface, are certainly playing a role. Since the Industrial Revolution, humans have pumped 1.6 trillion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. This has caused the world to be about 1.2 degrees Celsius, or 2.2 Fahrenheit, warmer than it was in the second half of the 19th century.
But the way this extra heat is distributed around the globe is still shaped by a complex brew of factors spanning land, sea and air, plus a certain amount of random chance. Which is why untangling the specific factors behind this summer’s severe heat will take time, Dr. Becker said. “There’s going to need to be quite a lot of research to understand it, and understand if we’re going to be seeing this again next year or 10 years from now.”
One factor that probably hasn’t been very important so far this summer, at least not in North America, is El Niño, Dr. Becker said. The cyclical phenomenon emerges when the surface of the central tropical Pacific is hotter than normal. Its arrival, which this year occurred in late spring, triggers a cascade of changes to wind patterns and rainfall around the globe. But its most immediate effects are felt in the tropical and far western Pacific, in places like Indonesia.
“In terms of North America, this El Niño is really just getting started,” said Dr. Becker, who contributes to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s El Niño and La Niña forecasts. Winter is when North America experiences El Niño’s most prominent effects, including wetter conditions in the Southern United States.
This summer’s record heat could still affect the way this El Niño plays out later this year and into 2024, Dr. Becker said. Large areas of the planet’s oceans have been warmer than average. If this continues into fall and winter, it could lead to even stronger storms, with even heavier rain, in places that typically receive more storms during El Niño, Dr. Becker said.
When it comes to factors besides global warming that may also be worsening heat waves, scientists have been examining potential changes in the jet streams, the rivers of air that influence weather systems around the planet.
In the Northern Hemisphere, the differences in temperature between the Arctic and the Equator keep the subtropical jet stream moving. As humans warm the planet, those temperature differences are narrowing, which could be causing the jet stream to weaken and hot spells to last longer.
So far, though, the evidence for this is inconclusive, said Tim Woollings, a professor of physical climate science at the University of Oxford. “It’s really not clear that the jet has been getting weaker,” he said.
In a study published in April, Dr. Woollings and four other scientists found that human-caused warming might have shifted the jet streams in both hemispheres toward the poles in recent decades. More research is needed to understand this potential shift, he said. But if it continues, it could make subtropical regions susceptible to greater heat and drought, he said.
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