Another hottest month. Another hottest ocean. Another heat wave that would have been extraordinarily unlikely without climate change. Another drought. Another wildfire season. Another chart whose line suddenly shoots above everything that came before it.

So many records are being broken so often, I often worry the public is becoming numb to the message and the urgency of confronting this crisis.

So let’s strip away the charts for a moment and talk about what actually matters.

The planet is extremely hot right now. The oceans are even more alarming. And one of the strongest El Niño events scientists have ever observed is developing on top of all of it.

That last part is important, because El Niño isn’t causing climate change.

Think of climate change as steadily raising the floor beneath us. El Niño is temporarily jumping on top of the roof.

And that combination could make the next year extraordinary.

Climate Central scientist Dr. Zachary Labe summed up the situation today:

“Another day, another record, as average global sea surface temperatures continue to shatter new record daily highs. Until we reduce carbon pollution, these record-breaking headlines will continue, and the impacts on communities and ecosystems around the world will only grow worse.”

He’s not exaggerating.

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The headline: July was brutally hot

July 2026 tied 2024 for the warmest July ever recorded globally, combining temperatures over land and ocean.

Modern record-keeping began in 1850.

The four most recent Julys are now the four hottest Julys ever recorded.

The Northern Hemisphere had its hottest July on record. So did North America.

And Africa.

And Asia.

For the contiguous United States, July wasn’t merely the hottest July on record — it was the hottest July ever recorded.

That record had stood since July 1936, during the Dust Bowl.

But there is an important difference between 1936 and today.

The Dust Bowl produced extraordinary regional heat across the central United States, intensified by drought and disastrous land-management practices.

Look at the planet today and the heat isn’t confined to one region.

It’s everywhere.

As Labe explained during Climate Central’s briefing, the comparison between 1936 and 2026 illustrates the difference between an extreme regional event and a planet whose entire temperature baseline has shifted.

That is the part that gets lost when every summer produces another headline about another record.

The record itself isn’t the story anymore. The trend is.

I’ve written about this problem before at Mesoscale News: climate statistics can become so enormous and so repetitive that they begin to feel abstract. When I wrote about the staggering financial toll of weather disasters in The New Normal Is $115 Billion a Year, I made the same point.

Records broken again. Billions lost again. Another disaster. Lives lost. Wash, rinse, repeat.

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The oceans are the story to watch

If there is one chart I would tell everyone to watch right now, it isn’t air temperature.

It’s ocean temperature.

Global ocean temperatures were the warmest ever recorded for July.

And this isn’t a one-month anomaly.

Beginning around 2023, global sea-surface temperatures shifted sharply upward. In 2026, they began setting daily records again in early June.

By early September, if the streak continues, the world will approach 100 consecutive days of record global sea-surface temperatures.

And the heat isn’t confined to the surface.

Measurements of ocean heat extending down roughly 2,000 meters (more than a mile) also reached record levels earlier this year.

That matters because the ocean is Earth’s great climate battery.

It absorbs the overwhelming majority of the excess heat trapped by greenhouse gases. Warmer oceans affect coral reefs, marine ecosystems, atmospheric moisture, rainfall, tropical cyclones and coastal temperatures.

We have already seen what that looks like.

A buoy in the western Mediterranean recorded water around 91°F this summer, setting a basin record amid an extraordinary marine heat wave.

Meanwhile, waters in the Gulf of Mexico have again climbed into the upper 80s, with some areas above 90°F. Developing El Niño conditions can suppress Atlantic hurricane activity by increasing wind shear, but exceptionally warm water remains fuel for any storm that finds favorable atmospheric conditions.

This is the strange climate world we now inhabit:

One climate pattern may reduce the odds of storms forming while climate change increases the amount of energy available to the storms that do.

And now comes El Niño

Here’s the simplest explanation of El Niño: Every few years, a large area of the tropical Pacific becomes unusually warm.

That ocean warmth interacts with the atmosphere, altering winds, rainfall and weather patterns around the world.

Some places become wetter.

Some become drier.

Some become warmer.

Agricultural regions can see rainfall shift at precisely the wrong time. Flood risks can increase in some places while drought and wildfire risks increase somewhere else.

And because an enormous area of the Pacific is releasing additional heat into the atmosphere, global average temperatures tend to rise during El Niño years.

Normally, that is temporary.

The problem is that El Niño is no longer occurring on the climate of 1950, 1980 or even 2000.

It is occurring on top of decades of human-caused warming.

And the El Niño developing right now looks exceptional.

NOAA’s latest outlook puts the probability of this event becoming “very strong” at roughly 95 percent.

More strikingly, NOAA estimates a 69% chance that it becomes stronger than any previous El Niño in the agency’s record dating to 1950.

That doesn’t mean there is a 69% chance of disaster.

It doesn’t mean California is guaranteed catastrophic flooding or Australia is guaranteed drought.

And despite the phrases you may see floating around social media — “Super El Niño,” “Godzilla El Niño,” and whatever inevitably comes next — those aren’t scientific classifications.

The scientifically important phrase is very strong.

And scientists are increasingly confident that is where we’re headed.

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Climate change loaded the dice. El Niño is rolling them.

This distinction matters enough to repeat: El Niño is not responsible for the long-term warming of Earth.

Human-caused greenhouse-gas pollution is.

Climate change has raised the starting temperature from which El Niño operates.

Labe described it well: the long-term rising trend is climate change; El Niño provides an additional boost.

That’s why blaming the coming records on El Niño gets the science exactly backward.

Without human-caused warming, El Niño would still temporarily warm the planet, but it would be jumping from a much lower platform.

Instead, Earth’s average temperature in early August was hovering around 17°C (62°F).

That number probably sounds pleasantly mild because it’s an average of everything from Antarctica to the Sahara.

For comparison, the normal seasonal peak during the 1991–2020 climate period was about 16.3°C.

The current all-time daily record, set in July 2024, is about 17.2°C.

We are already hovering close to it.

And El Niño hasn’t peaked yet.

2027 is where things get especially interesting

So far, 2026 ranks around the third-warmest year on record globally, depending somewhat on the dataset.

That may change as El Niño strengthens.

Climate models currently project global temperature anomalies rising over the next six to twelve months, with the multi-model average reaching around 1.7°C above the 1850–1900 preindustrial baseline around February 2027.

Individual models span a wider range, roughly 1.4°C to 2.2°C.

That does not mean the Paris Agreement’s 1.5°C threshold has permanently been crossed. The Paris target refers to long-term warming, not an individual month or year temporarily pushed higher by natural variability.

But it does tell us something extremely important about where the climate system is heading.

During his presentation, Labe was cautious about declaring 2026 the hottest year ever.

About 2027, he was considerably less cautious.

His assessment: 2027 will “probably most certainly” break the record.

That should get our attention.

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The disasters are already here

None of this exists only on a climate graph.

More than 200 million Americans experienced temperatures around the July Fourth period that Climate Central found were made at least three times more likely by human-caused climate change.

Another major July heat wave exposed nearly half the contiguous United States to temperatures made at least five times more likely by climate change.

Salt Lake City reached 109°F, breaking its all-time temperature record.

July’s average temperature across the contiguous United States surpassed the Dust Bowl record from 1936.

Warm nighttime temperatures were especially extraordinary — an underappreciated danger because bodies, homes, and infrastructure need nighttime cooling to recover from daytime heat.

As Labe explained, when nights remain hot, our bodies lose that recovery period. Heat stress accumulates.

And then there is drought.

By mid-August, nearly half the contiguous United States was experiencing at least moderate drought, with portions of the West experiencing conditions comparable on some measures to the Dust Bowl era.

Dryness and extreme heat have helped create favorable conditions for major wildfires across western North America.

Thousands of miles away, Indonesia is already confronting its own El Niño-amplified fire danger. Drier conditions have fueled wildfires in Kalimantan, including fires that recently threatened an orangutan rehabilitation center.

This is why I keep coming back to disasters in my reporting here.

Whether we’re talking about hurricanes, wildfires, heat waves, coral bleaching, drought or the enormous financial losses I’ve documented previously, these aren’t separate stories.

They’re different expressions of the same changing system.

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Your grocery bill may eventually notice, too

El Niño doesn’t only appear on weather maps.

It appears in commodity markets, too.

Reuters reported this week that a very strong El Niño is raising concerns about cocoa, coffee, and sugar production.

West African cocoa can be damaged by El Niño-related shifts between excessive rain and hot, dry conditions. Robusta coffee production in Vietnam and Indonesia is vulnerable to heat and drought. Sugar production can be disrupted by rainfall changes across Brazil, India and Thailand.

That doesn’t mean El Niño automatically makes your coffee more expensive.

It means climate variability is colliding with a warmer planet and an interconnected global food system.

A drought in Vietnam can eventually appear in a supermarket in Virginia.

Climate change has never respected borders.

Neither does El Niño.

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We know enough to prepare

There is one piece of this story that deserves more attention.

Scientists aren’t merely watching these changes happen.

They’re trying to turn forecasts into warnings people can actually use.

The World Meteorological Organization is working with national meteorological agencies to improve what it calls heat services: warning systems and climate information designed around the actual risks heat poses to human health, infrastructure and communities.

And there is a lot of work left to do.

In survey data presented during Climate Central’s briefing, only about a third of responding meteorological services said their forecasters were trained in impact-based forecasting — warnings that explain not simply how hot it will be, but what that heat is likely to do to people.

Only about 30%reported having mechanisms for user feedback, and just 22% had access to cross-sector impact information and post-heat-wave analytics.

Those numbers should improve quickly.

Because the climate we built our infrastructure, warning systems, insurance markets, electrical grids and emergency plans around is disappearing.

And the next year may provide an unusually stark demonstration of that.

This is the climate story now

There will be endless arguments over whether a particular hurricane was “caused” by climate change.

Whether one flood was caused by El Niño.

Whether one wildfire would have happened anyway.

Those questions are understandable, but they often miss the larger point.

Climate change doesn’t need to personally light every match.

It changes the room the match is struck in.

It raises temperatures.

It warms oceans.

It changes evaporation and atmospheric moisture.

It increases the likelihood and severity of some extremes.

It shifts the baseline against which natural cycles like El Niño operate.

And now one of the strongest El Niño events in the historical record may be developing on top of the hottest oceans humanity has measured.

That is the headline.

Not that El Niño is causing global warming.

Not that every disaster this winter will be caused by El Niño.

The headline is that a powerful natural climate cycle is arriving on a planet we have already made dramatically warmer.

We have never experienced this particular combination before.

And we’re about to find out what it looks like.

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Mesoscale News exists to make science like this understandable without stripping away the complexity or turning every climate story into clickbait. I read the datasets, scientific briefings, government forecasts and research so you don’t have to — and then connect those numbers to what they actually mean for people.

If that kind of independent science reporting is valuable to you, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription. Paid subscribers make it possible for me to keep doing this work without a corporate newsroom deciding which climate stories are worth your attention.

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Stewart rightfully points out that Trump has defied a multitude of court orders, as well as defiance of Congressional laws, including the order to divest from TikTok.

Since Fetterman lives in an alternative reality in which this Thanos-level villain has anointed himself savior, we thought we’d remind him of just a few of the orders Trump’s administration has openly defied.

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1. Order halting Alien Enemies Act deportation flights

On March 15, 2025, Judge James Boasberg ordered the administration to stop deporting Venezuelan detainees under the Alien Enemies Act and directed that departing aircraft be turned around. The administration completed the deportations to El Salvador.

Judge Boasberg later found probable cause that officials acted in “willful disregard” of the order, potentially supporting criminal-contempt proceedings.

2. Protective order barring Kilmar Abrego García’s removal to El Salvador

Kilmar Abrego García was deported to El Salvador despite an existing immigration-court order prohibiting his removal there because he faced a risk of persecution. The Supreme Court unanimously upheld the ruling in an emergency hearing. Trump refused to comply.

3. Orders releasing immigration detainees

In Minnesota alone, Chief Judge Patrick Schiltz initially identified 210 orders in 143 cases the Trump administration violated in January 2026 alone. In New Jersey, another 50 cases.

4.Nationwide and district-level immigration habeas orders

A Lawfare review and online database has identified at least 465 instances of contempt and non-compliance with federal court orders in habeas court cases. Minnesota represents the overwhelming majority of violations, though court orders on immigration have been violated all over the country.

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5. Order requiring bond hearings for detained immigrants

Judge Sunshine Sykes ruled that certain immigrants could not automatically be detained without an opportunity for bond. The administration continued denying bond hearings. Sykes found that officials were attempting to disregard the practical reach of her ruling and accused them of trying to erode the separation of powers.

6. Order unfreezing congressionally appropriated federal funds

Judge John McConnell ordered the administration to end a broad freeze on federal grants and loans. He subsequently found that the government had continued withholding funds despite the order’s clear language.

The dispute included funding for health, infrastructure, education and other state-administered programs. A later legal analysis summarized the court’s finding that the government had continued improperly freezing and refusing to disburse appropriated money.

7. Orders requiring payment of foreign-aid obligations

Federal courts ordered the administration to resume or pay foreign-aid obligations that Congress had appropriated and agencies had already committed. Judges found that officials continued withholding billions of dollars after the orders were issued.

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8. Order restoring Voice of America operations

After the administration dismantled much of Voice of America and placed employees on leave, a federal judge ordered the government to restore programming and comply with statutory broadcasting obligations. The judge later found that officials had not restored operations as ordered.

9. Order protecting refugee-admissions processing

Judge Jamal Whitehead ordered the administration to continue processing and assisting certain refugees whose travel and admission had already been approved. Whitehead accused the government of effectively inventing language in the appellate decision to justify noncompliance.

10. Orders restricting immigration conditions on disaster grants

Judge William Smith permanently blocked the Department of Homeland Security from conditioning disaster-relief money on states’ cooperation with Trump’s immigration policies. DHS retained versions of the conditions, making their operation contingent on a future appellate ruling. Smith found that this maneuver flouted his injunction and characterized it as an effort to bully states.

11. Orders blocking unlawful federal-worker layoffs

Courts issued orders requiring agencies to reverse or halt mass dismissals of probationary and other federal employees. Judges subsequently found that some agencies had:

• failed to reinstate workers;

• placed reinstated workers on administrative leave rather than returning them to their positions;

• withheld back pay or benefits;

• continued implementing layoffs under slightly revised procedures.

Mass-layoff cases were among the categories in which the AP found express judicial determinations that the administration violated orders.

12.Orders involving spending cuts and agency programs

Judges have also found noncompliance in cases involving:

• termination or suspension of federal grants (specifically climate funds, programs that didn’t align with his politics, and universities who didn’t expel students speaking against genocide)

• dismantling congressionally created programs (including libraries);

• refusal to process previously approved funding;

• education and mental-health grants;

• changes to agency operations during pending litigation;

• failure to preserve employee positions or institutional capacity required by injunctions.

The Associated Press found judicial determinations of violations in at least 31 major lawsuits during the first 15 months of Trump’s second term. Those 31 policy cases were separate from hundreds of individual immigration-order violations.

And there are so many more out there.

How’s that for “just talk?”

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While writing this piece, I received an alert that Donald Trump is dispatching agents to polling stations in Detroit, Hamtramck, Lansing, and East Lansing today to “monitor” polling stations for “transparency.”

These four cities are not just democratic stronghold cities — they’re the cities in Michigan that are considered the most progressive and leftist cities in the state.

Hamtramck stands out on this list not because of its leftist politics, but rather because of its population — half of the city are legal immigrants, and Hamtramck has some of the largest populations of Bangladeshi-American and Yemeni-American citizens in the nation. The city is majority Muslim, and the targeting of Hamtramck (as opposed to other equally far-left cities, like Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti) makes it clear that Trump’s actions here are to intimidate Muslim and minority voters in a primary that is very much about the genocide in Israel.

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I first met Elijah Manley five years ago, while I was in the throes of my fight against DeSantis over COVID-19 and DeSantis’ attacks on my family.

When you’re fighting a tyrannical government, much of the rest of the world becomes background noise and few things break through the chorus of calamity.

Elijah cut through the noise like a hot knife.

Elijah possesses a rare combination of lived experience, intelligence, empathy, and determination, all guiding him to be one of the most passionate and authentic people I’ve ever met in politics.

Elijah paved his own path - from living in a car to successfully suing DeSantis over election delays in 2022.

Donate to Elijah Manley

Having the privilege to know Elijah as he’s broken barriers and continued his fight for justice has been one of most amazing parts of my own journey in Florida.

We need leaders who will fight back, leaders who know what’s at stake, and leaders who will live to see the policies they’ve enacted.

Leaders w…

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Why One of Congress’ Most Polarizing Democrats Is Finally Facing a Serious Primary Challenge

After years of reporting on Jared Moskowitz’s political evolution, I sat down with the only Democrat trying to unseat him.

For years, Jared Moskowitz has cultivated a national image as one of the Democratic Party’s sharpest critics of Donald Trump. His viral committee exchanges and cable news appearances have made him one of the party’s most recognizable faces.

But I know Jared. We were friends once. And I know the facade he presents is nothing like the man underneath the mask.

Before the pandemic, I worked alongside Moskowitz while he led the Florida Division of Emergency Management. After I was fired from the Florida Department of Health for opposing the state’s misleading COVID messaging, he became an unlikely source, communicating with me privately even as I publicly challenged Gov. Ron DeSantis’ pandemic response. That relationship—and the political dynamics surrounding it—was later documented by the Miami Herald in an extensive investigation.

As Moskowitz’s political career moved to Congress, so did my reporting.

What I found increasingly conflicted with the public image many Democrats had of him. His campaign finance, political relationships, and, most importantly, his legislative record painted a more complicated picture than the one presented on television.

Last year, I published a legislative analysis examining dozens of key House votes where only a small fraction of Democrats broke with the party. Rather than measure speeches or social media posts, I looked exclusively at how members actually legislated. Moskowitz consistently ranked among the Democratic members who most frequently sided with Republicans on high-profile, divisive legislation.

Now, for the first time, that record is being directly challenged at the ballot box.

A Different Kind of Democrat

Oliver Larkin isn’t running as a moderate.

He’s running as a Democratic Socialist.

Conventional political wisdom, often by paid consultants who prefer safety over progress, would suggest that makes winning a competitive South Florida district difficult. Larkin argues exactly the opposite.

His campaign is built on the idea that voters are looking for Democrats willing to fight unapologetically for working-class families rather than compromise with Republicans. During our conversation, he repeatedly returned to two themes he hears from voters: protecting democracy and addressing the rapidly rising cost of living.

For Larkin, those issues are inseparable.

He argues that concentrated corporate wealth has not only driven higher housing, insurance, and health care costs, but has also distorted American democracy through campaign financing and political influence.

That philosophy shapes nearly every part of his platform: Medicare for All, banning congressional stock trading, rejecting corporate PAC money, universal child care, paid family leave, and stronger labor protections.

The Campaign’s Central Argument

Perhaps the most interesting part of our conversation came when I asked Larkin how he responds to Democrats who argue that Democratic Socialists fall outside the party mainstream.

Rather than argue he is further left than today’s Democratic Party, he argued he is actually more loyal to it.

Larkin contends that his disagreements with Democratic leadership come from pushing for stronger protections for civil liberties, labor rights, and economic equality — not from supporting Republican priorities. By contrast, Moskowitz’s voting record frequently places him among the small minority of Democrats willing to support GOP-backed legislation.

Whether voters ultimately agree with that assessment remains to be seen.

But it reflects a broader debate now unfolding within the Democratic Party over whether moderation is still an electoral asset — or whether voters increasingly want representatives willing to draw sharper contrasts.

In 2024, a party-wide shift to the right, of which Kamala Harris’ campaign fell victim to, resulted in major election losses across the board.

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Climate Still Matters

As readers of Mesoscale News might expect, our conversation eventually turned to climate change.

Unlike many congressional interviews where climate becomes an afterthought, Larkin spoke at length about Everglades restoration, protecting Florida’s coral reefs, investing in renewable energy, modernizing the electric grid, and opposing the rapid expansion of energy-intensive AI data centers.

For a state already grappling with sea-level rise, worsening hurricanes, insurance instability, and ecosystem collapse, those issues aren’t abstract policy debates.

They’re existential.

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Democracy Begins in the Primary

Democrats often ask why voters lose faith in institutions.

Part of the answer is that too many incumbents stop being seriously challenged.

Primaries are not acts of disloyalty. They’re one of democracy’s most important accountability mechanisms.

Whether Oliver Larkin ultimately succeeds is as important as the questions his campaign forces Democratic voters to confront.

Should representatives be judged primarily by viral moments and television appearances?

Or by the bills they sponsor, the votes they cast, and the coalitions they build?

Those questions extend far beyond one congressional district in South Florida.

Florida’s Democratic primary for the 25th Congressional District will be held on August 18, with early voting beginning in early August depending on the county. Whatever the outcome, Democratic voters now have a choice, and, perhaps more importantly, a conversation that has been overdue for years.

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Record Versus Reputation

One reason this race matters is because it raises a larger question than who represents Florida’s 25th Congressional District.

How much should voters weigh legislative records against political branding?

Over the past two years, my reporting has focused on that disconnect.

I’ve written about Moskowitz’s relationships with prominent Florida Republicans, his campaign financing, and the contrast between his media persona and congressional voting history. My legislative index was designed specifically to remove personality from the equation, evaluating members solely on votes cast and legislation supported.

The results consistently placed Moskowitz among the Democratic caucus’ most significant outliers. As one of the most MAGA democrats, it would difficult to downgrade outside of electing a Republican.

Larkin is someone whose ambitions are to serve the people, not himself.

And for that, we should all be rallying around him.

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Disclosure: I worked with Jared Moskowitz while we were both at the State Emergency Response Team during multiple hurricanes and the COVID-19 pandemic. To learn more about our relationship, read this article by the Miami Herald.

To read my previous warnings about Jared Moskowitz, click here.

Exclusive interviews and first-looks at scientific research before it’s public are just two of the perks given to paid subscribers of Mesoscale News.

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Climate Change, This Global Coral Crisis Wouldn’t Exist

For decades, scientists believed global coral bleaching events were primarily driven by El Niño.

New research suggests they wouldn’t happen at all without human-caused climate change.

In an interview with Mesoscale News, Climate Central Chief Program Officer Dr. Andrew Pershing discussed a new study concluding that global coral bleaching events, the most recent one of which began in 2018 and continues today, is almost entirely the result of human-caused warming.

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That won’t happen in television studios.

It happens in union halls, church basements, campaign offices, community centers, college campuses, and living rooms across the country.

That’s where I intend to be.

From August through Election Day, I’m launching the largest reporting project in Mesoscale News’ history: traveling across the country to cover the 2026 midterm elections from the ground, not from behind a studio desk.

I’ll interview candidates from across the Democratic Party. I’ll challenge them when they dodge questions. I’ll speak with organizers, scientists, teachers, veterans, election officials, workers, and voters. I’ll report from races national media often overlook until they’re suddenly “surprising.”

Democracy only works when people have access to honest information, and honest, independent reporting has never been more important.

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Norovirus is sweeping through cruise ships. Cyclospora is spreading through the nation’s food supply.

At the very moment these diseases are making headlines, the federal government weakened several of the public-health programs created to detect, investigate and contain exactly these kinds of outbreaks.

I know how important those systems are because I’ve built one.

Before I became known as the Florida COVID-19 whistleblower, I was the scientist who built and managed Florida’s public-facing COVID-19 dashboard and data surveillance systems. My job wasn’t simply to publish numbers. It was to provide an accurate, real-time picture of an evolving outbreak so physicians, researchers, local governments, and families could make informed decisions.

That experience taught me lessons I’ll never forget, including: You cannot control an outbreak you refuse to accurately monitor.

Disease surveillance isn’t bureaucracy. It’s infrastructure. It tells us what pathogens are circulating, where they’re spread…

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While the sparsely-attended July 4 fireworks topped off a failed 16-day “American fair” in Washington, DC, a constitutional crisis was unfolding in Louisiana.

Louisiana crossed into territory that few Americans alive have ever witnessed inside the United States — and it began with the election of an exonerated man.

Calvin Duncan spent nearly thirty years in prison for a murder he did not commit. An armed robbery in the Treme left a 23-year-old man dead and his 15-year-old white girlfriend as the only witness. The police had no leads, and targeted Duncan after Duncan’s ex-girlfriend called in a tip. Duncan was held without trial for three years. His trial lasted one day, despite no evidence connecting him to the case, and he was found guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced to life without parole.

Du…

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Climate change isn’t just threatening our future. It’s erasing our past.

The story you’re about to read begins with a Climate Central investigation into the threats facing Jamestown. It led me back to my own research on disappearing Indigenous sites along the Gulf Coast — places that preserve histories thousands of years older than the United States itself.

This kind of reporting takes time: digging through academic literature, historical records, scientific studies, and the lived experiences of communities whose stories are too often overlooked. If you believe science journalism should connect data to people, history, and power, please consider becoming a paid subscriber.

Paid subscriptions make investigations like this possible and help ensure these stories aren’t lost, too.

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At Jamestown, Virginia, archaeologists are racing against the water.

More than four centuries after English settlers established the first permanent English colony in North America, researchers are working methodically to excavate the site before rising seas and recurrent flooding claim what remains.

Climate Central recently documented the growing threat facing Jamestown, where sea level has risen approximately 1.6 feet over the last century and is projected to rise several feet more in coming decades. Archaeologists there now describe their work as a form of triage: deciding what pieces of history can be saved before they disappear.

It’s a sobering question.

But along the Gulf Coast, another race against time has been underway for decades, largely outside the national spotlight.

Seas are rising at a rate of 5.27 mm per year in Virginia. However, the rate of sea level rise in south Louisiana is 8.44 mm per year.

In Louisiana, climate change is not only threatening historic sites associated with the founding of the United States. It is erasing places that preserve histories that predate the nation itself — Indigenous landscapes, sacred places, archaeological sites, burial grounds, and oral histories that stretch back thousands of years.

And unlike Jamestown, many of these places were never fully documented to begin with.

The First Americans’ Vanishing Coast

Louisiana loses land faster than almost anywhere else in North America.

A combination of sea level rise, land subsidence, oil and gas development, saltwater intrusion, and increasingly destructive hurricanes has transformed large portions of the state’s coastline over the last century. Entire communities have relocated. Others remain trapped in a cycle of rebuilding and retreat.

For Indigenous nations whose histories are inseparable from the wetlands and bayous of south Louisiana, the consequences extend far beyond economics or infrastructure.

The land itself is the archive.

For generations, archaeologists and historians have treated Indigenous communities primarily as observers of environmental change. But my own research on Indigenous sites along the northern Gulf Coast has suggested a different perspective: Indigenous peoples were not simply witnesses to environmental catastrophe. They documented it through stories, migration patterns, settlement choices, burial practices, and the physical landscapes they constructed.

In many cases, those landscapes may contain records of extreme weather events that occurred centuries or even millennia before modern meteorological observations began.

Today, those records are disappearing.

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The Stories the Land Remembers

Long before satellites and weather stations, Indigenous communities across North America developed sophisticated systems for observing and interpreting environmental change.

Researchers working with Indigenous communities in Australia, Canada, and the Pacific Islands have found that traditional ecological knowledge systems often preserve detailed observations about changing weather patterns, species behavior, sea levels, seasonal cycles, and environmental disruptions across generations.

These observations are not simply folklore. They represent long-term environmental datasets encoded in stories, practices, language, and lived experience.

In British Columbia, Indigenous elders have documented changes in species distributions, weather patterns, and ecosystem behavior occurring over their own lifetimes. Researchers there argue that Indigenous communities possess unique adaptive knowledge precisely because they have spent millennia living with environmental change.

The same is true along the Gulf Coast.

For the Houma, Point au Chien and Isle de Jean Charles people of south Louisiana, hurricanes are not historical anomalies. They are part of a collective memory passed from one generation to the next.

“Hurricane stories are an integral part of Houma folklore,” writes T. Mayheart Dardar, Vice Principal Chief of the United Houma Nation. “The tales of winds and water have been told and repeated over the generations.”

The Chenière Caminada hurricane of 1893. The storms of 1915 and 1926. Betsy. Camille. Katrina. Ida.

These storms are remembered not simply because they were destructive, but because surviving them required adaptation, migration, rebuilding, and the preservation of communal knowledge.

For centuries, the pattern was familiar: a storm would come, communities would rebuild, and life would continue.

Climate change is altering that equation.

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When the Land Doesn’t Come Back

Dardar’s account of returning to his hometown after Hurricane Camille in 1969 is haunting.

“Houses were destroyed, tossed about like toys,” he wrote. “Trees were uprooted, cars flooded, boats scattered on the bank, and dead animals were hanging from trees.”

But his community returned.

The wetlands remained. The fisheries survived. The land endured.

Today, many Indigenous communities across coastal Louisiana face a fundamentally different reality.

The islands are shrinking.

The marshes are disappearing.

The cemeteries are flooding.

Sacred places and archaeological sites that survived hundreds or thousands of years of hurricanes are now disappearing beneath rising seas and accelerating erosion.

Many were never mapped.

Many were never excavated.

Some survive only in oral histories passed between generations.

Once these places disappear, they cannot be reconstructed.

NY Times: Isle de Jean Charles

Who Gets Remembered?

Climate Central’s reporting on Jamestown raises an uncomfortable but necessary question: in an era of climate change, what can we save?

Some places can be protected.

The Cape Hatteras Lighthouse was moved inland. Jamestown’s seawall has been reinforced. Archaeologists there are deploying sophisticated technologies to preserve as much of America’s colonial history as possible.

But many places cannot be relocated.

And some histories have never received the resources, recognition, or political attention required to preserve them.

The irony is difficult to ignore.

The United States is mobilizing to save the birthplace of colonization while many of the places preserving the histories of the people who lived here long before the nation’s founding are disappearing with comparatively little public attention.

Climate change is forcing us to confront a question far larger than sea walls or archaeological excavations.

It is forcing us to decide whose history matters enough to save.

Because along the Gulf Coast, the water is not only claiming land.

It is claiming memory.

And unlike Jamestown, many of these stories exist nowhere else.

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At Mesoscale, I don’t just cover climate change as a future threat. I investigate how it intersects with history, democracy, public health, and the communities living through it right now. That means original reporting, archival research, interviews, scientific analysis, and, sometimes, revisiting research I’ve spent years pursuing to tell stories that larger outlets often miss.

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The milestone comes after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth intervened in a series of military promotion decisions that disproportionately affected women and minority officers.

Military promotion boards selected 31 officers for advancement after determining they were the most qualified candidates within their respective competitive categories.

Hegseth ultimately canceled or withdrew nine promotions.

All seven women selected by the boards were removed.

The only other officers denied promotion were two Black men.

No white men selected by the boards were removed.

The military’s promotion boards are designed to identify the most qualified officers for advancement based on performance, command experience, evaluations, and service records.

Their recommendations are traditionally given significant weight because they are intended to reduce political …

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The future of science policy is increasingly being shaped by people who neither practice science nor appear particularly interested in it.

At Mesoscale News, I travel directly to conferences, hearings, communities, and disaster zones to document what is actually happening — not what officials say is happening. That means sitting through the speeches, asking uncomfortable questions, interviewing the experts being pushed aside, and reporting what larger outlets often miss.

If you value independent investigative journalism focused on science, climate, public health, and democracy, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. Your support makes this reporting possible.

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For the past several weeks, I’ve been deep in research and writing a series of academic and scientific papers examining the impacts of large-scale data center expansion on local communities — particularly the environmental, infrastructure, energy, and water consequences that are so hotly debated today.

Those papers are only part of the story.

What I ultimately want to produce here is something broader: a public-facing investigation that connects the science, the policy, the corporate influence, and the lived experiences of the communities now being transformed by this industry in real time.

But I don’t want to write this piece from behind a desk.

I want to speak directly with the people fighting these battles on the ground — the residents watching forests disappear, utility costs rise, water resources strained, and entire communities reshaped around infrastructu…

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Reports described repeated brutal beatings and even an incident in which Miller threw a pot of boiling water on his wife — all in front of their young daughter.

Miller rose the political ranks as a controversial Trump aide.

Stephanie Grisham came forward about abuse she endured at Miller’s hands in 2021, including being slapped, hit, thrown against a wall, grabbed, and having objects thrown at her.

Miller tried to sue Stephanie for speaking about the abuse, but the judge dismissed the case with prejudice.

The latest story details violent, repeated abuse of Miller’s wife, Emily Moreno.

Miller is also under active police investigation for abusing their two-year-old daughter. Miller broke the child’s collar bone, though the details around the incident have not been unsealed yet.

Since the news broke, Max Miller has gone into hiding. Not before attacking his wife and fathe…

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Disaster Briefs are semi-regular summaries of natural and man-made disasters, climate change, public health, and global conflict. Data is retrieved, analyzed, and synthesized on the day of publication unless otherwise noted.

If you rely on clear, data-driven reporting that cuts through misinformation and noise, support independent journalism that prioritizes evidence over access.

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