I generally look to Australia’s December/January summer weather to guess USA’s July/August summer weather. The New South Wales Australian forecast December 16 was 46 C (about 113 Fahnrenheit) to 47 C (nearly 117 Fahnrenheit) which, if the pattern from recent years holds, means a scorcher for the USA in summer 2025.
In a related matter, the trend for massive loss of nonhumans continues with Catrin Einhorn reporting December 12, 2024, in The New York Times article “Ocean Heat Wiped Out Half These Seabirds Around Alaska,” “About half of Alaska’s common murres, some four million birds, died as a result of the marine heat wave [in 2015 and 2016] the scientists found. They believe it is the largest documented die-off of a single species of wild birds or mammals.”
More recently, RNZ in New Zealand reported December 17, 2024 “Massive number of dead seabirds due to ocean warming – DOC,” “Hundreds of seabirds that have been found washed up along the west coast of the North Island are likely to have died from starvation, due to climate change impacts, the Department of Conservation says. [ par break] This is the biggest die-off for sooty shearwaters in northern New Zealand since the shearwater ‘wreck’ in 1999, which followed a large El Niño event in 1997-98.”
These two news articles complement my March 4, 2024 post:
The International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) noted, “Nearly 6,382 koalas are estimated to have perished during the 2019/2020 bushfires, nearly 15% of the population.” My June 5, 2023 post linked a July 28, 2020 bbc.com article, “Australia’s fires ‘killed or harmed three billion animals.’” I also noted the 2021 Pacific Northwest heat dome in which over “one billion marine intertidal animals may have perished along the shores of the Salish Sea” according University of British Columbia researcher Chris Harley; and estimated nearly eleven billion snow crab that likely died from one or more heat-related reasons off Alaska from 2018 to 2021 according to Molly Olmstead’s October 21, 2022 article at slate.com. The climate madness continues with over 160 dead elephants in Zimbabwe reported in January 2024, due to drought according to The Zimbabwe Parks & Wildlife Management Authority (Zimparks) cited by Tawanda Karombo in a January 17, 2024 article in The Guardian.
My favorite recent climate items are Bill McKibben’s December 13, 2024 New Yorker article “Hotter and Hotter” and Luke Kemp’s October 22nd, 2024 interview with Nate Hagens “The Biggest Threats to Life as We Know It with Luke Kemp | TGS 153,” (which I added to my “Updated Best Practices for Climate Crisis (December 2024)”).