The Season of Our Growing Discontent

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Summer, in the popular imagination, was the carefree season, a languid serenade associated with long, lazy days and a cold drink in hand. Schools emptied. Beaches and campsites bustled. Otherwise, life slowed down.

It is a more menacing time now. The cold drink is still poolside, but behind it gather thunderheads and smoke plumes. At home, go bags are packed and evacuation routes plotted. 

With the passing of the summer solstice, the countries north of the equator, from the tropics to the boreal latitudes, have entered the season of magnified environmental risk. From mid-June to mid-September, the heat is more intense, the storms more powerful, the fires bigger, the droughts more threatening. Risks build upon each other, raising the likelihood of cascading failures to energy and water systems. These northern hemisphere countries should be on alert.

Many have already sounded the warnings. 

In the United States, the epicenter of the recent aridity extends from central Arizona to the middle of Texas. The Edwards Aquifer, a foundational water supply for central Texas, plunged in May to one of its lowest levels on record. The drop, months in the making, prompted the aquifer’s governing body to impose its strictest level of water cuts. Permit holders had to reduce their pumping by 44 percent. 

In Arizona, the Salt River, which crosses through Phoenix, is likely to register its lowest runoff on record. Meanwhile, the runoff forecast for the Colorado River worsened every month this spring. Meager inflows for the river’s big reservoirs position the basin for difficult debates over water supplies and declines in hydropower generation in the coming years.

Declining runoff is a troubling trend globally, not just in the arid Colorado River. In a paper published in June in the journal Nature, researchers documented an increase in the atmosphere’s “thirst” as the planet warms. Growing evaporative demand pulls moisture out of the land and waterways, like a sponge. Rain arrives and evaporates, failing to sustain reservoirs or rivers. This dynamic, happening even in humid regions, is making droughts more severe.

What’s at stake

As these regions prepare for another tumultuous season, it is helpful to remember what is at stake.

In August, the U.S. will mark the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. The powerful Category 3 storm killed 1,833 people as it wrecked the levees of New Orleans and flooded the city with a storm surge taller than a two-story house. 

The season for cataclysmic hurricanes continues to move later in the year as the excessive heat absorbed by the ocean’s acts as a bellows to a fire, strengthening these storms even into the fall. The most destructive hurricanes of the last two decades – Sandy (2012), Harvey (2017), Maria (2017), Ida (2021), Ian (2022), Helene (2024) – arrived on or after Katrina’s initial landfall date of August 25. 

Katrina remains the most expensive weather disaster in U.S. history. In 2024 dollars, the total economic cost of the storm topped $201 billion, according to federal estimates. The next closest is Hurricane Harvey, at $160 billion.

Elsewhere, the combination of heat and aridity is a recipe for wildfire. Canada has already witnessed a frightful early fire season. More than 10 million acres have burned so far this year, four times the 10-year average. Smoke from fires in Manitoba and Saskatchewan drifted to the east and south, degrading air quality in the Great Lakes states in May. Even the skies in northern Europe, thousands of miles distant, were fouled by noxious particles that crossed the Atlantic from Canada.

While it contends with transcontinental smoke, northern Europe is also in the throes of a ground-cracking drought. 

The European Commission’s Joint Research Center reports an array of drought-related damages that extend to eastern Europe, western Russia, and Turkey. Rivers in these regions are at critical lows and wheat and soybean crops are showing signs of stress. The Rhine River, a key commercial shipping route, is still open, but the river has closed or reduced its capacity in the last three summers due to low water. The forecast for northern, central, and eastern Europe is for hot and dry weather to continue through September.

Rain – heavy rain – is the overpowering hazard in the Himalayas and South Asia. Summer is the season of the monsoon, in which 70 percent of the region’s flood events occur, according to ICIMOD, a Nepal-based environmental research center.

ICIMOD researchers expect a monsoon season of “intensifying risks” for India, Pakistan, Nepal, and the Tibetan plateau. That means a higher likelihood of extreme heat, heavy rain, landslides, floods, and high-elevation glacial lakes that burst their dams. These hazards abound, but they are a particular threat to mountain communities. 

Our collective memory, however, is maddeningly short. Even as the seas expand and flood waters percolate from below ground, cities continue to approve luxury high-rises and new subdivisions on the Atlantic and Gulf coasts. It is only a matter of time before they too are in a storm’s path in this, the riskiest season.