When El Niño exacerbates global warming: Record heat, record flooding, record wildfires
Traffic warden Rai Rogers mans his street corner during an 8-hour shift under the hot sun in Las Vegas, Nevada on July 12, 2023, where temperatures reached 106 degrees amid an ongoing heatwave. More than 50 million Americans are set to bake under dangerously high temperatures this week, from California to Texas to Florida, as a heat wave builds across the southern United States.
Frederic J. Brown | Afp | Getty Images
If you feel like record-level extreme weather events are happening with alarming frequency, you’re not alone. Scientists say it’s not your imagination.
“The number of simultaneous weather extremes we’re seeing right now in the Northern Hemisphere seems to exceed anything at least in my memory,” Michael Mann, professor of earth and environmental science at the University of Pennsylvania, told CNBC.
Globally, June was the hottest June in the 174-year records kept by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the federal agency said on Thursday. It was the 47th consecutive June and the 532nd consecutive month in which average temperatures were above the average for the 20th century.
The amount of sea ice measured in June was the lowest global June sea ice on record, due primarily to record-low sea ice levels in the Antarctic, also according to NOAA.
There were nine tropical cyclones in June, defined as storms with wind speeds over 74 miles per hour, and the global accumulated cyclone energy, a measure of the collective duration and strength of tropical storms, was almost twice its average value for 1991–2020 in June, NOAA said.
As of Friday morning, 93 million people in the United States are under excessive heat warnings and heat advisories, the National Weather Service Weather Prediction Center, according to a bulletin published Friday morning. “A searing heat wave is set to engulf much of the West Coast, the Great Basin, and the Southwest,” the National Weather Service said.
A person receives medical attention after collapsing in a convenience store on July 13, 2023 in Phoenix, Arizona. EMT was called after the person said they experienced hot flashes, dizziness, fatigue and chest pain. Record-breaking temperatures continue soaring as prolonged heatwaves sweep across the Southwest.
Brandon Bell | Getty Images News | Getty Images
Flooding in downtown Montpelier, Vermont on Tuesday, July 11, 2023. Vermont has been under a State of Emergency since Sunday evening as heavy rains continued through Tuesday morning causing flooding across the state.
The Washington Post | The Washington Post | Getty Images
On June 27, Canada surpassed the record set in 1989 for total area burned in one season when it reached 7.6 million hectares, or 18.8 million acres. And the total has since increased to 9.3 million hectares, or 23 million acres, which is being driven by record-breaking high temperatures, turning the vegetation into kindling for wildfires to race through.
Those record Canada wildfires have blanketed parts of the United States in smoke, causing some of the worst quality in the world at various points.
A view of the city as smoke from wildfires in Canada shrouds sky on June 30, 2023 in New York City, United States. Canadian wildfires smoke creating a dangerous haze as the air quality index reaches 160 in New York City. People warned to avoid outdoor physical activities and for those who spend time outdoors recommended to use well-fitting face masks when air quality is unhealthy.
Anadolu Agency | Anadolu Agency | Getty Images
In all of 2022, there were 18 separate billion dollar weather and climate disaster events according to data from NOAA, including tornado outbreaks, high wind, hailstorms, tropical cyclones, flooding, drought, heatwaves and wildfires. So far, there have been 12 billion-dollar weather and climate disasters in 2023, according to NOAA.
“This year will almost certainly break records for the number of extreme weather events,” Paul Ullrich, professor of regional and global climate modeling at University of California at Davis, told CNBC.
Global warming is making extreme weather events more severe, scientists said.
“Our own research shows that the observed trend toward more frequent persistent summer weather extremes — heat waves, floods, — is being driven by human-caused warming,” Mann told CNBC.
Ullrich agrees. “Increases in the frequency and intensity of heatwaves, floods and wildfires can be directly attributable to climate change,” Ullrich told CNBC.
Wildfire burns above the Fraser River Valley near Lytton, British Columbia, Canada, on Friday, July 2, 2021. A protracted heat wave continues to fuel scores of wildfires in Canada’s western provinces, with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau calling an emergency meeting of a cabinet crisis group to address the matter.
Bloomberg | Bloomberg | Getty Images
“Through the emission of greenhouse gases, we have been trapping more heat near the surface, leading to increases in temperature, more moisture in the air, and a drier land surface,” Ullrich said. “Scientists are extremely confident that an increasing frequency and intensity of extreme events is a direct consequence of human modification of the climate system.”
Also in June, the weather pattern called “El Niño“ arrived.
El Niño is like adding lighter fuel to an already smoldering fire. “Under recently emergent El Niño conditions, temperatures are pushed higher worldwide, further compounding increases in temperature brought on by greenhouse gas emissions,” Ullrich said.
That combination of anthropogenic climate change and El Niño is “spiking some of these extreme events,” Mann said.
Animation of sea surface temperatures for past 6 months
NOAA
El Niño, which means “little boy” in Spanish, happens when the normal trade winds that blow west along the equator weaken and warmer water gets pushed o the east, toward the west coast of the Americas. In the United States, a moderate to strong El Niño in the fall and winter correlates with wetter-than-average conditions from southern California to the Gulf Coast, and drier-than-average conditions in the Pacific Northwest and Ohio Valley.
When global warming and El Niño are hitting at the same time, “it can be difficult separating what is just a weather event or if it is part of a longer trend,” Timothy Canty, professor in the department of atmospheric and oceanic science at University of Maryland, told CNBC.
But what is clear is that climate change makes it more likely that an extreme weather event will happen.
“Higher temperatures from climate change are indisputable, and with each degree increase we’re multiplying our changes of getting an extreme heat wave. In the wetter regions of the world, including the Northeastern US, we’re expecting more rain and more intense storms,” Ullrich told CNBC. “To avoid even more extreme changes, we need to both reduce our reliance on fossil fuels and act to clean up our polluted atmosphere.”
And as long as global greenhouse gas emissions continues to increase, the trend of more and more frequent extreme weather is expected to continue, Mann says.
Decreasing the greenhouse gas emissions released into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels will help moderate the extreme weather trends.
An infographic titled “Sea ice in Antarctica drops to lowest level in 43 years” created in Ankara, Turkiye on March 01, 2023. The sea ice level surrounding the Antarctic continent has dropped to its lowest level since 1979.
Editorial #:1247611891, Getty Premium
“The good news is that the latest research shows that the surface warming driving more extreme weather events stabilizes quickly when carbon emissions cease. So we can prevent this all from getting worse and worst by decarbonizing our economy rapidly,” Mann told CNBC.
Every person’s contributions to reducing their climate footprint helps, Canty says.
“People have asked me essentially ‘What can I do as an individual that matters?’ and decide not to do anything and instead blame everyone else. Honestly, it’s societies made up of individuals that have gotten us to this point,” Canty said.
Individuals can reduce their greenhouse gas emissions by making small changes like turning off the lights when they’re not in a room, turning down the heat or up the air conditioning when they’re not home, avoiding food waste and using public transportation.
Voting also matters a lot, Canty said. Government leaders have been able to make successful progress on international environmental crises in the past, Canty said, pointing to the Montreal Protocol. “There is a roadmap for working together to fix environmental problems in ways that benefit everyone,” Canty said.
“Tackling the ozone hole required governments, scientists, and businesses to work together and the Montreal Protocol and its amendments have been very successful not only for ozone but for climate,” Canty said, noting that the same chemicals that deplete the ozone, chlorofluorocarbons, are also very bad greenhouse gasses. “The ozone hole is slowly recovering and because of actions taken in the 80s we’ve avoided even worse planetary warming, and we still have air conditioning and hair spray which seemed to be the big panic at the time.”
If individuals and organizations don’t commit to aggressively reducing their greenhouse gas emissions, however, then this battery of extreme weather is a harbinger of the future.
“If we fail to act what we’re seeing right now is just the tip of the proverbial — melting — iceberg,” Mann told CNBC.
A Tesla logo outside the company’s Tilburg Factory and Delivery Center.
Karol Serewis | Getty Images
Tesla CEO Elon Musk said the automaker completed its first driverless delivery of a new car to a customer, routing a Model Y SUV from the company’s Austin, Texas, Gigafactory to an apartment building in the area on June 27.
The Tesla account on social network X, which is also owned by Musk, shared a video overnight showing the Model Y traversing public roads in Austin, including highways, with no human in the driver’s seat or front passenger seat of the car.
Tesla did not say which version of its software and hardware had been installed and used in the car shown in the clip — or if and when that technology would be commercially available to its customers.
A Model Y owners’ manual, available on the Tesla website, says that in order to use Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (Supervised) option — which is the company’s most advanced, partially automated driving system available today — owners must keep their hands on the wheel, and remain ready to take over steering or braking at any time.
The vehicle in Tesla’s video was shown operating without a driver on the highway, passing through residential streets and around parking lots before arriving and stopping for a handoff to a customer. The buyer was waiting by the curb at an apartment building alongside Tesla employees, some sporting logo-emblazoned shirts. (The curb was painted red, indicating it is a no-stop fire lane.)
In 2016, Tesla shared an Autopilot video — known as the “Paint It Black” video — that had been staged in a manner which exaggerated its cars self-driving capabilities, depositions later revealed.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) is investigating Tesla over possible safety defects in their FSD systems, and recently sought more information from the company about its robotaxi debut after its cars were seen violating some traffic rules.
In posts on X on Friday, Musk wrote: “The first fully autonomous delivery of a Tesla Model Y from factory to a customer home across town, including highways, was just completed a day ahead of schedule!! Congratulations to the @Tesla_AI teams, both software & AI chip design!”
He also wrote, “There were no people in the car at all and no remote operators in control at any point. FULLY autonomous! To the best of our knowledge, this is the first fully autonomous drive with no people in the car or remotely operating the car on a public highway.”
Musk’s claim about the “first fully autonomous drive” on a public highway was not accurate. Alphabet-owned Waymo, which is already operating commercial robotaxi services across multiple U.S. cities, has been offering employees fully autonomous rides on Phoenix freeways since 2024, and has since expanded those rides to Los Angeles and San Francisco.
Head of AI at Tesla, Ashok Elluswamy, said in posts on X that the automaker “literally chose a random customer who ordered a Model Y in the Austin area” to participate. He also said the vehicle delivered is “exactly the same as every Model Y produced in the Tesla factory.”
Elluswamy also noted in a post on X that the Model Y in the driverless delivery traveled at a “max speed of 72 mph.” Most highways in Texas have a maximum speed limit of 70 miles per hour, according to the Texas Department of Transportation website.
Separately, Tesla began a robotaxi pilot program in Austin last weekend involving 10 to 20 of its Model Y SUVs equipped with technology, about which Tesla has revealed little to the public.
The Tesla robotaxi service is available only to select, invited riders who have mostly been influencers and analysts, many of whom generate income by posting Tesla-fan content on platforms like X and YouTube. The Tesla robotaxi vehicles run with a human safety supervisor on board in the front passenger seat, and are remotely supervised by employees in an operations center.
Since 2016, Musk has been promising that Tesla would soon be able to turn all of its existing EVs into fully autonomous vehicles with a simple, over-the-air software update. In his Master Plan, Part Deux, he outlined a future where every Tesla owner would be able to add their car to a “Tesla shared fleet just by tapping a button on the Tesla phone app,” enabling their car to generate income for them while they sleep.
In 2019, Musk said Tesla would have 1 million robotaxis on the road by 2020 — a claim that helped him raise $2 billion at the time from institutional investors.
While Tesla has not fulfilled those promises thus far, the driverless delivery in Texas this week has elicited excitement among believers in Musk and his vision.
Meanwhile, Tesla is battling a brand backlash in response to the CEO’s often incendiary political rhetoric, his endorsements of Germany’s far-right extremist party AfD, and his work for the Trump administration.
Tesla sales have declined year-over-year in key markets, especially throughout Europe, in the first five months of 2025 partly as a result of that backlash. The company is also facing increased competition from EV makers, particularly Chinese brands such as BYD, Nio and Xiaomi, offering more affordable and newer models.
Tesla is expected to disclose its second-quarter vehicle production and delivery numbers on July 2.
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Reddit CEO Steve Huffman stands on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) after ringing a bell on the floor setting the share price at $47 in its initial public offering (IPO) on March 21, 2024 in New York City.
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For 20 years, Reddit has pitched itself as “the front page of the internet.” AI threatens to change that.
As social media has changed over the past two decades with the shift to mobile and the more recent focus on short-form video, peers like MySpace, Digg and Flickr have faded into oblivion. Reddit, meanwhile, has refused to die, chugging along and gaining an audience of over 108 million daily users who congregate in more than 100,000 subreddit communities. There, Reddit users keep it old school and leave simple text comments to one another about their favorite hobbies, pastimes and interests.
Those user-generated text comments are a treasure trove that, in the age of artificial intelligence, Reddit is fighting to defend.
The emergence of AI chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude and Google’s Gemini threaten to inhale vast swaths of data from services like Reddit. As more people turn to chatbots for information they previously went to websites for, Reddit faces a gargantuan challenge gaining new users, particularly if Google’s search floodgates dry up.
CEO Steve Huffman explained Reddit’s situation to analysts in May, saying that challenges like the one AI poses can also create opportunities.
While the “search ecosystem is under heavy construction,” Huffman said he’s betting that the voices of Reddit’s users will help it stand out amid the “annotated sterile answers from AI.”
Huffman doubled down on that notion last week, saying on a podcast that the reality is AI is still in its infancy.
“There will always be a need, a desire for people to talk to people about stuff,” Huffman said. “That is where we are going to be focused.”
Huffman may be correct about Reddit’s loyal user base, but in the age of AI, many users simply “go the easiest possible way,” said Ann Smarty, a marketing and reputation management consultant who helps brands monitor consumer perception on Reddit. And there may be no simpler way of finding answers on the internet than simply asking ChatGPT a question, Smarty said.
“People do not want to click,” she said. “They just want those quick answers.”
Protecting Reddit’s data from AI
In a sign that the company believes so deeply in the value of its data, Reddit sued Anthropic earlier this month, alleging that the AI startup “engaged in unlawful and unfair business acts” by scraping subreddits for information to improve its large language models.
While book authors have taken companies like Meta and Anthropic to court alleging that their AI models break copyright law and have suffered recent losses, Reddit is basing its lawsuit on the argument of unfair business practices. Reddit’s case appears to center on Anthropic’s “commercial exploitation of the data which they don’t own,” said Randy McCarthy, head of the IP law group at Hall Estill.
Reddit is defending its platform of user-generated content, said Jason Bloom, IP litigation chair at the law firm Haynes Boone.
The social media company’s repository of “detailed and informative discussions” are particularly useful for “training an AI bot or an AI platform,” Bloom said. As many AI researchers have noted, Reddit’s large volume of moderated conversations can help make AI chatbots produce more natural-sounding responses to questions covering countless topics than say a university textbook.
Although Reddit has AI-related data-licensing agreements with OpenAI and Google, the company alleged in its lawsuit that Anthropic has been covertly siphoning its data without obtaining permission. Reddit alleges that Anthropic’s data-hoovering actions are “interfering with Reddit’s contractual relationships with Reddit’s users,” the legal filing said.
This lack of clarity regarding what is permitted when it comes to the use of data scraping for AI is what Reddit’s case and other similar lawsuits are all about, legal and AI experts said.
“Commercial use requires commercial terms,” Huffman said on The Best One Yet podcast. “When you use something — content or data or some resource — in business, you pay for it.”
Avishek Das | SOPA Images | Lightrocket | Getty Images
Anthropic disagrees “with Reddit’s claims and will defend ourselves vigorously,” a company spokesperson told CNBC.
Reddit’s decision to sue over claims of unfair business practices instead of copyright infringement underscores the differences between traditional publishers and platforms like Reddit that host user-generated content, McCarthy said.
Bloom said that Reddit could have a valid case against Anthropic because social media platforms have many different revenue streams. One such revenue stream is selling access to their data, Bloom said.
That “enables them to sell and license that data for legitimate uses while still protecting their consumers privacy and whatnot,” Bloom said.
Fighting AI with AI
Reddit isn’t just fending off AI. It launched its own Reddit Answers AI service in December, using technology from OpenAI and Google.
Unlike general-purpose chatbots that summarize others’ web pages, the Reddit Answers chatbot generates responses based purely on the social media service, and it redirects people to the source conversations so they can see the specific user comments. A Reddit spokesperson said that over 1 million people are using Reddit Answers each week.
Huffman has been pitching Reddit Answers as a best-of-both worlds tool, gluing together the simplicity of AI chatbots with Reddit’s corpus of commentary. He used the feature after seeing electronic music group Justice play recently in San Francisco.
“I was like, how long is this set? And Reddit could tell me it’s 90 minutes ’cause somebody had already asked that question on Reddit,” Huffman said on the podcast.
Though investors are concerned about AI negatively impacting Reddit’s user growth, Seaport Senior Internet Analyst Aaron Kessler said he agrees with Huffman’s sentiment that the site’s original content gives it staying power.
People who visit Reddit often search for information about things or places they may be interested in, like tennis rackets or ski resorts, Kessler said. This user data indicates “commercial intent,” which means advertisers are increasingly considering Reddit as a place to run online ads, he said.
“You can tell by which page you’re on within Reddit what the consumer is interested in,” Kessler said. “You could probably even argue there’s stronger signals on Reddit versus a Facebook or Instagram, where people may just be browsing videos.”
WATCH: Reddit sues Anthropic alleging wrongful use of content.
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