Extreme weather has been front and center this summer, from scorching high temperatures stretched across the Southwest to raging wildfires that destroyed whole communities in Hawaii.
And it's not just in the U.S. — this was the hottest northern hemisphere summer in recorded history. According to one analysis, 4 out of 5 people worldwide felt the heat of climate change-driven warming this summer.
Where do we go from here? How do we recover? Will our power grids keep up in a hotter future? In this special presentation, Scripps News investigates not just how bad it's become, but how to make things better.
UN: 'The era of global boiling has arrived'
United Nations leaders say human-driven climate change is to blame for the hottest month in recorded history.
We speak with President Biden's chief climate adviser Ali Zaidi on how the administration wants to prepare communities for a future of more extreme weather.
"There is a root cause to the climate crisis," said Zaidi. "We know what that is. If you put CO2 — carbon dioxide — into the atmosphere, if you raise the atmospheric concentration of CO2, you're going to see more warming. You're going to see more supercharged storms. You're going to see more extreme disasters. So we have to get at that root cause, and we do it by deploying clean energy."
NOAA, NASA agree that July 2023 was the hottest month on record
The head of NASA said "Americans are right now experiencing firsthand the effects of the climate crisis" as temperatures soared in July.
And we go into the field with biologists and expert divers, on an unprecedented mission to save corals off the Florida coast from unsurvivable high ocean temperatures.
