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Americans Face Dangerous Summer of Climate Disasters—Just as Big Oil Predicted

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By Aaron Regunberg, director of Public Citizen’s Climate Accountability Project

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Summer has always been a time for fun: family vacations, beach days, block parties. But for millions of Americans, anticipation of the start of summer also brings anxiety and dread. Every year, the threat of extreme weather—lethal heat waves, hurricanes, drought, and wildfires—continues to escalate.

These are not natural disasters. The catastrophes the summer could bring are exactly the kind of climate disasters that Big Oil companies predicted their fossil fuel products would cause or intensify. They were right, as climate attribution science demonstrates in increasingly precise ways.

Americans deserve to know that their summers haven’t simply gotten worse. They have been made worse by specific companies that knew their conduct would cause these “catastrophic” harms, and spent decades orchestrating fraudulent campaigns of climate denial to cover up this reality.

Extreme Heat

Extreme heat is the most lethal weather-related killer, and it is getting worse as climate change intensifies. The last three summers have been the three hottest ever recorded. Since 1985, 80% of U.S. cities have experienced an increase in the number of days with a heat index of 90 degrees or higher. Days above 90 degrees also appear earlier in the year and persist until later in the year. This trend has already extended into 2026, with record-smashing heat this spring across the western half of the country, including an average national temperature in March that was an astounding 9.35 degrees Fahrenheit hotter than the 20th century norm. Heat mitigation and worker protections have failed to keep up with these changes—for example, despite years of advocacy, the federal government has failed to pass a national heat standard.

This escalation in extreme heat isn’t a coincidence. It is being driven by climate change. A climate attribution study of the March 2026 heat wave found that it would have been “virtually impossible” without climate change. Nationally, scientists have found that the climate crisis lengthened the average heat wave season in the U.S. from 23 days to 70 days over the last 60 years. Another scientific study concluded that last summer the average American experienced at least one additional weeks’ worth of risky heat days—days hotter than 90% of those recorded in the local area in prior decades—due to climate change, while 32 U.S. cities (home to over 21 million people) experienced 30 or more additional risky heat days because of climate change. And these climate effects are directly impacting long-anticipated summertime activities. For example, a recent study found that approximately 25% of World Cup 2026 matches are likely to be played in heat conditions that require active safety measures, and at least 5 matches could occur at a temperature that FIFPRO, the global players’ union considers to be unsafe for play.  

Scientists are also increasingly able to determine the degree to which the emissions of particular oil and gas companies have contributed to particular heat waves. For example, a study published last fall in the prestigious journal Nature analyzed a number of major heat waves, including the extreme heat that hit the American Southwest in July 2023. The researchers found emissions from each of the biggest fossil fuel companies—ExxonMobil, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Shell, BP—made that lethal heat wave at least 10,000 times more likely to occur. They concluded that these events would have been virtually impossible without those emissions.

These companies didn’t just contribute to lethal heat—they did so knowingly. For decades, Big Oil companies internally forecasted exactly these kinds of deadly disasters. In 1996, for example, Exxon scientist DJ Devlin gave a presentation to the Global Climate Coalition, a group of fossil fuel companies that colluded to spread climate denial, reviewing the science connecting climate change with “suffering and death due to thermal extremes.” He discussed how the “elderly, sick, and very young” would be particularly vulnerable. And he explained the idea of threshold temperatures, referring to the point at which temperatures cross a critical limit “beyond which mortality rises significantly.”

El Niño

This recent record-breaking heat is particularly troubling given that it occurred during a La Niña, the cooling phase of the Pacific Ocean’s heat cycle. Scientists agree that in the coming months the Pacific Ocean will begin its warming cycle, or El Niño. And this El Niño is predicted to be particularly catastrophic, largely due to climate change.

Some studies have found that global warming may be leading to stronger El Niño events. More importantly, this El Niño will build on a higher temperature baseline, again thanks to climate change. This higher baseline has the effect of supercharging the impacts of an El Niño, enabling even more intense heat waves, storms, and droughts. This is a dangerous cycle. As Defense Department meteorologist Eric Webb put it: “Due to the increasing concentration of greenhouse gases, the climate system cannot effectively exhaust the heat released in a major El Niño event before the next El Niño comes along and pushes the baseline upward again.”

Even relatively weak El Niños can have catastrophic effects. The “Super El Niño” that scientists are predicting will begin this summer could be truly devastating.

Hurricanes

Hurricane season began on June 1. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has predicted a worse-than-average hurricane season in the Pacific this year (combined with a below-normal season in the Atlantic, where El Niño generally suppresses the number of storms), forecasting between three and six hurricanes, including one to three major storms.

Although hurricanes are not new phenomena, climate change is increasing their severity in several ways. Higher sea surface temperatures make hurricanes more likely to intensify—in fact, over the past 40 years, three times as many storms within a few hundred miles of coasts have intensified rapidly due to warming of the oceans. Storms are also staying stronger farther inland than they did in the past, with warmer sea surface temperatures leading to a “slower decay” of storms by increasing the amount of moisture they can carry. And they are generating more rainfall. For every degree of warming, the atmosphere can hold 7% more water vapor that could fall as rain. For example, a study funded by the U.S. Department of Energy looking at Hurricane Ida concluded that climate change was directly responsible for up to half a million people’s exposure to the storm’s floodwaters.

Coastal storms are also becoming more dangerous due to rising seas, whose levels have increased eight to nine inches since 1880, and may rise multiple feet during this century. A study of Hurricane Sandy estimated that sea level rise increased the likelihood of flooding in that storm by 300 percent. Meanwhile, regulations have failed to keep up with the frequency and volume of these flooding events.

Big Oil companies were fully aware that climate change would make coastal storms like these more dangerous. In 1989, Shell Oil Company produced a confidential planning document that predicted, based on “conventional and probably conservative” assumptions, that the continued burning of fossil fuels would cause “more violent weather,” including “more storms” and “more deluges.”

In fact, Big Oil companies demonstrated their understanding of and belief in these scientific conclusions by modifying their own infrastructure, often at significant expense, to prepare for the coming reality of worsening storms and rising sea levels. In the 1990s, engineers working for Shell, Exxon, and ConocoPhillips noted in design specifications for natural gas pipelines that there could be a “considerable increase of the frequency of storms as a result of climate change,” even specifying for one offshore natural gas platform that an “estimated rise in water level, due to global warming, of 0.5 meters may be assumed” for the project’s 25-year lifespan.

Drought and Wildfires

The U.S. experienced its worst spring drought ever this year. NOAA found that the first three months of 2026 were the driest on record. Over 60 percent of the country is currently experiencing at least moderate drought. In many regions, the situation is far more severe, and is leading to profoundly dangerous wildfires.

Ninety-nine percent of the Southeast is in drought, with over 60 percent in severe to exceptional drought. Some areas are in particularly dire straits, with over 80 percent of Florida facing extreme or exceptional drought. This drought has spurred record-breaking wildfires across the region, which have not historically been wildfire hotspots. Georgia has already had eight times as many burned acres so far this year compared to the pace of the last five years.

The Great Plains region is facing similar challenges. Nearly 90 percent of Nebraska is in drought, and the region has already experienced record-breaking spring wildfires that burned over a million acres of land across Nebraska, Kansas, and Oklahoma.

The West has been experiencing an extended drought for years, but this summer things are reaching a tipping point, following the lowest snowpack levels in a century. Utah recently announced a state of emergency over its water crisis, with the entire state in severe drought and 22 of 29 counties experiencing extreme drought. Colorado, which also relies on snowpack, may soon follow. Snowpack is also dangerously low in the Sierra Nevada, threatening water supplies for tens of millions of Californians.

These droughts, and their subsequent impacts on wildfires, are directly related to climate change, as Public Citizen has pushed policymakers to recognize. Climate scientist Kaitlyn Trudeau described the relationship this way: “Climate change is making the atmosphere thirstier. As it gets hotter, the amount of moisture that is pulled out of the landscape or sucked out of plants and soils, also increases.” A 2023 study in the journal Environmental Research Letters found that almost 40 percent of the area burned by wildfires in the western United States over the last several decades can be attributed to the emissions of the world’s largest fossil fuel companies. Speaking of the connection between climate change and increasing dryness that is contributing to wildfire growth, the author of the study said, “I’ve never had such a strong correlation in my data before.”

Big Oil companies understood these climate effects decades ago. In 1981, Exxon scientist Henry Shaw wrote an internal memorandum to Exxon’s President of Research and Engineering explaining that it was “Exxon’s position” that a doubling in atmospheric carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels would result in “major shifts in rainfall.” In 1982, the American Petroleum Institute commissioned a report warning that climate change would have “serious consequences for man’s comfort and survival since patterns of aridity and rainfall can change.” And in 1998, Shell confidentially predicted that if fossil fuels were not brought under control there would be “more droughts” that would “dramatically change” agricultural patterns and “disrupt eco-systems.” Shell also predicted that because of these changes “conflicts would abound” and “civilization could prove a fragile thing.”

Big Oil Lied

Big Oil companies didn’t just accurately predict the climate harms that are today transforming summer from a season of fun and relaxation to one of danger and anxiety. They also orchestrated a multi-decade campaign to defraud the public about these dangers and block solutions that could have prevented such disasters.

There are numerous internal strategy memos and other materials outlining Big Oil’s massive disinformation campaigns. These were designed, in the words of one fossil fuel coalition’s internal strategy document, to “reposition global warming as theory (not fact).” Documented tactics that Big Oil companies used to deceive the public about climate change include:

  • Publishing deceptive advertisements with false claims about climate; 
  • Directing bought-and-paid-for scientists to fraudulently undermine the clear scientific consensus on climate; 
  • Harassing and attempting to discredit scientists and activists engaged in researching and communicating the actual climate science; 
  • Deceptively attacking renewable energy efforts and policies;
  • Greenwashing to falsely promote Big Oil products and brands as climate solutions.

There is substantial evidence this conspiracy has delayed climate measures that could have prevented disasters like the ones threatening to derail millions of Americans’ upcoming summer, as described in the IPCC’s sixth assessment report, which condemned “vested economic and political interests” that have “organized and financed misinformation and ‘contrarian’ climate change communication” and noted that “misinformation and politicization of climate change science has created polarization in public and policy domains in North America, particularly in the US, limiting climate action.” In the words of former Senator Chuck Hagel, who championed anti-climate legislation when he was in Congress:

“They lied. … It would have put the United States and the world on a whole different track, and today we would have been so much further ahead than we are. It’s cost this country, and it cost the world.” 

The fossil fuel industry has, indeed, cost us, not least by ruining summer. The heat waves, hurricanes, droughts, and wildfires we are likely to experience over the coming months are climate disasters that Big Oil companies predicted their products would bring about. We shouldn’t let them get away with it.

Further Reading

Public Citizen’s work on holding Big Oil accountable for climate crimes.

Public Citizen’s work on heat stress.

Public Citizen’s work on wildfires.

Public Citizen’s work on disaster preparedness.

 

Topics

Climate & Energy: Fighting Climate Change

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