Wednesday’s horrific flash flooding at the border of Nepal and Tibet was, first and foremost, a human tragedy: at least 500 people have been killed and more than 2,000 are still missing.
But it may also have been a weather warning — a sign of strange and dangerous things to come as the planet keeps warming and the climate keeps changing.
An initial assessment by a group of geologists and glaciologists indicates that the disaster was “likely set off at least in part by an enormous chunk of ice snapping off a glacier,” according to the New York Times.
It’s a phenomenon known as an ice avalanche. In this case, preliminary seismological readings and satellite imagery suggest that a glacial slab about 2,000 feet wide plummeted almost 4,000 feet, smashing into the valley below. When something that big falls that far, it releases vast amounts of energy on impact — enough to pulverize ice into a massive surge of floodwater. (The U.S. Geological Survey now says the force of Wednesday’s “glacial collapse” was equal to a magnitude 5.2 earthquake.)
Usually, flash flooding is triggered by heavy rainfall. But Wednesday was dry — and “satellite images show a vanishing snow cover over the previous day, indicating warmer temperatures that may have melted the glacier and contributed to the ice avalanche,” according to the Times.
Could this be our new normal? Glaciers are melting throughout the fast-warming Himalayas, risking more avalanches and more flash floods. Meanwhile, the summer of 2026 — across the United States and Europe, especially — hasn’t just been warm.
It’s been… weird.
The heat waves keep coming. Records keep falling. Fires keep igniting. El Niño keeps strengthening. The ocean keeps getting hotter. Humidity keeps rising. And typically arid places like, say, Southern California end up feeling more like Florida, or the Amazon, as a result.
If it all seems connected, that’s because it very well may be. In March, the New York Times reported that “a growing number of scientists” agree that “the effects of climate change are intensifying in ways that have surprised even experts.”
“Many of the consequences of global warming — such as more intense storms, warming oceans and melting glaciers — are arriving faster and more powerfully than many scientists had expected,” the paper explained.
The summer of 2026 has felt a lot like Exhibit A.
How hot has it been?
Yet another heat wave has been scorching a large swath of the U.S. over the last week or so, inflicting 100-plus-degree temperatures on the southern third of the country, from California to Texas to the tip of Florida. More than 80 million Americans have been under an extreme heat warning or heat advisory, according to the National Weather Service.
Parts of Los Angeles County have registered triple-digit highs. Las Vegas will hover around 105 through Saturday; Phoenix has topped 110. Temperatures in Dallas reached 109°F on Sunday. Last week, Miami hit 100°F degrees for the first time ever.
But that’s been the pattern for months now. August kicked off with major heat waves across the western U.S. and along the East Coast. In July, a huge northern heat wave subjected more than 125 million Americans to some sort of heat alert.
At the same time, Western Europe has endured (with minimal air-conditioning) multiple grueling heat waves of its own — the “most severe and widespread ever,” according to scientists. Both continents have battled drought and wildfires as a result, while similarly extreme weather has triggered typhoons and flash floods in Asia.
The overall stats are striking. Western Europe has experienced its hottest start to summer on record, with June and July 2026 setting consecutive regional temperature records — and the combined June-July period surpassing all previous two-month summer records for the area.
July was also the hottest month ever across the contiguous U.S., according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, averaging 76.89°F throughout the Lower 48 — an eighth of a degree hotter than the prior Dust Bowl record (July 1936).
Finally, just last week, the average surface temperature of the world’s oceans exceeded 21°C for the first time, driven in part by a rapidly intensifying El Niño that’s on track to become “the largest in living memory.”
That also means August is likely to “be the hottest August in recorded history on Earth.”
The common thread? Climate change.
El Niño is a natural climate cycle: weaker-than-usual trade winds, warmer-than-usual surface water and a Pacific jet stream that moves south of its standard path, altering weather patterns across the U.S. and the globe.
But this year’s “super El Niño” — which is shaping up to be the most intense since the 19th century — is something else. Over the past four decades, El Niño events have become nearly 40% stronger than they were in the preindustrial era, according to a study published Aug. 27 in the journal Science — and climate change appears to be the cause.
“Our findings tell us that the big El Niño events of the last 40 years are not normal in the context of the last thousand years,” lead author Julia Cole, professor and chair of the University of Michigan Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, said in a statement. “We believe global warming is supercharging El Niño, and if that’s true, then we expect stronger climate extremes that will amplify ecological, infrastructural and human losses.”
“No country has the resources to be fully protected from these impacts,” Cole added.
At this point, most people are familiar with the pattern that plays out after extreme weather events: Australia’s “Black Summer” of wildfires in 2019 and 2020, when more than 46 million acres were scorched; Pakistan in 2022, when flooding left a third of the country under water; Hurricanes Milton and Helene in 2024, which ravaged parts of the southern United States; last year’s Los Angeles wildfires, which incinerated entire neighborhoods.
Every time, experts repeat — and journalists report — the same words of warning: while climate change didn’t necessarily cause this particular disaster, our warming planet is generally making weather catastrophes “more frequent and more intense.”
What’s different about the summer of 2026 is that horrors like Wednesday’s flash floods in Nepal and Tibet seem to be arising against a backdrop of everyday weather weirdness — the kind of change that really hits home.
In Los Angeles, that’s meant ocean temperatures in the mid-70s, about 10 degrees higher than average — which have, in turn, triggered oppressive, off-the-charts humidity and hot, almost tropical nights.
In New York, it’s meant “intense heat — temperatures reached over 100 degrees in Central Park on the hottest day in July — alternating with gales and floods,” according to New York Magazine. (“We’re on track to double our average precipitation for August,” said Alex Gallagher, a meteorologist at NYC Emergency Management. “Four out of the five most intense flooding events in the last five years happened this year.”) Two tornadoes even whipped through parts of Queens and Long Island.
And in England, it’s meant temperatures as high as 40°C(104°F) — a milestone that had only a 0.02% chance of happening before 2040, according to the U.K.’s 2022 Climate Risk Assessment.
Climate change is a factor here as well. Heat domes are the large, high-pressure atmospheric systems that have been stalling this summer over various regions like a lid on a pot, trapping hot air. A 2022 study in the journal Copernicus found that climate change is making heat domes 150 times more likely; as a consequence, U.S. heat waves now occur three times as often as they did in the 1960s.
El Niño promises to keep the oddness going. On Aug. 20, NOAA released its seasonal temperature outlook for fall 2026; it predicts above-normal temperatures across nearly the entire country from September through November. On X, weather analyst Colin McCarthy went even further, forecasting a “12+ month streak of each new month being the hottest on record, driven by El Niño + climate change.”
“During the last El Niño in 2023–24, we went 13 straight months setting a new all-time record warm month,” McCarthy explained. “This year’s El Niño is forecast to be nearly twice as strong. Buckle up.”
If past El Niños are any indication, those higher temperatures could be coupled with big rainstorms in drier places like Southern California and dry conditions in snowier places like Montana and Michigan.
In other words, brace yourself for a Weird Weather Winter as well — and with the way climate change is going, many more weird weather seasons to come.
