For some in the northern hemisphere, 2026 has been the summer the climate threat became real. It has, at times, felt like one long, rolling crisis, bringing drought, energy shortages, failed harvests, deadly wildfires – and relentless heat.
There’s much we can do to adapt to these extremes. Our cover feature this week reveals how we can train our bodies to cope better in the heat, both by hacking our circulatory systems and rethinking our summer habits.
We would be fools not to prepare our infrastructure now for future severe weather and its fallout. To that end, more must be done to protect our water supplies, shift our farming practices and cool our buildings.
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But climate change is a fickle beast. It is a big, global, slow-moving crisis. We know glaciers are slowly melting – as our reporter Alec Luhn saw first-hand – seas are warming and temperatures are rising. Yet it also emerges as a sudden, disastrous event, in the form of a storm, a flood or a heatwave.
We are getting better at spotting when these violent lurches in the system will take place. Satellite imagery, sensors, floating buoys and computer models can chart everything from the next storm to the coming monster El Niño. Sometimes, we will get a warning months before an event. But other times, as we saw tragically in Nepal and Tibet last week, severe events strike too suddenly to avoid disaster.
This summer has underscored how much climate breakdown can take us by surprise
The scale of these shocks means that just learning to predict and prepare for them isn’t a long-term solution. This summer has rightly brought much more focus on how we can adapt to live with future extremes. But it has also underscored the alarming potential for climate breakdown to take us by surprise with its speed and severity.
The urgent task is to reduce emissions, and fast. Limiting warming to well below 2°C – as the world has collectively promised – offers the chance of a future we can adapt to. Let’s hope this roiling summer has rekindled enthusiasm for that gargantuan task.
