Climate Change: What's Happening?

Updated August 27, 2026 — a snapshot of this moment, not an ongoing forecast.

A major heat wave hit North America starting in late June 2026. Record or near-record temperatures hit across the U.S. and Canada, including 113°F in Phoenix (Jul 6–8) and a new all-time record of 109°F in Salt Lake City (Jul 12). Nearly half the U.S. population was under an extreme heat warning at its peak.Wikipedia That heat did not stay in Phoenix and Salt Lake City. It sat on a Pacific Northwest that was already in its fourth drought year.

Pateros, WA, after the 2014 Carlton Complex Fire · Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Washington declared its 4th straight drought year on April 8, 2026. The WA Dept. of Ecology cited snowpack at roughly half its usual level, even after a near-normal winter — it just fell as rain instead of snow.WA Ecology

By August 1, 2026, that drought had become a statewide wildfire emergency. Governor Bob Ferguson declared a state of emergency and a statewide burn ban through September 30. The Department of Natural Resources said more than 1,000 fires had burned about 425,000 acres — the most acres since 2021. About 200,000 acres were still burning in 12 large fires. NASA's Earth Observatory, looking at early August smoke, tied the season to drought, heat, and Washington's first-ever National Weather Service "particularly dangerous situation" alert on July 31.WA Governor, Aug. 1NASA Earth Observatory

Three weeks later, the fire map had nearly doubled. On August 24, DNR wildfire communications manager Thomas Kyle-Milward told KOMO News the state had more than 800,000 acres burned so far in 2026, with 15 large uncontained fires still on the landscape. He called it the third-worst fire season by acres burned since 2015. It is also Washington's fourth drought year in a row. He said firefighters would likely still be working into October — and that two of the largest fires, Little Giant and Sinlahekin, would probably stay on the landscape "until the snow flies."KOMO News, Aug. 24

Washington's climate policy, as of August 2026

The Climate Commitment Act remains in place statewide — Washington voters rejected a 2024 ballot measure to cancel it (more on that below).Wikipedia

Todd Myers of the Washington Policy Center says the state would need 5-7% annual cuts, far above the 0.5% just recorded.KUOW

Environmental advocate Leah Missik reads the same number differently, pointing to "significant steps" already taken while agreeing more progress is needed. The numbers above are the same either way — Myers and Missik disagree about what the 0.5% drop means, not about the 96.1 million figure itself.KUOW

Picture a drink with a really long, skinny straw — one that's 800,000 years long. That's basically what scientists drink from when they study old ice. Antarctica's ice sheet has been building up, layer by layer, for hundreds of thousands of years. Drill down and you're pulling up a frozen timeline.

Nobody had weather instruments 800,000 years ago. Nobody was writing anything down. So how do scientists know what the climate was like that far back? They read clues left behind in nature — clues called climate proxiesNatural evidence that stands in for a direct measurement nobody was around to take — ice cores, sediment layers, tree rings, coral..

Tree growth rings · Commons (CC BY 2.0)

Ice cores are one of the best climate proxies we have. Every year, a fresh layer of snow falls on the ice sheet. Summer and winter snow pack down differently, leaving a distinct stripe — like a tree ring. Count the stripes down from the top, and you know exactly how old the ice at any depth is.NOAA

As snow gets buried, tiny air bubbles seal inside the ice — a direct sample of the atmosphere from the year it formed. The ice itself even holds a "chemical fingerprint" that reveals how cold it was when that snow fell.NOAA

That record comes from a single site: EPICA Dome C, Antarctica. A second record, the Vostok ice core from a different Antarctic site, independently confirms the same pattern going back about 420,000 years — two separate drill sites telling the same story.NOAANASAWikipedia

None of this was caused by people. Humans weren't around yet, or were too few and too low-tech to change a whole planet's atmosphere. Scientists point to natural causes instead: slow wobbles in Earth's orbit (Milankovitch cyclesRegular, slow changes in the shape of Earth's orbit and the tilt/wobble of its axis, over tens of thousands of years — named for the scientist who calculated them, Milutin Milanković.), volcanic eruptions, and small shifts in the sun's energy.NASA

Ever gotten into a hot parked car? Sunlight comes in through the glass, warms up the seats, and has a hard time getting back out. Earth's atmosphere does something surprisingly similar — and without it, Earth would be a frozen rock.

Here's the actual mechanism: sunlight warms Earth's surface. The surface tries to release that heat back to space. Certain greenhouse gasesA gas that traps heat instead of letting it escape to space. CO₂, methane, and water vapor are the main ones. catch some of it and send it back down instead of letting it escape.NASA

This is normally a good thing. The greenhouse effect is what makes Earth livable in the first place — without it, the ice age charted in Deep-Time Climate History would not be the coldest Earth has ever been. It'd be the mildest.NASA

So greenhouse gases aren't the villain of this story — not by themselves. Earth needs some of them. The real question: what happens when there's a lot more of them than there used to be?

You just read about huge climate swings over thousands of years. Ice ages came and went, all driven by slow natural causes. So what's different about the change since the late 1800s? The short answer: speed.

NASA calculated both numbers by comparing the same evidence you just read about — the ice-core record — against direct modern measurements. The gap between them is the whole story: nature moves in millennia, and this moves in decades.NASA

Mauna Loa Observatory, Hawaii · Commons (CC BY 2.0)

How do scientists know this so precisely? In March 1958, Charles David Keeling set up an instrument at Mauna Loa Observatory, Hawaii, and started continuous, direct CO₂ measurement. Nobody has stopped since — scientists call the result the Keeling CurveThe continuous, direct CO₂ record from Mauna Loa since 1958 — a real-time measurement, not a reconstruction from proxies..NOAA

These aren't abstract numbers on a chart — they're changes scientists can actually go out and measure, in places you can visit. Here are two: one global, one right in our own backyard.

Mount Rainier · Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Sea levels are rising, worldwide. Satellites have tracked the global average continuously since 1993 — and altogether, sea level has risen about 11.1 cm (4.4 in) since then, with the pace itself still climbing.NASA

Now for our backyard: Mount Rainier's glaciers are shrinking. Mount Rainier, less than 60 miles from Seattle, is the most heavily glaciated peak in the continental U.S. The USGS compared surveys from 1970 and 2007/2008 to get that number — nearly all the mountain's glaciers had thinned and retreated in the years between.USGS

Rising seas and shrinking glaciers are two totally different kinds of evidence — one from orbiting satellites, one from a scientist standing on a mountain with survey gear. They point the same direction.

The Climate Commitment Act

Washington State Capitol, Olympia · Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

In 2021, Washington's governor signed the Climate Commitment Act (CCA) — a cap-and-investA program that sets a shrinking legal limit ("cap") on total pollution, then lets companies buy and trade allowances to emit within that limit — with the money raised ("invest") put toward projects like clean transportation and wildfire resilience. program. The name has two halves, and the program is easier to follow if you take them one at a time. Cap: the state sets a limit on greenhouse gas from big polluters, and lowers that limit over time. A company that wants to emit more than its share has to buy an "allowance" at auction — one allowance is permission to emit a set amount, so buying more costs more, and the shrinking cap makes them scarcer over time. Invest: that auction money is the program's revenue, and the state puts it toward projects like clean transportation and wildfire resilience. First auction: 2023.WikipediaWA Ecology

Washington also has a separate, traditional state fuel tax that funds roads — the CCA is a different program with a different purpose (cutting emissions), even though its costs can also show up at the pump. Exactly how many cents per gallon the CCA adds has been debated; official estimates and independent analyses have landed on different figures, so no single cents-per-gallon number is treated as settled fact here.WA Ecology

November 2024: voters weighed in. Initiative 2117 would have repealed the CCA entirely. Voters rejected it: ~62% against, ~38% for. The Climate Commitment Act stayed in place. Supporters and opponents together spent over $13 million campaigning before the vote.Wikipedia

Washington's Electricity Mix

Grand Coulee Dam · Commons (CC BY 3.0)

Flip a light switch in Washington, and it's probably from a river. HydropowerElectricity generated by the force of flowing or falling water, usually through dams. Produces no direct CO₂ emissions while generating electricity. makes up roughly 60% of the state's electricity generation, more than any other single source — Washington alone generates about a quarter of all U.S. utility-scale hydropower. A big reason why: Grand Coulee Dam, the largest power plant of any kind in the U.S. — in 2024 it generated about 15.4 million MWh, enough to help supply eight western states and parts of Canada.U.S. EIA

Washington's Carbon Footprint

That gap isn't really a story about individual Washingtonians. It's a story about the electricity mix behind those numbers: a state that leans on hydropower instead of fossil fuels will tend to have a lower footprint, as a structural fact about its energy supply, not a comment on personal choices.WA EcologyEPA

Every date below came from somewhere — a scientist who ran an experiment, a program that started measuring something and never stopped. Here's the timeline.