• To understand how climate change supercharges natural disasters, think of a baseball player taking steroids. That batter will slam in more home runs, just like a jacked up climate will unleash more punishing storms. “It doesn’t cause rain events, but it takes what would otherwise be a moderate rain event or slightly heavyish rain event and turns it into a monster,” explains Andrew Dessler, climate scientist at Texas A&M University. Any given long ball, or hurricane, might have happened anyway. But when you look at the full season, the trend becomes clear.

• To extend that metaphor, think of President Donald Trump as a Commissioner of Baseball who wants to allow doping… and ban testing. Trump wants to let polluters pump more climate-warming emissions, and cut back on science that would track the impact on storms, floods, heatwaves, wildfires, blizzards and droughts.

• Experts warn Trump’s budget cuts could make it harder to accurately forecast and respond to extreme weather events (like flash floods!) at a time when they’re becoming more common — and deadly. Not to mention, cuts to public broadcasting could make it harder to get emergency alerts out ​to Americans, especially in rural communities. All of this feels like terrible timing considering this year has already featured a record number of flash flood warnings.

• This month alone, a surging river killed more than 130 people in Texas, including dozens of children, while many more remain missing. Torrential rains prompted flooding in New York City and New Jersey that inundated subway stations, sent cars floating down the highway, and killed two people. Forecasters warned of thunderstorms this week in central and eastern parts of the country​, including in New York City, Washington D.C., Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Cleveland and Columbus, Ohio. Severe weather related to Tropical Storm Chantal killed six people and prompted a state of emergency​ in North Carolina.

 

• Trump plans to eliminate the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration’s weather and climate research labs, including offices that work on improving forecasting technologies that track flash floods and other severe storms.

 

• “Predicting such storms is at the cutting edge of science right now, and the stakes are rising in a warming world in which they are intensifying,” UCLA climate scientist Daniel Swain wrote on social media.​ “Yet this is precisely the kind of research that NOAA/NSF have funded in the U.S. over decades that is at imminent risk of disappearing.”

 

• Trump has also eliminated the chief scientist role at NASA and removed climate data from government websites. This week, his administration announced it won’t be publishing a major (legally-mandated!) climate change report that informs states and local governments about climate risks and how to adapt to them. As Politico put it, the president is “blinding America to climate change.” The problem, however, is that extreme weather events will happen whether our eyes are open or not.

 

• A debate is now raging over whether Trump’s policies and budget cuts affected the response to this month’s deadly floods in Texas. While investigations are still underway, the broader point is that Texas isn’t a one-off: climate change means more devastating weather events will continue — and our ability to predict and react to them is increasingly at risk.

 

This article is supported by our nonprofit partner, Crooked Ideas. 

Stephen Colbert’s sudden firing raises many questions: Did Paramount cancel his show purely for financial reasons, as it claimed… or to appease Donald Trump?

Last night, Colbert announced that “The Late Show” will end next year — for good. It was shocking and sudden news, and the crowd erupted in outraged boos. “Yeah, I share your feelings. It’s not just the end of our show, but it’s the end of ‘The Late Show’ on CBS. I’m not being replaced,” Colbert responded. “This is all just going away.”

It’s extremely fishy, given that CBS is owned by Paramount, the company that settled a lawsuit with Trump by coughing up $16 million. The decision to cancel Colbert’s show — one of the network’s most popular, hosted by one of Trump’s most famous critics — was “purely a financial decision,” the network claimed.

The timing is… suspicious, to say the least. Paramount is attempting to complete a multibillion-dollar merger with a company called Skydance, for which it needs the Trump administration’s approval. Earlier this week, Colbert described Paramount’s settlement with Trump as a “big fat bribe.” Now, he’s being kicked off the air.

A person close to Colbert described the cancellation as a “casualty of the merger,” in comments to CNN.

“Love you Stephen,” Kimmel wrote in an Instagram story. “Fuck you and all your Sheldons CBS,” he added, likely referring to the network’s “The Big Bang Theory” main character and its spinoff.

It’s a big win for Trump, who is hopelessly addicted to television. He’s pumped about the news, and he apparently took note of Kimmel’s outrage, too.

“I absolutely love that Colbert got fired. His talent was even less than his ratings,” Trump wrote on Truth Social this morning. “I hear Jimmy Kimmel is next. Has even less talent than Colbert!”

Donald Trump threatened to sue the Wall Street Journal after the outlet reported on an embarrassing birthday card Trump wrote for late child sex predator Jeffrey Epstein — which included a drawing of a naked woman. Trump claims it never happened. “I never wrote a picture in my life,” Trump said, before posting on social media: “I look forward to getting Rupert Murdoch to testify in my lawsuit against him and his ‘pile of garbage’ newspaper.”

Side note: In this birthday message to his old buddy Epstein, Trump reportedly wrote: “Enigmas never age, have you noticed that?… Happy Birthday — and may every day be another wonderful secret.” Um… wow. Gross.

Meanwhile, Trump directed Attorney General Pam Bondi to seek the release of grand jury testimony from Epstein prosecution, in a new attempt to quell MAGA fury over this issue. There are legal barriers that make it tricky to release those documents, though — and they represent only a fraction of the government’s files on Epstein, anyways.

House Republicans passed $9 billion in cuts to foreign assistance and public broadcasting, which includes NPR and PBS. Republicans are threatening the future of “Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood” while slashing support for vulnerable kids in foreign countries and passing tax cuts for billionaires. Make it make sense.

Israel is performing thousands of controlled demolitions of civilian buildings in the Gaza Strip, which experts say could be a war crime. The Geneva Convention largely prohibits an occupying power from destroying such infrastructure, but Israel claims that Hamas has hidden “military assets” in civilian areas. This story is worth your time.

Trump’s plan to revamp Alcatraz into a maximum security prison could cost $2 billion, administration officials told Axios. For context: Republicans cut $1.1 billion in funds for NPR and PBS. But yes, a supermax prison that can only hold about 300 inmates is more important!

Five immigrants who the Trump administration deported to Eswatini, a small African nation, are being held in solitary confinement.

Did you have vacation plans in North Korea? Well too bad! The Hermit Kingdom banned foreign tourists from visiting its new beach resort, which dictator Kim Jong Un previously touted as “one of the greatest successes this year.” It’s unclear how long the ban will last… and why it was implemented in the first place.

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