Technologies

‘Weather Whiplash’ Could Be a Disturbing New Normal in a Weird, Warming World

After praying for rain for weeks, the US state that saw some of the year’s biggest wildfires in 2022 found itself soon suffering a deadly deluge.

This story is part of CNET Zero, a series that chronicles the impact of climate change and explores what’s being done about the problem.

I’ve lived in the high desert of the southwestern US most of my life, primarily in New Mexico and Colorado. In those four decades, I’ve never seen it as dry here as in 2022. In all that time, I’ve also never seen it as wet as this year.

In northern New Mexico, the year began with months of unseasonal heat, dryness and extreme wind that fueled the largest wildfire of the year in the lower 48 states. It burned through 340,000 acres of the Sangre de Cristo mountains and destroyed or damaged over a thousand homes and other structures.

Then, in the middle of June, the annual monsoon rains thankfully arrived to douse the fires. But they stayed a couple months longer and dumped nearly twice as much moisture as the previous year (or the year before that). In fact, we were still seeing some monsoon pattern precipitation several weeks later than normal.

There’s a term for this remarkably rapid turnaround in weather patterns that an increasing number of scientists have begun to use, both in the mainstream media and academic publications: weather whiplash.

“The huge shift in weather you experienced in New Mexico this summer is a perfect example,” Jennifer Francis, acting deputy director at the Woodwell Climate Research Center in Massachusetts tells me.

Francis is lead author on a paper published in September in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres on measuring weather whiplash events, which can be loosely defined as abrupt swings in weather conditions from one extreme to another.

At my home in the high desert this year, those swings translated into a Spring filled with smoke, heat, wind and the first emergency alert system notice I’d ever received warning me to get off the road immediately due to an approaching dust storm. By July the scene changed to one filled with rain, mud and more alerts, this time warning of flash flooding.

“Weather patterns are getting “stuck” in place more often, causing persistent heatwaves, drought, stormy periods, and even cold spells to happen more often,” Francis explained via email.

Her work shows all this stalled weather is connected to the rapid warming of the Arctic, which impacts the jet stream and in turn affects weather further south.

“These stuck weather patterns sometimes come to an abrupt end by changing abruptly to a very different pattern. This is weather whiplash.”

The phrase has been increasingly used in climate science circles for the past several years, but Francis points to a number of other instances of the phenomenon on full, sobering display in 2022 alone.

A July heatwave immediately followed exceptionally wet, cool weather in the Pacific Northwest and Northern Rockies in June. This turnaround was most dramatic in the Yellowstone region, where historic flooding in the first month of summer took many by surprise and claimed hundreds of homes but, somewhat miraculously, no lives. Shortly afterwards, temperatures soared several degrees above average and the region dried out.

Earlier in the year the inverse played out in Texas, where a spell of 67 consecutive dry, hot winter days in Dallas were followed by the city’s heaviest rains in 100 years, leading to flash flooding and a declaration of disaster by the state’s Governor.

Seasonal See-Saw

From late March until early June, much of northern New Mexico saw no measurable precipitation for a stretch of more than 70 days. Even for the current era, which many scientists suspect is the beginning of a megadrought in the southwestern US, that’s unusually dry.

This dryness, along with unseasonable heat and often extreme winds whipped up the embers of two controlled burns in the Santa Fe National Forest that had been secretly smoldering for months. Two wildfires sprang to life, eventually combining to form the 340,000-acre Calf Canyon-Hermit’s Peak fire complex.

The inferno burned homes, ranches, businesses and livestock, but didn’t claim any human lives – at least, not directly. Tens of thousands were evacuated from nearby cities and villages for weeks as fire devoured some of the state’s most rugged and beautiful terrain over the course of more than two months.

I visited some of the impacted communities to witness the total disruption and devastation while waiting to see if the flames would continue to push closer to my own community near Taos, less than 20 miles from the northwest edge of the fire.

For weeks it looked as though a nuclear bomb had been detonated just over the ridge of mountains near my home. A pyrocumulus mushroom cloud of smoke from the fire reached up into the atmosphere, a constant reminder of impending doom one valley over.

Sometimes the wind would shift and blow all that smoke our direction. It was possible to see this coming almost an hour in advance as a brown stream of smog would suddenly obscure the mountains. As it finally reached us, our eyes would water, our lungs would begin to burn and everything we wore or carried would take on the aroma of a barbecue. Minutes later, the sun would be blotted out on an otherwise sunny day. They were all sunny days back then.

My family would retreat inside every time the smoke came, of course. Then, in early June, another fire ignited on the opposite side of our community from where the megablaze was burning. We found ourselves surrounded. No matter which way the wind blew, there was a good chance it would blow smoke in our faces.

At this point our daughter was quarantined at home with COVID. We faced the very apocalyptic choice of keeping the windows open for better anti-viral ventilation or closing them to keep the smoke out. It wasn’t a particularly hard choice. We closed the windows. Inhaling smoke certainly isn’t great for getting over COVID, after all.

Then, in mid-June, both the weather and its impact took dramatic turns. The annual monsoon rains arrived right on time, and with an unusual intensity. Ironically, this is how New Mexico’s largest ever wildfire ended up claiming human lives after the flames had stopped spreading.

The burn scars left by wildfires absorb less moisture than healthy landscapes with plenty of vegetation, and that led to flash flooding. June and July in northern New Mexico saw repeated cycles of heavy rains, including a particularly heavy storm on July 21 that deluged the Calf Canyon-Hermit’s Peak burn scar. A flash flood tore through the Tecolote Canyon subdivision outside the city of Las Vegas, New Mexico, sweeping tons of mud, rocks, burned trees and even vehicles down the creek drainage. Tragically, three people were caught in the flood and died.

In the span of weeks, citizens in New Mexico went from fleeing fires to fleeing floods. Whiplash might describe the disjointed nature of this past summer, but it doesn’t begin to capture the anxiety brought on by this new realization that life in the 21st century might be about being ready for absolutely anything.

In June I was hauling water to my off-grid home in the back of a truck, 200 gallons at a time, and praying for the monsoon to arrive. The following month I was digging trenches to divert as much water as possible out of my driveway to lessen the persistent rain’s irritating habit of turning it into a muddy quagmire. This is to say nothing of the background anxiety created by nearby fires, floods and at least one epic wind event that took the roof off a neighbor’s house.

The Climate Connection

At least one group of researchers predicted this before it happened. Well, sort of.

On April 1, just five days before that massive fire in New Mexico sprang to life, a paper was published in the journal Science Advances titled “Climate change increases risk of extreme rainfall following wildfire in the western United States.”

The paper describes how scientists used climate models to predict that if global warming continues unabated, the western US will begin to see many more instances of extreme wildfires followed by extreme rainfall. They didn’t wait decades to see their predictions come true. It happened just weeks later.

“I would qualify what happened in New Mexico as extreme precipitation following extreme wildfires,” UCLA and National Center for Atmospheric Research climate scientist Daniel Swain, one of the authors of the study, told me. “Some of those fires were literally still burning pretty vigorously when the rain started. You really can’t get any whiplashier than that.”

Swain is one of a number of climate scientists digging into the data to determine what is creating this new, very 21st century sort of see-saw. One of the main factors, he says, is that the warming of the planet is accelerating the water, or hydrologic, cycle that moves moisture from surface water to the atmosphere and back again via precipitation.

“You actually get an exponential increase in the water-vapor-holding capacity of the atmosphere,” he explains.

Basically, for every degree centigrade of warming, the atmosphere can hold 7% more moisture. These increases compound over time, sort of like interest in a bank account, which provides the exponential acceleration of extreme rainfall events that are more frequent and more intense.

Swain describes our atmosphere as a sponge that grows ever larger as it warms, periodically soaking up potentially larger amounts of moisture and then dumping it all at once on some unfortunate locale. But this expanding sponge is also exacerbating dryness in places where it extracts an increasing amount of water out of the landscape.

This means drier dry periods and wetter precipitation events, sometimes back-to-back. Whiplash.

Swain cautions that it’s too soon to know how much of the weather whiplash experienced in northern New Mexico this year can truly be blamed on climate change versus just basic bad luck and the natural variation and randomness that we’d see in our weather patterns even without global warming.

Climate scientists have developed so-called “weather attribution” models that quantify the effects of climate change directly on specific weather events like what was experienced this year in New Mexico, but the process can take several months or longer.

Weirder than Warming

When I first started covering climate two decades ago, a climatologist told me the phrase “global warming” wouldn’t fully describe what was going to happen to our environment and that it would be more like “global weirding.”

That phrase never caught on, but I’m starting to think weather whiplash might be its appropriate successor.

For decades now, talk about the warming climate has focused on increasing temperatures, but usually these are increasing average temperatures. However, we don’t experience climate in the aggregate. We live it day-to-day as weather that is increasingly extreme.

“If you get 20 inches of rainfall distributed as half an inch a day for 40 days it’s a very different picture than getting 20 inches of rainfall because it rains 10 inches one day and 10 inches the next,” Swain suggests. “The average might be the same, but you’re living in a completely different world.”

In other words, our experience of climate change can’t be fully captured by talking about how much temperatures or sea levels or rainfall are rising. It’s the extremes and the weirdness and the chaotic swings from one state to another that tell the real story and inflict the most trauma.

At the point this summer when wildfires were burning on both sides of our community I had a weird flashback to my childhood. One of my favorite things to read as a kid in the previous century was Choose Your Own Adventure books. They had this intoxicating ability to provide both an escape and agency at the same time.

It feels like we could use a little more of both things right now. Life today has the feel of all the potential adventures in those books happening back-to-back and often simultaneously. The only choice is to be ready for anything.

Technologies

Supreme Court permits certain Trump mail-in voting restrictions before midterm elections

The Supreme Court has temporarily blocked a lower court ruling that prevented the Trump administration from implementing new restrictions on mail-in voting, allowing the administration to proceed with its plan to impose new requirements on states ahead of the midterm elections.

The Supreme Court on Monday sided with President Donald Trump for now in his effort to impose sweeping new restrictions on distributing mail ballots, putting on hold a lower-court ruling that had blocked key parts of the plan ahead of November’s midterm elections.

The justices, over three dissents, paused a ruling by U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani in Boston that prevented the Trump administration from carrying out portions of a March executive order involving the U.S. Postal Service and voter eligibility lists. The court’s three liberal justices dissented.

But the decision does not immediately allow the Postal Service to put its new mail-ballot system into effect.

A separate nationwide injunction issued Aug. 11 by U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani in Boston still blocks USPS from implementing the new procedures for the Nov. 3 elections. The administration would have to overcome that order as well.

The distinction was central to the Supreme Court’s decision.

The majority said Trump’s executive order itself does not require states to change how they conduct elections. Instead, it directs federal agencies to develop policies that could later impose requirements on states. Because those policies had not yet been implemented when 23 states and Washington, D.C., challenged the order, the court said the challenge was premature.

The justices stressed they were not deciding whether Trump’s order or the policies developed under it are ultimately legal.

“The Court’s disposition of this application does not mean that any measure taken by the Government to implement the Order will necessarily be lawful,” the majority wrote. “On that score, time will tell.”

The Postal Service last week finalized rules intended to carry out part of Trump’s order, including new requirements involving ballot envelopes, barcodes and information states must provide USPS. Those rules remain blocked by Talwani’s separate injunction.

The case now returns to the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals as the underlying legal fight continues. Some states have already started preparing to send ballots to military and overseas voters in early September.

Technologies

Trump targets Iran’s trade lifelines — here are the countries most exposed

Washington’s threat of “economic D-Day” collides with a small group of governments that account for most of what remains of Iran’s foreign trade.

The U.S. announced an “economic D-Day” campaign Monday to isolate Iran from the global economy, threatening penalties against “enablers” that continue doing business with Tehran.

The move is part of Washington’s bid to sever the trade lifeline that has sustained Tehran’s economy through nearly six months of war.

While enforcement details are sketchy, the threat could still put the U.S. on a collision course with some of Tehran’s major trade partners.

China

China is the biggest buyer of Iranian oil and serves as a crucial link to the global economy for Tehran, accounting for about 90% of its oil exports, according to the U.S. government.

China reported $9.96 billion in bilateral trade with Iran in 2025, excluding the roughly $31.2 billion in unreported Iranian crude oil exports to China that year, according to the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission.

Independent Chinese refiners take in the bulk of it, often rebranded as Malaysian or Indonesian crude and settled through intermediaries outside the dollar system, according to Kpler. The U.S. Treasury has sanctioned several of those refineries this year for Iranian oil purchases, while sparing Chinese financial institutions.

Beijing has openly opposed U.S. sanctions against Iran, arguing that economic pressure will not resolve the disputes. In May, China ordered domestic firms to disregard U.S. sanctions on five refiners linked to the Iranian oil trade.

While Beijing is unlikely to push back directly on Washington’s sanctions push, it will “quietly step up compliance” among state banks and oil companies to avoid getting caught in the net, said Dan Wang, China director at Eurasia Group, pointing to “a dichotomy between the official statement and the private practice.”

“Chinese authorities care more about dollar access in financing and market entry to the U.S.,” she said.

United Arab Emirates

The Emirates, located just 50 miles from Iran across the Persian Gulf, has long been a major trading hub for Iran.

The bilateral trade amounted to around $28 billion in 2024, when the Emirates was its largest source of imports, contributing over 30%, according to the World Trade Organization data. The UAE was also Iran’s third-largest export destination, making up 12% of its shipments, totaling more than $7 billion.

That relationship hit a snag last week as the UAE moved to suspend all trade and financial transactions with Iran, following two ballistic missiles fired toward Emirati territory, one of which targeted UAE-owned tankers.

Iran has relied on UAE banks and its financial system to access the world economy through illicit, often murky transactions, and cutting off Iran would require more forceful actions from Emirati authorities to crack down on opaque financial and trading activity, according to U.S.-based think tank The Washington Institute.

“The majority of Iran’s transshipment, smuggling, and shadow banking activity takes place in Dubai, so Washington must do what it can to help the UAE’s national leaders in Abu Dhabi convince and cajole Dubai’s leaders to play ball,” Matthew Levitt, a former U.S. Treasury official, wrote in a note on Monday.

Turkey

Turkey maintains significant commercial ties with Tehran, importing Iranian natural gas and exporting manufactured goods south.

The Turkey-Iran bilateral trade reached $5.7 billion in 2024, according to the Turkish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, with Ankara exporting mostly machinery and parts, chemical and agricultural products, while importing energy products from Tehran.

Meanwhile, under a 25-year gas supply contract between the two countries that expired at the end of July, Turkey’s imports of Iranian gas spiked this year while Iran’s share of Turkey’s total natural gas imports rose to 18.6%, according to local media.

While Ankara has sought to diversify toward other suppliers, expanding pipeline imports from Azerbaijan and Russia, it has, so far, not signaled that it intends to cut Iran off.

Iraq

Iraq, dependent on Iranian electricity and gas, has historically traded billions with Tehran.

Iran renewed a five-year contract in March 2024 to supply Iraq with up to nearly 660 billion cubic feet of natural gas a year, and electricity imports from Iran accounted for more than 30% of its electricity generation in 2023, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

Iraq-Iran trade reached more than $10 billion in 2025, according to Reuters, with Tehran exporting food, consumer goods and other products to the Iraqi market. The trade has dwindled this year amid increased security risks in the region and intermittent disruptions along border crossings since the war started in late February.

Iraq reportedly pays Iran around $4 billion to $5 billion a year for natural gas for electricity generation. The fresh U.S. sanctions could curtail Baghdad’s payments for Iranian energy.

India

India, among Iran’s top five trading partners, has seen its bilateral trade with Iran fall in recent years to around $1.6 billion in the year ending March 2026, according to India’s Department of Commerce, down from $2.3 billion in the year through to March 2023.

New Delhi primarily exports rice, tea, sugar and pharmaceuticals to Iran, and imports dry and fresh fruits from Iran.

In April, India resumed importing crude oil from Iran following a seven-year halt, after the U.S. temporarily lifted sanctions on Iranian crude exports.

But those trades now will be tested if Washington makes good on its threat to sanction any entity, including Indian refiners, that have procured Iranian energy.

Technologies

These ‘overlooked gems’ pay attractive income, a dividend specialist says

Seek out these dividend-paying names, says ClearBridge Investments’ Michael Clarfeld.

In this market, there are several “overlooked gems” that provide good opportunities — and pay dividends, according to ClearBridge Investments’ Michael Clarfeld. Stocks have been volatile this summer, with artificial-intelligence companies swinging up and down, depending on shifting investor views of infrastructure spending. Treasury yields have also weighed on stocks, with the 30-year bond yield climbing to a 19-year high last week before dipping back down. Yields declined on Monday after CNBC reported the Treasury Department could use its General Account to help fund increased purchases of government bonds. Despite the rocky summer, though, the market remains near their all-time highs. The S & P 500 closed at a new record of 7,798.99 on Aug. 13. And while there have been some periods when the bull market has broadened out to include more stocks, the market remains heavily concentrated in mega-cap technology companies. “The longer these things go on, like this market concentration and momentum, we get lulled into losing our perspective on how extreme the situation is,” said Clarfeld, portfolio manager in charge of ClearBridge’s dividend strategy. The funds he manages include ClearBridge Dividend Strategy Fund (SOPAX) and Franklin ClearBridge Enhanced Income ETF (YLDE). The former, rated four stars by Morningstar , yields 1.96% and has a 1% expense ratio. The latter boasts a 1.93% yield and 0.48% expense ratio. So far this year, both are slightly underperforming the S & P 500, which yields 1.02%. SOPAX YTD mountain ClearBridge Dividend Strategy Fund year to date Historical data shows that periods of narrow, momentum-driven markets are typically followed by periods of broader market participation — when dividend-growth portfolios excel, Clarfeld noted. ‘Pretty terrific opportunities’ Clarfeld isn’t predicting an immediate shift away from the current market environment, or that investors shouldn’t own tech. But he believes investors should be aware of risk and stay diversified. In the meantime, there are stocks that are going unnoticed by many investors right now, he said. “People are so myopically focused on things to do with AI that they’re overlooking things in other areas, and it’s really creating some pretty terrific opportunities,” Clarfeld said. He breaks it down into two areas: “pedestrian” companies that are high-quality businesses and “tangential” names that have been taken down during the concerns over the disruptive effect of AI on software . Two unexciting names Clarfeld likes are The Williams Companies and Unilever , which yield 2.98% and 3.46%, respectively. One of the largest natural gas pipeline companies in the country, Williams is a business not particularly commodity sensitive, he said. It is the second largest position in SOPAX, at 4.05% as of July 31. “We have been seeing a big growth in natural gas production and natural gas infrastructure for 15 years because of the shale boom and renaissance, and then it has gotten turbocharged over the last year or two as the energy demands are going surging with AI and data centers,” Clarfeld said. WMB YTD mountain The Williams Companies year to date On top of that, Williams has developed custom power solutions, its balance sheet is in good shape and it is growing earnings and cash flow, he said. Clarfeld sees “phenomenal growth” ahead for many years because of the need for data center power. Williams has an average analyst rating of overweight and 21% upside to the average price target, according to FactSet. Shares are up about 18% year to date. His other pick, U.K.-based Unilever, a global maker of consumer staples ranging from Dove soap to Hellmann’s mayonnaise, is executing well, Clarfeld said. “They’re growing in an industry or a sector where volume growth has been tougher to come by,” he said. “They’ve been having robust organic volume growth.” UL YTD mountain Unilever year to date Unilever makes up 2.67% of SOPAX. The stock has an average analyst rating of overweight and 11% upside to the average price target, according to FactSet. Shares are down fractionally year to date. Lastly, a third name Clarfeld likes is Automatic Data Processing , which took a hit earlier this year but has since rebounded. ADP, which offers a 2.42% dividend yield, uses software to process payrolls, he noted. ADP YTD mountain ADP year to date “When you think about businesses that are likely to be disintermediated by AI, payrolls would seem like it’s one of the last of them,” Clarfeld said. “It’s very mission critical.” ADP makes up 2.3% of SOPAX. It has an average analyst rating of hold and 2% upside to the average price target, according to FactSet. Other top holdings in the ClearBridge Dividend Strategy Fund include ExxonMobil , Microsoft , Alphabet , Apollo Global Management and Marsh & McLennan .

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