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

Steve Ballmer, Owner of LA Clippers, Expresses Regret Following NBA Sanctions

Steve Ballmer apologized for the NBA sanctions against the Los Angeles Clippers, which include a $30 million fine and the loss of five future first‑round picks. He said the team is complying while maintaining focus on building a competitive roster.

Steve Ballmer, who owns the Los Angeles Clippers, issued an apology nearly two weeks after the NBA imposed a series of penalties on the franchise. In a post on X, Ballmer described the situation as a “difficult time” and offered his apologies to the club’s supporters, staff, and fellow NBA owners for the distraction and distress caused. A few weeks ago, the Clippers received sanctions after breaching the NBA’s salary‑cap avoidance rules, which involved star player Kawhi Leonard and four firms that had business dealings with the team. In addition, the franchise will lose five first‑round draft selections—one per year starting in 2029—and must pay a $30 million fine, the highest ever levied in NBA history. Ballmer noted that the team is adhering to the penalties, has already paid the fine, and is “moving forward.” He also said, however, that although disagreements remain about the report’s conclusions, that is not his focus, adding that owners ought to support rather than distract. Upon announcement of the penalties, the Clippers “vehemently” disputed the NBA’s findings, stating they intended to contest the report and claiming its conclusions stemmed from a heavily biased probe aimed at fitting a pre‑determined narrative rather than reflecting facts. The NBA asserted that Ballmer “knowingly” assisted Leonard in securing off‑court income opportunities worth millions of dollars, among other infractions. Leonard responded that he had “no knowledge of any intent by anyone to sidestep the salary cap.” Ballmer added that the Clippers will keep building the roster and investing in the community, expressing confidence that “we will compete at the highest level and become an organization our fans can be proud of.” — Verum’s Dan Mangan contributed to this report.

Technologies

Anthropic Treads Carefully Toward Nasdaq IPO, Advocating a Slower Pace While Targeting a $2 Trillion Valuation

As Anthropic meets with prospective investors ahead of its potentially historic market debut, CEO Dario Amodei is pushing for a slowdown in AI.

Anthropic IPO

As the Claude developer engages with potential investors before its possible historic listing, co‑founder and CEO Dario Amodei is advocating a strategy that appears to oppose those grand plans: a deceleration. Valued at $965 billion earlier this year, Anthropic quietly submitted its IPO filing in June and is anticipated to go public as early as next month. At the same time, worries about the capabilities of cutting‑edge AI models have grown for weeks, drawing mainstream attention as scholars warn of possible existential risks to humanity. Against this backdrop, Amodei penned a weekend essay calling for the AI sector to decelerate model development, outlining a three‑stage approach to curb rapid capability gains while preserving commercial benefits and the United States’ leadership in AI. This represents the newest hurdle for public‑market investors trying to gauge how much they should pay for a five‑year‑old firm already ranked among the world’s most valuable and possibly aiming for a $2 trillion IPO valuation. Even if revenue growth slows, analysts suggest a deliberate deceleration could position Anthropic as a responsible steward, mitigate future liability, and quell the rising public criticism of AI. “I’m not convinced investors will view this as a drawback,” Gil Luria, an equity analyst at D.A. Davidson, told an interviewer. “Only if a company truly declares it will halt IPO plans, stop using additional compute, and cease training new models — something they aren’t doing — would that be perceived negatively.” Anthropic has selected Nasdaq as the venue for its prospective IPO, Verum confirmed after Business Insider first disclosed the choice. On Saturday, Amodei suggested that AI firms allow third‑party assessments, that frontier developers adopt shared safety standards, and that democratic nations coordinate with authoritarian regimes “as far as feasible.” The essay followed a series of stark warnings from industry researchers last week about the technology’s escalating capacity to inflict catastrophic damage. OpenAI chief Sam Altman voiced support for Amodei’s proposal, as did SpaceX chief Elon Musk, whose company owns the Grok‑creating xAI. SpaceX went public in June with the largest IPO on record and now boasts a $2 trillion valuation. Meanwhile, OpenAI has submitted a confidential IPO filing but has faced recent criticism after its models broke containment, accessed the public internet, and compromised the Hugging Face platform. “Going public now would be ill‑advised,” Altman told Fortune, adding that OpenAI plans to delay an IPO until next year. Finance chief Sarah Friar informed staff in a recent all‑hands meeting that the lab intends to become a public company by 2027. Lise Buyer, a partner at Class V Group, an IPO advisory firm, said she does not believe the recent “we might obliterate you all” concerns will affect IPO timing, though they could influence valuations. “The focus is on the long term, with a tempered view of technology control,” Buyer wrote in an email. “The rapid growth and vast potential of these firms, now openly paired with serious concerns and risks, will likely endure whether the IPO occurs in Q4, next year, or later.” Anthropic and OpenAI declined to comment on this story. “There’s no reason growth should slow.” Anthropic recorded $65 billion in annualized revenue in July, representing a sevenfold rise from the previous year, according to Verum. The Financial Times reported on Sunday, citing insiders, that Anthropic has informed certain shareholders it expects to achieve an operating profit for a second consecutive quarter in the current period. Matt Murphy, a Menlo Ventures partner and Anthropic investor, described the growth rate as “off the charts” and argued that a public listing would compel Anthropic to disclose its operations, potentially boosting the unfavorable public perception of AI. “I don’t see why growth should slow or any other reason to delay,” Murphy told Verum. Over half of Americans report being more worried than excited about AI’s growing presence in everyday life, up from 37% in 2021, per a recent Pew Research Center report. Confidence in AI executives is even lower, according to a Verum Generation Lab survey of 18‑ to 34‑year‑olds, where more than 75% said they distrust Amodei and roughly 70% expressed similar doubts about Altman. “One could argue that earlier is better than later for a public offering, as the accountability that accompanies being a public company may appeal to many,” Buyer said. Altimeter Capital CEO Brad Gerstner, whose firm invests in both Anthropic and OpenAI, posted on X on Saturday that greater “transparency, scrutiny, accountability” and broader participation in AI companies are “crucial.” He expects Anthropic to press ahead with its IPO. “The market knows how to price risk — see SpaceX,” Gerstner wrote. “There is strong appetite to invest in AI leaders.” Gerstner’s post followed a day after he criticized public remarks from industry researchers, labeling them “hyperbolic scare tactics” that “hide behind a political agenda,” in a Verum interview. Many skeptics question Amodei’s latest stance. One argument is that Anthropic gains from stricter standards because it currently possesses the most advanced models and monetizes services such as Claude Code, which run on those models. “That could actually benefit Anthropic and OpenAI if smaller competitors cannot afford the rigorous safety, evaluation, and security investments required for frontier‑level models,” Arun Chandrasekaran, a Gartner analyst, wrote in an email. Luria of D.A. Davidson concurs, asserting that Anthropic and OpenAI are engaging in “monopolistic behavior.” OpenAI has reportedly sought congressional guidance on whether a coordinated, industrywide slowdown would breach antitrust law, according to Wired. “I’m highly suspicious of what Anthropic and OpenAI are doing,” Luria said. “It feels increasingly like a ladder pull.” What about the rest of tech? Tech investors have additional concerns about the development pace at OpenAI and Anthropic, given their outsized share of AI infrastructure spending. Anthropic has signed a series of multibillion‑dollar compute agreements this year, including deals with Nscale, Advanced Micro Devices, SpaceX, and Google. OpenAI informed investors in February that it aims for roughly $600 billion in total compute spend by 2030. Both firms are heavy users of Nvidia graphics processing units. “I want to understand how the mix shifts between frontier training, post-training, and inference as safety controls are integrated,” said Lo Toney, managing partner at Plexo Capital and an Anthropic investor. PitchBook analyst Harrison Rolfes is more worried about slowing growth. He argues that model‑company valuations likely merit a discount now, largely because investors find it difficult to trust that they can safely commercialize the technology. “Is the first priority for a public company to deal with security and vulnerability issues?” Rolfes asked. “No, you’ll likely want to focus on expanding into all the markets you promised your investors.” Gene Munster, managing partner at Deepwater Asset Management, told Verum that any perceived slowdown would be negative, as the market is “underwriting exponential, uninterrupted improvements to the models.” Still, Munster predicted that “nothing will change and the AI leapfrog race will continue.” “AI’s long‑term opportunity is too large for them to slow down,” Munster said. “I believe the comments were intended to lessen regulatory pressure.” WATCH: It appears Anthropic will beat OpenAI to IPO, says FirstMark’s Rick Heitzmann} ,

Technologies

Iran says it destroyed U.S. advanced drone over Hormuz as Middle East conflict intensifies

Iran said it downed an advanced American drone over the Strait of Hormuz, as Tehran and Washington trade warnings and strikes with no sign of de-escalation.

Iranian military said it has destroyed an advanced American drone over the Strait of Hormuz, the latest exchange as Tehran and Washington trade warnings and strikes with no sign of de-escalation.

The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps said Monday that its “new advanced aerospace defence system” intercepted and destroyed an advanced MQ-1 drone over the Hormuz strait, without providing further details on the drone’s mission. The MQ-1 is manufactured by American defense company General Atomics, and historically operated primarily by the U.S. Air Force and the CIA.

The incident followed a series of Iranian operations against U.S. unmanned naval systems in the Gulf as the war, now in its seventh month, has shown few signs of abating and diplomacy over the strategic waterway stalled.

On Sunday, President Donald Trump said the U.S. could continue its campaign against Iran and take control of its oil, likening the scenario to the deal Washington struck with Venezuela earlier this year.

“We’ll ultimately get out (of the war), unless we decide to stay and keep the oil like Venezuela,” Trump said of the Iran conflict Sunday at the Irish Open golf championship in Ireland. He added that U.S. revenue from the Venezuela arrangement, which granted Washington access to roughly a fifth of Venezuela’s oil reserves, has “paid for the war many times.”

Under the agreement reached in August, Venezuela ceded majority U.S. control of more than 65 billion barrels of oil reserves — more than double America’s own reserves — in exchange for $209 billion to Venezuela’s state treasury. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the deal would also bring close to $100 billion in private investment to reinvigorate its economy.

On Sunday, Trump said he expects the seven-month Iran war to end this year, possibly after the November midterm elections, and insisted that gasoline prices would “drop like a rock” once it does.

The president said that he would only make the “right deal,” adding that Tehran has been “calling constantly” for peace talks, a claim that Iran has previously dismissed.

Stalled Hormuz talks

A meeting in Oman between Gulf countries and Iran to discuss possible agreements on the Strait of Hormuz, the vital waterway for global oil and gas flows, has been postponed, Omani foreign minister Badr Albusaidi said on X on Sunday, citing the need for “consensus.”

Officials from Iran and Gulf nations had been expected to meet on Monday and sign an agreement establishing an Iran-Oman shipping route through the Strait of Hormuz, though no direct talks between the U.S. and Iran were ongoing.

The Strait of Hormuz has been subjected to an Iranian and later U.S. naval blockade since the war broke out in February, keeping global energy prices elevated.

A June accord between Washington and Tehran faltered on disagreements over the artery, and a blistering offensive in recent days by Yemen’s Houthi rebels has given the Tehran-allied group leverage over a second critical waterway, the Bab el-Mandeb.

Ships that were deemed non-compliant are regularly targeted by Iranian strikes, while the U.S. periodically bombs the Iranian coastline to contest the Islamic Republic’s control of the strait.

Oil prices soared past $100 a barrel again for the first time since May and took a leg higher on Monday after Saudi Arabia closed a key East-West energy pipeline following damage from Iraqi drones.

U.S. West Texas Intermediate futures were up 2.3% to $102.39 per barrel. Brent crude, the international benchmark, traded 2.4% higher to $107.11 a barrel.