DISASTERSComing This Summer: Record-Breaking Heat and Plenty of Hurricanes

By Matt Simon

With less than a month to go until summer, weather forecasters have been dropping some troubling news about what might be in store. AccuWeather had already predicted an especially active season — which begins June 1 — with up to 10 hurricanes out at sea, and its meteorologists are now forecasting a hotter-than-normal summer on land. Last week, the company warned that the three months could bring “sweltering heat, severe weather, intense wildfires, and the start of a dynamic hurricane season” — an echo of last summer, which was the hottest on record. In some places, like coastal cities along the Gulf Coast, those hazards could combine into dangerous “compound disasters,” with heat waves and hurricanes arriving back-to-back. 

The Trump administration’s cost-cutting crusade could make this summer’s weather all the more perilous. Mass layoffs at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have hurricane forecasters worried that they’ll lose access to the data they need to make accurate predictions of where storms will make landfall and at what intensity. And as electricity gets more expensive and global warming forces households to run their air-conditioning more, advocates worry that the loss of federal support for people struggling to pay their electric bills could leave a swath of the population especially vulnerable. 

President Donald Trump’s proposed 2026 budget, unveiled last week, would cancel the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, which provides $4 billion a year to help people pay electricity bills, said Alison Coffey, senior policy analyst at the Boston-based nonprofit Initiative for Energy Justice. “We are about to experience one of the hottest summers on record,” Coffey said. “And this is happening at a time when U.S. households are really, really struggling to pay their utility bills.”