The Carbon Cartel Behind Every Extreme Heatwave

The drunk drivers of civilization are on record

The Carbon Cartel Behind Every Extreme Heatwave (created by author)

When a drunk driver plows through a red light and kills someone, no one calls it an “accident.” We don’t shrug and say it was fate, or the weather, or bad luck. We hold the driver accountable, because choices have consequences — and without accountability, the killing continues.

Heatwaves work the same way. They may feel like acts of the Devil, or random natural events, but the evidence says otherwise. Scientists have shown that human-caused climate change has supercharged heatwaves, making them more frequent, longer, and deadlier — driving economic losses, ecosystem collapse, and a surge in heat-related deaths. Now, researchers have gone further: tracing the fingerprints of disaster all the way back to the fossil fuel companies that lit the fuse.

A landmark study examined every major heatwave recorded this century — more than 200 events catalogued in the EM-DAT disaster database (and likely many more missing from unreported events in Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean). The findings should be, at least, as shocking as a drunk driver’s massacre on a full sidewalk. More than one-quarter of those heatwaves would have been virtually impossible without human-driven warming. From 2000 to 2009, they were made 1.4 °C hotter and 20…