This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Sávio Bortolini Pimentel just missed getting on the roster to represent his national team, Brazil, at the 1994 FIFA World Cup in the United States.

At the time, he was a 20-year-old professional player with the Rio de Janeiro team Flamengo. He recalls other players telling him after the fact that the weather during some matches was just too hot. And the heat was “intense,” they said, during the final match at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, California, under a 32 degree Celsius (90 degrees Fahrenheit) sun, when Brazil prevailed over Italy.

Players in the upcoming 2026 FIFA World Cup in June and July face an even greater risk of unsafe temperatures than they did in 1994 — the last time the World Cup was held in the United States — according to estimates from researchers at Imperial College London. Human-induced climate change has made these conditions significantly more likely in the 16 host cities in the US, Mexico and Canada, according to the report. 

The report predicted that five games could take place in unsafe heat, up from three games in 1994. The report used a threshold for unsafe temperatures that may require postponements based on wet bulb globe temperatures of 28°C (83°F), which is recommended by FIFPRO, the international player’s union. Wet bulb globe temperatures are calculated based on a variety of factors — including the sun, humidity, and temperature — to show the stress on the human body. FIFA also uses wet bulb globe temperatures but currently considers postponing matches only at levels exceeding 32°C (90°F). 

Chris Mullington, a consultant anesthetist at the Imperial College London who presented the report at a webinar, explained why soccer uses wet bulb temperatures to calculate if weather conditions are safe for players.

“A 30 [degrees] Celsius [86°F] day in dry, breezy conditions is very different from a 30 [degrees] Celsius [86°F] day with high humidity, strong sun, and little wind,” he said. “High humidity reduces the evaporation of sweat, limiting the body’s primary cooling mechanism.”

Sixty current and former professional soccer players from around the world recently issued an open letter urging FIFA to update its heat guidelines for events happening under dangerous heat before the World Cup.

“It can make you feel light-headed, dizzy, experience fatigue, muscle cramps and worse. You can run less and it becomes impossible to play with the same intensity as with more average temperatures,” the players wrote.

The players also asked the league to do what it can to ease the climate change crisis by dropping fossil fuel sponsors and changing game schedules to reduce travel and the league’s fossil fuel footprint.

Friederike Otto, professor of climate science at the Imperial College London and one of the authors of the report, said the increased risk for hotter temperatures shows climate change is having a real and measurable impact on the viability of holding World Cups during the northern hemisphere summer. The final match of the tournament, scheduled to be played on July 19 at the MetLife Stadium in New Jersey, has a 12.5 percent chance of exceeding the 26°C (7°F) mark and a 3 percent chance of reaching 28°C (83°F).

“That the World Cup Final itself — one of the biggest sporting occasions on the planet — faces a non-insignificant risk of being played in ‘cancellation-level’ heat [28°C or 83°F] should be a wake-up call for FIFA and fans, highlighting the urgent need to realize that there is no aspect of society not affected by climate change,” Otto said.

The 2022 World Cup, held in Qatar, was moved from summer to winter because of the threat of extreme heat. Last summer’s Club World Cup, held in 12 locations around the United States, served in many ways as a prelude for this year’s World Cup. In that tournament, no games were postponed due to heat, even though temperatures soared above 32°C (90°F).

The Imperial College report shows nearly a quarter of all World Cup games are likely to be played in temperatures higher than 26°C (79°F), and about 5 matches are expected to occur above 28°C (83°F) — almost double the number from the 1994 World Cup.

The risk for athletes

Under severe heat and dehydration, athletes’ heart rates rise, their muscles fatigue faster, and they sweat more. “Your body is trying to prevent the rapid rate of rise of your body temperature; it’s just a protective mechanism,” said Douglas Casa, chief executive officer of the Korey Stringer Institute, a nonprofit based at the University of Connecticut that works to educate and prevent heat illness and sudden death in athletes and laborers.

Under extreme conditions, around 40°C (104°F), Casa said, the body enters into the volitional exhaustion phase: the point during exercise where you voluntarily stop because you feel unable to continue doing the same movements. 

Sávio said players now are likely more resilient to the heat.

“There are athletes that are more used to the cold than to the heat — that’s normal,” he said. “But today’s athletes are much more prepared, and even more so than in 1994, due to the evolution of preparation techniques, equipment, and products.”

But training only goes so far. Sávio, who won bronze with the Brazilian team during the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta and is now retired from soccer, said athletes feel the heat on the pitch much more dramatically. 

“If we’re looking at 35°C [95°F], like what happened in 1994 when we even heard of matches played at 40°C (104°F), then yes, it’s increasingly demanding,” he said. “The pace is automatically reduced.” 

But there are alternatives, even if FIFA does not choose to postpone eligible matches. Casa urged FIFA to make aggressive cooling strategies available at all stadium locker rooms. He also recommended extending hydration breaks from the mandated three minutes to six, as the heat could influence the athletes’ recovery from one game to the next.

“Do you realize people could easily be 103 or 104°F [40°C] when they come in at halftime?” Casa said. “My point is, if you have 15 minutes and you get in quickly at the stoppage, you could have 10 or 11 minutes of aggressive cooling: rotating freezing cold wet towels over your whole body, going into a cold plunge, anything like that.”

The risk for fans

Casa said he is not against playing games in the heat, but high temperatures and dehydration at the World Cup can lead to lower-quality soccer games. 

“Why not give the fans who just spent a fortune on these tickets the best quality game that they could possibly watch with these elite soccer players?” he asked.

Kevin Muneton Ramirez, a 27-year-old American-Colombian dual citizen, is excited to watch the Portuguese star Cristiano Ronaldo play in what is expected to be his last World Cup. He bought tickets for the June 27 match in Miami between Portugal and Colombia, and he expects his home country’s team to win the game.

Muneton Ramirez said, as a fan, he does not really mind games when the players get exhausted at the end.

“The game turns into a different game, it’s more ‘mentality,’” he said. “The one that commits less mistakes is the one that ends up winning.”

For fans, Casa said FIFA should at least include free water-filling stations inside stadiums. Fans could fall ill as a result of overwhelming heat and dehydration, even if they’re not moving too much.

According to FIFA’s stadium code of conduct, last updated on June 2, fans are not allowed to bring empty containers that can be refilled at a water fountain or dispenser. Bottles containing “baby milk and sterilized water in containers” or liquids that a fan requires for medical reasons are allowed with approved documentation. 

Muneton Ramirez does not usually go to stadiums to watch soccer.

“But if I have the opportunity to go to a World Cup…at least once in my lifetime, I’d go to any game,” he said.

Nick Sadler and his wife had different ideas of what a chill Saturday looked like. He considered the weekend a blank slate — no set plans, the family’s moment to reset and chill. She was under the impression that time was up for grabs and put a short hangout on their calendar, which Sadler saw as his wife not taking his schedule into account. To settle the argument, he opened up ChatGPT, specifically the group chat function, which allows more than one human to interact with the technology. Sadler prompted the chatbot to act as a neutral mediator and to instruct them on their next moves. Sadler tells Vox that ChatGPT acted as a trusted friend, or even a therapist, suggesting both of them consider different perspectives. It attempted to pinpoint where the conversation broke down (“Both of you then behaved logically according to your own understanding. That means this is not primarily a respect problem. It’s a classification problem.”) and offered guidelines for future scheduling (“A simple question can prevent most of these arguments: ‘Is this an idea, or are we locking this in?’”)

“It was like, ‘Well, next time just consider this’ and ‘maybe try saying this’ and ‘maybe try doing that,’” Sadler, a film producer, says. “We got some sort of advice to follow, but ultimately we’ve still got to do the work and we’ve still got to actually take the actions.”

Sadler, a 48-year-old self-proclaimed AI enthusiast, is no stranger to utilizing ChatGPT in his marriage. He’s used it to uncover the weaknesses in his arguments and to craft apology texts to his wife. “I put in purpose mistakes so she wouldn’t think I was just using ChatGPT,” he says.

But the pressures of parenting two young kids was kindling for their periodic annoying marital spats. Sadler and his wife considered couples counseling, but once he discovered ChatGPT could guide them through difficult conversations, they no longer felt they needed the help of a professional. One night, while sitting on the couch with his wife, Sadler launched ChatGPT and told his wife to talk to it as if it was a therapist. “In a way, it’s having a therapist on tap,” he says.

That people are turning to large language models to navigate their love lives isn’t entirely surprising. Relationships have peaks and valleys and, many times, exist in an emotional gray area. Chatbots, on the other hand, are authoritative in tone and confident, even when they’re wrong. 

Some people are going a step beyond asking Claude to draft an apology text, and inviting AI into the most intimate moments of their lives: fights with their significant others. In other words, they are treating technology like an on-demand couples therapist. The tech, which could be ambiently listening or addressed directly via voice or text, might suggest someone use more “I” statements or prompt couples to ask questions like “Where did you feel unsupported?” 

Research has suggested publicly available AI, like ChatGPT, is an effective intermediary in a dispute, with human subjects feeling less divided when AI was mediating. But AI platforms lack the emotional intelligence to adequately read a couple’s body language and tone, understand cultural context and power dynamics, and incorporate a couple’s past into the fight at hand.

The desire for an authoritative, always-available guide in the midst of conflict is certainly seductive, but emotional matters are best reserved for human-to-human conversation. “The answer is typically not that you need some type of content strategy on how you should approach your next steps,” Amelia Miller, a fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, tells Vox. “But it’s much more that you need emotional support, which comes from asking other people that you care about what you should do in the situation, not asking a machine.”

Drawing from a shared reality

In her Bay Area therapy practice, Courtney Quattrini has seen her fair share of couples who leverage AI chatbots in their relationships, including using it as a practice conversation partner and to ghostwrite texts to their significant other. While none of her clients have let ChatGPT or Claude mediate a fight, some do bring in AI summaries of arguments from one person’s perspective to their sessions with her. “They’re ruminating or they’re thinking about their side of the fight: What am I going to come back and say, how am I going to prove that I’m right or wrong?” Quattrini tells Vox. “They’re summarizing the fight from their perspective, and then they’ll bring in the summary and present it almost like it’s objective, but of course it’s not objective.”

But much of the work in couples therapy centers on the idea that two things can be true at once, and is about getting both individuals to understand that their partner’s emotional reality is important. “When you’re coming in and you want to summarize who won a fight, that really doesn’t align with the work that we’re actually doing,” Quattrini says. Feeding AI your narrative doesn’t help you see the things you could have done differently. 

But when both people in a relationship invite AI into the discussion, leveling the playing field, the technology draws from a version of the story that may be more closely aligned with reality. A few months into dating, Khalid Tawohid and his partner discovered they’d both been discussing their relationship with their respective AI chatbots. “How can we get our AIs to just talk to each other?” Tawohid tells Vox.

Earlier this year, the 25-year-old software engineer designed a workaround where both his and his partner’s Claude agents — drawing from each individual’s full chat history — could facilitate difficult conversations. The app, called Bridge, claims to provide scaffolding for the discussions and package disorderly thoughts in a more coherent manner. Instead of looking to a machine to validate your point of view, the machine, ideally, would hold your hand as you attempt that same conversation with a human. “This helps your AI have a real sense of identity of who this [other] person is because it’s two different AIs, one knows one person, one knows the other person, and they’re both vehemently going to defend their own person,” Tawohid says. “But together it gets you to a more shared sense of truth.”

Still, Tawohid isn’t convinced his AI chatbot mediation tool, Bridge, is even a good idea. He has shared Bridge with about 10 couples, all of whom have given him the feedback that they’d use it again, he says, but it isn’t widely available for use. Perhaps, he says, it could be a supplement to traditional couples counseling, a way to practice communication outside of the therapy room.

Ironically, though, Tawohid has come down on the side of mild AI skepticism. “It’s a combination of a journal and a therapist and a friend, but it is also not real. It’s also just a computer code,” he says. When he discovered he’d lost his ability to craft a sentence without help, he stopped writing with AI. Now he fears people could lose their relationships to chatbots, too. 

Gateway to introspection or outsourcing sincerity?

After a few months of using Bridge, Tawohid says he and his partner spend much less time talking to AI. They’ve had enough machine-facilitated conversations that they better understand each other’s thought patterns and triggers. Sadler, the AI-curious film producer, and his wife have similarly come to rely on AI less frequently because, he says, ChatGPT has taught them to be better communicators. “It just taught me to understand that she’s got a different perspective on things. If I’m not understanding where [she’s] coming from, just asking questions to say, well, what do you mean? And not jumping to conclusions,” he says.

Using AI as a therapeutic outlet can be instructive for people who aren’t in the habit of introspection, says Miller, the Harvard fellow. These chatbots can, in theory, be a tool for reflecting on an argument and for rehearsing what to say next. But sometimes the language the chatbot suggests is so far out of the realm of what your partner would actually say that its assistance is counterproductive. 

For Josh Elledge and his wife, the stupid fight began over a haircut — or lack thereof. Elledge, a 54-year-old podcast consultant, was refusing to clean up his look (“I didn’t like something my barber said, and so I stopped going to him,” Elledge says) and his wife was not pleased. So she turned to an AI chatbot for assistance on how to break it to him. What she ended up saying to Elledge didn’t land. “It just made her opinion stronger in a way that wasn’t really helpful,” he says. “She’s conveying this stuff and I’m like, wow, you really think that? And she’s like, well, no, not really.” He says they “thankfully had the good sense” to distinguish between what she believed and what was the AI. 

Once you relinquish enough of your critical thinking to AI, you run the risk of undermining the relationship you sought to fix. Therapists are trained to identify when a fight needs to be slowed, rerouted, or ditched altogether. But because chatbots never tire of hearing about your problems, you can get caught in a loop of rumination, perpetually mulling over the same frustrations and workshopping language on how to tell your husband you hate his haircut. At that point, who are you in a relationship with — a large language model, or a human? “That was an instance where maybe this isn’t a miracle process. You still have to just be really careful about not showing up as someone who you are not just simply because you defaulted to this AI being this authority in all things,” Elledge says.

AI chatbots are programmed to keep you engaged, but endless mediation and reflection isn’t exactly helpful. If you feel compelled to use one to navigate a squabble, give the technology guardrails. For example, Miller has created custom prompts that don’t exceed 10 or so exchanges with the AI and are meant to illuminate your own biases and shortcomings. But, ultimately, Quattrini, the therapist, says it’s important to remember that true counsel comes from a human who possesses the ability to read nonverbal cues, affect, and changes in body language. “Right now I think AI is a pretty dangerous mediator because it doesn’t have a nervous system,” she says. 

The joy of being a person in a relationship with another person is getting through the hard parts together, even imperfectly. “We’re complicated people and no one really knows everything going on in everyone’s mind,” Tawohid says. “But humans are awesome, truly.”

Over the weekend, the Department of Defense stepped into one of the more delicate questions in American religiosity: who gets to be called “Christian.” 

More specifically, does the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (commonly called the Mormon Church), fit the bill?

The brouhaha started with Secretary Pete Hegseth’s plan to simplify and reform the work of military chaplains — those religious and spiritual advisers who tend to the faithful within the military’s ranks. 

A Pentagon spokesperson on Friday posted a new list of categories of religious affiliation for military service members, which had shrunken from over 200 to 31 labels. In previewing this reform, Hegseth had argued that it was part of the Trump administration’s fight against secular humanism and for the role of religion in public life. By narrowing the number of religions, and excluding some prior identity groups Hegseth’s Pentagon found objectionable, officials argued it would be easier to assign chaplains to units. 

“This brings the codes in line with its original purpose, giving chaplains clear, usable information so they can minister to service members in a way that aligns with that service member’s faith background and religious practice,” Hegseth said in a video statement in March.

Gone were “atheist” and “Wicca” from the new list — and though the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was included as a religion, it was not labeled “Christian.”

That set off an explosive reaction from Mormon elected officials, including some normally aligned with the administration. To them, the government seemed to be saying that Mormons are not Christians — a highly offensive statement for LDS Church members, who see Jesus Christ as the center of their faith.

It does seem that the LDS are being unfairly singled out here. If the essential criterion for Christianity is Trinitarian theology, why do the Jehovah’s Witnesses, Christian Scientists, Oneness Pentecostals, and even Quakers (in some instances) get a pass here? https://t.co/3NKPBsDFaw

— Michael Knowles (@michaeljknowles) June 7, 2026

“I can say confidently that the U.S. government has no business recognizing the Christianity of literally every other religious sect that worships Jesus Christ — with one exception,” Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) posted on X, one of many complaints he raised over multiple days.

On Monday, the Pentagon said the move was unintentional — and amended the original document that blew open this controversy. “The Pentagon’s job is not to adjudicate theological debates, but instead to ensure sincerely-held faith is respected and encouraged in our ranks,” an official statement read. Lee said he was “thrilled” with Trump’s response after he discussed the issue with the president in a phone call. 

But the fiery response spoke both to the LDS church’s long battle for acceptance in America’s faith community, and to deeper tensions within the religious right in President Donald Trump’s second term. Even as the administration tries to privilege Christianity in America, its coalition is suspicious about which kind is taking the lead.

A history of exclusion

Mormons have often faced a hostile reception in mainstream religious life since their church’s founding in the 19th century, a wound that the Pentagon decision reopened. 

Despite a tense history between the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and both the American state and other religious groups, there’s been a kind of detente in the 21st century. 

Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign was widely seen as a watershed moment for Mormonism’s mainstream acceptance, especially within the Republican Party’s conservative Christian electorate, even as his faith was a sensitive topic at points during the race.

“It’s not like those theological concerns about Mormonism disappeared in 2012, but by the time we got to 2012, the issue wasn’t Romney’s Mormonism anymore,” David Campbell, a professor of American politics and religion at the University of Notre Dame, told me. “And so a lot of members of the LDS church thought, well, this issue’s over now.”

As Campbell noted, however, there were still major doctrinal differences between LDS and major branches of Christianity. For example, LDS theology does not accept the Trinity — the idea that God is both one being and manifested in three essences (the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit). Roughly, LDS believers view Jesus Christ as the Son of God and a distinct entity to God the Father, who has a separate physical body.

More simply, the LDS Church rejects the Nicene Creed — the statements of faith that have united most Catholic, Orthodox, and mainline Protestant churches for more than a thousand years as well as the Apostles Creed (which most western Christians accept). For these reasons, many Catholics and Protestants would not call Mormons Christians, even if they believe in a God and follow Jesus Christ. 

The Pentagon dust-up brought these divides rushing back to the front of mind. 

“When Mormons have come into the public square and have sought to build bridges politically, that has been acceptable,” Campbell said. “But when that theological question comes up, maybe some have been won over, but not very many. And this is just yet another reminder of that.” 

One example of this submerged tension came up during Romney’s 2012 run, when a prominent Texas evangelical pastor, Robert Jeffress, called Mormonism a “cult” and argued Romney “is not a Christian.” But Jeffress also endorsed Romney in the general election, citing their shared values apart from theology — and he is now a prominent Trump supporter. 

Some LDS voices on the left argued that Mormon Republicans had been too naive in thinking that a White House that elevated figures like Hegseth, an evangelical who has pushed boundaries with his Christian rhetoric in public duties, would protect religious freedom rather than elevate political allies. Some linked the Pentagon list to the administration’s embrace of “Christian nationalist” evangelical leaders who have called for tearing down walls between church and state. 

“For us on the left, it’s like, yeah, of course the Trump administration doesn’t believe in our version of Christianity,” Eric Biggart, chair of the LDS Dems Caucus, told ABC4, a Salt Lake City news station. “That’s been clear to us for 10 years now.”

Republican lawmakers who protested the Pentagon’s decision did not make this argument themselves and appeared to accept the official explanation on Monday. But it’s also noticeable that they did not give Hegseth the benefit of the doubt when the story first emerged — the response to the Pentagon’s list was immediate and public, rather than delivered quietly behind the scenes. Loyal Republican politicians like Sens. Mike Lee and John Curtis immediately criticized the decision and spent the weekend debating theology, engaging other Christians, and calling out the Department of Defense.

This episode is probably not going to be a turning point, Campbell told me, but it is another crack in the religious right’s coalition. Many LDS members already view Trump and MAGA with suspicion in comparison to other conservative religious communities, although he’s made inroads with LDS voters since his first election. To some, the episode was a sign that members of the faith should be suspicious about tying their religion to a political coalition. 

“I say this with love to my fellow Latter-day Saints: the sooner you give up trying to convince the religious right to validate your faith, the sooner you’ll know peace,” McKay Coppins, an LDS journalist who has written extensively about the church, posted on X. 

“Are we real Christians? Only one opinion matters — and it’s not Pete Hegseth’s.”

This story appeared in The Logoff, a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here.

Welcome to The Logoff: The World Cup starts this week, and the Trump administration is already creating problems. 

What’s happening? On Monday, BBC Sport reported that a Somali referee, Omar Artan, was not allowed to enter the US ahead of the World Cup, which starts on Thursday. Artan was set to be one of 52 FIFA referees for the tournament, which will run until July 19, and was reportedly turned away at the Miami airport despite a valid visa.

Artan isn’t alone in his issues entering the country. Aymen Hussein, who plays for the Iraqi national team, was detained for “nearly seven hours” at Chicago’s O’Hare airport, according to Reuters, while an Iraqi team photographer was refused entry outright. Iranian players only received US visas at the last minute, while some team staff haven’t received them at all.

Fans hoping to attend World Cup games in the US — particularly those from African countries — have also had problems securing visas to visit the US.

How does the Trump administration figure in this? Donald Trump’s second administration has made hostility to all immigrants — and especially to non-white ones — a tentpole policy. Over the past six months, Mother Jones reported over the weekend, the US has admitted only white South Africans as refugees. 

In 2025, the administration also imposed a sweeping travel ban covering 39 countries, including Somalia, where Artan is from, and four countries — Haiti, Iran, Senegal, and Ivory Coast — that will compete in the World Cup.

As the Washington Post reported on Monday, concerns about potential ICE operations around the World Cup are also increasing anxiety for some fans.

What else should I know? The World Cup isn’t the only sporting event Trump is actively hindering. The president is in New York City today for Game 3 of the NBA Finals, featuring the New York Knicks (currently up 2-0 and riding high) against the San Antonio Spurs; his attendance is seriously cramping the party in Manhattan. 

And with that, it’s time to log off…

Hi readers — I enjoy baking but don’t always do a great job making the time for it, so I enjoyed this reminder from NYT Cooking’s Genevieve Ko on the virtues of making a pie crust from scratch. If you want her recipe, you can access it here with a gift link (and with a hearty Logoff endorsement for strawberry-rhubarb as the best pie filling). 

As always, thanks for reading, have a great evening, and we’ll see you back here tomorrow! 

At its outset, the war known as Operation Epic Fury in the United States and Operation Roaring Lion in Israel marked a historic first: the first time the two countries’ militaries went to war fighting side by side. By all accounts, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was one of the key voices — if not the most important voice — influencing President Donald Trump’s decision to launch the military operation, which has now lasted more than 100 days. And yet, it’s been clear from the start that there were differences in the two countries’ priorities when it came to the war. Those differences have never been more evident than they were this past weekend. 

On Sunday night, Iran launched its first direct attack against Israel since the tentative ceasefire in the conflict in early April, firing a barrage of missiles at several targets including an air base; Tehran said it was retaliation for Israel’s prior offensive in southern Lebanon. Trump said on Sunday that he had urged Netanyahu not to retaliate in order to allow ceasefire talks to continue. He also told the Financial Times in an interview on Sunday that Netanyahu “won’t have any choice,” but to accept a US-negotiated ceasefire, adding, “I call the shots,” he said. “I call all the shots. He doesn’t call the shots.”

Nonetheless, Netanyahu appeared to take a shot of his own on Monday, with Israel launching strikes against a petrochemical plant in southern Iran — its first strikes inside the country since the ceasefire. US officials say the US military did not participate in the attacks. 

The two sides have now taken steps to deescalate. Iran’s military says it has concluded its operations against Israel for now, while Netanyahu instructed his military to halt preparations for another attack after Trump posted on Truth Social that both countries “immediately stop ‘shooting.’”

Publicly, it looked like Netanyahu had defied Trump, although subsequently, sources told the Wall Street Journal that Netanyahu had made clear to Trump in a conversation on Sunday that he had to retaliate, and Trump had simply urged him to keep it limited. Either way, it’s a signal that when it comes to this war, the two leaders’ incentives are moving in opposite directions. The airstrikes come just a week after a tense phone in which Trump called Netanyahu “fucking crazy” and accused him of ingratitude over what Trump felt was Israel’s disproportionate military actions in Lebanon. On Sunday, according to Trump, he warned Netanyahu that if he escalated the war further, he might soon be left to fight Iran alone. 

The divisions here are not new. Israel’s end goal, from the start of the operation, has been regime change in Tehran, whereas the United States was more concerned about maintaining regional stability. As was the case in Gaza, Israeli officials felt the ceasefire with Iran was imposed on them by the United States and that their objectives had not yet been met.

Compounding the issue, both leaders are trailing heading into pivotal elections. Netanyahu faces the very real possibility of losing power in national elections in late October. Trump’s Republicans may lose one or both houses of Congress in midterm elections in November. 

While Trump likely still believes he can salvage a victory out of Epic Fury and has shown he won’t cut a deal with Iran at any price, it would clearly be in his best interest, and in the interest of his party, for him to end an unpopular war that has driven up the cost of living for American voters as quickly as possible. 

In Israel, meanwhile, the war is extremely popular, and resuming it may redound to the benefit of Netanyahu, reeling in the polls over his ongoing corruption trial as well as criticism over the security failures that led to the October 7, 2023, terrorist attacks. After months in and out of bomb shelters, it would certainly be harder to make the case to Israeli voters that it was all worth it if the war ends with Iran’s regime still in place, rebuilding its missile forces, its proxy networks, and perhaps even its nuclear program. Israel’s military is also pushing ever more aggressively into Lebanon in response to rocket attacks from Iran’s ally Hezbollah, despite US-led efforts to reach a ceasefire there. 

“There was no way that Netanyahu — when he’s so close to an election when he’s underwater, and when people are already angry about what’s going on in northern Israel [where Hezbollah is firing missiles] — could simply not respond to direct Iranian ballistic missiles on Israeli territory,” said Michael Koplow, chief policy officer at the US-based Israel Policy Forum. 

Both leaders are also at pains to demonstrate that they are not letting the other one “call the shots.” Netanyahu has been under increasing criticism from his electoral opponents for turning Israel into a client state of the United States and being unable to stand up to Trump; the criticism will only get louder if Israel is pressured into agreeing to a US-brokered ceasefire viewed as favorable to Iran. Trump, meanwhile, is taking heat from opponents as well as members of his own coalition for taking marching orders from Israel. Netanyahu has incentive to show he can defy Trump. Trump continues to emphasize that he’s the dominant partner in the relationship. 

The biggest point of stress in the partnership in the coming weeks may be Lebanon. Israel views Hezbollah as an imminent threat and wants to separate the issue from the negotiations with Iran, preserving its ability to strike in Lebanon as it sees fit. The Iranians, as they did on Sunday, are eager to link the two battlefields, demanding that any ceasefire also cover Lebanon. That means that the Trump administration — for whom the issue of Hezbollah is far less existential — is increasingly viewing Israel’s actions in Lebanon as an obstacle to ending the wider war. Trump has already pushed Israel to curtail some of its operations and avoid strikes on the Lebanese capital, Beirut. 

It will certainly complicate efforts to bring this war to a close if the United States has to negotiate a ceasefire not only with its adversary, Iran, but with its ally, Israel, as well. But ultimately, there’s probably a floor to just how bad relations between Trump and Netanyahu can get. For all that he’s far more willing than other US presidents to publicly say things that seem calibrated to humiliate the Israeli leader, Trump is also far more willing to accede to Israel’s actual policies — in Iran, Lebanon, or the Palestinian territories. For his part, Netanyahu can only go so far when it comes to publicly breaking with Trump.

The real test for whether something has fundamentally changed in the US-Israeli relationship is likely to come when one or both of these leaders are out of office. 

As the world waits to see if President Donald Trump will give his final approval to a deal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz and, perhaps, finally bring the 2026 US-Iran conflict to a close, it’s already clear that one of the more surprising developments of the conflict has been the prominent role of Pakistan as a mediator. 

It was Pakistan’s military leader, Field Marshal Asim Munir, who served as the key go-between in the talks that led to the initial two-week US-Iran ceasefire in early April, and Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif who announced that it had gone into effect. Several days later, Islamabad hosted the highest level talks between the US and Iranian governments since 1979, including US Vice President JD Vance. On April 21, Trump announced the ceasefire had been extended, saying it was at Pakistan’s request. Munir has made two personal visits to Iran as part of his mediation efforts, the most recent on May 21.

Whereas the “P5+1” countries of the UN Security Council — the US, China, the UK, France, and Russia, plus Germany — helped bring about the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, and Oman hosted the US-Iran talks in the lead-up to the war, Pakistan has been the intermediary and negotiating venue of choice since the conflict began. The world’s only predominantly Muslim nuclear power is a rare country with credibility on both sides of this war. 

Pakistan’s prominent diplomatic role in the conflict is the latest sign of the unexpectedly close relations between the country’s government and the second Trump administration. “Thank you to Pakistan and its great prime minister and field marshal, two fantastic people!” Trump wrote in a characteristic Truth Social post in April. He has lavished particular praise on Munir, whom he has called an “exceptional man” and “my favorite field marshal.”

Pakistan’s new role as an indispensable US partner is partly due to some skilled Trumpian diplomacy by its government and partly due to just how much this administration’s global priorities have changed from the days when China and jihadist terrorism were the top of the agenda. 

How Pakistan went from pariah to partner in Washington

All of this would have been difficult to imagine during Trump’s first term, when Pakistan was often treated as a pariah. 

On New Year’s Day in 2018, Trump suspended most security assistance to Pakistan, tweeting, “The United States has foolishly given Pakistan more than 33 billion dollars in aid over the last 15 years and they have given us nothing but lies & deceit, thinking of our leaders as fools.” 

Trump would go on to cancel hundreds of millions of dollars in aid to Pakistan, which had been a close US counterterrorism partner even amid widespread allegations that it had provided safe harbor to the Taliban militants fighting US forces in Afghanistan and maintained relations with other anti-US militants. Pakistan responded by halting intelligence-sharing with the US amid widespread anti-American protests.   

At the same time, Trump cultivated a close relationship with Pakistan’s arch-rival India and its prime minister, Narendra Modi. Modi’s brand of majoritarian populist politics made him a natural Trump ally, and India’s position as a superpower counterweight to China made it a natural security partner for the US. The pro-Indian tilt in US foreign policy continued into the Biden administration, and there was every expectation it would carry through when Trump returned in 2025. 

Flattery and crypto: How Munir won over Trump

Pakistan’s turnaround with the new Trump administration began in early March 2025, when the country arrested an ISIS-K operative who was allegedly a key planner of the Kabul airport suicide bombing that killed 13 US troops during the withdrawal from Afghanistan, and extradited him to the United States, earning public gratitude from Trump.  

Then came the brief May 2025 war between India and Pakistan. Pakistan’s government publicly praised Trump for his “pivotal leadership” in the diplomacy that ended the conflict and nominated him for a Nobel Peace Prize. The flattery worked: Trump brought up Pakistan’s nomination during a phone call with Modi and was reportedly irritated that the Indian leader did not follow suit and, by contrast, seemed to go out of his way to downplay America’s role. 

Pakistan has also seemed particularly well-attuned to the personalist style of diplomacy in the Trump era, where the line between business and politics can be extremely blurry. Pakistan’s finance minister has signed a deal with World Liberty Financial, the cryptocurrency company co-founded by Trump’s sons and the sons of his diplomatic envoy, Steve Witkoff. 

Last year, Sharif also signed several memoranda on deals to deliver critical minerals and rare earth elements from Pakistan to the US. Pakistani officials have taken to referring to counterterrorism, critical minerals, and crypto as the “3 Cs” underlying their relationship with the Trump administration. 

The current relationship has also doubtless been helped by the ascendance of Munir, a man who Trump might describe as a military strongman out of “central casting.” Pakistan would certainly not be playing the same role today if Imran Khan, the former cricket star turned anti-American populist prime minister — who took power halfway through Trump’s first term — were still in office. Khan was removed in a vote of no confidence in 2022, which Khan blamed on the military establishment, and has been detained on corruption charges since 2023. With his removal, the military moved quickly to consolidate power. 

Pakistan’s military has always played a significant and complex role in Pakistan politics, exercising a significant amount of power behind the scenes; the country has suffered several military coups. Since Munir, formerly chief of the country’s powerful military intelligence agency, was appointed army chief by Sharif in 2022, the nation has veered closer to an outright military dictatorship: A constitutional amendment passed in 2025 gave Munir full control over all branches of the military including the nuclear forces, for the duration of a term that could last until 2030, and immunity from prosecution.  

Trump has helped cement Munir’s status by hosting the field marshal for a working lunch at the White House — the first time a Pakistani military leader rather than its elected prime minister has been hosted for such an event. 

How Pakistan is navigating America’s new priorities

If things are different now for the US and Pakistan, it’s partly just because the world is different. The US military’s withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021 removed one of the major sources of tension in the US-Pakistan relationship: the Pakistani government’s alleged double game with the Taliban. In fact, Pakistan and the now Taliban-controlled Afghanistan have been fighting a brutal border conflict for months.

It also helps that the Trump administration is generally less focused on Islamist terrorism this time around. It has pivoted away from “great power competition” with China, decreasing the importance of India’s role. US-India relations are generally frostier over a variety of issues ranging from India’s agricultural protectionism, to immigration in the US, to India’s economic relationship with Russia. 

“The second Trump administration, in its foreign policy, is aggressively transactional; it’s not changed by strategic considerations, even compared to how it was during its first term,” said Michael Kugelman, senior fellow for South Asia at the Atlantic Council. “So in that regard, [the Trump administration] would not have any concerns about embracing Pakistan, even though Islamabad has a very close alliance with Beijing.”

Pakistan has been accumulating an unlikely set of friends and partners in recent years. Even amid its rapprochement with the US, Pakistan has deepened its military and economic relationship with China. (Xi Jinping hailed his country’s “unbreakable” friendship with Pakistan during a visit by Sharif last month.)

In 2025, Pakistan signed a nuclear defense pact with Saudi Arabia. This is particularly notable given Pakistan’s possession of nuclear weapons: Some analysts saw this as effectively extending Pakistan’s nuclear umbrella to its allies in the Persian Gulf, though others disputed this interpretation.

Pakistan’s relations with Saudi Arabia’s rival, Iran, are complex, to put it mildly. It was only in 2024 that the two countries were lobbing missiles at each other’s territory, but they quickly deescalated the tensions; they have since cooperated in combating separatist militants and smugglers along their shared border. Munir, in particular, is believed to be deeply familiar with Iran’s military establishment from his days as Pakistan’s spy chief. 

“They have proven remarkably adept and agile in ensuring that they’re able to keep all of these balls in the air,” said Elizabeth Threlkeld, director of the South Asia program at the Stimson Center, referring to Pakistan’s global web of alliances. “But they are also vulnerable to a number of different shocks from different sources, given their positioning right now.”

Pakistan’s involvement in US-Iran diplomacy is not just an effort to gain favor with Trump. Islamabad genuinely needs the war to be over as quickly as possible. Pakistan is one of the countries most exposed to the economic impact of the war: It normally imports almost two-thirds of its natural gas and 30 to 40 percent of its total imports via the Strait of Hormuz. Food and fuel prices are surging in the country. Add to that the strong domestic opposition to the US-led war among Pakistan’s population, particularly its large Shiite minority. Pakistan’s defense pact with Saudi Arabia also raises the risk of it being drawn into a conflict in the Gulf. 

If the war has highlighted Pakistan’s diplomatic savvy, it has also at times exposed its limits. For all its efforts, Pakistan’s mediation has been unable to turn April’s ceasefire into a permanent end to the conflict that reopens the Strait. At times, Pakistan has appeared to be misrepresenting the sides’ actual positions in hopes of pushing a deal through. Trump’s recent demand that a number of Muslim countries including Pakistan join the Abraham Accords as part of a final Iran deal did not go over well in Pakistan, which has refused to recognize Israel since its founding. 

The longer the war goes on, the more Pakistan’s involvement will look less like a diplomatic masterstroke and more like a credibility-taxing quagmire. As India’s experience has illustrated, foreign governments are often lavished with praise by Trump only so long as they’re useful. If Pakistan can’t deliver the ceasefire deal Trump is looking for, or if his priorities simply shift again, it may once again find itself on the receiving end of Trump’s attacks. 

In just 10 days over the summer of 1854, 500 people died of cholera in the Soho neighborhood of London. The city’s population had more than doubled to 2.3 million people in the first half of the 1800s, and its sewage system could not keep up. But the streams of human waste flowing into the street and seeping into the water supply were considered unconnected to the cholera crisis. The prevailing theory of the day was that bad air — miasma — caused illness.

The English physician John Snow thought differently. Five years before the outbreak he had suggested that the diarrheal disease was actually caused by a waterborne infection rather than miasma. He soon had a chance to test his theory, mapping the location of cholera-related deaths in Soho. Snow realized that the victims used one specific water pump on Broad Street, and he persuaded city officials to remove the pump’s handle to prevent anyone else from using it. With the source eliminated, the outbreak, which had already passed its peak, ended in days. 

Though it took years for Snow’s theory to achieve widespread acceptance, his approach is central to modern epidemiology. Investigating the source of outbreaks can prevent new cases, but it also gives us a better understanding of diseases and helps manage public fear. Even when infections have stopped, outbreak investigations are useful to develop strategies for preventing — and, failing that, responding to — future outbreaks. 

Two recent outbreaks have demonstrated the necessity — and the challenges — of such investigations, almost two centuries after Snow’s pioneering work. The first was the hantavirus outbreak that dominated headlines last month. Then, on May 17, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared a public health emergency of international concern, the highest level of global health alert, in response to an outbreak of the deadly hemorrhagic disease Ebola in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), which, as of June 2, had killed 62 people, with 363 confirmed cases. It’s the 17th Ebola outbreak in the DRC and one of the largest on record. It has spread to neighboring Uganda, where, as of June 4, there are 16 confirmed cases, one confirmed death, and one probable case and likely death. 

The first confirmed case, a healthcare worker in Bunia, DRC, died on April 24, but the outbreak may have been spreading undetected since as early as January. Investigators haven’t identified patient zero — the index case — and still don’t know how this outbreak began. Abdou Sebushishe, a doctor working with the International Medical Corps in Goma, DRC, told CBS News that up to 20 percent of current patients are themselves healthcare workers. He estimated that it may be more than six months before the outbreak could be controlled, given that the disease is outpacing the current response.

Part of the challenge is that the current outbreak is caused by the Bundibugyo strain of Ebola, which is relatively uncommon and has a genome about 30 percent different from the Ebola viruses that usually spark outbreaks. Testing for more common variants didn’t pick up the Bundibugyo virus right away, and ongoing conflict in the DRC contributed to the delay and continues to make contact tracing difficult. Unlike other strains, the Bundibugyo virus has no approved therapeutics or vaccines.  

In the past, researchers have had some success identifying the index case of Ebola outbreaks. Investigators managed to identify the first patient of the 2014-2016 West Africa Ebola epidemic — the largest and deadliest in history, with more than 15,000 confirmed cases and 11,000 deaths — as a toddler in the west African nation of Guinea. What’s harder to definitively determine is how the boy, who died in December 2013 before the outbreak had been identified, contracted it. It’s possible that he came into contact with an Ebola-infected fruit bat or its droppings while playing in a hollow tree, but scientists can’t say for sure.

Investigating outbreak origins is inherently fraught and can lead to the international fingerpointing that characterized much of the Covid-19 pandemic. But it’s not primarily about assigning blame. Instead, knowing where and how outbreaks began informs how we respond to them, halt transmission, communicate to the public, and prevent them from happening again. It can identify high-risk regions and influence how public health officials monitor a disease. As the recent Ebola and hantavirus outbreaks demonstrate, however, that effort is often complicated by a host of factors, and the resulting uncertainty makes it that much harder to manage public health concerns efficiently and well. 

The curious case of Legionnaires’ disease in New York City

Our epidemiological tools have come a long way since John Snow used hand-drawn maps to identify the source of the Soho cholera outbreak. The value of these new tools lies in the information they generate — which is crucial to fighting outbreaks. 

Take the case of New York City’s biggest — and deadliest — outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease (LD), a bacterial infection that causes a severe pneumonia and has a fatality rate of 10 percent. By the time public health investigators detected it in the summer of 2015, dozens had already been hospitalized. It was the second-largest LD outbreak in US history, infecting 138 people and killing 16. 

The initial epidemiologic investigation started with contact tracing to find the source of the disease, but the results didn’t suggest any shared exposures. Cooling towers, which provide water for air conditioning systems in the form of an inhalable mist, had been involved in previous LD outbreaks, but officials didn’t know how many cooling towers there were in the city or how well-maintained they were. 

Investigators ultimately located and tested 55 cooling towers in the South Bronx, where cases were clustered, for Legionella. They identified the source: a single cooling tower atop the Opera House Hotel. The hotel disinfected the tower, and New York’s City Council passed new regulations requiring every building in the city with a cooling tower to register it with the health department, test it every 90 days, and remediate it if Legionella was found. 

Within a year, the health department inspected almost 80 percent of the city’s towers — detection and disinfection that would have never been conducted otherwise. No large LD outbreaks emerged — until inspections declined in 2025. “Regulations do not enforce themselves,” Jay Varma, a physician and epidemiologist who served as incident manager for the 2015 New York outbreak, wrote last year in Healthbeat. “The Covid pandemic has sparked a strong backlash against government authority, and austerity budgets are now starving public health agencies. Infections may be inevitable, but outbreaks are a choice.”

Cholera and LD are waterborne, but Ebola and hantavirus, which first cross over to humans from animal reservoirs, present a different challenge. 

The challenge of hantavirus and Ebola

“The end of the world, the beginning of everything” is the motto of Ushuaia, Argentina, the southernmost city on the planet, where tourists flock to watch birds and embark on cruise ships. It’s the main gateway to Antarctica, making up 90 percent of all cruise departures to the continent. 

It’s here that a Dutch couple may have contracted the Andes virus, the only strain of hantavirus known to spread from person to person, before sparking an outbreak on the MV Hondius. The Argentinian government’s prevailing theory is that the couple got infected while birdwatching at a landfill in Ushuaia before the cruise, coming into contact with the rodents that carry the Andes strain. 

Well, maybe not. 

“The current theory of a couple birdwatching in southern Argentina may not be plausible, because the [long-tailed pygmy] rice rat that is responsible for spreading the Andes strain of the virus is usually found in northern Argentina or Chile, and we know the birdwatching at the landfill occurred in the southern part of Argentina,” Omer Awan, a physician and public health expert, told me over email. There have been no recorded cases of hantavirus in Tierra del Fuego province, where Ushuaia is located, before. 

“Understanding the origins of the outbreak will be helpful in guiding interventions like rodent control, isolation protocols, and…how the rare Andes strain of Hantavirus is transmitted,” Awan said. “[And] identifying the source of the [2026] ebola outbreak can influence response strategy and how public health officials monitor the virus.”

Delayed detection and human movement — especially for illnesses like hantavirus and Ebola that can incubate over the course of weeks — make tracing the source of an outbreak difficult, even in the best of circumstances. We still don’t know the original source of the first Ebola outbreak in 1976, which occurred in two simultaneous waves. Debates still rage over whether Covid-19 emerged naturally through zoonotic spillover — the virus jumping from an animal host to humans — or if it potentially escaped from a lab in an accident. We know that the hantavirus and Ebola outbreaks are natural in origin, but there are still international efforts to shift the “blame” from Argentina to neighboring Chile, especially with economic interests on the line.

Such spillover events have only become more likely as humans destroy ecosystems and infringe on animal habitats. Climate change exacerbates existing infectious disease risk. “Because of our choices as a society, there’s a one-in-five chance that another pandemic will occur in the next decade that will kill at least 25 million people,” Neil Vora, the executive director of Preventing Pandemics at the Source coalition, wrote in Time Magazine. 

Determining the source of outbreaks is even more difficult — and politically perilous — in the post-Covid era. The US and Argentina have pulled out of WHO. Global health funding cuts, on the part of the US as well as other countries, have weakened our biosurveillance architecture and ability to effectively respond to infectious disease. 

Compared to Covid, the scale of the 2026 Bundibugyo and hantavirus outbreaks are small. It’s still proving hard to get answers. That’s going to be a serious problem whenever the next pandemic arrives — and it is a matter of when, not if. 

An evolving threat landscape

Although we face escalating spillover risks from habitat destruction and climate change, we can’t count on the next global infectious disease threat being naturally occurring in origin when it does come. 

“It’s very clear that artificial intelligence capabilities are advancing incredibly rapidly,” Jaime Yassif, senior advisor for global biological policy and programs at the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI), told me. “[That could] make it easier for novice actors to engineer pathogens that we [already] know about or for sophisticated actors to engineer novel pathogens that are more dangerous than what’s found in nature.”

If there is an outbreak of uncertain origin — where it’s unclear if it’s natural, accidental, or deliberate — we lack robust international mechanisms that can investigate the source and quickly arrive at a conclusion. That would make it harder to address the source proactively, whether that means stopping future natural spillover events, preventing lab accidents, or holding bad actors to account. 

Public health professionals would need to take additional precautions if there was a risk of a deliberate outbreak, as we saw with the 2001 anthrax attacks, where letters laced with Bacillus anthracis were sent in the mail, infecting 17 people and killing five. A naturally-occurring anthrax exposure would have required a different response, since a bioterrorism investigation has to contend with the additional challenge of determining criminal responsibility. 

And as we’ve seen with the debates around Covid-19 origins, suspicion that something was caused by human activity can be incredibly corrosive to international trust, making necessary geopolitical cooperation in the face of outbreaks significantly harder. 

NTI identified that preparedness gap and proposed a Joint Assessment Mechanism to identify the source of outbreaks of uncertain origin. It would be housed in the UN Secretary-General’s Mechanism for Investigation of Alleged Use of Chemical and Biological Weapons (UNSGM) in order to pull together different components of the UN system and bridge security and public health. 

That project (which I supported and advocated when I worked at NTI from 2022 to 2024) is currently on pause. “We still think it’s a vital gap and really important, but we just couldn’t get the political will to move it forward in the system, notwithstanding the significant support for it internationally in various quarters,” Yassif said.

We are simply unprepared domestically and internationally to prevent, detect, and respond to global infectious disease threats. Emerging infectious disease outbreaks threaten us all, and we are nowhere near where we should be in order to protect vulnerable populations and countries around the world. While the current Ebola and hantavirus outbreaks are very unlikely to become pandemics on the scale of Covid-19, they’re still dangerous and deadly. Unless we can determine where and how they began, we’ll be ill-equipped to stop them from recurring. And next time, things could be far worse.

This story originally appeared in The Guardian and is republished here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The Trump administration’s plan to dismantle an ocean observation system vital to understanding the climate crisis and marine ecosystems would “severely degrade” the accuracy of weather predictions and El Niño forecasts, with economic consequences for the United States, European and American scientists have warned.

Decommissioning the US system, which plays a major part in a global ocean observation network, would lead to a massive increase in error in the annual estimates of ocean heating rates, according to research published last month.

As a result, the forecasts and early warning systems for storms, tropical cyclones and El Niño would degrade, “sometimes dangerously so,” according to Sabrina Speich, an expert in global ocean monitoring at the Ecole Normale Supérieure (ENS) in Paris and chair of the ocean expert panel of the Global Climate Observing System.

The Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI), run by the US National Science Foundation, is a vast network of seafloor systems, underwater gliders and moored surface platforms that feeds data to researchers, policymakers, educators and mariners worldwide. The initiative, which covers both US coastlines and extends into the North Atlantic and Southern Ocean, has been used to study marine heatwaves, harmful algal blooms, subduction zone earthquakes, ocean acidification and fisheries variability.

Dismantling it would remove a major component of the Global Ocean Observing System (GOOS), a network of robotic floats, moored buoys and research vessels experts describe as the “eyes and ears” of the ocean. The warning systems based on the data, “save lives,” experts say.

Prescient research published in Nature Climate Change last month showed how data losses in GOOS, a UN-coordinated framework for ocean data for weather and climate collected by several countries, could degrade the ocean heat estimates that underpin weather prediction, El Niño forecasting and fisheries management. Losing US observations would be worse than randomly losing 80 percent of all ocean data worldwide, it found. US-funded platforms span every ocean basin, plugging critical gaps that no other nation currently fills.

“Ocean heat content is the most robust indicator of climate change we have — not just of what is happening in the ocean, but of the entire climate system,” Speich, a co-author of the research, said. Vertical temperature profiles that provide ocean heat content, are among “the simplest measurements we can make,” she said.

“Lose them, and you lose your ability to track not just ocean warming but the climate system as a whole — they are a proxy for variables that become unavailable the moment the observations stop,” Speich said. “Forecasts would continue — but they would degrade, sometimes dangerously so. Atmospheric observations alone are not sufficient. Ocean data [is] fundamental to early warning systems for tropical storms, cyclones and El Niño. And the consequences would not stop at science: the economic costs would be felt within the United States itself, from agriculture to insurance to disaster response.”

The loss of US observations, in a year predicted to be an El Niño year, with “supercharged” weather extremes, could also “lose the ability to see it coming clearly to act in time,” she said.

“The stakes are concrete: Farmers in the US and across South America use El Niño forecasts to decide what to plant and when — whether to expect drought or flooding shapes every agricultural decision months in advance,” Speich said.

The most recent El Niño, which hit in 2023–2024, was one of the five strongest on record and contributed to 2024’s record-breaking increase in global temperature.

Removing US observations alone would produce a 163 percent increase in error for annual ocean heating rates, the research by Speich and her co-authors found.

On Thursday, the European Union said it would boost its own monitoring of the world’s oceans by investing in a $107 million initiative called OceanEye, more than half of which will go to GOOS. The announcement, by the European Commission, was long-planned, not a direct response to the US move.

John P. Abraham, professor of engineering at the University of St. Thomas, in Minnesota, and co-author of the research paper, described the US administration’s move to dismantle the $368 OOI system as “penny-wise, pound foolish.”

“The US government wants to save less than a billion in sensors, which are the eyes and ears of the ocean,” Abraham said. “We have hundreds of billions in climate costs per year. The cost of the observation system is a fraction of the climate costs from hurricanes and storms that hit the US.”

The US suffered more than 400 climate and weather disasters where damages exceeded or reached $1 billion, between 1980 and 2024. In 2024 alone, the costs of such disasters amounted to $177 billion. This “billion-dollar climate and weather product,” managed by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) will no longer be updated due to “evolving priorities,” according to a note on its website.

The system, is, Abraham said is “quite an inexpensive way to reduce climate-related costs.”

“This is not about saving money, this is about killing climate science research,” Abraham said.

Samantha Burgess, the strategic climate lead at the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S), the European Union’s Earth observation system which integrates European space data with in situ measurements to monitor changes and provide forecasts, said ocean observations are “irreplaceable” because “we can’t see the deep ocean from space.” They “save lives” by warning us of severe storms, she said.

“We need international cooperation to get the best available observations to mitigate risks in our changing world. Without ocean observations we are flying blind,” Burgess said.

A statement earlier this week by the National Science Foundation, which funds and oversees the OOI, said the program was not being cancelled entirely and described the plans as a “descope,” or reduction of elements, though it was not clear what data collection capacity would be left.