The summertime state of mind may be fading as extreme heat reshapes the season.
The season itself is in no danger; climate change, mainly caused by the burning of oil, gas and coal, is warming the weather year-round. Viewed this way, summer-like weather is ascendant. It's setting records across the globe - melting Arctic ice, driving droughts, intensifying wildfires, spinning up storms and endangering millions of people who can't afford air conditioning, time off work or "coolcations.” The heat is so extreme in Asia that Japan has coined a new meteorological category for the danger: kokusho-bi or "cruelly hot day.”
What seems as dead as the grass in England this year is the summertime ideal — lazy days, warm nights and escape, however temporary, from classes or parents or work or rules. During the Summer of '26, people are grieving that freedom. And perhaps, the versions of ourselves we become when our senses tell us that we are safe.
"I mourn for the way summer used to be,” author Debra Denker, who writes "cli-fi,” or climate fiction, wrote in an essay last month recalling leisurely days and July Fourth block parties of the 1960s. "Unless we change the trajectory we're on, today's children will never know the gentle and balmy summers of my childhood...I feel sad that they may never know the truly carefree summers that the more privileged among us enjoyed.”
No one needs meteorologists to confirm that this summer is different and our rituals are changing. Downwind from wildfires in North America and Europe, the sky turns orange and the air tastes gritty. Life under Paris' famous gray rooftops can be deadly. Nights can be a sullen cycle of sleep, showering and opening a window only to close it later to block out the urban noise.
Everywhere, life-giving sun hurts during much of the day. Checking the air quality index has become part of the act of stepping outside. We get things done earlier in the day and stay up later at night. And a full day at the beach - or an August holiday in Europe - is more a matter of risk management than it used to be.
A new poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research shows that Americans are more likely to say extreme heat has had either a "major impact” or "minor impact” on their travel or vacation plans, electricity bills, their sleep, their family’s outdoor activities and more parts of their day-to-day life than in July 2024. Research at Oxford University published in July found that the intense heat influences daily behavior globally, with such "everyday adaptations” to daily activities occurring across seven of the countries most at risk of heat waves: Brazil, France, India, Nigeria, Türkiye, the U.S. and China.
Amber Risebrow, a teacher in Britain’s Channel Islands, said she yearned for England’s idyllic warm season, that period when the sunlight lingers.
"I wanted the long light evenings and the sunshine and the not-dark-at-4pm of it all,” she posted recently on Instagram. "What I did not want was to feel like a rotisserie chicken every single time I stepped outside. Slowly rotating. Gently basting. Questioning my life choices by 10 A.M.”
For those who care to look, the data is plentiful and the weight of it is moving toward hotter and stormier summers . This week alone, intense heat hammered the U.K. and France as temperatures soared toward 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit). It was the fifth heat wave of the year in a region where air conditioning is sporadic at best. And the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported that the contiguous United States sizzled to its hottest month ever in July.
Globally so far, this is the third-hottest year, behind 2024 and 2025, climate statistics show.
But 2026 still has time to catch up. Thanks to the one-two punch of accelerated human-caused global warming and a supersized El Nino - a periodic warming of parts of the Pacific that leads to temperature variations around the globe - there’s an increasing chance that by the end of the year, 2026 could become the hottest year on record, scientists said.
"And it’s not just extreme heat,” the World Meteorological Organization’s Clare Nullis told reporters in Geneva. "We’re also seeing extreme rainfall, tropical cyclones. So we’re not in holiday mode at all.”
Somewhere deep, there's a sense of acceptance that life-threatening, trip-canceling heat waves and their rippling effects aren't a one-off fluke. So management has ensued, with the hope that escaping hot weather might somehow allow the return of that summertime feeling for now.
Advisories urging tourists to limit outdoor activity during peak heat hours have become a standard part of trip planning from Cambodia to Cambridge, England. Dog walking is becoming a dawn-or-dusk activity, with governments in high heat zones advising owners against midday walks. Employers and workers are adapting, with work hours especially for agricultural and construction workers shifting to the morning and policies in some places allowing employees to work from home when the heat becomes extreme.
But home doesn't offer much solace for workers with no air conditioning. Only about 4% of British homes have "air-con,” compared to about 90% of American homes, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
So achieving old-fashioned summertime bliss is, and perhaps always has been, mostly a matter of privilege.
In "An Open Letter to the Person Who Asked Me What I'm Doing For The Summer As If I Didn't Have to Work,” comedy writer Elizabeth Simone addressed the issue in the Weekly Humorist last year.
"You do know that summer vacation is an outdated sham, right?” she wrote. "Obviously it's because of what summer meant back when we were kids.”
