From war to the world, the new stage is climate extremism. Scientist Paul Beckwith covers worrying new science from failing food to wild weather changes. Can weather forecasting keep up? From Columbia University, Dr. Jeffrey Shrader asked leading professionals. It gets better and it gets worse. Radio Ecoshock reporting back from the edge.
Listen to or download this Radio Ecoshock show in CD Quality (57 MB) or Lo-Fi (14 MB)
HARSH CHANGE
PAUL BECKWITH ON BREAKING SCIENCE NEWS
While war and scandal dominate the news, here in the real world climate change is amping up the pressure – in the Middle East and around the world. Paul Beckwith follows it all. Paul is an independent climate systems scientist. He has over 1700 videos with almost 10 million views on YouTube – explaining new climate papers and developments, including real-time events.
From Ottawa Canada, we welcome Paul Beckwith back to Radio Ecoshock.
Listen to or download this half hour interview with Paul Beckwith in CD Quality or Lo-Fi
WAR IN THE HOT DROUGHT THAT IS THE MIDDLE EAST
Paul and I begin with deadly heat stress already occurring – and prognosis for Middle East. Just consider the long drought in Iran for years before this war. It was so bad last December the Government warned they may have to move the capital from Tehran to another city with more water. Sharon Astyk covers this well in a post in November 2025.
Also seldom reported: killer humid heat along Gulf State countries. We think of countries from Kuwait south to Saudi Arabia as dry deserts. Mostly they are, with rare surprising downpours flooding everything for a few days. But hot steamy air comes into those coastal cities from the Persian Gulf. Then it gets deadly without air conditioning.
Take a look at this key paper out last month: Peer-reviewed paper in Nature Communications: “Deadly heat stress conditions are already occurring”. Article Open access Published: 26 March 2026. This study repeatedly finds deadly conditions of heat increasing in the Middle East – as witnessed by high death rates during the Haj pilgrimages. Other studies find surprising periods of high heat and humidity along the Gulf States that go beyond human endurance outside.
This unthinkable event may be coming now.
Power systems are being threatened by both sides. Donald Trump threatened several times to completely destroy the electric system in Iran. In retaliation, the Iranians promised to wipe out power generating stations in the Gulf States that host American bases or allow attacks to be launched in their space.
Imagine a mass evacuation from Kuwait to the UAE when both cooling electricity and water disappear together, overnight. The Gulf states use hybrid plants where excess heat from fossil-powered electric plants is used to desalinate water from the Gulf. If someone hits one facility and both power and water are lost. These are easy targets for Iran….and Israel or the United States. Some wealthy, wealthy people in the Gulf oil states are losing sleep. The whole region might need to be evacuated for a time if the electric utility war becomes reality.
Paul Beckwith raised this in his November 2025 video “Chat on Today’s Dire Droughts in many Middle East Countries with Connections to AMOC and 4.2k Event”. Paul reports this drought is not just in Iran, but spread across the region, including for example Turkey. This could be a sign the AMOC is weakening, like the event 4.2 years ago, like about 2200 before the Common Era (the drought is recorded in the Epic of Gilgamesh).
Even without the drought, just take a look at extreme heat in Iran last summer. It was stupendous. Heat over 120 degrees Fahrenheit (48 C.) was common, day after day. All that starts in mid-May, just weeks away. Now picture American ground troops with big packs and big guns trying to survive there. You don’t invade Russia in the winter. You don’t invade Iran in the summer.
GOT FOOD?
NEW WMO FAO REPORT ON HEAT AND AGRICULTURE
Paul Beckwith’s video headline for this breaking report: “Global Food Supplies (Crops, Livestock, Fisheries) Are Pushed to Brink by Extreme Heat: New UN Study” (Apr 22, 2026). The Report (see link below) is huge. Just listening to Paul list some of the topics is worrying. We are breaking the natural backbone of the food system that sustained “civilization” for the last 10,000 years. Something will grow in the new hothouse climate, but will it be the mass crops needed to keep billions of us alive?
The Guardian newspaper has a good article on the new UN food report here. The U.N. produced an intro video on the highlights of the new report just released. (4 minutes). The whole 108 page report is available free (no sign-up or ads) here.
Also on the food front, this earlier video from Paul: “Global Food Quantity And Diversity To Drop By More Than Half With Our Accelerated Climate Warming“. Paul writes: “The results are eye popping. With accelerated warming, we will lose the ability to grow over 50% of the food quantity, and over 50% of the food diversity on a global basis. Food producing regions at low latitudes are even more severely degraded, by over 80% for some crops.”
The science paper behind that video is here: “Climate change threatens crop diversity at low latitudes”.
MESOSCALE EDDIES ANYONE?
We also tackle a new climate problem. At first it sounds obscure but turns out to be fundamental to future developments in world weather. Paul calls this “My Most Important Video in Years: Oceanic Uptake of CO2 Enhanced by Mesoscale Eddies” (Apr 12, 2026). In a nutshell, previous climate models could only consider very large squares of water and very large currents. Now we can drill down to the myriad swirls of ocean water called “eddies”. It turns out these “details” are key to how excess atmospheric heat is distributed in the ocean – and to coastal, even global, weather. Check it out.
AMOC NIGHTMARES
A number of Ecoshock guests raised the daunting specter of the Gulf Stream weakening – and the larger Atlantic circulation pump failing. If that happens, New England gets colder, but catastrophic cooling reached Iceland, Ireland, the United Kingdom, Northern Europe, and Scandinavia. It is like the movie “The Day After” but realistically happening over several decades. We don’t really know how fast that ocean current can flip.
Scientists know the AMOC (the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation) has stopped before. A group of European scientists, often led by Stefan Rahmsdorf, have been getting louder and louder about this hovering threat as we continue to warm the world. For example, take this paper: “Observational constraints project a ~50% AMOC weakening by the end of this century”.
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TRYING TO PREDICT WEATHER IN CLIMATE CHAOS
JEFF SHRADER
Did you check the weather? We all take that for granted. But will forecasting keep up as climate shifts into more extremes? What do experts expect for their own field? A new study looks into the future of weather forecasting for us all.
We reached the Lead Author, Dr. Jeffrey Shrader. Jeff is an Economist and Associate Professor at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs. He’s been publishing on the intersection of climate and economy for years. We being with his latest: “Weather forecasts become more important for reducing mortality as the climate warms”. (April 13, 2026)
Listen to or download this half hour interview with Jeff Shrader in CD Quality or Lo-Fi
The new paper begins with a fundamental assumption: “When people know extreme weather is coming, they can use that information to adjust their plans.” As proof, Jeff and colleagues cite six studies including one of his own. We know weather forecasting works. It saves lives.
Jeff says this about the new work on weather forecasting:
“Continued improvements in short-range temperature forecasts could reduce heat-related mortality in the U.S. by ~20% by the end of the century. That would offset nearly all of the increase in deaths under moderate climate change. But this is also “running to stay in place”: without climate change, these same improvements would lead to substantial declines in heat-related mortality. Surveyed operational meteorologists expect forecasts to keep improving, and realizing those improvements will require sustained investment in weather data and model development (including AI models).”
As a long-time science journalist, my guess would be weather forecasting during decades of rapid climate change would be more difficult and possibly less accurate. Certainly we are already seeing surprises with weather systems previously thought impossible or very rare popping up. It is hard to predict events never seen before in human records.
I also worry about the very human trait of judging from current and past circumstances. Science has a record of conservative estimates even as extremes appear. Jeff actually covered that in an earlier paper in 2022, “The Risk of Caution: Evidence from an Experiment”.
Humans also have a tendency for apocalyptic thinking. We see that in religions thousands of years old. Weather-casters with the most terrible predictions get the most views. Did this primal anxiety turn up in analysis of expert opinion?
CO-AUTHOR SUMMARY ON BLUESKY
Manuel Linsenmeier on BlueSky
“Our work is motivated by multiple trends: 1) Technology has made weather forecasts much better in predicting temperature extremes and this trend is likely to continue. 2) Under climate change, extremes become more frequent, but also the predictability of weather may change.
We combine a quasi-experimental empirical analysis with an expert solicitation to quantify how many lives can be saved if weather forecasts continue to improve. We find that several thousands of deaths can be prevented every year in an optimistic forecast scenario with moderate climate change.
We also ask experts about the determinants of future forecast improvements. They consider investments in weather models and observation networks as the most important. Better forecasts can thus save lives, but these gains depend on public investment in forecasting infrastructure.”
SEE ALSO: JEFF’S PREVIOUS PAPER ON WEATHER FORECASTING INEQUALITY
2026-03-30
“Manuel Linsenmeier and I have a new piece in VoxDev on global inequalities in weather forecasts. As we say in the piece, “Weather forecasts in low-income countries are about 20 years behind those in high-income countries, worsening economic losses and increasing vulnerability to climate-related risks.” We also offer some thoughts on how to make this situation better!”
A DECLINE IN WEATHER FORECASTING?
What happens if aging satellites are not replaced? Climate science in the United States, including major services formerly offered by American science, may not be available to future weather-casters – even fundamentals like weather balloons are missing. On the other hand, a diversification of weather science, likely aided by Artificial Intelligence, could keep weather forecasting get better and better.
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Thank you for making it all the way to the end of this blog. It is hard to know how many humans still have the desire to dig down to the bottom of issues, to get the complex answers which are not so satisfying as the exaggerated headlines so common these days. If you can, your financial support, large or small, would really help. These are terrible times for independent journalists trying to fund-raise through long media, like blogs or radio. Meanwhile, it seems every week there is a new big cost we did not expect, or something costs twice what it did four years ago. You know. Help Radio Ecoshock if you can here.
Let’s meet up again next week.
Alex