The United States could be in for another scorcher this summer, per a new study from the National Weather Service (NWS). And that could mean more extreme weather events — as well as heightened health concerns.

The NWS outlook, released this month, found that many parts of the US — including New England and the Southwest — are likely to have higher than average temperatures from June through August. In recent years, hotter summer temperatures have been driven by climate change and, in some cases, the arrival of a climate pattern known as La Niña, which contributes to drier conditions in certain regions in the US.

According to the Weather Channel, there’s a possibility this summer could even wind up being one of the hottest on record, adding to existing milestones.

National Weather Service

A hotter summer could have serious environmental consequences, including a higher risk of drought, hurricanes, and wildfires in some areas. Additionally, it could pose more health threats to people, with heat-related fatalities — including those tied to cardiovascular disease — increasing in the US in the last decade.

Broadly, warmer summers have prompted people to take more precautions when it comes to the activities they engage in, become more dependent on resources like air conditioning, and remain on guard for extreme weather events affecting their water supplies and air quality.

This summer is expected to be no different, which is why the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the CDC recently rolled out tools aimed at forecasting when extreme heat waves will strike this summer, with the goal of alerting people about these events so they can better prepare for them.

The reasons this summer could be so hot

Climate change is a major factor in the overall warming that the Earth is experiencing — including hotter summers, experts say. “The big obvious player is greenhouse gases that are producing long-term climate change,” William Boos, a UC Berkeley earth and planetary sciences associate professor, told Vox.

As a Washington Post analysis found in 2022, the average summer temperature from 2017–2021 was 1.7 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than the average US summer temperature from 1971–2000, an increase that coincided with record-breaking annual temperatures overall in recent years. The outlook for this year could well make this summer a continuation of that trend.

The La Niña climate pattern could also be a contributor to higher heat levels this year if it occurs in the coming months. La Niña is an atmospheric phenomenon involving strong winds that result in cooler temperatures in the Pacific Ocean. The cold water alters the course of high altitude air currents known as the jet stream, which contributes to weather changes.

While La Niña can lead to a “cooling down of global temperatures ... it causes changes in wind patterns that can cause some areas to be warmer than normal in summer,” says University of Pennsylvania climate scientist Michael Mann.

In the US, the areas that are most likely to see increased temperatures due to La Niña tend to be in the West and South, and that’s poised to be the case this time as well.

Heat could mean more drought, wildfires, and hurricanes

Higher temperatures in the summer can directly contribute to the proliferation of droughts because heat increases water evaporation and the loss of moisture from plants. Droughts often reduce water supplies for people and animals, and impact the ecosystems of flora and fauna that live in bodies of water as well. According to the National Weather Service, the Southwest, part of the Pacific Northwest, and Hawaii are a few of the regions susceptible to drought this coming summer.

National Weather Service

A hotter, drier summer season can also increase the likelihood of wildfires in certain areas because it means the ground is drier and the area is more likely to catch fire. When the temperature is warmer, there can be a higher frequency of lightning, too, which can ignite more wildfires.

According to projections from the National Interagency Coordination Center, which has published an outlook through July, the Southwest, Mountain West, and Hawaii are similarly areas that are poised to see greater wildfire risk this summer. California, meanwhile, could have a reduced risk compared to past years, in part because of the precipitation it’s experienced this year.

National Interagency Coordination Center

In recent years, wildfires have disrupted nearby communities, damaging people’s homes and displacing them, while also affecting people hundreds of miles away. Wildfires in Maui last year — which were sparked partly because of ongoing drought — killed around 100 people, and many of those who lost their homes have yet to find new ones. A major wave of wildfires in Canada affected large swaths of the US as well when smoke drifted over and reduced the air quality.

[Related: How Maui’s wildfires became so apocalyptic]

Higher temperatures could also lead to a more intense hurricane season, according to a group of University of Pennsylvania climate scientists led by Mann. In an analysis published this week, they noted that this Atlantic season could feature the most named hurricanes on record due partly to warmer ocean temperatures. The scientists estimate that there could be anywhere between 27 and 39 named tropical storms, roughly twice as many hurricanes as occur in a standard season.

Because evaporation increases when it’s hotter, hurricanes can pick up more moisture from oceans under these circumstances, leading to a higher frequency of more aggressive storms.

Generally, higher temperatures also raise worries about health issues and fatalities people may face due to conditions like heat stroke. As the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention notes, cities like St. Louis and Philadelphia have seen increases in death rates during heat waves in the past, and hospitals tend to see a spike of admissions related to cardiovascular and respiratory diseases in these times.

Since people’s hearts are under more strain when it’s hot, this puts additional stress on those navigating preexisting health issues as well as vulnerable groups like the young, elderly, and pregnant people. Additionally, people’s standard mechanism for cooling themselves — sweating — can be insufficient when it’s especially hot and particularly when there’s high humidity.

“In an average year in the U.S., heat kills more people than any other type of extreme weather,” Kristina Dahl, a senior climate scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, previously told Scientific American.

Philosophers, bless them, are trying to understand how normal people think about morality.

Normal people, as you may have heard, hang out on the internet. And what is the internet’s biggest trove of everyday moral dilemmas? Why, it’s Reddit’s “Am I the Asshole?” forum!

So, why not comb through millions of comments there to find out how people make moral decisions?

This might sound like a joke, but it’s actually been the past four years of Daniel Yudkin’s life. As he was doing a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania, Yudkin thought about how moral psychology and moral philosophy — his fields of research — mostly focus on hypothetical, contextless scenarios involving strangers.

For example, the famous “trolley problem” asks if you should actively choose to divert a runaway trolley so that it kills one person if, by doing so, you can save five people along a different track from getting killed.

That’s a pretty weird way to study moral decision-making. In real life, the trade-offs we face often involve people we actually know, but the trolley problem imagines a world where you have no special relationship to anybody. It doesn’t ask whether you should make a different decision if one of the people tied to the tracks is, say, your mother.

Yudkin, now a visiting scholar at Penn, hypothesized that this style of investigating morality overlooks an important aspect of real life: the relational context.

And Yudkin worried about that omission. Philosophy doesn’t only matter for the ivory tower — it can shape how we set up our societies. “If we’re living in a society that omits the importance of relational obligations,” he told me, “​​there’s a risk that we see ourselves as atomic individuals and we aren’t focused enough on what we owe each other.”

So, together with a group of co-authors on a recent preprint paper, he set about studying the popular subreddit where people describe how they acted in a moral conflict — whether with a spouse, a roommate, a boss, or someone else — and then ask that all-important question: Am I the asshole?

What studying morality on Reddit reveals

Yudkin and his co-authors scraped roughly 369,000 posts and 11 million comments written between 2018 and 2021 on “Am I the Asshole?” (AITA for short). Then they used AI to sort the dilemmas into several categories. Those include procedural fairness (like “AITA for skipping the line?”), honesty ( “AITA for saying I don’t speak English in awkward situations?”), and relational obligations ( “AITA for expecting my girlfriend to lint roll my jacket?”).

The researchers found that the most common dilemmas had to do with relational obligations: dilemmas about what we owe to others.

Courtesy of Daniel Yudkin

Next, they wanted to find out whether certain types of dilemmas were more likely to pop up in certain types of relationships. Will some dilemmas arise more often with your sister, say, than with your manager?

So the researchers examined how often each dilemma popped up in 38 different relationships. Surprise, surprise: The likelihood of encountering different dilemmas, they found, does depend on whom you’re dealing with. If you’re hanging out with your sister, you’re more likely to be worrying about relational obligations, while interactions with your manager are more likely to get you thinking about procedural fairness.

The truth is, you don’t need a fancy study to tell you this. If you’ve ever had a sister or a manager — or if you’ve ever had the experience of being, you know, a human — you probably already know this in your bones.

It’s probably obvious to most of us that relational context is super important when it comes to judging the morality of actions. It’s common to think we have different moral obligations to different categories of people — to your sister versus to your manager versus to a total stranger.

So what does it say about modern philosophy that it’s largely ignored relational context?

Uncovering philosophy’s blind spots

Let’s get a bit more precise: It’s not as though all of philosophy has ignored relational context. But one branch — utilitarianism — is strongly inclined in this direction. Utilitarians believe we should seek the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people — and we have to consider everybody’s happiness equally. So we’re not supposed to be partial to our own friends or family members.

This ethical approach took off in the 18th century. Today, it’s extremely influential in Western philosophy — and not just in the halls of academia. Famous philosophers like Peter Singer have popularized it in the public sphere, too.

Increasingly, though, some are challenging it.

“Moral philosophy has for so long been about trying to identify universal moral principles that apply to all people regardless of their identity,” Yudkin told me. “And it’s because of this effort that moral philosophers have really moved away from the relational perspective. But the more that I think about the data, the more clear to me it is that you’re losing something essential from the moral equation when you abstract away from relationships.”

Moral psychologists like Princeton’s Molly Crockett and Yale’s Margaret Clark have likewise been investigating the idea that moral obligations are relationship-specific.

“Here’s a classic example,” Crockett told me a few years ago. “Consider a woman, Wendy, who could easily provide a meal to a young child but fails to do so. Has Wendy done anything wrong? It depends on who the child is. If she’s failing to provide a meal to her own child, then absolutely she’s done something wrong! But if Wendy is a restaurant owner and the child is not otherwise starving, then they don’t have a relationship that creates special obligations prompting her to feed the child.”

According to Crockett, being a moral agent has become trickier for us with the rise of globalization, which forces us to think about how our actions might affect people we’re never going to meet. “Being a good global citizen now butts up against our very powerful psychological tendencies to prioritize our families and friends,” Crockett told me.

Utilitarians would say that we should overcome those powerful psychological tendencies, but many others would beg to differ. Philosopher Patricia Churchland once told me that utilitarianism is unrealistic because “there’s no special consideration for your own children, family, friends. Biologically, that’s just ridiculous. People can’t live that way.”

But just because our brains may incline us to care for some more than others doesn’t necessarily mean we ought to bow to that, does it?

“No, it doesn’t,” Churchland said, “but you would have a hard time arguing for the morality of abandoning your own two children in order to save 20 orphans. Even [Immanuel] Kant thought that ‘ought’ implies ‘can,’ and I can’t abandon my children for the sake of orphans on the other side of the planet whom I don’t know, just because there’s 20 of them and only two of mine. It’s not psychologically feasible.”

If you ask me, that’s fair enough. While I’d respect the decision of those who choose to save the 20 orphans, I certainly wouldn’t fault someone for acting in line with an impulse that is hardwired into them.

So ... am I the asshole?