(End of the American Dream)—We have witnessed crazy summer weather in the United States before, but this year has been just bonkers. There was snow at the end of June, high winds just shredded a wind farm in South Dakota, there have never been more tornadoes in Illinois, the western half of the country is being plagued by severe drought, wildfires are erupting at a blistering pace, and now the eastern half of the country is going to experience a “4th of July furnace” caused by an absolutely colossal heat dome…
Half of all Americans are facing prolonged, dangerously hot temperatures from an intense heat dome as they head outdoors to celebrate the country’s 250th Independence Day.
The temperatures in some spots in the eastern US, like New York City and Washington, DC, could be the hottest in over a decade, and numerous high temperature records are likely to fall in the coming days.
The oppressive heat and humidity are already gripping the Midwest and South and it will expand to the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast on Wednesday. The sprawling heat dome will then park over the East, particularly the Interstate 95 corridor, and peak by Friday.
I repeatedly warned my readers that things would get really hot once the “Super El Niño” officially arrived, and that is precisely what has happened.
Throughout the rest of this week, high temperatures will be way above normal from the Mississippi River to the Atlantic Ocean…
Actual high temperatures are forecast to range from 90 to 105 F in most areas from the Plains to the western slopes of the Appalachians early this week and from the Plains to the Atlantic and Gulf coasts from Wednesday to Independence Day. Temperatures this week will be 10-20 degrees above the 30-year historical average in nearly three dozen states in late June and early July.
“The extreme heat and humidity are expected to bring near-record, or possibly record, energy usage to the mid-Atlantic power providers,” AccuWeather Senior Meteorologist Alan Reppert said.
This is truly going to be an epic heat wave.
According to the Washington Post, a whopping 73 million Americans are expected to experience high temperatures in the triple digits…
- 73 million. That’s the number of Americans that are expected to experience triple-digit heat through Sunday.
- 190 million. Humidity will build to extreme levels for that many Americans by the end of the weekend.
- 205 million. For that many Americans, the risk for heat-related impacts will reach major or extreme levels through Monday, according to NOAA’s HeatRisk. At the rare extreme level, heat can be deadly to people without access to effective cooling.
The mid-Atlantic region will be hit particularly hard.
If you can believe it, in certain parts of the mid-Atlantic it could actually feel like it is 115 degrees outside once you account for the oppressive humidity.
One meteorologist is warning that it will be so hot in some areas that it “will melt your face off”.
If you live in an area that will be affected by this heat dome, please take proper precautions.
Sadly, there are still many people that do not take the heat seriously. In one very tragic case, an 18-month-old child ended up dead as a result…
An 18-month-old child died Monday after being found in a hot car outside an early education center in Plantation, Florida, on a day when temperatures climbed into the 90s.
Plantation police and firefighters responded at 5:39 p.m. Monday to a report of a deceased child inside a vehicle at A World of Discovery Academy, according to the Plantation Police Department.
The Plantation Fire Department confirmed the child was deceased, police said. Detectives responded to the scene, and an investigation into the child’s death is underway.
We need to educate our young parents better so that this sort of thing will stop happening.
When it gets extremely hot, we also see very large thunderstorms.
Throughout the rest of the week, the forecast calls for thunderstorms to develop all along the edges of the heat dome…
Rounds of thunderstorms will track along the edge of a massive heat dome through the days leading up to the Fourth of July. As the heat dome begins to weaken over the Independence Day weekend, severe thunderstorms are forecast to surge southward into areas that have remained largely storm-free this week.
During a heat wave like this week’s, sinking air beneath most of the heat dome suppresses thunderstorm development. Storms that do form typically develop along the weaker outer edge of the dome, where the flow around the high-pressure system helps steer them.
Thunderstorms will vary in size and intensity. Most will develop during the afternoon and evening, but some may organize into large complexes that persist overnight and continue into the next morning. In extreme cases, these complexes can evolve into derechos, while isolated storms may strengthen into supercells that may travel hundreds of miles. Both can be extremely dangerous and destructive.
Some of the storms that we have already seen have been absolutely frightening.
In South Dakota, a storm that actually occurred early in the morning produced a 131 mph wind gust that literally destroyed a bunch of wind turbines…
An early morning storm ripped through Highmore, South Dakota, about 220 miles east of Rapid City, producing a reported 131 mph wind gust that, if sustained, would fall within Category 4 hurricane strength on the Saffir-Simpson scale.
Local KELOLAND meteorologists Scot Mundt and Brian Karstens were absolutely stunned by the wind speed, which reached 131 mph.
The violent straight-line winds toppled grain silos, damaged infrastructure, and knocked over large wind turbines.
Wind turbines are normally placed in areas that typically get high winds.
But they were never designed to handle a wind gust of this magnitude…
High temperatures also typically mean lots of tornadoes, and this year has been no exception.
In fact, the state of Illinois has already experienced more tornadoes in 2026 than in any other full year on record…
Illinois has had a record-setting year of tornadoes that no state wants to experience.
As of late June, Illinois already has experienced 205 preliminary tornado reports, which is more than any other full year since records were first taken.
Notably, Illinois has had more than double the number of tornadoes of any other state thus far in 2026. Mississippi and Indiana are a distant second with 84 apiece.
This is insane.
At this stage, Illinois has “almost tripled the 30-year average number of tornadoes per year”…
Illinois state climatologist Trent Ford told Newsweek in an email that the number of tornadoes in the state has skyrocketed over the last four years, but even by those standards, this year has been extreme.
“2026 is by a wide margin the most severe weather active year we have since consistent records were taken in the late 1950s,” Ford said.
“We have smashed our previous tornado record by mid-June and almost tripled the 30-year average number of tornadoes per year in Illinois.”
I told you that this summer has been bonkers.
And the scary thing is that it has just started.
In the western half of the nation, drought is the biggest issue.
Right now, the entire state of Colorado is experiencing at least some level of drought…
A number of states are suffering from record drought, but none has suffered as much recently as Colorado. Drought at various levels covers the entire state, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor. The worst levels of drought, called “exceptional drought” and “extreme drought,” cover 37%. According to Drought Monitor experts, exceptional drought is “the most severe classification of drought, indicating critical, widespread water shortages, massive agricultural and pasture losses, and the frequent implementation of emergency water restrictions.”
Large wildfires have started along the Colorado border with Utah. This has strained the state’s firefighting resources. This has become a larger problem across the country. There have been over 35,000 wildfires in the US this year, the National Interagency Fire Center reports. These have burned 3.1 million acres so far this year. Last year, at the same time, the acres burned totaled 1.8 million.
The “Super El Niño” is likely to make things even hotter and even drier in many of the areas that are already dealing with drought.
The founder of AccuWeather is warning that we could soon see a “mini-Dust Bowl” in our western states…
And even though El Niño could transition back to neutral later this year, some experts are increasingly focused on what could follow, warning that drought conditions in the Plains could persist for years after the pattern breaks down — and the possibility of a “mini Dust Bowl” scenario.
“If the long-term drought is as bad as it could be, and you are starting off already with severe drought, this raises the real possibility of a ‘mini-Dust Bowl,” said AccuWeather Founder and Executive Chair Joel N. Myers. “Soybeans will be stressed further in the months and years ahead, and yields on some of these crops will be reduced in parts of the country. If that happens, it will have a negative impact on food production, leading to price inflation. Furthermore, water supplies will be harmed, as well.”
Drought is afflicting other key agricultural areas all over the globe, and that is setting the stage for widespread famines.
Everything that I have shared in this article is really happening.
But a lot of people out there are just sticking their heads in the sand and pretending that everything is going to be okay somehow.
It is time to wake up and face reality, but much of the population simply won’t do that.
Michael’s new book entitled “10 Prophetic Events That Are Coming Next” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can subscribe to his Substack newsletter at michaeltsnyder.substack.com.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
