On 20 October 2026, a virtual firestorm swept through newsrooms around the world, announcing the advent of apocalyptic ‘heat storms’ — a phrase that recalled former US Vice President Al Gore’s rhetoric at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January 2023, when he said, “That’s what’s boiling the oceans”, linking greenhouse gas emissions to droughts, and melting ice.
What had happened?
Had greenhouse gases, essential to life on Earth, suddenly become lethal?
No.
Reuters, led by investigative journalist Maurice Tamman, had introduced a new classification for above-average temperature events, with its own definition, naming convention, and live global tracker.
Maurice Tamman
Occasionally, journalists dig into the unglamorous investigative work that governments and others avoid: combing through death records, aggregating neglected court filings, and tracking illicit supply chains.
Sometimes, that work earns a Pulitzer Prize.
In 2025, Reuters won the Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting for ‘Fentanyl Express’, a series published in 2024 that exposed the international supply chain for the precursor chemicals used to manufacture fentanyl. The investigation traced the trade from Chinese suppliers through Mexican criminal networks to the US market.
The series was reported by a team of Reuters journalists, including Maurice Tamman, who previously worked as a data journalist. Reuters reported that the investigation exposed how suppliers and intermediaries were able to exploit gaps in trade controls and law enforcement.
Tamman is also the lead reporter behind Reuters’ ‘The Age of Heat Storms’, published on 20 October 2026.
Creating a Feedback Loop
Using 1961–1990 as its historical baseline, Reuters analysed temperature data across 1.04 million grid cells covering the planet. Its method identifies a heatwave when a grid cell records a weighted-average percentile rank at or above the 90th percentile over a rolling five-day window.
The calculation gives greater weight to more recent days, using an exponential decay factor of 0.9, and allows a one-day grace period. The threshold is local, not global: what counts as unusually hot depends on the historical temperature range of the particular place.
Reuters added another rule: when connected areas that qualify as heatwaves cover at least 1 per cent of Earth’s surface at their peak — about 5.1 million square kilometres, or roughly one and a half times the area of India — it christens this conceptual abstraction a ‘heat storm’.
Neither the term nor this particular classification is an established category of official meteorology.
Maurice Tamman acknowledges that Reuters faced pushback from scientists over its use of the word ‘storm’, which already has a distinct meaning in meteorology: “Some scientists objected to the term, because ‘storm’ has a distinct meteorological definition”.
Reuters and Tamman still went ahead with using it.
Reuters has not discovered a new kind of weather system. It took an existing field of study, applied its own thresholds and linking rules, and repackaged it as a new, headline-grabbing abstraction: ‘heat storm’.
A 2025 paper, ‘Disagreement in Detected Heatwave Trends Resulting from Diagnostic Methods’, highlights that any change in the parameters used to identify and connect heatwaves can alter their apparent size and duration. This reinforces questions about the choices Reuters made in selecting some definitions over others.
It also raises questions about what might have been left out.
The ‘heat storm’ label can make the pattern sound like an independent entity, dramatically moving through the atmosphere on its own.
But weather patterns do not spawn, develop, and dissipate in isolation. They are anchored to, and constantly interact with, the Earth’s surface.
Topography, atmospheric circulation, coastlines, soil moisture, and land cover all help determine where heat develops, how it behaves, and where its effects are felt.
Reuters’ ‘heat storm’ concept treats geographically connected temperature anomalies as a single atmospheric event, effectively ignoring the planet’s surface. But geographical boundaries, topography, and local conditions can interrupt that continuity: temperature anomalies that appear connected on a two-dimensional global grid do not necessarily constitute one physically coherent event.
Alleged geographical extent is not a measure of harm — size does not necessarily matter.
The consequences of weather are local and uneven: one man’s cursed flood is another man’s blessed rain. The same broad pattern can bring relief to one place and devastation to another. Its impact can only be assessed on the ground.
The Amplification Machine
Applying its freshly minted model to historical data, Reuters identified an event it called “Heat Storm Vera”, which it says lasted 367 days in 2023–2024 and reached nearly 85 per cent of the globe over its lifetime.
What damage did this supposed atmospheric entity cause?
Reuters points to more than 1,300 deaths during the 2024 Hajj pilgrimage in Saudi Arabia, heat-stricken schoolchildren in the Philippines, wildfires aggravated by drought in Louisiana, and a Spanish olive harvest in which production fell by roughly half. Olive oil prices rose by 44 per cent.
These are serious consequences. But they are local: a deadly heat episode in Saudi Arabia, overheated classrooms in the Philippines, drought and fires in Louisiana, and heat-related crop losses in Spain. Each has its own geography, conditions, and causal chain.
Any short-term response to these harms would also be local: protecting pilgrims from extreme heat, cooling classrooms, managing wildfire risks, or helping farmers cope with crop losses.
The question is what the label ‘Heat Storm Vera’ adds to our understanding of these events.
Reuters uses the model to assemble separate local disasters into the story of a single global event.
What larger threat does this framing really ask the reader to see?
Perception Management
In his explanation of how Reuters developed its heat storm concept, Tamman is concerned that the scientific discussion of global warming, with its abstract temperature thresholds and projections, fails to connect with ordinary people.
What, he asks, is the average person supposed to make of the prospect of a 2°C rise in global temperatures?
His answer is to attempt to repackage the science in terms people can feel — and fear: “Heat waves, it seemed to me, are the connective tissue between the science of global warming and our everyday experience”.
Tamman and Reuters are not just describing a weather event — they want to reshape public perception of it. And where the familiar term ‘heatwave’ supposedly fails to convey sufficient scale and drama, Reuters invents a new one — ‘heat storm’: “One thing we discovered is that we needed a new term for the largest heat waves, something simple that would instantly convey their scale and consequences”.
The ‘heat storm’ project fits the broader pattern in Reuters’ climate coverage.
In 2018, Reuters published ‘Ocean Shock’, a major investigation presented under the banner “the climate crisis beneath the waves”. Tamman was among its reporters. The series framed ocean warming, shifting marine populations and disruption to fishing communities within a wider account of climate change, human-generated warming and carbon dioxide.
The editorial ambition is clear: take a complex environmental system, identify consequences people can see and feel, and connect them to the wider climate narrative about rising atmospheric CO2 and its effects.
This framing is consistent with calls for globally coordinated action to reduce carbon dioxide emissions.
Although Reuters’ newsroom does not explicitly endorse or lobby for carbon dioxide laws, its parent corporation has formally adopted net-zero policy frameworks, and its enterprise journalism actively frames carbon emissions as an urgent systemic hazard. Stephane Bello, vice chairman of Thomson Reuters, said:
In addition to reducing the greenhouse gas emissions of our business, we will continue to inform and support our customers with the trusted news, analytics and tailored environmental law and disclosure solutions they need to evaluate their own efforts to address climate change.
That alignment also has a commercial dimension.
Despite its reputation as a historic global newswire, Reuters News generates only a fraction of Thomson Reuters’ total revenues. Thomson Reuters’ annual reports and financial results reveal that billions in profits come from its lucrative legal, tax, and accounting software—enterprise staples like Westlaw and ONESOURCE.
By developing specialised environmental, social, and governance (ESG) solutions that help multinational corporations calculate carbon liabilities, manage ESG disclosures, and comply with emerging climate mandates, Thomson Reuters turned environmental regulation into a high-margin enterprise software market.
The Broadcast
Thousands of newspapers, regional broadcasters, digital outlets, and financial terminals use Reuters’ real-time wire feed, often importing dispatches directly into their content systems. For smaller newsrooms facing shrinking investigative budgets, copy arriving over the wire typically carries not only the presumed authority of gospel truth — but also salvation.
For editors working to tight deadlines, a locally relevant dispatch bearing the Reuters name is valuable. A strong headline may go straight to publication with little local editing: “Giant ‘heat storms’ are scorching the Earth”.
Some outlets presented it as a new category of extreme heat; others made it clear that Reuters had coined the term. The distinction matters: repetition can make a newsroom’s classification sound like an established meteorological category.
Closing the Loop
Other outlets adopted the terminology.
The Irish Independent republished Reuters’ analysis under the headline “Meet the ‘heat storm’: Investigation gives new name to supersized heatwaves”.
India Today published the headline “India knows heatwaves well. What is the new threat called heat storm?” and explicitly acknowledged that the category had been developed by Reuters and was not an official weather classification.
TV Azteca in Mexico also published a report on the proliferation of giant ‘tormentas de calor’ (‘heat storms’), again attributing the analysis to Reuters.
These examples show the terminology travelling beyond the original investigation, with its provenance acknowledged.
Aaj Tak in India took another route and reported: “Heat storms increased from 5 to 102 in 60 years, scorching the Earth for 367 days”. This headline embraced the Reuters figures without mentioning the wire service’s role in inventing the science-sounding concept.
If politicians or other news outlets began using ‘heat storm’ independently of Reuters’ original definition as an established category, and Reuters then reported on that usage, the feedback loop would come full circle: a newsroom-created category would gain apparent authority through adoption by others and then be reported back as an established part of public discourse.
In intelligence and political warfare, this dynamic is known as ‘circular reporting’ and ‘information laundering’. The US Senate's Church Committee documented the phenomenon in its examinations of CIA operations associated with the 1973 coup against Salvador Allende in Chile (detailed in its ‘Staff Report’ and ‘Final Report’), Operation PBSUCCESS in Guatemala (1954), and Operation TPAJAX in Iran (1953).
Kristoffer Hell
Kristoffer Hell is an independent writer and journalist covering high politics and how technology shapes human experience. He holds an MLitt in Strategic Studies from the University of Aberdeen and a Diploma in News Journalism from the London School of Journalism. He previously worked as a software developer, contracting in banking, pharmaceuticals, and retail.