From New York Times, I'm Michael Babaro. This is a daily.

For decades, the worst impacts of climate change were felt by the world's poorest countries.

Today, I spoke with my colleague, Samina Sanguta, about how and why that's now changing.

It's Friday, July 23rd.

Samini, you are the global climate reporter for the times.

The reason we want to talk to you is that it feels like day after day after day, over the past several weeks,

there have been a series of climate events that are enormously destructive, that are geographically varied,

and that are more or less simultaneous.

And I wonder if you can just take us on what feels like a pretty dark global tour of those events.

So, here's how my summer began.

Now to the bone dry conditions up and down the west coast tonight, and the fears that an already bad drought could get even worse.

I went out to California to write a story about how much of the American west had been in the throes of a severe drought,

made worse by warming temperatures.

We begin tonight with the oppressive heat wave in the west.

At least 25 million people in six states are under heat alert.

These numbers are, well, it's record setting, right?

In the history of some of these places, they've never had temperatures as hot.

By then, the Pacific Northwest was seeing these kind of mind-melting high temperatures.

In Portland, Oregon, the temperature Sunday at 112, and it could reach 114 today.

Hundreds of people died.

We are talking an extremely dangerous heat wave.

What is going on with the weather in the U.S. right now? And what's coming next?

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