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WASHINGTON (AP) — The dangerous heat wave shattering March records all over the U.S. Southwest is more than just another extreme weather blip. It’s the latest next-level weather wildness that is occurring ever more frequently as Earth’s warming builds.

Experts said unprecedented and deadly weather extremes that sometimes strike at abnormal times and in unusual places are putting more people in danger. For example, the Southwest is used to coping with deadly heat, but not months ahead of schedule, including a 112 degrees Fahrenheit (44.4 degrees Celsius) reading in two Arizona communities on Friday that smashed the highest March temperature recorded in the U.S. Two places in Southern California also hit that same temperature. All four spots are clustered within about 50 miles (80.5 kilometers) of each other.

“This is what climate change looks like in real time: extremes pushing beyond the bounds we once thought possible,” said University of Victoria climate scientist Andrew Weaver. “What used to be unprecedented events are now recurring features of a warming world.”

March’s heat would have been virtually impossible without human-caused climate change, according to a report Friday by World Weather Attribution, an international group of scientists who study the causes of extreme weather events.

More than a dozen scientists, meteorologists and disaster experts queried by The Associated Press put the March heat wave in a kind of ultra-extreme classification with such events as the 2021 Pacific Northwest heat wave, the 2022 Pakistan floods and killer hurricanes Helene, Harvey and Sandy.

The area of the U.S. being hit by extreme weather in the past five years has doubled from 20 years ago, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Climate Extremes Index, which includes various types of wild weather, such as heat and cold waves, downpours and drought.

The United States is breaking 77% more hot weather records now than in the 1970s and 19% more than the 2010s, according to an AP analysis of NOAA records. In the United States, the number and average cost of inflation-adjusted billion-dollar weather disasters in the last couple years is twice as high as just 10 years ago and nearly four times higher than 30 years ago, according to records kept by NOAA and Climate Central, a nonprofit group of scientists and communicators who research and report on climate change.
Trying to keep up with extremes and failing

“It’s really hard to even keep up with how extreme our extremes are becoming,” said Climate Central Chief Meteorologist Bernadette Woods Placky. “It’s changing our risk, it’s change our relationship with weather, it’s putting more people in risky situations and at times we’re not used to. So yes, we are pushing extremes to new levels across all different types of weather.”

For government officials who have to deal with disaster it’s been a huge problem.

Craig Fugate, who directed the Federal Emergency Management Agency until 2017, said he saw extremes increasing.

“We were operating outside the historical playbook more and more. Flood maps, surge models, heat records — events kept showing up outside the envelope we built systems around. That’s just what we saw,” Fugate said via email.

He added: “We built communities on about 100 years of past weather and assumed that was a good guide going forward. That assumption is starting to break. And the clearest signal isn’t the science debate. It’s insurers walking away.”
‘Virtually impossible’ without climate change

Climate scientists at World Weather Attribution did a flash analysis — which is not peer-reviewed yet — of whether climate change was a factor in this Southwest heat wave. They compared this week’s expected temperatures to what’s been observed in the area in March since 1900 and computer models of a world with climate change. They found that “events as warm as in March 2026 would have been virtually impossible without human-induced climate change.”

That warming, from the burning of coal, oil and natural gas, added between 4.7 degrees to 7.2 degrees F (2.6 to 4 degrees C) to the temperatures being felt, the report found.

“What we can very confidently say is that human-caused warming has increased the temperatures that we’re seeing as a result of this heat dome, and it’s going to be pushing those temperatures from what would have been very uncomfortable into potentially dangerous,” said report co-author Clair Barnes, an Imperial College of London attribution scientist.
Examples abound of high heat and extreme weather

The Southwest heat wave is solidly in the category of “giant events,” with temperatures up to 30 degrees Fahrenheit (16.7 degrees Celsius) above normal, said Stanford University climate scientist Chris Field.

He listed five others in the last six years: a 2020 Siberia heat wave, the 2021 Pacific Northwest heat wave that had British Columbia warmer than Death Valley, the summer of 2022 in North America, China and Europe, a 2023 western Mediterranean heat wave and a 2023 South Asian heat wave with high humidity.

And that doesn’t include the East Antarctica heat wave of 2022 when temperatures were 81 degrees (45 degrees Celsius) warmer than normal. That’s the biggest anomaly recorded, said weather historian Chris Burt, author of the book “Extreme Weather.”

Worsening wild weather influenced by climate change isn’t just superhot days, but includes deadly hurricanes, droughts and downpours, scientists told AP.

Devastating floods hit West Africa in 2022 and again in 2024. Iran is in the midst of a six-year drought. And the deadly Typhoon Haiyan hitting the Philippines in 2013 shocked the world.

Superstorm Sandy, which in 2012 flooded New York City and neighbors, had tropical storm-force winds that covered an area nearly one-fifth the area of the contiguous United States. It spawned 12-foot seas over 1.4 million square miles, about half the size of the U.S., with energy equivalent to five Hiroshima-sized atomic bombs, said Yale Climate Connections meteorologist Jeff Masters.

And don’t forget wildfires that are worsened by heat and drought, so recent extremes should include 2025’s Palisades and Eaton wildfires, which were the costliest weather disaster in the United States last year, said Climate Central meteorologist and economist Adam Smith.

“This is due to climate change, that we see more extreme events, and more intense ones and have so many records being broken,” said Friederike Otto, an Imperial College of London climate scientist who coordinates World Weather Attribution.

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The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

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Associated Press reporter Hallie Golden contributed from Seattle.

LIVINGSTON (KETK) — An investigation into the sale of illegal drugs near a Livingston elementary school came to an end on Wednesday with the arrest of a man following the discovery of drugs in his residence. According to the Livingston Police Department, officers were looking into the sale of illegal drugs near Pine Ridge Primary School in a “lengthy” investigation.

Officers executed a search warrant at a home connected to the investigation, finding the following:
– Methamphetamine
– Crack cocaine
– MDMA
– Synthetic marijuana
– Illegally possessed prescription medications
– Items commonly used to sell and distribute drugs
– A firearm

The suspect, Alvin Taylor II was later arrested and charged with six counts of manufacture/delivery of a controlled substance and unlawful possession of a firearm by a felon. Taylor is currently being held at the Polk County Jail under a $330,000 bond. Since his residence was in a drug-free zone, some charges were increased and additional charges may be filed.

ST. PAUL, Minn. (AP) — Clergy will be allowed to minister to immigrants in a holding facility at the headquarters of the Trump administration’s enforcement surge in Minnesota, a federal judge ruled Friday.

U.S. District Judge Jerry Blackwell granted an injunction requested by Minnesota branches of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the United Church of Christ, and a Catholic priest who had sued the Department of Homeland Security.

Under his ruling, clergy will be allowed in-person pastoral visits to all detainees at the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building in Minneapolis, the site of frequent protests over roughly the 3,000 federal officers who had surged into the state at the height of the crackdown.

Blackwell said the plaintiffs had met their burden of proving that they’re likely to succeed when the case reaches a final conclusion, and that restrictions on the religious freedom of clergy to minister to detainees constitutes “irreparable harm.”

He ordered both sides to meet within four business days to try to agree on details for how to provide access that takes into account the government’s legitimate security concerns, and then submit a plan within seven business days, or competing proposals if they can’t agree.

Bishop Jennifer Nagel, of the Minneapolis Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, was turned away from Whipple when she tried to go to visit with detainees on Ash Wednesday. She told reporters after the hearing that serving people in crisis is fundamental in many religions.

“The trauma that families are going through, and individuals are going through, at these times is exorbitant. And so to be able to meet people in those needs, that’s very much at the core, the heart and soul of what we do as ministers of all different traditions,” Nagel said.

The lawsuit alleges the Whipple building, named for Minnesota’s first Episcopal bishop, a 19th-century advocate for human rights, “now stands in stark contrast to its namesake’s legacy.” It says the building has “become the epicenter of systematic deprivation of fundamental constitutional and legal rights by the federal government.”

Government attorneys noted that Operation Metro Surge officially ended on Feb. 12. They also said the number of new detentions has since subsided, so temporary restrictions on visitors have been eased, and clergy visits have been allowed for over two weeks.

But Blackwell agreed with attorneys for the plaintiffs who argued that the issue isn’t moot, because the government still doesn’t have a formal plan requiring access that sets out who decides the conditions under which clergy are admitted.

Catholic and Episcopal bishops in Minnesota, other Christian and Jewish clergy, and the Minnesota Council of Churches also formally supported the request. The courtroom was filled with Lutheran, United Church of Christ, Unitarian Universalist, Jewish and other clergy.

Clergy across the country have been pushing for more access to immigration detention facilities, especially during the holy seasons of Lent and Ramadan. It’s a longstanding practice for faith leaders to minister to detainees. but it has become far more contentious amid the current immigration crackdown.

It took a similar lawsuit for two Catholic priests and a nun to gain entry into an ICE facility in the Chicago suburb of Broadview on Ash Wednesday last month. And Muslim and Christian clergy in Texas have struggled to get into large Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facilities there.

Tauria Rich, a senior local ICE official who oversees Whipple, said in a filing this week that visitors to Whipple are rare, and that any clergy requests are handled on a case-by-case basis. She said one clergy member had attempted to visit in early March, but left because no detainees were present. The visit would have been allowed if any detainees had been there, she said.

ICE calls the building a short-term holding facility, and not the kind of long-term detention center where clergy visits are normally allowed.

It’s not just clergy who’ve struggled to get in. Three members of Congress from Minnesota were turned away when they tried to inspect the facility. Once they did get in, they reported poor conditions.

Access has also been an issue for attorneys. Homeland Security was ordered by a different federal judge last month to give new detainees at Whipple immediate access to counsel before they’re taken elsewhere. That judge held a hearing this week to consider whether to convert her temporary order into a more permanent injunction. Her ruling is pending.