The Brief

We all know it’s hot — and getting hotter.

According to NOAA and NASA, the 10 warmest years globally since 1850 have all occurred in the past decade. In less than 200 years, when the Industrial Revolution began, the global average temperature has increased by more than two degrees Fahrenheit.

While the planet’s climate has changed dramatically over millions of years, atmospheric carbon dioxide levels are now at their highest in millenia due to pollution from human society. Scientific consensus proves the modern, rapid weather shifts we're now experiencing are a result of how we humans, largely through fossil fuel pollution, are changing the climate.

The science is clear that we’re entering a new era of extreme heat. We’re unlikely to keep global temperatures below the threshold scientists have raised the alarm about for years, and weather extremes will only become more frequent and intense if we don’t dramatically cut emissions in the next seven years or soon after.

So, as the earth heats up, what is “normal” vs “extreme” heat? How is the climate crisis affecting heat here in Southern California?

Normal heat in the Southland

Of course, July through September and even much of October in southern California, it's normal for the weather to heat up. Southern California has deserts, mountains and the ocean, so our temperatures vary widely. From geography to tree cover to local weather patterns, there are a lot of factors that naturally make some parts of Southern California hotter than others. My colleague, science reporter Jacob Margolis, explains in more detail in this story.

'Extreme' vs 'normal' heat

What’s normal versus extreme depends on where you live — after all, what’s considered a hot day in Santa Monica is a far cry from a hot day in Palm Springs.

The climate crisis is shifting average temperatures hotter — not every day, or every season, but it’s driving an average increase in both day and nighttime temperatures.

How the climate crisis is expected to affect heat in California.

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Courtesy of the California Legislative Analyst's Office

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That also means longer and more frequent “heat waves,” during which temperatures reach higher extremes and stay there for longer periods of time. A week-long heat wave in early September 2022 was the hottest and longest in the state’s record for that month, which is already one of the hottest months in California.

“Whether you're on the coast, whether you're in the mountains, whether you're in the deserts, whether you're in between, all those averages are going up,” said Alex Tardy, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service (NWS) San Diego office.

In Southern California, the most rapid and dramatic increases are happening in the deserts and the mountains, already extreme environments, Tardy said.

Doing the math

Since 1901, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has collected temperature records from weather stations across the country. They use that information, combined with other data and computer models to calculate specific “climate normals” for different regions.

The “normals” add up to a 30-year average temperature, or what’s considered a long-term average temperature. NOAA’s National Weather Service uses those average temperatures to decide whether a heat event is extreme or not.

“Abnormal heat is typically daytime temperatures 10 to as much as 20 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than the long-term average,” said Tardy. “When we talk about a heat wave, what we're talking about is really two or more days when temperatures are much above average.”

NOAA's latest climate normals map showing the normals from 1991-2020 minus 1981-2010 normals. Most of the U.S. shows significant warming, especially in the West, Southwest and East, where soem normals jumped by a whole degree already.

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Courtesy of NOAA

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Since our bodies take time to acclimate to changes in temperature, those averages depend on the time of year. For example, Tardy said that an abnormal threshold in mid-July in L.A would be 90 degrees, whereas it would be 110 degrees in Palm Springs.

“We look at the heat risk, we look at the departure from normal, we look at the ability for someone to be able to acclimate to the heat,” Tardy said. “We don't just look at the fact that it's a hundred degrees and that requires a heat warning.”

Every 10 years, NOAA recalculates the climate normals — most recently in 2020 — and overall, averages are going up.

“Normals and averages — it's always been a moving target, but the target is moving up and up and up and warmer and warmer and that's what we've seen the past 10 years,” said Tardy.

Six of the last 10 years have been the hottest on record in Southern California, Tardy said.

Ranking heat waves like hurricanes 

When the NWS sees abnormal temperatures in the forecast, that can spark a heat watch or excessive heat warning or advisory. These warnings are meant to help individuals stay safe, inform governments and businesses, and can trigger some legal protections for outdoor workers.

NWS is currently prototyping an extreme heat risk scale that will more directly communicate how different heat extremes translate to health risk. They've already used it in tweets about the current heat wave:

Tardy said improving early communication about the dangers of heat is especially important as the climate crisis makes heat more extreme and frequent — already, heat kills more people than any other weather event in the U.S.

“Heat is a very silent killer,” Tardy said. “It's not something that we see like a hurricane or a flood or a winter storm. It's something that just kind of catches up to you over time. It's one of those things that a lot of people don't take seriously until it happens to them.”

The idea is to rank heat waves similar to how we rank hurricanes. California lawmakers also passed a bill in 2022 requiring a statewide heat wave ranking system by 2025.

The prototype scale for ranking heat waves amid a changing climate.

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Courtesy of NOAA

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“People can really relate to the magnitude or the potential impact on a five versus a one [for a hurricane],” Tardy said. “So we're trying to do that also with heat.”

NOAA’s current prototype, which you can peruse here, uses a color scale to indicate how dangerous forecasted temperatures may be to health. NWS is currently using it to inform its official heat alerts, but it will likely be a few years before it’s used in widespread public communication.

“The overall magnitude of the event — not just, 'It's 110 degrees' — that's something we're really trying to focus on more,” Tardy said.

The scale forecasts seven days in advance and allows a more nuanced view of heat as it relates to health by incorporating data about:

• How significantly above normal the temperatures are at your location.
• The time of the year. 
• How long the unusual heat will last (will overnight temperatures get low enough to lower heat stress? How much warmer than average will those temperatures be?)

Weather forecasting has gotten a lot better, and it is another tool to save lives amid the climate crisis, Tardy said. He hopes the heat risk scale will better communicate the health dangers of heat and help people better protect themselves and their loved ones amid our hotter normal.

“We have to do a better job ingraining it into the culture — that it's not just hot all the time, it's not just hot because it's summer,” Tardy said. “When we start talking about heat alerts or heat warnings, it's something that should be treated as, ‘Hey, this is very unusual.’ And we can't just treat the day or the activity as normal.”

Staying safe in the heat

Victor Villa brought his taco cart to Bad Bunny's Super Bowl Halftime performance.

Los Angeles residents likely know the name — Villa's Tacos is an award-winning taco business based in Highland Park. Villa began in his grandmother's front yard and now has brick-and-mortar locations in Highland Park, off Figueroa Avenue, and at Grand Park in downtown Los Angeles.

The restaurant has won L.A. Taco's Taco Madness championship three times (2021, 2022 and 2024) and earned a Michelin Bib Gourmand award for three consecutive years for its signature quesotacos. Villa previously appeared on LAist's AirTalk in August 2025.

A celebration of Latino culture

The entire performance was a celebration of Latin American culture's prominence in the United States, with Bad Bunny taking a moment to recognize Spanish-speaking countries worldwide.

Villa appeared during the opening number, "Tití me preguntó" from Bad Bunny's 2022 album "Un verano sin ti." In the sequence, Bad Bunny visits a piragüero cart — piraguas are iconic Puerto Rican shaved ice treats shaped like pyramids — before the camera pans to Villa and his cart, where Bad Bunny hands him the frozen treat. The moment bridges two beloved Latin American street food traditions: Puerto Rico's piraguas and L.A.'s taco culture.

'An absolute honor'

After the performance aired, Villa took to Instagram to express his thanks and call it a historic moment, He traced his journey from selling his first taco more than eight years ago to the Super Bowl stage.

"I want to give a huge thank you to @badbunnypr for hand selecting me & allowing me to represent my people, my culture, my family & my business," Villa wrote on Instagram.

'A product of immigrants'

As a first-generation Mexican American, he dedicated the moment to the immigrants who made it possible, emphasizing that Villa's Tacos is a product of immigration and that he is honored to represent his culture and all taqueros and Latinos everywhere. The post closed with shoutouts to Puerto Rico, Mexico, and all Latinos.

In August last year, Villa appeared on a Food Friday segment on LAist 89.3's AirTalk, bringing his freshly cooked tacos for host Josie Huang.

Howl about this for the history books? A wolf was found in L.A. County for the first time in a century on Saturday morning.

“It's the furthest south the gray wolves have been documented since their reintroduction into Yellowstone and Idaho just over 30 years ago,” said Axel Hunnicutt, the state gray wolf coordinator for the California Department of Fish and Wildlife.

The wolf, tagged as BEY03F, was spotted in the town of Neenach, near Lancaster, at 6 a.m.

The three-year-old wolf was born in 2023 in Plumas County, north of Lake Tahoe, as part of the first litter of the Beyem Seyo pack.

“ We don't know what happened to her after that,” said Hunnicutt. “ We documented her through genetics when she was born.”

Last May, BEY03F was caught in  Tulare County and fitted with a GPS tracking collar. The department has been monitoring her movements since. Hunnicut estimated that she has traveled more than 500 miles throughout the state.

The end of January marks the start of the breeding season for gray wolves, according to the Center for Biological Diversity. They will typically break from their pack to find a mate, sometimes traveling thousands of miles to establish a new pack.

There are no records of wolves in the San Gabriel or coastal regions, but the likelihood of her finding a mate is not impossible. Researchers were surprised to discover the pack that BEY03F belonged to in Northern California.

 ”No one expected a pack to pop up there,” Hunnicutt said. “And that's because two wolves wandered hundreds of miles, so it's possible that some other wolf is doing the same thing.”

The last gray wolf to make it into the Southern California region was in 2021, when the male wolf, OR93 traveled as far down as Ventura County. His journey was cut short later that year, after he was struck and killed by a vehicle along Interstate 5 in Kern County.

Hunnicut said that’s one of the main challenges for BEY03F in her search for a mate.

“ This morning she’s just east of Pyramid Lake,” said Hunnicutt. “Close to I-5, which is honestly just down the road from where [OR93] was killed on the highway.”

Bad Bunny has fans the world over. One of them apparently is Gov. Gavin Newsom.

On Saturday, Newsom posted on social media proclaiming today, Super Bowl Sunday, as "Bad Bunny Day" in California in a rather tongue-in-cheek, over-the-top tweet written in all caps.

"AS MANY PEOPLE KNOW, I AM A TREMENDOUS LOVER OF 'THE SPANISH'... THAT IS WHY I AM DECLARING TOMORROW IN CALIFORNIA AS 'BAD BUNNY DAY' WHEN BAD BUNNY PERFORMS AT THE BIG GAME IN THE GOLDEN STATE WITH HIS SOOTHING, BEAUTIFUL VOICE, AND HIS VERY NICE LOOKS," reads the message tweeted out through Newsom's office.

For months, the governor's social media team has been adopting the manners and tone of President Trump's signature style.

 "Obviously in this case, the governor is making light of the President's criticisms of  Bad Bunny performing during today's Super Bowl halftime show," said Chris Micheli, an adjunct professor of law at McGeorge School of Law in Sacramento, as well as the author of a number of textbooks on California state government.

So, is the proclamation for real?

To answer that question, let's take a detour into the state proclamation process.

"The governor has a wide authority on proclamations," said Micheli, who also works as a lobbyist for groups like the Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce.

Proclamations generally fall into two categories, he said. One is official actions, such as states of emergency in the case of disasters, to direct resources for relief. The second is proclamations that are ceremonial and commemorative in nature, where the governor may designate a specific day, week or a period of time to recognize a person or an event — like Black History Month or Ronald Reagan Day.

The Bad Bunny Day proclamation, Micheli said, falls in the second category. But, he added, proclamations are signed by the governor and attested by the Secretary of State in written declarations. As such, it's easy to interpret the Bad Bunny Day tweet as done in jest.

Here's what the Governor told LAist

"The Governor declared Bad Bunny Day via tweet. Enjoy!" The governor's office told us in an email seeking confirmation on Sunday.

Micheli said that means the governor would likely follow up with an official written declaration.

Here's the thing with ceremonial proclamations, though. Micheli said they need to be re-upped every year by the governor — they don't automatically renew.

So yes, let's celebrate Bad Bunny Day on this Super Bowl Sunday. Let's hope to do it again next year, and the years after.

Puerto Rican superstar, Bad Bunny, made history at the 2026 Grammy Awards when he became the first artist to win album of the year for a Spanish-language project, with him winning for his album Debí Tirar Más Fotos. In addition to the top prize, Bad Bunny, whose given name is Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, took home the award for the best música urbana album and best global music performance for his song "EoO".

In his acceptance remarks, and not unlike other moments throughout his career, the artist used the spotlight to express his political views.

"Before I say thanks to God, I'm going to say ICE out," Bad Bunny said during his acceptance speech for best música urbana album. "We're not savages, we're not animals, we're not aliens — we're humans and we are Americans," he added in response to the ongoing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids across the country.

The crowd in Los Angeles, largely met his statements with applause and ovation.

But this Sunday, Bad Bunny will meet a larger and potentially more politically divided audience at the Super Bowl, where he is set to headline this year's halftime show. Since late September when the NFL, Apple Music and Roc Nation announced their invitation to Bad Bunny, many took to social media to voice their indignation at the choice to platform an artist who has only released music in Spanish.

To learn more about Bad Bunny's political history and what we might expect at the Super Bowl, Morning Edition host A Martinez spoke with Petra R. Rivera-Rideau, who chairs the American Studies Department at Wellesley College and the co-author, alongside Vanessa Díaz, of the new book, P FKN R: How Bad Bunny Became the Global Voice of Puerto Rican Resistance. The two academics are also behind the Bad Bunny Syllabus, an online teaching resource based on Puerto Rican history and Bad Bunny's meteoric rise since 2016.

Below are three takeaways from the conversation.

Students come for Bad Bunny and stay for the history 

Rivera-Rideau teaches "Bad Bunny: Race, Gender, and Empire in Reggaetón" at Wellesley and said the course uses Bad Bunny's work as a hook to get students into the seminar.

"But we really actually spend most of our time talking about Puerto Rican history and Puerto Rican history is part of U.S. history," she said. "And Bad Bunny music has consistently made references to this history."

Rivera-Rideau pointed to an example from 2018 when Bad Bunny debuted on a U.S. mainstream English language television show, The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. The artist opened with a critique of the Trump administration's handling of Hurricane Maria, which had devastated his island in 2017.

"After one year of the hurricane, there's still people without electricity in their homes. More than 3,000 people died and Trump is still in denial," Martínez Ocasio said.

Latinos remain "perpetually foreign" to some

Puerto Ricans are born U.S. citizens — but this has not always protected them from being caught in recent ICE operations.

"I think part of that has to do with the kind of racialization of Spanish and the racialization of Latino communities of which Puerto Ricans are a part," she said. "And I think what it indicates is that, to me, Latinos in the United States, many of whom have been here for generations, are often understood to be perpetually foreign as a group of people that just does not belong."

The Party is the Protest 

Rivera-Rideau said if Apple Music's trailer for the Super Bowl halftime show — which features Bad Bunny dancing with a group representing a smattering of ages, faces and abilities — is any indication of what audiences can expect on Sunday's stage, the theme might be joy in the face of a difficult moment for immigrants and Latinos in the U.S.

"One of the things we talk about in our book is that Bad Bunny is part of resistance, he does engage in protests but it's often through joy," she said. "We have a chapter in our book called 'The Party is the Protest' and I actually feel like that's what I expect at the Superbowl, a party and a protest.

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