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For those of us old enough to remember a different climate, the feeling is one of loss: the summers of childhood, the winters that arrived on time.��

For younger people, the feeling may be different, but no less real. It’s closer to dread — a sense, even without personal memories of a better time, that things are accelerating toward the unknown.

I grew up near the coast in Argentina, where people spent all year waiting for summer: the beach, warm nights, relief from winter. Now, many people I know are apprehensive about its arrival. These months increasingly bring long stretches of brutal heat that feel like a warning.

Japan recently gave that feeling a name. In April 2026, Japan’s Meteorological Agency to describe days when temperatures reach 40°C or higher — a threshold now frequent enough to require its own word. The character “koku” carries moral weight in Japanese: harsh, merciless, cruel. It was the first time the agency introduced a new weather term since 2007, when “mōshobi” — “extremely hot day” — was coined for days over 35°C. The fact that the language had to be updated again, within a single generation, says something statistics alone cannot.

In Colorado, this anxiety takes a different shape. It’s not scorching summers so much as uncertain winters — whether there will be enough snow and water to sustain the rhythms of life as we know it. In 2021, a�� in �ֲ���ý County became part of a growing trend of fire activity extending well beyond the summer. That detail — fire in winter — also captures something data doesn’t: the old categories no longer hold.

What we do with our grief — our older generation’s loss, our younger generation’s dread — is the only climate question that matters now. The science is settled. The feeling is not.

��Pedro DiNezi is an associate research professor at CU �ֲ���ý’s ATLAS Institute.

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Illustration by Kara Fellows��