August 2026 was the hottest month ever recorded on Earth, according to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. NOAA announced that the summer just finished was the hottest in the 132-year history of American record-keeping, breaking the marks set in 1936 and 2021. Before either number had time to settle, heat advisories were issued across 12 U.S. states, with heat indices in South Texas climbing to 114 degrees Fahrenheit. Three separate heat records, on two continents, inside a single calendar year, all riding the same historic El Niño pattern that federal forecasters now say has a seventy-five percent chance of reaching a strength never before observed. The scientists tracking these numbers are running out of superlatives.
While the scientists compared data, they should have checked the Talmud, which described exactly this kind of escalating, compounding catastrophe two thousand years before anyone measured a global average temperature: chevlei Mashiach, the birth pangs of the Messiah.
Europe’s Copernicus Climate Change Service, whose observations reach back to 1940, confirmed that global average air temperatures in August reached 16.96°C (62.52°F), edging past the previous single-month record set in July 2023 by a margin so narrow that Copernicus now calls the two months joint-highest ever measured. Samantha Burgess of the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, which runs Copernicus, placed the number in a context no living person has experienced: “Humans haven’t seen temperatures as hot as today for, arguably, at least the last 100,000 years.” Climate scientist Friederike Otto of Imperial College London said the trend has no natural ceiling: “Climate change makes every El Niño hotter, and until we stop burning coal, oil, and gas these record-shattering months will simply keep on coming.” UN climate chief Simon Stiell called the data “the spiraling price of humanity’s fossil fuel addiction.”
NOAA’s own numbers, released September 9, confirmed the pattern on American soil. The average temperature for the contiguous United States this summer reached 74.4°F, the warmest in the 132-year record, exceeding the previous marks set in 1936 and 2021 by four tenths of a degree. August alone averaged 75.6°F, the warmest August ever recorded. California, Nevada, New Mexico, and Colorado each set all-time records for their warmest August average temperature. Drought expanded to cover 59.1 percent of the contiguous United States by September 1, a jump of more than ten percentage points in a single month.
The same summer produced extremes running in opposite directions at once. Indiana and Ohio recorded their highest August precipitation totals on record, roughly double their normal totals, while Texas and Oklahoma received less than thirty percent of their average August rainfall, their driest since 2000. One season, one country, opposite catastrophes.
By mid-September, sixteen National Weather Service forecast offices had issued heat advisories spanning Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Missouri, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, Kentucky, Indiana, and Illinois, with heat indices forecast to reach 46°C (114°F) in Brownsville and Corpus Christi. The same week, NOAA raised the odds of a historic-strength El Niño developing by winter to seventy-five percent. August’s disaster count read like a single overloaded ledger: more than 10,000 acres burned across eastern Washington and into Oregon, additional wildfires in Nevada and Alaska, wind gusts of 111 miles per hour tearing across South Dakota, a heat wave gripping south Florida, and Hurricane Lala battering Hawaii with rain that made this the wettest January-through-August period the islands have ever recorded.
Every scientist quoted above has an explanation for all of it, claiming that fossil fuel combustion has driven a decades-long warming trend and that this year’s El Niño has compounded it. It has nothing to say about why the hottest month on Earth and the hottest American summer in a century and a quarter arrived in the same twelve months, compounding rather than canceling out, while an unprecedented El Niño builds toward a peak still to come.
The New Paganism
Moshe Feiglin has spent his political career arguing that Israel’s institutions, and the world’s, have substituted ideology for covenant. A Temple Mount activist and founder of the libertarian Zionist party Zehut, Feiglin watched the 2021 Glasgow climate summit and called what he saw “the new paganism.” “The climate and the corona are nothing but the new communism,” he wrote. “There is no God, no personal freedom, no national identities. Just a central world government.” His sharpest line named the mechanism of enforcement directly: a Nobel-winning scientist who breaks from “the desired religious conclusion” about climate loses “your honor, your professional status, your livelihood, your right to speak” — treated, in his words, as though he “cursed Muhammad.” Feiglin’s diagnosis is that climate ideology functions as religion for people who have already rejected the real one, demanding submission rather than truth. Jeremiah described the same failure three thousand years earlier: “the townsmen of Yehuda and the inhabitants of Yerushalayim will go and cry out to the gods to which they sacrifice; but they will not be able to rescue them in their time of disaster” (Jeremiah 11:12).
Blocking the Sun
The clearest example of that substitute religion is a government-funded research program. In 2023, the White House released a congressionally mandated report on Solar Radiation Modification, outlining research into artificially reflecting sunlight back into space to cool the planet. A Bill Gates-funded test of the approach, the Stratospheric Controlled Perturbation Experiment, was set to release calcium carbonate twelve miles above Sweden before the Swedish Space Corporation canceled it. The same week the American report appeared, the European Union called for an international framework to govern solar radiation modification research. None of that momentum has reversed. The research lines opened in 2023 remain active at universities and national academies, and the European push for a governance framework continues to move through diplomatic channels. The proposal is, without exaggeration, to dim the sun. Yuval Ovadia, who has studied the project closely, named what it actually resembles: “They think they can control men and god, heavens and the earth. Great deeds are not forbidden, but they require purity of purpose and attachment to the Divine. This is a way in which those who only seem good but are actually not are weeded out.” The Tower of Babel ended the same way — men attempting to reach and manage the heavens on their own terms, until God intervened directly. The prophet Amos described the very inversion this generation is now deliberately engineering: “And in that day — declares my God — I will make the sun set at noon, I will darken the earth on a sunny day” (Amos 8:9).
Blaming Zion
The same international architecture managing this crisis has, for decades, found room within it to target Israel specifically. At a 2016 UN Earth Day ceremony in New York, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas took the podium meant for signing the Paris Climate Accords and, in a classic antisemitic trope, blamed Israel for the weather: “The Israeli occupation is destroying the climate in Palestine, and the Israeli settlements are destroying the environment in Palestine. Please help us stop the occupation and the settlements.” Israel’s ambassador to the UN, Danny Danon, called it what it was: exploiting “an international stage to mislead the international community.” A global climate ceremony, convened to address a planetary crisis, became a platform for Israel-bashing instead — a pattern that recurs at nearly every international body Israel engages with, climate forums included.
Eating the Problem Away
Once the crisis is treated as ideology rather than mechanism, the proposed remedies stop answering to any limiting principle. In 2019, Democratic presidential candidates debated climate policy on national television. Andrew Yang said the world would be “OK if the vast majority of the world goes vegetarian immediately.” Bernie Sanders proposed population control through expanded birth control access as a climate solution. That same year, Swedish behavioral scientist Magnus Soderlund addressed a food-industry summit in Stockholm on a panel titled “Can You Imagine Eating Human Flesh?” and suggested cannibalism as a legitimate alternative food source, describing the only real obstacle as “conservative taboos.” Eight percent of the summit’s attendees said they would be willing to try it. A movement that began by denying God ends by treating the human body itself as negotiable.
The Birth Pangs of the Messiah
The Talmud in Sanhedrin 97a describes a defined period before the Messiah’s arrival, marked not by a single crisis but by intensifying, compounding crises: chevlei Mashiach, the birth pangs of the Messiah. The Sages regarded this period as so severe that Rabbi Elazar, upon encountering the teaching in Sanhedrin 98b, responded: “Let him come, but let me not see him.”
Rabbi Yitzchak Batsri, a noted Kabbalist from Jerusalem, addressed this directly when Israel365 News asked him about doomsday predictions tied to the current global threats. He was unmoved by them. “While the world exists, it is through God’s mercy and not because of our merit,” Batsri said. “Therefore, until God’s mercy ends, the world cannot end, no matter what men do. Men simply do not have the power to destroy God’s creation against His will.” He located the boundary precisely: “The Rambam writes that the world will never be destroyed. But the Talmud says in Tractate Sanhedrin that the world will exist for 6,000 years, and in the 7,000th year it will be destroyed, as prophesied in Isaiah 2:11, ‘And the LORD alone shall be exalted in that day.'” Even there, Batsri noted, the Rambam holds the destruction is partial — evil eliminated, good remaining — while other Sages hold it is total. “According to all opinions,” he concluded, “until the year 7,000 by the Hebrew calendar, there can be no total destruction, only in certain countries or regions.”
That regional qualifier is exactly what this year’s data shows. Amos described the same selective pattern nearly three thousand years ago: “I have withholden the rain from you, when there were yet three months to the harvest; and I caused it to rain upon one city, and caused it not to rain upon another city; one piece was rained upon, and the piece whereupon it rained not withered. So two or three cities wandered unto one city to drink water, and were not satisfied; yet have ye not returned unto Me, saith the LORD” (Amos 4:7-8). Indiana drowning in its wettest August on record while Texas registered its driest since 2000 is not chaos. It is exactly the differentiated pattern the prophet named.
The same principle runs through the covenant God made after the flood: “So long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night shall not cease” (Genesis 8:22). That promise concerns rhythm, not mildness — the seasons will hold their order, even when their intensity escalates toward something the created world has not seen before. Malachi named that escalation directly, and the healing built into it: the day that “burneth as a furnace” leaves the wicked “neither root nor branch” (Malachi 3:19), while the very next verse promises the righteous the same sun “with healing in its wings” (Malachi 3:20). The Talmud in Nedarim 8b makes the mechanism explicit: the sun itself will not change in the Messianic age. Only what it does to each person will.
Batsri went further than judgment. Asked what remains even in the most severe reading of the world’s end, he answered: “Even when the world ends, the souls of those who follow God will remain here, flying above the earth, as it is written in Isaiah 40:31, ‘But they that wait for the LORD shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles.’ So even when this world is destroyed, there will be a place above the earth, a different kind of existence.”
The Only Cure the World Has Not Tried
This is not the first time the Jewish people held the land and let its holiest site sit unattended. When the exiles returned from Babylon and built their own homes while leaving the Temple in ruins, God’s response came through the climate directly, as the prophet Haggai recorded it: “Ye looked for much, and lo, it came to little; and when ye brought it home, I did blow upon it… Therefore over you the heaven hath kept back, so that there is no dew, and the earth hath kept back her produce. And I called for a drought upon the land and upon the mountains” (Haggai 1:10-11). The equation runs in both directions. A people who neglect the Temple invite drought. A people who build it invite restoration.
Moshe Feiglin’s diagnosis and his platform are the same argument stated twice. The man who called climate ideology a substitute religion has spent his political career running Zehut on the position that Israel’s actual answer was never a carbon framework or a UN accord — it was rebuilding the Beit HaMikdash, the Holy Temple, on Har HaBayit, the Temple Mount. He has lost elections making that case while the nations spent billions engineering ways to dim the sun and gave Mahmoud Abbas a UN podium to blame Israeli settlements for a crisis every other nation in the room shares equally.
That is the fact worth sitting with as this year’s heat records give way to next year’s, and NOAA’s projected El Niño peak in 2027 approaches: the same international bodies drafting climate frameworks, funding solar geoengineering, and hosting the diplomatic architecture around this crisis are, with remarkable consistency, the ones condemning the one nation whose ancient prophets already named both the cause of this heat and its cure. The world has tried blocking the sun. It has tried blaming Israel for weather. It has tried mandating diets and, in its most degraded moment, floated eating each other. It has not tried building the Temple. Haggai already recorded what happens when it finally does.
