On the days when your local weather breaks records, pause. Delay purchases. Skip nonessential work. Rest, organize, look after others. A Heat Strike day is any day your forecast high exceeds the 99th percentile of the historic record for your location and date. That threshold moves with the calendar — an unseasonably mild February qualifies just as readily as a July heat wave. Either way, it's a once-a-century kind of day in the climate of our grandparents, and an increasingly common one in ours.
Climate change is hard to act on partly because it's so diffuse. Heat Strike picks one of the rare moments it isn't: a day whose temperature would have been historically anomalous for this place and time of year — whether that's a record-breaking summer scorcher or an eerily warm January. There's no organizer scheduling anything, no committee filing permits. The atmosphere picks the date.
Nobody's asking you to drop out of the economy permanently. The idea is much smaller: notice when the climate is doing something everyone in 1955 would have called freakish, and respond by doing less for the day. Skip the errand. Cancel the meeting that wasn't going to matter. Don't buy the thing you were on the fence about. If enough people notice the same way on the same day, that adds up to something visible.
Global emissions track global economic activity closely. When COVID-19 lockdowns shut down a chunk of the world economy in 2020, energy-related CO2 emissions fell about 5.8%, the steepest annual drop since World War II. Nobody wants pandemic-scale shutdowns, but the number is useful as a sense of scale: consumption drives demand drives emissions, very directly. When you defer a purchase, skip a non-essential trip, or stay home from a job that isn't urgent, you're shaving small amounts off that machinery. By yourself, it's negligible. Across many people on the same day, it adds up to something measurable.
The bigger lever is political. Strikes have always worked less through lost output than through visibility. A general strike doesn't end because the factory missed a day's revenue; it ends because the disruption becomes impossible for decision-makers to ignore. Heat Strike days are a way for climate concern to take a form that newsrooms cover, that businesses feel directly, and that's harder for politicians to wave off as a survey number.
One honest note: emissions bounced back above 2019 levels by December 2020. A temporary pause doesn't permanently change anything on its own. Heat Strike isn't trying to substitute for policy or for the larger structural changes the climate needs. It's trying to keep the issue legible at a moment when the climate is doing the explaining for us, and to give people who already care a thing to do that isn't just despair.
#HeatStrike, or just forward this page. A solo pause is mostly just a vibe; a coordinated one starts to register.
No single approach is going to be enough on its own. If you have time, money, or attention to give, here are eight groups working different angles of the same problem. They have no affiliation with this page; we just think they're doing real work.
The global student-led climate strike movement that started with Greta Thunberg in 2018. Weekly walk-outs and annual global strikes.
Nonviolent direct-action group demanding governments declare a climate emergency and act on it. Disruption as message.
Youth-led US group pushing the Green New Deal and climate-focused electoral politics. Hubs in dozens of cities.
Frontline communities defending land, water, and climate from extractive industry. Decades of practical experience at this.
Academics and activists arguing that endless GDP growth is incompatible with planetary limits. The case for less.
Annual one-day boycott of consumption on the Friday after US Thanksgiving. The original "pause as protest" model, since 1992.
Global campaign against fossil-fuel infrastructure and investment. Coordinator of the fossil-fuel divestment movement.
Coalition treating climate as a workers' issue: safer outdoor labor, just transition, union climate organizing.
For your location, we pull the daily maximum temperature record from a multi-decade historical baseline — drawn from either ERA5 reanalysis (1940–1970, via Open-Meteo archive) or MERRA-2 reanalysis (1981–2010, via NASA POWER), depending on availability. Both are physically-based reanalysis products that reconstruct past atmospheric conditions from observations and models. The baseline label shown on your forecast card tells you which period was used.
For your specific calendar date, we gather the highs from a ±7-day window across all baseline years, weight them by proximity to today's date, and fit a normal distribution. The strike threshold is the 99th percentile of that distribution — a level that would have occurred roughly once a century in the baseline climate. These days are now substantially more common, which is most of why this site exists.
Data: Open-Meteo forecast and archive; NASA POWER reanalysis. No tracking, no ads, no account required.