A Heat Strike day is any day your forecast high beats the 99th percentile of the historical record for your place and date. On those days: pause. Buy nothing, skip nonessential work, rest, check on your neighbors. The bar moves with the seasons — a freakishly warm February counts the same as a July heat wave. Either way, it's a once-a-century day in your grandparents' climate, and an increasingly ordinary one in yours.
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 freakish for this place and this time of year — 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 is asking you to drop out of the economy. The ask is much smaller: notice when your local weather is doing something almost nobody alive in 1955 ever saw, and answer it by doing less for one day. Skip the errand. Cancel the meeting that wasn't going to matter. Don't buy the thing you were on the fence about. One person pausing is a mood; many people pausing on the same day is a signal.
Global emissions track global economic activity closely. When COVID-19 lockdowns idled 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 gives a sense of scale: consumption drives demand drives emissions, very directly. Every purchase deferred and trip skipped shaves a small amount off that machinery. Alone it's negligible. Across many people on the same day, it becomes measurable.
The bigger lever is political. Strikes have always worked less through lost output than through visibility. A general strike doesn't win because the factory missed a day's revenue; it wins because the disruption becomes impossible for decision-makers to ignore. Heat Strike days give climate concern a form that newsrooms cover, that businesses feel directly, and that politicians can't wave off as a survey number.
One honest note: emissions rebounded above 2019 levels by December 2020. A temporary pause changes nothing permanent on its own, and Heat Strike is not a substitute for policy or for the structural changes the climate actually needs. It's a way to keep the issue legible at the exact moments the climate is doing the explaining for us — and to give people who already care something to do that isn't despair.
#HeatStrike, or just forward this page. A solo pause is mostly a vibe; a coordinated one starts to register.
Pausing is easiest for people with flexible, indoor work. For the people who pour concrete, pick crops, deliver packages, fix power lines, or wait tables on a patio, a record-heat day isn't symbolic — it's a workplace hazard, and heat already kills more people than any other kind of weather. If your job lets you strike and theirs doesn't, part of the point of your pause is to make their conditions visible.
If you have any workplace power, a strike day is a good day to use it. Ask what your employer's heat protocol actually is. Push for water, shade, and paid rest breaks for anyone working outside. If you're in a union, propose heat thresholds for the next contract — a temperature above which outdoor work stops. In the US, OSHA's heat illness prevention resources are a practical starting point, and the Labor Network for Sustainability (listed below) organizes on exactly this.
No single approach will 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. None are affiliated with this page; they're just 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 first look for a nearby weather station with a long observational record: daily maximum temperatures from NOAA's GHCN-Daily archive, the same dataset official heat records are drawn from. Your threshold is computed against that station's actual thermometer readings over roughly 1940–1970 (the exact span depends on the station and is shown on your advisory card). If no station near you has an adequate record, we fall back to physically-based model reconstructions of the past atmosphere: ERA5 reanalysis (1940–1970, via Open-Meteo) or MERRA-2 (1981–2010, via NASA POWER). The advisory card always names the record it used.
For your specific calendar date, we gather the highs from a ±7-day window across all baseline years (counted in your local time), weight them by proximity to today's date, and take the 99th percentile of that weighted sample directly — no fitted distribution, just the observed record. The strike threshold is a level that would have occurred roughly once a century in the baseline climate. Such days are now substantially more common, which is most of why this page exists.
Data: NOAA GHCN-Daily station observations; Open-Meteo forecast and archive; NASA POWER reanalysis. No tracking, no ads, no account required.