By Emily Dieckman , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: Historic wildfires broke out in South Korea in late March 2025, killing 32 people, injuring 45, and displacing about 37,000. In total, the fires burned more than 100,000 hectares (about 247,000 acres), nearly quadruple the area that burned in the country’s previous worst recorded fire season in 2000. ( In comparison , the January 2025 Palisades and Eaton Fires in Southern California burned about 91,000 hectares, or 37,000 acres.) A  new study  by scientists with World Weather Attribution (WWA) suggests that atmospheric warming—caused primarily by fossil fuel burning—made the hot, dry, and windy conditions that drove the South Korean fires about twice as likely and 15% more intense. ...This study adds to a growing body of science showing how climate change is making weather conditions more favorable to dangerous wildfires....  Full article at https://eos.org/articles/climate-change-heightened-conditions-of-south-korean-fires ....

By Saima May Sidik , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: Research shows that communities are best able to mitigate the effects of climate change when they can work alongside scientists on adaptation plans .  Hanson et al.   recently extended this finding to Indigenous communities in the Colorado Plateau, including members of the Navajo Nation, Hopi Tribe, and Ute Mountain Ute Tribe. ...the researchers conducted a series of listening circles, interviews, and consultations with Indigenous peoples and Westerners with extensive experience working in Indigenous communities. They collaborated with members of the Nature Conservancy’s Native American Tribes Upholding Restoration and Education, or  NATURE , program, which aims to equip Indigenous college students with natural resource management skills. ...Indigenous students are most likely to engage in climate education when they’re actively recruited for a program, when mentors are willing to learn from students as well as teach them, and ...

By Erik Stokstad , Science.  Excerpt: Rice plants usually love warmth. But when they start to flower, hot nights can result in meager harvests and chalky grain. So far, breeders have made slow progress in solving these challenges, which are becoming more urgent with climate change. Now, after searching for more than a decade, researchers in China have found a culpable gene, which they describe this week in  Cell . They also show that a  natural variant of the gene can preserve both yield and rice quality  when temperatures rise....  Full article at https://www.science.org/content/article/major-breakthrough-natural-gene-variant-protects-rice-heat-waves . 

By Paul Voosen , Science.  Excerpt: For decades, a climatological mystery has haunted West Africa. In the 1970s and ’80s, a vicious drought, perhaps the worst worldwide in the 20th century, struck the region...just south of the Sahara Desert. The disaster killed tens of thousands of people in Senegal and other countries and caused a mass migration to cities. But then the drought stopped, and nothing like it has occurred since. Still the question has lingered: Could the great drought return? Climate researchers led by Edward Cook and Michela Biasutti of Columbia University want to glean an answer from trees, using tree-ring records to create the first comprehensive, multicentury drought atlas for any region of Africa. They’re now mounting an arduous search for the few West African trees that capture the whispers of past rainfall in their annual growth. “We want to tell people what to expect in the next few decades,” Biasutti says. Climate change will surely affect future droughts, b...

By Brad Plumer  and  Rebecca Dzombak , The New York Times.  Excerpt: The Trump administration has dismissed the hundreds of scientists and experts who had been compiling the federal government’s flagship report on how global warming is affecting the country. The move puts the future of the report, which is required by Congress and is known as the National Climate Assessment, into serious jeopardy, experts said. Since 2000, the federal government has published a comprehensive look every few years at how rising temperatures will affect human health, agriculture, fisheries, water supplies, transportation, energy production and other aspects of the U.S. economy. The  last climate assessment came out in 2023  and is used by state and local governments as well as private companies to help prepare for the effects of heat waves, floods, droughts and other climate-related calamities. On Monday, researchers around the country who had begun work on the sixth national clima...

By Umair Irfan , Wired.  Excerpt: Making sure there are always enough generators spooled up to send electricity to every single power outlet in the country requires precise coordination. And while the amount of electricity actually used can swing drastically throughout the day and year, the grid is built to meet the brief periods of  peak demand , like the hot summer days when air conditioning use can double average electricity consumption. Imagine building a 30-lane highway to make sure no driver ever has to tap their brakes. That’s effectively what those who design and run the grid have had to do. But what if you could just hold onto electricity for a bit and save it for later? You wouldn’t have to overbuild the grid.... You could smooth over the drawbacks of intermittent power sources that don’t emit carbon dioxide, like wind and solar. ...Back in 2011...a  wind farm in West Virginia ...was...the world’s largest battery energy storage system...to provide 32 megawatts o...

By Andrew Chang, San Francisco Chronicle.  Excerpt: ...Some of the most exciting and impactful climate tech revolutions today are happening beyond the U.S. — they’re unfolding in China and emerging markets like Vietnam and Pakistan. ...Long derided for its coal dependence, [China] now leads the world in clean energy deployment. In 2024 alone,  China added 277 gigawatts of new solar capacity  — a 45% jump from the year before. That’s more than the  entire installed solar capacity of the United States . On a recent trip to Shanghai, I hopped into a taxi and was told we’d need to make a quick stop to swap the battery. I started to object, assuming it would take a while — but the driver just smiled and said, “Three minutes.” We pulled into a battery swapping station, scanned a QR code and drove onto an elevated platform. In less time than a coffee run, we were back on the road — fully charged. It was fast, seamless and completely routine....  Ful...

By Warren Cornwall , Science.  Excerpt: In the wake of devastating floods, Vermont lawmakers last year passed legislation making fossil fuel producers liable for damages from natural disasters supercharged by their greenhouse gas emissions. ...But so far, no company has had to pay a penny under Vermont’s law. A key challenge: tying disasters to the actions of a specific producer and calculating its share of the cost. Now, two scientists say they can do just that. In a  paper appearing today  in  Nature , the researchers spell out a method for quantifying how much the emissions from a particular polluter contributed to a given heat wave. ...All told, the researchers say, the world economy lost $12 trillion to $49 trillion in productivity between 1991 and 2020 because of heat waves tied to pollution from the 111 largest individual polluters. The Saudi Arabia–owned energy company Saudi Aramco was responsible for the largest share of that cost, an estimated $850 billion ...

By Jon Hurdle , The New York Times.  Excerpt: ...Philadelphia’s Navy Yard ...evolving further to become a pioneer for sustainable development with energy-efficient buildings, innovative storm-water management, construction that’s designed to withstand future sea-level rise and green spaces that provide an inviting environment for the campus’s approximately 15,000 employees. ...Those efforts have just been recognized by the U.S. Green Building Council which gave a portion of the Navy Yard a gold certification in its Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design program for Neighborhood Development, known as LEED-ND. The certification, which covers 39 existing and 38 planned buildings over 295 of the site’s 1,200 acres, makes the project the biggest of its kind in the United States and the first in Philadelphia. ...To qualify for LEED-ND, properties must meet Green Building Council standards for building construction and operation and provide evidence that energy, water and materials...

By Umair Irfan ,  Benji Jones ,  Adam Clark Estes , and  Sam Delgado , Vox.  Excerpt: Technologies that can power our lives and jobs while doing less harm to the global climate — wind, solar, batteries, etc. — are getting cheaper, more efficient, and more abundant. The pace of progress on price, scale, and performance has been so extraordinary that  even the most optimistic forecasts  about green tech in the past have turned out to be too pessimistic. Clean energy isn’t just powering our devices, tools, and luxuries — it’s  growing the global economy , creating a whole suite of new jobs, and reshaping trade. And despite what  headlines may say , there’s no sign these trends will reverse.  Political  and  economic  turmoil may slow down clean energy, but the sector has built up so much momentum that it’s become nigh unstoppable. ...Texas utilities have come to realize that investing in clean energy is not just good for the envir...

By Mark Fischetti , Scientific American.  Excerpt: By last Saturday, the National Weather Service reported that 552 tornadoes had occurred in the U.S. this year—well above the average total of 337 for the period of January through April in 1991–2020. Then an outbreak struck Texas and Oklahoma on Saturday night, killing at least three people. Parts of those two states were at the center of the twister-prone “ tornado alley ” for most of the 1900s, but this well-known corridor has been shifting steadily eastward in the past three and a half decades. This year many of the touchdowns that caused deaths occurred in Mississippi, Alabama and Tennessee, all east of the old alley. Why does the U.S. have so many tornadoes? Far more tornadoes strike the U.S. than any other country, and this is because of its geography. Wet, westerly winds from the Pacific Ocean become dry as they pass over the the Rocky Mountains, then become high and cool as they blow farther east. Meanwhile warm, humid air...

By Rebecca Owen , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: As the climate warms,  drought  conditions are intensifying in many parts of the world. The effects of  hydrological drought  on water levels in rivers and other waterways are especially crucial to monitor because they can affect regional agriculture, energy production, economic stability, and public health. ... Guo et al.   combined limited historic river flow observations, climate model simulations, and paleohydrologic reconstructions from tree ring proxy data to examine how hydrological drought has evolved since 1100 CE—and how it may continue changing until 2100 CE—in northern Italy’s  Po River  basin. This basin supports about 40% of the country’s gross domestic product and 45% of its hydropower, .... The work revealed agreement between paleohydrologic reconstructions and climate model simulations of past droughts, including some during the  Medieval Climate Anomaly  (900–1300 CE) and the  L...

By Warren Cornwall , Science.  Excerpt: U.S. scientists, state policymakers, farmers, and others who depend on up-to-date climate data on Thursday confronted an information blackout from federal regional climate centers across much of the country. ...A decision about funding for the current year, which is the final year in the 5-year agreements, is currently “somewhere in NOAA,” says John Nielsen-Gammon, a climatologist at Texas A&M University and director of the Southern Regional Climate Center. If approved, “then we can spin back up relatively quickly. Of course, there’s no guarantee they will approve things.” ...The White House’s Office of Management and Budget has recommended ending funding for the regional climate centers in the  budget request for the 2026 fiscal year  that the administration is expected to send to Congress in coming weeks....  Full article at https://www.science.org/content/article/us-climate-data-websites-go-dark .  See also Tru...

By Kimberly M. S. Cartier , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: In a few weeks, Earth scientists will launch a satellite that will provide unprecedented, high-resolution coverage of some of the most remote and rapidly changing parts of the world. The NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar ( NISAR ) satellite, a joint mission between NASA and the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), will scan nearly the entire globe twice every 12 days to measure changes in Earth’s ecosystems, cryosphere, and land surface....  Full article at https://eos.org/articles/transformational-satellite-will-monitor-earths-surface-changes . 

By Kimberly M. S. Cartier , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: NOAA has quietly reported that they will soon decommission 14 datasets, products, and catalogs related to earthquakes and marine, coastal, and estuary science.  According to the list , these data sources will be “decommissioned and will no longer be available” by early- to mid-May. Though NOAA regularly evaluates its data products to ensure they are still relevant, data sources are usually merged with or replaced by other products rather than outright removed. The agency did this just 7 times in 2024 and 6 times in 2023. ...The announcement of the removals comes days after environmental and science groups  sued the Trump administration  for the removal of climate and  environmental justice  websites and  data ....  Full article at https://eos.org/research-and-developments/noaa-datasets-will-soon-disappear . 

By Maggie Astor , The New York Times.  Excerpt: With frequent and severe disasters repeatedly underscoring the dangers of climate change, scientists across the country have been working to understand the consequences for our hearts, lungs, brains and more — and how to best mitigate them. The work has relied largely on hundreds of millions of dollars in grants from the National Institutes of Health, a federal agency within the Department of Health and Human Services. But since Robert F. Kennedy Jr. took charge of H.H.S., the Trump administration has indicated that it will stop funding research on the health effects of climate change. The N.I.H. said in an internal document obtained by The New York Times that it was the agency’s new policy “not to prioritize” research related to climate change. ...N.I.H. employees were instructed to tell researchers to “remove all” mention of the topics and resubmit their applications, even if the main focus was unrelated....  Full article at ht...

By Ben Geman , Axios.  Excerpt: Trump administration officials just took their most aggressive step to thwart offshore wind by stopping ongoing construction of Empire Wind, a big project off New York's coast. ...The 810 megawatt Empire Wind 1 was slated to send enough power into New York to supply 500,000 homes, per Equinor. It was slated to start producing power in 2026. The company began laying rock in the marine region earlier this month. ...A January executive order barred new lease sales and new permitting, while requiring review of existing leases....  Full article at https://www.axios.com/2025/04/17/trump-offshore-wind-regulatory-assault . 

By Kara Manke , UC Berkeley News.  Excerpt: ...according to  a new study , Caltrain’s switch from diesel to electric trains in late summer of 2024 dramatically boosted the air quality aboard the commuter rail line. The findings, published today in the journal  Environmental Science and Technology Letters , showed that electrifying the system reduced riders’ exposure to the carcinogen black carbon by an average of 89%, and significantly reduced ambient black carbon concentrations within and around the San Francisco station. ...The majority of U.S. commuter trains are still powered by diesel fuel, despite the fact that electric trains are quieter, more reliable and produce fewer greenhouse gases than diesel locomotives. Apte hopes the study motivates more U.S. municipalities to follow the lead of Asian and European countries in electrifying their railways....  Full article at https://news.berkeley.edu/2025/04/16/electric-trains-are-quieter-more-reliable-than-diesel-new...

By Rebecca Dzombak , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: The use of solar power is growing rapidly, especially in developing regions in the tropics, as countries work toward meeting carbon neutrality goals. But according to new research, solar power use is also accompanied by solar power shortages, or “droughts,” when demand exceeds supply for at least 3 days. Such shortages can leave millions without access to cooling or cooking abilities. Lei et al.  analyzed global supply and demand for solar power from 1984 to 2014, looking for instances of these 3-day shortages and the conditions under which they occur. Over that time, the western United States, eastern Brazil, southeastern Asia, and much of Africa each experienced at least five solar power droughts per year, and solar power droughts increased at a rate of 0.76 additional shortage per decade. This increase in rate is responsible for 29% of the weather-driven solar droughts that occurred during the 30-year period. Solar power droughts are ...

By Veronika Meduna , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: ...New Zealand glaciologists...surveys, which have been running since 1977, show that summer melt now far exceeds winter snowfall and “we’re seeing the glaciers’ terminus and sides, the whole body, diminishing.” New Zealand has lost more than a third of its glacial ice and the archipelago ranks third globally—after central Europe and the Caucasus—in the proportion of ice lost to rising temperatures, according to  findings  published in  Nature  by the first comprehensive global Glacier Mass Balance Intercomparison Exercise ( GlaMBIE ). ...the GlaMBIE team produced a time series of global glacial mass change between 2000 and 2023, showing that collectively, the world’s glaciers lost 5% of their total volume. “This may not seem much,” said  Michael Zemp , GlaMBIE project leader and director of the World Glacier Monitoring Service at the University of Zürich. But it means an annual global loss of 273 billion tonnes (301 ...

By authors of Eos/AGU.  A collection of Eos/AGU articles about tornadoes, including The Surprising Factor Making the United States a Tornado Hot Spot (2024 Aug 16), Is It Climate Change? Americans Mostly Say Yes (2024 Jun 18), Tornadoes’ Fastest Winds Howl Close to the Ground (2023 Apr 3), A Hotter Earth Means Stronger Tornadoes (2021 Dec 13), Rise in Tornado Numbers per Outbreak May Not Be Tied to Warming (2016 Dec 7), Understanding How Climate Change Could Affect Tornadoes (2014 Nov 11).... 

By ScienceAdviser.  Excerpt: Historians have long debated the reasons why the Roman Empire—which once stretched across the Mediterranean sea and from northern Africa to the U.K.—collapsed. Recently, some have pointed to a sudden period of cooling called the Late Antique Little Ice Age. This cold spell could have hindered agricultural production,  facilitated disease outbreaks , and driven people to migrate. According to a new paper,  serendipitously discovered rocks on the shore of Iceland add to the evidence for this chilly period . ...the change in climate may have compounded the troubles of an empire that was already in decline. “ When it comes to the fall of the Roman empire, this climate shift may have been the straw that broke the camel’s back ,” co-author Tom Gernon told  The Independent. ...

By Paul Voosen , Science.  Excerpt: The assault on climate science by President Donald Trump’s administration has been taken to a new level, as NASA has terminated the contract that supports two dozen technical staff at the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP), the White House office that coordinates research among the federal agencies. The move will hollow out the staff relied on to assist volunteer scientists in the production of the quadrennial U.S. National Climate Assessment (NCA), potentially leaving that report delayed, diminished, or as a venue for climate misinformation. Politico first  reported the news , and Science has independently confirmed it with multiple sources at NASA and USGCRP, who declined to be named for fear of retaliation....  Full article at https://www.science.org/content/article/trump-administration-fires-staff-flagship-u-s-climate-assessment . 

By Anne Fischer , PV Magazine.  Excerpt: The 500 MW Cider Solar Farm, which is to be the largest solar plant in New York State, was approved by the New York Office of Renewable Energy Siting and Transmission (ORES). ...The project started early construction activities in November 2024 and is expected to be complete by Q4 2026, reaching commercial operations by the end of 2026. ...The solar plant will include 955,724 Canadian Solar modules on Array Technologies trackers with 134 Sungrow inverters, de Boer told  pv magazine USA . During construction the site will generate hundreds of jobs and generate $100 million in tax revenue to local governments, according to the developers. Funds will flow to local schools, fire departments and first responders, and other vital services....  Full article at https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2025/04/08/new-yorks-largest-solar-power-plant-moves-forward/ .

By Rebecca Owen , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: Like heat waves, these periods of high atmospheric demand for water can damage crops and ecosystems and increase pressure on water resources. New research shows they’re becoming more severe. As the climate warms, the atmosphere is getting thirstier. Scientists define this atmospheric thirst, or evaporative demand, as the amount of water that could potentially evaporate from Earth’s surface in response to weather. Standardized short-crop evapotranspiration  (ET os ) is a metric that estimates how much water would evaporate and transpire across a uniform, well-watered grass surface. It is used to measure the evaporative demand experienced by land covered by agricultural crops. Past studies have shown that  ET os  has increased over time  in response to factors such as air temperature, solar radiation, humidity, and wind speed. But that research doesn’t cover patterns and trends over prolonged periods with exceptionally high atm...

By Sophie Hardach, BBC.  Excerpt: A photographer's iconic shot of polar bears in abandoned buildings on a Russian island shines a spotlight on wider changes in their behaviour. ...Smith notes that polar bears are  spending more time on land  due to the climate-change-driven  loss of sea ice . They are also shifting their dens from the ice onto the land, to avoid the risk of denning on the increasingly unstable sea ice,  research in northern Alaska  shows. Without the sea ice, the  bears can't hunt  for their  preferred, ideal diet  of  blubber-rich seals , and may  resort to land-based food , be it prey or rubbish. ...A 2022 research paper warns that food from human sources – especially waste – is an  emerging threat  to polar bears. The supply of such human-provided food including from dumps is growing, according to the paper. As a consequence, some communities in the Arctic have seen startling incursions of dozens o...

By Emily Dieckman , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: analyzed data confirmed that Mount Speke, the second-highest peak in the range, no longer hosts a glacier (only static ice) and that Mount Baker, the third highest, is practically ice free. The researchers found that the surface area of the Stanley Plateau glacier fell by 29.5% between 2020 and 2024. “Glaciers worldwide are shrinking or disappearing, so that’s not a surprise,” Thymann said. “I think what is surprising is how rapid it’s going.”. ...The ice on the mountain range is the highest source of water for the River Nile and holds water that millions of Ugandans rely upon....  Full article at https://eos.org/articles/a-new-3d-map-shows-precipitous-decline-of-ugandan-glaciers . 

By Kate Yoder , Grist.  Excerpt: As more students come to school traumatized by living through fires, floods, and other extreme weather, teachers are being asked to do more than educate — they’re also acting as untrained therapists. While Thesenga’s private school has psychologists on staff, they don’t provide mental health resources dedicated to helping students work through distress related to the changing climate, whether it’s trauma from a real event or more general anxiety about an overheated future.“ ...Middle school teachers around the country say they feel unprepared to help their students cope with the stress of living on a warming planet, according to  a new survey  of 63 middle school teachers across the United States by the Climate Mental Health Network and the National Environmental Education Foundation.....  Full article at https://grist.org/health/middle-school-climate-anxiety-emotions-teacher-toolkit/ .

By Kristen Lawrence, The Cool Down.  Excerpt: Soluna, a leading developer of sustainable data centers that convert excess renewable energy into computing power for energy-hungry applications — such as bitcoin mining and artificial intelligence — announced that it secured 60 acres of land to build a new 187-megawatt data center in Texas, an important milestone in its expansion efforts.  According to a  company news release , the data center, called Project Rosa, will be conveniently co-located next to a 240 MW wind farm, allowing it to directly harness a significant amount of renewable energy. ...While capturing wasted power from solar and wind farms and hydropower plants reduces cryptocurrency's massive pollution footprint and adds capacity to the grid, many  crypto transactions consume huge amounts of energy  — often derived from dirty fuel sources such as coal, oil, and gas. According to a  United Nations University study , nearly 70% of the ele...

By Pragathi Ravi , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: Coal-fired power plants in India—responsible for generating  73.4% of the country’s electricity —are bad for the country’s wheat. A new study shows that nitrogen dioxide (NO 2 ) emitted from the plants can affect agricultural productivity on farms up to 100 kilometers away and reduce crop yields for wheat and rice in particular. ...The results, published in the  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America , show that in certain regions heavily exposed to coal emissions, yields are more than 10% lower than they would have been in the absence of emissions from coal-fired power plants....  Full article at https://eos.org/articles/emissions-from-coal-fired-power-plants-may-lower-crop-yields-in-india . 

By Michael Muir, The Cool Down.  Excerpt: Renewable energy received a major boost in Texas with the opening of a 1.6-gigawatt solar module factory in Brookshire. Waaree Solar Americas, a subdivision of Indian conglomerate Waaree Energies, began production in January 2025. The manufacturer told  PV Magazine , "The launch of commercial production marks a critical step in localizing solar manufacturing in the United States, contributing to job creation and economic growth while reducing reliance on imported solar products." The company plans to ramp up production in 2026 to three gigawatts and five gigawatts by the end of 2027. For reference, one gigawatt is enough energy to power around  876,000 homes  for a year, per Carbon Collective. ...Solar power is incredibly popular across the political spectrum in the United States, with a recent poll finding that almost  90% of citizens  support federal incentives to install it. ...As a clean energy source, it a...