2025-06-27. A Special ‘Climate’ Visa? People in Tuvalu Are Applying Fast . By Max Bearak , The New York Times. Excerpt: As sea levels rise, Australia said it would offer a special, first-of-its-kind “climate visa” to citizens of Tuvalu, a Polynesian island nation of atolls and sandbars where waters are eating away at the land. The visa lottery opened last week, and already nearly half of Tuvalu’s population has applied.... Full article at https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/27/climate/climate-visa-tuvalu.html . 

By Sahas Mehra , Science.  Excerpt: In 2023, China embarked on the  largest coastal restoration project ever attempted . Threatened by an invasive, fast-growing weed known as smooth cordgrass ( Spartina alterniflora ), which was overrunning clam farms, bird habitats, and shipping channels, the country planned to remove the plant and replace it with environmentally friendly species, such as native reeds and mangrove trees. But  such efforts would have a huge downside, increasing methane emissions 10-fold , researchers report this month in  Geophysical Research Letters . The mangroves would eventually counter these effects, but it could take 5 decades for these native plants to absorb the increasing greenhouse emissions....  Full article at https://www.science.org/content/article/china-s-massive-coastal-restoration-project-could-backfire . 

By Sachi Kitajima Mulkey Claire Brown  and  Mira Rojanasakul , The New York Times.  Excerpt: Summer started barely a week ago, and already the United States has been smothered in a record-breaking “ heat dome .” Alaska saw its  first-ever heat advisory  this month. And all of this comes on the heels of 2024, the  hottest calendar year  in recorded history. The world is getting hotter, faster. A report published last week found that human-caused global warming is now  increasing by 0.27 degrees  Celsius per decade. That rate was recorded at 0.2 degrees in the 1970s, and has been growing since. ...For years, measurements have followed predictions that the rate of  warming in the atmosphere would speed up . But now, patterns that have been evident in charts and graphs are starting to become a bigger part of people’s daily lives. “Each additional fractional degree of warming brings about a relatively larger increase in atmospheric extremes, ...

 By Paul Voosen , Science.  Excerpt: Climate change is worsening many natural hazards, including droughts, heat waves, and storm surges. Now, a new one has joined the list: earthquakes. Researchers have found that as global warming accelerates melting of mountaintop glaciers, the meltwater, percolating underground, increases the risk of damaging earthquakes. The evidence comes from beneath Grandes Jorasses, a glacier-clad peak in the Alps that is part of the Mont Blanc massif, home to Western Europe’s tallest mountains. Precise seismic records show a heat wave in 2015 kicked off a surge of small earthquakes under the mountain. Although the tremors themselves were not damaging, the chances of large earthquakes are known to rise with the frequency of small ones. “It increases the hazard dramatically,” says Toni Kraft, a seismologist at ETH Zürich and co-author of the  new study , published this month in  Earth and Planetary Science Letters ....  Full article at ht...

By   Rebecca Owen , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: In 2003, several states and environmental groups sued the U.S. EPA for violating the  Clean Air Act  by not regulating emissions from new vehicles. When the  case  eventually reached the Supreme Court, a group of climate scientists  contributed an amicus brief —a legal document in which a third party not directly involved in the case can offer testimony—sharing data demonstrating that rising global temperatures were directly caused by human activity. This led to  the Supreme Court deciding  that greenhouse gases did constitute pollutants under the Clean Air Act and, ultimately, to the EPA’s 2009  endangerment finding  that greenhouse gas emissions endanger human health. The endangerment finding became the basis for governmental regulation of greenhouse gases. Sixteen years later, the Trump administration is  poised to repeal it , along with  other environmental protections . In a new ...

By Max Bearak , The New York Times.  Excerpt: Some of Vegas’ iconic casinos, convention centers and hotels — and thousands of households across the city, too — are using the sun to save money and better the planet’s odds at tackling climate change. ...Today in Nevada, around a third of all energy demand is met by solar panels. The state has the highest solar electricity generation per capita in the country, as well as the most solar-industry jobs per capita. ...Take the Strip. It uses more electricity than 300,000 households, which is more than the rest of Las Vegas combined. The state’s biggest employer, MGM Resorts International, which has 11 properties on the Strip, is betting on solar. ...MGM installed 26,000 panels on the roof of Mandalay Bay, an enormous casino and convention center at the Strip’s southern end. ...northeast of the city near a place called Dry Lake, ...MGM teamed up with a clean energy company to build an array of 322,000 panels. The panels now provide 90 perc...

By José María León Cabrera , The New York Times.  Excerpt: ...20 Indigenous men in the Ecuadorean Amazon boarded a canoe in their community near the border with Peru. Their destination was a neighboring village 45 minutes away by river. ...The journey between the isolated villages was made possible thanks to their boat, a traditional river canoe aside from one distinctive feature on top: 24 solar panels that harness sunlight to power an engine. The canoe is part of a growing fleet of electric-powered vessels providing a cheaper and greener alternative to diesel-powered boats that typically travel the Indigenous region’s waterways....  Full article at https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/23/world/americas/electric-boats-ecuadorian-amazon.html .

By  Stephen Council , SFGate.  Excerpt: California’s massive buildout of  solar panels  over the past decade has delivered vast amounts of clean energy to state residents, but with a big catch.  When the sun sets , utilities have to either turn to nonrenewable energy sources or the relatively little solar power that gets stored in the state’s batteries. But this month, California’s  battery problem  saw a major breakthrough. On June 11, the California Energy Commission officially approved the Darden Clean Energy Project, a sprawling solar farm and battery storage facility proposed for a stretch of fallow farmland in western Fresno County. Darden is the first project approved under a new fast-track permitting program, which gave the commission just 270 days to finish its environmental review; Gov. Gavin Newsom lauded the news in a  news release , writing that the state is “moving faster than ever before” to build up clean energy. Da...

By Calvin Coffee, TCD-The Cool Down.  Excerpt: Gujarat, a leading state in India, already gets nearly 60% of its electricity from renewable sources, and it's gearing up to deliver even more. According to  the Times of India , Gujarat's clean energy mix, composed of solar, wind, and hydro power, currently meets about 58% of the state's energy demand. ...even more improvements are on the horizon. The state has announced plans to invest around $3.5 billion in the next phase of its  Green Energy Corridor , a massive grid project designed to make clean power more accessible and reliable across the region. The upcoming upgrades will help move over 16,000 megawatts of renewable energy  throughout Gujarat , connecting new solar and wind zones in areas like Kutch, Banaskantha, and Jamnagar. New transmission lines and substations will ensure the system operates smoothly, even during peak demand, allowing more people to benefit from uninterrupted clean power. ...The Indian gove...

By Annika Inampudi , Science.  Excerpt: The crowd gathered in an auditorium in the Swiss village of Villars on Tuesday applauded as, one by one, three scientists—two women and a man—stepped onto the stage to accept a plaque and their prize of 1 million Swiss francs ($1.1 million) for research into solutions for the ongoing climate crisis. It marked the first time in the Frontiers Planet Prize’s (FPP’s) 3-year history that a woman, let alone two, has won. ...This year’s lineup—Arunima Malik, a University of Sydney sustainability researcher; Zahra Kalantari, an environmental and geosciences engineer at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology; and Zia Mehrabi, a climate and agriculture data scientist at the University of Colorado Boulder.... Kalantari,  whose work focuses on reducing the carbon footprint of cities . And Malik’s winning paper, about the  sustainability of supply chains and global trade routes , was written with multiple women as co-authors.... Mehrabi’s winning...

By Lauren Schneider , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: Canada is home to more than 400,000 nonproducing oil and gas wells. These abandoned facilities still emit methane, which can contaminate water supplies and pollute the atmosphere with a greenhouse gas more potent than carbon dioxide. The scope of these emissions may be greater than previously understood, according to a new  study . In 2023, nonproducing wells may have leaked 230 kilotons of methane, about 7 times more than the official estimates published in the government’s annual  National Inventory Report  (NIR)....  Full article at https://eos.org/articles/nonproducing-oil-wells-may-be-emitting-7-times-more-methane-than-we-thought .

By Andrew Freedman , CNN.  Excerpt: For the past four years, a fleet of drone vessels has purposefully steered into the heart of hurricanes to gather information on a storm’s wind speeds, wave heights and, critically, the complex transfer of heat and moisture between the ocean and the air right above it. These small boats from California-based company Saildrone also film harrowing footage from the ocean surface in the middle of nature’s most powerful tempests—videos that are scientifically useful and have also gone viral, giving ordinary people windows into storms. Importantly, Saildrone vessels were being used by federal scientists to improve forecast and warning accuracy. But they won’t be in forecasters’ suite of tools this year. The company “was unable to bid” on a contract for this season, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration spokesperson Keeley Belva told CNN. The reason why concerns the timing of NOAA’s solicitation for this season’s contract.... NOAA sent out its...

By Andrew Chapman , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: California produces more than a third of the vegetables and three quarters of the fruits and nuts in the United States. But water constraints are leaving more and more fields unplanted, or “fallowed,” particularly in the state’s famed farming hub, the Central Valley. In a study  published in  Communications Earth and Environment , researchers showed that these fallowed agricultural lands are producing a different problem: dust storms, which can cause road accidents and health problems and can have far-reaching environmental impacts. Using remote sensing methods, the team found that 88% of anthropogenic dust events in the state, such as dust storms, come from fallowed farmland. California’s  frequent droughts  could mean a rise in fallowed farmland....  Full article at https://eos.org/articles/fallowed-fields-are-fueling-californias-dust-problem . 

 By Madeleine Seale  et al , Science.  Excerpt: Perhaps the biggest challenge confronting plants will be in the tropics, where temperatures are already high—and are projected to rise as much as 4°C by the end of the century if more isn’t done to curb climate change. “They’re the hottest forests,” says ecologist Kenneth Feeley of the University of Miami. “So, the question is: What happens when we go into unprecedented heat?” ...Some tree species in Mexico, for example, have shifted to higher elevations, where temperatures are cooler, a recent paper in  Science   reported ). But across the Americas, tropical species aren’t moving fast enough to keep pace with warming, and researchers are  skeptical  that they will be able to cope by migrating upslope or away from the equator. Nor is evolution likely to be the answer. Trees can take decades to start reproducing, making it unlikely they can evolve new genetic adaptations for heat tolerance fast enough to w...

By Sushmita Pathak , Science.  Excerpt: In response to the 22 April attack that killed 26 people, India said it was putting “in abeyance” its participation in the Indus Waters Treaty (IWT), a 65-year-old pact that governs how Pakistan and India share water from one of Asia’s major river systems. Pakistan, in turn, said it would consider any move by India to withhold Indus water, which irrigates most of its farmland, as an act of war. Researchers say the jousting highlighted not only the political sensitivity of the treaty, but also the increasingly urgent need to update the IWT to reflect the ongoing impacts of climate change and population growth....  Full article at https://www.science.org/content/article/climate-change-threatens-india-pakistan-pact-over-major-river-system .

By Sarah Derouin , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: Kampf et al.  studied relationships between fire, fuel, and climate in temperate regions around the world, focusing specifically on  western North America ,  western and central Europe , and southwestern South America. ...The researchers found that over the 20-year study period and across all three regions, fires burned smaller areas of land in zones with either very dry climates or very wet climates compared with zones of intermediate aridity. They suggest that this trend is explained by the lack of vegetation sufficient to fuel widespread fires in dry zones and, in wet zones, by weather conditions that dampen the likelihood of fires.... Full article at https://eos.org/research-spotlights/the-goldilocks-conditions-for-wildfires . 

By Science.  Excerpt: As human activities continue to pump carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, more and more of the stuff gets absorbed into Earth’s oceans, where it reacts with seawater to form carbonic acid. When this weak acid dissociates into ions of hydrogen and bicarbonate, it drives down the ocean’s overall pH, which is typically slightly basic. This acidification—sometimes referred to as climate change’s “evil twin”—can wreak havoc on marine life, for example by interfering with the mineralization process that corals, oysters, and other organisms use to build and maintain their skeletons and shells. A 2014 video released by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association’s Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory (NOAA PMEL), for instance, shows a marine snail called a pteropod  struggling to swim, its shell having been partially dissolved by acidic waters . In 2009, a group of researchers led by Swedish climate scientist Johan Rockström developed what is known as the ...

By Noam S. Vogt-Vincent et al.  Abstract: Past coral range expansions suggest that high-latitude environments may serve as refugia, potentially buffering coral biodiversity loss due to climate change. We explore this possibility for corals globally, .... Our simulations suggest that there is a mismatch between the timescales of coral reef decline and range expansion under future predicted climate change. Whereas the most severe declines in coral cover will likely occur within 40 to 80 years, large-scale coral reef expansion requires centuries. The absence of large-scale coral refugia in the face of rapid anthropogenic climate change emphasizes the urgent need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and mitigate nonthermal stressors for corals, both in the tropics and in higher latitudes....  Full article at https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adr2545 . 

Summary: ...brown alga is an important habitat and food source for myriad marine species. Unfortunately, warming oceans have rapidly caused kelp forests around the world to disappear; in some areas, red “turf” algae are taking their place. A new study in Science Advances finds that you can’t just substitute one alga for another—the shift alters the food web from the bottom up. The researchers behind the work wondered from where cunner and pollock fish—two common kelp forest predators—derived their energy. To find out, they examined carbon and nitrogen in the tissues of fish caught off the coasts of northeastern Maine...where 80% of kelp forests have collapsed. While the fish in kelp forests got most of their energy from kelp, fish in turf reefs didn’t just switch to eating the turf—they turned to phytoplankton for their main food source instead. The finding shows how important kelp is as a food source, and hints at how its loss could affect the entire ecosystem.... ' Paper, Kelp f...

By Paul Voosen , Science.  Excerpt: For nearly 4 decades, researchers have tracked one of the most prominent harbingers of global warming—dwindling Arctic sea ice—with data from aging weather satellites run by the U.S. military. But this continuous record is now at risk, after the Department of Defense (DOD) quietly told climate scientists it would be “deprioritizing” access to the data. The move comes as Arctic sea ice approaches a possible new record low. “The [satellites] are up there and functioning,” says Walt Meier, a remote-sensing scientist at the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC). “But we’re not getting all the data anymore, at least regularly.” NSIDC and Europe’s Copernicus Climate Change Service compile the two most prominent global records of sea ice, and both groups rely on these data. The only options for similar observations come from either an  aging Japanese satellite , launched in 2012, or a series of Chinese weather satellites, which the country...

[Paper: Passive cooling paint enabled by rational design of thermal-optical and mass transfer properties]. By Jipeng Fei  et al, Science.  Editor's summary: The top and exterior of buildings can be used to passively cool, but this requires materials with the right properties to do so effectively. Fei  et al . designed a paint that cools both radiatively and through evaporation and that appears to keep buildings relatively cool even in humid environments. Although radiative cooling is effective at reducing temperature, it requires the material to be sky-facing. Designing a paint that also cools through evaporation allows the material to be effective when applied to the sides of the buildings as well. —Brent Grocholski.  Full article at https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adt3372? . 

By Paul Voosen , Science.  Excerpt: Like many cities around the world, Austin is now facing questions about how to build and adapt for a changing climate. A growing number of these cities—as well as insurance companies, home builders, and farmers—are turning to climate modelers for answers. But despite decades of effort, forecasting how global warming will play out on a local scale remains a stubborn challenge, riven with uncertainty. There is little agreement on how best to convert climate models, which simulate the entire world at coarse resolutions, into the detailed local forecasts of temperature and rainfall that planners crave. Different methods lead to drastically different projections, especially in terms of rainfall—even when using the same climate model. ...The problem has become more pronounced with the discovery that global climate models, good at the big picture, often miss local impacts that are already painfully evident. For example, despite nailing the overall pace ...

By Madeleine Cuff , New Scientist.  Excerpt: Rivers around the world are leaking ancient carbon back into the atmosphere. The finding has taken scientists by surprise and suggests human activities are damaging the natural landscape far more than first thought. Researchers already knew rivers released carbon dioxide and methane as part of the global carbon cycle – the short-term movement of gases that happens as living things grow and decompose. They are thought to emit around 2 gigatonnes of this carbon each year. But when  Josh Dean  at the University of Bristol, UK, and his colleagues set out to determine how old this carbon really is, they found that around 60 per cent of global river emissions are from thousands-of-years-old stores. Ancient carbon is trapped in rocks, peat bogs and wetlands. The findings suggest that as much as 1 gigatonne of it is being released back into the atmosphere each year through rivers. ...The pressing question now is why rivers are releasin...