By Cara Buckley , The New York Times.  Excerpt: Iowa City eliminated bus fares in August 2023 with a goal of lowering emissions from cars and encouraging people to take public transit. The two-year pilot program proved so popular that the City Council voted this summer to extend it another year, paying for it with a 1 percent increase in utility taxes and by doubling most public parking rates to $2 from $1. Ridership has surpassed prepandemic levels by 18 percent. Bus drivers say they’re navigating less congested streets. People drove 1.8 million fewer miles on city streets, according to government calculations, and emissions dropped by 24,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide a year. That’s the equivalent of taking 5,200 vehicles off the roads....  Full article at https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/18/climate/iowa-city-free-buses.html . 

By Paul Voosen , Science.  Excerpt: For all their usefulness in forecasting global warming, climate models tend to paint the future in the broad strokes of an Impressionist artist. ...Now, a new high-resolution modeling project called MESACLIP, run at great computational expense over the past 5 years, is putting Earth’s future into sharper focus by simulating the churning of the atmosphere and ocean at a level of detail similar to the scale of weather forecasts. The project reveals heightened risks for regions like the Gulf Coast and coastal California, where extreme rainfall could occur far more often than traditionally projected. The trends, published today in  Nature Geoscience ,  show the benefit of high-resolution models , which better capture shifts in wind patterns that lead to the downpours....  Full article at https://www.science.org/content/article/high-resolution-climate-model-forecasts-wet-turbulent-future .

By Kara Manke , UC Berkeley News.  Excerpt: After more than a century of fire suppression in California’s forests, mounting evidence shows that frequent fire — through practices like prescribed fire or Indigenous cultural burning — can improve forest health, increase biodiversity and reduce the risk of catastrophic wildfire. ...A  new long-term study  shows that, while prescribed burning may release carbon dioxide in the short term, the repeated use of controlled fire may boost a forest’s productivity, or carbon sequestration capacity, in the long term....  Full article at https://news.berkeley.edu/2025/11/17/prescribed-burning-helps-store-forest-carbon-in-big-fire-resistant-trees/ . 

By Anupreeta Das , T he New York Times. Excerpt: India is getting hotter, faster. The grim present presages a grimmer future for the world’s most populous country, which is experiencing more frequent and severe heat waves. But India — with 1.4 billion people, many of whom are impoverished and particularly vulnerable to climate change — has yet to grasp the magnitude of the problem and may be underequipped to deal with it, public health experts and scientists say. ...Numerous studies suggest that India undercounts such deaths. In part, that is because most government doctors follow a narrow definition of what classifies as a heat-related death, sticking to easily identifiable causes like heat stroke, experts say....  Full article at https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/16/world/asia/india-heat-wave-deaths.html .  See also Women Toiling in India’s Insufferable Heat Face Mounting Toll on Health . 

By Robert Sanders , UC Berkeley News.  Excerpt: Sea urchins are a key but often destructive part of the kelp forest ecosystem along the Pacific Coast, and in boom years can often turn these forests into barrens devoid of marine life. But it remains a mystery what causes urchin boom and bust cycles and how sea urchins are affected by increasingly common marine heat waves. A new study by marine biologists at the University of California, Berkeley, now suggests that sea urchin populations along the Pacific Coast are more susceptible to heat waves than once thought, because the animals ramp down reproduction at temperatures substantially below levels that kill them. ...The study,  published last week  in the journal  Communications Biology , a  Nature  journal, was conducted in cooperation with the Hakai Institute in British Columbia, Canada, and UC Davis’s Bodega Marine Laboratory in California....  Full article at https://news.berkeley.edu/2025/11/14/ev...

By Brad Plumer , The New York Times.  Excerpt: Global fossil fuel emissions are on track to soar to record highs in 2025 and show no signs of declining overall, although there are indications of a recent slowdown in China’s emissions, researchers said on Wednesday. This year, nations are projected to emit roughly 38.1 billion tons of planet-warming carbon dioxide by burning oil, gas and coal for energy and by manufacturing cement, according to  data from the Global Carbon Project . Those sources are the largest contributors to human-caused climate change. The total is roughly 1.1 percent more than the world emitted in 2024. Not everywhere saw a large increase. Emissions appear to have stayed nearly flat in China and Europe, but rose significantly in the United States and much of the rest of the world. ...A relatively small number of countries account for most of the world’s emissions, with China responsible for 32 percent, the United States at 13 percent, India at 8 percent an...