By Maxine Joselow  and  Lisa Friedman , The New York Times.  Excerpt: The Trump administration on Thursday filed  a new lawsuit  against California over its strict limits on planet-warming pollution from cars, arguing that the restrictions would unlawfully force a rapid transition to electric vehicles in the state. ...Across the country, 17 states representing more than a third of the American automobile market follow California’s lead on clean car standards. “Gavin Newsom is determined to continue pushing Democrats’ radical E.V. fantasy — even if doing so is illegal,” Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said in a statement.... Anthony Martinez, a spokesman for Governor Newsom, called the lawsuit “meritless.” “While the Trump administration surrenders the future of the auto industry to China, California will continue competing globally to win the clean vehicle market,” Mr. Martinez said, adding, “This lawsuit is meritless, and we’re not backing down from this fi...

By Erik Stokstad , Science.  Excerpt: Insects living in the lowland tropics have evolved to deal with brutal heat. But many of them are close to their limit, according to a massive study that assessed the heat tolerance of hundreds of species. The findings, published today in  Nature , provide  an unprecedented view of what temperatures tropical insects can deal with —and reinforce concerns about the risk that climate change poses for insect biodiversity....  Full article at https://www.science.org/content/article/many-heat-stressed-tropical-insects-are-reaching-their-limits . 

By Grace van Deelen , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: A new study of  Antarctica  has found that since 1996, its ice sheet has lost 12,820 square kilometers (nearly 5,000 square miles) of ice—nearly enough to cover the state of Connecticut, or 10 cities the size of Greater Los Angeles. The study, published today in  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences ,  evaluated the retreat of the ice sheet’s grounding line over the past 30 years. A grounding line is the point at which continental ice (grounded on bedrock) meets a floating ice shelf, and as such serves as a good measure of the advance and retreat of ocean-terminating glaciers....  Full article at https://eos.org/research-and-developments/antarctic-ice-sheet-has-lost-a-connecticut-sized-amount-of-ice-over-the-past-30-years .

By Dan Charles , NPR.  Excerpt: A  mammoth solar farm  is moving forward in the heart of California. If built, which seems increasingly likely, it would cover 200 square miles of land and generate 21,000 megawatts of electricity, enough to power entire cities. Huge batteries will store some of that power until it's needed most. Farmers are among the project's backers. They don't have enough water to grow crops on big chunks of their land, and they're looking for new uses for it. "We're farmers, and we would rather farm the ground," says Ross Franson, president of Woolf Farming and Processing, his family's business. "If we had the water to do it, we would farm it. But the reality is, you don't. You have to deal with the cards you're dealt."...  Full article at https://www.npr.org/2026/02/26/nx-s1-5726411/farmers-california-san-joaquin-valley-solar-farm-westlands-water-district-golden-state-clean-energy . 

By Science Advisor.  Excerpt: About 2.7 million years ago, Earth’s climate had a personality crisis. Before then, ice ages waxed and waned in long, predictable cycles tied to Earth’s orbit, tens of thousands of years at a time. But new research in  Science  suggests that  as Northern Hemisphere ice sheets grew larger, the planet’s climate system began behaving very differently . And ice ages started “flickering,” swinging abruptly every couple thousand years. To understand when and why this shift occurred, researchers analyzed sediment cores drilled from the seafloor off the Iberian margin, near Portugal. ...For most of the Pliocene, from about 5.3 to 2.7 million years ago, the record shows only slow orbital cycles, with little to no sign of any rapid swings. But after 2.7million years ago, during the intensification of Northern Hemisphere glaciation, the first isolated cold events begin to appear. Within 200,000 years, rapid oscillations became freque...

By John Timmer  , arstechnica.  Excerpt: On Tuesday, the US Energy Information Administration released full-year data on how the country generated electricity in 2025. It’s a bit of a good news/bad news situation. The bad news is that overall demand rose appreciably, and a fair chunk of that was met by additional coal use. On the good side, solar continued its run of astonishing growth, generating 35 percent more power than a year earlier and surpassing hydroelectric power for the first time. Overall, electrical consumption in the US rose by 2.8 percent, or about 121 terawatt-hours. Consumption had been largely flat for several decades, with efficiency and the decline of industry offsetting the effects of population and economic growth. There were plenty of year-to-year changes, however, driven by factors ranging from heating and cooling demand to a global pandemic. Given that history, the growth in demand in 2025 is a bit concerning, but it’s not yet a clear signal that ...