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Gas power leapfrogs wind for first time in 10 years in Texas’ grid connection queue

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By Brandon Mulder, The Texas Tribune .  Excerpt: A decade ago, wind power was surging in popularity and attracting huge investments that made Texas a national leader in renewable energy. But today, gas generation is making a big comeback, driven by a wave of data centers flooding into the state. For the last six months, the volume of gas generation in the Texas grid’s interconnection queue — the yearslong waiting list for electric generators wanting to connect to the grid — has surpassed wind. It’s the first time since January 2016 that gas has overtaken wind in the queue, a shift that reflects the policy and economic headwinds facing the wind industry and data centers favoring gas power as they seek to cash in on the artificial intelligence boom. ...Still, the queue gives an early indication of how the grid is projected to evolve in the future. Solar and battery projects dominate, accounting for 75% of the 458,000 megawatts in the queue, with gas and wind projects making up the re...
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Ancient ice core could help explain mysterious shift in Earth’s ice ages

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By Elise Cutts , Science.  Excerpt: VIENNA— Scientists have drilled a record-setting ice core stretching back 1.2 million years. The ancient air it contains reveals sharp swings in carbon dioxide that could help explain a mysterious shift in the rhythm of Earth’s ice ages. The core...is the culmination of 10 years of work and 2.8 kilometers of drilling in Antarctica by the European project Beyond EPICA. It provides the first direct, detailed look at how greenhouse gases varied during a critical climatic window between 800,000 and 1.25 million years ago, when Earth’s ice ages shifted from 40,000-year-long cycles to longer, more intense sequences of 100,000 years. ...The extended window has brought the mysterious Mid-Pleistocene Transition (MPT) into focus. Beginning about 2.6 million years ago, the climate swung in and out of relatively mild ice ages every 40,000 years, driven by wobbles in Earth’s orbit. But then, about 1.25 million years ago, something began to slide Earth to...
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The future of plant extinction

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By Rosa A. Scherson  and  Federico Luebert , Science.  Excerpt: Climate change is reshaping the environmental conditions that plants must face and accelerating their extinction. Estimating how endangered plants are is important to inform conservation decisions. However, only 18% of plants are included in the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species, which provides global assessments of the risk of extinction for 76,864 plant species ( 2 ). ...Although Forest  et al . and Wang  et al . used different scales of time and space and studied different (but largely overlapping) groups of plants, both studies revealed that plant extinctions do not occur randomly across geographical areas. For example, Forest  et al . reported that angiosperm [flowering] species at high extinction risk are concentrated in tropical regions and islands, such as Madagascar, Borneo, and Ecuador. Furthermore, Wang  et al. ...
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Under US pressure, EU moves to soften rules for fighting climate superpollutant

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By ia Weise and Ben Munster , Politico.  Excerpt: BRUSSELS — The European Union is bowing to demands from the United States and the fossil fuel industry that it scale back its efforts to fight a planet-warming superpollutant. The EU in 2021 vowed to curb emissions of methane and drew up legislation that forces the oil and gas sector to limit emissions of the powerful greenhouse gas, which is responsible for around a third of the global rise in temperatures since the industrial era.  Now, however, Brussels is poised to significantly weaken enforcement of its flagship methane regulation, granting fossil fuel companies the freedom to pollute with a focus on protecting the continent’s energy security, according to a draft document seen by POLITICO ....  Full article at https://www.politico.eu/article/under-us-pressure-eu-softens-climate-superpollutant-methane-rules/ .
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Close calls at Michigan's dams are a climate warning to America

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By Vivian La , Grist.  Excerpt: Flooding across northern Michigan last month pushed rivers to record levels, testing the limits of the state’s aging dams so severely that officials in one city nearly ordered evacuations as water threatened to spill over the top of a key barrier — a close call that highlights the growing risk that intensifying storms pose to similar infrastructure around the country....  Full article at https://grist.org/extreme-weather/close-calls-at-michigans-dams-are-a-climate-warning-to-america/ . 
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Wildfire damages and the cost-effective role of forest fuel treatments

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By Frederik Strabo , Calvin Bryan , and Matthew N. Reimer , Science.  Abstract: Wildfires are among the most pressing environmental challenges of the 21st century, intensified by the accumulation of forest fuels after a century of fire suppression policies. Although fuel-reduction treatments (“fuel treatments”) are a primary tool for reducing wildfire risk, they remain underutilized, partly owing to limited evidence of their economic value. In this study, we integrated high-resolution data on wildfires, fuel treatments, suppression effort, and damages across the Western United States to assess their cost-effectiveness. ...we found that fuel treatments reduced wildfire spread and severity, avoiding an estimated $2.8 billion in damages by limiting structure loss, cutting carbon dioxide emissions, and lowering fine particulate matter (PM 2.5 ) exposure. Each dollar invested yielded $3.73 in expected benefits....  Full article at https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aea6463...
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A 481-meter-high landslide-tsunami in a cruise ship–frequented Alaska fjord

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By Dan H. Shugar , et al, Science.  Abstract: Early in the morning of 10 August 2025, a >64 × 10 6  m 3  landslide struck Tracy Arm fjord in Alaska. The landslide was preconditioned by glacial retreat caused by climate change. The resulting 481 m runup megatsunami followed an initial 100-m-high breaking wave traveling >70 m s −1 . The landslide was preceded by several days of microseismicity, which increased in rate and magnitude until ~1 hour before failure. The landslide produced globally observed long-period seismic waves equivalent in size to a M5.4 earthquake. A long-period (~66 s) global seismic signal, produced by a landslide-induced seiche trapped within the fjord, persisted for up to 36 hours, the second time a days-long seiche has been thus observed. With fjord regions increasingly visited by cruise ships, and climate change making similar events more likely, this unanticipated, near-miss event highlights the growing risk from landslides and tsun...
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