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 ...

By Rachel Nuwer , Science.  Excerpt: A new study finds that as climate changes, dewdrops are forming on plants’ leaves earlier in the spring, triggering a chemical cascade that hastens flowering. ...According to findings published last week in the  Proceedings of the   National Academy of Sciences , tiny water droplets that come into contact with the surface of leaves set off a cascade of chemical signals that  tell a plant it’s time to bloom ....  Full article at https://www.science.org/content/article/could-dewdrops-explain-why-plants-are-flowering-earlier . 

By Dr. Juliet Lamont, Ecesis — the News Journal of SERCAL California Society for Ecological Restoration .  This is a story about an urban creek, degraded by decades of short-sighted engineering decisions, that was brought back to health. Bringing nature back into our cities is essential not only for climate resilience, but also for generating support for biodiversity. Direct engagement can reconnect us to the natural world in our backyards and on our streets, to foster a deeper environmental ethic that spreads beyond city borders and across future generations....  Full article at https://sercal.org/s/ecesis-25iv-yes-backyards.pdf . 

By Kenny Torrella, Vox.  Excerpt: More than one in 10 Americans rely on the Colorado River to take showers and drink clean water. But with no end in sight to the decades-long drought in the western US and rapidly decreasing river levels, this essential resource is fueling bitter disputes over who, exactly, should be cutting back on water. This fight has been coming to a head especially among the seven states that make up the Colorado River Compact — California, Arizona, Colorado, Utah, Nevada, New Mexico, and Wyoming — as well as a sliver of Mexico and over 20 tribal nations that rely on the 1.9 trillion gallons of water pulled from the Colorado River for use each year. ...Farming accounts for about 75 percent of annual Colorado River water usage, according to a 2024  paper  published in the journal  Nature Communications Earth & Environment . But not all agricultural sectors are equally thirsty. While a small share of the Colorado River water is used on far...

By Raeanne Raccagno , Inside Climate News.  Excerpt: Standing inside the New Jersey Statehouse last month, Claudia Mutzus wore a T-shirt from the Service Employees International Union ...gathered with other union members to mark the start of a new organized labor coalition,  Climate Jobs New Jersey , with lofty ambitions: to secure energy independence through solar construction and, in the process, address the state’s electrical affordability crisis.  New Jersey residents have been facing increasingly high electrical bills since they began to spike as much as  20 percent  in June 2025. With large electricity demands from data centers and the state’s need to purchase off-grid power to meet energy requests, costs have surged, leaving many residents baffled with no relief.   One of Climate Jobs New Jersey’s priorities is a statewide solar and battery storage program that coalition leaders say will enable the state to take back control of planning its own ...