By Karen Zraick , The New York Times.  Excerpt: The Maryland Supreme Court on Tuesday dealt a major blow to cities and other local governments looking to sue oil companies over climate change. The court ruled against reviving climate lawsuits brought by Baltimore, Annapolis and Anne Arundel County that were struck down by lower courts. Those governments had sued 26 multinational oil and gas companies to recover damages caused by the effects of greenhouse gas emissions, accusing them of deceiving the public about the dangers of using their products. Some three dozen similar lawsuits have been filed nationwide in the past decade....  Full article at https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/24/climate/baltimore-climate-lawsuit.html . 

By Maxine Joselow  and  Brad Plumer , The New York Times.  Excerpt: The Trump administration will pay the French energy giant TotalEnergies nearly $1 billion to abandon its plans to build wind farms off the East Coast, the Interior Department said on Monday at an energy conference in Houston. ...In exchange, TotalEnergies would invest that money in oil and gas projects in the United States, including a facility in Texas that would export liquefied natural gas to global markets. The company would also commit to producing more oil in the Gulf of Mexico and said it was developing some additional gas-burning power plants to meet rising electricity demand from data centers....  Full article at https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/23/climate/offshore-wind-gas-trump-total.html . 

By Alan Blinder  and  Sonia A. Rao , The New York Times.  Excerpt: San Francisco hit 90 degrees on Friday, the first day of spring. ...As these kind of spikes have become more common, there has been a rush to add air conditioning in the region. More than half of the San Francisco area’s homes now have air-conditioning, a first for the famously cool region.... It is not just the Bay Area: The United States has become a lot more air-conditioned in recent years, both fueling climate change and taming its day-to-day consequences. About 93 percent of occupied American housing units had primary air-conditioning in 2023, according to the most recently published federal data. Eight years earlier, about 89 percent did. ...Compared to other countries...the United States was “oddly obsessed with air-conditioning.” ...one issue is that relatively few American buildings, especially in places historically unaccustomed to intense heat, were designed to embrace alternate cooling me...

By Eric Niiler , The New York Times.  Excerpt: The Earth is out of balance. That’s the message from a United Nations report released late Sunday that looked at how much energy from the sun is absorbed by the Earth or reflected back into space. Researchers found the gap between the two is the biggest since measurements began in 1960, meaning more of the sun’s heat energy is now staying on Earth. And that energy imbalance is heating up the oceans, atmosphere, and frozen regions of the world, according to the World Meteorological Organization’s  State of the Global Climate report . ...said Dr. Deoras, who was not associated with the report... “...all these greenhouse gases, they are just trapping more and more heat. The planet is just not getting a chance to cool down.”...  Full article at https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/22/climate/energy-imbalance-un-report.html .  See also Inside Climate News article Report Shows Earth’s Climate is Out of Balance, as Indicators Hit Ne...

By Ajit Niranjan , The Guardian.  Excerpt: In one telling of the story, the golden fields of a proud farming nation are under attack. Besieged by an industrial sprawl of solar panels, they are being smothered at the behest of an urban elite. That narrative has failed to thrive in conservative heartlands such as Texas and Hungary, which have embraced solar power while lambasting green rules. But it is taking root in  Denmark , the most climate-ambitious nation on Earth. “We say yes to fields of wheat,” said Inger Støjberg, the leader of the rightwing populist Denmark Democrats in a speech in 2024. “And we say no to fields of iron!” ...in Denmark, which generates 90% of its electricity from renewables and aims to  cut planet-heating pollution  faster than any other wealthy country, the spread of solar power has alarmed some regions in which construction is concentrated. Solar tripled from 4% of Danish power production in 2021 to 13% in 2025. And a handful of villages h...

By Emily Gardner , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: In 2019, researchers collected a 9.5-meter ice core from Austria’s Weißseespitze ice cap, which covers the top sections of Gepatschferner Glacier in the eastern Alps, near the Austrian-Italian border. They analyzed 18 trace elements and organic acids in the core to paint a picture of Earth’s climate and atmosphere over more than a thousand years. But Weißseespitze Glacier is melting quickly: As of 2025, the ice was only 5.5 meters thick in the area where scientists collected the core. “When this glacier disappears, we don’t lose only the ice: We’ll lose irreplaceable knowledge about the Earth’s climate history and how it has evolved and how human activity has influenced it,” said  Azzurra Spagnesi , a paleoclimatologist at Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia and lead author of the new research  published  in  Frontiers in Earth Science ....  Full article at https://eos.org/articles/earths-climate-records-are-melting .