By Elisabeth Pain , Science.  Excerpt: Since 2019, the Institute of Biology and Chemistry of Proteins (IBCP) in Lyon, France, has retrofitted the building for greater energy efficiency, raised freezers’ temperatures 10°C, and reduced the need for autoclaving by 1 month’s worth of cycles per year. The institute increasingly orders consumables in bulk, recycles polystyrene packaging, and gets small lab equipment repaired rather than replaced. Every year it also organizes a contest for researchers to clean out their freezers so it doesn’t have to buy new ones. Thanks to these efforts and more, IBCP reduced its carbon footprint by about 13% between 2019 and 2023. ...These grassroots efforts are part of a larger movement across France. At its forefront is  Labos 1point5 , a collective of some 600 researchers who believe science should lead by example when it comes to reducing society’s carbon footprint. ...more than half of the carbon footprint of most French research laboratories ...

By Tim Appenzeller , Science.  Excerpt: This year, renewables surpassed coal as a source of electricity worldwide, and solar and wind energy grew fast enough to cover the entire increase in global electricity use from January to June,  according to energy think tank Ember . In September, Chinese President Xi Jinping declared at the United Nations that his country will cut its carbon emissions by as much as 10% in a decade, not by using less energy, but by doubling down on wind and solar. And solar panel imports in Africa and South Asia have soared, as people in those regions realized rooftop solar can cheaply power lights, cellphones, and fans. To many, the continued growth of renewables now seems unstoppable—a prospect that has led  Science  to name the renewable energy surge its 2025 Breakthrough of the Year....  Full article at https://www.science.org/content/article/breakthrough-2025 . 

By Chris Baraniuk , WIRED .  Excerpt: ...workers began adding a secret, light brown powder to water as they mixed up a special fluid that can store energy.... Their goal was to achieve a mixture 2.5 times denser than water. ...Pumped hydro first emerged in the late 19th century . During subsequent decades, countries including the US and UK built lots of large plants, though construction had waned by the 1990s . The tech was originally designed to complement fossil fuel power plants, making use of excess energy they produced. But today grid operators increasingly value pumped hydro plants as workhorses able to mediate highly variable wind and solar assets. They can fill in shortfalls in electricity generation or soak up surplus energy within minutes, and store it for short or long periods....  Full article at https://www.wired.com/story/pumped-hydro-energy-storage-is-having-a-renaissance/ . 

By Hannah Richter , Science.  Excerpt: NEW ORLEANS— Alarm spread fast today among climate scientists here at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU): President Donald Trump’s administration, they learned, was going to try to dismantle the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), one of the world’s premier climate and weather research centers. The news, delivered last night via a post on X from Russell Vought, director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, had come with no prior warning from the White House or from NCAR’s funder, the National Science Foundation (NSF), says Antonio Busalacchi, president of the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR), a consortium that manages NCAR. Vought’s  post  asserted that NCAR is “one of the largest sources of climate alarmism,” and said the center’s “vital activities,” such as weather research, would be moved to another entity or location....  Full article at https://www.sc...

By Grace van Deelen , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: The 20th annual Arctic Report Card reveals new highs in temperature and new lows in sea ice, as well as an uncertain outlook for the availability of federal data. ...After 2 decades of the U.S. government producing the annual report, however, datasets and resources used to create it may be under threat as federal science agencies lose staff and plan for funding uncertainties....  Full article at https://eos.org/articles/amid-the-arctics-hottest-year-arctic-science-faces-a-data-deficiency . 

By Arcelia Martin , Inside Climate News.  Excerpt: Capacity additions to the Texas grid continue to be led by renewables. Battery storage facilities and solar farms powered virtually all capacity growth in Texas’ electric grid throughout 2025, as the home of the nation’s oil and gas industry created almost twice as much new solar power as California. ...according to the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), operator of Texas’ electric grid...Solar power accounted for the second-largest capacity addition, with more than 4,500 megawatts installed....  Full article at https://insideclimatenews.org/news/10122025/texas-electric-grid-transitioning-to-battery-storage-solar/ .

By CHLOE AIELLO  AND  SAM BLUM , Inc.  Excerpt: Inside the fallout from the Department of Energy’s slashing of $8 billion in loans and grants, and how the companies affected aim to ‘Trump-proof’ their businesses. ...Jim Kesseli...was particularly rattled when one of Brayton’s hard-earned Department of Energy contracts was terminated last month. ...The research and development contract was issued by the DOE, and was initially meant to fund a three-year project researching various utility-scale energy storage solutions. ...Kesseli islooking to find new assignments for five people as a direct result of the contract’s cancellation. ... Nearly $8 billion in funding, cancelled ...Since Donald Trump was sworn into office again, U.S. energy policy has drastically veered toward fossil fuels—and away from renewables. The policy has left scores of clean energy startups on precarious financial footing, or scrambling to make up for projected revenue streams that have d...

By Jean Chemnick , E&E News by Politico.  Excerpt: EPA has ...modified sections of  its website  by deleting information about human-created greenhouse gases and the role they play in warming the planet. It also removed links to scientific data and information. The website now directs visitors to a subsection  on climate “causes”  that mentions only natural phenomena as the drivers of warming, like changes in the Earth’s orbit and variations in solar activity. Two subsections titled “ Climate Change Indicators ” and “ Climate Change Impacts and Analysis ” have been removed....  Full article at https://www.eenews.net/articles/epa-erases-references-to-human-caused-climate-change-from-websites/ . 

By Eric Niiler , The New York Times.  Excerpt: A 5,500-mile blob of seaweed in the Atlantic Ocean that has menaced beaches across the Caribbean and Florida in recent years is exploding in size, while a second patch farther north is declining rapidly, driven by rapid changes in the region’s climate. A study published Thursday in the journal  Nature Geoscience  finds a big shift in the growth patterns of sargassum, a type of floating macroalgae that provides food and shelter for fish, turtles, seabirds and other marine life. The southern patch, known as the Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt, has now reached 38 million metric tons, a 40 percent increase from its record year of 2022. “Usually we have a 10 percent to 20 percent fluctuation year to year,” said Chuanmin Hu, a professor of physical oceanography at the University of South Florida and an author of the paper. “But this year was crazy, and we do not have an answer of why.” ...“The climate is having a very significant eff...

By Andrew Curry , Science.  Excerpt: The Black Death is the single most deadly documented pandemic in human history. In 1347 C.E., it spread from a few Italian port cities to nearly every corner of Europe, killing tens of millions of people within a decade and eliminating more than half the continent’s population. In a paper published today in  Communications Earth & Environment , researchers argue that cool weather  spurred by previously unidentified volcanic eruptions  set into motion a deadly chain of events. ...The authors of the new paper suggest volcanic eruptions a few years before the plague’s rapid spread played a role, by pushing plumes of sulfur high into the atmosphere that cooled parts of Europe and caused harvests to fail around the Mediterranean. These failures, in turn, forced Italian cities to import large quantities of grain from the plague-wracked Black Sea region—along with infected fleas, capable of subsisting on grain dust in the cargo holds...

By Hayley Smith, Los Angeles Times.  Excerpt: The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power has stopped receiving any coal-fired power, officials announced Thursday. The city's last remaining coal source was the Intermountain Power Project in Utah, which provided 11% of L.A.'s energy in 2024. It's a milestone in the city's transition to 100% clean energy....  Full article at https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2025-12-04/los-angeles-says-so-long-to-coal . 

By Science Advisor.  Excerpt: By the 1990s, the world had achieved a striking victory: largely banning chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), compounds used as refrigerants but destructive to the ozone layer. Unfortunately, their replacements, while safer for ozone, are still potent greenhouse gases; they contribute a few percent to emissions globally. Alternatives to compressible liquid coolants have so far suffered from inefficient heat transfer and the inability to scale. In a typical refrigerator or air conditioner, cooling is achieved by transporting heat away from the system using a fluid that absorbs heat, evaporates into a gas, and gets condensed back into a liquid. Researchers probed a different way to cool down:  adding ions to water to improve its ability to absorb heat  , similar to how we spread salt on the roads to melt snow in the winter. The team ...determined that the cooling process was three times more efficient than conventional systems and could reduce electrici...

By Savannah Gupton ,  Mark Bradford ,  Alex Polussa ,  Sara E. Kuebbing  and  Emily E. Oldfield , Eos/AGU. Excerpt: In the modern era, the necessity to adapt has led to expansive land use, fertilization, irrigation, and other agricultural routines—powered primarily by combusted carbon and freshwater extractions—to suit local environmental conditions and meet demands of growing populations. These practices have been a boon to food supplies, but have also contributed to many of today’s  climatic  and  environmental   challenges . ...the  Paris Agreement  ...  legally binds  participating nations to implement land use methods that mitigate emissions and actively remove carbon from the atmosphere. One such set of  modified land management practices , known collectively as climate-smart agriculture [ U.S. Department of Agriculture , 2025], is lauded as a pragmatic, low-barrier pathway to manage climate change through natur...

By Lisa Friedman  and  Maxine Joselow , The New York Times.  Excerpt: The Environmental Protection Agency announced on Wednesday that it would delay a requirement that the oil and gas industry limit emissions of methane, a powerful planet-warming gas. Under the requirement, which dates to the Biden administration, oil and gas companies were supposed to start this year reducing the amount of methane they release into the atmosphere. Instead, the Trump administration is giving them until January 2027 and is considering repealing the measure altogether. The move dealt a blow to any remaining effort by the United States to slow Earth’s dangerous warming. It came after the Trump administration  boycotted the United Nations climate summit  this month, the first time that the United States was not present since the annual meetings began 30 years ago....  Full article at https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/26/climate/epa-delays-methane-oil-gas.html . 

By Mariana Mastache-Maldonado , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: Fragments of blue ice up to 6 million years old—the oldest ever found—offer key insights into Earth’s warming cycles. Researchers are using these ancient data to refine models of our future climate. ...In Antarctica...rare formations known as blue ice areas may offer a distinct look into that deep past. These areas, which make up barely 1% of the continent, form where strong winds strip away surface snow. ...The Allan Hills region, situated on the edge of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet.... Here researchers have discovered ice up to 6 million years old—the oldest yet found. Their  study  of the ice, published in  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America , revealed that parts of it formed during periods far warmer than today—times when sea levels were higher and open forests and grasslands covered much of the planet. ...studying the atmospheric remnants trapped in blue ice, the rese...

By Paul Voosen , Science.  Excerpt: It seems an easy climate solution, almost too good to be true. Greenhouse gas emissions from airplanes are stubbornly difficult to reduce—batteries cannot power a jumbo jet. But in the past few years, scientists and industry have seized on a way to trim airplanes’ climate footprint by limiting the clouds they leave behind. Jet contrails, when they turn into long-lived clouds, trap significant amounts of heat that would otherwise escape Earth—three times more than the carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) emitted by the engines, some studies have suggested. In theory, tweaking flight routes to avoid creating these clouds could slash aviation’s toll on the climate....  Full article at https://www.science.org/content/article/airplane-contrails-may-not-be-climate-villain-once-feared .

By Paul Voosen , Science.  Excerpt: Global greenhouse emissions will soon flatten or decline—a historic moment driven by China’s surge in renewable energy. In July, a team of scientists assembled...to study an anomalous wobble in a data curve. ...it was a surprising decline in a quantity that has grown relentlessly throughout the Industrial Age: the amount of planet-warming greenhouse gases dumped by humanity into the atmosphere each year. The researchers were members of Climate TRACE, a collaboration of academics, environmental think tanks, and companies that tracks how much coal, oil, and natural gas the world is burning—and where—using a mix of energy statistics, satellite observations, and artificial intelligence (AI). As the group began to push out monthly estimates for January, February, and March, it was unmistakable that levels were lower than at the same time last year. ...overall emissions have crept up by some 1% each year. Although Europe and the United States reached p...

By Claire Brown and Mira Rojanasakul, The New York Times.  Excerpt: New research shared with The New York Times estimates the extent to which rising home insurance premiums, driven higher by climate change, are cascading into the broader real estate market and eating into home values in the most disaster-prone areas....  Full article at https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/11/19/climate/home-insurance-costs-real-estate-market.html . 

By J. Besl , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: CalHeatScore creates heat wave warnings for every zip code in California, using temperature data, socioeconomic indicators, and the history of emergency room visits, to predict heat-related health risk....  Full article at https://eos.org/articles/new-tool-maps-the-overlap-of-heat-and-health-in-california . 

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 Sachi Kitajima Mulkey , The New York Times.  Excerpt: This summer, Len Necefer finally planned the road trip he’s been thinking about for nearly a decade: Going coast-to-coast in an electric vehicle, stopping only to charge on tribal lands. As a Navajo citizen and tribal energy expert who used to work in the federal government, he saw it as the ultimate test of how far energy infrastructure had come. Stop by stop, his plans came together until North Dakota, where a dearth of chargers seemed to prevent a Midwest crossing. Then, he spotted it: a level-2 charger at Sitting Bull College on the Standing Rock Reservation. It was more than a lucky break. Over the past three years, Standing Rock has installed chargers across the reservation as part of the Electric Nation project, a regional effort to create an intertribal charging network. By the time the project wraps at the end of November, Standing Rock Nation will operate 13 E.V. chargers, most of them in North Dakota. While there a...

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 Somini Sengupta , The New York Times.   Excerpt: A small group of countries is aiming to impose a fee on private jets and premium commercial fares. The revenue would help nations adapt to warming....  Full article at https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/17/climate/private-jet-tax-climate.html . 

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 Hannah Richter , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: More than 75 million people work in the garment industry, many of them in the world’s hottest countries. As climate change warms the air and oceans, so too does it seep into the stuffy chambers of garment factories, where conditions are highly uncomfortable if not downright unsafe. In  research recently published in  The Lancet , scientists tested different interventions for protecting workers from rising temperatures in Bangladesh, a nation where 80% of its export revenue comes from the garment industry. The 4 million Bangladeshi people, mostly women, who sew ready-made garments often work 12-hour shifts 6 days a week in humid and poorly ventilated buildings. Prolonged heat stress can put strain on their cardiovascular systems and increase their risk of heat stroke, especially because many workers have existing kidney and cardiovascular issues....  Full article at https://eos.org/articles/garment-factories-are-heating-up-heres-...

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...

By Colleen Howe , Reuters.  Excerpt: BEIJING, Nov 12 (Reuters) - China's energy administration said on Wednesday that it will push renewable energy use beyond the power sector over the next five years, aiming to better absorb the country's booming wind and solar output. Provinces and power producers should help local governments to build up their industrial bases for green hydrogen, green ammonia, green methanol, and sustainable aviation fuel during the next five-year plan from 2026-2030, the National Energy Administration (NEA) said in its opinion document on integrating new energy. Green hydrogen ... can serve as a low-carbon fuel for heavy industry and transport, power industrial processes or vehicles, and as a feedstock for ammonia and methanol, which are used in fertilisers, shipping and elsewhere. The department encouraged coastal areas to explore using offshore wind to produce hydrogen, a still nascent production method. The document also called for using renewables to p...

By  Erin Douglas ,  Inside Climate News .  Excerpt: This mosquito species is native to tropical and subtropical climates, but as climate change pushes up temperatures and warps precipitation patterns, the  Aedes aegypti   —  which can spread Zika, dengue, chikungunya and other potentially deadly viruses — is on the move. It’s popping up all over the Mountain West, where conditions have historically been far too harsh for it to survive. In the last decade, towns in  New Mexico  and  Utah  have begun catching  Aedes aegypti  in their traps year after year, and just this summer, one was found for the  first time in Idaho . ...as climate change allows the  Aedes aegypti  to move northward, survive at higher elevations and stay active for longer into the fall, dengue virus is fast emerging as one of the most dangerous of the world’s diseases transmitted by mosquitoes and  ticks , researchers say.......

By Somini Sengupta  and  Brad Plumer ,  The New York Times.  ' Excerpt: As the United States  torpedoes climate action  and Europe  struggles to realize its green ambitions , a surprising shift is taking hold in many large, fast-growing economies where a majority of the world’s people live. Countries like Brazil, India, and Vietnam are rapidly expanding solar and wind power. Poorer countries like Ethiopia and Nepal are leapfrogging over gasoline-burning cars to battery-powered ones. Nigeria, a petrostate, plans to  build its first solar-panel manufacturing plant . Morocco is creating a battery hub to supply European automakers. Santiago, the capital of Chile, has electrified more than half of its bus fleet in recent years. Key to this shift is the world’s new renewable energy superpower: China. Having  saturated its own market  with solar panels, wind turbines and batteries, Chinese companies are now exporting their wares to energy-hungr...

By Max Bearak , The New York Times.  Excerpt: ...Fatih Birol... has led out of obscurity over the past decade, the International Energy Agency [IEA]. ...Mr. Birol likes to joke that he is “the world’s most boring man.” He certainly exudes a kind of bureaucratic plainness. But he has also deftly led the I.E.A. through a decade during which energy has re-emerged as a geopolitical weapon. The debate over how to address climate change is upending economic and diplomatic relations around the world — right as the Trump administration works to reverse a global push for a transition to renewable energy by producing, consuming and exporting as much fossil fuel as it can. Mr. Birol, for his part, has repeatedly offered the fossil fuel industry a kind of “adapt or fail” warning, particularly as solar power grows at a pace that even the I.E.A. underestimated. ...The organization’s members, mostly Western countries, have increasingly turned to it for guidance, even if the I.E.A. has occasionall...

By Alan Gould, GSS. Excerpt: The 30th Conference of the Parties (COP) to United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) is an international effort to dramatically reduce human caused climate change. The Quaker Youth UN Ambassadors Program has organized a delegation to COP30 from the US, tropical Africa, and the Middle East. Most of the delegation are credentialed remote observers rather than actually on the ground in Belem, Brazil for COP30 which is November 10 through 21. If you are interested in participating in virtually connecting up with these ambassadors, please contact Frank Granshaw.  Here is the portal: A Virtual Observers Guide to COP30 , the 2025 UN Climate Conference https://sites.google.com/view/virtualobserversguidetocop30 . 

By Somini Sengupta ,  Brad Plumer  and  David Gelles , The New York Times.  Excerpt: The international climate summit opened on Thursday in Belém, a Brazilian city on the edge of the imperiled Amazon rainforest, with several of America’s global allies and rivals alike making the case that slowing down global warming is today key to economic growth and energy security. It was a sharp counterpoint to President Trump, who has called climate change a “con job” ...attacked global efforts to transition away from coal, oil and gas ...has launched a full-throated...attack on global efforts to reduce the world’s reliance on fossil fuels. ...no senior American government officials are present at the meeting in Belém. ...extreme weather events, aggravated by the burning of coal, oil and gas, has heightened human suffering. In the last two weeks alone, storms and hurricanes supersized by climate change clobbered Mexico, Jamaica and Haiti. Globally, 2025 is on track to be the sec...

By Sachi Kitajima Mulkey , The New York Times.  Excerpt: Hurricane Melissa’s path through the Caribbean last month was made more violent by climate change, according to a scientific analysis released Thursday. Researchers from the group World Weather Attribution found that the storm had 7 percent stronger wind speeds than a similar one in a world that has not been warmed by the burning of fossil fuels. They also found the rate of rainfall inside the eyewall of the storm was 16 percent more intense. Melissa made landfall as a Category 5 storm in Jamaica on Oct. 28 with wind speeds of 185 miles per hour, collapsing buildings and knocking out internet to most of the island. It continued on to Cuba as a Category 3 storm, forcing hundreds to evacuate, and pummeled Haiti with catastrophic flooding. Dozens of people in hard-hit areas have died. Even a small increase in wind speed can cause substantial damage, said Friederike Otto, one of the group’s founders and a climatologist at Imperia...

By Paul Voosen , Science.  Excerpt: It’s a hallmark prediction of climate change: As the world warms, trees will migrate not just toward the poles, but also up the slopes of mountains, eating away at fragile alpine ecosystems. Although advancing tree lines have been tracked at individual mountains, a new large-scale study  has found something surprising : Over a span of 4 decades, the largest upward movement of these forests has come not near the poles, as one might expect, but instead in the tropics, where monitoring has been far more limited....  Full article at https://www.science.org/content/article/forests-are-migrating-mountain-peaks .

By Hannah Richter , Science.  Excerpt: In 2022, something shocking happened to the Hektoria Glacier, a small river of ice that slips into the sea near the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula. Over 16 months, it retreated by 25 kilometers, and it lost a whopping 8 kilometers in just two of those months—the fastest glacial retreat in the modern record. Now, after  a forensic analysis of the event reported today in  Nature Geoscience , researchers say they have identified the worrisome mechanisms behind it: a combination of glacial earthquakes and a swath of thinned ice popping afloat and breaking apart in a geological instant. If the same processes were to occur at larger Antarctic glaciers, they could rapidly accelerate the retreat of ice sheets and raise global sea levels, says Jeremy Bassis, a glaciologist at the University of Michigan. The study is “telling us that those worst-case scenarios are maybe not as implausible as some people might have thought.” ...[Jeremy] Bassis ...

By Rebecca Owen , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: Tropical forests are biodiversity hot spots; preserving them is a crucial part of global efforts to mitigate the effects of climate change. When these verdant ecosystems are destroyed, they release  millions  of metric tons of carbon dioxide each year, emissions numbers second only to those driven by fossil fuel consumption. A host of international efforts have emerged to help curb tropical forest loss. The Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries ( REDD+ ) program, established in 2005, is a United Nations–supported initiative for countries to sustainably manage and conserve forested land to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Countries receive financial incentives to preserve and maintain their forests—compensation intended to make forests more valuable intact than cut down. There are more than 350 REDD+ projects worldwide, and in many project locations,  habitats have been protected , and...

By Robert F. Service , Science.  Excerpt: Despite the growing adoption of solar power and other renewables, fossil fuels still rule our energy world. That makes steps to make them cleaner all the more vital. Chemists report today in  Science  the discovery of an additive that  sharply cuts carbon emissions  from an industrial process that can convert coal, natural gas, or agricultural biomass to liquid fuels such as diesel or gasoline. ...Fischer-Tropsch process ...was used by Germany in the 1930s to fuel the Nazi war machine and by South Africa during apartheid to produce fuels from the nation’s abundant coal reserves. Although relatively expensive, the approach is still used today to satisfy strategic fuel security needs or in places with abundant feedstocks such as coal or natural gas. The chemistry is highly polluting, however. ...one-third of all the carbon contained in syngas ends up as CO 2  vented into the atmosphere. ...Ding Ma, a chemist at Peking...

By Taylor Mitchell Brown , Science.  Excerpt: About 2200 years ago, a wealthy Han soldier was entombed in a hillside grave on the frontier of the expanding Han Dynasty, in what is now western China. His tomb was filled with gold coins and emblazoned with ornate calligraphy. But what most interested Bao Yang at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and head of its Tree-Ring Laboratory was the wood of his coffin. For dendrochronologists like Yang, coffin wood can be a critical source of tree rings, which can help scientists date sites—sometimes to precise calendar years—and offer details about the region’s environment and climate during the tree’s lifetime. The thickness of rings from the Han soldier’s pine coffin and hundreds of others like it, for example,  revealed that from 270 B.C.E. to 77 C.E. average humidity levels were 18% to 34% higher than today’s, which may have allowed the western Han to expand westward  into what before—and is again today—a barren desert. That...

By Grace van Deelen , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: A yearly analysis of climate change’s progress and effects shows a “planet on the brink” of ecological breakdown and widespread crisis and suggests that only rapid climate mitigation can avoid the worst consequences. ...The sixth annual report, published in  BioScience ,  analyzes global data on Earth’s atmosphere, oceans, energy, ecosystems, food systems, and more. Researchers identified our planet’s so-called vital signs, including ocean temperature, surface temperature, sea ice extent, and carbon pollution. Of the 34 vital signs, 22 were at record levels, indicating a highly stressed Earth system. For example, 2024 surpassed 2023 as the hottest year on record.  Ocean heat  and  wildfire -related tree cover loss are both at all-time highs. Deadly weather disasters surged in 2024 and 2025, with floods, wildfires, and typhoons killing  hundreds in the U.S. alone . Atmospheric warming is showing signs of acc...

By Adele Peters , FastCompany.  Excerpt: Most climate reports are bleak. Temperatures are soaring. Sea levels are rising. Companies are missing—or abandoning—their emissions targets. But a  new report  from the nonprofit Energy & Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU) looks at the surprising amount of progress that’s happened since the Paris climate agreement 10 years ago. Renewable energy has grown faster than every major forecast predicted in 2015. There’s now four times as much solar power as the International Energy Agency (IEA) expected 10 years ago. Last year alone, the world installed  553 gigawatts  of solar power...which is 1,500% more than the IEA had projected. Investors are now pouring twice as much into renewables as into fossil fuels. More than 1 in 5 new cars sold worldwide today is  an EV ; a decade ago, that number was fewer than 1 in 100. ...the world is on track to reach 100 million  EVs  by 2028. Dozens of countries have net-zero...

By Karen Zraick , The New York Times.   Excerpt: Exxon Mobil sued California late Friday claiming that two new state laws that aim to fight climate change would violate the oil company’s free speech rights. The two laws, passed in 2023 and known as the California Climate Accountability Package, would require thousands of large companies doing business in the state to calculate and report the greenhouse gas emissions created by the use of their products, along with the business risks that climate change represents for the companies. ...In the past, climate regulations have generally required companies to report their own corporate emissions, but not emissions caused by people using the products that they manufacture and sell. For oil companies like Exxon, the new rules, which begin to take effect in 2026, mean calculating and then reporting the emissions caused by activities like the use of gas or diesel in cars and trucks. ... Exxon’s lawsuit , filed in the United States Distr...

By Karen Zraick  and  Lisa Friedman , The New York Times.  Excerpt: Some carmakers and energy executives say the plan would trigger costly litigation and spur individual states to create a patchwork of tighter rules....  Full article at https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/25/climate/endangerment-finding-auto-energy-lawsuits.html . 

By Science Advisor.  Excerpt: Researchers have declared  southern Florida’s  Acropora  coral colonies functionally extinct . The death knell for two reef-building species, elkhorn and staghorn, was the 2023 marine heatwave that brought temperatures above 31°C for almost 6 weeks. The event was the ninth mass coral mortality event for the region since 1987. “ This ecosystem is forever transformed ,” lead author Ross Cunning told  Nature . Conservation for these species “needs to fundamentally change.” Acropora  have made Florida and the Caribbean their home for the past 250,000 to 500,000 years. During the heatwave, they bleached in 98% to 100% of their southern Florida range, a process whereby the corals lose the symbiotic algae that feed them and give them color. Previously, scientists had attempted to reintroduce the corals in areas where they had declined. But with the reintroduced organisms now dead, the authors say that efforts must turn to breeding mor...

By Paul Voosen , Science.  Excerpt: Acoustic technique could make it easier to monitor threat to marine life stemming from rising carbon emissions. ...The ocean is a noisy place. Ship propellers and whale songs reverberate at the lowest pitches, while at higher tones dolphins click and shrimp snap their claws. Between these frequencies are the sounds of the churning sea itself, generated as waves, wind, and rain roil its surface. Researchers have now used this ambient noise to probe the rising acidity of the ocean. The acoustic technique,  published  last week in the  Journal of Geophysical Research: Oceans , could make it easier to measure this key parameter of ocean health across vast distances rather than relying on point measurements....  Full article at https://www.science.org/content/article/ambient-noise-can-track-dangerous-ocean-acidification . 

By Emily Gardner , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: A large swath of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) will soon open for drilling, the Trump administration announced today. ...The news is the latest in  a saga  involving the ANWR, which in total spans 19.6 million acres. The 1.5 million acres to be opened for drilling represent the coastal plain of the refuge. ...Trump first opened the 1.5 million-acre coastal plain region for drilling in 2020, but the  sale of drilling leases in early 2021  generated just $14.4 million in bids, rather than the $1.8 billion his administration had estimated. ...Erik Grafe, an attorney for the environmental law nonprofit Earthjustice, in   a statement ...  “The Gwich’in people, most Americans, and even major banks and insurance companies know the Arctic Refuge is no place to drill.” In contrast,  Voice of the Arctic Iñupiat (VOICE) , a nonprofit dedicated “to preserving and advancing North Slope Iñupiat cultural and eco...

By Warren Cornwall , Science.  Excerpt: ...the recent fate of snow crabs in much of the Bering Sea. An unprecedented underwater heat wave there in 2018 and ’19 set off a chain reaction that led to the disappearance of an estimated 47 billion crabs, one of the largest marine die-offs ever documented. Suddenly, a $150 million fishery mythologized in the  Deadliest Catch  reality TV show found itself with no catch at all. State regulators for the first time banned Bering Sea snow crab fishing in 2023 and ’24, and the U.S. government declared a federal fishery disaster. The fishery reopened this year. But crabbing boats were only allowed to haul in a tiny fraction of what they had caught previously. The collapse “has had massive impacts,” says Scott Goodman, a fisheries biologist and executive director of the Bering Sea Fisheries Research Foundation, which is funded by the crab industry. ...In the early months of 2018 and again in 2019, however, the winds reversed, blowing fr...

By Amelia Nierenberg , The New York Times.  Excerpt: Iceland lost the distinction this month of being one of the last places in the world  without a confirmed sighting of wild mosquitoes . And their presence was discovered only because of a rope in a garden doused in sugary red wine. ...The question for Icelandic scientists is whether they will be short-lived tourists or the beginning of a new, native population. But either way, mosquito experts say the discovery is a sign of how  rapid climate change  and  globalization  are changing Iceland. “We should not be surprised that we see mosquitoes popping up in very strange localities,” said Bart Knols, a Dutch mosquito expert and a founder of  MalariaWorld , which gathers and shares malaria research. Iceland has seen a spike in insect life over the past four decades.... Recently, that growth has  coincided with the skyrocketing number of international travelers visiting the geographically isolated na...

By Evan Howell , Quanta Magazine.  Excerpt: In May 2014, NASA  announced(opens a new tab)  at a press conference that a portion of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet appeared to have reached a point of irreversible retreat. Glaciers flowing toward the sea at the periphery of the 2-kilometer-thick sheet of ice were losing ice faster than snowfall could replenish them, causing their edges to recede inland. With that, the question was no longer whether the West Antarctic Ice Sheet would disappear, but when. When those glaciers go, sea levels will rise by more than a meter, inundating land currently inhabited by  230 million people(opens a new tab) . And that would be just the first act before the collapse of the entire ice sheet, which could raise seas  5 meters(opens a new tab)  and redraw the world’s coastlines. ...If  greenhouse gas emissions  continue unabated, seas would rise a staggering  15 meters(opens a new tab)  by 2300. ...not all scie...

By Kate Saxton, The Cool Down.  Excerpt: The United Nations recently  announced  that more than $1 trillion has been invested in its Energy Compact...an initiative by countries, companies, and organizations under the UN to invest in clean energy, improve electricity access, and promote  clean cooking . The latest Energy Compacts Annual Progress Report showed that $1.6 trillion has been invested, with $284 billion put to action since 2021, according to Power Technology.  The report revealed that approximately 285 million people have benefited from the agreement, with better access to clean energy. ...Additionally, 2.8 million  electric vehicles  were added, along with more than 300,000  EV charging stations . However, the report also stated that more than $4 trillion is needed annually to cover global needs for electricity and clean cooking. It showed that 660 million people have no access to electricity and that more than 2 billion rely on polluti...

By Prabhat Ranjan Mishra , Interesting Engineering.  Excerpt: A new energy storage system for high-rise buildings has been introduced in Canada. Designed by University of Waterloo researchers, the solid gravity energy storage system is claimed to be suitable for storing renewable energy. The system combines façade-mounted PV panels, small rooftop wind turbines, Li-Ion batteries, and a rope-hoist-based gravity energy storage (GS)....  Full article at https://interestingengineering.com/energy/canada-solid-gravity-energy-storage-buildings .

By Raymond Zhong  and  Sachi Kitajima Mulkey , The New York Times.  Excerpt: The average level of carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere climbed by the largest amount on record between 2023 and 2024, the World Meteorological Organization said on Thursday. ...Last year was  Earth’s hottest year  in recorded history. ...In 2024, the atmosphere’s average concentration of the gas reached 423.9 parts per million, an increase of 3.5 parts per million from the year before. That edged out a 3.3 parts per million increase in 2016 that was previously the largest ever measured. Year-to-year rises in carbon dioxide concentrations have accelerated since the 1960s, when the average pace of increase was 0.8 parts per million....  Full article at https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/16/climate/carbon-dioxide-emissions-record-jump.html . 

By Michelle Lewis , Elektrek.  Excerpt: Rondo Energy has begun commercial operations of what it says is the world’s largest industrial heat battery – a 100 MWh system now operating at a Holmes Western Oil facility in California. Powered entirely by an onsite solar array, the system supplies constant high-pressure steam and heat to the plant, demonstrating how renewable energy can directly power heavy industry. ...During the day, the off-grid solar array charges the Rondo Heat Battery, and the battery delivers stored heat 24/7. After 10 weeks of daily operation, Rondo says the system has met every performance target, achieving over 97% round-trip efficiency and operating at temperatures above 1,000 °C (1,832 °F). The 100 MWh unit provides the same volume of heat as 10,000 household heating systems....  Full article at https://electrek.co/2025/10/16/worlds-largest-industrial-heat-battery-is-online-and-solar-powered/ .

By John Surico  and  Nick Underwood , The New York Times.  Excerpt: The waters surrounding New York allowed it to grow into an economic powerhouse. But what has been a blessing is increasingly a threat, as flooding becomes one of the city’s greatest challenges. Projections that model future flooding in the city show that it will only get worse. By 2080, many areas will face an increased risk of  tidal flooding  because of rising sea levels. At the same time, more neighborhoods will become vulnerable to  extreme rainfall . And wide swaths of the city face increasing peril in the event of  storm surge  from a hurricane. By 2080, nearly 30 percent of the city’s land mass could be  at risk of significant flooding . Some 1.4 million New Yorkers currently live in these areas — 17 percent of the city’s population. New York’s adaptation is a matter of survival. Climate experts have recommended several strategies. The city could increase its ability t...

By Science Advisor.  Excerpt: According to 160 researchers from around the world, the planet has reached the first climate ‘tipping point’: Warmed waters have resulted in mass coral bleaching. “Already … coral reefs are crossing their thermal tipping point and experiencing unprecedented dieback,” the authors of the report noted. “We can no longer talk about tipping points as a future risk,” said one of the report’s lead authors. “This is our new reality.”...  See GLOBAL TIPPING POINTS  REPORT  |  READ MORE AT  NATURE . See also Eos article, As Seas Rise, Corals Can’t Keep Up . 

By Dharna Noor , The Guardian.  Excerpt: The  Trump administration  has killed a massive proposed  solar power project  in  Nevada  that would have been one of the largest in the world, indicating that the White House plans to attack not only wind power but all renewable energy. On Thursday, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) changed the status of the  Esmeralda 7  project to say its environmental review has been “ cancelled ”, .... The super project in southern Nevada was set to cover set to cover 185 sq miles – a footprint close to the size of Las Vegas ...the network of solar panels and batteries was set to produce 6.2 gigawatts of energy, or enough to power nearly 2m homes....  Full article at https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/oct/10/trump-officials-drop-major-solar-power-project-in-another-renewable-energy-attack .  Related article from Los Angeles Times has this headline: "Leaked list shows Trump administration conside...

By Dharna Noor , The Guardian.  Excerpt: Donald Trump has placed dozens of people with ties to the fossil fuel sector in his  administration , including more than 40 who have directly worked for oil, gas or coal companies, according to a  new analysis . The report from Public Citizen, a consumer advocacy and ethics non-profit that has been critical of the  Trump administration , alongside the Revolving Door Project, a corporate watchdog, analyzed the backgrounds of nominees and appointees within the White House and eight agencies dictating energy, environmental and climate policy. That includes the Environmental Protection Agency, the interior and energy departments and others....  Full article at https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/oct/08/trump-administration-fossil-fuels-climate . 

By Robert Sanders , UC Berkeley News.  Excerpt: Omar Yaghi, a Jordanian-American chemist at the University of California, Berkeley, was awarded the 2025 Nobel Prize in Chemistry today, sharing it with Richard Robson of the University of Melbourne, Australia, and Susumu Kitagawa of Kyoto University, Japan. The  scientists were cited  for creating “molecular constructions with large spaces through which gases and other chemicals can flow. These constructions, metal-organic frameworks, can be used to harvest water from desert air, capture carbon dioxide, store toxic gases or catalyze chemical reactions.”...  Full article at https://news.berkeley.edu/2025/10/08/uc-berkeleys-omar-yaghi-shares-2025-nobel-prize-in-chemistry/ .

By By Raymond Zhong , The New York Times.  Excerpt: Fifty miles off the Tuscan coast, in a sparkling blue expanse broken only by rocky, forbidding islets, including the real-life Island of Montecristo, ancient creatures are roosting beneath the waves. They spend their days feasting on an unlikely source of nourishment: methane, a potent greenhouse gas that leaks out of cracks in the seafloor. Lately, researchers have been trying to put these microorganisms to work on an urgent task. If their appetites can be redirected to other sources of their favorite gas — namely, the hundreds of millions of tons of planet-warming methane emitted each year from oil and gas sites, livestock and wetlands — then they might just help slow climate change. First, though, researchers need to better understand these microbes, which have been on this planet for billions of years but remain enigmatic in many ways....  Full article at https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/06/climate/methane-eating-microbes-...

By Shelby Conn , SFGate.  Excerpt: ...11% of  Siskiyou County  households [are] on the  California FAIR Plan  — a fire-only insurance policy no homeowner wants to turn to. ...the reality for many residents and business owners living in California’s rural, high-fire risk areas, where costly insurance rates are forcing homeowners who own their properties outright to forgo insurance altogether. ...“The FAIR Plan is not intended to compete with or replace insurers in the voluntary market.” Rather, it is meant to provide “basic fire insurance coverage for high-risk properties when traditional insurance companies will not,” she said.  The state’s escalating wildfire risk has driven more and more insurers  out of the market  in California. A study funded by the  National Integrated Drought Information System  estimated that, between 1971 and 2021, the number of acres burned in California rose by 172%. That number is only expected to grow, with...

By   MICHAEL HILL . Associated Press (AP).  Excerpt: ...Battery energy storage systems that suck up cheap power during periods of low demand, then discharge it at a profit during periods of high demand, are considered critical with the rise of intermittent energy sources such as wind and solar. ...the systems can make grids more reliable and have been credited with reducing blackouts. ...China and the United States lead the world in rapidly adding battery storage energy systems. ...In the U.S., California and Texas have been leaders in battery storage. ...While the Trump administration has been unsupportive or even hostile to renewable energy, key tax credits for energy storage projects were maintained in the recently approved federal budget.... Developers added 4,908 megawatts of battery storage capacity in the second quarter of 2025, with Arizona, California and Texas accounting for about three-quarters of that new capacity, according to a report from American Clean Power As...

By Antonio Piemontese , Wired.  Excerpt: Speaking by video  at the UN Climate Summit in New York last week,  China's  president Xi Jinping laid out his country's  climate  ambitions. While the stated goals may not have been aggressive as some environmentalists would like, Xi at least reaffirmed China's green commitment. “Despite some countries going against the trend, the international community should stay on the right track, maintain unwavering confidence, unwavering action, and undiminished efforts,” he said. Any reference to Donald Trump and the United States was surely intended (though not explicit). ...Xi Jinping's speech included a commitment to reach 3,600 gigawatts (GW) of installed wind and solar capacity by 2035, six times the country's 2020 figures. This is already the leading country in terms of installed renewable power, and a giant on the technology front as well, with universities churning out environmental and climate tech research at full ...