By Tianyun Dong et al, Science.  Editor’s summary: Ocean surface temperatures vary from year to year, experiencing heat waves like those felt on land, but 2023 saw an extraordinarily large increase in marine heat waves with no recent analog. Dong  et al . report that 2023 set new records in the duration, extent, and intensity of these events by as much as three standard deviations above the historical average of the past four decades. The increasing trends in marine heat waves present intensifying dangers to ecological, social, and economic systems. —Jesse Smith.  Full article at https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adr0910 .

By Jeff Brady , National Public Radio.  Excerpt: The Trump administration wants to overturn a key  2009 Environmental Protection Agency finding  that underpins much of the federal government's actions to rein in climate change. The EPA has crafted a proposal that would undo the government's "endangerment finding," a determination that pollutants from burning fossil fuels, such as carbon dioxide and methane, can be regulated under the Clean Air Act. The finding has   long served as the foundation for a host of policies and rules to address climate change. The EPA's proposal to revoke the finding is currently under review by the White House Office of Management and Budget....  Full article at https://www.npr.org/2025/07/24/nx-s1-5302162/climate-change-trump-epa . See also article in Eos/AGU, A Healthy Environment Is a Human Right, UN Court Rules .

By Cara Buckley , The New York Times.  Excerpt: Pittsburgh is replacing most of its streetlights — more than 33,000 inefficient high-pressure sodium lamps — with LED versions that are projected to save about $942,000 a year in energy costs while tackling light pollution. The old lights cast an orange glow that bathed the heavens and anything nearby in what Flore Marion, the city’s assistant director of sustainability and resilience, described as “horror-movie” lighting....  Full article at https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/22/climate/pennsylvania-pittsburgh-light-pollution.html . See also article in Eos, Artificial Light Lengthens the Urban Growing Season .

By Robert F. Service , Science.  Excerpt: As a fuel, hydrogen has one major attraction. When it burns or powers a fuel cell, it creates only water—and no climate-warming carbon dioxide. After that, the caveats start. To ship it or store it, the gas must be crushed under intense pressures or liquefied at ultracold temperatures, which raises costs. Now, researchers report the discovery of a cheap catalyst that adds hydrogen atoms to oil-like molecules that are liquid at ambient temperature and pressure. That means hydrogen could be stored and shipped in existing tanks, trucks, and pipelines, much like gasoline....  Full article at https://www.science.org/content/article/storing-hydrogen-oil-liquid-could-allow-easy-transport-trucks-and-ships . 

By Ione Wells, BBC.  Excerpt: Raquel Celina Rodriguez watches her step as she walks across the Vega de Tilopozo in Chile's Atacama salt flats. It's a wetland, known for its groundwater springs, but the plain is now dry and cracked with holes she explains were once pools. "Before, the Vega was all green," she says. "You couldn't see the animals through the grass. Now everything is dry." She gestures to some grazing llamas. For generations, her family raised sheep here. As the climate changed, and rain stopped falling, less grass made that much harder. But it worsened when "they" started taking the water, she explains. "They" are lithium companies. Beneath the salt flats of the Atacama Desert lie the world's largest reserves of lithium, a soft, silvery-white metal that is an essential component of the batteries that power electric cars, laptops and solar energy storage. As the world transitions to more renewable energy sources, the ...

By Benjamin L. Rice , et al.  Editor’s summary: The increasing prevalence of extreme weather events creates severe disruptions to public health, as well as to the environment. In the wake of two successive cyclones hitting Madagascar in 2022 and 2023, Rice  et al . examined the effect of these extreme weather events in a high-malaria region. In the aftermath, infection rates by the mosquito-vectored parasite increased to 10% for school-aged children within 3 months as mosquito and malaria control activities were interrupted. Modeling showed that the recently available vaccines supply prolonged protection (up to 10 months) against repeat malaria infections and offer a sustainable instrument for health resilience in the wake of climate change. —Caroline Ash.  Full article at https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adp5365 . 

By Hannah Richter , Science.  Excerpt: On every continent not cloaked in ice, researchers have discovered strangely barren circular depressions, tens of meters or even kilometers across and as little as a few centimeters deep. Soil probes show these sunken patches, sometimes called “fairy circles,” leak hydrogen gas that is percolating up from within the earth. They have attracted scientists and businesspeople alike for their potential to signal  reserves of clean hydrogen fuel . Now, researchers are offering one of the first geomechanical explanations for how they form: from the pressure of upwelling hydrogen gas, which causes a circular patch of land to rise and then sink. Before the  new study , which was published on 30 May in  Geology , “nobody really understood or tried seriously to understand how these fairy circles are formed,” says Alain Prinzhofer, a geologist and scientific director of Brazilian company GEO4U who reviewed the paper. ...But these circles ha...

By Bob Berwyn , Inside Climate News.  Excerpt: Add to the long list of global warming concerns that melting ice caps could trigger more volcanic eruptions. Worse, researchers said Monday at a scientific conference in Prague, the increasing volcanic activity holds the potential for a range of long-term climate feedbacks, as some volcanoes in Antarctica could accelerate ice melt from below while others could be so explosive that they send climate-altering material into the upper layers of the atmosphere. The research funded by the National Science Foundation studied the chemistry of rocks at six volcanoes in the Chilean Andes, where the scientists were able to detail changes in the magma below the ice or underground over the millennia of the most recent ice age, and to document how volcanic activity increased when the ice melted. University of Wisconsin–Madison geoscientist  Brad Singer , who led the research, said there are clear signs that thick ice caps act as lids on vo...

By Jim Robbins , The New York Times.  Excerpt: Eighteen years ago, farmed oyster larvae began disappearing in mass die-offs, mystifying hatchery managers in the Pacific Northwest and threatening a thriving part of the region’s economy. Up to 90 percent of the farmed Pacific oysters — the backbone of the industry — were being wiped out. Businesses like Taylor Shellfish Farms, the country’s largest grower now run by the fifth generation of the Taylor family, stood at the brink of catastrophe. ...The culprit turned out to be an increasingly acidic ocean, and research efforts to solve the mystery have propelled Washington State to the forefront of the world’s efforts to understand and offset the shifting chemical composition of the seas. Now, the global race against ocean acidification is intensifying as carbon dioxide levels in the seas increase. A recent study  found that the world’s oceans crossed a “planetary boundary”  in 2020, and warned that things were worse than prev...

By Kimberly Hatfield , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: Scientists constructed a 100-year history of acidity in the Gulf of Maine. They expected coastal variability but were surprised by what they didn’t find: a strong anthropogenic signal. ...Using ocean chemistry recorded in algae, researchers have now constructed a nearly 100-year history of acidity (pH) in the region. The  analysis, published in  Scientific Reports , shows that ocean acidification, seen around the world, has been delayed in the gulf....  Full article at https://eos.org/articles/warming-gulf-of-maine-buffers-ocean-acidification-for-now . 

Size-Insensitive Vapor Diffusion Enabled by Additive Freeze-Printed Aerogels for Scalable Desalination . Paper by Xiaomeng Zhao et al, American Chemical Society (ACS).  Summary: ...[desalination] currently requires huge plants with expensive machinery that require tons of energy to separate salt from the water. But now, researchers have developed a sponge-like material that turns saltwater into freshwater using only sunlight.  To make the sponge, the team developed a so-called ‘additive freeze-printing’ technique that combines 3D printing and freeze-casting, a technique that uses ice to create a highly porous material. ...The researchers put the sponge in a cup full of seawater then covered it with a lid to collect the condensation. After six hours in the hot Hong Kong sunlight, they got around three tablespoons of drinkable water. The team notes that, unlike other evaporators which don’t work as well as they get larger, their aerogel lattice is just as effective at a lar...

By Jennifer Hiller , The Wallstreet Journal.  Excerpt: Big wind and solar projects stand to be among the biggest losers, while hydrogen and other projects get a short reprieve. ...U.S. risks a slowdown in power delivery during the global artificial-intelligence race by ending the tax credits that were part of former President Joe Biden’s landmark Inflation Reduction Act. The U.S. is also poised to cede advances in technologies from solar panels to batteries and electric vehicles to China. .... Loser: Big wind and solar power projects ... Winner: U.S. factories, ... Winner: Rooftop solar [??]  ... Loser: Electric vehicles  ....  Full article at https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/the-renewable-energy-sectors-relative-winners-and-losers-in-the-megabill-95e7ed48 .  See also July 2 Forbes article, Red States–And AI–Are Big Losers From Trump’s Clean Energy Massacre , and July 3 article in TechCrunch, Final GOP bill kneecaps renewables and hydrogen but lifts nuclear...

By Robert F. Service , Science.  Excerpt: More than 2 billion people worldwide lack access to clean drinking water, with global warming and competing demands from farms and industry expected to worsen shortages. But the skies may soon provide relief, not in the form of rain but humidity, sucked out of the air by “atmospheric water harvesters.” The devices have existed for decades but typically are too expensive, energy-hungry, or unproductive to be practical. Now, however, two classes of materials called hydrogels and metal-organic frameworks have touched off what Evelyn Wang, a mechanical engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), calls “an explosion of efforts related to atmospheric water harvesting.”...  Full article at https://www.science.org/content/article/devices-pull-water-out-thin-air-poised-take . 

By Warren Cornwall , Science.  Excerpt: Less than 15 months into a scheduled 5-year mission, a pioneering satellite built to track rogue emissions of planet-warming methane has been lost. The demise of MethaneSAT  was announced today  by the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), the nonprofit behind the $88 million satellite. ...Methane is emitted by natural sources, such as wetlands, but also by leaky oil and gas infrastructure. Stanching those leaks  is an efficient way to slow global warming , many researchers argue, and MethaneSAT was developed specifically to identify them. ...Some existing satellites, such as the European Space Agency’s Sentinel-5, can map methane on broader scales across hundreds of kilometers. Others can pinpoint large individual polluters such as a refinery. But MethaneSAT, funded with the help of a $100 million grant from Jeff Bezos’s Earth Fund, was unique in its ability to detect smaller emissions across entire oil and gas fields while also z...

By David Gelles  in New York;  Somini Sengupta  in Brasília and in Tirunelveli, India;  Keith Bradsher  in Beijing; and  Brad Plumer  in Washington, The New York Times.  Excerpt: In China, more wind turbines  and solar panels were installed last year than in the rest of the world combined. And China’s clean energy boom is going global. Chinese companies are building electric vehicle and battery factories in Brazil, Thailand, Morocco, Hungary and beyond. At the same time, in the United States, President Trump is pressing Japan and South Korea to invest “ trillions of dollars ” in a project to ship natural gas to Asia. And General Motors just killed plans to make electric motors at a factory near Buffalo, N.Y., and instead will put $888 million into building V-8 gasoline engines there. The race is on to define the future of energy. Even as the dangers of global warming hang ominously over the planet, two of the most powerful countries in the wo...

By Max Bearak , The New York Times.  Excerpt: As sea levels rise, Australia said it would offer a special, first-of-its-kind “climate visa” to citizens of Tuvalu, a Polynesian island nation of atolls and sandbars where waters are eating away at the land. The visa lottery opened last week, and already nearly half of Tuvalu’s population has applied....  Full article at https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/27/climate/climate-visa-tuvalu.html . 

By Sahas Mehra , Science.  Excerpt: In 2023, China embarked on the  largest coastal restoration project ever attempted . Threatened by an invasive, fast-growing weed known as smooth cordgrass ( Spartina alterniflora ), which was overrunning clam farms, bird habitats, and shipping channels, the country planned to remove the plant and replace it with environmentally friendly species, such as native reeds and mangrove trees. But  such efforts would have a huge downside, increasing methane emissions 10-fold , researchers report this month in  Geophysical Research Letters . The mangroves would eventually counter these effects, but it could take 5 decades for these native plants to absorb the increasing greenhouse emissions....  Full article at https://www.science.org/content/article/china-s-massive-coastal-restoration-project-could-backfire . 

By Sachi Kitajima Mulkey Claire Brown  and  Mira Rojanasakul , The New York Times.  Excerpt: Summer started barely a week ago, and already the United States has been smothered in a record-breaking “ heat dome .” Alaska saw its  first-ever heat advisory  this month. And all of this comes on the heels of 2024, the  hottest calendar year  in recorded history. The world is getting hotter, faster. A report published last week found that human-caused global warming is now  increasing by 0.27 degrees  Celsius per decade. That rate was recorded at 0.2 degrees in the 1970s, and has been growing since. ...For years, measurements have followed predictions that the rate of  warming in the atmosphere would speed up . But now, patterns that have been evident in charts and graphs are starting to become a bigger part of people’s daily lives. “Each additional fractional degree of warming brings about a relatively larger increase in atmospheric extremes, ...

 By Paul Voosen , Science.  Excerpt: Climate change is worsening many natural hazards, including droughts, heat waves, and storm surges. Now, a new one has joined the list: earthquakes. Researchers have found that as global warming accelerates melting of mountaintop glaciers, the meltwater, percolating underground, increases the risk of damaging earthquakes. The evidence comes from beneath Grandes Jorasses, a glacier-clad peak in the Alps that is part of the Mont Blanc massif, home to Western Europe’s tallest mountains. Precise seismic records show a heat wave in 2015 kicked off a surge of small earthquakes under the mountain. Although the tremors themselves were not damaging, the chances of large earthquakes are known to rise with the frequency of small ones. “It increases the hazard dramatically,” says Toni Kraft, a seismologist at ETH Zürich and co-author of the  new study , published this month in  Earth and Planetary Science Letters ....  Full article at ht...

By Jochen Knies ,  Matt O’Regan  and  Claude Hillaire Marcel , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: The Arctic...average temperatures...rise  up to 4 times faster  than on the rest of the planet. Among the many  environmental effects of this warming , the Arctic Ocean, critically, is moving toward a “blue” state, ...becoming ice free during the summer months. This shift raises  significant concerns  about  the region’s future . Arctic Indigenous peoples...heavily rely on stable ice conditions for traditional hunting, fishing, and travel. ...Global geopolitical and economic pressures will also rise as new shipping routes open, previously inaccessible resources become available for extraction, and international competition over these resources rises. Currently...scientists struggle to predict how an  ice-free Arctic  will react to and amplify a warmer global climate. The lack of clear climate projections...is largely due to a shortage of key geolo...

By   Rebecca Owen , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: In 2003, several states and environmental groups sued the U.S. EPA for violating the  Clean Air Act  by not regulating emissions from new vehicles. When the  case  eventually reached the Supreme Court, a group of climate scientists  contributed an amicus brief —a legal document in which a third party not directly involved in the case can offer testimony—sharing data demonstrating that rising global temperatures were directly caused by human activity. This led to  the Supreme Court deciding  that greenhouse gases did constitute pollutants under the Clean Air Act and, ultimately, to the EPA’s 2009  endangerment finding  that greenhouse gas emissions endanger human health. The endangerment finding became the basis for governmental regulation of greenhouse gases. Sixteen years later, the Trump administration is  poised to repeal it , along with  other environmental protections . In a new ...

By Max Bearak , The New York Times.  Excerpt: Some of Vegas’ iconic casinos, convention centers and hotels — and thousands of households across the city, too — are using the sun to save money and better the planet’s odds at tackling climate change. ...Today in Nevada, around a third of all energy demand is met by solar panels. The state has the highest solar electricity generation per capita in the country, as well as the most solar-industry jobs per capita. ...Take the Strip. It uses more electricity than 300,000 households, which is more than the rest of Las Vegas combined. The state’s biggest employer, MGM Resorts International, which has 11 properties on the Strip, is betting on solar. ...MGM installed 26,000 panels on the roof of Mandalay Bay, an enormous casino and convention center at the Strip’s southern end. ...northeast of the city near a place called Dry Lake, ...MGM teamed up with a clean energy company to build an array of 322,000 panels. The panels now provide 90 perc...

By José María León Cabrera , The New York Times.  Excerpt: ...20 Indigenous men in the Ecuadorean Amazon boarded a canoe in their community near the border with Peru. Their destination was a neighboring village 45 minutes away by river. ...The journey between the isolated villages was made possible thanks to their boat, a traditional river canoe aside from one distinctive feature on top: 24 solar panels that harness sunlight to power an engine. The canoe is part of a growing fleet of electric-powered vessels providing a cheaper and greener alternative to diesel-powered boats that typically travel the Indigenous region’s waterways....  Full article at https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/23/world/americas/electric-boats-ecuadorian-amazon.html .

By  Stephen Council , SFGate.  Excerpt: California’s massive buildout of  solar panels  over the past decade has delivered vast amounts of clean energy to state residents, but with a big catch.  When the sun sets , utilities have to either turn to nonrenewable energy sources or the relatively little solar power that gets stored in the state’s batteries. But this month, California’s  battery problem  saw a major breakthrough. On June 11, the California Energy Commission officially approved the Darden Clean Energy Project, a sprawling solar farm and battery storage facility proposed for a stretch of fallow farmland in western Fresno County. Darden is the first project approved under a new fast-track permitting program, which gave the commission just 270 days to finish its environmental review; Gov. Gavin Newsom lauded the news in a  news release , writing that the state is “moving faster than ever before” to build up clean energy. Da...

By Calvin Coffee, TCD-The Cool Down.  Excerpt: Gujarat, a leading state in India, already gets nearly 60% of its electricity from renewable sources, and it's gearing up to deliver even more. According to  the Times of India , Gujarat's clean energy mix, composed of solar, wind, and hydro power, currently meets about 58% of the state's energy demand. ...even more improvements are on the horizon. The state has announced plans to invest around $3.5 billion in the next phase of its  Green Energy Corridor , a massive grid project designed to make clean power more accessible and reliable across the region. The upcoming upgrades will help move over 16,000 megawatts of renewable energy  throughout Gujarat , connecting new solar and wind zones in areas like Kutch, Banaskantha, and Jamnagar. New transmission lines and substations will ensure the system operates smoothly, even during peak demand, allowing more people to benefit from uninterrupted clean power. ...The Indian gove...

By Annika Inampudi , Science.  Excerpt: The crowd gathered in an auditorium in the Swiss village of Villars on Tuesday applauded as, one by one, three scientists—two women and a man—stepped onto the stage to accept a plaque and their prize of 1 million Swiss francs ($1.1 million) for research into solutions for the ongoing climate crisis. It marked the first time in the Frontiers Planet Prize’s (FPP’s) 3-year history that a woman, let alone two, has won. ...This year’s lineup—Arunima Malik, a University of Sydney sustainability researcher; Zahra Kalantari, an environmental and geosciences engineer at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology; and Zia Mehrabi, a climate and agriculture data scientist at the University of Colorado Boulder.... Kalantari,  whose work focuses on reducing the carbon footprint of cities . And Malik’s winning paper, about the  sustainability of supply chains and global trade routes , was written with multiple women as co-authors.... Mehrabi’s winning...

By Lauren Schneider , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: Canada is home to more than 400,000 nonproducing oil and gas wells. These abandoned facilities still emit methane, which can contaminate water supplies and pollute the atmosphere with a greenhouse gas more potent than carbon dioxide. The scope of these emissions may be greater than previously understood, according to a new  study . In 2023, nonproducing wells may have leaked 230 kilotons of methane, about 7 times more than the official estimates published in the government’s annual  National Inventory Report  (NIR)....  Full article at https://eos.org/articles/nonproducing-oil-wells-may-be-emitting-7-times-more-methane-than-we-thought .

By Andrew Freedman , CNN.  Excerpt: For the past four years, a fleet of drone vessels has purposefully steered into the heart of hurricanes to gather information on a storm’s wind speeds, wave heights and, critically, the complex transfer of heat and moisture between the ocean and the air right above it. These small boats from California-based company Saildrone also film harrowing footage from the ocean surface in the middle of nature’s most powerful tempests—videos that are scientifically useful and have also gone viral, giving ordinary people windows into storms. Importantly, Saildrone vessels were being used by federal scientists to improve forecast and warning accuracy. But they won’t be in forecasters’ suite of tools this year. The company “was unable to bid” on a contract for this season, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration spokesperson Keeley Belva told CNN. The reason why concerns the timing of NOAA’s solicitation for this season’s contract.... NOAA sent out its...

By Andrew Chapman , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: California produces more than a third of the vegetables and three quarters of the fruits and nuts in the United States. But water constraints are leaving more and more fields unplanted, or “fallowed,” particularly in the state’s famed farming hub, the Central Valley. In a study  published in  Communications Earth and Environment , researchers showed that these fallowed agricultural lands are producing a different problem: dust storms, which can cause road accidents and health problems and can have far-reaching environmental impacts. Using remote sensing methods, the team found that 88% of anthropogenic dust events in the state, such as dust storms, come from fallowed farmland. California’s  frequent droughts  could mean a rise in fallowed farmland....  Full article at https://eos.org/articles/fallowed-fields-are-fueling-californias-dust-problem . 

 By Madeleine Seale  et al , Science.  Excerpt: Perhaps the biggest challenge confronting plants will be in the tropics, where temperatures are already high—and are projected to rise as much as 4°C by the end of the century if more isn’t done to curb climate change. “They’re the hottest forests,” says ecologist Kenneth Feeley of the University of Miami. “So, the question is: What happens when we go into unprecedented heat?” ...Some tree species in Mexico, for example, have shifted to higher elevations, where temperatures are cooler, a recent paper in  Science   reported ). But across the Americas, tropical species aren’t moving fast enough to keep pace with warming, and researchers are  skeptical  that they will be able to cope by migrating upslope or away from the equator. Nor is evolution likely to be the answer. Trees can take decades to start reproducing, making it unlikely they can evolve new genetic adaptations for heat tolerance fast enough to w...

By Sushmita Pathak , Science.  Excerpt: In response to the 22 April attack that killed 26 people, India said it was putting “in abeyance” its participation in the Indus Waters Treaty (IWT), a 65-year-old pact that governs how Pakistan and India share water from one of Asia’s major river systems. Pakistan, in turn, said it would consider any move by India to withhold Indus water, which irrigates most of its farmland, as an act of war. Researchers say the jousting highlighted not only the political sensitivity of the treaty, but also the increasingly urgent need to update the IWT to reflect the ongoing impacts of climate change and population growth....  Full article at https://www.science.org/content/article/climate-change-threatens-india-pakistan-pact-over-major-river-system .

By Sarah Derouin , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: Kampf et al.  studied relationships between fire, fuel, and climate in temperate regions around the world, focusing specifically on  western North America ,  western and central Europe , and southwestern South America. ...The researchers found that over the 20-year study period and across all three regions, fires burned smaller areas of land in zones with either very dry climates or very wet climates compared with zones of intermediate aridity. They suggest that this trend is explained by the lack of vegetation sufficient to fuel widespread fires in dry zones and, in wet zones, by weather conditions that dampen the likelihood of fires.... Full article at https://eos.org/research-spotlights/the-goldilocks-conditions-for-wildfires . 

By Science.  Excerpt: As human activities continue to pump carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, more and more of the stuff gets absorbed into Earth’s oceans, where it reacts with seawater to form carbonic acid. When this weak acid dissociates into ions of hydrogen and bicarbonate, it drives down the ocean’s overall pH, which is typically slightly basic. This acidification—sometimes referred to as climate change’s “evil twin”—can wreak havoc on marine life, for example by interfering with the mineralization process that corals, oysters, and other organisms use to build and maintain their skeletons and shells. A 2014 video released by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association’s Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory (NOAA PMEL), for instance, shows a marine snail called a pteropod  struggling to swim, its shell having been partially dissolved by acidic waters . In 2009, a group of researchers led by Swedish climate scientist Johan Rockström developed what is known as the ...

By Noam S. Vogt-Vincent et al.  Abstract: Past coral range expansions suggest that high-latitude environments may serve as refugia, potentially buffering coral biodiversity loss due to climate change. We explore this possibility for corals globally, .... Our simulations suggest that there is a mismatch between the timescales of coral reef decline and range expansion under future predicted climate change. Whereas the most severe declines in coral cover will likely occur within 40 to 80 years, large-scale coral reef expansion requires centuries. The absence of large-scale coral refugia in the face of rapid anthropogenic climate change emphasizes the urgent need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and mitigate nonthermal stressors for corals, both in the tropics and in higher latitudes....  Full article at https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adr2545 . 

Summary: ...brown alga is an important habitat and food source for myriad marine species. Unfortunately, warming oceans have rapidly caused kelp forests around the world to disappear; in some areas, red “turf” algae are taking their place. A new study in Science Advances finds that you can’t just substitute one alga for another—the shift alters the food web from the bottom up. The researchers behind the work wondered from where cunner and pollock fish—two common kelp forest predators—derived their energy. To find out, they examined carbon and nitrogen in the tissues of fish caught off the coasts of northeastern Maine...where 80% of kelp forests have collapsed. While the fish in kelp forests got most of their energy from kelp, fish in turf reefs didn’t just switch to eating the turf—they turned to phytoplankton for their main food source instead. The finding shows how important kelp is as a food source, and hints at how its loss could affect the entire ecosystem.... ' Paper, Kelp f...

By Paul Voosen , Science.  Excerpt: For nearly 4 decades, researchers have tracked one of the most prominent harbingers of global warming—dwindling Arctic sea ice—with data from aging weather satellites run by the U.S. military. But this continuous record is now at risk, after the Department of Defense (DOD) quietly told climate scientists it would be “deprioritizing” access to the data. The move comes as Arctic sea ice approaches a possible new record low. “The [satellites] are up there and functioning,” says Walt Meier, a remote-sensing scientist at the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC). “But we’re not getting all the data anymore, at least regularly.” NSIDC and Europe’s Copernicus Climate Change Service compile the two most prominent global records of sea ice, and both groups rely on these data. The only options for similar observations come from either an  aging Japanese satellite , launched in 2012, or a series of Chinese weather satellites, which the country...

[Paper: Passive cooling paint enabled by rational design of thermal-optical and mass transfer properties]. By Jipeng Fei  et al, Science.  Editor's summary: The top and exterior of buildings can be used to passively cool, but this requires materials with the right properties to do so effectively. Fei  et al . designed a paint that cools both radiatively and through evaporation and that appears to keep buildings relatively cool even in humid environments. Although radiative cooling is effective at reducing temperature, it requires the material to be sky-facing. Designing a paint that also cools through evaporation allows the material to be effective when applied to the sides of the buildings as well. —Brent Grocholski.  Full article at https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adt3372? . 

By Paul Voosen , Science.  Excerpt: Like many cities around the world, Austin is now facing questions about how to build and adapt for a changing climate. A growing number of these cities—as well as insurance companies, home builders, and farmers—are turning to climate modelers for answers. But despite decades of effort, forecasting how global warming will play out on a local scale remains a stubborn challenge, riven with uncertainty. There is little agreement on how best to convert climate models, which simulate the entire world at coarse resolutions, into the detailed local forecasts of temperature and rainfall that planners crave. Different methods lead to drastically different projections, especially in terms of rainfall—even when using the same climate model. ...The problem has become more pronounced with the discovery that global climate models, good at the big picture, often miss local impacts that are already painfully evident. For example, despite nailing the overall pace ...

By Madeleine Cuff , New Scientist.  Excerpt: Rivers around the world are leaking ancient carbon back into the atmosphere. The finding has taken scientists by surprise and suggests human activities are damaging the natural landscape far more than first thought. Researchers already knew rivers released carbon dioxide and methane as part of the global carbon cycle – the short-term movement of gases that happens as living things grow and decompose. They are thought to emit around 2 gigatonnes of this carbon each year. But when  Josh Dean  at the University of Bristol, UK, and his colleagues set out to determine how old this carbon really is, they found that around 60 per cent of global river emissions are from thousands-of-years-old stores. Ancient carbon is trapped in rocks, peat bogs and wetlands. The findings suggest that as much as 1 gigatonne of it is being released back into the atmosphere each year through rivers. ...The pressing question now is why rivers are releasin...

By Grace van Deelen , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: Sixty-seven extreme heat events have occurred since May 2024. All of these events—including a deadly Mediterranean heat wave in July 2024, an unprecedented March 2025 heat wave in central Asia, and extreme heat in South Sudan in February 2025—broke temperature records, caused major harm to people or property, or did both. According to  a new analysis , each of these extreme events was made more likely by climate change. The number of days with extreme heat is now at least double what it would have been without climate change in 195 countries and territories. Climate change added at least an extra month of extreme heat in the past year for 4 billion people—half the world’s population....  Full article at https://eos.org/articles/climate-change-made-extreme-heat-days-more-likely .

By Georgina Jedikovska , Interesting Engineering.  Excerpt: A high-tech anaerobic digestion facility in the U.S. has been transforming organic waste from the iconic ice cream brand Ben & Jerry’s into renewable energy, helping power the state’s electric grid and reduce the region’s environmental footprint. The popular ice cream, frozen yogurt, and sorbet producer has been sending all of its high-strength organic waste and out-of-spec (OOS) products directly to the plant located in St. Albans, Vermont, U.S., through a dedicated pipeline....  Full article at https://interestingengineering.com/energy/ben-jerrys-waste-now-powers-vermont-homes . 

By Eric Holthaus , The Guardian.  Excerpt: Enormous early-season  wildfires  have erupted across the prairie provinces of  Canada  this week, taxing local emergency response and threatening a long stretch of dangerous air quality across eastern North America. The country’s largest fires – the Bird River fire and the Border fire – remain completely uncontained  in northern Manitoba . In Manitoba alone, wildfires have burned about 200,000 hectares already this year – already about three times the recent full-year average for the province. More than 17,000 people are in the process of being airlifted out of wildfire zones by the Canadian military, .... First Nations in Saskatchewan  have been particularly affected  by the fires this week, with some entire communities evacuated and occasionally trapped by road closures due to unsafe conditions....  Full article at https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/may/30/canada-wildfires-air-quality ....

By Grace van Deelen , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: Pine Hollow Arboretum’s founder, John W. Abbuhl, began planting trees around his Albany, N.Y., home in the 1960s. He planted species native to surrounding ecosystems but also made ambitious choices—bald cypresses, magnolias, pawpaws, sweetgums—that were more climatically suited to the southeastern United States. Now, those very trees are thriving, said  Dave Plummer , a horticulturalist at Pine Hollow.  Other Pine Hollow trees, such as balsam firs native to New York, have struggled with this century’s warming winters. ...Pine Hollow Arboretum is one of many botanical gardens rethinking their planting strategies as the climate warms. These strategies range from testing out new, warmth-loving plants to putting more resources toward pest and invasive species management. Planting Zones Shift North. The U.S. Department of Agriculture recognizes 13  plant hardiness zones  based on a region’s coldest annual temperatures, av...

By Umair Irfan , Vox.  Excerpt: China is the world’s  largest single greenhouse gas emitter , spewing more than double the amount of heat-trapping chemicals as the next biggest climate polluter, the United States. ...At one point, China was approving  two new coal power plants per week . ...But now, for the first time, there’s been a shift: China’s greenhouse gas emissions have actually fallen even as energy demand went up. ...greenhouse gas output fell 1 percent over the past year, even as China’s overall energy use and economic activity increased. ...In large part, the decline in emissions came from clean electricity production. China deployed vastly more wind, solar, and nuclear power — sources that don’t emit carbon dioxide — at a pace faster than its electricity demand growth. Meanwhile, its coal and gas electricity production dropped. ...China has established itself as the world’s largest producer of  solar panels ,  wind turbines ,  electric veh...

By Theo Burman , Newsweek.  Excerpt: Geothermal energy from Nevada's Great Basin could supply as much as 10 percent of the United States' electricity needs, according to a newly released assessment by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). The report estimates the area, which covers the majority of Nevada and extends into parts of Arizona, California, Idaho, Oregon, Utah and Wyoming, could generate 135 gigawatts of baseload power, if enhanced geothermal systems are deployed at scale. ...The USGS evaluation was conducted under the 2020 Energy Act, which saw the agency explore new ways of generating efficient energy from untapped resources. ... The report, published on Wednesday,  includes newly developed maps of underground heat flows and refined extraction models that suggest geothermal deployment could increase the basin's productivity. Under the proposed model, water would be pumped as deep as 3.7 miles underground, heated by natural geological formations, and returned to the...

By Katherine Kornei , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: Cows,  with their four stomach pouches , are evolutionarily primed to consume grass and extract all the nutrients possible from that roughage. ...But bovines around the world are increasingly being fed a corn-based diet as industrial-scale farming proliferates—it’s often easier, more efficient, and more scalable to feed cows from a trough rather than allow them to forage in a pasture. ...But bovines around the world are increasingly being fed a corn-based diet as industrial-scale farming proliferates—it’s often easier, more efficient, and more scalable to feed cows from a trough rather than allow them to forage in a pasture. ...Climate change is also driving that shift. Even in regions that have long turned cows out to green pastures,  farmers are facing summertime grass shortages due to droughts . ...Delbès and her collaborators found that the shift from a diet of 25% grazed grass to one of 0% grazed grass was more detrimental to ...

By Jack Ewing , The New York Times.  Excerpt: A tax and policy bill passed by House Republicans on Thursday would deal a serious blow to electric vehicles by repealing many of the subsidies that have been critical to the growth of the technology. If passed by the Senate and signed into law by President Trump, the bill would sharply slow the sales and production of battery-powered cars and trucks in the United States and set back the global effort to address climate change. The measure would gut subsidies for battery manufacturing, incentives for purchases of electric vehicles by individuals and businesses, and money for charging stations that Congress passed during the Biden administration. And it would impose a new annual fee on owners of electric cars and trucks. Republican leaders ...aim to use the money the government saves on the incentives to cut taxes, primarily for high-income households and businesses. ...The rollback of sales incentives will leave the United States even f...

By Kasha Patel , The Washington Post.  Excerpt: Penguin poop — sorry, penguin guano — is creating clouds in Antarctica that could be affecting local temperatures, according to  new research published  Thursday in Communications Earth & Environment....  Full article at https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-solutions/2025/05/22/penguin-guano-clouds-study-climate/ . 

By Jennifer Hiller , The Wallstreet Journal.  Excerpt: The struggling rooftop solar industry faces a potentially fatal blow after the House of Representatives passed a tougher version of President Trump’s expansive tax-and-spending package. The bill sunsets rich renewable energy credits, as expected.... Credits for rooftop solar and battery storage would end this year, while those for larger solar, storage and wind energy projects would end by 2028, instead of a slower phaseout through 2031....  Full article at https://www.wsj.com/finance/stocks/rooftop-solar-takes-gut-punch-in-house-tax-bill-dee033fa . See also article in The Guardian: Trump’s tax bill to cost 830,000 jobs and drive up bills and pollution emissions, experts warn .

By Melissa A. Versteeg et al, Science.  Abstract: Vertebrate growth is generally considered to be unidirectional, but challenging environmental conditions, such as heatwaves, may disrupt normal growth patterns and affect individual survival. Here, we investigate the growth of individual clown anemonefish,  Amphiprion percula , during a marine heatwave. ...Our results show that clown anemonefish shrink in response to heat stress.... Further, shrinking is modulated by social rank and size, and individuals that shrink more often and in a coordinated fashion with their breeding partner have higher survival during the heat stress event....  Full article at https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adt7079 . 

By Damian Carrington , The Guardian.  Excerpt: Sea level rise will become unmanageable at just 1.5C of global heating and lead to “catastrophic inland migration”, the scientists behind a new study [ https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-025-02299-w ] have warned. ...The loss of ice from the giant Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets has quadrupled since the 1990s due to the climate crisis and is now the principal driver of sea level rise. The international target to keep global temperature rise  below 1.5C is already almost out of reach . But the new analysis found that even if fossil fuel emissions were rapidly slashed to meet it, sea levels would be rising by 1cm a year by the end of the century, faster than the speed at which nations could build coastal defences. The world is  on track for 2.5C-2.9C  of global heating, which would almost certainly be beyond tipping points for the collapse of the Greenland and west Antarctic ice sheets. The melting of those ice shee...

By Rebecca Owen , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: In consulting rainfall data from 2001 to 2020, the researchers designated a hazardous flood event as one that had an average recurrence interval of 2 or more years.... They compared their findings to the flooding events documented in the  NOAA Storm Events Database  and  Dartmouth Flood Observatory  (DFO) database. Their analysis captured 3 times as many flooding events as the DFO database did and identified an additional $320 million in damages. ...This study also considered heat events, or periods in which the wet-bulb globe temperature exceeds a  30°C health threshold  rather than a given percentile. Using this definition, the researchers determined that between 2003 and 2020, Texas experienced 2,517 days with a heat hazard event—nearly 40% of all days. Heat hazard events affected a total of 253.2 million square kilometers....  Full article at https://eos.org/research-spotlights/scientists-reveal-hidden-heat...

By Rebecca Owen , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: Fifty-six million years ago, during the  Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum  (PETM), global temperatures rose by more than 5°C over 100,000 or more years. Between 3,000 and 20,000 petagrams of carbon were released into the atmosphere during this time, severely disrupting ecosystems and ocean life globally and creating a prolonged hothouse state. Modern anthropogenic global warming  is also expected  to upend Earth’s carbon cycle for thousands of years. Between 1850 and 2019, approximately 2,390 petagrams of carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) were released into the atmosphere, and the release of another 5,000 petagrams in the coming centuries is possible with continued fossil fuel consumption. However, estimates of how long the disruption will last range widely, from about 3,000 to 165,000 years. Understanding how long the carbon cycle was disrupted during the PETM could offer researchers insights into how severe and how long-lasting disrup...

By Nina Lakhani , The Guardian.  Excerpt: The  four-day historic storm  that caused death and destruction across the central  Mississippi  valley in early April was made significantly more likely and more severe by burning fossil fuels, rapid analysis by a coalition of leading climate scientists has found. ...The floods were caused by rainfall made about 9% more intense and 40% more likely by human-caused climate change, the  World Weather Attribution (WWA) study  found. Uncertainty in models means the role of the climate crisis was probably even higher....  Full article at https://www.theguardian.com/us- news/2025/may/08/storms-mississippi-valley-climate-change-study . 

By Michelle Lewis , Electrek.  Excerpt: In 2024, the US produced more than three times as much solar, wind, and geothermal power as it did in 2015. That’s according to a  new interactive dashboard  just released by Environment America Research & Policy Center and Frontier Group. The tool, called The State of Renewable Energy 2025, tracks the growth of clean energy and EVs in all 50 states — and it shows that progress has happened everywhere. ...The dashboard looks at how far we’ve come in six areas that matter most for a clean energy future: wind, solar, EVs, EV charging, energy efficiency, and battery storage. And the numbers are impressive. ...Wind, solar, and geothermal comprised 19% of national retail electricity sales in 2024 – up from just 7% in 2015. South Dakota took the lead, generating the equivalent of 92% of its retail electricity from wind, solar, or geothermal. Texas, California, Iowa, Oklahoma, and Kansas were the top five states for total renewable ene...

By Peter Reiners , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: ...humanity’s first priority should be to drastically reduce its annual emissions of roughly 40 gigatons...of carbon dioxide (CO 2 ), the greenhouse gas most responsible for driving warming. Without this reduction, other measures will be only modestly effective at best. But...the  scale of mitigation  needed to  keep warming to below 2°C–3°C  goes beyond reducing annual emissions. We must also remove and store carbon that has accumulated in the atmosphere. ...The biggest opportunity...for  geoscientists to contribute  to  mitigation  is through facilitating durable  carbon dioxide removal  (CDR). Concerns are sometimes raised about CDR as a form of  climate intervention , or geoengineering, yet it is far less risky than the centuries-long geoengineering experiment of using the atmosphere as a sewer. ...Many approaches to CDR exist.  Direct air capture  (DAC)...in which CO 2  ...

By Elise Cutts , Science.  Excerpt: VIENNA—  Climate change is causing the oceans to get warmer and more acidic, making it harder for corals to build and maintain their mineral skeletons. Eventually, reefs will literally start to dissolve. It’s a grim fate, but one with a surprising silver lining. Research presented this week here at a conference of the European Geophysical Union shows  dissolving reefs will slow climate change , by boosting the oceans’ ability to soak up carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) out of the atmosphere. By the end of the century, the oceans could be absorbing up to 400 megatons of additional carbon per year. That’s more than the annual emissions of Australia or the United Kingdom. No one had actually calculated the magnitude of this “feedback” before, and it’s big enough that climate models need to account for it, says Jens Daniel Müller, a biogeochemist at ETH Zürich who wasn’t involved in the work. “Often we focus more on positive feedbacks, where the proc...

Joint release of the AGU and the AMS.  Excerpt: WASHINGTON — The American Geophysical Union (AGU), the world’s largest association of Earth and space scientists, and the American Meteorological Society (AMS), the professional society for atmospheric and related sciences and services, invite manuscripts for a new, first-of-its-kind special collection focused on climate change in the United States. This catalog of over 29 peer-reviewed journals covers all aspects of climate, including observations, projections, impacts, risks, and solutions. This effort aims to sustain the momentum of the sixth National Climate Assessment (NCA), the authors and staff of which were dismissed earlier this week by the Trump Administration, almost a year into the process. Congressionally mandated, the NCA draws on the latest scientific research to evaluate how climate change is affecting the United States. The new special collection does not replace the NCA but instead creates a mechanism for this import...

By Emily Dieckman , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: Historic wildfires broke out in South Korea in late March 2025, killing 32 people, injuring 45, and displacing about 37,000. In total, the fires burned more than 100,000 hectares (about 247,000 acres), nearly quadruple the area that burned in the country’s previous worst recorded fire season in 2000. ( In comparison , the January 2025 Palisades and Eaton Fires in Southern California burned about 91,000 hectares, or 37,000 acres.) A  new study  by scientists with World Weather Attribution (WWA) suggests that atmospheric warming—caused primarily by fossil fuel burning—made the hot, dry, and windy conditions that drove the South Korean fires about twice as likely and 15% more intense. ...This study adds to a growing body of science showing how climate change is making weather conditions more favorable to dangerous wildfires....  Full article at https://eos.org/articles/climate-change-heightened-conditions-of-south-korean-fires ....

By Saima May Sidik , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: Research shows that communities are best able to mitigate the effects of climate change when they can work alongside scientists on adaptation plans .  Hanson et al.   recently extended this finding to Indigenous communities in the Colorado Plateau, including members of the Navajo Nation, Hopi Tribe, and Ute Mountain Ute Tribe. ...the researchers conducted a series of listening circles, interviews, and consultations with Indigenous peoples and Westerners with extensive experience working in Indigenous communities. They collaborated with members of the Nature Conservancy’s Native American Tribes Upholding Restoration and Education, or  NATURE , program, which aims to equip Indigenous college students with natural resource management skills. ...Indigenous students are most likely to engage in climate education when they’re actively recruited for a program, when mentors are willing to learn from students as well as teach them, and ...

By Erik Stokstad , Science.  Excerpt: Rice plants usually love warmth. But when they start to flower, hot nights can result in meager harvests and chalky grain. So far, breeders have made slow progress in solving these challenges, which are becoming more urgent with climate change. Now, after searching for more than a decade, researchers in China have found a culpable gene, which they describe this week in  Cell . They also show that a  natural variant of the gene can preserve both yield and rice quality  when temperatures rise....  Full article at https://www.science.org/content/article/major-breakthrough-natural-gene-variant-protects-rice-heat-waves .