By Eric Beinhocker and J. Doyne Farmer , The Wallstreet Journal.  Excerpt: Since Donald Trump’s election, clean energy stocks have plummeted, major banks have pulled out of a U.N.-sponsored “net zero” climate alliance, and BP announced it is spinning off its offshore wind business to refocus on oil and gas. Markets and companies seem to be betting that Trump’s promises to stop or reverse the clean energy transition and “drill, baby, drill” will be successful. ...But this bet is wrong. The clean energy revolution is being driven by fundamental technological and economic forces that are too strong to stop. ...Our research shows that once new technologies become established their patterns in terms of cost are surprisingly predictable. ... Since 1990, the cost of wind power has dropped by about 4% a year, solar energy by 12% a year and lithium-ion batteries by about 12% a year....  Full article at https://www.wsj.com/business/energy-oil/thecleanenergyrevolution-is-unst...

By Climate Central.  Excerpt: Climate Central analyzed 55 years of temperature data and found that meteorological spring (March - May) has warmed across the U.S. from 1970 to 2024.  The spring season has warmed in 234 (97%) of the 241 U.S. cities analyzed — by 2.4°F on average.  Unusually warm spring days now happen more often. Four out of every five cities now experience at least one more week of warmer-than-normal spring days than in the 1970s.  Spring has warmed the most across the southern tier of the country, particularly in the Southwest. Spring warming can prolong seasonal allergies, worsen wildfire risk, and limit snow-fed water supplies....  Full article at https://www.climatecentral.org/climate-matters/2025-spring-package .

By Mohana Ravindranath, The New York Times.  Excerpt: Extreme heat  can be particularly dangerous  for older people, putting them at increased risk for heat stroke and death. But could it also affect how their DNA functions, and accelerate the aging process itself? A  new study,  published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances, suggests it could. The analysis of over 3,600 older adults in the United States found that those living in neighborhoods prone to  extreme heat  — classified as 90 degrees or above — showed more accelerated aging at a molecular level compared with those in areas less prone to extreme heat. The findings suggest that heat waves and  rising temperatures  from climate change could be chemically modifying people’s DNA and speeding up their biological aging. The study authors estimated that a person living in an area that reached 90 degrees or above for 140 days or more in a year could age up to 14 months faster than som...

By Rebecca Owen , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: In classic literature, wetlands—ecosystems characterized by permanently or periodically water-saturated land—have too often been depicted as dangerous, gloomy, desolate places. “Look at Tolkien...Dickens or Austen,” said  Christian Dunn , an environmental scientist at Bangor University in Wales. “The wetlands are where the ne’er-do-wells and villains hang out.” In reality, though, wetlands are ...vibrant ecosystems, especially important in a changing climate. Wetlands are biodiversity hot spots and provide carbon sequestration. They also manage water—storing it quickly during heavy rain events and releasing it slowly during dry spells. “Wetlands are the superheroes of natural ecosystems when it comes to the power they have to help us combat the two biggest crises that we’re facing: climate breakdown and biodiversity loss,” said Dunn. In the past 100 years, Europe has  lost  80% of its wetlands, a diverse array of inland and coasta...

By Paul Voosen , Science.  Excerpt: The world’s nations convened this week in Hangzhou, China, to plan the next major international assessment of climate science—but without the United States. Late last week, President Donald Trump’s administration denied officials permission to travel to the meeting and cut off a technical support contract for the report, the seventh assessment of the United Nations’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The decision,  first reported by Axios , is the first time the administration has targeted international climate science. The news caught climate scientists off guard. During the first Trump administration there was no interference with IPCC .... The U.S. has long been a leader of IPCC, which for decades has brought volunteer scientists together, unpaid, to produce influential reports every seven or so years. Katherine Calvin, NASA’s chief scientist, was set to co-lead IPCC’s third working group, focused on climate mitigatio...

By Andrew J. Hawkins .The Verge.  Excerpt: The General Services Administration  (GSA), which manages buildings owned by the federal government, is planning to shut down all of its electric vehicle chargers nationwide, describing them as “not mission critical.” The agency, which manages contracts for the government’s vehicle fleets, is also looking to offload newly purchased EVs. The GSA currently operates several hundred EV chargers across the country, with approximately 8,000 plugs that are available for government-owned EVs as well as federal employees’ personally owned vehicles. ...Under the Biden administration, the GSA was in charge of implementing the president’s plan to  phase out the federal government’s use of gas-powered vehicles in favor of EVs . The federal government owns approximately 650,000 vehicles, more than half of which were to be replaced with EVs. ...the GSA had ordered over 58,000 EVs and begun installing more than 25,000 charging ports, adding to t...

By Oliver Milman , The Guardian.  Excerpt: The  Trump administration  is stripping away support for scientific research in the US and overseas that contains a word it finds particularly inconvenient: “climate.” The US government is withdrawing grants and other support for research that even references the climate crisis, academics have said, amid Donald Trump’s blitzkrieg upon  environmental regulations  and  clean-energy development . Trump, who has said that the climate crisis is a “giant hoax”, has already stripped  mentions of climate change and global heating from government websites  and ordered a halt to programs that reference diversity, equity and inclusion. A widespread funding freeze for federally backed scientific work also has been imposed, throwing the US scientific community into chaos. ...Kaarle Hämeri, chancellor of the University of Helsinki in Finland, said the descriptions for Fulbright grants had been changed to remove or alte...

By UC Berkeley Public Health.  Excerpt: A new study led by a UC Berkeley School of Public Health Environmental Health Sciences postdoctoral scholar shows that mosquitoes may be more able to adapt to climate change and rising temperatures than previously thought. “The most common prediction of how global change will affect mosquitoes and mosquito-borne disease is that populations will shift to higher altitudes and higher latitudes,” said lead author  Lisa Couper . “That is assuming mosquitoes won’t adapt to heat. But mosquitoes have all sorts of adaptive capabilities.” Mosquito-borne diseases collectively cause nearly one million deaths each year world-wide, including dengue, malaria, and West Nile virus, among others. ...The study raised mosquito larva in both normal and high temperatures, then sequenced the genome of more than 200 individual insects. The genetic analysis showed that mosquitoes raised in the high temperature setting had ...structural changes to their DNA–that ...

By Robert F. Service , Science.  Excerpt: Lithium-ion batteries are ubiquitous, not just in earbuds, phones, and cars, but also in massive facilities that store renewable energy for when the Sun doesn’t shine or the wind dies down. But lithium itself is relatively scarce and available from just a few countries. A world that runs on renewable energy would need 200 times more battery capacity than exists today—and that probably means a different kind of battery. ...A decades-old technology may be rising to the challenge: batteries that use sodium rather than lithium ions to carry and store charge. Sodium is everywhere, in seawater and salt mines, so supply and cost aren’t a problem. But the metal isn’t as good at storing charge as lithium because its ions are three times bigger, hampering their ability to slip in and out of existing battery electrodes. Labs worldwide are developing new electrode materials to address that shortcoming, ....  Full article at https://www.science.org...

By Sarah Crespi, Sandeep Ravindran, Martin Enserink, Science.  Excerpt: TinyML (the ML stands for machine learning) is a low-cost, low-power implementation of AI that is being increasingly adopted in resource-poor regions, especially in the Global South. In contrast to the large language models (LLMs) that have dominated the news with their versatility and uncanny knack for humanlike expression, tinyML devices currently have modest, specialized capabilities. Yet they can be transformative. Murugan’s tinyML-equipped drones, for example, have  been able to identify cashew leaves with the fungal disease  Anthracnose with 95% to 99% accuracy. They should save farmers time they would otherwise spend looking for signs of disease themselves. And their ability to target treatments to diseased plants removes the need to indiscriminately spray pesticides on all the plants, which is both expensive and damaging to health and the environment. ...once the AI model is trained ...

By Robert F. Service , Science.  Excerpt: If humanity wants to avoid a climate catastrophe, sucking up the carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) it has already spewed into the atmosphere may be its last hope. One approach is to use naturally abundant minerals as CO 2  sponges, but the process is slow. Now, a study  reported in Nature  suggests a way to accelerate it: by converting those minerals to compounds that bind CO 2  faster and are similar to others already widely used in farming. ...direct air capture (DAC)...requires building expensive CO 2  capture plants and consumes some 2 megawatt hours of energy for every ton of CO 2  wrung from the air. ...Another approach is  carbon mineralization : spreading vast amounts of crushed alkaline rocks—usually abundant magnesium silicates, such as olivine and serpentine—on soils worldwide. The pulverized rock binds CO 2 , permanently locking it away in mineral form. Nature already performs carbon mineralization o...

By Matt Simon , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: ...cows are really gassy, and that’s really bad for the planet: Microbes in their guts produce methane—a greenhouse gas up to  80 times more powerful  than carbon dioxide—which comes out as burps. Consequently, livestock is responsible for  30 percent  of humanity’s methane emissions. ...Rice cultivation, surprisingly enough, accounts for another 12 percent of humanity’s global methane emissions. ...Growing rice requires flooding fields, called paddies, with staggering quantities of water. Microbes known as archaea multiply in the wet, oxygen-poor conditions, releasing methane. One way to reduce those emissions is to inundate the fields less often, but that’s not always feasible given local irrigation infrastructure, and less water can lead to reduced yields. ...Now, though, scientists have gone to the source, announcing a breakthrough in breeding a variety of rice they say reduces methane emissions by 70 percent—while deliveri...

By Michelle Lewis , Elektrek.  Excerpt: Renewable energy – solar, wind, geothermal, hydropower, biomass – accounted for more than 90% of total US electrical generating capacity added in 2024, according to data released yesterday by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) and reviewed by the SUN DAY campaign. Solar alone accounted for over 81% of the new capacity. Moreover, December was the 16th month in a row in which solar was the largest source of new capacity. ...In its latest monthly  “Energy Infrastructure Update” report  (with data through December 31, 2024), FERC says 105 “units” of solar totaling 4,369 megawatts (MW) came online in December, along with two units of wind (324 MW) and two units of biomass (45 MW). Combined, they accounted for 86.9% of all new generating capacity added during the month. Natural gas provided the balance: 717 MW....  Full article at https://electrek.co/2025/02/07/renewables-90-percent-new-us-capacity-2024-ferc/ ....

By Maya Yang , The Guardian.  Excerpt: The  Trump administration  has ordered US states to suspend a $5bn  electric vehicle  charging station program in a further blow to the environmental movement since the president’s return to the White House. In a memo  issued  on Thursday to state transportation directors, the transportation department’s Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) ordered states not to spend any funds allocated to them under the  Biden administration  as part of the national electric vehicle  infrastructure  (NEVI) program....  Full article at https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/07/trump-electric-vehicle-charging-station-program . 

By Julienne C. Stroeve et al, Science.  Abstract: Under current nationally determined contributions (NDCs) to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions, global warming is projected to reach 2.7°C above preindustrial levels. In this review, we show that at such a level of warming, the Arctic would be transformed beyond contemporary recognition: Virtually every day of the year would have air temperatures higher than preindustrial extremes, the Arctic Ocean would be essentially ice free for several months in summer, the area of Greenland that reaches melting temperatures for at least a month would roughly quadruple, and the area of permafrost would be roughly half of what it was in preindustrial times. These geophysical changes go along with widespread ecosystem disruptions and infrastructure damage, which, as we show here, could be substantially reduced by increased efforts to limit global warming....  Full article at https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.ads1549 .  See...

By Reuters.  Excerpt: The cost of clean energy technologies worldwide, such as wind, solar and battery storage, are expected to fall further this year, a report by BloombergNEF showed on Thursday, despite rising protectionism in the form of tariffs on green energy imports. ...On average, the China can produce a megawatt-hour of electricity from major power-generating technologies 11-64% cheaper than other markets, the report said. ...The cost of clean power technologies is expected to fall further by 2-11% in 2025. While trade barriers could stall declines temporarily, BNEF expects the levellized cost of electricity for clean technologies to fall by 22-49% by 2035....  Full article at https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/clean-energy-costs-continue-fall-150909361.html . 

By Thomas R. Chudley et al, Nature Geoscience.  Summary: The Greenland Ice Sheet, which measures more than 3 kilometers at its thickest point and covers an area three times the size of Texas, is the world’s second largest body of ice. If all of it were to melt, the world’s oceans would rise a whopping seven meters. And while such a complete meltdown would likely take thousands of years, Greenland—already one of the largest contributors to sea level rise—is poised to add up to 30 centimeters by 2100. Now, new research published in  Nature Geoscience  has revealed that  this enormous mass of ice is breaking apart faster than expected ....  Full article at https://www.nature.com/articles/s41561-024-01636-6 .