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...