By Emily Gardner , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: A chapter on climate science has been removed from a manual designed to be an independent, neutral source of scientific information for judges. Judges aren’t always scientific experts, but they are responsible for determining whether scientific evidence is admissible and for making rulings in scientific cases. That’s why the  Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence , jointly produced by the Federal Judicial Center (FJC) and the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM), was introduced more than 30 years ago: to inform judges about fundamental truths of various areas of science. ...In December 2025, the manual was updated for the first time in 15 years to include new chapters on computer science, artificial intelligence, and climate science. The chapter on climate science  met   with   backlash  almost immediately. In late January, 27 Republican state attorneys general  wrote a letter  t...

By Dennis Pillion , Inside Climate News.  Excerpt: Despite a sunny climate, Alabama ranks 49th among U.S. states in residential solar installations—lower than Alaska. Advocates say the steep solar fee is part of the reason why. ...A federal judge ruled last week that Alabama Power can continue charging its small solar customers one of the highest standby charges in the nation, dismissing a lawsuit that argued the fee was illegal under the Public Utility Regulatory Policies Act....  Full article at https://insideclimatenews.org/news/31032026/alabama-power-solar-fee-ruling/ . 

By Grace van Deelen , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: A warming climate could expose a Pennsylvania-sized chunk of ice-free land in Antarctica by 2300, which could drastically reshape Antarctic geopolitics as well as the continent’s geography. A study published in  Nature Climate Change  is the first to incorporate glacial isostatic adjustment—how land beneath heavy ice sheets uplifts after the ice retreats—into projections of ice-free land emergence in Antarctica. ...Within the area that Lucas and the research team projected would be ice-free by 2300 lie known or suspected deposits of copper, gold, silver, iron, and platinum— critical minerals  used in manufacturing and valuable metals in and of themselves. In particular, the study found the largest land emergence in Antarctica is likely to occur over territories claimed by Argentina, Chile, and the United Kingdom and contains a range of mineral deposits, including copper, gold, silver, and iron. ...Currently, commercial mineral...

By Brad Plumer , The New York Times.  Excerpt: Clean energy isn’t dead in the Trump era. But it does look different these days. Since returning to office, President Trump  has dismantled federal efforts  to fight climate change and vowed to stop new wind turbines from going up. His administration  has canceled billions of dollars in funding  for technologies that might one day help reduce planet-warming emissions, and it has instead pushed to expand domestic oil and gas drilling. Those moves have taken a brutal toll on America’s budding clean energy industry, including  canceled offshore wind farms ,  shuttered electric-car factories  and  layoffs  at climate technology start-ups. Yet many clean energy executives say they are finding ways to adapt, and some promising technologies that might help slow global warming are moving forward. Some industries, such as geothermal energy or nuclear power, still receive support from the Trump admini...

202By Oliver Milman , The Guardian.  Excerpt: The US has caused an eye-watering $10tn in global damages to the world over the past three decades through its vast planet-heating  emissions , with a quarter of this economic pain inflicted upon itself, new research has found. By being the largest carbon emitter in history, the US has  caused greater harm  to worldwide economic growth than any other country, ahead of China, now the world’s largest emitter that is responsible for $9tn in GDP damage since 1990, according to the findings of the paper. About 25% of this GDP dampening has occurred in the US itself, although other countries have borne a heavy toll, with economic losses disproportionately felt in the poorest countries. Since 1990, US emissions have caused an estimated $500bn of economic damage to India and $330bn in damage to Brazil, the research finds. ...The  new study , published in Nature on Wednesday, attempts to attach dollar amounts to “loss and dam...

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

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

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

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

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

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

By UC Berkeley Goldman School of Public Policy. Excerpt: BERKELEY, Calif.  A new study, “ An Analysis of Japan’s Carbon Neutral Port Initiative and Yokohama Port and Harbor Decarbonization Plan ,” ( download the Japanese version here ) from the University of California, Berkeley examines Japan's innovative approach to decarbonizing maritime ports. Japan’s Carbon Neutral Port (CNP) certification framework and the City of Yokohama’s port decarbonization initiatives represent serious and forward-looking efforts to address the complex challenge of maritime emissions reduction. The study comes as momentum builds for decarbonization of the international shipping industry,....  Full article at https://gspp.berkeley.edu/research-and-impact/news/recent-news/new-analysis-by-uc-berkeley-highlights-japans-port-decarbonization-leadership . 

By Saugat Bolakhe , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: Zoom out from Earth and take a satellite view of the planet in time-lapse: One of the most obvious and notable changes would be the surge of greenness sweeping seasonally across the globe. Scientists call this [the “green wave”, a] seasonal pulse of vegetation growth, which intensifies in the Northern Hemisphere during boreal summer and in the Southern Hemisphere during austral summer, Now, in a  study published in  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America , researchers analyzed 40 years of this green wave data and tracked the center of mass of global greenness [that] has been shifting northward and eastward and that this movement has accelerated over the past decade....  Full article at https://eos.org/articles/earths-green-wave-is-on-the-move . 

By Nicholas Kusnetz ,  Georgina Gustin , Inside Climate News.  Excerpt: As countries scramble to secure oil, gas and fertilizer, China’s bets on clean energy and coal are cushioning its dependence on oil and gas imports. ...In an  essay in Foreign Policy  written with Jason Bordoff, the founding director of the Center on Global Energy Policy, Downs argued that while the war has exposed China’s dependence on Middle Eastern oil, “it also underscores how deliberately Beijing has sought to prepare for a world in which energy security is inseparable from geopolitics—by electrifying its economy, securing domestic sources of energy, amassing stockpiles, and dominating clean technology supply chains.” Last year more than half of new cars sold in China were electric,  according to the energy think tank Ember , while the country is a leader in electrifying heavy-duty vehicles and high-speed rail, too. Meanwhile, a rapidly growing portion of its electricity is being genera...

By Maxine Joselow  and  Lisa Friedman , The New York Times.  Excerpt: The Trump administration on Thursday filed  a new lawsuit  against California over its strict limits on planet-warming pollution from cars, arguing that the restrictions would unlawfully force a rapid transition to electric vehicles in the state. ...Across the country, 17 states representing more than a third of the American automobile market follow California’s lead on clean car standards. “Gavin Newsom is determined to continue pushing Democrats’ radical E.V. fantasy — even if doing so is illegal,” Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said in a statement.... Anthony Martinez, a spokesman for Governor Newsom, called the lawsuit “meritless.” “While the Trump administration surrenders the future of the auto industry to China, California will continue competing globally to win the clean vehicle market,” Mr. Martinez said, adding, “This lawsuit is meritless, and we’re not backing down from this fi...

By Nature's Voice Spring 2026 (Natural Resources Defense Council—NRDC).  Excerpt: It’s been one legal blow after another against the Trump administration’s war on wind energy. In December, a federal court ruled that the administration’s blanket ban on new wind projects is illegal. That was followed in quick succession by five separate court rulings preliminarily halting the administration’s attempt to stop construction on five multibillion-dollar wind projects off the East Coast. Says Kit Kennedy, managing director for power at NRDC: “The administration should use this string of court losses as a wake-up call and get out of the way of the expansion of renewable energy.”...  Source at https://issuu.com/nrdc/docs/nature_s_voice_spring_2026 (page 2).

By Erik Stokstad , Science.  Excerpt: Insects living in the lowland tropics have evolved to deal with brutal heat. But many of them are close to their limit, according to a massive study that assessed the heat tolerance of hundreds of species. The findings, published today in  Nature , provide  an unprecedented view of what temperatures tropical insects can deal with —and reinforce concerns about the risk that climate change poses for insect biodiversity....  Full article at https://www.science.org/content/article/many-heat-stressed-tropical-insects-are-reaching-their-limits . 

By Grace van Deelen , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: A new study of  Antarctica  has found that since 1996, its ice sheet has lost 12,820 square kilometers (nearly 5,000 square miles) of ice—nearly enough to cover the state of Connecticut, or 10 cities the size of Greater Los Angeles. The study, published today in  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences ,  evaluated the retreat of the ice sheet’s grounding line over the past 30 years. A grounding line is the point at which continental ice (grounded on bedrock) meets a floating ice shelf, and as such serves as a good measure of the advance and retreat of ocean-terminating glaciers....  Full article at https://eos.org/research-and-developments/antarctic-ice-sheet-has-lost-a-connecticut-sized-amount-of-ice-over-the-past-30-years .