As tens of thousands of people continue to be evacuated from parts of southern France ravaged by wildfires, firefighters are facing a new threat never seen before in the region in the form of “fire clouds”.

Described by Nasa as the “fire-breathing dragon of clouds”, pyrocumulonimbus formations are the result of extreme heatwaves and can lead to wildfires.

Sophie Brocas, the prefect of the Gironde in Bordeaux at the epicentre of recent blazes, told Le Monde the “incredible, unprecedented, unknown phenomenon” meant we are “entering a new dimension” when it comes to fighting the effects of global warming.

How are they formed?

Pyrocumulonimbus or cumulonimbus flammagenitus – more commonly known as fire clouds – are created by intense heat from the Earth’s surface. This is usually caused by volcanic eruptions or large wildfires where temperatures can reach as high as 800C.

The rapidly rising plume of air cools and forms fire clouds, which, when combined with enough moisture and strong updrafts, can develop into so-called “fire storms”. These produce downdrafts that spread burning embers and dry lightning that starts new fires; and they can even form dangerous fire tornadoes.

The result is so intense, they effectively create their own internal weather systems.

Are they getting more common?

Fire clouds have become increasingly common in the US, Canada and Australia, where the 2019-20 “black summer” bushfires killed at least 33 people and destroyed more than 11 million hectares (27.2 million acres) of bush, forest and parks.

Fire officials in New South Wales reported that embers from the fire storm were landing 18 miles ahead of the front, three times more than the usual distance, said the BBC. But until now, there have been no documented cases in France or northern Europe.

Given pyrocumulonimbus are more likely in extreme weather conditions such as high temperatures, strong winds and little moisture, scientists have warned climate change is likely to increase the chance of them forming.

How can they be stopped?

With the advent of devastating fire clouds, French authorities have “reached a point of ‘operational impossibility’ that requires us to accept the need for strategic retreat”, Lieutenant Colonel Eric Brocardi, spokesman for the National Firefighters Federation of France, told Agence France-Presse.

These fires are convective, which is a problem because they create their own winds “that constantly shift direction, unlike a standard fire that spreads in a conical pattern”. This makes the movement of the blaze “completely unpredictable” as it spreads outwards and becomes impossible to fight head-on.

“It’s a David-versus-Goliath scenario: the idea is that, at some point, we’ll find a weak spot and strike there”, said Brocardi.

“Salvation will come either from the sky – in the form of rain, though it would need to pour heavily for three days – or by finding a way to steer the fire towards a place where it will die out on its own. The sea, for example.”

As firefighters battle wildfires that have already burned nearly 300,000 acres in southwest Spain and France, the search is on for ways to prevent fires of this scale in the future. One solution might be in the hands – or hooves – of goats.

Why the goat is the G.O.A.T

Goats might sound like unlikely firefighters, but their role is preventative. They actually provide a “cost-effective and environmentally sound way” to clear shrubbery that would “otherwise feed a wildfire instead of a hungry herd”, said the Los Angeles Times. In California, where the size and intensity of wildfires have increased, 400 goats and 100 sheep have been deployed in Fresno to graze on yellow star thistle, a weed that can help to spread fires.

Goats are “particularly effective” at reducing flammable flora as they “happily consume” thorny shrubbery other animals tend to avoid. And sheep are good at reaching grasses and low-growing plants, said The Times of India. “Together, they provide an environmentally friendly alternative to bulldozers, lawnmowers and herbicides, especially on uneven or difficult terrain.” The animals consume seeds, as well as leaves, which limits the plant’s ability to spread further.

It is not just goats and sheep. The cow breed Cachena is making a “comeback” in northwest Spain, for a similar purpose, said Reuters. A fire in 2017 prompted the community to turn to the “centuries-old wildfire prevention technique”. These “goat-like” smaller cows “eat almost anything” and can “negotiate mountainous terrain that ​larger cows can’t”. As well as creating firebreaks, their consumption of “gorse, brambles and scrub” also helps “preserve local ecosystems”, said Deustche Welle.

‘Regulatory attack’

Certain laws and regulations could put these “most effective fire-prevention specialists” under “regulatory attack”, said Reason Magazine. California’s minimum and overtime wage laws will now apply to “goat-herding companies” which “for decades” have been “largely exempt” from these rules. Given the “round-the-clock” nature of herding, this would make employing the companies “prohibitively expensive”. Owners of herding companies cannot “sustain” this new cost along with doing “fire fuels abatement”, said Tim Arrowsmith, owner of Western Grazers.

The recent wildfires in southwest Europe have been the “most painful manifestation” of the “climate emergency”, Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez told a climate conference this week. If these extreme crises are “no longer an exception”, but the rule, we need to look at solutions for future prevention.

We’ll be seeing huge numbers of colourful migrants in the UK this summer – in what is widely predicted to be the largest arrival of painted-lady butterflies for 17 years.

“We are in the midst of a miracle”, said wildlife writer Simon Barnes in The Observer. Last time there was a painted-lady spike, in 2019, they were seen in their hundreds of thousands. Clouds of the butterflies have already been spotted, as Butterfly Conservation’s annual Big Butterfly Count – the world’s largest citizen-science insect count – gets under way. Large numbers have been recorded along the east coast into northern England and, at Hickling national nature reserve, close to the Norfolk coast, 253 of them have been seen feeding on one patch of brambles.

What are painted ladies?

Formally known as Vanessa cardui, they are medium-sized orange butterflies with black markings and, on their forewing tips, white spots on a black background. Every year, in a spectacular long-distance migration, they fly from the desert fringes of North Africa, the Middle East and central Asia to mainland Europe and then Britain and Ireland. Then in September, they fly south again, completing a 9,000-mile round trip and one of the world’s longest insect journeys. “They can move from egg to adult in less than six weeks,” said Barnes in The Observer, so it might take “three or four” generations to reach the UK.

In an average year, the number of painted-lady arrivals in the UK hovers around 15,000, although, some years, hardly any reach our shores. But butterfly experts are confidently predicting such a surge in numbers this year that we’re in for “a once-in-a-decade ‘painted lady summer’”, said The Guardian.

Why are numbers spiking?

It’s down to a combination of “favourable early spring conditions in southern Europe”, the recent heatwaves and “benign southerly winds”, said The Guardian. Sightings have been increasing for several weeks but “there’s been a big recent immigration” in the past week, Dan Hoare of Butterfly Conservation told the paper. Painted ladies “grow extremely fast, feed easily and fly really well” and, after breeding particularly successfully during heatwaves in France and Spain, they have benefited from “favourable winds to get them across the Channel”.

The last time this happened, in 2019, more than 420,000 painted ladies were recorded in the UK. But that most recent summer spike pales in comparison to the record year of 2009, when more than two million painted ladies arrived in the UK over a two-day period in May. Over the course of that summer, there were a “barely credible” billion British painted ladies, said Barnes in The Observer.

What about wider butterfly numbers?

In marked contrast to the excitement about the “painted-lady summer”, butterfly numbers in the UK have long been decreasing, according to Butterfly Conservation. Sightings hit record lows in 2024, although there was “improvement” in 2025. Climate change, habitat loss, pollution and plant pesticides have contributed to a picture where more than three-quarters of butterfly species are in decline.

Warnings about the “fragility of nature in the 21st century” are the “naturalist’s lot”, said Barnes in The Observer. But the “awe and disbelief” that will no doubt greet this year’s painted-lady numbers are “symbols of hope”. The bumper success of that butterfly’s 9,000-mile intercontinental journey is a reminder that “if you give nature even the fragment of a chance, it’s always avidly seized”. If the “right decisions” are made, at local, national and international levels, British butterfly “recovery is still possible”.

What happened

Ongoing massive wildfires in southwestern France and central Spain have forced nearly 400,000 people to evacuate. The French blazes have scorched an “area four times the size of Paris,” The Associated Press said, and are spreading toward the wine region city of Bordeaux. Near Madrid, the “biggest wildfire in Spain’s recent history” has burned around 200 square miles of countryside, Reuters said. Firefighters are racing to contain the fires as another European heatwave looms.

Who said what

“We don’t know how the blaze will spread, the fire front is constantly shifting,” a spokesperson for the National Firefighters Federation of France told Agence France-Presse. “It’s a David-versus-Goliath scenario.” The fires have caused “incalculable” damage to Spain’s cultural heritage, the country’s King Felipe VI told reporters. Western Europe is experiencing an “extreme summer” of intense heatwaves and dry weather, “setting the stage” for wildfire conditions, The New York Times said.

What next?

Temperatures are forecasted to again “reach abnormally hot levels” across the Spain and France fire zones this week, CNN said. “Difficult hours lie ahead,” Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez told reporters ahead of a crisis meeting with his Cabinet on Monday.

Heat waves this summer have brought droughts to large swaths of the United States, and they are spelling disaster for many farmers. Coupled with the lingering problems from last year’s dry winter, some farmers say their livelihood in the fields is literally and figuratively drying up.

Why is this particular drought so bad?

While droughts are a frequent fixture of summertime, 2026 has been worse due to a confluence of factors, including the arrival of El Niño. The ocean-warming weather pattern “can contribute to severe droughts,” which often “disrupt growing seasons in key breadbaskets of the world” including parts of the United States, said Mother Jones. Some experts believe this El Niño could be the strongest so far this century, making it an especially dry season.

The extreme heat in many American areas is also a contributor, leading to drought patterns that are “intensifying across several key farming regions while corn and soybean crops enter critical reproductive stages,” according to the USDA. Some areas in the Western U.S. are routinely reaching over 100 degrees Fahrenheit, which is “increasing stress on vegetation and raising concerns over fire ignition.”

Farmers are also still recovering from an unusually dry winter, which was an “extraordinarily dry one in the Western part of the country” and has been “taking a bite out of farmers' plans,” said PBS News. One notable dearth is occurring along the Colorado River system in Arizona, where the drought is “pitting farmers against residents of cities and suburbs as well as industrial users including data centers, solar projects and semiconductor plants,” said Reuters.

How are farmers being affected?

Many could be “feeling the impacts of the ongoing drought and extreme heat this summer both in the short-term and long-term future,” said WRAL-TV Raleigh. Some customers have had to cut back on buying plants because of water restrictions, which have also “led to some smaller crops” this summer. “We just have enough water to grow what we normally grow. We didn’t expand any more this year,” farmer John Harmuth said to WRAL-TV.

Across the country in California, a similar scenario is playing out. The state has been the “king of broccoli production for decades,” but “water struggles provide an opening for New York, Maine and other Eastern states to boost their own production of the green vegetable,” said Politico’s E&E News. While California isn’t “about to be unseated” as the top broccoli grower, farmers in the Golden State may see increased competition as farmers in the East “could fill some of the gap caused by drought if the region coordinates its efforts.”

With farmers continually losing access to water, many are turning to state governments for solutions. In Arizona, farmers are fighting with “housing developers and solar companies” who are “buying up agricultural land,” said Reuters. They are urging Arizona politicians to “impose a moratorium on residential growth, arguing that farmers are critical to the country's food security.” Innovations such as “cross-country water pipelines similar to those for oil” could also help, said farmer Jace Miller to the outlet. Companies “can't just keep taking water from agriculture.”

As the US and Iran continue to trade blows in the Middle East, the consequences of the intense bombings threaten Iran’s already “fragile biodiversity”, said The Associated Press.

Historically, Iran has had a “deep connection” with its wildlife, being one of the first countries to form an environmental protection agency, although “decades of mismanagement and years-long drought” had already put a strain on conservationist work.

Unique biodiversity

Iran’s geographical location gives it a “wide range of climates” that host an “astounding diversity of life”, said the AP. The country is home to at least 86 species at risk of extinction, including the “Asiatic cheetah, Persian fallow deer, brown bear, leopard, black bear, Persian onager, the great bustard and various birds of prey”, according to a 2024 report by Iran’s Environment Department. “Ironically”, military zones had been considered “one of the few areas where falcons can breed safely”, out of reach of smugglers and poachers.

US and Israeli strikes on remote military facilities in deserts and mountain ranges are “causing habitat degradation”, leading to “water and land pollution, soil contamination” and “destruction of land cover”, US-based Iranian wildlife expert Jamshid Parchizadeh told the AP. And an animal population driven away from its habitat, like mountain-dwelling Persian leopards and brown bears, “forever leaves that area from fear”.

Land ecosystems are not the only ones at risk. The “highly contested” Strait of Hormuz is home to the “most diverse” coral population in the region, said CNN. Greenpeace researchers have been able to “regularly detect oil slicks” in the water, following attacks on tankers passing through the strait.

“Many of the compounds found in crude oil will target heart function and respiration,” Martin Grosell, a professor of biology and ecology, told the outlet. Prolonged exposure also “suppresses immune function, rendering animals more susceptible to infections”.

Invisible victims

While most of the attention has been on the urban and economic consequences of the war, the country’s animal species are “less visible victims”, said Iranian news agency Wana.

While there have been “no official reports” on widespread casualties of animals in “natural habitats”, experts warn that a “lack of reporting does not equate to an absence of damage”. And the war’s impact “extends far beyond direct fatalities”: the “intense” noise pollution of bombardments also inflicts “devastating” physical and psychological trauma.

At the Lavizan Bird Garden in Tehran, it was reported that the “deafening noise” caused several birds to lose “behavioural control” due to “severe stress” and to collide with enclosure walls, resulting in injuries and some fatalities.

There are also lasting “indirect” ecological impacts for Iran’s biodiversity. International studies have shown animals exposed to conflict zones develop “disrupted migration, feeding, and breeding patterns” and show signs of “severe aggression or depression”.

“The war has caused serious environmental degradation in a country reeling from a range of climate-related crises, water stress, and air quality issues”, and Iran’s “fragile” ecosystems now face an uncertain future, said non-profit US news organisation Truthout. When it comes to “post-conflict reconstruction”, environmental rehabilitation “often doesn’t take priority”.

There’s a whale of a problem off the U.S. West Coast. Gray whales are undergoing a “catastrophic mortality event,” said the nonprofit Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), with close to 150 carcasses found on beaches along the Pacific Ocean just this year. The loss is largely due to human-caused climate change, and action is needed to protect the species.

Blood in the water

Gray whales are under stress due to “multiple threats, including ship strikes and reduced food sources,” said PEER in a statement. Between 2019 and 2023, their population declined by almost 30% from 20,500 to 14,526.

The statistics are even worse between 2025 and 2026. An estimated 2,500 to 8,000 whales died during that time frame. “Determining an exact number is difficult because marine biologists can only count the whales that are stranded,” said The Guardian. The ones that “wash ashore are only maybe 10% of the whales that are dying,” said Rick Steiner, a marine ecologist in Alaska and the chair of PEER’s board of directors, to KTOO.

Because of climate change, the marine animals are “starving” as “Arctic sea ice decline is reducing their Arctic seabed prey resource,” said Steiner in the PEER statement. The West Coast population travels approximately 10,000 miles between Baja California, Mexico, and its feeding grounds in the Arctic, where the whales “feed on crustaceans called amphipods,” said Smithsonian magazine. Climate change is reducing the amphipod population, so “some hungry whales are detouring into dangerous places like San Francisco Bay, where they are being fatally struck by ships or becoming entangled in fishing gear.”

Gray whales were once protected under the Endangered Species Act because of commercial overfishing but were removed from the protection list in 1994 after populations recovered. So it may be necessary to “relist them on the Endangered Species Act” and “provide the management tools that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) needs" to "give these guys the best chance of making it through this climate bottleneck,” said Steiner to KTOO.

Where to next

Along with anthropogenic climate change, other human actions are threatening gray whale populations. Reducing emissions is necessary to protect the whales and other species, but “shorter-term threats to these whales must also be reduced, including ship strikes, oil spills, entanglement in fishing gear, harmful algal blooms, microplastic pollution, ocean noise, disturbance, and the harvest in Russia,” said Steiner in the PEER statement.

NOAA has yet to relist the gray whale under the Endangered Species Act or take action to protect the species. Individual states, however, have enacted protective policies.

California has “ship-speed reduction zones in areas known to have higher gray whale concentrations,” and, though voluntary, “many ships do reduce their speed,” and some ships have people assigned to look out for whales, said The Guardian. Other states are advocating for similar measures. “The loss of thousands of whales in just two years,” said Steiner in the statement, “should be of concern to us all.”

What happened

Canadian wildfires have sent “massive plumes” of smoke “pouring over the border” into the U.S., CNN said. The combination of wildfires in Ontario and a “heat dome in the central U.S. spells smoky trouble,” with dangerous air quality for “more than 120 million people in the Midwest and Northeast.”

Who said what

In cities including Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, Minneapolis and Toronto, air quality readings “surged to levels so dangerous” that one public health expert warned “nobody should spend time outside,” The New York Times said. Sensors across the upper Midwest on Thursday recorded the “worst air quality in North America,” with Chicago reportedly having the worst in the world.

The smoke “arrived in force,” National Weather Service Meteorologist Steven Freitag told The Associated Press. “It’s really pretty extreme levels.” And air in coastal cities like New York, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., was also at “unhealthy levels,” said the Times.

What next?

The Midwest could “face weeks to months of continued smoke and flare-ups,” depending on wind patterns, said Brent Williams, the head of the University of Minnesota’s Soil, Water and Climate Department, to the AP. Republican lawmakers have meanwhile “threatened punitive action against Canada,” accusing its government of “mismanaging the wildfires,” said the Times. “I will be introducing a bill next week to sanction Canada and the responsible Canadian government officials for this atrocity,” said Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-Ohio) on X.

What happened

More than 100 wildfires are burning out of control in Canada this week, sending plumes of smoke south across the border to blanket parts of the Northeast and Midwest and turning skies orange. Poor air quality triggered health warnings across multiple states including New York, Michigan and Massachusetts. In Canada, Toronto’s air quality briefly registered as the worst of any city in the world.

Who said what

The “primary health concern” with wildfire smoke is fine particulate matter, which can “bypass the body’s defenses” when inhaled, Canadian physician Dr. Farhan M. Asrar said at The Conversation. The “best thing to do” is to keep a close eye on the air quality in your area, Heatmap News said. This summer’s wildfire activity in Canada is “nowhere near the hyperactivity of 2023,” CNN said, but “planet-heating fossil fuel pollution is increasing the chance of prolonged smoke seasons.”

What next?

Forecasters expect air quality to remain poor across the Midwest and Northeast on Thursday and possibly Friday. It’s “too early to determine the weekend outlook,” The Wall Street Journal said.

Australian beaches are seeing a higher-than-usual number of shark bites. There were two attacks in the span of 48 hours in January, and since then, at least four people have been killed and almost two dozen others injured in encounters. Extreme rainfall and warming ocean temperatures due to climate change are driving the uptick.

Water weather

While shark attacks remain very rare, they have been increasing. In Australia, there has been a “gradual rise in encounters,” said Reuters. The country has been “averaging nearly 29 incidents per year over the last decade, up from an average of roughly 16 per year in the 2000s.”

Australia is not the only country seeing more of the aquatic predators. South Korea “counted 46 large sharks in Korean waters by late June, nearly four times the number recorded at the same point last year,” said The Independent. There have also been an increased number of shark sightings in the U.S., even though summer has just started.

The January attacks were predicted to be caused by a deluge “which broke January daily rainfall records for Sydney” and “flushed sewage and other waste into the nearby coastal waters, attracting baitfish, which in turn lured sharks closer to shore,” said Scientific American. Heavy rain also causes increased sediment, especially on coasts. The sediment “reduces water visibility, making it more difficult for sharks to see and avoid people.”

Along with increasing rainfall, climate change is warming the oceans, which changes shark behavior. Fatal shark attacks are usually because of bull sharks, tiger sharks or white sharks. All three species tend to prefer warm water and stay longer in those waters during summer.

The sharks’ range is growing as the ideal water temperature is encompassing a larger region. There may be increased shark sightings this year in the Pacific Ocean as well because of the super El Niño bringing warmer-than-usual water temperatures. Sharks that bite people have “often mistaken a human for a seal” or the bites “can be exploratory” or to “ward off imagined competition for food, such as a school of fish,” said The Guardian.

Spotting and culling

To prevent human-shark interactions, Australia has used aerial surveillance to spot the marine animals. “Once drone pilots spot a potentially dangerous shark, they will alert lifeguards, who can sound the shark siren and clear the water,” said The New York Times. The country does currently have a shark culling program, but some are calling for the program’s expansion in light of recent attacks.

However, others have objected. If sharks are removed from a certain area, that “habitat does not cease being suitable,” said The Sydney Morning Herald. “Other sharks will swim in and colonize that area.” Therefore, to be effective, “you would have to remove all the sharks, driving them to extinction or close to it,” which is “not a cull, it’s ecocide.”

“Human-shark encounters are extremely rare” despite the increased number of shark attacks, and “you’re statistically more likely to be killed by lightning,” said Scientific American. Instead, “beachgoers should be ‘shark smart,’” and avoid swimming when the sharks are most active, at dusk and dawn. Environmental factors play a part, but an increased human population along with the growth of water sports and recreation in the ocean have also increased human-shark interactions.

Sharks are not simply deadly killing machines. Their presence may be helping fight climate change. Sharks in coastal waters “ultimately protect and enhance what is known as ‘blue carbon,’ which is “carbon stored in oceans,” said the World Wildlife Fund. “When sharks target plant-eating fish, they can positively impact the marine carbon cycle.”

The supply of one of the world’s “hottest commodities” is suffering a “huge disruption”, said Javier Blas in Bloomberg: the “humble anchovy”. The tiny fish may sound “utterly mundane”, but it’s at “the bottom of a crucial supply chain”.

Anchovies are the main ingredient in fishmeal, used to feed farmed seafood like salmon and prawns. But a drop in the catch has caused global fishmeal production to plummet an estimated 40% in a year. Prices are now up 80% since last year to “an all-time high”, threatening a knock-on effect on the global aquaculture industry – and food prices. The culprit? This year’s El Niño.

The ‘Saudi Arabia’ of anchovies

Most of the tinned anchovies we buy in Britain come from Mediterranean fisheries. But fishmeal is primarily made with the South American species, anchoveta. Peru is “the Saudi Arabia of anchovies”, said Blas. Combined with Ecuador and Chile, the catch accounts for nearly a third of the world’s fishmeal production.

Around Peru, the “unusually warm waters” in the Pacific, linked to El Niño, have dramatically reduced the population, said The Times. The naturally occurring weather pattern “reduces the nutrient-rich upwellings on which the fish depend”.

“It’s easy to say, ‘Oh, well, anchovies, who cares? I don’t particularly like them,’” food economist Mike von Massow said on Global News. But they are “a critical part” of the global food supply chain. About two-thirds of the fish and seafood we consume is farmed using fishmeal.

Manufacturers are trying to substitute anchovies with plant-based proteins, like soy or insect protein. “The problem is the profile of that protein isn’t the same,” said Von Massow. It “changes the nutritional makeup of the feed”, and therefore, the fish that consume it. We can do “small degrees of replacement”, but yields are lower, with lower levels of omega-3. It’s not “the same kind of fish product”.

The interconnected supply chains

Peru has imposed increasingly severe restrictions on anchovy fishing this year to protect the remaining population and allow the stocks to recover. That has caused the “unprecedented surge” in the price of fishmeal, said The Times, as buyers “compete for dwindling supplies”. Producers are “trying to absorb” some of the hikes, but “analysts say the pressure is building”. The “real impact” will likely be felt “much higher up the food chain”, on supermarket favourites such as salmon. If shortages continue, companies “may have little choice but to pass on higher costs to retailers”.

Industry executives are “tight-lipped about how much prices could increase”, said Blas, but 20% to 25% seems a “reasonable expectation”. Once, this would have been “a first-world problem”. But since the last powerful El Niño in 1997-1998, the aquaculture industry has “exploded”. The average fish consumption per capita has also “jumped” to nearly double the levels of the 1990s. So fishmeal is “crucial”. And because El Niño typically “peaks” at the end of the year, the problem is “likely to get worse before it gets better”.

The “anchovy crisis” is a reminder of “the surprising ways in which the world is wired today”, in which weather in Peru can increase fish costs in European supermarkets. It’s also “a warning sign that El Niño will have significant impacts on global food prices – far greater than those from the war in Iran”.

Americans use air conditioning just about everywhere. Europeans, for the most part, do not. But a deadly summer heat wave that threatens to become the new climate normal has sparked a fierce debate about whether it is time for the continent to finally cool down.

The dispute has grown “especially heated” in recent weeks, said Yahoo News. “Millions” of visiting World Cup fans have kept cool in “American bars, restaurants, hotels and even stadiums” while their neighbors back home suffered Europe’s “worst-ever heat wave” without much relief. Just 20% of European homes have AC, mostly because northern Europe “rarely got hot enough to justify” the technology until recently, and electricity is “way more expensive” than in the United States. The air conditioning divide also “reflects deep cultural differences” highlighted by the warming climate.

‘Vast amounts of suffering’

Americans and Europeans have “very different ideas about physical suffering and sacrifice,” said Thomas Chatterton Williams at The Atlantic. Americans are “scandalized” by European reluctance to cool down, but Europeans are “much more willing” to see discomfort as “part of life.” The result is “far too much air conditioning on one side” of the Atlantic Ocean and “not remotely enough on the other.”

Air conditioning can “save your life” but also “drain your bank account and accelerate the apocalypse,” said Jonn Elledge at The New World. Running AC “adds to your carbon emissions,” especially if you are using “cheap portable air conditioning units” that people tend to panic-buy during a heat wave. The flip side is that most British homes overheat during the summer, with terrible effects on “health, productivity, hydration levels.” The electricity bills to cool your home will be high, but death or extreme discomfort is “also likely to impact your household finances.”

Europe’s resistance to air conditioning is “driving it insane,” Noah Smith said at his Substack, Noahpinion. The lack of AC is causing “vast amounts of suffering” and death as “punishing, brutal heat waves” become more frequent. The continent’s elites are reluctant to adopt air conditioning, partly from fears that doing so would “change European culture in strange and unacceptable ways.” But climate change is causing a “rise in preventable death” on the continent. If you think U.S. gun culture is a problem, “you should think that heat in Europe is an even bigger emergency.”

‘Frivolous sideshow’

Adding more air conditioning to Europe’s grid could create a “vicious cycle,” said Deutsche Welle. The electricity to power those devices is substantially “generated by polluting, planet-warming fossil fuels.” That “only makes the problem worse.”

The debate may seem like a “frivolous sideshow,” but it actually reflects Europe’s inability to make “quick, effective, wholesale transformation even in the face of vital threats,” said Rym Momtaz at Carnegie Europe. The climate emergency has been coming for decades, and the continent’s governments are not ready. “Why trust them to manage defense if they can’t properly manage a heat wave?”

Western Europe is experiencing a heat wave that has caused over 50 deaths in France alone. These unprecedented high temperatures, which can affect human, animal and plant health, as well as several industries, are due to a weather phenomenon known as an omega block.

What is an omega block?

An omega block is reminiscent of the shape of the Greek letter Ω, with a “bulge of warmer, settled high pressure held between two cooler low-pressure systems,” said Reuters. The high-pressure warmth is essentially “blocked” by the low-pressure systems surrounding it. As a result, “hot, still air gets lodged over the same area,” and “conditions become hot and dry.” The high pressure also “suppresses cloud formation, resulting in clear, sunny skies that allow temperatures to climb.” Omega blocks usually last between three ​and ten days, but can go on for longer.

With the current omega block, a “surge of hot, dry air from North Africa has become trapped in the atmosphere over parts of Europe,” said Time. France “recorded its hottest day since records began nearly 80 years ago, when temperatures peaked” at 111.74 Fahrenheit in the “southwestern town of Pissos,” said CBC. In Paris this week, temperatures hit a June record of 105.62 F.

The U.K., Spain, Germany, Italy and several other countries are also experiencing temperatures much hotter than normal. Across most of Western Europe, June is “warming faster than any other month,” said an analysis by World Weather Attribution (WWA). “Extreme heat is already reaching the limits of our societies’ ability to cope.”

How will heat affect the future?

Scientists have “not yet agreed upon how climate change is affecting the frequency of blocking events,” said Reuters. But the “consensus is ⁠clear that climate change is increasing the frequency and intensity of heat waves.”

Climate change is responsible for driving up temperatures all over the world, but “particularly in Europe,” said the BBC. Europe is the “fastest warming continent, heating up twice as fast as the global average.” The current heat wave is also the “most severe and widespread” to have “ever affected this large a region” on the continent, said Theodore Keeping, an extreme weather research associate at Imperial College London who worked on the WWA analysis, to The Guardian.

Extreme heat, especially when mixed with high humidity, poses “risks for public health and infrastructure, as well as transport, energy and water supply,” said Time. Many industries, including tourism, have also been affected. During the recent heat wave, the “Eiffel Tower and the Louvre announced early closing times, and the Changing of the Guard outside Buckingham Palace was scaled back, without the usual ceremony of soldiers in scarlet tunics and heavy bearskin hats,” said CBC.

When it comes to health, everyone can be affected by heat, but certain groups are more at risk for heat-related illness, including babies, children and older adults. “Heat exposure and dehydration during pregnancy have also been linked to complications including premature birth, low birthweight and an increased risk of stillbirth,” said Time. Experts recommend remaining inside with the curtains closed during the hottest parts of the day and staying hydrated.

California is tense, or at least its fault lines are. The southern part of the state is at risk of experiencing a devastating earthquake as stress levels along both the San Andreas and San Jacinto faults are at a peak. While researchers cannot predict when the earthquake will occur, understanding the state of these two fault lines and their associated risks can help to better prepare civilians and municipalities.

Tension at the gate

Stress levels along the San Andreas and San Jacinto fault lines have “now reached high levels,” and the “two fault systems may interact when their stress levels become similar,” leading to a massive earthquake, said a study published in the journal JGR: Solid Earth. After analyzing 1,000 years of paleoseismic data, researchers found that “stress along multiple portions of the faults is the highest it has been in at least a millennium,” said The Washington Post.

Earthquakes occur when a slip along a fault line “releases energy built up over time,” said CNN. Stress “accumulates as tectonic forces move the crust, but parts of the fault are locked and unable to slip freely.”

While the Los Angeles area has seen its share of small earthquakes over the years, its last devastating quake was in 1857. The “violent magnitude-7.9 tremor ruptured a 225-mile stretch on the southern part of the San Andreas fault,” said the Post. Since then, that portion of the fault has “remained largely dormant, with stress continuing to build elsewhere along the fault, as well as along the neighboring San Jacinto fault.”

The two fault lines meet at a point called the Cajon Pass that could serve as an “earthquake gate.” A gate can “either stop or transmit large ruptures between the two faults,” said CNN.

“The conditions that determine whether the earthquake gate at Cajon Pass opens or stays closed appear to be related to how closely the stress levels on the two fault systems are aligned with each other at the time of rupture,” said lead study author Liliane Burkhard in a news release. “Right now, with stress at historically high levels across the region and more than 160 years elapsed since the last major rupture, the system is in a critically loaded state.”

Magnitude prediction

Because of the comparable stress levels, the Cajon Pass could “facilitate a joint rupture of both the San Andreas and San Jacinto faults simultaneously — a scenario that could be significantly more damaging than a single-fault event,” said the release. The resulting quake would affect “densely populated areas including Los Angeles, San Bernardino, Riverside and the Coachella Valley.” Researchers predict the tremor would be between a 7.4 and 7.8 in magnitude and cause significant damage to “critical infrastructure such as major highways, railways and energy corridors over several cities simultaneously,” said CNN.

Major earthquakes have occurred in other parts of California. There was a devastating 7.9-magnitude earthquake along the San Andreas fault in 1906 that affected San Francisco and the Bay Area. However, earthquakes in “one part of the fault network do not relieve pressure elsewhere,” said the BBC.

This research does not predict when the next giant earthquake will happen, but it does “improve our understanding of earthquake interactions in Southern California,” said the study. And knowing the risk can “help refine regional hazard assessments.”

While the world’s oceans have generally been heating up, one patch of the Atlantic located south of Greenland has been dropping in temperature. Dubbed the “cold blob,” the region’s cooling is likely tied to the growing unsteadiness of one ocean current system due to climate change. The collapse of the system could lead to disruptions in global weather patterns.

Current problems

The Atlantic cold blob has cooled by nearly one degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) since 1900. The region is also the “only part of the world” that has “cooled significantly since the 19th century, both in the atmosphere and ocean,” said a study published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. Scientists believe that the climate anomaly is happening because of shifts in a network of ocean currents called the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC).

Researchers analyzed decades of North Atlantic temperature and heat flux data going back as far as 1870. They found that the cold blob had “shown a marked decrease in the amount of heat escaping to the atmosphere over the last half-century, especially since 1993” and that the “largest drop in heat content has been in the top 1,000 meters — coinciding with the AMOC’s location,” said Science News. The decrease in heat content indicates that the heat supply provided by the AMOC has been declining over the past few decades.

The AMOC “works like a vast ocean conveyor belt, pulling warm water from the tropics to the Northern Hemisphere, where it cools, sinks and flows back south,” said CNN. Over time, the system has been “weakening as human-driven global warming melts ice and causes a surge of freshwater into the ocean, disrupting the AMOC’s delicate balance of heat and salinity.” Eventually, the current system may “become so weak” that it can “no longer distribute heat around the world,” said USA Today. The collapse of the AMOC has been deemed a climate tipping point after which there will be irreversible ecological damage.

Future problems

The cold blob and resulting disruption of the AMOC have been taking a toll on various regions of the planet. The Indian summer monsoon rainfall pattern has “shifted dramatically since 1999,” said a study published in the journal AGU Advances. “Northwest India receives 24.6% more rain during the monsoon season, while the Indo-Gangetic Plain has decreased by 4.4%, experiencing drought conditions.” Upon investigation, researchers found that the cold blob had “shifted the Indian monsoon by creating a strong temperature gradient over the North Atlantic,” which affected “jet stream winds and pressure systems in the atmosphere above Eurasia,” said Live Science, a sister site of The Week.

Similar effects are likely to occur around the world. While scientists do not know when the AMOC tipping point will be reached, it could “trigger dramatically cold winters in northern Europe” when it does, said Euronews. An AMOC collapse would also cause sea levels on the east coast of the U.S. to “rise rapidly since the current normally drives water away from the land,” and “storms in the Atlantic would increase in intensity.”

The internet is awash with jokes about the reflecting pool in front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, which is now riddled with algae.

The Trump administration spent more than $14 million (£10.5 million) draining the pool and painting the bottom “American flag blue” in time for the 250th anniversary of US independence. The president had described the reflecting pool – the scene of Martin Luther King’s 1963 “I have a dream” speech – as “filthy” and “dirty”, and promised to transform it into something “beautiful”. Instead, residual algae has “proliferated” in warm weather, said The Guardian, turning the pond “Wicked” green.

Something positive that can be said about the pool’s algal bloom is that it’s harmless. But toxic algae blooms are a worldwide phenomenon that can harm humans and devastate marine life. And as the climate crisis warms the water, the problem is growing.

‘Underwater phantom’

“Algal blooms are a rapid, explosive growth of algae,” said pharmacology researcher Ian Musgrave on The Conversation. Blue-green algae, known as cyanobacteria, naturally occur in inland waters, estuaries and the sea. They often contain multiple species, some of which produce toxins. The “bewildering variety” can cause many effects in humans, from nausea and skin irritation to increased asthma symptoms and even liver failure. Those that don’t produce toxins can “suffocate fish” by damaging the gills and reducing oxygen.

For a year now, a toxic algal bloom in South Australia has had “devastating effects” on wildlife. “At my local beach, walks were a sad parade of dead sea life,” said Musgrave.

Since last March, algae have “flared at hotspots” along the coastline, causing “stinging eyes, coughing, rashes, headaches and breathing difficulties” among surfers, said ABC. One swimmer was hospitalised with severe gastroenteritis. “It was like razor blades in my gut,” he said. “I was rolling around on the floor in the emergency room, coughing and spewing blood.”

Along the “jagged coastline”, it has become “an underwater phantom”, and researchers are “not entirely sure why”, said The New York Times. Beachgoers are “horrified by the dead animals washing ashore”. Since February last year, a crowdsourced platform has recorded more than 100,000 instances of dead sea life. “It was literally just like an underwater bushfire,” said a recreational fisherman.

Recent citizen science data suggests the bloom affected nearly 8,000 square miles. Last October, state agency scientists estimated the algae had impacted about a third of South Australia’s coasts. The psychological effect is enormous: in a survey of South Australians last July, nearly 70% said “they were repeatedly thinking about the bloom”, said researcher Brianna Le Busque, from Adelaide University. Some compared seeing the washed-up marine life to “the death of a loved one”.

‘Visible from space’

Harmful algal blooms stalk shores far beyond Australia. In Southern California last year an “unprecedented, multi-toxin event” killed hundreds of seabirds, sea lions and dolphins, said the Public Policy Institute of California.

Lough Neagh in Northern Ireland, the UK’s largest freshwater lake, has also been blighted by blue-green algae for years. This “majestic landscape of water and sky”, the inspiration for Seamus Heaney’s prize-winning poetry, is “choking on recurring toxic algal blooms”, said The Guardian.

The algae feed on high levels of nutrients in the water, mainly from agriculture (farm run-off, fertiliser and livestock waste), as well as “inadequate wastewater treatment”. Global warming has also increased the temperature of the lough, encouraging the abundant blooms. Last year, there were 243 detections of cyanobacteria growths, according to Northern Ireland’s Department of Agriculture, Environment and Rural Affairs: a record.

In some places, the green sludge – “so widespread it is visible from space”, said The Guardian – forms “patterns and swirls redolent of Gustav Klimt”. But far from picturesque, the blooms “coat the surface, kill wildlife, unleash stenches and make the lake all but unusable”. The impact on wildlife and tourism is “incalculable”.

“Lough Neagh is dying in front of our eyes,” said Claire Hanna, leader of the Social Democratic and Labour Party. “Images of fish and eels gasping for life on the surface are not just shocking – they are a stark warning of total ecological collapse.”

What’s happening to the river?

Running from the Rocky Mountains in Colorado to Mexico’s Gulf of California, the Colorado River is being pushed to the breaking point by years of drought and overuse. That dwindling flow is causing panic across the region because the river supplies water to more than 40 million people in seven Western states—Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming. It also provides power to more than 25 million people through hydroelectric dams at the nation’s two largest reservoirs: Lake Powell (in Utah and Arizona) and Lake Mead (in Nevada and Arizona). Water levels at both are down about 75% from peak volumes; declining water levels at Lake Mead could potentially reduce the Hoover Dam’s power generating capacity by 40% as early as this fall. And the situation will likely worsen as climate change accelerates and further dries out the West, with recent studies suggesting the river will provide 10% to 45% less water by 2050. With an October deadline looming for the seven states to agree on a new Colorado River Compact—the plan that governs how water is distributed between them—regional officials are under pressure to strike a compromise on steep water cuts. “Maybe this is the first worldwide climate-change crisis that’s going to force really fundamental policy-level decisions to be made,” said Brad Udall of Colorado State University’s Colorado Water Center.

How did the situation get this bad? 

The entire Colorado River Basin has been in drought since 2000, with snow and rain down 7% from the 20th-century average. The snowpacks that feed the river hit their lowest level on record this year, with snow accumulations in Colorado’s high country peaking a month early in March and containing just half the average moisture. Even a rare May storm that dropped 30 inches of snow in parts of the Rockies offered little relief. But drought is just one of the basin’s problems. Struck in 1922 during an unusually wet period, the Colorado River Compact overestimated how much water the river could provide. Meanwhile, the demands for water keep rising as drought shrinks the flow. The semi-arid region’s population has exploded over the past century—the river served only 457,000 people in 1922—as has its agriculture sector, which now covers more than 5 million acres of farmland and accounts for 70% of all water use. Alfalfa grown for cattle feed swallows 26% of all water consumed in the basin, more than every city in the region combined. Former Upper Colorado River commissioner Anne Castle likens the demands on the river to “spending more money than you’re bringing in. You can pull on your savings, but your savings aren’t going to last forever.”

Are states willing to take less water?

In theory. But three years of talks on a new compact between the four upstream states—Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming —and the three downstream states of Arizona, California, and Nevada have yet to produce an agreement. The Lower Basin states recently proposed slashing their water allotments by about 20% annually and asked Upper Basin states to commit to permanent cuts to ensure water keeps flowing south. But Upper Basin states are wary of restrictions that would limit future development and stop them building new dams. “I see still a very large lack of skin in the game by the Upper Basin,” said Tom Buschatzke of the Arizona Department of Water Resources.

What’s the federal government doing? 

To avert potential water shortages, the Interior Department in April sent billions of gallons from Wyoming’s Flaming Gorge Reservoir into Lake Powell. Up to a third of the water in Flaming Gorge could be let out over the next year to ensure Powell’s dam keeps generating electricity. The Upper Basin states only reluctantly agreed to the Flaming Gorge drawdown, which could put many boat ramps out of action at the popular tourist destination and also hurt local fish populations. “Our consideration and approval are not taken lightly,” said Wyoming state engineer Brandon Gebhart, “and we wouldn’t be recommending this release except for the historically dire conditions.”

What happens if states can’t reach a deal?

The Bureau of Reclamation, which oversees water in the West, will step in and impose cuts. Buschatzke said a plan under consideration by the Trump administration would slash the Lower Basin’s allocation by up to 40%—almost as much water as flowed from 19 million people’s taps in Southern California last year. For now, any breakthrough in compact talks seems unlikely. If anything, the recent releases by the Interior Department have exacerbated tensions, with Upper Basin states complaining they’ve already been forced to use less than the 7.5 million acre-feet allotted by the compact because dry conditions have cut their water supply by 25%. “The Upper Basin is proud to be part of the solution,” said Colorado water commissioner Becky Mitchell. “But we cannot be the entire solution.”

Could taps actually run dry? 

It’s possible in some areas. The small desert town of Kearny, Ariz., gets its water from a reservoir on a Colorado tributary that’s only 2% full. Mayor Curtis Stacy has warned residents they could run out of water in July unless they take radical action now; he’s suggested washing clothes less often and showering together. Other towns and cities are rationing water just in case. Las Vegas, N.M., has barred restaurants from serving water to customers unless specifically requested. Denver and Aurora, Colo., have ordered cuts to outdoor watering. Climate change could force more communities to drastically reduce their water usage in coming years. “Just because we’re the first don’t mean we’ll be the last,” said Stacy. “We’re the canary in the copper mine.”

The bees of the United States are in trouble and so is their honey. Disease and budget cuts have put bee populations in peril across the country even as honey demand has skyrocketed. The government is also planning on closing an important agricultural research center, risking further loss of both bees and their beloved nectar.

Honey, I shrunk the output

The U.S. demand for honey has grown significantly during the past three decades, mostly due to population growth and “consumers’ association of honey as a ‘superfood,’” said the USDA. However, as more people seek honey, the country is producing less. The U.S. has seen “staggering honeybee colony losses,” said the bee research nonprofit Project Apis m. Between June 2024 and March 2025, 1.6 million colonies were lost, with commercial beekeepers sustaining an average loss of 62%.

There are several reasons for the reduced honey production. The parasitic mite called the varroa destructor has “decimated hives ever since its appearance in the late ’80s,” said Bloomberg. More than 60% of honeybee colonies in the U.S. that died from June 2024 to January 2025 were “infected by mites resistant to the industry’s most widely used pesticide.”

For the bees that survived the mites, “it’s generally more lucrative for beekeepers to put them to work pollinating crops, rather than dedicating the insects to honeymaking.” As a result of the growing demand and reduced supply, “near-record imports are flowing in to fill that widening gap, with India, Argentina, Brazil and Vietnam emerging as some of the top suppliers.”

A bad place to bee

Alongside the ecological issues, the government is perpetuating the honey dearth. The USDA is planning to close the Beltsville Agricultural Research Center, a “6,500-acre agricultural research station in Maryland that is home to the nation’s premier bee research and disease diagnosis hub,” Jennie L. Durant, a research affiliate in human ecology at the University of California, Davis, said at The Conversation. Beltsville researchers “have helped beekeepers respond to varroa mites” and is now “helping them prepare for a deadlier mite that is infesting honey bees in Asia: Tropilaelaps mercedesae.”

The USDA has claimed that its reason for decommissioning the Beltsville center is that “building maintenance and renovations would cost an estimated $500 million,” said Durant. However, the price, experts argue, is well worth it. “The lab is $3.2 million a year for 20-plus scientists,” Zac Lamas, a researcher at the bee lab within the Beltsville Agricultural Research Center, said to The Associated Foreign Press. “We responded to a $600 million problem,” so the “idea that we’re redundant and expensive isn’t a good way to generalize the value of this lab.”

In addition to the Beltsville center, the Trump administration has “proposed eliminating the U.S. Geological Survey’s Ecosystems Mission Area, a move that could defund the USGS Bee Lab, an essential resource for research on native bees,” said Durant. The honey industry “has never been this stretched to keep healthy bees,” Jeff Pettis, who worked as a bee researcher at Beltsville from 1996 to 2016, said to Wisconsin Public Radio. And maintaining bee health is “what Beltsville was all about.”

“When a river is alive, it has a sound”, Angela Ortigara, a senior adviser at WWF Netherlands, told CNN. “You hear it trickling down the rocks. You see vegetation around it. It is this flow of life.” And, said the broadcaster, “across Europe, that sound is now beginning to return.”

Environmental coalition group Dam Removal Europe has calculated that a record-breaking 603 dams were removed across the continent last year, as countries embark on a “broader reassessment of how rivers function in an era of climate extremes”.

Natural course

A dam is a large barrier built across a river or stream to block, control or redirect the flow of water. They help with water storage, generate electricity, control floods and aid navigation for boats.

Dam Removal Europe found that the number of dams dismantled in 2025, along with other water-flow controls like weirs, culverts and sluices, grew by 11% from the year before. In the US, an estimated 100 dams were dismantled last year, while conservation projects in China have resulted in the removal of hundreds of dams on the Yangtze River in recent years.

The removals allow waterways to “resume their natural course” as part of a “global trend to restore rivers to help wildlife thrive”, said The Guardian. The damming of rivers “disrupts ecosystems, hinders the transport of sediments” and is believed to have contributed to a 75% fall in Europe’s freshwater migratory fish population in the past 56 years.

The 2,324 miles (3,740km) of European rivers that were reconnected through barrier removals last year bring the European Union a “step closer to its goal of restoring 15,500 miles to their natural state by 2030”.

Connectivity conundrum

The process is “rarely as simple as tearing down concrete”, said CNN. There can be “years of environmental assessments, engineering studies” and careful “negotiations with dam owners and local authorities”. Sediment levels must be “managed”, riverbanks need to be “stabilised” to prepare for the restored waterway, and ecosystems need to be “monitored after demolition” for unforeseen negative impacts.

The wide-scale dismantling of dams and water barriers has been criticised by some farming groups and policymakers who have raised concerns about potential impacts on land use and rural livelihoods. A study published last year found that the presence of dams could slow the spread of invasive species, while barrier removals may also allow new threats to travel from one part of a river to another.

But “with careful preparation, monitoring and long-term management, these risks can be minimised”, Ellen Dolan, a biologist at Queen’s University Belfast and lead author of the study, told The Guardian.

RCP8.5, a high-emissions climate scenario deemed to be the “business-as-usual” model under which no efforts are made to curb climate change, has been removed by scientists. This model represented what was thought to be the worst climate change could get. But thanks to strides in renewable energy and emissions reductions, it is now largely considered improbable.

Lowering the ceiling

It is difficult to determine how climate change will affect the future “because how much the planet will warm depends in large part on what humans do,” said Vox. So scientists build scenarios or “structured guesses about how the next century might unfold under different assumptions about energy use, growth and climate policy.” These scenarios get updated approximately every seven years. In a new paper published by an international team of researchers, the worst-case scenario was scrapped.

Under RCP8.5, “nations would make no effort to cut emissions and expand fossil fuel use,” Andrew King, an associate professor of climate science at the University of Melbourne, said at The Conversation. By 2100, “carbon dioxide levels would almost triple, to 1,135 parts per million and the world would be around 4.5°C (8.1°F) hotter than the preindustrial period.” Instead, the “new high-emissions scenario projects about 3.5°C (6.3°F) of warming by 2100,” said The Times.

Scientists have been positing that the worst-case scenario for climate change was becoming less likely over time. Despite this, the “use of RCP8.5 in climate modeling has remained, in part, as a way to study what might happen under a ‘baseline’ scenario in which the world does nothing to tackle climate change,” said The Washington Post. Using this model, however, has also “provided fodder for attacks,” with skeptics arguing that “scientists, activists and the media have overstated the risks that actually exist and given outsized attention to the most extreme scenario.”

Raising the floor

President Donald Trump claims that climate activism has been used to “scare Americans, push horrible energy policies and fund billions into their bogus research programs,” he said in a Truth Social post. But these recently updated scenarios are a “sign the expansion of solar, wind, electric vehicles and batteries have slowed emissions growth,” King said. “Taking RCP8.5 off the table is a sign of progress.”

Making progress does not mean all is well. Along with RCP8.5, the updated scenarios “discarded some very low-emissions scenarios because nations are unlikely to slash their fossil-fuel use as deeply as many world leaders had urged,” said The New York Times. Essentially, the “scenarios are becoming less pessimistic but also less optimistic.” The new models show that it is no longer possible to limit global warming to the recommended 1.5°C (2.7°F) above pre-industrial levels.

The new worst scenario of a temperature increase of 3.5°C (6.3°F) “would still be a very much worst-case scenario with considerable climate ­impacts,” Detlef van Vuuren, a senior researcher at the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency and lead author of the updated climate scenarios, said to The Times. “The brutal math of climate change is this,” climate scientists Zeke Hausfather, Glen Peters and Piers Forster, said in a commentary about the updated scenarios: “As long as CO2 emissions remain above zero, the world will continue to warm.”

Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon fell last year to its lowest level since 2019, according to a report from the MapBiomas monitoring network.

The findings are “good news” for President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva who made the “fight against deforestation” a “central tenet” of his reign, said France24. But how good is the news overall?

Breathtaking destruction  

South America's biggest country lost 985,000 hectares (2.4 million acres) of native vegetation in 2025, down 20.6% from 2024, the report found. Deforestation in the Amazon alone fell by 23.5%, while reductions were recorded across Brazil’s six major ecosystems.

“Even so”, said France24, the “rate of destruction” remains “breathtaking”. In the Amazon, the world's largest rainforest, five trees are still chopped down every second.

The “hardest-hit” biome last year was once again the Cerrado, a “vast, biodiverse savanna” south of the Amazon, which accounted for more than half of the deforestation.

The Amazon is the largest tropical rainforest on the planet and it absorbs more than a billion tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, helping to offset the effects of human-caused emissions. But agriculture, wildfire, logging and mining are stripping it of its powers. Agriculture accounted for 99% of vegetation loss across the country.

If deforestation and global warming “continue unchecked”, the Amazon could “begin a gradual transition” to a “degraded, grassland-like ecosystem” in “just a few decades”, said the New York Times.

The “consequences” of an “Amazon tipping point” are “catastrophic for the entire planet,” Bernardo M. Flores, an ecology researcher at the University of Santiago de Compostela in Spain told the broadsheet, so “we need to be careful not to get anywhere near those risks”.

Reality on the ground

Part of the problem with protection is the region is the chasm between theory and reality. A “protected area” may “exist in law” and “appear on maps, in international pledges, and in official counts of how much of Brazil is under protection”, said Mongabay.

But “on the ground” the reality depends on “staff, fuel, boats, radios, boundary markers, fire brigades, monitoring, community work”, and “the ability to respond when illegal miners, loggers, poachers, or land-grabbers arrive”.

Brazil has created of the world’s “most important protected-area systems”, but the most federal protected areas are still underfunded, with the largest shortfalls in the Amazon.

The Amazon’s protected areas are “expensive to manage” because “many are vast” and “some are difficult to reach”, so a field visit can “require a river journey, a flight, or both” and enforcement could involve “long patrols” with a single manager “responsible for an area larger than some countries”.

Cuba is rapidly growing its solar infrastructure due to the U.S. oil blockade. With the help of China, solar farms have popped up all over the country. But renewable energy access is unequal across the island, and Cuba still has a long way to go before it can survive without oil.

Looking to the skies

Cuba’s “energy crisis is chronic,” and the United States’ blocked fuel shipments have “pushed an already fragile system to the brink,” said El País. The country, which ran out of oil in the middle of May, has been experiencing 24- to 30-hour-long blackouts regularly. In the last four months, “only a single oil tanker has reached Cuban ports, that of the Russian Federation,” said Juan Antonio Fernández Palacios, Cuba’s representative to Belgium and the European Union, to Jacobin. Cuba “requires, at a minimum, eight tankers per month simply to sustain the basic functioning of the country.” The situation is “critical, harsh” and “approaching the contours of a humanitarian emergency.”

But where one door closes, another opens. Cuba is “currently pulling off one of the fastest solar revolutions on the planet, with help from China,” said CNN. “Imports of Chinese solar panels and batteries have soared over the past year.”

Chinese exports of solar equipment to Cuba “skyrocketed from about $5 million in 2023 to $117 million in 2025 and show no sign of stopping,” said The Washington Post. Beijing “pledged last year to help Cuba build more than 92 solar parks by 2028, and more than half of these projects have come online.” Along with providing materials, Chinese companies have also been “facilitating installation” and “working directly in Cuba to build solar farms.”

Because of the U.S. blockade and Cuba’s longstanding energy crisis, the Cuban government announced plans to move completely to renewable energy by 2050. The “installation of 52 solar photovoltaic parks has been completed, contributing more than 1,000 MWp and generating, at peak output, 38% of the energy consumed during daylight hours,” said Granma, the official newspaper of the Central Committee of the Cuban Communist Party. Renewable energy “now accounts for some 10% of the island’s electricity, up from 3.6% in 2024,” said The Associated Press. However, “distribution remains limited, and few Cubans can afford such a system.”

Far to go

While solar power and renewable energy in general have ramped up in Cuba, it is “highly unlikely that, considering their current situation today, Cuba could achieve the goal of 100% renewables by the year 2050,” said Jorge Piñon, a researcher at the University of Texas at Austin’s Energy Institute, to NBC News. The “surge may be rapid, but solar power is not yet available at scale,” said CNN. Cuba’s solar parks are “small and scattered.” And solar power is “only generated when the sun shines, meaning it cannot meet peak evening demand.”

To make solar power work at all hours, batteries would be necessary. But much of the country does not have the necessary infrastructure. “You are talking about a major overhaul of a system that is old, is broken, is tired,” said Piñon to CNN. This overhaul is not cheap, and historically, the country’s energy problems have “disproportionately affected rural areas and provincial hubs,” said Bloomberg. Havana, the “wealthiest part of the island, would see greater uptake of solar panels,” as “battery systems that charge while the electric grid is on, to then power appliances when it’s not, are also commonly used in the capital.”

Colombia is home to 1,900 identified bird species, a whopping 20% of all known bird species, said The Bogotá Post. And on May 9, Colombia won this year’s Global Big Day, an annual worldwide birdwatching event in which citizen scientists document the birds they have seen. Over the course of the day, 1,566 bird species were recorded by observers in the country, making Colombia the world’s most bird-diverse nation.

This avian supremacy is the result of geography and a complicated history of political violence. Today, the birds’ presence both promotes ecotourism and emphasizes the importance of conserving ecosystems.

Flying colors

Colombia’s Global Big Day triumph puts the South American country in a five-year winning streak. “This achievement confirms the Country of Beauty as a global benchmark for biodiversity and nature tourism,” said Carmen Caballero, the president of the promotion agency ProColombia, in a release. Birdwatching has become a “powerful platform to showcase Colombia’s extraordinary ecosystems, promote sustainable regional development and attract travelers seeking authentic and responsible experiences.”

Colombia is home to the “highest number of identified bird species on the planet: 1,900,” which is a whopping 20% of all known bird species, said The Bogotá Post. It’s also a “temporary home to over 200 migratory species each year.”

Colombia’s “global ranking is opening doors for regions that were once isolated but still hold incredible natural resources,” said Luisa Aguirre, a technical director at the Colombian environmental authority Regional Autonomous Corporation of Cundinamarca, a department in Colombia, said to The Bogotá Post.

Colombia’s biodiversity has given rise to “avitourism,” said The New York Times. Visitors come to see the birds and “generate needed income,” making it more “profitable to protect, rather than destroy, habitats.” The country “stands out as a destination where biodiversity, conservation and community-driven tourism converge to define the future of travel,” said Caballero in the release.

Nature vs. nurture

Colombia is only the 25th largest country in the world by land mass, but it “contains immense ecological diversity, from the Amazon rainforest to glacier-topped Andean peaks to palm-fringed Caribbean beaches,” said the Times. These geographic features have allowed myriad bird species to thrive.

Decades of political conflict have also contributed. The “conflict between the government, left-wing guerrillas, right-wing paramilitaries and narco-traffickers made many parts of Colombia too dangerous for development,” said CBS News. “Many bird habitats were preserved as a result.”

There being “illegal armed groups in this area for so long prevented” people from “coming and slashing and burning the habitats,” said Diego Calderón Franco, a researcher and birding guide, to CBS News. Thanks to the country’s troubled past, you can “look at that isolated mountain range and you might find a new species of bird for science.”

These unique species have turned birdwatching into a “great opportunity to support local businesses and promote the country’s biological heritage fairly and responsibly,” said Aguirre to The Bogotá Post. Colombia’s Global Big Day win is a “huge recognition of the hard work that local communities, guides and researchers do for nature conservation.”

What happened

The United Nations General Assembly on Wednesday voted 141-8, with 28 abstentions, to endorse a 2025 International Court of Justice opinion that countries are legally obligated to take steps to fight climate change. That opinion, while “not legally binding,” is “expected to be cited in ‌climate-related ⁠legal cases worldwide,” Reuters said.

Who said what

“The world’s highest court has spoken,” U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres said, and the General Assembly “has answered” with a “powerful affirmation of international law, climate justice, science, and the responsibility of states to protect people from the escalating climate crisis.” The U.S. had engaged in “diplomatic efforts” to derail the resolution, The Associated Press said, and joined other big “oil-producing nations and major greenhouse gas emitters” in voting against it. The “highly problematic” text “includes inappropriate political demands relating to fossil fuels,” U.S. Deputy Ambassador to the U.N. Tammy Bruce said before the vote.

What next?

While the resolution called for limiting global temperature rise to below 1.5 degrees Celsius, there is “no chance” of meeting that “1.5 to stay alive” goal anymore, the AP said, citing new scientific estimates. But thanks to “increasing use of green energies,” the “worst case scenario” is “no longer plausible,” either.

The Naegleria fowleri amoeba can cause a rare but fatal brain infection that progresses quickly and can’t be cured. It has been found in several recreational locations in the U.S., with the number of cases likely to increase as global temperatures rise.

Unwelcome inhabitant

Scientists tested 185 water samples from 40 recreational waterways across five National Park Service sites. N. fowleri was found in 34% of the samples, according to a study published in the journal ACS ES&T Water. The amoeba was “detected in well-known and previously untested hot springs, including sites with high recreational use,” including Yellowstone National Park, Grand Teton National Park and Lake Mead National Recreation Area, said the study.

The single-celled organism is “very widespread” and “not just in national park hot springs,” said study author Brent Peyton, a professor at Montana State University, to Outside. The amoeba “thrives in soil and warm freshwater lakes, rivers, ponds and hot springs all over the globe,” said USA Today. It flourishes in “warm pools up to 115 degrees Fahrenheit,” as “water across western national parks is getting warmer,” said Outside.

Brain infection most often occurs when someone “goes swimming or diving in a lake, river or other fresh water during summer months” and the amoeba enters the nasal cavity, said the CDC. A few infections have occurred when people “used tap water that contained Naegleria fowleri to rinse their sinuses or cleanse their nasal passages.” However, you cannot get an N. fowleri infection from “swallowing water containing the amoeba,” get it “from someone else” or “pass it on to others.”

The infection, primary amoebic meningoencephalitis (PAM), advances quickly, destroying brain tissue and causing massive cerebral swelling, with most people dying “within one to 18 days after symptoms begin,” said USA Today. The amoeba can “infect their brain with a fatality rate of 98%.”

PAM symptoms include “headache, fever, nausea and vomiting,” said the CDC. And as the disease progresses, it can cause a “stiff neck, confusion, lack of attention to people and surroundings, loss of balance and hallucinations.”

Domain expansion

There’s “no need to be alarmed,” said Peyton. Infection can be “prevented by keeping water out of one’s nose.” Experts suggest people “hold their nose or wear a nose clip if they are jumping or diving into fresh water,” keep their “head above water in hot springs,” and avoid splashing around in shallow water, as the amoeba is more likely to be found there, said Fast Company.

Other bodies of water may also become more hospitable to N. fowleri due to warming temperatures. The findings “indicate that N. fowleri is present in thermally impacted areas across the western United States,” said the study. The amoeba’s presence underscores the “use of enhanced monitoring, public awareness and risk management strategies in thermally influenced recreational waters.”

Years of drought and growing demand have taken their toll on the Colorado River, which supplies water and hydropower to 40 million people in seven Western states. Now the moment of crisis has arrived.

The river is “on the brink of disaster,” said The Wall Street Journal. An “unusually warm winter” deprived Colorado and Utah of the snowpack that feeds the river in the spring. That will have literal downstream effects: Lake Powell reservoir in Utah and Arizona “will receive the least amount of water this year” since its creation in 1963.

Western states have struggled for years to divvy up the dwindling supply, and old agreements are expiring. Now the Trump administration is preparing a “drastic” plan to “cut water deliveries to farms, cities and tribes” by a third, said E&E News. “There wasn’t enough water to start with, and there’s still less water,” Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said last month, per The Arizona Daily Star.

Solutions ‘will not be popular’

“The clock is running out on a deal” between Western states to “keep the Colorado River alive,” Mike Gardner said at The Raincross Gazette in Riverside, California. The Interior Department’s proposal would likely face years of legal challenges, but the system of dams and reservoirs along the river “could cease to function due to lack of water” before the lawsuits play out. So the states must find agreement before the federal government imposes one. The “political reality,” though, is that elected officials who agree to water cuts “will not be popular” with their constituents.

States along the river have seen “enormous increases” in water consumption over the last half-century “with no thought for tomorrow,” Steve Hanley said at CleanTechnica. They have been “kicking this can down the road this entire century.” We are getting a “preview of the kind of wrangling” that will become common as “Earth becomes too hot in some places to sustain human life.”

Downsizing agriculture?

It is time to build more water desalination plants on the Pacific Ocean, Greg Walcher said at The Daily Sentinel in Grand Junction, Colorado. If the Colorado River “cannot continue to supply all the people who once relied on it” then desalination plants seem a logical solution to the West’s “seemingly unsolvable water dilemma.” Indeed, Arizona, Nevada and Utah are trying to “buy excess water” from San Diego, said The New York Times. The city built a desalination plant to process Pacific Ocean water in the 1990s and is now poised to sell its “surplus water” across the West.

Such solutions will take time and cutbacks loom in the short term. Farms use about three-fourths of Colorado River water to “grow alfalfa and other kinds of hay to feed cattle,” said the Los Angeles Times. It will be “critical” to “downsize” the sector’s water usage. Some agricultural lands “are going to go out of production,” The University of Colorado Law School’s Anne Castle said to the outlet.

Britain’s hospitals, schools and homes will need to be fitted with air conditioning to deal with expected rises in global heating, the government’s climate advisers have said.

With temperatures forecast to exceed 40C in all parts of the UK by 2050, a major report from the Climate Change Committee has warned the country is “built for a climate that no longer exists today and will be increasingly distant in years to come”.

What’s in the report?

Julia King, chair of the CCC’s adaptation subcommittee, said that, of the many climate threats laid out in the report, “extreme heat is certainly the most deadly” and requires the “need to see cooling rolled out at scale”.

“Sometimes this will mean shading, but sometimes it will mean air conditioning. And either way, we’ve got to get serious about protecting our most vulnerable people in hospitals, in care homes, and in schools.”

The CCC recommends air conditioning be installed in all care homes and hospitals within the next 10 years, and in all schools within 25 years. Exams should be set at cooler times of year, to stop students struggling to think in the heat.

The government should also set a maximum temperature for working indoors and outdoors, it said, following countries like Spain. There, the maximum legal working temperature indoors is 27C for sedentary work and 25C for light physical work.

Failure to take the necessary steps to stop people overheating could cause deaths from heat-related illnesses to rise to 10,000 a year by 2050, the committee warned.

Anything else?

As well as the risk from more intense heatwaves, the CCC found droughts are likely to become much more frequent. Last year the Environment Agency warned that England is on track for a daily shortfall in public water supplies of five billion litres by 2055 – equivalent to more than a third of current daily usage.

“We’re facing a potential world where you could turn on the tap and nothing would come out,” said King.

Global warming will also lead to more erratic rainfall and flash flooding. Seven million UK properties are currently at risk of flooding; if nothing is done, this could rise by 40% by 2050, the CCC said. Sea levels will also rise, threatening coastal areas that would no longer be protected by natural flood defences. Higher temperatures would also put domestic food production under threat.

How much would the changes cost?

“Adapting to a changing climate comes at a price,” said the BBC. The CCC estimates its recommendations would cost roughly £11 billion per year, split between the public and private sectors.

But every £1 spent would yield about £5 in benefits, the committee claims, and “the UK invests 50 times this amount every year” already, “some of it on infrastructure that exacerbates the climate crisis or vulnerability to it”, said The Guardian. “It’s very good value compared to the cost of the impacts of the climate that we’re already seeing,” said King.

There could also be a political cost to inaction. Sam Alvis, from the left-leaning think tank IPPR, told The Times that if the government did not step up efforts to adapt to hotter temperatures, it risked “stoking support” for populist politicians.

“When increasingly severe and frequent climate impacts strike, populists are quick to exploit public anger over a lack of preparation, using it to advance their own agenda and weaken support for climate action more broadly.”

Marine cloud brightening (MCB) is a form of geoengineering in which salt water is fired into the clouds in order to increase their brightness and reflectivity. The method shows promise in helping to curb warming temperatures due to climate change, however there may be unforeseen ecological consequences.

Cloud cover

Injecting sea salt aerosol into the clouds can restrict the “future global-mean surface air temperature and precipitation change,” said a study published in Communications Earth & Environment. In a computer simulation, the scientists salted “four cloudy regions in the eastern Pacific Ocean every year from 2020 to 2100” and found that the injection “compensates well for the global warming induced by anthropogenic aerosol reductions over both land and ocean.” Scientists, in a separate research project in the U.K., are testing the geoengineering process in a three-story “cloud chamber,” with the potential for a real world test in 2028.

MCB enhances the “natural process of cloud formation” similar to the “natural effects of sea spray on cloud properties over the ocean,” said a release about the U.K. project. The sea salt aerosol particles “act as sites for the formation of cloud droplets when the air becomes humid enough, the more particles present, the more cloud droplets form and the more reflective clouds become.” The sea salt then “scatters more sunlight back to space and prevents some solar radiation from reaching the Earth’s surface in that area.” With less light reaching the planet, the temperatures cool.

The process is not perfect. In the simulation, MCB was found to “not fully mitigate the warming in some regions, including Europe, the U.S., northeastern China, central and eastern Siberia and the Arctic,” while it did help in other regions, said the study. This discrepancy is likely because the sea salt injections “would indirectly cause the ocean conveyor belt known as the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation to speed up,” said Anthropocene magazine.

MCB also affected rainfall. Though the total amount of rain globally remained the same as in 2020 when the simulation began, the distribution varied. The U.S. “would become hotter and drier by the end of the century, while India, Australia, the Amazon and the semi-arid Sahel region of Africa would be cooler and wetter than they are now.”

Silver lining

Real world testing of MCB is still needed despite the study’s findings. “One model cannot settle whether marine cloud brightening could work safely in the real atmosphere over decades,” said Earth.com. Cloud behavior remains difficult to simulate because “droplets, particles, winds and ocean currents interact at many scales.” There is “very limited understanding of whether such approaches are scientifically sound, so it is essential that we understand whether spraying sea water can be performed effectively and what the effects might be,” Hugh Coe, a professor of atmospheric composition at The University of Manchester and the lead of the U.K. project, said in the release.

The focus of the “cloud lab” tests is “to find the ideal ‘Goldilocks’ size for the salt particles, said The Times. “Too large, and they risk soaking up all the moisture before smaller droplets can form. Too small, and they won’t ‘activate’ properly, meaning the cloud won’t brighten enough.” If the tests are successful, MCB could be tested in the real atmosphere as soon as two years from now. Geoengineering is a controversial measure that is “opposed by environmentalists who fear it is an excuse for not cutting the carbon emissions driving climate change,” said The Times. Other experts argue that reducing emissions is not enough.

“Decarbonization is the only sustainable route out of the climate crisis,” Mark Symes, the program director of the U.K.’s Advanced Research and Invention Agency, which is funding the project, said to The Independent. “However, decarbonization is not happening quickly enough to protect many parts of the world from the worst effects of global heating.”

Scientists are pushing for “radical” measures against climate change, proposing the construction of a dam across the Bering Strait that would link Alaska and Russia, said Science.

A study by University of Utrecht academics Jelle Soons and Henk Dijkstra suggests that this would be a decisive way to protect the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), which is instrumental in regulating the planet’s sea temperature and climate.

Three separate dams would be needed across the strait, which is 51 miles (82km) wide at its narrowest, due to the two islands that lie in the middle, with the longest section spanning roughly 24 miles (38 km), said LiveScience. Similar structures already exist in the Netherlands and South Korea, although “not in remote locations with strong currents and sea ice, or with rival geopolitical powers on opposite sides”.

‘Grave’ dangers

Building a dam in the Bering Strait is just as “out there” an idea as “refreezing the Arctic” or “floating a giant parasol in outer space”, said The New York Times. The concern for the continuation of the AMOC is very real, however.

Acting as a “vast oceanic conveyor belt”, it carries tropical, salty currents from the Atlantic towards Europe. There, it releases the warmth into the air, which regulates the temperature across the continent. Once cooled, it circles back south, influencing rainfall patterns in Africa, South America, and beyond.

There is a “growing body of evidence” that human-caused global warming could cause it to “shut down or slow significantly”, which would have “grave effects” on weather patterns on multiple continents.

“At first glance”, the role of the Bering Strait “isn’t all that obvious” in this global cycle. However, it acts as the “gateway for large quantities of fresh water” to flow from the Pacific into the Arctic Ocean, then into the Atlantic. A dam in this region would alter the balance of fresh and salt water in all three oceans.

The University of Utrecht study was based on simulations indicating that the AMOC was “much stronger” in the Pliocene era – roughly 5.3 to 2.6 million years ago. During this era, sea levels in the strait were lower, exposing an intercontinental land bridge, leading Soons, the study’s lead researcher, to wonder “could we do this again?”, said New Scientist.

No ‘escape hatch’

It is an “audacious proposal”, and a project that would be on an unseen and “truly epic scale”. Researchers have been “mulling it over” at the European Geosciences Union general assembly in Vienna this month. But “because we don’t fully understand the AMOC, we can’t be sure of the consequences of such an intervention”. “These drastic things really do have big uncertainties attached”, Jonathan Rosser, a climate researcher at the London School of Economics, told the magazine.

“This is one of those climate ideas that sounds almost ridiculous when you first hear it”, said Earth.com. In fact, the “real takeaway” from the study, and its discussion at a conference level, is “how worried scientists have become about the AMOC”. “When researchers start seriously modelling something this extreme, it tells you that the level of concern is high.”

Even if this project were given the green light – following much more advanced and rigorous modelling – it would “raise huge environmental, political, legal and logistical questions”. The scale of the intervention, let alone the complex political relations between the US and Russia, would mean this project would not be anywhere as simple as “building a bridge or a seawall”. “It would be one of the boldest and strangest geoengineering projects ever seriously contemplated.”

Even then, it does not promise an “escape hatch”, or get-out-of-jail-free card. “Once you are debating mega-dams to prop up ocean currents”, it’s a clear sign that progress towards reducing emissions “has not gone nearly well enough”.

The UK has rapidly decarbonised its energy sector, with emissions falling by about 54% since 1990. Fossil fuels supply only around a third of our electricity, but when it comes to the total energy mix – including heating, transport etc – we still rely heavily on oil and gas: they accounted for 74% of the total in 2024 (36.5% oil; 37.5% gas). And the nation is producing less of both than it once did.

In 1999, when production peaked on the UK Continental Shelf, Britain was a net exporter of oil, and was self-sufficient in gas. Today, only about 50% of UK oil comes from domestic sources; some 30% of the UK’s natural gas also comes from domestic sources. Whereas, of the imports: 76% of imported gas comes from Norway, 17% from the US, in the form of LNG, and 2% from the Persian Gulf.

Is there much oil and gas left?

The UK Continental Shelf (largely in the North Sea, but also in the Irish Sea) is a mature basin: over the past 60 years, its most accessible oil and gas – about 47.7 billion barrels of oil equivalent (BOE) – has been extracted. Domestic production of oil and gas fell by 76% and 73% respectively between 2000 and 2024. Today there are over 280 active oil and gas fields, but 180 of these are expected to cease production by 2030. Estimates vary as to how much is left.

According to the energy consultancy Wood Mackenzie, there’s an estimated 2.3 billion BOE of recoverable oil and gas in the North Sea – enough to cover a sixth of the UK’s projected needs until its net-zero target date of 2050. Offshore Energies UK, an industry group, estimates there are around 7.5 billion BOE of oil. The North Sea Transition Authority, the industry regulator, is more cautious: it thinks the North Sea is home to 2.9 billion BOE of “proven and probable reserves” of oil and gas, with an extra 10.8 billion that may or may not be accessible.

How easily could it be recovered?

“Easy oil is over,” says Dr Mark Ireland, a geologist at Newcastle University. “What remains are smaller, sometimes more remote, and often more technically challenging or expensive resources and reserves.”

New exploration competes for investment with more accessible sources of hydrocarbons abroad, so the North Sea’s future depends on relatively high oil and gas prices, tax levels that aren’t too high and investor confidence. At present, a headline 78% tax rate and high costs mean British oil fields need global prices at nearly $40 (£29) a barrel just to break even, more than twice the threshold for Norway.

There are undeveloped fields, where oil or gas are confirmed but not yet produced. Furthest along is Jackdaw gas field, which could be connected to the UK within months; but that and Rosebank have not been approved.

Could more drilling lower prices?

Probably not. Oil and gas prices are set on international markets; and given the North Sea’s relatively small reserves, drilling there would not impact global prices. Nigel Topping, chair of the Climate Change Committee, says the best way to bring down bills is by “making clean electricity cheaper and reducing demand for oil and gas – not doubling down on declining resources”. The Department for Energy Security and Net Zero wants to get Britain off “the roller-coaster of fossil fuel prices and onto homegrown power that we control”.

But might it be useful in other ways?

Yes. Advocates of further exploration point out that it would improve energy security: gas is pumped straight into the UK’s energy system, which insulates the nation from energy shocks, and potentially from price spikes such as the present one. Crucially, they point out, companies licensed to extract North Sea oil and gas would pay billions in tax – money that could be used, for instance, to lower domestic energy bills. (The industry has paid between £4.5 billion and £9 billion in annual tax in recent years.)

Domestic production is good for the balance of payments, too: the UK spent £36 billion on oil and gas imports in 2024, money lost to the British economy. And jobs are at stake. In the past decade, the North Sea workforce has shrunk from 450,000 to 160,000; the hope that jobs would be created in renewable energy to replace them has not yet been borne out.

Wouldn’t more drilling undermine our climate policies?

On the face of it, yes. Over the Jackdaw field’s lifetime, if you include both “operational” and “downstream” emissions (those caused by burning the gas), it will generate the equivalent of 35.8 million tonnes of carbon – nearly Scotland’s total emissions per year.

On the other hand, realistically, Britain is going to need a lot of oil and gas even if it does reach net zero by 2050, for domestic heating, transport – and to back up intermittent wind and solar. Shell, which owns Jackdaw, argues that “the UK will consume this gas, wherever it is produced” – and imported LNG from the US and Qatar is about a fifth more carbon intensive. Thus, arguably, domestic production can help reduce overall emissions.

So what should we do?

Opinion is divided. Reform UK, the Conservatives and most recently the SNP have all backed further drilling in the North Sea. Even Tara Singh, CEO of RenewableUK, the trade association for renewable power, has argued that the UK should continue, and even increase, North Sea gas production for energy security during the transition to net zero, to reduce imports. But Labour's 2024 election manifesto explicitly ruled out issuing new oil and gas exploration licences, although it does allow “tiebacks” for existing fields. (The Lib Dems and the Greens are also opposed.) The Energy Secretary Ed Miliband argues that Britain should show “climate leadership”, and that if it were to allow more licences and more drilling, it would undermine efforts to slow global warming and to move to low-carbon energy sources.

One species’ trash is another’s treasure. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch in the Pacific Ocean is now home to dozens of species, and the floating plastic island emphasizes how human civilization can influence even the most remote areas. More species in the open ocean can also facilitate the spread of invasive types.

Moving in

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is located within the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, a “huge rotating current system between California and Hawaii” where “floating objects tend to get trapped instead of drifting away,” said Earth.com. The gyre has essentially created an island of tens of thousands of tons of plastic trash, approximately 80% of which originated on land. The size and shape of the patch is constantly changing.

Plastic is not the only thing present at the patch. Over time, much of the plastic has gained living inhabitants, according to a 2023 study published in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution. Scientists found 484 animals from 46 species on plastic debris from the gyre. Inhabitants were not “merely riding the debris to a new location” because “brooding females, rich with eggs and young” were found, as well as “animals at all life stages, including juveniles and adults,” said IFL Science. This range of life indicates that the organisms are there for the long haul and not just temporarily.

Many of the species living and thriving in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch “were able to reproduce asexually, essentially cloning themselves,” said Earth.com. “Their larvae also did not need to spend much time drifting freely in the water,” therefore “young animals could grow right on the same surface as the adults.” The reproductive cycle “fits well with a small, isolated raft of plastic that slowly circles within the gyre.”

House hunting

The discovered organisms largely made up two categories: coastal and pelagic, meaning species found in open water. “Barnacles, sea anemones, hydroids, amphipods, crabs and bryozoans are all represented, and most appear to come originally from the western Pacific, including the coasts of Japan.” said Econews. The mix of coastal and ocean life is called a “neopelagic community,” which is a “human-made ecosystem that exists only because of long-lived plastic floating far from land.”

Plastic may be the key for certain populations to expand into the open ocean. “Unlike natural floating substrates such as driftwood or pumice, plastic can persist for decades, thereby providing a continuous surface for attachment,” said The Economic Times. The plastic allows “coastal species that once would have died long before reaching remote islands” to “travel for years on these rafts,” said Econews.

The sampling of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch done by the study “likely doesn’t capture the biodiverse richness floating in the Pacific’s most polluted area,” said IFL Science. “Some animal groups, such as molluscs, were unexpectedly absent from the Patch, whereas others, such as sea anemones, were more common than in tsunami debris.” Unfortunately, open water travel “comes with serious risks,” especially introducing new invasive species, said Econews. Foreign species can use plastic to reach new areas where they “could compete with native corals, algae and invertebrates on reefs that are already stressed by warming, pollution and overfishing.”

Even though there is life on the Patch, it “does not diminish the urgency of reducing plastic production and improving waste management,” said The Economic Times. Instead, it “underscores the complexity of ocean systems and the long-lasting consequences of synthetic debris.”

The invasion of the golden oyster mushroom is posing a threat to native species. And with temperatures warming, further expansion could lead to dire ecological consequences.

Yellow flag

The golden oyster mushroom was brought to the U.S. from Asia during the 2000s mostly because it “can grow quickly, which was a boon, as it’s considered one of the most delicious mushrooms a forager can find,” said Vice. What was once deemed a benefit turned out to be a threat. The bright yellow mushroom’s ability to reproduce quickly has caused it to spread across the continent, making it notoriously invasive. The species has already been found in 25 states.

The fungus is “invisible for most of the year, living as mycelium, fungal strands within the wood,” said the BBC. In the spring, it “sends out its fruiting body,” which is “what we would recognize as the mushroom itself.” The “huge yellow clusters cascade out of logs and trees, each mushroom itself producing millions of microscopic airborne spores.” Though the golden oyster mushroom “isn’t yet posing a significant risk to Western forests, it is taking hold in the Northeast and Midwest,” said The Cool Down.

When the mushroom is present in a forest, the “fungal community composition significantly changes, and fungal species richness significantly decreases,” said a 2025 study published in the journal Current Biology. Trees colonized by the fungus have “about half the fungal biodiversity as trees without the golden oyster,” Aishwarya Veerabahu, a mycologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and lead author of the study, said to the BBC. “That was a huge indicator that they are likely outcompeting the native fungi that were there.”

Settling the spore

The golden oyster mushroom “mainly grows on dead or dying hardwood trees, breaking down the tough wood fibers,” said the BBC. The fungi are gilled mushrooms, which have the ability to “release up to billions of spores.” These oyster mushrooms also “happen to be one of the few carnivorous mushrooms” and mainly prey on nematode worms.

Dead wood is a “crucial habitat for small animals and tree seedlings in the forest,” said Veerabahu. The spread of the mushroom could pose a risk to a variety of species. The golden oyster “grows and ‘chews’ through woods so rapidly,” and it could spell bad news for the “rate of decay of wood and for the carbon emissions that come from that.” Not only this fungus but all invasive fungi are “especially dangerous because so little is known about them,” said Oregon Live.

Human trade brought the mushroom west. “It’s a problem created by the way we use, grow and transport fungi,” said the BBC.

And warmer temperatures due to climate change are creating conditions increasingly suitable for its spread. The mushroom’s “proclivity for expansion means it could soon become a problem in new territories,” including urban areas, said The Cool Down.

To prevent the fungus from overtaking forests everywhere, “continued research, management efforts anchored in social theory and collaborative conversations about microbial endemism” will be necessary, said the study. “The cultivation of local species or development of sporeless mushroom strains could also mitigate risks.”

Below the Antarctic ice lies a treasure trove of minerals, including copper, iron, gold, silver, platinum and cobalt. Warming temperatures due to climate change could unearth these minerals and, in turn, fuel future geopolitical conflict, potentially leading to a reversal of the current Antarctic drilling ban. If the ban is lifted, there may also be an increase in emissions. Those emissions would raise temperatures even more.

Iced out

Though under 0.6% of Antarctica is estimated to be free of ice cover today, scientists predict there will be up to a 550% increase during the next 30 years, according to a study published in the journal Nature Climate Change. And this climate-driven melting will lead to a “likely rise in the economic viability of Antarctic mineral resources over the coming centuries.” New accessible resources could pose problems in the future when it comes to determining whether these minerals can be mined and by whom.

A country’s interest in Antarctic mineral resource development may be “linked to whether it holds a territorial claim, the economic value of mineral resources within that claimed territory and the extent of land emergence,” said the study. The largest land emergence in Antarctica is “likely to occur over territories claimed by Argentina, Chile and the United Kingdom,” said Eos. But “all territorial claims on Antarctica were suspended by the 1959 Antarctic Treaty and are not recognized by other nations,” said The New York Times

Global copper demand is “currently at 28 million metric tons and is expected to jump to 42 million metric tons by 2040 as demand for electricity grows,” said the Times. Access to resources is going to become more important than ever. Changes to Antarctic ice cover could “put pressure on the region’s legal framework surrounding mineral resource activities,” said Eos. And interest may come from “states without territorial claims or non-state actors,” said the study.

Melting the ice

The Antarctic Treaty was signed in 1959 as a response to World War II and global interest in keeping Antarctica unmilitarized. The agreement stipulated that Antarctica should be “used for peaceful purposes only” and that “no acts or activities taking place while the present treaty is in force shall constitute a basis for asserting, supporting or denying a claim to territorial sovereignty,” said the treaty. It also bans any mining or drilling activities for commercial purposes.

These provisions may change in the future. Nations, beginning in 2048, will be able to request adjustments to the Antarctic Treaty. Along with Argentina, Chile and the U.K., Australia, New Zealand, France and Norway also made formal land claims to Antarctica before the treaty. “Major powers like the United States and Russia, though not formal claimants, retain strategic interests and could play a key role if rules around resource extraction change,” said Money Control.

Drilling in Antarctica can have significant negative environmental impacts, including the release of trapped greenhouse gases. Increased greenhouse gases would lead to worsening climate change, which would cause additional ice melt. In the future, “environmental impacts of mineral resource extraction activities will be weighed against societal pressure for sustainable resource development,” said the study.

Nonetheless, the ice melt is ”unlikely to trigger a major change to Antarctic governance on its own,” Tim Stephens, a professor of international law at The University of Sydney Law School, said to Eos. “The continent will still remain a very challenging environment for mineral resource extraction.”

The deep, blue sea is becoming deeper — in color, that is. Climate change, along with human development, has reduced how much light can filter through the water. Reduced light can significantly disrupt the marine food chain as well as lead to the large-scale worsening of climate change.

Zoning issues

Ocean darkening occurs when “changes in the optical properties of the oceans reduce the depth to which sufficient light penetrates to facilitate biological processes guided by sunlight and moonlight,” said a 2025 study published in the journal Global Change Biology. The color shift can make the water look more opaque. The part of the ocean that sunlight is able to penetrate is called the photic zone and it is “home to 90% of marine species,” said the World Economic Forum. Organisms like phytoplankton also “convert sunlight and CO2 into energy, producing nearly half the planet’s oxygen and absorbing vast amounts of carbon emissions” in the photic zone.

Rather than just some patches of darkening, the phenomenon has affected “large, connected regions,” Tim Smyth, a marine scientist at Plymouth Marine Laboratory and co-author of the study, said to New Scientist. “Roughly one‑fifth of the world’s oceans have darkened in some way.” Already, the depth of the photic zone has reduced by more than 10% “across 9% of the global ocean,” said the study.

In coastal areas, darkening is “closely linked to changes in the rivers that flow into the sea,” Smyth said. “Shifts in land use affect what becomes dissolved or suspended in the water, which, in turn, alters the optical quality of the water entering the ocean.” In addition, “fertilizers used in industrial agriculture are washed into rivers, stimulating phytoplankton growth,” which reduces “how deeply light can penetrate the water column.”

However, darkening is not limited to the coast. The open ocean has also increased in opacity, which “may be linked to shifts in phytoplankton blooms driven by climate change.” There have been “rising ocean temperatures, more frequent marine heatwaves and changes in salinity in some regions.” Such changes “influence large‑scale ocean circulation patterns.”

Light direction

Dark oceans are bad news and the consequences have already begun to appear. As the photic zone shrinks, “many marine species are forced to move closer to the surface in order to survive,” said Diario AS. This “pushes large numbers of organisms into a much smaller space, increasing competition for food, raising biological stress and leaving them far more exposed to predators, including human fishing vessels.”

Along with disrupting the marine food chain, ocean darkening hinders the ocean’s ability to perform photosynthesis, weakening the “ocean’s role as a carbon sink, its natural capacity to capture and store the carbon dioxide that warms the planet.” If the ocean isn’t helping to sequester carbon from the atmosphere, climate change will worsen at a faster rate.

Some of the main culprits of ocean darkening are “sediment runoff from agriculture, deforestation and development,” especially in coastal regions, said the World Economic Forum. Improved land management can play a large role in reducing the level of darkening. This includes reducing fertilizer use as well as encouraging conservation efforts. In the open ocean, the problem is much more difficult to tackle as “even if global emissions dropped to net zero tomorrow, the ocean would take decades, if not centuries, to respond,” said Smyth. The good news is that the ocean “still has a remarkable capacity to heal itself. Give marine ecosystems a little room to recover and they often respond with surprising speed.”

An estimated $500 billion worth of lithium lies below the Salton Sea, a large lake in Imperial County, California, east of San Diego, and many people are eager to tap into this “white gold mine.” But the sea is located in a region of the Golden State where there are already numerous environmental concerns, and some residents worry that plundering for lithium could exacerbate the problem.

‘Saudi Arabia of lithium’

There has been a renewed push to extract the Salton Sea’s lithium, as the mineral is crucially important for rechargeable electric batteries. The lithium in question could likely “power our smartphones, electric cars and electricity grids,” said Soumya Karlamangla at The New York Times, and a modern gold rush “could bring jobs, tax dollars and economic revitalization to one of the most impoverished places in the nation.” In 2022, the area was called the “Saudi Arabia of lithium” by California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D), a reference to that country’s abundant natural resources.

Pressure to extract this lithium is also coming from the artificial intelligence industry, as AI is “driving a surge in energy demand as tech companies scramble to build more data centers,” said Kori Suzuki at KPBS San Diego. There is “just a massive demand for power,” Rod Colwell, the CEO of Controlled Thermal Resources, said to KPBS. The company is planning to build a lithium extraction project in the region, and there has never “been a change of focus.”

‘Not everyone is eagerly welcoming’

Residents of Imperial County, on the other hand, are concerned that the ongoing lithium push could create even more environmental hazards, and “not everyone is eagerly welcoming” the industry, Karlamangla said at the Times. The Salton Sea has been rapidly shrinking, and “as it does, it spews plumes of pesticide-laden dust throughout Imperial County.” Lithium extraction requires a lot of fresh water, and locals “worry the process will deplete the region’s scarce water resources.”

Ecological groups have launched lawsuits, arguing that environmental hazards outweigh the benefits of extracting the lithium. The proposed project from Controlled Thermal Resources “would create a high-water demand in an arid desert environment where the drying out of the Salton Sea worsens severe air pollution impacts,” said a legal brief from the nonprofits Comite Civico del Valle and Earthworks. The lawsuits “only serve to delay progress on clean energy projects that are essential to the community, California and the nation,” Lauren Rose, a spokesperson for Controlled Thermal Resources, told CalMatters.

Others are not buying this argument. The project “must be corrected to meet the standards that protect our community and our environment,” Luis Olmedo, the executive director of Comite Civico del Valle, said to CalMatters. Imperial County is “no stranger to 21st century plans that arrive with great promise but do little to benefit locals,” Aaron Cantú said at Capital & Main. The lithium mining is “just another way the community will be sacrificed for private gain,” Anahi Araiza, a policy researcher at Imperial Valley Equity & Justice, told Capital & Main. Residents “want a slow and methodical process to ensure that things are done well.”

Rather than blood in the water, sharks are finding drugs in the water. The aquatic predators have tested positive for both legal and illegal drugs in parts of the Bahamas. These substances have the potential to cause behavioral changes in the sharks and indicate that humans have a stronger hand in ecosystem changes than expected, even in isolated places.

Drugged and dangerous

Scientists found cocaine, caffeine and painkillers in sharks around Eleuthera Island in the Bahamas, according to a study published in the journal Environmental Pollution. The blood of 85 sharks in the region was tested for several drugs. Twenty-eight of those sharks from “three species had caffeine, anti-inflammatory painkillers or other drugs in their blood,” and some even tested positive for multiple, said Science News. “Caffeine was the most common, followed by acetaminophen and diclofenac,” the active ingredients in Tylenol and Voltaren, respectively.

This is not the first time cocaine has been found in sharks. A study from 2024 found the drug in Brazilian sharpnose sharks in waters near Rio de Janeiro. But this is the “first report of caffeine and acetaminophen detected in any shark species worldwide and the first report of diclofenac and cocaine in sharks from the Bahamas,” said the study. “We are talking about a very remote island,” said Natascha Wosnick, the 2024 lead study author and a biologist at the Federal University of Paraná, to Science News.

While the Brazil study found sharks’ exposure to cocaine, the scientists only “tested the liver and muscle tissue of sharks,” said Smithsonian Magazine. In the 2026 study, the researchers tested blood, which “reflects more recent exposure to drugs.” The sharks were captured in popular areas for diving and cruising. The exposure is “mostly because people are going there, peeing in the water and dumping their sewage,” said Wosnick.

Fins of the future

While cocaine sharks are concerning, the “widespread presence of caffeine and pharmaceuticals in the blood of many analyzed sharks is equally alarming,” said Wosnick to CBS News. “These are legal substances, routinely consumed and often overlooked, yet their environmental footprint is clearly detectable.”

The Bahamas sharks’ blood also had “changes in some biological markers, which can point to how tissues are functioning,” said Smithsonian Magazine. These markers “might be leading to higher stress and higher energy use as the aquatic predators’ bodies work to detoxify their systems,” said Science Alert.

The study findings are a “reminder that coastal infrastructure, tourism and marine food webs are tightly connected,” said Tracy Fanara, an oceanographer who helped produce the documentary “Cocaine Sharks,” to Science News. Researchers are still unsure about how detrimental the blood changes could be to the sharks’ health.

“Our primary concern is not an increase in aggression toward humans but rather the potential implications for the health and stability of shark populations," said Wosnick. “Chronic exposure to these anthropogenic compounds, many of which have no natural analogue in marine systems, may lead to negative effects that are still poorly understood.” These effects could be the subject of research in the future.

The concrete cap of a tomb encasing radioactive fallout now has cracks, and what’s beneath can rise from the dead. The U.S. military, in 1958, conducted a nuclear test on Runit Island in the Marshall Islands with an 18-kiloton bomb called Cactus. The resulting blast left behind an almost 33-foot deep crater, which later became a dumping ground for the debris from a myriad of nuclear tests from the 1940s to 50s. In 1977, the Runit Dome was created to contain that radioactive waste. But the dome’s deterioration could contaminate the ocean and displace hundreds of people.

Nuclear consequences

The Runit Dome contains more than 120,000 tons of contaminated material from nuclear testing, including lethal quantities of plutonium. The isotope plutonium-239 is a “radioactive element used in nuclear weapons that remains dangerous for more than 24,000 years,” said the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC).

Merely coming into contact with the radioactive element can kill you. Concrete, unfortunately, does not endure that long. “There are already cracks in it in less than 50 years,” Arjun Makhijani, a nuclear engineer and president of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, said to the ABC.

Since the concrete tomb was built, “groundwater has penetrated the otherwise-unlined crater, beneath which there lies a bed of porous coral sediment,” said Science Alert. The leaked water in the dome is “soaking the radioactive waste with the daily rise and fall of the tide,” said ZME Science. The tomb’s outer shell also contains cracks, “allowing contaminated waste to wash into the surrounding lagoon,” said the ABC. Runit Dome is approximately 20 miles from a human population that regularly uses the lagoon. Continued radioactive waste would lead to its displacement.

While these are the current problems, there are also “concerns that layers of the dome intended to sit above sea level are not going to stay above water much longer,” said Science Alert. “Sea levels are rising and there’s indications that storms are intensifying,” Ivana Nikolic Hughes, a senior lecturer in chemistry at Columbia University and president of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, said to the ABC. “We worry the integrity of the dome could be in jeopardy.” Higher water levels could bring radioactive contaminants further into the Pacific Ocean.

Radioactive risks

Despite experts’ concerns about the Runit Dome, the U.S. Department of Energy has claimed that the “dome was not in imminent danger of collapse,” the “cracks were consistent with aging concrete” and the “lagoon already contained large amounts of radioactive material from past tests,” said the ABC. The U.S. conducted 67 nuclear tests across the Marshall Islands between 1946 and 1958, some of which were bigger than Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Over 300 Marshallese people were removed from the area in 1946 before the U.S. began nuclear testing.

The ocean has been “steadily encroaching on the dome over the years,” and “residents fear nuclear contamination if the site were to collapse,” said The Cool Down. The problem is expected to worsen over time without climate change mitigation. “Legacies of nuclear testing and military land requisitions by a foreign power have displaced hundreds of Marshallese for generations,” Paula Gaviria Betancur, the UN Special Rapporteur, said in 2024, and the “adverse effects of climate change threaten to displace thousands more.”

What happened

The Trump administration on Monday agreed to pay France’s TotalEnergies nearly $1 billion to forgo its leases to build two wind farms off the coasts of New York and North Carolina. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said the federal government would reimburse TotalEnergies as the company invested in natural gas and oil projects in the U.S. Under the “innovative agreement,” the Interior Department said in a press release, TotalEnergies also “pledged not to develop any new offshore wind projects in the United States.”

Who said what

The deal to abandon the two wind projects, which would have powered more than 1.3 million homes and businesses, “is an extraordinary transfer of taxpayer dollars to a foreign company for the purposes of boosting the production of fossil fuels” and “throttling” clean energy, The New York Times said. President Donald Trump has “personally reviled” windmills for years, CNN said.

Burgum argued that offshore wind was “unreliable, unaffordable and unsecured” because the wind doesn’t always blow. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) said Trump’s “pay-not-to-play scheme” was “an outrageous abuse of taxpayer dollars.” North Carolina Gov. Josh Stein (D) said it was “ludicrous and wasteful” to “pay off a company to stop it from investing private dollars to create the clean energy we need.” TotalEnergies made the “pragmatic” business decision now that developing “offshore wind projects is not in the country’s interest,” CEO Patrick Pouyanné said in a statement.

What next?

One of the five East Coast wind farms Trump tried and failed to stop last year, Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind, “started delivering power to the grid for Virginia” on Monday, The Associated Press said. And as Trump is “boosting oil, gas and coal” in the U.S., “globally the offshore wind market is growing, with China leading the world in new installations.”

What is glyphosate?

It’s the world’s most used herbicide, best known in the U.S. as Roundup. American farmers alone spray about 300 million pounds of it on fields annually. Such chemical herbicides have long been opposed by environmental groups and Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s MAGA-aligned Make America Healthy Again movement, which claims glyphosate causes cancer and other health problems. Bayer, the German chemicals giant that makes Roundup, last month proposed a $7.25 billion settlement to resolve tens of thousands of lawsuits from people who allege the glyphosate-based weed killer is to blame for their non-Hodgkin lymphoma, a cancer of the immune system. (Bayer insists glyphosate is safe and has not admitted liability, but in 2023 began phasing the chemical out of Roundup sold for residential use.) So MAHA activists were stunned when President Trump issued an executive order a day after the settlement was announced to boost glyphosate production, calling it “central to American economic and national security.” Zen Honeycutt, founder of the MAHA-linked Moms Across America group, said she felt “sick to my stomach” when she read the executive order, calling it, “a love letter to glyphosate.”

Is glyphosate safe?

The evidence is mixed. The International Agency for Research on Cancer, an affiliate of the World Health Organization, designated the herbicide in 2015 as “probably carcinogenic to humans.” Bayer points out that the IARC puts drinking hot beverages and eating red meat at the same hazard level as glyphosate, and that other public health bodies—including the EPA and the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization—disagree with this assessment. But Lianne Sheppard, a University of Washington professor who served on the EPA panel that reviewed glyphosate in 2016, notes that scientific evidence for the herbicide’s effects on human health has recently “strengthened for cancer and other end points.”

What is that evidence?

A meta-study she co-authored found that people with high exposures—such as agricultural workers or people who live near farms—have a 41% increased risk of developing non-Hodgkin lymphoma. Meanwhile, laboratory studies using human cells and animals suggest glyphosate can damage DNA and harm the liver and kidneys. Critics caution that animal and cell studies typically use far higher exposure levels than most people would encounter. “There’s just no compelling evidence that glyphosate causes cancer,” said Robert Tarone, a 28-year veteran of the National Cancer Institute. But other scientists argue that there’s a lack of hard evidence showing glyphosate to be safe, especially following the retraction in November of a landmark study cited by many regulators as proof that the herbicide is not carcinogenic.

Why was the study pulled?

Because lawsuits against Monsanto—the former owner of Roundup, which Bayer acquired for $63 billion in 2018—revealed emails that show the company’s scientists secretly helped conceive and write the supposedly independent study. In messages sent in 2000, one Monsanto employee complimented her colleagues’ “hard work” on the paper and said the “plan is now to utilize it both in the defense of Roundup and Roundup Ready crops worldwide.” In withdrawing the study, the Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology journal cited “serious ethical concerns” over the “independence and accountability of the authors,” who may have been paid by Monsanto for their work. The study’s retraction doesn’t mean its findings were incorrect, but it adds to the haze of uncertainty around glyphosate. “We absolutely must study it, given it is the most commonly used herbicide in the world,” said Brenda Eskenazi, a public health expert at the University of California, Berkeley. “Even a small, tiny effect, if it’s real, can have a huge public health impact because so many people would be exposed.”

How many people are exposed to the herbicide?

A 2024 CDC study found glyphosate traces in the urine of about 70% to 80% of Americans, but researchers say that the presence of the chemical does not mean it is causing harm. While running for president in 2024, Kennedy vowed to curb Americans’ exposure to glyphosate, which he called “one of the likely culprits in America’s chronic disease epidemic.” And as an environmental lawyer in 2018, Kennedy won a nearly $290 million lawsuit against Monsanto, in which he argued Roundup caused his school groundskeeper-client to develop cancer. But since joining the agribusiness-friendly Trump administration, Kennedy has quietened his criticisms.

What has he said about glyphosate?

The first report from the White House’s Kennedy-led MAHA Commission in May mentioned glyphosate once in 72 pages, saying studies have “noted a range of possible health effects.” A second 20-page report in September made no mention of it. That led to rumblings of discontent in the MAHA movement, which became thunderous after Trump’s executive order. In a statement, Kennedy said herbicides “are toxic by design” but that he backed the president’s order as a necessary step “to bring agricultural chemical production back to the United States.” Many MAHA supporters—a group that includes 62% of parents who identify as Republican—called that about-face a betrayal. So-called MAHA moms “feel like they were lied to,” said conservative wellness influencer Alex Clark. “How am I supposed to rally these women to vote red in the midterms?” Kelly Ryerson, a MAHA advocate who goes by Glyphosate Girl online, said the order feels “very, very much like the breaking point. People can’t continue to make excuses for the administration.”

While it is widely known that rising carbon dioxide emissions have significantly impacted the climate and our ecosystems, scientists recently found a less expected outcome. Increased CO2 levels have altered the chemical balance of human blood, which may have negative long-term health ramifications. The rate at which emissions are increasing also does not allow time for the human body to adapt.

A bloody problem

Increased CO2 levels in the atmosphere have correlated to an increase in bicarbonate (HCO3-) levels and a decrease in calcium (Ca) and phosphorus (P) levels in human blood, according to a study published in the journal Air Quality, Atmosphere & Health. If these trends continue, “blood bicarbonate values could be at the limit of the accepted healthy range in half a century, and Ca and P will be at the limit of their healthy ranges by the end of this century.”

In human blood, CO2 is converted into bicarbonate, which at normal concentrations has an important role in maintaining healthy pH levels. However, the concentration of bicarbonate increased by about 7%, or 0.34% per year, between 1999 and 2020. Calcium and phosphorus levels dropped by 2% and 7%, respectively. This is because when carbon dioxide dissolves in the bloodstream, it “alters the body's acid-base balance,” said Science Alert. In order to keep the blood pH within its healthy range, the “kidneys conserve bicarbonate, a buffering molecule that helps neutralize excess acidity.” Bones “can also buffer acid by exchanging minerals such as calcium and phosphorus.”

Code red

Elevated CO2 can lead to a range of adverse health effects. Even “moderate increases in carbon dioxide indoors can affect thinking and focus,” said Earth.com. Certain levels “have been linked to slower decision-making and changes in brain activity in some groups.” It can also “increase stress hormones and cause oxidative stress, which can damage cells.” As far as the changes in our blood, “chronic CO2 retention can lead to metabolic acidosis, which may cause the calcification of kidneys and arteries as the body attempts to manage pH levels,” said Down to Earth. Calcium and phosphorus are also extremely important for our health.

There is a "delicate balance between how much CO2 is in the air, our blood pH, our breathing rate and bicarbonate levels in the blood,” Phil Bierwirth, a retired environmental geoscientist and one of the authors of the study, said in a release. “CO2 in the air is now higher than humans have ever experienced,” and we may “never adapt.” Because of this, many experts believe it is important to take action against climate change to reduce emissions and limit the levels of atmospheric carbon.

Rising CO2 levels are “especially relevant for children and adolescents, whose developing bodies will experience the longest cumulative exposure,” said the release. “We’re not saying people are suddenly going to become unwell when we cross a certain threshold,” Alexander Larcombe, a respiratory physiologist and author of the study, said in the release. “But this suggests there may be gradual physiological changes occurring at a population level, and that's something we should be monitoring as part of future climate change policy.”

What if plastic waste could be turned into something useful? That dream may soon become a reality, as scientists have found a way to turn plastic into acetic acid using sunlight. Plastics and microplastics have been found everywhere from waterways to remote ecosystems to the bodies of humans and animals. Worldwide plastic usage has also continued to increase over the past 60 years. But this new method would mark a uniquely environmentally friendly way of dealing with plastic pollution.

Sunny solutions

Scientists have created a “sustainable, highly efficient” method to “upcycle plastics to value-added acetic acid,” which is the main component of vinegar, said a study published in the journal Advanced Energy Materials. The process is a “bio-inspired cascade photocatalysis using iron atoms embedded in carbon nitride,” said a release about the study. It is similar to “how certain types of fungi break down organic matter using enzymes.”

“Our goal was to solve the plastic pollution challenge by converting microplastic waste into high-value products using sunlight,” said Dr. Yimin Wu, a professor of mechanical and mechatronics engineering at the University of Waterloo who guided the study, in the release. When the photocatalyst is exposed to sunlight, it triggers two back-to-back chemical reactions. The first one “breaks plastic down into smaller molecules,” and the second “converts those molecules into acetic acid,” said Earth.com. The reaction also takes place in water, “making it particularly relevant for addressing plastic pollution in aquatic environments,” said the release.

The other benefit is that the system works on a variety of plastic types. Acetic acid could be produced from “common plastic wastes, including PVC, PP, PE and PET,” and remained “effective across mixed plastic compositions,” said the release. This makes it a valuable tool for real-world waste streams where different plastics are all mixed together.

Acidic answers

Global plastic use has grown from 20 megatons (Mt) in 1966 to 460 Mt in 2019, according to the Center for Sustainable Systems at the University of Michigan. It is expected to reach 1,231 Mt by 2060. Unfortunately, there is no great way to deal with plastic waste. The majority of it ends up in landfills, where it stays for thousands of years. It can also get stuck in the ecosystem or in waterways. Some can be incinerated, but that releases chemicals and smoke into the atmosphere. Recycling is another option, but not all types of plastic can be recycled, and many current processes require the use of fossil fuels.

This newly discovered alternative “allows abundant and free solar energy to break down plastic pollution without adding extra carbon dioxide to the atmosphere,” Wu said. In addition, while acetic acid is used to make vinegar, it also has several other uses and a “global annual demand of approximately 18 million tons,” said The Engineer. The material is “widely used across the chemicals sector and also has some energy applications.” The study’s findings also “point to new possibilities for addressing microplastics directly,” as the “process degrades plastics at the chemical level,” which “could help prevent the accumulation of microplastics in water systems,” said the release. The technology is still in the laboratory phase.

Oil spills have a new whirlwind solution. Disasters like Exxon Valdez in 1989 and Deepwater Horizon in 2010 are difficult to clean up after and can cause catastrophic ecological damage — and there are thousands of them each year. The options to deal with the crude oil are either burn it and produce high levels of smoke and pollution in the process, or leave it to destroy habitats and kill wildlife. Now, scientists may have found a new way to burn the oil without releasing excessive emissions: by creating raging fire tornadoes.

A blazing idea

The most common method of removing oil from bodies of water is through on-site burning. This technique can “rapidly remove up to 95% of spilled oil from the water surface, reducing the risk of oil penetrating sediments or drifting to contaminate adjacent habitats,” said a study published in the journal Fuel. However, it also “produces a visible smoke plume containing soot and other combustion products, raising concerns about air pollution and potential health risks.” It also tends to leave a layer of black sludge on the surface of the water.

Fire tornadoes or fire whirls offer the “potential for cleaner, more efficient burns with reduced emissions in environmental applications like oil spill remediation,” said the study. These flames spread upward rather than outward, acting like a “natural turbocharger, sucking in oxygen and creating a flame that burns hotter, faster and far more efficiently than fire pools,” said a release about the study. The blazing tornado can also produce 40% less soot and consume up to 95% of the fuel.

Scientists tested this method in a controlled experiment during which they “built 316-foot walls and a rough triangle and generated a controlled fire whirl that reached 17 feet high,” said Vice. The tornado burned through the oil 40% faster than the on-site method and was able to “destroy the particles that form thick smoke plumes,” reducing the amount of emissions, said the release. This can cut the “environmental cost of emergency burning while vaporizing nearly all the oil before it can become a toxic tar mat on the ocean’s surface.”

Not so slick

As promising as fire tornadoes are, these “inferno giants are sensitive,” said the release. “Too much wind, and the column can collapse or destabilize. Too little control over airflow, and it behaves like a fire pool.” The thickness of the oil layer can also affect the whirl’s efficiency. However, “this is the first time anyone has conceived using fire whirls for oil spill remediation, and it’s really just the beginning,” said Elaine Oran, a professor of aerospace engineering at Texas A&M who led the study, in the release. “Our goal is to harness the chaotic nature of fire whirls as a powerful, precise restoration tool, to protect coastlines, marine ecosystems and the environment as a whole.”

There is still a lot of work to be done before widespread use becomes possible. For now, the method to create the whirls using three walls is “not directly applicable to open ocean environments where large oil spills typically occur,” said the study. More research should be done to “explore applicable methods for inducing fire whirls in open water conditions,” like using “mobile or deployable structures” or “leveraging natural atmospheric conditions.”

This research could also be applied to other uses, like to “help engineers design high-efficiency combustion systems” or to “better predict and control wildfire behavior on land,” said Earth.com. “By understanding the physical laws that govern fire whirls, we can harness their power beyond oil spill remediation,” said Oran.

Our planet may be heading to a point of no return. Scientists predict that a domino effect of damage is on the horizon if there is no intervention, including “hothouse” level warming. Climate change is likely to worsen, especially with relaxed emissions regulations, which will lead to irreparable harm to the ecosystem and human health.

What’s ‘hothouse’ warming?

Earth’s climate is “departing from the stable conditions that supported human civilization for millennia” and barreling toward several tipping points, which “could commit the planet to a hothouse trajectory,” said an analysis published in the journal One Earth. “Most tipping interactions are destabilizing in nature,” and if “one element tips, it can trigger a cascade effect, pushing other systems past their thresholds.” This tipping may “already be underway or could occur soon for the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets, boreal permafrost, mountain glaciers and parts of the Amazon rainforest.” The shift could “raise global temperatures, accelerate sea-level rise, release vast stores of carbon and destabilize ecosystems.”

In the hothouse trajectory, “global temperature stays significantly above the 4°C rise of current worst-case climate scenarios for thousands of years, driving a huge rise in sea level that drowns coastal cities,” said The Guardian. Unfortunately, global temperatures are likely already as “warm as, or warmer than, at any point in the last 125,000 years,” and the progress is “advancing faster than many scientists predicted,” said Christopher Wolf, a scientist at Terrestrial Ecosystems Research Associates and one of the authors of the analysis, to The Guardian. “Policymakers and the public remain largely unaware of the risks posed by what would effectively be a point-of-no-return transition.”

What does the future hold?

Despite the warning, there is still a lot of uncertainty. Scientists “do not yet know the exact thresholds for many tipping elements, how feedback will interact with climate sensitivity, or how quickly tipping cascades might unfold,” said the analysis. Regardless, we “may be approaching a perilous threshold, with rapidly dwindling opportunities to prevent dangerous and unmanageable climate outcomes.” The risks are higher as the Trump administration is working to roll back caps on carbon dioxide emissions. The “added pollution could lead to as many as 58,000 premature deaths and an increase of 37 million asthma attacks between now and 2055,” said The New York Times.

The U.S. is “currently the world’s second-largest climate polluter (after China) but is the nation that has pumped the most greenhouse gases into the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution,” said the Times. Time is of the essence now as the “boulder is going off over the edge of the cliff,” said Jillian Gregg, a study co-author and the CEO of Terrestrial Ecosystems Research Associates, to KLCC. “We are on this trajectory, and we don’t have recourse in how to get back.” However, even with evidence to show the dangers of climate change, we may be living in a “post-truth era in which too many people prefer pleasant lies over unpleasant truths,” said Reinhard Steurer, a professor of climate policy and governance at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences in Vienna, to Inside Climate News.

What happened

Eight people were killed in an avalanche near Lake Tahoe on Tuesday and one person is missing and presumed dead, California authorities said Wednesday. The other six people on the three-day backcountry skiing trek in the Sierra Nevada mountains were rescued alive, including one of the four guides. The avalanche, near Castle Peak, was the deadliest in modern California history and the worst in the U.S. since 11 climbers were killed on Washington’s Mount Rainier in 1981.

Who said what

The backcountry expedition set out Sunday morning, shortly after the Sierra Avalanche Center issued an avalanche watch for the area, indicating that large avalanches were likely in the following 24 to 48 hours. The skiers were heading back to the trailhead after two nights at the remote Frog Lake huts when “someone saw the avalanche, yelled ‘Avalanche!’ and it overtook them rather quickly,” Capt. Russell Greene of the Nevada County Sheriff’s Office said at a news conference Wednesday.

After the avalanche hit, the “six survivors were able to use a combination of emergency beacons and iPhone SOS functions to contact rescuers, who braved treacherous conditions to reach them,” said The New York Times. The “dangerous, hourslong rescue effort” was “hampered by whiteout conditions and strong winds from the winter storm roaring through” the Donner Summit area, said CNN. Rescuers reached the survivors just before sunset. They were unable to remove the bodies of the eight dead skiers due to the “really horrific conditions,” said Nevada County Sheriff Shannan Moon.

An average of 27 people a year have died in U.S. avalanches in the past decade, according to the Colorado Avalanche Information Center. Tuesday’s tragedy was the second fatal avalanche near Castle Peak this year, after a snowmobiler was killed about a mile away in January.

What next?

“As families grieve and crews come up with a plan to remove the bodies from the mountain when it’s safe,” USA Today said, the company that led the expedition, Blackbird Mountain Guides, “is facing a tough question: Given the known dangers, why did they still go?” It is “unclear if the guides would have known” that the avalanche watch was elevated to a more imminent warning Tuesday morning, said The Associated Press, but Moon “said investigators would look into the decision to proceed with the trip on Sunday despite the forecast.”

Ozempic, Wegovy, Mounjaro and other GLP-1s have been touted as miracle drugs with a myriad of health benefits. However, they come at a high environmental cost. The manufacturing of these weight-loss medications can produce toxic byproducts that end up in waterways and increase plastic waste. Scientists are working to clean up the process.

How do GLP-1s affect the environment?

GLP-1s are peptide drugs that produce “unsustainable volumes of toxic waste and non-degradable solid supports,” said a study published in the journal Nature Sustainability. Peptide manufacturing uses a method called solid phase peptide synthesis, which “anchors the first amino acid building block to a synthetic resin, such as polystyrene beads,” said Futurism. Then, toxic solvents, “including dimethylformamide, a component of paint strippers,” are “used to add each amino acid one by one, which can then leak into the water supply.” Peptide drugs are also “cold chain dependent,” which means “every unit must be refrigerated from factory to pharmacy shelf, multiplying emissions across the supply chain,” said IDR Medical.

Along with the manufacturing process, the use of the drugs creates its own waste. Patients who take GLP-1 injectables self-inject once per week. Because of this, “every month, there are four disposable auto-injectors that they have to throw out,” that are “made of solid plastic material that can persist in landfills for decades to centuries,” said Thanigavelan Jambulingam, a business professor at Saint Joseph’s University, in an interview with the school. Millions of people are producing this waste, which could “end up in the water systems” or it could be in “other areas where it causes harm.”

Could it be cleaner?

The increased usage of GLP-1s may help the environment in some ways, however. By treating diabetes and obesity, they “could reduce the incidence of cardiovascular disease, kidney failure and other conditions, each of which carries a heavy environmental cost through surgeries, hospitalizations and long-term drug use,” said IDR Medical.

The drugs are also changing people’s diet. “People taking these drugs are eating less beef, choosing more vegetables and turning away from processed snacks,” said Anne Jomard, a scientist and nutritionist from Zurich, at Food Facts. This “could meaningfully reduce the environmental damage caused by industrial food production.”

Even so, unless “manufacturing and delivery evolve, the environmental gains from healthier populations could be offset by the waste created to get there,” said IDR Medical. Luckily, a better way to produce peptide drugs may be on the horizon in the form of water-based synthesis.

The method pairs amino acids with specific salts, making them water-soluble. This replaces “conventional non-degradable supports” and enables “clean, efficient peptide synthesis entirely in water, without the unwanted side reactions,” said John Wade, a chemistry professor at the University of Melbourne and lead author of the study, in a university publication about the research.

GLP-1s are not the only products that require peptide synthesis. Certain cancer treatments, as well as crop treatments, veterinary drugs and cosmetic ingredients, also require it. “Why are we still making life-saving medicines using chemical processes that produce mountains of toxic waste?” asked Wade. “Could water, the cleanest and most familiar solvent of all, offer a way out?”

A group of engineers and scientists are planning to build a 50-mile underwater barrier around the melting “Doomsday glacier” in a bid to stop it collapsing into the ocean, triggering a disastrous rise in sea levels.

They can’t stop the glacier melting but they hope to “slow the rate of ice loss, buying time as global emissions reductions take effect”, said Euronews.

‘Almost certainty’ of collapse

Thwaites Glacier, on the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, covers a vast area roughly the size of Great Britain and has earned its “Doomsday” nickname because it is so big and melting so fast. Its ice loss already accounts for about 4% of the annual rise in sea levels globally. “The glacier holds enough ice to raise global sea levels by around 65cm if it collapses completely,” said Interesting Engineering. To put that in context, “each centimetre of sea level rise exposes an estimated six million people worldwide to coastal flooding”.

Scientists aren’t agreed about how long it would take for Thwaites to collapse entirely – or indeed if it actually would any time soon. In a 2023 study published in The Cryosphere, glaciologists concluded that the West Antarctic Ice Sheet glaciers had yet to enter the phase of “irreversible retreat” that leads to total collapse. But it seems more and more likely that this will one day happen: we have gone from a stage of “we don’t know” to “an almost certainty” that it will, study co-author Hilmar Gudmundsson, of Northumbria University, told The New York Times.

Other scientists believe there is still time to “protect the glacier from oblivion”, if we can succeed in “cutting the carbon emissions that are driving climate change”, said the paper. But, with fossil-fuel emissions soaring to record levels in 2025, “nations are not exactly on track to make this happen”. Enter the Seabed Anchored Curtain Project.

‘Major technical challenges’

The project involves the construction of a flexible underwater barrier, anchored into the seabed. It would be 152m tall and stretch roughly 50 miles across key parts of the seabed in front of Thwaites Glacier. The aim is to block warmer ocean currents from reaching under the glacier’s fringing shelves, and causing the ice to melt.

But there are “major technical challenges”, said Interesting Engineering. The barrier would “need to survive extreme Antarctic conditions, deep water pressure, moving ice, and long-term ocean exposure”. And it could take many years “before any full-scale deployment is possible”.

The multinational project team – from Cambridge University, the University of Chicago, New York University, Dartmouth College, Germany’s Alfred Wegener Institute, Norway’s NIVA research institute, UK engineering firm Aker Solutions and the University of Lapland’s Arctic Centre – have worked out a roadmap that includes three years of research to choose and design materials, and test the technology.

The curtain project used to be a “fringe idea”, confined to academic articles, said The Atlantic. This kind of “geoengineering” project to “address the symptoms of climate change”, rather than its causes, “was a bête noire in the glaciology community”. But now more and more scientists are realising that such “targeted interventions” are “inevitable”.

People do need to “get over” the notion that “there’s a clean exit on climate change”, said David Holland, a climate scientist working on the project. What needs to be decided now is “what is the least brutal outcome for the world”.

“You would be forgiven for thinking the rain this year has been relentless – because in some parts of the UK, it actually has been,” said BBC weather presenter Ben Rich.

There have been more than 280 flood warnings and alerts in place across southwest and central England, Scotland and Wales. So far, 26 weather stations have reported monthly rainfall records, and the heavy rainfall has brought strain to homes, businesses and the environment across the UK.

The constant rain feels like “some sort of biblical punishment”, said The Independent. Few corners of the country have been spared entirely, with the southwest of England and Scotland “bearing the brunt”. And there is still “more to come”.

What did the commentators say?

“We have, then, reached the apotheosis of British climate: unchangeably changeable weather,” said The Times. The weather is “stuck”, and the “setting it has been stuck on is ‘miserable’”.

The “main architect” of our current weather pattern has been the fixed jet stream heading in from the Atlantic, said the Met Office. Caused by significant “cold plunges” across North America, this “powerful ribbon of air” is positioned further south than expected at this time of year. Acting as a “conveyor belt”, it funnels low-pressure systems towards northern Europe, which in turn increases the “frequency and intensity of rain-bearing weather fronts”.

At the same time, high-pressure zones in mainland Europe stop the jet stream in its tracks, “blocking” the system from passing through. As a result, we are left with “increasingly saturated ground, travel disruption, and a general sense that winter has been stuck on repeat”.

“Spare a thought” for the “saturated souls” of North Wyke in Devon, Cardinham in Cornwall and Astwood Bank in Worcestershire, said The Independent. They have experienced downpours every day from 31 December to 8 February, with more expected. But perhaps the “bleakest” fate has been Aberdeen’s: as of 10 February the city hadn’t “seen a single minute of sunshine for two weeks and counting”. That’s the “longest period for the area” since records began in 1957.

Britons have been “dodging deluges or showers” for 40 consecutive days in the worst-affected areas, said The Guardian. The “persistent” wet weather is impacting “farmers, builders, sports, wildlife – and damaging roads and homes”. Hundreds of people have faced “misery” after the flooding of businesses and homes. Wild swimmers have been hit by “sewage problems on beaches and inland”, caused by the heavy rainfall.

There is the “occasional bright spot” amid the grey-skied gloom. A “month of mud” festival has been organised in Somerset’s Quantock Hills, and on Studland beach in Dorset the extreme weather has caused a “historic shipwreck” to emerge, “thought to be the remains of a Dutch merchant ship that sank in 1631”.

What next?

This week “looks as grey and damp as the week before and the week before that”, but there is “evidence of a change”, based on Met Office data, said The Times. There could be a “brief window” where a lingering system breaks down, bringing fleeting sunlight to Scotland in particular.

However, “although this Valentine’s Day we expect to glimpse the sun, it would be wrong to call it light at the end of the tunnel”. In fact, it is “more a skylight, in the middle of a long, bleak and damp tunnel, to which we are all about to return.”

But “change is on the horizon”, said BBC weather presenter Chris Fawkes. In the last week of February the Atlantic jet stream is returning to the far northwest of Scotland, and there is a possibility that high pressure may bring “more settled weather conditions” by the end of the month. “It’s a long way off, but it’s the least we deserve given just how wet and dull it’s been over recent weeks.”

Climate change has led to a marked decrease in salaries across the country, including in places that haven’t experienced significant temperature changes. The problem is likely not limited to the U.S. and is expected to worsen without intervention.

Heating costs

Global warming has cut incomes in the U.S. by 12% since 2000, according to a study published in the journal PNAS. “A lot of the real cost comes from how temperature changes across the whole country ripple through prices and trade,” Derek Lemoine, an economics professor at the University of Arizona and a lead author of the study, said in a statement.

Climate change has a substantial effect on the economy. Heat “reduces productivity, lowers crop yields and changes how people spend money,” said ZME Science. These events “feed into the price of goods and shipping across state lines.” And temperatures in “California or Iowa can influence income in Arizona,” said Lemoine.

Temperature was used as the metric of measurement because it can be “tracked everywhere and provides a consistent way to link climate change to economic activity,” said the statement. Nonetheless, there are “uncertainties,” said the BBC. The “true income hit could plausibly sit anywhere from 2% to 22%, according to the study’s confidence interval.” The study also excluded losses from “specific extreme weather events, such as hurricanes or wildfires.”

It only tracked temperatures in the U.S. and not the global impact, but similar trends are likely present in other countries. “What does not change, though, is that climate change has caused losses of at least several percent,” Lemoine said to the BBC. “These losses are driven by how it altered weather elsewhere in the country, not by how it altered a county’s local weather.”

Domino effect

While temperature can affect national trade routes, it also “affects workers’ productivity, agricultural yields and how people spend their time,” said the BBC. All could “affect income directly and could affect the prices of traded goods.” In addition, the shift can influence the supply of natural resources, which directly correlates to prices. “Recognizing economic losses that have already occurred illustrates the importance of resilience planning for businesses,” said Lemoine.

Understanding how climate change has impacted the economy can help determine what actions can be taken. “If you want to decide where to direct adaptation resources, you have to know what’s already happening on the ground,” said Lemoine. “Measuring the current economic effects of climate change helps businesses and policymakers understand where risks are emerging right now.” And the risks are only expected to increase. The global economy could also be significantly altered and likely already has.

A similar type of risk analysis should continue. Agencies could “update estimates like this regularly, making climate damage a standard economic indicator reported alongside employment or inflation,” said ZME Science. Climate change is “pervasive,” said Lemoine. “Climate adaptation must mean more than just protection against local weather.”

The planet has incurred a watery debt. Society is using far more water than is ecologically sustainable, leading us to what's called water bankruptcy. The problem is only going to worsen with climate change, population growth and technological expansion that continuously increase water demand. And while some water sources can still be protected, many places may have already reached a point of no return.

What's water bankruptcy?

We are using up water sources faster than they can be replenished, essentially putting us in water debt. In “many basins and aquifers, long-term water use has exceeded renewable inflows and safe depletion limits,” said a report by the United Nations. Other water sources, including rivers, lakes, wetlands, soils and glaciers, have been “damaged beyond realistic prospects of full recovery.”

Like financial bankruptcy, water bankruptcy happens gradually. We “pull a little more groundwater during dry years. We use bigger pumps and deeper wells. We transfer water from one basin to another. We drain wetlands and straighten rivers to make space for farms and cities,” said Kaveh Madani, the director of the UN University’s Institute for Water, Environment and Health and author of the report, at The Conversation. After that, the costs begin to pile up. “Lakes shrink year after year. Wells need to go deeper. Rivers that once flowed year-round turn seasonal. Salty water creeps into aquifers near the coast. The ground itself starts to sink.” More cities are experiencing Day Zero events in which their municipal water systems are unable to provide for the whole population.

Before using the word “bankruptcy,” scientists used “water stress” or “water crisis,” both of which imply the possibility of recovery. “If you keep calling this situation a crisis, you’re implying that it’s temporary. It’s a shock. We can mitigate it,” said Madani to CNN. Though steps can still be taken, in acknowledging water bankruptcy, “you also need to adapt to a new reality,” and to “new conditions that are more restrictive than before.”

What does the future look like?

More than two billion people worldwide don’t have access to safe drinking water today, and roughly half of the world’s population is experiencing severe water scarcity for at least part of the year, according to the UN. Agriculture is one of the biggest drivers of global water usage. “Increasing agricultural water efficiency has been shown to only increase water use, since drip or sprinkler irrigation allows water to be gradually absorbed by plants,” said New Scientist, whereas the “flooding of fields results in more water running back into the river.” In addition, “population growth, urbanization and economic expansion have increased water demand for agriculture, industry, energy and cities,” said the report.

Climate change is only exacerbating the problem by “reducing precipitation in many areas of the world,” said Madani. Global warming “increases the water demand of crops and the need for electricity to pump more water” and also “melts glaciers that store fresh water.” The Middle East, North Africa, South Asia and the U.S. Southwest are especially struggling with climate vulnerability and high levels of water stress.

Even in places that do receive adequate rainfall, “more water is being sucked up by data centers or polluted by industry, sewage, fertilizers or manure,” said New Scientist. The expansion of AI is a particular risk to water sources, as data centers can “consume up to 5 million gallons per day, equivalent to the water use of a town populated by 10,000 to 50,000 people,” said the Environmental and Energy Study Institute.

Despite these challenges, water bankruptcy may be a “powerful bridge to promote cooperation to address some of the most critical security, peace, justice, development and sustainability challenges of our time,” said the UN report. Water is an “effective medium to fulfill the global environmental agenda.”

The 2011 Fukushima meltdown was a nightmare that all but shut down Japan’s nuclear power industry. But things change, and the country has now restarted the world’s largest nuclear power plant over the objections of neighbors who fear another calamity.

Restarting reactor No. 6 at Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear power plant northwest of Tokyo is a “milestone in Japan’s slow return to nuclear energy,” said The Guardian. Japan’s government wants to reduce the country’s carbon emissions and increase its energy security without relying on fossil fuels. But many of the 420,000 people living near the plant say the restart is “fraught with danger.” That makes the move a “human rights issue,” said resident Ryusuke Yoshida. Authorities refused calls to hold a referendum on the plant’s future, said The Guardian, but polls show “clear opposition to putting the reactor back online."

Japan shut down all 54 of the country’s reactors following the Fukushima incident, and has since restarted 14 of the 33 that remain operable, said CNN. The Kashiwazaki-Kariwa restart, though, is seen as a “watershed moment in the country’s return to nuclear energy,” said Reuters. Tokyo Electric Power Co., which also operated the Fukushima plant, said it has a host of new safety measures. The company has learned the lessons of the earlier disaster, officials say. “We remain firmly committed to never repeating such an accident,” a TEPCO spokesperson said.

What did the commentators say?

"Japan’s big nuclear restart is an economic inevitability,” said Yuriy Humber at Nikkei Asia. Restarting reactors can “help lower electricity bills” in a country still experiencing high inflation. A dormant nuclear plant, meanwhile, “still costs tens of millions of dollars a year to maintain,” while an operating plant can bring hundreds of millions in profit. Shifting dependence to liquid natural gas and coal would be “neither cheap nor sustainable.” All of this has long been true, but the trauma of Fukushima forced officials to take a path that is “slow, deliberate and shaped as much by psychology as by policy.”

The nuclear power industry in Japan “cannot simply be switched on again,” said Tadahiro Katsuta at Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Reactors once supplied 29% of the country’s electricity, but that number has dipped to 5% in the years since Fukushima. Renewable energy has started to fill the gap, and is expected to fulfill 40% or more of Japan’s energy needs by 2040. The bottom line, though, is that the Fukushima incident demonstrated the “claimed inherent safety of nuclear power is a myth.”

What next?

The return of Kashiwazaki-Kariwa’s reactor was delayed by a day. The restart was “originally scheduled to resume” on Jan. 20, said Bloomberg, but was put on hold “following an issue with an alarm.” The issue was not serious, a company spokesperson said to The Japan Times, but safety demands that TEPCO “respond sincerely whenever issues are identified.” The reactor went online on the morning of Jan. 21.