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.”

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.”

Warming temperatures from climate change will likely lead to high levels of physical inactivity in the future, which could have significant public health implications. Heat leads to dehydration, exhaustion and overall inhospitable conditions. Regions with less air conditioning and cooling facilities will see the highest reduction in activity, but without intervention, more places will be affected.

Running hot

Rising temperatures are “projected to increase the prevalence of physical inactivity, translating into additional premature deaths and productivity losses,” said a study published in The Lancet Global Health. The study analyzed data from 156 countries between 2000 and 2022 to create a model for future physical activity globally. The results showed that by 2050 “each additional month with an average temperature above 27.8°C (82°F) would increase physical inactivity by 1.5 percentage points globally and by 1.85 percentage points in low- and middle-income countries,” said a release about the study.

With this reduction in physical activity, there would be a “predicted 0.47-0.70 million additional premature deaths annually and $2.40-3.68 billion in productivity losses,” said the release. The effects were mostly concentrated in low- and middle-income countries, and “some hot spot countries closer to the equator show estimated increases in physical inactivity of more than 4 percentage points by 2050,” said The Washington Post. On the other hand, high-income countries had no discernible difference in physical activity levels because they tend to have better infrastructure to combat heat.

The inactivity levels would increase gradually. The “real-world picture is usually not that people suddenly stop moving altogether,” the study’s lead author Christian Garcia-Witulski, a research fellow at the Lancet Countdown Latin America and a professor at the Pontifical Catholic University of Argentina, said to the Post. Instead, “heat gradually erodes the safe, comfortable and practical opportunities people have to stay active in everyday life.” Warmer temperatures would hinder activities such as “jogging outdoors or walking to work, particularly in areas which don’t have strong adaptive measures like proper shading or cool pavements,” said Time.

Internal conflict

Even without the climate pressure, “nearly one third (31%) of the world’s adult population, 1.8 billion adults, are physically inactive,” said the World Health Organization (WHO). Between 2010 and 2022, the number of people who “do not meet the global recommendations of at least 150 minutes of moderate-intensity physical activity per week” increased by 5%. Climate change is only expected to increase the number further. While lower-income countries face the brunt of the decrease in physical activity, “the pattern was not uniform,” and “some colder areas, such as North America, Argentina and South Africa, also report high rates of physical inactivity,” said the study.

“Outdoor laborers, street vendors and subsistence farmers cannot easily shift physical exertion to cooler hours,” said the study. Also, “women and adolescents often lack access to climate-controlled recreational spaces.” Physical activity “contributes to prevention and management of noncommunicable diseases such as cardiovascular diseases, cancer and diabetes and reduces symptoms of depression and anxiety,” said WHO.

“The link between physical inactivity and chronic diseases is so strong that any compromise to achieving regular exercise” will “pose broad public health risks,” Jonathan Patz, the chair of health and the environment at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said to the Post. Prioritizing reducing greenhouse gas emissions as well as building cooling infrastructure will be necessary for human health.

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.

While 2026 is less than three months old, this year has already seen its fair share of avalanches. This includes one that slammed into a train in the Swiss Alps, injuring five people, and a recent occurrence near Lake Tahoe that killed nine skiers — the deadliest in California’s history. And a major factor is contributing to how hazardous these avalanches are, according to scientists: climate change.

Why are avalanches getting worse?

A decrease in snow caused by a warmer planet may be making avalanches worse. People “might assume that increasing global temperatures would lead to fewer avalanches,” said The Independent. But rising temperatures can “increase the risk of avalanches,” especially at altitudes of 6,500 feet or higher.

At these higher elevations that see more snowfall, climate change can “increase the risk of ‘wet’ avalanches, which contain more liquid from rain or melted snow,” said The Independent. These are avalanches that “travel less far and more slowly than dry snow avalanches,” but they are also “denser, so they can exert greater pressure and impact,” Nicolas Eckert, a mountain risk specialist at the French National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and Environment, said to Le Monde.

Scientists investigating the Lake Tahoe disaster are “pointing to a combination of heavy snow on top of an unstable snow pack as conditions that led to the avalanche,” said The New York Times. Some have also pointed to atmospheric ‘rivers’ that “occur when a high-altitude current of moisture flows from the tropical ocean regions.” These rivers over the Pacific Ocean are “becoming wetter and warmer,” and when they pass over the Western U.S., they could “lead to heavy snowfall in higher mountain elevations even as the number of snowy days decreases.”

In some areas of Europe, this lack of snow could be problematic. When it “does not snow for some time, the surface snow is exposed to warming during the day and colder temperatures at night,” said The Sydney Morning Herald. The snow’s crystals then become unstable, like “standing up a deck of cards on their end all the way across the snow pack,” Craig Sheppard, the program manager for the Mountain Safety Collective, said to the Herald. When the next snowfall arrives, it creates a “recipe for avalanches because you have snow sitting on a really weak grain.”

What can be done?

Many experts say the best solution is proper avalanche safety. About “90% of slides that cause an injury or death are triggered by the victim or a companion,” said The Associated Press. Avalanches travel fast and can’t be outrun, so the best “plan is to make sure you’re not in a place where one is at risk of occurring.” The National Avalanche Center allows outdoor enthusiasts to track avalanche threats and warnings across the U.S.

Despite avalanches happening less often these days, when they do, they are increasingly likely to be deadly. Over the “last 10 winters, an average of 27 people died in avalanches each winter in the United States,” according to the Colorado Avalanche Information Center. Still, there is no way to determine the exact number of people in such avalanches, as “most nonfatal avalanche incidents are not reported.”

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.

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.”

Free-living amoebas, which are single-celled organisms that do not require a host to live, pose a dangerous threat to humans. They are prevalent in both natural water sources and drinking water systems. They are also notoriously difficult to kill and can harbor other pathogens. More research needs to be done to effectively control amoebic disease spread.

A Trojan horse

Amoebas’ “widespread presence in both natural and engineered environments poses significant exposure risks through contaminated water sources, recreational water activities and drinking water systems,” said a paper published in the journal Biocontaminant. While most species are harmless, there is a subset that can have serious public health consequences, like Naegleria fowleri, the brain-eating amoeba.

The brain-eating amoeba is not the only one to be worried about. Others can “cause painful eye infections, particularly in contact lens users, skin lesions in people with weakened immune systems and rare but serious systemic infections affecting organs such as the lungs, liver and kidneys,” Manal Mohammed, a senior lecturer of medical microbiology at the University of Westminster, said at The Conversation. The level of human exposure to amoebas is “likely substantially underestimated,” said the study, as “amoebic infections are prone to clinical misdiagnosis as other diseases.”

Free-living amoebas have the “ability to change shape and move using temporary arm-like extensions called pseudopodia,” or “false feet,” Mohammed said. This allows them to thrive in even the most inhospitable of environments, including extremely high temperatures and in the presence of strong cleaning chemicals like chlorine. Along with their resilience, amoebas “act as hidden carriers for other harmful microbes,” said a release about the paper. “By sheltering bacteria and viruses inside their cells, amoebae can protect these pathogens from disinfection and help them persist and spread in drinking water systems.” This is known as the Trojan horse effect, and it can contribute to the prevalence of antibiotic resistance.

Deep water

Unfortunately, “most water systems are not routinely checked for free-living amoebas,” said Mohammed. Since they can be rare, and may “hide in biofilms or sediments,” they “require specialized tests to detect, making routine monitoring expensive and technically challenging.” Generally, water testing “relies on proper chlorination, maintaining disinfectant levels and flushing systems regularly,” which can help but does not guarantee the removal of amoeba. There is a lack of knowledge on how to deal with amoebas, making it “challenging to establish science-based regulatory standards for water treatment that are guaranteed to be effective against all threatening species,” said the study.

The problem is also likely to worsen because of climate change. The rising temperatures are “expanding the geographic range of heat-loving amoebae into regions where they were previously rare,” said the release. Mitigating the spread “requires comprehensive strategies combining enhanced surveillance, rapid diagnostics and targeted environmental interventions,” said the study. There should also be more public awareness about the risk of amoebic infections, especially in natural bodies of water.

“Amoebae are not just a medical issue or an environmental issue,” Longfei Shu, the author of the study, said in the release. “They sit at the intersection of both, and addressing them requires integrated solutions that protect public health at its source.”

An MP has warned that “food security is national security” as concerns grow about the risk of food shortages in the UK.

Sharing photos of empty supermarket shelves in his Shetland constituency on social media, Lib Dem MP Alistair Carmichael said they were “your handy cut-out-and-keep guide to food security and why it matters”. He told his followers that “the next time someone tells you that we can rely on imports for our food needs, show them these pictures”.

Why has the alarm been raised?

“Food policy across much of the world is changing. But not in Britain,” said The Guardian. As the “prices of essentials rise”, this approach “may be a costly mistake”, because the “climate emergency, geopolitical tensions and the fragility of just-in-time supply chains” are putting huge pressure on food supplies in the UK.

Elsewhere, Sweden, Finland, Norway and Germany are “rebuilding stocks dismantled after the cold war”, Egypt and Bangladesh are “boosting similar programmes”, while Brazil and Indonesia are "also expanding their reserves”. But the UK has “no substantial public food reserves”.

In a letter to The Guardian, farmer Richard Harvey warned that we could face “economic and political breakdown and anarchy”.

What measures are in place? 

Britain’s current strategy “rests almost entirely on global markets and private intentions”, said The Guardian. This approach, “shaped by decades of liberalised trade”, means that even if there’s a war, official advice “focuses on households stockpiling essentials”, because in Britain, food security is about “prices, not scarcity of supply”.

Things might change, however. Last summer, the government launched a new food strategy, aiming to build “improved resilience of the supply chain” with “reduced impact of shocks and chronic risks on access to healthy and sustainable food”. It wants to make “nutritious, locally grown” British food “more accessible and affordable for all”.

What more could be done?

But the national food strategy is “only the first step [in] tackling this problem”, said the Economics Observatory. “Fortunately, there are several useful ways to calm the coming storm”, including modelling food systems on computers or deploying “serious games” – a policy tool that “tests potential interventions that increase the resilience of the food system”.

Public buffer stocks can serve as shock absorbers, steadying prices and ensuring physical supply, argued a 2024 paper published in the journal Industrial and Corporate Change. Countries without buffers can become vulnerable to inflation, so food reserves “make sense”, said The Guardian.

Stocks can be “accumulated when prices are low” and released when “inflation spikes” or supply is limited. The short-term losses "should be understood as the price of resilience”, like flood defences.

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.”

Lizards, crocodiles and turtles have some rocky times ahead. Warming temperatures have the potential to drastically alter the reproductive ability of reptiles, affecting their genetic breakdown as well as their evolution. With worsening climate change plus habitat degradation, pollution and other human influences, maintaining populations is likely going to be an uphill battle.

Sexual seesaw

Temperature can have a significant effect on reptiles’ diversity. Their sex genetics tend to “differ from typical vertebrates in that their sex is not determined by their genes,” said Scientific American. Rather, the “temperature of their nest pushes them toward becoming male or female.” This is called Temperature-Dependent Sex Determination (TSD). A world of increased heat from climate change means that “entire generations of sexually reproducing reptiles will be dramatically skewed male or female.” This shifts the entire balance of species. Some scientists have predicted there could be only one sex of alligators by the year 2100.

Unfortunately, this development may lead to a “sexpocalypse” that spells the end of some species. “Mating opportunities will decline; populations might become inbred,” said Scientific American. In addition, “surviving members of a species that’s already dwindling from other pressures might not be able to find a partner with whom to make babies.” As a result, “these ancient creatures — who have survived since the era of the dinosaurs — simply won’t be able to find mates to sustain the next generation,” said NBC.

Along with the sex breakdown of reptile species, temperatures can also impact their genetic diversity, according to a study published in the journal PLOS Genetics. The study found that extreme temperatures can “alter the genetic recombination” of the Guibé’s ground gecko (Paroedura guibeae), a “small reptile living in the warm ecosystems of Madagascar,” said a release about the study. Genetic recombination is a process where DNA is exchanged between chromosomes, and it “generates genetic diversity, which increases the probability of a species adapting to climate changes.” It also “influences evolution by determining which genetic combinations are passed on to descendants.”

Downward slide

The survival of reptiles is highly dependent on their ability to adapt. Reptiles are some of the oldest animals on Earth and have outlasted “dramatic climate shifts, living through ice ages and intense heat,” said Scientific American. Reptiles at risk “might be able to keep their eggs cool and their sex ratios steady by nesting earlier in the year or in shadier places or by digging deeper in the ground.” However, this would “depend on the animals perceiving the temperature shift” and having the “capacity to do things differently.”

Many reptiles also face additional dangers, giving them even worse odds of survival. “For reptiles that already face habitat loss and pollution, this genetic sensitivity adds a quiet risk,” said Earth.com. The good news is that by “knowing the genetic makeup of males and females, scientists can predict how changes in temperature might affect sex ratios in the wild.” Global warming “not only affects the climate, but also influences the adaptation mechanisms of animals to survive,” said Laura González Rodelas, a co-author of the study, in a statement.

One of the oldest icebergs that has ever been tracked is feeling the blues. The megaberg A23a is most likely on its last legs, and has been captured turning blue because of meltwater. The iceberg was once the largest in the world, though it has been drastically shrinking and is now just a fraction of its former size. Given these changes, experts believe it won’t be around for much longer.

Blue period

Iceberg A23a is “sopping with blue meltwater and on the verge of complete disintegration,” said a NASA news release. The space agency’s Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) captured an image of the blue waterlogged iceberg at the end of December, then just a day later, an astronaut on the International Space Station took a “photograph showing a closer view of the iceberg” that had an “even more extensive melt pool.”

In parts of the iceberg, the “ponded water appears a deep, vivid blue, suggesting depths of several meters,” said New Scientist. The water volume “probably runs into billions of liters,” which is “enough to fill thousands of Olympic‑sized swimming pools.” The “weight of the water” is “sitting inside cracks in the ice and forcing them open," Ted Scambos, a senior research scientist at the University of Colorado Boulder, said in the NASA release. The images also showed a “thin white line around the outer edge of the iceberg seemingly holding in blue meltwater,” in a “‘rampart-moat’ pattern caused by an upward bending of the iceberg plate as its edges melt at the waterline.”

A23a broke off from Antarctica’s Filchner Ice Shelf in 1986, and it was over 1,500 square miles in size. Today, it is just about 456 square miles, which is a little bigger than New York City. In July, August and September of 2025, the iceberg “saw some sizable breakups as it moved into the Southern Hemisphere’s relatively warm summer conditions,” said Popular Science. It is currently drifting in the South Atlantic between the eastern tip of South America and South Georgia Island.

End of an era

The megaberg will likely not last through the austral summer, or the summer months in the Southern hemisphere. All signs indicate that A23a is “just days or weeks from totally disintegrating as it rides currents that are pushing it toward even warmer waters,” said CBS News. “Warmer air temperatures during this season could also speed up A23a’s demise in an area that ice experts have dubbed a ‘graveyard’ for icebergs.” Climate change will probably lead other icebergs to a similar fate.

Iceberg A23a has been on scientists’ radar for a while. After not moving for a long time, it began to drift in 2020. It got caught in the Antarctic Circumpolar Current, where it was stuck spinning in 2024. When it began moving again, it was on course to crash into an island in 2025, though it didn’t end up making contact. Turning blue is just the next chapter in the megaberg’s long saga.

“I’m incredibly grateful that we’ve had the satellite resources in place that have allowed us to track it and document its evolution so closely,” Chris Shuman, a retired scientist from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, said in the NASA release. “A23a faces the same fate as other Antarctic bergs, but its path has been remarkably long and eventful. It’s hard to believe it won’t be with us much longer.”

What happened

President Donald Trump on Wednesday signed an executive order suspending U.S. participation in dozens of international organizations, including the landmark United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The White House said Trump determined that the 66 treaties and organizations, 31 of which are U.N. entities, “operate contrary to U.S. national interests.”

Who said what

Many of the organizations Trump is targeting are obscure or narrow in focus, like the International Cotton Advisory Committee, but the 1992 UNFCCC is the “bedrock international agreement that forms the basis for countries to rein in climate change,” The New York Times said. The U.S. withdrawal, “amid the hottest decade ever recorded,” appears to be Trump’s “latest attempt to destabilize global climate cooperation,” Politico said.

Making the U.S. the “only country in the world not a part of the UNFCCC treaty” is “shortsighted, embarrassing and foolish,” said former EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy in a statement. Trump is “forfeiting our country’s ability to influence trillions of dollars in investments, policies and decisions that would have advanced our economy.” Other organizations on Trump’s withdrawal list are the Global Counterterrorism Forum, the gender equality–focused UN Women and the U.N.'s Population Fund for family planning and maternal health, International Law Commission and Peacebuilding Commission.

What next?

The U.S. exit from the UNFCCC, unanimously ratified by the Senate in 1992, will take effect a year after Trump files formal notice with the U.N. Trump’s second-term withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement, which is undergirded by the UNFCCC, becomes official on Jan. 20. The U.S. is also the only country to pull out of the Paris deal.

Arctic marine life is notoriously difficult to study because of its remoteness. But drones have enabled whales to be monitored and diagnosed while being minimally invasive, according to a new study.

Arctic air

By having drones collect samples of whale breath or “blow” from humpback, sperm and fin whales in the northeast Atlantic to screen for pathogens, researchers have “confirmed for the first time that a potentially deadly whale virus” is “circulating above the Arctic Circle,” said a news release about the study published in the journal BMC Veterinary Research. Cetacean morbillivirus can cause “immunosuppression and severe disease in cetaceans,” said NPR. The disease has previously caused “several mass die-offs” of whales, dolphins and porpoises.

When whales come to the surface of the ocean to breathe, they “release a plume of air mixed with microscopic droplets from their blowholes,” said Discover. The droplets “carry traces of cells, microbes and viruses from the animals’ respiratory systems.”

To collect them, researchers “hovered the drone over a whale that looked like it was about to blow” and then “captured the exhales on petri dishes” attached to it, said NPR. The droplets were screened to find pathogens similar to how diseases are identified in humans.

Virus vigilance

Species in these regions are difficult to monitor. Usually, collecting samples from wild whales requires “getting close to them in a boat and then shooting a dart gun to snag a small skin sample,” said NPR. And most collected samples are from dead whales.

“Drone blow sampling is a game changer,” Terry Dawson, a professor at King’s College in London and a co-author of the study, said in the release. It “allows us to monitor pathogens in live whales without stress or harm, providing critical insights into diseases in rapidly changing Arctic ecosystems.”

“Dense winter feeding aggregations, where whales, seabirds and humans interact closely, could increase the risk of viral transmission,” said Oceanographic. Drone surveillance can also identify deadly threats to other marine life before they spread.

The “priority is to continue using these methods for long-term surveillance, so we can understand how multiple emerging stressors will shape whale health in the coming years,” Helena Costa, the lead author of the study, said in the release. While there “aren’t protocols to treat a sick whale,” the animals can still be helped by “reducing their stress during illness by, for example, temporarily altering shipping lanes to avoid them,” said NPR. Or if a whale is “carrying a disease that can spread to humans, governments can limit whale-people interactions.”

Climate change is warming the seas, and Arctic marine life is facing other threats too, including “shifting prey," said Discover. "Expanding shipping routes and growing human presence are altering habitats that many species rely on for feeding and migration.” And infectious disease can “compound those pressures, particularly when animals are stressed or concentrated in smaller areas.”

Polar bears are leaping through their evolution in real time as rising temperatures threaten their habitat. A population of bears was found in a climate warmer than one in which they usually exist, showing genetic differences from their colder-weather counterparts. Those differences could be key to the survival of the species, and may prove how other animals and humans could evolve in the future.

Hot and cold

An isolated colony of polar bears found in southeast Greenland “inhabits a warmer climate zone, akin to the predicted future environments of polar bears with vastly reduced sea ice habitats,” said a study published in the journal Mobile DNA. The subpopulation is particularly interesting as it may have had a “200-year start on developing advantageous genetic changes for survival in this shifting landscape,” said Popular Mechanics.

Researchers analyzed blood samples from polar bears located in northeastern and southeastern Greenland. The results showed that “some genes linked to heat-stress, aging and metabolism” were “behaving differently” in the southern bears compared to the northern ones, Alice Godden, a co-author of the study, said in an article for The Conversation.

This difference can be attributed to “jumping genes,” or transposons, which are “mobile pieces of a gene that can move around to influence how other genes work,” said Popular Mechanics. “By comparing these bears’ active genes to local climate data, we found that rising temperatures appear to be driving a dramatic increase in the activity of jumping genes within the southeastern Greenland bears’ DNA,” Godden said in a statement.

Jumping genes are like “puzzle pieces that can rearrange themselves, sometimes helping animals adapt to new environments,” said Godden. In this case, researchers “found active jumping genes in parts of the genome that are involved in areas tied to fat processing,” which is “important when food is scarce.” This could mean that the southern polar bears are “slowly adapting to eating the rougher plant-based diets that can be found in the warmer regions,” while the “northern populations of bears eat mainly fatty seals.” The polar bear genome comprises approximately 38.1% jumping genes, compared to 45% in humans.

Up and down

Because of climate change, more than two-thirds of polar bears are predicted to be extinct by 2050, and total extinction is expected by 2100. Arctic Ocean temperatures are also “continuing to rise, reducing vital sea ice platforms that the bears use to hunt seals, leading to isolation and food scarcity,” said the statement. Scientists believe this is the “first documented case of rising temperatures driving genetic change in a mammal,” said NBC News.

While the genetic changes “provide a genetic blueprint for how polar bears might be able to adapt quickly to climate change,” it “does not mean that polar bears are at any less risk of extinction,” Godden said. It is still required that we “do more to mitigate our carbon emissions to help provide and extend this window of opportunity to help save this wonderful, vital species.” Since humans also have transposons in their genome, our DNA sequence also has the potential to change and evolve, “but environmental stress, such as warmer climates, can accelerate this process,” said the statement.

O data, where art thou? Apparently, in the wrong place. The large majority of AI data centers have been constructed in locations that are not ideal for efficiency or environmental protection. And warming temperatures are making more places increasingly unsuitable, with the potential to stress water and electric resources.

Where are these data centers?

Of the 8,808 operational data centers worldwide as of October 2025, almost 7,000 are located in areas outside the optimal temperature range for operation, according to an analysis by Rest of World. The ideal temperature range for data centers is from 64.4 to 80.6 degrees Fahrenheit. But the majority of centers are in “regions with average temperatures that are colder than the range,” and only 600, or less than 10% of all operational data centers, are located in areas where average temperatures are above the upper limit. While cold temperatures could affect efficiency, high temperatures are the biggest risk for the centers. Cooling the centers will be a huge environmental drain, an operation that requires substantial amounts of water.

In 21 countries, including Singapore, Thailand, Nigeria and the United Arab Emirates, all of the data centers are located in areas with too-hot average temperatures. Specifically, Singapore has “temperatures hovering around 91.4 F, with humidity levels frequently above 80%,” said Tom’s Hardware. Despite this, the “country hosts more than 1.4 gigawatts of operational capacity, and authorities have approved several hundred additional megawatts under tighter efficiency controls.” Meanwhile, “all data centers in Norway and South Korea, and nearly all data centers in Japan, are in regions with temperatures below” 64.4 degrees, said the analysis. As climate change worsens, more locations are going to become too hot for data centers.

How is the US building them?

The U.S. is also rapidly expanding its AI capabilities and building in the wrong locations, according to a study published in the journal Nature Sustainability. Currently, the most common locations for data centers in the country are California, Virginia and the greater Southwest. Unfortunately, these regions have notable environmental issues, including water scarcity. The true extent of environmental damage is also still being discovered. The country “doesn’t have a clear sense of what the AI boom is doing to U.S. resources” yet, said Built In. “We don’t really know how much strain these data centers put on aquifers, power plants or local grids, or how much pollution nearby communities can reasonably absorb.”

As AI expansion does not appear to be going anywhere, being strategic about where data centers are built can reduce their environmental impact. “Concentrating AI server deployment in Midwestern states,” especially Texas, Montana, Nebraska and South Dakota, is “optimal, given their abundant renewables, low water scarcity and favorable projected unit water and carbon intensities,” said the study. These states also “possess substantial untapped wind and solar resources, enabling robust green power portfolios and reducing competition with other sectors.”

Additional solutions are also being considered as the demand for data increases. Building centers in space and relying on solar energy is one of them. Underground and underwater resources are another possibility. While “best practices may reduce emissions and water footprints by up to 73% and 86%, respectively,” said the study, “their effectiveness is constrained by current energy infrastructure limitations.”

The outgoing year was a mixed one in the fight against global warming. While some countries, including the UK, continued to make positive steps towards net zero, the return of Donald Trump to the White House exacerbated an already fraying international climate consensus. But a series of scientific breakthroughs in 2025 holds out some hope for a greener future. Here are seven of the most promising:

Carbon dioxide satellite tracking

A novel satellite-based method to track fossil fuel CO2 emissions with greater precision than ever before marks a “significant advancement for climate monitoring”, said Open Access Government. “Traditional methods” such as “ground-based measurements and bottom-up inventories, are often resource-intensive and prone to inaccuracies”.

Researchers at Tsinghua University used nitrogen dioxide – which has a shorter atmospheric lifetime and enhanced detectability – as a “proxy” for CO₂, to successfully trial a “more reliable and scalable solution for monitoring emissions”.

Automated food waste upcycling

AI-powered food waste management uses real-time data and predictive analytics to monitor, categorise, and reduce food waste. Food scraps can effectively be upcycled into resources for “composting and biogas systems”, said The Sweaty Penguin environmental podcast.

One of the 10 environmental tech breakthroughs for 2025 compiled by the World Economic Forum and published in science journal Frontiers, this technology can also support “nutrient cycling” by enabling food waste to be returned to soil systems. Automated waste sorting can also “separate food waste from plastic waste, reducing plastics and organics going into landfills, producing quality compost for agriculture, while helping slash methane, CO2 and nitrous oxide emissions”.

Gene variant protects rice from rising temperatures

After more than 10 years, Chinese researchers led by plant geneticist Yibo Li of Huazhong Agricultural University have discovered a naturally occurring gene variant that can preserve both the yield and quality of rice from excessive heat. Rising temperatures are a “major and growing threat to rice production”, said Science, citing a 2004 study that found yields fell by 10% for every degree Celsius average night-time air temperature rose.

The impact of this “major breakthrough” could “ultimately be even broader than rice” as the same gene variant can be found in other cereals, such as wheat and corn, that are at a similar risk from heat, said Argelia Lorence, a plant biochemist at Arkansas State University.

Sodium batteries make electric flight possible

The sodium-air fuel cell – designed by a team led by Yet-Ming Chiang, a professor of materials science and engineering at MIT – works by combining liquid sodium with oxygen drawn from the air in a continuous reaction. The device is “based on well-established electrochemical principles”, said The Times, but “unlike conventional batteries, which must be recharged, it is designed to be refuelled, with its energy-rich material being replaced as it is consumed”.

While still in the experimental stage, sodium batteries could eventually lead to electric-powered flight which is more sustainable and much cheaper even than non-petroleum aviation fuel. In laboratory tests, the MIT sodium-air fuel cell prototype delivered more than five times as much energy per kilogram as the lithium-ion batteries currently used in electric cars. It also produces sodium hydroxide as a by-product which could be used to absorb CO2 from the atmosphere or turned into sodium bicarbonate which could help de-acidify the ocean, a problem caused by carbon emissions. It is an “essentially free” by-product, “producing environmental benefits at no cost”, said Chiang.

Microplastic referencing

The dangers of microplastics to the environment and human health are well documented, but tracking microplastic pollution remains complicated. Now, in a world first, the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre has developed reference material to measure polyethylene terephthalate (PET) particles, commonly found in packaging and textiles, in water.

Already being used to update key EU regulations such as the revised EU Drinking Water Directive, the JRC’s reference material “lays the groundwork for coordinated global action” on microplastics, said Open Access Government.

Clean energy from toxic waste

Bio-tar – the thick liquid by-product produced when heating biomass and organic matter – has long been viewed as toxic to the environment and an unavoidable cost of renewable energy production. But new research by scientists at the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences has found that instead of being treated as waste, bio-tar can be converted into “bio-carbon”, a “novel material with applications ranging from water purification to clean energy storage”, said Science Daily.

“Turning bio-tar into bio-carbon not only solves a technical problem for the bio-energy industry, but also opens the door to producing advanced carbon materials with high economic value,” said senior author Dr Zonglu Yao.

Green concrete

Manufacturing Portland cement, the key binding ingredient in concrete, currently contributes around 8% of global CO2 emissions. The development of “novel cement-free green concrete technologies” offer an “alternative by eliminating Portland cement altogether and instead using binders derived from industrial byproducts or construction and demolition waste”, according to a World Economic Forum report.

This process “not only eliminates emissions from traditional cement production but also creates a permanent storage route for captured CO₂”. Together, these advances “cut demand for extracted raw materials and ease pressure on planetary boundaries related to climate change, land-system change, and biogeochemical flows”.

Some people may be dreaming of a white Christmas when they wake up on Dec. 25, but for many parts of the world, climate change could soon make this a rare event. And snowfall is not the only part of the holiday that could be affected by extreme weather patterns, as everything from Christmas tree affordability to the prevalence of reindeer could be impacted.

How is holiday weather changing?

Climate change is “causing temperatures to rise across the country, and it’s impacting precipitation patterns,” said Time. In the last 75 years, temperatures in December have “warmed three to five degrees” nationwide, David Robinson, a New Jersey climatologist and Rutgers University professor, said to Time.

This small change in the global temperature “could mean the difference between snow and rain” on Christmas Day, said Time. And such a pattern has already been seen for years. From 2003 to 2024, the “average Christmas morning snow cover blanketed just 36% of the contiguous U.S. states,” according to National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration data cited by Time, though this also factors in areas of the country like southern California, where it rarely snows.

A person’s memory of Christmastime may also play into the phenomenon, whether this frosty recollection is accurate or not. People “tend to remember that one snowy Christmas, and they forget that it was surrounded by five Christmases that weren’t,” Robinson said to Time. This could be contributing to some of the skewed memories of past Christmases.

What else is impacted?

While the drive to the store for Christmas gifts may not be covered in snow, once shoppers arrive, they may be even more disappointed. Many of the “most lucrative Christmas commodities are grown” in areas that are being transformed by climate change, said Mother Jones. In African countries over the past few years, plummeting cacao yields altered the production of cocoa, which goes into “all sorts of holiday classics — from yule log cakes to marshmallow-topped cocoa.” This “points to a new normal in a climate-driven shift,” said Harvard University’s Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability.

People’s Christmas trees may look different in future years too, as “modern-day circumstances are slowly transforming the tree-farming industry,” said CBC News. Beyond the weather shifting growing conditions for trees, the “high cost of land is also having an impact on the industry,” Kelsey Leonard, the founder and director of the Christmas Tree Lab at Canada’s University of Waterloo, said to CBC News. People may think plastic trees are the solution, but their environmental repercussions are troublesome. Many “artificial trees are some type of plastic by-product, which is a product of fossil fuel consumption,” said Leonard.

Not even classic Christmas characters like Rudolph will be able to avoid the changing climate; global warming could cause a 50% decline in the global reindeer population by the end of the 21st century, according to a study in the journal Science. Population decline could be particularly bad in North America, where “projected losses are expected to exceed 80%.” This may be catastrophic for the only species of deer “adapted to year-round occupancy of the Arctic.”

The world’s supply of glacial ice is quickly approaching an alarming milestone, as the planet continues heating to disruptive new heights. In a striking study published this week in Nature Climate Change, researchers modeling multiple warming scenarios predict the number of glaciers that disappear annually is set to dramatically increase in the coming decades.

The paper introduces the concept of “peak glacier extinction,” defined by researchers as the “year in which the largest number of glaciers is projected to disappear between now and the end of the century.” Peak glacier extinction is the point when anywhere from 2,000 to 4,000 glaciers will disappear annually. With the Alps leading our planet’s glacial disappearing act, the next few years may be a turning point for much of Earth’s ice.

‘We will lose a lot of glaciers’

Although typical glacier studies focus on “mass and area loss,” the newly published research focuses on disappearances of “individual glaciers” — a trend that “directly threatens culturally, spiritually and touristically significant landscapes,” the study’s authors said. The number of individual glaciers is a “less clearly defined metric” that can be “influenced by observational limitations,” but tracking individual disappearances is “important from touristic, cultural and spiritual perspectives.”

The study’s authors used data on 200,000 glaciers obtained from a “database of outlines derived from satellite images” and applied “three global glacier models” to test the ranges under “different heating scenarios,” The Guardian said. Areas featuring the “smallest and fastest-melting glaciers” are “most vulnerable,” unsurprisingly, with about 3,200 glaciers in central Europe set to shrink by 87% by the coming century “even if global temperature rise is limited to 1.5 degrees Celsius.”

Regions with “larger glaciers,” such as Greenland and around the South Pole, would likely experience peak glacier disappearance “later in the century,” ABC News said. “The biggest findings,” the lead researcher and ETH Zurich glaciologist Lander Van Tricht said to the network, “are that we will lose a lot of glaciers.”

‘Point of no return’ for global glaciers

Whether or not we will be “witnessing the deaths of 2,000 or 4,000 glaciers” annually depends on “how much is done to rein in global heating,” CNN said. A mere 20% of global glaciers are expected to exist in 2100 “under 2.7 degrees Celsius of warming, compared to around 50% at 1.5 degrees.” At 4 degrees the world can expect a “nearly complete loss.”

The study shows we are at a “point of no return,” said Eric Rignot, a professor of Earth system science at the University of California at Irvine, to CNN. “Reforming a glacier would take decades if not centuries.” The researchers behind the study hope their paper, along with an accompanying database showing the “projected survival rate of each of the world’s 211,000 glaciers,” will help “assess climate impacts on local economies and ecosystems,” Politico said. Even for smaller, remote glaciers that may not affect water-levels or resources, a disappearance could “have a huge importance for tourism, for example,” Van Tricht said to Politico. “Every individual glacier can matter.”

What happened

More than 1,000 people have died and hundreds remain missing after catastrophic floods and landslides from tropical storms struck Southeast Asia, according to the latest death tolls. Sri Lanka reported 355 deaths from mudslides and flooding triggered by Cyclone Ditwah. A separate cyclone, Senyar, caused at least 502 deaths in Indonesia, 170 in Thailand and three in Malaysia.

Who said what

Much of the Indonesian island of Sumatra remains “cut off due to blocked roads, while damage to telecommunications infrastructure has hampered communication,” Reuters said. Hat Yai, the biggest city in Thailand’s hard-hit Songkhla province, recorded 13 inches of rain on Friday, “its highest single-day tally in 300 years, amid days of heavy downpours.” Sri Lankan President Anura Kumara Dissanayake Sunday declared a state of emergency to manage what he called the “largest and most challenging natural disaster in our history,” and the first to strike the entire country.

“Persistent bouts of the La Niña climate pattern are at least partially to blame for the flooding across the region,” as unusually warm oceans increase the moisture in the air, The Washington Post said. But “rising global temperatures have also made the atmosphere more waterlogged, fueling wetter and more dangerous storms.” Southeast Asia is “one of the areas most vulnerable to climate change,” said CNN.

What next?

As emergency response crews work to clear roads and get aid to people stuck without food or shelter, a “separate tropical storm, Koto, is expected to hit western Vietnam,” the latest in the “near-continuous string of storms” that have lashed Southeast Asia since mid-September, the Post said.

Blotting out the sun might not fix climate change, but it could pause the warming process. The idea of using planes to “geoengineer” the climate by spreading sunlight-reflecting aerosols throughout the earth’s atmosphere is controversial. It is also becoming closer to reality.

Stardust Solutions, an Israel-based company, wants to “do nothing less than dim the sun” with a plan “modeled on volcanoes,” said The New Yorker. Average global temperatures dropped in the aftermath of the Mount Pinatubo eruption in the Philippines in 1991. Stardust wants to “market eruptions of its own” using “highly reflective particles” sprayed across the stratosphere.

The plan comes with likely tradeoffs, with possible side effects including “shifts in regional weather patterns” that people depend on for crops. But continued warming may force a radical solution. The planet’s “climate and nature are already passing tipping points,” researchers said in a recent report.

Can geoengineering work?

Maybe. Until now, the idea of geoengineering the climate has been the province of “research papers, backyard debates and science fiction novels,” said Politico. Stardust’s pitch now means the idea is “effectively for sale.” The company has raised more than $60 million from investors, “far larger than any previous investment in solar geoengineering.” Scientists who warn of potential “environmental and geopolitical turmoil” from attempts to alter the earth’s climate are unsettled.

Using aerosols to dim the sun would be a “painkiller, not cure, for the climate crisis,” said Lara Williams at Bloomberg. Blanketing the stratosphere “masks the impact of greenhouse gas concentrations” instead of reversing them. There are concerns the technology could “cause acid rain, bring on asthma attacks” and “damage the ozone layer.”

But the temptation for a quick fix may win. Two-thirds of climate scientists said in a recent poll they expect “large-scale” geoengineering efforts by 2100, and more than half believe it will be the result of a “private company, billionaire or nation state going it alone.” Some say it is time for governments to get involved because Stardust “won’t be the last” company to offer a solution.

Why is geoengineering controversial?

“The political opposition in the U.S. is growing” just as geoengineering looks to become reality, said Alexander C. Kaufman at The Atlantic. The left side of the debate argues the “world should be talking only about mitigating emissions” and curbing fossil fuel use, while some on the right are using the prospect to play into “conspiracy theories about government manipulation of the atmosphere.” Florida and Tennessee have passed laws to block Stardust-style efforts. “The real fight over geoengineering is beginning.”

But if the U.S. does not act, other countries might. “Other powers may forge ahead” with geoengineering and other climate mitigation efforts, said the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. The European Union is taking a close look at the “social, engineering and climatological challenges” posed by such technologies. EU scientists, however, are “pessimistic about its potential” to pause climate change without adverse effects. Despite that, geoengineering could proceed, and America “could end up watching from the sidelines.”

In March, the World Meteorological Organisation reported that the concentration of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere had reached its highest level in the past 800,000 years – and continues to build.

The world has already warmed approximately 1.1-1.3°C above pre-industrial levels (i.e. from 1850 to 1900), and is on track for around 2.5-3°C of warming by 2100. Given that we don’t know what level of future emissions the world will produce, predicting future effects is very difficult.

What do we know about how Britain’s climate will change?

Subject to the uncertainties above, the Met Office’s latest projections show the UK getting substantially warmer and wetter overall, but with stark seasonal contrasts – wetter winters and significantly drier summers – and more extreme weather events.

Under a “medium emissions” scenario, Britain will warm by a couple of degrees by the end of the century against 1990 temperatures. The changes are regionally variable. London’s annual average temperature is likely to increase by 2-3°C. In summer, very hot days (30-35°C) will occur more often, and extreme days (35-40°C) will become increasingly commonplace. There will be an increase in average winter rainfall, and summers will be drier, but punctuated by intense storms.

What effects will this have?

In its 2025 report, the Climate Change Committee (CCC) lists five key risk areas for the UK. First, the threat from extreme weather to food production and nature (i.e. biodiversity and the ability of land, such as peat bogs, to sequester carbon). Second, the risk of infrastructure disruption: drought putting pressure on water supplies, extreme heat buckling railway lines, and so on. Third, the risk to properties from flooding and overheating. Fourth, the risk of heat-related deaths. Finally, the risk to economic prosperity from climate change. The CCC predicts that economic output could be reduced by up to 7% by 2050 (the Office for Budget Responsibility recently put this figure even higher).

Will food production be affected?

The effects are already being seen. In 2024, flooding followed by very dry weather damaged crops and drove up the price of animal feed. This year’s very low rainfall also affected yields. A study this year found that 86% of farmers had experienced extreme rainfall in the past five years, while drought had affected 78%.

Warming won’t be altogether negative: warmer weather will extend the growing season, and make some crops – chickpeas, oranges, grapes – viable. But dry summers will reduce yields of many staple crops, and of grass-fed livestock. Farmers may need to invest more in irrigation systems. Pollinators may be wiped out. Higher temperatures will allow pests and diseases to thrive. There are also the threats posed by flooding.

What effects will flooding have?

Since 1900, global sea levels have risen by around 16.5cm. Depending on emissions levels, the Met Office anticipates a sea level rise of between 0.3m and 1.15m by 2100, relative to 1990 levels, though around 0.5m is more probable. Rising sea levels cause coastal erosion, destroying homes and habitats, and increasing the likelihood of coastal flooding, which is a particular risk on the east coast. The Environment Agency assesses that 13% of agricultural land is already at risk of river or coastal flooding. The Government thinks more than half of the UK’s prime “Grade 1” agricultural land is at risk. According to the think-tank Climate Central, one-third of Lincolnshire – one of Britain’s most productive agricultural regions – is at risk of being below the annual flood level by 2050.

How will floods affect property?

The Environment Agency estimates that 6.3 million properties across England are now at risk from flooding from rivers, seas and surface water, and that this could rise to eight million by 2050 – one out of every four properties. One concern is that some areas will become uninsurable and thus uninhabitable; a government-backed scheme to provide insurance to vulnerable properties ends in 2039. In Tenbury Wells in Worcestershire, hit by floods in 2019, 2020, 2023 and 2024, some properties are already uninsurable.

How will public health be affected?

As summers heat up, the CCC estimates heat-related deaths could exceed 10,000 a year by 2050 (the long-term average for England and Wales is 634, but the hot summer of 2022 caused more than 4,500 heat-related deaths). A warming climate will also change disease patterns, creating a welcoming environment for food-borne bacterial infections such as salmonella and campylobacter, and for insect-borne diseases such as malaria and Lyme’s.

How can Britain adapt?

For the period to 2030, Labour has allocated more than £59 billion to achieving net-zero emissions. It spends far less on adaptation, though significant pledges have been made. Nine new industrial-scale reservoirs will be built by 2050 to address water shortages; and a £2.7 billion boost given to the £1 billion spent on flood defences annually. In 2022, the government identified 56 climate risks, from loss of native species to political instability abroad, and 12 opportunities (notably, the potential benefits of higher winter temperatures, and the growth of tourism). More than half of the risks were judged as needing “more action” in the near term.

As he arrived in Belém, Brazil, this month for Cop30, Energy Secretary Ed Miliband sought to downplay the impression of a fraying international consensus on climate action. The “action and the atmosphere” at the summit “in my view, already demonstrates that the doubters are wrong”, he said.

Although the outcome of the summit remains unclear, with delegates divided on whether to commit to a "road map" for phasing out fossil fuels, Miliband has doubled down on Britain’s commitment to tackling global warming. But the actions behind the government’s words paint a more complicated picture.

What did the commentators say?

Keir Starmer arrived in Brazil “armed with undeniable climate credentials”, said Politico’s Charlie Cooper. His government remains committed to achieving net zero by 2050, opening up clear water with the Conservatives who recently joined Reform in calling for the target to be scrapped. It can point to successes in reducing carbon emissions and promoting renewables, with a target of clean power meeting 95% of Britain’s energy demand by 2030, as well as the promise of hundreds of thousands of new green energy jobs.

At the same time, international aid spending which supports the UK’s global climate objectives has been slashed, ministers are exploring watering down a pledge to ban new licences for oil and gas exploration in the North Sea, and the Treasury is looking at easing the tax burden for fossil fuel companies. These contrasting policy positions “neatly capture the Starmer approach to climate action”, said Cooper. “If it suits the domestic economic and political agenda, great. If not, then there is no guarantee of No. 10 and Treasury support.”

The reality is that “far from leading the world on the path of righteousness, the UK is an example of how not to do energy and climate policy”, said Dieter Helm, professor of economic policy at the University of Oxford, in The Times. While UK territorial carbon emissions have been coming down, this “reflects more the transformation of the British economy, and not in a good way”. “Britain is a leader in deindustrialisation in Europe”, and much of its green energy industry relies on imports from China, who burn half the world’s coal.

Rather than inspiring the world to follow Britain’s example on climate, Starmer is “setting an example in nothing except how to ruin your economy and impoverish your people”, said The Sun.

What next?

Reform UK has launched an all-out war on what its deputy leader, Richard Tice, has called “net stupid zero”, pledging to tax solar farms and rip up green energy contracts if it wins power. The “challenge” for Miliband and his allies “will be to show that his mission is a net benefit, not a net cost”, said James Heale in The Spectator. As the economy becomes “less of a dividing line in British politics” energy policy “might take its place”.

The UK’s net-zero consensus has “broken down”, said Helm in The Times. Miliband and Starmer should “stop boasting of world leadership, stop claiming to be creating a ‘clean energy superpower’” and “face up to the facts”. The current net-zero agenda is not convincing the public or mitigating global warming: Miliband must “stop digging an ever-deeper energy policy hole”. What we need is “honesty” that meaningful decarbonisation “really costs”.

The Brazilian government has created 10 new Indigenous territories as the end of Cop30 approaches in Belém. The new legislation enshrines the protection of the environment and culture of Indigenous people living in these areas.

Opening the summit last week, Brazil’s president, Lula da Silva, said Cop30 would be “inspired by Indigenous peoples and traditional communities”, and this year’s edition welcomed the largest Indigenous delegation in the summit’s history. But talks have also been disrupted by Indigenous-led protesters who say much more needs to be done.

What did the commentators say?

The summit in Belém, which is situated at the mouth of the Amazon River system, marks an “unprecedented effort to elevate Indigenous voices”, said Danilo Urzedo, Oliver Tester and Stephen van Leeuwen on The Conversation. Around 1,000 Indigenous representatives were invited to take part in the summit, with a further 2,000 able to access spaces for activists and the public. It represents a recognition of the “unique knowledge” cultivated by Amazonian communities, those most vulnerable to the “direct consequences of climate change”.

But on Tuesday, Indigenous-led protesters clashed with security guards as they attempted to enter the conference venue, “highlighting tensions” around the Brazilian government’s claim that the summit was “open to Indigenous voices”, said Al Jazeera. Three days later, a peaceful protest prevented delegates from entering the venue for several hours.

Of particular concern is Cop30’s “emphasis on climate finance” rather than a total ban on disruptive activities like mining, logging and oil drilling in the Amazon basin. “We can’t eat money,” said one community leader.

Under the “rallying cry ‘Our land is not for sale’”, the demonstrations “brought global attention to injustices that climate politics have long tried to contain”, said The Conversation. With “unresolved land-tenure conflicts” compounded by the “rising violence faced by Indigenous communities on the frontline of climate impacts”, Cop30 and political shifts “reveal that effective environmental actions depend on dismantling power inequalities” in climate decisions.

Despite the palpable discontent, the fact that protests could even take place could be seen as a positive, said Politico. They show that “democratic” Brazil is different to previous “autocratic” hosts – Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and Azerbaijan – who have “little tolerance for demonstrations”.

What next?

Last year, President Lula’s government “recognised Indigenous possession of 11 territories”, said the BBC. As well as the 10 new territories, his administration also marked an “institutional milestone” by establishing a Ministry of Indigenous Peoples of Brazil, headed by Sônia Guajajara, who “is widely recognised for her leadership and activism in defending Indigenous rights”, said EuroNews.

Officially recognising Indigenous lands, which is known as demarcation, continues to be an “arduous” process, said The New York Times. The process is “filled with logistical and bureaucratic hurdles”, and before Monday’s announcement about the 10 new territories, there were “107 Indigenous land demarcation processes awaiting a final government decision”.

The worldwide effort to mitigate climate change is not going well. Fossil fuels are still burning, temperatures are rising and effects ranging from historic droughts to super-powered hurricanes are becoming the norm. Authorities are now thinking more about how to adapt.

Climate adaptation efforts are “climbing up the agenda” as the world deals with “record-breaking hot years and extreme weather disasters,” said the Financial Times. World leaders gathering this week for the COP30 climate summit in Brazil have an eye on “shoring up economies against climate change. There is a tension between those who believe “governments and businesses are being too slow” to adapt and those who worry adaptation will “distract and divert finances from efforts to reduce” greenhouse gas emissions. Mitigating climate change is necessary, but near-term adaptation is the “first half of our survival,” said COP30 President André Aranha Corrêa do Lago.

The big question is cost. Adaptation efforts would include everything from “funding air conditioners and fans” to “AI mapping of soil conditions to improve crop yields,” said Reuters. A new United Nations report says developing countries will need $310 billion a year to buy those and other tools, but “where that money will come from is unclear.”

What did the commentators say?

The world must “stop burning fossil fuels,” University College London’s Susannah Fisher said at The Conversation. That is the first step to “stop further damage and make it possible to adapt.” In the meantime, nations must also prepare for the “future we are currently heading toward.” That means making big shifts in how people live, work and eat in order to “create new futures where they can thrive” even as the world warms. For now, though, adaptation efforts do “not go far enough to manage these effects of climate change.”

Participants at COP30 “must get serious” about financing adaptation efforts, said Demet Intepe at the World Economic Forum. Many countries are already “deeply affected by floods, heatwaves and wildfires,” which makes adaptation efforts an “essential lifeline for communities threatened by climate-related disasters.” It is unlikely the money will come from the private sector. Adaptation efforts like “coastal flood protection” are expensive but create “minimal opportunities for financial returns.” Without the opportunity to create new profits, there will be no substitute for the “scale and reliability of public finance.”

What next?

Any solutions negotiated at COP30 will happen without the help of the United States, which is still one of the world’s biggest greenhouse gas emitters. America is “not sending any top officials” to the summit, said The New York Times. In President Donald Trump’s second term, his administration has “abandoned” the country’s promise to “curb the burning of fossil fuels at home.”

Other countries are trying to keep up with their own goals and fill the gap left by the U.S. Germany and Spain have pledged $100 million to climate adaptation efforts, said Bloomberg. But more than $300 billion will be needed to help developing countries adapt, and that is a “figure that’s far higher than amounts currently being made available” from richer countries.

Decades of mismanagement and environmental exploitation, and an unprecedented drought have left Iran teetering on the edge of a water crisis.

The reservoirs are nearly empty following record-low rainfall, and officials are “pleading with citizens to conserve water”, said the BBC. The 10 million inhabitants of Tehran are “facing the real possibility of their taps running dry”. Authorities warned this week that the five main dams supplying the capital were at “critical levels”.

With no rain on the horizon, the president has warned that citizens might have to start rationing water. “If rationing doesn’t work,” said Masoud Pezeshkian, “we may have to evacuate Tehran.”

A crisis ‘decades in the making’

The crisis has been “decades in the making”, said the BBC. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the country’s supreme leader, has “repeatedly acknowledged the looming threat”. “Yet little has changed.”

Water scarcity is “a major issue throughout Iran”, said Al Jazeera. Authorities blame shortages on “mismanagement and overexploitation of underground resources”, exacerbated by the climate crisis. The situation reached its current breaking point after the worst drought in decades. Tehran has had no significant rain since May, a situation one official said was “nearly without precedent for a century”. A heatwave also drove temperatures above 40C in the Iranian capital, and above 50C in some parts of the country, causing widespread power cuts.

Authorities warned citizens over the summer to “cut back on water and energy consumption”, said Agence France-Presse. But by October, 19 major dams – about 10% of Iran’s reservoir supply – had effectively run dry.

The crisis is also fuelling conspiracy theories: some Iranians are claiming on social media that neighboring countries are “stealing” their rain clouds, said Forbes. Authorities have made similar claims, accusing Turkey, the UAE and Saudi Arabia of “diverting clouds away from Iran to their own skies”. Iran’s Meteorological Organisation, and other entities, have had to clarify that “stealing clouds and snow” isn’t possible.

Cloud seeding, cloud stealing

The energy minister, Abbas Ali Abadi, has blamed water leakage caused by Tehran’s century-old water infrastructure, and has also cited the 12-day war with Israel in June as a factor. Strikes on northern Tehran are believed to have led to heavy flooding.

But over-extraction of groundwater in Tehran has left the city sinking, said researcher Sanam Mahoozi on The Conversation. Across the country, more than 90% of Iran’s water is extracted for agricultural use. “Many of Iran’s iconic lakes have turned into a bed of salt.”

Studies also point to “decades of mismanagement, including excessive dam construction, illegal well drilling and unsustainable agriculture”, said The New York Times. The Ministry of Energy recently announced the practice of “cloud seeding”, which involves “dispersing particles like silver iodide into existing clouds to encourage rainfall”. But clouds need to contain at least 50% moisture for it to work. “With no relief in sight, some officials have called on the population to pray for rain.”

The world has failed to limit rising temperatures to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels – the goal set in the 2015 Paris climate agreement, the UN secretary general has said.

Speaking ahead of the Cop30 climate conference in Brazil, António Guterres acknowledged it is now “inevitable” that humanity will overshoot the cap, with “devastating consequences” that include “tipping points” in the Amazon, Greenland, western Antarctica and the coral reefs.

What has happened since Paris?

The Paris Agreement, signed by almost 200 countries, is “at the heart of the international commitment to tackle rising global temperatures”, said the BBC.

Signatories committed to “pursue efforts” to limit global temperature rises to 1.5C, and to keep them “well below” 2C above those recorded in pre-industrial times, generally considered to mean the late 19th century. It also aimed to achieve balance between the amount of greenhouse gases added to the atmosphere and those that are removed – known as net zero – by the second half of the century.

Progress has undoubtedly been made over the past decade, said Christiana Figueres, the former executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, in The Economist.

Global carbon dioxide emissions that were rising by almost 2% per year in 2015, have since slowed to 0.3%, while fossil-fuel demand has “plateaued and is falling in several large economies, including China”. The world was on course to warm by as much as 4C by 2100. Today, projections hover near 2.6C “still dangerously high, but a profound course correction that must now deepen, and fast”.

The “unprecedented economic transformation” towards a greener global economy, is “now unmistakably under way, despite a global pandemic, war, Brexit and two Trump presidencies”.

Yet despite this, 2024 marked the first year global average temperatures exceeded the 1.5C threshold.

Can humanity do more?

While one year alone of over-shooting the 1.5C target “doesn’t mean that threshold has been irreversibly breached”, said Time, research published by the Yale School of the Environment suggests that it likely means the world will exceed the target over the next 20 years. A separate study found there was a 90% likelihood emissions will peak in 2045, two decades after they were meant to.

Guterres has, however, refused to give up on the target set in Paris. “It is absolutely indispensable to change course in order to make sure that the overshoot is as short as possible and as low in intensity as possible”, he told The Guardian, saying it may still be possible to bring temperatures down in time to return to 1.5C by the end of the century.

With the planet’s past 10 years among the hottest on record, this requires countries to meet or exceed their individual climate action plans, known as nationally determined contributions (NDCs).

Up to now, “while they helped some nations make progress in emissions reduction, it hasn’t been enough to offset high economic growth,” Adrian Raftery, a University of Washington professor emeritus of statistics and sociology, told Time.

Failure to stick to the 1.5C threshold will “challenge fundamental aspects of nationhood and identity”, said the Chatham House think tank. It will also “reshape systems that underpin modern society, including finance”.

The stakes heading into COP30 could not be higher.

Keir Starmer has told his fellow world leaders at Cop30 that the “consensus is gone” when it comes to tackling climate change as the lack of any high-level US representatives at the talks has led to accusations that the event will have little effect.

Starmer insisted the UK was “all-in” when it comes to the fight against climate change and described green policies as a “win-win”, despite the fact that he has faced “pressure from US President Donald Trump, who has repeatedly criticised Britain’s net zero agenda”, said ITV News science correspondent Martin Stew.

The Brazilian city of Belém, the gateway to the Amazon, is hosting delegations from more than 190 countries for Cop30. But the absence of the Trump administration is a “watershed moment”, said EU Climate Commissioner Wopke Hoekstra. “We’re talking about the largest, the most dominant, most important geopolitical player from the whole world,” Hoekstra told Bloomberg. “It is the second-largest emitter. So if a player of that magnitude basically says, ‘Well, I’m going to leave and have it all sorted out by the rest of you,’ clearly that does damage.”

What did the commentators say?

“Every year people ask what difference Cop will make, given the thousands of flights that come along with it,” said Sky News. But this year, “those questions have grown louder”, coming at a “particularly precarious time for climate action”. UN Secretary-General António Guterres recently warned that the world has failed to hold the average global temperature at 1.5C above pre-industrial levels – the commitment of the Paris climate agreement a decade ago. Yet “fewer than 60” world leaders have registered to attend Cop30, compared with more than 80 at 2024’s Cop29 in Baku, and more than 150 in Dubai the year before. There is a “serious lack of accommodation” in the impoverished city of Belém; what’s left is prohibitively expensive. Some “furious countries even lobbied Brazil to switch cities”.

The US has sent delegations to climate summits over the past three decades, even when they had “scant desire” to address global warming, said The Guardian’s environment reporter Oliver Milman. But this is a “much more aggressive administration”, said Todd Stern, lead climate negotiator for the US under Barack Obama. In his speech at the UN General Assembly, Trump called climate change the world’s “greatest con job”. One former state department official said Cop30 could actually stand a better chance of a stronger climate agreement if the US does not attend. “If the choice is no US or a US that is there as a spoiler, to wreck and disrupt things, then I think most countries would prefer there to be no US.”

Indeed, the decision is “alleviating some concern” that “Washington would send a team to scupper the talks”, said Reuters. Last month, the administration threatened to “retaliate against nations” if they voted for a proposal put forward by the UN’s shipping agency, the International Maritime Organization, to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from ocean shipping. That “led a majority of countries” at the agency to vote to postpone the decision. The US also “pressured countries” negotiating the first global plastics treaty not to back an agreement to cap plastic production.

It’s not just the US that’s undermining the summit, said Politico. Around 100 of the 195 nations that signed the Paris Agreement missed the September deadline to submit their Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), or plans for cutting greenhouse gas emissions, to the UN. That includes the EU.

China, the world’s biggest greenhouse gas polluter, set a target to cut economy-wide net greenhouse gas emissions by 7% – an NDC “largely seen as modest”, said Bloomberg. “Most experts were hoping for an NDC north of 30%,” said Hoekstra. Even with “all the diplomatic language I would love to wrap around that, it’s hard to see how that is enough”.

What next?

Cop30 organisers have not laid out a main goal or deal going into the talks. The summit will instead “focus on implementation, or turning policies into tangible outcomes”, said Bloomberg.

Of the countries that did submit their NDCs by the deadline, the new plans are of a “much higher quality than the previous ones”, said Sky News. They mean that a “clear” fall in global greenhouse gas emissions is on the horizon for the first time, according to the UN. They are aided by the “dramatic and rapid roll-out of solar and wind power”. “More plans are expected to be published during Cop30, bringing some hope to the summit.”

China’s “remarkable progress on clean energy”, which has “soared beyond expectations”, leads some to hope that China will “take on a more proactive role in the talks”. It’s not clear whether there will be “major takeaways from this year’s summit”, but “pulling off an international meeting at a time of strained global relations will be a success in and of itself”.

Humans burp after a big meal. Heat from climate change might be released by the Southern Ocean into the atmosphere sometime in the future. This heat would cause comparable heating to anthropogenic climate change. The longer humans continue to release emissions, the more heat will be trapped in the ocean.

Bring up the heat

Heat trapped in the Southern Ocean could be “burped” up into the atmosphere and cause climate change-like effects, even after humans stop greenhouse gas emissions, according to a study published in the journal AGU Advances. This burp “originates from heat that has previously accumulated under global warming in the deep Southern Ocean, and emerges to the ocean surface via deep convection,” said the study. As a result, there could be a “renewed pulse of warming from the maritime zone, without any new CO2 entering the atmosphere,” said Daily Galaxy.

The study showed that this release would occur “after several centuries of net negative emissions levels and gradual global cooling,” and could lead to a “decadal- to centennial-scale period of warming,” said Eos. This warming would be “comparable to average historical anthropogenic warming rates.” The released heat will not be distributed evenly around the world; the effects would be “greatest and longest-lasting in the Southern Hemisphere, suggesting a greater impact on today's more vulnerable countries of the global south,” said the study. However, “while some CO2 is released, the primary impact is thermal, not chemical,” said Daily Galaxy.

Ocean on hold

Oceans act as a carbon sink, meaning they are capable of holding atmospheric carbon. The ocean will likely continue to “absorb heat well after atmospheric CO2 peaks and net-negative emissions are reached, because surface atmospheric temperatures also take their time to fall,” said Science Alert. The future Southern Ocean also has a “greatly increased capacity to absorb shortwave solar radiation, since much of the sea ice that historically reflected the heat has melted.”

The burp is attributed to two processes. These are warmer surface waters mixing with cooler layers and ventilating heat into the depths, plus the “ocean’s natural heat release pathways” are becoming less active, said Daily Galaxy. These “combined effects trap heat where it cannot easily escape, setting the stage for a delayed warming rebound.”

The potential for this “burp” “assumes a rosy climate future,” said Popular Mechanics. Unfortunately, we are a long way from being carbon negative or reaching net-zero. This is especially true as the Trump administration “openly encourages other countries (along with the U.S.) to keep burning fossil fuels.”

The study shows that “burning fossil fuels with reckless abandon for centuries will have lasting impacts long after the green revolution finally takes hold,” said Popular Mechanics. But the “sooner we can achieve this technological dream, the better our chances are for preserving a future.”

“The nation’s harvest is in trouble – again,” said The Independent, and it’s not just farmers who should be concerned.

The 2025 harvest was the second worst on record, after 2020, with 2024 in third place, according to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs.

How bad is it?

During the summer, Jeremy Clarkson, who runs the Diddly Squat farm in Oxfordshire, warned in the summer that this year’s harvest was on track to be “catastrophic”, said The Telegraph. He wasn’t far off.

The Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board estimated yields of 7.6 tonnes per hectare for wheat, 6.7 tonnes for winter barley, 5.8 tonnes for spring barley, 5.2 tonnes for oats and 3.7 tonnes for oilseed rape, said the Press Association. However, actual yields were lower: 7.0 tonnes for wheat, 6.5 tonnes for winter barley, 5.0 tonnes for spring barley, 4.6 tonnes for oats and 3.5 tonnes for oilseed rape.

Potato farmers in particular have been bit by “one of the driest potato growing seasons in living memory”, said Farmers Weekly. When temperatures hit the “high 20s and low 30s”, potato plants begin to “shut down”, although there was an upside for some farmers because the dry conditions “meant fewer disease and pest issues”.

Why is this happening?

Months of “scorching heat followed by sudden deluges” mean that Britain’s farmers are “watching once-reliable crops wither, shrivel or rot in the ground”, said The Independent. The “pattern of the year” has been that “crops have come early, caused by the unusually dry and sunny weather beginning in March and April” – the “hottest spring in a century”.

All of this tells a “story of escalating climate impacts that farmers are unable to cope with”, said Tom Lancaster, an analyst at the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit. This is what “farming with climate change looks like, as extreme weather wrecks harvests, hits farm incomes and reduces our food security”.

An “increasingly unpredictable climate and extreme weather” are “making it much harder to produce food”, Jamie Burrows from the National Farmers’ Union told the Press Association. While last year’s harvest was marked by heavy rain and flooding, this year it was drought: these twin extremes show that “growing crops in the UK is increasingly challenging”.

How are we feeling the effects?

The “climate crisis” is “hitting farmers hard” and “ultimately impacting UK supermarket shelves and the food we put on our tables”, Philip Evans from Greenpeace UK, told The Independent. Poor harvests make our domestic food chain less secure and could in turn lead to a rise in prices for consumers.

Recent agricultural challenges are a reminder that “the food on our plates begins in fields at the mercy of a changing climate”. That change is “not distant, not theoretical – but happening now, in every loaf of bread, every pint of cider and every punnet of strawberries that ripened too soon”.

About 60 years ago, Russian physicist Lev Artsimovich said nuclear fusion “will be ready when society needs it”.

For decades, scientists have tried to recreate the fusion reaction that powers the sun, hoping to produce potentially unlimited clean energy. But recent advances in science and technology, and funding from tech companies desperate to power the artificial intelligence boom, now make fusion a “realistic option”, said Fortune.

The UK has achieved a “major breakthrough for fusion energy research”, the UK Atomic Energy Authority announced last week. Researchers there stabilised the fusion process in a spherical tokamak – a more compact fusion machine than those used by most researchers – for the first time. This is a “significant step forward”.

What is fusion?

When most people think of nuclear power, they are thinking of nuclear fission. Fission creates energy by splitting heavy atoms – but fusion creates energy by fusing light atoms together.

In fusion, hydrogen isotopes are heated to extremely high temperatures until they form plasma – superheated, electrically charged gas. The atoms’ nuclei then have enough energy to overcome their repulsion and fuse together, forming helium.

In the process, they lose a small amount of mass, which is converted into a massive amount of energy. It’s the same reaction that powers the stars.

Why is it so attractive?

Fusion promises a “virtually limitless, carbon-free source of energy”, said The Times. It is the “holy grail of energy”, nuclear physicist Annie Kritcher told Fortune.

Scientists estimate that one glass of fusion fuel could produce enough energy to power a home for more than 800 years, according to the Financial Times. Unlike fission, it produces no long-lived radioactive waste, and couldn’t cause a runaway nuclear accident like Chernobyl.

“If you know how to build a fusion power plant, you can have unlimited energy anywhere and forever,” said Bill Gates on his Gates Notes website this month. Nuclear fusion could not only meet the soaring global energy demand, but some scientists suggest it could also power a carbon-capture system that could remove CO2 from the atmosphere, helping to reverse climate change.

Why is fusion so difficult to recreate?

Stars can fuse hydrogen because their massive gravity creates extreme pressure and heat in their core. On Earth, recreating those conditions remains one of science’s toughest – and most expensive – challenges.

British scientists first achieved nuclear fusion in 1934, using a particle accelerator, but commercial fusion “remained a distant dream”, said the International Atomic Energy Agency’s Bulletin magazine. Achieving controlled fusion, the kind that could one day power a reactor, remained elusive. To sustain fusion, hydrogen isotopes must be heated to tens of millions of degrees until they form plasma. This is so hot, hotter than the surface of the Sun, that it can’t touch any solid surface; it must be contained by powerful magnetic fields or using laser pulses.

Soviet physicists developed the first fusion machine in the 1950s, known as a tokamak – short for a Russian acronym that translates as “toroidal chamber with magnetic coils”. These doughnut-shaped vacuum chambers use powerful magnets to spin and heat the hydrogen, then trap the plasma while it can fuse and release energy.

But for 70 years, no experiment produced more energy from fusion than was put into the fuel. Then, in 2022, scientists at the US Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory achieved a landmark breakthrough: their reaction released more energy than the process consumed. It was the “Wright brothers’ moment”, said Kritcher, the project’s designer.

So when might we see fusion deliver power to the grid?

The world’s biggest fusion experiment, the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, is under way in France. It’s a publicly funded project backed by 33 countries, including China, Russia and the US – but it has “suffered multiple delays and setbacks” and isn’t expected online before 2035, said the B1M. It’s also “basically a big experiment” to show how feasible fusion is at scale: it won’t generate electricity.

But the private sector fusion race is “heating up”, said the FT. Tech companies are pouring money into fusion start-ups, hoping for energy to power their data centres. Fusion companies have also received huge private investment – “largely from billionaires” like OpenAI’s Sam Altman – and public funding.

And they are making fast progress. One start-up in the US, Commonwealth Fusion Systems, is building a nuclear fusion power plant it aims to turn on in 2027. It is hoped that it will supply electricity to the grid in the early 2030s, which has never been done before. Many private and state-backed Chinese enterprises are also “racing to build a commercial fusion reactor by 2035 or sooner”, said the South China Morning Post.

But even if the most ambitious timelines are achieved, fusion power plants are not likely to be widespread until at least the 2040s.

Climate change doesn’t just pose an existential threat to our planet. It’s also ratcheting up national security risks. With increasing food insecurity, resource scarcity and unstable borders, climate change could lead to a rise in political tensions both within the U.S. and between other countries.

How is climate change a security risk?

An unpredictable climate “leads to heightened risks of interpersonal and intergroup violence,” said the World Economic Forum. A one-degree Celsius uptick in temperature can “increase interpersonal violence by approximately 2%, while intergroup conflict risk” can increase by “2.5% to 5%.” This is largely attributed to resource loss. With a two-degree change, “not only will there be continual extreme weather events, but the average climate will have changed so that crops now grown can no longer survive; water shortages will become widespread; and food will be in short supply,” said Kevin Trenberth, a climate scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, at Newsroom.

As a result, there will be climate refugees deepening “regional conflicts that could explode to encompass many countries,” said Trenberth. Climate change “takes things that we were already worried about, like extremism or terrorism, and exacerbates the scale or nature of those threats,” Scott Moore, a practice professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania, said to Time. “If you have these intensified climate change impacts, they place stress on things like food systems, and worsen already existing tensions within countries.”

The U.S., in particular, faces a “compounding threat when it comes to conflict, disease, migration, poverty,” as well as the “ability of the American military to operate effectively globally,” said Jake Sullivan, former President Joe Biden’s national security adviser, to The New York Times. In addition, playing a “leading role in the innovation and manufacturing of clean energy technologies” is “vital” for the U.S. economy.

What is the government doing about it?

The threat of climate change on national security has been identified on both sides of the U.S. political aisle, at least until recently. It was first acknowledged by President George W. Bush in 1991, and first listed as a threat by the U.S. national security community in 2008. However, in the U.S. intelligence community’s 2025 Annual Threat Assessment, any mention of climate change was noticeably absent for the first time in more than a decade. Instead, they focused on the “most extreme and critical direct threats to our national security," said Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, in a Senate Intelligence Committee meeting when questioned about the climate change exclusion.

The Trump administration has been known to deny climate change and curtail programs dedicated to the environment or aid. It has “defunded climate science, shut down USAID, cut billions from foreign aid,” as well as “withdrawn America from the Paris Climate Agreement,” said William S. Becker at The Hill. Unfortunately, failing to acknowledge the threat climate change poses will make the administration's national security sector “less nimble,” said Mark Nevitt, an associate professor of law at Emory University, to Time. “You can’t just wish climate change away.”

Will nuclear fusion deliver us from climate change? Is humour the best way to take on Trump? And will Grace Wales Bonner change Hermès for the better?

Olly Mann and The Week delve behind the headlines and debate what really matters from the past seven days.

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We’re going dark. The Earth is reflecting less light than it used to, especially the Northern Hemisphere. While climate change is to blame, the reverse is also true: the planet being darker — and absorbing light instead of reflecting it — is in turn worsening climate change. But scientists are still unsure exactly how the change in Earth’s reflectivity will affect our planet’s future.

A light problem

Climate change is darkening the Earth, according to a study published in the journal PNAS. Data from NASA’s Clouds and the Earth’s Radiant Energy System (CERES) satellites found that the planet is reflecting much less light into space than it did two decades ago. In addition, while both sides of the planet should be receiving and reflecting equal amounts of sunlight, Earth’s Northern Hemisphere (NH) is reflecting less than the Southern Hemisphere (SH), thus retaining more heat and appearing dimmer.

This affects the Earth’s radiation budget, which is the “amount of light the planet absorbs and re-emits into space as outgoing longwave radiation,” said Popular Mechanics. Any imbalance between the NH and SH is typically “offset by the oceanic currents that transport energy from the southern hemisphere to the northern hemisphere.” But this research suggests that “surface changes have tipped the balance so much that ocean currents haven’t been making up the difference for the past two decades.”

Along with the NH dimming and warming more than the SH, the “NH tropics are getting wetter, which suggests changes in large-scale atmospheric circulation are occurring,” said the study.

A dim future

The reason for this phenomenon, like most environmental problems, is climate change. Melting Arctic ice and reduced snow cover are actively dimming the glow of the planet. The NH “used to be so snowy that all that white was bouncing tons of light back into space,” said Vice. Temperatures have increased, melting the snow cover and “exposing these darker surfaces that absorb more sunlight instead of reflecting it,” said the BBC.

Changes in cloud formation have also contributed to the dimming Earth. Low-lying clouds “decreased in recent decades,” said Popular Mechanics. Ironically, this may be because we have been polluting less than we used to. In the NH, “stricter environmental regulations have reduced aerosol pollution, which previously reflected sunlight,” said the BBC. So, while the air has been cleaner, it has also incurred an unintended consequence. On the SH, “aerosol levels are increasing due to events like bushfires and volcanic eruptions, which reflect more sunlight.”

In a positive feedback loop, the Earth’s darkening is “accelerating the effects of climate change, and an asymmetric hemispheric darkening could produce its own complex impacts, including disruptive shifts in precipitation,” said 404 Media. Researchers are “watching for signs that the symmetry might reemerge in the future, or if asymmetry is perhaps the new normal.”

“All of this means that our planet isn’t just growing darker to outside observers,” said Vice. “Darkness is a symptom of a planet that is getting hotter. So hot that it’s essentially causing a planet-wide brownout.”

Climate change has been wreaking havoc on our largest organ: the skin. Extreme heat, pollution and changing rainfall can worsen skin conditions. As a result, skin products have also had to evolve to keep up with changing demands.

On the surface

Skin is “exquisitely sensitive” to climate and ecological changes, said Louise Andersen, the cochair of the International Society of Dermatology Committee on Climate Change and a dermatologist at Aleris-Hamlet Hospitals in Denmark, to Harvard Medicine. It is the first barrier against the environment, pathogens and UV radiation, so it is also one of the first organs to be affected by the rapidly changing climate. It is a “delicate system where the balance has shifted in recent years.”

Many different aspects of climate change can negatively affect the skin. Rising temperatures and extreme heat are one of the biggest risks. Heat can “get trapped in our skin, triggering several inflammatory issues,” said Women’s Health. Acne can worsen too, as “increased sweat can lead to more clogged pores.” Heat can also “increase heat rashes, particularly those in friction-prone areas like under the breasts, groin and inner thighs, as well as yeast and bacterial conditions that can occur with perspiration buildup on the skin.” Extreme temperatures additionally affect prior conditions, exacerbating “psoriasis and facial flushing from lupus,” said National Geographic. These symptoms are now “appearing earlier in the spring and later into the fall because hotter days are beginning earlier in the year and lasting longer into the fall.”

Along with heat, “many, if not all, inflammatory diseases will be affected by air pollution, including wildfire smoke,” Maria Wei, a dermatologist at the University of California, San Francisco, said to National Geographic. Wildfires release fine particulate matter that can “trigger oxidative stress” and damage the skin, the outlet said. In addition, “floods from changing rainfall patterns or severe storms carry the threats of chemical exposure, skin injury, fungal infections, and bacterial, viral and parasitic diseases with skin manifestations.” There is an elevated risk for children, as climate change “poses unique dermatologic risks” because of their “immature skin barrier function, weakened immune systems and dependence on caregivers,” said a study published in the journal Cureus.

Skin solutions

Our relationship to skin care is changing in response to the climate. For example, ozone depletion as a result of pollution is causing more exposure to UV radiation. Many are “buying more sun protection products now — both in their cosmetics and as standalone sunscreens — than they did five years ago,” said Beauty Matter. Warming temperatures are “driving demand for sweat-proof, cooling and anti-humidity solutions.”

Driven by newfound demand, “brands are launching hyper-targeted solutions designed to shield, adapt and defend against the elements in real time, addressing immediate concerns while enhancing long-term resilience,” said Beauty Matter. But not everyone can afford new skin solutions, and inflammatory skin conditions are “common in marginalized populations who may not have access to air conditioning, or who work outside all day, and extreme heat creates a favorable environment for bacterial growth, compromising the skin's natural defenses,” said National Geographic. “Monitoring air quality and preventing damage during those poor air quality days is key to protecting your skin.”

What if cropdusting could cool down the climate? What about rockdusting? Turns out sprinkling rock dust on fields may enhance a process called rock weathering, capable of trapping and removing atmospheric carbon. While the method would be low-cost, there is little data on how much carbon can truly be offset through the process.

Drop it like it’s hot

Rock weathering is a natural carbon removal process that occurs when “rain falls through the atmosphere” and “combines with CO2 to form carbonic acid,” said Undo, a London-based business dedicated to carbon removal. When the acid falls on the landscape, the CO2 “interacts with rocks and soil, mineralizes and is safely stored in solid carbonate form.” Scientists want to supercharge this process in a system called enhanced rock weathering.

The process of rock weathering can be enhanced when rocks are “crushed into a fine dust over land where soybeans, sugar cane and other crops are grown,” said The Washington Post. Then, as it rains, “chemical reactions pull carbon from the air and convert it into bicarbonate ions that eventually wash into the ocean, where the carbon remains stored.” As an added benefit, these carbonates are minerals that “help farmers by replenishing depleted soils,” said the World Economic Forum.

The method has the potential to sequester billions of tons of carbon and slow climate change. “Not too many people have the opportunity to change the temperature of the planet,” said Shawn Benner, a hydrogeologist and geochemist at Terradot, a company working on expanding enhanced rock weathering, to the Post. While covering fields in rock dust is relatively inexpensive, the main difficulty lies in the “logistics of transporting and spreading the rock dust,” said the World Economic Forum. This obstacle “could be overcome by using local sources of rock dust and developing efficient spreading methods.”

Carbon questions

Reducing emissions and moving toward renewable energy is no longer enough to curb climate change. Unfortunately, as countries “fall woefully short of their emissions reduction targets,” there has been a “growing consensus that large-scale carbon removal will be necessary to avoid some of the worst effects of climate change,” said the Post. As a result, methods like enhanced rock weathering are coming to the forefront. However, like with other carbon removal methods, there are “concerns persisting over the efficacy of its verification procedures and ultimately how much carbon it can effectively remove,” said Data Center Dynamics.

Companies working on enhanced rock weathering have “drawn some skepticism from researchers who say they want to see data and peer-reviewed research,” said the Post. There are still questions as to the accuracy of the estimated amount of carbon being removed through this process, especially long term. Conditions, including the type of rock dust, the type of soil and overall climate, can affect the amount of carbon removal as well. Companies are “experimenting with various silicate rocks, including basalt, wollastonite, olivine and crushed concrete, which differ in terms of weathering rates,” said Data Center Dynamics.

“It’s at an exciting juncture,” said David Beerling, the director of the University of Sheffield’s Leverhulme Center for Climate Change Mitigation, to the Post. “But there’s a need for caution in ensuring that we have rigorous, cost-effective [tracking and verification] so that people don’t make claims for carbon credits that aren’t substantiated.”

“We’re about to have an internet of animals, and that’s super exciting.”

So said Martin Wikelski, from the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior in Germany, on BBC Science Focus. Wikelski was referring to a programme he founded, the International Co-operation for Animal Research Using Space (Icarus).

The “internet of animals” he envisages is a system that monitors animals and collates the data on a freely accessible platform. This month Icarus launches the first of a series of satellites into space that hope to track 100,000 animals worldwide, so data from their movements can inform conservationists about habitat loss and climate change – and, hopefully, help us anticipate natural disasters and zoonotic disease. “The ancient art of augury is now being resurrected for the space age,” said The Sunday Times.

What is the background?

Humans have long observed animals acting differently before natural phenomena like earthquakes. In 2012, Wikelski’s team began tracking goats that graze on Mount Etna, the volcano in Sicily. They found that before an eruption, the goats stayed lower. “They know much earlier than the volcanologists can see on their equipment,” Wikelski told The Sunday Times. “And they know better how big it will be.”

The team also found that farm animals in the Italian Apennine mountains could detect an earthquake up to 12 hours before it hit. About 45 minutes beforehand, it was like a trading floor “in a stock market crash – all the animals were going crazy”.

Wikelski believes the answer lies in the animals’ sensitive feathers and fur. “During the build-up to an earthquake, tectonic plates slide across each other under enormous pressures, and that throws out ions from the rocks into the air,” Wikelski told The Guardian. “The animals may be reacting to that.”

How does Icarus work?

Various terrestrial tracking systems have monitored wildlife worldwide for decades. But Icarus became possible after “a revolution in tagging technology”, said The Guardian, which led to “cheap and plentiful minuscule GPS devices”.

Miniature sensors and communications devices led to the development of “large-scale wireless digital networks that track the location and status of objects”, said BBC Science Focus: the “internet of things”.

The IoT made “two-way digital communications with small devices viable”, while lithium batteries “shrunk to sizes that more animals can carry”, and smartphones made low-cost GPS “increasingly available”, said MIT Technology Review. Wikelski’s team launched “affordable and lightweight GPS sensors that could be worn by animals as small as songbirds”. These “Fitbits for wild creatures” could offer “live location data accurate to a few metres”, while allowing scientists to monitor heart rates and body heat, as well as ambient temperature and air pressure.

The Icarus tags will send their information to receivers on tiny satellites made from 10cm cubes, called CubeSats. From there, the data will be beamed back to Earth and published in a freely accessible database called Movebank. Wikelski describes this as a “permanent digital museum” of animal data, established 25 years ago.

What is the point?

It is “the most ambitious wildlife-tracking project that’s ever been attempted”, said BBC Science Focus. For researchers, “the possible applications are almost endless”.

One day, people worldwide will be able to “log on with a smartphone app” to the internet of animals, to “follow their favourite bird or tortoise or fish”, said The New York Times. Wikelski hopes that connecting people to “a single charismatic animal” could help “build support for conservation”. “If people hear Cecil the lion died, it’s very real to them,” he said. “But if you say 3,000 lions died, nobody cares.”

The project could help prevent that, as many animals are on the move due to climate change. Protecting them will “require an understanding of where they are”. Icarus could also “keep tabs” on species that have played a part in epidemics – like bats. “With skin temperature we can see in the ducks in China whether the next avian influenza is starting,” said Wikelski.

“In the wake of the pandemic, the prospects of using animals’ GPS locations to monitor the spread of zoonotic disease is truly beguiling,” said Paul McGreevy on The Conversation.

Critics “question the costs” compared with existing animal monitoring programmes, said MIT Technology Review: about $10 million to $15 million a year. But that is “significantly cheaper than sending humans or drones” to remote locations. Ultimately, Icarus offers “another way to monitor the Earth itself during a period of increasing instability”, transforming animals into “sentinels of a changing world”.

What happened

Chinese President Xi Jinping Wednesday told a United Nations climate summit that his country would reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by between 7% and 10% over the next 10 years and ramp up its solar and wind energy capacity so that renewables account for more than 30% of domestic energy consumption. It was Beijing’s first commitment to cut emissions, though climate experts called it an insufficient target from the world’s largest producer of heat-trapping gases. The U.S., the world’s No. 2 emitter, did not attend the New York summit.

Who said what

“Green and low-carbon transition is the trend of our time,” Xi said via video. “While some countries are acting against it, the international community should stay focused in the right direction.” That was a “veiled rebuke” of President Donald Trump, Reuters said. The U.S. president told fellow world leaders on Tuesday that “windmills are pathetic,” climate change is a “con job” and if they “don’t get away from the green energy scam, your country is going to fail.”

China burns more coal than any other country but has also “emerged as the dominant manufacturer of clean-energy technologies,” The Wall Street Journal said. “Trump wants fossil fuels,” political scientist Ian Bremmer said to Reuters, “but letting China become the world’s sole powerful electro-state is the opposite of making America great again.”

What next?

China’s pledge could give a moderate boost to the U.N.’s COP30 climate negotiations in Brazil in November. “The U.S. going AWOL has lowered the bar for what will count as ambitious enough to qualify as sufficient,” energy analyst Lauri Myllyvirta told The Washington Post.

Climate change may be giving us a sweet tooth. New research shows there has been an increase in sugar consumption as temperatures rise. This poses a risk to public health, as people are drawn to low-nutrient soft drinks in an effort to stay cool.

Sugar, we’re going up

Climate change may lead to a “substantial nationwide increase in added sugar consumption” by 2095, said a study published in the journal Nature. This will happen largely in the form of “higher consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages and frozen desserts.”

Researchers analyzed the relationship between weather and consumer purchases and found that “sugar consumption rose as temperatures moved between 54 and 86 degrees Fahrenheit,” said The Associated Press. The consumption diminished at higher temperatures, however, because “appetites began to lessen when it grew warmer than 86 degrees.” The findings showed that there was an increase of added sugar consumption by 0.7 grams per person per day for every 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit of warming in U.S. households. While the “daily difference from higher temperatures doesn’t amount to even a single candy bar for the average person,” it “adds up over time and has a big effect.”

Rising temperatures “do make a difference on what you eat and drink,” said Pan He, a study co-author and senior lecturer in environmental social sciences and sustainability at Cardiff University, to Grist. “We don’t take much of a second thought on what we eat and drink and how that can be responding to climate change, but in fact, this research shows it would.”

Sweet escape

The health implications of sugar consumption have been well-studied: it increases the risk of obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular disease. However, “if we consider the interaction with climate change, it will make things worse,” He said to CNN. Specifically, “people tend to take in more sweetened beverages as the temperature is getting higher and higher,” Duo Chan, a study co-author and climate scientist at the University of Southampton, said to the AP. “Obviously, under a warming climate, that would cause you to drink more.”

The health consequences will disproportionately impact certain demographics. According to the research, “men consumed more sugary soft drinks,” said the AP. Also, the “amount of added sugar consumed during hot weather was several times higher for low- and very low-income families than for the wealthiest.” Lower-income households are less likely to have access to air conditioning, making them more reliant on sugary drinks to cool down. Outdoor workers and less educated families also showed higher sugar consumption with higher temperatures. There were additionally racial differences, with white people having the highest added sugar effect, while Asian Americans showed no significant change.

“Evidence on how (extreme heat) changes eating patterns is still relatively scarce,’’ said Charlotte Kukowski, a researcher at the Cambridge Social Decision-Making Lab at the University of Cambridge, to CNN. But this study “highlights a less-discussed channel through which climate change can affect human well-being.”

What happened

President Donald Trump Tuesday sharply criticized the United Nations, renewable energy and global migration in an extended speech before the U.N. General Assembly in New York, then held more cordial meetings with world leaders. After huddling with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Trump called Russia a “paper tiger” and said with U.S. weapons and European support, Kyiv could “fight and WIN all of Ukraine back in its original form.” He also said NATO countries should shoot down any Russian aircraft that crosses into their airspace.

Who said what

Trump’s 56-minute speech to the General Assembly — almost four times his allotted 15 minutes — “shifted from subject to subject” as he “often made unsubstantiated or contradictory claims,” The Wall Street Journal said. His lecture was “filled with grievances about ongoing wars, windmills and malfunctioning escalators,” but it was his “attacks against what he called a ‘double-tailed monster’” of immigration and “so-called green, renewable energy” that “rang loudest” as he berated fellow leaders. “I’m really good at this stuff,” Trump said. “Your countries are going to hell.”

His “head-spinning pivot” on Ukraine and Russia was what really caught everyone by surprise, though, The New York Times said. “After getting to know and fully understand the Ukraine/Russia Military and Economic situation,” Trump said on social media, Ukraine’s recovery of its “original borders” is “very much an option. Why not? Russia has been fighting aimlessly for three and a half years a War that should have taken a Real Military Power less than a week to win.” The U.S. “will continue to supply weapons to NATO for NATO to do what they want with them,” he added. “Good luck to all!”

What next?

The “strengthened support from Trump, if it sticks, is a huge win for Zelenskyy,” The Associated Press said. And Trump’s “dismissal” of Russia’s military and economic might “will hurt” President Vladimir Putin, who craves being seen as a “global player,” the BBC said. “But one should always treat Trump’s words with a pinch of salt.” This is Trump’s “hardest” stance against Moscow yet, a European Union official told Politico. “But he’s always one Putin call away from doing something not great.”

Scientists have struggled to explain the rapid acceleration of global warming over the past 15 years, with temperatures now regularly breaking records.

It is “among the biggest questions in climate science today”, said atmospheric science professors Laura Wilcox and Bjørn H. Samset on The Conversation. Causes suggested by researchers include a clean-up of sulphur emissions from global shipping, as well as changes in cloud cover.

But “one factor that has not been well quantified” are the “monumental efforts” by east Asian countries, particularly China, to combat air pollution. A recent study by Wilcox and Samset claims that east Asia’s “aerosol clean-up” is likely a “key reason” for the surge. The polluted air “may have been masking the full effects of global warming”.

The ‘sting in the tail’

“In the early 2000s, China had extremely poor air quality as a result of rapid industrialisation, leading to a public outcry in the run-up to the 2008 Beijing Olympics,” said New Scientist.

In response, Beijing began concerted and highly effective efforts to reduce air pollution. But “there is a sting in the tail of this environmental success story”. Its dirty air had “inadvertently been cooling the planet”.

Reducing air pollution didn’t actually cause additional warming – but it “removed an artificial cooling”, said Wilcox and Samset on The Conversation. Air pollution “shields the Earth from sunlight and therefore cools the surface”. The aerosol particles reflect sunlight into space or influence cloud formation so that they reflect more sunlight. But reducing air pollution means removing “this artificial sunshade”. Since China’s greenhouse gas emissions (the main driver of global warming) continued to increase, “the result is that the Earth’s surface is warming faster than ever before”.

More good than harm

“When we started looking at the numbers, it turns out it is definitely macroscopic – it’s not a small effect,” Samset told New Scientist. China’s air pollution crackdown is responsible for 80% of the increased rate in global warming since 2010, the team concluded.

“When you emit aerosols over China, they are taken by the atmospheric circulation, transported out over the Pacific, so they spread over a large area,” said Samset. “The same amount of emissions from India would not have had the same effect on global warming.”

But the action still did more good than harm, said Duncan Watson-Parris, of the University of California San Diego. “The consequence for the climate is not great, but it’s not as acute as the number of people that were dying because of air quality.”

Air pollution is still a major concern in China, however. It’s responsible for about two million deaths a year, according to the World Health Organization. This year Beijing is “ramping up efforts in pollution control and emissions reduction” in a bid to eliminate it by the end of 2025, said The Independent.

“The battle for blue skies remains unchanged,” said a senior environment official, Li Tianwei.

The planet's seasons are not as immutable as previously thought. Turns out there are parts of the world that have different seasonal timing than those regions even just a short distance away. This irregularity may have led to evolutionary changes in various ecosystems. Now, humans are also adding to the seasonal alterations, which could create fresh future consequences.

Time warp

Earth contains hot spots that are seasonally "asynchronous" with surrounding areas, according to a study published in the journal Nature. These spots are regions where "timing of seasonal cycles can be out of sync between nearby locations," Drew Terasaki Hart, an ecologist and study author, said at The Conversation. "These differences in timing can have surprising ecological, evolutionary and even economic consequences."

Our current understanding of seasons comes from phenology, which is when people study the "timing of natural events, like when trees flower or animals migrate, simply by watching," said Orbital Today. The method "works well in much of Europe, North America and other high-latitude places with strong winters" but can "struggle in the tropics and in arid regions," said Hart. The study wanted to expand on seasonal observations using satellite data. This allowed scientists to identify irregularities in seasonal patterns that may not have been otherwise observed.

One of those examples was in Earth's Mediterranean climate regions, characterized by mild, wet winters and hot, dry summers. This includes regions like California, Chile, South Africa, southern Australia and the Mediterranean. These areas have a "double peak" seasonal pattern because "forest growth cycles tend to peak roughly two months later than other ecosystems," said Hart. They also "show stark differences in the timing of plant growth from their neighboring drylands, where summer precipitation is more common." This phenomenon had only previously been documented in California. Another example is the American Southwest, where cities "just about 100 miles apart can show very different annual rhythms because one area leans on summer monsoon rains while another splits rain between winter and summer," said Earth.com.

Season of change

Disjointed seasons have likely had a significant effect on biodiversity and evolution. Many of these seasonally asynchronous regions have singular biodiversity, according to the study. "Because seasonal cycles of plant growth can be out of sync between nearby places, the seasonal availability of resources may be out of sync too," said Hart. "This would affect the seasonal reproductive cycles of many species." Varying reproductive cycles could give way to genetically diverse species.

While seasons are not straightforward, per the study's findings, humans may also be influencing the shift. A study published in the journal Progress in Environmental Geography suggests that the planet is developing new seasons because of human activity. There has been a rise in "syncopated" seasons, which are "places where things are still technically on beat, just in weird and unpredictable ways," said Vice. This includes "heat waves where there should be rain or snowstorms in April." Some regions have been having "arrhythmic" seasons, which have no pattern to them. "Springs come too early. Summers won't end. Winters barely exist." This lack of consistency can lead to extreme weather events and disturb agriculture.

Unpredictable seasons are a result of climate change. The "scale and rapidity of changes to our planet's biogeochemical cycles profoundly impact the sociopolitically interpreted (re)definitions of seasonal rhythms," said the Progress in Environmental Geography study. "There used to be four seasons," said Vice. "Now we have melting ones, burning ones, polluted ones and plastic ones."

Beneath Antarctica's vast expanse of ice sit hundreds of canyons, some up to tens of thousands of feet deep. These complex formations under a seemingly barren landscape play a significant role in global climate change and ocean circulation — and studying them could lead to better climate models and predictions.

Rolling in the deep

Scientists have mapped 332 underwater canyons in Antarctica, according to a research article published in the journal Marine Geology. Some of these are deeper than 4,000 meters (over 13,000 feet). Antarctic submarine canyons "resemble canyons in other parts of the world," David Amblàs, a part of the Consolidated Research Group on Marine Geosciences at the University of Barcelona and one of the authors of the article, said in a statement. "But they tend to be larger and deeper because of the prolonged action of polar ice and the immense volumes of sediment transported by glaciers to the continental shelf."

The canyons also vary significantly between east and west Antarctica. In the east, the canyons are "intricate and branching, with wide U-shaped profiles," while the western canyons "are shorter and steeper, cut into sharp V-shapes," said IFL Science. These findings indicate that the East Antarctic Ice Sheet is likely much older than its western counterpart. "This had been suggested by sedimentary record studies," Amblàs said, "but it hadn't yet been described in large-scale seafloor geomorphology."

Scientists posit that the canyons "may have a more significant impact than previously thought on ocean circulation, ice-shelf thinning and global climate change, especially in vulnerable areas such as the Amundsen Sea and parts of East Antarctica," said the statement.

Zone of interest

Submarine canyons are "vitally important to ecological, oceanographic and geological processes worldwide," said Discover. The canyons "facilitate water exchange between the deep ocean and the continental shelf, allowing cold, dense water formed near ice shelves to flow into the deep ocean and form what is known as Antarctic Bottom Water," said the University of Barcelona statement. They also do the reverse, where they transport "warmer ocean waters from the sea toward the coastline," which helps "maintain and stabilize Antarctica's interior glaciers," said Discover.

The role of submarine canyons is thus far a "blind spot in climate change science," said Discover. There is not much known about the deep-sea gorges because less than one-third of the seafloor has been properly mapped. "Since so many submarine canyons are undiscovered and understudied, they do not factor into many of the current climate change models," the outlet added. This may be understating their effect on climate change. "Omitting these water-transporting canyons drastically limits the ability of climate change models to accurately predict ocean and overall climate changes."

Scientists have identified approximately 10,000 submarine canyons globally, but most remain unexplored, particularly those in polar regions. "Mapping the seafloor and its influence on the movement of water is necessary to build accurate ocean circulation models," said The Guardian.

The UK is experiencing a "false autumn", according to the Met Office, with leaves turning brown and berries starting to ripen weeks ahead of the official start of the season. Trees and plants started exhibiting behaviours associated with autumn in August, due to "the stress of extreme summer conditions", the weather agency said.

When does autumn officially begin?

Traditional "folk" markers for the start of autumn include leaves turning brown, hawthorn berries ripening, swallows migrating and, more recently, coffee chains launching their pumpkin spice brews.

More scientifically, there are three ways to define when a season begins: meteorological, astronomical and phenological. Across the northern hemisphere, meteorological autumn begins on 1 September and ends on 30 November. Using set calendar periods makes it easier for meteorological and environmental agencies to compare data over years.

The astronomical date varies between 21 and 24 September, in time with the autumn equinox, when day and night are of equal length, and ends with the winter solstice in December.

The phenological definition relies on the natural world and its response to weather and climate. So here, autumn starts when observable events – such as leaves falling from trees and the migration of birds – begin. Weather and climate conditions mean it varies from year to year.

How is climate change affecting the seasons?

Global warming has changed both the length and timing of the seasons, said Jadu Dash, professor of environmental sciences at the University of Southampton. Autumn has started to arrive, on average, two weeks later and spring now arrives a fortnight earlier, he said on Polytechnique Insights. But these trends are not the same everywhere on the planet: Europe and the rest of the northern hemisphere have seen a "much more pronounced change in seasonality" than that in the global south.

The "ongoing impacts" of climate change are bringing more frequent occurrences of a false autumn, said the Met Office, as ecosystems "struggle to adapt to extreme weather patterns", which could affect tree health and biodiversity.

Just as climate change can bring certain autumnal conditions forward, it can also slow them down. The weather body's analysis found that for every 1C increase in October temperatures, the date at which trees lose all their leaves is delayed by two or three days. Increases in CO2 can also lengthen the period when trees can photosynthesise, which keeps them green for longer.

The Oropouche virus, also known as sloth fever, was not seen outside the Amazon until recently. Prior to 2023, only a few hundred cases were recorded annually. But now the virus has been spreading across the Western Hemisphere, and infections are likely only going to increase.

What is sloth fever?

Sloth fever is mostly spread by a small insect called the biting midge, which lives in rural areas all over the world. "Sometimes this midge bites you, and you don't realize," William de Souza, a virologist at the Kentucky College of Medicine, said to National Geographic. "You don't see because it's so fast." Midges can transmit the virus to several animals, including sloths and humans. The virus is vector-borne and does not spread directly from person to person. Instead, "when a midge bites an infected host, it can pass on the pathogen to a human during a subsequent bite," said Vox. The virus may also be sexually transmissible, but there are yet to be documented cases.

Infection from the Oropouche virus can cause fevers, coughs, chills and body aches. Largely, people survive it, and many cases are asymptomatic. But in severe cases, it can be deadly. It also poses a particular risk to those who are expecting, as it may "trigger a fever that may cause pregnant people to miscarry or their babies to have birth defects known as microcephaly," similar to the Zika virus, said Salon.

Outbreaks of sloth fever used to be limited to forests, but that changed in 2023 when it began "spreading in metropolises like Rio de Janeiro," said Vox. This allowed for wider transit when travelers brought the diseases back to many other places. Since then, Oropouche fever has "sprung up in the U.S., Canada and Europe in people returning from the afflicted region." The outbreak has "killed at least five people."

Why is it spreading?

The expanded range of sloth fever is largely due to human activity. "Dynamics like deforestation, urban sprawl, international travel and gaps in surveillance are converging to drive up the dangers from infections spread by animals," said Vox. Researchers have also found that, along with biting midges, certain species of mosquitoes are capable of spreading the infection. More insects could also be spreading candidates in the future.

Past strains of Oropouche have "mutated to form a version that's better and faster at infecting cells," said National Geographic. As a result, "people previously infected in the Amazon could be susceptible to reinfection by the new strains," said de Souza. On top of this, climate change has expanded the range of vectors for the virus. Higher temperatures and rainfall "make more of the world an ideal place to breed" for mites and mosquitoes. This "could increase their contact with urban zones, which, for now, tend to have fewer midges."

There is currently no cure for the virus, so experts recommend taking precautions to avoid being bitten, like wearing long clothing and using bug spray. Other vector-borne illnesses have also been spreading more rapidly. "We are seeing cumulative threats because we are seeing not just one vector-borne disease," said Tatiane Moraes de Sousa, a researcher at the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation and a professor at the State University of Rio de Janeiro, to Vox. "In a lot of scenarios, we are also maintaining high levels of communicable diseases."

Audiences at Oasis reunion shows aren't just middle-aged people remembering the music of their youth – Gen Z are also lapping up the 1990s nostalgia, even though none of them can remember the decade.

It's because people can "feel nostalgic for a past that predates them", known as "historical nostalgia", wrote nostalgia expert Clay Routledge in The New York Times.

Golden age

Gen Z, who were born between 1997 and 2012, are "specifically captivated by what life was like in the analogue past", wrote Routledge, and they seem to be "mining" it to "enrich their present lives", particularly by "fostering a greater appreciation for offline living".

"At some point" during the past 15 years, wrote Daisy Dunn in The Spectator, "it was decided that the 1990s were a golden age". This feeling even extends to those who can't remember them because Gen Z, who know only the "colourless, anodyne first years of the new millennium", "speak of the 1990s in mystical tones".

I thought that I saw the 1990s through "rose-tinted specs because it was the decade of my childhood" but those years are "worthy of nostalgia and deserve the envy of those who didn't experience them".

Gen Z members see the 1990s as "less stressful" than now, when they're "weighed down by concerns about climate change, war and artificial intelligence", said France 24. Students are adopting the "baggy jeans and bucket hats" that were a "staple" of Liam Gallagher's wardrobe in the 1990s.

The Oasis reunion tour continues to offer various generations their very own 1990s revival. Although the band continued until 2009, the reunion setlist includes only one track, "Little by Little", to indicate that the band "existed into the 21st century", wrote Alexis Petridis in The Guardian. Other than that, it's a "shameless trip back to the 1990s".

Objectively brighter

Millennials are also enjoying the 1990s revival. There's a "sudden rash of nostalgic food rebrands" of "everything from Nik Naks to Walkers" and "Bacardi Breezers", which is "tapping into 30-somethings' apparent yearning to return to our 1990s childhoods", wrote Emily Watkins in The i Paper. It was a "simpler time, when the worst thing that could happen was being sent to bed before 'Top of the Pops'".

Each generation "loves to romanticise the good old days, whether or not they were actually better" but "for my generation, they were". Houses were more affordable, the internet "hadn't yet melted our brains" and "economically, politically, culturally, life was objectively brighter".

All this has us "feeling more than a little nostalgic – for the decor as well as the music", said Liz Lane in House Beautiful. If you want a 1990s-themed home, she recommends lots of "rich colours" like navy blue, burgundy and mustard yellow. You can also add "quirky decor items like a vintage record player or retro radio", and "bring back shabby chic", which was "one of the defining styles of the decade".