#climate change

#climate change

A big rig overturned this morning on the Southfront Road on-ramp to eastbound I-580 in Livermore. As of 8:30 am, there was no estimate for when the on-ramp would reopen. [CHP-Dublin/X] Firefighters tamped down a fire early Tuesday at a warehouse in East Oakland. The fire began around 3:30 am on 44th Avenue and San Leandro Street. [NBC Bay Area] Scientists say that 2025 was such a hot year globally that it pushed the three-year temperature average past the 2.7-degree (1.5 degrees Celsius) threshold set in the 2015 Paris Agreement.

The crumbling cliff edge is just metres away. An automatic blind, which I can operate without getting out of bed, rises to reveal an ocean view: the dramatic storm-surging North Sea with great black-backed gulls circling nearby and a distant ship on the horizon. A watery gold sunrise lights the clouds and turbulent grey water. I'm the first person to sleep in the new Kraken lodge at Still Southwold, a former farm in Easton Bavents on the Suffolk coast.

Extremes of weather have pushed nature to its limits in 2025, putting wildlife, plants and landscapes under severe pressure, an annual audit of flora and fauna has concluded. Bookended by storms Eowyn and Bram, the UK experienced a sun-soaked spring and summer, resulting in fierce heath and moorland fires, followed by autumn floods. The National Trust, which provides a snapshot of how the weather is hitting wildlife every Christmas, described it as a rollercoaster of conditions that tested nature's resilience like never before in modern

Coastal villages around Toliara, a city in southern Madagascar, host tens of thousands of the semi-nomadic Vezo people, who make a living from small-scale fishing on the ocean. For centuries, they have launched pirogues, small boats carved from single tree trunks, every day into the turquoise shallows to catch tuna, barracuda and grouper. We rely solely on the ocean, says Soa Nomeny, a woman from a small island off the south-west coast called Nosy Ve.

We hold in our thoughts the millions of people worldwide who are enduring the devastating impacts of interconnected crises of climate change, war, conflict, and displacement, the many families this Christmas who will sadly experience fear, uncertainty, or profound loss,

On the banks of the Yukon River, after arriving by canoe only a few miles from the Canadian border, I shared some salmon with Karma Ulvi, the chief of the Native Village of Eagle in Alaska. But the fish we ate wasn't caught locally: A plane had delivered the salmon from Bristol Bay, in the southwest corner of the state, over 1,000 miles away. For the Native tribes that have lived along the Yukon for millennia, importing is the only option.

From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, 'The A Word', which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messaging.

GlaMBIE has entered the research scene during a critical time: continued funding for crucial glacier monitoring technologies is uncertain, and the magnitude of global glacier decline in the 21st century has been historically unprecedented-reinforcing glaciers as clear indicators of ongoing anthropogenic climate change. Glacier monitoring is essential for tracking glacier mass changes over time, and GlaMBIE's assessment is important to ensuring the continuity of this data, especially when many glacier monitoring technologies are expected to be suspended or decommissioned due to U.S funding cuts.

Bailenson is the founder of Stanford's Virtual Human Interaction Lab, a research center studying the psychological and behavioral impacts of virtual and augmented reality, the latter of which overlays digital images onto the real world. He's worked on experiments aimed at increasing people's focus on climate change for more than a decade, having found some success. His team discovered that when people put on a VR headset and cut down a tree, feeling the vibration of the chainsaw, they use less paper afterward.

Since 2021, at least 6 million policy holders across the country have seen rate hikes to their property insurance policies, according to a new report from environmental advocacy group Climate Power. Insurers have also canceled at least 1.4 million policies in that time. One big reason is the worsening climate crisis, which is driving more and more instances of extreme weather. Inflation, labor shortages, and supply chain issues are also factors, as they drive up the costs to rebuild a home.

A coalition of more than 230 environmental groups has demanded a national moratorium on new data centers in the US, the latest salvo in a growing backlash to a booming artificial intelligence industry that has been blamed for escalating electricity bills and worsening the climate crisis. The green groups, including Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, Food & Water Watch and dozens of local organizations, have urged members of Congress

The spots gave it away. Just like a human fingerprint, the rosette pattern on each jaguar is unique so researchers knew they had a new animal on their hands after reviewing images captured by a remote camera in southern Arizona. The University of Arizona Wild Cat Research and Conservation Center says it's the fifth big cat over the last 15 years to be spotted in the area after crossing the U.S.-Mexico border.

The book is a history of carbon dioxide's complicated and vital role in shaping life on Earth, told across many millions of years. It is only during the very last bit of that span when humans had the chance to start messing around with everything, and while we talked about that part, a lot of this first segment was spent with Drew and I asking Peter very basic questions about carbon dioxide, and him giving very interesting and detailed answers.

King tides return to Southern California coastlines Thursday and Friday, reaching heights 1 to 2 feet higher than normal ocean swells. The National Weather Service warns of hazardous swimming conditions, powerful rip currents and waves up to 7.8 feet in some areas through Saturday. Scientists and coastal planners are using these extreme tides to study future sea level rise and identify vulnerable communities for infrastructure planning.

The agency previously estimated that the higher standards set in 2024 would collectively save Americans $23 billion in fuel costs over the years, or about $600 for each passenger car and light truck owner over the lifetime of their vehicle. The rules were expected to cut down gasoline use by 70 billion gallons through 2050. That would avoid 710 million metric tons of planet-heating carbon dioxide pollution, equivalent to taking more than 165.6 million gas-guzzling passenger vehicles off the road for a year.

Record-breaking heat is now routine. The devastating heatwave that wracked southwestern Europe in 2003 and claimed more than 70,000 lives produced temperatures not experienced in the region since the sixteenth century. Subsequent summers have extended this trend. In 2024, the continent recorded its hottest summer on record. In urban environments, where most of the world's population lives, the problem is especially acute. "If you build a city, inevitably it will be hotter," says Edward Ng, an architect at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.