#climate-change

#climate-change

A fierce barrage of storms from the Atlantic has drenched south-west England in January, saturating soils and supercharging rivers. It's deja vu, she said. The stress and anxiety is palpable in the community. We've all been here before, we know what happens and it shouldn't. But since 2014, the weather events are becoming more and more frequent and the rain just dumps now.

Decades of successful scientific collaboration could be at risk if Europe-US political relations continue to fray over trade and defense issues. For more than 30 years, Arctic nations have worked together across the physical, biological and social sciences to understand one of the world's fastest changing regions. Since the late 1970s, the Arctic has lost around 33,000 square miles of sea ice each year roughly the same area as Czechia.

Trump has frequently peddled disinformation about the climate crisis over the years, and has dismantled a wide range of climate protections while in office. He has, for example, expanded non-renewable energy production in the U.S., including oil and coal, and early in his second term (as he did in his first), he withdrew the U.S. from the international Paris Climate Agreement.

California marked a milestone this month with the return of an uninterrupted Highway 1 through the perilous, yet spectacular cliffs of Big Sur. The famed coastal road was closed for more than three years after two major landslides buried the two-lane highway, and it took unprecedented engineering might and precarious debris removal to once again connect northern Big Sur with its southern neighbors.

Human-caused global heating made the intense heatwave that affected much of Australia in early January five times more likely, new analysis suggests. The heatwave earlier this month was the most severe since the 2019-20 black summer, with temperatures over 40C in Melbourne and Sydney, even hotter conditions in regional Victoria and New South Wales, and extreme heat also affecting Western Australia, South Australia and Tasmania.

"Protecting the climate and protecting our democracy are inextricably linked," veteran climate reporter and activist Bill McKibben said last week at a Covering Climate Now press briefing on covering the climate story in 2026. President Donald Trump "is in many ways operating as a political arm of the oil industry," McKibben added, "and coming to grips with his authoritarian impulse is going to be crucial to ever getting any climate action."

The physical nature of the project was inspiring and fun for everyone and also contained within it a kind of message. If we are going to change the direction of our climate we are going to have to do it for real too - in the real world, by doing real stuff.

The administration turned its back on the climate "hoax", as Trump describes it, withdrawing from the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, the basis for the Paris climate agreement (abandoned twice by Trump in his two terms), and signed by 197 nations in 1992. Other non-U.N. organizations were dropped as well, including the Partnership for Atlantic Cooperation, the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, and the Global Counterterrorism Forum.

Timothy Morton is one of the authors leading the new wave of environmentalism. The British thinker, whose latest work is provocative and extremely personal, takes it as a point of fact that the destruction of the planet is in process. Admired by the singer Bjork and Hans Ulrich Obrist, the artistic director of the modernist London gallery Serpentine, Morton comes across as a punk creative, one who has kept up the fight against preconceived thinking.

The fact of the matter is, the ones that add a nice earthiness to a pasta cream sauce look entirely too similar to the ones that leave you curled up and dying in agony for me to trust any forager's eye test, a point driven home by California's ongoing epidemic/outbreak of mushroom poisoning cases, which in less than two months has left three dozen people sickened and resulted in multiple fatalities.

Green iguanas (Iguana iguana) are not native to the U.S. but were brought to Florida in the 1960s, where they have, for the most part, flourishedexcept, that is, when temperatures have dropped below 50 degrees F (10 degrees C). These chilly conditions can cause a cold shock in the lizards. And because the iguanas tend to sleep in trees, getting cold shocked can sometimes cause the animals to fall from the skies in an infamous Florida phenomenon.

Meanwhile, signs that the planet's health is worsening are unmistakable. Last year was among the warmest on record globally, with average temperatures far above long-term baselines and heat driving more extreme weather worldwide. In 2025, brutal heatwaves baked much of the Indian subcontinent with temperatures near 48 °C, stressing health systems and agriculture across India and Pakistan. Europe and the Mediterranean faced record wildfires and prolonged heat, forcing tens of thousands to evacuate and worsening drought conditions.

President Donald Trump started his second term with his sights set on Greenland. Though the island is not for sale, the president emphasized Greenland's importance to U.S. national security. Left unspoken: A U.S. takeover could weaken the country's mining laws and ban on private property, aiding Trump donors' plans to profit from the island's mineral deposits and build a libertarian techno-city.

Since the 1990s, American homes have been systematically underinsured in the event that they are completely destroyed. Study after study shows that, counter to the public's understanding, many home insurance policies are not required to cover total replacement of homes. The trend, though decades old, has been somewhat hidden. But climate-driven events that cause massive destruction, especially wildfires, are revealing just how pervasive and severe the problem has become.

In the small town of Chipaya, everything is dry. Only a few people walk along the sandy streets, and many houses look abandoned some secured with a padlock. The wind is so strong that it forces you to close your eyes. Chipaya lies on Bolivia's Altiplano, 35 miles from the Chilean border. The vast plateau, nearly 4,000 metres above sea level, feels almost empty of people and animals, its solitude framed by snow-capped volcanoes. It raises the question: can anybody possibly live here?

Recently, while sailing with friends on San Francisco Bay, I enjoyed the sight of harbor porpoises, cormorants, pelicans, seals and sea lions and then the spouting plume and glistening back of a gray whale that gave me pause. Too many have been seen inside the bay recently. California's gray whales have been considered an environmental success story since the passage of the 1972 Marine Mammal Protection Act and 1986's global ban on commercial whaling. They're also a major tourist attraction during their annual 12,000-mile

If they survived the summer and reached adulthood, they would become some of the fastest land animals on Earth. Adult pronghorn, a bit smaller than deer, can run seven miles in just 10 minutes, achieving short bursts of nearly 60 mph, much faster than horses or wolves. With their long thin legs and oversized hearts and lungs, they are built to cover ground in the wide-open sagebrush basins of Wyoming, my home state.

The Trump administration announced last week that it wants Americans to consume more protein, churning out a colorful illustration of an inverted food pyramid that prominently features a big, red steak, a wedge of cheese, and a carton of whole milk at the top and claiming it's "ending the war on protein." It may seem like another example of cartoonish propaganda from an administration that essentially runs on memes, but don't be fooled: It signals a marked turn from previous advice that encouraged Americans to limit high-fat sources of protein like red meat and whole milk for their health, which can incidentally also curb planet-heating pollution from the beef and dairy industries.

Jonathan Rinderknecht, a 29-year-old occasional Uber driver who used to live in Pacific Palisades, was charged with three felonies by federal prosecutors in October, who claim he was in the neighborhood in the early hours of New Year's Day. According to a federal complaint, Rinderknecht allegedly used an open flame likely a lighter to start a small blaze that grew to about 8 acres (3.2 hectares) before firefighters rushed to the area and extinguished it. That blaze was known as the Lachman fire.