Every summer when extreme heat arrives in Dhakale, India, Pramila Waghmare notices her children’s grades drop, only to improve again when winter arrives. After three years of this pattern, she asked her neighbors and learned that heat waves seemed to be hurting the academic performance of at least 40 schoolchildren in her hamlet with a total population of less than 1,000.

Schoolteachers told her that students in many nearby villages in Maharashtra state had similar problems, especially a loss of focus and a sharp decline in math performance.

“During the summer, I can’t concentrate,” said Waghmare’s 9-year-old daughter Kavya. “My friends and I feel like running away and sitting in the shade of the mango tree.”

By this past April, it was already difficult for students to focus as temperatures in the village exceeded 36 degrees Celsius (96.8°F). Teachers told Waghmare that during peak summer heat, most students stop participating actively by the afternoon.

Relatives from nearby villages and teachers and community health care workers across India have also noticed more days of extreme heat that make children listless, struggling to remember what they have learned and taking longer to respond to questions. It’s not just India: Extreme heat is making it harder for students to learn in classrooms around the world.

After decades of global warming and worsening heat waves, the physical effects of extreme heat are well known: dizziness, fainting, sleep disruption, labored breathing, and sometimes heat exhaustion. Large-scale studies are now revealing to scientists precisely how children’s brains and cognitive skills are suffering, making it harder to learn, concentrate, and perform. Experts say it is important for teachers to be understanding and for children to drink a lot of water and avoid physical exertion until the weather cools.

But with extreme heat getting worse and affecting millions of people a year, the problem is too big for teachers to tackle on their own. Systemic change could help. For instance, school administrators could stop planning tests for hot summer months and create areas for teachers and students to cool off on extremely hot days.

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2025 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #47

Posted on 23 November 2025 by BaerbelW, Doug Bostrom

A listing of 28 news and opinion articles we found interesting and shared on social media during the past week: Sun, November 16, 2025 thru Sat, November 22, 2025.

Stories we promoted this week, by category:

International Climate Conferences and Agreements (9 articles)

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Fact brief - Are changes in solar activity causing climate change?

Posted on 21 November 2025 by Sue Bin Park

FactBriefSkeptical Science is partnering with Gigafact to produce fact briefs — bite-sized fact checks of trending claims. You can submit claims you think need checking via the tipline.

Are changes in solar activity causing climate change?

NoThe rise in global temperatures over the past century cannot be explained by the small changes in the sun’s energy output. 

The sun varies slightly in brightness through several natural cycles, including an 11-year sunspot cycle, but these shifts are small and largely cancel out over decades. Satellite measurements show total solar irradiance actually drifted slightly downward since the late 1970s, which would have caused mild cooling, not rapid warming. 

Over longer timescales, research has found that solar changes account for 1% of the 1.4°C (2.5°F) of warming since pre-industrial times. In contrast, greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels cause far more warming and align closely with the measured temperature rise.

Change in the sun’s activity has been small and cannot explain the recent rise in global temperatures. The dominant driver of today’s climate change is not the sun, but greenhouse gas emissions from our use of fossil fuels.

Go to full rebuttal on Skeptical Science or to the fact brief on Gigafact

This fact brief is responsive to quotes such as this one.

Sources

NOAA Couldn't the Sun be the cause of global warming?

NOAA Climate Change: Incoming Sunlight

NASA Global Temperature - Earth Indicator

IPCC Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis report

Please use this form to provide feedback about this fact brief. This will help us to better gauge its impact and usability. Thank you!

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Skeptical Science New Research for Week #47 2025

Posted on 20 November 2025 by Doug Bostrom, Marc Kodack

Open access notables

A desk piled high with research reports

Observed changes in the temperature and height of the globally resolved lapserate tropopause, Ladstädter et al., Atmospheric Chemistry and Physic

The tropopause is a key indicator of atmospheric climate change, influenced by both the troposphere and stratosphere. Here we present a global view of tropopause changes, using high-resolution GNSS radio occultation data from 2002 to 2024. We identify significant trends in lapse rate tropopause (LRT) temperature and height with seasonal and regional detail. The tropical LRT has warmed, with particularly strong warming (>1 K per decade) over the South Pacific during austral spring and summer, while height changes remain largely insignificant. Outside the tropics, LRT temperature changes are confined to southern high latitudes in winter, showing cooling of up to 1 K per decade. Notably, LRT height has increased significantly across most extratropical regions, with localized trends exceeding 200 m per decade over Asia and the Middle East during Northern Hemisphere winter. An exception is the LRT height decreases over the South Pacific, coinciding with a LRT warming in that region. These results highlight the interrelated effects of tropospheric and stratospheric changes and demonstrate the value of precise tropopause monitoring for detecting ongoing changes in the global climate system.

Pan-basin warming now overshadows robust Pacific Decadal Oscillation, Cluett et al., Nature Climate Change

The Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) has served as a key index linking basin-scale climate variability to marine ecosystem changes in the North Pacific. However, recent apparent breakdowns of PDO–ecosystem correlations have raised concerns about the stability of the mode and its continued relevance in a warming climate. Here we show that basin-wide warming now overwhelms PDO-related sea surface temperature (SST) variability, although neither the PDO’s spatial pattern nor its strength have changed. We introduce the pan-basin pattern as a complementary index to describe the non-stationary SST baseline of the North Pacific. Regional SSTs increasingly reflect the superposition of these two signals, providing an explanation for weakened or inverted PDO–ecosystem correlations. Future use of the PDO index in management will require discerning the effects of internal dynamics from those of absolute changes in SST as extreme and no-analogue ocean conditions driven by interacting natural variability and anthropogenic warming become more common.

Forecast attribution reveals enhanced heat mortality from climate change in British Columbia heatwave, Shapland et al., Science Advances

In 2021, Canada experienced one of the most extreme heatwaves ever seen anywhere on the globe. We use a weather forecast model to attribute health impacts to climate change. We simulate the heatwave as a present-day forecast, a preindustrial-counterfactual scenario, and a future-counterfactual scenario. Despite the extremeness of the event, our analysis shows that, under current climate conditions, we could have still seen up to 30% more heat-related deaths than the number observed. We show that between 11 and 15% of the observed human mortality was attributable to climate change during this event, depending on the conditioning of the atmospheric circulation. We also show that, had “the same event” occurred in the future, the mortality toll is nonlinear compared with the warming trend, and so the future attribution would be even more extreme, 16 to 31%. We argue that this method gives particularly reliable impact attribution results and is therefore strongly defensible in decision-making and legal settings.

The evolution of heat exposure in changing societies and a changing climate from 1960 to 2100, Schäfer et al., Frontiers in Climate

With climate change, human exposure to heat has increased over recent decades and is expected to substantially increase in the future. This study introduces a novel metric – namely, the exponentially weighted degree-day approach – to assess population-weighted heat exposure at the national level, incorporating both static and dynamic population scenarios. Using ERA5 reanalysis and CMIP6 climate projections under the SSP2-4.5 and SSP5-8.5 scenarios, we analyze and categorize global heat exposure and its trends from 1960 until 2100. Our findings reveal a significant rise in heat exposure over past decades, disentangling the contributions of climate and demographic changes. Furthermore, a thorough analysis of biases across different datasets and model dimensions provides a global perspective based on daily maximum and daily mean temperatures. This analysis forms the basis for quantifying current and future heat exposure, together with a qualitative heat zone classification scheme. The results underscore the urgent need for targeted adaptation strategies and improved climate metrics to better assess and mitigate future heat-related risks.

From this week's government/NGO section:

Warming Projections Global Update, November 2025, Gonzales-Zuñiga et al., Climate Analytics, Next Climate Institute, and Institute for Essential Services Reform

Ten years after the Paris Agreement, the world stands at a critical juncture in the fight against climate change, with little to no measurable progress in the Climate Action Tracking’s warming projections, now for the fourth consecutive year. Almost none of the 40 governments the CAT analyses have updated their 2030 target, which is critical to keep warming levels below 1.5°C, nor have they set out the kind of action in new 2035 targets needed to change course. As a result, the temperature projection for our “2030 and 2035 targets scenario”, the one estimating impact of submitted climate targets (NDCs) to date, remains at 2.6°C, the same as last year. In other words, the 2035 NDCs so far submitted do not change the dial in terms of keeping warming to 1.5?C.

Climate Information Integrity: How to act now to ensure the success of the climate agenda, FALA Impact Studio and Climate Action Against Disinformation

Confronting climate disinformation requires structural change. In practice, this means urgently overhauling the supply chain of lies. This can only happen through public policies that connect the climate agenda with information integrity, challenge harmful business models, and promote healthy, safe communication ecosystems. Calls to action include call out climate disinformation for what it is, demonetize the supply chain of lies, and ensure transparency and accountability in the use of AI and technology for spreading disinformation.

107 articles in 59 journals by 627 contributing authors

Physical science of climate change, effects

Changing Northern Hemisphere weather linked to warming amplification in High Mountain Asia, Xie et al., Communications Earth & Environment Open Access 10.1038/s43247-025-02883-0

Deep Arctic Ocean warming enhanced by heat transferred from deep Atlantic, Song et al., Science Advances 10.1126/sciadv.adx9452

Diagnosing the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation in density space is critical in warmer climates, Oliveira Matos et al., Open Access 10.5194/egusphere-2025-2326

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Exploring newly released estimates of current policy warming

Posted on 19 November 2025 by Zeke Hausfather

This is a re-post from The Climate Brink

It's the COP time of the year: the 30th Conference of the Parties of the UNFCCC. In addition to countless delegates trekking down to Brazil, this also means the release of a number of high-profile reports approximately timed to the COP to maximize their impact.

This year we have three new analyses that explore how much warming might be in store for us under current policies in place today as well as if countries meet their near-term nationally determined contributions under the Paris Agreement and their long-term net zero targets. The new analyses include updates to the high profile annually re-occurring estimates from the UNEP Emissions Gap Report, the IEA’s World Energy Outlook, and Climate Action Tracker (CAT).

In addition, three other studies were released this year on current policy warming outcomes from Rhodium, Wood MacKenzie, and Jiang et al., 2025.

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Climate Adam - Why the Climate Crisis is a Health Crisis

Posted on 18 November 2025 by Guest Author

This video includes personal musings and conclusions of the creator climate scientist Dr. Adam Levy. It is presented to our readers as an informed perspective. Please see video description for references (if any).

Video description

Climate change is here, today, and it's threatening our lives. Whether through the direct danger of extreme weather - from floods, to heatwaves, to wildfires - the dangers of diseases and new pandemics, or the harms from climate change's causes: whether that's toxic air or unhealthy diets. So let's take a look at all the ways climate change harms our lives, what we can do to protect ourselves, and what we have to gain by halting global warming.

Support ClimateAdam on patreon: https://patreon.com/climateadam

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Super pollutants are trendy, but we should be careful how we use them

Posted on 17 November 2025 by Zeke Hausfather

This is a re-post from The Climate Brink

“Super pollutants” – short-lived climate pollutants like methane (CH4) and some refrigerants (halocarbons) – are having a moment. There were numerous sessions on the topic during the recent New York Climate Week, and a number of companies are exploring investments in reducing these emissions as part of their climate goals.

Reducing emissions of short-lived climate pollutants (SLCPs) is, by itself, an unambiguously good thing. Methane in particular is responsible for around a third of all warming to-date from well-mixed greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, and reductions in emissions can have a rapid cooling effect on the planet.

It is when methane (or other SLCPs) are used to offset or neutralize CO2 emissions – to make a claim that the climate effects of CO2 can be counterbalanced by methane – that the problem becomes much, much thornier. As Ray Pierrehumbert explains, “It is useful to reduce methane, but it’s not going to really help us towards net zero. The only real solution to the climate crisis is to get carbon dioxide emissions down to as close to zero as we can.”

Stocks vs flows

The question of how to compare methane and CO2 is one that has long interested me. I wrote a paper a decade ago on how to compare the climate impacts of coal and natural gas (back when talk of a “natural gas bridge” was in vogue), and authored the chapter on methane and other short-lived climate pollutants for Greta Thunberg’s Climate Book.

At its core, the difference in climate impacts between CO2 and methane comes down to the fact that CO2 is a “stock pollutant” and methane is a “flow pollutant”.

CO2 is an extremely stable molecule that accumulates in the atmosphere over time with constant emissions; while a portion of CO2 can be absorbed by land and ocean sinks in the form of organic or inorganic carbon, it does not naturally degrade. The warming that results from CO2 is – to a first order approximation – a largely time-invariant function of cumulative emissions. If CO2 emissions increase, the world warms faster; if they stay constant the world warms at a constant rate; if emissions decline, the world warms more slowly. But even if CO2 emissions get to zero, the world does not meaningfully cool back down for centuries to come; the only way to cool the planet through CO2 is to go net-negative – remove more CO2 from the atmosphere than we are adding.

Simple model of global temperatures as a function of cumulative emissions, using the IPCC AR6 Transient Climate Response to cumulative carbon Emissions (TCRE) of 1.65C per trillion tons of carbon.

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2025 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #46

Posted on 16 November 2025 by BaerbelW, Doug Bostrom

A listing of 28 news and opinion articles we found interesting and shared on social media during the past week: Sun, November 9, 2025 thru Sat, November 15, 2025.

Stories we promoted this week, by category:

International Climate Conferences and Agreements (11 articles)

Public Misunderstandings about Climate Science (4 articles)

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Skeptical Science New Research for Week #46 2025

Posted on 13 November 2025 by Doug Bostrom, Marc Kodack

Open access notables

A desk piled high with research reports

Robust increase in observed heat storage by the global subsurface, Cuesta-Valero et al., Science Advances

Changes in heat storage within the different components of the climate system alter physical and biogeochemical phenomena relevant for human societies and ecosystems. Among such processes, permafrost thawing, soil carbon storage, and surface energy exchanges depend on the persistent heat gain by the continental subsurface. Nevertheless, there are not enough data to estimate ground heat storage at the global scale after the year 2000. We solve this problem by expanding the database of geothermal data with remote sensing observations from satellite platforms. Estimates from satellite data show a heat gain between 16.4 ± 3.4 and 21.78 ± 0.62 zettajoules during the past six decades. The global ground heat storage presents a positive acceleration between 0.16 ± 0.15 and 0.624 ± 0.032 zettajoules per square decade, similarly to the rest of components of the Earth heat inventory. The planned satellite missions ensure the monitoring of the land component of the Earth heat inventory in the future.

Bridging the Gap: Empowering Rural Teachers to Navigate the Complex Terrain of Climate Science Education, Scheer et al., Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society

Despite significant resources dedicated to climate science education, teachers often encounter unique challenges due to local cultural and social norms. This study investigates these challenges faced by teachers in rural eastern Colorado when teaching anthropogenic climate change mandated in state academic standards. We explored teachers’ confidence in their knowledge, their belief in the importance of teaching this topic, and concerns about potential risks that influenced their teaching decisions. We found that teachers’ instructional choices are shaped by both their lack of understanding of the scientific evidence for climate change and concerns about community backlash. These findings highlight the need for support that goes beyond simply improving teachers’ scientific knowledge. We recommend 1) providing local examples to make climate science more relevant to students’ lives, 2) involving community members and school administrators in professional development to foster a supportive environment, and 3) partnering with trusted local figures, such as agricultural extension agents, to build bridges between scientific expertise and local knowledge.

Negative verbal probabilities undermine communication of climate science, Juanchich et al., Nature Climate Change

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) recommends describing low-probability outcomes using negative verbal probability terms such as unlikely, rather than positive terms such as a small probability. However, we propose that this choice of probability terms might undermine public perception and understanding of climate science. Across eight preregistered experiments (N = 4,150), we find that participants perceive outcomes described with negative low probability terms as reflecting lower scientific consensus than probabilistically equivalent but positively framed terms. The effect persists after controlling for beliefs in climate change, familiarity with the IPCC and political orientation, although it weakens when the projected values exceeded participants’ personal expectations. Participants also associate negative low-probability terms more strongly with extreme outcomes and judge them as less evidence-based than their positive counterparts. We recommend using positive verbal probabilities to communicate comparable levels of uncertainty without undermining perceptions of scientific consensus and evidence.

Accelerated rifting in response to regional climate change in the East African Rift System, Muirhead et al., Scientific Reports

Continental rifting is influenced by interactions between tectonic, magmatic, and surface processes, with the latter strongly dependent on regional climate. We test the role of regional climate variability on rift system behavior, by investigating fault slip rate changes in the South Turkana Basin (Lake Turkana Rift, northern Kenya) at the end of the African Humid Period. Throw rates on 27 faults examined during the African Humid Period (9,631–5,333 yr BP) and post-African Humid Period (5,333 yr BP–present) exhibit a mean 0.17 ± 0.08 mm/yr increase during the drier, post-African Humid Period. Numerical simulations reveal Coulomb stress changes from two loading sources that may explain these changes: (1) reduced vertical loading from a 100–150 m lake level drop, and (2) increased magmatic loading from enhanced mantle melt production due to reduced lake loading. An increase in magma flux of > 0.1 km3/kyr below the South Turkana Basin results in Coulomb stress changes exceeding those expected from a 100–150 m lake level drop. We provide the first empirical evidence of increased fault activity in response to climate-induced lake level changes in the East African Rift System over time scales of 103–104 years, and reveal that climate-tectonic interactions are enhanced in magmatically active rift systems.

From this week's government/NGO section:

State of the Cryosphere 2025 Ice Loss = Global Damage, International Cryosphere Climate Initiative

Current unambitious climate commitments, leading the world to well over 2°C of warming, spell disaster for billions of people from global ice loss, but that damage can still be prevented, according to the authors. The authors note that thresholds likely at just 1°C of warming for the stability of the polar ice sheets and even lower temperatures for many glaciers. The authors also note however that the most proactive climate pathways, also released today, can bring down temperatures below 1.5°C by 2100 and below 1°C next century – but only if reductions begin immediately.

Climate change enhanced intensity of Hurricane Melissa, testing limits of adaptation in Jamaica and eastern Cuba, Clarke et al., World Weather Attribution

Hurricane Melissa moved very slowly across the Caribbean, allowing the storm to gather immense destructive energy over very warm ocean waters. When it finally made landfall in Jamaica as a Category 5 hurricane, the storm hit a region familiar with hurricanes, but unaccustomed to one of such exceptional strength and intensity. To estimate if human-induced climate change influenced the heavy rainfall, the authors first determined if there is a trend in the observations. In Jamaica, they found that heavy 5-day rainfall events such as the one associated with Melissa are about 30% more intense and about twice as likely in today’s climate, that is 1.3°C warmer than it would have been without human-induced climate change. In Eastern Cuba the observations show an even stronger increase of about 50% in intensity and a factor 9 in frequency. Taking all lines of evidence together, including the observations, the IRIS analysis, other studies in the region, and physical reasoning, that in a warming climate an increase in heavy rainfall is expected, the authors estimate an increase in intensity of the rainfall associated with hurricanes like Melissa to be larger than 9%.

128 articles in 59 journals by 908 contributing authors

Physical science of climate change, effects

Mean Kinetic Energy and Its Projected Changes Dominate Over Eddy Kinetic Energy in the Arctic Ocean, Rieck et al., Geophysical Research Letters Open Access 10.1029/2025gl117957

The impacts of climate change on tropical-to-extratropical transitions in the North Atlantic Basin, Garin et al., Weather and Climate Dynamics Open Access 10.5194/wcd-6-1379-2025

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On the Gates climate memo

Posted on 12 November 2025 by Zeke Hausfather

This is a re-post from The Climate Brink

There are a lot of things I agree with in Bill Gates’ new memo on climate change. The recent cutbacks on international spending on vaccination, malaria control, feeding the hungry, and poverty alleviation by many of the richest countries (driven in part by a desire for more military spending) is a catastrophe that will cost thousands if not millions of lives. Adaptation is a critically important part of addressing climate change, and a world with more prosperity and less inequality is one where we can better deal with the impacts of climate change – at least up to a point.

But in other areas I feel that it needlessly sets up a conflict between laudable goals: we can both mitigate emissions and alleviate poverty, disease, and hunger. While there are some tradeoffs it is more a question of policy priority than a zero sum game. Similarly, I feel that Gates is a bit too cavalier in his treatment of climate risk.

Given the strong reactions to Gates’ memo both on the left and the right, I thought it would be helpful to provide a more measured reaction and critique, and give some thoughts how to move forward to – as Gates suggests – have the most positive impact on the world.

A zero sum game?

Bill Gates – through his philanthropic work with the Gates Foundation – has done more than almost anyone else on the planet to meaningfully improve the lives of the world’s poorest. The Gates Foundation was the founding funder of Gavi which helped expand vaccination in the global south and drive down prices. They did key work to help eradicate polio, combat HIV, TB and malaria, deliver sanitation and clean drinking water, and worked to raise smallholder farmer yields and income through access to agricultural technology.

The recent gutting of USAID – and smaller reductions in aid spending by other countries – is a humanitarian catastrophe and threatens to undo much of the work that the Gates Foundation supported over the past few decades. I can see why, in light of these urgent needs, he is suggesting that resources to combat climate change be repurposed toward dealing with poverty, hunger, and disease.

But this assumes that funding for climate and development (to use a term to encompass help improve the lives of the world’s poorest) are inherently zero sum. And here I think that, for the most part, Gates errs in his analysis – for a few reasons:

First, the vast majority of spending on climate mitigation worldwide is not in low income countries, and there is little reason to assume that cutting it would free up resources for development aid. The world spent more than two trillion on clean energy technologies (albeit somewhat expansively defined) in 2024, but the overwhelming majority of this was spent by middle- and high-income countries (e.g. China, the US, the EU, the UK, India, Japan, etc.) to build domestic clean energy, build transmission, buy electric vehicles, electrify heating, etc.

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Climate Adam - Climate Scientist responds to Bill Gates

Posted on 11 November 2025 by Guest Author

This video includes personal musings and conclusions of the creator climate scientist Dr. Adam Levy. It is presented to our readers as an informed perspective. Please see video description for references (if any).

Video description

Bill Gates just published a climate think piece that has taken the internet by storm. While conservatives are claiming he's backtracked on climate change, the truth is much more subtle. So what does the Microsoft founder, Gates, get right and wrong about climate change? And why might he be downplaying the risks at a crucial moment for our planet's climate?

Support ClimateAdam on patreon: https://patreon.com/climateadam

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