Skeptical Science

Skeptical Science New Research for Week #33 2026

Thu, 13 Aug 2026 14:35:40 EST

Open access notables

Methane Emissions From Wildfires: Trends and Anomalies, Zhu et al., Journal of Geophysical Research Atmospheres

Wildfires emit smoke particles and trace gases including greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, impacting the environment and leading to detrimental impacts on human health and economy. The estimation of spatially and temporally resolved methane emissions from biomass burning (BB) provides critical information in developing measurement-informed methane inventories. The use of satellite active fire products (fire radiative power) is an effective pathway to investigate wildfire emissions around the world. In this study, the Global BB Emissions Product-eXtended algorithm is employed to estimate long-term temporal variation and geographic distribution of methane emissions from BB using satellite observations from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer and the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite. Globally, on average about 19 Megatonnes of BB methane are released to the atmosphere every year, nearly half of it originating from Africa, where BB represents a significant proportion of the total methane emissions. Our findings show that methane emissions from wildfires are substantial and can exceed other source sectors during extreme wildfire events, negating gains from years of emission reductions from anthropogenic sources. The contribution of fires to the methane budget is significant for regions with intense fire activities. Effective wildfire prevention and management could be beneficial to rapidly reduce methane emissions from BB.

Diurnal asymmetry in heat stress intensification across Bangladesh, 1985–2024: Accelerated nighttime warming and emerging urban risk, Kamruzzaman et al., PLOS Climate

Bangladesh’s rapidly growing cities are becoming hotter, but how heat stress is changing over the day–night cycle has remained unclear. Using 40 years (1985–2024) of hourly Universal Thermal Climate Index (UTCI) data from ERA5-HEAT, we examined long-term changes in physiologically relevant heat stress across Bangladesh and its major cities. Results show a clear day–night imbalance in warming: nighttime heat stress (UTCI???) is rising faster than daytime extremes. National trends indicate increases of +0.03 °C per decade for UTCI???, +0.02 °C for daily mean UTCI, and +0.01 °C for UTCI???, with the strongest warming occurring in the early morning hours. These national spatially averaged trends reflect the mean across all 194 grid cells; individual grid cells show local trends of +0.1 to +0.4°C per decade, and the cumulative nighttime warming over the full 40-year period reaches approximately 1.0–1.7°C across most of the country. This signals a steady loss of nighttime cooling that people rely on for physical recovery. The most pronounced nighttime warming occurs in western and southern Bangladesh. Major cities—including Dhaka, Rajshahi, Khulna, Chattogram, and Sylhet—show additional intensification consistent with, but not directly attributed to, urban heat-island dynamics at the spatial scale of this analysis. The number of very strong heat stress days (UTCI > 38 °C) has increased by 4–15 days per decade, and cities such as Rajshahi and Dhaka now experience more than 150 such days annually. Together, these findings indicate a transition from occasional heat extremes to persistent, 24-hour heat stress, increasing risks to health, labor productivity, and urban resilience. By identifying when heat stress is rising fastest and where it is concentrated, this study provides evidence to support city-specific heat-action plans, early-warning systems, and climate-responsive urban design in rapidly warming regions.

Significant soil warming across Alaska permafrost and non-permafrost regions from 1997 to 2023, Oliver & Phillips, Frontiers in Climate

Air temperatures in Alaska are increasing at twice the rate of the contiguous United States. Soil temperatures have been shown to be increasing across various landscapes but have overall received less attention. No comprehensive studies have been conducted in Alaska looking at soil temperature trends on a broad scale. In this paper we synthesized soil and air temperature data from 43 weather stations across Alaska spanning a 27-year period (1997-2023). Stations were divided into three regions based on permafrost extent (continuous, discontinuous, and no permafrost). Soil temperature trends were calculated at 5, 20, and 50 cm depth in all three permafrost regions, and additionally at 70, 95, and 120 cm depth for the continuous permafrost region only. Annual average soil temperatures increased significantly across all regions with the fastest warming rates occurring at the highest latitudes. Whole profile warming averaged 0.64, 0.37, and 0.35°C dec-1 in the continuous, discontinuous, and no permafrost regions, respectively. Warming was not slowed by increasing soil depth. Air temperatures warmed faster than soil (p < 0.05) in the continuous permafrost region (1.15°C dec-1) but were not significantly different from soil in the discontinuous and no permafrost regions (p > 0.1). Seasonally, soils in the continuous and discontinuous regions warmed fastest in the winter months, whereas in the no permafrost region soils warmed fastest in the summer months.

Optimizing the Rainwater Harvesting and Roof Sprinkling System to Adapt to Urban Extreme Heat, Yu et al., Earth s Future

Roof watering is a novel strategy for reducing air conditioning energy consumption and mitigating excess urban heat, yet its application is often constrained by water availability. To address this challenge, we propose an adaptation strategy that integrates rainwater harvesting tank with roof sprinkling to strengthen urban heat resilience. We develop a new module implemented in the Community Land Model Urban (CLMU) to evaluate the efficacy of the proposed strategy, whose parameters were further determined by a framework using multi-objective optimization combined with a transformer-based tabular foundation model. This integrated modeling framework enables the optimization of the proposed strategy and provides insights into its impacts on air conditioning energy consumption and its co-benefits on the urban thermal environment. Results show that the temperature threshold for triggering sprinkling is a more important parameter than rainwater tank size or sprinkling intensity. The optimal strategies effectively reduce cooling energy demand, lower extreme temperatures, and decrease heatwave days. However, a trade-off exists between rainwater tank size and the reduction in cooling energy consumption and heatwave days. Additionally, the energy saving is more pronounced under higher atmospheric temperatures. The implementation of the rainwater harvesting and roof sprinkling system in CLMU provides valuable insights for improving urban resilience and can be further coupled into Earth system model for large-scale studies.

From this week's government/NGO section:

State of the Climate in 2025, Blunden et al., American Meteorological Society

The authors provide a comprehensive, observation-based assessment of Earth’s climate system that not only documents what happened during a given year (e.g., 2025), but also how that year compares to previous years in the observational record. Thus, it is critical to have continuous, long-term observations of various components of the Earth system to document variability and change over time. Many of these observations, both current and historical, are also assimilated into various reanalysis products (e.g., ERA5 and MERRA-2), which are physically constrained representations of the Earth system and are used extensively throughout the State of the Climate report. Reanalyzes are particularly useful in regions where in situ and satellite observations are sparse.

Built for backup, contracted to run: China’s coal support system risks crowding out clean power, Qin et al., The Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air and Global Energy Monitor

New coal power plants entering operation in China reached the highest first-half year level since 2016, with 10 GW entering operation for every 1 GW retired, despite a policy shift towards tighter control of new project approvals. China commissioned 30 GW of new coal power, up 43% from last year, while retiring only 2.7 GW. Another 25.4 GW started construction; Coal power generation rebounded 3.4% year-on-year in H1 2026, reversing the 2025 decline. The rapid expansion of coal power capacity led to worsening oversupply, reflected both in the increase of wasted wind and solar generation and in falling utilization of coal power plants; The rebound was not evidence of a broad return to coal following LNG shipping disruptions in the Strait of Hormuz. China’s combined domestic coal production and imports in fact fell by 1.4% year-on-year in H1 2026, rather than expanding in response to the external energy shock. Growth in clean energy supply and electrification helped offset the fall in oil supply and limit increases in fossil fuel consumption; Estimated wind and solar curtailment, including both reported and unreported curtailment, reached 360 TWh in H1 2026, up 49% year-on-year. Had this electricity been absorbed, the additional power supply could have met all demand growth and allowed coal power generation to fall.

132 articles in 58 journals by 1667 contributing authors

Physical science of climate change, effects

Regime shifts of AMOC-sea surface temperature relationship, Fan et al., Nature Communications Open Access 10.1038/s41467-026-76149-4

Trends in the Seasonal Cycle of the Equatorial Pacific Cold Tongue, Jiang et al., Journal of Climate Open Access pdf 10.1175/jcli-d-26-0049.1

Observations of climate change, effects

Diurnal asymmetry in heat stress intensification across Bangladesh, 1985–2024: Accelerated nighttime warming and emerging urban risk, Kamruzzaman et al., PLOS Climate Open Access pdf 10.1371/journal.pclm.0000848

Globally and intergenerationally unequal exposure to hourly heat extremes, Liao et al., Nature Climate Change 10.1038/s41558-026-02724-8

Recent History of Surface Ocean Acidification Extremes That Compound Marine Heatwaves, Gregor & Gruber, AGU Advances Open Access 10.1029/2025av002112

Significant soil warming across Alaska permafrost and non-permafrost regions from 1997 to 2023, Oliver & Phillips, Frontiers in Climate Open Access pdf 10.3389/fclim.2026.1887902

Spatiotemporal Patterns of Drought and Flood Abrupt Alternation and Their Driving Factors in China from 1951 to 2020, Li et al., Journal of Hydrometeorology Open Access pdf 10.1175/jhm-d-25-0187.1

State of the Climate in 2025, Zhao et al., Atmospheric and Oceanic Science Letters Open Access 10.1016/j.aosl.2026.100897

Instrumentation & observational methods of climate change, effects

The rise of AI in weather and climate information and its impact on global inequality, Mozaffari et al., npj Climate Action Open Access pdf 10.1038/s44168-026-00412-z

Modeling, simulation & projection of climate change, effects

Intensification of the North Pacific Storm Track in the Mid-1980s: Internal Variability Versus External Forcing, Yang, Geophysical Research Letters Open Access 10.1029/2026gl124032

Machine learning-based projection of China's ski resort suitability under CMIP6 scenarios, ZHAO et al., Advances in Climate Change Research Open Access 10.1016/j.accre.2026.08.002

Projections of Earth's Hottest Surface Temperatures in CMIP6, Wilson et al., Geophysical Research Letters Open Access 10.1029/2026gl122540

Advancement of climate & climate effects modeling, simulation & projection

Advances in regional climate science in South America and Central America during the CORDEX Era, Bettolli et al., PLOS Climate Open Access pdf 10.1371/journal.pclm.0001015

Global fully coupled climate-aerosol CMA-CPSv4 – Part 1: Aerosol simulation performance, Zheng et al., Geoscientific model development Open Access 10.5194/gmd-19-7279-2026

Impact of mesoscale eddy parameterization on Arctic Atlantic Water circulation and heat transport in the eddy-permitting grey zone, Pemberton et al., Ocean science Open Access 10.5194/os-22-2375-2026

Statistical Downscaling of Daily Temperature and Precipitation From Regional Climate Models in Complex Mountain Terrain, Matiu et al., International Journal of Climatology Open Access 10.1002/joc.70545

Underestimated Arctic “Radiator Fin” Effect in Climate Model Simulations, Huang & Huang, Geophysical Research Letters Open Access 10.1029/2026gl122725

Cryosphere & climate change

A nine-year record of slush on the Greenland Ice Sheet, Glen et al., cryosphere Open Access pdf 10.5194/tc-20-4345-2026

A State-Space Model for Monitoring Greenland Ice Sheet Surface Elevation Change from CryoSat-2, Andersen et al., cryosphere Open Access pdf 10.5194/tc-20-4327-2026

Arctic sea ice loss amplifies local evaporation influence on water vapor isotopes: insights from cruise observations, Zhang et al., Atmospheric chemistry and physics Open Access pdf 10.5194/acp-26-11189-2026

Destabilization of seasonal snow cover under climate warming: Mechanisms and implications from four decades of satellite observations across mainland China, Wu et al., Global and Planetary Change 10.1016/j.gloplacha.2026.105644

Future climate change will intensify snow drought in the high-latitude water tower, Changbai Mountain, Xu et al., Global and Planetary Change 10.1016/j.gloplacha.2026.105646

Glacier mass balance response to extreme precipitation events in the Western Himalaya, India, Kumar et al., Global and Planetary Change 10.1016/j.gloplacha.2026.105643

Glacier surges on James Ross Island, Antarctica, and their relationship with climate, Davison et al., cryosphere Open Access 10.5194/tc-20-4293-2026

Snow-eater heat waves of the western United States, Rhoades et al., Science Advances Open Access 10.1126/sciadv.aeb3361

Synchronous Holocene thinning of Pine Island Glacier and its tributaries influenced by ice-shelf unpinning, Johnson et al., Nature Communications Open Access 10.1038/s41467-026-76244-6

Sea level & climate change

Diverse response of extreme sea levels amplification and more vulnerable deltas/islands in the northern South China Sea by the end of the 21st century, Chen et al., Advances in Climate Change Research Open Access pdf 10.1016/j.accre.2026.07.021

Increasing Frequency of Coastal Erosion Indicated by a Hindcast Model of Storm-Driven Forcing Calibrated With Beach Stratigraphy, Schmelz et al., Earth s Future Open Access 10.1029/2025ef007482

Paleoclimate & paleogeochemistry

Planetary energy budget during abrupt glacial climate events set by Atlantic Ocean heat valve, Buizert et al., Nature Geoscience 10.1038/s41561-026-02070-6

Biology & climate change, related geochemistry

Abalone Mortality Associated With Hypoxia in Tidepools During a Summer Heatwave, Gagnon et al., Ecology and Evolution Open Access 10.1002/ece3.74126

Arctic sea-ice variability is linked to long-term changes in bowhead whale foraging, Teixeira et al., Marine Environmental Research 10.1016/j.marenvres.2026.108344

Beyond temperature: The environmental constraints of high-mountain microrefugia, Vrábel et al., Journal of Ecology Open Access 10.1111/1365-2745.70422

Blue rings in Scots pine indicate cooling in the early and late growing season at the northern treeline, ?ermák et al., Dendrochronologia Open Access 10.1016/j.dendro.2026.126592

Climate Warming Is Causing an Increasing Dominance of Smaller Moth Species, Ellis et al., Global Ecology and Biogeography Open Access 10.1111/geb.70294

Continental-Scale Biodiversity Predictions Are Influenced by Climatic Variability and Extreme Weather, Cohen et al., Global Change Biology 10.1111/gcb.71028

Coupling Climate Downscaling With Species Distribution Models to Identify Potential Climate Refugia for Giant Panda Forage Bamboos, Shang et al., Ecology and Evolution Open Access 10.1002/ece3.74162

Denning Phenology Mediates Sea-Ice Loss Impacts on Early Reproductive Success in Polar Bears, Naciri et al., Global Change Biology 10.1111/gcb.71042

Evaluation and Forecasting of Habitat Suitability and Thermal Growth Responses in the Mud Clam Geloina coaxans under Climate Change, Liu et al., Marine Environmental Research 10.1016/j.marenvres.2026.108337

Future NDVI projections and ensemble strategy comparison in Inner Mongolia under CMIP6 scenarios, Li et al., Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution Open Access 10.3389/fevo.2026.1921058

Global threat exposure of islands in a changing world, Marino et al., Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Open Access 10.1073/pnas.2534106123

Hydraulic traits govern opposing range shifts of montane trees under warming, Zhang et al., Nature Climate Change 10.1038/s41558-026-02726-6

Metabolic Responses of Mammals to Temperature Anomalies Vary Across Climates, Rubalcaba & Correas-Araus, Global Ecology and Biogeography 10.1111/geb.70293

Oxygen Deprivation Implicated in Rapid Coral Mortality Under Acute Heating Events, Dhillon et al., Global Change Biology 10.1111/gcb.71030

Projecting the impact of climate change on the lipid profile of the hydrocoral Millepora alcicornis: Relative lipid homeostasis under warming and ocean acidification, Marrero et al., Marine Environmental Research 10.1016/j.marenvres.2026.108349

Resident and Migratory Falcons' Breeding Phenology and Productivity Respond Differently to Weather and Climate Change Across the Arctic, Gulotta et al., Global Change Biology Open Access 10.1111/gcb.71022

The Impact of Climate Change and Human Habitation on Long-Term Ecological Stability, Staples et al., Global Ecology and Biogeography Open Access 10.1111/geb.70296

GHG sources & sinks, flux, related geochemistry

Accelerating biomass loss from forest disturbances across Europe, Kowalski et al., Nature Geoscience Open Access pdf 10.1038/s41561-026-02032-y

Carbon dioxide fluxes of two differently managed sites in a former Scots pine plantation in response to widespread drought mortality, Sulzer et al., Agricultural and Forest Meteorology Open Access 10.1016/j.agrformet.2026.111398

Decadal doubling of Siberian methane emissions due to warming-induced fires and methanogenesis, Zhu et al., Science Open Access 10.1126/science.aea5828

Global Change Impacts on Mineral-Associated Organic Matter: Consequences for Soil Carbon Persistence, Jia & Feng, Global Change Biology 10.1111/gcb.71037

Global methane emissions from rice paddies are now increasingly quantifiable, Mehla et al., Communications Earth & Environment Open Access pdf 10.1038/s43247-026-03902-4

Mechanical thresholds constrain global peatland carbon accumulation, Mahdiyasa et al., Scientific Reports Open Access pdf 10.1038/s41598-026-66259-w

Methane Emissions From Wildfires: Trends and Anomalies, Zhu et al., Journal of Geophysical Research Atmospheres Open Access 10.1029/2026jd046687

Persistence of Arctic Ocean acidification under negative emissions, Köhn et al., Nature Climate Change Open Access pdf 10.1038/s41558-026-02715-9

Snow depth shifts greenhouse gas balance during freeze–thaw periods in grasslands, Luo et al., Journal of Ecology 10.1111/1365-2745.70421

The impact of artificial intelligence on carbon emission intensity: evidence for an early-stage inverted U-shaped relationship, Wang, Frontiers in Environmental Science Open Access pdf 10.3389/fenvs.2026.1756431

Decarbonization

A policy-navigation framework for exploring hydrogen integration pathways in Great Britain towards net zero, Abuella et al., Energy Policy Open Access 10.1016/j.enpol.2026.115535

Charging infrastructure network expansion for electric vehicles in Norway from a grid perspective: Barriers and solutions, Hjelkrem & Flataker, Energy Policy Open Access 10.1016/j.enpol.2026.115528

CO₂ mitigation potential of biomass-derived charcoal in Indian iron and steel industry: A case study from Karnataka, Tikadar et al., Energy Sustainable Development/Energy for sustainable development 10.1016/j.esd.2026.102093

Decarbonization potential and limits of e-fuel policies in the EU, Campos-Rodríguez et al., Energy Policy 10.1016/j.enpol.2026.115529

Evidence of predation events by marine mammals at offshore wind farms, Bicknell et al., Scientific Reports Open Access pdf 10.1038/s41598-026-65167-3

Impact of renewable energy communities on the Italian day-ahead electricity market: A scenario analysis, Koltunov et al., Energy Policy pdf 10.1016/j.enpol.2026.115518

Linking photovoltaic development with energy storage: A review of solar-to-battery integration pathways, Kashyap et al., Energy Sustainable Development/Energy for sustainable development 10.1016/j.esd.2026.102096

Geoengineering climate

Assessing combinations of regional MCB designed to target multiple climate response objectives, Mason et al., Atmospheric chemistry and physics Open Access 10.5194/acp-26-10861-2026

Middle atmosphere chemical and dynamical effects in the CCMI-2022 stratospheric aerosol injection scenario, Jörimann et al., Atmospheric chemistry and physics Open Access 10.5194/acp-26-11207-2026

Aerosols

A global model of dust mineralogy: Impacts on aerosol absorption, radiative balance and climate, Liu et al., Atmospheric Environment 10.1016/j.atmosenv.2026.122263

Effects of East Asian Anthropogenic Aerosol Emissions Reduction on Summer Extreme Heat Events in Eastern China, Shu et al., Journal of Geophysical Research Atmospheres 10.1029/2025jd045994

Global fully coupled climate-aerosol CMA-CPSv4 – Part 1: Aerosol simulation performance, Zheng et al., Geoscientific model development Open Access 10.5194/gmd-19-7279-2026

Climate change communications & cognition

Beyond the Greenwash: Understanding and Mitigating the Impact of Misleading Native Advertisements from Fossil Fuel Companies, Krishna et al., Environmental Communication 10.1080/17524032.2026.2714124

Climate imagination. Dispatches from hopeful futures, Blanchard, Environmental Politics 10.1080/09644016.2026.2709209

Delay Means Death: Development of a Scale to Measure Public Support or Rejection of Climate Delay Discourses, Wójcik et al., Journal of Environmental Psychology 10.1016/j.jenvp.2026.103168

Discourses on the roots and resilience of climate misinformation: perspectives from the Canadian agri-food sector, Kabir & Chowdhury, Climate Policy 10.1080/14693062.2026.2713878

IPCC experts as passeurs actors: A new typology of international experts in domestic science-policy interfaces, Gaveau et al., Environmental Science & Policy Open Access 10.1016/j.envsci.2026.104464

National Survey Explores Associations between Climate Knowledge, Visual Interpretation, Sociodemographics, and Flood Risk Perceptions in U.S. Adults, Ruckert et al., Weather Climate and Society Open Access pdf 10.1175/wcas-d-25-0216.1

Transportation and Climate Behaviors: Comparing Difficulty of Transportation-related Behaviors Across Different Populations, Naseri et al., Journal of Environmental Psychology Open Access pdf 10.1016/j.jenvp.2026.103173

Agronomy, animal husbundry, food production & climate change

A Machine Learning Framework for Rice Yield Prediction under Heat Stress: Enhancing Model Training through Crop-Simulation-Based Scenario Generation, R et al., Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climatology 10.1175/jamc-d-25-0201.1

Cover crops for soil carbon sequestration and sustainable agroecosystem: a review of ecological processes, Demissie et al., Ecological Processes Open Access 10.1186/s13717-026-00738-w

Designing farmer-centered extension programmes for low-carbon agriculture: evidence from a discrete choice experiment in China, Jiang et al., Figshare Open Access 10.6084/m9.figshare.33204022.v1

Global methane emissions from rice paddies are now increasingly quantifiable, Mehla et al., Communications Earth & Environment Open Access pdf 10.1038/s43247-026-03902-4

Impacts of Future Oil Palm Expansion on Carbon and Hydrological Fluxes Across the Tropics, Xu et al., Geophysical Research Letters Open Access 10.1029/2025gl120846

Long-Term Analysis of Winter Wheat Yield and Climatic Influences in Ukraine, Grabovska et al., International Journal of Climatology Open Access 10.1002/joc.70524

The possibility of growing winter crops in the face of global warming; variation in seed yield and phytochemistry of selected fenugreek (Trigonella foenum-graecum L.) genotypes, Yaldiz & Camlica, Scientific Reports Open Access pdf 10.1038/s41598-026-66442-z

Hydrology, hydrometeorology & climate change

Changes in tropical cyclone size over the western North Pacific, Feng et al., Weather and Climate Extremes Open Access 10.1016/j.wace.2026.100946

Climate change impacts on streamflow in a dam-regulated Mountain Watershed in South Korea using SWAT and CMIP6 projections, Sadiqi et al., Arabian Journal of Geosciences 10.1007/s12517-026-12568-3

Climate extremes expose groundwater risks, Wei & Cao, Science 10.1126/science.aek2112

Future climate change will intensify snow drought in the high-latitude water tower, Changbai Mountain, Xu et al., Global and Planetary Change 10.1016/j.gloplacha.2026.105646

Global River Discharge Projections From a Large Multi-Model Ensemble of CMIP6 and ISIMIP3b Simulations, Seubert et al., Earth s Future Open Access 10.1029/2025ef007982

Periodic extreme rainfall in a warmer climate due to stronger convectively coupled waves, Quan et al., Science Advances Open Access 10.1126/sciadv.aed1634

Record-Breaking Atmospheric River Drives April 2024 Extreme Precipitation in the United Arab Emirates and the Surrounding Gulf Region, Massoud et al., Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society 10.1175/bams-d-26-0052.1

Climate change economics

Beyond the mean: the macroeconomic consequences of shifting temperature anomaly distributions, Winter et al., Climatic Change 10.1007/s10584-026-04257-7

Geopolitical fragmentation, climate risk, and crude oil price dynamics: Evidence from TVP-VAR-SV and causal forest models, Aloui et al., Energy Policy 10.1016/j.enpol.2026.115531

The political feasibility of Degrowth and the Green New Deal: Swedish politicians on the relation between economic growth and climate policy, Sellbjer, Environmental Sociology Open Access 10.1080/23251042.2026.2712609

Climate change mitigation public policy research

Climate-friendly food advertising and procurement in English local authorities: A systematic scoping review of policy ambition, Sermin-Reed et al., PLOS Climate Open Access pdf 10.1371/journal.pclm.0000971

Climate change adaptation & adaptation public policy research

Advancing a justice-centred approach to climate (un)inhabitability through transformative adaptation, [] et al., Climate and Development 10.1080/17565529.2026.2714547

Assessing the integration of older adults’ vulnerability in climate adaptation policies in a developing country, Opoku et al., Climate and Development 10.1080/17565529.2026.2714549

Climate adaptation among transnationally connected households in Coastal Havana Province, Cuba, Bernasconi, Frontiers in Climate Open Access pdf 10.3389/fclim.2026.1812869

Climate adaptation investment planning: insights from applications in developing countries, Watkiss et al., Climate and Development 10.1080/17565529.2026.2689995

Climate change and efficiency losses in combined heat and power plants: Evidence from China, Xiao et al., Energy Policy 10.1016/j.enpol.2026.115546

Non-linear urban overheating increments under climate change: Evidence from UKCP18 nighttime temperatures, Zhang et al., Urban Climate Open Access 10.1016/j.uclim.2026.103082

Optimizing the Rainwater Harvesting and Roof Sprinkling System to Adapt to Urban Extreme Heat, Yu et al., Earth s Future Open Access 10.1029/2026ef008876

Putting children at the heart of climate change adaptation policies via Allyship, Bias Recognition and Child Centeredness: A global qualitative interview study, Zangerl et al., PLOS Climate Open Access 10.1371/journal.pclm.0001025

Climate change impacts on human health

Aedes albopictus and Dengue Transmission Risk in France Over the 21st Century, Radici et al., Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) Open Access 10.5281/zenodo.21281650

Globally and intergenerationally unequal exposure to hourly heat extremes, Liao et al., Nature Climate Change 10.1038/s41558-026-02724-8

Public perceptions of extreme heat: A review, Howarth & Bedenk-Smith, Environmental Science & Policy Open Access 10.1016/j.envsci.2026.104457

Spatial Heterogeneity in Heat-Related Mortality in the Valencian Region: Implications for Climate Adaptation Beyond Administrative Boundaries, Paredes-Fortuny et al., GeoHealth Open Access 10.1029/2025gh001699

Climate change & geopolitics

The geopolitics of decarbonization: How changing international relations reshape the European Union's sustainability transition, Kiefer, Energy Research & Social Science 10.1016/j.erss.2026.104910

Other

Climate change may increase landslide frequency despite generally drier conditions in the Mediterranean area, Quintero et al., Natural hazards and earth system sciences Open Access pdf 10.5194/nhess-26-3723-2026

Landscape context constrains climate regulation recovery in Amazonian secondary forests, Oliveira et al., Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Open Access 10.1073/pnas.2426400123

Articles/Reports from Agencies and Non-Governmental Organizations Addressing Aspects of Climate Change

Climate change means extreme fire seasons in Canada are here to stay, Keeping et al., World Weather Attribution

At the time of writing, Ontario and the Northwest Territories have been especially affected regions in Canada’s 2026 wildfire season, with hundreds of active fires, many of them out of control. Scientists from Canada, the U.S., the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom collaborated to assess to what extent human-induced climate change altered the likelihood and intensity of the weather conditions at the time of the fires, and how the conditions will be affected with further warming. To assess the role of human-induced climate change the authors combine the observation-based assessments with climate models. In both regions and for both event definitions the climate models show a much smaller increase in likelihood and intensity. Combining models and observations gives an increase in likelihood of about a factor of 5 in the Northwest Territories for DSR7 and a factor 2 for DSR30 and in Ontario of about 2 for both event definitions.

Most Americans have been affected by extreme heat this year, AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research

Adults are increasingly likely to say extreme heat in the past year has impacted their electricity bills, outdoor plans, and other routines. At the same time, the public has become slightly less inclined to believe that climate change is happening. About half of adults say extreme heat has had a major impact on their electricity bills, while 3 in 10 say the same about their outdoor activities. Fewer report major impacts on their exercise routines, sleep, pets, travel or vacation plans, the timing of events like weddings or reunions, or their job or commute. Ninety percent of adults say extreme heat has had at least a minor impact on their lives, up from 83% two years ago.

Built for backup, contracted to run: China’s coal support system risks crowding out clean power, Qin et al., The Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air and Global Energy Monitor

New coal power plants entering operation in China reached the highest first-half year level since 2016, with 10 GW entering operation for every 1 GW retired, despite a policy shift towards tighter control of new project approvals. China commissioned 30 GW of new coal power, up 43% from last year, while retiring only 2.7 GW. Another 25.4 GW started construction; Coal power generation rebounded 3.4% year-on-year in H1 2026, reversing the 2025 decline. The rapid expansion of coal power capacity led to worsening oversupply, reflected both in the increase of wasted wind and solar generation and in falling utilization of coal power plants; The rebound was not evidence of a broad return to coal following LNG shipping disruptions in the Strait of Hormuz. China’s combined domestic coal production and imports in fact fell by 1.4% year-on-year in H1 2026, rather than expanding in response to the external energy shock. Growth in clean energy supply and electrification helped offset the fall in oil supply and limit increases in fossil fuel consumption; Estimated wind and solar curtailment, including both reported and unreported curtailment, reached 360 TWh in H1 2026, up 49% year-on-year. Had this electricity been absorbed, the additional power supply could have met all demand growth and allowed coal power generation to fall.

State of the Climate in 2025, Blunden et al., American Meteorological Society

The authors provide a comprehensive, observation-based assessment of Earth’s climate system that not only documents what happened during a given year (e.g., 2025), but also how that year compares to previous years in the observational record. Thus, it is critical to have continuous, long-term observations of various components of the Earth system to document variability and change over time. Many of these observations, both current and historical, are also assimilated into various reanalysis products (e.g., ERA5 and MERRA-2), which are physically constrained representations of the Earth system and are used extensively throughout the State of the Climate report. Reanalyzes are particularly useful in regions where in situ and satellite observations are sparse.

2026 Progress report: National adaptation plan (New Zealand), He Pou a Rangi Climate Change Commission

The author's assessment of progress found that adaptation is not keeping pace with escalating climate risks in Aotearoa New Zealand, and in some cases is slipping further behind. This reflects their 2024 finding, that the work underway is not enough to make the country resilient to current pressures, let alone into future decades. The progress made since 2024 has been uneven and serious gaps remain. This matters, critically. As climate effects intensify, weaknesses in the country’s response increase in consequence – as harm and costs experienced by families, communities, workers and businesses across the motu. Aotearoa New Zealand is – too often – paying to react and recover after damage occurs, rather than preparing ahead of time.

Opposition to Local Data Centers Rises Sharply, The Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania

The survey was conducted among a nationally representative sample of 1,320 U.S. adult citizens from June 16-July 19, 2026. The authors found that three in five Americans (61%) now somewhat or strongly oppose the construction of new data centers in their area, up from 49% in the survey ending in March; majorities of Democrats (69%), Republicans (54%) and independents (53%) oppose new local data centers. Opposition is highest among young adults under 30 (70%) and declines to 57% among those 65 and older, the inverse of what one might expect for a new technology; 39% expect AI’s effect on the United States to be negative over the next decade, against 18% who expect it to be positive, unchanged from the spring. Two-thirds (68%) say the government has done “too little” to regulate AI; and across 13 areas, only medical research and discoveries draws a net-positive assessment (+41 points) in which the anticipated benefits of AI outweigh the expected negatives. The most negative areas are personal privacy and data security (-63 points), children’s safety online (-50 points), and employment and jobs (-46 points).

About New Research

Click here for the why and how of Skeptical Science New Research.

Suggestions

Please let us know if you're aware of an article you think may be of interest for Skeptical Science research news, or if we've missed something that may be important. Send your input to Skeptical Science via our contact form.

Previous edition

The previous edition of Skeptical Science New Research may be found here.

The real energy use of agentic AI

Wed, 12 Aug 2026 16:31:28 EST

This is a re-post from The Climate Brink

AI energy use is a huge and controversial topic at the moment. Credible estimates have AI data centers accounting for around 12% US electricity use by 2030. But at the same time consumers have been given reassuringly small numbers about the impact of their own AI use, numbers that seem on their face somewhat inconsistent with the staggering size of their aggregate usage.

In 2025 Google published an article calculating that median Gemini text prompt used only 0.24 watt-hours (Wh), less energy than “watching nine seconds of television”. Around the same time, Sam Altman said that an average ChatGPT query uses about 0.34 Wh, and Epoch AI came out with similar numbers. Writers like Andy Masley and Hannah Ritchie have shown that at these rates an individual using chatbots has a pretty negligible impact, with one prompt only amounting to roughly 1/150,000th of an average American’s daily emissions.

Those numbers are basically right. They are also increasingly divorced from how AI is actually being used today.

The fastest-growing way that software engineers and scientists actually use AI is not typing questions into a chat box. Rather, we use AI agents through tools like Claude Code and Codex that plan, write code, run it, read the results, and iterate on their own. These agents make dozens of model calls per human prompt, and engage in complex reasoning chains that involve attempting and evaluating multiple answers to the same question.

I work for a company in Silicon Valley (Stripe) and admittedly use the latest AI tools more than most people. But I thought it would be instructive to take a deep dive into my own AI use over the past 8 weeks and calculate the actual energy use I was responsible for.

Over the past 8 weeks I typed 1,138 prompts into Claude Code. Those prompts triggered more than 14,000 model calls that processed 3.2 billion tokens. My best estimate is that this used around 170 kWh of data center electricity (with an uncertainty range of roughly 70 to 330 kWh across methods and assumptions). That works out to around 150 Wh per prompt (60 to 290 Wh), which is roughly 600 times (250 to 1,200) the energy of a median chat prompt. A “prompt” is ultimately not a unit of AI use any more than “trips” is a measurement of driving; it’s how far you go that matters.

Agents supercharge AI usage

Part of the impetus for this post is the publication of a new white paper from Watershed (Bistline et al. 2026) proposing a standardized framework for corporate AI emissions accounting. It is the most careful treatment I have seen of why published per-query numbers differ by orders of magnitude (system boundaries, mostly), and it contains a figure that should reframe the whole discussion: electricity per AI task spans more than five orders of magnitude, from thousandths of a watt-hour for text classification to 50-500 Wh for an agentic workflow making 5-50 frontier model calls. As they put it, emissions attributed to one “interaction” may understate the compute actually consumed “by an order of magnitude or more.”

Other researchers have found similar results. Bai et al. (2026) measured coding agents on real software tasks and found they consume roughly 1,000 times the tokens of an ordinary chatbot interaction. And these sort of agents tasks represent the most rapid driver of increased AI usage; Anthropic’s Economic Index found that 97% of their API usage now show “automation-dominant” patterns associated with agents.

To put these values in perspective, the figure below compares published per-prompt and task estimates (blue) with what I measured from my Claude Code use (orange) as well as common benchmarks for energy use (running a microwave, a fridge, or a whole home):

Electricity consumption per AI task, including published estimates (blue) and values computed from my own Claude Code session logs (orange). Measured token counts converted using Bistline (2026) activity-tier energy factors; orange ranges span cache-read energy assumptions of 1% to 25%.

My median Claude Code session uses around 0.6 kWh (0.25 to 1.2 kWh), which is at the top end of Watershed’s generic agentic usage estimate, and fifty times the energy used to charge a cellphone. My average day of Claude Code (3.0 kWh, range 1.2 to 5.9 kWh) uses more electricity than running two refrigerators.

Measuring my own footprint

Claude Code keeps complete local transcripts of every session, including the exact token counts the API reports for every model call.1 This lets me precisely know how much AI usage I was responsible for rather than simply extrapolating it from published benchmarks; its only the step to convert tokens used to energy that requires assumptions.

The first thing I found is that the gap between “prompts” and reality is massive: my 1,138 typed prompts resulted in just over 14,000 distinct model calls (12 per prompt), and each prompt consumed on average 2.9 million tokens. For comparison, typical web-based AI chat exchanges with no reasoning or web searches only use around a thousand tokens.

Over the past the 8 weeks, my Claude Code used 3.2 billion tokens. These overwhelmingly came from the agent re-reading its own working memory. Every time an agent takes a step (e.g. runs a command, reads a file, or calls a tool), the model re-processes its entire accumulated context. The figure below shows the breakdown of how tokens were used and their share of total electricity use.

Token and estimated electricity composition of my Claude Code usage, May 31 to July 25, 2026. “Cache reads” are previously processed context re-read from the key-value cache on each model call; “cache writes” are new context being processed and stored; “output” is text and code generated by the model. Electricity shares use Bistline (2026) factors with cache reads at 10% of the fresh-input energy rate.

The text I actually see (e.g. the model’s output) is only around 0.4% of total tokens processed. Some 96% of the tokens are cache reads where the agent re-reads its own context at each of those 14,000 steps. This matters enormously for the energy estimate, because a cached token is much cheaper to re-read than a fresh one is to process. AI companies charge about 10% of the price for cache reads compared with fresh content, and I use that ratio as my central energy assumption, with 1% and 25% as bounds.2

Since nobody outside of the labs actually knows the true per-token energy of a frontier model (Anthropic has published no per-prompt or per-token figures, something the Watershed paper politely but firmly flags as the field’s biggest data gap), I ran my measured token counts through three independent published methodologies: Watershed’s activity-tier factors, the per-token factors Simon Couch’s estimates derived from Epoch AI’s work, and the claude-carbon tool’s pricing-inferred coefficients.

Estimated electricity consumption for the 3.2 billion tokens I used under three published methodologies: Watershed activity-tier factors under three cache read assumptions, Couch (2026) per-token factors, and claude-carbon per-model coefficients.

Every one of these methodologies gives an answer between roughly 70 and 330 kilowatt-hours over 8 weeks. The estimate is genuinely uncertain, by a factor of ~2 in either direction. But the broader conclusion is not: counting my 1,138 prompts at published per-chat-prompt rates would have suggested about 0.3 kWh, while the reality is 150 to 1,200 times that.

My daily pattern of energy use is shown in the figure below. The day to day variability is huge: my heaviest day (11 kWh central estimate) involved multiple parallel agents churning through a large geospatial analysis, and used more than a third of the total daily electricity of an average US home. This reflects that fact that even within the category of agentic usage, the complexity of the task and the number of simultaneous sub-agents used will greatly influence the resulting energy use.

Estimated daily electricity consumption of my Claude Code usage(bars: cache reads at 10% of input energy; whiskers: 1% to 25%). Reference lines show typical daily electricity use of a refrigerator and of an average US household.

My numbers are a bit higher than some of the other published estimates of agentic use, and it is worth digging in a bit to determine why. Couch estimated that a median Claude Code session uses around 41 Wh, involving 24 model calls and 592k tokens. Andy Masley’s June 2026 calculator puts a 100k-token Claude Opus agent session at ~459 Wh. My median session is ~600 Wh, involving a hundred-plus calls and around ten million tokens including numerous subagents for large data analyses projects. Hannah Ritchie’s hypothetical heavy user (24 agentic queries a day) came out at 2.4 kWh/day, while I measured a central estimate of 3.0 kWh/day (1.2 to 5.9 kWh) for my actual usage.

None of these estimates are necessarily wrong, they just reflect a wide range of actual usage assumptions. Software engineers, researchers, and data analysts (e.g. folks like me) probably lie pretty far down the tail of the usage distribution. At the same time, usage will likely grow over time as more complex agentic tools increasingly become the norm.

What a year of this looks like

If we assume that these 8 weeks are fairly typical, we can estimate that a full year of my agentic Claude Code use would consume roughly 1.1 MWh of data center electricity (0.4 to 2.2 MWh), which is about a tenth of what an average US household uses. Applying the US-average grid intensity, that is roughly 370 kgCO2e per year (150 to 730 kgCO2e).3

Annual emissions of common activities compared with my annualized Claude Code usage. Car: EPA typical passenger vehicle (22.2 mpg, 11,500 mi/yr). EV: 11,500 mi/yr at 0.30 kWh/mi on the California grid. Flight: ICAO-method economy round trip, CO2 only. Home electricity: EIA average US household on the US-average grid. Dryer: typical electric clothes dryer at ~770 kWh/yr (DOE) on the US-average grid.

My personal and professional AI usage now emits a bit more per year than running an electric clothes dryer, and about half as much as driving an electric car 11,500 miles in California or taking one San Francisco to New York round-trip flight in economy.4 It is about 8% of the annual emissions of a typical American gasoline car, and roughly 2% of the average American’s ~18-ton annual greenhouse gas footprint.

This is simultaneously a large emissions source and a relatively modest part of my total carbon footprint. I typically take a round trip flight from San Francisco to the East Coast twice a year to visit my aging parents (not to mention work travel), and I generally don’t lose sleep over that choice. It is also fundamentally a much easier-to-decarbonize end-use than aviation (more on that below). But this also represents a net new source of emissions, at a time when global temperatures are skyrocketing and our emissions reduction goals are increasingly off track.

So what do we do about it?

Having spent most of this post arguing that agentic AI use is hundreds of times more energy intensive than the chatbot numbers suggest, let me be clear that I don’t think the answer is guilt or abstinence. But there are real levers here that we can use to shape the trajectory of AI energy use and emissions going forward.

On the personal side we can try and not be frivolous with agentic tools. There is a real difference between pointing five parallel agents at a hard research problem and doing the same to settle a bar bet (or, in my case, making axolotl-themed games with my daughter). What models you use matters too: sending simple tasks to smaller models uses perhaps 5 to 7 times less energy per token than defaulting to a frontier model,5 and it is what I increasingly do for searches and mechanical work. That said, I don’t want to oversell this. My entire annual AI footprint is a few hundred kilograms of CO2; personal restraint by the small population of heavy users is not going to bend any curves.

The technology lever is more powerful, and it is genuinely impressive. The figure below shows the energy efficiency of NVIDIA’s data center chips over the past decade. The amount of math an AI chip can do per joule of energy has grown roughly 150-fold since 2016, doubling about every two years, per Epoch AI. The latest B300 chips running at their lowest supported precision use about a quarter of the energy per operation of the 2022-era H100s that trained today’s frontier models. This represents a 3.8-fold improvement in energy efficiency in three years. Software gains can make this even faster: Google reports the energy of a median Gemini prompt fell 33-fold in a single year through a combination of better models, better tools, and better hardware.

Peak dense tensor throughput per watt of rated chip power for NVIDIA data center GPUs, by release year and numeric precision. Dashed line shows Epoch AI’s trend of energy efficiency doubling every two years for leading ML hardware.

But if 150-fold efficiency gains were going to reduce AI’s energy use, they would have done it by now. This is the Jevons paradox in action: making compute cheaper per token in turn tends to lead to greater levels of AI use. Efficiency is why my agentic habit costs 170 kWh rather than the 950 kWh it would have used with 2020-era hardware. But efficiency only determines how much intelligence we get per unit of energy, but so far it has so far shown no sign of determining AI’s total energy use.

Which is why the lever that actually matters most is the carbon intensity of the electricity. Every number in this post assumed the US-average grid; run the same workload on largely clean power and my footprint falls by roughly 90%. Unlike aviation, this is an end-use we already know how to decarbonize.

The problem is that we are moving in the wrong direction today: a sizable portion of planned US data center capacity intends to build its own behind-the-meter generation, and nearly three quarters of that is natural gas. AI companies with genuine climate commitments need to do better at finding alternatives: solar plus storage (which I helped lead a study about in 2024), next-generation nuclear and restarts of retired reactors, enhanced geothermal, and siting data centers in regions where both the average and the marginal generation is low-carbon).

There is also a silver linings version of this story where AI demand becomes an asset for decarbonization. Getting to net-zero emissions requires roughly tripling electricity generation by mid-century as we replace nearly all the current uses of fossil fuels with clean electricity. The barriers are mostly not technological, but rather things like interconnection queues, permitting, transmission. The AI buildout is a preview of that world of rapidly increasing electricity demand, backed by companies with enormous capital and unusual urgency. If that money and impatience gets spent speed-running the elimination of those barriers (buying firm clean power, funding transmission, absorbing the early costs of advanced nuclear and geothermal the way early corporate buyers did for wind and solar), the AI boom could leave the grid cleaner than it found it. If it gets spent on behind-the-meter gas turbines, it won’t. That choice is being made right now, and it will matter far more than how many prompts any of us type.

In the interest of full disclosure: the python code underlying the analysis and figures in this post were, naturally, built with the help of Claude Code, but the writing is all mine.6

1 Claude Code records API usage including the amount of uncached input tokens, cache-creation tokens, cache-read tokens, and output tokens, per model call, with model IDs and timestamps. One logging subtlety matters a lot: each API response is written to the log as one line per content block, with every line repeating the message’s full usage object, so a naive line-by-line sum double-counts tokens by a factor of ~2.2. All numbers here count each API message once, deduplicated by message ID.

2 A cache read retrieves already-computed attention states from memory rather than recomputing them, so it is much cheaper than inputting fresh data, but its not free. Cache reads context still makes each output token more expensive to generate at long context. Anthropic prices cache reads at 10% of fresh input, and the claude-carbon and Couch methodologies both adopt ~10% as an energy ratio. Watershed flags cache handling as a known gap in per-token accounting; my 1%-25% band is intended to span the plausible range.

3 Using the eGRID 2024 US-average 341 gCO2e/kWh, since Anthropic does not disclose where their data centers are located and what electricity sources they use. Market-based emissions (counting providers’ clean power purchases) would probably be lower, potentially much lower. This estimate excludes my laptop, which at ~50 W is negligible against 3.0 kWh/day of data center load.

4 Note that the flight estimate here only includes direct CO2 emissions from aviation; including contrails and other secondary factors would probably increase flight emissions by at least 50%.

5 Based on inferring energy use through token pricing, claude-carbon gives ~0.3 J/token for Haiku-class vs ~2 J/token for Opus-class models.

6 In a good example of why you always need to double check work done with AI coding tools, Claude accidentally doubled its original estimate of my token use as all the relevant files were stored twice and it simply added them all up. I only caught it because the numbers seemed too high!

The floods of the future won’t come one at a time

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 15:01:05 EST

This is a re-post from Yale Climate Connections by Jeff Masters

When a weak 45-mph tropical storm named Harvey moved through the Lesser Antilles Islands in August 2017 and then petered out in the central Caribbean Sea, no one could have suspected that the meager clump of clouds that remained would go on to become the second-costliest weather disaster in world history. But after crossing Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula into the Gulf of Mexico, Harvey was rejuvenated, rapidly intensifying into a ferocious Category 4 hurricane that hit Texas just north of Corpus Christi.

Harvey's true mischief came after it stalled inland as a tropical storm for two days, dumping at least 40 inches of rain across a gigantic area from Houston to Port Arthur — larger than the entire state of Delaware. The storm total of 60.58 inches (1,534 mm) at Nederland, Texas, was the heaviest single amount ever recorded from a tropical cyclone or its remnants in the U.S. With damages of $164 billion (2026 USD) — mostly from flooding, Harvey became a historical catastrophe exceeded only by Hurricane Katrina of 2005.

When all of Harvey’s rainfall runoff rushed toward the ocean, it encountered the blocking influence of seawater being pushed inland by the persistent onshore winds of the tropical storm, creating a significant compound flood event — coastal flooding that resulted from a combination of storm surge and river runoff unable to drain into the ocean because of the storm surge waters piled up against the coast.

A similar setup could cause an even worse catastrophe in the future. Climate change is causing more intense, slower-moving hurricanes, increased rainfall, and higher sea levels. But traditional risk assessment methods typically consider one hazard at a time — ignoring compound flood events — leading to an underestimation of the danger. If we include all the ways climate change will likely increase flooding, the future flood risk along significant portions of the U.S. Gulf and Atlantic coasts is nearly certain to make them unlivable by late this century, even under a moderate global warming scenario.

How climate change worsens the danger

A 2023 study looking at the flooding from Harvey near Port Arthur, Texas, found that 19% of the flood area occurred because of compound flooding. Under a global warming scenario where a repeat of Harvey hits with an additional sea level rise of 0.57 meters (1.9 feet), accompanied by 18% more total rainfall — plausible in 2050 — this area would increase to 33%. A potential sea level rise of 1.6 meters (5.2 feet) and an additional 50% in total rainfall, plausible by 2100, would cause the compound flooding area to rise to 46%, increasing the number of structures impacted by about a factor of 23 compared to 2017, causing tens of billions in additional damage.

Figure 1. Storm-total rainfall from Hurricane Harvey, August 24-31, 2017. Harvey dumped over 40 inches (yellow colors) in Houston, with isolated amounts over 50 inches (pink colors) south of Houston and northwest of Port Arthur. Image credit: NOAA.

There are three main ways climate change can increase flood risk along the U.S. Atlantic and Gulf coasts:

An increase in the frequency of more intense hurricanes and ones moving more slowly at landfall, which will dump more rain
Increased heavy rainfall because a warmer atmosphere holds more water vapor
Sea level rise

The relative importance of these three factors in a future warmer climate will vary depending upon the location, according to a 2022 study. This study found that across the Gulf of Mexico and Florida coastlines, the increase in rainfall was expected to be the largest driver. For parts of the Southeast and mid-Atlantic, the increase in the number of intense or slow-moving hurricanes would predominate. And along the upper mid-Atlantic and New England coastlines, sea level rise will dominate the future compound flood risk.

Figure 2. The main driver of compound flooding on the U.S. coast. Across the Gulf of Mexico and Florida coastlines, the increase in rainfall is the largest driver (yellow colors), while the increase in storm frequency (of more intense, slow-moving storms) has the largest impact for parts of the Southeast and mid-Atlantic (blue). Along the upper mid-Atlantic and New England coastlines, sea level rise causes the most impact (green). Locations with no clear main driver are labeled NA (gray). (Image credit: Gori et al., Tropical cyclone climatology change greatly exacerbates US extreme rainfall–surge hazard, Nat. Clim. Chang. 12, 171–178 (2022), https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-021-01272-7, open access)

Sea level rise has already led to a massive increase in flood risk

Sea level rise from all causes – for example, human-caused climate change, natural tectonic processes, and subsidence from groundwater pumping — has already led to a massive increase in the risk of damaging coastal flooding from storm surges alone, according to a 2026 study, Human-driven sea-level rise has quadrupled the frequency of coastal sea-level extremes since 1900. Relative sea level rise from all causes made a 100-year coastal flood in 1900 into a one-in-five-year flood or less by 2005 in Key West, Jacksonville, Atlantic City, and Maine. Because sea level rise is accelerating, the odds of coastal flooding will increase even faster than the increases already observed since 1900.

Flood risks are growing

Charleston, South Carolina: What was a one-in-10-year coastal flood in 1901 occurred 17 times in 2025.
Galveston, Texas: What was a one-in-10-year flood in 1904 occurred nine times in 2024.
Atlantic City, New Jersey: What was a one-in-10-year coastal flood in 1911 occurred 10 times in 2024.
Miami, Florida: What was a one-in-10-year coastal flood in 1931 occurred 14 consecutive days during the "king tides" of October 2025.
Key West, Florida: What was a one-in-10-year coastal flood in 1913 occurred an astonishing 26 out of 27 days during the "king tides" of October 2025; what was a one-in-100-year flood in 1913 has occurred three times in the past 10 years.

_{Data: NOAA}

Dramatic rises in compound flood risk are coming

A return period refers to how often we can expect a weather event of a given severity to occur. For example, we use rainfall statistics from NOAA to compute how often a flood with a 1% chance of occurring in a given year will recur — which is defined as a one-in-100-year storm, with a return period of 100 years.

A 2022 paper, Tropical cyclone climatology change greatly exacerbates US extreme rainfall-surge hazard, studied the odds of a truly extreme compound flood event — a one-in-100-year storm surge occurring at the same time as a one-in-100-year rainfall event. Historically, the return period of such an event was about once every 200-500 years along the coastlines of the Gulf of Mexico and southeast Atlantic (up to the Chesapeake Bay), shifting to once every 1,000 years or even less frequently along the New England coastline.

But under an extreme global warming scenario for the year 2100, these odds would generally (with some exceptions, see Fig. 4) increase by seven- to 36-fold in the South and 30- to 195-fold to the north — a massive rise in extreme flood risk. Although this result was for an extreme global warming scenario, the strong signal found implies that a significant increase in extreme flood risk would occur even in a moderate global warming scenario.

Figure 3. The return period in years in 2005 for what was a one-in-100-year flood in 1900 because of relative sea level rise. Data is plotted from the 2026 paper, Human-driven sea-level rise has quadrupled the frequency of coastal sea-level extremes since 1900. For example, a 100-year coastal flood in 1900 in Jacksonville, Florida, and Atlantic City, New Jersey, was a one-in-two-year flood by 2005 (red circles with the number "2" in them). This change in flood risk is for sea level rise alone — additional increases in flood risk because of changes in precipitation are not included.

The greatest rises in risk were to the north, because climate change is expected to bring greater increases in extreme precipitation closer to the poles. This was also the finding of a 2020 study, More meteorological events that drive compound coastal flooding are projected under climate change, which predicted that the greatest increases in compound flood threat should occur north of 40°N latitude.

Figure 4. The change in return period for an extreme compound flood, defined as a one-in-100-year storm surge occurring at the same time as a one-in-100-year rainfall event, under an extreme global warming scenario. Left side of table: the return period in the historical climate (1980-2005). Right side: return period in the 2070-2100 period under an extreme global warming scenario, using the median value from eight different climate models. The return period increases by a factor of 14 to 265 for these nine cities. Data taken from the supplemental materials in: Gori et al., Tropical cyclone climatology change greatly exacerbates US extreme rainfall–surge hazard, Nat. Clim. Chang. 12, 171–178 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-021-01272-7.

Main cause of future increased compound coastal flood risk: more intense and slower-moving hurricanes

The model used in the 2022 study projected that the top 10% of most intense hurricanes would, along the majority of the U.S. coast, increase in intensity by 15-30% and move 20-30% slower in the future compared to the historical period. “The increase in storm intensity coupled with the decrease in translation speed drives an increased likelihood to observe both extreme rainfall and extreme storm tide in the future,” the authors wrote.

A substantial inland compound flood risk along the Gulf of Mexico coast

Rivers draining into the Gulf of Mexico have seen large increases in their maximum streamflow in recent decades (commonly 20-40% increases), making them susceptible to increased compound flooding. A 2021 paper found long-term increases in the frequency of compound storm surge and heavy rainfall flooding along the rivers of the northeastern Gulf of Mexico. Surprisingly, these compound flood events were largest a good distance inland, near the limit of where tidal influences stopped — not at the coast where compound events are usually expected. A 2026 study focused on North and South Carolina also found a considerable expansion of the threat of compound flooding inland in a future warmer climate.

A Hurricane Sandy-like compound flood event: five times more likely by 2100?

Hurricane Sandy in October 2012 caused devastating surge-driven flooding across heavily populated coastal areas in New York City, resulting in more than $91 billion (2026 USD) in damages. A 2024 paper, Climate Change Contributions to Increasing Compound Flooding Risk in New York City, found that a Sandy-like event can be expected about once every 150 years in the present climate. But climate change — through sea level rise and an increase in hurricane strength and rainfall — can be expected to make a similar storm about a one-in-65-year event by 2050, and a one-in-30-year event by 2100, under an emissions scenario slightly higher than the trajectory humanity is currently on.

Increased compound flood threat from hurricanes earlier in the season

A 2022 paper, Earlier onset of North Atlantic hurricane season with warming oceans, found that initial threshold dates of continental U.S. named storm landfalls have trended earlier by two days per decade since 1900. Modeling work suggests that the length of hurricane season will continue to increase because of climate change. A 2017 study found that a hurricane season that was two months longer (May-December) would increase the number of flood-risk days by 28-180% along rivers in four Southeast U.S river basins.

Figure 5. Predicted water levels at the Carrollton gage on the Mississippi River in New Orleans as of July 10, 2019. The river was running high, at 16 feet above sea level, and the city’s levees protect the city to a height of 20 feet. The storm surge from Hurricane Barry was predicted to reach that level on July 13. The last time water levels that high were observed at this point on the Mississippi was in the Great Flood of 1927. Image credit: NOAA.

As I wrote in a 2019 post, New Orleans’ Achilles Heel: A Hurricane Storm Surge During a Mississippi River Flood?, a trend toward earlier hurricanes increases the risk of storm surge moving up the Mississippi River that could overwhelm the levees in New Orleans, since the river tends to run high in late spring and early summer. This situation was feared in July 2019, when Hurricane Barry sent a storm surge up the river when the river was already running high from early-summer runoff (Fig. 5). Fortunately, Barry ended up delaying its intensification into a hurricane until after it passed the mouth of the Mississippi, resulting in a storm surge that was not as high as initially forecast.

Other compound hurricane threats

Climate change is likely to make two other types of compound hurricane threats more severe. One of these was covered in my previous post, The emerging danger of post-hurricane heat waves (2026). In addition, more intense hurricanes with higher winds and heavier rains have the potential to create a double-whammy of high-end wind damage and extreme inland flooding simultaneously, overwhelming infrastructure and emergency preparedness and response efforts that could have handled one of these hazards alone, but not both together.

A preprint of a 2026 paper that has not yet undergone peer review, Global Warming Amplifies Inland Compound Risks From Tropical Cyclones, found that when comparing the recent climate (1981-2020) with an extreme climate-change projection for later this century (2061-2100), the annual probability of compound wind and precipitation extreme hazards ranking in the 99th percentile globally increases by 61-115% within 100 kilometers of the coast, and further escalates by 92-204% in areas 100-500 kilometers inland. This inland amplification is driven by more intense landfalling hurricanes and the increased moisture available caused by the 7% increase in water vapor holding capacity of the air per degree Celsius of warming. Hurricane Helene’s impact in 2024 in western North Carolina can be regarded as a harbinger storm in this regard.

Coastal areas becoming unlivable

A 2020 paper, Sea-level rise exponentially increases coastal flood frequency, found that for the most susceptible sites around the U.S., the odds of a one-in-50-year coastal flood “are likely to double approximately every five years into the foreseeable future.” This finding took into account not just storm surges from hurricanes but also from more common coastal storms such as Nor'easters. According to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, most coastal engineering works in the U.S. are designed for return periods of 50 to 100 years, so the increase in flood risk at so many sites represents a drastic increase in vulnerability. And if high-end sea-level rise projections of one meter (3.28 feet) by 2100 come true, sea-level rise will likely cause "once-in-a-lifetime" coastal flooding events to occur nearly every day before 2100. (NOAA's 2022 sea level rise forecast gives 50% odds that sea level rise along the contiguous U.S. coast by 2100 will exceed 0.7 meters.)

Figure 6. The return period in years in 2050 for what was a one-in-100-year flood in 2005 because of relative sea level rise. Data is plotted using data from the 2020 paper, Sea-level rise exponentially increases coastal flood frequency, in combination with observed and predicted sea level rise from The Virginia Institute of Marine Science annual Sea Level Rise Report Cards. For example, a one-in-100-year coastal flood in 2005 in Key West, Florida, is predicted to recur every 0.04 years (two weeks) by 2050 (red circle with the number "0.04" in it). This change in flood risk is for sea level rise alone — additional increases in flood risk because of changes in precipitation are not included. The forecasts out to 2050 are generated using the observed acceleration trend fitted with a quadratic curve (since sea level rise is increasing exponentially, and a straight-line linear fit is not appropriate). Note that these forecasts are not based on a climate model and may be underestimated.

If we now add in the massive additional increase in flood risk resulting from compound flooding, good luck trying to insure your home. The huge increase in climate change-induced flood risk from sea level rise, heavier rainfall, and stronger/slower-moving hurricanes is nearly certain to force abandonment of portions of the U.S. Gulf and Atlantic coasts by late this century, even under a moderate global warming scenario. A 2026 study, The Growth Effects of Natural Disasters: Evidence From A Novel Global Dataset Over 1970-2023, found that a one-in-100-year flood reduces GDP by about 0.5%, so it is easy to see how the coast could quickly become unlivable if once-in-a-lifetime floods are occurring nearly yearly in low-lying regions. Indeed, hurricane flooding has already led to the unofficial abandonment of several U.S. communities, and a number of others are already at significant risk, which I will detail in a series of future posts (spoiler alert: Barrier islands are high on the list).

https://bsky.app/profile/drjeffmasters.bsky.social/post/3mnhxhqjjtc2g

The only recourse we will have is to spend vast amounts of money to defend the most important places and retreat from or abandon the rest. A society-shaking mass migration of millions of Americans away from the coast is inevitable in future decades because of increased climate change-induced flood risk. The trigger for the beginning of this exodus may be only a few years away. To understand what’s coming, I recommend reading my 2024 post, When will climate change turn life in the U.S. upside down?

Fact brief - Are there enough minerals for solar power expansion to help mitigate climate change?

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 11:43:39 EST

Skeptical 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 there enough minerals for solar power expansion to help mitigate climate change?

Global mineral supplies are large enough to support solar development for climate change mitigation.

A 2023 analysis of 75 emissions-reduction scenarios found that projected median mineral demand largely remains within known geological resources. Projected median demand for silver was about 68,000 metric tons, compared to 530,000 tons of estimated reserves; cadmium demand was 38,000 tons against 500,000 tons of reserves.

Tellurium may constrain cadmium-telluride panels, a minority of the global solar market, but research suggests improved refining and material efficiency could substantially reduce this strain.

Recycling can further reduce demand for newly mined minerals by recovering silver, copper, silicon, and other components for reuse in future panels. Recent innovations are improving recycling cost-effectiveness, while federal programs continue to support domestic mineral supply chains and recycling research.

The main challenge lies in expanding production and supply chains, not mineral shortages.

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

AP News Study: Enough rare earth minerals to fuel green energy shift

Joule Future demand for electricity generation materials under different climate mitigation scenarios

USGS Byproduct Mineral Commodities Used for the Production of Photovoltaic Cells

Yale School of the Environment As Millions of Solar Panels Age Out, Recyclers Hope to Cash In

Resources, Conservation and Recycling Innovating the recycling of silicon-based solar panels with an eco-friendly alkaline leaching process

MIT Climate Can solar panels be recycled?

U.S. Department of Energy End-of-Life Management for Solar Photovoltaics

The White House Fact Sheet: President Donald J. Trump Delegates Defense Production Act Authority with Respect to Recoverable Critical Minerals and Materials That Are Essential to Our National Defense

Columbia Law School Sabin Center for Climate Change Law Rebutting 33 False Claims About Solar, Wind, and Electric Vehicles

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

About fact briefs published on Gigafact

Fact briefs are short, credibly sourced summaries that offer "yes/no" answers in response to claims found online. They rely on publicly available, often primary source data and documents. Fact briefs are created by contributors to Gigafact — a nonprofit project looking to expand participation in fact-checking and protect the democratic process. See all of our published fact briefs here.

2026 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #32

Sun, 9 Aug 2026 10:04:10 EST

A listing of 29 news and opinion articles we found interesting and shared on social media during the past week: Sun, August 2, 2026 thru Sat, August 8, 2026.

Stories we promoted this week, by category:

Climate Change Impacts (11 articles)

El Niño and climate change are affecting rice crops in weird ways Researchers explain how El Niño and global warming are combining to create "the haves and the have-nots." Grist, Tik Root & Frida Garza, July 31, 2026.
Heatwaves and raging fires mark Europe’s ‘dystopian’ summer This article about the recent record-breaking heat and wildfires in Europe dives into the science about the causes, quoting several experts. ABC News, Romy Stephens, Alex Lim and Fran Rimrod, Aug 1, 2026.
Climate shocks hit hydropower in Southern Africa, reviving interest in coal The Daily Climate, Chisapi Kumbutso, Aug 02, 2026.
Climate change could dramatically reduce water flowing from the West's headwaters Phys.org, Northern Arizona University, Aug 02, 2026.
Washington`s wildfires are a warning for the entire U.S. Dry conditions and climate change are putting forests across the country at risk for disaster Scientific American, Mary Randolph, Aug 03, 2026.
Factcheck: How nuclear, gas, wind and solar power are affected during heatwaves Carbon Brief, Molly Lempriere, Aug 04, 2026.
French wildfires are turning animals’ homes into ‘a desert of ashes’ The catastrophic fires have potential to do long-term damage to many wild animal populations, but a toad species could be the most affected. National Geographic, Melissa Hobson, Aug 4, 2026.
Butterflies are on the move as the planet warms: new research A comprehensive survey indicates that one in ten known butterfly species have already shifted in range. The Conversation, Shawan Chowdhury, Aug 05, 2026.
Summer of wildfires sees catastrophe bonds approach new record Wildfires raging across the U.S. and Europe this summer are pushing more and more insurers into slashing their risk by issuing catastrophe bonds to investors, and the so-called CAT bonds on the market are already nearing levels from all of last year. Callaway Climate Insights, David Callaway, Aug 06, 2026.
Climate change created conditions for Canada fires, scientists say, as Trump blames mismanagement A new study calculates that human-caused climate change doubled the likelihood of the tinderbox weather conditions that sparked Canada’s massive summer wildfires. The Okaloosa Herald, EHN Curators, Aug 06, 2026.
Heatwaves have killed millions. Here’s how scientists tally lives lost Two very different methods are used to estimate the human toll of heatwaves such as those now hitting parts of Asia and Europe. Nature, Kaia Glickman, Aug 6, 2026.

Climate Policy and Politics (6 articles)

ECB official warns climate crisis poses growing threat to `core financial stability` Exclusive: As wildfires rage, Frank Elderson says more work needed to assess risk from collapse of ecosystem services The Guardian, Richard Partington, Aug 01, 2026.
Climate Hushing Strategy May Cost Democrats At The Polls Argued from a foundation of ample research evidence, this colorfully written op-ed criticizing ''climate hushing'' suggests that tip-toeing around climate change isn't grounded in facts, and that addressing public concerns about climate change can be part of a winning electoral package. CleanTechnica, Steve Hanley, Aug 03, 2026.
Opinion: Why local action is key to surviving America's climate crisis 'The current administration in Washington denies that climate change is even real,'' starkly reminding us that meaningful climate change mitigation is a political matter and begins with voting. Politico, William S Becker, Aug 03, 2026.
Appeals Court Says E.P.A. Cannot Block Billions in Climate Grants The funds have been frozen since early in President Trump’s second term. New York Times, Claire Brown, Aug 04, 2026.
Q&A: What is in China`s new five-year plan for climate change? The new plan does not include any major new targets, instead consolidating and reaffirming existing policies, but does include significant signals on key policy areas, such as non-carbon dioxide (CO2) greenhouse gases, global climate governance and carbon markets. Carbon Brief, Carbon Brief Staff, Aug 06, 2026.
Trump Administration to Pay RWE to Cancel Wind Leases It was the fifth such deal struck by the administration to get companies to drop offshore wind projects. NYT, Brad Plumer, Aug 06, 2026.

Climate Education and Communication (4 articles)

Why is gaining citizen support for climate policies so difficult? Phys.org, Autonomous University of Barcelona, Jul 31, 2026.
A majority of Americans don`t actually fit either climate camp An analysis of 20 years of polling data shows how age, education and income—in addition to political affiliation—shape views on climate policy Anthropocene, Sarah DeWeerdt, Aug 04, 2026.
Climate Trunk - The Persuadable Majority Progress on climate depends on speaking to the movable middle. Climate Trunk, John Lang, Aug 5, 2026.
Extreme heat impact on travel, family increasingly felt by Americans: poll Americans are increasingly feeling a personal impact from extreme heat, according to a new poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. AP News, Alexa St. John and Linley Sanders, Aug 06, 2026.

Climate Change Mitigation and Adaptation (3 articles)

Climate adaptation at its limits, says one scientist A climate scientist says Earth is "passing the limits of adaptation" when it comes to withstanding the effects of climate change. NPR, Michelle Aslam, Jul 31, 2026.
Q&A: Does the world need `carbon capture and storage` to reach net-zero? Carbon capture and storage is an expedience for the fossil fuel industry and frequently the target of emotionally overheated and shallow criticism, but also stands as a poster child for ''nothing is simple," as illustrated in this excellent explanation. Carbon Brief, Josh Gabbatiss, Aug 03, 2026.
`The obsession with endless growth can only end in tears`: your questions on extreme weather this summer answered 'Every fraction of a degree of warming that we can prevent will help millions of people and billions of other forms of life,'' which pretty much answers why Skeptical Science exists and what each of us can help to achieve; we can do better or worse by fractions of degrees, and we choose better. The Guardian, Jonathan Watts and Ajit Niranjan, Aug 03, 2026.

Miscellaneous (2 articles)

2026 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #31 A listing of 28 news and opinion articles we found interesting and shared on social media during the past week: Sun, July 26, 2026 thru Sat, August 1, 2026. Skeptical Science, Bärbel Winkler & Doug Bostrom, Aug 02, 2026.
15 new books for five new takes on climate change Recent years have seen a boom in books on climate change. This collection spans from techno-optimism to philosophical pessimism. Yale Climate Connections, Michael Svoboda, Aug 06, 2026.

Climate Law and Justice (1 article)

Supreme Court sets date for blockbuster climate case The case, Suncor v. Boulder, has spurred calls for two of the justices to recuse themselves as they weigh whether federal law or the Constitution bars local governments from suing fossil fuel companies over the costs of addressing climate change. Politico E&E News, Lesley Clark, Aug 05, 2026.

Climate Science and Research (1 article)

A Short History of Climate Science #17 of the ClimateTrunk graphics published ClimateTrunk, John Lang, July 15, 2026.

Public Misunderstandings about Climate Science (1 article)

Fixing one of climate`s worst plots The 1930s were hot over the U.S. Midwest, but not that hot The Climate Brink, Andrew Dessler, Aug 03, 2026.

If you happen upon high quality climate-science and/or climate-myth busting articles from reliable sources while surfing the web, please feel free to submit them via this Google form so that we may share them widely. Thanks!

Skeptical Science New Research for Week #32 2026

Thu, 6 Aug 2026 07:33:21 EST

Open access notables

‘Towards electric vehicle misinformation communities: Shared narratives, networked validation, and reassurance among Australian consumers, McEwen et al., Energy Research & Social Science

Electric vehicles (EVs) provide a pathway to sustainable transport systems. Yet public understanding of EVs is shaped by contested information environments in which misinformation circulates alongside facts. Existing EV misinformation research has largely focused on individual EV beliefs, attitudes, and information deficits. However, less is known about how EV misinformation becomes socially meaningful in everyday life. Drawing on qualitative ethnographic data from 122 Australian consumers, we introduce the concept of EV misinformation communities to help interpret how participants share narratives and engage in social interactions and everyday sense-making practices relating to misinformation about EVs across online and offline settings. Our analysis explores how EV misinformation becomes socially meaningful through symbolic framing, networked validation, and reassurance. We suggest that countering EV misinformation requires socio-cultural understanding of people's ideologies, dispositions and circumstances, and recognition of the value and sense of shared experiences that misinformation provides. Policy and programme interventions to accelerate the transition to EVs should seek to foster community through opportunities for creating positive value and shared experiences in addition to the provision of information.

Managing climate overshoot: a risk-based strategy for climate stabilisation, Taylor et al., Frontiers in Climate

Global warming is accelerating, yet current climate strategies centred on emissions reduction and carbon removal are unlikely to prevent temperatures from crossing dangerous tipping points. Although essential, these approaches operate too slowly to counter near-term warming driven by Earth’s growing energy imbalance, weakening carbon sinks, and amplifying climate feedbacks. This mismatch reflects systemic shortcomings in climate risk assessment that underestimate nonlinear risks and the escalating costs of delay. We argue that climate stabilisation should be treated as a risk-management challenge rather than an incremental policy process. This requires explicit comparison of intervention risks with those of continued warming. We outline a comparative risk–risk framework that integrates mitigation, carbon removal, and cooling interventions, and suggests that a viable strategy may require combining rapid decarbonisation and expanded carbon removal with carefully governed cooling interventions to limit near-term warming. Without aligning response timelines with accelerating climate threats, the likelihood of irreversible Earth-system disruption will continue to grow.

Ecological Transformations of Coastal Wetlands of the Conterminous United States in Response to Contemporaneous Sea-Level Rise, Neville et al., Earth s Future

Coastal wetlands are among the most important ecosystems on the planet but are increasingly imperiled by accelerating sea-level rise (SLR). In the past, biogeomorphic feedbacks have allowed coastal wetlands to adjust vertically and persist through periods of accelerated SLR. Recent rates of SLR are faster than any in recent geologic history, making the fate of coastal wetlands highly uncertain. Here, we synthesize surface elevation table marker-horizon data from 442 stations in coastal wetlands across the conterminous United States to evaluate if they are largely persisting in the face of accelerated SLR, or if they are undergoing ecological transformations of submergence and/or migration. Across the conterminous United States, 11% of coastal wetlands in this sample are on a trajectory of submergence whereas 73% of sites are lagging SLR, but may be able to migrate upslope, and 16% of sites are gaining elevation at rates which exceed SLR indicating persistence and an ability to migrate seaward. Vulnerability of these systems to ecological transformation varies across the three coasts of the conterminous United States which, span large biogeomorphic gradients. These results serve as one of the first national syntheses of coastal wetland elevation trends and may help focus conservation and restoration efforts in a rapidly changing future.

Long-Term Trends in the Ionospheric Equivalent Slab Thickness as a Proxy of Climate Change in the Ionosphere, Pignalberi & Alberti, Geophysical Research Letters

Anthropogenic greenhouse emissions do not affect all parts of Earth's atmosphere in the same way. While the lower atmosphere warms, the upper atmosphere is expected to cool and contract, and this may also change the ionosphere, the region containing charged particles (plasma). In this study, we analyzed nearly three decades of observations from three stations spanning equatorial to high latitudes. We focused on ionospheric equivalent slab thickness, a quantity that measures how broadly plasma is distributed around the main ionospheric peak. We found that slab thickness generally decreases over time, although the strength of the decrease is neither spatially uniform nor equally detectable at all latitudes. We then linked these changes to the plasma scale height, which controls how fast plasma density decreases with altitude. The results show that the ionospheric profile is becoming narrower with time, especially at middle and high latitudes. This suggests that long-term climate-related changes in the upper atmosphere are also affecting the vertical structure of ionospheric plasma.

Disrupted Skies: How Offshore Wind Farms Alter Flight Behavior of Breeding Seabirds, Liang et al., Ecology and Evolution

Offshore wind farms are expanding rapidly as part of global climate mitigation efforts, but their effects on seabird movement behavior remain incompletely understood. While collision risk has received substantial attention, less is known about how turbines may alter flight routes through evasive behavior and meso-avoidance, particularly near breeding colonies where repeated commuting flights may accumulate energetic costs. We investigated flight responses of breeding Bridled Terns (Onychoprion anaethetus) to offshore wind turbines near their colony using high-resolution satellite tracking data collected at 1-s intervals and lower-resolution data collected at 1-h intervals. We quantified within-trajectory flight traits, including mean redirection, number of turns, flight speed, and flight altitude, in relation to turbine exposure. We assessed avoidance using both proximity-based and direction-sensitive metrics. At the near-colony scale, we tested whether flight behavior changed with increasing alignment between the trajectory bearing and turbine bearing from the colony. At the broader breeding-range scale, we tested whether behavior differed inside and outside wind farms or with distance to turbines, while accounting for colony distance, wind, and landscape variables. Bridled Terns showed increased mean redirection and lower flight altitude when trajectories were more closely aligned with turbine directions from the colony, suggesting localized route alteration in obstacle-facing directions. However, flight behavior was not significantly associated with turbine proximity, nor did it differ significantly inside and outside wind farms. These findings suggest that offshore wind farms may influence seabird movement through localized, direction-dependent route alteration rather than simple distance-dependent responses, highlighting the value of movement-context metrics and within-trajectory traits in wind farm impact assessments.

From this week's government/NGO section:

Interim heat mortality monitoring report, England: May and June 2026, UK Health Security Agency

During the May and June 2026 heat events there were an estimated total of 2,877 heat-associated deaths, an estimated 753 heat-associated deaths occurred during the May heat episode; an estimated 2,124 heat-associated deaths occurred during the June heat episode, and the mortality burden is already close to the highest annual totals previously recorded by UKHSA. Although these estimates remain provisional and are subject to revision as more complete mortality data becomes available, the magnitude of the impact is already comparable with some of the highest annual heat-associated mortality estimates previously reported through UKHSA’s heat mortality monitoring programme. For context, UKHSA estimated 2,295 heat-associated deaths during the whole of summer 2023, 1,311 during summer 2024 and 1,504 during summer 2025. The highest annual estimate recorded to date remains summer 2022, when 2,985 heat-associated deaths were observed across 5 heat episodes.

Climate change increases likelihood of compounding drivers of severe wildfire conditions in France and Spain, World Weather Attribution

The authors perform a super rapid analysis of trends in fire-conducive weather conditions in the two affected areas in France and Spain, analyzing observations only. In both study regions observations show strong trends of increasing likelihood and severity with global warming.

99 articles in 50 journals by 827 contributing authors

Physical science of climate change, effects

Climate modes synergistically influence marine heatwaves in the North Sea, Lin et al., Ocean science Open Access pdf 10.5194/os-22-2287-2026

Most cited from this section, published 2 years ago:
Uncertainties too large to predict tipping times of major Earth system components from historical data, Science Advances, 10.1126/sciadv.adl4841 40 cites.

Observations of climate change, effects

Climate warming and atmospheric deposition jointly accelerate the Antarctic Peninsula atmosphere–glacier–land–ocean mercury loop, Zhou et al., Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Open Access 10.1073/pnas.2613472123

Climate warming preconditions Himalayan slopes for post-earthquake cascading hazards, Gao et al., Communications Earth & Environment Open Access pdf 10.1038/s43247-026-03885-2

Impact attribution of anthropogenic forcing on lake surface temperature, Wang et al., Nature Communications Open Access pdf 10.1038/s41467-026-76221-z

Long-term observed changes in air temperature extremes over Romania (1901-2023), Amihesei et al., Weather and Climate Extremes Open Access 10.1016/j.wace.2026.100941

Long-Term Trends in the Ionospheric Equivalent Slab Thickness as a Proxy of Climate Change in the Ionosphere, Pignalberi & Alberti, Geophysical Research Letters Open Access 10.1029/2026gl123868

Pan-tropical ocean warming drives record-breaking rainfall in South China in April 2024, Xing et al., Communications Earth & Environment Open Access 10.1038/s43247-026-03894-1

Threefold increase in atmospheric–riverine compound heatwaves under climate change, Zhou et al., Nature Geoscience Open Access 10.1038/s41561-026-02040-y

Understanding the Climatology and Characteristics of Arctic Moisture Intrusions, Woods et al., Journal of Geophysical Research Atmospheres Open Access 10.1029/2025jd044159

Winter warm spells in the pyrenees: synoptic drivers and snowmelt impacts (1960–2024), Bonsoms & Serrano-Notivoli, Atmospheric Research Open Access pdf 10.1016/j.atmosres.2026.109245

Most cited from this section, published 2 years ago:
Summer Monsoon Drying Accelerates India's Groundwater Depletion Under Climate Change, Earth s Future, 10.1029/2024ef004516 38 cites.

Instrumentation & observational methods of climate change, effects

Enhanced detectability of forced signal in monthly precipitation changes, Duan et al., Communications Earth & Environment Open Access pdf 10.1038/s43247-026-03684-9

GLBD-FED: a global first-hand in-situ daily temperature dataset preferentially with a 00:00–24:00 UTC 24 h window (1981–2024), Yang et al., Earth system science data Open Access 10.5194/essd-18-5739-2026

Post-Season Review of Rapid Attribution of 2025 Summer Extreme Heat in China, Sun et al., Advances in Climate Change Research Open Access 10.1016/j.accre.2026.07.014

Most cited from this section, published 2 years ago:
The ERA5 global reanalysis from 1940 to 2022, Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society, 10.1002/qj.4803 290 cites.

Modeling, simulation & projection of climate change, effects

Climatic Impacts of a Warmer Mediterranean Sea Simulated by the Fully Coupled Community Earth System Model, Version 2 (CESM2), Toker et al., Journal of Climate 10.1175/jcli-d-25-0540.1

Compound climate hazards revealed by global modeling of drought, heatwaves, and land degradation, Liu et al., Global and Planetary Change 10.1016/j.gloplacha.2026.105637

Intensifying Short-Interval Heatwave-To-Rainfall Compound Extremes and Associated Exposure in the Indus Basin, Wen et al., International Journal of Climatology 10.1002/joc.70534

Multi-model ensemble mean shows accelerating global below-ground warming, Ju et al., Agricultural and Forest Meteorology Open Access 10.1016/j.agrformet.2026.111382

Most cited from this section, published 2 years ago:
The radiative feedback continuum from Snowball Earth to an ice-free hothouse, Nature Communications, 10.1038/s41467-024-50406-w 14 cites.

Advancement of climate & climate effects modeling, simulation & projection

Advective, adiabatic and diabatic contributions to heat extremes simulated with the Community Earth System Model version 2, Röthlisberger et al., Weather and Climate Dynamics Open Access 10.5194/wcd-7-1363-2026

Most cited from this section, published 2 years ago:
Accurate assessment of land–atmosphere coupling in climate models requires high-frequency data output, Geoscientific model development, 10.5194/gmd-17-1869-2024 32 cites.

Cryosphere & climate change

Delayed freeze-up in the western Arctic Ocean fueled by subsurface heat release, ZHOU et al., Advances in Climate Change Research Open Access 10.1016/j.accre.2026.07.018

The Modèle Atmosphérique Régional – Intelligence Artificielle (MAR-IA): surface meltwater over Greenland, Tedesco et al., cryosphere Open Access 10.5194/tc-20-4235-2026

The recent enhancement of the surface melt over the Antarctic Peninsula dictated by thermodynamics, Zhang et al., Nature Communications Open Access 10.1038/s41467-026-76310-z

Most cited from this section, published 2 years ago:
Recent tropical Andean glacier retreat is unprecedented in the Holocene, Science, 10.1126/science.adg7546 27 cites.

Sea level & climate change

Coastal Flood Risk Governance in Newfoundland, Canada: A Multidimensional Analysis of Assessment, Management, and Communication, Parvez & Akter, Risk Analysis 10.1111/risa.70327

Most cited from this section, published 2 years ago:
The influence of realistic 3D mantle viscosity on Antarctica’s contribution to future global sea levels, Science Advances, 10.1126/sciadv.adn1470 23 cites.

Paleoclimate & paleogeochemistry

Calcium isotopes link ocean acidification to Aptian–Albian foraminiferal extinctions, Chen et al., Science 10.1126/science.aed9359

New classes of climate model emulators to improve paleoclimate reconstructions, Gaudin & Khodri, Geoscientific model development Open Access 10.5194/gmd-19-7135-2026

Most cited from this section, published 2 years ago:
Plant, insect, and fungi fossils under the center of Greenland’s ice sheet are evidence of ice-free times, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 10.1073/pnas.2407465121 6 cites.

Biology & climate change, related geochemistry

Climate Change Predicted to Trigger an Upward Altitudinal Range Shift and Boost the Abundance of a Montane Rock Face Specialist, the Wallcreeper (Tichodroma muraria), Luisier et al., Open Access CRIS of the University of Bern Open Access 10.48620/99848

Declining coccolithophore blooms in the North Atlantic and Western Barents Sea, Yu et al., Science Advances Open Access 10.1126/sciadv.adw5268

Distribution of suitable habitats and bloom risk assessment for Sargassum horneri in the China Seas under global climate change, Mo et al., Marine Environmental Research 10.1016/j.marenvres.2026.108325

Ecological Transformations of Coastal Wetlands of the Conterminous United States in Response to Contemporaneous Sea-Level Rise, Neville et al., Earth s Future Open Access 10.1029/2025ef006836

Sustained transpiration masks weakened canopy cooling and emerging carbon constraints during heatwaves in a riparian poplar plantation, Li et al., Agricultural and Forest Meteorology 10.1016/j.agrformet.2026.111390

The synoptic meteorology of coral reef high water temperature events in the Gulf of Eilat (Aqaba), Israel, McGowan et al., Scientific Reports Open Access pdf 10.1038/s41598-026-65507-3

Underestimated climate contributions: Dynamic attribution of vegetation changes in China incorporating soil moisture and vapor pressure deficit, Zheng et al., Agricultural and Forest Meteorology 10.1016/j.agrformet.2026.111395

Warming associated with forest integrity loss in global wildland-urban interfaces, Huang et al., Anthropocene 10.1016/j.ancene.2026.100569

Warming Drives Large-Scale Shifts in Post-Disturbance Vegetation Dynamics and Expansion of Deciduous Trees in the Boreal Forest in a Dynamic Vegetation Model, Layritz et al., Journal of Geophysical Research Biogeosciences Open Access 10.1029/2025jg009176

Most cited from this section, published 2 years ago:
High heat tolerance, evaporative cooling, and stomatal decoupling regulate canopy temperature and their safety margins in three European oak species, Global Change Biology, 10.1111/gcb.17439 46 cites.

GHG sources & sinks, flux, related geochemistry

Climate Constraints on the Methane-Carbon Efficiency of Global Wetlands: Spatiotemporal Drivers and Future Projections, Zhu et al., Earth s Future Open Access 10.1029/2025ef008003

Communicating Climate Change in Africa: Role Perception and Role Shifting among Environmental Journalists in Nigeria, Oduolowu et al., Environmental Communication 10.1080/17524032.2026.2711229

Compound Effects of Warming and Wetting Enhance Soil Respiration on the Earth's Third Pole, Shen et al., Global Biogeochemical Cycles 10.1029/2026gb009376

Detection and quantification of agricultural methane plumes using MethaneAIR through targeted scene selection, wavelet denoising, and divergence-integral analysis, Smale et al., Atmospheric chemistry and physics Open Access 10.5194/acp-26-10661-2026

Drought stress on the global vegetation carbon sink: Capacity decline in nearly 70% of regions, LIU et al., Advances in Climate Change Research Open Access 10.1016/j.accre.2026.07.020

Ecological Transformations of Coastal Wetlands of the Conterminous United States in Response to Contemporaneous Sea-Level Rise, Neville et al., Earth s Future Open Access 10.1029/2025ef006836

Elevated Spring Methane Emissions in a Sub-Arctic Peatland Fen, Montemayor et al., Journal of Geophysical Research Biogeosciences Open Access 10.1029/2026jg009699

Estimating carbon storage and flux in sea urchin barrens following kelp forest collapse, Rogers-Bennett et al., Marine Environmental Research 10.1016/j.marenvres.2026.108297

Quantifying Methane Emissions From a Rich Fen With Uncrewed Aircraft Systems in Boreal Alaska, Tomlin et al., Journal of Geophysical Research Atmospheres 10.1029/2026jd046424

Quantifying national, state, and oil/gas field methane emissions and trends in the US (2019–2024) through high resolution inversion of satellite observations, Estrada et al., Atmospheric chemistry and physics Open Access pdf 10.5194/acp-26-10629-2026

Responses of Riverine Dissolved Organic Carbon to Global Warming and Permafrost Thaw on the Tibetan Plateau, Pan et al., Global Biogeochemical Cycles 10.1029/2026gb009157

Urban CO₂ flux characteristics observed at an eddy-covariance tower in northeastern Seoul, An et al., Atmospheric Environment 10.1016/j.atmosenv.2026.122252

Most cited from this section, published 2 years ago:
Towards an ecosystem capacity to stabilise organic carbon in soils, Global Change Biology, 10.1111/gcb.17453 55 cites.

CO2 capture, sequestration science & engineering
Most cited from this section, published 2 years ago:
The politics of carbon management in Austria: Emerging fault lines on carbon capture, storage, utilization and removal, Energy Research & Social Science, 10.1016/j.erss.2024.103697 6 cites.

Decarbonization

Assessing strategies to decarbonise embodied carbon impacts of residential buildings in Indian cities: case of Ahmedabad, Trivedi et al., Environmental Research Infrastructure and Sustainability Open Access pdf 10.1088/2634-4505/ae87c7

Disrupted Skies: How Offshore Wind Farms Alter Flight Behavior of Breeding Seabirds, Liang et al., Ecology and Evolution Open Access 10.1002/ece3.74089

Hydrogen supply chains across Chinese provinces for production and transportation, Bi et al., Communications Earth & Environment Open Access pdf 10.1038/s43247-026-03869-2

Peak coal electricity under rapid electricity demand growth conditions: A case study of Indonesia, the Philippines, and Vietnam, Dzikrurrokhim et al., Energy Policy Open Access 10.1016/j.enpol.2026.115532

Sceptical, pragmatic, and innovative teleworkers: Exploring commuting carbon footprints and subjective well-being, Vu et al., Energy Research & Social Science Open Access 10.1016/j.erss.2026.104894

Most cited from this section, published 2 years ago:
Integration of Renewable Energy in Microgrids and Smart Grids in Deregulated Power Systems: A Comparative Exploration, Advanced Energy and Sustainability Research, 10.1002/aesr.202400088 88 cites.

Geoengineering climate

Climate benefit and ecological cost trade-offs for ocean iron fertilization, Yu et al., Nature 10.1038/s41586-026-10795-y

Aerosols

Heatwaves and particulate matter increases: An Italian case study, Faggi et al., Atmospheric Environment Open Access 10.1016/j.atmosenv.2026.122246

Invisible Ship Tracks Produce Mean-State Cloud Microphysics Perturbation in Tropical Trade Cumulus, Wright, Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) Open Access 10.5281/zenodo.20076712

Climate change communications & cognition

Challenges and next steps in climate disaster communication, Houston & First, Nature Climate Change 10.1038/s41558-026-02714-w

Finding Gaia: exploring climate change through gamification, Gargiulo et al., Geoscience Communication Open Access pdf 10.5194/gc-9-331-2026

Local stories in climate change communication, Cheng, Nature Climate Change 10.1038/s41558-026-02694-x

Psychological barriers to improving carbon competence, Herberz et al., Open MIND Open Access pmh:10.17605/osf.io/qp76t

Psychological inoculation against climate doom, O'Boyle et al., Open MIND pmh:10.17605/osf.io/74cgf

Social influence shapes climate attitudes and action, Hampton et al., Nature Climate Change 10.1038/s41558-026-02711-z

Untrustworthy sources on Facebook and Instagram in 2020: Concentrated exposure but no attitudinal effects, Bergeron-Boutin et al., Science Advances Open Access 10.1126/sciadv.adz6502

‘Towards electric vehicle misinformation communities: Shared narratives, networked validation, and reassurance among Australian consumers, McEwen et al., Energy Research & Social Science Open Access 10.1016/j.erss.2026.104902

Most cited from this section, published 2 years ago:
Climate change engagement of scientists, Nature Climate Change, 10.1038/s41558-024-02091-2 45 cites.

Agronomy, animal husbundry, food production & climate change

Climate Change Shows Inverse Effects on Grain Yield and Protein Concentration in West Africa, Abigaba et al., Earth s Future Open Access 10.1029/2026ef008409

Discovery of a covalent FGFR2-selective inhibitor overcoming clinically-acquired resistance mutations, Huang et al., Nature Communications Open Access 10.1038/s41467-026-76339-0

Engaging farmers with climate projections: integrating long-term climate risk into farm business resilience planning, Malakar et al., Climate Risk Management Open Access pdf 10.1016/j.crm.2026.100859

Food system contributions to future planetary boundary transgressions: a multiscale modelling assessment of scenarios, Luchtenbelt et al., The Lancet Planetary Health Open Access 10.1016/j.lanplh.2026.101492

Halochromic modulation of amorphous calcium carbonate crystallization driven by pH-responsive bioinspired pigments, Sardhalia et al., Nature Communications Open Access pdf 10.1038/s41467-026-75888-8

Leveraging climate-smart agriculture for improved resource-use efficiency: evidence from rice farmers in Kwara State, Nigeria, Ajiboye et al., Frontiers in Climate Open Access pdf 10.3389/fclim.2026.1878309

Relearning with the Land: Intergenerational food literacy pathways for resilience in a changing climate, Adelodun et al., Environmental Science & Policy 10.1016/j.envsci.2026.104462

Vulnerability to high temperature shapes global warming impacts on rice yield, Jian et al., Science Advances Open Access 10.1126/sciadv.aed9226

Most cited from this section, published 2 years ago:
The centennial legacy of land-use change on organic carbon stocks of German agricultural soils, Global Change Biology, 10.1111/gcb.17444 26 cites.

Hydrology, hydrometeorology & climate change

Greenhouse warming exacerbates El Niño-induced Indian monsoon droughts, Zhao et al., Nature Communications Open Access pdf 10.1038/s41467-026-76049-7

Improving Daily Streamflow Forecasting under Nonstationarity with a Physics-Informed, Decomposition-Enhanced Deep Learning Model, Jiang et al., Journal of Hydrometeorology 10.1175/jhm-d-25-0166.1

Reservoir Drought Resilience Under Future Warming Scenarios: Regional Disparities Across Heavily Regulated US Basins, Eldardiry et al., Earth s Future Open Access 10.1029/2025ef007984

Understanding the Climatology and Characteristics of Arctic Moisture Intrusions, Woods et al., Journal of Geophysical Research Atmospheres Open Access 10.1029/2025jd044159

Most cited from this section, published 2 years ago:
Understanding Climate Change and Anthropogenic Impacts on the Salinization of Low-Lying Coastal Groundwater Systems, Earth s Future, 10.1029/2024ef004737 20 cites.

Climate change economics

Global trade-offs between consumption, carbon prices and equity, Li et al., Nature Communications Open Access 10.1038/s41467-026-75815-x

Most cited from this section, published 2 years ago:
Estimating economic losses from perceived heat stress in a global south country, Bangladesh, Urban Climate, 10.1016/j.uclim.2024.102072 11 cites.

Climate change mitigation public policy research

Environmental taxation and biofuel production in the EU: Heterogeneous effects across producer scales, Auteri, Energy Policy 10.1016/j.enpol.2026.115525

From corporate net-zero pledges to credible climate action, Gudipudi et al., Nature Sustainability 10.1038/s41893-026-01908-6

From project participants to policy shapers: How communities influence renewable energy governance, Eitan, Energy Research & Social Science Open Access 10.1016/j.erss.2026.104906

Pathways towards social license for offshore wind energy: Modelling strategies to reduce conflict and increase acceptability, Condie et al., Energy Policy Open Access 10.1016/j.enpol.2026.115523

Most cited from this section, published 2 years ago:
Renewable energy transition and regional integration: Energizing the pathway to sustainable development, Energy Policy, 10.1016/j.enpol.2024.114270 65 cites.

Climate change adaptation & adaptation public policy research

Aspirations in a warming world: Modeling migration and education decisions under climate risk in Senegal, Choquette-Levy et al., Global Environmental Change 10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2026.103215

Back to the future: A mixed-methods approach for developing event-based participatory storylines to advance climate risk assessments, Casartelli et al., Climate Risk Management Open Access 10.1016/j.crm.2026.100865

Climate-resilient infrastructure and the future of the SDGs, Zaqout et al., Environmental Research Infrastructure and Sustainability Open Access pdf 10.1088/2634-4505/ae900b

Coastal Flood Risk Governance in Newfoundland, Canada: A Multidimensional Analysis of Assessment, Management, and Communication, Parvez & Akter, Risk Analysis 10.1111/risa.70327

Global vulnerability assessment of mobile telecommunications infrastructure to climate hazards using crowdsourced open data, Oughton et al., Nature Communications Open Access pdf 10.1038/s41467-026-76197-w

Traditional, indigenous and local knowledge for climate adaptation: trends, themes and governance implications (2000–2025), Zhang et al., Advances in Climate Change Research Open Access pdf 10.1016/j.accre.2026.07.019

Most cited from this section, published 2 years ago:
Rare and highly destructive wildfires drive human migration in the U.S., Nature Communications, 10.1038/s41467-024-50630-4 28 cites.

Climate change impacts on human health

Rapid Increase in Tropical Humid Heat Stress and Its Predictability in a Warming World, Saha et al., Journal of Geophysical Research Atmospheres 10.1029/2026jd046437

The GHEMMS checklist: design, conduct, and reporting guidance for studies modelling climate mitigation actions and their health cobenefits, Reynolds et al., The Lancet Planetary Health Open Access 10.1016/j.lanplh.2026.101474

The past and future impact of climate change on childhood malaria in Africa, Carlson et al., Nature Open Access 10.1038/s41586-026-10840-w

Welcome to the Calentón: How Puerto Rican Community Leaders Respond to Extreme Heat, López et al., Environmental Communication 10.1080/17524032.2026.2711233

Most cited from this section, published 2 years ago:
Climate change could fuel urinary schistosomiasis transmission in Africa and Europe, Global Change Biology, 10.1111/gcb.17434 19 cites.

Climate change & geopolitics

Energy transition and climate vulnerability: Energy policy in an era of geopolitical fragmentation, Chen et al., Energy Policy 10.1016/j.enpol.2026.115536

The immediate impact of crises on energy transitions: Policy responses to the Russian invasion of Ukraine in Finland, Germany, and Poland, Haukkala et al., Energy Research & Social Science 10.1016/j.erss.2026.104881

Other

Coupled air–sea interactions drove and sustained the 2013–2016 North Pacific marine heatwave, Jiang et al., Nature Communications Open Access 10.1038/s41467-026-76096-0

Mid-2000s reversal of North Atlantic warming pattern reshapes hemispheric circulation and Eurasian cold extremes, Wu et al., npj Climate and Atmospheric Science Open Access pdf 10.1038/s41612-026-01492-8

The cooling paradox: Rising air conditioner adoption in Bangladesh as a driver of energy insecurity and compounding climate risk, Rahman et al., Energy Research & Social Science Open Access 10.1016/j.erss.2026.104886

Unveiling Future Individual and Compound Heat and Air Pollution Extremes in China: Insights for Mitigation, Zhang & Gao, Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society 10.1175/bams-d-25-0333.1

Most cited from this section, published 2 years ago:
Expansive learning of climate scientists towards transdisciplinarity, Climate Risk Management, 10.1016/j.crm.2024.100642 3 cites.

Informed opinion, nudges & major initiatives

Managing climate overshoot: a risk-based strategy for climate stabilisation, Taylor et al., Frontiers in Climate Open Access pdf 10.3389/fclim.2026.1872846

Most cited from this section, published 2 years ago:
Achieving net zero greenhouse gas emissions critical to limit climate tipping risks, Nature Communications, 10.1038/s41467-024-49863-0 71 cites.

Articles/Reports from Agencies and Non-Governmental Organizations Addressing Aspects of Climate Change

Groundwater Supply East of Interstate 95 (Virginia), Virginia Department of Environmental Quality

As directed by Senate Joint Resolution No. 25, the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) completed a study of the groundwater supply in the Commonwealth east of Interstate 95 (I-95). This area generally encompasses the Virginia Coastal Plain (VCP) aquifer system. Under current conditions, the VCP aquifer system has limited capacity for significant new withdrawals. The estimated capacity for new withdrawals varies by region, from a maximum of 360,000 gallons per day in the eastern Northern Neck to less than 30,000 gallons per day in some western regions near I-95. Only the upper end of this range would support a significant new withdrawal for industrial use. The confined Potomac aquifer is the largest and deepest in the VCP, accounting for 70% of total reported and estimated groundwater withdrawals in the Eastern Virginia Groundwater Management Area. The confined Yorktown-Eastover aquifer system accounts for 95% of total reported and estimated groundwater withdrawals in the Eastern Shore Groundwater Management Area. Combining the two regulated areas, the major uses of groundwater are industrial (35% of total), private domestic (34%), and public water supply (26%).

California New Car Dealers Association Releases Q2 2026 Auto Outlook. Q2 2026 CA Auto Outlook: Hybrid Market Share Climbs to Highest Level on Record in California, California New Car Dealers Association

Hybrid vehicles accounted for 22.1 percent of California’s new vehicle market through June, the highest share in the report’s data series and up from 19.5 percent for all of 2025. Hybrid share has now increased in each of the past four years. Quarterly share climbed from 20.9 percent in the first quarter to 23.2 percent in the second. Hybrid registrations totaled 191,000 units in the first half of the year, and every one of those vehicles was sold through a franchised new car dealership. Franchised dealerships accounted for 75.7 percent of combined hybrid, ZEV, and plug-in hybrid registrations statewide. Gas powered vehicles remained the largest single segment of the market at 57.6 percent of registrations, up from 54.0 percent in 2025.

Characterization and Screening-Level Risk Evaluation Report. Vicinity of Moss Landing Power Plant, Moss Landing, California, Terraphase Engineering, Vistra Corporation

On January 16, 2025, a lithium-ion battery fire occurred within ML300 at the Moss Landing Power Plant (MLPP). The fire was confined to the ML300 structure and did not spread to other on-site facilities. Emergency response actions were implemented promptly, including precautionary evacuations that were lifted the following day based on air monitoring results. The authors evaluate whether releases associated with the fire event pose a potential threat to human health or the environment and whether additional investigation or response actions are warranted. Chemicals measured in the sampled off-site soil, sediment, and surface water do not indicate lasting conditions expected to pose an unacceptable risk to people or ecological receptors. For purposes of the risk evaluation, health-protective assumptions and treated measured chemical concentrations are considered as if they were related to the fire. Some nickel concentrations in sediment exceeded ecological screening levels in Hester Marsh and the Mosquito Abatement Observation Area. The authors attributed these results to natural variability and marsh conditions rather than lasting fire-related impacts. No further human-health or ecological-risk evaluation, off-site investigation, or response action is warranted at this time for the sampled locations and environmental media.

Colorado River Basin Water Security Survey, Morning Consult, Walton Family Foundation

Nearly 9-in-10 voters across key states are very concerned about wildfire risks, threats to clean drinking water, and lowering water levels in the Colorado River Basin. Four-in-five voters across all seven states and in the Colorado River Basin counties say addressing the drought effects from the Colorado River is an important priority to them personally and the majority say it is important for the federal government or their state government to make addressing water security a priority this year. Nine-in-ten voters support restoring wetlands to help protect communities from fires, increasing agricultural efficiency to reduce water use, boosting municipal water conservation, and managing forests to limit wildfire damage. Support is broad across the political spectrum, ranging from more than eight-in-ten Republicans and Independents to more than nine-in-ten Democrats. Similar shares say each approach is an important priority, with more than half saying forest management and boosting municipal conservation should be a top priority. About half of voters across the seven states prefer strategies to address water conservation that are both long-term and short-term, to help manage the drought into the future. Ensuring reliable water supply is a top priority for voters.

Thirsty Power. Coal and gas will leave us high and dry, Sonoda et al., Sierra Club, Wisconsin Chapter

Wisconsin’s current dirty energy power fleet– including coal, gas, and nuclear plants– withdraws 1.34 trillion gallons of water annually. This is more than 7 times all of the municipalities in Wisconsin combined, and 18 times more than agricultural irrigation. Meanwhile, solar and wind use so little water that the U.S. Energy Information Administration does not even track their use. Five new gas plants, known or assumed to be proposed for data centers, would use 142 million gallons of water a year on average– the equivalent of the annual drinking water for 284 million people– and the majority of which would be needed during summer months when energy and water use has been strained by drought and heat.

The 50 States of Solar: Q2 2026 Quarterly Report, North Carolina Clean Energy Technology Center

This report series focuses on cataloging and describing important proposed and adopted policy changes affecting solar customer-generators of investor-owned utilities (IOUs) and large publicly owned or nonprofit utilities, i.e., those serving at least 100,000 customers. In the second quarter of 2026, 45 states plus Washington, DC and Puerto Rico took a total of 284 actions related to distributed solar policy and rate design. Of the 284 actions cataloged, the most common were related to distributed generation compensation rules (53), followed by community solar (48), and residential fixed charge or minimum bill increases (45).

Interim heat mortality monitoring report, England: May and June 2026, UK Health Security Agency

Suring the May and June 2026 heat events there were an estimated total of 2,877 heat-associated deaths, an estimated 753 heat-associated deaths occurred during the May heat episode; an estimated 2,124 heat-associated deaths occurred during the June heat episode, and the mortality burden is already close to the highest annual totals previously recorded by UKHSA. Although these estimates remain provisional and are subject to revision as more complete mortality data becomes available, the magnitude of the impact is already comparable with some of the highest annual heat-associated mortality estimates previously reported through UKHSA’s heat mortality monitoring programme. For context, UKHSA estimated 2,295 heat-associated deaths during the whole of summer 2023, 1,311 during summer 2024 and 1,504 during summer 2025. The highest annual estimate recorded to date remains summer 2022, when 2,985 heat-associated deaths were observed across 5 heat episodes.

Climate change increases likelihood of compounding drivers of severe wildfire conditions in France and Spain, World Weather Attribution

The authors perform a super rapid analysis of trends in fire-conducive weather conditions in the two affected areas in France and Spain, analyzing observations only. In both study regions observations show strong trends of increasing likelihood and severity with global warming.

Risks of Lithium-ion Battery Facilities to Workers and Communities in Reno, Nevada - A Case Study Supporting Community Right-to-Know, Moon et al., GAIA

The authors report examines the environmental and health implications of lithium-ion battery recycling in Nevada’s rapidly expanding “Lithium Loop” and is designed not only to document current conditions but to equip communities, policymakers, and other stakeholders with the information and frameworks needed to strengthen transparency and accountability across the sector. This case study marks the launch of GAIA’s Community Right-to-Know Initiative for Battery Recycling, a multi-year effort to establish industry-wide transparency and accountability benchmarks among battery recyclers regarding transition mineral claims; support frontline communities in accessing, interpreting, and acting on environmental data; and align battery supply chain stakeholders, policymakers, researchers, and advocates, in Nevada and throughout the US, around enforceable disclosure standards.

The Pace of Solar Progress: How Preexisting Land Use Shapes Permitting Timelines for Utility-Scale Solar in California, Johnson et al., The Nature Conservancy

California’s future hinges on its ability to rapidly and responsibly develop significant amounts of utility-scale solar. Yet the pace of deployment is increasingly constrained by permitting complexity. In a first-of-its-kind analysis, the authors examine over 15 years of permitting data and includes interviews with county officials, a state agency, and solar developers to understand the drivers of permitting timelines and to identify how California can accelerate clean energy deployment while protecting important landscapes.

Annual Report to the Legislature on California Climate Investments Using Cap-and-Invest Auction Proceeds, California Air Resources Board

The California Air Resources Board released a new report showing the state’s Cap-and-Invest program has generated $36.2 billion for climate investments, $15.5 billion of which have been implemented through over 600,000 projects. With billions yet to be implemented and $8 billion in additional proceeds estimated through 2030, these funds are expected to continue reducing emissions and supporting jobs across the state for years to come. 36.2 billion generated by Cap-and-Invest auctions. $15.5 billion implemented across 122 programs into over 600,000 projects delivering cleaner air, stronger communities, and more affordable options for Californians. Of that money, $11.4 billion, or 76%, is benefiting disadvantaged and low-income communities. 130.5 million metric tons of carbon-dioxide equivalent of estimated greenhouse gas reductions over project lifetimes, equivalent to avoiding the consumption of over 12.6 billion gallons of gasoline. 16,386 affordable homes under contract, helping address California’s housing needs. $44.4 billion in expected cost savings from reduced fuel use, lower transportation costs, and lower household energy bills. 143,000+ jobs supported across the economy through project spending, supply chain activity, and induced economic activity over project lifetimes.

How Important is Clean Energy to Utahns?, Elizabeth Brunner and Stacia Ryder, Utah State University

Data from the 2024/25 Utah People and Environment Poll estimates that a majority of Utahns support carbon-free energy. Over half of Utahns are willing to pay more for clean energy. Nuclear and geothermal energy sources draw the most consistent support across rural, transitioning, and urban communities Rural, transitioning, and urban communities are most divided on support for natural gas, coal, solar, and wind energy sources. The Utah Office of Energy’s Strategic Energy Plan may not prioritize clean energy in the same way its residents do. Future research should explore the links between Utahns’ views of energy and data center development.

Energy Transition Monitor: Momentum Is Still Insufficient for the Expansion of Renewables, Electrification, and Storage, Von Wolf-Peter Schill, DIW Weekly Report

The expansion of solar and wind energy is progressing, but it is not fast enough to meet the 2030 statutory targets. The heating transition is stalling: Heat pumps make up half of all newly sold heating systems, yet many fossil-fuel heaters are still being installed. Electric vehicles are gaining ground in all categories, but internal combustion engines continue to dominate new registrations. Electricity price trends show that the flexibility of the power system is growing more slowly than electricity generation from renewables. The expansion of large-scale battery storage is gaining momentum, nearly doubling in the first half of 2026.

China Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) Investment Report 2026 H1, Christoph Nedopil, The University of Queensland Business School, Brisbane, Australia in collaboration with the Green Finance & Development Center (GFDC) at FISF, PR. China

China’s energy related engagement in 2026 H1 reached record levels with about USD36.3 billion – almost double the energy engagement in any first half year since 2013 except 2025. 56% of China’s energy engagement was green – a new record both in absolute and in relative terms. More than USD20 billion in H1 2026, same level as green energy engagement in all 2025. More than 20 GW of green electricity projects confirmed through investment and construction – more than in all of 2025.

Organizations and Climate Action. Accelerating Climate Solutions Through Organizational Change, Amel et al., American Psychological Association & ecoAmerica

The escalating effects of climate change are already reshaping lives, livelihoods, and communities. A large majority of people recognize this reality and express concern. Yet awareness alone has not translated into the scale of action the moment demands. The authors address that gap by examining one of the most powerful and underutilized levers for climate action: organizations. Drawing on peer-reviewed research from organizational psychology, behavioral science, and sustainability studies, this report presents an evidence-based case for why organizations — understood as structured collectives of people — are uniquely positioned to accelerate climate solutions. Although much of the research reviewed in this report is based on workplace settings, the principles it identifies are broadly applicable across diverse organizational contexts, from corporations, associations, and nonprofits to educational institutions and places of worship. At its core, any collective is shaped by universal human dynamics: culture, leadership, and motivation. The authors examine the cultural and behavioral foundations of organizational change and offer practical, role-specific recommendations for advancing climate action.

Communities Centered: Frontline Perspectives on Hyperscale Data Centers in Washington State, Mengal et al., Front and Centered

Hyperscale data centers represent an emerging threat to climate and environmental justice. New articles or reports are constantly being released detailing the negative health, environmental, energy and economic effects of data centers on communities across the nation, and too often it is frontline communities who bear the brunt of these effects. As a coalition of frontline community-based organizations advancing climate and environmental justice in Washington State, we know that our communities are continually overlooked in conversations about how to address data centers and their impacts, despite holding distinct and multiple forms of expertise and lived experiences. The authors provide the first statewide report to combine original geographic analysis with interviews from frontline organizations to examine how the growth of AI data centers is affecting communities across Washington. In addition to documenting community concerns, the authors outline a series of policy recommendations, including passing a statewide moratorium on new data centers and the expansion of existing hyperscale facilities.

About New Research

Click here for the why and how of Skeptical Science New Research.

Suggestions

Previous edition

The previous edition of Skeptical Science New Research may be found here.

New Mexico’s clean energy success story

Wed, 5 Aug 2026 16:23:41 EST

This is a re-post from Yale Climate Connections by Karin Kirk

It’s hot. Fans and air conditioners are humming in homes, offices, commercial buildings, and factories. July is the most electricity-intensive time of year in the U.S., and the grid is working hard to keep up.

In many places, high electricity demand equals high pollution. That used to be true in New Mexico, but the state’s electricity supply flipped from majority climate-warming fossil fuels to majority renewables in just five years. Spurred by an ambitious clean energy law called the Energy Transition Act, utilities have been busy building solar panels, wind turbines, batteries, and transmission lines. A major coal plant was retired and demolished. Solar panels proliferated on homes, schools, and businesses.

And even while New Mexico was building out its clean energy future, electricity prices remained cheaper than average.

A case study in cleaner electricity

New Mexico’s largest utility is the Public Service Company of New Mexico, or PNM. Only five years ago, most of PNM’s cooling needs were met by coal and gas, which made up 83% of its electricity generation in July 2021.

But the state’s abundant sunshine now provides much of the region’s electricity.

The golden line on the graph below shows grid-scale solar energy production in PNM’s territory every day for a week. The sun generated 41% of the total electricity the week of July 6, when I did this analysis.

Batteries deliver stored sunshine in the evening

The next graph shows electricity stored and generated by utility-scale batteries. During the daytime, the line dips below zero when the batteries are pulling electricity off the grid to charge up.

In the Southwestern U.S., electricity is cheap during sunny days because everyone’s solar panels are cranking out electrons at the same time. The utility could try to sell excess solar energy to other regions, but it’s not worth much. It’s far better to store it for later.

Summer evenings are hot, even as the sun eases toward the horizon and solar production wanes. That’s when PNM’s battery fleet comes to life, delivering the solar energy stored a few hours earlier. The green line spikes upward as the batteries kick into gear.

By around midnight, the batteries are discharged. But metaphorically speaking, so are most people. Electricity demand drops off as everyone heads to bed and temperatures cool off for the night.

Bring on the wind

Sunshine and batteries aren’t quite enough to power everything 24/7. The next big player is wind, shown with the blue line on the graph below. Note how the wind blows strongest in the evening – it’s the perfect complement to solar in this region. Wind accounted for 20% of electricity generation during the week shown below.

New Mexico’s evening wind is also helping out Arizona and California as a result of the recently completed SunZia project. Located in central New Mexico, the project’s 916 wind turbines generate electricity and a 550-mile, high-voltage transmission line carries it westward.

Still some fossil fuels – but a lot less

Only five years ago, fossil fuels were the main characters in PNM’s electricity generation. Now they’re the supporting cast.

The brown line on the graph below shows electricity generated from natural gas, a fossil fuel composed primarily of climate-warming methane. Little gas is needed during the day, thanks to solar energy. In the evening, gas generation picks up, though it’s still generating less than batteries and wind.

The steady black line shows coal generation. Coal plants run best when operated at a constant pace, because frequent ramping up and down causes them to run less efficiently and can lead to more fatigue on aging equipment.

All told, coal and gas made up 38% of the electricity supply the week of July 6, with renewables generating 62%.

It’s worth noting that July’s heat drives the highest rates of fossil fuel use for PNM. About half the days in the past year saw renewables generating 70% or more of the daily electricity need, and in late spring of this year, renewables routinely met more than 80% of demand.

A transformation in just five years

Compare the chart above to the one below from 2021, when coal and gas power plants generated nearly 80% of the total electricity. Every day, the utility ramped up gas power plants to meet the evening peak in electricity demand. Solar and wind were relatively small contributors, totaling just over 20% between them.

So how did this transformation happen? The answer is in part two of this story, coming Monday.

A note on data

The data comes from the Energy Information Administration’s Hourly Grid Monitor. Note that not all of the electricity shown in these graphs is used by PNM. Some of it is exported to other regions, and PNM also imports some electricity into its service territory. Nevertheless, the data paints a picture of how different sources of electricity generation blend together to provide power through the day and night.

This article first appeared on Yale Climate Connections and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Is Europe having a bad wildfire year?

Tue, 4 Aug 2026 15:37:33 EST

This is a re-post from By the Numbers by Hannah Ritchie

Over the last week, this chart of wildfire burn in Europe has been doing the rounds on social media and traditional media outlets. Carbon Brief goes through some of this coverage here.

The underlying narrative is that Europe is having its lowest wildfire year on record, which is quite at odds with the huge wildfires we see from France and Spain on the news.

But this data and the media headlines are not as contradictory as they first appear.

The wildfire data we present on Our World in Data comes from the Global Wildfire Information System (GWIS). This uses satellite imagery, which doesn’t distinguish, for example, between forest fires and large-scale burning of agricultural land, grasslands, or savannah.

Its aggregate category “Europe” includes Russia. On OWID, we also have predefined regions across our datasets, and Russia falls under “Europe”.

Russia, as a country, is split between Europe and Asia. Most of its landmass lies in Asia, but most of its population is on the European side. Since most of our datasets, from poverty and inequality, to health, education, energy consumption and access to resources, are about human activity and outcomes, assigning Russia to Europe usually makes more sense. That’s not so much the case for the few metrics — like wildfires — that concern land mass.

As Russia is big, the European numbers are heavily influenced by what’s happening there. This is something that’s true of aggregate wildfire data more broadly. The global numbers are heavily influenced by what’s happening in Africa, for example.

It can be true that the world is having a low wildfire year, while Europe is having a high one. Or that Europe is having a low wildfire year, and particular countries within Europe are battling huge outbreaks. There is no inconsistency there.

To provide more regional insight, we added an entity called “Europe (excluding Russia)” and already had one for the “European Union (27)”.

What does the European data look like if we remove Russia?

It’s no longer the lowest wildfire year on record, but still fairly quiet for this time of year. Russia is not the only explanation.

What if we look at the European Union?

It is higher again, with a particular uptick in the last week. It’s around 40% higher than the median year since 2012, and the 5th highest in that record.

At Our World in Data we use GWIS as our main source, since we want the global picture. But Europe also has the European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS). It stretches back to 2006, and tries to filter out agricultural burning to focus on forest fires.

Its data has the EU running at its 2nd highest level for this time of year.

Underneath this trend from either source is a stark regional split. Many countries in Western Europe are having a bad wildfire year. Those in the Balkans and Southern Europe, a comparatively quiet one.1

The bar chart below shows how wildfire burn at this stage of the year compares to the median over the past 15 years. A figure of 2 means it’s twice as high as the median; 0.3 means wildfire burn is around one-third.

Countries such as France, Spain, Germany, and Portugal are well above the average for this time of year. But countries such as Romania, Greece, and Croatia are well below.

For France, it’s not just that wildfire burn is higher than usual. It’s seeing record-breaking fires for this time of the year. You can see this in the panel chart below.

Compare that to Greece, where wildfires are tracking for their lowest levels since 2012.

This matters for the aggregate European, or EU, figures.

Let’s take that same chart, but make the y-axis scale the same across all countries. Some countries simply contribute far more to the total than others. France is breaking records — which obviously matters a lot for its national figures — but it doesn’t have a huge impact on the region’s overall numbers. A really big year in Portugal, Italy, Romania or Spain does make a big difference. But the relatively high year in Spain is “offset” by a low year for Romania.

That’s really the point: some countries are having really severe wildfire outbreaks, affecting huge population centres and landscapes. That France is struggling this summer is not a lie or just media hype. It can also be true that others offset this with quiet years in the regional totals.

The anomaly in France this year is even clearer when we look at the weekly wildfire burn. The spike you see in the chart below was far higher than any other week in France’s record since 2012. The speed and intensity of wildfire outbreaks is arguably more important for the impact on communities than just the total area burned.

What about global wildfires this year?

What if we zoom out to look at data across all regions?

Here they are, with the y-axis scales the same. It really is a low year for wildfires globally. Most of that is explained by low wildfire burn in Africa. A lot of Africa’s wildfires are about agricultural burning, and fires on grasslands and savannahs. South America is also having a quiet year, so far.

Europe and North America, in particular, have little bearing on the global total, simply because they’re so small. Europe without Russia has even less so.

1 Much of the burning in the Balkans is related to agricultural land practices, which differ from how people think about forest fires.

Why Hansen may end up being right about 2026

Mon, 3 Aug 2026 14:49:59 EST

This is a re-post from The Climate Brink

Jim Hansen and I have spent much of this year making seemingly opposite predictions about where 2026 will end up in the global temperature record books. He has argued since the spring that 2026 will be the warmest year on record; I have made the case that it is more likely than not to end up in second place. And in a recent post he framed our disagreement in memorably equine terms:

Based on this scientific evidence, we expect that when the horse race comes down the stretch, in November and December of this year, we will be riding a thoroughbred, a strong young horse, and Zeke will be atop a fading old nag.

For the record, I am the fading old nag in this metaphor. I have been called worse.

But here is the fun part: when the race comes down the final stretch at the end of 2026, there is a good chance we will both be declared winners. Hansen’s prediction is about NASA’s GISTEMP record specifically. Mine is about the average across the major surface temperature datasets. And when I run my own forecast model separately on each of six datasets, it gives GISTEMP a ~65% chance of a new 2026 record even as the multi-dataset average only has a ~32% chance and is likely to come in second place.

First, where my forecast stands. Back in December I projected 2026 at 1.41C (1.27C to 1.55C) above preindustrial levels, and in early June I revised that up to 1.46C (1.36C to 1.59C) as forecast models converged on a doozy of an El Niño developing in the latter half of the year. Hansen, via the Washington Post, cited my June estimate of a 26.6% chance that 2026 sets a new record.

That number has continued to creep up. With observations through June and the latest El Niño forecast ensemble, my current central estimate for 2026 is 1.50C (1.44C to 1.57C) above the 1850-1900 baseline in the average of six surface temperature datasets.1 That translates into a ~32% chance that 2026 beats 2024’s record, a ~66% chance it comes in second, and almost no chance (<2%) it falls to third or below. The figure below shows where those projections sit against the observational record.

Observed annual global mean surface temperature (average of GISTEMP, HadCRUT5, NOAA GlobalTemp, Berkeley Earth, JRA-3Q, and ERA5; °C relative to 1850–1900) and the 2026 and 2027 forecast medians with 25–75% and 5–95% Monte Carlo ranges, alongside the 2024 record (dashed) and the 1.5C level (dotted). Forecast updated 30 July 2026 with observations through June and the July-initialized multi-model El Niño ensemble.

Here we see 2026 sitting just below the 2024 record line, with 2027 well above it. So the horse race (to continue the metaphor) is drifting in Hansen’s direction, though still short of the finish line. In the average of all the groups reporting global surface temperatures, second warmest remains my central call for 2026.

It is worth being clear about why my odds keep rising, because it is not that 2026 has been running unexpectedly hot. Year-to-date temperatures have actually drifted slightly down since March (a January-June mean of 1.39C, versus 1.41C for January-March). What changed is the El Niño forecast. To show this, I reran my forecast as it would have looked with each month’s information: that month’s multi-model El Niño plume plus observations through that month.

Left: probability that 2026 exceeds the 2024 record in the six-dataset composite, recomputed at each monthly forecast vintage (that month’s multi-model El Niño forecast plume plus year-to-date observations through that month). Right: additive decomposition of the March-to-now rise into an observations step (March plume held fixed, observations updated through June) and an El Niño forecast step (July plume swapped in). Updated 30 July 2026.

The odds of a 2026 record in the composite have risen from ~7% at the March vintage to ~35% now,2 and the decomposition on the right shows that the strengthening El Niño forecast accounts for ~84% of that rise; incoming observations contributed just over 4 points. In other words, my drift toward Hansen’s position is not the 2026 observations through June being particularly extraordinary. It is the ENSO models converging on an unprecedentedly large event. If that El Niño underdelivers, these odds will sag back down. If it holds, the odds will likely hold as well. But it seems unlikely (I hope!) that we see continued strengthening of the El Niño forecast beyond what already would blow past the prior record by a “truly mind-numbing margin”.

But “the warmest year on record” is not a single number that nature hands us; it depends on whose record you check. Hansen’s prediction is specifically about GISTEMP. So a natural question is: what does my model say if I fit it to each dataset individually, using each dataset’s own 2024 record as the bar to clear? The figure below shows the result for six datasets: the four traditional surface station products (GISTEMP, HadCRUT5, NOAA GlobalTemp, and Berkeley Earth) and two reanalysis products (Copernicus/ERA5 and JRA-3Q).

Probability that 2026 exceeds each dataset’s own 2024 record, from the same statistical forecast model (trend, ENSO, and observed 2026 months) fit to each of six datasets separately, with 10,000 Monte Carlo draws sampling a 14-model El Niño forecast ensemble. Observations through June 2026 (May for HadCRUT5). Updated 30 July 2026.

The same model, fed the same El Niño forecast, gives 2026 a ~65% chance of a record in GISTEMP and a ~66% chance in Berkeley Earth,3 but only ~35% in HadCRUT5, ~24% in NOAA, ~13% in ERA5, and ~9% in JRA-3Q. Conveniently, the average across the six (~35%) lands nearly on the blended estimate (32%), which is a reassuring consistency check.

Why the spread? It is not that the datasets disagree much about how warm 2026 will be; the projections are quite similar. They disagree about how high the bar is. The reanalysis products (ERA5 and JRA-3Q) ran exceptionally hot during the 2023-2024 event, so their 2024 records sit further above their long-term trend lines and are harder to beat. GISTEMP’s 2026 median projection sits ~0.02C above its 2024 record, while ERA5’s sits ~0.05C below its own and JRA-3Q’s ~0.07C below. When the margin is a few hundredths of a degree, structural differences between datasets could end up deciding the race.

So Hansen predicting a GISTEMP record and me predicting second warmest in the multi-dataset average are, oddly, compatible bets. If 2026 sets a record in GISTEMP but not in the dataset average (or in ERA5), expect a flurry of confused headlines in January as people try and explain how its the warmest or second warmest year depending on what dataset you look at.

I should concede the larger point plainly: Hansen made this call earlier and more confidently than I did, and the odds have moved steadily his way since. If 2026 ends up warmest across the board, he won outright, and a 32% chance is the kind of thing that happens all the time. I’d also gently note that a probabilistic forecast of “second warmest, with a one-in-three chance of a record” is a difficult thing to lose spectacularly.

What our agreement on 2026 does not settle is the more consequential disagreement about why. Hansen’s forecast rests on a specific physical story: his argument for a climate sensitivity of 4-5C per doubled CO2, a large forcing boost from falling aerosols, and a warming rate that has roughly doubled.4 My forecast is simpler: it just relies on the long-term trend, the state of ENSO, and the year-to-date observations and ends up in more or less the same place. When a statistical model based on the historical trend and an El Niño forecast lands on essentially the same 2027 number as Hansen (more on that in a moment), it tells you that a single warm year, or even two, cannot distinguish between “very rapid acceleration driven by aerosols and high sensitivity” and “the trend and more modest acceleration plus a very strong El Niño.” That debate will be settled by energy balance observations and the post-El-Niño years, not by whether 2026 clears 2024 by 0.03C in one dataset.

And on 2027 there will be no horse race at all: my model puts the odds of a new record next year at ~91%. Here I should give Hansen his due on a second count. Back in December he was already predicting a ~1.7C 2027, at a time when my own central estimate was 1.57C. Seven months and many rounds of strengthening El Niño forecasts later, my regression has drifted up to 1.70C (1.48C to 1.93C): essentially the number he wrote down at the start.

Ultimately both probabilistic forecasts and confident predictions can be validated by the same outcome, and the interesting scientific disagreement (how fast is warming accelerating, and why) will outlive whatever the December photo finish shows. Either way we are in for quite a wild climate ride in both the latter half of 2026 and 2027 due to a combination of accelerating warming and a super El Niño event.

1 The blended forecast uses the average of GISTEMP, HadCRUT5, NOAA GlobalTemp, Berkeley Earth, JRA-3Q, and ERA5, each rebaselined to 1850-1900 using its own pre-1900 offset. The model regresses annual temperature on the year, the prior year’s anomaly, observed and forecast ENSO conditions, the year-to-date anomaly, and the latest monthly value, trained on 1950-2025 excluding major volcanic years, with 10,000 Monte Carlo draws sampling both regression uncertainty and a ~650-member multi-model El Niño forecast ensemble. The headline numbers use a relative (RONI-style) ENSO index; using the raw ONI instead gives a slightly warmer 1.51C and a 37% record chance, because the forecast El Niño is strong enough to sit beyond the range of the historical ONI training data.

2 This figure only uses 13 of the 14 El Niño models in the live ensemble as the 14th (SINTEX-F) was only added to the tracker in June and cannot be used for the retrospective calculations, which is why it puts today’s odds at ~35% rather than the headline ~32%.

3 It's worth noting that my odds for Berkeley Earth are notably higher than those provided (~12%) in the official Berkeley Earth update. This is largely due to my statistical model including the ENSO predictions for the remainder of the year which does not improve the fit much for most years (start-of-year ENSO conditions tend to be a much stronger predictor) but does matter in the rare years where strong El Nino events are forming like 1997, 2015, 2023, and 2026.

4 It's worth noting that Hansen’s estimate of ECS is well within our very likely uncertainty range of 2C to 5C per doubling CO2 in the IPCC AR6. And there has been some compelling evidence in recent years that ECS might be higher, though I’d personally give a central estimate closer to 3.5C than Hansen’s ~4.5C, as well as a new preprint suggesting forcing from the 2020 IMO low sulfur shipping fuel regulations may end up somewhere between Hansen’s high and my low-end estimate.

2026 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #31

Sun, 2 Aug 2026 10:04:51 EST

A listing of 28 news and opinion articles we found interesting and shared on social media during the past week: Sun, July 26, 2026 thru Sat, August 1, 2026.

Stories we promoted this week, by category:

Climate Change Impacts (7 articles)

State of the climate: Rapidly developing El Niño raises chance of record-warm 2026 Chances of a record setting 2026 El Niño rapidly increase, taking us closer to an important warming threshold. Carbon Brief, Zeke Hausfather, Jul 24, 2026.
Why is Germany building roads for yesterday's climate? As the Autobahn buckles under heat waves, Germany is still paving roads for a past climate. Engineers know how to fix that — so what's the holdup? DW, Tim Schauenberg, Jul 28, 2026.
Summer of Heat, Fires and Storms Is a Reckoning for Europe on Climate Europe is experiencing some of its biggest fires and highest temperatures ever; residents are fleeing, leaders are struggling to respond and “it will get worse,” one climate expert said. NYT, Mark Landler and Chico Harlan, Jul 29, 2026.
`The heat took him from me`: India`s death toll rises amid escalating heat crisis As extreme heat claims the lives of workers in India’s poorest areas, many fear the true mortality rate is being dangerously undercounted. The Guardian, Hannah Ellis-Petersen and Aakash Hassan, Jul 29, 2026.
4 things to know about cyclospora and climate change A fragile food system, uneven public health messaging, and global warming are all working to supercharge the parasite’s spread. Grist, Frida Garza, Jul 30, 2026.
`Was this heatwave caused by climate change?` - we`re asking the wrong question The question is not whether climate change caused the heatwave, but how much hotter and more dangerous heatwaves have become because greenhouse gases, primarily from burning fossil fuels, have accumulated in the atmosphere. The Conversation, Prof. Haley J. Fowler & Prof. Ed Hawkins, Jul 31, 2026.
Everything on fire DrGilbz on Youtube, Ella Gilbert, July 31, 2026.

Climate Science and Research (6 articles)

Human-driven climate change largely responsible for last 50 years of worsening fire weather in Western North America, new study shows Just as detectives can find literal fingerprints at a crime scene, scientists can detect human and natural ‘fingerprints’ in climate and meteorological data like temperature, precipitation, and relative humidity— all factors that can influence fire behavior. Science Feedback, Science Feedback team, May 8, 2025.
How do scientists know if climate change made a heat wave, extreme storm or wildfire worse? When a devastating heat wave, hurricane, flood or wildfire strikes, people often want to know: How much did human-caused climate change influence this event, if at all? The Conversation, Kevin T. Smiley, Deepti Singh, Jennifer Marlon, Jim Hurrell, Jul 24, 2026.
Low-Level Cloud Loss Amplifies Global Warming A new study adds weight to concerns over the positive feedback effects of clouds on global warming. CalTech, Katie Neith, Jul 24, 2026.
Canopy-mediated climate feedbacks in the boreal continuous permafrost zone A vast amount of carbon locked up in permafrost is protected by a thin and increasingly threatened layer of vegetation. Nature Climate Change, M. Langer, Jul 27, 2026.
Rising CO2 Alters Upper Atmosphere Response to Stratosphere Sudden Warming A whole-atmosphere model simulation shows that rising CO2 changes how the upper atmosphere and ionosphere respond to a sudden stratospheric warming (SSW), with implications for future space weather.? Eos, Huixin Liu, Jul 29, 2026.
Why Hansen may end up being right about 2026 Whether 2026 sets a new record is increasingly likely to be a split decision between different groups The Climate Brink, Zeke Hausfather, Jul 30, 2026.

Climate Policy and Politics (3 articles)

American Nero: Why Trump is trying to burn down the National Academy of Sciences The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Benjamin Santer, July 26, 2026.
Trump administration eyes massive coal reserves under federal lands Despite vast contrary scientific evidence, the US executive branch sees vast reserves of coal as a resource desirable to burn. Inside Climate News, Lisa Sorg, Jul 27, 2026.
Do small climate habits help or hurt the bigger cause? Researchers tracked nearly 2,800 people's habits, protests, and policy views to test whether small green acts help or hurt the bigger fight. Neither, it turns out. Anthropocene, Sarah DeWeerdt, Jul 28, 2026.

Public Misunderstandings about Climate Solutions (3 articles)

2026 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #30 A listing of 28 news and opinion articles we found interesting and shared on social media during the past week: Sun, July 19, 2026 thru Sat, July 25, 2026. Skeptical Science, Bärbel Winkler & Doug Bostrom, July 26, 2026.
Fact brief - Do solar plants require backup from fossil fuels? Solar plants require backup, but it doesn’t have to be from fossil fuels. Skeptical Science, Sue Bin Park, Jul 28, 2026.
The influencer teaching millions to fear solar Alexandra Fasulo says she’s protecting farms and wildlife. How much of her rhetoric is actually true? HEATED, Alex Hannaford, Jul 30, 2026.

Miscellaneous (2 articles)

`I can`t work in the farce of climate change cruise tourism anymore`: why Antarctic guides quit their dream jobs 'You’d see massive glacier calvings, and you’d just want to cry. But all the guests would be cheering. And you’d be like … ‘can you not put two and two together?’'' The Conversation, Zdenka Sokolickova, Christy Hehir, Elizabeth Cooper, Jul 21, 2026.
Scientists decry Trump`s `blame game` after he claims Canada `poisoning` US air Trump told Mark Carney ‘you got to stop these fires from coming in’ as experts say wildfires symptom of climate crisis The Guardian, Oliver Milman, Jul 24, 2026.

Public Misunderstandings about Climate Science (2 articles)

Factcheck: No, Europe`s heatwaves are not being `caused` by declining air pollution Scientists tell Carbon Brief that the framing of heatwaves being “caused” by declining air pollution is “wrong”. Carbon Brief, Robert McSweeney, Jul 24, 2026.
Hot days, cold thermometers A graph popular with climate change deniers is desconstructed by Zeke Hausfather, exposing its economy of truth. Skeptical Science, Zeke Hausfather, Jul 27, 2026.

Climate Change Mitigation and Adaptation (2 articles)

Can we alter ocean chemistry to absorb carbon? Here are the pros and cons Procrastination on arresting fossil fuels leads to extreme measures; here are pros and cons of "ocean alkalinity enhancement" and pitfalls in public perceptions this technology will encounter should it require deployment. The Conversation, Harris Anderson, Andrew Lenton, Mathieu Mongin, Jul 23, 2026.
U.S. Raises Threat of Steep Water Cuts in Lower Colorado River Basin A federal plan would impose drastic water cuts on Arizona, California and Nevada in dry years over the next decade. A legal battle could follow. NYT, Scott Dance, Jul 31, 2026.

Climate Education and Communication (1 article)

Wildfires: why media coverage doesn`t always make the climate connection Exploring how contradictory press coverage can sit on the same front page tells us a lot about how climate change is narrated in the UK, and why climate reporting differs so much from country to country. The Conversation, Doug Specht,, Jul 28, 2026.

Climate Law and Justice (1 article)

Shell`s hidden climate knowledge under scrutiny as court battle looms As the company faces a landmark climate lawsuit, confidential documents show how British scientist James Lovelock warned executives of the risks of burning fossil fuels in the 1960s. DeSmog, Rebecca John, Jul 30, 2026.

Health Aspects of Climate Change (1 article)

Trump Administration Is Undoing Plans to Boost Workplace Heat Protections The Biden administration took steps to shield workers from extreme temperatures. The Trump administration is taking a gentler approach with employers. NYT, Scott Dance, Aug 01, 2026.

Skeptical Science New Research for Week #31 2026

Thu, 30 Jul 2026 15:08:21 EST

Open access notables

Observed Multi-Decadal Acceleration of Globally Averaged Abyssal Ocean Warming, Johnson, Geophysical Research Letters

Given sparse historical data in the deep and abyssal ocean, previously only multi-decadal temperature trends have been estimated from observations there on a global scale. Full-depth CTD sampling started circa 1970, with the first decadal global ship-based survey occupied in the 1990s, and the first regional pilot array of Deep Argo floats started circa 2016. Here we fit second-order polynomial functions versus time to all available full-depth CTD profile temperature data in local spatial bins to estimate changes in the rates of these multi-decadal temperature trends. We find a statistically significant increase of the heating rate of the abyssal (4,000–6,000 dbar) ocean, from 5.4 (±4.9) TW in 1988 to 20.2 (±3.9) TW in 2018. In contrast, we find no statistically significant change in the heating rate of the deep ocean, estimated at 29.4 (±22.1) TW in 1988 and 25.0 (±17.5) TW in 2018.

High-resolution simulations reveal positive global warming feedback from Pacific low clouds, Chammas et al., Science Advances

Uncertainty in marine low-level cloud feedbacks limits accurate climate projections. Using 7083 high-resolution simulations of tropical Pacific low clouds, we separated the impacts of sea surface warming from direct carbon dioxide (CO2) effects. Surface warming alone drives a positive low-cloud feedback of 0.14Wm^-2K^-1. While this changes little with doubled CO2, the total cloud radiative response strengthens markedly to 0.43Wm^-2K^-1 under quadrupled CO2, revealing a strong nonlinear interaction. Surface warming alone modifies the boundary layer through increased inversion strength and weakened subsidence, which buffers clouds by promoting higher liquid water content while cloud fraction decreases. Rapid adjustments to high CO2 concentrations counteract this protective cloud thickening. Consequently, a pronounced reduction in cloud fraction is no longer offset by an increase in cloud brightness, markedly strengthening the total radiative response under quadrupled CO2. Ultimately, our results suggest that climate sensitivity is more state-dependent than often assumed.

Canopy-mediated climate feedbacks in the boreal continuous permafrost zone, Stuenzi et al., Nature Climate Change

Boreal forests, covering approximately a quarter of the continuous permafrost zone, store relatively modest aboveground carbon, but thermally protect vast soil organic carbon (SOC) pools. Here, using a process-based model to compare seasonal thaw depths under forested and bare-ground scenarios, we quantify distinct canopy thermal insulation capacities of deciduous needleleaf, evergreen needleleaf and deciduous broadleaf canopies on permafrost thermal dynamics. Canopy buffering maintains approximately 59 Pg of carbon in a frozen state, which equals 32% of the total forested permafrost carbon pool and far exceeds boreal biomass stocks (7–19 Pg). Canopy changes could mobilize this frozen SOC through gradual thaw (40 Pg) and rapid thermokarst collapse (19 Pg). While forest loss sacrifices biomass carbon stocks, resulting thaw would expose orders of magnitude more SOC from previously frozen reservoirs, revealing a critical asymmetry. Forest conservation strategies in continuous permafrost zones must account for canopy-mediated thermal protection of frozen SOC, which far exceeds its biomass carbon sequestration capacity.

The 2026 western US snow drought was about four times more likely due to climate change, Marshall et al., Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

In the spring of 2026, anomalously low snow conditions in the western United States threatened winter recreation and water supplies. Here, we investigate: to what extent was this snow drought attributable to the climate change that has occurred since the pre-industrial period? We find that a snow drought this severe across the western United States was approximately 4.4 [95% CI: 2.6, 9.4] times more likely in the current climate than in the preindustrial period. In the Upper Colorado River Basin, the snow drought was approximately 14 times more likely [0.09, 4,300]. Given a projected increase in the frequency of snow droughts at least this severe in a moderately high emissions warming scenario, the lived experience of this event may help scientists, resource managers, and the public consider what western US snow might look like if greenhouse gas emissions are not aggressively reduced.

Feasibility of CO2 pipeline construction to enable gigaton-scale carbon dioxide removals: evidence from historical precedent, Roberts et al., Frontiers in Climate

In this analysis, we use the history of fossil fuel pipeline networks to assess the feasibility of rapidly building enough CO₂ pipelines to enable gigaton-scale removals of CO₂ from the Earth's atmosphere. We collect data on scenarios of CO₂ pipeline construction, historical fossil fuel pipeline construction, and the historical context of this construction to answer four questions: (1) What length of pipeline network will be required to achieve the benchmarks of 1 Gt or 100 Mt of CO₂ in 2050? (2) What have been the largest national and international fossil fuel pipeline buildouts achieved in a 25-year period? (3) Is it feasible to build enough CO₂ pipelines to enable gigaton-scale carbon dioxide removals given these historical precedents? (4) Under what political, economic, and social circumstances have rapid pipeline build-outs occurred? We find that a pipeline network of roughly 8,000 km will be necessary to enable 100 Mt of carbon dioxide removal, and that roughly 100,000 km will be necessary for 1 Gt. There are 15 cases in the historical record of a country building 8,000 km of fossil fuel pipelines in 25 years, and only three cases of a country building 100,000km or more of pipelines in the same timescale. Rapid construction of fossil fuel pipelines has benefited from strong economic and institutional drivers, which may not apply to CO₂ pipelines in the same way. Our findings are reason for caution about the likelihood of CO₂ pipeline build outs keeping pace with CO₂ removal targets.

From this week's government/NGO section:

Pay, Baby, Pay. Why Trump's Energy & AI Dominance Agenda Means Higher Bills For Everyone, Lorne Stockman, Oil Change International

U.S. wholesale fossil gas prices will likely double by the late 2030s relative to the 2020 to 2025 average if the Trump administration’s energy and AI policies succeed in pushing gas demand to levels that can only be met by more expensive gas production. Significant energy price volatility from 2020 to 2025 caused hardship in the U.S. and in LNG-importing countries, particularly in Asia and Europe. Costlier U.S. gas risks exacerbating the energy affordability crisis for U.S. and international consumers alike. The surge in gas demand – and gas prices – is being driven primarily by the Trump administration’s support for massive increases in liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports. Trump’s hostility toward renewables and support for the poorly regulated AI data center boom aggravate the impending crunch. Lower-cost gas from the two biggest U.S. gas-producing regions, the Permian and Appalachian basins, will not be able to meet rising demand alone. To fill the gap between demand and production, gas producers will have to increase drilling in the significantly more expensive Haynesville shale play in Louisiana and Texas.

Interfacing science and policy: Exploring the role of scientific knowledge in the design of Voluntary Sustainability Standards, Loconto et al., Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations

Through the concept of scientific cherry-picking, the authors analyze how Voluntary Sustainability Standards selectively incorporate particular strands of scientific knowledge that align with operational models and governance structures. This selective integration often leads to the promotion of interpretations of sustainability that are compatible with weak sustainability paradigms –emphasizing incremental improvements within existing systems – rather than fostering more systemic and transformative approaches.

181 articles in 66 journals by 1509 contributing authors

Physical science of climate change, effects

Climate Coupling in the Western Hemisphere and 2023 El Niño Onset, Jury, ATMOSPHERE-OCEAN 10.1080/07055900.2026.2698635

Fast expansion and slow contraction of the ITCZ in response to CO2 forcing, Zhang, Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) Open Access 10.5281/zenodo.18164506

High-resolution simulations reveal positive global warming feedback from Pacific low clouds, Chammas et al., Science Advances Open Access 10.1126/sciadv.aec8488

Key role of continental inorganic halogens in the evolution of global air quality, Li et al., Nature Communications Open Access pdf 10.1038/s41467-026-75932-7

Multi-century cooling after net-zero greenhouse gas emissions, Tarshish et al., Nature Climate Change 10.1038/s41558-026-02700-2

Subtropical gyre expansion causes Southern Ocean salinification contrary to freshening predictions, Yu & Toole, Nature Communications Open Access 10.1038/s41467-026-75775-2

Most cited from this section, published 2 years ago:
A more quiescent deep ocean under global warming, Nature Climate Change, 10.1038/s41558-024-02075-2 20 cites.

Observations of climate change, effects

Accelerating and Intensifying Dry-to-Wet Hydroclimate Whiplash Across the Contiguous United States, Yang & Li, Earth s Future Open Access 10.1029/2026ef008646

Anthropogenic Warming Increases Extreme Precipitation in Huaihe River Basin, China in 1961–2020, Guo et al., International Journal of Climatology 10.1002/joc.70525

Asymmetric Warming and Climate Regime Shift in Bhubaneswar: Evidence from a Rapidly Growing Tropical City (1950-2025), Beuria et al., Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics 10.1016/j.jastp.2026.106922

Attribution of the Record-Breaking June 2024 Eastern Mediterranean Heatwave: Contrasting Roles of Soil Moisture in Anthropogenic Forcing and Natural Variability, Ma et al., Geophysical Research Letters Open Access 10.1029/2025gl121002

Escalating heat waves and human thermal stress over semi-arid Bundelkhand region, India, Singh et al., Urban Climate 10.1016/j.uclim.2026.103035

Lengthening Summer in the Northern Hemisphere with the Declining Arctic Sea Ice, Cui et al., ATMOSPHERE-OCEAN 10.1080/07055900.2026.2695602

Observed Multi-Decadal Acceleration of Globally Averaged Abyssal Ocean Warming, Johnson, Geophysical Research Letters Open Access 10.1029/2026gl124104

Opposite changes in comfortable days over tropical and mid-latitude lands due to anthropogenic warming, 1980-2020 and 2060-2100, Wang et al., Advances in Climate Change Research Open Access 10.1016/j.accre.2026.07.010

The 2026 western US snow drought was about four times more likely due to climate change, Marshall et al., Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Open Access 10.1073/pnas.2612961123

Warming-Induced Increase in Flooding in the Taklimakan Desert, Su et al., Journal of Earth Science Open Access pdf 10.1007/s12583-025-2033-0

Most cited from this section, published 2 years ago:
Anthropogenic amplification of precipitation variability over the past century, Science, 10.1126/science.adp0212 218 cites.

Instrumentation & observational methods of climate change, effects

A multi-method Antarctic atmospheric blocking dataset (1979–2024), Bozkurt et al., Earth system science data Open Access 10.5194/essd-18-5399-2026

A simplified method to calculate atmospheric CO₂ equivalency for changing surface albedo, Akbari, Urban Climate 10.1016/j.uclim.2026.102795

Climate scientists sharpen tools for linking global warming to extreme weather, Vaz, Science 10.1126/science.aek8030

Most cited from this section, published 2 years ago:
Causes of extreme events revealed by Rényi information transfer, Science Advances, 10.1126/sciadv.adn1721 9 cites.

Modeling, simulation & projection of climate change, effects

European summer drying largely driven by atmospheric circulation changes since the 1980s, Dunkl et al., Nature Geoscience Open Access pdf 10.1038/s41561-026-02050-w

Future tropical cyclone rainfall constrained by increased atmospheric dryness, Chen et al., Nature Geoscience Open Access 10.1038/s41561-026-02047-5

Identifying the Timing of Regional Summertime Minimum Temperature Threshold Crossings and the Potential Subsequent Climate Evolutions, Arcodia & Barnes, Earth s Future Open Access 10.1029/2026ef008520

Imbalances in climate outcomes in net-zero pathways with fossil fuel CO₂ emissions and reforestation-based CO₂ removals, MacIsaac et al., Communications Earth & Environment Open Access pdf 10.1038/s43247-026-03329-x

Most cited from this section, published 2 years ago:
The Indian Ocean Dipole in a warming world, Nature Reviews Earth & Environment, 10.1038/s43017-024-00573-7 52 cites.

Advancement of climate & climate effects modeling, simulation & projection

Added value of a priori bias correction for dynamical downscaling - A case study of Coastal British Columbia, Hingmire et al., PLOS Climate Open Access 10.1371/journal.pclm.0000717

The Big Data paradox: how climate model authority becomes institutional mandates for climate extremes in the Anthropocene, Vijayakumar, Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability 10.1016/j.cosust.2026.101698

The TIPMIP Earth system model experiment protocol: phase 1, C. et al., Publication Database PIK (Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK)) Open Access pmh:oai:publications.pik-potsdam.de:item_32889

Most cited from this section, published 2 years ago:
On the suitability of a convolutional neural network based RCM-emulator for fine spatio-temporal precipitation, Climate Dynamics, 10.1007/s00382-024-07350-8 16 cites.

Cryosphere & climate change

Century-long data reveals complex trends in ice cover in the Laurentian Great Lakes, Cannon et al., Communications Earth & Environment Open Access 10.1038/s43247-026-03866-5

Climate-driven tree failures: how extreme rainfall threatens the survival of monumental Araucaria angustifolia trees, Scipioni et al., Agricultural and Forest Meteorology Open Access 10.1016/j.agrformet.2026.111168

Glacier loss in Central Caucasus from ICESat-2, using the SRTM baseline and crossover analysis, Mehrishi et al., Advances in Climate Change Research Open Access 10.1016/j.accre.2026.07.012

Mass Loss From Thwaites Glacier Continues Even Without Ocean Melting, Williams et al., Geophysical Research Letters Open Access 10.1029/2026gl122843

Observed responses of sea ice formation and decay in a mid-latitude marginal sea under dual-mode global warming, Qiu et al., Global and Planetary Change 10.1016/j.gloplacha.2026.105631

Rapid acceleration of ice-cover loss from Northern Hemisphere lakes above critical air temperature thresholds, Zhou et al., Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Open Access 10.1073/pnas.2610752123

The 2026 western US snow drought was about four times more likely due to climate change, Marshall et al., Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Open Access 10.1073/pnas.2612961123

The dynamic response of Pine Island Glacier to two decades of intermittent ice shelf regrounding, Stepney et al., White Rose Research Online (University of Leeds, The University of Sheffield, University of York) pmh:oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:243583

Most cited from this section, published 2 years ago:
Ships are projected to navigate whole year-round along the North Sea route by 2100, Communications Earth & Environment, 10.1038/s43247-024-01557-7 24 cites.

Sea level & climate change

Observed thresholds in sea-level rise driving global tidal wetland loss, Luo et al., Nature Communications Open Access 10.1038/s41467-026-76031-3

Most cited from this section, published 2 years ago:
Probabilistic reconstruction of sea-level changes and their causes since 1900, Earth system science data, 10.5194/essd-16-3471-2024 31 cites.

Paleoclimate & paleogeochemistry

Broadly stable atmospheric CO₂ and CH₄ levels over the past 3 million years, Marks-Peterson et al., Nature 10.1038/s41586-025-10032-y

Interplay of North Atlantic freshening and deep convection during the last deglaciation constrained by Iberian speleothems, Endres et al., Climate of the past Open Access pdf 10.5194/cp-22-797-2026

Wildfires rampaged across Europe in the dying days of the Triassic, [authors did not process], Nature 10.1038/d41586-026-02333-7

Most cited from this section, published 2 years ago:
Response of coastal California hydroclimate to the Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum, Climate of the past, 10.5194/cp-20-1615-2024 2 cites.

Biology & climate change, related geochemistry

Larix gmelinii growth limitation shifts from nitrogen availability to drought under warming and permafrost degradation, Chen et al., Global and Planetary Change 10.1016/j.gloplacha.2026.105395

Aftermath of marine heatwaves on the growth and physiological performance of Sargassum fusiforme and Sargassum thunbergii, Chu et al., Marine Environmental Research 10.1016/j.marenvres.2026.107945

An integrated assessment of climate change on landscape adaptive capacity, vulnerability, and divergence in Avicennia species, Sheidai et al., Scientific Reports Open Access pdf 10.1038/s41598-026-42720-8

Analysis of the mechanism of MKK4 participating in heat stress response in Mytilus coruscus, Wei et al., Marine Environmental Research 10.1016/j.marenvres.2026.107956

Aragonite Saturation Horizon Variability Along North Pacific Seamounts and Implications for Deep-Sea Coral Reefs, Kassem et al., Journal of Geophysical Research Oceans Open Access 10.1029/2025jc023926

Assessing impacts of extreme climate and weather events on endangered pearl oysters Pinctada maxima, He et al., Marine Environmental Research 10.1016/j.marenvres.2025.107821

Biogeochemical signal from marine heatwaves, cold spells, and transient warming events in a coastal upwelling system, Valdés et al., Scientific Reports Open Access pdf 10.1038/s41598-026-62941-1

Climate change alters biogeochemical cycles in oxygen-depleted and dead zones, Bourbonnais et al., Communications Earth & Environment Open Access pdf 10.1038/s43247-026-03756-w

Climate Change Enhances the Success of Marine Invasive Species, Smith & Cheung, Global Change Biology Open Access 10.1111/gcb.71020

Climate-Driven Population Dynamics, Growth, and Phenology of the Moon Jellyfish Aurelia coerulea in the Mediterranean Thau Lagoon, Pigeon et al., Marine Environmental Research Open Access 10.1016/j.marenvres.2026.107977

Climate-Driven Restructuring of Phytoplankton Productivity and Community Composition in the South-eastern Black Sea: Insights from Seasonal CO₂-Temperature Manipulation Experiments, A??rba? et al., Marine Environmental Research 10.1016/j.marenvres.2026.108029

Disentangling the effects of FPAR, CO₂, and climate on terrestrial vegetation productivity trends over two decades (2001–2023), Pu et al., Agricultural and Forest Meteorology 10.1016/j.agrformet.2026.111122

Ecological novelty induced by climate change, Wright et al., Nature Climate Change 10.1038/s41558-026-02697-8

Ecosystem services can persist in drowning macrotidal salt marshes, Mason et al., Marine Environmental Research Open Access pdf 10.1016/j.marenvres.2026.108260

Establishing ring width and cell chronologies for predicting future growth of Thuja koraiensis under climate change, Park et al., Dendrochronologia 10.1016/j.dendro.2025.126423

First evidence of climate-driven modulation of octinoxate toxicity in the sea urchin Paracentrotus lividus, Costa et al., Marine Environmental Research Open Access 10.1016/j.marenvres.2026.107847

Global Change Reshapes Northern Lakes Towards Browner, More Nutrient-Depleted and Nitrogen-Limited Conditions With Contrasting Impacts on Phytoplankton Biomass, Bergström et al., Global Change Biology Open Access 10.1111/gcb.71008

Iceberg-driven constraints on colony–foraging connectivity result in severe decline in chick counts for the Coulman Island emperor penguin colony, Park et al., Communications Earth & Environment Open Access pdf 10.1038/s43247-026-03764-w

In-situ experimental evidence revealing how ocean warming promotes Aurelia coerulea polyps mediated by benthic ecosystem change, Zang et al., Marine Environmental Research 10.1016/j.marenvres.2026.107853

Landscapes heavily impacted by human activities amplify climate sensitivity of Aleppo pine growth, Cappelluti et al., Agricultural and Forest Meteorology 10.1016/j.agrformet.2026.111364

Marine heatwaves disrupt germination and seedling physiology in Zostera marina, Pieraccini et al., Marine Environmental Research 10.1016/j.marenvres.2025.107789

Microbial drought resistance is achieved at the expense of soil carbon loss, Pang et al., Nature Communications Open Access pdf 10.1038/s41467-026-76033-1

Modelling and geospatial mapping of whitefly Bemisia tabaci population dynamics in cassava-growing areas of Sub-Saharan Africa in response to climate change, Ndjomatchoua & Gilligan, Agricultural and Forest Meteorology Open Access 10.1016/j.agrformet.2026.111059

Moisture limitation superseding thermal forcing: Elevational divergence in growth and physiological responses of Picea crassifolia to accelerated warming and drying on the Northeastern Tibetan Plateau, Wang et al., Agricultural and Forest Meteorology 10.1016/j.agrformet.2026.111377

Ocean acidification effects on growth, survival and physiological immunity of farmed Larimichthys crocea, Zhang et al., Marine Environmental Research 10.1016/j.marenvres.2026.107869

Penguins on the Move: Mapping Priority Penguin Habitat Areas Under Climate Change, Ramirez et al., Diversity and Distributions Open Access 10.1111/ddi.70233

Physiology and behaviour of eastern oysters (Crassostrea virginica) and soft-shell clams (Mya arenaria) under hypoxic and heatwave conditions, Talevi et al., Marine Environmental Research Open Access 10.1016/j.marenvres.2026.107902

Predicting the water temperature effects and climate change impacts on gametogenesis of the sea urchin Mesocentrotus nudus using a DVI model, Takagi et al., Marine Environmental Research 10.1016/j.marenvres.2026.107941

Projected declines in zooplankton energy supporting Northwest European Shelf ecosystems, Tyldesley et al., Communications Earth & Environment Open Access pdf 10.1038/s43247-026-03840-1

Relationships Between Climatic Variation and Population Dynamics of the Threatened Mohave Ground Squirrel, Poessel et al., Ecology and Evolution Open Access pdf 10.1002/ece3.73952

Resilience of the macroalgae Gongolaria barbata under ocean acidification: physiological responses and restoration perspective, Ilaria et al., Marine Environmental Research Open Access 10.1016/j.marenvres.2026.107887

Responses of plant biomass to rising atmospheric CO₂ concentration in the Yellow River Basin, Luan & Ma, Global and Planetary Change 10.1016/j.gloplacha.2026.105480

Strengthened resource limitation driven by accelerated microbial growth dampens response to elevated CO₂ in a mature forest, Yuan et al., Communications Earth & Environment Open Access pdf 10.1038/s43247-026-03365-7

The Impact of Subglacial Drainage System Evolution and Glacier Lake Outburst on Arctic Fjord Macronutrient Dynamics, Alexander et al., Journal of Geophysical Research Biogeosciences Open Access 10.1029/2023jg007969

Thermal responses and climate change implications of spring and autumn spawning Patagonian squid (Doryteuthis gahi) embryos, Grient et al., Marine Environmental Research Open Access 10.1016/j.marenvres.2026.107856

Tracing the imprints of dual stressors: eco-physiological and genotoxic insights from Mystus gulio under acidification and warming scenario, Mahapatra & Mandal, Marine Environmental Research 10.1016/j.marenvres.2026.108290

Tree-Ring Based Precipitation Reconstructions Reveal Hydroclimatic Variability and a Recent Drying Trend in Northeastern Iran, Mazaherifar et al., Dendrochronologia 10.1016/j.dendro.2026.126587

Understanding the resilience of Halophila ovalis to warming and nutrient enrichment for improved seagrass conservation policy, Yuxin et al., Marine Environmental Research 10.1016/j.marenvres.2025.107824

Warming overwhelms CO₂-driven drought mitigation in alpine vegetation on the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau, Lyu et al., Communications Earth & Environment Open Access pdf 10.1038/s43247-026-03308-2

Widespread Increase in Global Plant Water Stress Obscured by Greening, Chang et al., AGU Advances Open Access pdf 10.1029/2025av002243

Most cited from this section, published 2 years ago:
Large potential impacts of marine heatwaves on ecosystem functioning, Global Change Biology, 10.1111/gcb.17437 29 cites.

GHG sources & sinks, flux, related geochemistry

Applying satellite observations to improve bottom-up national emission inventories for methane: application to Colombia, Hancock et al., Atmospheric chemistry and physics Open Access pdf 10.5194/acp-26-10455-2026

Canopy-mediated climate feedbacks in the boreal continuous permafrost zone, Stuenzi et al., Nature Climate Change Open Access pdf 10.1038/s41558-026-02692-z

Carbohydrate-active enzymes of soil prophages enhance global carbon cycling potential, Liao et al., Nature Communications Open Access pdf 10.1038/s41467-026-75907-8

Carbon sink-source dynamics across ecuadorian coastal tropical dry forests: unraveling the seasonal balance of soil carbon inputs and CO2 efflux, Jarre-Castro et al., Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution Open Access pdf 10.3389/fevo.2026.1824696

COVID-19 induced reduction of fossil-fuel emissions in 2020 altered the seasonal cycle of atmospheric CO₂ at high latitudes, Gui et al., Agricultural and Forest Meteorology Open Access 10.1016/j.agrformet.2026.111071

Extreme precipitation during the warm growing season amplifies methane emissions and reduces non-growing season contributions in a Tibetan alpine peatland, Lin et al., Agricultural and Forest Meteorology 10.1016/j.agrformet.2026.111378

Floods Enhanced the Terrestrial and Marine Organic Carbon Burial in the East China Sea, Xu et al., Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) Open Access 10.5281/zenodo.20278779

Global vessel carbon dioxide emission from navigable rivers, Lü et al., Nature Climate Change 10.1038/s41558-026-02718-6

High-resolution land surface modeling of climate and CO₂ effects on ecosystem carbon-water coupling across the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, Xi et al., Agricultural and Forest Meteorology 10.1016/j.agrformet.2026.111195

Higher, but more variable, annual CO₂ emissions from lakes in drier Arctic landscapes, Hazuková et al., Communications Earth & Environment Open Access pdf 10.1038/s43247-026-03275-8

Hydrological Threshold for Optimizing Wetland Climate Mitigation, Li et al., Geophysical Research Letters Open Access 10.1029/2026gl123743

Leveraging wide snapshot XCO₂ pre-training to estimate urban fossil fuel CO₂ emissions from space, Wang et al., Remote Sensing of Environment 10.1016/j.rse.2026.115260

Long-Term Urban Emission Trends in Salt Lake City: Examining CO, CO₂, and NO_X Enhancements, Humble et al., Atmospheric Environment 10.1016/j.atmosenv.2026.121883

Microbial Functional Gene Abundance-Integrated Modeling of Global Methane Sinks in Upland Soils Under Future Climate Change, Xiao et al., Global Change Biology 10.1111/gcb.71026

Migratory bird aggregation drives seasonal greenhouse gas hotspots in restored wetlands, Zhang et al., Communications Earth & Environment Open Access pdf 10.1038/s43247-026-03853-w

Modeling the impact of drainage on peatland CO2 and CH4 fluxes and its underlying drivers, Liu, HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe) pmh:oai:HAL:hal-05574304v1

Multi-Year Continuous Lateral Fluxes of Dissolved Carbon From a Microtidal Saltmarsh, He et al., Journal of Geophysical Research Biogeosciences 10.1029/2026jg009760

Rapid microbial production of long-lived dissolved organic carbon in the global ocean, Cai et al., Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Open Access 10.1073/pnas.2601044123

Soil moisture-induced changes in land carbon sink projections in CMIP6, Gabele et al., Biogeosciences Open Access pdf 10.5194/bg-23-2729-2026

Spatio-temporal patterns and environmental controls of soil organic carbon stocks in global tidal wetlands since 2009, Yang et al., Nature Communications Open Access 10.1038/s41467-026-76092-4

Tall-tower isotope measurements to infer urban CO₂ sources: a case study of Vienna, Austria, Meeran et al., Atmospheric Environment Open Access 10.1016/j.atmosenv.2026.122245

The added value of new ground-based observations in improving China's methane emission quantification, Zhong et al., Atmospheric measurement techniques Open Access pdf 10.5194/amt-19-4759-2026

The Evidence for Linearly Scaling Ocean Gas Exchange With Sea Ice Needs Strengthening, Watts et al., Journal of Geophysical Research Biogeosciences Open Access pdf 10.1029/2025jg009346

The timing of warming matters as much as its intensity for the annual carbon balance of a degraded raised bog, Behrens et al., Biogeosciences Open Access pdf 10.5194/bg-23-5071-2026

Thermogenic methane beneath the North Greenland Ice Sheet revealed by isotopic and geological evidence, Ketzer et al., Nature Communications Open Access pdf 10.1038/s41467-026-75951-4

Three-Fourths of Carbon Emissions From 2023 Record-Breaking Wildfires in Canada Traced to Soil and Peat Combustion, Zhong et al., Geophysical Research Letters Open Access pdf 10.1029/2026gl123393

Transition of coastal marsh to mangrove forest: implications for Everglades CO2 and CH4 fluxes, Yannick et al., Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution Open Access pdf 10.3389/fevo.2026.1890986

VOCs Impact Soil Carbon Transformations and Sequestration, Zhang et al., Journal of Geophysical Research Biogeosciences 10.1029/2026jg010104

Most cited from this section, published 2 years ago:
Dual roles of microbes in mediating soil carbon dynamics in response to warming, Nature Communications, 10.1038/s41467-024-50800-4 92 cites.

CO2 capture, sequestration science & engineering

Bioinspired charge reservoir enables efficient CO₂ photoreduction with H₂O via tungsten valence oscillation, Huang et al., Nature Communications Open Access pdf 10.1038/s41467-026-68991-3

CO₂ subsurface mineral storage by its co-injection with recirculating water, Oelkers et al., Nature Open Access 10.1038/s41586-026-10130-5

Electrified reversible surface mineralization of CO₂ for direct air capture, Liu et al., Nature Energy 10.1038/s41560-026-01989-9

Feasibility of CO2 pipeline construction to enable gigaton-scale carbon dioxide removals: evidence from historical precedent, Roberts et al., Frontiers in Climate Open Access 10.3389/fclim.2026.1807933

Nanoscale greenhouse effect for promoting solar-driven CO₂ reduction with water to CH₄, Kang et al., Nature Communications Open Access pdf 10.1038/s41467-026-70960-9

Observationally constrained global warming hysteresis under CO₂ removal, Song et al., Communications Earth & Environment Open Access pdf 10.1038/s43247-026-03484-1

Potential evaluation and favorable zone optimization of CO₂ geological sequestration in deep coal reservoirs, Xue et al., Scientific Reports Open Access pdf 10.1038/s41598-026-42680-z

Reducing Uncertainties in Net Carbon Capture to Advance Wetlands as Natural Climate Solutions, Mistry et al., Journal of Geophysical Research Biogeosciences Open Access 10.1029/2025jg009136

Reflecting on the politics and power dynamics of contested climate technologies, Fritz et al., Environmental Science & Policy 10.1016/j.envsci.2026.104448

Rethinking expertise on climate cooling technologies, Carabajal et al., Environmental Science & Policy 10.1016/j.envsci.2026.104446

The renaissance of carbon capture and storage in Germany and the politics of conditionality, Haas et al., Environmental Politics Open Access pdf 10.1080/09644016.2026.2700726

Translating insights from progress in photovoltaics to accelerate industrial-scale CO₂ electroreduction, Choi et al., Nature Energy 10.1038/s41560-025-01953-z

Most cited from this section, published 2 years ago:
Deployment expectations of multi-gigatonne scale carbon removal could have adverse impacts on Asia’s energy-water-land nexus, Nature Communications, 10.1038/s41467-024-50594-5 27 cites.

Decarbonization

An Analysis of Future Wind Energy Resources and Cost Uncertainties Across the United States, Buster et al., Wind Energy Open Access 10.1002/we.70144

Assessing potential impacts of offshore wind development on U.S. marine ecosystems using food web modeling, Lato et al., Scientific Reports Open Access 10.1038/s41598-026-63407-0

Carbon-aware resource allocation and task offloading in EH-assisted edge-cloud systems, Fu et al., Scientific Reports Open Access pdf 10.1038/s41598-026-62950-0

Solar-driven co-production of C₂H₄ and H₂O₂ from CO₂ and H₂O, Xie et al., Nature Communications Open Access pdf 10.1038/s41467-026-69277-4

Most cited from this section, published 2 years ago:
Geothermal energy in Kenya: Evaluating health impacts and environmental challenges, Energy Sustainable Development/Energy for sustainable development, 10.1016/j.esd.2024.101522 23 cites.

Geoengineering climate

Robust Solar Radiation Modification Strategy for Achieving Temperature Targets, Zheng et al., Risk Analysis 10.1111/risa.70312

Most cited from this section, published 2 years ago:
Effects of grain size and seawater salinity on magnesium hydroxide dissolution and secondary calcium carbonate precipitation kinetics: implications for ocean alkalinity enhancement, Biogeosciences, 10.5194/bg-21-3463-2024 13 cites.

Aerosols

Most cited from this section, published 2 years ago:
A model study investigating the sensitivity of aerosol forcing to the volatilities of semi-volatile organic compounds, Atmospheric chemistry and physics, 10.5194/acp-24-8489-2024 6 cites.

Climate change communications & cognition

Misperception of Extreme Weather Event Mortality Risk in the United States, Manware et al., GeoHealth Open Access 10.1029/2025gh001782

Most cited from this section, published 2 years ago:
Communicating the Links between Climate Change and Heat Waves with the Climate Shift Index, Weather Climate and Society, 10.1175/wcas-d-23-0147.1 13 cites.

Agronomy, animal husbundry, food production & climate change

A data-driven method for identifying climate drivers of agricultural yield failure from daily weather data, Sweet et al., Geoscientific model development Open Access 10.5194/gmd-19-6687-2026

Agroforestry protects arable crops from climate shock during critical early-season phenological stages, Tosh et al., Agronomy for Sustainable Development Open Access pdf 10.1007/s13593-026-01129-3

Attribution analysis of historical and future global staple crop yield shocks to climate stressors, Xiao et al., Agricultural and Forest Meteorology 10.1016/j.agrformet.2026.111340

Balancing growth, resource efficiency and soil greenhouse gas emissions: optimal water-fertilizer coupling for Chukrasia tabularis seedlings, Quan et al., Frontiers in Forests and Global Change Open Access pdf 10.3389/ffgc.2026.1914270

Carbon fluxes and partitioning in Eucalyptus and Pinus plantations across a climatic gradient in Brazil, Cunha et al., Agricultural and Forest Meteorology 10.1016/j.agrformet.2025.110977

Designing agrivoltaic systems for plant protection, Vernier et al., Agricultural and Forest Meteorology Open Access pdf 10.1016/j.agrformet.2026.111361

Exposure risk of maize cropland under compound high-temperature and drought events over Northeast China in response to future warming, Yan et al., Advances in Climate Change Research Open Access pdf 10.1016/j.accre.2026.07.015

Ocean acidification effects on growth, survival and physiological immunity of farmed Larimichthys crocea, Zhang et al., Marine Environmental Research 10.1016/j.marenvres.2026.107869

Quantifying the impact of extreme heat events on net ecosystem exchange in a wheat-maize cropping system in North China, Pei et al., Agricultural and Forest Meteorology 10.1016/j.agrformet.2026.111379

Reduced phosphorus bioavailability in rice paddies intensified by elevated CO₂-driven warming, Wang et al., Nature Geoscience 10.1038/s41561-026-01917-2

The economic dimension of climate-smart agriculture: bibliometric review of trends, challenges, and opportunities from an economic perspective, Jing et al., Environment Development and Sustainability 10.1007/s10668-026-07995-x

The occurrence of extreme heat events offset CO₂ fertilization and deteriorate grain quality in double cropping rice systems under projected climate change, Liu et al., Agricultural and Forest Meteorology 10.1016/j.agrformet.2026.111184

Warmer growing seasons improve cereal yields in Northern Europe only with increasing precipitation, Tootoonchi et al., Biogeosciences Open Access pdf 10.5194/bg-23-2583-2026

Most cited from this section, published 2 years ago:
Global assessment of production benefits and risk reduction in agroforestry during extreme weather events under climate change scenarios, Frontiers in Forests and Global Change, 10.3389/ffgc.2024.1379741 31 cites.

Hydrology, hydrometeorology & climate change

Accelerating and Intensifying Dry-to-Wet Hydroclimate Whiplash Across the Contiguous United States, Yang & Li, Earth s Future Open Access 10.1029/2026ef008646

Amazon Dry Season Will Lengthen Under Future Climate, Ferreira et al., Global Change Biology Open Access 10.1111/gcb.71018

Anthropogenic Warming Increases Extreme Precipitation in Huaihe River Basin, China in 1961–2020, Guo et al., International Journal of Climatology 10.1002/joc.70525

Asynchronous Emergence of Water Scarcity Risks Amid Shifting Hydrological Regimes in High Mountain Asia, Zhao & Yang, Earth s Future Open Access 10.1029/2026ef008373

Dominant Controls on Preferential Flow and Their Implications for Future Soil Water Fluxes, Li et al., Earth s Future Open Access pdf 10.1029/2026ef008296

Future tropical cyclone rainfall constrained by increased atmospheric dryness, Chen et al., Nature Geoscience Open Access 10.1038/s41561-026-02047-5

Global Terrestrial Water Storage Projections and Uncertainty Decomposition Under Multiple Warming Levels, Kim et al., Earth s Future Open Access 10.1029/2025ef007835

Integrating climate projections and hydrological modeling for sustainable water management in a major indian peninsular basin, Thakur et al., Frontiers in Environmental Science Open Access pdf 10.3389/fenvs.2026.1835963

Intensifying Sub-Daily Rainfall Extremes in Tropical Cities: Projections From Downscaled Baselines in a Warming Climate, Blagojevi? et al., Earth s Future Open Access 10.1029/2025ef007703

Marine heatwaves in the Northeast Pacific intensify landfalling atmospheric rivers on the west coast of North America, Renkl et al., Scientific Reports Open Access 10.1038/s41598-026-62522-2

Nature-based solutions in arid and semi-arid countries: A review of best practices and lessons learned, Chiarelli et al., Urban Climate Open Access pdf 10.1016/j.uclim.2026.103060

Seasonal Asymmetry in Extreme Precipitation Intensification Across China's Drylands, Wang et al., Journal of Geophysical Research Atmospheres 10.1029/2026jd046518

U.S. rivers are transporting more suspended sediment, often in less time, Sigdel & Husic, Communications Earth & Environment Open Access pdf 10.1038/s43247-026-03847-8

Warming-Induced Increase in Flooding in the Taklimakan Desert, Su et al., Journal of Earth Science Open Access pdf 10.1007/s12583-025-2033-0

Most cited from this section, published 2 years ago:
Critical Effects of Precipitation on Future Colorado River Flow, Journal of Climate, 10.1175/jcli-d-23-0617.1 25 cites.

Climate change economics

Climate change and high-quality economic development: Insights from the perspective of extreme temperatures, Li & Feng, Environment Development and Sustainability 10.1007/s10668-026-07996-w

Climate change mitigation public policy research

2040 greenhouse gas reduction targets and energy transitions in line with the EU Green Deal, Rodrigues et al., Nature Communications Open Access pdf 10.1038/s41467-026-71159-8

A simplified method to calculate atmospheric CO₂ equivalency for changing surface albedo, Akbari, Urban Climate 10.1016/j.uclim.2026.102795

Bricolage as an early-niche mechanism: Expectations and carbon lock-in in two Polish energy clusters, Stasik & Da?kowska, Energy Research & Social Science Open Access 10.1016/j.erss.2026.104861

California's plan to decarbonize electricity omits key greenhouse gas emissions, Fortier et al., Energy Policy Open Access pdf 10.1016/j.enpol.2026.115509

Cost-effective abatement of industrial sources of nitrous oxide with methane for urgent climate mitigation, Wu et al., Nature Communications Open Access 10.1038/s41467-026-75982-x

Eligibility interpreted as assurance and trust inflation in carbon credit markets, Kuwae, PLOS Climate Open Access pdf 10.1371/journal.pclm.0001001

Optimizing residential energy management through an integrated techno-economic evaluation of PV-battery systems, Kumar et al., Electrical Engineering 10.1007/s00202-026-03614-0

Most cited from this section, published 2 years ago:
Public acceptability of carbon pricing: unravelling the impact of revenue recycling, Climate Policy, 10.1080/14693062.2024.2376747 29 cites.

Climate change adaptation & adaptation public policy research

A systematic global stocktake of evidence on human adaptation to climate change, Berrang?Ford et al., Nature Climate Change Open Access pdf 10.1038/s41558-021-01170-y

Beyond adaptive capacity: Assessing how power relations shape household responses to climate impacts on water and sanitation, Dickin et al., PLOS Climate Open Access 10.1371/journal.pclm.0000906

Building climate-resilient development pathways in China: Evaluating environmental policy impacts, Zhou et al., Environmental Science & Policy 10.1016/j.envsci.2026.104456

Deep uncertainty analysis to characterise regional climate for building stock transition: A Nordic empirical study, Feng et al., Urban Climate 10.1016/j.uclim.2026.103057

Europe's transport infrastructure is not ready to face climate change, Deidda et al., Natural hazards and earth system sciences Open Access 10.5194/nhess-26-3345-2026

From devolution to distortion: political and fiscal constraints on locally led adaptation in Kenya, Mulwa & Gravesen, Climate Policy 10.1080/14693062.2026.2703375

How urban system structure and land use dynamics jointly shape climate vulnerability in Northwestern China over the 21^st century, Zhou et al., Urban Climate 10.1016/j.uclim.2026.103066

In search of climate migrants: a journey from crisis to opportunity, Ahmed et al., Climate and Development Open Access 10.1080/17565529.2026.2694724

Scenario Planning for Transformative Climate Adaptation, Mach et al., Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews Climate Change 10.1002/wcc.70084

Strategic streams of evolving climate policy and governance in Vietnam: Challenges and potentials for resilience, Doi et al., Environmental Science & Policy 10.1016/j.envsci.2026.104451

Unequal protection and sacrificial territories: climate governance and infrastructural exposure in Southern Italy, Terenzi & Paone, Environmental Sociology 10.1080/23251042.2026.2704993

Unraveling the nuances of climate change maladaptation: A call for more verstehen perspectives, Ofosu, PLOS Climate Open Access 10.1371/journal.pclm.0000784

Most cited from this section, published 2 years ago:
Nature-based solutions in spatial planning and policies for climate change adaptation: A literature review, AMBIO, 10.1007/s13280-024-02052-1 28 cites.

Climate change impacts on human health

Climate change and health in the rural context: Vulnerability, capacity and outlook, Rose & Birchall, PLOS Climate Open Access 10.1371/journal.pclm.0000974

Climate regulation as cardiovascular prevention: Heart failure risks after the Endangerment Finding rollback, Nguyen et al., PLOS Climate Open Access pdf 10.1371/journal.pclm.0001006

Divergent Heat Assessments Across Thermal Stress and Sensation Metrics, Huang et al., Earth s Future Open Access 10.1029/2026ef008395

Drought amplifies the psychological burden of war, Döring et al., Nature Sustainability Open Access pdf 10.1038/s41893-026-01882-z

On the compound effect of humidity and temperature on mortality in the Eastern Mediterranean, Tzyrkalli et al., PLOS Climate Open Access 10.1371/journal.pclm.0000821

Survival First: How Citizens Prioritize Competing Climate-Health Risk Countermeasures Under Fiscal Constraints, Tanaka & ??, Risk Analysis Open Access 10.1111/risa.70315

Most cited from this section, published 2 years ago:
Framework of street grid-based urban heat vulnerability assessment: Integrating entropy weight method and BPNN model, Urban Climate, 10.1016/j.uclim.2024.102067 40 cites.

Other

Fire weather waves drive extreme fires globally, Yin et al., Communications Earth & Environment Open Access 10.1038/s43247-026-03858-5

Implementing a National Framework for Climate Services: Understanding Progress, Challenges, and Future Opportunities, Golding et al., Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society 10.1175/bams-d-25-0281.1

Navigating optimal solar-wind trade-offs under climate change, Li et al., Nature Communications Open Access pdf 10.1038/s41467-026-75879-9

Projecting climate change impacts on Scottish River pollution, Corrochano-Fraile et al., Climate Risk Management Open Access 10.1016/j.crm.2026.100856

Most cited from this section, published 2 years ago:
Evolution of the Climate Forcing During the Two Years After the Hunga Tonga=Hunga Ha'apai Eruption, Journal of Geophysical Research Atmospheres, 10.1029/2024jd041296 32 cites.

Informed opinion, nudges & major initiatives

Four years of PLOS Climate: Past, present and future, Boers et al., PLOS Climate Open Access 10.1371/journal.pclm.0000866

Most cited from this section, published 2 years ago:
State of the UK Climate 2023, International Journal of Climatology, 10.1002/joc.8553 39 cites.

Articles/Reports from Agencies and Non-Governmental Organizations Addressing Aspects of Climate Change

The Environmental Footprint of Emerging Technology and Artificial Intelligence. Data Centers, Community Health and Policy Responses, Emma Uridge and Jasmin Kamruddi, Kansas Health Institute

The rapid growth and use of artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming many sectors, but it also has environmental implications that are complex and multifaceted. AI infrastructure drives increased demand for significant water use, greater energy consumption and expanded grid infrastructure, all of which require careful management to avoid environmental and community harm.

How Local Governments Can Use Communication to Drive Climate Action, Dwight et al., Yale University

The majority of constituents want local government climate action - 56% of registered voters want local government officials to do more to address climate change. With a duty to serve the public, local governments are well positioned to listen and respond — and the Yale Climate Opinion Maps include city- and county-level public opinion data to support your efforts. Know your audience and foster trust - To motivate climate action, governments must understand their communities and become trusted partners. Short surveys, message testing, and in-person engagement can help local governments understand what messages resonate and what issues are a priority for their audience. To build and retain trust, partnerships with community-based organizations, transparency, and frequent engagement are essential. Make climate action local - Many perceive climate change as a problem that is distant in time and space. Local governments can communicate local stories and social norms to help community members understand how climate change is impacting their community now — and that their neighbors are worried about it and taking action, even if they aren’t talking about it.

Protecting the nature of Texas, powering our clean energy future, Quentin Good and Luke Metzger, Frontier Group

Renewable energy developers in Texas have demonstrated many ways their siting practices and operations can minimize harm and even create new benefits from renewable energy projects. Texas should take steps to encourage the adoption of “best practices” by renewable energy developers that protect wildlife and landscapes while continuing the beneficial transition to clean energy. Operational changes and smart siting decisions can reduce the environmental impact of wind energy. The most serious environmental challenge posed by wind energy is its impact on birds and bats, but smart strategies – including those currently in use by Texas wind farm operators – have been proven to reduce collisions.

U.S. Can Cost-Effectively Supply One Third of Industrial Heat Demand Using Off-Grid Electric Thermal Storage and Heat Pumps, Dominguez et al., India Energy and Climate Center, Goldman School of Public Policy, University of California, Berkeley

Industrial heat is a major source of U.S. emissions and is challenging to decarbonize due to the availability of low-cost natural gas keeping fossil fuel heating highly competitive. Emerging low cost and efficient options such as thermal electric storage and industrial heat pumps offer a promising alternative when combined with local low-cost solar and wind power. Using facility-level emissions data and a geospatial assessment of nearby buildable land, the authors evaluate 3,559 industrial sites and three temperature ranges: low (0–200°C), medium (200–850°C), and high (above 850°C). For each site, the authors estimate how much heat could be supplied using off=grid renewable systems, its' cost, and how their potential grows as clean energy costs fall. By 2035, the authors found that renewable-powered heat systems could economically supply up to one third of U.S. industrial heat demand—3,255 trillion BTU out of 9,530 trillion BTU in total. This includes more than half of temperature heat needs above 200°C, particularly in states with higher natural gas prices and strong renewable resources, such as California and parts of the northern and eastern U.S. Local off-grid systems also avoid multiyear grid interconnection delays while reducing integration costs for many facilities.

Coal Beneath Federal Lands in the United States— Mines, Reserves, and Resources, Shaffer et al., US. Geological Survey

The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) compiled a list of coal mines and tabulated the coal reserves and available coal resources beneath Federal lands in the conterminous United States. Coal resources beneath Federal lands in Alaska are also discussed in this report. In 2024, the 34 coal mines on Federal lands produced more than 261 million short tons of coal. Surface mining is used at 23 of the coal mines, and underground mining is used at 11. These 34 coal mines control more than 4.2 billion short tons of reported coal reserves. Most of the coal mines (31) and more than 98 percent of the reported coal reserves are on Federal lands west of the Mississippi River. Of all the States, Wyoming has the most coal mines on Federal lands (14) and produces the most coal from Federal lands. The Powder River Basin has the most coal mines per basin or coal field operating on Federal lands (12 in Wyoming, 2 in Montana). Most of the available coal resources in the conterminous United States are also west of the Mississippi River. There are five basins or coal fields in the West that each contain available coal resources of more than 25 billion short tons. The USGS estimates that more than 355 billion short tons of available coal resources remain beneath Federal lands in the conterminous United States. Alaska contains substantial quantities of coal resources. The USGS estimates that Alaska has at least 140 billion short tons of identified available coal resources but may ultimately have as much as 5.5 trillion short tons of coal resources.

Americans with disabilities are more likely than those without disabilities to say global warming is harming their health, Ettinger et al., Yale Program on Climate Change Communication

Americans with disabilities are more likely to think global warming is harming their own health than Americans without disabilities. Americans with and without disabilities have similar views on whether some groups of people are more likely to experience the health harms of global warming. Americans with disabilities have lower trust in several information sources about the health harms of global warming.

Paying for Resilience in New York State, Rebuild by Design and The New York State Adaptation Practitioners Network

Climate change has catalyzed new and opportunities and risks within nearly every dimension of New York State’s economy – with the costs being passed onto New Yorkers in the form of tax increases, medical bills, insurance hikes, damages, home repairs, and business losses. The authors present a first-of-its-kind inventory of the cost to adapt to climate effects. New York State will need to spend over $519 billion to build, upgrade, or adapt infrastructure to prepare for climate impacts. This accounts for costs of proposed, in-progress, and completed adaptation investments. The per capita cost of adapting New York State’s infrastructure is approximately $26,000. The highest regional adaptation cost, $387 billion, is in New York City, where the approximate per capita need is $50,000. The most substantial costs include culvert replacements, sewer and stormwater upgrades, and coastal defense on Long Island and in New York City.

Transmission Planning with Large Loads: Current Practices and Recommendations, Large Loads Task Force, Energy Systems Integration Group

The authors trace the structural reasons why the growth in data centers, AI facilities, and other large loads is outpacing existing transmission planning processes, which were designed for slower and more dispersed demand growth. They lay out what planners, utilities, and regulators can start doing now and over the longer term, as large load and associated generator interconnection requests continue to arrive faster than current planning processes can accommodate. The authors identify three structural reasons current planning processes struggle to keep pace including planning functions are siloed by jurisdiction, time horizon, and study method; there is a fundamental timing mismatch between how fast large loads want to connect and how long transmission takes to plan and build; and planners face a radically different level of demand uncertainty that current planning methods were not designed to handle. The authors distinguish between actions planners can take now with immediate payoff, such as studies that make visible where the grid can serve new load, tools that quickly expand available grid capacity, and coordinating assumptions across planning functions and structural shifts in the planning process, including moving from project-by-project upgrades toward proactive, scenario-based, multi-value planning with longer-term benefits.

Electricity Mid-Year Update 2026, Çam et al., The International Energy Agency

Amid the energy shock triggered by the war in the Middle East, the world’s electricity consumption is set to increase strongly in 2026, driven by rising demand from industry, appliances, cooling needs, data centers and electrification. This mid-year update builds on the comprehensive Electricity 2026 report published in February, providing an assessment of recent market developments and updated outlooks through 2027. It incorporates updated data for 2025 and new forecasts for 2026 and 2027, covering global electricity demand, generation by fuel, and carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from electricity generation, among other trends. The report also reviews the latest developments in major economies such as China, the European Union, India and the United States and provides updated tracking of wholesale electricity prices across markets worldwide.

Through the concept of scientific cherry-picking, the authors analyze how Voluntary Sustainability Standards selectively incorporate particular strands of scientific knowledge that align with operational models and governance structures. This selective integration often leads to the promotion of interpretations of sustainability that are compatible with weak sustainability paradigms –emphasizing incremental improvements within existing systems – rather than fostering more systemic and transformative approaches.

Food Security Green Bonds. Scaling finance for sustainable and climate-resilient agrifood systems, Mikell O’Mealy, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations

The authors examine the growing pressures on global agrifood systems, where hunger and food insecurity remain widespread and are expected to intensify under climate change and population growth. They highlight the dual challenge of expanding production to meet rising demand while addressing the sector’s significant contribution to greenhouse gas emissions and increasing climate risks that threaten agricultural land and livelihoods. Despite strong recognition by countries of the need for climate-smart agriculture and agrifood systems transformation, progress is constrained by a large financing gap. Current investment levels fall far short of the estimated USD 1.1 trillion required annually by 2030, with particularly acute shortfalls affecting smallholder farmers and agri-Subject Matter Experts. Public finance continues to dominate, reflecting both its catalytic role and the barriers limiting private sector engagement. The authors identify public-led green bonds as a practical avenue to mobilize private and institutional capital at scale.

Pay, Baby, Pay. Why Trump's Energy & AI Dominance Agenda Means Higher Bills For Everyone, Lorne Stockman, Oil Change International

U.S. wholesale fossil gas prices will likely double by the late 2030s relative to the 2020 to 2025 average if the Trump administration’s energy and AI policies succeed in pushing gas demand to levels that can only be met by more expensive gas production. Significant energy price volatility from 2020 to 2025 caused hardship in the U.S. and in LNG-importing countries, particularly in Asia and Europe. Costlier U.S. gas risks exacerbating the energy affordability crisis for U.S. and international consumers alike. The surge in gas demand – and gas prices – is being driven primarily by the Trump administration’s support for massive increases in liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports. Trump’s hostility toward renewables and support for the poorly regulated AI data center boom aggravate the impending crunch. Lower-cost gas from the two biggest U.S. gas-producing regions, the Permian and Appalachian basins, will not be able to meet rising demand alone. To fill the gap between demand and production, gas producers will have to increase drilling in the significantly more expensive Haynesville shale play in Louisiana and Texas.

About New Research

Click here for the why and how of Skeptical Science New Research.

Suggestions

Previous edition

The previous edition of Skeptical Science New Research may be found here.

The government canceled this nature study. Scientists finished it anyway.

Wed, 29 Jul 2026 10:29:49 EST

This is a re-post from Yale Climate Connections by Neha Pathak

Most of us sense it without being told why: A walk in the woods or an hour in the park leaves us calmer, clearer, and restored. Increasingly, modern science agrees. A growing body of evidence links time in nature to better physical and mental health – and a major new effort is working to document exactly what that evidence shows.

That effort is called the Nature Record, and its survival is a story in itself. It began as the National Nature Assessment, a federal undertaking modeled on the long-running National Climate Assessment and mandated by a Biden-era executive order. Roughly 180 scientists volunteered to develop about a dozen chapters. The project had reached an early public-comment draft when the Trump administration canceled it. Rather than abandon the work, the authors decided to finish it independently under a new name, with foundation funding and National Academy of Sciences review.

Howard Frumkin, a physician-epidemiologist and a professor emeritus at the University of Washington, led the assessment’s chapter on human health. Yale Climate Connections spoke with him about how the report survived, what the science says about nature’s health benefits, why those benefits aren’t shared equally, and what it all means for communities and the healthcare system.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Yale Climate Connections: The connection between nature, health, and climate change pulls together fields that don’t usually sit at the same table. How do you frame that intersection?

Howard Frumkin: This intersection of the natural world and human health – in the context of climate change – draws on three different lineages intellectually.

The first is the scientific evidence on the health benefits of nature contact, which is what the Nature Record is focusing on. So if you or I take a walk in a forest or in a park, we have nature contact, and something about that is good for us. We don’t fully understand. It might be the visual appreciation of beautiful nature; it might be phytoncides – biogenic chemicals that we’re inhaling. It could be the quiet, could be the physical activity. But nature also delivers benefits without direct contact: The upstream ecosystem in the watershed that delivers clean water is good for health. We may never go up there, but we still benefit from it.

The second is the whole literature on climate solutions, indicating that coastal mangrove forests and sponge cities and tree canopy deliver benefits both in terms of climate mitigation and adaptation: We can store carbon, reduce temperatures of neighborhoods, we can manage storm water.

Then there’s a third line of thinking, which has to do with the human relationship with the natural world. In Indigenous and tribal wisdom, there’s talk of reciprocity, the shared relationship that we have as part of nature, the obligations for stewardship, the legal concepts of the rights of nature. All of that is related to, but different than, the climate benefits piece because it’s explicitly not instrumental; it’s not transactional; it’s relational. You come into that thinking about the right relationship that we as humans should have with the natural world – not because of what it gets us.

Yale Climate Connections: So how did the Nature Record come to be, and how did the project survive after the federal government withdrew its support?

Frumkin: It was a pretty simple concept: the idea that you can’t take good care of what you don’t know. There was a perception that if we were to be good stewards of our natural heritage in this country, we needed an inventory. We needed to take stock of what we had, and not just at a fixed moment in time but over time to understand the trends that were affecting nature and the benefits it delivers. The model for doing that was the National Climate Assessment, which is the every-four-year assessment of climate change in the U.S. – how it’s unfolding, what the impacts are on humans – mandated by federal legislation back in the 1990s. It comes with lots of federal procedures, in terms of scientific rigor, transparency, public review, and so on. Out of that conceptual commitment to taking stock of what we have, and using the model of the National Climate Assessment, an executive order in the Biden administration mandated the creation of the National Nature [Assessment].

It got as far as a “zero order draft,” – what regular people call an outline – that was published in the Federal Record and made available for public comment. And no sooner did that happen than the Trump inauguration happened, and the Trump administration killed the National Nature Assessment.

By then we had rostered around 12 chapters with around 15 authors each, so we had 180 authors all volunteering time, representing academic institutions and agencies and NGOs across the country. And pretty much in the blink of an eye, everybody said, “Let’s do it anyway … This work is so important, and the value is so clear that we don’t need to be a federal undertaking.”

There were some legal issues, like we couldn’t use the same name; federal employees could no longer participate because of potential risks to them and to the project. We found foundation support in early 2025, and by mid-2025 [it was] clear that we had enough money, energy, and commitment that we could continue. We landed on the Nature Record, and we’re proceeding almost in some ways as if it were a federal document – with transparency, National Academy of Sciences review, very careful documentation of all factual claims – partly because rigor will give a lot of credibility to the report, and partly because it would be a good thing for this to return to being a federal effort. If we have followed all the rules, dotted all the i’s, and crossed all the t’s, this can be reimported into government.

That said, being nonfederal offers some advantages. We can be more flexible and nimble, more creative in the ways we undertake outreach and build partnerships, and publicize and disseminate what we find. In some ways, this is a blessing in disguise. We have, for example, a national poetry effort running alongside the Nature Record, and we’ve published a book of poetry. We’ve engaged young people in graphic arts related to the benefits of nature. Bringing that creativity to bear has been a really nice part of the project.

Yale Climate Connections: When you dug into the evidence for the health chapter, what were the biggest takeaways or trends you saw?

Frumkin: The first key message is that, in general, nature contact is good for people; it’s health-promoting. The second is that those benefits are unequally distributed across society. Some of us have much better or easier access to nature than others. It’s an equity issue, because poor people and people of color disproportionately tend to have less access to parks and high-quality park programming, through the legacies of redlining and other historical trends.

But it’s not just that conventional form of equity that’s important. People with disabilities have difficulty accessing natural places. Older people have difficulty because too many parks lack accessible trails and shade, and children often lack access because safe, easy access to green space is rare in many communities.

Another trend is more screen time and less green time. People are spending less time outdoors. On the other hand, there are some emerging technologies that may facilitate nature contact, such as Merlin [the birdsong identification app], which may help deepen people’s appreciation of nature, and there’s reason to think that being more familiar with it deepens nature connectedness.

Four takeaways about health and nature from the Nature Record

Nature contact is broadly good for human health.
Those benefits are unequally distributed – by race, income, age, and disability.
Long-term trends, such as rising screen time and falling green time, are reshaping how people benefit – for better and worse.
Evidence-based interventions, like well-designed park programming, can reliably strengthen nature’s health benefits.

Yale Climate Connections: If the evidence that nature helps is solid, how much do we actually know about why – and about how much nature is enough?

Frumkin: One of the most interesting parts of this is that although we have pretty solid evidence that nature contact benefits health, we know precious little about how it works. So you may walk through a forest and benefit from seeing the natural beauty of the forest. We have lab evidence that T cells do better after contact with natural compounds than they otherwise would. It may be that the benefit comes from the fact that you’re walking through the forest with friends, and social contacts in natural settings are soothing and restorative. It may be that natural settings call on us just to get out there and take a walk, and the physical activity is a really effective promoter of good health.

Not knowing the pathways and mechanisms of benefits makes it a little difficult to prescribe. And we don’t know a lot about the varieties of nature and which ones are more or less effective. Do you need trees, or do shrubs do the trick? Do you need immersion, or viewing nature out the window? Do you need the real thing, or might virtual nature provide some of the same benefits? Do you need to get out every day, or does a few times a week suffice? So these are a lot of questions we still need to try to answer.

The potential benefits of nature contact are strong, much less expensive than pharmaceuticals, free of side effects, and don’t need to be prescribed by a licensed healthcare provider. The cost-benefit implications are potentially enormous if we get it right and understand best how to optimize those benefits.

Yale Climate Connections: As a physician, I hear a real fear of nature from patients: ticks and mosquito-borne disease, allergies, wildfire smoke, and extreme weather – and climate change is heightening those risks. How do you balance nature’s benefits against these threats?

Frumkin: Rarely in life can you eliminate risk altogether, but you can manage risk.

The risks of being outside: Well, there’s a risk of sunburn – but we can manage that risk with sunblock and with protective clothing. The risk of ticks – that’s a real risk. But we can manage that risk: inspecting ourselves after we’ve been in tick-infested areas and using bug repellent to keep the ticks away. So for each risk, we can reduce the risk by managing it well.

Yale Climate Connections: How do you hope communities will use the Nature Record?

Frumkin: So for communities, here’s an example. Almost every community in the country now has a housing shortage, and there is a need to build more housing. And to do that in economically and environmentally efficient ways generally means density. Density can collide with protecting nature. This report will make it clear that balancing the protection of nature with fulfillment of other human needs – like housing – is a key set of trade-offs we need to tackle and be explicit about.

Using the insights from this report, design strategies that both protect nature and provide nearby nature contact and also provide housing and transportation – which means in many cases nonmotorized transportation, active transport, cycling, and walking. The design of communities needs to take into account all these needs: environment, human, and equity.

Yale Climate Connections: Hospitals and health systems have a natural connection to health, not only through the care they provide but also through the spaces they create. As they consider land use decisions, including parking needs and opportunities for green space, what should they keep in mind?

Frumkin: Two thoughts. One is that we know a lot about how to build green, and that means the buildings themselves, with biophilic principles. It means the environmental performance of the buildings – what are called green buildings – and it means the situation of buildings in lots, protecting nearby nature. That’s a good way to build; it’s economical. There may be increased up-front costs, but they’re generally recoverable in a short number of years, and they deliver health benefits to patients and staff.

The second message is that nonprofit hospitals are required to carry out community health needs assessments and to invest in community health based on the findings of those assessments.

Nature deficit is a community health need, and in my view ought to be a part of every community health needs assessment. To the extent that it’s documented, hospitals can consider investing funds in local parks, either for developing parks or planning programming in parks that we know improve community health.

I would urge hospitals to think about nature deficit as one of those community health needs and then consider investments in nature contact for people in their catchment areas as a means of promoting public health.

Yale Climate Connections: Finally, what makes you most hopeful?

Frumkin: For me, one of the biggest potential sources of despair is the polarization and ideological hysteria that seems to be sweeping our country and many others as well. But this topic offers a counterbalance, because across the political spectrum people love the natural world and appreciate it.

Hunters and anglers and campers may be far right politically, but they have common cause with environmentalists who may be on the political left. There aren’t too many domains that can unite us across the ideological divide that bedevils the country now, but this is one.

I think the fact that we’re approaching this entire Nature Record in an apolitical way, and framing it in terms of benefits that all Americans can enjoy, gives me hope that we may be able to help overcome one of the biggest challenges we face.

Hot days, cold thermometers

Mon, 27 Jul 2026 10:20:11 EST

This is a re-post from The Climate Brink

A graph has been making the rounds on social media showing the average number of days per weather station above 95F, 100F, and 105F across the contiguous US since 1895. It comes from CFACT analyst Chris Martz, drawing on raw data from NOAA’s Global Historical Climatology Network daily dataset (GHCNd), and it shows the 1930s towering over everything since. The implication is that extreme heat in the US is nothing new, and that all the recent fuss about record temperatures is overblown.

It is a compelling figure. The 1930s Dust Bowl really was an extraordinary period of extreme heat in the US, and no amount of correction for changes in measurement techniques over time makes it go away. But the graph is also a case study in why you cannot naively count threshold exceedances in raw daily station data and call it a climate record. Its results rest on two well-documented thermometer problems that artificially depress modern hot day counts, plus a station network that happens to be oversampled where the Dust Bowl happened.

Reproducing the viral chart

To start with, let’s reproduce the figure properly. Rather than averaging whatever stations happen to be reporting in a given year (the station network grew from a few hundred stations in 1895 to many thousands today, with big shifts in where they are located), I selected the 543 GHCNd stations in the contiguous US with long, near-continuous maximum temperature records over the full 1895-2025 period,1 gridded them to 2x2 degree cells, and computed an area-weighted national average.

Average number of days per year at or above 95°F, 100°F, and 105°F over the contiguous US, 1895–2025, from 543 long-record GHCN-Daily stations (raw, unadjusted TMAX), averaged on a 2°×2° grid with cos(latitude) area weighting.

Here we see the same basic story as the viral version: a huge spike in the 1930s (1936 alone averaged 33 days at or above 95F across these stations), elevated values through the mid-1950s, and nothing since that comes close. So the Martz figure is not fabricated, and its shape is not an artifact of the changing station network. To be fair to its author, counting hot days in raw data really does produce this picture.

The problem is what “raw” means here.

Two thermometer problems, both pointing the same way

Raw sounds virtuous, like unfiltered honesty. But the US cooperative observer network has changed in two important ways over the past century, and both changes bias hot day counts downward in recent decades relative to earlier ones.

The first is time of observation bias. Volunteer observers read and reset their max/min thermometers once a day. In the early 20th century most did so in the late afternoon, near the hottest part of the day. An afternoon reset means a very hot afternoon can get counted twice: once for the day it happened, and again the next day if the following afternoon is cooler, since the thermometer still holds yesterday’s peak. Over the 20th century the network gradually shifted to morning observations (better for measuring precipitation), which does not double count heat. Vose et al (2003) documented how this shift alone imparts a spurious cooling trend of a few tenths of a degree in US records, and the double counting directly inflates hot day counts at afternoon-observing stations.

The second is the thermometer switch. In the mid-1980s NOAA replaced liquid-in-glass thermometers in wooden Cotton Region Shelters with electronic maximum-minimum temperature sensors (MMTS) at most cooperative stations. Quayle et al (1991) showed the new sensors read maximum temperatures around 0.4C (0.7F) cooler than the old shelters. This produced a one-time step change at thousands of stations that landed right at the start of the modern warming era. When your threshold is a hard cutoff like 95F, a step down of nearly half a degree C removes a lot of days.

Homogenization algorithms (like NOAA’s pairwise method, Menne and Williams 2009, or the Berkeley Earth approach, Rohde et al 2013) detect and correct these breakpoints by comparing each station to its neighbors. Our 2016 paper validated these adjustments against the pristine, purpose-built US Climate Reference Network and found they perform well. While NOAA does not have daily homogenized data (they only provide monthly homogenized data), Berkeley Earth does. So let’s compare the raw hot day count to the same metric computed from Berkeley Earth’s homogenized daily maximum temperature fields.

Days per year at or above 95°F over the contiguous US. Top: raw GHCN-Daily data from 543 long-record stations, gridded and area-weighted. Bottom: Berkeley Earth homogenized daily TMAX (1°×1°, area-weighted over CONUS), with the dashed line showing the same calculation restricted to the grid cells containing the long-record stations. Absolute values differ because gridded fields smooth out local extremes; the shapes are the meaningful comparison.

The two datasets agree that the 1930s were exceptional. Where they disagree is the modern era: in the homogenized data, recent decades rival the Dust Bowl years CONUS-wide, with 2011 (16.1 days) actually edging out 1936 (14.0 days) as the biggest year in the Berkeley Earth series.

We can make the comparison cleaner by putting each series relative to its own 1951-1980 average:

Days ≥95°F, 11-year running means, with each series shown relative to its own 1951–1980 average. Red: raw GHCN-Daily long-record stations. Blue solid: Berkeley Earth homogenized daily TMAX over the full CONUS. Blue dashed: Berkeley Earth restricted to the grid cells sampled by the long-record station network.

The raw and homogenized series track each other closely for the first 85 years, through the Dust Bowl peak and the cool 1960s and 70s. Then, right around 1980 (just when the MMTS transition began), they split. The homogenized data rises to around 1.4 times its mid-century baseline while the raw data stays flat at roughly 1.0. The raw data does not exaggerate the 1930s, but rather erases the last 40 years of increases in extreme heat.

The dashed and solid blue lines in the figure are also worth a closer look. The dashed line averages the Berkeley Earth data over only the 130 grid cells where our long-record stations actually sit; comparing it to the raw series is the fair like-for-like test, since the places are the same and data adjustments are the only difference. The solid line averages over the whole country, and the gap between the two exposes a sampling problem rather than a data problem. Century-old stations cluster in the Midwest and East, which is precisely where the 1930s heat was centered and where extreme daytime heat has increased the least since. Averaged over the long-lived station locations, even in homogenized data, puts the 1930s roughly 45% above the last two decades. If we average over the full contiguous US, however, that gap shrinks to about 10%.

Locations of long-lived weather stations used in the reproducing the viral Martz figure. Note that these tend to oversample the Midwest region where dust bowl temperature extremes were most pronounced.

A Dust Bowl story, not a national one

There is a second, subtler issue with interpreting the viral graph: geography. Long-record stations are heavily concentrated in the Midwest and East (only 116 of our 543, around a fifth, sit west of 100W), which happens to be exactly where the 1930s heat was centered. Let’s break the country into NOAA’s nine US climate regions and look at each one separately, using the spatially complete Berkeley Earth data.

Days per year at or above 95°F for each of NOAA’s nine US climate regions, 1895–2023, from Berkeley Earth homogenized gridded daily TMAX (1°×1°), area-weighted within each region. Thin lines are annual values; bold lines are 11-year running means. Note that the y-axis scale differs by region.

The Dust Bowl turns out to be a story about three regions. In the Upper Midwest the 1930s averaged around 15 times as many 95F days as the last two decades (3.4 vs 0.2 per year), in the Northern Rockies and Plains around 9 times (2.8 vs 0.3), and in the Ohio Valley around 4 times (8.7 vs 2.1), with 1936 the record year in all three.

Everywhere else the present rivals or beats the past: the South is essentially tied (22.4 days in the 1930s vs 22.7 over 2000-2023, with 2011 the biggest year in the record), while the Southeast (14.7 vs 11.1 days), Southwest (4.9 vs 3.9), and West (4.6 vs 3.6) all see more 95F days now than in the 1930s, with the two western regions peaking in 2020. (The remaining two regions, the Northeast and Northwest, average less than one 95F day per year throughout the record, too few for meaningful comparisons.)

The mid-century spike in that average comes almost entirely from three regions in the middle of the country. This makes physical sense: the Dust Bowl heat was tied to a specific regional catastrophe, a multi-year drought amplified by human-induced land degradation (Cook et al 2009), with bare, desiccated soils driving daytime temperatures to levels those same fields have not approached since. A record set during an ecological disaster in one part of the country is not evidence that the whole country, much less the planet, was hotter. The national chart is really being driven by a distinct regional anomaly.2

Meanwhile, the thermometers all agree it is warming

Finally, it is worth stepping back from the hottest afternoons of the year, which are a noisy, bias-sensitive sliver of the temperature record, and looking at what US temperatures as a whole are doing. The figure below shows annual average maximum, minimum, and mean temperatures for the contiguous US from NOAA’s homogenized nClimDiv dataset.

Contiguous US annual average daily maximum (TMax), minimum (TMin), and mean (TAvg) temperature anomalies relative to 1901–2000, from NOAA nClimDiv, 1895–2025. Thin lines are annual values; bold lines are 11-year running means.

All three are unambiguous. Since 1970, maximum temperatures have warmed at 0.52F per decade, minimums at 0.51F per decade, and the average at 0.51F per decade (all p < 0.0001), with the last decade roughly 2F above the 20th century baseline. The 1930s show up here too, but as a modest bump in maximum temperatures far below present (as the dust bowl event was largely limited to summer TMax temperatures, with a much smaller effect on the remainder of the year). Extreme daytime heat in summer is one of the places where the US warming signal is weakest (a real and interesting scientific result, related in part to agricultural intensification and irrigation in the Midwest (Mueller et al 2016), but it is not representative of the climate system as a whole.

Zooming all the way out

One last piece of context. The contiguous US covers less than 2% of the Earth’s surface, and as we saw above, even within the US the Dust Bowl signal is regional. So what does the very same chart look like for the planet as a whole? The figure below reproduces the design of the viral graph (days at or above 95F, 100F, and 105F) using the Berkeley Earth daily data over global land. To avoid mixing climate changes with changes in the locations we measure (global station coverage grew from under 40% of land area in the 1890s to essentially complete today), I restrict the average to the grid cells with continuous century-long records, covering 42% of global land.3

Average number of days per year at or above 95°F, 100°F, and 105°F across global land, 1895–2023, from Berkeley Earth homogenized gridded daily TMAX (1°×1°), area-weighted by cos(latitude) and land fraction. Restricted to grid cells with complete data in at least 90% of years over 1895–2023 (42% of global land area), so that changing station coverage does not affect the trend.

Globally there is no 1930s spike at all: 1936, the year that towers over the US record, comes in at 15.1 days at or above 95F, less than a day above the surrounding years. The Dust Bowl, extraordinary as it was in Kansas, barely registers when averaged over the world’s land. Instead, hot days hold roughly steady until around 1980 and then climb: days at or above 95F are up around 70% between the early 20th century (1895-1924) and the last decade (12.8 to 22.1 per year), days at or above 100F have more than doubled (3.0 to 7.5), and days at or above 105F have nearly quintupled (0.3 to 1.6). The hotter the threshold, the faster the rise, which is exactly what you expect when a whole temperature distribution shifts upward. All ten of the warmest years by the 95F metric have occurred since 1998, and the six most recent years in the series (2018-2023) are all among them.

The US Midwest is one of the few places on Earth where the hottest days of the mid-20th century still stand; picking it as your yardstick for global warming is, to put it charitably, a choice.

So what are the takeaways here?

First, the Dust Bowl was real, and it remains the benchmark for multi-year extreme daytime heat in the central US, in adjusted and unadjusted data alike. Anyone claiming the 1930s heat is purely an artifact of bad data is simply wrong.

Second, it was a regional phenomenon. Break the country into NOAA’s nine climate regions and the 1930s is only exceptional in only three of them (the Upper Midwest, the Northern Rockies and Plains, and the Ohio Valley, at roughly 4 to 15 times recent levels). The four regions where hot days are the most common (the South, Southeast, Southwest, and West) all match or exceed the Dust Bowl today, with record years of 2011 and 2020, not 1936.

Third, raw daily data is the wrong tool for this question. Time of observation changes and the 1980s switch to MMTS sensors both suppress modern hot day counts relative to the past, and the raw and homogenized series diverge almost exactly when the instrument transition happened. In homogenized data, recent decades rival the 1930s even averaged nationally.

Fourth, hot days above a fixed threshold are a narrow and noisy way to look at the data. The overall US warming trend (around 0.5F per decade since 1970 in max, min, and mean temperatures) is robust in every dataset, raw or adjusted, satellite or surface. And globally, days above 95F have been climbing steadily for a century, with no Dust Bowl bump at all: the central US is one of the few spots on the planet where the mid-20th century still holds the record for extreme daytime heat.

The viral chart is built from real measurements, and the heat it shows was real too. But it takes a regional catastrophe, fails to account for changes in instruments and observation times, and presents the result as a national climate verdict. Accounting for the thermometers and the geography, and the US looks a lot like the rest of the planet: the hottest days on record are increasingly the ones we are living through now.

I’ve included a more detailed writeup of the methods and code to reproduce this analysis on my GitHub here.

1 Specifically: stations whose GHCNd TMAX record spans at least 1900 through 2024, keeping station-years where at least 80% of April-October days have a valid, quality-controlled observation, and keeping stations valid in at least 85% of years over 1895-2025. Hot day counts are averaged within 2°×2° grid cells and combined with cos(latitude) area weighting over the 130 cells with near-complete records. The results are insensitive to these choices: stricter completeness screens shrink the network but leave the series essentially unchanged (details and robustness checks are available in the methods writeup on my GitHub). A map of the station network is also available in the repo; note that coverage is much denser east of 100W, a point that becomes important later in the post.

2 This also explains most of the difference between the dashed and solid blue lines in the “days ≥95°F, 11-year running means” figure. The long-record station network oversamples the region where the 1930s were most extreme and undersamples the South and West where recent warming has added the most 95F days.

3 This matters a lot. Computed naively over whatever area has data each year, the global days above 95F triple from ~12 to ~37 days per year, but much of that rise is an artifact of hot regions (the Sahara, the tropics, interior Australia) entering the dataset over time. On the fixed network the increase is a still-substantial ~75% (from ~13 to ~22 days per year). The fixed-coverage region is disproportionately Northern Hemisphere midlatitude land, so this series should be read as “hot days where we have century-long records” rather than a true global land average.

Fact brief - Do solar plants require backup from fossil fuels?

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 10:41:48 EST

Skeptical 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.

Do solar plants require backup from fossil fuels?

Solar plants require backup, but it doesn’t have to be from fossil fuels.

A combination of renewables, energy storage, and long-distance transmission can reliably power the majority of the U.S. without relying on coal, oil, or natural gas, as one 2017 research paper describes. Renewables like wind can generate under cloudy conditions, while surplus solar from brighter weather can be stored in utility-scale batteries for rainy days. Additionally, transmission from neighboring regions can assist solar capacity drops.

The Department of Energy and Princeton have outlined decarbonization scenarios projecting expansion of solar and decrease in fossil fuels while maintaining reliability. Analysis of real-world outcomes has found that renewables growth has actually outperformed projections.

California is an example of improving reliability while transitioning from fossil fuels to solar. From 2015 to 2025, in-state generation saw a jump in solar reliance from 8% to 27%, while natural gas dropped from 60% to 36%.

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

The Electricity Journal Reliably integrating variable renewables: Moving grid flexibility resources from models to results

The Alliance for Climate Transition Institute Solar energy requires 100% fossil fuel backup

Princeton University Net-Zero America

University of Virginia Decarbonization by 2050: Are We on Track?

California Energy Commission CA Electric Generation 2001-25

California Energy Commission California Energy Leaders Report Progress on Grid Reliability Ahead of Summer 2026

MIT The Future of Energy Storage

Columbia Law School Sabin Center for Climate Change Law Rebutting 33 False Claims About Solar, Wind, and Electric Vehicles

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

2026 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #30

Sun, 26 Jul 2026 10:14:32 EST

A listing of 28 news and opinion articles we found interesting and shared on social media during the past week: Sun, July 19, 2026 thru Sat, July 25, 2026.

Stories we promoted this week, by category:

Climate Change Impacts (11 articles)

Insane': Republicans Push To Punish Canada For Wildfires “We will not tolerate this incompetence,” vowed Ohio Sen. Bernie Moreno, who may not understand how climate change works. Huffington Post, Jennifer Bendery, Jul 17, 2026.
UN to list more sites as 'in danger' from conflict or climate change Phys.org, Simon Valmary and Celia Lebur, Jul 18, 2026.
As mosquito ranges expand, better monitoring is key to preventing disease Monitoring is expensive and labor intensive. But it helps public health officials stop outbreaks. Ars Technica, Madeline Shaw, Jul 19, 2026.
Climate Scientists Say The Dice Are Loaded. Here's Why "Just have a Think" on Youtube, Dave Borlace, July 19, 2026.
Opinion: Is the Colorado River in a climate doom loop? We caused a problem, and our efforts to fix the problem make it worse Colorado Newsline, Gary Wockner, Jul 20, 2026.
Rising seas magnify the dangers of coastal Georgia`s industrial past The state’s first Superfund research center is looking into how climate change is resurfacing industrial pollution. Grist, Emily Jones, Jul 20, 2026.
Extreme heat morphs into a major economic shock for an unprepared Europe Europe’s status as the planet’s fastest-warming continent is becoming a serious drag on its economic prospects. The Business Standard, Laura Millan, Jul 21, 2026.
What Happens to Our Brains in a Warming World? In this era of advancing AI, when everyone is debating the nature of 'intelligence,' we have forgotten that our brains run well only within a narrow band of temperature. What happens to the brain once that temperature threshold is crossed is often overlooked in discussions of climate change. State of the Planet, Marco Tedesco and Burcin Ikiz, Jul 22, 2026.
The year climate change came for the Tour de France Record heat, wildfire threats, and an unprecedented stage modification highlighted the growing challenge global warming poses to endurance sports. Grist, Tik Root, Jul 23, 2026.
Climate change to obliterate $1.5 trillion in U.S. home values Climate change will wipe out about $1.47 trillion in U.S. home values over the next three decades and hasten economic gaps in U.S. communities, a report released on Monday finds. CBS News, Kate Gibson , Jul 23, 2026.
This El Niño is set to be the largest on record by a ‘mind-blowing margin’ Forecasters predict that the monster climate pattern will combine with global warming to push global temperatures in 2027 to new heights. Nature, James Dinneen, Jul 23, 2026.

Climate Policy and Politics (5 articles)

How Companies Have Abandoned Their Climate Goals and Let Themselves Off the Hook Big business made big promises about saving the planet. Following through hasn’t been easy. New York Times, David Gelles, Jul 17, 2026.
Trump threatens new Canada tariffs over fires sending 'filthy' air into US cities US President Donald Trump has threatened to impose new tariffs on Canada after hundreds of wildfires have left much of the northern US covered by a blanket of smoke. BBC News, Nadine Yousif, Jul 18, 2026.
Majority of US voters link extreme weather to climate crisis, study finds Top Democrat says findings show public ‘way ahead of the politicians’ as Trump dismisses global heating as ‘hoax’ The Guardian, Dharna Noor with graphics by Andrew Witherspoon, Jul 19, 2026.
Trump Lashes Out at National Academies of Sciences Over Climate Guide For Judges Trump claimed without evidence that the manual was “fraudulent, biased, and misleading.” Inside Climate News, Dennis Pillion, July 20, 2026.
Q&A: What the EU`s carbon market review means for climate action The European Commission has put forward new plans to cut emissions under the EU carbon market more slowly, from 2031 onwards. Carbon Brief, Orla Dwyer, Jul 20, 2026.

Climate Education and Communication (3 articles)

Why Earth is reflecting less sunlight Climate change is first and foremost an emissions problem. It’s also fast becoming a reflection problem. Climate Trunk, John Lang, Jul 21, 2026.
The climate crisis onscreen: 14 films that made waves Climate-themed films matter more than ever as the Trump administration weakens environmental protections. Here are some of the best and most meaningful ones. Capital & Main, Alex Demyanenko, Jul 22, 2026.
Trump calls climate change a hoax. Americans aren`t buying it New polling finds broad agreement that the climate crisis is worsening heat, floods, and wildfires. Mother Jones, Dharna Noor, Jul 24, 2026.

Climate Science and Research (3 articles)

Skeptical Science New Research for Week #29 2026 A regular weekly survey of climate-related research from academic, government and NGO sources. Skeptical Science, Doug Bostrom & Marc Kodack, Jul 16, 2026.
Skeptical Science New Research for Week #30 2026 Skeptical Science, Doug Bostrom & Marc Kodack, Jul 23, 2026.
France orders total evacuation of Cap Ferret peninsula as wildfire spreads ‘Unpredictable’ blaze forces evacuation of holiday spot Cap Ferret and Spain declares emergency over fires near Madrid The Guardian, Jon Henley in Paris and Sam Jones in Madrid, Jul 24, 2026.

Climate Change Mitigation and Adaptation (2 articles)

Lake Powell shrinks and marinas must adapt “The Colorado River is in full-blown crisis mode,” said John Berggren, regional policy manager with Western Resource Advocates, an environmental nonprofit. AP News, DORANY PINEDA and JOHN LOCHER, Jul 22, 2026.
Air conditioning is not enough to keep people cool — can scientists find an alternative? Air conditioning can end up as a climate maladaptation due to installation and operation expenses as well as serious side-effects, but advances in methods to passively cool buildings hint at solutions without drawbacks. Nature, Rachel Fieldhouse, Jul 22, 2026.

Miscellaneous (2 articles)

2026 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #29 A listing of 28 news and opinion articles we found interesting and shared on social media during the past week: Sun, July 12, 2026 thru Sat, July 18, 2026. Skeptical Science, Bärbel Winkler & Doug Bostrom, Jul 19, 2026.
Oil Firms Knew for Decades of Methane’s Danger to Planet, Documents Suggest The companies knew they were releasing more of the greenhouse gas than they publicly reported, according to industry files cited by the Center for Climate Integrity, an activist organization. NYT, Hiroko Tabuchi, Jul 21, 2026.

Climate Law and Justice (1 article)

Trump Attacks National Academies Over Climate Chapter in Judges` Manual The president joined Republican officials who slammed the National Academies of Sciences for a chapter about climate science in an educational guide for judges. NYT, Karen Zraick, Jul 20, 2026.

Public Misunderstandings about Climate Science (1 article)

Hot days, cold thermometers Why a viral graph on US days above 95F is misleading and overstates regional warmth The Climate Brink, Zeke Hausfather, Jul 22, 2026.

Skeptical Science

Skeptical Science New Research for Week #33 2026

Open access notables

From this week's government/NGO section:

132 articles in 58 journals by 1667 contributing authors

Articles/Reports from Agencies and Non-Governmental Organizations Addressing Aspects of Climate Change

About New Research

Suggestions

Previous edition

The real energy use of agentic AI

Agents supercharge AI usage

Measuring my own footprint

What a year of this looks like

So what do we do about it?

The floods of the future won’t come one at a time

How climate change worsens the danger

Sea level rise has already led to a massive increase in flood risk

Flood risks are growing

Dramatic rises in compound flood risk are coming

Main cause of future increased compound coastal flood risk: more intense and slower-moving hurricanes

A substantial inland compound flood risk along the Gulf of Mexico coast

A Hurricane Sandy-like compound flood event: five times more likely by 2100?

Increased compound flood threat from hurricanes earlier in the season

Other compound hurricane threats

Coastal areas becoming unlivable

Related posts on sea level rise

Fact brief - Are there enough minerals for solar power expansion to help mitigate climate change?

Are there enough minerals for solar power expansion to help mitigate climate change?

2026 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #32

Stories we promoted this week, by category:

Skeptical Science New Research for Week #32 2026

Open access notables

From this week's government/NGO section:

99 articles in 50 journals by 827 contributing authors

Articles/Reports from Agencies and Non-Governmental Organizations Addressing Aspects of Climate Change

About New Research

Suggestions

Previous edition

New Mexico’s clean energy success story

A case study in cleaner electricity

Batteries deliver stored sunshine in the evening

Bring on the wind

Still some fossil fuels – but a lot less

A transformation in just five years

A note on data

Is Europe having a bad wildfire year?

What about global wildfires this year?

Why Hansen may end up being right about 2026

2026 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #31

Stories we promoted this week, by category:

Skeptical Science New Research for Week #31 2026

Open access notables

From this week's government/NGO section:

181 articles in 66 journals by 1509 contributing authors

Articles/Reports from Agencies and Non-Governmental Organizations Addressing Aspects of Climate Change

About New Research

Suggestions

Previous edition

The government canceled this nature study. Scientists finished it anyway.

Four takeaways about health and nature from the Nature Record

Hot days, cold thermometers

Reproducing the viral chart

Two thermometer problems, both pointing the same way

A Dust Bowl story, not a national one

Meanwhile, the thermometers all agree it is warming

Zooming all the way out

So what are the takeaways here?

Fact brief - Do solar plants require backup from fossil fuels?

Do solar plants require backup from fossil fuels?

2026 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #30

Stories we promoted this week, by category: