Browsed by
Category: Climate Change

The new science that has oil companies running scared

The new science that has oil companies running scared

Jeff Goodell writes: On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Suncor Energy, Inc. v. County Commissioners of Boulder County, a case that could give fossil fuel companies a get-out-of-jail-free card for the harms caused by climate change. That is not exactly how Kannon Shanmugam — who represents Suncor and Exxon Mobil, another petitioner in the case — framed the argument. He said that dozens of active lawsuits that use state tort law to sue fossil fuel companies…

Read More Read More

Only one GOP Supreme Court justice needs to flip for Big Oil to face climate accountability

Only one GOP Supreme Court justice needs to flip for Big Oil to face climate accountability

Slate reports: The Supreme Court officially began its new term on Monday morning with oral argument in Suncor Energy v. Boulder County. Befitting an institution with vast power over the public despite historically low public support, the court’s opening case this term is about elite impunity: Suncor will determine whether communities may sue oil and gas companies in state court and hold them financially responsible for literally fueling climate change. Back in 2018, Boulder County filed a lawsuit in a…

Read More Read More

‘The toll is huge’: El Niño-driven wildfires overwhelm Indonesia’s orangutan population

‘The toll is huge’: El Niño-driven wildfires overwhelm Indonesia’s orangutan population

The Guardian reports: The mother’s hands were peeling from walking on the torched ground. Her eight-month-old baby, which clung to her side, was dehydrated and thin. The pair, named Mama Abu and Abu (“ash” in Indonesian), were found in an oil palm subsidiary estate, rescuers say. The orangutan pair were saved last month from wildfires that are devouring Indonesia’s forests and peatland, unleashing thick smog, and destroying the habitat of some of the planet’s most vulnerable species. Primate specialists from…

Read More Read More

‘Explosion of melt rates’: 20% of Swiss glaciers lost in five years

‘Explosion of melt rates’: 20% of Swiss glaciers lost in five years

The Guardian reports: Switzerland has lost almost one-fifth of its ice in just five years, research has found, in a dramatic reshaping of the Alpine country whose big white glaciers have been reduced to moonlike rock deserts, scientists say. Swiss glaciers shrank by 5.5% in the first eight months of 2026, according to an annual monitoring report, after a summer of scorching heatwaves that followed a winter with little snow. The reduction in ice volume falls just shy of the…

Read More Read More

Concern mounts over slow-moving, planetary-scale ‘Kelvin’ wave heading for California

Concern mounts over slow-moving, planetary-scale ‘Kelvin’ wave heading for California

The Guardian reports: Concerns are mounting about an ocean phenomenon known as a Kelvin wave that could raise sea levels along the California coastline by up to a foot, as scientists say El Niño is supercharging the threat of storm surges and flooding in the coming months. As an incredibly strong El Niño continues to develop in the Pacific, the phenomenon brings with it a strange shift in the ocean. The Kelvin wave phenomenon is created when trade winds that…

Read More Read More

Climate super-pollutant from China’s electric grid is cooking the planet

Climate super-pollutant from China’s electric grid is cooking the planet

Inside Climate News reports: China’s electric grid has a dirty secret: Despite leading the world in renewable energy expansion, it is also the largest emitter of the planet’s most potent greenhouse gas. Sulfur hexafluoride (SF6) is a synthetic chemical that plays a critical role as an electrical insulator in high-voltage equipment. The gas is odorless, invisible, non-toxic and non-flammable. But it is also a climate killer, 24,300 times more effective at warming the planet than carbon dioxide on a pound-for-pound…

Read More Read More

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang likens AI to surgery: ‘in order to save you, they’ve got to hurt you first’

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang likens AI to surgery: ‘in order to save you, they’ve got to hurt you first’

The Verge reports: As Jensen Huang puts it, AI can help fight climate change — but only if it inflicts “an enormous amount of pain and suffering” first. The Nvidia CEO discussed the future of energy and AI’s impact on our planet in the latest episode of The Ezra Klein Show. But his comments boil down to the same accelerationist spin we’ve seen from a variety of tech leaders as well as President Donald Trump. They promise that AI will…

Read More Read More

Wildfire converted me from a tree-hugger to a tree-worshipper

Wildfire converted me from a tree-hugger to a tree-worshipper

Robert Moor writes: Thirteen years ago, I traded a shoe-box apartment on the east side of Manhattan for a cabin in the woods on the west coast of Canada. Like so many would-be Thoreauvians before me, I moved here in part because I craved an escape from the city’s pollution and noise. In that time, however, I have begun to feel the city — which is to say, the whole tangled system of advanced technology, industrial agriculture and hypercapitalism —…

Read More Read More

Can the energy giants be held responsible for extreme weather?

Can the energy giants be held responsible for extreme weather?

Ross Andersen writes: In late June 2021, the ghost of summertime future visited the Pacific Northwest. For three days, a heat dome hovered over Multnomah County, Oregon, broiling Portland’s drizzly landscape of evergreens and ferns with temperatures of 116 degrees Fahrenheit—much hotter than any resident, even the centenarians, had ever experienced there. Along the rocky ocean shore, sea stars and clams cooked alive in the tide pools. The heat buckled highway lanes and melted the cables that route power to…

Read More Read More

Satellites show Earth lost more than 12 trillion tons of ice from Greenland, Antarctica in 47 years

Satellites show Earth lost more than 12 trillion tons of ice from Greenland, Antarctica in 47 years

The Associated Press reports: About 12.5 trillion tons (11.3 trillion metric tons) of ice from glaciers in Greenland and Antarctica have melted since 1979, which is enough frozen water to stack ice five feet deep across the continental United States, according to a major scientific report. A warming Earth is accelerating the melting of the planet’s two major ice sheets, with five-sixths of the melt not coming from hotter air, but from warmer waters eating away at the ice sheets…

Read More Read More

EPA expected to remove limits on climate pollution from power plants

EPA expected to remove limits on climate pollution from power plants

The New York Times reports: The Trump administration plans to announce Monday that the United States will no longer limit the planet-warming pollution that power plants pump into the air while burning coal and gas, according to two people familiar with the proposal. The shift by the Environmental Protection Agency would complete the administration’s erasure of the most consequential climate policies of Presidents Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Barack Obama. If the move survives expected legal challenges, it could also…

Read More Read More

Nepal’s catastrophic flood heralds a new era of disasters

Nepal’s catastrophic flood heralds a new era of disasters

Bloomberg reports: The giant wave of rock, ice and debris that swept through 100 kilometers (62 miles) of Nepalese valleys last week is the deadliest illustration yet of how climate change is fueling mountain disasters of epic proportions. Scientists have long predicted quicker melting of snow and ice and accelerated thawing of permafrost in high mountain areas that are warming twice as fast as the rest of the planet. For years they have documented the results: more frequent rockfalls, avalanches,…

Read More Read More

‘Supersizing before our eyes’: UN warns of record El Niño approaching

‘Supersizing before our eyes’: UN warns of record El Niño approaching

The Guardian reports: The El Niño climate phenomenon is “supersizing before our eyes”, the UN has said. The event is near certain to shatter temperature records, according to the latest forecasts. The El Niño is likely to be the largest in at least 1,000 years and will pile extra heat into an atmosphere where temperatures are already rising rapidly due to global heating. The combination means 2027 is set to “blow apart” the record and be the hottest year ever…

Read More Read More

Nepal’s glacial collapse foreshadowed a future of climate disaster

Nepal’s glacial collapse foreshadowed a future of climate disaster

Michael Mann writes: For millennia, the high peaks of the Himalayas were held together by an invisible, frozen cement – permafrost and glacial ice that bound ancient rock into seemingly unshakable fortresses. But as the planet continues to warm, this alpine glue is liquefying. The glacial collapse and deluge in Nepal and Tibet was not a freak weather event; it was the structural failure of a mountain itself, nature’s latest commentary on the deadly consequences of human-caused planetary warming. And…

Read More Read More

When a mountain falls: How ice and rock triggered Nepal’s catastrophic flood – and why climate change is raising the risks

When a mountain falls: How ice and rock triggered Nepal’s catastrophic flood – and why climate change is raising the risks

A massive rockfall in the Himalayas led to a surge of flood water than swept through villages, killing hundreds of people, on Aug. 26, 2026. Prabin Ranabhat/AFP via Getty Images By Umesh Haritashya, University of Dayton The catastrophic flood that killed hundreds of people in Nepal on Aug. 26, 2026, and left many more missing likely began with falling ice and rock crashing into the river below, but that wasn’t the end of the disaster. Days later, a new lake…

Read More Read More

Climate crisis could be destabilising mountain areas like Nepal, experts warn

Climate crisis could be destabilising mountain areas like Nepal, experts warn

The Guardian reports: The devastating flash flood that has ripped through the border communities of Nepal and Tibet has heightened fears that the climate crisis is destabilising the geology of mountain and polar regions, threatening millions of people. Satellite imagery suggests a glacier collapse high in the Himalayas was the primary cause of the deadly torrent of mud, water and ice that tore along the Bhotekoshi River on Wednesday. It swept away buildings and roads and left at least 360…

Read More Read More