Climate

Extreme weather costs the EU about €28.3bn in lost crops and livestock per year, more than half the losses stem from drought

When drought descended on Hendrik Jan ten Cate’s farm in 2018, slashing his onion yield to just 10% of a regular year, he slogged through days of heavy labour to draw water from canals and pump it to his crops. One day, overworked and anxious to extract as much as he could, Ten Cate fell into the canal and broke his arm.

This year, with plants already growing but a severe dearth of rain to nourish young crops, the Dutch farmer is once again watching the weather forecast with worry.

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The Inflation Reduction Act was once hailed as the biggest climate law in U.S. history. But as supporters try to save it, they’ve stopped talking about the environment altogether.

A Microsoft model can make accurate 10-day forecasts quickly, an analysis found. And, it’s designed to predict more than weather.

Over breakfast at Tom’s Restaurant, right below the historic Giss lab, James Hansen calls Doge’s decision a ‘big mistake’

Perched above the New York City diner made famous by the TV show Seinfeld, Tom’s Restaurant, a small research laboratory became, improbably, crucial to humanity’s understanding of our changing climate and of the universe itself.

Now, it is being shut down by Donald Trump’s administration.

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Across the scientific community, the threats and cuts coming from the Trump administration are already wreaking widespread havoc. With the peak of wildfire season approaching, the impacts of these cuts are top of mind, particularly the broad reduction in force and early retirements in the National Weather Service (NWS), which is now struggling to fill ‘critical’ vacancies, with some NWS offices no longer operating 24/7/365.  

I’ll break down what these cuts could mean for the upcoming and future fire seasons, how climate change has supercharged wildfire activity and conditions, and what we’re expecting in the 2025 wildfire season. 

Impacts of Budget and Personnel Cuts 

While the administration exempted wildland firefighters from personnel cuts, their actions to date have substantially reduced the number of federal workers who actively support firefighting efforts. These are personnel who ensure that front-line wildland firefighters have food, housing, and access to necessities like clean water during what can be long deployments to remote areas. These employees fall under UDSA and DOI, but one specific position, Incident Meteorologists could be affected by cuts at NOAA.   

Incident meteorologists (IMET) are specialized, highly trained professionals who deploy to large fires to provide forecasts to ensure that firefighters can prioritize values at risk (lingo for anything threatened by a fire) and stay safe themselves. During a wildfire, conditions can change rapidly. A sudden wind shift could redirect a fire toward an entirely different town; a nearby thunderstorm could ignite a new blaze; and some fires even generate their own weather. In each of these situations, IMETs provide critical information that keep communities and front-line personnel safe. What’s most worrisome about this situation is the lack of transparency: we don’t know if IMETs were impacted by layoffs, voluntary reductions in force, or budget cuts—or if there is a strategy to ensure sufficient staffing ahead of peak fire season. 

To make matters worse, defenders of the President’s cuts point to a plan to create a National Wildland Fire Fighting agency, but such an agency is proposed and therefore does not exist, making it of little use for anyone facing a wildfire in the coming months.   

On a longer-term basis, proposed cuts to satellite programs and scientific infrastructure could constrain our ability to maintain all sorts of critical functions like detecting fires remotely (VIIRS), accurately modeling fire spread, which is a key component of decision making when actioning a fire (MODIS), and monitoring smoke conditions and sending timely air quality alerts (GOES).  

Further, cuts are hamstringing innovative scientific programs that could enhance our ability to respond to wildfires, manage our forests for resilience, and adapt to the coming impacts of climate change.  

Wildfires and Climate Change  

The scope of these cuts, both proposed and actualized, is particularly difficult to stomach given the well-established science showing the myriad ways that climate change is super charging wildfires.  

Data shown are from John T. Abatzoglou and A. Park Williams, Impact of anthropogenic climate change on wildfire across western US forests, which models forest fire area as a function of fuel dryness both with and without climate change.

This is particularly true for western North America, given the large number of studies focused on the region. Between 1984 and 2015, climate change had nearly doubled burned area in forests in the western US. Other recent research shows that, relative to the mid 1980s, more wildfires are burning larger areas (fourfold by one analysis), at higher severity, growing with greater speed, at higher elevations, over longer fire seasons, and under more extreme fire weather conditions. Wildfires also are burning later into the night and ramping up earlier in the morning, due in part to increases in vapor pressure deficit, which has been attributed to climate change. 

At the same time, research illustrating the consequences of wildfire exposure continues to accumulate.  Recent research links short-term exposure to the smallest particles in wildfire smoke, PM2.5, to greater risk of mortality and pre-term birth for pregnant individuals.  

(If you’re wondering why wildfire researchers are obsessed with a start date of 1984, don’t fear! It’s not Orwellian, just an artifact of the start date of MTBS (Monitoring Trends in Burned Severity), a widely-used, publicly available fire perimeter and severity database for the entire US.)  

The Outlook 

All of this is against the backdrop of seasonal outlooks from both the US and Canadian governments, which show escalating wildfire risk across western North America beginning in June and continuing through the summer. Already, we’ve seen devastating fires in Manitoba and in the United States, we have already ahead of the 10 year average and number of fires to date.  

On the US front, the most recent update, released on May 1 shows above average wildfire potential in coastal Southeastern states, southwestern states, and northern Minnesota, where a dry April has constrained spring greening and elevated wildfire risk. In June, July, and August, the outlook forecasts above average wildfire potential for California, Pacific Northwest states, and large parts of Texas and Oklahoma.  

Natural Resources Canada’s seasonal outlook adds color to an already bleak picture of North America’s wildfire situation, with the area categorized as high fire risk forecasted to grow as the summer unfolds.  

Changes made by the Trump administration may damage our ability to detect, respond, and recover from wildfires, on top of cuts to research that limit our ability to adapt to future fires and improve our responses, on top of cuts to FEMA that will constrain our ability to help those affected. 

Although other factors like colonization, forest management, and misguided suppression policies have all played a role in getting us to this point, ignoring the impact of climate change and potential impacts of the Trump administration’s cuts sets us back even further.   

Conversations with Bob Gray contributed to this blog. 

Cocoa one of six commodities vulnerable to environmental threats in ‘extremely worrying picture’ for food resilience

Climate breakdown and wildlife loss are deepening the EU’s “chocolate crisis”, a report has argued, with cocoa one of six key commodities to come mostly from countries vulnerable to environmental threats.

More than two-thirds of the cocoa, coffee, soy, rice, wheat and maize brought into the EU in 2023 came from countries that are not well-prepared for climate change, according to the UK consultants Foresight Transitions.

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There is an opportunity staring centre-left parties in the face – if they reject the male gaze distorting our politics

‘The boys are alt-right.” This seems to be the new consensus on far-right politics propagated in numerous articles and podcasts. But the media’s obsessive focus on the young men allegedly fuelling the rise of the far right isn’t just empirically flawed – it misses a much more significant shift in public opinion among young people. While many surveys show a large gender gap in support of far-right parties and policies, it is young women who stand out as the more politically interesting demographic, as they are turning in ever greater numbers towards the left.

The idea that young people in general, and young men in particular, disproportionately support the far right has been around for a while. In a classic 2012 study, the German political scientist Kai Arzheimer characterised the “typical” voter of far-right parties in Europe as “male, young(ish), of moderate educational achievement and concerned about immigrants and immigration”. It is frequently used to explain the rise of Donald Trump, while in Europe there has been an explosion of articles claiming that young people, particularly young men, are “driving far-right support”. But is the recent rise of Europe’s far right truly due to the disproportionate support of young men? And are young people really becoming more rightwing?

Cas Mudde is the Stanley Wade Shelton UGAF professor of international affairs at the University of Georgia, and author of The Far Right Today

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Haunted by memories of the Dust Bowl, Oklahoma farmers have adopted conservation practices that have helped to revive about 100 streams.

Run by teenagers, for teenagers, the Green Crew helps students get their hands dirty with projects like tree planting, trail restoration and invasive species removal.

The Portland area is a hot spot for vegans, who have the most environmentally friendly diets. It has also yielded a game-changing dessert.

Climate Change Committee says original goal of a 75% emissions cut by 2030 will now be delayed by up to six years

The UK’s climate watchdog has warned that Scotland needs to take “immediate action at pace and scale” to cut its emissions after ministers axed a series of policy pledges.

The Climate Change Committee (CCC), an official advisory body, said ministers in Edinburgh needed to take urgent action to curb emissions from buildings and transport to cut Scotland’s overall emissions to nearly zero by 2045.

Abandoned a target to cut car miles by 20% by 2030.

Dropped a pledge to rapidly decarbonise homes by mandating low-carbon heating systems.

Cut funding for tree planting.

Missed targets to restore degraded peatland.

Ignored calls for a plan to cut meat and dairy consumption, and failed to use their powers to tax air travel more heavily.

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Health of adolescents worldwide has reached a ‘tipping point’, authors of Lancet commission analysis warn

Almost half a billion adolescents worldwide will be living with obesity or overweight and 1 billion at risk of preventable ill health by 2030, according to an international report.

While adolescent mortality has declined by more than a quarter over the past two decades, comprehensive analysis of global data calculated that in five years, at least half of the world’s 10- to 24-year-olds will be living in countries where preventable health problems such as HIV/Aids, early pregnancy, depression and poor nutrition pose a “daily threat to their health, wellbeing and life chance”. Young people’s health has reached a “tipping point”, the authors warned.

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Burgum defends Trump budget slashing green funds, saying AI and Iran pose bigger threats than warming

The US has “plenty of time” to solve the climate crisis,” the interior secretary, Doug Burgum, told a House committee on Tuesday.

The comment came on his first of two days of testimony to House and Senate appropriators in which he defended Donald Trump’s proposed budget, dubbed the “one big, beautiful bill”, that would extend tax reductions enacted during Trump’s first term, while cutting $5bn of funding for the Department of the Interior.

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BP has funded Washington’s National Gallery of Art, UK’s Royal Shakespeare Company and National Portrait Gallery

Oil interests have funded cultural institutions such as museums, youth organizations and athletic groups in recent years, new research shows, in what appears to be a public relations effort to boost their image amid growing public awareness of the climate crisis.

Top US fossil fuel lobby group the American Petroleum Institute (API) sponsored a 2017 workshop for the Pennsylvania Girl Scouts, featuring “activities that mimicked work in the energy industry”. Energy giant BP in 2016 sponsored Washington DC’s National Gallery of Art and continues to fund the British Museum in London. And in 2019, Shell sponsored the golf event the Houston Open for the 26th time.

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Simon Stiell says investors ‘ready to hit the go button’ if they have the right signals from governments

The climate crisis has raised the price of commodities and exacerbated famine – and only strong action on greenhouse gas emissions can restore economic stability, the UN’s climate chief has said.

Simon Stiell, the executive secretary of the UN framework convention on climate change, was speaking in Panama, where recent years of drought drove the water to perilous lows that disrupted international trade.

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The hemlines were high and the diamonds hefty as the world’s second-richest fiancee and her entourage stormed the Seine. Formez vos bataillons!

To Cannes, in the country of France, where last night Jeff Bezos’s fiancee, Lauren Sánchez, got what she deserves: a philanthropy award. Lauren was honoured at something called the Global Gift Gala, where she received the women empowerment award for her commitment to climate justice, social justice and coming off at absolutely all times as a woman who refers to her breasts as “my girls”. Regular readers will know I have a huge amount of time for her. She accepted her gong wearing a necklace with a diamond pendant slightly larger than an Amazon warehouse, once again redrawing the blueprint that other humanitarians will simply need to watch and learn from.

Meanwhile, if there were awards for hen nights – or bachelorette parties, in the American style – then Lauren would surely have taken one for her full-scale invasion of Paris last weekend, after French forces withdrew and declared the city open. Hand on heart, I initially assumed Lauren was the new US ambassador to France, but then remembered that state department randos were probably seated in some windy overspill gazebo for Donald Trump’s presidential inauguration, while Lauren had pride of place ahead of the actual cabinet as part of Oligarchs’ Row. Plus, having just Googled, I discover the Senate yesterday confirmed Trump’s pick for the ambassador to France – his own son-in-law’s former jailbird dad.

Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist

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Alice Mah’s book explores cultural and ecological loss through the lens of a trip to south China

When Alice Mah, a university professor, visited her family’s ancestral village for the first time in 2018, she knew it would not be a grand homecoming. Her father’s lack of interest in ever making the trip to south China had suggested that much. But what she did not know was that it would unleash waves of eco anxiety that would follow her back to the UK.

As documented in her new book Red Pockets, Mah confronts her family’s past – the site where her ancestral home used to be, untended graves and the descendants of the villagers who remained. This presents her with a whole host of debts and the impossibility of ever really repaying them.

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The pandemic and harsh laws suffocated climate movements as we knew them. Get ready for a new kind of action

On 21 April 2019, I was on Waterloo Bridge in London with my younger siblings. Around us were planters full of flowers where there were once cars, and people singing. This was the spring iteration of Extinction Rebellion, when four bridges in London were held by protesters. My siblings, then 14, had been going out on school strike inspired by Greta Thunberg, and wanted to see her speak.

We were there for less than a day, but the occupations of bridges and other blockades lasted for 11 days. Tens of thousands of people mobilised in the UK that spring. An estimated 500,000 people were affected by the shutdowns the movement imposed on central London’s road networks, and more than 1,000 protesters were arrested in what was then an official part of XR’s strategy.

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Rising oceans will force millions away from coasts even if global temperature rise remains below 1.5C, analysis finds

Sea level rise will become unmanageable at just 1.5C of global heating and lead to “catastrophic inland migration”, the scientists behind a new study have warned. This scenario may unfold even if the average level of heating over the last decade of 1.2C continues into the future.

The loss of ice from the giant Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets has quadrupled since the 1990s due to the climate crisis and is now the principal driver of sea level rise.

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Once, getting ready for the apocalypse was for the paranoid. Now, in the face of cyber-attacks, climate breakdown and nuclear threats, the UK government recommends it. Should everyone have a survival kit?

This is a great time to be a shopkeeper, if that shop is for those worried about the breakdown of civilisation. “It started with Covid, and people weren’t looking for toilet rolls, put it that way,” says Justin Jones, who runs the online UK Prepping Shop, whose stock ranges from emergency food and wind-up radios to crossbows and body armour.

Business is booming, as is the British prepping scene – 22,700 members of the UK Preppers and Survivalists Facebook group, 6,000 in the UK Preppers Club Facebook group. The scene is not as well-known as its US and Canadian equivalents, but that’s partly by choice. “Preppers are by nature a little bit secretive,” says Bushra Shehzad, who is researching prepping for a PhD in marketing and consumer behaviour at Newcastle University. “They are sceptical of people who aren’t part of it asking questions, which I think is because they’re portrayed in a manner that many of them don’t agree with.”

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