"Global temperatures have been rising for decades," reports the Washington Post. "But many scientists say it's now happening faster than ever before." According to a Washington Post analysis, the fastest warming rate on record occurred in the last 30 years. The Post used a dataset from NASA to analyze global average surface temperatures from 1880 to 2025. "We're not continuing on the same path we had before," said Robert Rohde, chief scientist at Berkeley Earth. "Something has changed...." Temperatures over the past decade have increased by close to 0.27 degrees C per decade — about a 42 percent increase... For decades, a portion of the warming unleashed by greenhouse gas emissions was "masked" by sulfate aerosols. These tiny particles cause heart and lung disease when people inhale polluted air, but they also deflect the sun's rays. Over the entire planet, those aerosols can create a significant cooling effect — scientists estimate that they have canceled out about half a degree Celsius of warming so far. But beginning about two decades ago, countries began cracking down on aerosol pollution, particularly sulfate aerosols. Countries also began shifting from coal and oil to wind and solar power. As a result, global sulfur dioxide emissions have fallen about 40 percent since the mid-2000s; China's emissions have fallen even more. That effect has been compounded in recent years by a new international regulation that slashed sulfur emissions from ships by about 85 percent. That explains part of why warming has kicked up a bit. But some researchers say that the last few years of record heat can't be explained by aerosols and natural variability alone. In a paper published in the journal Science in late 2024, researchers argued that about 0.2 degrees C of 2023's record heat — or about 13 percent — couldn't be explained by aerosols and other factors. Instead, they found that the planet's low-lying cloud cover had decreased — and because low-lying clouds tend to reflect the sun's rays, that decrease warmed the planet... That shift in cloud cover could also be partly related to aerosols, since clouds tend to form around particles in the atmosphere. But some researchers also say it could be a feedback loop from warming temperatures. If temperatures warm, it can be harder for low-lying clouds to form. If most of the current record warmth is due to changing amounts of aerosol pollution, the acceleration would stop once aerosol pollutants reach zero — and the planet would return to its previous, slower rate of warming. But if it's due to a cloud feedback loop, the acceleration is likely to continue — and bring with it worsening heat waves, storms and droughts. "Scientists thought they understood global warming," reads the Post's original headline. "Then the past three years happened." Just last month Nuuk, Greenland saw temperatures over 20 degrees Fahrenheit above average, their article points out. And "Parts of Australia, meanwhile, have seen temperatures push past 120 degrees Fahrenheit amid a record heat wave..."

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President Donald Trump announced Thursday that the Environmental Protection Agency is rescinding the legal finding that it has relied on for nearly two decades to limit the heat-trapping pollution that spews from vehicle tailpipes, oil refineries and factories. From a report: The repeal of that landmark determination, known as the endangerment finding, will upend most U.S. policies aimed at curbing climate change. The finding -- which the EPA issued in 2009 -- said the global warming caused by greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane endangers the health and welfare of current and future generations. "We are officially terminating the so-called endangerment finding, a disastrous Obama-era policy," Trump said at a news conference. "This determination had no basis in fact -- none whatsoever. And it had no basis in law. On the contrary, over the generations, fossil fuels have saved millions of lives and lifted billions of people out of poverty all over the world." Major environmental groups have disputed the administration's stance on the endangerment finding and have been preparing to sue in response to its repeal.

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The world is closer than thought to a "point of no return" after which runaway global heating cannot be stopped, scientists have said. From a report: Continued global heating could trigger climate tipping points, leading to a cascade of further tipping points and feedback loops, they said. This would lock the world into a new and hellish "hothouse Earth" climate far worse than the 2-3C temperature rise the world is on track to reach. The climate would also be very different to the benign conditions of the past 11,000 years, during which the whole of human civilisation developed. At just 1.3C of global heating in recent years, extreme weather is already taking lives and destroying livelihoods across the globe. At 3-4C, "the economy and society will cease to function as we know it," scientists said last week, but a hothouse Earth would be even more fiery. The public and politicians were largely unaware of the risk of passing the point of no return, the researchers said. The group said they were issuing their warning because while rapid and immediate cuts to fossil fuel burning were challenging, reversing course was likely to be impossible once on the path to a hothouse Earth, even if emissions were eventually slashed. It was difficult to predict when climate tipping points would be triggered, making precaution vital, said Dr Christopher Wolf, a scientist at Terrestrial Ecosystems Research Associates in the US. Wolf is a member of a study team that includes Prof Johan Rockstrom at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany and Prof Hans Joachim Schellnhuber at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Austria.

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Iceland in October classified the potential collapse of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation -- the ocean current system that ferries warm water northward from the tropics and essentially functions as the country's central heating -- as a national security risk, a designation that amounts to a formal reckoning with the possibility that climate change could render the island nation uninhabitable. Several recent studies have found the AMOC far more vulnerable to breakdown than scientists had long assumed. One, analyzing nine models under high-emission scenarios, saw the current weaken and collapse in every single instance; even under the Paris agreement's emission targets, the researchers estimated a 25% chance of shutdown. Stefan Rahmstorf, an oceanographer at Germany's Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and a co-author of that study, said it was "wrong to assume this was low probability." Simulations of a post-collapse world project Icelandic winter extremes plunging to minus-50 degrees Celsius, and sea ice surrounding the country for the first time since Viking settlement. Iceland's national strategy for dealing with AMOC risks is scheduled to be finalized by 2028. The country has also flagged that NASA Goddard, a key source of AMOC modeling, has been targeted for significant staff and budget cuts under the current U.S. administration.

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Despite urgent pleas to Americans to save the honeybees, "it was all based on a fallacy," writes Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank. "Honeybees were never in existential trouble. And well-meaning efforts to boost their numbers have accelerated the decline of native bees that actually are." "Suppose I were to say to you, 'I'm really worried about bird decline, so I've decided to take up keeping chickens.' You'd think I was a bit of an idiot," British bee scientist Dave Goulson said in a video last year. But beekeeping, he went on, is "exactly the same with one key difference, which is that honeybee-keeping can be actively harmful to wild-bee conservation." Even from healthy hives, diseases flow "out into wild pollinator populations." Honeybees can also outcompete native bees for pollen and nectar, Milbank points out, and promote non-native plants "at the expense of the native plants on which native bees thrive." Bee specialist T'ai Roulston at the University of Virginia's Blandy Experimental Farm here in Boyce warned that keeping honeybees would "just contribute to the difficulties that native bees are having in the world." And the Clifton Institute's Bert Harris, my regular restoration ecology consultant in Virginia, put it bluntly: "If you want to save the bees, don't keep honeybees...." Before I stir up a hornet's nest of angry beekeepers, let me be clear: The save-the-pollinator movement has, overall, been enormously beneficial over the past two decades. It helped to get millions of people interested in pollinator gardens and wildflower meadows and native plants, and turned them against insecticides. A lot of honeybee advocacy groups promote native bees, too, and many people whose environmental awakening came from the plight of honeybees are now champions of all types of conservation... But if your goal is to help pollinators, then the solution is simple: Don't keep honeybees... The bumblebees, sweat bees, mason bees, miner bees, leafcutters and other native bees, most of them solitary, ground-nesting and docile, need your help. Honeybees do not. The article calls it "a cautionary tale about the unintended consequences that emerge when we intervene in nature, even with the best of intentions."

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"There's one big bright spot in the fight against climate change that most people never think about," reports the Washington Post. "It could prevent nearly half a degree of global warming this century, a huge margin for a planet that has warmed almost 1.5 degrees Celsius and is struggling to keep that number below 2 degrees..." [M]ore than 170 countries — including the U.S. — have agreed to act on this one solution. That solution: phasing out hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), a group of gases used in refrigerators, air conditioners and other cooling systems that heat the atmosphere more than almost any other pollutant on Earth. Pound for pound, HFCs are hundreds or even thousands of times better at trapping heat than carbon dioxide. Companies are replacing HFCs with new gases that trap much less heat. If you buy a new fridge or AC unit in the United States today, it'll probably use one of these new refrigerants — and you're unlikely to notice the difference, according to Francis Dietz, a spokesperson for the Air-Conditioning, Heating and Refrigeration Institute, a trade group representing U.S. HVAC manufacturers... But that invisible transition is one of the most important short-term tactics to keep Earth's climate from going catastrophically off-kilter this century. HFCs are powerful super-pollutants, but the most common ones break down in the atmosphere within about 15 years. That means stopping emissions from HFCs — and other short-lived super-pollutants such as methane — is like pulling an emergency brake on climate change. "It's really the fastest, easiest and, some would say, the only way to slow the rate of warming between now and 2050," said Kiff Gallagher, executive director of the Global Heat Reduction Initiative, a business that advises companies and cities on cutting greenhouse gas emissions. The only other solution that comes close to the speed and scale of slashing HFCs would be dimming the sun, a much more controversial and potentially dangerous option... [P]hasing out HFCs now "would buy us a little bit of time to develop other solutions that maybe take longer to implement," said Sarah Gleeson, a climate solutions research manager at Project Drawdown, a nonprofit that models how much different strategies would slow climate change. It could also keep the planet from crossing dangerous climate tipping points this century.

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The Trump administration said Wednesday that the United States was withdrawing from 66 international agreements, including a major climate change treaty.

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Some tech leaders are concerned that the artificial intelligence race will exhaust available land and energy. The solution might lie in orbit.

© Soña Lee

Some tech leaders are concerned that the artificial intelligence race will exhaust available land and energy. The solution might lie in orbit.

© Soña Lee