The United States’s first major climate legislation dismantled, a crackdown on government scientists, a frenzy of oil and gas drilling, the Paris climate deal not only dead but buried.
A blueprint is emerging for a second Donald Trump term that is even more extreme for the environment than his first, according to interviews with multiple Trump allies and advisers.
In contrast to a sometimes chaotic first White House term, they outlined a far more methodical second presidency: driving forward fossil fuel production, sidelining mainstream climate scientists and overturning rules that curb planet-heating emissions.
“Trump will undo everything [Joe] Biden has done, he will move more quickly and go further than he did before,” said Myron Ebell, who headed the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) transition team for Trump’s first term. “He will act much more expeditiously to impose his agenda.”
The prized target for Trump’s Republican allies, should the former president defeat Joe Biden in November’s election, will be the Inflation Reduction Act, the landmark $370bn bill laden with support for clean energy projects and electric vehicles. Ebell said the legislation, signed by Biden in 2022 with no Republican votes, was “the biggest defeat we’ve suffered”.
Carla Sands, a key environment adviser to the pro-Trump America First Policy Institute who has criticized Biden’s “apocalyptic green fantasies”, said: “Our nation needs a level regulatory playing field for all forms of energy to compete. Achieving this level playing field will require the repeal of the energy and environment provisions within the Inflation Reduction Act.”
The GOP-controlled House of Representatives has already pushed bills to gut the act. But fully repealing the IRA, which has disproportionally brought popular funding and jobs in solar, wind and battery manufacturing to Republican districts, may be politically difficult for Trump even if his party gains full control of Congress.
However, Trump could still slow down the progress of the clean energy transition as president by redrawing the rules for the IRA’s generous tax credits.
He would, his allies say, also scrap government considerations of the damage caused by carbon emissions; compel a diminished EPA to squash pollution rules for cars, trucks and power plants; and symbolically nullify the Paris climate agreement by not only withdrawing the US again but sending it to the Senate for ratification as a treaty, knowing it would fail.
“The Paris climate accord does nothing to actually improve the environment here in the United States or globally,” said Mandy Gunasekara, Trump’s former EPA chief of staff. She argued that the agreement puts too little pressure on China, India and other developing countries to reduce their emissions.
In recent rallies, Trump, the likely Republican nominee, has called renewable energy “a scam business” and vowed to “drill, baby, drill”. On his first day in office, Trump has said he would repeal “crooked Joe Biden’s insane electric vehicle mandate” and approve a glut of new gas export terminals currently paused by Biden.
Areas currently off-limits for drilling, such the Arctic, will also probably be opened up to industry by Trump. “I will end his war on American energy,” Trump has said of the incumbent president, even though in reality the US hit record levels of oil and gas production last year.
“I expect the Republicans will put together their own very aggressive reconciliation bill to claw back the subsidies in the IRA,” said Tom Pyle, president of the free market American Energy Alliance and previous head of the US Department of Energy’s transition team under Trump.
“The president will benefit from having the experience of being in office before, he’ll get a faster head start on his agenda. He won’t be encumbered by the need to be re-elected, so there will be a short window of time but he may be more aggressive as a result.”
‘There is no logic to it’
Critics of Trump, who are already fretting over his potential return to the White House, warn this agenda will stymie clean energy investment, place Americans’ health at the mercy of polluters, badly damage the effort to address the climate crisis and alienate America’s allies.
“A return of Trump would be, in a word, horrific,” said Andrew Rosenberg, a former National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration official, now fellow at the University of New Hampshire.
“It would also be incredibly stupid. It would roll back progress made over decades to protect public health and safety, there is no logic to it other than to destroy everything. People who support him may not realize it’s their lives at stake, too.”
A second Trump term would be more ideologically extreme than the first, with fewer restraints, Rosenberg claimed. “There were people part of a reasonable mainstream in his first term who buffered against his craziest instincts – they won’t be there any more,” he said.
Should Trump manage to repeal the IRA and water down or scrap EPA pollution rules, there would be severe consequences for a world that is struggling to contain an escalating climate crisis, experts say.
The US, the world’s second biggest carbon polluter, would still see its emissions drop under Trump due to previous policies and a market-led shift away from coal to gas as an energy source, but at only half the rate of a second Biden term, according to an analysis by Energy Innovation shared with the Guardian.
This would deal a mortal blow to the global effort to restrain dangerous global heating, with scientists warning that the world needs to cut greenhouse gas emissions by nearly half this decade, and eliminate them entirely by 2050, to avoid breaching agreed temperature limits and plunge billions of people into worsening heatwaves, floods and droughts.
“I don’t think Donald Trump would actually be able to replace the IRA, but you couldn’t rule it out,” said Anand Gopal, executive director at Energy Innovation.
“If he did, the global effect would be potentially disastrous. It would encourage everyone else to go backwards or slow down their climate pledges and put the world way off track to where it needs to be. It could prove the difference between staying under 1.5C warming or not.”
Much will hinge upon any new Trump administration’s ability to better navigate arcane regulatory procedures and the courts. His previous term saw an enormous number of legal defeats for his hurried attempts at environmental rollbacks, as well as the departure of scandal-plagued cabinet members overseeing this effort.
“You can’t just snap your fingers,” said Jeff Navin, a former chief of staff at the US Department of Energy. “You need to spend a lot of time redoing regulations. Is that something Trump really wants to do rather than just pursue other grievances? I don’t think so.”
But some conservatives believe Trump will prove more successful second time around, pointing to an amenably conservative supreme court and more detailed planning ahead of the election, such as the Project 2025 document put out by the rightwing Heritage Foundation, which details severe cuts to the EPA and Department of the Interior, as well as a greater politicization of the civil service to push through Trumpian goals.
“We are writing a battle plan, and we are marshaling our forces,” Paul Dans, director of Project 2025, told E&E News last year. “Never before has the whole conservative movement banded together to systematically prepare to take power day one and deconstruct the administrative state.”
Jeff Holmstead, who ran the EPA’s air office during George W Bush’s administration, said Trump’s administration would be “much more prepared” for a second term.
“They know what they need to do to undo rules in a in a legally defensible way,” he said. A new Trump administration would take a more “surgical approach” to deregulation, he said, taking more of its cues from industry.
Under Biden, Gunasekara said, there has been an “unnecessary tension” between the oil sector and regulators.
“You have to work with the industry players,” she said. “Agencies should not be about suppressing or boosting particular technologies.”
Early on, Trump officials will probably work with Congress to kill certain rules through a parliamentary procedure called the Congressional Review Act. The Clinton-era statute empowers Congress and the president to work together to overturn major federal regulations within 60 legislative days of finalization, by passing a joint resolution of disapproval signed by the president.
“Generally in the past, anything that is finalized after mid- to late May is likely to be within that window,” said Holmstead. “So speed is of the essence for the Biden administration.”
A fresh Trump term could engulf federal climate scientists, too, who were ignored but largely allowed to issue their work during Trump’s last term. A new Trump White House could intervene more to alter climate reports, or even stage a previously mooted public debate on the merits of climate science.
“I expect that idea will be revived and I think we would get a much wider view of climate science that wouldn’t be controlled by a small cabal,” said Ebell. “That will start very quickly.”
Trump’s plans come as Biden has struggled to inspire younger, climate-conscious voters who have been angered by his ongoing leasing of public lands and waters to the fossil fuel industry, such as the controversial Willow oil project in Alaska.
Biden has overseen a boom in liquified natural gas exports that he has belatedly attempted to restrain and his administration has floundered in its attempts to sell the IRA to the American public, with most voters unaware of the climate legislation or its significance in driving down emissions.
Still, the president’s position on climate change is incomparable to Trump’s, according to Rosenberg. “The contrast is incredibly stark between Biden and Trump,” he said. “Do I think Biden is the best of the best? Of course not. But compared to Trump? That’s just scary.
“Anyone who cares about public health, the environment, science, international relations, you could go on, should be scared about another Trump presidency.”
@MatthewCappucci
BREAKING: A rain gauge at UCLA has picked up 12.46 inches of rain in 24 hours.
Per NOAA statistics, that’s 1.1 inches MORE than a thousand-year rainfall event.
The odds of an place in the Los Angeles area seeing a 11.5 inch/24 hour rain event any given year is 0.1%.
The climate scientist Michael Mann on Thursday won his defamation lawsuit against Rand Simberg, a former adjunct scholar at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, and Mark Steyn, a contributor to National Review.
The trial transported observers back to 2012, the heyday of the blogosphere and an era of rancorous polemics over the existence of global warming, what the psychology researcher and climate misinformation blogger John Cook called “a feral time.”
The six-member jury announced its unanimous verdict after a four-week trial in District of Columbia Superior Court and one full day of deliberation. They found both Mr. Simberg and Mr. Steyn guilty of defaming Dr. Mann with multiple false statements and awarded the scientist $1 in compensatory damages from each writer.
The jury also found the writers had made their statements with “maliciousness, spite, ill will, vengeance or deliberate intent to harm,” and levied punitive damages of $1,000 against Mr. Simberg and $1 million against Mr. Steyn in order to deter others from doing the same.
“This is a victory for science and it’s a victory for scientists,” Dr. Mann said.
In 2012, Mr. Simberg and Mr. Steyn drew parallels between controversy over Dr. Mann’s research and the scandal around Jerry Sandusky, the former football coach at Pennsylvania State University who was convicted of sexually assaulting children. Dr. Mann was a professor at Penn State at the time.
“I am pleased that the jury found in my favor on half of the statements at issue in this case, including finding my statement that Dr. Mann engaged in data manipulation was not defamation,” Mr. Simberg said in a statement emailed by his attorney.
Mr. Steyn’s manager, Melissa Howes, wrote in an email: “We always said that Mann never suffered any actual injury from the statement at issue. And today, after twelve years, the jury awarded him one dollar in compensatory damages. The punitive damage award of one million dollars will have to face due process scrutiny under U.S. Supreme Court precedent.”
The two sides argued for days about the truth or falsity of the posts, presenting evidence that included unflattering emails between Dr. Mann and colleagues, excerpts from investigations by Penn State and the National Science Foundation that cleared Dr. Mann of academic misconduct, other scientists who testified that Dr. Mann had ruined their reputations, and a detailed but controversial critique of his research methods by a statistician.
“It’s constitutionally deliberately hard to win defamation suits in cases involving matters of public concern and prominent public figures,” said RonNell Andersen Jones, a law professor at the University of Utah.
Mr. Simberg and Mr. Steyn testified that they sincerely believed what they wrote.
In statements in court at the beginning and again at the end of the trial, Mr. Steyn said he stood “on the truth of every word I wrote about Michael.”
“Inflammatory does not equal defamatory,” said Mr. Simberg’s attorney, Victoria Weatherford, in her closing statement. “Rand is just a guy, just a blogger voicing his truly held opinions on a topic that he believes is important. That is an inconvenient truth for Michael Mann.”
Dr. Mann argued that he lost grant funding following the blog posts and that he had been excluded from at least one research collaboration because his reputation had suffered. The defendants argued that Dr. Mann’s star continued to rise and that he is one of the most successful climate scientists working today.
The presiding judge, Alfred Irving, emphasized to the jury that their job was not to decide whether or not global warming is happening. “I knew that we were walking a fine line from a trial concerning climate change to a trial concerning defamation,” he said earlier while discussing which witnesses to allow.
The story of this lawsuit isn’t over.
In 2021, Judge Irving, along with another D.C. Superior Court judge, decided that the Competitive Enterprise Institute and National Review could not be held liable. The publishers did not meet the bar of “actual malice” imposed on public figures suing for defamation, the judges ruled, meaning employees of the two organizations did not publish Mr. Simberg and Mr. Steyn’s posts knowing them to be false, nor did they have “reckless disregard” for whether the posts were false.
Dr. Mann’s attorneys have indicated that they will appeal this earlier decision. Asked about Competitive Enterprise Institute and National Review, John Williams said, “They’re next.”
The climate scientist Michael Mann on Thursday won his defamation lawsuit against Rand Simberg, a former adjunct scholar at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, and Mark Steyn, a contributor to National Review.
The circulation of the Atlantic Ocean is heading towards a tipping point that is “bad news for the climate system and humanity”, a study has found.
The scientists behind the research said they were shocked at the forecast speed of collapse once the point is reached, although they said it was not yet possible to predict how soon that would happen.
Using computer models and past data, the researchers developed an early warning indicator for the breakdown of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (Amoc), a vast system of ocean currents that is a key component in global climate regulation.
They found Amoc is already on track towards an abrupt shift, which has not happened for more than 10,000 years and would have dire implications for large parts of the world.
Amoc, which encompasses part of the Gulf Stream and other powerful currents, is a marine conveyer belt that carries heat, carbon and nutrients from the tropics towards the Arctic Circle, where it cools and sinks into the deep ocean. This churning helps to distribute energy around the Earth and modulates the impact of human-caused global heating.
But the system is being eroded by the faster-than-expected melt-off of Greenland’s glaciers and Arctic ice sheets, which pours freshwater into the sea and obstructs the sinking of saltier, warmer water from the south.
Amoc has declined 15% since 1950 and is in its weakest state in more than a millennium, according to previous research that prompted speculation about an approaching collapse.
Until now there has been no consensus about how severe this will be. One study last year, based on changes in sea surface temperatures, suggested the tipping point could happen between 2025 and 2095. However, the UK Met Office said large, rapid changes in Amoc were “very unlikely” in the 21st century.
The new paper, published in Science Advances, has broken new ground by looking for warning signs in the salinity levels at the southern extent of the Atlantic Ocean between Cape Town and Buenos Aires. Simulating changes over a period of 2,000 years on computer models of the global climate, it found a slow decline can lead to a sudden collapse over less than 100 years, with calamitous consequences.
The paper said the results provided a “clear answer” about whether such an abrupt shift was possible: “This is bad news for the climate system and humanity as up till now one could think that Amoc tipping was only a theoretical concept and tipping would disappear as soon as the full climate system, with all its additional feedbacks, was considered.”
It also mapped some of the consequences of Amoc collapse. Sea levels in the Atlantic would rise by a metre in some regions, inundating many coastal cities. The wet and dry seasons in the Amazon would flip, potentially pushing the already weakened rainforest past its own tipping point. Temperatures around the world would fluctuate far more erratically. The southern hemisphere would become warmer. Europe would cool dramatically and have less rainfall. While this might sound appealing compared with the current heating trend, the changes would hit 10 times faster than now, making adaptation almost impossible.
“What surprised us was the rate at which tipping occurs,” said the paper’s lead author, René van Westen, of Utrecht University. “It will be devastating.”
He said there was not yet enough data to say whether this would occur in the next year or in the coming century, but when it happens, the changes are irreversible on human timescales.
In the meantime, the direction of travel is undoubtedly in an alarming direction.
“We are moving towards it. That is kind of scary,” van Westen said. “We need to take climate change much more seriously.”
Nations should be cutting emissions to meet Paris agreement, says Michel Forst after year-long inquiry
European nations must end the repression and criminalisation of peaceful protest and urgently take action to cut emissions in line with the Paris climate agreement to limit global heating to 1.5C, the UN special rapporteur on environmental defenders has said.
After a year-long inquiry that included gathering evidence from the UK, Germany, Denmark, the Netherlands, Spain and Portugal, Michel Forst said the repression faced by peaceful environmental activists was a major threat to democracy and human rights.
All of the nations inspected are party to the Aarhus convention, which states that peaceful environmental protest is a legitimate exercise of the public’s right to participate in decision-making and that those engaged in it must be protected.
But Forst said that across Europe the response to peaceful environmental protest was to repress rather than to enable and protect.
“The environmental emergency that we are collectively facing and that scientists have been documenting for decades cannot be addressed if those raising the alarm and demanding action are criminalised for it,” he said.
“The only legitimate response to peaceful environmental activism and civil disobedience at this point is that the authorities, the media and the public realise how essential it is for us all to listen to what environmental defenders have to say.”
Nations should be urgently cutting emissions to meet the Paris agreement, acting to restore 30% of all degraded ecosystems by 2030 and working to substantially reduce deaths and illnesses from air pollution.
Forst said the failure of European nations to act urgently would lead to more direct-action protest. “To date, governments continue to take decisions that directly contradict the clear and urgent recommendations of scientists,” he said.
Forst said the parts of the media and some politicians across Europe were criminalising environmental activism and labelling it a “terrorist threat”. He highlighted the 2023 European Union Terrorism Situation and Trend (TE-SAT), which features environmental activism in its entries on current “extremism”.
“Worryingly, the report classifies roadblocks and the occupation of bank buildings or airports as extremism and appears to take the view that being worried about climate change is an extremist viewpoint,” he said.
In Spain, the 2022 report of the public prosecutor’s office listed Extinction Rebellion under “international terrorism”.
New legislation in many countries, including the UK’s 2022 Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act and the 2023 Public Order Act, a so called “eco-vandalism” law in Italy and legislation in Germany that forbids any form of peaceful protest including sit-ins, was repressive towards peaceful protesters, he said.
“By categorising environmental activism as a potential terrorist threat, by limiting freedom of expression and by criminalising certain forms of protests and protesters, these legislative and policy changes contribute to the shrinking of the civic space and seriously threaten the vitality of democratic societies.”
During his inquiry Forst received several reports of police harassment towards peaceful climate protesters. In Portugal, peaceful protesters had been arrested and detained by the police for “disruption of traffic” after taking part in a protest legally, with its itinerary notified to the authorities in advance. In France, people who tried to join an authorised demonstration had been subjected to widespread identity checks, vehicle searches and confiscation of their personal items by the police.
In addition, journalists covering climate protests have been harassed and arrested across Europe, including in the UK and Poland. In Sweden, a journalist was arrested at a climate protest, subjected to a full strip-search at the police station, held in police custody for six hours and had their equipment confiscated, Forst said.
He said he had recorded countless examples of police brutality. These included shoving and pushing protesters and using “pain grips” to deliberately inflict intense pain. In Austria, Finland, France and the Netherlands, protesters including children have been pepper-sprayed, and in the Netherlands police have used water cannon against non-violent protesters.
Several countries are adopting measures for peaceful demonstrators that are also used against organised criminals. These include early morning raids by counter-terrorism units and the use of undercover police to infiltrate groups.
Forst said states had international obligations related to freedom of expression, peaceful assembly and association and they must abide by these legal duties in their response to environmental protest. He said states had to address the root causes of environmental mobilisation by taking action to address the triple environmental crises of pollution, biodiversity loss and climate change.
Forst’s report was released as the appeal court for England and Wales considers an application from the attorney general to remove one of the last remaining legal defences for protesters engaged in acts of criminal damage. The judges are due to give their ruling in the coming weeks.
The world isn’t on track to meet its climate goals — and it’s the public’s fault, a leading oil company CEO told journalists.
Exxon Mobil Corp. CEO Darren Woods told editors from Fortune that the world has “waited too long” to begin investing in a broader suite of technologies to slow planetary heating.
That heating is largely caused by the burning of fossil fuels, and much of the current impacts of that combustion — rising temperatures, extreme weather — were predicted by Exxon scientists almost half a century ago.
The company’s 1970s and 1980s projections were “at least as skillful as, those of independent academic and government models,” according to a 2023 Harvard study.
Since taking over from former CEO Rex Tillerson, Woods has walked a tightrope between acknowledging the critical problem of climate change — as well as the role of fossil fuels in helping drive it — while insisting fossil fuels must also provide the solution.
In comments before last year’s United Nations Climate Conference (COP28), Woods made a forceful case for carbon capture and storage, a technology in which the planet-heating chemicals released by burning fossil fuels are collected and stored underground.
“While renewable energy is essential to help the world achieve net zero, it is not sufficient,” he said.
“Wind and solar alone can’t solve emissions in the industrial sectors that are at the heart of a modern society.”
International experts agree with the idea in the broadest strokes.
Carbon capture marks an essential component of the transition to “net zero,” in which no new chemicals like carbon dioxide or methane reach — and heat — the atmosphere, according to a report by International Energy Agency (IEA) last year.
But the remaining question is how much carbon capture will be needed, which depends on the future role of fossil fuels.
While this technology is feasible, it is very expensive — particularly in a paradigm in which new renewables already outcompete fossil fuels on price.
And the fossil fuel industry hasn’t been spending money on developing carbon capture technology, IEA head Fatih Birol wrote last year on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.
To be part of a climate solution, Birol added, the fossil fuel industry must “let go of the illusion that implausibly large amounts of carbon capture are the solution.”
He noted that capturing and storing current fossil fuel emissions would require a thousand-fold leap in annual investment from $4 billion in 2022 to $3.5 trillion.
In his comments Tuesday, Woods argued the “dirty secret” is that customers weren’t willing to pay for the added cost of cleaner fossil fuels.
Referring to carbon capture, Woods said Exxon has “tabled proposals” with governments “to get out there and start down this path using existing technology.”
“People can’t afford it, and governments around the world rightly know that their constituents will have real concerns,” he added.
“So we’ve got to find a way to get the cost down to grow the utility of the solution, and make it more available and more affordable, so that you can begin the [clean energy] transition.”
For example, he said Exxon “could, today, make sustainable aviation fuel for the airline business. But the airline companies can’t afford to pay.”
Woods blamed “activists” for trying to exclude the fossil fuel industry from the fight to slow rising temperatures, even though the sector is “the industry that has the most capacity and the highest potential for helping with some of the technologies.”
That is an increasingly controversial argument. Across the world, wind and solar plants with giant attached batteries are outcompeting gas plants, though battery life still needs to be longer to make renewable power truly dispatchable.
Carbon capture is “an answer in search of a question,” Gregory Nemet, a public policy professor at the University of Wisconsin, told The Hill last year.
“If your question is what to do about climate change, your answer is one thing,” he said — likely a massive buildout in solar, wind and batteries.
But for fossil fuel companies asking “‘What is the role for natural gas in a carbon-constrained world?’ — well, maybe carbon capture has to be part of your answer.”
In the background of Woods’s comments about customers’ unwillingness to pay for cleaner fossil fuels is a bigger debate over price in general.
This spring, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) will release its finalized rule on companies’ climate disclosures.
That much-anticipated rule will weigh in on the key question of whose responsibility it is to account for emissions — the customer who burns them (Scope II), or the fossil fuel company that produces them (Scope III).
Exxon has long argued for Scope II, based on the idea that it provides a product and is not responsible for how customers use it.
Last week, Reuters reported that the SEC would likely drop Scope III, a positive development for the companies.
Woods argued last year that SEC Scope III rules would cause Exxon to produce less fossil fuels — which he said would perversely raise global emissions, as its products were replaced by dirtier production elsewhere.
This broad idea — that fossil fuels use can only be cleaned up on the “demand side” — is one some economists dispute.
For the U.S. to decarbonize in an orderly fashion, “restrictive supply-side policies that curtail fossil fuel extraction and support workers and communities must play a role,” Rutgers Univresity economists Mark Paul and Lina Moe wrote last year.
Without concrete moves to plan for a reduction in the fossil fuel supply, “the end of fossil fuels will be a chaotic collapse where workers, communities, and the environment suffer,” they added.
But Woods’s comments Tuesday doubled down on the claim that the energy transition will succeed only when end-users pay the price.
“People who are generating the emissions need to be aware of [it] and pay the price,” Woods said.
“That’s ultimately how you solve the problem.”
Climate change is increasing the risk of wildfires in Texas, a danger made real this week as the Smokehouse Creek fire, the largest in state history, burns out of control across the Panhandle region.
And that growing fire risk is beginning to affect the insurance market in Texas, raising premiums for homeowners and causing some insurers to withdraw from parts of the state.
For the Smokehouse Creek fire to grow so big so quickly, three weather conditions had to align: high temperatures, low relative humidity and strong winds, said John Nielsen-Gammon, the Texas state climatologist and a professor of atmospheric science at Texas A&M University.
On Monday, as the Smokehouse Creek fire began to spread, it was 82 degrees Fahrenheit in Amarillo. The city’s average daytime high temperature in February is 54 degrees, according to the National Weather Service.
As of Thursday, a New York Times tracker based on federal data shows more than one million acres burning, making the fire one of the most destructive in U.S. history.
Temperatures in Texas have risen by 0.61 degrees Fahrenheit per decade since 1975, according to a 2021 report by the state climatologist’s office. The relative humidity in this region has been decreasing as well, Dr. Nielsen-Gammon said. It’s less clear whether the winds have changed significantly.
Climate change is likely making fire season start earlier and last longer, he said, by increasing the number of days in a year with hot and dry weather conditions that enable wildfires.
Texas is currently the state with the second highest number of properties that are vulnerable to wildfires, behind Florida, according to analysis by the nonprofit research group First Street Foundation.
In most of Texas, wildfires happen in the summer. But across the Southern Plains, including the Texas Panhandle, fire risk is highest around March when temperatures warm, strong winds blow over the flat landscape and dry grass left from the previous growing season can easily catch fire.
Only about 1 percent of wildfires in Texas happen in the Panhandle, but the region accounts for half of the state’s acres burned, said Sean Dugan, a spokesman for the Texas A&M Forest Service. “They’re not very numerous. But when they do happen, they get really big,” he said.
Normally, if there is no drought, in April the landscape starts to become green and the Panhandle’s fire risk goes down. But this year, there are “enhanced chances” of a dry spring and summer and a hot summer, Dr. Nielsen-Gammon said. As a result, he expects the fire risk to remain high in the Panhandle and it may be higher during the summer in the rest of the state as well.
As the climate changes, the very concept of a fire season is becoming blurry.
“There were clear fire seasons for Texas in the past, but fires have become a year-round threat,” said Yongqiang Liu, a meteorologist at the U.S. Forest Service’s Southern Research Station, in an email.
Texans are noticing the uptick in extreme weather events, said Jeremy Mazur, a senior policy adviser at Texas 2036, a nonpartisan research organization that helps fund an extreme weather report written by the state climatologist.
A top concern of residents is the rising cost of homeowners insurance, according to a recent survey conducted by Texas 2036. About 88 percent of 1,000 likely voters polled expressed some level of concern about extreme weather events increasing what they pay for property insurance.
“The real impact that we’re starting to see from this growing wildfire risk is in the form of growing property insurance premiums,” Mr. Mazur said.
Texas homeowners saw their insurance rates increase 53.6 percent between 2019 and 2023, according to data compiled by S&P Global Market Intelligence. That was the highest rate of any state save for Arizona.
Allstate, the second-largest insurer in Texas, included wildfires as one of its “greatest areas of potential catastrophe losses” in a regulatory filing this month.
Some insurance companies have begun to withdraw from parts of the Texas market. People in Llano and Burnet counties, southwest of Dallas, report being dropped by their insurers because of wildfire risk, the news outlet KXAN reported last week.
State legislators are starting to take note, but more action is needed, Mr. Mazur said. During the last legislative session, a Republican representative from East Texas introduced a bill to require the state forest service to recommend ways to mitigate the state’s wildfire risks. The bill was removed from the calendar before the end of session.
Abstract
Ocean-driven melting of floating ice-shelves in the Amundsen Sea is currently the main process controlling Antarctica’s contribution to sea-level rise. Using a regional ocean model, we present a comprehensive suite of future projections of ice-shelf melting in the Amundsen Sea. We find that rapid ocean warming, at approximately triple the historical rate, is likely committed over the twenty-first century, with widespread increases in ice-shelf melting, including in regions crucial for ice-sheet stability. When internal climate variability is considered, there is no significant difference between mid-range emissions scenarios and the most ambitious targets of the Paris Agreement. These results suggest that mitigation of greenhouse gases now has limited power to prevent ocean warming that could lead to the collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet.
If you have been enjoying lushly covered mountains by skiing or snowboarding this winter then such an experience could soon become a receding memory, with a new study finding that an era of reliably bountiful snow has already passed due to the climate crisis.
The US ski industry has lost more than $5bn over the past two decades due to human-caused global heating, the new research has calculated, due to the increasingly sparse nature of snowfall on mountain ranges. Previous studies have shown that in many locations precipitation is now coming in the form of rain, rather than snow, due to warming temperatures.
This situation, the new study states, has shortened the average ski season in the US by five to seven days over the past half century, costing the industry an average of $252m a year from lost revenue and the rising cost of making snow via machines.
“We are probably past the era of peak ski seasons,” said Daniel Scott, a scientist at the University of Waterloo in Canada, who undertook the research with colleagues at the University of Innsbruck. “Climate change is an evolving business reality for the ski industry and the tourism sector.”
An unusually warm winter for parts of the US, as well as ski resorts in Europe, have illustrated the mounting problems facing the pastime. Mountains across France, Austria and Bosnia have been left almost entirely bare of snow, forcing ski lifts to judder to a halt and resorts to shutter.
In the US, sites across the western half of the country have reported less than half the normal snowpack, causing resorts to scramble into greater snow production or scale back their offering to skiers.
“The record-breaking temperatures this winter provided a preview of the future,” Scott said. “It tested the limits of snowmaking in many areas and altered millions of skiers’ ski visits and destination choices.”
Last year was the hottest, globally, ever recorded and 2024 is following this with extraordinary levels of heat that have set new records in January and February. The absence of a normal winter in many locations has been evident in the mountains, with the lack of snow not only imperiling winter sports but also risking a crucial reservoir of water where melting snowpack feeds rivers and streams throughout spring.
The winnowing away of ski seasons is already evident, according to the new research which compared winters from the 1960s and 1970s with the two decades since 2000. The shrinkage is set to continue as the world heats up further due to the burning of fossil fuels, with ski seasons set to be reduced by 14 to 33 days by the 2050s, even if the world is able to severely cut planet-heating emissions and develop advanced methods to make snow.
Should the world fail to curtail emissions the future is even bleaker, the study forecast, with as much as two months of the year lost for ski conditions by the mid-part of the century if this occurs.
“Average ski seasons in all US regional markets are projected to get shorter in the decades ahead under all emission futures,” Scott said.
“How much shorter depends on the ability of all countries to deliver on their Paris climate agreement emission reduction commitments and whether global warming temperatures are held below 2C (3.6F).”
Abstract
Observed Arctic sea ice losses are a sentinel of anthropogenic climate change. These reductions are projected to continue with ongoing warming, ultimately leading to an ice-free Arctic (sea ice area <1 million km2). In this Review, we synthesize understanding of the timing and regional variability of such an ice-free Arctic. In the September monthly mean, the earliest ice-free conditions (the first single occurrence of an ice-free Arctic) could occur in 2020–2030s under all emission trajectories and are likely to occur by 2050. However, daily September ice-free conditions are expected approximately 4 years earlier on average, with the possibility of preceding monthly metrics by 10 years. Consistently ice-free September conditions (frequent occurrences of an ice-free Arctic) are anticipated by mid-century (by 2035–2067), with emission trajectories determining how often and for how long the Arctic could be ice free. Specifically, there is potential for ice-free conditions in May–January and August–October by 2100 under a high-emission and low-emission scenario, respectively. In all cases, sea ice losses begin in the European Arctic, proceed to the Pacific Arctic and end in the Central Arctic, if becoming ice free at all. Future research must assess the impact of model selection and recalibration on projections, and assess the drivers of internal variability that can cause early ice-free conditions.
New England fishers are on thin ice this winter as warming temperatures force them to abandon their lake perches months ahead of schedule, an alarming reality that could jeopardize the future of a deeply rooted recreational tradition.
Ice fishing is a way of life in places like New Hampshire, where people flock to frozen lakes each winter with their bob-houses in tow.
These little houses – diminutive, hand-built wooden shanties mounted on sled gliders so they can be pulled into the middle of frozen lakes – have long offered protection from the freezing northern winds. In recent years they have become ever more elaborate, with holes built into their floors for hauling in fish, along with heaters, solar panels, lights and even TVs.
But ice fishers are increasingly finding themselves stuck on the lakeside after being forced to abandon their efforts unseasonably early.
On a recent Tuesday in late February, with midwinter temperatures pushing into the balmy 50s, fishers on New Hampshire’s Lake Winnepocket were scrambling to pull their bob-houses off the rapidly melting ice.
Johnny Cutter and Ethan O’Neil rushed to slide their ice shanties off the lake with winches and tractor-like all terrain vehicles, before it got warm enough for them to fall through the ice.
“Global warming is real,” said Cutter, wading through puddles in his ice cleats. “I never thought it was, but it is.”
O’Neil, who was working to hoist his little house on to some rounded logs so he could roll it on to planks lined up on the lakeshore, agreed. “Tell everybody in the lower states to stop using their air conditioners, so we’ll have winter up here.”
According to Stephen Baron, a meteorologist with the nearest National Weather Service station, in Gray, Maine, temperatures never dropped below 0F (-18C) in the area around Concord, New Hampshire, this winter – a phenomenon that has not occurred since the winter of 1952-53.
“As of right now, the average temperature is only one-tenth of a degree off of it being the warmest winter ever on record,” he said, adding that those Concord records go all the way back to 1869.
Cutter has been ice fishing on nearby lakes in New Hampshire since his youth, when his stepdad brought him out on the ice with a pup tent and a portable heater brand-named “Mr Buddy”.
“The houses then weren’t as glamorous as the ones we have now,” he said. “Mine has a 300-watt solar panel on the top. It runs all my electrical and my TV. I even have a disco ball.”
In recent years, the bob-houses have had to be pulled from the lakes far earlier than the state-mandated deadline of 1 April. Cutter said this year some of the local fishing derbies had been canceled because of the perilously thin ice. And, with a late start to winter and an early melt, his house was only on the ice for 20 days.
The heating ice can create dangerous conditions for the fishers. In other parts of the country, several people have fallen in, sometimes fatally. In recent years, authorities have had to haul Jeeps and ATVs out of melting lakes.
“I had to help pull out a bob-house out that fell in three years ago,” said Cutter, adding that a friend had built that house with a glass roof, which ended up turning it into a heating greenhouse that melted a hole in the ice beneath it.
“It was floating,” he said. “That’s the reason they call it a bob-house, because it was literally bobbing.” (It’s one of several theories put forward to explain the name; others have suggested it’s related to the bobbing of a fishing line.)
Last Tuesday, despite the brilliant sun, Cutter estimated that the ice on Lake Winnepocket was still 10in thick and safe to walk on – at least until the warm rains forecast for that evening came in.
Cutter looked across the ice and saw an orange flag rise up on one of the wooden ice fishing traps he had set a few hundred feet across the lake. The traps are rigged with “tip-ups”, simple mechanisms that cause a flag to raise when a fish pulls on a line dangling through the ice hole into the water.
Cutter jumped on his ATV and powered across the ice to pull the line up. He started whooping with joy when he pulled in a hefty, large-mouthed bass, which he estimated weighed at least 5lb.
He posed for a picture, then quickly released the bass back into the hole, which he said was “best for the lake”.
“It’s just great being out here,” he said. “This is a huge hobby for us. And we’re losing the opportunities to do it.”
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Many climate risks in Europe require urgent action now
The assessment identifies 36 major climate risks for Europe within five broad clusters: ecosystems, food, health, infrastructure, and economy and finance. More than half of the major climate risks identified in the report demand more action now and eight of them are particularly urgent, mainly to conserve ecosystems, protect people against heat, protect people and infrastructure from floods and wildfires, and to secure the viability of European solidarity mechanisms, such as the EU Solidarity Fund.
Ecosystems: Almost all risks in the ecosystem cluster require urgent or more action, with risks to marine and coastal ecosystems assessed as particularly severe. The EEA report reminds that ecosystems provide multiple services to people, and therefore these risks have a high potential to cascade to other areas, including food, health, infrastructure, and economy.
Food: Risks from heat and drought to crop production are already at a critical level in southern Europe, but countries in central Europe are also at risk. Especially, prolonged droughts that affect large areas pose a significant threat on crop production, food security and drinking water supplies. As one solution, even a partial shift from animal-based proteins to sustainably grown plant-based proteins, would reduce water consumption in agriculture and dependency on imported feed.
Health: Heat is the gravest and most urgent climate risk driver for human health. At greatest risk are specific population groups, such as outdoor workers exposed to extreme heat, the elderly and people living in poorly built dwellings, in areas with a strong urban heat island effect or with inadequate access to cooling. Many levers to reduce climate risks for health lie outside traditional health policies, such as urban planning, building standards and labour laws.
Infrastructure: More frequent and extreme weather events increase the risks to Europe’s built environment and critical services, including energy, water and transport. While coastal flood risks have been managed relatively well in Europe, rising sea levels and changes in storm patterns can cause devastating impacts on people, infrastructure and economic activities. In southern Europe, heat and droughts cause substantial risks to energy production, transmission and demand. Residential buildings also need to be adapted to increasing heat.
Economy and finance: Europe’s economy and financial system are facing many climate risks. For example, climate extremes can increase insurance premiums, threaten assets and mortgages, and increase government expenditure and loan costs. The viability of the EU Solidarity Fund is already critically threatened due to costly floods and wildfires in recent years. Worsening climate impacts can also widen private insurance gaps and make low-income households more vulnerable.
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Europe is the fastest warming continent in the world...
It would mean severe global climate repercussions, with Europe bearing the brunt of the consequences.
Scientists have successfully modelled a climate tipping point that would plunge large parts of Europe into a deep freeze - and it could be closer than previously thought.
Using a complex climate model, researchers from Utrecht University in the Netherlands simulated the collapse of an important Atlantic Ocean current which currently brings warm water north and keeps temperatures in Europe mild.
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What would a collapse of the ocean current mean for Europe?
If the AMOC collapses, previous research has shown the resulting climate impacts would be nearly irreversible in human timescales. It would mean severe global climate repercussions, with Europe bearing the brunt of the consequences.
Some parts of Europe could see temperatures plunge by up to 30C. On average, the model shows London cooling by 10C and Bergen by 15C.
The report’s authors say that “no realistic adaptation measures can deal with such rapid temperature changes”.
