Climate

Scientists called the news ‘particularly worrying’ because ice reflects sunlight and cools the planet

Global sea ice fell to a record low in February, scientists have said, a symptom of an atmosphere fouled by planet-heating pollutants.

The combined area of ice around the north and south poles hit a new daily minimum in early February and stayed below the previous record for the rest of the month, the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) said on Thursday.

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A government spreadsheet lists thousands of campsites and trails that could shutter for the summer because of federal government staff reductions and budget freezes.

Conservationists say the rodents will fix ecosystems and bring wildlife back to wetlands

• ‘I feel real hope’: historic beaver release marks conservation milestone in England

Beavers have been legally released for the first time into England’s rivers. Conservationists are celebrating, as they say the large rodents will help heal broken ecosystems and bring wildlife back to wetland habitats.

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Cyclone Alfred formed in the Coral Sea towards the end of February when sea surface temperatures were almost 1C hotter than usual

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Tropical Cyclone Alfred is due to hit south-east Queensland about 1am on Friday morning, bringing the risk of destructive winds, extreme flooding and storm surges to millions of people around Brisbane, the Gold Coast and northern New South Wales.

After last year was recorded as the hottest on record around the world, and the hottest for Australia’s oceans, what role could the climate crisis be playing in Tropical Cyclone Alfred and its impacts?

When and where is Cyclone Alfred likely to hit?

How to prepare for a cyclone

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He is surrounded by people who have grandiose plans and dreams beyond our planet. Vengeful nihilism is a big part of the Maga project

In thinking about the war being waged against life on Earth by Donald Trump, Elon Musk and their minions, I keep bumping into a horrible suspicion. Could it be that this is not just about delivering the world to oligarchs and corporations – not just about wringing as much profit from living systems as they can? Could it be that they want to see the destruction of the habitable planet?

We know that Trump’s overriding purpose is power. We have seen that no amount of power appears to satisfy his craving. So let’s consider power’s ultimate destination. It is to become not only an emperor, but the last of the emperors: to close the chapter on civilisation. It is to scratch your name indelibly upon a geological epoch. Look on my works, ye vermin, and despair.

George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist

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After a relentless deluge of Trump administration attacks, overwhelmingly at the hands of Elon Musk, the nation’s exceptional, thriving innovation machine is teetering on the brink. 

The ramifications are calamitous.  

Since World War II, the US has committed itself to robustly supporting the scientific enterprise, that great endless frontier, in recognition of the wellspring of public benefits that such research can ultimately bring forth. At the heart of that commitment is the central tenet that science should be a public good, for public good. The US research enterprise reflects that, with the nation supporting a vast ecosystem within which a staggering array of public and private actors—and their many and varied areas of interest—can flourish.  

Musk is now knowingly, deliberately, gleefully taking an ax to the whole of it.  

With the full and unyielding support of President Trump and his administration’s leadership, Musk is directing the indiscriminate firing of federal workers, casting off hard-earned, impossible-to-replace expertise. 

He is hamstringing agencies and their capacity to execute research internally and launch significantly more research externally. 

He is slashing universities’ and research institutions’ capacity to pursue bold new ideas, as well as onboard and train the next generation of innovators. 

He is arbitrarily and catastrophically reneging on government contracts and agreements, leaving pioneering new investments in the lurch while undermining faith in future government-supported endeavors. 

He is isolating the nation’s researchers by attacking vital channels of international coordination and collaboration that have long improved our own country’s work.  

And instead, courtesy the world’s richest man whose riches rest upon the very system he now abhors: science behind a paywall; knowledge for a fee.  

Firing federal researchers, hamstringing federal agencies  

Federal researchers are positioned at agencies throughout the government, at institutions as wide-ranging as the Centers for Disease Control, the Environmental Protection Agency, the US Department of Agriculture, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.  

From tracking food safety outbreaks, to studying pollution controls, to analyzing crop yields; from triaging pending pandemics, to identifying infrastructure vulnerabilities to cyberattacks, to flying through hurricane eyewalls. Civil servants, in civil service, pushing for insights that ultimately help to unravel how things work, how things break, and how we, as a society, can push ever forward.  

But now, Musk is directing the slashing of the federal workforce, without concern for the role, the expertise, the loss, the cost.  

Take, for example, the mass firing of federal workers on probationary status. Conservative estimates suggest that this has impacted approximately 20,000 workers thus far, though lack of transparent reporting, as well subsequent re-hirings, have muddied accurate accounting. The Trump administration has further signaled its apparent intent of ultimately slashing nearly all of the hundreds of thousands of employees on probationary status—albeit now under new cover. 

This move is illegal on its face, and is being advanced in a manner that is entirely devoid of authority. 

Moreover, it is fully untethered from any coherent strategy. Notably, “probationary” does not equal “junior” or even “new,” as promotions and position shifts can result in a return to probationary status. Indeed, such firings are only being advanced because probationary employees have fewer workplace protections and are thus easier to fire.  

The net result, the intended result, is a staggering theft of publicly funded, publicly held knowledge and expertise—as well as the theft of all the ways in which that publicly held expertise would have served the interests of the public in the hours, days, and decades to come.  

Much will be lost outright. That which is not lost faces threats of privatization and paywalls. Think hurricane warnings for the rich—not for the most exposed; drought forecasts for commodity traders—not for the farmers planting rows.  

And this is just the beginning.  

At the same time that agencies are being forced to draw up broader plans for even more massive reductions in staffing, they are also being directed to abandon core and critical areas of work. The ensuing involuntary atrophy of capacity and achievement will then be cynically invoked to justify even further staffing cuts in the time to come.  

For those who remain, the work will change. Not just in the way in which an administration change always signals the arrival of new priorities, nor even in the way in which a specifically, relentlessly anti-science administration will antagonize the means of executing those priorities.  

No, this cuts deeper.  

The Trump administration is already forcing the nation’s remaining federal scientists and experts to insulate and isolate: to depart from coordinating bodies, to abandon collaborative endeavors, to extract themselves from the inherently interconnected affair of scientific research. 

At Musk’s and Trump’s direction, federal agencies are seizing up. And as they do, so too does the capacity of the scientific enterprise to serve the public good.  

Slashing federal support for research and innovation 

As harmful as the arbitrary attacks on federal agencies and federal experts are for the nation’s public good, attacks on the federal government’s ability to support the broader innovation ecosystem threaten to be even worse.  

In 2024, US support for research and development totaled approximately $200 billion dollars.  

More than half of that funding was dedicated to defense. Of the rest, approximately half was allocated to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), while the rest was channeled through a range of agencies including the Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation, NASA, Commerce, USDA, and more.   

And yet, the Trump administration is now attempting to illegally seize the funds outright or, where stopped, undertake other means to achieve the same outcome.  

Take what’s occurred at NIH.  

Of NIH’s approximately $47 billion budget, as much as 85 percent is awarded to outside research. In 2023, that funding translated into approximately 60,000 awards, supporting more than 300,000 scientists, at more than 2,700 entities, across all 50 states. A recent sample of that research: a vaccine to treat pancreatic cancer, novel ways to detect Alzheimer’s earlier, and the most detailed mapping yet of human brain cells, to name just three.  

A scientific-, economic-, innovation-spurring, and life-saving colossus—which the Trump administration is now actively, unrelentingly working to break. 

Since Day 1, the Trump administration has alternately attempted: directly freezing funds, indirectly freezing funds, freezing the means by which funds can actually be granted, firing the workforce required to process funds, limiting the scope of what can be funded, and dramatically curtailing how research institutions are compensated.  

What’s occurred at NIH is shocking. It also should not be viewed as a one-off. 

For one thing, the administration directed the freezing of all funds, disbursed by all agencies. Same for limiting research agendas. Same for wildly disruptive workforce firings. And there is no reason to believe that attempts at abrupt, severe changes in indirect cost rates will stop at NIH. 

Accordingly, the chill is setting in. Research institutions across the country are confronting this injection of wild uncertainty into the funding picture and bracing for shattering impact. Already, word is emerging of institutions halting enrollment for the next class of researchers—the canary, in plain sight. But the specter of calamitous funding shortfalls is also leading to broader hiring freezes, holds on approvals of new instruments and equipment, and overall adoption of austerity measures.  

If these attacks do not soon relent, austerity will be just the start.  

Moreover, at the same time as the administration is attempting to knock out the research foundations of the US scientific enterprise, it is also—again illegally, again incomprehensibly—attempting to dismantle the scaffolding established by forward-looking industrial policy intended to help turn that research into applied solutions.  

These are policy instruments and investments meant to ensure that the technologies, the industries, the workforces our nation will want and need to have on hand to respond to the challenges confronting us are strategically nurtured and developed. Under Musk’s and Trump’s hands, however, the green shoots of those policies—the manufacturing investments, the job training programs, the novel solutions—are withering in salted earth.  

What could be—and what gets lost 

Musk and his team of DOGE scavengers revel in spotlighting off-beat grants—nevermind the repeated falsehoods of their “efficiency” claims, nevermind the rapidly accruing expenses resulting from their lawless execution of unconstitutional actions. Moreover, these identifications are not the wins they think. 

The hallmark of the US commitment to the scientific enterprise is just that: A commitment to science, and in so doing, a commitment to curiosity. It is precisely because of that fiercely held commitment to curiosity, and its attendant tolerance of funding work that could ultimately fail to deliver, that the US has cultivated the research envy of the world. These are, at their core, the conditions required to allow for pioneering, truly path-breaking discovery.   

Now, as Musk and his DOGE team hunt for the latest bad-faith headline to win the internet for the day, they lurch the country another step further, another step further, another step further to rendering the whole of the publicly-oriented scientific enterprise obsolete.  

As the endless frontier recedes, in its place looms the pitch-black darkness of pay-to-play, with a public cut off from the vast riches enabled by civil science, in civil service.  

In the heart of Utah’s Uinta Mountains, a team of scientists is re-creating historical pictures to study how much, and how quickly, ecosystems are changing.

Este tipo de pensamiento, que indica que solo hay espacio para un ganador, se ha extendido como un virus mental desde la geopolítica hasta la cultura pop.

Scientists are studying whether the grounded A23a iceberg might help stir nutrients and make food more available for penguins and seals

The world’s biggest iceberg appears to have run aground roughly 70km (43 miles) from a remote Antarctic island, potentially sparing the crucial wildlife haven from being hit, a research organisation said Tuesday.

The colossal iceberg A23a – which measures roughly 3,300 sq km and weighs nearly 1tn tonnes – has been drifting north from Antarctica towards South Georgia island since 2020.

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Since 2008, embassies and other diplomatic posts had been publishing data about local air quality. In many countries, it was the only reliable source of such information.

The Justice Department and F.B.I. are investigating $20 billion in climate funds, despite a top prosecutor’s decision that there was not sufficient evidence of wrongdoing.

Cutting down emissions of planet-warming methane from oil and gas production was supposed to be relatively simple. It hasn’t worked that way.

A massive superberg, four times as big as New York City, has halted east of the southern tip of South America.

Powerful thunderstorms likely to sweep through Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama

Severe thunderstorms are forecast to batter the southern and central United States on Tuesday, with a threat of tornadoes, damaging winds, blizzards, flash flooding and dust storms possible from the southern Plains into the lower Mississippi Valley and south-east.

Meteorologists warn that a line of powerful thunderstorms will probably sweep through Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama, and could include destructive tornadoes. The main threats are strong destructive gales, tornadoes and at least some areas of large hail.

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How do you stop people worrying about the climate emergency? By sacking anyone whose job it is to keep an eye on it. Chalk up another win for Project 2025

Some politicians go whichever way the wind blows. Not, however, the US’s esteemed leader, Donald Trump. He is such a force of nature that he can dictate the direction of the wind. During his first term, he suggested “nuking hurricanes” to stop them from hitting the country. A few weeks after that, Trump seemed to think he could alter the course of Hurricane Dorian with a black marker, scribbling over an official map to change its anticipated trajectory in an incident now known as Sharpiegate. Weirdly, Dorian did not end up following Trump’s orders. Hurricanes can be uncooperative like that.

Six weeks into Trump’s second term, the president hasn’t bombed any hurricanes, but he has nuked the US’s weather-forecasting capabilities. Last week, hundreds of workers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa), the US’s pre-eminent climate research agency, were abruptly fired.

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Many people may be taken aback by reading the news headlines about hundreds of wildfires breaking out in the Carolinas and Georgia this week. The latest wildland fire outlook also shows extreme wildfire risks for the Southern plains, including parts of Texas and New Mexico. Unfortunately, hotter, drier conditions, coupled with gusty winds, are contributing to an early wildfire season, which already got off to a catastrophic start with the deadly, costly LA wildfires in January. The Trump-Musk regime’s cuts to crucial agency budgets and staffing will undoubtedly add to risks this year.  

Mapping wildfire risk

While wildfire risks in California have lessened for now, wildfire risk predictions in early February were already signaling the risks to the Carolinas. Here’s what the latest map of above-normal fire risk looks like for March. (And, yes, in case you were wondering, these outlooks depend in part on data from NOAA’s National Weather Service. Another reason why the Trump administration’s attacks on NOAA make no sense).

The latest wildland fire outlook report highlights especially high wildfire risks in the Southeast:

Most of the rest of the Southeast will start March off with unusually dry fuels for this time of year. The highest significant fire potential is expected to occur from the Florida Big Bend into western North Carolina due to impacts from Helene or other recent hurricanes, in addition to the longer-term dryness that has been the rule since hurricane season.

It also calls attention to high risks in the southern Great Plains:

Confidence is increasing in a high impact spring fire season across the southern Great Plains. The expected weather pattern and its impacts to the fire environment are of major concern, and at least weekly high-end wind events are plausible through March and April. Areas with normal and especially above normal grass loading will be most susceptible to unusually large fires

What’s behind the high wildfire risks?

The immediate spark for wildfires can come from fires carelessly or purposely set by people, malfunctioning power infrastructure, lightning or other proximate causes. But, once sparked, the background weather, climate and ecological conditions can greatly increase the risks of large fires taking hold and spreading rapidly.

Emerging dry and drought conditions are one of the classic precursors to an increase in wildfire risk, as we are seeing in parts of the southeast and southern plains now.

Another set of more complex factors is also highlighted in the latest wildfire prediction report: the multi-season, long-term effects of previous storms, droughts and bark beetle infestations.

For example, Hurricane Helene’s devastating impacts across Florida, Georgia, the Carolinas and Tennessee damaged and killed trees that are now more prone to serve as fuel for wildfires and burn under dry conditions. The record-breaking rainfall that accompanied that storm also contributed to the growth of new vegetation that is now drying out, again adding to the load of flammable material. A historic drought in 2023 and subsequent pine beetle infestation are also now contributing to higher fire risks in Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana.

All of these underlaying factors are affected by climate change, and they show how some of the markers for wildfire seasons are set well before summer, which is considered to be the time of peak fire risk.

April’s outlook shows that risks will remain high in the southeast and southwest. It also expands the above-normal fire risk to parts of Alaska, where abnormally dry conditions around Bristol Bay and Kodiak Island create high fire risk. As the report notes: If this trend continues into spring, there is the potential for a busy start to the fire season across much of southern Alaska.

It’s never too early to prepare for fire season

Hopefully, the fires burning right now will soon be brought under control and people will remain safe. If there’s one thing this potentially high impact spring wildfire season shows, it’s that it’s never too early to prepare. States and communities in these high-risk zones need to take stock now to make sure they have taken all the advance precautions they can to limit the risk of fires starting. And, should fires break out, there must be plans in place for how best to protect people from the dangers including safe evacuation routes if needed.

Policymakers at the state and federal levels must make sure adequate funding and resources are available to deal with wildfires, and to help fire-damaged communities get back on their feet.

Worsening wildfire seasons will also contribute to the ongoing challenges in the property insurance market, another hardship for homeowners and everyone struggling with the lack of affordable housing. And wildfire smoke is a health hazard that can affect people hundreds of miles away from the original fire site.

Trump administration budget cuts and layoffs will worsen risks to people

The Trump administration’s mass layoffs of thousands of forest service employees, combined with federal funding freezes that affect wildfire mitigation and prevention projects, are their own red flag warnings going into this year’s fire season. Across the board, indiscriminately cutting staff and budgets at agencies such as NOAA, USDA and FEMA that contribute to predictive data and wildfire risk mapping, firefighting, and disaster response and recovery will only make things more unsafe for everyone.

Instead, the nation must scale up investments in solutions that will help people this fire season, and in the future, as our climate continues to heat up.

While millions live with regular blackouts and limited energy, plants are being built to satisfy the global demand for digital storage and processing – piling pressure on an already fragile system

Thirty-six hours by boat from Manaus, the capital of Amazonas state, Deodato Alves da Silva longs for enough electricity to keep his tucumã and cupuaçu fruits fresh. These highly nutritious Amazonian superfoods are rich in antioxidants and vitamins, and serve as a main source of income for farmers in Silva’s area. However, the lack of electricity to refrigerate the fruit makes it hard to sell their produce.

Silva’s fruit-growing operation is located in the village of Boa Frente, in Novo Aripuanã municipality, one of Brazil’s most energy-poor regions, where there is only one diesel-powered electricity generator working for a few hours a day.

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A backlash against climate initiatives appears to have resonated in conservative strongholds – and could influence future policy

• A country divided: five key takeaways from the German election

The empty factories in Plattling and Straßkirchen sit just 6 miles (10km) apart but they tell two very different tales about the state of Germany’s economy.

In Plattling, an ailing paper factory closed two years ago and put 500 people out of work – a casualty of high gas prices and a symbol of the nationwide “deindustrialisation” that conservatives have blamed squarely on the Greens.

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The Biden administration had sued to force the Denka Performance Elastomer plant in Louisiana to reduce emissions of chloroprene, a likely carcinogen.

The backlash against the electric vehicle company has intensified as the billionaire ally of President Trump exerts his power over the federal government.