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When Rebecca Lindsey was fired from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration last February, the first thing she did was stew. Then she worried about what was going to happen to the website she and her team had built over the last decade and a half. Lindsey had long been the lead writer and editor, and more recently the program manager, of Climate.gov, a site that distilled the agency’s research on climate change into easy-to-understand, free resources for the public. 

She was right to be concerned: Within a matter of months, the Trump administration had eliminated the rest of the staff supporting Climate.gov and shut down the website — ironically, to comply with an executive order calling for “restoring gold standard science.”

“I couldn’t stand the thought of it all being thrown away,” Lindsey said of the website, which had been used by teachers, community leaders, and policymakers. It had also given researchers in the government important insight into what everyday Americans needed to know about climate science and how to answer their questions effectively. Members of the former Climate.gov team met periodically to discuss what could be done to preserve the work. By the end of last summer, they’d decided to create an independent version of the site. It launched late last month with a new nongovernmental domain: Climate.us. 

The intent behind Climate.us isn’t just to save what was on the Climate.gov website when it died, but to continue to update it with new visuals, explainers, features, and Q&As, making climate science relevant to people with resources that are vetted by scientists. “We just try to constantly take the pulse of what scientists say is valuable and important and needs to be talked about and explained,” Lindsey said.

Since its launch two weeks ago, the new site has gotten about 800,000 page views — an impressive number, considering that the old NOAA site had been getting about a million views a month, according to Lindsey.

Read Next Why the federal government is making climate data disappear Kate Yoder

After President Donald Trump took office a second time, some of the most easy-to-understand resources to help people understand the warming planet disappeared. The National Climate Assessments, congressionally mandated reports released every four years that translated the science into warnings for policymakers and the public, vanished last summer. In December, the Environmental Protection Agency removed at least 80 webpages about the causes, indicators, and effects of climate change. The EPA webpage explaining the causes of climate change no longer lists human activity as a direct driver of global warming. It now emphasizes — misleadingly — natural processes. 

Izzy Pacenza, who monitors government websites for the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative, called it “an all-out assault on climate information.”

Thousands gather at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., to defend science as a public good and central pillar of social progress in March 2025. Astrid Riecken / The Washington Post via Getty Images Beyond the federal government

As organizations race to fill the gap left by the United States’ attack on its own scientific knowledge, many experts see an opportunity to shield research and data from the shifting winds of politics. The world’s science has relied on massive support from the U.S. government, but experts see a future that disperses some of its responsibilities, including how data is collected, handled, preserved, and used.

“It can’t just be the federal government anymore,” said Janice Lachance, executive director and CEO of the American Geophysical Union, the largest Earth and space organization in the world. “That’s proven to us that that’s unreliable, that there’s too much control in very few hands. And so how do we distribute this to like-minded organizations, civil society, and [nongovernmental organizations] who care about it?

The American Geophysical Union is trying to fill the void where it can. It has launched a global initiative to ensure that environmental datasets are more resilient against threats such as political interference, pulling together a group of about 100 experts around the world. It’s also working with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the world’s leading authority on climate science, hosting an academic network that allows U.S. scientists to participate in key international reports even after the Trump administration withdrew from the group. Along with the American Meteorological Society, it has also released an invitation for climate manuscripts to maintain the research momentum of what would have been the sixth National Climate Assessment, with plans to eventually publish a special climate collection across different peer-reviewed journals.

Read Next Why this NASA climate scientist wants you to stay angry Clayton Aldern

For many former federal researchers like Lindsey, trying to carry on their previous work at nonprofits and through independent initiatives has been challenging. 

Adam Smith, who led a project tracking billion-dollar weather and climate disasters at NOAA before the agency ended the program last year, has taken the work over to the nonprofit Climate Central. The project is now up and running with all the same data and methods, but it took almost a year to get it fully where it was back at NOAA. The research is important, Smith said, because it quantifies the economic effects of extreme weather, helping to communicate the real-world consequences of climate change to businesses, policymakers, and the public. He is working to develop the project further, documenting disasters that cost $100 million or more back to 1980. 

Creating an independent copy of the Climate.gov site wasn’t easy, either. Researchers who had no experience fundraising had to crowdsource money and court philanthropists to back their work, Lindsey said. Web developers had to update all the old links that directed people to the defunct original site. The Climate.us team wanted independent scientific review for their materials, as they had done at NOAA, but some scientists declined to put their names on a defunded federal project because of unwanted publicity or fear of retaliation. 

Lindsey managed to revive the site as one of just three full-time staff, compared to roughly eight people who were running the operation under NOAA full-time. 

“In a lot of ways, I feel I’m back in 2010 when we first started building Climate.gov,” she said. “There are days when I think, ‘What am I doing? Do I have it in me to start this all over again?’”

These efforts to save climate information are crucial, experts said, but it’s tough for a patchwork of nonprofits, universities, and independent initiatives to fill the vacuum left by the federal government removing the most accessible resources about climate change. “No nonprofit is going to have the reach of the federal government, and so I think that there’s a massive gap in terms of people learning about where they can find these resources,” said Gretchen Gehrke, an environmental and public information researcher who co-founded the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative. Philanthropic funders can be fickle, too, raising questions about financial sustainability. “Truly, all of us are scrambling for funding and underfunded,” she said.

Nonprofits also don’t have the instant recognition that the government does, which can make it harder to earn public trust. When Smith started running the billion-dollar disaster project at Climate Central, for example, he found that some people didn’t know that anyone from NOAA was still involved. Now, the top of the website makes it clear that Climate Central is continuing NOAA’s dataset, with the same methods and the same lead scientist. 

A sign that reads “NOAA Saves Lives” is seen in a corridor of the University of Colorado at Boulder in May. Ulysse Bellier / AFP via Getty Images From rescue to reform

For information and data advocates, the current crisis is a wake-up call. “Guess what? We have really terrible and really insufficient data policies,” Gehrke said. As the Trump administration tests those vulnerabilities, it gives these stakeholders insight into what needs to change to protect government information from the political whims of future administrations. That could include writing specific requirements for agencies into law and building up Congress’ oversight capacity and enforcement mechanisms. 

When public-facing platforms like Climate.gov disappear, people tend to wonder, How can we bring this product back? without examining the structural failures that led it to be vulnerable in the first place. Sonia Wang, senior director at the Data Foundation’s Center for Climate and Environmental Data, uses the metaphor that people usually focus on the fountain — the shiny map or platform — rather than the plumbing behind it. This invisible infrastructure is much more fragile than people realize, Wang said, sometimes relying on one person who’s been maintaining a dataset for decades, or relationships the federal government has built over time. 

“This was always a problem, regardless of administration,” Wang said. “I think we’re just seeing more of the cracks be exposed now with the rapid decline in some of our federal partners being able to actually carry on their work without the staff.” 

As organizations work to shore up the plumbing of the data that helps us understand the world, there’s increasingly a sense that they can’t count on government support like they did in the past. “It happened in the United States last year, and it continues this year, but it could happen anywhere,” Lachance said. “And we just don’t think that critical scientific data should be vulnerable to the political winds of the day.” 

toolTips('.classtoolTips5','In scholarly research, a “peer-reviewed” study or article is one that has been independently evaluated by other experts in the field to assess scientific accuracy. Not all studies go through a peer-review process, so peer-reviewed studies and journals typically indicate a higher level of confidence in methodologies and results.');

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The plan to make climate science harder to erase on Jul 7, 2026.

Heatwave insomnia Channel News brendan 7th July 2026 Teaser Media

Popularitas Spaceman tidak hanya didukung oleh tampilannya yang menarik, tetapi juga karena permainan ini memberikan pengalaman interaktif yang berbeda dibandingkan permainan digital lainnya. Hal tersebut menjadikan Spaceman sebagai salah satu pilihan hiburan yang banyak dibicarakan oleh berbagai kalangan.

Terbang Tinggi Bersama Spaceman Raih Kemenangan Melalui Strategi

Keberhasilan dalam bermain Spaceman bukan hanya dipengaruhi oleh keberuntungan semata. Pemahaman terhadap mekanisme permainan menjadi faktor penting yang dapat membantu pemain mengambil keputusan secara lebih rasional.

Salah satu pendekatan yang banyak diterapkan adalah menentukan target sejak awal sebelum permainan dimulai. Dengan memiliki batas kemenangan maupun batas risiko, pemain dapat menjaga konsistensi tanpa mudah terbawa emosi ketika permainan berlangsung.

Selain itu, pengelolaan modal juga memiliki peran yang sangat penting. Mengatur nominal permainan sesuai kemampuan akan membantu menjaga keseimbangan sehingga pengalaman bermain tetap terasa nyaman. Pendekatan ini sering menjadi rekomendasi dari pemain berpengalaman karena mampu mengurangi keputusan impulsif yang berpotensi meningkatkan risiko.

Pentingnya Memahami Pola Permainan

Setiap permainan digital memiliki karakteristik tersendiri, termasuk Spaceman. Oleh sebab itu, memahami pola permainan menjadi langkah yang bijak sebelum mulai bermain secara aktif.

Banyak pemain meluangkan waktu untuk mengamati ritme permainan terlebih dahulu. Walaupun hasil setiap putaran bersifat independen dan tidak dapat dipastikan, proses observasi dapat membantu pemain lebih memahami dinamika permainan sehingga keputusan yang diambil terasa lebih terukur.

Pendekatan analitis seperti ini menunjukkan bahwa pengalaman dan pemahaman terhadap mekanisme permainan memiliki nilai yang tidak kalah penting dibandingkan sekadar mengejar hasil instan.

Pengalaman Bermain yang Bertanggung Jawab

pengalaman bermain yang positif selalu didukung oleh pengambilan keputusan yang bertanggung jawab. Menentukan batas waktu bermain, mengelola anggaran, serta memahami aturan permainan merupakan bagian dari praktik yang lebih bijaksana.

Pemain yang memiliki disiplin umumnya lebih mampu menikmati setiap sesi permainan tanpa tekanan berlebihan. Dengan demikian, aktivitas bermain tetap menjadi bentuk hiburan digital yang menyenangkan sekaligus terkendali.

Selain itu, memilih platform yang memiliki sistem keamanan yang baik, layanan pelanggan responsif, serta informasi permainan yang transparan juga menjadi aspek penting dalam menciptakan pengalaman pengguna yang lebih terpercaya.

Kesimpulan

Tema “Terbang Tinggi Bersama Spaceman Raih Kemenangan” menggambarkan semangat untuk mencapai hasil terbaik melalui persiapan, strategi, dan pengambilan keputusan yang tepat. Memahami mekanisme permainan, menerapkan pengelolaan modal yang disiplin, serta bermain secara bertanggung jawab merupakan fondasi penting dalam memperoleh pengalaman bermain yang lebih optimal.

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More than 350 gas-powered generators could soon be operating just outside Philadelphia as part of Amazon’s proposed data center in Fairless Hills, Bucks County. The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) is hosting a public meeting about this proposal July 14. 

Over the July 4 holiday heatwave, existing data centers were instructed to run their gas generators on already polluted days, severely endangering local public health. We need our elected officials to prevent this from happening again.  

On hot summer days, when the region is already struggling with unhealthy air quality, those generators could add significant pollution to the air we breathe. Unless elected officials act now, this proposal could become a model for future data center development across southeastern Pennsylvania. 

Meeting growing electricity demand doesn’t mean building more fossil fuel infrastructure.

Data centers rely on massive amounts of electricity, and how we meet that demand will shape Pennsylvania’s energy future. Electricity costs are rising in Philadelphia, but expanded solar deployment has helped moderate those increases. 

Rather than responding to growing electricity demand with more fossil fuel development, city residents should demand that new data center development bring more solar onto our grid, making it easier for homes and commercial spaces to electrify while reducing our reliance on fossil fuels. 

The City is already taking steps in this direction. A planned 1.5 megawatt solar farm near the Northeast Philadelphia Airport would give the City government a set electricity rate for 25 years, in addition to a 20-year contract with a solar farm in Clearfield County, PA, further locking in long-term electricity rates for municipal operations, but not for residents.  

This should be extended to include Pennsylvania households. Pennsylvanians are still waiting for the state legislature to pass House Bill 1155, which would allow households to benefit from community solar projects and see savings on their electric bills while supporting clean energy.   

We can’t allow data center growth to become an excuse for slowing the transition away from fossil fuels. 

Regardless of nearby industrial development, residents can take action on their own. Moving from gas cooking and heating appliances to electric devices will improve air quality inside your home and throughout the region.

In the middle of a polluted, summer heat wave, it doesn’t make much sense to heat a tank of water with an open flame so you can wash your hands. Tankless, electric water heaters that only heat the water you need could have a massive impact on the city’s public health while reducing energy bills.  

Nationwide, electricity consumption is increasing, yet new solar generation — not additional gas-fired power — is meeting much of that demand. Pennsylvania should follow that example.

Courts have affirmed that states have the right to set a standard for the air pollution that’s emitted by gas appliances in buildings. Transitioning away from your own household gas appliances is one way to remove gas pollution from your life. Contacting your elected officials to ask them to push back against the hundreds of gas generators proposed in the region is another. 

Click here to tell your state and local officials to support a three-year pause on data center development.

 In a world where sustainability and agricultural efficiency are more important than ever, we present an essential guide that will transform your vision of field production: the Sugarcane and Rice...

As the world's most bird-diverse country, Colombia is home to 1,969 recorded bird species. Many of these birds inhabit landscapes that overlap with nearly 1.5 million acres of oil palm plantations...

This is a re-post from The Climate Brink by Andrew Dessler

I am finalizing a textbook on climate risk and am posting chapters as I finish them. I’d previously posted chapters about embedded energy, physical climate risk, and transition risk. This post is a chapter on attribution of extreme weather to climate change. It is an emerging battleground in the public debate over climate change, so this chapter is an opportunity to get up to speed on the science.

Introduction

In the aftermath of any major weather disaster, the question inevitably arises: “Did climate change cause this disaster?” However, this is a bad way to think about the problem.Climate change does not cause a rainstorm, a heatwave, or a hurricane in a direct sense. These hazards would still occur in a world without human influence on the climate: hurricanes would still form over warm ocean waters, heatwaves would remain a product of stationary high-pressure systems, and low-pressure systems will always generate rain and the occasional flood.

But climate change can make these events more intense. It takes a heatwave and pushes the temperature higher. It adds moisture to a rain event, generating more intense rainfall, enhancing flooding. Warmer oceans make a hurricane’s winds stronger and its rainfall more severe.

Therefore, the scientifically interesting question is not “Did climate change cause this?”, but about influence:

1.How much morelikely did climate change make this event?

2.How much moreintense did climate change make this event?

Answering these questions is the work of a rapidly advancing field of science called Extreme Event Attribution. This chapter will explore the methods scientists use to disentangle the roles of natural variability and climate change.

To understand the two different ways of looking at the problem, let’s examine a hot 38°C (99°F) day in a hypothetical city (like Houston, Texas) and examine each question in turn.

1. How much more likely has climate change made a 38°C day?

This figure sets up how scientists look at the problem.It shows two hypothetical distributions of daily temperature for the city. The red curve is the present-day distribution: the climate as it actually is today. The distributions tell you how often each temperature occurs in that world.For example, today’s temperature distribution peaks around 35°C with a value of 17%, meaning that 17% of days have temperatures around 35°C.

The blue curve is a counterfactual: the distribution that would occur in a world without climate change. For this hypothetical example, climate change has shifted the climate a few degrees toward warmer temperatures.

Given the two distributions, we can now answer the question of how much more likely a 38°C day is.In the counterfactual no-climate-change world, a 38°C day occurred on roughly 1.5% of days; in the present-day climate, it occurs on about 6% of days.

We define the relative risk to be the risk of the event in today’s climate divided by the risk in the counterfactual climate:

where Pa is the probability of the event in the world with climate change (6%) and Pc is the probability in the counterfactual world (1.5%). Thus, the relative risk in this example is 6%/1.5% = 4. We can therefore say that, “Climate change made this 38°C day four times as likely” or that, “The relative risk of a 38°C day is four.”

Because of the shape of the distributions, the relative risk increases with temperature.Using the same curves, a 42°C day occurs on 0.013% of days in the counterfactual world and 0.19% in the world with climate change, implying a relative risk of 15.This confirms that the hotter the day, the more the relative risk of that day has increased.In fact, we are approaching a world (if we’re not already there) with so much climate change that events occur that could not have occurred in the counterfactual world (Pc ≈ 0).For those events, the risk ratio is infinity.

Temperatures near average have a risk ratio around 1, meaning their probability isn’t changing much due to climate change.Below average temperatures (e.g., 27°C) have risk ratios less than one, indicating that they are occurring less often than in the counterfactual world.

2. How much did climate change warm this day?

This is a different way to ask the same question: how much hotter was the day because of climate change?To answer this, we look at the graph horizontally. We find the probability of a 38°C day on the present-day curve and trace it back to the same probability on the counterfactual curve.

In this example, we find that the same probability for today’s 38°C corresponds to a temperature of 36°C in the counterfactual climate. In this case, we can say, “Climate change made this hot day 2°C warmer.”

While some economic actors (e.g., governments, insurers) may focus on probability, most impact evaluations are clearer when examined through magnitude changes. In other words, it may be of more practical use to know that climate change warmed this day by 2°C or increased total rainfall by 30% than knowing that climate change increased the probability by a factor of four.

Thus, we can express climate change’s contribution to this hypothetical 38°C day in two ways.We can say that 1) climate change made the event four times more likely, or that 2) climate change added 2°C to the temperature.

Determining the counterfactual world

As discussed in the last section, estimating the impact of climate change on a meteorological event requires assessing the distribution of those events in the present-day world and in a counterfactual world without climate change.

To establish the present-day distribution of climate events (red curves in the plots above), researchers rely primarily on a combination of real-world observational records and numerical climate-model simulations of the present-day climate. To estimate the counterfactual climate (blue curves), the world that would have existed had human activities not altered the climate system, scientists will often run these same climate models but with human influences removed (e.g., carbon dioxide and other climate forcers set at pre-industrial values).

Researchers can also use historical observations to estimate the counterfactual climate. In some cases, researchers can use observations from a time period when human influence on the climate was small, such as the late 19th or early 20th century. As an example, this is a plot of Houston’s daily maximum temperature in the 1970s and 2016-2025:

There is a clear shift in the climate between these two periods, much — but not necessarily all of it — due to climate change.This shift made a day with a maximum temperature of 37°C (99°F) about 6.5 times more likely (i.e., risk ratio = 6.5); alternatively, it increased the temperature of this day by 2.3°C (4.1°F).

Notably, in the 1970s, daily maximum temperatures above 40°C (104°F) never occurred in Houston, but they did occur in the 2016-2025 period.Such days would therefore be considered virtually impossible without climate change.

One thing to look out for: After every extreme event, fossil-fuel interests will take to social media to point out that a more severe event — e.g., more rain, higher winds, and higher temperatures — occurred in, e.g., 18XX (some year in the late 19th century). They use this to incorrectly imply that climate change therefore could not have influenced the event.

But that’s a logical error.If you look at the probability distributions from Houston, you’ll see that you could have had a 39°C day in the counterfactual 1970s world (it’s just very unlikely). But the existence of a 39°C day in the 1970s doesn’t contradict the conclusion that the 37°C day you just lived through was enhanced by climate change.

Traditional detection and attribution

There is another way scientists connect climate change to extreme events known as detection and attribution.This approach focuses on trends in some quantity — for example, the trend in the annual maximum 1-day precipitation amount, with units of mm/decade.This is different from extreme event attribution, which focuses on individual extreme weather events.

As a simple example, suppose we have an observational time series of the aforementioned maximum daily rainfall at a station in the U.S. This gives us one number each year: the maximum daily rainfall in 1950, the maximum daily rainfall in 1951, and so on:

We want to know whether the variations in in this observed (synthetic) time series can be attributed to greenhouse gases from human activities, aerosols (basically air pollution and dust, this is partially due to human activities), or some combination of them. These different drivers have different trends over time: greenhouse gases have been steadily increasing, while aerosols in the U.S. increased until around 1970 and have declined since then.

The first step in detection and attribution is to run climate models to estimate the fingerprint of each process. To do this, scientists run climate models with just the increase in greenhouse gases, and then run the models again with just the changes in air pollution.These runs tell us what the observations would look like if just this forcing was present in the atmosphere.

We then compare the observed time series to the model fingerprints. A simple way to do this is with a regression model:

Here, obs(t) is the observed time series. G(t) is the greenhouse gas fingerprint timeseries, and A(t) is the aerosol fingerprint timeseries.

We then use regression techniques to estimate the coefficients bGHG and bAER, which tell us how much of each fingerprint is present in the observations. e is the residual, the part of the observations not explained by the fingerprints.

Here are the results:

In the left panel, the blue line is the synthetic observations and the orange line is the fit:

where G(t) and A(t) are the fingerprints above.As you can see, we can closely fit the observations with the fingerprints for greenhouse gases and aerosols.

Next, we examine the estimated coefficients (bGHG and bAER) and their uncertainty ranges (right panel). If a coefficient is statistically different from zero, we say that fingerprint has been detected. That’s the case here — the uncertainty bars do not cross zero — so the fingerprints for greenhouse gases and aerosols are detected.

This is the basic logic of detection and attribution.

Importantly, detection and attribution does not allow us to link specific events (e.g., Hurricane Harvey) to climate change.Rather, it allows us to connect the trend in some type of extreme weather (hurricanes) to human activities.

If you want to play around with a simple demonstration that shows how this works, click here.

This is an extremely powerful technique that has laid the foundation for much of our understanding of how climate change is affecting extreme weather.Here are some key results:

• Hot extremes and heatwaves: Humans are clearly making hot extremes more frequent and more intense through human-caused greenhouse gas emissions.

• Heavy precipitation: Human influence, especially greenhouse gas emissions, is likely the main driver of the observed global-scale intensification of heavy precipitation over land.

• Flash flooding due to extreme rainfall: Scientists have high confidence that stronger extreme precipitation leads to more frequent and larger surface-water and flash floods.

• Drought: Scientists have medium confidence that human-caused climate change has increased drought1 in some regions.

• Tropical cyclones: Scientists have medium confidence that human influence has contributed to extreme tropical cyclone rainfall.In addition, the global proportion of the strongest tropical cyclones has likely increased over the past four decades, a change that cannot be explained with natural factors alone.

• Fire weather: Scientists have concluded with medium confidence that compound hot, dry, and windy conditions have become more likely in some regions.

Confidence in attribution studies

In reading the previous section, you saw that scientists have varying levels of confidence in the attribution statements.Some conclusions are termed likely or very likely, and confidence may be medium or high.How is this confidence determined?

The foundation of any attribution study is a solid physical understanding of why climate change would affect a particular type of event. If we can’t provide a mechanism, you really can’t believe an attribution study.

For many extreme events, the physics is well-understood and there is a clear connection between the climate and the severity of the events:

• Heatwaves: Greenhouse gases trap heat, shifting the distribution of temperatures toward warmer values, thereby making extreme heat more probable.

• Rainfall: The connection is the physical fact that a warmer atmosphere can hold more water vapor. This means that when a storm system develops, there is more available moisture to convert into rain, leading to more intense downpours.

• Wildfires: Warmer temperatures produce a drier atmosphere, dry out vegetation and make it more flammable.Thus, wildfires are expected to be bigger and more intense in a warmer climate.

For other phenomena, the physics is murkier. For example, there is no robust theory explaining how the total number of tropical cyclones will change as the climate warms (tropical cyclone is the general term for storms known as hurricanes in the Atlantic, typhoons in the Pacific, and cyclones in the Indian Ocean).Right now, there are around 80 tropical cyclones per year around the planet, and we can’t explain why that’s the number.Why isn’t it 8?Or 800?We don’t know.Without such an understanding, we can’t really trust climate models’ counterfactual world for this.

But this doesn’t mean that we know nothing about tropical cyclones.There are strong physical arguments that tropical cyclones will get more intense (higher wind speeds) and rainier as the climate warms, which will cause more damage.As an example, severalgroupsanalyzed the impact of climate change on Hurricane Harvey’s enormous rainfall totals over Houston, Texas and they found that climate change increased rainfall by ~20%.The increase in wind speed means that we expect the fraction of tropical cyclones reaching the major storm category (cat 3-5) will increase as the climate warms, in general agreement with our observational record.

Once you have a physical mechanism, the other factors that determine confidence are things like:

• How good is the observational record?For some things, like temperature, we have good observations going back to the 19th century.For others, like tropical cyclones, good observations are only available during the satellite era, i.e., since the 1970s.With a shorter dataset, your confidence in any attribution study will be lower.

• How good are climate models at simulating the weather phenomenon?Most attribution studies require climate models to generate the various counterfactual worlds (the world without climate change).Climate models do a really good job with temperature, which is a large-scale atmospheric phenomenon.But they do a much poorer job with precipitation, which is a very small-scale process that models struggle with.

• How many independent studies have confirmed an attribution statement?In science, the gold standard for a rigorous conclusion is that it has been multiply replicated by independent scientific groups.While any individual study might be flawed, the odds of a major error go down significantly if several groups have independently reached the same conclusion.

It is also worth noting that there may be times when detection and attribution studies fail but extreme event attribution studies can still identify a contribution of climate change to an extreme event. For example, high quality time series of some extreme events (e.g., tropical cyclones) may go back only a few decades, which may be too short for confident detection and attribution. Extreme event attribution approaches, which do not rely on long time series of observations, are nevertheless able to conclude that climate change is making specific hurricanes stronger.

Conclusion

The science of extreme event attribution has transformed our ability to discuss the impacts of climate change. We can now make statements about how climate change affected the likelihood and intensity of individual events as well as the trends in extreme events. This helps demonstrate that climate change is indeed increasing the ‘hazard’ component of climate risk.

As the science of extreme event attribution has developed, it has increasingly moved into the legal and public policy arenas. Fossil fuel interests are terrified that someone will use extreme event attribution science to sue them for their contribution to a natural disaster, or that policymakers will use extreme event attribution science to justify policies to restrict fossil-fuel use.

Because of this, the legitimacy of extreme event attribution is frequently contested by fossil-fuel interests. So don’t be surprised if you hear a lot of misinformation about extreme event attribution in the future.And don’t think that, just because people are criticizing these studies, that criticism is legitimate.

Note that the techniques described in this chapter deal with the effects of climate change on hazards.A new subfield, extreme event impact attribution connects climate change to the actual impacts (e.g., number of houses burned down in a wildfire, dollars of flood damage).This is an emerging area of research, and I expect that this is something we’re going to hear a lot more about in the future.

This is a draft of a section of my climate risk textbook (slightly edited & reformatted to make it appropriate for Substack). I’d very much like to identify errors now, so if you see any, please let me know in the comments.

1 Different types of drought respond differently to climate change. In this case, we are talking about agricultural and ecological droughts.

Very often, in cities, rural areas, and along roads, we see birds perched on power lines. For many people, this image is part of the everyday landscape: a bird resting on a power line, or small...

GARNER, N.C. – North Carolina lawmakers included a major investment in farmland preservation in the budget passed on July 2, including a $46.9 million nonrecurring allocation to the Agricultural...

Developers are asking Pittsburgh City Council to vote on another major tax giveaway scheme – giving up to $200 million dollars to a handful of Downtown private real estate companies, without any requirements around public benefit. This vote to implement the Downtown Transit Revitalization Improvement District (TRID) will divert tax revenue from the Strip District, Downtown and the North Shore for the next 40 (!) years into the coffers of private corporations.

Right now, when working people and our public agencies are struggling to make ends meet, Pittsburgh City Council is being asked (via the Urban Redevelopment Authority) to hand the Golden Triangle yet another golden ticket.

Take Action: Tell Council to fund neighborhoods, not developers What is the TRID proposal?

A TRID is a type of legislation intended to fund transit improvements—but this one won’t do that. Instead, here’s how this proposal would work: 

• The City (i.e., taxpayers) would initially borrow $50 million to invest exclusively in the TRID area: the Strip District, parts of the North Shore, and Downtown. This money would effectively be a grant paid to wealthy developers, with the City gambling on future tax revenue to pay down the debt.
  • Many Downtown developers are concurrently challenging their commercial property assessments, so that they could pay lower taxes in the future.
    
• Only 20% of this money would be invested in public infrastructure—but they’ve not named any particular public projects that would benefit. By contrast, the remaining 80% has been earmarked for specific, private, for-profit real estate developers.
  
• All future public tax dollars from Downtown, the Strip District, and the North Shore for the next 40 years would be diverted to a “Golden Triangle Reinvestment Fund”, exclusively financing development in a small pocket of Downtown. This fund would be controlled by the non-elected Urban Redevelopment Agency (URA)—not City Council, a public body that is accountable to the public.

Members of Pittsburgh City Council and the Mayor’s administration have said that we are facing a massive City budget crisis. So why are they fast-tracking a $200 million handout to Downtown developers, with almost no public process? 

What’s at stake

We have already given almost a billion dollars to Downtown developers in tax breaks over the past 5 years. Enough is enough. 

Our communities deserve so much more: public transit infrastructure, affordable housing, local food initiatives, street and sidewalk repairs, childcare programs and more. These are critical investments for the well-being of our City—and we cannot fund them if our City Councilmembers signs away millions in tax dollars to private developers for the next four decades.

Transit riders must tell our elected officials to vote NO on implementing the Downtown Transit Revitalization Investment District (TRID). Public dollars – whether borrowed or generated from tax revenue – should be invested across all communities – from Fairywood to Fineview, Brookline to Bloomfield. Our resources should be allocated through the annual City budgeting process, with robust public input to ensure that our tax resources are distributed equitably and address the needs of the moment.

We say: no more handouts to Downtown corporations until our neighborhoods, our small businesses, our workers and our students are given their fair share!

Take Action Now

After you send a letter, CALL your City Councilmember to urge them to vote NO (find your councilmember here):

• District 1 (Northside, Strip District, Parts of Downtown):
  Bobby Wilson (412) 255-2135
• District 2 (West End, Sheraden, Elliott, Banksville):
  Kim Salinetro (412) 255-8963
• District 3 (Oakland, Southside, Arlington, Allentown):
  Bob Charland (412) 255-2130
• District 4 (Beechview, Brookline, Carrick, Overbrook):
  Anthony Coghill (412) 255-2131
• District 5 (Greenfield, Hazelwood, Lincoln Pl, Swisshelm Park):
  Barb Warwick (412) 255-8965
• District 6 (Manchester, Downtown, The Hill, Uptown, Perry Hilltop):
  Danielle Lavelle (412) 255-2134
• District 7 (Bloomfield, Lawrenceville, Polish Hill, Stanton Heights) :
  Deb Gross (412) 255-2140
• District 8 (Squirrel Hill, Shadyside, Oakland):
  Erika Strassburger (412) 255-2133
• District 9 (East Liberty, Larimer, Homewood, Garfield):
  Khari Mosley (412) 255-2137

The post ACTION ALERT: Pittsburgh City Council Considers New Slush Fund for Downtown Developers—on our Dime appeared first on Pittsburghers for Public Transit.

CALGARY — Janetta McKenzie, director of the Pembina Institute’s Oil and Gas program, made the following statement in response to the new proposed crude oil pipeline from Hardisty, Alberta to Sarnia, Ontario:“The proposed 3,300-kilometre pipeline...

What if we treated the earth we walk on with the respect it deserves? There is an opportunity to value soil, grow food and support human communities in a way that gives more than it takes. How we respond is up to us. But so long as we remain hooked on fossil fuels, nothing will change.

The post Nebraska soil, Mid-east oil appeared first on CELDF - Community Rights Pioneers - Protecting Nature and Communities.

For decades, toxic lead cables lay like giant sea monsters snaking across the bottom of Lake Tahoe. Installed as early telecommunications lines and owned by AT&T, the abandoned cables contained over 100,000 pounds of lead and were slowly deteriorating, leaching contaminants into one of the most iconic lakes in the country.

In 2021, the California Sportfishing Protection Alliance, or CSPA, filed a lawsuit to force AT&T to remove the abandoned lead cables. The multimillion-dollar litigation dragged on for over two years. Without sampling and scientific testing, it was difficult to make the case in court. Then Roland Peralta, the founder of a new non-profit called WHEN Justice, offered to provide $100,000 for the science needed to support the litigation. The case quickly changed course. 

With the new funding, scuba divers went down to the lake floor to collect samples that helped show that the lead in the cables was leaching into the surrounding waters. The crucial piece of missing evidence was found with lead isotopic testing, providing “fingerprints” that showed the lead in the cables was the same as the surrounding contamination in the lake.

Once the lead contamination was linked to the cables, AT&T settled the case in nine weeks and removed the cables within months. “That was the ‘aha’ moment, where we realized we could scale this model,” said Peralta.

An innovative pay-it-forward model

WHEN Justice is built around a simple but deeply powerful idea: Strategic funding at the right moment in litigation can help public-interest cases win. The non-profit raises funds to help pay for the costly pieces of litigation at the intersection of environmental and human health — like scientific testing, expert analysis, and sampling — that smaller entities taking on massive corporations in court frequently cannot afford. Because environmental lawsuits often include cost recovery, WHEN’s donations can sometimes be used repeatedly, helping fund multiple cases from the same original donation. 

Building off the AT&T case success, WHEN was officially launched on Earth Day in April of 2026. “WHEN made a huge difference in the Lake Tahoe case,” said Erica Maharg, the environmental attorney who represented the sportfishing group against AT&T. “Those funds provided us with the evidence we needed at a critical time in the litigation.”

Colin West, founder and CEO of the nonprofit Clean Up the Lake, sees that role as especially important for groups without deep legal budgets. “Being a smaller organization that is trying to step up and take on big litigation against larger entities is challenging,” he said. “A group like WHEN Justice that has closing that funding gap as their core focus fills a need, and a role that others can’t.”

The litigation bottleneck

Adequate funding is critical in today’s environmental justice landscape. Currently, much of the environmental law enforcement that forces powerful entities to clean up pollution is being done by individuals and nonprofit organizations. “We think of government and regulators as being the primary enforcement mechanisms. But in reality, many environmental cleanups happen because of the efforts of small organizations,” said Maharg.

For those groups, the main obstacle is usually not the legal standard, but the cost of assembling the scientific evidence needed to support the case. “If you’re going up against big companies, litigation is so expensive,” said WHEN’s chief executive and legal officer, Jacqueline Biner. “The way the legal system is set up right now, it sadly is not always about the merits of the case. It’s often just about who has more money.”

WHEN’s model is designed to help remove that barrier. In another current campaign, the organization is fundraising to support scientific analysis and sampling in a lawsuit involving a long-closed hazardous waste disposal site located on the edge of the San Pablo Bay in California. The lawsuit alleges that toxic substances are now leaching from the landfill into the bay. Together, WHEN and the public are funding experts to conduct sampling and analyze the results, showing how the pollution is moving from the landfill toward the bay, grounding the case in science and data.

“There are so many cases out there, like landfills that are leaching contaminants, or factory farms leaking manure and nitrates into water bodies,” said Biner. She sees strategic, targeted litigation funding as a tool that could help fuel a sea change, showing large corporations that it’s more cost-efficient to clean up their own messes and address sources of harm, rather than fighting in court to try to evade responsibility.

A new way to demand accountability

A serial entrepreneur and the co-founder of wellness company Nutrafol, WHEN’s founder Roland Peralta initially envisioned giving back through traditional philanthropy. But he soon began to see an additional, larger opportunity: By directing strategic funding to organizations fighting expensive David-and-Goliath battles against large corporations, he could help create a healthier planet for future generations. “I kept asking myself, what kind of world will I leave for my son?” he said.

By helping cover litigation costs, WHEN can help smaller organizations pursue cases against much larger and better-resourced opponents. “The ability to access funding for litigation is really exciting, because it means that we can take on bigger cases,” said Maharg. “Having a partner like WHEN that can help with fundraising key costs in the litigation makes all the difference in our ability to take on these well-funded polluters.”

Over the next several years, WHEN Justice aims to build an infrastructure for a new kind of corporate accountability — helping identify harmful corporate conduct before it becomes irreversible. They plan to give people a direct way to participate in the fight for transparency and justice through crowd-funding. Peralta and Biner envision an interactive platform, where donors can direct their dollars toward the fights that matter most to them. These funds would support both large, precedent-setting cases, and smaller, community-driven campaigns that help local residents confront injustices in their own backyards. 

Winning is not the only goal, said Biner. “We also believe it is ok to pursue a case that may lose if it will create momentum and pressure. If we educate the courts, place new accountability on corporations, and educate consumers, that moves the needle in a different way.”

WHEN’s goal is also to get the public involved. “We think there is so much more power in a million people giving a dollar than in a single person giving a million dollars,” Biner noted. “We want people to become invested in these cases, to follow them, and to become more informed about the legal process.”

A call to action

That sense of agency is central to WHEN’s purpose. At its core, the model is designed to give people a concrete, accessible way to respond to injustices that might otherwise feel too large or too entrenched to take on.

For Peralta, that means creating a clear path that allows ordinary people to turn outrage into action. “Everybody’s angry and appalled about these massive environmental issues, but as an individual, it’s hard to know how to help,” he said. “WHEN Justice is designed to be the call to action button that everyone has been longing for, to help individuals play a role in shutting this madness down by voting with their dollar.”

WHEN Justice is a charitable crowdfunding platform for legal and regulatory action at the intersection of environmental and human health. From pollution and toxic exposure to climate-related harms, we select and fund high-impact efforts that seek accountability from powerful actors whose actions put people, communities, and ecosystems at risk. Every campaign is open to the public, creating a direct way for concerned citizens to participate in outcomes that affect their families, communities, and future.

LEARN MORE

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Funding the fight against corporate polluters on Jul 6, 2026.

Shaun Martin is vice president for adaptation and resilience at the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) in the United States.

“Adapt or perish, now as ever, is nature’s inexorable imperative.” A century later, H.G. Wells’s warning reads less like philosophy and more like a prediction for the near future.

Last week, the World Meteorological Organization forecast that a powerful El Niño – a naturally occurring climate pattern marked by unusually warm ocean temperatures in the Pacific – will develop in 2026, becoming potentially one of the strongest on record, capable of triggering floods, droughts and extreme heat across the globe.

This warning should make one thing crystal clear: we need to move faster to adapt to the rapidly changing climate.

Scientists warn El Niño could intensify climate extremes in 2026

What does it mean to take climate change adaptation seriously? It means recognising that building resilience to increasing hazards must inform planning and policy-making efforts that go beyond trying to reduce climate emissions.

Rising climate risks like extended heatwaves or massive bursts of rainfall should guide decisions about where homes are built, which crops are grown, and how natural resources are managed. We need to invest in systems that withstand and recover from climate-driven shocks rather than collapse under them.

Impacts arriving ahead of schedule

For decades, climate action has been anchored in mitigation – reducing emissions to prevent future harm. That work remains essential. But it is operating on a slower timeline than the impacts we are now experiencing in real time and ahead of schedule. The strengthening 2026 El Niño makes that mismatch impossible to ignore.

In the first few months of 2026 more than 600 thousand square miles of forest land burned globally – the equivalent of 81 million football fields – the highest on record for this point in the year. Ocean surface temperatures are at historic highs, Arctic sea ice has hit record lows, and multiple regions have experienced extreme, out-of-season heat.

The strengthening of El Niño later this year could push these conditions even further, potentially making 2026 one of the hottest years ever recorded.

El Niño expected to bring next record-hot year as soon as 2027

The climate today is fundamentally different than the one that shaped past El Niño events. Heatwaves run hotter. Droughts last longer. Rainfall increasingly comes in destructive bursts. Even historically cooler periods no longer offer relief.

El Niño’s counterpart, La Niña, now occurs in a warmer world with ocean temperatures during cooler La Niña phases exceeding those seen during past “super” El Niño events like 1998 and 2016. Yesterday’s extremes have become today’s baselines, and this new level of turbulence will test the limits of preparedness across the country.

Pragmatic preparations to build resilience

When it comes to policy-making, the focus should be on strengthening the health and resilience of communities facing growing climate risks. Across the United States, communities are already feeling the impacts of the quickly changing climate. Preparing for and withstanding what’s ahead is not ideological; it’s pragmatic.

WHO issues new guidance on heat-health action plans, as El Niño sets in

Planning that prioritises resilience, modernises infrastructure and invests in adaptation helps safeguard food systems, protect homes and supply chains, and reinforce critical infrastructure. Keeping the strength and stability of local communities at the centre of decision-making is essential to building a more secure and resilient future.

Conservation organisations have long emphasised that adapting to climate change is not just about reacting to disasters, but about building resilience in ways that support people and nature. That means working with communities, governments and businesses to reduce vulnerability to natural hazards, strengthen local capacity, and deploy solutions that improve nature’s ability to protect us.

Adaptation rooted in nature

In coastal regions, for example, mangrove forests act as natural defences – absorbing storm surge, stabilising shorelines and protecting nearby communities.

In Mexico, World Wildlife Fund and its partners are using networks of sensors, drones and artificial intelligence to monitor mangrove health and weather in real time. The project analyses how these ecosystems respond to storms, heat and changing water conditions, helping communities and policymakers adapt their conservation strategies accordingly. It is a glimpse of what climate change adaptation looks like at its best: locally grounded, data-driven and rooted in nature.

Climate risk is not a single problem to solve but a system to manage. Addressing it requires rethinking and integrating conservation, economic development and disaster risk reduction into a single, yet multi-dimensional, agenda focused on resilience.

It will also expose vulnerabilities in infrastructure, stress-test disaster response systems and challenge assumptions about what constitutes a “normal” climate year. And it will remind us that even the best forecasts cannot reduce impacts – only preparation can.

The problem is not that we have ignored climate change. It is that we have misjudged its timeline. These hazards are no longer a future risk to be avoided; they are a present reality to be managed. H.G. Wells’ warning remains. We need to adapt or perish, now as ever.

The post A supercharged El Niño is coming – are we ready? appeared first on Climate Home News.

In the United States, PFAS chemicals are so ubiquitous — found in everything from frying pans to skincare — that nearly all of the country’s population likely has measurable levels of the so-called “forever chemicals” in their blood. It’s only in the last few decades that the public and scientists started untangling the health and ecological risks associated with some of the manufactured compounds, which earned their nickname because they don’t break down easily in the environment.

Now, new research from the University of Notre Dame has deepened our understanding of how PFAS can filter through ecosystems and move up the food chain to get to people.

The peer-reviewed study, published this spring in the Journal of Environmental Quality, focused on the Great Lakes. The researchers analyzed 42 years of studies and combined nearly 2,500 samples of algae, fish, birds, and other organisms, in what’s called a meta-analysis to identify trends in PFAS distribution.

PFAS have been linked to a range of health issues, and the chemicals have been identified in human tissue, including in the bloodstream, liver, kidneys, and lungs. Known health risks range from decreased fertility to a higher prevalence of certain cancers. People can be exposed to PFAS in several ways, including through the food they eat. 

“What we’re finding is that the food web itself is a vehicle for transferring these chemicals from one organism to another,” said Gary Lamberti, aquatic science professor at Notre Dame and a study co-author. “So it’s a more holistic view than we’ve known before.”

The Great Lakes study focused on six of the PFAS chemicals most commonly tested for, but there are more than 15,000 types out there, according to the National Institutes of Health. Researchers identified a dramatic decrease over the last two decades of one PFAS chemical known as PFOS, following a voluntary phaseout by industries in the early 2000s. 

“If we stop manufacturing these chemicals, they will eventually reduce in concentration in the food web,” Lamberti said. “That’s kind of good news for how we can manage these chemicals.”

Those declines were seen in the lower Great Lakes — Ontario and Erie — likely because these areas are home to the heavy industries that used the chemicals.

But there was little to no decline in PFOS in the upper lakes Superior, Michigan, and Huron, most likely because the water bodies are larger than the lower lakes. In contrast to the shallower Erie and Ontario lakes, which flush out their water about every 2 to 7 years, water can stay in the upper lakes anywhere from about 60 to 170 years.

The study also confirmed that these chemicals increase in concentration as they travel up the food chain. Algae and plants have the lowest concentration, according to the study, because they grow and die quickly. But predators like salmon and eagles had the highest concentration because they’re eating a large amount of prey that have a lot of accumulated PFAS.

Read Next Trump’s EPA vows to fight ‘forever chemicals’ — by loosening regulations Zoya Teirstein

Potentially dangerous levels of these chemicals in fish have prompted warnings by state officials across the country on how much is safe to eat, including in North Carolina, Wisconsin, Montana, and Pennsylvania. Michigan, which borders 4 of the 6 Great Lakes, has been testing fish for PFAS since 2012 and issues “safe fish” guidelines annually.

“If we can understand what the PFAS levels are in the food web, we can better communicate the risk of consuming those potentially toxic food sources,” said Katherine Manz, an environmental health professor at the University of Michigan who was not involved in the study.

While it was easy to find PFAS data on salmon, trout, and some birds, Lamberti said, the information on the “less glamorous” smaller fish, invertebrates, and algae was harder to come by.

Tools to analyze the range of these chemicals are still evolving, said Vernon Lalone, CEO of Wave Lumina, a Michigan-based startup that’s developing a rapid testing kit for PFAS in water and soil.

“It’s like a chicken-and-an-egg situation,” said Lalone, who wasn’t involved in the study. “You’ve got to have an analytical method that’s robust and reliable enough to measure these things before you can regulate them at certain limits.”

Lamberti said there are still plenty of questions about how these chemicals will shift in waterways as temperatures rise due to climate change, ice formation shifts, and as industries introduce new chemicals. But he’s optimistic — his study shows that when forever chemicals are removed from production, food webs eventually cycle them out. There is no national ban on PFAS, but a patchwork of federal regulations restricts certain chemicals, and some manufacturers have phased out other PFAS compounds voluntarily. 

“That’s what we need to be thinking about with these chemicals,” Lamberti said, “how we’re going to remove them from the production and find substitutes for them to do the right thing.”

toolTips('.classtoolTips5','In scholarly research, a “peer-reviewed” study or article is one that has been independently evaluated by other experts in the field to assess scientific accuracy. Not all studies go through a peer-review process, so peer-reviewed studies and journals typically indicate a higher level of confidence in methodologies and results.'); toolTips('.classtoolTips12','An acronym for per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, PFAS are a class of chemicals used in everyday items like nonstick cookware, cosmetics, and food packaging that have proven to be dangerous to human health. Also called “forever chemicals” for their inability to break down over time, PFAS can be found lingering nearly everywhere — in water, soil, air, and the blood of people and animals.
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This story was originally published by Grist with the headline New research traces how ‘forever chemicals’ move through the Great Lakes and into people on Jul 6, 2026.

Nate poses questions about our shared future, using headlines regarding a potential ceasefire deal between the U.S. and Iran to confront a subject that has re-entered public discourse with a quiet but startling force: nuclear warfare.

War has become a fever that world leaders cannot seem to break. As militarism spreads, its costs extend far beyond the battlefield, accelerating climate change while consuming the resources needed to confront it.