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What to know about the new wave of biotech beauty Anthony Lacey August 4, 2026

Cosmetics ingredients once discussed mostly in dermatology clinics, research labs or professional spas are now widely available. And biotechnology, or biotech, for personal care products is a rapidly growing part of the industry.

Biotech beauty is fueled by consumer demand for products that promise effective, “clinical,” “regenerative” and “science backed” results at home. These ingredients usually promise to be “anti-aging” or to provide “cellular repair” or “barrier strength.” 

But biotech ingredients do not automatically make a product safe, effective or well studied. For most products, premarket tests aren’t required and claims may be backed by very little data. Consumers should look beyond marketing claims and ask what evidence supports claims about an ingredient’s safety and benefits. 

Biotech in personal care products refers to ingredients inspired by biology, medicine or lab-based innovation. It’s not a single category and can include familiar skincare ingredients like hyaluronic acid and newer ingredients like polydeoxyribonucleotide, or PDRN, and spicules. 

Cosmetics using PDRN

You may have heard of “salmon facials” and skincare using “salmon sperm.” These treatments use DNA fragments from salmon sperm to help boost collagen and reduce signs of aging. 

The ingredient behind the buzz is PDRN, which activates tissue repair. Botanical versions are also emerging in the market. 

PDRN is not entirely new. For decades, it has been approved for medical use in Italy and South Korea, including as a treatment for wounds and ulcers. 

Cosmetics that contain PDRN are available in the U.S. too. But since the Food and Drug Administration does not require pre-marketing tests of ingredients, PDRN's presence on store shelves doesn’t indicate it’s been reviewed for safety or efficacy.

In lab studies, injected PDRN has been shown to increase collagen production, which helps smooth and firm the skin. 

Topical PDRN has been shown to support skin regeneration for skin ulcers. The data about undamaged skin is limited, but topical PDRN may not penetrate deeply enough for meaningful results. 

PDRN is believed to be a lower hazard ingredient, though there is no data on carcinogenicity or reproductive harm. An animal study showed no acute toxicity and no effects to major organs, even at high doses. 

PDRN from salmon sperm can be a concern for people allergic to salmon. If you have a fish allergy and want to try products with PDRN, look for plant-based instead.  

PDRN’s pathway is also used by certain types of tumors to grow and evade immune responses. So anyone with cancer or a history of cancer should consult their doctor before use, even though no evidence currently links topical PDRN to cancer.

It can be difficult to tell whether a product contains PDRN. Product marketing may highlight PDRN, but you won't find it on ingredient labels. Instead, look for the term “sodium DNA.” 

Cosmetics using spicules

“Liquid microneedling” is also gaining popularity. 

It’s a technology based on another biotech ingredient: spicules. These are tiny, needle-like structures from marine sponges or synthetically produced using silica. Liquid microneedling is a topical treatment that creates tiny openings in the skin, triggering collagen production and helping skincare penetrate more deeply. 

Spicules are promoted as a way to help other beauty product ingredients penetrate the skin, rather than the main active ingredient. They are often paired with ingredients like PDRN, peptides and hyaluronic acid.

The data is limited, but spicules are believed to be lower hazard ingredients. A bigger concern is the other ingredients in the same product.

Spicules can help some ingredients pass through the skin barrier, making some formulas more effective but also increasing risk of exposure to potentially harmful chemicals, like certain fragrance ingredients.  

If you’re reaching for a product with spicules, consider the safety of its other ingredients. By design, spicules affect the skin barrier and can cause redness, stinging or irritation, so they’re best avoided by people with sensitive skin, rosacea, eczema, active acne or a compromised skin barrier.

But it can be difficult to tell whether a product has spicules. Marketing may call out spicules, but ingredient labels won’t. Instead look for the term “hydrolyzed sponge” on the label. 

Tips for consumers

If you’re thinking about buying a biotech-inspired beauty product, consider these tips:

• Consult resources like EWG’s free searchable database of personal care products, Skin Deep®, to make more informed choices. Skin Deep considers increased absorption when scoring products.
• When you’re out shopping for cosmetics, you can also use EWG’s Healthy Living™ app to learn more about a product, its ingredients and safety.
• Look for products bearing the EWG Verified® mark, which means it is free from EWG's ingredients of concern and meets our strictest standards for your health. 
• If you have sensitive skin, talk to a dermatologist or patch-test the product before applying it more extensively.
• If you want to avoid animal-derived ingredients, beware vegan marketing claims and check ingredients carefully, since animal-derived ingredients may not always be obvious on the label. Look for full disclosure about ingredients. 

Areas of Focus Personal Care Products Cosmetics Family Health Women's Health Toxic Chemicals Guest Authors Lilianna Gross (EWG Verified® intern) August 4, 2026

When torrential rain doused the Texas Hill Country last month, Paul Welch stayed up past his bedtime checking radar and rain gauges on RiverHub, the Upper Guadalupe River Authority’s new tracking website. At midnight, comforted by what he saw, he went to bed. 

Four hours later, his phone rang. It was a neighbor, the same fellow who had awakened him the previous July, just before floodwaters swamped Welch’s riverfront cabin near Comfort. “Get up. Get out. Quick,” he said, speaking calmly into the phone. The water at Center Point, 4 miles upstream, had risen 25 feet as Welch slept. A wall of water was heading his way.

Welch and his partner, Elizabeth Hastings, could hardly believe it was happening again. This time, they knew what to do: Hastings tossed the guns, jewelry, paperwork, and medication into the Sprinter van and drove through the downpour to a gas station already crowded with vehicles. Welch moved his tractor, golf cart, and other essentials to higher ground, then joined his neighbors on the same high spot near the highway where they’d gathered the last time this happened. For the second time in 12 months, they watched water tear through the valley, roiling and churning with more power than Welch had ever seen.  

Water floods a street after heavy rain in Comfort, Texas, in July. Aaron E. Martinez / The Austin American-Statesman via Getty Images

The next morning, as Welch and Hastings picked their way through the muck, his phone rang. It was Huntly Dantzler,  a volunteer who had helped them through last year’s catastrophe. “Paul, give me some good news,” he said. “I’ve got none to give,” Welch replied.

Gone was the $130,000 RV they’d lived in as they awaited construction of their dream house — into which Welch had already sunk $80,000. Gone were the new appliances that sat in his shop, still in bubble wrap. Gone were the 200-year-old cypress trees that had survived so much. “We cried and prayed over the phone,” Dantzler said.

Read Next One year after the Texas floods, home feels further away than ever Laura Mallonee

One year after several rivers and creeks in central Texas killed 139 people and spurred a statewide push to improve flood warnings, another historic storm tested those changes. This year’s disaster brought at least 12 inches of rain — and as much as 28 — to one dozen counties north and west of San Antonio and destroyed or damaged hundreds of buildings. Yet just three people died.

“Here we are a year later, but under incredibly different circumstances,” Kerr County Judge Rob Kelly said at a July 20 press conference. “Last year when we were here, we were grieving. We were in a pall of human loss.”

Earlier forecasts, new warning systems, and a public primed by last year’s tragedies saved lives. But the catastrophe also exposed how much work remains, leaving many Texans counting on vigilance and neighbors when the water rises. 

A law enforcement officer prays during a joint hearing from the Texas Senate and Texas House on disaster preparedness and flooding following the natural disaster in the Texas Hill Country on July 4th. Scott Stephen Ball / The Washington Post via Getty Images

Many of those caught in this year’s flood were still mourning those who died in last year’s. The torrents that swept across the Hill Country then came with such speed and ferocity that many people were still asleep as the water crashed into their homes. The scale of the devastation, which included the deaths of 25 girls at Camp Mystic in Kerr County, shocked the nation. 

It also spurred action.

Legislative hearings and investigations revealed failures by Kerr County and the Upper Guadalupe River Authority that exemplified weaknesses in the state’s flood-warning and emergency management systems. Among them, the county lacked outdoor sirens, even along the most vulnerable stretch of the Guadalupe, and the authority had deferred building the warning system it knew it needed after the state denied funding. The county never activated a federal emergency alert system capable of reaching nearly every cellphone in the area and delayed some local alerts while dispatchers sought supervisory approval. 

Those shortcomings became central to lawmakers’ push for a more robust warning system across flood-prone communities. During a special late-summer session, lawmakers passed four flood-response bills. Two strengthened safety and licensing requirements at youth camps. Another launched an effort to expand flood-warning systems in 30 counties by identifying flash flood–prone areas that need warning siren systems, including sensors and gauges. The last bill provided $50 million to buy them and another $24 million for a two-year project to dot the Hill Country with more rain gauges, radar, and forecasting tools. 

Twenty-nine of the 30 eligible counties had joined the warning-system program by early July. But much of it remained under development when the flooding started.

A flood gauge marks over 4 feet of water near downtown Comfort, Texas after heavy rain caused flooding in July. Aaron E. Martinez / The Austin American-Statesman via Getty Images

The Upper Guadalupe River Authority was the first to act. Using $1 million drawn from its reserves, it placed six sirens on 50-foot poles in western Kerr County, home to many of the region’s youth camps and RV parks. It also added a weather station and river gauge at the Guadalupe’s headwaters to give earlier notice of rising water. The agency shares that data through RiverHub — the website Welch checked hours before the flood came.

Kerr County officials sent 59 local emergency text alerts and triggered three sirens before and during the storm. A company called River Sentry said a few of the 104 sirens it had installed for landowners along the river sounded automatically, as they were designed to. Local authorities also helped dozens of people evacuate ahead of the deluge.

At the July 20 press conference, Governor Greg Abbott and Kelly cited several reasons for the lower death toll, including a storm that moved more slowly, a community and public officials with greater vigilance after the previous year’s disaster, and warning systems installed in the months since.

The first two of those things may have mattered most. 

Unlike last year’s storm, this one was larger and easier to track. That gave forecasters a much clearer signal that dangerous flooding was possible, said Robert Mace, who leads the Meadows Center for Water and the Environment at Texas State University. 

The National Weather Service used the same models and warning procedures it used in 2025, said Jason Runyen, warning coordination meteorologist at the agency’s Austin/San Antonio office. It simply began briefing emergency officials four days before the river peaked; last year, it did so less than 24 hours ahead of the disaster.

But it was the storm’s intensity that might have played the biggest role in minimizing fatalities, said state climatologist John Nielsen-Gammon. Rain fell at a rate of 2 to 5 inches per hour, versus the 4 to 6 that fell last year, according to Weather Service data. That meant it took longer for the floodwaters to build up, giving people more time to evacuate, Nielsen-Gammon said.

A dog looks out the window of her a trailer on North Camp Street as floodwaters rise in Uvalde, Texas, in July. Sam Owens / San Antonio Express-News via Getty Images

Ryan J. Rock Logue, a Kerrville resident who led the United Cajun Navy’s relief efforts there last year, credits public awareness for minimizing fatalities. People checked on neighbors. They didn’t try driving through floodwaters. And they heeded calls to evacuate. “We were all on hypervigilant PTSD mode with this flood, so everyone was kind of hyperaware,” he said. 

Mark Rose is a former general manager of the Lower Colorado River Authority, which oversees the lower Colorado River basin just north of the Guadalupe. He cautioned against drawing quick conclusions from the lower death toll. “Did we really do better because we know better and we’ve made institutional changes?” he said. “Or, did we just do better because last year we had a horrible flood that killed a bunch of people, and it’s now more on our mind? Those are the hard questions that all of the authorities should be asking and answering.”

The storm highlighted just how much of the state’s flood-warning network remains unfinished. Many counties included in last year’s disaster declaration still lack sirens, adequate stream gauges and other infrastructure. In eastern Kerr County, where Paul Welch and Elizabeth Hastings live, no sirens sounded even though their part of the Guadalupe flooded catastrophically last year. Kerr County plans to install 26 more sirens by next summer, but officials in Kerrville have estimated that a more thorough system with additional sirens, river gauges, and the like would cost at least $14 million — far more than the state’s $1 million allotment.

Tom Moser, a former NASA engineer, former Kerr County commissioner and leader of the team that’s establishing requirements for the county’s flood-warning system, said the state should fully fund such hardware up front. “There’s no reason, in my judgment, why a system like this couldn’t be put in place in probably less than six months,” he said. “We’ve seen enough emergencies and the impact of floods in the area that it ought to be full speed ahead.”

Kerr County officials did not respond to requests for comment. The governor has said the conversation is not over. 

“The systems we put in place last year proved to be successful and helpful,” Abbot said when asked during a press conference if the Legislature might provide more money for sirens. “We want to make sure we are equally successful and helpful in every region across the state of Texas. And those are the kinds of issues that we will take up in the next session.” 

Texas Governor Greg Abbott shows a signed major disaster declaration that he says he will send to President Donald Trump following a news conference about the state’s flood response in July. Sara Diggins / The Austin American-Statesman via Getty Images

It’s unclear how the system that officials have assembled so far would have stood up in a disaster more like last year’s storm and whether they would have resulted in a similar death toll. Too many homes, vacation rentals, and campgrounds remain in floodplains inundated both times.  “Not to be too macabre about it, but it’s possible that some of the people who died last year in their homes would have died in the flooding this year,” Nielsen-Gammon said.

But even the most expansive network of sirens won’t fully eliminate fatalities because they are reactive, Rose said. “With all due respect to those who think they have solved the problem by putting up a siren, in my opinion that’s total bullshit. And the reason is, [are] you going to hear a siren at 3 o’clock in the morning in a pounding rain, dead sleep, when you have an hour to respond? No.”

Rose believes effective flood warning begins as soon as the rain starts falling. In the Hill Country, where rivers are fed by runoff that can be difficult to track, that means monitoring the entire watershed with rain and stream gauges in creeks and tributaries, as the Lower Colorado River Authority has done. Because the Guadalupe has little flood control infrastructure, information is the first line of defense, he said, and it is only as good as the speed with which it arrives.

The fact that Welch felt safe enough to go to bed after checking RiverHub “tells you that we’re in the fledgling stages of data gathering on the Guadalupe River,” Rose said. He suspects the system probably does not yet provide enough timely, real-time information to keep a rapid rise in the water level coming as such a surprise.

“If anybody thinks that they’re done, that the job is done, it’s not,” Rose said. “It’s just starting.” 

A man stands in mud washed into his RV near Goat Creek, Texas, after the recent July floods. Sara Diggins / The Austin American-Statesman via Getty Images

In the end, what saved Welch and Hastings was a phone call from a neighbor — who had himself been tipped off by a friend in the fire department hearing the first emergency calls. “He saved our lives twice,” Hastings said.

The two of them fled to an Airbnb they found in downtown Comfort. Two weeks later, they had given up on the idea of living along the river and closed on a house 20 miles west, in Kerrville. It sits on a hilltop. “For the first time in a couple years, I’m going to feel safe,” Hastings said.

She has always known the Hill Country was dangerous. As a child in 1978, she watched television footage of cabins floating down the Guadalupe after 48 inches of rain fell in two days. But she never imagined the river would produce two catastrophic floods just 12 months apart.

That could grow more common. Warmer sea-surface temperatures are loading the atmosphere with more moisture, increasing the risk of extreme rainfall along the Gulf Coast, Mace said.

Still, Welch and Hastings can’t let go of their spot on the river. They love the waterfalls, the swimming hole, and the birds too much. They’ll keep coming back, but only in the van so they’re ready to get out quickly. Just in case. 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline What another Texas flood revealed about the state’s warning system on Aug 4, 2026.

I’ll never forget it. My family and I had just arrived in San Francisco in 2024 to begin a long tour with my podcast. I immediately reached out to Richard and was welcomed with the kindness that characterised him as much as his work.

How can one truly grasp the experience of war – “the omnipresent, everyday, tangible, arbitrary possibility of a battlefield, of a destroyed house, of flight, of famine, of abduction, of a violent death” – without witnessing first-hand its violence and devastation? Through memories, recollections, and speaking to the families of Israeli victims of the 7 October attacks and Palestinians trapped under Israel’s bombs in Gaza, Tel Aviv-based musician and writer Ofer Waldman searches for help in words. An edited excerpt from the book Verkämpftes Land (2025).

Here I end my days, helpless, and nothing, nothing I could have done or not done, willed or thought, could have led me to a different goal.

– Christa Wolf, Cassandra

I would much rather tell you something else. To write something down – something proper – and then search out the life that matches the written words.

Poet Lea Goldberg believed that in times of war, it is the poet’s duty, above all else, to write about flowers and children’s laughter. She wrote that in Tel Aviv in September 1939, just after World War II had broken out. Tanja Maljartschuk, the Ukrainian poet-in-exile, says that she no longer trusts language: language that is suited both to writing down poems and writing out orders for war and murder. Somewhere between these two extremes, I would have liked to tell you something else.

What story, then, am I to tell you?

I have not been on any battlefield. My house has not been destroyed. I did not have to starve, I did not have to flee, and I was not abducted. And yet life here knows an intimacy with the thoughts of war. And it is not because one spent countless hours in a shelter, surrounded by children, family, friends, even complete strangers, thinking of the people in Gaza who have neither houses nor shelters, or of the Israelis in the Kibbutzim whose shelters on 7 October could not protect them and rather became gateways to hell. All of us here will, as Serhij Zhadan once said, never again be able to look at the sky as we did before. For war – that is, the omnipresent, everyday, tangible, arbitrary possibility of a battlefield, of a destroyed house, of flight, of famine, of abduction, of a violent death – leaves behind certain traces. It is of these traces that I want to tell you. To search for them through words.

These are not words of courage, nor are they words of self-torment. Had I been in Gaza, I might not have written a sentence such as: “One cannot distinguish the smoke of the intercepted rockets from the autumn clouds.” Instead, my eyes – had I raised them to the sky – would have brimmed over with concrete dust, with ashes, and become blind. I would have written about undrinkable water and the stench of death. But I am not in Gaza. I direct my gaze there – not to please you, or to please myself, but because I know that all other gazes, including the gaze turned inward, are conditioned by one another. That is, also by this gaze toward Gaza. But I am not in Gaza. No more than you are.

In Terry Gilliam’s film Twelve Monkeys, which is based on Chris Marker’s short film La Jetée, a time traveller is sent into the past to prevent an apocalyptic pandemic. The entire plot revolves around one key scene: the moment when the protagonist, James Cole (played by Bruce Willis), and his partner, who are trying to find the source of the pandemic, run into a boy, who is in fact Cole’s younger self. At the very moment they meet the boy, they realise that they have been following the wrong lead all along. But before Cole manages to warn his younger self of what is to come, the police, who have been pursuing them, shoot him.

The climax of the scene is the moment when Cole’s partner, a young, bewildered woman, holding Cole in her arms, stares at the boy with pleading terror as she grasps what is happening: Cole is bleeding to death, and it is too late to warn the boy – the young Cole, who will later be sent back into the past and will fail again and again to avert the dystopia – about his future.

(Time travel, anyhow: the drift into the surreal, a pause in the presumed logic of reality, the escape into an imaginary world to shut oneself off from the real one. To confront the insane through insanity itself, to name it. That too – and of that as well – I want to tell you.)

We all constantly try to trace the seeds of dystopia through poems, plays, essays, novels, and history books; and then, once we have found them (too late), we try to call them out. Our frequent failures make us no less secure; quite the contrary, we are sometimes bowled over by an omnipresent, almost brazen self-assurance as the sky around us darkens. These words are not self-assured. They are the gaze of the woman who knows she is doomed to fail. They are the gaze of the boy peering into his own future, fated to grasp it too late.

And yet these words are also the brief lingering over the gaze between the woman and the child. A lingering ascribed with the possibility – also arbitrary, painfully arbitrary – of recognition. Thus, along with every stratum of war laid upon this land, clinging to its people, the layer of this arbitrary possibility is laid. Lingering. Creating space, sometimes almost surreal, but nameable. Visualisable. Describable.

Stuttering

I start over again.

“I’d like to hear my new work read aloud,” says S. from Berlin, and asks me to read it together. I’m in Israel, so we start a video call. Before we begin, S. asks if it might be too much for me right now –  that is, if I can read, write, think at all about literature at this time.

“Why would it be too much?” I ask. “I thought the play was about the war in Ukraine, about family history, about your grandfather.”

“It is about my grandfather, too,” S. says. “But it’s also about 7 October. About Israel. About Gaza.”

I wave it off. When is it a good time, anyway?

“Let’s read.”

I start over again.

It’s a beautiful spring day. My brother sits in front of me on a rickety garden swing, rolling a cigarette. I hold his lighter, hand it to him.

“I thought Y. wasn’t in Gaza,” I say. Y. is my brother’s eldest son. “I thought he was at a base near the border. He’s not a combat soldier.”

“He’s a medic, serving the battalion commander. When the commander goes in to assess the situation, he has to go in too.”

The things he saw in Gaza. The air there. The sounds.

My brother looks at his hands, as if searching for words. He spreads his fingers, and the cigarette falls on the ground.

I start over again.

The moderator has just introduced me. I’m on stage in Frankfurt and am supposed to read from letters I wrote to a friend in the first weeks of the war. I take the microphone and look out at the hall again, at the expectant faces, at the tense faces.

Pronouncing the words becomes more difficult with every sentence. I draw in breath, shape my lips to speak the sounds I see before me: “child,” “air,” “sound,” “ashes”. But hardly anything comes out. I have to thrust the words out between my lips with increasing force. I have to tense my diaphragm with a direct command from my head, to push the air out through my mouth. At some point, it doesn’t matter whether it comes out as words, or as barking, or a scream.

I recognise this feeling from my time as an orchestral musician. Among brass players, it’s called “airlock”. Breathing in and out in time with the music, you place the mouthpiece on your tensed lips, position your tongue just behind your front teeth, and wait to play the note. As you’re about to play it, the tongue must retract to make way for the flow of air generated by your breathing muscles. But sometimes the tongue baulks at the command from your head and sticks, creating an airlock that leads to a kind of stutter when you start playing. Or the tongue does not move at all, and you have to skip the passage in whole or in part because the orchestra does not wait, it cannot wait, it must play on. Your eyes track the unsounded notes on the paper, your ears register the void of your own missing notes amidst the orchestra’s onward playing. In your mind, the world shrinks to the tip of your rebellious tongue, to the pressure building in your lungs and throat, to the blood flooding into your face. To the onrushing feeling of failure.

You want to join in the music, to fall into its rhythm. But sometimes you have to pull the instrument away from your lips. Breathe out. Try anew.

Start over again.

So I start over again.

* * *

“The music – the music helps,” says A. from Kibbutz Kfar-Aza. “The singing.”

Three of us – A., her husband, and I – are sitting in the lobby of a Tel Aviv hotel. She’s about to tell her story from 7 October to a group from Germany, but we still have a little time before she starts. For now, A. sits across from me, a glass of cold water in her hand, and repeats a few times that music helps.

“I have been asked,” she says – and now her eyes, her faint smile, try to break free from her face, pressing themselves as if through crusted earth  – “I have been asked,” – that crusted earth around her eyes and mouth begins to show cracks and long, deep wrinkles – “I have been asked how I felt at my son’s funeral, my mother-in-law’s funeral, my brother-in-law’s funeral, the funeral of…”

Her husband gently interrupts her, placing one hand on the back of his other hand and rubbing them: “At the funerals,” he says. “Just say: ‘At the funerals’.”

Her objectivity lies in counting off; his lies in reducing to the essential. One feels their connection, their love.

“Yes.” The encrusted earth around her mouth cracks open. “At the funerals.”

Speaking was difficult for her, A. said, but singing came more easily. And so they went from one funeral to the next, her daughter playing guitar, A. singing. I did not dare ask what she sang.

“I played music myself for a long time,” I tell her.

“What instrument did you play?”

“The French horn,” I say.

“Netta, our son, played the violin,” says A. “He loved Peter and the Wolf, and always wanted to hear it again and again as a child.” The torn, crusted earth wrinkles and cracks; the backs of the hands rub together. “He wanted to be Peter, and that’s why he chose the violin.”

I search for words in my head, what to say now. “It’s interesting,” I say (stupid word). “It’s interesting, which instrument people choose – that is, what character from the fairy tale: Peter, or the wolf, the hunters, the grandfather, the duck, the cat, the bird. What these characters say about us.”

“So you’re the wolf?” A.’s husband repeats the word again, “wolf”. I want to utter my standard line: that, as the wolf (a character whose music is played by three French horns), I have frightened many children already. Thankfully I remain silent and risk a smile.

“Netta was definitely Peter,” says A. “The hero of the story. He didn’t always follow the rules either.”

Embarrassed, I hum Peter’s melody: tam-tam-ta-ta-tim-tam. Hebrew has only one word for “protagonist,” “main character,” and “hero” – gibor. A. uses this word for her son only when she refers to him as Peter from the fairy tale. She does not use it when she is recounting the moment he threw himself on a hand grenade to save his fiancée, as she will soon tell the group from Germany in the same gentle, matter-of-fact voice. The cracks in the encrusted earth close, leaving delicate cobweb-like patterns around her mouth and eyes, trapping the sounds within them, tam-tam-ta-ta-tim-tam.

* * *

I experienced for the first time what is called an “airlock” while speaking at a solidarity event in Berlin. I was joining remotely from Israel and was supposed to say something, read something aloud. My reading included a poem by Yehuda Amichai: El male Rachamim (“God Full of Mercy”).

El male Rachamim, 

ilmale HaEl male Rachamim 

haju HaRachamim BaOlam WeLo rak bo.

God full of mercy,

were God not full of mercy,

there would be mercy in the world, not only in him.

I drew breath, shaped the first sound – “E” – and stalled. The words caught in my throat. I tried to clear it to get the air flowing again. It did not help. The audience in Berlin flickered on the screen in front of me. Had they noticed anything? Were they already irritated? I was slipping out of the rhythm of the words. Trying to counteract, to fall back into the rhythm, I started tapping my foot, an old musician’s exercise.

1, 2, 3, 4.

1, 2, 3 (breathe out), 4 (breathe in), “E”.

“E”

“E”.

El male Rachamim. God full of mercy.

1. 2. 3. (Breathe out). 4. (Breathe in).

* * *

Scarcely to be found in the Israeli newspapers are accounts of what life is now like for the people in Gaza. I know the figures – the number of dead, wounded, starving; the number of destroyed houses. I see the images of endless landscapes of ruins and dust. Yet everything feels secondhand, far away. I search for a voice behind the images and numbers; I want to hear such a voice, within my own four walls, to face it.

The few people I know from Gaza now live in Germany. So I ask a Palestinian friend from Nazareth to connect me with M., an acquaintance of his from the Jabalia refugee camp in northern Gaza that he has spoken about many times.

M. is an English teacher. He and his family are now sheltering in Khan Younis – their fifth stop since the outbreak of the war. Each time the bomb strikes draw closer, he tells me later in conversation, they flee further. But the Gaza Strip is narrow. There is no real escape and no safety.

M. sounds like someone describing what it is like to be trapped in a cage with a predator. It is about constantly trying to anticipate which corner the predator will move toward next. But beyond pressing oneself against the bars of the cage (pulling one’s own children close), there is nothing one can do.

My first attempt to arrange a conversation with him fails.

“We’ll talk tomorrow, Wednesday,” he writes.

“Tomorrow is Thursday,” I write.

“What time?” he asks. “What time is it where you are right now?”

And I think: But we should be in the same time zone – he’s only 170 kilometres away from me in Tel Aviv (I wanted to know exactly how far away he was. At first, the app responded: “Route cannot be calculated.” I switched to the straight-line function, which gave me 170 kilometres).

Later, during our call, fighter jets fly over my head, and I wonder: how long does a fighter jet take to cover a straight-line distance of 170 kilometres? How long before the thunder stops over me and starts roaring over him?

I write to him: “Same time as Gaza.”

He does not reply.

When we do finally talk, I first ask him about the sense of time. He thinks for a moment.

“It took me 15 years to build my house. It took only a few seconds to almost completely destroy it with a single artillery shell.” 1, 2, 3, 4.

I scroll through my messaging apps. Every day, dozens of appeals pile up there – for donations and acts of solidarity, for Jewish-Arab gatherings, for wounded Israeli soldiers, for protecting aid convoys to Gaza from attacks by radical settlers, for the families of the hostages, for dispossessed Palestinian communities, for internally displaced Israelis, for the bereaved, for children, widows, for lonely elderly parents.

In the evening comes a call for a rally in the north of Israel to end the war and release the hostages. It’s not too far from where I live. I put on a black shirt that says “De-Mo-Kra-Tia” (a relic from earlier times) and drive there. Since the outbreak of the war, GPS jammers have been deployed across the entire region to make it harder for enemy rockets to locate their targets, and I find the place with difficulty.

The last kilometre I cover on foot. The closer I get to the demonstration, the more people I see heading for the same place. Some wave flags, some carry banners with anti-government slogans, and others wear shirts with anti-war messages. There aren’t many of us. Onlookers in cars and on street corners follow us with tired eyes; some curse us, insult us as traitors, wish us death – but they do so with weary gazes and hollow voices. They receive no response and expect none; everything feels like a compulsory exercise, like a ritual worn thin and emptied out.

Later, at the rally, an elderly man stands at the edge of the crowd, leaning on a cane to which a limp Israeli flag is tied. He is weeping to himself, silently. He cries throughout the entire demonstration, never once looking toward the stage or at the angry speakers. Instead, his eyes, reddened by tears, gaze into the crowd without fixing on any particular point. Only when the mother of a hostage begins to speak does he briefly straighten up and turn his face toward the stage. He listens to her speak, in short sentences, of her days and nights. The demonstrators at the rally fall silent almost at once and stand as if frozen. The only sound to be heard is the flapping of flags in the light wind. The mother’s voice, carried by loudspeakers, is scattered and absorbed by the low walls enclosing the square, breaks against shop windows, police cars, and the huge billboards. She reaches the end of her speech. Around me, people open their mouths to shout. I open my mouth too, again and again, not knowing myself whether I am trying to shout or gasping for air.

* * *

Mohammed Al-Rimlawi was one of the students in the English club that M. had founded in the Jabalia refugee camp. A few weeks ago, Mohammed’s mother went with his youngest sister in search of one of the increasingly scarce power sources to charge her phone. When they returned, their house was no longer standing. Mohammed, his father, one sister, and two brothers lay buried under the rubble.

Once more a factual, objective listing. Again I search for words.

I enquire about the English club. The students in the club (boys only) are between 10 and 14 years old.

“There are hardly any foreigners here in Gaza,” M. says. So, to offer them a window onto the world, he has built an international network of mentors who practice English with the students over video calls.

“All they know is Gaza,” he says about his students. “I don’t want that. That’s not good.”

In the meantime, the school has been partly destroyed, and the students have fled with their families to sites throughout the Gaza Strip. He keeps coming across them, by chance.

“What questions are they asking right now?”

“They are not asking any questions,” he says at first. The sunburned faces of the children – the majority live in tents run by aid organisations and spend most of their time outside – remain expressionless, their mouths closed. I press him. This cannot be; after all, children ask questions; that’s what children do: they ask questions. (What questions do my children ask.)

M. thinks for a moment. Then he says:

“When.”

That is what they are asking.

When.

Exhale. Inhale.

1,2,3,4.

This text is an edited excerpt from Ofer Waldman’s book Verkämpftes Land (Wallstein Verlag, 2025). Translated from the German by Anton Baer | Voxeurop.  

Students horrified by uni oil and arms collab Channel News brendan 4th August 2026 Teaser Media

Tidak sedikit pengguna internet yang pernah mengalami situasi seperti ini. Saat membuka media sosial atau bergabung dalam sebuah komunitas digital, muncul berbagai unggahan yang membahas Mahjong Ways scatter 1000xxx. Ada yang membagikan tangkapan layar, ada pula yang menceritakan pengalaman memperoleh kombinasi simbol tertentu hingga menghasilkan kemenangan bernilai tinggi. Fenomena tersebut kemudian memancing rasa penasaran orang lain. Sebagian ingin mengetahui bagaimana mekanisme permainan bekerja, sementara yang lain hanya ingin memahami alasan mengapa topik ini begitu ramai diperbincangkan.

Perbincangan semacam itu sebenarnya bukan hal baru di dunia permainan digital. Setiap kali sebuah permainan menghadirkan momen yang dianggap menarik atau berbeda, informasi akan menyebar dengan sangat cepat. Mahjong Ways menjadi salah satu contoh yang menunjukkan bagaimana sebuah permainan dapat berkembang menjadi bahan diskusi di berbagai platform dalam waktu singkat.

Popularitas Mahjong Ways tidak muncul tanpa alasan. Permainan ini mengusung tema yang terinspirasi dari permainan mahjong klasik dengan tampilan visual modern. Kombinasi warna yang cerah, animasi yang halus, serta efek suara yang dinamis menciptakan pengalaman bermain yang terasa lebih hidup. Bagi banyak pengguna, unsur hiburan tersebut menjadi daya tarik utama sebelum mereka mulai memahami berbagai fitur yang tersedia.

Istilah scatter 1000xxx sendiri sering muncul dalam percakapan komunitas. Umumnya, istilah tersebut digunakan sebagai penyebutan informal terhadap momen ketika simbol scatter menghasilkan hasil yang dianggap sangat besar oleh pemain. Perlu dipahami bahwa istilah ini bukan merupakan fitur resmi dalam permainan, melainkan berkembang sebagai bahasa komunitas yang menggambarkan pencapaian tertentu. Oleh karena itu, setiap cerita yang beredar sebaiknya dipahami sebagai pengalaman individu, bukan sebagai hasil yang pasti dapat diperoleh oleh semua pemain.

Dari sudut pandang mekanisme permainan, simbol scatter memang memiliki fungsi penting. Pada banyak permainan slot modern, simbol ini berperan sebagai pemicu fitur bonus, seperti putaran gratis atau fitur tambahan lainnya. Kehadiran fitur tersebut membuat permainan terasa lebih dinamis karena memberikan variasi dibandingkan putaran biasa. Namun, kapan simbol scatter muncul tetap ditentukan oleh sistem permainan yang menggunakan proses acak sesuai aturan yang berlaku.

Hal inilah yang sering kali menjadi sumber berbagai cerita menarik. Ada pemain yang memperoleh simbol scatter dalam waktu singkat, sementara pemain lain harus menunggu jauh lebih lama. Perbedaan pengalaman tersebut menciptakan beragam diskusi, mulai dari strategi bermain hingga berbagi momen keberuntungan. Dari sisi psikologi pengguna, pengalaman yang unik cenderung lebih mudah dibagikan sehingga akhirnya memperkuat popularitas permainan tersebut di media sosial.

Banyak konten yang menampilkan kemenangan besar juga turut memengaruhi persepsi publik. Video pendek, siaran langsung, maupun unggahan komunitas sering kali hanya menampilkan momen ketika hasil yang diperoleh terlihat sangat mengesankan. Padahal, proses permainan secara keseluruhan jauh lebih panjang daripada potongan video yang beredar. Karena itu, penting bagi pembaca untuk melihat informasi secara lebih utuh dan tidak hanya berfokus pada hasil akhir yang ditampilkan.

Pengalaman para pemain menunjukkan bahwa setiap sesi permainan dapat memberikan hasil yang berbeda. Ada yang merasa permainan berlangsung cukup stabil, sementara yang lain mengalami perubahan hasil yang sangat bervariasi. Variasi tersebut merupakan karakteristik umum permainan yang menggunakan sistem acak, sehingga tidak ada pola tertentu yang dapat menjamin hasil yang sama pada setiap percobaan.

Dalam komunitas digital, muncul pula berbagai teori mengenai waktu bermain, pola putaran, maupun kombinasi tertentu yang dianggap meningkatkan peluang memperoleh scatter. Meski teori tersebut sering menjadi bahan diskusi menarik, hingga kini tidak terdapat bukti yang dapat memastikan bahwa metode tertentu mampu mengubah mekanisme acak permainan. Oleh sebab itu, informasi seperti ini lebih tepat dipandang sebagai pengalaman pribadi daripada fakta yang berlaku secara universal.

Fenomena Mahjong Ways scatter 1000xxx juga memperlihatkan bagaimana kekuatan komunitas mampu membentuk tren digital. Ketika satu unggahan memperoleh perhatian besar, pengguna lain terdorong untuk mencoba permainan yang sama atau membagikan pengalaman mereka sendiri. Akibatnya, percakapan terus berkembang dan menciptakan efek berantai yang membuat topik tersebut semakin populer.

Dari perspektif pengalaman pengguna, daya tarik permainan bukan hanya berasal dari kemungkinan memperoleh hasil besar. Desain antarmuka yang nyaman, animasi yang responsif, serta ritme permainan yang cepat juga menjadi faktor penting yang membuat banyak orang bertahan memainkan permainan tersebut. Kombinasi aspek visual dan mekanisme permainan inilah yang akhirnya membangun pengalaman yang dianggap menyenangkan oleh sebagian pemain.

Meskipun demikian, penting untuk memahami bahwa permainan berbasis peluang tetap memiliki unsur ketidakpastian. Setiap putaran berdiri sendiri dan hasil sebelumnya tidak menentukan hasil berikutnya. Dengan memahami prinsip tersebut, pemain dapat memiliki ekspektasi yang lebih realistis serta menikmati permainan sebagai bentuk hiburan, bukan sebagai sesuatu yang dapat diprediksi secara pasti.

Pada akhirnya, alasan mengapa Mahjong Ways scatter 1000xxx menjadi perbincangan bukan semata-mata karena angka atau istilah yang digunakan, melainkan karena perpaduan antara pengalaman pemain, penyebaran informasi melalui media sosial, serta rasa penasaran yang terus berkembang di dalam komunitas. Fenomena ini menunjukkan bagaimana sebuah permainan digital dapat menjadi topik yang menarik ketika pengalaman individu bertemu dengan kekuatan komunikasi di era digital. Dengan menyikapi setiap informasi secara objektif dan memahami mekanisme permainan secara menyeluruh, pembaca dapat melihat tren ini dari sudut pandang yang lebih seimbang dan informatif.

• A new Gallup poll found that Americans’ No. 1 fear is car crashes. When asked about the greatest risk to their safety, 34 percent of respondents said car crashes — almost twice as many as the second-most popular response, violent crime. (Jalopnik)
• Beth Osborne blasted Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy for implying that people who ride bikes or live in apartments are unworthy of safe streets.
• Cities are using robots to evaluate sidewalk conditions and find out where improvements are needed to meet ADA requirements. (Government Technology)
• The new book “Transportation and the Shape of Cities” examines the spatial needs of various modes of transportation. (Forbes)
• Florida wants to use $198 million the federal government earmarked for electric vehicle chargers to build helipads for flying taxis instead. (The Next Web)
• The Federal Highway Traffic Safety Administration is letting robotaxi company Zoox deploy up to 5,000 vehicles in San Francisco. (The Verge)
• A Wayne County, Michigan transit funding referendum would no longer let communities opt out of the tax. (Detroit Free Press)
• Idaho’s Valley Regional Transit is shutting down a program that takes people to medical appointments due to lack of funding. (Capital Sun)
• Leaders in Philadelphia’s Chinatown neighborhood are fighting to restore federal funding for an expressway cap. (Inside Climate News)
• A Nashville city council member is considering restricting cars on Broadway after a driver hit four pedestrians. (WSMV)
• The Portland city council is considering banning right turns on red on more streets. (KGW)
• Volunteer docents on a Pacific Coast Amtrak line are getting passengers to look up from their phones and check out the scenery. (Oregonian)

In our latest, Scott and guest co-host Laurel Sutherlin (@laurelsutherlin) talk with author and environmentalist Jason Mark (@jasondovemark) about his new book “The Earth Said Remember Me: How to Revive…

A public consultation opened today on the Environment Agency’s (EA) draft decision to grant consent for gas drilling and lower-volume fracking at Burniston in North Yorkshire.

The consultation runs for six weeks until Wednesday 23 September 2026. It gives people a chance to have their say before the final decision is made.

Equipment proposed during lower-volume fracking stage at Burniston. Source: planning application

This is the second EA consultation on the proposals by Europa Oil & Gas in the village on the edge of the North York Moors National Park.

The first consultation, on the initial environmental permit application, was held a year ago. The deadline for comments in that consultation was extended after complaints by the local campaign group, Frack Free Coastal Communities, that key information was missing.

Today’s new consultation seeks views on a draft environmental permit.

This is separate from the decision by North Yorkshire Council on 24 April 2026 to refuse planning permission, later confirmed in May.

The Burniston development can go ahead only with both planning permission and the environmental permit.

The EA said it was minded to issue a permit for the proposed wellsite, known by Europa as Cloughton-2, as well as drilling and testing a borehole and the lower-volume fracking process called proppant squeeze.

Proppant squeeze is one of several lower-volume fracking operations that remain legal in the UK, despite the moratorium on high-volume fracking. The process aims to improve the flow of gas and involves injecting fluid into the well under pressure to open fractures in the surrounding rocks.

The EA said it was legally required to issue a permit where an application met requirements under environmental legislation. It can refuse an application only where one or more of these requirements are not met, including where the proposed activity would pose an unacceptable risk to people or the environment.

Ian Foster, EA area manager for Yorkshire, said today:

“We recognise there is significant public interest in this application, particularly following the local planning authority’s decision to refuse planning permission.

“The Environment Agency has a different legal role. Our responsibility is to independently assess whether the application meets the requirements of environmental legislation and whether the proposed activities can be carried out without unacceptable risks to people or the environment.

“Our assessment is evidence-based and we have published the reasons for our draft decision. We encourage anyone with an interest in the application to read the consultation documents and provide their views before we make our final decision.”

The local MP, Alison Hume, who opposed the Burniston proposal, said today:

“I will be submitting my comments on the EA’s draft permit decision and highlighting my concerns about Europa’s plans to carry out small-scale fracking … on the edge of the North York Moors.

“Given the level of concern that many local residents have expressed about this proposal, I have also written to the relevant minister to make them aware of these developments and the strength of feeling among constituents. I will continue to monitor the situation closely and keep in contact with the relevant authorities as the process moves forward.”

The consultation comprises 31 documents, including the EA’s draft decision.

All the documents can be viewed online. Comments can also be made online or by phoning the EA on 03708 506 506.

The EA can take into account:

• Relevant environmental regulations and technical standards
• Information on the local population and sensitive sites
• Whether the right process or technology is proposed by the developer
• The impact of the proposal on the use of land around the site, whether the impact is acceptable and what pollution control may be required
• The impact of noise and smell from traffic on site
• Correcting incorrect information in the application
• Information the EA has not been made aware of in the application

The EA cannot take into account

• Issues outside the remit of the environmental permitting regulations
• Whether a site should have a formal ecological designation
• Whether the activity should or should not be allowed
• Land use issues
• Impact of noise and smell from traffic travelling to and from the site
• The process followed by the EA to determine a permit

The deadline for comments has been extended because the consultation is during the summer holiday.

DrillOrDrop will report on comments submitted to the consultation.

RNs delivered a petition to their employer opposing CommonSpirit Health’s planned layoffs of more than 175 frontline health care workers signed by more than 5,000 nurses. The nurses held a rally and press conference to protest the proposed layoffs at 17 hospitals in California and their impact on patient safety. The nurses are demanding that CommonSpirit Health immediately rescind the layoffs.

This is a re-post from The Climate Brink

Jim Hansen and I have spent much of this year making seemingly opposite predictions about where 2026 will end up in the global temperature record books. He has argued since the spring that 2026 will be the warmest year on record; I have made the case that it is more likely than not to end up in second place. And in a recent post he framed our disagreement in memorably equine terms:

Based on this scientific evidence, we expect that when the horse race comes down the stretch, in November and December of this year, we will be riding a thoroughbred, a strong young horse, and Zeke will be atop a fading old nag.

For the record, I am the fading old nag in this metaphor. I have been called worse.

But here is the fun part: when the race comes down the final stretch at the end of 2026, there is a good chance we will both be declared winners. Hansen’s prediction is about NASA’s GISTEMP record specifically. Mine is about the average across the major surface temperature datasets. And when I run my own forecast model separately on each of six datasets, it gives GISTEMP a ~65% chance of a new 2026 record even as the multi-dataset average only has a ~32% chance and is likely to come in second place.

First, where my forecast stands. Back in December I projected 2026 at 1.41C (1.27C to 1.55C) above preindustrial levels, and in early June I revised that up to 1.46C (1.36C to 1.59C) as forecast models converged on a doozy of an El Niño developing in the latter half of the year. Hansen, via the Washington Post, cited my June estimate of a 26.6% chance that 2026 sets a new record.

That number has continued to creep up. With observations through June and the latest El Niño forecast ensemble, my current central estimate for 2026 is 1.50C (1.44C to 1.57C) above the 1850-1900 baseline in the average of six surface temperature datasets.1 That translates into a ~32% chance that 2026 beats 2024’s record, a ~66% chance it comes in second, and almost no chance (<2%) it falls to third or below. The figure below shows where those projections sit against the observational record.

Observed annual global mean surface temperature (average of GISTEMP, HadCRUT5, NOAA GlobalTemp, Berkeley Earth, JRA-3Q, and ERA5; °C relative to 1850–1900) and the 2026 and 2027 forecast medians with 25–75% and 5–95% Monte Carlo ranges, alongside the 2024 record (dashed) and the 1.5C level (dotted). Forecast updated 30 July 2026 with observations through June and the July-initialized multi-model El Niño ensemble.

Here we see 2026 sitting just below the 2024 record line, with 2027 well above it. So the horse race (to continue the metaphor) is drifting in Hansen’s direction, though still short of the finish line. In the average of all the groups reporting global surface temperatures, second warmest remains my central call for 2026.

It is worth being clear about why my odds keep rising, because it is not that 2026 has been running unexpectedly hot. Year-to-date temperatures have actually drifted slightly down since March (a January-June mean of 1.39C, versus 1.41C for January-March). What changed is the El Niño forecast. To show this, I reran my forecast as it would have looked with each month’s information: that month’s multi-model El Niño plume plus observations through that month.

Left: probability that 2026 exceeds the 2024 record in the six-dataset composite, recomputed at each monthly forecast vintage (that month’s multi-model El Niño forecast plume plus year-to-date observations through that month). Right: additive decomposition of the March-to-now rise into an observations step (March plume held fixed, observations updated through June) and an El Niño forecast step (July plume swapped in). Updated 30 July 2026.

The odds of a 2026 record in the composite have risen from ~7% at the March vintage to ~35% now,2 and the decomposition on the right shows that the strengthening El Niño forecast accounts for ~84% of that rise; incoming observations contributed just over 4 points. In other words, my drift toward Hansen’s position is not the 2026 observations through June being particularly extraordinary. It is the ENSO models converging on an unprecedentedly large event. If that El Niño underdelivers, these odds will sag back down. If it holds, the odds will likely hold as well. But it seems unlikely (I hope!) that we see continued strengthening of the El Niño forecast beyond what already would blow past the prior record by a “truly mind-numbing margin”.

But “the warmest year on record” is not a single number that nature hands us; it depends on whose record you check. Hansen’s prediction is specifically about GISTEMP. So a natural question is: what does my model say if I fit it to each dataset individually, using each dataset’s own 2024 record as the bar to clear? The figure below shows the result for six datasets: the four traditional surface station products (GISTEMP, HadCRUT5, NOAA GlobalTemp, and Berkeley Earth) and two reanalysis products (Copernicus/ERA5 and JRA-3Q).

Probability that 2026 exceeds each dataset’s own 2024 record, from the same statistical forecast model (trend, ENSO, and observed 2026 months) fit to each of six datasets separately, with 10,000 Monte Carlo draws sampling a 14-model El Niño forecast ensemble. Observations through June 2026 (May for HadCRUT5). Updated 30 July 2026.

The same model, fed the same El Niño forecast, gives 2026 a ~65% chance of a record in GISTEMP and a ~66% chance in Berkeley Earth,3 but only ~35% in HadCRUT5, ~24% in NOAA, ~13% in ERA5, and ~9% in JRA-3Q. Conveniently, the average across the six (~35%) lands nearly on the blended estimate (32%), which is a reassuring consistency check.

Why the spread? It is not that the datasets disagree much about how warm 2026 will be; the projections are quite similar. They disagree about how high the bar is. The reanalysis products (ERA5 and JRA-3Q) ran exceptionally hot during the 2023-2024 event, so their 2024 records sit further above their long-term trend lines and are harder to beat. GISTEMP’s 2026 median projection sits ~0.02C above its 2024 record, while ERA5’s sits ~0.05C below its own and JRA-3Q’s ~0.07C below. When the margin is a few hundredths of a degree, structural differences between datasets could end up deciding the race.

So Hansen predicting a GISTEMP record and me predicting second warmest in the multi-dataset average are, oddly, compatible bets. If 2026 sets a record in GISTEMP but not in the dataset average (or in ERA5), expect a flurry of confused headlines in January as people try and explain how its the warmest or second warmest year depending on what dataset you look at.

I should concede the larger point plainly: Hansen made this call earlier and more confidently than I did, and the odds have moved steadily his way since. If 2026 ends up warmest across the board, he won outright, and a 32% chance is the kind of thing that happens all the time. I’d also gently note that a probabilistic forecast of “second warmest, with a one-in-three chance of a record” is a difficult thing to lose spectacularly.

What our agreement on 2026 does not settle is the more consequential disagreement about why. Hansen’s forecast rests on a specific physical story: his argument for a climate sensitivity of 4-5C per doubled CO2, a large forcing boost from falling aerosols, and a warming rate that has roughly doubled.4 My forecast is simpler: it just relies on the long-term trend, the state of ENSO, and the year-to-date observations and ends up in more or less the same place. When a statistical model based on the historical trend and an El Niño forecast lands on essentially the same 2027 number as Hansen (more on that in a moment), it tells you that a single warm year, or even two, cannot distinguish between “very rapid acceleration driven by aerosols and high sensitivity” and “the trend and more modest acceleration plus a very strong El Niño.” That debate will be settled by energy balance observations and the post-El-Niño years, not by whether 2026 clears 2024 by 0.03C in one dataset.

And on 2027 there will be no horse race at all: my model puts the odds of a new record next year at ~91%. Here I should give Hansen his due on a second count. Back in December he was already predicting a ~1.7C 2027, at a time when my own central estimate was 1.57C. Seven months and many rounds of strengthening El Niño forecasts later, my regression has drifted up to 1.70C (1.48C to 1.93C): essentially the number he wrote down at the start.

Ultimately both probabilistic forecasts and confident predictions can be validated by the same outcome, and the interesting scientific disagreement (how fast is warming accelerating, and why) will outlive whatever the December photo finish shows. Either way we are in for quite a wild climate ride in both the latter half of 2026 and 2027 due to a combination of accelerating warming and a super El Niño event.

1 The blended forecast uses the average of GISTEMP, HadCRUT5, NOAA GlobalTemp, Berkeley Earth, JRA-3Q, and ERA5, each rebaselined to 1850-1900 using its own pre-1900 offset. The model regresses annual temperature on the year, the prior year’s anomaly, observed and forecast ENSO conditions, the year-to-date anomaly, and the latest monthly value, trained on 1950-2025 excluding major volcanic years, with 10,000 Monte Carlo draws sampling both regression uncertainty and a ~650-member multi-model El Niño forecast ensemble. The headline numbers use a relative (RONI-style) ENSO index; using the raw ONI instead gives a slightly warmer 1.51C and a 37% record chance, because the forecast El Niño is strong enough to sit beyond the range of the historical ONI training data.

2 This figure only uses 13 of the 14 El Niño models in the live ensemble as the 14th (SINTEX-F) was only added to the tracker in June and cannot be used for the retrospective calculations, which is why it puts today’s odds at ~35% rather than the headline ~32%.

3 It's worth noting that my odds for Berkeley Earth are notably higher than those provided (~12%) in the official Berkeley Earth update. This is largely due to my statistical model including the ENSO predictions for the remainder of the year which does not improve the fit much for most years (start-of-year ENSO conditions tend to be a much stronger predictor) but does matter in the rare years where strong El Nino events are forming like 1997, 2015, 2023, and 2026.

4 It's worth noting that Hansen’s estimate of ECS is well within our very likely uncertainty range of 2C to 5C per doubling CO2 in the IPCC AR6. And there has been some compelling evidence in recent years that ECS might be higher, though I’d personally give a central estimate closer to 3.5C than Hansen’s ~4.5C, as well as a new preprint suggesting forcing from the 2020 IMO low sulfur shipping fuel regulations may end up somewhere between Hansen’s high and my low-end estimate.

As America celebrates its 250-year anniversary, the Liberty Bell pavilion in Philadelphia is hosting millions of people from across the country. Recent upgrades, however, were designed to...

More than 35 groups today called on the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to withdraw its proposal to rescind its 2024 climate disclosure rule. The 2024 rule, which is currently stayed in litigation, requires large public companies to disclose climate-related financial risk information to investors, including Scope 1 and 2 greenhouse gas emissions.

Led by Chair Paul Atkins, the SEC’s proposal ignores the reality of climate change as a growing source of financial risk for public companies and investors, as well as overwhelming investor demand for this more comparable, reliable climate disclosure. If finalized, the proposal would undermine transparency in capital markets to protect companies with high climate-related financial risks, the groups maintain.

“The proposal reflects the desire of Paul Atkins’s SEC to ignore growing financial risks from climate change and to deprive investors of essential information,” said Elyse Schupak, climate policy advocate for Public Citizen. “For polluting industries that seek to downplay their role driving the climate crisis and their exposure to related risks, finalizing the proposed rule would be a victory. The SEC should withdraw this proposal as it contradicts the Commission’s responsibility to facilitate transparency for investors and promote well functioning capital markets.”

“The 2024 climate disclosure rule set the SEC record for most comments ever collected on a regulation, and investors showed up nearly unanimously in support,” said Alex Martin, climate finance policy director at Americans for Financial Reform. “This move is another in a long string of recent SEC actions to empower corporations over investors, and reflects this administration’s far-reaching attempts to deny the reality of climate change. If finalized, this proposal will hurt workers saving for retirement by depriving people of information needed to assess companies’ financial risks due to climate change — and by endangering other critical disclosures as well.”

Sobre las asambleas Carlos Tornel Para el filósofo francés Jacques Rancière, todo orden social se sustenta en una partición previa de lo perceptible o en un orden de lo sensible: una distribución de espacios, voces y capacidades que determina quién y qué puede verse, decirse u oírse, y reconocerse como político. La política comienza, según Rancière, cuando esta disposición se ve interrumpida: cuando quienes no debían hablar se reúnen, se nombran a sí mismos y hacen

On Assemblies Carlos Tornel For French philosopher Jaques Rancière, every social order rests on a prior partition of the perceptible or an order of the sensible: a distribution of spaces, voices, and capacities that determines who and what can be seen, said or heard, and recognized as political. Politics begins, according to Rancière, when this arrangement is interrupted: when those who were not supposed to speak, gather, name themselves, and make TapestryAlternativesGTAGTAalternativesvs.GTA…

Checks & Balances Project (C&BP) has filed a Freedom of Information Act request seeking the response times of Sussex County, Virginia, emergency medical responders.

AI-assisted searches indicate the records are on the Sussex County website, but links to those meetings and records don’t work. The failure to maintain the site and keep records available is an apparent violation of Virginia law.

Response times of the Stony Creek Volunteer Rescue Squad (SCRVS) run by Steve White, the chair of the county board of supervisors, are of particular interest. A ChatGPT search showed the SCVRS weeknight response times “consistently exceeded the 20-minute standard for several months.”

C&BP has reported that White voted to send taxpayer funds to SCVRS, which is an apparent violation of Virginia’s conflict-of-interest law. White also engineered the defunding of the positions of the county fire chief and deputy fire chief in September 2025 and the April firing of County Administrator Richard Douglas.

A previous Freedom of Information Act request by C&BP yielded an October 2025 memorandum of understanding between the county and SCVRS in which the county agreed to pay SCVRS $422,250 a year for EMS services. That amount was more than twice the revenues SCVRS reported in its publicly available tax returns from 2019, the last year they filed tax returns with the IRS.

The IRS suspended SCVRS’ nonprofit status in 2023 after it failed to file tax returns for three straight years.

Ray Locker is the executive director for Checks & Balances Project, an investigative watchdog blog holding government officials, lobbyists, and corporate management accountable to the public. Funding for C&BP is provided by Renew American Prosperity and individual donors.

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Editor’s Note: This article was published by Colorado Newsline, reprinted with permission through Creative Commons.

Feds to impose new cuts on lower Colorado River states amid climate-fueled megadrought ByChase Woodruff–July 31, 2026 2:26 pm Glen Canyon Dam holds back the waters of Lake Powell near Page, Arizona, on Feb. 2, 2025. (Photo by Spenser Heaps for Utah News Dispatch)

The federal government on Friday formalized a set of guidelines for managing water use in the Colorado River Basin over the next decade, if Colorado and six other Western states can’t come to an agreement on how to deal with declining flows caused in large part by climate change.

“The Department has a responsibility to ensure the Colorado River system remains reliable and resilient for the millions of Americans, communities and industries that depend on it,” Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said in a press release. “This framework provides the flexibility to respond to changing hydrologic conditions while preserving the opportunity for the Basin States to continue working toward durable, consensus-based solutions.”

Under the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation’s “preferred alternative” for the management of the river’s reservoir system, outlined in a extensive environmental impact statement, the burden of the most severe cuts would continue to fall on the Lower Basin states of Arizona, California and Nevada, which could face mandatory cuts of up to 3 million acre-feet of water. The Upper Basin states of Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming would face only voluntary conservation targets totaling 200,000 acre-feet.

All seven states were parties to the Colorado River Compact, a 1922 agreement governing the use of water from the vital Western watershed. Today, the Colorado River provides water to an area inhabited by 40 million people across the Southwest, though agricultural uses account for the vast majority of consumption.

Since 2000, a megadrought caused largely by global warming — the region’s worst dry spell in at least 1,200 years — has stressed water supplies across the basin and pushed the Colorado River Compact to a breaking point. The last set of federal guidelines to address shortages, issued nearly 20 years ago, will expire Jan. 1, and the seven Colorado River Compact states failed to reach a new agreement before a federally imposed deadline in February.

A map of the Colorado River Basin system. (U.S. Bureau of Reclamation)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The combined amount of water stored in Lake Powell and Lake Mead, the Colorado River system’s two key reservoirs, fell this month to its lowest level since May 1957 — before Lake Powell, created by the Glen Canyon Dam, had even begun to fill.

Without a major turnaround in hydrologic conditions in the near future, water levels in Lake Powell are expected to fall by next spring to below “minimum power pool,” at which point the Glen Canyon Dam’s hydroelectric turbines would be unable to operate.

Negotiations over a comprehensive new agreement have led to an increasingly bitter dispute between the Upper Basin states — led by Colorado, the river’s headwaters state and by far the Upper Basin’s largest water user — and the Lower Basin states, especially Arizona, which has borne the brunt of the cuts imposed in recent years. Arizona is widely expected to launch a high-stakes legal challenge as soon as this summer, alleging Colorado and other Upper Basin states are failing to meet an obligation under the original Colorado River Compact to allow enough water to flow downstream.

Colorado Gov. Jared Polis issued a joint statement Friday with the governors of the other three Upper Basin states, saying that “both the Upper and Lower divisions of the basin are feeling the pain of severe drought,” and that they were “committed to continued good-faith discussions with our counterparts.”

“Many hours of meetings and negotiations took place between the Colorado River Basin states and these discussions will continue,” the statement said. “Today’s framework does not represent a final solution, but enables the River to be managed in the short-term while the seven states and (the Interior Department) continue to negotiate a consensus solution.”

In the absence of a new agreement among the states, the Bureau of Reclamation says it will continue to update its new guidelines every two years until 2036.

Andrea Travnicek, the Interior Department’s assistant secretary for water and science, said the plan “strikes a balance between flexibility and predictability … given unprecedented hydrologic conditions and the potential for considerable impacts on water users.”

In a statement, Democratic U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet of Colorado said he was “disappointed” by the failure to reach a new long-term agreement among the seven Colorado River Compact states.

“While a two-year operating plan is the bare minimum needed to operate the river, a long-term, consensus agreement that recognizes real hydrologic conditions is the only durable solution to bring certainty to the Colorado River,” Bennet said.

Editor’s note: This story was updated at 3:47 p.m., July 31, 2026, to include a joint statement from Upper Basin governors.

PHILADELPHIA, PA (August 3, 2026) Feet First Philly (FFP), a pedestrian advocacy project of the Clean Air Council, launched the seventh round of its Public Space Enhancement Mini-Grant program in partnership with Philadelphia Department of Public Health’s Division of Chronic Disease and Injury Prevention.

The initiative funds projects aimed at improving Philadelphia’s pedestrian environment and public spaces, with Mini-Grant recipients receiving funding ranging from $500 to $2,500 to create public space enhancements and safety improvements. FFP is hosting an informational webinar on August 25.

“For the past six years, our Public Space Enhancement Mini-Grant program has successfully funded 80 projects that are led by community groups, businesses, and individuals across the Greater Philadelphia region”, said Titania Markland, Clean Air Council Sustainable Transportation Program Manager. “With the launch of the seventh round, we are excited for the new ideas that community leaders will propose to improve their public spaces. We are also able to offer an increase in funding for the first time since launching this program.”

“Environments shape health,” said Dr. Kinnari Chandriani, Director of the Health Department’s Division of Chronic Disease and Injury Prevention. “It is a joy to support communities throughout the city to enhance public spaces with mini-grant funding. We are excited for another round of inspiring projects to make our city safer, cleaner, and greener.” 

In 2020, FFP launched its first Public Space Enhancement Mini-Grant program with seven projects that were led by and benefited local communities. Since then, the program has awarded 80 Mini-Grants to local organizations all over Philadelphia and provided funding to:

• Extend efforts to clean up the Cobbs Creek Trail 
• Create a pocket park in Southwest Philadelphia 
• Replace a severely damaged sidewalk outside of a community garden in Kensington 
• Create a mural on a newsstand in Germantown
• Paint an artistic crosswalk in North Philadelphia 
• Add amenities to a local meadow to make it a walking destination 
• Install bike racks to prevent illegal sidewalk parking outside of a school 
• Help develop community gardens all over the city 

For the full list of projects awarded during the sixth round (2025-2026), read more here.

“Pedestrian advocacy projects bring communities together to create safer and healthier spaces,” said Sally Hecht, a Clean Air Council Transportation Program Coordinator. “They bring people from all walks of life together and make neighborhoods around Philadelphia safer and healthier. Through the Mini-Grants, we can give Philadelphians the ability to build their communities in ways that benefit and directly support their neighbors.” 

Safety is a top priority for this program, and applicants are encouraged to identify ways their project can improve safety in their communities. 

If you are interested in applying or want more information, attend the webinar on August 25 at 12 p.m. (noon) ET. Applicants can email shecht@cleanair.org to schedule a one-on-one meeting with Clean Air Council staff to discuss their project ideas. Applications for the Mini-Grant are open until Saturday, October 3 at 11:59 p.m. ET. 

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Feet First Philly is Philadelphia’s only advocacy group dedicated to pedestrian rights, sponsored by the Clean Air Council.

As communities across the world endure record-breaking heatwaves, wildfires and rising living costs, the world’s biggest oil and gas companies have confirmed another blockbuster quarter of profits. The Make Polluters Pay coalition says the timing exposes the true cost of delaying the end of the fossil fuel era, and is calling on governments meeting in New York this month to seize a historic opportunity to make the polluters pay.

This summer’s extreme weather has spared no continent. Wildfires are tearing through Spain and France, forcing hundreds of thousands of people from their homes. In the United States, a series of heat domes pushed temperatures past 100°F (38°C), and smoke from hundreds of Canadian wildfires produced some of the world’s worst urban air quality across North America. India endured pre-monsoon temperatures above 48°C earlier this year, while torrential rain left hundreds dead in several countries in Africa since March.

Scientists estimate that emissions from just five fossil fuel corporations – BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil, Shell and TotalEnergies – were sufficient to cause around one in four of the heatwaves recorded globally between 2000 and 2023. Those same five companies are now announcing another blockbuster quarter of fossil fuel profits. TotalEnergies has reported adjusted net income of $5.4 billion for the second quarter of 2026, Shell profit hit $9.84bn in the three months to June, more than double compared with the same period last year. Exxon clocked $14.5 billion in profits this quarter; Chevron, $12.1 billion. BP is expected to announce comparable astronomical profits on the 4th of August.

That’s over USD $40 billion in profits by just 4 large oil companies, which is more than the entire GDP of over 100 countries, reaped in rewards while the rest of the world is left dealing with climate and energy chaos. The price spikes are driven in large part by volatility in oil prices during the war in Iran.

The results land as governments prepare to resume negotiations on a UN Framework Convention on International Tax Cooperation in New York this month. A mandatory surtax on highly polluting industries is gaining support as part of that process, alongside measures to prevent jurisdiction-shopping and anchor taxing rights in real economic activity. Analysis by the Global Alliance for Tax Justice and partners estimates that aton the profits of the world’s 100 largest oil and gas companies could have generated more than US$1 trillion since the Paris Agreement was signed in 2015. The Make Polluters Pay coalition says governments meeting in New York should seize the moment to get behind it.

To mark the moment, campaigners inflated a giant barrel of oil outside the Houses of Parliament in Westminster, London, calling on the UK government to back a permanent stronger taxex on fossil fuel profits and support a strong outcome at the UN tax talks.

David Hillman, Stamp out Poverty, said

“Big Oil has spent fifty years profiting from pollution while the rest of us pay the price in heatwaves, in wildfires, in energy bills we can barely afford. That’s why we’re bringing a giant oil barrel to the doorstep of Parliament: to make sure politicians can’t look away. Governments have a real chance this month, at the UN tax talks in New York, to finally make the polluters pay. They should take it.”

Anne Jellema, Executive Director of 350.org, said:

“From Bordeaux to Phoenix to Mumbai, families are living through the cost of climate delay, while the companies most responsible bank blockbuster bonanzas. That is not a coincidence; it is a business model. Governments meeting in New York this month have a genuine opportunity to change it. Calls are growing across the political spectrum for a proper global profits tax, so the industry that helped cause these disasters pays towards the recovery, the solutions and the protection people need. It’s simple fairness: those who caused the damage and profited from it should pay to fix it.”

Tyrone Scott, Head of Campaigns, War on Want
“While people struggle with soaring bills and communities across the world lose homes, livelihoods and lives to climate disasters, fossil fuel corporations are banking another quarter of enormous profits. This is wealth extracted from people and the planet. The UK Government must stop protecting polluters and start making them pay through permanent taxes on fossil fuel profits, a wealth tax on the super-rich and by backing a strong UN Tax Convention that ends corporate tax avoidance. Those who have profited most from the climate crisis must fund the transition and the repair.”

The Make Polluters Pay coalition is calling on governments worldwide to introduce permanent, higher taxes on oil and gas profits, to fund emergency response, recovery and long-term resilience for communities on the frontline of the crisis, and to back a strong, binding outcome at this month’s UN tax convention talks.

After three years of intense and divisive negotiations, the seven Colorado River Basin states failed to reach a long-term agreement, forcing the federal government to step in.

Federal water managers on Friday announced a new 10-year plan to manage the Colorado River that opens the door to unprecedented water supply cuts. Arizona, California, and Nevada, the three lower basin states, could face up to 3 million acre-feet in water cuts. The upper basin states of Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming will also have to conserve up to 200,000 acre-feet, or 65 billion gallons in the coming decade.

The plan released Friday by the Interior department marks the first time federal authorities have stepped in to determine the management for the waterway that supports 40 million people, 30 Tribes, and 5.5 million acres of farmland across the Southwest. The new management framework comes amid an ongoing crisis on the Colorado River due to drought and overuse of the river’s dwindling supplies. As of last Thursday, Lake Powell was 22 percent full and Lake Mead was 27 percent full. Scientists have warned that warmer temperatures and drier soils caused by climate change are shrinking the river’s flow, as are winters with significantly less mountain snowpack, the source of the vast majority of the river’s water.

Burgum doubles down on debunked Reflecting Pool ‘vandals’ claims

U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro asked a judge to drop the Trump administration’s case against David Hearn, a former U.S. Olympian, whom it had accused of vandalizing the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. The Department of Justice said Friday that flawed installation, not vandalism, caused the ‌liner of the newly renovated reflecting pool to peel. Despite the DOJ’s reversal, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum doubled down on blaming vandals, posting on X over the weekend, “The evidence is clear, vandals have repeatedly caused damage to the Reflecting Pool.”

Pirro said that DOJ prosecutors had been misled by the Interior department, which had awarded a no-bid contract to a first-time government contractor to repair the iconic landmark. Pirro blamed both the government’s vendor and the administration’s timetable, saying the pool’s poor state “was the result of a flawed installation by the contractor, Atlantic Industrial Coatings, and the rush to complete the project prior to events associated with the America 250 celebration” on July 4.

Quick hits Federal government proposes steep cuts for Colorado River Basin states

Denver Post | PBS News | Colorado Sun | New York Times | The Hill | Reuters | Arizona Republic | The Guardian | Washington Post | KJZZ | CNN | Arizona Mirror | 8 News Now | Los Angeles Times

DOJ dismisses ‘vandalism’ charges while Doug Burgum doubles down on debunked claims

New York Times | The Hill | Associated Press | Advocate | Reuters | NOTUS | Wall Street Journal

National park ranger quits, tours visitor centers to fight censorship

SFGATE

More livestock grazing on public lands could spell trouble for ecosystem health

Sierra Magazine | St George News

Forest Service moves toward unrestricted motorized access in area used by iconic western elk herd

Outdoor Life

Utahns brave 100-degree heat to protest shrinking of national monuments

Fox13

Helicopter tried to pick up firefighters before deadly burn over in western Colorado

Denver Post

The conflict over permanent climbing anchors in wilderness areas

High Country News

Quote of the day

The last 20 years everybody has played this game which is, ‘Let’s wait on the hydrology and hope the hydrology bails us out,’ but that’s become a very dangerous game to play. If you have another crappy year like this year, you could be looking at 4 or 5 million acre-feet cuts, because the reservoirs would be completely empty.”

—Brad Udall, climate scientist at Colorado State University’s Colorado Water Center, Washington Post

Picture This

@usinterior

Come celebrate the First Peoples of Yellowstone with us. From August 2–8, join Voices of Yellowstone near the North Entrance in Gardiner, Montana, for a week honoring the Indigenous cultures woven into this land: past, present, and future.

There’s a lot to take part in. An opening ceremony with the lighting of the teepees, guided cultural tours across the park (registration required), a native art market, live music, speakers, and a community potluck.

Voices of Yellowstone is hosted by @ynpforever in partnership with Yellowstone National Park, alongside the Pretty Shield Foundation, @rockymountaintlc, and @visitgardinermt. We hope to see you there.

Photos by Jacob W. Frank / NPS

Featured image: Colorado River Basin map. Source: usgs.gov

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