#climate-change

#climate-change

Jonathan Rinderknecht, a 29-year-old occasional Uber driver who used to live in Pacific Palisades, was charged with three felonies by federal prosecutors in October, who claim he was in the neighborhood in the early hours of New Year's Day. According to a federal complaint, Rinderknecht allegedly used an open flame likely a lighter to start a small blaze that grew to about 8 acres (3.2 hectares) before firefighters rushed to the area and extinguished it. That blaze was known as the Lachman fire.

After experiencing one of the wettest holiday seasons on record, still soggy California hit a major milestone this week - having zero areas of abnormal dryness for the first time in 25 years. This data, collected by the U.S. Drought Monitor, is a welcome nugget of news for Golden State residents, who in the last 15 years alone have lived through two of the worst droughts on record, the worst wildfire seasons on record and the most destructive wildfires ever.

Every winter in the Ladakh region in northwest India, the two roads that connect the small villages in the Zanskar Valley with the rest of the country close, are overwhelmed by snow. But for centuries, locals have had a workaround: a road of ice formed by the frozen Chadar River. A week-long trek in frozen temperatures connects them to the outside world.

Flooded ponds are starting to shrink and green grasses are reaching skyward, making jaguars, tapirs, and crab-eating foxes easier to spot as they seek out water. Palm fronds shroud a jaguar just 10 feet from our idling safari vehicle. As she bites into the hind leg of an unlucky cow, a loud snap sounds through the thick air. Lucas Nascimento Morgado, a young biologist who works for an NGO called Onçafari in these parts, grins giddily: "This is a special sighting, my friends."

It's been an adventurous three decades for The World and we're glad to have you with us as we celebrate our 30th anniversary. In this special New Year's show, we highlight some of our reporting over the years. We bring you a discussion with Neil Curry, who helped create the show and was The World's first executive producer, as well as a conversation with our reporters Matthew Bell and Shirin Jafaari, who discuss how their coverage of major global news evolved after 9/11.

Writing on New Year's Day 2026, I feel the need to try to make some sense of the worst year of my 73-year life. I don't mean worse personally. My close family and I live in the relative safety and affluence of London, England, and we are all healthy and have fulfilling jobs. I mean, worst in the global sense.

A big rig overturned this morning on the Southfront Road on-ramp to eastbound I-580 in Livermore. As of 8:30 am, there was no estimate for when the on-ramp would reopen. [CHP-Dublin/X] Firefighters tamped down a fire early Tuesday at a warehouse in East Oakland. The fire began around 3:30 am on 44th Avenue and San Leandro Street. [NBC Bay Area] Scientists say that 2025 was such a hot year globally that it pushed the three-year temperature average past the 2.7-degree (1.5 degrees Celsius) threshold set in the 2015 Paris Agreement.

The world's leading climate scientists on the United Nations's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) on Monday released the final part of their sixth assessment report, warning again of human-induced climate change causing increasingly irrevocable damage to the world and its ecosystems. This report is a clarion call to massively fast-track climate efforts by every country and every sector and on every timeframe. Our world needs climate action on all fronts: everything, everywhere, all at once," said UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres.

The crumbling cliff edge is just metres away. An automatic blind, which I can operate without getting out of bed, rises to reveal an ocean view: the dramatic storm-surging North Sea with great black-backed gulls circling nearby and a distant ship on the horizon. A watery gold sunrise lights the clouds and turbulent grey water. I'm the first person to sleep in the new Kraken lodge at Still Southwold, a former farm in Easton Bavents on the Suffolk coast.

Coastal villages around Toliara, a city in southern Madagascar, host tens of thousands of the semi-nomadic Vezo people, who make a living from small-scale fishing on the ocean. For centuries, they have launched pirogues, small boats carved from single tree trunks, every day into the turquoise shallows to catch tuna, barracuda and grouper. We rely solely on the ocean, says Soa Nomeny, a woman from a small island off the south-west coast called Nosy Ve.

I do this newsletter every week on Substack called The Crucial Years, which, I think because it's free, has turned into the largest newsletter of its kind around climate and energy and the environment. It means that I get to keep track of all the things that are happening on a weekly basis around the world. About 36 months ago, if you were paying attention, you couldn't help but notice this sudden spike beginning. We'd finally hit the steep part of the S curve.

We hold in our thoughts the millions of people worldwide who are enduring the devastating impacts of interconnected crises of climate change, war, conflict, and displacement, the many families this Christmas who will sadly experience fear, uncertainty, or profound loss,

Global heating is helping insects such as aphids, planthoppers, stem borers, caterpillars and locusts thrive. Greater warmth enables pests to develop faster, produce more generations each year and attack crops for longer as winters shorten. Rising temperatures are also helping pests invade places further from the equator and on higher ground that were previously too cold. As a result, the climate-driven flourishing of pests will be worst in temperate places, such as Europe and the US, the researchers said.

On the banks of the Yukon River, after arriving by canoe only a few miles from the Canadian border, I shared some salmon with Karma Ulvi, the chief of the Native Village of Eagle in Alaska. But the fish we ate wasn't caught locally: A plane had delivered the salmon from Bristol Bay, in the southwest corner of the state, over 1,000 miles away. For the Native tribes that have lived along the Yukon for millennia, importing is the only option.

Crop yields have increased enormously over the past few decades. But early warning signs have arrived as crop yield rates flatline, prompting warnings of efficiency hitting its limits and the impacts of climate change taking effect. At first glance trends seem positive. Farming methods have become more and more efficient over the last 80 years. However, multiple projections suggest that climate change will soon have key crops plateauing, then sliding down again.

Global temperatures are set to remain alarmingly high, with 2026 predicted to be the fourth consecutive year exceeding 1.4C above pre-industrial levels, according to the Met Office. The UK's national weather service, in its annual outlook, forecasts 2026 to reach an estimated 1.46C above the 1850-1900 baseline, indicating a persistent "warming surge." While this figure sits below the record 1.55C observed in 2024, it would still rank 2026 among the four warmest years ever recorded.

From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, 'The A Word', which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messaging.

Kendra Pierre-Louis: For Scientific American's Science Quickly, I'm Kendra Pierre-Louis, in for Rachel Feltman. You're listening to our weekly science news roundup. First up, the European Union's Copernicus Climate Change Service reported last Monday that 2025 is shaping up to be the second-hottest year on record, with data suggesting it will tie with 2023 for runner-up status. To learn more about what this means, we are talking to Andrea Thompson, senior desk editor for life science here at Scientific American. Hi, Andrea.

GlaMBIE has entered the research scene during a critical time: continued funding for crucial glacier monitoring technologies is uncertain, and the magnitude of global glacier decline in the 21st century has been historically unprecedented-reinforcing glaciers as clear indicators of ongoing anthropogenic climate change. Glacier monitoring is essential for tracking glacier mass changes over time, and GlaMBIE's assessment is important to ensuring the continuity of this data, especially when many glacier monitoring technologies are expected to be suspended or decommissioned due to U.S funding cuts.

Bailenson is the founder of Stanford's Virtual Human Interaction Lab, a research center studying the psychological and behavioral impacts of virtual and augmented reality, the latter of which overlays digital images onto the real world. He's worked on experiments aimed at increasing people's focus on climate change for more than a decade, having found some success. His team discovered that when people put on a VR headset and cut down a tree, feeling the vibration of the chainsaw, they use less paper afterward.