The best public art involves and invites visitors to interact with it even if it’s just a part of a greater background. Here, it acts as a strong reminder that the triple planetary crisis –climate change, pollution and biodiversity loss– is but a quick glance way.
Continue readingThese record high temperatures are part of an alarming long-term trend. From the story:
Temperatures in the Antarctic climbed above 15C this month, shattering the previous winter heat record for the usually frozen region and raising concerns about the speed of climate breakdown.
The new winter peak temperature was logged by the Argentinian Esperanza base on the Trinity peninsula on 6 June amid a protracted heatwave, when the maximum daily temperature exceeded zero degrees for three consecutive weeks.
Scientists said the high of 15.4C broke the previous record set at the same station in 1998 by 2C. “This is absolutely crazy,” said Raúl Cordero, an Ecuadorian climate professor at the University of Groningen. “It is also about 20C above normal for this time of the year. That is a huge anomaly.”
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The climate crisis is a serious health crisis. From the report:
Rising temperatures are turning cities across south and south-east Asia into places where workers can no longer recover from the heat. A new report by US-based People’s Courage International (PCI), using research in Delhi, Dhaka, Kathmandu, Jakarta and Quezon City, has found hotter nights, combined with the urban heat island effect – the trapping of heat inside dense cities – are leaving millions of informal workers exhausted before a new workday even begins.
And
The crisis is worsening in south Asia as climate change is predicted to triple the chance of pre-monsoon heatwaves, such as a 15-day one that turned deadly last month. Scientists say night-time temperatures are rising faster than daytime temperatures across much of the region, reducing the hours people once relied on to recover from extreme heat.
Across Asia, the International Labour Organization estimates that more than 70% of the workforce are exposed to excessive heat at some point during their jobs, with informal workers among the most vulnerable. This has a big impact in countries like India, where nearly 90% of workers are employed in the informal economy.
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All time record highs for the month of May bring in the first European heatwave of 2026. Among those was the UK where temps reached 34.8C, surpassing the previous all-time May peak of 32.8C, reached in 1922 and 1944. From the report:
Temperatures hit record highs for May in the United Kingdom and France on Monday, May 25, as forecasters warned of a prolonged period of extreme heat across Europe throughout the week. A so-called “heat dome” of warm air from northern Africa trapped under a high-pressure system over western Europe is behind the high temperatures not usually seen until high summer.
And
A so-called “heat dome” of warm air from northern Africa trapped under a high-pressure system over western Europe is behind the high temperatures not usually seen until high summer. Restrictions on outdoor work were imposed in parts of Italy, beaches in southwest France filled earlier than usual and farmers reported accelerated harvests as temperatures went beyond 30°C across the region. Scientists say human-driven climate change is amplifying such extremes, with Europe warming faster than the global average and heatwaves growing more frequent and severe.
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The climate crisis driving a health crisis is rapidly reshaping everyday life. From the report:
An intense and prolonged heatwave has been causing misery for millions across Pakistan and India. In southern Pakistan throughout April and May, temperatures have risen far above seasonal norms. In Sindh, daytime temperatures have frequently crossed 44C to 46C, forcing residents indoors during peak afternoon hours and severely affecting outdoor labourers, transport workers and farming communities.
And
The strain is also becoming visible in local healthcare facilities. Dr Suresh Kumar, who heads the children’s ward at Ibrahim Hyderi government hospital, said the number of children visiting the outpatient department has risen sharply since the last week of April. “On normal days, we would see around 50 to 60 children,” he said. “Now the number has crossed 200 daily.”
And
The World Weather Attribution group has looked at the current extreme heat in Pakistan and India and found that “human-caused climate change approximately tripled the probability of an event like this happening, making it no longer exceptional in today’s climate. The same heat event would have been about 1C cooler in a pre-industrial climate.”
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.. Or millions will die unnecessarily, according to a report issued on Saturday by the Pan-European Commission on Climate and Health. From The Guardian report:
The independent pan-European commission on climate and health, which was convened by the WHO, concluded the climate crisis was such a worldwide threat to health that the WHO should declare it “a public health emergency of international concern” (Pheic).
The international spread of vector-borne disease, such as dengue and chikungunya, as well as the health impacts of extreme weather events, global heating, food insecurity and air pollution make a Pheic necessary, said the commission’s report, which will be presented to European ministers on Sunday before the WHO’s world health assembly starts on Monday.
And, notably:
The commission also urged governments to stop subsidising fossil fuels, which are directly responsible for 600,000 premature deaths a year in Europe alone. The region spends about €444bn (£387bn) a year on subsidies for oil and gas production, the report said. In 12 European countries, fossil fuel subsidies exceeded 10% of national health expenditure in 2023 and in four exceeded the entire health budget, the report observed.
From the WHO press release:
The commission’s report drew up 17 recommendations spanning four areas: treating climate change as a growing threat to health security, transforming health systems, scaling up local action, and reforming the economic and financial systems that are driving the climate crisis.
Download the Call to Action.
It’s been difficult to keep track of the Trump administration’s relentless all-out all assault on clean energy in the US. Here’s a good one-stop shop, courtesy of Thomas Edsall.
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In case you missed it when when it was featured on NYT Docs and PBS POV in 2023, this is ‘Freshwater’ by dream hampton, an evocative short taking on memory, loss and displacement in Detroit communities after devastating floods in 2021. And likely the most beautifully poignant nine minutes you’ll experience today.
One of the the most thoughtful capsule reviews I read was by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, who writes:
‘Freshwater’ is “a meditative, intimate, quietly devastating piece that uses the language of memory, water, and place to make climate change feel personal. dream narrates, talking us through flooded basements of homes in her home city of Detroit, Michigan.”
And in the film notes, hampton explains:
“Freshwater is a portrait of remembrance, of flooded Midwestern basements and maintaining connection in the wake of ongoing displacement, abandonment and climate catastrophe. This film was meant to be small in every way–lingering shots that seem like photographs until the wind blows a leaf or a raindrop disturbs a puddle. Similarly the intentionally small production was meant to be healing. It was a retreat into a cadre of like-minded community of Detroit artists after doing work on three projects that were at major studios. I made Freshwater to remind myself I’m an artist, but also to reinforce the organizing principle about the power of small, local organizing.”
From a report released on the eve of the first global conference on ‘Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels‘, which takes place in Santa Marta, Colombia:
Six of the biggest fossil fuel companies are projected to earn $2,967 a second in profits in 2026, new Oxfam research finds, ahead of the first global conference this week on Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels in Santa Marta, Colombia. This marks an increase of almost $37 million a day compared to the 2025 profits of these six corporations – Chevron, Shell, BP, ConocoPhillips, Exxon and TotalEnergies. Their total projected fossil fuel profits of 2026 are $94 billion: enough to provide solar power for the energy needs of almost 50 million people in Africa.
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Booking multi-country connecting flights is a snap. But booking rail connections on the same journeys is not. Research released today from the Brussels-based advocacy organization Transport & Environment (T&E) illustrates.
Europe’s rail renaissance will never reach its full potential unless passengers are able to book connecting and international trains in a few clicks. That’s the conclusion of new research by T&E which finds that on almost half of the EU’s busiest international air routes, booking the same journey by train is difficult or impossible.
T&E looked at the 30 busiest international air routes within the EU to see if the rail alternative was easy to book. On 20% of these routes, none of the rail operators allowed passengers to buy tickets for the whole journey. On a further 27% of the routes, passengers could only obtain such tickets from one of the train operators involved. Similar trends were found on a broader set of 50 international routes.
This finding is concerning as rail passengers tend to primarily buy tickets on the booking engine of their national incumbent operator. The convoluted booking experience is deterring all but the most committed. A recent YouGov poll for T&E found that 61% of long distance rail travellers have at least once avoided journeys because the booking process is a hassle.
And, according to a research team at the University of Applied Sciences St. Pölten in Austria, on average it takes people 70% longer to book a train ticket than a flight.
And the fix:
The EU now has an opportunity to address these shortcomings. T&E calls on the European Commission’s forthcoming Single Ticketing Package to require major rail operators to display and sell other willing operators’ tickets under fair conditions and to share their own tickets with other operators and independent platforms. Independent platforms must also be required to sell willing operators’ tickets under fair conditions.
The proposal for the new Single Ticketing Package is due to be published by the European Commission on 13 May.
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Snow cover in the Southern French Alps on 20 April 2026.
Continue readingI spent more than 25 years living within a 15-minute drive from a southern shore of Lake Erie, so this caught my attention.
Walking along the shoreline of Erie Shore Drive, a narrow stretch of road along Lake Erie in Chatham-Kent, Ontario, the signs of climate change are hard to miss. Aging breakwaters, patchwork protection barriers, and empty lots where homes once stood, all point to its growing impacts. The area has become a visible example of what happens when climate impacts outpace planning, infrastructure, and policy responses, and when responsibility for those impacts remains unclear.
While this community is far from alone, Erie Shore Drive offers a stark view of how climate risk is reshaping communities and raising a more difficult question: who is responsible for the costs when changing environments put infrastructure and human lives at risk?
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This is bad. As others have already pointed out, likely the biggest climate-related story at the moment.
The critical Atlantic current system appears significantly more likely to collapse than previously thought after new research found that climate models predicting the biggest slowdown are the most realistic. Scientists called the new finding “very concerning” as a collapse would have catastrophic consequences for Europe, Africa and the Americas.
The Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (Amoc) is a major part of the global climate system and was already known to be at its weakest for 1,600 years as a result of the climate crisis. Scientists spotted warning signs of a tipping point in 2021 and know that the Amoc has collapsed in the Earth’s past.
How catastrophic?
The Amoc is a major part of the global climate system and brings sun-warmed tropical water to Europe and the Arctic, where it cools and sinks to form a deep return current. A collapse would shift the tropical rainfall belt on which many millions of people rely to grow their food, plunge western Europe into extreme cold winters and summer droughts, and add 50-100cm to already rising sea levels around the Atlantic.
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CarbonBrief factchecks claims made in the UK by opposition politicians, newspapers and other public figures who are using the fossil fuel energy crisis triggered by the US-Israel war on Iran to argue in favour of opening the North Sea to more oil and gas drilling.
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It’s a simple equation: more renewables, less shocks. Reporting for the AP, Aniruddha Ghosal, Anton L. Delgado and Allan Olingo write:
The war in Iran is exposing the world’s reliance on fragile fossil fuel routes, lending urgency to calls for hastening the shift to renewable energy.
And
Unlike during previous oil shocks, renewable power is now competitive with fossil fuels in many places. More than 90% of new renewable power projects worldwide in 2024 were cheaper than fossil-fuel alternatives, according to the International Renewable Energy Agency.
It’s obvious, but bears repeating: countries that have built out or invested in renewables have also invested in a cushion from oil shocks, which are a trait of the fossil fuel-based energy system. These include China and India, and other Asian countries, too, including:
Pakistan’s solar boom has preempted more than $12 billion in fossil fuel imports since 2020
And
Vietnam’s current solar generation will help the country save hundreds of millions of dollars in potential coal and gas imports in the coming year, based on current high prices.
Another thing that 49.9% of Americans voted for in 2024 – weakening the limits on emissions of the cancer-causing gas ethylene oxide. From the New York Times report:
The agency’s proposed rule would loosen limits on ethylene oxide emissions from around 90 commercial sterilization facilities across the country. Roughly 2.3 million people live within two miles of these facilities in what are often low-income neighborhoods or communities of color, according to an analysis by the Union of Concerned Scientists, an environmental group.
The proposal is the E.P.A.’s latest move to relax pollution limits in an effort to lower costs for industries. In recent months, the agency has also weakened restrictions on mercury from coal-burning power plants and repealed a scientific finding that allowed the government to regulate planet-warming pollution from cars and trucks.
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As I often tell anyone within listening distance, the transition to renewables continues to grow and expand, and is unstoppable. That’s not to say that the lies, rhetoric and strong-armed tactics of the Trump administration and its climate change dismissive acolytes aren’t reversing some of the momentum and influencing policies around the world, or that the transition is happening fast enough, because it’s not, even in the remotest sense. But it’s not all doom and gloom either. David Wallace-Wells writes:
In January, a total of seven gas-powered cars were sold in all of Norway. This year, Pakistan expects that parts of the country will get more electricity from decentralized rooftop solar than from its entire electricity grid during parts of the day. In the United States, where we often tell ourselves we are in the grips of climate backlash and fossil fuel retrenchment, Texas has been setting new solar records through frigid February, around 90 percent of all new power capacity installed anywhere in the nation last year was green, and the share of renewables is expected to be even higher next year. The new “breakout star” of the battery world is the notorious petrostate Saudi Arabia, the countries with the biggest growth in solar power are concentrated in sub-Saharan Africa, and Australia’s breakneck pursuit of clean energy too cheap to meter is so far along that electricity prices in some regions have fallen by a third in a single year.
It might just be the sun shining outside today, which always manages, even if only briefly, to renew a sense of optimism. Today, like Wallace-Wells, it’s transition optimism.
Fossil fuel merchants can keep throwing hurdles in the way, but the transition to renewables can’t be stopped.
Portugal has topped the EU leaderboard for renewable electricity thanks to surges in hydro and wind power. According to the Portuguese Association for Renewable Energies (APREN), a staggering 80.7 per cent of electricity generated in January 2026 came from renewable energy.
It marks the best record in nine months, since Portugal suffered a mass blackout that triggered nationwide chaos, and bumps the country up to second in Europe overall. Non-EU Norway came first, with 96.3 per cent renewable electricity production last month, while Denmark dropped to third place with 78.8 per cent.
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Russia is bombing fossil-fueled power plants, so the country is building solar and wind. From the story:
Wind and solar arrays with independent transmission lines are scattered over the landscape, which makes them harder to hit and easier to repair. “A coal power station [is] a large single target that a single missile could take out,” says Jeff Oatham of DTEK, Ukraine’s largest energy company and its largest private energy investor. “You would need around 40 missiles to do the equivalent amount of capacity damage at a wind farm.”
“Attacking decentralized solar power installations is not economically rational,” says Ukrainian energy expert Olena Kondratiuk. “Missiles and drones are expensive, and significantly disrupting such systems would require a large number of strikes, while the overall impact on the energy system would remain limited.”
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Snow cover in the Southern French Alps on 6 February 2026.
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