Scientific American reports that it’s over 90°F in the Arctic. This region is warming four-times faster than the rest of the world, as reflective ice and snow is replaced by sunlight-absorbing water and vegetation. This appears to be changing the jet stream in the northern hemisphere, leading to more stationary high-pressure systems (‟heat domes”). As Arctic soils warm, the vast stores of frozen organic matter will decay, leading to more greenhouse-gas emissions in a feedback loop that will exacerbate climate change.

The New York Times reports that the Trump Administration’s response to this Arctic threat is to stop funding the Arctic Report Card, which has been coordinated by NOAA for the past two decades. The Report Card ‟has provided a checkup on the health of the region, which is heating up at several times the pace of the rest of the globe.” The Administration provided no explanation for this change, but it is consistent with its other attempts to ‟kill the messenger.” The oceanographer who led this effort for NOAA during Biden’s presidency stated that ‟it’s another inane step in this administration’s turning a blind eye to climate change, among other environmental issues.”

Scientific American also notes that global ocean temperatures established a new record in July: ‟Sea surface temperatures, measured at 10 meters deep, averaged 20.96 degrees Celsius (69.7 degrees Fahrenheit) in July. This included all global oceans aside from the polar regions.” Such records are expected, as 90% of the heat being trapped by greenhouse gases is going into the ocean. This breaks the record set in 2023, and is being fueled by the growing El Niño event in the tropical Pacific.

Danger Season arrived in Hawaii, Shanghai and Indiana. Hurricane Lala caused massive flooding on the Big Island, and the San Francisco Chronicle reports that, just days later, tropical storm Moke was also heading toward Hawaii. The Guardian describes the evacuation of more than one million people in Shanghai after Typhoon Dolphin made landfall in southern China. Flooding and storm winds devastated Gary, Indiana, in mid-August. Portions of the region were without electricity for 10 days. The New York Times notes that powerful winds brought down trees and power lines, with residents forced to live without refrigeration and air conditioning while stores ran out of batteries and candles. ‟The regional power company said its crews were working tirelessly to restore electricity but were overwhelmed by unprecedented levels of damage.” That’s a story being repeated all over the world.

An op-ed in the Guardian notes that, in the face of the growing intensity of these extreme weather events, governments around the world are actually reversing climate policies under political pressure from the fossil-fuel industry and its allies. This has been accompanied by less public acknowledgement from politicians about the crisis. The Guardian describes this trend, known as ‟climate hushing,” and how activists are mobilizing to counter it. While some argue that Democratic candidates talking about climate change would detract from affordability messaging, the polls suggest that voters recognize that the problem must be addressed and reject the Republican argument that it is a ‟hoax” or an ‟alarmist” issue.

Another op-ed in the Guardian states: ‟The US has flipped so far beyond recalcitrance during Trump’s second stint in the White House that it can only be described as waging ecological warfare.” The author notes that, ‟as the skies fill with smoke and forests turn to ash, shouldn’t the United States, the guiltiest of guilty parties, be made to pay?” He suggests that sanctions should be placed on countries that refuse to curb their emissions. I think this is a call ahead of its time, and we’ll hear more about this in the coming years if the U.S. continues to avoid the global transition to renewable energy.

The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) has issued a new report about drought in the United States. A key finding of the report is that climate change has altered the nature of drought, as there is now higher baseline aridity and more frequent rapid-onset droughts. In addition, the U.S. is experiencing its first multi-decadal “mega-drought” in the Southwest, causing water shortages in the basins of the Colorado and the Rio Grande (The New York Times notes that Lake Mead, the nation’s largest reservoir that sits on the Colorado River, is at its lowest level ever and continuing to drop). The NAS report calls for improved tools to predict droughts and to take account of the new baseline by incorporating ‟nonstationarity — the statistical reality that the frequency, intensification rate, severity, and duration of droughts are no longer stable — into drought assessment.”

The Washington Post visits Kearny, Arizona, a town that is on the edge of running out of water because of the very low flows in the Gila River. In the Guardian, Peter Gleick describes the growing pressure on water resources around the world as climate change reshapes the hydrologic cycle, generating international tensions and economic and public health impacts.

The Atlantic looks at the lasting affect of the Inflation Reduction Act, the signature climate and energy law of the Biden Administration. The conventional wisdom is that Trump’s actions have ‟killed” the programs created by this bill, but there is actually much of it still in place. Trump has repealed consumer tax credits, but not manufacturing credits, and while he tried to kill the Green Bank grant program for climate-change mitigation and pollution reduction in disadvantaged communities, a court has ordered the Green Bank grants to be released. ‟Even after the passage of Trump’s bill, U.S. solar capacity is expected to double over the next five years. Wind installations will surge this year, too. Meanwhile, the commercial-battery tax credits are still around. With these policies in place, America is on track this year for its biggest build-out of power generation in history, 93 percent of it clean. This is happening because of the IRA’s deepest legacy: It helped make clean energy cheaper. Since the law passed, battery prices have fallen by roughly a third. A tax credit can be repealed, but a price decline cannot. (Trump is, unfortunately, doing the next worst thing: His tariffs raise the price of clean-energy inputs, making Americans pay extra for technology that the rest of the world gets for cheap.)”

And Trump’s vendetta against wind power continues. The New York Times reports that the Trump Administration just paid another offshore-wind developer to forfeit its leases and instead develop natural-gas facilities in the U.S. This payment was $1.2 billion to the German firm RWE, bringing the total taxpayer investment to end offshore-wind development to $3.9 billion. Canary Media notes that a federal judge just ordered the Department of Defense to restart reviews of onshore-wind facilities, which had been halted for supposed national-security reasons. ‟The DoD delays, which began in August 2025 and ramped up to an outright halt this spring, have affected more than 155 projects across 21 states.” Similar bogus arguments were made to block offshore-wind power, and these claims were thrown out in court.

Experts are now suggesting that offshore wind is actually a national-security imperative, as they stabilize the national electric grid and provide opportunities for military training exercises around these offshore marine installations, which are becoming more widespread globally. The Guardian describes the growth of union support for renewable energy, and in particular for offshore wind. Solid working relationships between unions and environmentalists have been important for pushing back against Trump’s efforts to destroy the industry. The New York Times notes that, while Trump has attacked wind and solar, his Administration is boosting battery manufacturing to support drones and AI. But these sectors are relatively small and, to create a robust domestic battery industry, it is essential that the U.S. grow the market for EVs. While this is anathema to Trump, there is a growing bipartisan consensus in Congress to support battery manufacturing, and this could soften future resistance to EV subsidies.

The New York Times reports on Trump’s trashing of the chapter in the Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence for federal judges that was prepared by the Federal Judicial Center and the National Academy of Sciences ‟to provide mini-tutorials to federal judges about scientific issues that might come up in cases over which they preside.” Trump wrote that the science academies are run by “Radical Left Dumocrats who, it turns out, published fraudulent, biased, and misleading Manuals on Climate Change.” The Federal Judicial Center had already removed the climate-change chapter of the reference manual from their website. The National Academy of Sciences, however, had continued to keep the chapter available. Now Scientific American reports that the Academy has removed the chapter from its website as well, pending a review of "the process used to develop it." The authors have objected strenuously, noting that the chapter underwent extensive peer review and editing before it was published.

Despite Trump’s efforts to take us back into the dirty past, renewable electricity continues its rise to dominance. Yale Climate Connections tells the story of New Mexico, where the grid ‟flipped from majority climate-warming fossil fuels to majority renewables in just five years. Spurred by an ambitious clean energy law called the Energy Transition Act, utilities have been busy building solar panels, wind turbines, batteries, and transmission lines. A major coal plant was retired and demolished. Solar panels proliferated on homes, schools, and businesses. And even while New Mexico was building out its clean energy future, electricity prices remained cheaper than average.” In July 2021, 83% of New Mexico’s electricity was supplied by fossil fuels, but this July renewables provided 62%. ‟About half of the days in the past year saw renewables generating 70% or more of the daily electricity need, and in late spring of this year, renewables routinely met more than 80% of demand.” Grist reports how important solar and wind electricity are becoming in Utah, where ‟solar generation eclipsed all other electricity sources for the first time ever in May.” There are now 8,000 solar jobs in the state, compared to less than 3,000 in the oil and coal sectors.

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