Author: Alex Tabibi

Some years grab headlines with record heat and dramatic satellite images of the greenland ice sheet bleeding meltwater across the landscape. Then there are years like 2025-26, when summer arrived late, clouds lingered longer than usual, and the surface melt seemed almost subdued. Yet Greenland still lost ice. Again. For the 30th consecutive year. This is the story climate scientists at the Danish Meteorological Institute (DMI) have been tracking. Dr Martin Stendel and Prof Ruth Mottram published their annual analysis through Carbon Brief in late October 2026. Their finding is stark: even a comparatively “quiet” year on the ice sheet…

On a clear day in the Permian Basin, you can sometimes see the flares before you see the rigs. Pockets of burning methane light up the horizon, a byproduct of an industry that has long treated natural gas as an afterthought to crude oil. That visual may become more common if the Trump administration follows through on its latest regulatory push. The White House has directed the Environmental Protection Agency to relax methane controls across oil and gas operations, a move that would unwind some of the tightest emissions rules ever placed on the sector. The timing matters. Methane, the…

Walk into any major climate research lab today and you’ll notice something that would’ve seemed impossible ten years ago. Whiteboards covered in Python code, not just fluid dynamics equations. Postdocs arguing about neural network architectures while atmospheric physicists listen in. That quiet hum of servers? It’s joined the chorus of fume hoods and centrifuges now. Artificial intelligence isn’t a side project in climate science anymore. It’s woven into how we predict hurricanes, track carbon leaks, model ice sheet collapse. The shift happened fast. And it’s changing what climate experts can actually see coming. From Physics-First to Data-First Traditional climate models…

Every few years, a band of unusually warm water stretches across the tropical Pacific. The atmosphere notices immediately. Farmers in Australia pray for rain that never arrives. Peruvian fishermen watch their catch disappear. California braces for storms that send mudslides through fire-scarred hillsides. This is El Niño. Its fingerprints turn up on weather maps from Nairobi to New Delhi. Scientists have tracked these events since the 1950s. The global connections only came into focus recently. The 2023-24 El Niño, one of the five strongest on record, showed how a single oceanic anomaly can reroute jet streams, rewrite rainfall patterns, and…

The Kapuas River in West Kalimantan used to flow wide and brown past Suparman’s two-hectare palm oil plot. Now it’s a cracked spine of mud, and his diesel pump sits silent. The fuel costs more than the water would earn him, and anyway, the river’s dropped so far the suction hose can’t reach what’s left. Suparman, who like many Indonesians goes by one name, isn’t alone. Across Borneo and Sumatra, smallholder palm farmers are watching 2024’s El Niño drought hollow out their livelihoods. The same warming pattern that dumps rain on California and dries out Southeast Asia has turned Indonesia’s…

The glossy marketing photos never show the other side. You’ve seen the pristine factory shots, robots welding chassis with millimeter precision, the promise of a cleaner tomorrow wrapped in vegan leather and touchscreen dashboards. What you won’t find in a dealership brochure, or in those polished dixon ford vw photos, is the scarred earth thousands of miles away where battery materials begin their journey. Investigative reporting and supply chain audits have traced nickel, cobalt, and lithium used by Volkswagen, Ford, and Tesla to mining operations linked to deforestation of indigenous territories. The disconnect is staggering. A driver in Illinois browsing…

America bet big on offshore wind. Towering turbines over the Atlantic, spinning out power for millions of homes, zero carbon in the mix. That was the pitch. Today? More like a political football. The Trump administration has Orsted’s massive offshore wind project back in its crosshairs. Another gut punch for an industry already reeling from supply chain chaos, spiking costs, and federal policy that shifts with the headlines. If you’ve been tracking how this White House handles environmental and energy projects, the pattern isn’t subtle. What Orsted Built, and What’s Now at Risk Orsted, the Danish energy giant, has poured…

Autumn in the UK used to mean crisp mornings, turning leaves, and the first excuse to dig out a decent coat. Lately, it also means watching the sky with a growing sense of dread. The Met Office has already issued stark warnings about the months ahead, and the phrase “prepare for the unthinkable” is not hyperbole. It is the new normal. Last winter saw communities in Yorkshire and the Midlands underwater for weeks. Roads became rivers. Homes that had never flooded before took on feet of murky water. And here is the uncomfortable truth: those events are becoming more frequent,…

Switzerland’s Alps have shaped everything from its national identity to its water supply for centuries. The glaciers carved those valleys, fed those rivers, and drew millions of visitors every year. But something has shifted in a way that researchers are calling genuinely alarming. Over just a five-year window, Switzerland lost roughly one-fifth of its total glacier volume, a rate of disappearance that glaciologists say has no modern precedent in the observational record. That figure comes from the Swiss glacier monitoring network, and it landed in scientific circles with the kind of weight that stops conversations. Twenty percent. Gone in five…

Oceanographers watched the numbers climb through late 2023 and early 2024 with the kind of dread that comes from recognizing a pattern too familiar to ignore. Sea surface temperatures in the central and eastern Pacific weren’t just warm; they were shattering benchmarks set during the infamous 1997-98 and 2015-16 events. By mid-2024, the ocean temperature record had fallen, and the event had earned a label that keeps emergency planners awake at night: a super El Niño. Now, with the 2024-25 event still reverberating through global weather systems, attention has pivoted hard to what comes next. Models are already hinting at…

Back in 2015 and 2016, farmers across the southern United States watched their fields flood while growers in Southeast Asia prayed for rain that never came. That was the last super El Niño, and it cost global agriculture tens of billions of dollars. Now, meteorologists are tracking conditions that suggest another could be forming, with super El Niño 2026 appearing increasingly likely in climate model runs. The term gets thrown around a lot, so let’s be clear. A super El Niño isn’t just a warm patch of Pacific water. It happens when sea surface temperatures in the Niño 3.4 region…

The ocean has always done the heavy lifting when it comes to absorbing the consequences of human activity. It soaks up carbon dioxide, moderates temperatures, and keeps the planet from cooking faster than it already is. But 2023 pushed that relationship to a breaking point. According to a peer-reviewed study published in Advances in Atmospheric Sciences, the world’s oceans absorbed more heat last year than at any point in recorded history, storing the equivalent of roughly 40 times the total energy consumed by every human on Earth in a single year. That number is almost too large to hold in…

The roads Americans drive on are about to get a whole lot dirtier, at least in terms of what comes out of the tailpipe. The Trump administration has moved aggressively to roll back the clean car rules designed to cut climate-warming emissions from the transportation sector, which remains the single largest source of greenhouse gas pollution in the United States. These rollbacks are not a minor tweak to the margins. They represent a fundamental shift in how the federal government treats vehicle emissions, fuel economy, and the role the auto industry plays in the country’s climate future. Transportation accounted for…

The numbers coming out of climate science labs in late 2023 were genuinely unsettling. Researchers who’d spent entire careers studying ocean heat were running the same calculations twice, then a third time. Sea surface temperatures in parts of the tropical Pacific didn’t just break records. They obliterated them, by margins so wide that finding any useful historical comparison became nearly impossible. Some scientists started using the phrase “super El Niño” just to signal that normal framing wasn’t adequate anymore. This wasn’t just another warm year. The event crossed thresholds that hadn’t been touched in the entire instrumental record, which stretches…

The window for meaningful climate action is getting smaller by the year, and the world’s top officials know it. As the United Nations General Assembly convenes, world leaders are arriving in New York carrying something heavier than diplomatic briefcases: the weight of broken promises, record-breaking heat, and constituents who are increasingly running out of patience. Scientists have confirmed that the recent El Niño cycle was among the most powerful ever recorded, pushing global temperatures into territory that climate models once reserved for distant worst-case scenarios. Now those scenarios are the present. Against this backdrop, heads of state from nearly every…

Europe has had a rough few years. Wildfires tearing through Greece and Spain, catastrophic flooding in Germany and Slovenia, droughts baking the continent’s agricultural heartland. And every time disaster strikes, the same painful question surfaces: who pays? For millions of homeowners, farmers, and small businesses, the answer is increasingly “you do,” as insurers quietly exit markets they’ve decided are too risky. That trend, often called insurance withdrawal climate risk, is becoming one of the continent’s most urgent financial problems. Now the European Union is stepping in with a proposed climate insurance scheme designed to fill that gap before it becomes…

Somewhere between the daily flood of headlines about politics, inflation, and the latest tech drama, the world quietly crossed one of the most significant energy milestones in human history. Global installed solar capacity has now surpassed 3 terawatts. Three trillion watts of peak generating power, sitting on rooftops, floating on reservoirs, and stretching across desert fields from China to Chile. And most people have absolutely no idea it happened. That silence is strange, because the number itself is extraordinary. To put it in terms that actually land: 1 terawatt is roughly enough to meet the entire peak electricity demand of…

Global CO2 emissions have barely moved in over a decade. Yet atmospheric carbon dioxide just hit record highs. Those two facts sit in the same headline, and they seem to cancel each other out. They don’t. The confusion is understandable, though, and it’s not harmless. Misread this story and you end up in one of two bad places: falsely optimistic (“we’ve solved it!”) or completely checked out (“nothing works, why bother?”). Neither reaction is accurate. The real picture is messier, more urgent, and honestly more interesting than either extreme. The bathtub problem: why flatlining emissions still means rising CO2 Picture…

There’s an argument that keeps showing up in comment sections, dinner table debates, and op-eds written by people who really love their V8s. It goes something like this: “EVs don’t actually reduce emissions. You’re just moving pollution from the tailpipe to the smokestack. And the battery? Making that thing is an environmental disaster.” It’s a tidy talking point. It also happens to be wrong, and now there’s rigorous, peer-reviewed science to prove it. MIT just published a study that systematically dismantles every version of that argument. Not with optimistic assumptions or cherry-picked data, but with a full lifecycle analysis covering…

Germany invented the car and yet the country that gave the world the internal combustion engine just recorded something that has never happened in the entire history of the automobile. And one can probably thank Trumps war with Iran which has increased petrol prices while the Chinese are presenting ever better and cheaper cars. In June 2026, battery electric vehicles became the top-selling powertrain in Germany – outselling hybrids, petrol, diesel, and everything else on the market. The Numbers That Rewrote History According to ADAC – Germany’s largest and most credible auto club – battery electric vehicles sold 84,057 units…