This is Not Cool

Study: More Birds in Solar Fields

Listen to the haunting silence of an ecosystem gradually dying out over half a century.

This acoustic profile captures the progressive erasure of birdsong, serving as a stark and alarming warning of catastrophic biodiversity loss. Listen closely to realize exactly what we have… pic.twitter.com/peqtCK8DmH
— Kekius Maximus (@Kekius_Sage) July 10, 2026

BBC:

A new study has found well-managed solar farms can make an important contribution to nature as well as “provide relief from the effects of agricultural intensification”.

The report, from the RSPB and the University of Cambridge, was published on Wednesday in the journal Bird Study and looked at two types of solar farms in the East Anglian Fens.

Scientists found that solar farms had a greater number of species and individual birds per hectare than the surrounding arable land.

It added that farms which had been managed with a mix of habitats, had not cut back grass and maintained hedgerows, had nearly three times the number of birds present compared with arable land nearby.

Dr Catherine Waite, researcher at the University of Cambridge and co-author of the study, said: “With the combined climate and biodiversity crises, using land efficiently is crucial.

“Our study shows that if you manage solar energy production in a certain way, not only are you providing clean energy but benefiting biodiversity.”

Climate Change: The Enshittification of Planet Earth

Above, good local news reporting on Chicago area’s storm and sewage management system, which includes a massive series of tunnels and reservoirs in the area. Something I did not know.

It’s important because climate enhanced extreme rains are becoming more common across the world, straining infrastructure.

Chicago’s reservoirs have been filling up more regularly this year than ever before, and one result of those big ponds of sewage-heavy water – persistent and overwhelming foul stench pervades local communities.
Climate change is the enshittification of the planet.

And there will be more shit to go around. See Below.

Super El Niño “Virtually Certain”

Colin McCarthy on X:

The 2026-27 El Niño is simply astonishing. Tropical Pacific waters are running nearly 7 weeks ahead of where they’ve ever been at this point in an El Niño cycle in modern history. Models now put the peak strength at 3.6°C on the Relative Oceanic Niño Index (RONI), the new standard for measuring El Niño that adjusts for background ocean warming from climate change.

That would beat the previous record (Dec. 1877, the strongest El Niño ever observed) by 0.7°C. In the context of climate, that’s completely blowing the previous record out of the water.
For context, an El Niño is informally considered a Super El Niño when, for 3 months, the Niño 3.4 index is 2.0°C or above. Frankly, expect extreme climate and weather impacts over the next 12-18 months. Forecasts have also been consistently, aggressively wet for California and the southern US. Many of California’s largest floods have hit during El Niño years, and in very strong events, El Niño typically becomes the single best predictor of a very wet winter in California. It also elevates the odds of a megaflood in the state.

Al Gore on “Inconvenient Truth” at 20

Missed this when it came out a few weeks ago, someone alerted me to it.

Former GOP Leader Regrets Climate Votes

Former Republican Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, a former Cardiac Surgeon, after retiring, applied his science chops (finally) to his understanding of climate, and realized he’d made some mistakes.
He is now Director of the Nature Conservancy, and turning that organization toward a climate perspective, and messaging on the issue.
Above, Al Gore is a lot more generous to him than I would be, but ok, welcome aboard.

New York Times:

Bill Frist, the former Republican Senate majority leader, racked up a slew of notable medical successes during his years as one of the country’s top heart and lung surgeons.

He founded one of the country’s busiest transplant centers. One of his patients held the Guinness World Record for being the longest surviving single lung transplant recipient. And, in 1991, Mr. Frist performed lifesaving thoracic surgery on Gen. David Petraeus, then a lieutenant-colonel, when, during a training exercise, the military leader was accidentally shot in the chest.

But now, Mr. Frist, 74, advocates for the health of the biggest, most famous patient of all: the Earth.

In earnest writings, folksy videos recorded on his front porch in Tennessee, podcasts, speeches and congressional testimony, Mr. Frist has been highlighting the inseparability of planetary and human health.

“A healthier planet means healthier people,” Mr. Frist said. “The science shows it. Our experience shows it. Nobody can really argue against that.”

Climate Feedbacks Strengthen Shocking Heatwaves

I’ve been talking to some Senior Scientists in recent months, working on a new series of videos that will be aimed at this current wave of “New” Climate Denial, which is the same as the old climate denial, but aimed, perhaps at a generation that hasn’t been well informed, or perhaps that can not remember a world that was not burning.
Yesterday, I spoke to Daniel Swain, one of our most valuable players on the science comms team. As always, lucid, eloquent, informative, and had a lot to say.
Above, we discussed some issues related to the recent shocking heat events in the US and Europe.

Bloomberg:

A troubling pattern has emerged in this summer’s heat: Not only has it broken records, it’s done so often by margins far above the previous all-time highs.

These heat jumps are part of a larger shift of climate change seeming to accelerate. Ocean temperatures just reached a new high for the early summer. Sea levels are rising faster than before, while new records for daily rainfall are being set at a rapid clip. The pace of global warming itself has quickened in recent years.

While scientists have long braced for climate change, the growing severity of its impacts is shocking them.

Today’s climate can “seem like an unexpected step change” from that of a few years ago, said atmospheric scientist Katharine Hayhoe of Texas Tech University.

Project 2025 Science Cuts Cripple Weather Warnings

A lot of people are noticing. Less weather data, compliments of DOGE cuts, means more holes in model output, and more nasty surprises.

Politico:

At issue, meteorologists say, are spending reductions imposed under President Donald Trump by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency team last year that have thinned the network of weather balloons the National Weather Service launches twice daily — and which provide crucial information for severe weather warnings for communities across the country.

“The issue is the forecast,” Thomas Winter, emergency manager for Franklin County, Kansas, said of the twister that hit his community southwest of Kansas City. “There was a zero percent chance of thunderstorms — and that forecast comes from the storm prediction center out of Oklahoma.”

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration data show the standard early morning launches of weather balloons — which are coordinated globally to measure wind, temperature, humidity and pressure — are no longer happening regularly. Meteorologists say the dearth of weather balloons flying over the Great Plains, Southwest, interior Northwest and Midwest have compromised severe weather forecasts, putting communities at risk of being unprepared for sudden floods, thunderstorms and tornadoes.

Meteorologists say because of Trump’s cuts to the federal workforce, the National Weather Service offices in the West are too sparsely staffed on the midnight shift, which usually handles morning weather balloon releases. Those offices have instead pushed those launches to later shifts, creating sizable data holes for crafting severe weather forecasts.

Topeka Capital-Journal:

Early on April 13, the National Weather Service forecast almost no chance of tornadoes in east-central Kansas. But that evening, several twisters tore across the region.

The next morning, people in Ottawa picked up the pieces of homes and businesses.

Ohio Rains are Biblical

WTOL Toledo:

TOLEDO, Ohio — A rare and unusual slow moving “meso low” pressure system remained nearly stationary for over 24 hours across northern Ohio with torrents of rain that fed off of the warmer waters of Lake Erie in what seemed to be endless waves of downpours.

The torrential rainfall has led to devastating flooding and what could amount to historic rainfall of biblical proportions. It appears that the Kelleys Island rainfall of 17.19 inches, according to personal weather stations, would be in line with at least 1-in-1,000+ year rain event.

School Bus Magic Keeps Grids Stable in Heat

Reuters:

Schools are out for the summer, but the batteries in more than 200 electric school buses are helping some people in the U.S. find relief when temperatures soar.

From California to North Carolina, yellow electric school buses are sending power ‌back to the grid, easing some strain when demand spikes during heat waves. Hundreds more are expected to come online.

The stored energy from school buses and other electric vehicles is dwarfed by power plants. But efforts to use their batteries to return power to electrical systems, known as Vehicle-to-Grid (V2G), show how EVs could fortify strained power grids.

Fully deployed V2G projects involving about 230 of the nation’s roughly 6,700 electric school buses now have the capacity to supply about 8 megawatt-hours of power at a given time, according to the World Resources Institute’s (WRI) Electric School Bus Initiative.

Global Solar Shift Has Arrived

RenewEconomy (Australia):

Solar is not just getting cheaper; it is sprinting down a learning curve that has held for half a century, with module prices falling about ten-thousand-fold as cumulative capacity has exploded.

That is my first message: a technology whose cost keeps dropping predictably as deployment grows, and where every new gigawatt makes the next gigawatt cheaper again.

And beating the trend line.

The second message is about speed.

When we line up all major power sources from the year each first exceeded a bigly amount of energy – 100 TWh – solar and wind are now racing ahead faster than coal, gas, hydro or nuclear ever did – nuclear did move fast for a while there, but then it stopped. Wind hasn’t.

And batteries are climbing even more steeply from their own 100 TWh “year zero”.