If you’re watching the Super Bowl from Los Angeles this year, you might see an ad from Science Moms, a nonpartisan group of climate scientists, who are also parents, working to improve the public’s understanding of climate change and its impacts.
The ad comes on the heels of Los Angeles’ devastating wildfires last month. Wildfires are happening more frequently and causing greater damage as a result of climate change. In Los Angeles, high winds whipped through after a dry period left the region particularly susceptible, destroying more than 10,000 homes.
“There’s a very direct link between the fires that we’re seeing now—for example, in Los Angeles, and the fires that we’ve seen in in Texas recently and in Colorado—and climate change,” said Emily Fischer, an atmospheric scientist at Colorado University.
The world warmed to yet another monthly heat record in January, despite an abnormally chilly United States, a cooling La Nina and predictions of a slightly less hot 2025, according to the European climate service Copernicus.
The surprising January heat record coincides with a new study by a climate science heavyweight, former top NASA scientist James Hansen, and others arguing that global warming is accelerating. It’s a claim that’s dividing the research community.
January 2025 globally was 0.09 degrees Celsius (0.16 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than January 2024, the previous hottest January, and was 1.75 C (3.15 F) warmer than it was before industrial times, Copernicus calculated. It was the 18th month of the last 19 that the world hit or passed the internationally agreed upon warming limit of 1.5 C (2.7 F) above pre-industrial times. Scientists won’t regard the limit as breached unless and until global temperatures stay above it for 20 years.
Copernicus records date to 1940, but other U.S. and British records go back to 1850, and scientists using proxies such as tree rings say this era is the warmest in about 120,000 years or since the start of human civilization.
By far the biggest driver of record heat is greenhouse gas buildup from the burning of coal, oil and natural gas, but the natural contributions to temperature change have not been acting quite as expected, said Samantha Burgess, strategic lead for climate for the European weather agency.
The big natural factor in global temperatures is usually the natural cycle of changes in the equatorial Pacific Ocean waters. When the central Pacific is especially warm, it’s an El Nino and global temperatures tend to spike. Last year was a substantial El Nino, though it ended last June and the year was even warmer than initially expected, the hottest on record.
Critics of a global transition to clean, renewable electricity argue no wind- or solar-dominated grids exist and solar and wind’s variabilities cause blackouts. This paper uses data from the world’s 5th-largest economy to show no blackouts occurred when wind-water-solar electricity supply exceeded 100 % of demand on California’s main grid for a record 98 of 116 days from late winter to early summer, 2024, for an average (maximum) of 4.84 (10.1) hours/day. Compared with the same period in 2023, solar, wind, and battery outputs in 2024 increased 31 % 8 %, and 105 %, respectively, dropping fossil gas use by an estimated 40 %. Batteries, which shifted excess solar to night, supplied up to ∼12 % of nighttime demand. Wind-water-solar is not the cause of high California electricity prices; to the contrary, most all states with higher shares of their demand met by wind-water-solar experience lower electricity prices. Thus, data support models: a reliable wind-water-solar-dominated large grid appears feasible.
One of the biggest myths about renewable energy is that it isn’t reliable. Sure, the sun sets every night and winds calm down, putting solar panels and turbines to sleep. But when those renewables are humming, they’re providing the grid with electricity and charging banks of batteries, which then supply power at night.
A new study in the journal Renewable Energy that looked at California’s deployment of renewable power highlights just how reliable the future of energy might be. It found that last year, from late winter to early summer, renewables fulfilled 100 percent of the state’s electricity demand for up to 10 hours on 98 of 116 days, a record for California. Not only were there no blackouts during that time, thanks in part to backup battery power, but at their peak the renewables provided up to 162 percent of the grid’s needs — adding extra electricity California could export to neighboring states or use to fill batteries.
“This study really finds that we can keep the grid stable with more and more renewables,” said Mark Z. Jacobson, a civil and environmental engineer at Stanford University and lead author of the new paper. “Every major renewable — geothermal, hydro, wind, solar in particular, even offshore wind — is lower cost than fossil fuels” on average, globally.
Despots hate science because science has its own laws that are immutable and don’t bend to the will of tyrants.
The tobacco industry pioneered many of the persuasion techniques we now see deployed by the climate denial establishment. Similarly, in Stalinist Russia, a particular strain of anti-science took root and caused widespread damage to agriculture.
In 1940, Lysenko became director of the Institute of Genetics of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, and he used his political influence and power to suppress dissenting opinions and discredit, marginalize, and imprison his critics, elevating his anti-Mendelian theories to state-sanctioned doctrine.[7][8]
Soviet scientists who refused to renounce genetics were dismissed from their posts and left destitute. Hundreds if not thousands of others were imprisoned. Several were sentenced to death as enemies of the state, including the botanist Nikolai Vavilov, whose sentence was commuted to prison.[9] Lysenko’s ideas and practices contributed to the famines that killed millions of Soviet people;[9] the adoption of his methods from 1958 in the People’s Republic of China had similarly calamitous results, contributing to the Great Chinese Famine of 1959 to 1961.[9]
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Donald Trump can now do what Stalin, the Tobacco companies, and generations of Republicans only dreamed of.
Trump administration political appointees have taken steps in recent weeks to exert unprecedented influence over the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s flagship medical research publication, the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, multiple federal health officials tell CBS News. The interference included dictating what to cover and withholding studies on the growing bird flu outbreak.
The Trump administration’s moves to control the research published by the agency ends a decades-long streak of independence for the journal, known as the MMWR.
Health officials and experts have long considered the MMWR as the “voice of CDC” and a respected source where federal scientists release research of public health importance. It ranks as among the most-cited health journals in the world.
“The MMWR has lost its autonomy,” one health official told CBS News.
Efforts by Trump officials to control the publication have stalled the release of three studies about bird flu for weeks, as the virus continues spreading through wildbirds, poultry farms and cows around the country.
Even before federal employees at the National Weather Service received so-called buyout offers this week, America’s public forecasting agency was suffering its lowest staffing in decades. Now, the NWS — whose mission is to protect lives and property, ensuring Americans have sufficient time to evacuate before a hurricane or tornado strikes — is staring down more cuts and the nomination of an agency leader they are deeply wary of.
This website registered in Pakistan features a picture of a rainforest that purports to be Northern Michigan
We saw the workings of a well oiled global misinformation machine, as click bait stories appeared on South Asia and made the round trip to social media echo chambers in North America, as intended, see above.
While Elon Musk has been generating headline after headline for his efforts to reshape the US federal workforce, the stock of his electric-car company is on track for its worst weekly performance since the US presidential election.
Tesla Inc. shares have sunk 7.5% this week through Thursday’s close, weighed down by shockingly bad sales reports from around the world. In Germany, sales plunged last month to the lowest since 2021, and they tumbled in France and the UK as well. The news from China, one of Tesla’s biggest markets, is also bleak. Deliveries fell 11.5% year over year — while the shares of Chinese competitor BYD Co. notched their best week since 2020 as investors cheered an update to its smart-driving technology.
The battering has left Tesla’s stock down 22% from its Dec. 17 record closing high. It reached that peak after nearly doubling in the wake of Donald Trump’s election victory, as Musk established himself as the president’s right-hand man. That honeymoon has given way to the day-to-day reality of running an electric-vehicle maker at a time when the new administration’s policy is turning away from the industry and as Musk has become an increasingly polarizing figure.
Sales of Tesla’s electric vehicles have fallen sharply across many of its key European markets amid a consumer backlash against Elon Musk’s interventions in the region’s politics.
The world’s largest EV maker in January registered only 1,277 new cars in Germany, according to the German Federal Motor Transport Authority, a drop of 59.5 per cent compared with the same month last year. The country hosts Tesla’s only manufacturing plant in Europe.
Sales of electric vehicles slowed sharply in Germany and France last year following a pullback in government subsidies, but demand has started to recover recently. Tesla’s drop came as the German EV market in January grew more than 50 per cent year on year, pushing its market share down from 14 to 4 per cent.
In France, Tesla sales were down 63 per cent in January, while registrations of Tesla cars in Norway fell 38 per cent. In the UK, registrations declined 8 per cent from a year earlier.
Tesla sales dropped around 13 percent across Europe in 2024, but so far this year, the scale of the problem is far greater. In France, sales of new Teslas fell by 63 percent, while total car sales in the country fell by just 6 percent, with EV sales dropping just half a percent.
Germany was already looking like lost ground for Tesla—its 41 percent drop in 2024 accounted for most of Tesla’s lost sales across Europe. That must make the 59 percent drop in German Tesla sales recorded during January even more painful on the profit and loss statements.
