Month: July 2026

As fires explode once again in Canada’s boreal forests, and unprecedented smoke clouds descend over the Eastern US, atmospheric expert Daniel Swain explains a newly popular climate denial meme, above.
Liars can use statistic. Who knew?

Nature -Increasing frequency and intensity of the most extreme wildfires on Earth:
Here we identify energetically extreme wildfire events by calculating daily clusters of summed fire radiative power using 21 years of satellite data, revealing that the frequency  of extreme events (≥99.99th percentile) increased by 2.2-fold from 2003 to 2023, with the last 7 years including the 6 most extreme.
Although the total area burned on Earth may be declining, our study highlights that fire behaviour is worsening in several regions—particularly the boreal and temperate conifer biomes—with substantial implications for carbon storage and human exposure to wildfire disasters.
—–

Below, Energy Secretary Chris Wright, in his confirmation hearing, stands by his assertions that wildfire intensification from climate change is “hype”.

Washington Post:

The frequency and magnitude of extreme wildfires around the globe have doubled in the past two decades because of climate change, according to a study published last year in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution. Rising temperatures have ushered in an era of hotter and drier weather, lending the right conditions for wildfires to erupt, the researchers found.

A study released last week in the journal Nature Reviews also found that climate change is contributing to “weather whiplash” — periods of torrential rain followed by dry, tinderbox-like conditions — in the Los Angeles area. Experts say this trend set the stage for the Los Angeles blazes, along with other key factors such as urban sprawl and a resistance to clearing vegetation around homes.

Continue reading “Teachable Moment: Scientists on Wildfires and Climate Denial”

Above, Mackinac Bridge Webcam from the north side, looking south over the Straits of Mackinac and the bridge.

If you are not familiar with the Upper Great Lakes, this might not have the emotional freight that it carries for those of us who have grown up around the world’s largest bodies of fresh water.
The Mackinac Bridge, which connects Michigan’s lower peninsula to the sparsely populated wilderness of the north, is generally considered the gateway to God’s country, and a place where historically, a high pressure system blowing from the northwest is as fresh as breeze as one could imagine, coming off the Canadian boreal forests and perhaps a few hundred miles of pristine Lake Superior.
Heartbreaking does not even begin to describe the emotion.

Below, view from the south approach to the Bridge.

Below, clear day view of the Straits and Bridge, from the south, compared to today.

Below, Fox Weather reporting on smoke.

Continue reading “Choking Smoke Returns to God’s Country”

Fast moving energy landscape is demanding power for Data Centers, and for now, pushing up greenhouse emissions as developers have been choosing gas as the speediest path to powering up.
But some savvy operators, as well as policy makers, looking out a decade or two, wonder about the wisdom of relying on fossil fuel, with the prices for clean energy, particularly solar and batteries, crashing month by month, and the urgency of climate change only rising.

CNBC:

Google parent Alphabet on Monday announced it will acquire Intersect, a data center and energy infrastructure company, for $4.75 billion in cash in addition to the assumption of debt.
In a release at the time, Intersect said its strategic partnership with Google and TPG Rise Climate aimed to develop gigawatts of data center capacity across the U.S., including a $20 billion investment in renewable power infrastructure by the end of the decade.

Sheldon Kimber, Founder and CEO of Intersect, on Energy Empire Podcast:

…if I were starting my own company, I see clean firm and next-gen geothermal where it becomes really hard to imagine putting large amounts of that in the load pocket, and those technologies are going to have to compete head-to-head with renewables for transmission. I wouldn’t bet against solar and batteries. I just wouldn’t. ….I don’t know anybody on the planet who’d argue that’s a great strategy.

 It’s all about the flexibility to get rid of the gas over time. We are not building anything that isn’t in a place where there are enough renewables around it, which we control, that we can decarbonize it as batteries get better. We’re building flexible gas that’s modular, can be taken out, can run at a lower capacity factor, with enough renewables on the site that we can keep building until it’s 100% clean firm. The problem is people siting a big combined-cycle gas plant behind the meter in a tight, landlocked area that can never be decarbonized. That’s a recipe for stranded costs.

Associated Press:

Lawmakers in states with stronger climate policies don’t want data centers to hinder their goal of slashing planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions.

In other states, environmental advocates and corporations with clean energy goals are working regulatory levers to push monopoly utilities that historically control the energy supply and grid access.

The problem clean energy proponents are confronting is that tech giants are demanding power at such speed and scale — some data centers consume more energy than a mid-size city — that the construction of wind and solar simply can’t keep up.

Continue reading “Data Centers Quandary: Gas or Renewables?”

Was wondering when we would see this.

Canadian Fires will bring smoke across the East.
See my earlier post on this page with Daniel Swain’s insights on global wild fires.
Welcome to the Rest of Our Lives.

Fox Weather:

A recent wildfire outbreak across western Ontario, Canada, and Minnesota is sending thick plumes of smoke toward the Great Lakes and Northeast through Thursday, bringing extremely hazardous air quality and potentially some orange skies reminiscent of the Mars-like skies that enveloped New York City in June 2023.

According to the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre, 32 wildfires sparked across mostly western Ontario on Monday, with 46 wildfires burning out of control across the province.

Several other fires sparked and intensified in northern Minnesota Monday, as a heat dome continues to drive record temperatures across the Northern Plains.

Continue reading “Here Comes the Smoke”

I’ve been doing a series of interviews with senior scientists about what I call the “New Climate Denial”.
Among them, Daniel Swain – you’ll hear me chuckling above when he talks about the ongoing “torture” of data sets. Dr. Swain gives a prime example of how data sets are being tortured and misused by the internet trolls now in charge of American science.

Meanwhile, if you are in the central US, hope you are hydrating today.

Meanwhile in Ontario, Canada:

One firefighter said today, “it looks like the end of the world.”

Huge wildfires popping off across the province’s landscape. pic.twitter.com/KXwioNyuN0

— The Hotshot Wake Up (@HotshotWake) July 14, 2026

WMAQ NBC Chicago:

Planted alongside 7,000 solar modules over several acres in Kane County, are pesticide-free, native flowering plants providing vegetation for bees, butterflies and other pollinators to thrive.

“We often see birds nesting around the panels. We find a lot of bees’ nests on the panels. We see foxes, smaller wildlife, love this kind of habitat,” said Keith Hevenor, the communications manager for Nexamp, a solar storage company co-headquartered in Chicago.

Nexamp is one of several solar companies installing pollinator-friendly projects in Illinois as part of an effort to build more robust habitats for the critical components of the world’s agricultural practices. 

They work with contractors to design custom seed mixes that include native pollinator vegetation. 

“Black Eyed Susan, Yarrow, we’re seeing a whole variety of clovers, daises, fleabane,” said Hevenor.

Agrivoltaics is the dual-use practice of co-locating agricultural activities, including crop growth, livestock grazing, and pollinator habitats with solar photovoltaic power generation on the same land, according to the United States Department of Energy.

The plots require very little maintenance and almost no mowing. The company leases the land from farmers.

Continue reading “From Illinois to Spain – Solar Farms are Habitat for Pollinators, Birds”

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.”

Continue reading “Study: More Birds in Solar Fields”

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.

Continue reading “Climate Change: The Enshittification of Planet Earth”

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.

Continue reading “Super El Niño “Virtually Certain””