Climate Apocalypse

Data centers, whose expansion is being fueled dramatically by the artificial intelligence boom, have a far bigger carbon footprint than previously estimated, according to a new study.

The sprawling, power-hungry sites, used to store critical IT infrastructure like servers, are being built worldwide by companies and countries as AI applications gobble ever greater computing power.

This has helped to boost their greenhouse gas emissions, with a new study by Allianz Trade estimating the centers emitted 286 million tonnes of carbon dioxide in 2025.

This is 57 percent higher than estimates by the International Energy Agency, according to the group, which is the trade credit insurance arm of global insurer Allianz.

AI already accounts for between 15 and 20 percent of electricity consumption at data centers, and this share could climb to 40 percent by 2030, the report said.

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It follows Republican outrage over Mamdani offering the same heatwave advice as everyone else.

The US Department of Energy reportedly deleted about 6,000 pages related to energy conservation as a historic heatwave tears across the country.

The deletion was suspiciously timed, following Republican outrage over Mayor Zohran Mamdani asking New Yorkers to help reduce strain on the grid by setting their AC to 78 degrees. Republicans like Ted Cruz (who has famously fled severe weather in his home state), Nikki Haley, and Representative Nancy Mace (South Carolina) quickly pounced, framing the request as socialism and an act of war on women in menopause (the Republican Party is notoriously friendly to women’s health).

Of course, this is pretty standard advice during a heatwave. It was the official stance of the Department of Energy that Americans should set their thermostats between 75 and 78 degrees, and Republican governors in deep red states like Texas have issued the same advice in the past — including current governor Greg Abbott.

Climate.gov was essentially gone, and the team that deleted implied that it happened because climate research somehow failed to uphold what the administration was calling “gold standard science.”

But the people who put together climate.gov didn’t go away. While the government didn’t hesitate to delete inconvenient climate information, dedicated volunteers outside the government managed to preserve copies of much of the material, which the federal government is prohibited from copyrighting. The volunteers and former climate.gov admins got together and launched climate.us. On Tuesday, the team announced that it had completed the project to restore everything lost when climate.gov shut down.

Of 358 human rights defenders killed in 2025, 84 were protecting land and the environment, according to a new report.

The recently proposed budget from the Trump administration includes a $1.6 billion cut to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The reduction would eliminate NOAA climate, weather and ocean research labs; zero out grants aimed at improving rainfall and flood prediction; and cut the Integrated Ocean Observing System, which monitors what’s happening in the ocean, where hurricanes strengthen and where coastal flooding begins. This comes on top of the 2025 DOGE layoffs of some 880 people from the agency.

Some lawmakers are pushing back, either because they don’t think climate change is fake news, or they’re from flood-prone regions. But a detail being missed, as noted by Emily Atkin at Heated (5/7/26), is that while these cuts would substantially harm the agency’s work, the proposed “savings” of $1.6 billion is equivalent to the cost of 1.3 days of the war on Iran—which Popular Information estimated to have cost $72 billion in its first 60 days.

That figure is much higher than the one you will likely have heard in the news. The acting Pentagon comptroller put the figure at $25 billion when talking to Congress at the end of April, and he raised that number to $29 billion in widely covered hearings this week (USA Today, 5/12/26). CNN (4/29/26) said anonymous officials suggested the $25 billion figure was actually closer to $50 billion, once repairs to US bases in the region were included.

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Opponents continue to characterize Stratos as a billionaire vanity project to loot Utah’s vast natural resources with little consideration for how it will affect residents.

Utah State University physics professor Robert Davies told Fox 13 that the Great Salt Lake “is occupied by amazing living systems” and that “projects like this go into environments like this and scrape the living systems right off the face of the Earth.”

He said, “This is a private enterprise that is coming in to extract from our natural wealth and pipe it out of the state… and leave us with a few crumbs.”

We infer that 2026 is likely to be the warmest year in the period of instrumental data, based on a physics-based approach with identifiable assumptions. This approach may help us learn something in 2026 about the mechanisms of climate change.

Republican lawmakers in multiple states and Congress are advancing proposals to shield polluters from climate accountability and prevent any type of liability for climate change harms—even as these harms and their associated costs continue to mount.

The last two times the Olympics came to Los Angeles, the city launched major tree planting programs. L.A. planted tens of thousands of palm trees in the run up to 1932. An L.A. non-profit led the charge to plant one million trees ahead of the 1984 Games.

Planners are taking a different approach ahead of this Olympics, focusing on shade structures more broadly rather than specifically on planting trees... That means canopies, pop-up structures and infrastructure to create shade, with or without tree cover.

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But many of the specifics are still to come. That's also true of LA28, which has promised to create a "Heat Mitigation Plan." A spokesperson told LAist that it was expected to be finished by mid-2027.

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Still, L.A. has a long way to go. In L.A. County, urban areas have just 21% shade cover at noon on average, according to data from the UCLA Luskin Center for Innovation – less than the national average of 27%. And it's only getting hotter. By 2050, average temperatures in the county are expected to rise by almost four degrees.

The Olympic imperative that every Games has to be newer, bigger and better than the one before makes the claim that this is a “sustainable Games” an insult to everyone playing and watching.

Assuming a linear relationship and a ~ 0.34% increase rate per year, the calculated trendline in Fig. 2A predicts that the healthy maximum HCO3− level of 30mEq/L will be reached in the year 2076.

Chronic ocean heating is fuelling a “staggering and deeply concerning” loss of marine life, a study has found, with fish levels falling by 7.2% from as little as 0.1C of warming per decade.

Researchers examined the year-to-year change of 33,000 populations in the northern hemisphere between 1993 and 2021, and isolated the effect of the decadal rate of seabed warming from short shifts such as marine heatwaves. They found the drop in biomass from chronic heating to be as high as 19.8% in a single year.

“To put it simply, the faster the ocean floor warms, the faster we lose fish,” said Shahar Chaikin, a marine ecologist at the National Museum of Natural Sciences in Spain and the study’s lead author.

“A 7.2% decline for every tenth of a degree per decade might sound small,” he added. “But compounded over time, across entire ocean basins, it represents a staggering and deeply concerning loss of marine life.”

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The winter smog is driven by a perfect storm of factors. Falling temperatures and weaker winds coincide with a spike in seasonal crop burning by farmers — compounded by already high vehicle and factory emissions, Diwali-season fireworks and construction dust. Trapped by the capital’s bowl-like geography, the pollution lingers for months.

The health impacts are severe. High concentrations of PM 2.5 raise the risk of heart attacks, cancer, respiratory diseases, strokes and dementia, local and international studies show. Almost 1.7 million deaths were attributable to air pollution in India in 2019, according to the Lancet journal. Children are particularly vulnerable, which is why the Nov. 9 protest at India Gate was organized by an advocacy group called Warrior Moms. An informal survey the group conducted across more than a dozen pharmacies recorded a substantial rise in demand for inhalers and respiratory medications in recent years, with a third of all nebulizers typically purchased for children.

The visit suggests a possible FBI probe into Extinction Rebellion NYC as the Trump administration increases surveillance of activist groups.

Continued global heating could set irreversible course by triggering climate tipping points, but most people unaware

Some may still hope that markets or innovation will quietly resolve the problem, and extraterrestrial data centres may yet do something to help. But water does not behave like other commodities. It is local, finite, and political: unlike rare earths or hydrocarbons, water cannot be stockpiled at scale, substituted or shipped across oceans to smooth out shortages; it must be consumed where it falls or flows. So when water is scarce, there is no global market to arbitrate supply — only hard decisions, made locally, about who goes without. In a century defined by ecological pressure, then, water sits near the top of the hierarchy of risks. This is not because it is unsolvable, but because it is foundational.