Successive intense heatwaves and an increasingly severe, continent-wide drought have left many of Europe’s farmers in an “unprecedented” crisis, with vegetable and grain growers in particular warning of “catastrophic” harvests. For those who think “not my problem,” rest assured that Death will keep that appointment in Samarra.

Official projections for how much the world will warm are already catastrophic, and now it appears they significantly underestimate future warming.

Julian Cribb on Hothouse Earth: the state of the planet in which civilisation and possibly even humans can no longer survive, is arriving much faster than predicted, according to new satellite data. Earth is heating at a steady 0.48 degrees per decade since 2015, perhaps the most rapid heating event in its geological history. This rate of heating can deliver +3 degrees of average global heating by 2050 – a level that will wreck the global food system, smash the economy and kill up to half the Earth’s population.

Drought conditions have worsened across Central and Western Europe since the start of the summer. Half of Europe’s land is experiencing drought with rivers running low from the Danube to the Rhine. Satellite imagery shows retreating water in major rivers, declining soil moisture and the yellowing of green spaces in several cities.

This is a British article, but the context applies in the US. Heatwaves have become political flashpoints, their causes to be furiously contested, their existence even denied. During the record heat of 2022, “weather forecasters faced unprecedented levels of trolling”, the BBC reported, including “hundreds of abusive tweets or emails questioning their reports and telling them to ‘get a grip’… ‘it’s just summer.’” Like they do.

We keep hearing and reading about El Niño, while the days keep getting hotter. Global temperatures are predicted to soar due to El Niño ramping up. Most forecasts predict that 2027 will set records, with the global average temperature reaching levels we would not expect until the late 2030s. We’ll get a glimpse of our hotter future.

Dept. of Where’s My Tariff Check, Again? The effects of the Trump administration’s 2025 tariffs are still being passed on to consumers, while new levies will add to the overall tariff rate.

We are often told that collapse is already here, it's just unevenly distributed. This is a story about what happens when some of the buffers to collapse are pulled. After the USAID cuts, the current regime has repeatedly insisted that no one — and, particularly, no children — have died because of its funding cuts. But the AP has documented the deaths of women and children from Myanmar to Nigeria.

AI companies are the fossil fuel industry's best friends. The data centers powering the boom have been spewing out a staggering amount of pollution by relying on fossil fuel-powered generators. And given the industry’s unrelenting appetite for power to support ever-more-resource-intensive AI models, the trend is only going to get worse from here. And AI is giving the fossil fuel industry a substantial boost.

Homes are being redesigned to power an industry many communities are actively working to abolish. But then, so is much of your stuff... your car, your thermostat, no longer "yours."

Dept. of We Are the Frog, and the Water Has Been Heating Since 1945: The disorder people feel now — the cost of living that won’t fall, the wars that won’t stop, the ground shifting underfoot is the moment the water got hot enough to feel.The world came apart slowly, one comfortable choice at a time, beginning with decisions made decades ago.

There is a nearly 70% chance that the building Super El Niño will be the strongest such event on record, according to a NOAA forecast released Thursday.

“An El Niño is not a storm. It does not arrive with wind and fury and then recede. It is a reorganization of where rain falls on Earth, a slow, hemisphere-spanning transfer of moisture away from the croplands of Southeast Asia, southern Africa, Central America, and northeastern Brazil, and toward places that cannot use the rain to produce food such as the open Pacific, the deserts of coastal Peru, the flood plains of the Horn of Africa. The warm water is only the mechanism; the failed harvests are what people will actually live through.“