Draft script:

I have mentioned previously in this space the importance of invertebrates for humans. These organisms, typically known as insects, provide many important functions for our species and many others. I have also mentioned that invertebrates, like the rest of life on Earth, are susceptible to extinction in the ongoing Mass Extinction Event.

From The Conversation on 1 April 2026 comes an article titled Insects in the tropics are already near their heat limits – climate change could push many beyond survival. This is no surprise to anyone paying attention. The ongoing Mass Extinction Event, which is at least the ninth such event in the last 600 million years, is the worst event in planetary history, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

The article at The Conversation was written by a Postdoctoral Fellow at Germany’s University of Würzburg. Here’s the lede, followed by another sentence to complete the first paragraph: “Insects make up to 90% of all animal species on the planet, and most of them can be found in the tropics, the regions around the equator. Yet we still know surprisingly little about how these species will cope with rising temperatures driven by climate change.”

The following paragraph introduces the author and her scientific background. It includes an embedded link to one of the author’s peer-reviewed papers: “I am an animal ecologist, studying how organisms respond to climate change. My research aims to provide a better understanding about whether and how insects might be affected by heat. I was part of a team of scientists who studied more than 2,000 insect species along elevational gradients, from lowland areas up to high mountain regions, in Kenya and Peru.”

The following seven paragraphs provide a detail description of the research: “Using a field experiment, we measured the heat tolerance of insects across many different groups. This is important because most previous studies either combine inconsistent datasets or focus on a single species.

Our goal was to understand how entire insect communities respond to heat. We looked at a large variety of insects, such as flies, bees, beetles, butterflies and grasshoppers, to name just a few.

We found that many are likely to face dangerous levels of heat stress. This was true even under conservative assumptions, including the possibility that species move into cooler habitats.

In parts of tropical Africa, where temperatures are already high and rising quickly, this could put large numbers of species at risk. Flies are the most vulnerable group. Our findings suggest that many tropical insects, especially those in lowland regions, are already living close to their thermal limits and may struggle to survive further warming.

Tropical regions, including much of Africa, contain the greatest diversity of insect life on Earth. The loss of these species would have far-reaching consequences for ecosystems, agriculture and human well-being.

Insects are essential to ecosystems – and to people. They play a key role in food production through pollination. While bees are the best-known pollinators, ants, flies and beetles also make major contributions. They are also nature’s recyclers. Dung beetles, for example, break down waste and carcasses, helping prevent the spread of disease and maintaining healthy soils.

Insects also form the backbone of food webs. They are both predators, such as dragonflies hunting mosquitoes, and prey for birds, reptiles and mammals. Without insects, ecosystems would quickly begin to fail.”

The comment about dung beetles breaking down waste reminds me of personal experiences from long ago. When I was a graduate student at Texas Tech University, early working hours often required the elimination of bodily waste during the day. There were no modern facilities at our study sites, so elimination of bodily waste was conducted on rangelands. I recall many times attempting to swat away incoming dung beetles as they tried to be the first to my freshly deposited bodily waste. Maintaining one’s balance in these situations was often difficult. Although I understood the importance of dung beetles, I experienced their inconvenient presence many times.

Back to the article at The Conversation, the next subsection is titled “Mountains as natural laboratories.” This subsection provides an explanation of the research in four paragraphs: “To understand how insects respond to temperature, we used mountains in Kenya and Peru as ‘natural laboratories’. Despite being on different continents, these countries share key features: they lie in the tropics, have steep mountain ranges, and host exceptionally high biodiversity.

Air temperature decreases predictably with elevation, allowing us to study how species cope with different thermal conditions across short distances. In Kenya, this meant working from hot lowland savannas to cooler highland forests. The study was carried out from Watamu to Mount Kenya, including the Taita Hills. In Peru, the gradient ranged from the lowland Amazon region, including some parts of Manu National Park, to the high Andes close to Cusco.

We collected insects manually, trying to cover the entire community and include a large diversity across the major insect groups. For each single individual, we measured what is known as the critical thermal maximum: the temperature at which an insect loses motor control due to heat stress. To do this, we gradually increased temperature until each insect entered a heat coma.

We then compared these limits with real-world temperatures, using both field measurements and satellite data. This allowed us to calculate ‘thermal safety margins’ (how close species are to the temperatures they can tolerate).”

I understand this approach, although I’m not a fan. Using the mountains in Kenya and Peru as natural laboratories has significant disadvantages. Properly conducted experiments are able to control what is being measured. In contrast, the mountains in Kenya and Peru have many differences that cannot be controlled by researchers. As a result, findings attributed to one of many factors might be incorrect. However, I also understand that experiments cannot be conducted in some locations. Therefore, the results mentioned in the article must be taken with a grain of the proverbial salt: “The results were striking: insects, such as dung beetles, from lowland areas already live very close to their thermal limits, while insects from higher elevations overall have a greater buffer, meaning they could possibly adjust to more heat.

We found that some insects can temporarily increase their heat tolerance through short-term physiological responses, such as producing heat shock proteins – special molecules that help protect and stabilise their cells when temperatures rise. But we found that this ability is limited in insects living at low elevations.

Insects from mid- and high elevations could slightly increase their heat tolerance after prior exposure to heat. In contrast, lowland insects showed little to no such capacity. This is worrying, because these are the species already experiencing the highest temperatures.”

The following subsection is titled “Results and relevance.” As expected, it provides details, some of which are disturbing: “Extreme heat can kill insects within seconds. But even lower levels of heat stress can have long-term effects, reducing reproduction and causing population declines.

Insects can sometimes avoid heat by moving into cooler microhabitats, such as shaded vegetation, forest understories or soil. This makes habitat complexity critically important. In African landscapes, intact forests, savannas and shrublands can provide these thermal refuges. But habitat loss and fragmentation reduce these options.

Maintaining climate corridors, connections between cooler and warmer areas, will be essential to allow species to move and survive.

Our findings suggest that many tropical insects are already close to their limits. Without strong action to limit global warming and protect habitats, climate change could push them beyond survival. The consequences would not only be ecological but could deeply affect society on many levels.”

I turn now to the peer-reviewed, open-access paper in Nature. Written by 18 scholars, it is titled Limited tolerance in tropical insects and its genomic signature. It was published 4 March 2026. The Abstract includes embedded links to other peer-reviewed papers: “Insects make up the majority of all animal species, with 70% occurring in the tropics, yet the impacts of warming on tropical insects remain highly uncertain. This stems from sparse, taxonomically biased data on thermal tolerance of tropical insects and an incomplete understanding of the underlying physiological mechanisms. Here we compared environmental temperatures with field-measured upper and lower thermal tolerance limits of around 2,300 insect species along Afrotropical and Neotropical elevational gradients and identified genomic signatures of thermal tolerance across the insect tree of life. We show that thermal tolerances do not proportionally track environmental temperatures but approach an asymptote in tropical lowlands. Insects at high elevations utilize plasticity to cope with rising temperatures, whereas lowland species have limited plastic abilities. Heat tolerance showed strong differences among insect orders and families, reflected in the thermal stability of proteins, suggesting that variation in thermal tolerance is founded in the fundamental protein architecture. Up to 52% of future surface temperatures and 38% of air temperatures in the Amazonian lowlands can cause heat mortality in half of the studied community. Our data suggest a limited capacity of insects in the Earth’s most biodiverse regions to buffer future warming.”

This information is cause for exceptional concern. Invertebrates are important elements of ecosystems throughout the world. They pollinate crops, maintain many important functions in ecosystems on which we depend for our survival, and they clean up our messes. You would be hard-pressed to identify species of greater concern to humans.

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I have mentioned the importance of the Arctic many times in this space. The Arctic has been dubbed the planetary air conditioner by scientists since the mid-1970s. What happens in the Arctic soon spreads to the entire planet. Finnish President Sauli Niinistö famously pointed out: “If we lose the Arctic, we lose the world.”

An article titled Arctic ground is collapsing, leaving scars that may take decades to heal, was published at earth.com on 1 April 2026. Here’s the lede, followed by another sentence to complete the first paragraph: “The Arctic is changing fast. In some places, the ground suddenly gives way, collapsing in mess, dramatic shifts that leave the land stripped and unstable.”

The importance of this phenomenon is explained in the following paragraph: “These events don’t just reshape the terrain. They wipe out plant life, disturb stored carbon, and leaves scientists wondering how long it takes for nature to recover.”

The following paragraph provides a partial response: “The answer turns out to be complicated. Some areas bounce back surprisingly quickly, turning green again in less than a decade. Others take generations, even up to a century, to regain what was lost.”

The article at earth.com continues with a subsection titled “Why Arctic ground gives way.” An explanation is provided in five short paragraphs: “These collapses are called retrogressive thaw slumps. They happen when frozen Arctic ground, known as permafrost, begins to thaw. Ice within the soil melts, and the land above it can suddenly slide or sink.

The damage can be huge. A single slump can stretch across many acres, with the ground dropping hundreds of feet. Plants are torn out or buried, and carbon locked in the soil is released.

That matters because permafrost holds massive amounts of carbon that can enter the atmosphere once disturbed.

Mark Lara, a professor of plant biology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, worked on the study alongside postdoctoral researcher Zhuoxuan (Summer) Xia and Liu Lin, a professor at The Chinese University of Hong Kong.

The team’s work looks at how these damaged landscapes recover over time.”

The following subsection is titled “Why some places recover faster,” and it explains the differences in response of Arctic areas: “The researchers found that recovery depends on something called gross primary productivity. This is a measure of how well plants in an area can photosynthesize and grow.

Places with higher productivity tend to recover faster. In regions where plants grow more easily, greenery can return within about ten years.

But in harsher environments, especially in the high Arctic or at high elevations, recovery slows down dramatically.”

One of the authors of an associated peer-reviewed paper is then quoted: ‘In low-Arctic regions, it can recover within a decade. In high-Arctic regions, however, it can take as long as 100 years.’”

That difference gives scientists a new way to predict recovery time. By measuring how productive a region is, they can estimate how long it will take for plant life to return after a collapse.”

The researchers used satellite data to address these differences. They focused on Arctic and high-elevation areas in Alaska, Canada, Siberia, and the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau. What they found is described in a short subsection titled “A shifting plant landscape”: “Even when the greenery returns, the land does not go back to exactly what is was before. The mix of plants often changes.

Fast-growing species like willows tend to move in quickly and take over. These plants are especially good at colonizing disturbed Arctic ground, which gives them an early advantage over slower-growing species.

That shift matters. Different plants store and cycle carbon in different ways. Some may help stabilize the soil and reduce additional carbon loss.”

The bottom line is provided in the final paragraph of a subsection titled “A small but meaningful climate impact.” Specifically, the last of 12 authors of the peer-reviewed paper is quoted: “Plants are not going to save us. Plants can’t take up the amount of carbon that we’re releasing from permafrost as it warms and thaws. But plants might be able to offset some of that loss.” This is a surprising admission from the co-author, an Associate Professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

I now turn, briefly, to the peer-reviewed paper. Published in Nature Climate Change on 30 March 2026, the open-access paper was created by 12 scholars. It is titled Vegetation recovery following retrogressive thaw slumps across northern tundra regions. The Abstract provides an excellent overview: “Warming permafrost is driving widespread terrain destabilization and collapse through retrogressive thaw slumps, stripping vegetation and releasing soil carbon. Despite increasing thaw slump disturbances in permafrost regions, the time and patterns of vegetation recovery remain uncertain. Here we estimate surface greenness recovery times and compositional changes following disturbances across northern tundra regions, using data from remote sensing imagery. Our findings reveal that low-stature vegetation recolonizes barren terrain in low-Arctic sites within a decade, followed by erect shrubs, resulting in greener surface than undisturbed areas. In contrast, vegetation recovery in high-Arctic and high-elevation sites requires over 30 years. Greenness recovery time … varies widely but can be accurately predicted by a power-law function … based on solar-induced chlorophyll fluorescence-derived ecosystem gross primary productivity.” Sorry, I have no dressing for that word salad.

Importantly, low-stature vegetation recolonizes barren terrain in low-Arctic sites within a decade. This is somewhat surprising, considering the barren terrain and cold climate. Not surprisingly, vegetation recovery in high-Arctic and high-elevation sites requires more than 30 years. The Arctic is among the most difficult of places on Earth to support life. I’m not surprised recovery is such a long endeavor in this region.

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Droughts have many adverse impacts for humans. Most importantly, they restrict access to a critical aspect to our survival: water. Along with air to breathe, having potable water to drink is among the most important elements. In this video, I identify another negative outcome associated with droughts.

An article at Science Alert is headlined Droughts Are The Ideal Breeding Ground For Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria, Study Warns. The article was published on 7 April 2026. Here’s the lede: “Increasing droughts due to global climate change may be creating the perfect conditions for antibiotic-resistant bacteria to evolve, according to a new study. The “new study” refers to a peer-reviewed paper, to which I will turn shortly.

Continuing with the article at Science Alert, we read two paragraphs, the latter of which refers to the peer-reviewed paper: “Excessive use of antibiotics in medicine, it seems, is not the only factor driving resistant bugs. The new research also suggests that what’s happening outside hospitals, in the Earth’s soil, could impact antibiotic resistance within healthcare settings, too.

The study, from researchers at the California Institute of Technology …, reveals that drought can concentrate natural antibiotics in soil – pushing microbes towards evolving antibiotic-resistant genes.”

The article continues with clarifying information: “As drought becomes more frequent, intense, and widespread due to climate change, microbes with the genetic toolkit to survive these concentrated levels of soil antibiotics are having their day in the sun.

Bacteria have been producing antibiotics in the soil long before we harnessed these compounds in medicine, as a way of getting an advantage over their microbial competitors.”

A microbial ecologist who was not involved in the study commented: “Likewise-antibiotic resistant bacteria, and the genes that confer their resistance, long predate human medicine, having evolved as natural defenses against antibiotic-producing bacteria … [this] raises a pivotal question: What environmental factors might promote the spread of antibiotic resistance genes from the reservoir of soil bacteria into the built environment and clinical human pathogens?”

The answer to this question is provided by the peer-reviewed paper, as elucidated in six paragraphs in the article at Science Alert: “[The researchers] analyzed five datasets from studies of samples collected in the USA, China, and Europe. This captured the effects of drought on soil microbe communities across a range of environments, including cropland, grassland, forests, and wetlands.

Across all five datasets, drought conditions went hand in hand with an uptick in the abundance of genetic materials from antibiotic-producing bacteria, as well as genes known to confer antibiotic resistance.

In other words, the bacteria in drought-affected soil samples appeared better adapted to survive antibiotic exposure.

In accompanying lab experiments, scientists added an antibiotic to a miniature soil ecosystem, which they dried out to simulate drought. The conditions increased the concentration of that antibiotic in the soil.

Species of bacteria in the soil that were already resistant to the antibiotic survived just as easily in the dry soils as in damp soils, but strains that were sensitive to the antibiotic almost entirely died off in the ‘drought’ scenario.

Among those that survived were some antibiotic-producing bacteria (which are inherently resistant to their own compounds). In the end, the soil was enriched in both antibiotic producers and antibiotic-resistant bacteria.”

The article at Science Alert continues with a description of the strong connection between antibiotic resistance and drought: “In an analysis of hospitals across 116 countries, the researchers found an extremely strong link between the frequency of antibiotic resistance inside hospitals, and the local aridity index – that’s how dry the climate is – outside.

That link held up, even when the researchers adjusted for national income, a factor that can affect antibiotic usage and the healthcare system overall.”

The peer-reviewed paper was published in Nature Microbiology, part of the renowned Nature series of peer-reviewed papers. Published on 23 March 2026, it was written by seven scholars. It is not open-access. However, the Abstract tells the tale: “Antibiotic resistance is a growing threat to human health and is often attributed to excessive clinical usage that selects for resistance. Although many antibiotics are derived from soil microorganisms, how environmental changes to soil ecosystems might promote resistance is poorly understood. Here we establish drought as a driving force of antibiotic resistance in the soil, with potentially far-reaching public health consequences. Across various geographic regions and soil types, we consistently observe metagenomic signatures of enrichment for antibiotic producers under drought conditions. Experimentally, we demonstrate that drought-induced lowering of water content concentrates natural antibiotics, thereby intensifying selection against sensitive strains and favouring antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Using clinical surveillance data from 116 countries, we show that the average frequency of hospital antibiotic resistance is strongly correlated with the local aridity index, even after controlling for regional income differences. Together, our findings reveal an underrecognized link between climate factors and antibiotic resistance.”

I began this video with a description of the negative impacts of drought on humans. This recent research, published in Science Alerts and the peer-reviewed Nature Microbiology, definitively indicates even more negative impacts. It also demonstrates yet another strong connection between anthropogenic climate change and human well-being.

There is no draft script for this video. Miller and McPherson spoke spontaneously.

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I am frequently informed that humans need only reduce the amount of fossil fuels we burn. Doing so will immediately solve the ongoing loss of habitat for humans and other organisms. Unfortunately, as pointed out by the designed-to-fail Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Earth is amid the most rapid change in planetary history. The IPCC also concluded that this change is irreversible. Adding to our misery, there is no known way to capture and store carbon. Even worse, as I will point out today, there is no space in which to store that carbon that we cannot capture.

From the Associated Press comes a story titled Study: There is less room to store carbon dioxide, driver of climate change, than previously thought. The article was published 3 September 2025. As suggested by the title, it includes reference to a peer-reviewed paper.

Here’s the lede: “The world has far fewer places to securely store carbon dioxide deep underground than previously thought, steeply lowering its potential to help stem global warming, according to a new study that challenges long-held industry claims about the practice.”

The next paragraph includes a reference to the peer-reviewed paper: “The study, published … in the journal Nature, found that global carbon storage capacity was 10 times less than previous estimates after ruling out geological formations where the gas could leak, trigger earthquakes or contaminate groundwater, or had other limitations. That means carbon capture and storage would only have the potential to reduce human-caused warming by 0.7 degrees Celsius … — far less than previous estimates of around 5-6 degrees Celsius …, researchers said.”

I’ll have more shortly from the peer-reviewed paper in the renowned Nature series. The article at the Associated Press continues: “The study is the latest knock on a technology, for years promoted by oil and gas industry, that has often been touted as a climate solution. Today, carbon capture is far from being deployed at scale, despite billions of dollars in investments around the world, and the amount of carbon currently captured is just a tiny fraction of the billions of tons of carbon dioxide emitted every year.”

That’s inconvenient. Humans tend to believe we can wiggle our way out of any situation. However, there seems to be no solution to the predicament of abrupt, irreversible climate change.

Beneath a subsection titled “Challenging assumptions,” the Associated Press story continues with many details. I’ll present a few. “The 2015 Paris Agreement called for limiting average global temperature increase to 2 degrees Celsius …, but ideally below 1.5C …, compared to the early 1800s.

Many scenarios for achieving that have relied on carbon removal and storage. … That’s not to say that carbon capture and storage isn’t important to keep global temperatures in check — but countries must prioritize how they use the limited storage and do so in conjunction with fast and deep emissions reductions, researchers said.”

As you undoubtedly know, the designed-to-fail Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded that Earth is amid the most abrupt change in planetary history. It also concluded this human-induced change is irreversible. The IPCC was designed to fail when it was created during the Ronald Reagan administration.

Back to the Associated Press article, we read that carbon capture and storage is not optional. We must capture and store carbon as one of many means of addressing the disaster humans have collectively created.

Some scholars believe there are other reasons we will fail to employ carbon capture and storage. Rob Jackson directs the Global Carbon Project, a group of scientists who monitor greenhouse gas emissions. He praised the peer-reviewed study for its cautionary perspective. Furthermore, he is optimistic that carbon capture technology itself will work. However, he believes very little carbon will ever be stored “because I don’t think we’re willing to pay for it.”

Again, it comes down to money. Everyone wants to be a millionaire or a billionaire. Nobody wants to pay the cost of admission into either club. And very few wealthy people are willing to spend a few dollars to reduce their own greenhouse gas emissions, much less pay for carbon capture and storage. That leaves the issues in the hands of the masses, few of whom are able—much less willing—to make a dent in society’s greenhouse gas emissions and the ensuing consequences.

The story at the Associated Press concludes with a quote from the first author of the peer-reviewed paper: “If we prolong our dependence on fossil fuels for too long with the expectation that we will offset that by simply storing carbon underground, we’re likely saddling future generations with a nearly impossible task of dealing with not only our mess, but limited ways of cleaning it up.”

I would argue the situation is far worse than that. There is no known way to clean up the mess, much less turn back the clock on negative consequences already under way. These include, for example, the worst Mass Extinction Event in planetary history.

The peer-reviewed paper was created by 11 scholars and titled A prudent planetary limit for geologic carbon storage. Published on 3 September 2025, the open-access paper was published in the renowned journal, Nature.

The Abstract quotes additional peer-reviewed literature in telling the tale: “Geologically storing carbon is a key strategy for abating emissions from fossil fuels and durably removing carbon dioxide … from the atmosphere. However, the storage potential is not unlimited. Here we establish a prudent planetary limit of around 1,460 … Gt of [carbon dioxide] … storage through a risk-based, spatially explicit analysis of carbon storage in sedimentary basins. We show that only stringent near-term gross emissions reductions can lower the risk of breaching this limit before the year 2200. Fully using geologic storage for carbon removal caps the possible global temperature reduction to 0.7 °C ... The countries most robust to our risk assessment are current large-scale extractors of fossil resources. Treating carbon storage as a limited intergenerational resource has deep implications for national mitigation strategies and policy and requires making explicit decisions on priorities for storage use.”

This sounds great. I doubt reality matches this optimistic perspective.

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I have reported many of the impacts of climate change, including generally increased temperature, more variable weather, and more precipitation. I have described the likelihood of loss of habitat for many organisms, including humans. From Time ezine comes yet another undesirable outcome of anthropogenic climate change.

An article published 27 August 2025 is titled Extreme Heat May Make You Age Faster. Here’s the lede, followed by an additional sentence to complete the first paragraph: “Everyone has felt the exhaustion and dehydration that comes with spending too much time in the heat. But research shows that the impact of being exposed to extreme heat goes beyond heat waves: consistent exposure to high temperatures might also be making you age more quickly.”

The article at Time refers to a peer-reviewed paper in the second paragraph: “A new study, published Aug. 26 in the journal Nature Climate Change, found that repeated exposure to heat waves was linked to accelerated aging and increases vulnerability to health issues. The more extreme heat events an individual was exposed to, the more their bodies aged.”

The peer-reviewed paper is not open-access. It was published as part of the renowned Nature series of peer-reviewed publications on 26 August 2025. Written by one scholar, it is titled Repeated heatwaves can age you as much as smoking or drinking. The subhead reads “Long-term study suggests that the more heatwaves people are exposed to, the more it accelerates body ageing.” It is based on a long-term study of 24,922 people in Taiwan. The story in Time provides sufficient information to reach the same conclusion as the peer-reviewed paper.

Back to the study in Time, we find an overview of the peer-reviewed paper: “Researchers analyzed medical data from nearly 25,000 people in Taiwan over the course of 15 years: between 2008 and 2022, when the region experienced 30 heat waves (defined by the researchers as a ‘period of elevated temperature over several days’). They were able to calculate a person’s biological age by using results from several medical tests including assessments of liver, lung, and kidney function; blood pressure; and inflammation. They then used participants’ addresses in the two years before their medical visit to compare their biological ages to the temperatures that they were likely exposed to.”

The findings are summarized in the following short paragraph: “They found that the more extreme heat events a person endured, the more quickly they aged, with every extra 1.3°C of total cumulative heat adding around eight to twelve days to their biological age. Manual laborers and those living in rural areas experienced the largest health impacts.”

The final two paragraphs of the story at Time provides an overview, embedded links to two more research studies, and the bottom line: “Climate change is making extreme heat events more common around the world. 2024 was the hottest year on record, topping the record set in 2023. A Climate Central study found that 88% of 247 major U.S. cities have seen an increase in the number of extremely hot days since 1970.

Climate models show that global temperatures will only continue to rise, with the World Meteorological Organization estimating a 70% chance that the five-year average warming for 2025 to 2029 will be more than 1.5 °C. Creating solutions to combat extreme heat is only going to become more imperative as temperatures increase, experts say.”

The embedded link to the Climate Central study takes the reader to a story headlined Climate Change Driving 55-year rise in Extremely Hot Summer Days. Published 4 June 2025, the story opens with five KEY FACTS expressed as bullet points:

First, “As heat-trapping pollution continues to warm the planet, summers are getting hotter and heat extremes are becoming more frequent—putting health as risk.”

Second, “New attribution analysis shows that climate change is having a growing influence on the frequency of extremely hot summer days in 88% of 247 major U.S. cities analyzed since 1970.”

Third, “On average, these cities currently experience about six extremely hot summer days with a strong climate change fingerprint each year, compared to zero such days during the 1970s.”

Fourth, “Seven of the top 10 cities with the largest increases in climate change-fueled extremely hot summer days are located in the South, mainly in Texas.”

Fifth and finally, “Heat is the leading cause of weather-related deaths in the U.S. The rising frequency of extreme heat due to climate change puts public health at risk from heat-related illness.”

The embedded link to the World Meteorological Organization study takes the reader to a story headlined Global climate predictions show temperatures expected to remain at or near record levels in coming 5 years. Published 28 May 2025, this story begins with a one-sentence overview: “Global climate predictions show temperatures are expected to continue at or near record levels in the next five years, increasing climate risks and impacts on societies, economies and sustainable development, according to a new report from the World Meteorological Organization.” Six Key messages are then presented as bullet points:

One, “80% chance that at least one of the next five years will exceed 2024 as the warmest on record.”

Two, “86% chance that at least one of next five years will be more than 1.5°C above the 1850-1900 average.”

Three, “70% chance that 5-year average warming for 2025-2029 will be more than 1.5 °C.”

Four, “Long-term warming (averaged over decades) remains below 1.5°C.”

Five, “Arctic warming predicted to continue to outstrip global average.”

Sixth and finally, “Precipitation patterns have big regional variations.”

Each of these six bullet points has been proven accurate. Each year tends to be warmer than the last. The heating at the poles exceeds that of the overall planet. And precipitation is increasing, albeit with large regional variations. The ongoing accumulation of data tells the same story I’ve been rattling on about for several years: Our time is short. As always, I recommend living accordingly.

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From Yale Climate Connections on 13 May 2026 comes a story titled Something startling is happening in the Gulf of Mexico. The subhead reads “Its waters are heating up twice as fast as the global oceans, with huge implications for hurricane risk.”

Here’s the lede, which draws in the reader: “In 2012, the temperature of the Gulf of Mexico began rising along a shocking upward trajectory.” The following paragraph provides the reason for concern: “Climate change is causing oceans worldwide to warm. But that year, summertime sea surface temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico began heating up at about twice the rate seen in the global oceans. The trend has continued into the 2020s, with sea surface temperatures hitting record highs in both 2024 and 2025. The shift has huge implications for the hurricanes that form in the Gulf – and the people who live along its shores and on the islands that dot its waters.”

The following paragraph adds to the concern and provides a numerical approach: “Hurricanes are heat engines that take heat energy out of the ocean and convert it to the kinetic energy of wind. The maximum intensity that a hurricane can reach increases by about 5-7% per degree Celsius of sea surface temperature increase. So the rise of about half a degree per decade in Gulf sea surface temperatures per decade since 2012 may be causing a 3% per decade increase in the winds of the strongest hurricanes. Because stronger winds cause more destruction, this equates to about a 30% increase in hurricane damage per decade for these strongest storms.”

The following paragraph adds to the cause for concern: “When a hurricane traverses a shallow area of warm ocean waters, its powerful winds churn up cold waters from the depths, cooling the surface and putting the brakes on the storm’s intensification. But when unusually warm ocean waters extend 100 meters or more below the surface, the hurricane’s winds simply stir up more warm water, in some cases allowing dangerous rapid intensification to occur. This phenomenon fueled Hurricane Helene’s furious winds as the storm bore down on Florida in 2024.”

Finally, the questions begin: “So why have sea surface temperatures been rising so rapidly in the Gulf of Mexico? Will the temperatures keep rising? And what does it all mean for hurricanes?”

Beneath a subsection titled “Global warming and ocean current changes are to blame” we find nine paragraphs of additional explanation. Links to two peer-reviewed papers are embedded: “The cause of the Gulf’s warming trend is not just climate change, but also the behavior of a wide ribbon of water called the Loop Current.

This ocean current transports warm Caribbean water through the Yucatan Channel between Cuba and Mexico, northward into the Gulf of Mexico, in a loop southeastward just south of the Florida Keys – where it is called the Florida Current – and then just west of the westernmost Bahamas. There, the waters of the Loop Current flow northward along the U.S. coast and become the Gulf Stream.

With speeds of about 1.8 mph (0.8 m/s), the Loop Current is one of the fastest currents in the Atlantic Ocean. During summer and fall, its deep, warm waters can provide a huge energy source that fuels rapidly intensifying major hurricanes. Rapid intensification is dangerous because when storms strengthen quickly, they can take people by surprise, leaving little time for preparation or evacuation.

The Loop Current often bulges out in the northern Gulf of Mexico, where it sometimes sheds a clockwise-rotating ring of warm water that separates from the main current. This ring of warm water – called a Loop Current ring, Loop Current eddy, or warm core ring – slowly drifts west-southwestward toward Texas or Mexico at two to three miles per day.

The Loop Current pulsates in a quasi-regular fashion, shedding rings every six to 11 months. When a Loop Current eddy breaks off in the Gulf of Mexico at the height of hurricane season, it can provide a vast reservoir of energy to any hurricane that crosses over.

A 2024 paper, Loop Current Eddies as a Possible Cause of the Rapid Sea Level Rise in the Gulf of Mexico, found that in recent years, Loop Current eddies have been growing larger – in fact, their surface area increased by about 50% compared to previous decades. As a result, they’re transporting more warm water into the Gulf, raising sea surface temperatures and sea levels.

That explains the spike in temperatures. But why are the eddies getting larger?

A 2023 paper theorized that the huge clockwise-spinning ocean current system spanning most of the North Atlantic Ocean, called the North Atlantic subtropical gyre, had expanded, causing the Loop Current to transport more warm water into the Gulf of Mexico. The authors concluded that about 40% of this shift was from climate change and about 60% was from natural variability.

They predicted that this effect would die down within the next decade or so, reducing the amount of warm water being transported into the Gulf of Mexico. If they’re right, the rate at which warm water is being delivered to the Gulf will likely decline within the next five or so years, making the Gulf’s rising temperature closer to the global average increase.”

The embedded 2024 peer-reviewed paper is titled Loop Current Eddies as a Possible Cause of the Rapid Sea Level Rise in the Gulf of Mexico. It was created by three scholars, and is published in JGR Oceans. It is open-access. I will skip the Abstract because the Plain Language Summary provides an excellent overview: “While it is generally accepted that global … [sea level] is rising as a result of climate change, the rate of rise varies depending on the ocean area being studied. Using devices called tide gauges, researchers have shown that the … [sea level] has risen sharply along the densely populated coasts of the … [Gulf of Mexico]. However, little research has been done on the causes of this phenomenon throughout the basin. Oceanographers know that … [sea level] variations depend on several parameters such as heat input. Indeed, the warmer the water, the more its volume increases, leading to a rise in … [sea level]. Using satellite data, we show that the surface waters of the Gulf have warmed since the early 2010s, and that … [sea level] rise there is faster than in the adjacent Caribbean where no such warming has occurred. This difference may be related to the large warm-water eddies generated by the Loop Current. Indeed, the larger the eddies, the more heat they carry with them. Yet, our results show that the size of these eddies has increased in recent years and that they could be a major contributor to the surface water warming and ultimately to the … [sea level] rise in the area.”

The 2023 embedded, peer-reviewed paper is also open-access. It was created by nine scholars and titled Acceleration of U.S. Southeast and Gulf coast sea-level rise amplified by internal climate variability. The Abstract tells the tale: “While there is evidence for an acceleration in global mean sea level … since the 1960s, its detection at local levels has been hampered by the considerable influence of natural variability on the rate of … mean sea level change. Here we report a mean sea level acceleration in tide gauge records along the U.S. Southeast and Gulf coasts that has led to rates (>10 mm yr⁻¹ since 2010) that are unprecedented in at least 120 years. We show that this acceleration is primarily induced by an ocean dynamic signal exceeding the externally forced response from historical climate model simulations. However, when the simulated forced response is removed from observations, the residuals are neither historically unprecedented nor inconsistent with internal variability in simulations. A large fraction of the residuals is consistent with wind driven Rossby waves in the tropical North Atlantic. This indicates that this ongoing acceleration represents the compounding effects of external forcing and internal climate variability.”

There you have it: bad news followed by more bad news. The ongoing impacts of global climate change include land and sea. My advice remains the same: live as though our time is short.

Draft script:

Anthropogenic climate change has many consequences. Most people are aware that these include increasing global temperatures, increased variation in local temperatures, more precipitation, and reduced ability to predict local weather. However, there’s even more.

According to the headline of an article at BBC Science Focus, A biblical megaflood could hit the US at any moment. And that’s only the beginning. The subhead of this article published 6 April 2026: “A flood, the scale of which has not been seen in centuries, is coming, scientists say. Can we prepare before it hits?”

The first paragraph provides a terrifying overview: “California. The Golden State. Home to almost 40 million people and the world’s fourth-largest economy, it is a global capital of technological innovation and the epicentre of the entertainment industry. But beneath the glitz and glamour, prosperity and prestige, the state is a natural disaster hotspot.”

The following paragraph tells a tale with which most Californians are familiar: “From earthquakes to wildfires, Californians are accustomed to battling the forces of nature. In 2025 alone, wildfires ravaged more than 500,000 acres of land statewide, killing 31 people and causing hundreds of billions of dollars worth of damage.”

California is one of the dozen U.S. states I have called home. Because of its size and location along the Pacific Ocean, California hosts a tremendous level of biological diversity. From tiny marine organisms to towering redwood trees, California is home to organisms small and large. The state’s tremendous variety of ecosystems supports many economic activities. As a result, the state is home to casinos, state and national parks, and myriad businesses. It is also home to natural disasters that range from floods to droughts. The abundance of people in the state poses a constant target for these disasters. A megaflood poses a near-term threat to the state and its nearly 40 million inhabitants.

The article in BBC Science Focus continues with a summary of recent wildfires: “Wildfires – and how to prevent, mitigate and fight them – have dominated California’s disaster planning in recent years. And with good reason: the state has been in a constant state of drought for 25 years, only becoming drought-free for the first time this January [, 2026]. The last five years in particular have seen some of the worst fire seasons in living memory, with millions of acres scorched.”

The following four paragraphs pose a warning: “But California is built on extremes at both ends. Alongside vast wealth sits deep poverty; alongside years of drought and fire come episodes of torrential rain and devastating floods.

Only in 2023, hundreds of thousands were left without power as storms and flooding battered the state. Highways collapsed, trains derailed, and thousands were evacuated from their homes.

That sounds bad enough, but according to the latest research, episodes like this pale in comparison to what’s to come.

Scientists and officials are now preparing for not one threatening storm, but a 30-day maelstrom of megastorms unlike anything seen in the state for almost 200 years. Such a scenario was always possible, but rising global temperatures are making it more likely – and far more destructive.”

The storm system has already been named, as explained in the following paragraph: “This storm system, dubbed ‘ARkStorm 2.0’, could strike this year or in 60 years – no one knows for sure. Whenever it does, it is likely to be one of the most costly disasters in global history. The only question is whether California can prepare in time.”

The next subsection begins with an explanation of an ARkStorm: “Short for ‘Atmospheric River 1,000-year Storm’, the ARkStorms are hypothetical – yet very plausible – megastorm scenarios. Those familiar with weather on the US West Coast may already know [atmospheric rivers] … well.”

“Though often strong rainfall events, … [atmospheric rivers] are important to water supplies in the region, contributing up to 50 per cent of California’s annual precipitation.

However, when these systems stall, or multiple hit in quick succession, they can dump extraordinary amounts of rain and snow in a short time, dramatically raising the risk of landslides, river flooding and reservoir overflow.”

The following four paragraphs provide a short summary of what happens when anthropogenic climate change is added to the historical mix of rainstorms: “In 2010, a team of interdisciplinary scientists led by the US Geological Survey developed the first ARkStorm scenario: a sequence of super-strong atmospheric rivers striking California just days apart.

Far from being a speculative worst-case, the scenario was designed to mirror real historical events, including devastating storms in 1861-62 that lasted 45 days and turned hundreds of miles of the Central Valley into an inland sea.

Today, if an ARkStorm hit, it would be the most costly geophysical disaster of all time. In such an event, damages are expected to exceed $1tn, with flood depths in some areas up to 6m (20ft). Millions of people would need to be evacuated, as water invaded populated areas from San Francisco to Los Angeles.

In 2022, researchers revisited the ARkStorm scenario to factor in one – pretty important – factor that was left out of the original analysis: our old friend climate change. Suffice to say that if the first scenario was troubling, ARkStorm 2.0 was truly mind melting.” In other words, the sequel increases the level of horror beyond the original ARkStorm.

The article in BBC Science Focus includes an embedded link to a peer-reviewed, open-access article in the renowned Science Advances. Created by two scholars, the article is titled Climate change is increasing the risk of a California megaflood. It was published 12 August 2022.

The Abstract of the peer-reviewed, open-access paper in Science Advances tells the tale: “Despite the recent prevalence of severe drought, California faces a broadly underappreciated risk of severe floods. Here, we investigate the physical characteristics of ‘plausible worst case scenario’ extreme storm sequences capable of giving rise to ‘megaflood’ conditions using a combination of climate model data and high-resolution weather modeling. Using the data from the Community Earth System Model Large Ensemble, we find that climate change has already doubled the likelihood of an event capable of producing catastrophic flooding, but larger future increases are likely due to continued warming. We further find that runoff in the future extreme storm scenario is 200 to 400% greater than historical values in the Sierra Nevada because of increased precipitation rates and decreased snow fraction. These findings have direct implications for flood and emergency management, as well as broader implications for hazard mitigation and climate adaptation activities.”

That last sentence is a typical understatement in a peer-reviewed paper: “These findings have direct implications for flood and emergency management, as well as broader implications for hazard mitigation and climate adaptation activities.”

My interpretation: These findings are directly related to abrupt, irreversible climate change. They indicate what we already know: Our time is short. In addition, they provide relevant information about the many topics that keep me awake at night. May your own experiences be rooted in ignorance, and therefore in bliss.

Draft script:

I have described the ongoing invertebrate apocalypse previously in this space. The loss of invertebrates, or insects, is part of the ongoing Mass Extinction Event. The documented consequences continue to grow.

A 10 May 2026 article in Live Science is titled ‘Insect apocalypse’ is already fueling malnutrition in some regions, first-of-its-kind study reveals. Here’s the subhead: “In a first, researchers quantify how pollinator declines contribute to food insecurity.”

The opening paragraph provides an excellent overview, although it fails to mention the ongoing Mass Extinction Event: “Insects are disappearing, and they are leaving global food security gaps in their wake. Over the past three decades, bugs have been declining at an alarming rate across the globe — up to 1% per year, by some estimates. The drop has been so intense that some scientists have dubbed it an ‘insect apocalypse.’”

The apocalypse is not restricted to invertebrates, of course. This ongoing Mass Extinction Event is the most abrupt in planetary history, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The IPCC has also concluded that this event is irreversible.

A peer-reviewed, open-access paper in the renowned Nature series of publications is referenced in the following paragraph: “Because many insects pollinate crops, lower insect abundance has hurt everything from ecosystem health to crop yields. But historically, such consequences have been tough for scientists to measure directly. Now, in a new paper published May 6 in the journal Nature, researchers have quantified the impact of insect pollinator declines on human health for the first time.”

I’ll have more about the peer-reviewed paper later. The article in Live Science continues with two haunting paragraphs: “The scientists studied the relationships between wild pollinator populations, crop yields and human diet in 10 Nepalese farming villages over one year. Most of the food eaten in these settlements is grown on-site. The team conducted pollinator surveys every two weeks to determine which bugs (and how many of them) were visiting which crops, and then correlated this data with instances of malnutrition.

The finding was stark: Insect pollinators were responsible for an estimated 44% of the villagers’ farming income and over 20% of their intake of some essential nutrients, including vitamin A, vitamin E and folate. As fewer and less-diverse pollinators visited the crops, people’s income and dietary health declined.”

Adding to the misery is a quote from one of the authors of the peer-reviewed paper: “Over half of the children in our study were too short for their age, which is largely driven by poor diets that depend upon insect pollinated vegetables, legumes and fruits.”

It gets worse. According to the article in Live Science, extrapolating the “data into a future with even fewer pollinators, the impacts were more pronounced. If no agricultural practices changed, they predicted a 7% loss of vitamin A and folate intake for the villagers by 2030. Deficiencies in these nutrients can lead to vision loss and birth defects.”

The following paragraph provides justification for the people being studied: “Although the researchers only studied farming communities in Nepal, the new results offer a glimpse into the hidden burden of pollinator loss worldwide. Roughly 2 billion people rely primarily on smallholder farming like the villages in the study. About three-quarters of global crops need insect pollination to thrive, and a few crops ‪— like coffee, almonds and chocolate ‪— are totally reliant on pollinating insects to survive. If current trends continue, it could jeopardize many farmers’ ability to grow food on a meaningful scale.”

The article in Live Science offers promising news: “But the new study also found ways to counteract this downward spiral. According to the team’s models, simple interventions ‪— like planting native wildflowers near farms, keeping wild bees and reducing pesticide usage ‪— can help boost pollinator numbers. Such measures could increase farming income above current levels by up to 30% and boost vitamin A and folate intake by 5% and 9%, respectively.”

The bottom line is offered by the lead author in the peer-reviewed paper: “Biodiversity is not a luxury. It is fundamental to our health, nutrition and livelihoods.”

I now turn to the peer-reviewed, open-access paper in the renowned journal, Nature. Written by 15 scholars, the paper is titled Pollinators support the nutrition and income of vulnerable communities. It was published 6 May 2026.

The Abstract of the peer-reviewed paper references additional peer-reviewed evidence in providing an excellent summary: “Biodiversity loss threatens human health and welfare through the degradation of ecosystem services like pollination. However, without clear mechanistic links between ecosystems and people, these services can remain abstract and intangible. Consequently, it is challenging to predict the effects of environmental degradation on human welfare or to identify effective ecological interventions that improve human lives. Here we record individual-level diets, crop yields, farming income and crop–pollinator interactions in replicate smallholder communities in Nepal to quantify the links among insect pollinators, crop plants and nutrient intake and income of individual families. Insect pollinators were directly responsible for 44% of people’s farming income and more than 20% of their vitamin A, folate and vitamin E intake. We show how declines in local pollinator species are anticipated to exacerbate rates of poverty and micronutrient deficiency in vulnerable communities such as the ones studied here. However, our results demonstrate that management of local pollination services can improve human nutrition and household income. Indeed, abundant pollinators like native honeybees, bumblebees and hoverflies are the most important for sustaining and enhancing nutrient flows. Applied more widely, this approach of linking biodiversity to human health and livelihoods could reveal sustainable new pathways for improving the lives of millions of smallholders worldwide.”

This is the latest in a group of several videos focused on reduced access to food. If, like me, you like to eat, then these videos and the data they contain tell a haunting story. We desire a lot, but we actually need a little. Among the items we need are air to breathe, potable water, and healthy food. It seems the latter item is running out.

Draft script:

Humans go to great lengths to mine anything of significant value. From the many gold rushes throughout the world in the mid-19th century to today’s quest for lithium and other finite materials, humans have sacrificed their health and the lives of their loved ones to secure products deemed to be valuable.

From Eos on 30 March 2026 comes a story titled As Ice Recedes and Land Rebounds, Antarctica’s Mineral Resources Come into Focus. Here’s the subhead: “Melting ice, rebounding land, and rising seas will change what resources are available in Antarctica, a new analysis finds.”

The lede introduces bad news, albeit so far in the future I doubt humans will experience it: “A warming climate could expose a Pennsylvania-sized chunk of ice-free land in Antarctica by 2300, which would drastically reshape Antarctic geopolitics as well as the continent’s geography.”

The next paragraph introduces a peer-reviewed paper and political possibilities: “A study published in Nature Climate Change is the first to incorporate glacial isostatic adjustment—how land beneath heavy ice sheets uplifts after the ice retreats—into projections of ice-free land emergence in Antarctica. The results reveal that climate change could expose potentially valuable mineral resources that may spur renegotiations of the international treaties that currently govern Antarctica.”

I’ll have more information from the peer-reviewed paper shortly. The article in Eos continues with an idea from the lead author of the peer-reviewed paper. A geophysicist at the University of California-Santa Cruz, she indicated that as ice-free land emerges in Antarctica, countries may become more interested in the potential for mining minerals. Considering the exploitative history of humans, I’d say that’s a pretty safe bet. The article in Eos points out that the research conducted for the peer-reviewed paper likely would reveal critical minerals such as gold, silver, copper, iron, and platinum. These minerals likely would be found in territories currently claimed by Argentina, Chile, and the United Kingdom. I sense trouble ahead.

The article in Eos concludes with a statement from a Professor of international law at the University of Sydney Law School who was not involved in the peer-reviewed research: “the ice-free land emergence projected by the new study is unlikely to trigger a major change to Antarctic governance on its own.

The continent will still remain a very challenging environment for mineral resource extraction.”

Challenges notwithstanding, I strongly suspect the minerals in Antarctica will remain attractive to countries intent upon economic growth. The last time I checked, this included all countries. Economic growth is the rallying cry of politicians and the citizenry the politicians represent.

The article in Eos is quoted, along with the peer-reviewed paper, in Live Science. The headline of the story in Live Science tells the tawdry tale: Antarctica hides huge caches of gold, silver, copper and iron. As the ice melts, countries may race to harvest them. The subhead hauntingly foresees the future: “Melting ice, rebounding land, and rising seas will change what resources are available in Antarctica, a new analysis finds.”

The peer-reviewed paper introduced in the articles in Eos and Live Science is not open-access. Written by nine scholars for a paper in the renowned Nature series of publications, the paper was published 20 February 2026 in Nature Climate Change. Titled Emergence of Antarctic mineral resources in a warming world, the Abstract tells the tale: “The extent of ice-free land across Antarctica will increase in a warming world, driven by ice sheet retreat and sea-level change. Here we project an up to ~120,000 km² (~550%) increase in the extent of Antarctic ice-free land over the next three centuries, using a state-of-the-art sea level model combined with ice sheet melt predictions for a range of greenhouse gas emission scenarios. New ice-free land is projected to emerge in all regions with existing territorial claims as well as in the unclaimed sector in West Antarctica. The geologic setting and distribution of known mineral occurrences indicate that ice-free land emergence will expose new mineral deposits in these regions. With the likely rise in the economic viability of Antarctic mineral resources over the coming centuries, the environmental impacts of mineral resource extraction activities will be weighed against societal pressure for sustainable resource development.”

Draft script:

The large and growing number of humans on Earth cannot be supported over time. Contrast the numbers from the year of my birth with today. About three billion people in 1960 has ballooned to more than eight billion people today. Obviously, the amounts of clean air, potable water, and healthy food have not increased during the last 66 years. Most humans continue to live as if an infinite supply of everything we need and want will continue to be available.

An article in Popular Mechanics was published on 30 January 2026 and titled Oops, Scientists May Have Severely Miscalculated How Many Humans Are on Earth. The subhead reads “We have to start counting from 1 again.”

The story at Popular Mechanics opens with a section titled “Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story.” Three bullet points follow:

First, “While most estimates place the current human population at around 8.2 billion, a study suggests we might be vastly underrepresenting rural areas.”

Second, “By analyzing 300 rural dam projects across 35 countries, researchers from Aalto University in Finland found discrepancies among these independent population counts and other population data gathered between 1975 and 2010.”

Third, “Such underreporting could have consequences in terms of resource allocation within a country, but other experts remain skeptical that decades of population counting could be off by such a wide margin.”

The next two paragraphs introduce the nature of the predicament we face while referencing a peer-reviewed paper in the renowned Nature series: “Homo sapiens is the most successful mammalian species in Earth history, and it’s not even close. The species thrives on nearly every continent, in a variety of adverse conditions, and outnumbers the second-place contender—the rat—by at least a cool billion. However, a new study suggests that the impressive nature of humanity’s proliferation may have been vastly underreported.

Most estimates place Earth’s human population at around 8.2 billion, but Josias Láng-Ritter—a postdoctoral researcher at Aalto University in Finland and lead author of the study published in the journal Nature Communications—claims that these estimates could be underrepresenting rural areas by a significant margin.”

In a press statement, the lead author of the peer-reviewed paper expressed concern about the underestimated number of people on Earth: “We were surprised to find that the actual population living in rural areas is much higher than the global population data indicates—depending on the dataset, rural populations have been underestimated by between 53 percent to 84 percent over the period studied. The results are remarkable, as these datasets have been used in thousands of studies and extensively support decision-making, yet their accuracy has not been systematically evaluated.”

I now turn to the peer-reviewed, open-access paper in Nature Communications. Created by three scholars, the paper is titled Global gridded population datasets systematically underrepresent rural population. It was published 18 March 2025.

The Abstract of the peer-reviewed paper describes the nature of the research, along with its importance and outcomes: “Numerous initiatives towards sustainable development rely on global gridded population data. Such data have been calibrated primarily for urban environments, but their accuracy in the rural domain remains largely unexplored. This study systematically validates global gridded population datasets in rural areas, based on reported human resettlement from 307 large dam construction projects in 35 countries. We find large discrepancies between the examined datasets, and, without exception, significant negative biases of −53%, −65%, −67%, −68%, and −84% for WorldPop, GWP, GRUMP, LandScan, and GHS-POP, respectively. This implies that rural population is, even in the most accurate dataset, underestimated by half compared to reported figures. To ensure equitable access to services and resources for rural communities, past and future applications of the datasets must undergo a critical discussion in light of the identified biases. Improvements in the datasets’ accuracies in rural areas can be attained through strengthened population censuses, alternative population counts, and a more balanced calibration of population models.”

The Introduction of the peer-reviewed paper cites many other peer-reviewed papers in providing a compelling overview of the situation: “The accurate estimation of population distribution is a central aspect of many scientific, social, and environmental endeavours, ranging from resource allocation and infrastructure planning to disease epidemiology and disaster risk management. In recent years, the advancement of geospatial technologies and the widespread availability of satellite imagery and remote sensing data have facilitated the development of global gridded population data. These comprehensive datasets partition the planet into evenly spaced, high-resolution grid cells with population counts, enabling researchers and policy makers to gain insights into the spatial distribution of human populations on a global scale …”

The following paragraph cites abundant peer-reviewed evidence in describing the datasets used in this study. It also provides an overdue description of the acronyms used in the Abstract. “To date, eight open-access datasets of population counts are available with (near-)global coverage, namely GWP (Gridded Population of the World), GRUMP (Global Rural-Urban Mapping Project), GHS-POP (Global Human Settlement Population), LandScan, WorldPop, HYDE (History database of the Global Environment), HRSL (High Resolution Settlement Layer), and Kontur ... The models behind these products have varying degrees of complexity, ranging from simple areal disaggregation of census counts (as in GWP) to dasymetric mapping approaches involving numerous auxiliary data sources, such as satellite-based detection of infrastructures and nightlights (as in WorldPop). Details of the population datasets and their underlying methods are documented by Leyk et al., TReNDS, and on the website of the POPGRID data collaborative (https://www.popgrid.org).” Dasymetric mapping refers to a type of thematic map that uses areal symbols to visualize a geographic field.

A subsection in the Discussion section is titled “Main implications of the results.” It provides the bottom line in citing many other peer-reviewed papers: “The findings from this study hold significant implications for a wide array of research and policy fields that consider rural areas and their populations, including disaster preparedness, public health planning, environmental conservation, and, ultimately, sustainable development. We assessed the accuracy of global gridded population datasets specifically in rural areas around the globe using reported human resettlement numbers from over 300 dam projects, which provide multi-national reference data fully independent from population censuses. We found a significant and systematic tendency for all datasets to underestimate rural population, with biases ranging from −53% … to −85% ... This is remarkable, as countless studies have employed these datasets without questioning their accuracy in the rural domain, and the systematic underrepresentation of rural population directly propagated into their results. It implies that the results of such studies, especially those focusing on rural applications, unknowingly underrepresented the interests of rural populations. For instance, studies that map the potential impacts of disasters on population have likely underestimated the population exposed in rural areas, which may result in an unequitable distribution of risk reduction efforts favouring urban and discriminating rural population. Or, past analyses of healthcare accessibility may have guided policy makers to an insufficient development of healthcare services in rural areas, simply because the real demand of the rural population was not adequately reflected in the data. Policies that build upon such studies have likely been causing population in rural regions, currently forming about 43% of global population, to experience systematic disadvantages in accessing services, resources, and equal opportunities for development. To ensure that the rural population is not left further behind, past and future studies employing these datasets must undergo a critical discussion of the underlying uncertainties and limitations, encouraging policy makers to a more careful interpretation of the studies’ results particularly in rural areas. Otherwise, the fundamental objective of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development to ‘leave no one behind’ will remain an unfulfilled promise.”

Draft script:

An article in Grist correctly points out that oceans absorb and store heat created by humans. Greenhouse gas emissions have greatly increased the rate of planetary warming. Oceans of the world have absorbed and stored much of this heat.

The article in Grist was published 7 November 2025 and titled The ocean has been hoarding heat. Now it is building up a massive ‘burp.’ The subtitle indicates why we should be concerned: “When humans manage to cut emissions and eventually reduce global temperatures, new research shows the Southern Ocean could kick warming back into gear.” That’s a rather optimistic outlook: I’ve seen no indication humans will “manage to cut emissions and eventually reduce global temperatures.” Everything I’d read indicates we are accelerating global warming, not reversing or slowing it.

The opening paragraph of the Grist article provides an excellent overview that is easy to understand: “Consider your morning cup of coffee. Your kettle’s heating element — or flame on a stove — warms up water that you infuse with beans and pour into a mug. Maybe you get busy and the cup of joe sits there for a while, releasing its heat into the atmosphere of the room, until it reaches equilibrium with the indoor temperature. In other words: It got cold.”

This opening paragraph is used to set up the following paragraph: “Now consider that the expansive Southern Ocean, which wraps around Antarctica, could one day do much the same thing. Since the Industrial Revolution kicked off, humans have dialed up the kettle to its max, adding extraordinary amounts of heat into the atmosphere, more than 90 percent of which has been absorbed by the sea. (It’s also taken up a quarter of our CO₂ emissions.) Under climate change, the Southern Ocean has been storing warmth which, like your morning jolt, can’t stay there forever, and will someday return to the atmosphere.”

The next paragraph hits hard: “New modeling suggests that this ‘burp’ of heat — the scientists called it that, by the way — could be abrupt. In a scenario where humanity eventually reduces its greenhouse gas emissions and then goes ‘net negative,’ finding ways to remove those planet-warming pollutants from the atmosphere, global temperatures fall. But suddenly the Southern Ocean belches its accumulated heat, leading to a rate of planetary warming similar to what humanity is causing right now. And the thermal burping would continue for at least a century.”

As if that’s not painful enough, the following paragraph provides clarity: “Put another way: According to this modeling, at least, humans figure out a way to reverse climate change, only to see the Southern Ocean essentially restart it. While there would be nothing our descendants could do to stop this — since the warming would be driven by already stored heat — the calculations are yet another urgent call to reduce that pollution as quickly and dramatically as possible.”

Skipping a paragraph, we read a description of the importance of the Southern Ocean: “The Southern Ocean may encircle the frozen continent of Antarctica, but it’s very effective at storing heat: It alone holds around 80 percent of the warmth that’s taken up by all the oceans. Some of this comes from currents that transport relatively toasty waters south, but also lots of upwelling in the Southern Ocean brings cold water to the surface to be warmed up.”

The article at Grist introduces a peer-reviewed, open-access paper in AGU Advances. The peer-reviewed paper was published 15 October 2025 and created by six scholars. Titled Southern Ocean Heat Burp in a Cooling World, the paper begins with an Abstract: “The ocean accumulates carbon and heat under anthropogenic CO₂ emissions and global warming. In net-negative emission scenarios, where more CO₂ is extracted from the atmosphere than emitted, we expect global cooling. Little is known about how the ocean will release heat and carbon under such a scenario. Here we use an Earth system model of intermediate complexity and show results of an idealized climate change scenario that, following global warming forced by an atmospheric CO₂ increase of 1% per year until CO₂ doubling, features subsequent sustained net-negative emissions. After several hundred years of net-negative emissions and gradual global cooling, abrupt discharge of heat from the ocean leads to a global mean surface temperature increase of several tenths of degrees that lasts for more than a century. This ocean heat ‘burp’ originates from heat that has previously accumulated under global warming in the deep Southern Ocean, and emerges to the ocean surface via deep convection. Little CO₂ is released along with the heat which is largely due to particularities of sea water carbon chemistry. As the ocean heat loss causes an atmospheric temperature increase independent of atmospheric CO₂ concentrations or emissions, it presents a mechanism that introduces a breakdown of the quasi-linear relationship of cumulative CO₂ emissions and global surface warming, a metric that underpins political decision-making. We call for assessing the robustness of how models forced with net-negative CO₂ emissions simulate durability of ocean storage of heat and CO₂, and pathways of loss to the atmosphere.”

This Abstract is clear, and it is followed by an even clearer Plain Language Summary: “The ocean accumulates carbon and heat under anthropogenic CO₂ emissions and global warming. Little is known about how the ocean will release heat and carbon under potential future ‘net-negative CO₂ emissions.’ In a net-negative emission scenario more CO₂ is extracted from the atmosphere than emitted, and one expects global cooling. We use an Earth system model which is of intermediate complexity in that its ocean is comparatively coarsely resolved and its atmosphere comparatively simple, with the advantage that it can be used for multi-centennial scale climate simulations. We expose the model to an idealized climate change scenario, with first increasing atmospheric CO₂ concentration, followed by decreasing atmospheric CO₂ that implies sustained net-negative CO₂ emissions. We find, after several centuries of global cooling under negative CO₂ emissions, global atmospheric warming that is unrelated to CO2 emissions and is caused by ocean heat release. The rate of warming is comparable to average historical anthropogenic warming rates and lasts for more than a century. The ocean heat loss originates from the deep Southern Ocean. We call for assessing the robustness of how models simulate durability of ocean storage of heat and CO₂, and pathways of loss to the atmosphere.”

Draft script:

Rivers losing oxygen might not seem like a big deal. However, just as humans and other animals need access to oxygen on land, aquatic organisms need oxygen, too.

From the Associated Press on 15 May 2026 comes a story titled Scientists find climate change is reducing oxygen in rivers worldwide. The lede refers to a peer-reviewed paper: “Global warming is causing rivers to slowly lose oxygen, threatening fish and other lives in the waterways, a new study shows.”

The next paragraph provides an overview of the peer-reviewed paper and includes an embedded link to the peer-reviewed paper: “Researchers in China used satellites and artificial intelligence to track and analyze oxygen levels in more than 21,000 rivers across the globe since 1985. They found oxygen levels have dropped an average of 2.1% since 1985, according to a study published … in Science Advances. That doesn’t seem like much but it adds up and if it continues or accelerates, rivers in the Eastern United States, India and across the tropics could lose enough oxygen by the end of the century to suffocate some fish and create dead zones, the study said.”

The next paragraph elaborates: Basic chemistry and physics dictate that warmer water holds less oxygen, scientists said. Warmer water, which happens with human-caused climate change, releases more oxygen into the atmosphere.”

The next paragraph projects into the future: “If the oxygen loss rate continues at the current pace, the world’s rivers on average will lose an additional 4% of their oxygen by the end of the century, and in some cases close to 5%, the study found. That’s when oxygen loss — called deoxygenation — becomes problematic for fish and people who rely on rivers, according to the study’s lead author Qi Guan, an environmental scientist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Nanjing.”

Beneath a subsection titled “More dead zones appear,” we are informed that dead zones have already occurred: “Scientists worry that oxygen levels in rivers could fall so low that dead zones appear, as they have in the Gulf of Mexico, Chesapeake Bay and Lake Erie. Those are areas where fish struggle to breathe and die.

The lead author of the peer-reviewed paper is then quoted: “Deoxygenation is a very slow process. If we have a long period, the negative impact will attack the river ecosystems. The low level of oxygen can cause a series of ecological crises such as biodiversity decline, water quality degradation and maybe some fish will die.”

The next subsection is titled, “India, Eastern US and the Amazon are hot spots.” It describes these areas and provides reasons for labeling them as dangerous areas: “Earlier this century, India’s heavily polluted Ganges River was losing oxygen more than 20 times faster than the global average ... Even with moderate-to-high increases in global carbon dioxide emission rates — not the implausible worst-case scenario — rivers in the Eastern United States, the Arctic, India and much of South America are projected to lose about 10% of their oxygen by the end of the century, the analysis showed.”

The peer-reviewed study “found several reasons for oxygen loss in the world’s rivers, including nutrient pollution from fertilizer and urban runoff, along with dam construction, flow and wind issues. But nearly 63% of the problem is from warmer water, the study found.

A Duke University ecologist and biogeochemist who was not part of the peer-reviewed study mentioned in this article said, “as rivers warm it becomes easier and easier for the same pollution problems as before to cause more severe, more long lasting or more widespread hypoxia and anoxia.” Anoxia is the total loss of oxygen.

I now turn to the peer-reviewed paper in the renowned Science Advances. Titled Sustained deoxygenation in global flowing waters under climate warming, the paper was written by three scholars and published 15 May 2026. The Abstract provides an excellent overview of the research and its findings: “Dissolved oxygen …, as a vital material sustaining aquatic ecosystems, has declined markedly in oceans, lakes, and coastal waters, yet unbiased understandings of changing dissolved oxygen concentrations in each individual river segment globally remain a challenge. Here, we estimate dissolved oxygen … concentrations in 21,439 rivers globally between 1985 and 2023, based on Landsat observations and climatic data, and examine their patterns and trends. We find sustained deoxygenation in global rivers, at a rate of −0.045 mg liter⁻¹ decade⁻¹, with 78.8% experiencing fluvial deoxygenation, driven mainly by oxygen solubility and temperature. Moreover, short-term heatwaves and dam impoundment exert non-neglecting influence on these changes. Future projections demonstrate that global fluvial dissolved oxygen … concentrations decline by 1.1% ± 1.6% under SSP1–2.6 and 4.7% ± 2.7% under SSP5–8.5 throughout the 21st century. Our study provides an unbiased baseline for escalating deoxygenation in global fluvial ecosystems that underscores targeted measures to mitigate deoxygenation threats and protect ecosystem health.”

The first paragraph of the Introduction of the peer-reviewed paper cites many other peer-reviewed sources in briefly providing an overview of the situation and why it matters: “The concentration of dissolved oxygen … is fundamental to fluvial ecosystem health and services, as it can sustain ecosystem functioning, regulate biogeochemical cycle, protect aquatic biodiversity, and measure drinking water quality. Fluvial dissolved oxygen … concentrations generally depend on covarying physical, biological, and chemical processes that encompass atmospheric oxygen dissolution, ecosystem metabolism, and microbial decomposition. Oxygen dissolution, defined by oxygen solubility, depends on water temperature, air pressure, and salinity. As temperature increases, … oxygen solubility will decline and thus accelerate deoxygenation. Ecosystem metabolism (photosynthesis and respiration that sustain fluvial ecosystems) varies with multi-drivers, such as temperature, light and flow regimes, land use, and nutrients. In photosynthesis-dominated rivers, aquatic vegetation and phytoplankton can produce oxygen to enhance dissolved oxygen … levels and even supersaturate dissolved oxygen … in surface waters. Conversely, when respiration exceeds photosynthesis, fluvial ecosystems will consume oxygen and be vulnerable to hypoxia …, which severely threatens well-oxygenated habitats and survival conditions for aquatic species and organisms. Moreover, microbial decomposition, as an oxygen-consuming process, can rapidly deplete oxygen and thereby form anoxic conditions, named as dead zones …, when massive phytoplankton biomass decays, leading to mass fish kills, water quality degradation, and ecosystem service loss. However, little is known about how these processes regulate fluvial dissolved oxygen … concentrations on a global basis.”

At this point, you probably recognize that the oxygen content of waterways is critically important to organisms in waterways. And, because we are one, you undoubtedly realize the importance of organisms in the places you spend little time.

Draft script:

I have frequently spoken and written about the Arctic Ocean as the planetary air conditioner. Recently, I have been reporting on the importance of Antarctica in regulating this planet’s temperature. It has become clear that the temperature of both poles is critical to the maintenance of habitat for all species on Earth.

An article in The Conversation is titled How Antarctica warmed by 28°C in the depths of winter – and what it signals for the decades ahead. Published 24 April 2026, the article includes an embedded link to a peer-reviewed, open-access paper in the renowned Nature series of peer-reviewed publications. I’ll refer to this paper later. The first five paragraphs of the article in The Conversation provide abundant information: “In the middle of the Antarctic winter, during months of darkness when temperatures often dip below −30°C, the continent warmed dramatically.

In July and August 2024, temperatures in parts of East Antarctica rose by up to 28°C above average and stayed high for more than two weeks. To put that in perspective, a similar anomaly in the UK would push January temperatures into the mid-30°Cs.

In a recent study, colleagues and I show the Antarctica heatwave was not simply unusual weather. It was a rare atmospheric disturbance, amplified by human-caused climate change, offering a glimpse of what could become more common in the decades ahead.

This was not an isolated event. It followed a heatwave in March 2022, when temperatures in some Antarctic areas soared by nearly 40°C above average – one of the largest temperature anomalies ever recorded anywhere on the planet.

Together, these events point to a clear shift: extreme warming is no longer confined to traditionally vulnerable regions.”

The next subsection is titled “How the heatwave unfolded.” It provides an excellent overview of the situation in five paragraphs: “In 2024, the extraordinary winter heat began with a weakening of the Antarctic polar vortex – a band of strong winds high in the atmosphere that usually keeps cold air locked over the continent. In July 2024, this vortex became distorted, allowing unusual warming in the stratosphere, where temperatures rose by more than 15°C in early July, with another surge in early August.

These changes in the upper atmosphere set the stage for what followed.

A persistent high-pressure system developed over East Antarctica, opening a pathway for a long, narrow plume of warm, moisture-rich air – known as an atmospheric river – to move deep into the continent. This air mass transported heat from lower latitudes into the Antarctic interior – something that rarely happens in winter.

Clouds associated with the system acted like a blanket, trapping heat near the surface and preventing it from escaping back into space. Instead of a brief spike, the result was a prolonged and widespread heatwave.

At the same time, Antarctic sea ice was near record lows and the surrounding Southern Ocean was unusually warm, likely linked to the same large-scale atmospheric conditions and helping to sustain the flow of heat into the continent.”

The final subsection introduces who deserves the blame. Titled “A warming signal from the coldest place on Earth,” it includes these six paragraphs: “Natural variability helped trigger this heatwave. But it unfolded in a climate system already altered by human activity.

Our analysis, using computer simulations to compare today’s climate with a world without human influence, shows climate change made the 2024 winter heatwave both stronger and more likely. Such extreme weather would have been exceptionally rare in the past, but today it is already significantly more likely – and could become up to 20 times more frequent by the end of the century under high emissions.

A heatwave in Antarctica might seem remote from everyday life. But what happens there has global consequences.

Antarctica holds most of the world’s freshwater, locked in vast ice sheets. Even short-lived warming events can influence snowfall, surface melt and the stability of floating ice shelves that hold back glaciers. When these ice shelves weaken, glaciers can accelerate into the ocean, contributing to sea level rise that affects coastlines worldwide.

Perhaps most importantly, the 2024 heatwave shows how climate change is transforming not just average temperatures, but extremes. Atmospheric processes that have always existed can now have a far greater impact in a warmer world.

This is why Antarctic heatwaves matter. Even the most remote and coldest parts of the planet are being transformed by global warming. And what happens there – through rising seas and shifting climate patterns – has consequences way beyond the poles.”

The final phrase perfectly sets up the peer-reviewed paper in the renowned Nature series of publications. Published in npj Climate and Atmospheric Science, the peer-reviewed, open-access publication is titled Unprecedented 2024 East Antarctic winter heatwave driven by polar vortex weakening and amplified by anthropogenic warming. The paper was created by 13 scholars and published 1 April 2026. The Abstract provides an excellent overview: “During July–August 2024, East Antarctica experienced the most intense winter heatwave in the 46-year satellite era, with regional mean surface air temperatures across Dronning Maud Land exceeding the climatological mean by more than 9°C for 17 consecutive days. To explore the physical drivers and quantify the anthropogenic contribution to this unprecedented event, we propose a multi-model, multi-method attribution framework integrating regional climate model-based storyline attribution, circulation analogues, and large-ensemble probabilistic attribution. The results show that a pronounced weakening of the stratospheric polar vortex initiated a quasi-barotropic high-pressure anomaly, which enhanced meridional heat and moisture transport and accounted for approximately 50% of the observed surface warming. Across different models and attribution methods, synthesis of the attribution results indicates that anthropogenic warming intensified the event by approximately 0.7°C and more than doubled the likelihood of such exceptional winter heatwaves in the current climate. Probabilistic attribution further indicates that, compared to a natural climate without human influence, the likelihood of such events increases from 2–3 times today to ~6 times under moderate emissions and up to 26 times under high emissions by 2100. These findings reveal how human-induced warming is transforming even the coldest regions, with implications for ice shelf stability and predictability of future Antarctic extremes.”

It has become increasingly clear that both poles on this planet matter. The abrupt warming of Antarctica matches that of the Arctic region. The abrupt, irreversible warming of both poles serves as further evidence that the designed-to-fail Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was correct when it concluded that anthropogenic climate change is abrupt and irreversible. The IPCC, created during the Ronald Reagan administration, reached this conclusion with two reports published more than six years ago.

Draft script:

The effects of climate change have been manifested in many ways. In addition to warming Earth, effects include sea level rise and melting of snow and ice. The latter impact has led to the shifting of continental plates and an increase in earthquakes and volcanic activity. A peer-reviewed paper adds to the negative impacts of climate change.

The peer-reviewed paper is introduced by an article in Phys.Org. Titled Global warming amplifies extreme day-to-day temperature swings, study shows, the article was published 10 December 2025. The opening paragraph describes the link between climate change and human health: “A new study has revealed that rapid, large-scale day-to-day temperature fluctuations have intensified amid global warming, representing a distinct climate hazard with impacts on human health. This growing volatility creates a weather pattern akin to a ‘climate roller coaster,’ exposing populations to more frequent and sharp shifts between temperature extremes.”

In a subsection titled “Defining and measuring extremes,” the article at Phys.Org details the expected outcomes: “The study defines such extreme temperature events as occurrences where the temperature difference between two consecutive days exceeds the 90th percentile of historical records. Through analysis, the study finds that these extreme day-to-day temperature changes have become more frequent and intense across low- to mid-latitude regions. Using optimal fingerprinting methods, the researchers confirmed that human-driven greenhouse gas emissions are the primary cause of this trend.

Projections from climate models indicate this trend will continue. Under a high-emission scenario, the frequency and total intensity of these extreme temperature events could rise by approximately 17% and 20%, respectively, by 2100—impacting regions where more than 80% of the global population lives.”

Never mind the optimism associated with approximating how Earth will appear in 2100. The high-emission scenario we are currently implementing puts us on a fast track to additional extreme events within the next few years. As I have indicated previously in this space, we are on the fastest imaginable path to destroying habitat for all life on Earth.

One of the co-authors of the peer-reviewed paper described the findings of the study in the Phys.Org article: “Global warming exacerbates soil drought and intensifies variability in sea-level pressure and soil moisture. These processes reduce the surface’s heat capacity and amplify fluctuations in cloud cover and radiation, ultimately leading to more rapid temperature swings.”

The following paragraph provides the expected rapid outcome: “Notably, the health risks posed by these sudden ‘roller-coaster’ temperature shifts outweigh those associated with other temperature-related variables. Drawing on mortality data from Jiangsu Province, China, and the United States, the study finds that the correlation between these extreme temperature events and all-cause mortality follows a near-exponential pattern. This risk is particularly pronounced for cardiovascular and respiratory diseases.”

The corresponding author of the peer-reviewed paper explains the importance of this ongoing event: “This study establishes extreme day-to-day temperature change as a distinct and independent category of extreme climate events.

Global warming is systematically intensifying these temperature swings in the world’s most populous regions, posing challenges to public health and ecosystem stability. We recommend that relevant international scientific organizations formally recognize it as a new type of extreme weather event.”

I now turn to the peer-reviewed, open-access paper in Nature Climate Change. Titled Global warming intensifies day-to-day temperature changes in mid-low latitudes, the paper was published on 21 November 2025.

The Abstract tells the story: “Global warming is increasing the number and intensity of many extreme weather and climate events. Here we argue that extreme day-to-day temperature changes, exceeding the 90th percentile threshold of historical records, are an independent, but largely ignored, aspect of extreme weather events. Such extreme temperature changes have a stronger impact on human health in many locations than do diurnal temperature variations. Global observations show that such events have become more frequent since the 1960s in low and mid-latitudes but decreased at high latitudes, primarily due to GHG forcing. Climate models project a further amplification of extreme day-to-day temperature changes under warming, with frequency, amplitude and total intensity rising by ~17%, ~3% and ~20%, respectively, by 2100 in regions covering 80% of global population. Increased extreme day-to-day temperature changes are associated with drier soil and increased variability in pressure and soil moisture, posing substantial risks to societal and ecosystem resilience and adaptation.”

The second of two paragraphs in the Discussion provides the bottom line for this research and its findings: “Our study highlights that the extreme day-to-day temperature change represents a distinct event type of weather extreme under global warming. The observed, simulated and projected amplification of these extremes reflects that most terrestrial populations and ecosystem functions will experience intensified temperature swings. Analysis of return period changes and associated mortality in the western USA and eastern China supports rapid amplification. Two record-breaking events in the western USA and eastern China occurred only once every 1,000–3,000 years between 1950 and 1985 but increased to once every 40–60 years between 1986 and 2021, causing larger event-related mortality. Extreme day-to-day temperature changes exhibit near-exponential increases in mortality risk, with stronger impacts than those from minimum temperature or diurnal temperature range. These extremes could trigger cascading impacts on human society, with threats to public health, ecosystem functions, agricultural security and economic development. Considering that the health and ecological impacts of day-to-day warming and day-to-day cooling events within these extremes may differ, these differences highlight the need for future studies to distinguish the two phases of extreme day-to-day temperature changes. In addition, abrupt day-to-day temperature changes severely challenge the existing capabilities of modern weather forecasting and climate prediction systems, such that improving the ability to accurately predict, adapt to and mitigate these extremes is urgently needed.”

In other words, climate change is producing terrible outcomes. These outcomes continue to surprise climate change researchers, despite the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluding Earth is amid abrupt, irreversible climate change. The IPCC reached these conclusions—abrupt and irreversible—more than six years ago.

Draft script:

If you have completed a high school chemistry class, then you probably remember the importance of acidity for various aspects of our lives. Today’s example comes from the oceans of the world. Marine life evolved via natural selection to a specific environment, including a narrow range of acidification.

From Dialogue Earth on 23 December 2025 comes a story titled Explainer: The latest science on ocean acidification. Here’s the subhead: “In 2025, scientists warned the ‘planetary boundary’ for ocean acidification had been crossed. This is what that means and why it matters.” Here’s the lede: “The past twelve months have been worrying for researchers who study the chemistry of the ocean.”

The following two paragraphs explain what’s happened and why it matters: “More and more evidence has been published showing that human activities are fundamentally altering this chemistry in an acidic direction.

At the end of 2025, it seems clear ocean acidification is pushing the largest habitat on Earth into a risky zone.”

The first of nine subsections provides an explanation for the importance of this matter. It is titled “How does CO2 in the atmosphere make the ocean acidic?”

The explanation is provided in four short paragraphs: “Ocean acidification is part of the global carbon cycle.

When carbon dioxide dissolves in water, it forms carbonic acid. This acid releases hydrogen ions, which lower the seawater’s pH balance.

Carbon dioxide emitted by human activities may be largely released into the atmosphere, but it does not all stay there. Huge amounts are absorbed by the ocean. A study published in 2023 determined that the ocean absorbed 25% of anthropogenic CO2 emitted from the early 1960s to the late 2010s. This has so far saved humanity from greater global warming.

Because of the rise in atmospheric CO2 concentrations over the past century, more CO2 has been taken up by the ocean, causing it to acidify.”

The next subsection asks and answers the question “How acidified is the ocean as of 2025?”

“Earth’s ocean has become roughly 30% more acidic than it was in the pre-industrial age, according to data from the European Environment Agency ... A huge part of that seawater pH decrease has come in recent decades. Just before the industrial revolution began in around 1750, Earth’s mean surface seawater pH was 8.2. By 1985 it had fallen to 8.11. By 2024, it was down to 8.04.

This data indicates that pH at the surface of the ocean will decline even further by 2100, by between 0.15 and 0.5, depending on how much emissions are curtailed.

Also in October, researchers working at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology authored a study of ocean acidification models to quantify the global ecological and economic consequences of future acidity rises. ‘If in the years to come we continue on the current emission level, our models show that for most regions the ocean is on a trajectory toward worst-case scenarios,’ says Sedona Anderson, lead author of the paper.”

The following asks and answers the question “Why does this matter?”

“In May, a new study found that as acidification intensifies, the ocean’s capacity to absorb atmospheric CO2 weakens, reducing its ability to slow global warming. The explanation lies in chemistry: as the sea accumulates more carbon dioxide, its ‘carbonate buffering’ capacity is reduced, making CO2 more chemically challenging to absorb.

In March, researchers reported that the speed at which people are releasing CO2 into the atmosphere is much faster than the ocean’s natural capacity to absorb it without becoming acidic. This is profoundly altering the ocean’s chemistry. The consequences of the change are not yet fully clear.”

I’ll skip a subsection about ocean animals with shells to address a subsection that concerns us: “Do we need to worry about humans and other animals, too?” You almost certainly know the answer to this question, but I’ll include the five paragraphs of explanation: “While calcifiers are the first to suffer the consequences of a more acidic ocean, many other species, including humans, are set to pay the price if we continue on this trajectory. Upcoming research areas are focusing on the impact of changes in ocean chemistry on non-calcifying organisms.

In a summary about the ‘silent crisis’ of ocean acidification published in April, experts from Spain’s Institute of Marine Sciences (ICM) highlight how data collected over recent decades is demonstrating that non-calcifying species, such as fish and squid, are suffering from impaired respiration, altered behaviour and reduced reproductive success in a more acidic environment.

The behavioural impacts are thought to be due to calciferous structures within fish ears that, like corals, cannot form properly in environments that are too acidic. This correlates with diminishing behavioural responses to danger. However, these are preliminary studies that focus on one generation of marine creatures only. More research in the field is needed.

Two other studies published this year, one observed in the Pacific and the other in the Mediterranean, found that the development and survival of mollusc larvae are negatively impacted by lower pH levels. A reduction in the number and characteristic variations of adult species was detected.

Though a direct correlation between increasingly acidic oceans and human health has not yet been explored, more than a billion people worldwide depend on healthy coral reefs for food and coastal protection. If these reefs become more fragile because they cannot properly build calcium shells, this will generate cascading problems. An acidic ocean will mean millions of dollars in lost fisheries and tourism revenue, because frailer coastal reefs will not provide the same level of coastal protection from storms.”

The next subsection is titled “What is the ocean acidification planetary boundary?” The first paragraph provides the dire and expected information: “Perhaps the biggest news in ocean acidification this year is the warning that a new ‘planetary boundary’ has been crossed.”

The importance of this issue is great. Passing planetary boundaries is critical to the continued existence of all life on Earth. A researcher at the University of St. Andrews’ School of Earth and Environmental Sciences in Scotland provides the expected and incorrect response to this information: “We know that the planet will find a way to survive. The question is if humanity will cope with the transition.”

If you’ve been paying attention to my work, which relies on the work of other scholars, then you know that the planet will not necessarily find a way to survive. A paper published in Scientific Reports, part of the renowned Nature series of peer-reviewed publications, concluded on 13 November 2018 that all life on Earth likely would go extinct during the ongoing Mass Extinction Event. That was nearly eight years ago. Concluding that “we know that the planet will find a way to survive” and seriously questioning “if humanity will cope with the transition” express unsupported optimism.

Humans are relatively large animals with little protection from myriad factors that threaten our species with extinction. Expressing optimism about our ability to survive is unwarranted. I would love to have our species and many others survive the ongoing Mass Extinction Event. If only wishing would make it so.

Draft script:

As I have reported frequently within the last few months, microplastics are posing serious problems for the continued survival of many organisms. Microplastics are tiny fragments of plastic less than five millimeters in size. They contaminate the oceans, lakes, and rivers on Earth. They are found in remote locations, including high mountain peaks and clouds.

From the Oceanic Preservation Society comes yet another article about microplastics. Titled Microplastics: Pervasive Pollution and Their Impact on Human Health, the article was published 4 March 2025. The article begins with a summary of the history of microplastics. As with the rest of the article published by the Oceanic Preservation Society, references to additional research are included: “Microplastics—tiny fragments of plastic less than five millimeters in size, and even smaller nanoplastics—have become a ubiquitous feature of our modern world. Once considered an issue confined to ocean debris, we now know that these particles have infiltrated every corner of the environment and even our own bodies. In this post, we’ll explore where microplastics have been found—from water and air to remote mountain peaks—and examine the emerging evidence of their presence in human tissues, as well as the potential negative health effects.”

This opening paragraph is followed by a subsection titled Microplastics in the Environment. This subsection is divided into two additional sub-subsections. The first is titled “Water, Air, and Beyond.” It contains two horrifying paragraphs that cite additional literature: “Microplastics have been detected in virtually every environmental matrix. They contaminate our oceans, rivers, and lakes, where they enter the food chain through marine life and freshwater organisms. Studies have documented their presence in drinking water and even in rain and snow—demonstrating that no corner of the planet is exempt from plastic pollution. For example, researchers have found microplastics in remote regions like the high peaks of mountains and even in clouds, highlighting the capacity for these particles to be transported by wind over vast distances.

Airborne microplastics, including microscopic fibers shed from synthetic textiles and the breakdown products from car tires and other urban sources, have been detected in both indoor and outdoor environments. A study measuring microfibers in urban dust reported that these plastic particles can accumulate in the air we breathe, potentially traveling from city centers to even the most isolated regions. Additionally, microplastics have been found in soil and agricultural lands, often as a result of contaminated wastewater or atmospheric deposition. Even our food can be a source of microplastic exposure—sea salt, for example, often contains plastic particles derived from ocean pollution.”

The next sub-subsection is titled “The Ubiquity of Microplastics.” It, too, contains links to additional, relevant information. In two short paragraphs, it explains that microplastics are common throughout this planet: “From the convenience of our packaged foods to the cosmetics we apply daily, microplastics are everywhere. Studies have shown that the average person may ingest tens of thousands of microplastic particles each year—not to mention those we inhale in dust and air.

With plastic production continuing to rise exponentially, the problem is only growing more severe. As environmental contamination increases, so does the likelihood that these tiny particles will continue to infiltrate our ecosystems.”

The following subsection is titled “Microplastics in the Human Body.” Under a sub-subsection titled “Evidence of Infiltration,” we find three descriptive paragraphs: “Until recently, scientists believed that microplastics were primarily an environmental issue. However, groundbreaking research has now revealed that these particles are present in human tissues. Microplastics have been detected in human blood, the placenta, and even in our brain tissue. For instance, a study led by Professor Matthew Campen at the University of New Mexico found microplastics in brain, liver, and kidney samples from people who died in different years—with a 50% increase in brain contamination observed over just eight years.

Other research has confirmed the presence of microplastics in human placentas. In one study using Raman microspectroscopy, researchers detected tiny plastic fragments in several placental samples—raising concerns about fetal exposure during a critical period of development.

Similarly, studies have reported microplastics in human blood and even semen, indicating that these particles circulate throughout our bodies and may accumulate in various tissues over time.”

The second and final sub-subsection is titled “A Growing Trend.” It describes the relationship between microplastics in the environment and the potential for human exposure: “The evidence suggests that as the environmental load of microplastics increases, so too does the level of human exposure. Data indicate that microplastic concentrations in human tissues have been rising steadily over the past few decades. For example, newer brain tissue samples show much higher levels of microplastics compared to older samples, a trend that mirrors the ever-increasing production and disposal of plastic products worldwide.

Moreover, some studies have observed that individuals with conditions like dementia may have significantly higher levels of microplastics in their brains, although researchers caution that a direct causal link has yet to be established.”

The next subsection is titled “Health Effects: What Do We Know?” It contains three sub-subsections, the first of which is titled “Potential Mechanisms of Harm.” It contains two paragraphs that bring non-experts up-to-date: “While research into the health impacts of microplastics is still in its early stages, several mechanisms by which these particles might harm the human body have been proposed. Laboratory studies on animals and cell cultures have shown that microplastics can cause inflammation, oxidative stress, and even interfere with cellular function. For example, exposure to microplastics has been linked to the activation of inflammatory pathways and the production of reactive oxygen species—factors that are known to contribute to various chronic conditions.

Furthermore, some microplastics contain chemical additives like phthalates and bisphenol A (BPA) that are known endocrine disruptors. These chemicals can interfere with hormone regulation, potentially affecting reproductive health, growth, and development. Although microplastics themselves are often considered biologically inert, their ability to act as vectors for these harmful chemicals raises additional concerns about their cumulative impact on human health.”

The next sub-subsection is titled “Associations with Disease,” and it addresses associations between microplastic exposure and health issues resulting from epidemiological and experimental studies. These include Neurological Concerns, Cardiovascular and Respiratory Issues, Reproductive Health, and Metabolic and Digestive Disorders.

The final subsection is titled “Conclusion: A Call for Systemic Change.” It explains that we can all take actions to mitigate the issue. Surprisingly, it also points out that “the solution requires systemic change and robust government intervention to truly mitigate the global plastic crisis.” This marks a rare admission: “systemic change and robust government intervention” are required to address this issue. Contrary to the usual pleas for individual action, this article correctly points out that microplastics require efforts beyond the masses.

I now turn briefly to the peer-reviewed, open-access paper in the Journal of Hazardous Materials: Plastics. This paper was written by five scholars and published in February 2026. Titled From pollution to ocean warming: The climate impacts of marine microplastics. It opens with four Highlights that provide a good overview of the disaster underlain by microplastics:

First, “microplastics disrupt nutrient cycling and influence climate-related processes.” Second, “microplastics interact with ocean warming and acidification, amplifying ecological impacts.” Third, “Combined effects of microplastics, warming, and acidification threaten marine ecosystem stability.” Fourth and finally, “microplastic pollution hinders progress toward multiple UN SDG targets.” “UN SDG targets” refers to United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.

Microplastics have become a worldwide disaster in a relatively short period of time. The word microplastic was coined in 2004. In slightly more than two decades, microplastics have become major players in the arenas of science, pollution, and medicine.

Draft script:

During the 20 years I lived in Tucson, Arizona, the border wall between the US and Mexico became a source of considerable controversy. The wall was intended to prevent people from Mexico from entering the country of my birth. It was largely successful, although other consequences became increasingly well known.

First, though, a couple of anecdotes about living in southern Arizona. We commonly referred to the spectacular two-season climate: nine months of summer, three months of Hell. Visitors and people new to the area pointed out that it’s a dry heat. Locals would respond with “dry, like an oven.” Now that I live in the humidity-plagued northeastern US, I miss the dry heat … and also the two-season climate. The Sonoran Desert is among the most biologically diverse regions on Earth. I miss this aspect of southern Arizona, too.

Back to that border wall. An article in Vox was published 23 June 2025 and titled Scientists put motion cameras along the US-Mexico border to spy on wildlife. The footage is spectacular – and telling. The subhead: “Videos reveal the hidden lives of animals in the borderlands and how the wall affects them.”

The article in Vox opens with five paragraphs about the consequences of the US-Mexico border wall: “The border wall between the US and Mexico is, of course, a barrier meant to prevent human migrants from crossing into America as they seek work, family, or refuge from violence.

It’s also a significant barrier to ranging wildlife.

The border wall, a centerpiece of President Donald Trump’s agenda, cuts through a rugged, unique ecosystem home to hundreds of native species, from jaguars and pumas to black bears and deer. These animals often need to move to survive, whether to find a source of water or a mate.

We know the wall is impassable for many species, potentially lowering their chance of survival. How exactly the border affects this rich ecosystem, however, has largely been a mystery.

A new study, among the first of its kind, finally offers some answers — by essentially spying on animals near the border. For the research, [the] ecologist and lead author …, then a doctoral researcher at the University of Arizona, set up 85 motion-sensing cameras in northeastern Sonora, Mexico, along and south of the US border in Arizona and New Mexico. Throughout the course of the research, when animals walked by, the cameras began recording.”

I now turn to the peer-reviewed, open-access article. Published in Science of the Total Environment on 1 August 2025, it is titled Mammals on the edge: how the border wall, roads, and riparian areas impact mammal populations along the US-Mexico boundary. It was created by two scholars.

The peer-reviewed, open-access paper begins with a Highlights section. The five Highlights are:

“Guild and size determine the habitat use of mammals in the US-Mexico borderlands.

Areas closer to the international border are less used by larger mammals.

The highway is acting as a second barrier, and it is negatively impacting smaller mammals.

The border wall is already negatively impacting the most abundant small-prey species.

Mountainous and riparian areas are critical for endangered species like the jaguar.”

The Abstract follows the Highlights section. It begins by pointing out the biological diversity I mentioned earlier: “The international border between Arizona and Mexico traverses a vast landscape of extreme biodiversity. Habitat degradation and loss of functional connectivity are potential consequences of increased border-related disturbances and physical barriers. We aimed to determine how mammal diversity and habitat use change across significant landscape features, the border wall, the most transited highway in the area, and the Cajon Bonito, the only perennial stream in the area. We installed 85 camera traps and recorded 31 species of terrestrial mammals from 15 families and identified two different jaguar individuals and other cryptic species: the ocelot, porcupine and beaver. Diversity analyses showed that vegetation type influenced the composition of mammals in combination with the presence of cattle and distance to the road. The presence of cars, distance to the border wall, and effort also affected the composition ... Habitat use models of each species showed that anthropogenic covariates associated with the international border negatively affect mammals depending on their size and guild. Areas closer to the international limit are less used by conspicuous larger mammals, such as the black bear and white-tailed deer. The highway is impacting smaller species like skunks, white nose coatis, and cottontails, and sites closer to the border wall were less used by the most abundant small herbivores, leporids, and collared peccaries. In contrast, two meso [or medium-sized]-predators, more tolerant to disturbance, the coyote and the bobcat, used more sites with cattle and dirt roads where cars are more frequent. However, the presence of cattle negatively affected the habitat use and detectability of large and small carnivores. Our results highlight the broad impacts associated with the international border, the need to keep bi-national connectivity for mammal populations using mountain corridors, and prioritize locations that provide water sources to wildlife to mitigate highway and border wall impacts.”

Maintaining habitat for non-human animals is a great idea. After all, human animals depend on many other species for our own survival. The peer-reviewed paper makes this clear as it quotes many other peer-reviewed papers in the Introduction: “The human footprint has impacted almost every ecosystem and ecological process that occurs in the world, including biodiversity and animal movement ... For terrestrial mammals, anthropogenic activities and infrastructure have a negative effect on median and long-distance movements, altering distribution ranges, migration routes, predator-prey interactions, genetic diversity, and disease transmission ... Complete and semi-permeable barriers to wildlife movement have been constructed in recent decades, interrupting the connectivity of landscapes and wildlife movements ... Physical barriers constructed in the modern era include the fences and walls along the borders of China-Mongolia, Malaysia-Thailand, India-Pakistan, Germany-Czech Republic, Slovenia-Croatia, Polonia-Belorussia, Turkey-Syria, Hungary-Romania, Iran-Turkmenistan, Botswana-Zimbabwe and US-Mexico …

Fences and walls along political boundaries are explicitly intended to be permanent and impenetrable for humans, but that also results in blocked transit of most medium and large wildlife species as well ... In fact, the distribution ranges of 60 % of the world's mammals span multiple countries, but the management and conservation actions are usually less effective where international borders are present ...

In addition to the border infrastructure, the world is crisscrossed by roads and fences, which might be actively functioning as barriers and ecological traps depending on an animal's guild and species-specific interactions with the landscape ... The pervasive effects of roads on wildlife movement are due not just to the physical structure but all the anthropogenic activities associated with their presence, such as vehicle traffic, pollution, increased light exposure, noise, and other indirect effects, including facilitating access to hunting in remote locations ... Roads also impact wildlife movements and mortality due to collisions with motor vehicles and pose a risk for wildlife and drivers. In the United States alone, it is estimated that over 58,000 people are injured annually by wildlife collisions ... Vehicle collisions are especially detrimental for large species with low reproductive rates, such as carnivores …, and can reduce their populations locally ...”

There are few surprises here. Biologically diverse areas are biologically diverse for many reasons, including minimal human contact. This research demonstrates the importance of paying attention to human actions, especially near boundaries. The absence of surprises provides clarification: Humans, beware. We are not alone in the world, and that’s a very good thing.

Draft script:

People with a lot of money get that money by a variety of means. They work hard, they invest wisely, they take advantage of other people, and/or they steal the money from others. Lacking a conscious, these people become millionaires or billionaires by any means necessary.

From Futurism on 9 December 2025 comes an article titled Tech Billionaires Are Starting Private Cities to Escape the United States. The subhead: “Can you imagine being that rich and that miserable?” Here’s the lede, along with another short sentence to complete the opening paragraph: “As economic discontent grows throughout the world, the world’s techno billionaires are heading for the promised land. But first, they’ll have to build it.”

What’s the point? A former chief technology officer of Coinbase shared his perspective at the Network State Conference in Singapore. He referred to the United States as “failing” and called the escape from the U.S. as the “ultimate exit.” He said, “I think it’s fair to say, …, we have a movement.” The movement refers to the startup societies—the ultimate startup company—comprised of “a pro-corporate, anti-government coalition of tech magnates, libertarian idealists, and neoliberal economic theorists.”

The article at Futurism continues with seriously bizarre rationale: “As the Financial Times notes in new reporting on the phenomenon, the movement is indeed growing. What once was the stuff of dystopian fiction like the Bioshock franchise is now the task of some 120 startup societies throughout the world, each scrambling to erect specially-built cities to court billionaires who feel maligned by organized society.” Wait, what? Billionaires feel maligned by organized society? How do you think they became billionaires? That’s right, by relying on an organized society that allows, and even encourages, the ability of wealthy people to accumulate more wealth. You’ll know when the U.S. becomes a socialist state. The U.S. is already a fascist country. I doubt it becomes a socialist country before our species falls into the abyss of extinction.

The article at Futurism describes the relatively recent history of startup societies: “Why tech billionaires and venture capitalists are throwing an ungodly amount of fuel on the fire, startup societies aren’t a new fad.

For decades, libertarians have been dreaming of ways to break free of the bonds of organized society. One notable example is Prospera, a libertarian ‘charter city’ which functions as a free-for all tax haven on the island of Roatán in Honduras. Prospera has courted over $100 million in investments from techno-libertarian figures like Peter Thiel, Adam Draper, and Marc Andreessen.

Though Prospera was originally billed as a private, for-profit-city with low tax rates and extremely lax regulations, the experiment is now circling the drain following the arrest of Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández in the US. Though Hernández and his regime allowed Prospera a unique legal foothold in the country, his successor … has made kicking Prospera to the curb a key pillar of her platform.”

The article at Futurism quotes a Nobel-prize winning economist who was instrumental in developing the idea of a charter city in 2012. He criticized Prospera as “living in this libertarian fantasy that … they can be free of the government. That’s not gonna turn out well.”

The bottom line of the story in Futurism is provided by a researcher in cyberlibertarianism at New Zealand’s University of Otago: Can you imagine begin that rich and that miserable? They think they are the grand solutionists that can fix all the problems, but it’s so insular. But just because it’s stupid doesn’t mean it won’t inherit the Earth.”

I couldn’t agree more. The wealthiest people are not the most intelligent. The most intelligent people are not the wealthiest. There is more to life than money—much more—and the pursuit of money has personal and societal costs.

I’m not suggesting that poverty is pleasant. My recent personal experience indicates otherwise. However, the rabid pursuit of money is no way to live. It illustrates the difference between surviving and living, the latter of which offers rewards that count, even if those rewards cannot be used to hire others to complete mundane tasks.