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Climate
Urgent Global Response Needed to Prepare for 'Literally Off the Charts' Supersized El Niño, Says UN
"The science leaves no room for doubt: the planet is in uncharted waters, and those waters are heating up."
Sep 03, 2026
Officials at the United Nations are warning that governments around the world must urgently prepare for the impacts of an El Niño climate pattern that is being "supersized before our eyes."
The UN's World Meteorological Organization (WMO) on Thursday provided an update on El Niño, projecting with near certainty that it would persist at least through Februrary 2027.
El Niño is a phenomenon that produces above-average temperatures in the Pacific Ocean, which then disrupt weather patterns elsewhere in the world. In its update, WMO said that this year's El Niño projects to be historically intense.
"Forecasts indicate further strengthening of El Niño in the coming months, with the event forecast to reach very strong intensity before peaking towards the end of the year," WMO said. "A very strong El Niño increases the likelihood of significant shifts in temperature and rainfall patterns in many parts of the world."
The organization emphasized, however, that El Niño's impacts are not predictable and vary widely by region.
WMO Secretary-General Celeste Saulo said the latest projections show that El Niño "has the potential to deliver a massive blow to communities and economies across the world" in the form of droughts, floods, and other climate-related disasters made more intense by the continued extraction and burning of fossil fuels.
"This exceptional El Niño demands exceptional preparation and response," Saulo said. "Never before in the 50-year history of the World Meteorological Organization have we launched such a major mobilization with National Meteorological and Hydrological Services who are on the frontline of delivering the forecasts and services to save lives and livelihoods."
While speaking with reporters in Geneva, Switzerland on Thursday, Saulo noted that the current El Niño "may be stronger than anything since our monitoring began," making it "literally off the charts we have used for the past four decades."
UN Secretary-General António Guterres warned that "El Niño is being supersized before our eyes," and said the ramifications could be severe.
"The science leaves no room for doubt: the planet is in uncharted waters, and those waters are heating up," said Guterres. "Sea surface temperatures are rising, temperatures keep climbing, and the world is in the danger zone of extreme weather."
Daniel Swain, climate scientist at the University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources, echoed UN officials' warning about El Niño in an interview with Wired published Thursday.
“This is probably one of the larger, if not the largest, climate events... that anybody alive is potentially ever experiencing,” said Swain. "That's a very big deal. And I think there’s certainly going to be dramatic outcomes from this.”
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Trump Commerce Secretary Once Said Data Centers ‘Suck Water,’ Now Scoffs That Such Concerns Are Just ‘Propaganda’
"Data centers don't use water," laughed Howard Lutnick during an interview. In fact, across seven states, they rely on about 3.4 trillion gallons of it per year.
Sep 02, 2026
President Donald Trump's commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, told a brazen lie on Wednesday while trying to defend the administration's support for rapid data center expansion amid growing public backlash from voters concerned about their extreme electricity and water use.
Asked on CNBC's "SquawkBox" about how politicians in both parties were responding to voter outrage, Lutnick laughed the concerns off.
"One of my favorite things is when people talk about data centers using water," Lutnick chuckled. "The number one product in America that uses water is cattle."
"I mean, data centers don't use water," Lutnick continued. "This is propaganda by our adversaries to try to slow us down."
Lutnick is correct that beef cattle production—which uses about 6 trillion gallons per year, according to the US Department of Agriculture—involves much greater amounts of water consumption than data centers.
But the contention that data centers "don't use water" is egregiously false. A report out Tuesday from the Pacific Institute, a nonprofit water policy research organization, found that data centers in the US directly use anywhere from 270 to 3.9 million gallons of water per day.
About 74% of that water, which is withdrawn from local sources near the data center, is consumed rather than returned to the same watershed, the report found.
The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory estimated that in 2023, US data centers directly consumed about 17 billion gallons of water. Since then, data center capacity in the US has more than doubled, according to the commercial real estate firm CBRE.
Water directly consumed by data centers also only represents a fraction of their overall demand. Most of the water being used is not directly pumped into the centers to cool servers, but is used for the power generation that supplies the centers.
A report out last month from the corporate sustainability organization Ceres found that across the seven US states that host about half of all US data centers—Virginia, Texas, California, Illinois, Georgia, Ohio, and Arizona—the facilities depend on 3.4 trillion gallons of freshwater for electricity generation per year.
Lutnick's comparison of national water use between data centers and cattle farming also overlooks that the effects are often concentrated heavily in the areas where data centers are located.
In Newton County, Georgia, for instance, families told The New York Times that shortly after Meta broke ground on a $750 million data center project in 2018, their taps began to run dry, and water rates soared. According to Meta's environmental data, the center withdrew about 146 megaliters, or 38.6 million gallons, of water in 2024.
In Fayette County, Georgia, residents complained of low water pressure only to find that a QTS data center had covertly used about 29 million gallons of water without paying for it, far exceeding the amount agreed upon during the planning process. The company was ultimately required to pay back nearly $150,000.
In New Carlisle, Indiana, about a dozen residents reported that their wells had gone dry during the construction of Amazon Web Services' massive data center campus. One resident told the Indy Star that she'd gone 18 months without running water and had to bathe using bottled water from the store.
Lutnick's claim doesn't just contradict the facts, but his own statements from just over a year ago on Fox News, as MeidasTouch senior digital editor Acyn Torabi noted.
Attempting to promote data centers as a vehicle for job growth, the secretary emphasized that "these AI things suck water" and that they will "need a plumber."
The Trump administration has made the rapid expansion of data centers central to its "AI Action Plan." But Trump and his team have struggled to sell the vision to voters, including in their own party.
A national survey by the Annenberg Public Policy Center last month found that 61% of voters oppose the construction of new data centers in their area. That included 69% of Democrats, but also 54% of Republicans, and 53% of independents.
Critics described Lutnick's dismissive remarks about voters' concerns as a sign of how out of touch the administration was with the public on this issue and how much their data center PR push is failing.
Rep. Seth Magaziner (D-RI) said it showed that "our government is being run by morons."
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With Planet Set to Overshoot 1.5°C Threshold, Emissions Must Still Be Cut Rapidly to Limit Damage: UN Report
"Overshoot doesn’t have to mean surrender," said one campaigner. "The size and length of that overshoot is still being written by the decisions governments make this year."
Sep 02, 2026
The world has officially moved past the point where preventing a temperature rise above 1.5°C will be possible, scientists said in a United Nations report released Wednesday, which made clear that communities can expect sea levels to continue rising, heatwaves to intensify, and hurricanes, wildfires, and flooding to become more frequent and dangerous—all climate impacts that experts have long warned about as policymakers have failed to rapidly draw down greenhouse gas emissions.
But the authors of the report, published by the UN Environment Program (UNEP) and titled "Limiting Overshoot," emphasized that the inevitable temperature rise must not be viewed as a point of no return, and that steps can and must be taken to ensure the overshoot of the 1.5°C goal is only temporary.
The best-case scenario is now a peak global temperature of 1.8°C, said the report's dozens of authors, with an "overshoot, peak, and decline” pathway still possible before the end of this century if policymakers ensure that planet-heating fossil fuel emissions are drastically reduced—starting immediately.
The report is the first ever to establish the inevitability of overshooting the 1.5°C goal that countries were tasked with working toward when the Paris climate agreement was signed in 2015, and to chart a path toward ensuring the planet can ultimately make its way back down to 1.5°C—hopefully limiting the time above the threshold to a few decades.
If the world remains above 1.5°C over preindustrial temperatures long-term, said UNEP Executive Director Inger Andersen, "there are no good outcomes."
Last year, global temperatures were already about 1.3°C to 1.4°C above the preindustrial average, The Washington Post reported, and the effects on the Earth have been made clear as wildfires have engulfed parts of Canada and South America; a glacial collapse led to flooding that killed more than 1,000 people in Nepal last week; and extreme heat killed more than 1,000 people across Europe this summer.
"Across the globe, extreme heatwaves are already proving that climate impacts will strike faster, hit harder, and last longer—costing more lives and causing deeper disruption,” said Andersen. “Now is the time we must double down on climate action. We can—and must—get on the right path. By cutting greenhouse gas emissions, strengthening resilience and adaptation, and ensuring exceedance of 1.5°C is as small and short as possible.”
The scientists said planet-heating fossil fuel emissions must be slashed by 55% by 2035 and almost entirely eliminated by the middle of the century to limit the global temperature rise to 1.8°C above preindustrial levels.
Climate scientist Joeri Rogeli of Imperial College London, a lead author of the report, told the Post that swift action is crucial, as "for every five years that humanity delays reducing emissions... the peak temperature the world will ultimately face rises by at least a 10th of a degree."
The scientists emphasized that avoiding the 1.5°C limit would have been a less daunting goal than reversing the temperature rise. Policies that continue allowing oil, gas, and coal companies to extract fossil fuels will make both goals difficult to achieve.
The report was released weeks after President Donald Trump terminated offshore wind energy projects in the US—the latest of several renewable energy projects he's killed—and moved to take ownership of Venezuelan oil fields. Recent global climate summits have been attended by an outsized number of corporate lobbyists for fossil fuel industries, weakening the climate commitments that have come out of the meetings.
Fenton Lutunatabua of 350.org Pacific noted that the report was also released as Pacific countries meet at the 55th Pacific Islands Forum Leaders Meeting.
"All eyes are on one of the world’s largest fossil fuel exporters, Australia, and how they act on this urgent warning," said Lutunatabua. "The climate crisis is here and any delay in mitigation, in phasing out coal, oil, and gas, will only make our adaptation pressures harder and more expensive to bear.”
The report emphasizes that even if the world is able to reduce planetary heating once global temperatures shoot above 1.5°C, some impacts of continued fossil fuel extraction will be irreversible, including the melting of glaciers and the extinction of some species.
But UN Secretary-General António Guterres was among those who said "an overshoot of ambition" is now required to mitigate the damage as much as possible.
"This summer’s scorching heat, raging wildfires, and deadly floods are a warning of what lies ahead. We must make the overshoot above 1.5 degrees as small and short as possible," said Guterres.
Along with rapidly cutting emissions, the report calls "carefully governed carbon dioxide removal (CDR)—the process of removing carbon from the air and storing it through afforestation or other means—an essential part of the mix."
CDR methods—from planting forests to act as carbon sinks to technological fixes—come with limitations and are potentially reversible. Forests that are planted could be destroyed by wildfires, while CDR technology is largely unproven and can be energy-intensive—negating many of the benefits.
"Overall, even optimistic CDR scaling is unlikely to deliver a temperature reversal beyond a few tenths of a degree this century," reads the report. "This emphasizes the importance of focusing on reducing greenhouse gas emissions."
Richard Betts, a climate scientist at the University of Exeter and another report author, told the Post that CDR cannot be relied upon as a "get-out-of-jail-free card."
At 350.org, head of campaigns and networks Savio Carvalho said that "there is no version of ‘limiting overshoot’ that doesn’t start with ending new coal, oil, and gas expansion today.”
"This report confirms what communities on the frontlines of the climate crisis have been telling us for years: that delay is not a neutral act, it is a decision," said Carvalho. "We’ve just watched a glacier collapse bury Himalayan communities under mud and water, and we’re watching Pacific nations lose land to the sea in real time. UNEP is right that overshoot doesn’t have to mean surrender: The size and length of that overshoot is still being written by the decisions governments make this year, on fossil fuel phase-out, technology transfer, and on finance for the countries least responsible and most exposed."
Murat Kurum, Türkiye's minister of environment, urbanization, and climate change and the president-designate of the 31st UN Climate Change Conference (COP31), said the upcoming summit scheduled for November "must turn this urgency into concrete action."
“Every fraction of a degree matters, and every year spent in overshoot increases climate risks and the potential for irreversible losses," said Kurum. "The Overshoot Report makes clear that exceeding 1.5°C should not be seen as a new destination, but as a pathway we must urgently work to minimize and reverse. This requires rapid and sustained emissions reductions, alongside ambitious adaptation to protect people, communities, and ecosystems."
"We need to accelerate global electrification, reduce methane emissions from waste, strengthen the climate resilience of cities, and enhance the resilience of marine and coastal ecosystems," he added. "The choices we make today will determine how high temperatures peak, how long they remain there, and how safely we can return to 1.5°C.”
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'Declare a Worldwide Climate Emergency': Death Toll in Nepal-Tibet Floods Tops 1,000
"The glacial collapse and deluge," one scientist said, "was the structural failure of a mountain itself, nature's latest commentary on the deadly consequences of human-caused planetary warming."
Sep 01, 2026
With more than 1,000 people dead as of Tuesday and rescue teams still searching for the thousands missing after a glacial collapse in the Himalayas that created a flooding crisis in Nepal and Tibet last week, campaigners, politicians, and scientists reiterated the need for global climate action.
China confirmed at least 16 people are dead and 546 are missing in Tibet, including 261 foreign nationals, while Nepal reported 1,003 deaths and 3,916 more unaccounted for, including 583 foreigners, according to The Associated Press. Among those missing in Nepal are about 900 workers from a dozen hydropower projects, 500 of whom are believed to be trapped in tunnels.
Thousands have been rescued since last Wednesday, and as the AP noted, "authorities in Nepal have been burying bodies in temporary graves until they can be identified. They are preserving DNA samples, photographing distinguishing facial features, and recording other identifying details. Each body is assigned a reference number to help families identify and claim the remains later."
Nepali Prime Minister Balendra Shah has emphasized in recent days that "the flood in the Bhote Koshi River in Rasuwa was not an ordinary flood," and "it is now time for us to strongly raise with the international community the issue of the disasters we are experiencing as a result of climate change."
In a Monday interview with The New York Times, Maheshwar Dhakal from Nepal's Ministry of Agriculture, Forest, and Environment also linked the disaster to human-caused climate change and said that "those who have contributed the least are suffering the most."
Dhakal estimated the recovery cost at $5 billion, and shared his government's letter to the United Nations' fund for such disasters, which says in part that "early action in Nepal would send a signal that the fund is capable of responding with humanity, speed, flexibility, and solidarity when climate-vulnerable countries face losses and damages beyond their capacity to address alone."
Declare a world-wide #climate emergency www.nytimes.com/live/2026/08... #nepal #floods #flooding
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— Nikolas Kozloff (@nikolaskozloff.bsky.social) August 27, 2026 at 4:29 PM
Stefan Rahmstorf, a scientist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, highlighted on social media Tuesday that experts have long warned about the kinds of disasters seen in the Himalayas over the past week.
"Why are climate scientists not surprised about mountains being destabilized by glacier melt and permafrost thaw?" he asked. "Because they have long predicted that as a result of global heating."
Bill McGuire, professor emeritus of geophysical and climate hazards at University College London, wrote in a Tuesday column for The Guardian that "the increasingly temperamental behavior of the Earth beneath our feet teaches us that global heating is all-pervasive. It will intrude into every aspect of our lives and livelihoods, and leave no part of the planet untouched. As the world processes the horror of the events in Nepal and Tibet, it is a lesson that we ignore at our peril."
Also writing for the British newspaper on Tuesday, Michael Mann, a renowned climate scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, similarly stressed that "the glacial collapse and deluge in Nepal and Tibet was not a freak weather event; it was the structural failure of a mountain itself, nature's latest commentary on the deadly consequences of human-caused planetary warming. And it was the exclamation point on a summer of extremes, illustrating with a sole unnatural disaster the apocalyptic future that lies in store if we fail to take dramatic climate action."
Mann pointed to the lack of such action in the United States—the world's largest historical climate polluter—where President Donald Trump openly courted Big Oil on the campaign trail and has served the climate-wrecking fossil fuel industry's interests since returning to the White House last year, from declaring a national energy emergency and ditching the Paris Agreement, again, to waging a war on renewable power projects.
"Trump and enabling congressional Republicans continue to double down on policies favoring fossil fuel extraction and dependence at the very time we need to be moving even more quickly away from fossil fuels toward clean energy," Mann wrote. "These extreme events underscore the urgency of taking action now, and—while there are many things we can do—one of the greatest opportunities Americans will have to affect climate policy is the upcoming midterm election. You can make support for urgent and dramatic climate action a litmus test issue as you go to the voting booth."
Highlighting that dozens of Americans are among those still missing in Asia, the US-based watchdog group Public Citizen argued on social media Tuesday that "this isn't just a climate change catastrophe. It's a crime. For decades, Big Oil knew fossil fuels would lead to disasters like this. Big Oil must be held accountable."
In 2024, the group published a legal memo detailing how local or state prosecutors in the United States could bring criminal charges against Big Oil for deaths from extreme heat made more likely by the fossil fuel-driven climate emergency. With rapidly advancing attribution science, the approach could also be applied to other disasters linked to the human-caused crisis.
Greenpeace International also demanded accountability for the industry on Tuesday, saying that "it makes us SICK to think of people losing their homes, their livelihoods, and the people they love to fires, floods, and storms, while fossil fuel companies make billions. A FRACTION of those obscene profits could help communities rebuild. MAKE POLLUTERS PAY."
"Make oil, coal, and gas corporations pay their fair share for the damage they cause," the advocacy group added. "Introduce new taxes or fines on them to help communities at home and around the world rebuild from climate disasters and invest in climate solutions."
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Federal Panel Halts What Would Be First Data Center on Public Lands
"The Trump administration is pulling out all the stops to let tech companies build massive data centers on our public lands. This tremendous victory proves communities have the power to fight back and win.”
Sep 01, 2026
Environmental groups are celebrating on Tuesday after a federal panel halted construction of what would be the first artificial intelligence data center to be built on US public lands.
The Interior Board of Land Appeals, an appellate body within the US Department of the Interior, put a temporary stay on the Bureau of Land Management's (BLM) approval of the proposed 80-acre Townsite Data Center near Boulder City, Nevada, which environmental groups warned would jack up electricity demand and water usage and threaten local species.
The board sided with the Sierra Club, the Center for Biological Diversity (CBD), and the local government of Boulder City, which argued that the BLM had not conducted the legally required review of the plan's environmental impacts.
The BLM had approved the site based on a review of a proposed solar power plant, but had not reevaluated the impacts of a data center.
The board said that the environmental groups were "likely to prevail" in their case that the BLM had acted illegally "because the two projects are not ‘substantially the same.’” It also ruled that continuing the project without a proper review was likely to cause "irreparable harm" to the landscape—including soil disruption, habitat loss for species like the Mojave desert tortoise, and construction activities that pollute the air.
The temporary stay blocks the data center project from continuing while the board considers the environmental groups' appeal.
While it was not a final ruling on whether the project will be built at all, Patrick Donnelly, Great Basin director at the CBD, said the group was "thrilled that this data center has been stopped dead in its tracks."
Townsite has been described as a test case as BLM considers approving other data center proposals on federal lands, including in Nevada, where 80% of the land is federally managed.
Building data centers on federal lands is a major priority of the Trump administration's "AI Action Plan," which was published by the White House in 2025 and directs US agencies to identify public lands “well-situated for large-scale data centers."
Under the plan, the US Department of Energy announced in July 2025 that it had identified at least four other sites around the country for potential development, including the Idaho National Laboratory, the Oak Ridge Reservation in Tennessee, the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant in Kentucky, and the Savannah River Site in South Carolina.
Donnelly said Tuesday's ruling had shown BLM would not be able to approve these and other sites without conducting the appropriate environmental reviews.
"The Trump administration is pulling out all the stops to let tech companies build massive data centers on our public lands," he said. "This tremendous victory proves communities have the power to fight back and win.”
Boulder City is one of many locales around the country where plans for large data centers have received public backlash. For months, the project faced protests at City Hall from residents who raised concerns about energy and water use, light pollution, and impacts on the local desert habitat.
Public anger ultimately led the Boulder City Planning Commission to turn against the project, voting in May against adding data centers to the city's land management process. To bypass the city, BLM approved the same project on adjacent federal lands. Boulder City responded by joining environmental groups' appeal against the project.
“The BLM essentially, sweepingly, approved a new land use without following processes in federal law, which include a meaningful engagement process with the city," City Attorney Brittany Walker told the Nevada Current in July, after the City Council unanimously voted to appeal.
Olivia Tanager, director of the Sierra Club Toiyabe chapter, called Tuesday's ruling "a victory for democracy, public participation, and the principle that our public lands should serve the public."
"The people of Boulder City have made clear that they do not want a data center on public lands, and this ruling gives their voices the weight they deserve," she said. "Data centers do not belong on public lands, and we will continue to fight unfettered data center development.”
Townsite is just one of several data center proposals being considered on federal lands in Nevada. In June, BLM officials told local leaders that it had received four applications for data centers on public lands around Silver Springs, a small community east of Reno in Lyon County, which has eight facilities planned in total, according to the US Data Center Map.
The sudden explosion of data center planning in the area has led many residents to push for a moratorium on new data center approvals.
Brynn deLorimier, a Boulder City resident who joined the appeal, said she hopes her city's victory will help to protect neighboring communities from unaccountable data center growth.
“We love our community and our desert, and we’re so grateful to our friends and neighbors for working hard to protect both,” she said. “We’re also grateful to the Interior Board of Land Appeals for recognizing that this case matters far beyond Boulder City and could set an important precedent for public lands in Nevada and across the country.”
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'Far From the Last Word': Campaigners Urge Appeal After Judge Blocks New York Climate Superfund Law
“If allowed to stand, this wrongheaded ruling would shift $75 billion in planned climate-resilience funding from major fossil fuel polluters onto New York taxpayers,” said one advocate.
Sep 01, 2026
Climate advocates on Monday called on New York Attorney General Letitia James to appeal a ruling by a federal judge that found the state's superfund law, aimed at holding fossil fuel companies accountable for the weather disasters they cause, was unenforceable—"a bad decision," as campaigner Jamie Henn said, "based off a controversial ruling."
Henn, co-founder of 350.org and director of Fossil Free Media, said that "a cabal of Big Oil lawyers, Republican attorneys general, and Trump administration stooges just convinced a federal judge to strike down" the law, which was signed in 2024 by Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul and would require oil and gas companies in New York to contribute about $3 billion annually—$75 billion total—to a superfund starting in 2028.
That sum would be divided among the companies according to their greenhouse gas emissions, which cause planetary heating and the hurricanes, flooding, and other extreme weather disasters that are associated with it.
Companies that have been found responsible for at least 1 billion tons of fossil fuel emissions between 2000-18 would be required to contribute to the fund, which would be used to rebuild infrastructure and help communities adapt to more frequent extreme weather events.
Chief Judge Brenda Sannes of the US District Court for the Northern District of New York ruled that a federal appeals court's earlier decision in City of New York v. Chevron Corp., in which the city's lawsuit against oil companies for climate damages was thrown out, was relevant to the Climate Change Superfund Act.
Sannes, who was appointed by former President Barack Obama, also said in her ruling that the state law is not authorized by the Clean Air Act and is preempted by federal law.
Henn said that after 22 Republican states joined industry groups and the US Chamber of Commerce in suing over the law, the judge "fell for Big Oil's argument that because of a precedent set by a controversial ruling involving the City of New York, the superfund program was preempted by the Clean Air Act."
"But that's bogus," said Henn. "The superfund program does nothing to regulate future emissions, it's just asking polluters to pay for a small share of the damages caused by their past pollution."
A judge in Vermont is expected to rule soon on the state's superfund law, which was the first in the nation. Sixteen states in all have proposed similar laws.
"This is far from the last word on the legality of climate superfund bills," said Henn.
Maya Golden-Krasner, deputy director of the Climate Law Institute at the Center for Biological Diversity, urged other states to "move forward with fair legislation that makes polluters pay for their damage."
"With the Trump administration gutting climate protections," she said, the campaign for superfund laws in states including California "is gaining momentum every day" despite the legal setback.
“If allowed to stand, this wrongheaded ruling would shift $75 billion in planned climate-resilience funding from major fossil fuel polluters onto New York taxpayers,” said Golden-Krasner.
Henn also said that the push to hold fossil fuel giants accountable for the damages their emissions cause "isn't going away."
"Eighty percent of voters think the fossil fuel industry should pay their fair share of climate damages," said Henn. "As disasters increase (and oil profits keep skyrocketing), the call to make polluters pay will only grow louder."
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As Ocean Temperatures Rise, Coral Reefs Face Closing Window for Recovery From Climate Damage
Persistent marine heatwaves are causing a "staircase of decline that becomes harder to reverse with every bleaching event," said one scientist.
Aug 31, 2026
The destruction of coral reef cover, cataloged in the largest global assessment of the reefs ever completed, was distressing to scientists, with the world's reefs declining by nearly 10% between 2020-24, compared with 1980-2009.
The authors of the report released Monday by Global Coral Reef Monitoring Network (GCRMN), however, emphasized that coral bleaching events driven by ocean heating was not the most worrisome finding of the analysis—but rather, the fact oceans have become so warm that stressed reefs have less and less time to recover.
Historically, coral bleaching events—in which changes in conditions such as ocean temperatures and pollution cause coral to expel its symbiotic algae and become completely white and more vulnerable to mortality—have taken place about once in a decade, giving the reefs years to recover.
Now, the reefs are “lucky to get five or six years,” as water temperatures are remaining high and making it more difficult to regain hard coral cover, explained Manuel González Rivero of the Australian Institute of Marine Science, the lead author of the report, titled “Status of Coral Reefs of the World: 2025.”
“After decades of studying coral reefs, what concerns me most isn’t the current loss of hard coral cover; it’s that we’re steadily eroding the conditions they need to recover,” said González Rivero. “Climate change is driving more frequent and severe marine heatwaves, but local pressures such as poor water quality, overfishing, and coastal development are making reefs even less able to withstand them."
The study compiled 21.1 million observations from 36,886 reef sites across 124 countries and territories, drawing on more than 40 years of data from across the globe.
But scientists cautioned that because the research did not include the most recent and intense global bleaching event, which lasted from 2023-25, it may not provide a full picture of the danger coral reefs are in—as well as the coastal communities they help protect and the thousands of marine species they serve as a habitat for.
Carlos Duarte, a marine scientist at the Coral Research and Development Accelerator Platform, told The New York Times that this year's El Niño warming trend is likely to cause another global bleaching event next year, which reefs will likely struggle to recover from as ocean temperatures have been recorded as getting hotter and hotter in recent years.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has projected that the Earth will lose 70-90% of its coral reef cover if the planet gets 1.5°C hotter than its preindustrial level.
"For many reefs affected by the unprecedented marine heatwaves in 2024, this year’s El Niño likely means they’ll have had little more than a year to begin recovering before being hit again," said González Rivero. "This is creating a staircase of decline that becomes harder to reverse with every bleaching event.“
The report emphasizes that reefs have maintained their ability to regain hard coral cover "when disturbances are reduced and sufficient recovery time is available," such as after the third major global coral bleaching event since 1998, which took place from 2016-17 and saw a 6.6% decline in coral.
After the event, scientists observed a "relative increase of approximately 6% between 2017 and 2019," said the GCRMN.
"That recovery matters because the benefits coral reefs provide extend far beyond the reef itself. Coral reefs cover less than 0.2% of the ocean floor," said the organization. "Yet, they support at least 25% of all marine species and underpin food security, livelihoods, coastal protection, tourism, and cultural heritage of close to one billion people worldwide."
Scientists including Terry Hughes, a former director of coral reef studies at James Cook University in Australia, who was not involved in the analysis, emphasized that reducing planet-heating emissions is the top solution to the crisis of coral reef recovery, as the pollution from fossil fuel extraction is linked to increasingly hot oceans.
Allowing coral reefs to recover from bleaching events "really depends on how much more greenhouse gases go into the atmosphere and the amount of warming that causes," Hughes told the Times, while local solutions including reducing water pollution are also crucial for maintaining reef health.
David Obura, chair of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, expressed hope that the report will "shake us out of our persistent inertia."
The long-term monitoring by GCRMN, said Obura, "tracks not just the pulse of coral reefs, but of our planet too. It shows which regions are under the greatest pressure, that actions to date have not been sufficient, and warns where reefs will be under increasing threat in years to come."
"We must act now to halt this decline and invest in solutions that reduce pressures and build resilience, while sustaining the monitoring that turns good intentions into effective policy," he said. "The 40 years of data in this report provide a strident warning that delayed action risks locking in irreversible losses—not just to reefs, but also to the economies and people that depend on them.”
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‘Unconscionable, Immoral, and Illegal’: Lawsuit Targets Trump Approval of Cancer-Causing Forever Chemical
“While everyone’s distracted by the Trump administration’s erratic actions on the world stage, it keeps approving dangerous forever pesticides right here on our own soil."
Aug 31, 2026
Environmental groups have sued the Trump administration, alleging the Environmental Protection Agency approved a potentially cancer-causing "forever chemical" for use as an herbicide without fully assessing the risk.
The petition was filed Friday in the US Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit by the Center for Food Safety, the Center for Biological Diversity, and Pesticide Action & Agroecology Network North America, who asked the court to throw out the EPA's June 30 approval of trifludimoxazin and six products containing it for use on a wide range of crops including corn, wheat, soybeans, and apples.
Trifludimoxazin is part of the family of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, synthetic chemicals with strong carbon-fluorine bonds that can take years to fully break down, earning them the nickname "forever chemicals."
The trifludimoxazin was initially approved in 2021 during the Biden administration. But the company agreed to stop selling the product the following year after environmental groups sued, citing its potential to cause cancer and harm to threatened and endangered fish. But the Trump EPA last year proposed registering it again for widespread use and issued a final approval in June.
The groups argue that the EPA approved the use of trifludimoxazin without accounting for evidence that the pesticide could cause cancer and harm wildlife and ecosystems.
The EPA itself has acknowledged that the chemical could harm many endangered and threatened species, including posing chronic risks to bees and other invertebrates. Meanwhile, rodent studies have found that at high doses, the chemical can cause thyroid tumors and adverse effects on the liver and reproductive systems.
The chemical, which blocks an enzyme in plants needed for growth, has been described as 10 times as potent as dicamba, another weedkiller used on soybeans and cotton, whose products have caused millions of acres of unintended crop damage since its approval in 2017.
But though the EPA's own guidance states that carcinogenic effects in animals could point to human risk, the agency stated that its final risk assessment found “no human health risks of concern."
The plaintiffs argue that the EPA did not take all the proper steps to reach this conclusion, having failed to quantify the chemical's danger, especially when combined with exposure to other approved chemicals.
“Trifludimoxazin is a likely human carcinogen that belongs to a family of weedkillers that also causes reproductive harm, birth defects, and neurological deficits in animal studies,” said Bill Freese, science director at the Center for Food Safety. “As if the health threats weren’t enough, this incredibly potent herbicide can drift to stunt crops and wild plants hundreds of yards from a sprayed field, while runoff threatens wetland plants. Potent biocides like this have no business on the American landscape.”
The lawsuit also notes that two of the approved trifludimoxazin products combine it with another toxic herbicide called saflufenacil, meaning that farmworkers who apply the chemicals could be exposed to the effects of both at once. The plaintiffs said the EPA did not evaluate the risk that would be posed to farmworkers who are exposed to these chemicals.
“While everyone’s distracted by the Trump administration’s erratic actions on the world stage, it keeps approving dangerous forever pesticides right here on our own soil,” said Nathan Donley, environmental health science director at the Center for Biological Diversity. “It’s unconscionable, immoral, and illegal. Our kids and grandkids deserve better than to be saddled with pollution that never goes away.”
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Study Suggests Climate Crisis Is Supercharging 'Godzilla' El Niños
"We are seeing a trend of stronger El Niños, and the one we have now is consistent with that trend," said the lead author. "That is bad news for climate hazards and for people."
Aug 27, 2026
As the flooding disaster in Tibet and Nepal demonstrates the deadly consequences of the climate emergency, experts wrote Thursday in the journal Science that fossil fuel-driven global heating has intensified the warm phase of a key pattern in the Pacific Ocean.
The El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) has a warm phase, called El Niño, as well as a neutral phase and a cold one, La Niña. In June, scientists declared the start of a warm event nicknamed "Godzilla," which helped push last month's average global ocean surface temperature to the hottest ever recorded in July.
The current event is expected to become not only a super El Niño, but the most intense one on record—and it could contribute to 2027 possibly being the hottest year humanity has ever endured.
While ENSO is a naturally occurring phenomenon, the scientists behind the new paper studied coral skeletons from the Galápagos Islands and concluded that global warming—tied to humans continuing to burn fossil fuels—has intensified El Niño phases.
"Our findings suggest El Niño can supercharge global warming, but also global warming can supercharge El Niño—that is what we are seeing," said lead author Julia Cole, who chairs the University of Michigan's Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences.
The scientist also spoke with Inside Climate News, which noted that "the first documented super El Niño in 1982-83 killed about 95% of the shallow-water corals around the Galápagos Islands, right around the time Cole began her research career."
Based on the team's analysis, "after the El Niño in 1982, we start seeing much more variability; it's a lot more extreme and looks like nothing in the previous 1,000 years," Cole told The Guardian. "What surprised me was how consistent it was. There is just such a large, distinct difference between what has been happening in the last 40 years compared to preindustrial times."
As Inside Climate News reported:
When Cole visited the islands in 1989, many of the large mapped corals that could have served as sample material were gone, wiped out by the El Niño early in the decade and then decomposed quickly by organisms in the biologically active waters. But in 2006, her team discovered fossil coral remnants, often perched as boulders near remote east-facing coastlines, tossed inland by large waves or tsunamis.
Cole said the signal of El Niños intensified by human-caused warming would have been even stronger if the study had included the most recent occurrences. All the events categorized as super El Niños have occurred since the 1980s and have triggered flooding in East Africa, led to disease outbreaks, and intensified tropical storms. This year’s El Niño is intensifying drought in Indonesia, fueling widespread fires that are sending smoke and hazardous air pollution across Southeast Asia, Cole said. Her team is currently analyzing corals to show the changes from the El Niños in 2015-16 and 2023-24, she added.
"We are seeing a trend of stronger El Niños, and the one we have now is consistent with that trend—it's not a fluke. We are seeing a shift where El Niño doesn't look like what it did prior to industrial times," Cole said. "That is bad news for climate hazards and for people, particularly those who are badly impacted and yet have done little to cause climate change."
According to the United States' National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, consequences of El Niño include "increased rainfall across the southern tier of the US and in Peru, which has caused destructive flooding, and drought in the West Pacific, sometimes associated with devastating brush fires in Australia."
Dalhousie University marine scientist Boris Worm wasn't involved with the new study but told The Associated Press on Thursday that "El Niño is the most violent aspect of climate variability worldwide, with effects ranging from local fisheries collapse, to widespread coral die-offs to severe droughts, and food shortages around the world."
Experts are already worried about the latest El Niño's impact on food security and prices, with the United Nations World Food Program projecting earlier this month that almost 50 million more people worldwide face the prospect of acute hunger.
Pointing to late climate scientist Wallace Broecker's warning that "the climate system is an angry beast and we are poking it with sticks," Worm said that "human emissions are the stick, and El Niño is [one] of the 'angry' outbursts that can be so threatening to our collective safety."
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Investigation Exposes Massive New Jersey Data Center Operating Army of Polluting Generators Without Permits
“It seems that this industry, in particular, values speed to market more than almost anything else."
Aug 27, 2026
A joint investigative report published by Floodlight and The Guardian on Thursday revealed that one of the largest planned artificial intelligence data centers on the East Coast is operating dozens of gas-powered generators without permits in a possible violation of federal law.
Using a thermal drone to take footage of the Microsoft-backed DataOne facility in Vineland, New Jersey last week, Floodlight determined that the data center was operating 45 generators at once.
The investigation noted that the generators were operating roughly one mile from two different schools, and that the gas-powered generators used as the facility "emit substantial amounts of health-harming air pollution linked to asthma, heart attacks, and even premature death."
Bruce Buckheit, who previously served as air enforcement chief at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), told Floodlight that DataOne is likely violating federal law with its unpermitted generators, and he said the government should make the facility pay a fine for "illegal emissions."
Buckheit added that DataOne's apparent disregard for regulations appeared to be a common trait in the AI industry.
“It seems that this industry, in particular, values speed to market more than almost anything else,” he said.
A New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection spokesperson told Floodlight that the agency is investigating DataOne's use of gas generators but has yet to reach "a full compliance determination."
Local residents told Floodlight that they have for months complained about the nonstop humming produced by the facility, which they suspect is being caused by the generators.
"It's just constant," resident Andrew Groetsch told Floodlight of the noise coming from the facility. "It never goes away."
DataOne, which is projected to cover 2.5 million square feet upon its completion, has long been controversial.
In an interview with NBC Philadelphia published earlier this month, Vineland resident Peggy Schumacher said that the noise from the data center has gotten so bad that it's making her neighborhood "unlivable."
"We are a mile away," Schumacher explained, "and the vibration in our house is horrible now."
Fellow Vineland resident Tallis West offered a similar description of living near DataOne in an interview with CBS News published in May.
"Outside is not even enjoyable to sit outside because of the noise sometimes," West said. "We can't enjoy being outside anymore."
Despite the objections of many local residents, the Vineland Planning Board earlier this month voted to approve the second phase of construction at the facility.
The tech industry's rapid buildout of AI data centers is getting major pushback from voters across the US, as residents issue complaints about both pollution and energy consumption that has been raising their utility bills.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) earlier this year proposed a moratorium on new data center construction.
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With 350+ Dead and 1,300 Missing, Nepal Carnage Seen as Climate Disaster
"Delay is deadly," said one campaigner. "Without a rapid transition away from fossil fuels, the planet will continue to heat up and lives can be lost in a flash.”
Aug 27, 2026
Scientists and climate action campaigners on Thursday pointed to the collapse of a glacier as a likely cause of disastrous flash flooding in Tibet and Nepal's Rasuwa district, where emergency workers are searching for more than 1,300 missing people after water and mud poured into the Trishuli River valley, crashing through villages where thousands of people live and sweeping away bridges, homes, and miles of roads.
An initial assessment by geologists and glaciologists found that in satellite imagery taken before the flooding, a glacier was seen about 4,000 feet above the valley where at least 353 people were later killed Wednesday by the rushing waters and mudslide.
The glacier appeared about 2 million square feet smaller after the flooding, while the valley was "strewn with ice and mud" and the nearby river was "swollen beyond its banks, submerging the surrounding vegetation beneath murky brown floodwaters.
The scientists said an "ice avalanche"—a massive chunk of ice that fell off a glacier in the mountainous region and into the valley below, was likely at least partially to blame for the flash flooding, but noted that it was too early to rule out other or additional causes.
The satellite imagery appeared to show that "a glacier in the area basically snapped off in a clean break, allowing it to fall just over a vertical kilometer to the valley bottom,” Daniel Shugar, a geologist at the University of Calgary in Canada, told The New York Times. "The bottom looks like a bomb exploded—it’s just deposits from the broken-up glacier."
The chunk of ice was likely about 2,000 feet wide, Shugar told the Times, and fell nearly 4,000 feet—a fall that would have "pulverized" the ice into water.
Aakriti Dotel, national network coordinator for the climate action group Nepalese Youth for Climate Action said the floods were "another painful reminder of the growing climate crisis facing Nepal and the Himalayas."
"As our glaciers melt and extreme weather events become increasingly unpredictable, communities living downstream are bearing the devastating consequences," said Dotel. "We mourn the lives lost and the livelihoods affected and call for urgent global climate action. There must be stronger support for vulnerable mountain communities, and accountability from those most responsible for the climate crisis.”
The disaster stunned officials in the area, where there had been no rainfall before the floodwaters and mudslide overtook the region.
Intense videos circulating on social media Wednesday showed people attempting to run away as water and mud crashed into villages in the region.
🇳🇵🌊 Nepal flash flood kills at least 95, hundreds missing
➤ A massive flash flood swept away villages in Nepal’s mountainous Rasuwa district near the Tibet border Wednesday, killing at least 95 people and leaving hundreds missing, including 384 tourists and eight South Korean…
— Drop Site (@DropSiteNews) August 26, 2026
Tom Fletcher, the United Nations humanitarian chief, said he had mobilized $2 million from the UN Global Emergency Fund "to save lives with emergency medical care, shelter, water."
The secretary-general of the Nepal Red Cross told CNN that about 20,000 houses have been "swept away" in the region.
"These people do not have anything," said Rishi Khanal. "To feed them for some time, some days is a very serious thing to us... The shelter problem is there. The drinking water problem is there."
A truly desperate assessment out of Nepal from the Secretary General of @NepalRedCross: pic.twitter.com/QrJ4vZhmSz
— Becky Anderson (@BeckyCNN) August 26, 2026
A police officer in the village of Syabrubesi told the Times that waves of water crashed into his police station Wednesday morning, right after he got off the phone with a friend who had warned him a flood was headed toward the town.
“One of my senior officers and I were together when the wave struck. I was thrown out, but he was unlucky and was buried or swept away,” he told the newspaper. “I cannot explain how big the waves were. They engulfed several-meters-high buildings in a fraction of seconds... It wasn’t just water. It was a combination of boulders, sand, and thick sludge.”
Seven people were working at the station when the flood hit, and the officer is one of three who have been found alive. He said he was concerned that the other four are among the missing.
Homes, schools, government buildings, and the office of a hydropower project are among the infrastructure destroyed in Syabrubesi.
More than 160 glaciers in Nepal have entirely melted in recent decades, as scientists have warned that continued fossil fuel extraction is heating the planet and causing dangerous extreme weather. The area of the country's glaciers also shrank by about one-quarter between 1970-2010.
At The Conversation, Levan Tielidze, a research fellow in glacial geomorphology at Monash University, wrote that "it’s too early to say this was the exact cause. But we know that the great ice stores of the Himalayas—known as the world’s 'third pole' because it contains the largest amount of snow and ice after the Arctic and Antarctic—are no longer safe."
Tielidze continued:
What happened in Nepal is likely due to an enormous ice-and-rock landslide sweeping down a mountain pass and gathering up ice, water, rock, trees and dirt.
The landslide was so large it was originally thought to be an earthquake, as the seismic energy registered as a 4.4 magnitude quake on seismographs.
By the time it reached Gyirong Port—a China-Nepal border crossing—the wall of debris resembled a tsunami of dirt. Early estimates suggest the wave may have been 30 meters high.
Rising global temperatures have been linked to previous collapses of glaciers, including in Switzerland last year when the Birch Glacier wiped out nearly an entire town of 300 residents, who had evacuated before the disaster. Eleven mountain climbers were also killed by a glacier collapse in Italy in 2022.
“Every destabilized glacier in a warming Himalaya is a ticking time bomb that can go off unannounced, and when it does, those least responsible for the climate crisis pay with their lives," said Savio Carvalho, head of campaigns and networks for 350.org. "This moment of grief has a clear message for world leaders: Delay is deadly. Rich countries must finally deliver the finance and protection they owe frontline communities. Without a rapid transition away from fossil fuels, the planet will continue to heat up and lives can be lost in a flash.”
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