Blogs

Facts on the Ground

In early November, high waves spawned by Typhoon Fung-wong engulfed Sinbanali, a seaside village near the Philippine’s capital of Manila, prompting the evacuation of 1.3 million people. Ivy Villamor, a local resident, said “The winds howled, and the rains were non-stop. Like it was the end of the world.” The typhoon was classed as a super typhoon when it came ashore on the main island of Luzon. 132 villages were flooded, with some parts of Aurora Province cut off due to landslides. 1,000 homes were damaged by the storm and two people were killed which. The Philippines’ government deployed almost a thousand search-and-rescue teams to combat typhoon Fung-wong, the 21st storm to hit the Philippines this year.

Typhoon Kalmaegi preceded Fung-wong and it tore through the center of the Philippines and caused devastating flooding and forced the evacuation of about 1.9 million people. Rescue teams searched relentlessly for dozens of missing people. Most of the victims of Typhoon Kalmaegi, also known as Typhoon Tino locally, died by drowning or were hit by falling trees or were electrocuted or buried by landslides. Cebu, the heart of commerce in central Philippines, was hit the hardest with over 70 deaths reported. Pamela Baricuatro, Cebu’s provincial governor, declared a “state of calamity,” triggering an immediate release of emergency funds. “It was by far the worst flash flood by a typhoon in the history of Cebu,” Gov. Baricuatro said. After pummeling the Philippines, Typhoon Kalmaegi came ashore in Vietnam with windspeeds of about 90 miles per hour. The devastation from Typhoon Kalmaegi exacerbated the situation in the region, which was still reeling from the impacts of a 6.9 earthquake that struck in October.

All of North America experienced record heat in late October: Mexico had a daytime high of 42C (107.6F) and nighttime temperatures of 28C (82.4F), and 100% of Caribbean countries broke records with Martinique having a high of 35.7C (96.3F) crushing its October record again, and in the Dutch Island of Bonaire, a minimum nighttime temperature of 28C was recorded throughout a one-week period.

In late October, two men, aged 39 and 45, died when floodwaters swamped their basements in Brooklyn and Manhattan, as unprecedented heavy rainfalls brought flash flooding to the New York area. The deaths occurred after 1-3” of rain fell across the tristate area surpassing the three-day rainfall records across the metropolitan area. The rainfall had been forecast over a period of eight hours but much of it fell in an intense 20-minute period. The rain fell amid a drought which left piles of fallen leaves and trash on the streets and sidewalks. The rain swept the debris toward sewer drains, many of which became clogged. Flatbush and Hollis, Queens, were hit the hardest. Both neighborhoods had floodwaters, almost two feet deep. Bushwick, in Brooklyn, and parts of East Flushing, in Queens, were also hard hit. The torrential rainfall left cars stranded in the floodwaters on city streets, and some were swept away by the floodwaters. The heavy downpour disrupted travel and caused train and plane delays. The Long Island Expressway at Springfield Boulevard in Queens was closed in both directions, and Amtrak temporarily paused train service at Newark Airport due to flooding, with delays reported on regional and Acela services. The storm left 1,500 residents without electricity with thunderstorms and low cloud ceilings disrupting travel at all three of the region’s major airports.

Beaches were closed in two communities on North Carolina’s Outer Banks, and visitors were advised to stay away after five houses collapsed into the ocean in late October, torn off their pilings by stormy weather and high winds. It was the second time in a two-month period that a group of houses in the same area of Buxton had been claimed by the ocean. Since 2020, 27 privately owned houses have collapsed into the water in Buxton and Rodanthe. Most of the homes swept away had been built several hundred feet from the ocean in the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s, but as the shoreline narrowed from erosion, the houses have closed in on the water’s edge and become more vulnerable.

At least five people died in Jamaica and 23 people were killed in Haiti, when hurricane Melissa struck in late October. Hurricane Melissa’s destructive path across Jamaica rendered parts of the island unrecognizable to residents, with towns littered with rubble, twisted cellphone towers. In Black River, the capital of St. Elizabeth Parish on Jamaica’s southwestern coast, “only places that have four concrete walls are still standing, and usually their roofs are gone,” Amiri Bradley, a visitor, said. The storm “totally destroyed” the port of Black River, Jamaica’s Prime Minister, Andrew Holness, said. 25,000 tourists were stranded when Hurricane Melissa came ashore, with the storm closing the Norman Manley International Airport in Kingston. The death toll from the storm in Jamaica was at least 54, with 109 people injured and 15 missing. The cost of the damage caused by the storm was about $10 billion, the costliest in Jamaica’s history. Melissa came ashore in Jamaica as one of the strongest Category 5 storms on record, with windspeeds of 185 mph before battering Cuba and the Bahamas. Hurricane Melissa devastated Jamaica to levels never seen before, with more than one million people, a third of the population, directly affected by the storm. The hurricane caused power outages in 70% of the country, and severe communications outages reduced internal connectivity to 30% of normal levels, which hampered rescue efforts.

In Haiti, children were among the dead, and a dozen other people remained missing due to Melissa. In the Haitian community of Petit-Goâve, several people died, and the flood caused significant damage. Three people were killed in a landslide near the capital, Port-au-Prince. As of late November, the devastating impact of Melissa in Haiti included 43 fatalities, 15 people injured and 13 people missing.

As hurricane Melissa advanced towards Cuba, several provinces were under a hurricane warning and nearly 900,000 residents were ordered to evacuate the island’s eastern provinces, with the U.S. Navy evacuating about 1,000 nonessential personnel from its base at Guantánamo Bay. The storm killed one person and injured 17 and at least one person died in the Dominican Republic due to the storm.

Persistent rainfall pummeled parts of Central Florida in late October, causing flash flooding, stranding cars, forcing road closures and swamping homes. Forecasters called the storm a “particularly dangerous situation,” a rarely used phrase. About 18” of rain fell in Lake County prompting the NWS to issue a flash flood emergency for two cities in the county, Eustis and Mount Dora, and warned of life-threatening flash flooding, advising residents to seek higher ground. A flash flood warning was also issued for the neighboring Brevard County, where up to 13” of rain fell. That amount of rain was “definitely not normal” for the region, “This is definitely a pretty big event,” the NWS said. Some areas including the city of Eustis, with a population of about 25,000 people, and Titusville in Brevard County, experienced a one-in-200 years rainfall event.

In Mexico in mid-October, torrential rains set off deadly floods and landslides across five Mexican states, leaving a trail of devastation across the central and eastern parts of the country. Mexican authorities searched for dozens of missing persons and supplied aid to thousands who were stunned by the deluge causing significant damage. 64 people died and 65 were missing across five affected states near the Gulf of Mexico. “There were no scientific or meteorological conditions that could have indicated to us that the rainfall would be of this magnitude,” Mexico’s President, Claudia Sheinbaum, said. About 100,000 homes were affected by the floods and landslides. The central and eastern parts of the country, (in the states of Veracruz, Hidalgo, San Luis Potosí, Querétaro and Puebla) were hit the hardest with torrential rains overflowing rivers and setting off landslides. Some towns had about 20” of rain dumped in just four days. Earlier this year, heavy flooding on Mexico’s border with the US also caused fatalities and left widespread damage, making torrential rainfalls a major risk for large areas across Mexico. More than 7,300 Army soldiers and National Guard members were deployed in mid-October to help rescue and evacuate people, with health officials also deployed to prevent the spread of mosquito-borne illnesses such as dengue fever. The deluge in mid-October also interrupted power supply, leaving more than 250,000 people without electricity.

Emergency crews rescued dozens of people in western Alaska in mid-October as flooding spawned by the remnants of Typhoon Halong pounded remote coastal communities and ripped houses off their foundations. Three people were reported missing in Kwigillingok and Kipnuk. The extreme weather stemming from Typhoon Halong occurred when above-average sea temperatures in Japan interacted with colder air from Siberia. The storm brought winds that reached 80 mph and caused water levels to rise as high as seven feet above normal, the NWS said. “The remnants of the typhoons have been the exception, but now they are becoming the norm.” Vivan Korthuis, chief executive of the village council association, said.

In May, about five months before deadly floods swept through the Alaska Native village of Kipnuk in mid-October, destroying many houses, the Environmental Protection Agency revoked a $20 million grant aimed at stabilizing Kipnuk’s riverbank to protect it from the threats of erosion and flooding. The grant had been awarded by the Biden Administration under the Community Change Grants Program.  The EPA explained that the grant was “no longer consistent” with the agency’s priorities. The tragedy in Kipnuk, killed one person with two people reported missing in the neighboring village of Kwigillingok.

Kipnuk, a village of about 970 people along the Bering Sea, is built on permafrost, ground that has been frozen in some cases for hundreds or thousands of years. Climate change induced heat in the region has caused the permafrost to melt. As a result of this melting, Kipnuk’s key infrastructure is at risk of collapsing into the river whenever it floods after a major storm. Kipnuk has already flooded at least 30 times between 1979 and 2022, mostly after major storms, according to a report last year from Alaska’s Division of Geological and Geophysical Surveys. The remnants of Typhoon Halong unleashed record-breaking storm surges in Kipnuk in mid-October with emergency management officials rescuing at least 51 people in Kipnuk and Kwigillingok, and over 1,000 people remained in emergency shelters in mid-October.

The NWS announced in early October that a deadly tornado which passed through rural North Dakota in June this year had been reassessed and given an ‘EF 5’ rating on the enhanced Fujita scale, with wind speeds greater than 210 mph and a damage intensity/potential rating of “incredible.” It is the first time since 2013 that a tornado has been given the highest rating possible on the scale, a post-event system for rating tornado intensity based on the damage they cause, with ratings ranging from ‘EF0’ (weakest) to’ EF5’ (strongest). Three people were killed in June when the tornado, part of a series of storms moving through North Dakota and Minnesota, struck in Enderlin, N.D., and more than 30 train cars were derailed.

In early October, India, like many other Asian nations, experienced record heat, it was October’s hottest day in history in Palayankottai in southern India, with temperatures reaching 39.5C (103.1F).

In late September, Typhoon Bualoi struck Vietnam’s central coast, leaving at least 13 people dead and 46 injured. The storm had earlier battered the Philippines, killing at least 10 people there. The storm came ashore in Vietnam with windspeeds of between 73 and 83 mph, leaving almost two million people without electricity. “This typhoon is one of the strongest to hit the areas it swept through in the last two decades,” “It created widespread damage because it stayed inland for many hours, between six and eleven hours, after making landfall.” Huy Nguyen, a local weather forecaster, said. 13 people were rescued from the floods, while 21 others were reported missing. The region was already reeling from the devastation caused by Typhoon Kajiki in August.

In Vietnam’s Ninh Binh Province, the storm collapsed homes and killed nine people, and in the Ha Tinh Province, vast areas were without power. The storm prompted the evacuation of tens of thousands of people in late September. “The previous typhoon destroyed my home. All the roof was blown away. I had just fixed my house with loans. Today, this typhoon has damaged my home again,” Tran Thi Ha, 40, a resident of Ha Tinh Province, said.

In Guangdong Province, in southern China, authorities evacuated almost two million people in late September as Typhoon Ragasa approached. The deadly storm had already killed at least 21 people and injured dozens in the Philippines, Taiwan and Hong Kong. Typhoon Ragasa reached sustained wind speeds of 165 mph making it the most powerful storm in the world this year as of late September, the Joint Typhoon Warning Center in Hawaii said. The Hong Kong Observatory issued its highest storm signal, level 10, with the sea level in eastern Hong Kong rising 12’ above normal and residents were advised to stay indoors. Before coming ashore in southern China, the typhoon had pounded Hong Kong in late September with heavy rain and fierce winds, which felled hundreds of trees, flooded coastal areas, and injured 90 people. Typhoons in the Western Pacific have grown in intensity due to higher water temperatures and atmosphere stemming from climate change. The warming has caused heavier rains when typhoons make landfall, Shun Chi-ming, the former director of Hong Kong Observatory, said. The storm disrupted travel with over 600 flights from Cathay Pacific and other carriers canceled at Hong Kong International Airport.

Typhoon Ragasa first came ashore in the Philippines in late September, killing four people before heading back to sea and moving south of Taiwan, where it destroyed a bridge, killed 18 people, injured 107, and 6 people were reported missing in the eastern part of Hualien County on Tiawan’s east coast. The storm prompted the evacuation of over 8,000 people, and the cancellation of 270 flights.

.

Severe heat this summer killed three times as many people in European cities due to anthropogenic global warming, scientists said in mid-September. The researchers looked at 854 European cities and towns, where they estimated that a total of 24,400 people died due to this summer’s heat. The findings reflect a worrying pattern: Rising temperatures are increasing the risks to human health more quickly than communities and societies can adapt. The fact that so many people still die each summer “shows that we are not able to keep pace with global warming,” Malcolm Mistry, an assistant professor of climate and geospatial modeling at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine who contributed to the analysis, said. In 2022, during what was then the continent’s hottest summer on record, more than 61,000 people died from heat, scientists have estimated. More than half of those people would not have died but for global warming caused by greenhouse gas emissions, deforestation and other human activities, researchers concluded.

Global temperatures in 2024 year crept up past a key goal, raising questions about how much nations can stop the planet from heating up further. Rome, Athens and Bucharest, Romania, were the European capitals with the highest number of heat-related deaths after adjusting for city population, researchers found. The highest ranked capitals with deaths attributed to climate change were Stockholm, Madrid and Bratislava, Slovakia. “Before, we had very few, if any heat-related deaths in Northern Europe,” Garyfallos Konstantinoudis, a climate scientist at Imperial College London who worked on the new analysis, said. Global warming is now starting to lift summer temperatures in northern countries into the range where they can harm human health, Dr. Konstantinoudis said. Far fewer people still die of heat there than in Southern Europe, but when they do, it is much more squarely the result of climate change, he said.

In August and early September, heavy rains, flash floods and cloudbursts drenched large parts of northern India causing hundreds of fatalities, displacing over a million people and destroyed corps. “Now, not only is this paddy crop destroyed, but the soil will not be dry enough for wheat to be sowed in a couple months for a good yield”, Surjan Singh, a local farmer in the northern Indian state of Punjab, which was hard hit by the storm, said. Although heavy rains are common in northwest India during the monsoon season, August saw the highest rainfall in over two decades, according to the local Weather Service. Almost 12” of rain fell within a 72-hour period in late August, about three times the seasonal average for the period, setting off deadly flooding, local officials said.

In India’s capital city, New Delhi, and its suburbs, shelters were filled with families in early September, as flooded roads slowed traffic. In the northern state of Punjab, considered the breadbasket of India, all 23 districts in the state were severely flooded in August and early September with about 500,000 acres of farmland submerged, causing significant damage to corps, 37 deaths and power outage, while 15,000 people were evacuated due to the storm. The torrential rains also caused deadly landslides and flashfloods, with cloudbursts battering several parts of the Himalayas, washing away roads, bridges and power lines and disrupting communication. Dozens of people were killed by the deluge in the Jammu and Kashmir region with India’s northern state of Uttarakhand also hard hit.

In late August, at least 34 people died after days of torrential rainfalls triggered deadly landslides and flash floods in the Indian-controlled part of Jammu and Kashmir. The victims, mostly pilgrims, died along the route to a popular Hindu shrine. Rescue workers pulled bodies from the debris after rain sent boulders and mud crashing down along the route to the temple. At least 15 inches of rain overwhelmed rivers and drains in Jammu in less than 24 hours, the heaviest daily rainfall recorded in Jammu, the local Weather Service said. In a separate incident, a sudden cloudburst killed at least four people in Doda, in the Indian-controlled part of Jammu and Kashmir. Earlier in August, cloudbursts in the region along another pilgrimage route killed at least 70 people, with 25 missing. In Jammu, more than 3,500 residents were evacuated from low-lying areas in late August, officials said, with government offices and schools closed as landslides severed two highways connecting Jammu to the rest of India. The storm also disrupted travel with rail services in the Himalayan region suspended, flights delayed and mobile and internet networks disrupted, leaving millions out of contact, officials said.

Environment and Climate Change Canada (previously known as Environment Canada), Canada’s environmental protection agency, issued a severe thunderstorm warning in mid-August for south-central Alberta. The storm hit Brooks, downing power lines, prompting road closures and stranding cars on the road. The storm travelled over 500 kilometers from the foothills west of High River, Alberta to Saskatchewan, south of Saskatoon, fueled by unstable air and strong winds. "They're not unheard of, but to see it go this distance at this speed is quite rare," Kyle Brittain, a climate journalist, said. The storm uprooted trees and damaged high-voltage transmission towers along its path. "In order to crumple or shear off these transmission towers, you need incredibly intense winds," Mr. Brittain said. The recorded windspeed for the storm was over 110 km/h (68.3 mph), he added.

Swelled by torrential rainfall, a local stream turned into a roaring torrent sweeping away debris and everything in its path through the village of Beshonai, Pakistan, in mid-August, including fallen trees and 185 homes. Mr. Samad, a local resident, said his wife and daughter were killed when the floods swept them away along with the family home, and his mother’s body was recovered three miles downstream. The highest toll from the storm was reported in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, a province bordering Afghanistan, where at least 365 fatalities were recorded with Buner district hit the hardest with at least 225 confirmed deaths. The floodwaters flowed southward, engulfing vast areas and crippling economic activities in the port City of Karachi, the country’s economic hub and home to over 20 million people, as residents plodded through shoulder-deep waters in some streets.  “If extreme weather keeps being an annual event, if it keeps hitting people so strongly and trapping them in a circle of perpetual poverty and misery, there will be upheaval,” Aisha Khan, the executive director at the Civil Society Coalition for Climate Change, said. Officials also said that nothing could have prepared the country for what was unleashed on villages like Beshonai. “This was once a bustling village,” Shiraz Ali, a college student who was helping with rescue operations said. “How can anyone be normal in a place like this?” He added. Pakistan contributes less than 1% to global GHG emissions but requires $43 billion on average every year until 2030 to mitigate the effects of global warming according to the World Bank. The monsoon season, once revered as a source of life and renewal, has brought death and devastation across large parts of Pakistan, home to 250 million people. Monsoons have killed over 700 people across Pakistan since the season began in late June.

In mid-August, Spain deployed 500 more soldiers to its 3,500 military personnel, and European allies supplied firefighters and equipment to bolster emergency teams combating raging wildfires around Spain. The searing temperatures from the blaze complicated rescue efforts. The fires burned more acres than any other fires in Spain in recent years. Spain’s Defense Minister, Margarita Robles, said the country’s military emergency unit had not seen anything like it in its 20 years of activity. This year’s fires had “different characteristics due to climate change.”, Ms. Robles said. A temperature high of 114F (46C) was recorded in Jerez de la Frontera, southern Spain, and temperatures in Galicia rose to 109F (almost 43C) at the peak of the heat wave in mid-August, with hot spells lasting for over 2 weeks, making it the third longest since 1975, when such data collection began. An emergency worker who was assisting in combating the blaze was killed when his vehicle overturned and fell down a steep hillside in Espinoso de Compludo, in northwest Spain. After appealing for assistance from the EU, Spain received firefighters, equipment and aircrafts from France, Germany, Finland, Italy, the Netherlands, Slovakia and the Czech Republic. Over 31,000 people were evacuated due to the blaze which also prompted the closure of parts of the Camino de Santiago, a famed religious pilgrimage trail. The devastating wildfires burned over 3,440 square kilometers (about 1,330 square miles) of land, the largest annual amount ever recorded in Spain since 2006.

The Iberian Peninsula faced some of the most devastating wildfires in southern Europe, with southern Europe recording one of its worst fire seasons in recent memory as it struggled with scorching life-threatening heat. The mid-August wildfires killed at least eight people across southern Europe, and injured many others, including firefighters, with firefighters in Greece combating 14 wildfires. Firefighters also battled several wildfires in August in Portugal, where a firefighter was killed in a road accident while responding to a fire incident in mid-August.

Researchers from World Weather Attribution found that Hurricane Melissa had 7% stronger wind speeds than a similar one in a non-globally warmed world and they found that the rate of rainfall inside the eyewall of the storm was 16% more intense than it otherwise would have been. The 7% increase in wind speed caused substantial additional damage, said Friederike Otto, a WWA founder and a climatologist at Imperial College London.  He estimated that the increase speed may have added more than one billion dollars in additional damages.

Climate change “absolutely has its ‘finger on the scale,’ but that doesn’t automatically mean all hurricanes will become powerful,” said Brian McNoldy, a senior researcher of atmospheric science at the University of Miami. It suggests that an average storm is more likely to intensify, he said.

Hurricanes draw energy from warm water. Melissa formed in the central Caribbean which was 2.5F higher than usual. The WWA analysis found that climate change made this warmth, and the humidity that intensified Melissa, six times more likely. “It is very clear that the oceans have warmed in recent decades due to climate change,” said Mr. McNoldy. “All other things being equal, that would act to enhance hurricane activity.”

Atmospheric heat intensifies storms too. For each 1C warming, the air can hold 7% more moisture. This enables hurricanes to carry more rain to be discharged in staggering quantities.

Melissa’s impact was worsened because many areas of Jamaica and Cuba were still recovering from last year’s hurricanes, Beryl and Oscar, said Roop Singh, a climate specialist with the Red Cross and one of the report’s authors. “These types of back-to-back shocks make it harder for people to fully recover,” she said. “The full picture is still unraveling as people reach communities that have been cut off by flooding and landslides.”

As COP30 began in November in Balem, Brazil, predicted global warming based on the pledges by the 195 participating countries is 2.5C – 2.9C above pre-industrial levels. Humanity has been burning coal for 150 years and warming the planet in lockstep with increasing carbon emissions. The last 10 years have been the warmest on record. In 2024 the average global increase was 1.6C, exceeding the goal of the Paris accord of keeping global warming well below 1.5C. It is critical that developing countries such as India power its future not with fossil fuels but with carbon-free renewables. It is therefore good news that solar and onshore wind offer the cheapest sources of new electricity generation. India’s electricity sector generates more than half of its energy from solar, wind and hydropower.

An earth warmed 2.5-2.9C is not a world anyone living today would recognize or enjoy. There would be catastrophic changes, including the irreversible melting of major ice sheets, significant sea-level rise, mass human migration, conflict, chaos and wars. There would be more frequent and intense extreme weather events, widespread crop failure, human starvation and disease, and substantial loss of biodiversity. Many areas would be uninhabitable due to heat and water scarcity. Scientists are able to predict this because they are seeing it now, they have been predicting such developments for decades and they have every reason to believe the future will be more of the same, only much, much, worse.

To have any chance of keeping below 2.5C, coal must be rapidly phased out. The growth of coal is slowing worldwide and is waning in wealthy countries such as the US. In 2024, Britain closed its last coal plant and derived more than half of its electricity from renewables. But coal is still growing in China, which, despite its pledge to clean up its economy, continues to build more coal plants than any other country, ever. Natural gas has replaced coal in many instances, and it is less harmful than coal, but it is still a fossil fuel and it too must be phased out. Under Biden, the US became the world’s largest exporter of natural gas. Trump intends to continue this trend and reinvigorate the use of coal.

At the turn of the century, forests were absorbing over 9 gigatons of CO2 per year. Due to deforestation, mostly for agriculture, forests now absorb around 2.2 GT/year and that amount is shrinking. Rainforests in both the Amazon and Australia are in danger of flipping from carbon sinks to carbon sources in what could be a devastating irreversible positive feedback loop. Mining and logging on indigenous land provoked indigenous protesters wearing feathered headdresses and face paint to angrily break into the conference in Balem. They demanded that their lands be respected, and their resources be left for them to survive.

Global transport too must move from fossil fuel powered vehicles to electric. Worldwide, one in five cars sold in 2024 was electric. If the source of the electric power is from renewables, that’s displacing 2 million barrels of oil per day, roughly equal to Germany’s total daily demand. China is leading the way on EVs while Trump has ended subsidies encouraging the purchase of EVs.

Corral reefs continue to bleach and decline due to warming seas. Since 2015 there have been two separate bleaching events stretched over six years. In 1988, 21% of the world’s coral reefs were affected by bleaching events. By 2023-25, 85% of the world’s reefs were affected. About a quarter of all marine species depend on reefs during their lives and millions of people rely on fish for nutrition and income. The reefs also are vital protection for shorelines and people who reside or work there.

Wealthier countries agreed in Paris to aid poorer countries both to develop without using fossil fuels and to help pay to adapt to a world warmed by wealthier countries. A figure of $1.3 trillion was estimated as necessary every year by 2035 to help developing countries manage climate harms, including $300 billion/year from rich countries. But nowhere near that amount has been forthcoming. In 2022, the figure broke $100 billion for the first time. Globally, physical damage to the global economy from climate change is about $1.4 trillion/year. In addition, thousands of people die, and millions are displaced and suffer each year. That the world’s leaders met for the 30^th time to try to deal with this catastrophe, and largely failed, is stunning.

For the first time since world leaders began gathering 30 years ago to address a globally warming world, not only will the US not be in a lead role, the US did not officially send a single top government official to the annual United Nations climate summit. The Trump administration has abandoned America’s promises to the rest of the world that it would control its GHG emissions and instead it has been pressuring other countries to buy US produced oil and gas and similarly abandon efforts to fight climate change. The US recently joined Saudi Arabia and Russia to prevent the first-ever global fee on shipping emissions. Trump administration officials openly threatened countries with tariffs and levies if they supported the carbon fee. Trump lectured world leaders at the UN summit that if they did not “get away from this green scam, your country is going to fail.”

Every fraction of a degree of additional warming potentially exposes tens of millions more people worldwide to dangers from heat waves, wildfires, water and food shortages, and coastal flooding, scientists have said. At COP30, countries were expected to deliver revised, more ambitious plans to cut CO2, methane and other GHG emissions but they largely failed to do so. Foreign ministers and other senior diplomats from 194 countries attended. Trump said he is withdrawing the US from the Paris Agreement (which may take effect Jan 27, 2026).

“President Trump will not jeopardize our country’s economic and national security to pursue vague climate goals that are killing other countries,” said Taylor Rogers, a White House spokeswoman.

Still, a group of about 100 American leaders, mostly Democratic state and local officials, went to Brazil to send a message that mayors, governors and business leaders still prioritize climate change even if Trump does not. Gov. Gavin Newsom of California attended: “As the president of the United States turns his back on people and the planet, California is inking global partnerships focused on creating jobs and cutting toxic pollution,” he said.

At COP30, it is clear that countries like Brazil, India, and Vietnam are rapidly expanding their use of solar and wind power. Poorer countries like Ethiopia and Nepal are skipping over gasoline-burning cars to battery-powered ones. Nigeria, a petrostate, said it intends to build its first solar-panel manufacturing plant. Morocco is creating a battery hub to supply European automakers. Santiago, the capital of Chile, has electrified more than half of its bus fleet in recent years. And the country driving these changes and supplying the equipment is not the US, it is China. China is investing billions of dollars in factories that make solar panels in Vietnam and electric cars in Brazil and they are reaping the economic and political rewards. “From a climate point of view, the developing countries are showing solutions,” said André Corrêa do Lago, the Brazilian diplomat leading the climate talks at COP30.

Still, most countries, get most of their energy from fossil fuels. Indonesia is still mining vast amounts of coal, the dirtiest energy source. India and China continue to build coal-plants. Brazil plans to expand oil production. But it is significant that these countries are meeting large portions of their energy needs with renewable power, both for the cost savings and for energy security reasons. Many are trying to reduce the amount of fossil fuels they import, to relieve pressure on their foreign currency reserves.

Ani Dasgupta, head of the World Resources Institute, an environmental research and advocacy group, said such developments show how economic development can proceed while reducing GHG emissions. “Emerging economies are a very important part of the story,” he said. “The reason we should be paying attention is that they have the most people in the world, they have the largest number of poor people in the world, and their energy demands are growing. If these economies don’t change, there’s no chance for the world to get to a safer place.”

In 2024, Ethiopia took the extraordinary step of banning the import of new gasoline-powered cars. Nepal reduced import duties on EVs which are now cheaper than cars with internal combustion engines. Brazil raised tariffs on all car imports to induce Chinese automakers like BYD and Great Wall Motors to construct plants inside Brazil. India is using incentives to install huge amounts of solar power and manufacture more solar equipment at home. India reached its 2030 targets for pivoting to cleaner energy sources under the Paris Agreement five years early.

Global Chinese manufacturing investments exceed $225 billion since 2011, according to the Net Zero Policy Lab at Johns Hopkins University, with three-fourths of that money invested in the global south, low-income countries and emerging economies. Chinese exports of solar panels, wind turbines and batteries hit records in 2025. Beijing has invested in selling the rest of the world what it needs to adopt to renewable energy. Many American and European leaders are alarmed at China’s growing dominance, which has undercut their own industries. But at the summit, the developing countries seem fine with the arrangement. “You can’t insist that China has to lower its emissions” and then, later, “complain that China is putting cheap E.V.s all over the world,” Mr. Corrêa do Lago said. “If you are worried about climate, this is good news.”

Ten years ago, following the Paris accord, there was hope as the US and China began to cooperate to reduce GHG emissions. But at the 2024 UN Climate Change Conference (COP29), the president of the host country, Azerbaijan’s Ilham Aliyev, praised oil and gas as “gifts from God.” The annual climate summits had been high-profile, star-studded affairs, but in 2024 neither President Biden nor President Xi Jinping of China attended.

All 195 parties to the 2015 Paris agreement were tasked to arrive at COP30 with updated decarbonization plans, called Nationally Determined Contributions. But only 15 countries, 8%, had met a February deadline. Even worse, as the plans trickled in, some represent backsliding when more vigorous efforts are required. Only one country has announced its renunciation of the Paris accord and will not be participating, and that’s US. Worse, the US is pushing the other countries to buy more refined oil and natural gas from us.

Significant progress was being made. From 2019 to 2021, world governments made more than 300 climate-adaptation and mitigation policies each year, dropping to under 200 in 2023, and to 50 in 2024. Existing laws in South America and Europe have been weakened or are in danger due to changing political coalitions.

Jason Bordoff, an energy advisor to Obama, said “You can’t walk more than two feet at any global conference today without ‘pragmatism’ and ‘realism’ being thrown around as the order of the day.” “But it’s not clear to me that anyone knows what those words mean other than this whole climate thing is just too hard.” Current polls show that voters do not prioritize decarbonization, are not willing to pay much to achieve it, and don’t seem to buy the doomsday forecasts if they don’t achieve it.

Pope Leo did not attend COP30, but on Oct. 1, he called on Catholics and citizens of the world to carry on the environmental advocacy of his predecessor, Francis, and not to treat it as a “divisive” issue. Leo spoke at the opening ceremony of a climate conference to commemorate the 10th anniversary of Laudato Si, a groundbreaking papal document on the urgent need to protect the health of the planet. “The challenges identified in Laudato Si are in fact even more relevant today than they were 10 years ago,” he said.

“Everyone in society, through nongovernmental organizations and advocacy groups, must put pressure on governments to develop and implement more rigorous regulations, procedures and controls,” he said. “Citizens need to take an active role in political decision making at national, regional and local levels. Only then will it be possible to mitigate the damage done to the environment.” “What must be done now to ensure that caring for our common home and listening to the cry of the earth and the poor do not appear as mere passing trends or, worse still, that they be seen and felt as divisive issues?” he said, echoing Pope Francis.

Just over a week earlier, Trump told the UN General Assembly that climate change was the “greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world.” The pope made no explicit reference to Trump. But he did refer to Francis’ 2023 update to Laudato Si, which “noted that ‘some have chosen to deride’ the increasingly evident signs of climate change, to ‘ridicule those who speak of global warming’ and even to blame the poor for the very thing that affects them most.” When Pope Francis first met Trump in 2017, he gave Trump a copy of Laudato Si, urging the president not to pull the US out of the Paris climate accord. Trump did so anyway.

If humanity is to reduce its suffering and economic loss from climate change, it must get its energy from non-carbon sources and cease burning fossil fuels. While the federal US government has turned its back on this effort, other countries have produced record solar expansion and steady wind growth. In fact, for the first time, more electricity was produced by solar and wind in the first half of 2025 than coal. This marks “a crucial turning point” according to Małgorzata Wiatros-Motyka, a senior electricity analyst and the author of a report released in early October by the climate thinktank, Ember. Solar power supplied 83% of the global increase in electricity demand and wind power grew by over 7%.

She said, “Solar and wind are now growing fast enough to meet the world’s growing appetite for electricity. This marks the beginning of a shift where clean power is keeping pace with demand growth.” China and India were largely responsible for the surge in renewables, in contrast with the US and Europe, which relied more heavily on fossil fuels.

A separate report by the International Energy Agency found that global renewables could more than double by the end of the decade, with 80% of new clean energy capacity expected to come from solar power. Fatih Birol, the IEA’s executive director, said, “The growth in global renewable capacity in the coming years will be dominated by solar PV – but with wind, hydropower, bioenergy and geothermal all contributing, too.” “In addition to growth in established markets, solar is set to surge in economies such as Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and several south-east Asian countries.”

By contrast, demand for electricity in the US outpaced its growing renewables sector, leading to a 17% increase in coal generation in the first half of the year. And this is before the impact will be felt from the ending of federal subsidies.

Due to the reality of the market, Florida surpassed California in 2024 in new utility-scale solar capacity plugged into its grid. It built 3 gigawatts of large-scale solar in 2024, making it second only to Texas. And in the residential solar sector, Florida continued its longtime leadership streak. The state has ranked number two behind California for the most rooftop panels installed each year from 2019 through 2024.

As federal subsidies end or become hard to claim, companies are racing ahead with solar, wind and battery projects. In the long run, in the US, that will mean fewer wind and solar farms will be built than otherwise would have. In the near-term, the US may add record amounts of renewable energy and batteries through 2027. Wind and solar projects must be under construction by July 2026 to be eligible for federal tax credits that Congress voted in the summer 2025, to eliminate.

That so much renewable energy is poised to be built despite federal opposition reflects just how much momentum the sector has — not just because of subsidies, but because there is tremendous demand for new sources of energy. Solar and batteries can be installed much faster than natural gas and nuclear power plants. Solar and batteries have also become cheaper, while the cost of building gas power plants has increased.

This year, renewable energy and batteries will make up around 93% of the capacity added to US grids, according to the IEA. “We have never seen this kind of demand, ever,” said Sandhya Ganapathy, chief executive of EDP Renewables North America, an energy developer.

The Trump administration is intent to stymie the growth of the renewable energy sector. Beyond eliminating tax credits, Trump said his administration will not approve federal permits for wind or “farmer destroying solar.” The administration is also fighting the off-shore wind industry. “This is the death knell of offshore wind,” said David Giroux, chief investment officer for T. Rowe Price Investment Management. “Any time you increase uncertainty around the ultimate return on an investment, you either have to get a higher return to compensate you for that risk, or more likely you just won’t take that risk in the first place.”

Ultimately, the loss of renewable energy tax credits is likely to raise energy bills, because it can take years to build alternatives like gas or nuclear power plants. Existing gas plants are also likely to be used more. “There’s not going to be as much supply as expected,” Thomas Byrne, the Founder and CEO of CleanCapital, said. “Necessarily, prices will go up.”

The Trump administration also favors carbon-emitting cars over EVs and has ended the federal subsidy for EVs. EV. sales likely will fall because EVs are generally more expensive than comparable gas cars. But, depending on where one lives, the cost of recharging one’s EV may be cheaper than re-filling it with gas. Owning an EV has other advantages, like lower maintenance costs, simpler maintenance and lower emissions.

Driving 100 miles in a typical gas car that gets 25 miles per gallon costs about $13 on average. On average, re-charging an EV at home costs $5. Charging at a fast-charging station is significantly more costly.  A typical hybrid (not the plug-in kind), like a Toyota Prius, can get more than 50 mpg and so its fill-up costs are roughly on par with an EV charged at home.

But it matters where you’re charging, because electricity and gas rates vary from state to state.  And if you have solar panels and charge at home, then anywhere can be quite cheap. On average, the cheapest places to charge are rural Western states, where residential electricity costs little. The most expensive are Hawaii and California.

The cost to drive 100 miles in an EV charged at home ranges from Idaho at $3.57, to Hawaii at $12.32. NY is in 45^th place at $8.01.  California and Hawaii may be expensive places to recharge an EV, but they’re also states with typically high gas costs. Washington tops the list for states for EVs where electricity is cheap and gas is expensive. Connecticut is the opposite with cheaper gas and more expensive electricity, so it has the smallest gap between home EV charging and filling at the pump.

EV home-charging cost over 100 miles, relative to a gas car ranges from the best in Washington at $-13.53 to Connecticut at $-2.98. NY is $-4.67. (The negative dollar amount represents the savings for the EV owner relative to a gas car driver over the same distance.)

Fast-charging rates also differ across states and typically run two to four times as high as residential electricity rates, according to data from the EV charging data firm Paren. If you can’t charge at home and rely primarily on public fast charging, you’ll usually pay a little more than you would for gas. The exception is in Western states, where gas is expensive and fast-charging prices are close to average. In Oregon and California, you could break even; in Washington, you could save money. (Public slow charging is an option, and cheaper than fast charging, but prices vary widely.)

EV fast-charging cost over 100 miles, relative to a gas car range from the best in Washington at $-3.23, to Arkansas at +$8.36.  NY is 19^th at $-2.94.

Just as the economics of renewables is driving the conversion from fossil fuels to renewables, so too is it driving the conversion from fossil fuel powered cars to EVs. One of the hindrances had been the lack of charging stations, but that is rapidly changing too. EV fast-charging stations in the US have increased from around 1,000 a decade ago to 12,000 today.  The Trump administration is hostile toward EVs and has cut federal funding for public chargers, yet, new stations are being installed. In 2025, there were  around 17,000 new DC fast-charging ports installed and thousands more Level 2 chargers, pushing total US ports past 200,000. By late 2025, there were around 228,000 ports and over 76,000 charging locations.

Large portions of the country are now within reach of a fast charger, though some rural regions and smaller roadways lag. Fast chargers are important for longer drives because they can recharge a car in around half an hour. (The over-night chargers used at home take hours.) The overwhelming majority of car trips are less than 50 miles, well within the range of most new EVs, even in poor conditions, and charging usually happens at home.

Fast chargers are a key to soothing “range anxiety,” the fear of not making it to the next charger. That had been the single most important concern among potential EV buyers, according to the research firm J.D. Power. Now, for most major destinations, thanks to both longer vehicle ranges and the proliferation of chargers, EV drivers have peace of mind, and not just in more populated areas. For example, the growth from 2020 to 2025, in: Alabama, 16 fast-charging stations to 160; New Mexico, 24 to 125; NY, 129 to 503; Texas, 179 to 681; Colorado, 108 to 348; Vermont, 26 to 82; Maine, 32 to 85; and, California,1040 to 2161.

Tesla has made its extensive charging network available to other cars, and some carmakers are building their vehicles with Tesla’s style of port or offering adapters. Tesla has built around a fifth of the country’s fast-charging stations, and because its stations tend to be large, more than half of all ports.

The driving distance between chargers, even on the most challenging routes just 5 years ago, are doable in 2025. To drive from Amarillo, Texas, to Las Cruces, N.M., there was a 395 mile gap in 2020. In 2025 the gap is 100 miles. In 2020, Fayetteville, Ark., to New Orleans, was 275 mi., now 115 mi.

Many routes have gone from doable to easy. Driving from Boston to D.C., for example, you’re never more than 10 miles from a charger. Most of the time, you’re within three miles. On all these routes you are within 3 miles of a charger 50-70% of the time and within 10 miles of a charger 90-100% of the time: Boston to Washington, D.C.; Rutland, Vt., to Washington, D.C.; San Diego to San Francisco.

Some routes are more challenging, especially in rural areas such as parts of Arizona, Kansas and Montana, or on I-25 in Wyoming. Portions of Louisiana and southern Arkansas lack fast-charging ports.

Private investment is making up for a weak federal presence. A group of major car manufacturers has started the Ionna network, which intends to build 30,000 charging ports in the US. Ford and Rivian have each built more than 100 fast-charging stations. Volkswagen funded the Electrify America network with $2 billion that it was required to contribute in settlement of its prosecution for cheating on diesel emission tests.

Six big networks — Tesla, ChargePoint, EVgo, Electrify America, EV Connect and Blink — have built more than two-thirds of the fast-charging stations in the US. Several smaller operators own the rest, including power companies like Hawaiian Electric, Florida Power and Light and Iowa’s MidAmerican, which are all major fast-charger operators in their states. Buc-ee’s, the supersize travel stop chain, is adding E.V. chargers to its stations, and Walmart announced its intention to install thousands of fast chargers at its stores.

The National Renewable Energy Laboratory estimates the country will need 180,000 fast-charging ports by 2030. At the current pace, the US will reach that number in the early 2030s. If the rate continues to accelerate, as it has in recent years, that day could come much sooner.

Globally, one terawatt of solar power had been produced by 2022. The second TW was produced by 2024. It’s possible that the third TW was produced in 2025. In 2024, renewables provided more than 40% of the world’s electricity, and twice as much money was invested in them than in fossil fuels. Also in 2024, 93% of new power worldwide derived from clean sources. GHG emissions continue to rise but it is possible that by 2026 renewables could be the world’s largest source of electricity.

And we will need it given the rise of A.I. which requires immense amounts of electricity. Trump has turned to fossil fuels. The markets are clearly indicating that the future of energy, economically, is in renewables. China is making the transition. Seventy-four percent of all global solar and wind projects are now being constructed in China or by Chinese companies, and in the 12-month period ending in June 2025, China installed more solar power within its borders than America has ever brought online.

The former U.S. treasury secretary Lawrence Summers said, “There’s a growing acceptance of fragmentation, and — maybe even more troubling — I think there’s a growing sense that ours may not be the best fragment to be associated with.”

Around 50 countries are making major investments in solar and they’re buying the panels, and batteries, from China. Pakistan is now the sixth-largest solar market in the world. Many sub-Saharan African countries have increased their imports of Chinese solar panels tenfold since 2023; in a few, they’ve grown more than a hundredfold. “For the first time in two centuries, the West is no longer the leader in future technology but the follower,” Tim Saha, co-director of the Net Zero Industrial Policy Lab at Johns Hopkins, recently wrote in the online journal Polycrisis.

Skeptics of decarbonization have pointed to the 600 million people worldwide who lack access to electricity or the billion-plus living in “energy poverty” to argue for “moral” (as Energy Secretary Chris Wright put it) expansion of fossil fuels. More recently Jigar Shah, who led the Department of Energy’s venture-capital-style Loans Programs Office under Biden, predicted that clean tech will bring an end to energy poverty globally within a decade. Perhaps the retreat of the US is not a global setback, but simply a restructuring of climate geopolitics. Christiana Figueres, the former Executive Secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and the architect of the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change, calls it a more “distributed” world, with Trump rendering the US “irrelevant” on climate and most other countries pleasantly surprised at how little difference that really makes for them and their green-energy futures. “If the U.S. isn’t there,” the political scientist Geoff Mann said. “I have a little more faith.”

In March, the UN considered a resolution to establish an International Day of Hope and an International Day of Peaceful Coexistence. On both propositions, the US voted “no.”

A study published in mid-August shows that Arctic polar ice melting is occurring at alarming rates. The study focused on the Svalbard Islands during the summer of 2024. The melting there suggests that similar melting may be occurring on Greenland and elsewhere in the Arctic. SLR threatens trillions of dollars in damage to real estate and infrastructure and the displacement of a billion people as coastal cities and towns become unlivable.

So much ice melted on Svalbard, the archipelago north of Norway in the Barents Sea, that the region was one of the most significant contributors to global SLR in 2024. Ice melt records set in 2020 and 2022 were slightly greater than previous years, but an extreme and long Arctic heat wave in the summer of 2024, produced record-breaking melting. It was “in a different league,” said Thomas Vikhamar Schuler, professor of geosciences at the University of Oslo and lead author of the research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Schuler said the study shows that a seemingly a once-in-1,000 year event “will become normal in the future.” “Usually, we say, ’Oh, let’s talk about the world that our grandkids will experience.’ But this is something within our lifetime.”

James Kirkham, an ice researcher with the British Antarctic Survey, said “I think all glaciologists felt a sense of trepidation when we saw the images coming out of Svalbard last summer.” “But the official numbers are truly appalling.” The scale and speed of ice loss on Svalbard “underlines a sobering reality for the broader climate system.” Even if global emissions are cut to zero by 2050, many Svalbard summers likely will continue to be excessively warm with continued melting and all the above consequences.

The sudden influx of fresh water from the melting ice into the sea also impacts marine ecosystems, starting at the base of the food chain with plankton, which is very sensitive to water temperature and salinity. Change to the chemical composition of the water reverberates up the food chain altering migration and breeding patterns for marine life for both mammals and seabirds which are closely linked with plankton cycles. Such a disruption can starve an entire generation of breeding birds.

Research has shown a linkage between surges of fresh water into the North Atlantic with changes to global weather systems producing extreme weather in Europe, and potentially North America. The addition of cold, fresh water from Svalbard and other parts of the Arctic appears to be contributing to the weakening of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, a key ocean current that carries warm water toward northwestern Europe. A breakdown of the current could cause extreme climate impacts in Europe and possibly disrupt global weather systems. We may be in the early stages of such a devastating change which may be irreversible.

Similarly grim findings are emerging from scientific studies in the Antarctic. Quoting a report published in late August: “Human-caused climate change worsens with every increment of additional warming, although some impacts can develop abruptly. Evidence is emerging for rapid, interacting and sometimes self-perpetuating changes in the Antarctic environment. A regime shift has reduced Antarctic sea-ice extent far below its natural variability of past centuries, and in some respects is more abrupt, non-linear and potentially irreversible than Arctic sea-ice loss. A marked slowdown in Antarctic Overturning Circulation is expected to intensify this century and may be faster than the anticipated Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation slowdown. The tipping point for unstoppable ice loss from the West Antarctic Ice Sheet could be exceeded even under best-case CO2 emission reduction pathways, potentially initiating global tipping cascades. Regime shifts are occurring in Antarctic and Southern Ocean biological systems through habitat transformation or exceedance of physiological thresholds, and compounding breeding failures are increasing extinction risk. Amplifying feedbacks are common between these abrupt changes in the Antarctic environment, and stabilizing Earth’s climate with minimal overshoot of 1.5C will be imperative alongside global adaptation measures to minimize and prepare for the far-reaching impacts of Antarctic and Southern Ocean abrupt changes.”

Thus, both poles are experiencing similar potentially catastrophic run-away irreversible positive feedback loops that threaten everything from the marine food chain to essential oceanic currents to global weather patterns to species extinctions, SLR and more.

A study in Nature looked at four of the largest systems on earth—the Greenland ice sheet, the Atlantic currents, the South Asian monsoon, and the Amazon rainforest—and found that in each case “the stability of these four tipping elements has declined in recent decades, suggesting that they have moved towards their critical thresholds, which may be crossed within the range of unmitigated anthropogenic warming.”

Meaning: the damage from the heat trapped by carbon and methane in our atmosphere may be threatening the most critical systems upon which human civilization depends and may be irreversible unless warming is halted.

In order to prepare for SLR and increasingly dangerous storm surge, it is essential to understand the condition of the polar ice sheets. Trump’s cost-cutting could deprive scientists of the use of the only US icebreaker that scientists depend on. Trump’s proposed budget calls for the abrupt termination of the Nathaniel B. Palmer, the US icebreaker dedicated to Antarctic research. The budget also pauses development of a new vessel that was supposed to succeed the Palmer in the 2030s. Scientists said such cuts would endanger decades of US leadership in studying the Southern Ocean and the Antarctic coast.

“I just think it’s tragic, really, for U.S. science,” said Rob Larter, a marine geophysicist at the British Antarctic Survey. Graduate students and younger scientists will be hit hardest, Dr. Larter said. Unable to do field work and publish research, many of them will simply quit polar science. “Effectively, you’ve lost a whole generation, a lot of expertise that will be lost and difficult to restart.”

Previous research has estimated that 0.7–0.9 meters (2 7.6 – 35.4”) global mean SLR is likely to occur by 2100, and 2.2–2.5 meters (86.6 – 98.4” or 7.2 – 8.2’) by 2300, if the objectives of the Paris Agreement are not met. This magnitude of SLR across coastlines would inundate about 5 million existing buildings at high tide by the end of this century and destroy immense amount of infrastructure.

The Chinese leader, Xi Jinping, announced at the United Nations on September 24 that it intended to reduce its GHG emissions by at least 7 to 10% over the next 10 years, the first time China has made such a strong commitment to halt global warming. China is the world’s largest emitter of GHGs. In an apparent reference to the US, Mr. Xi added, “Some countries are against it” (“it” being reducing GHG emissions).

There is little doubt that SLR will continue and that major cities will flood. Various options have been proposed to protect NYC but they have received little public attention. By 2080, nearly 30% of the city’s land mass could be at risk of significant flooding affecting 1.4 million New Yorkers, 17% of the city’s population.

A combination of strategies likely will be necessary including designating areas to absorb water and converting areas of asphalt and concrete to absorbant green space. In Staten Island, some inland waterways have been restored and connected, and parkland was added to reduce flooding. This is part of the Bluebelt project stringing together streams, ponds and wetlands, some natural, some engineered. Rohit Aggarwala, the commissioner of the New York City Department of Environmental Protection, said the agency had listed 86 “priority areas” citywide for similar flood mitigation.

Around 1970, the city’s stormwater system was built to handle up to 1.75” of rain per hour. Hourly precipitation didn’t exceed this limit until 1995. It’s been eclipsed in three of the last five years.

Rain gardens, curbside planted pits designed to siphon water away from drainage systems, keep floodwaters from over-whelming the sewar system and pushing raw sewage into the city’s waterways. Permeable pavement is part of the city’s Cloudburst program which includes designing parks and public spaces to flood intentionally to act as natural catch basins. Larger waterfront properties are now required to provide stormwater solutions.

In Gowanus, Brooklyn, DEP engineers are constructing an eight-million-gallon underground tank, redirecting and holding water that would otherwise overwhelm the combined sewar system during heavy rainstorms and discharge into the Gowanus Canal.

A Daylighting project involves uncovering pre-existing waterways to channel floodwater to avoid harm. Tibbetts Brook in the Bronx will be uncovered, and surface water will be routed to an underground pipe, reducing sewer overflow into the Harlem River. Such projects will be costly and slow. A major overhaul of local sewer capacity in Bushwick, Brooklyn, will cost $390 million and take years to dig up Knickerbocker Avenue.

After Hurricane Sandy, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers developed and assessed different options for protecting the NY-NJ Harbor region from future storm surge. They estimated the area at risk from storm surge in 2095, using a moderate projection of SLR. After a cost-benefit analysis, the Corps tentatively selected an option that would include a series of barriers strategically placed to protect certain areas. Though it would cost an estimated $53 billion and take 14 years to construct, this proposal would leave 37% of the region unprotected and potentially affect waterfront views. Part of the project built in 2022, included a 30-foot steel wall, seven-miles long, covered with concrete and stone and then by sand dunes on Rockaway Peninsula in Queens, NY.

Another project under way includes an area devastated by recent storms on Staten Island’s South Shore. Construction started in 2025 on a $2.3 billion coastal protection project, with the federal government picking up most of the cost. It is called “living breakwaters” and it consists of submerged stone and concrete 2,400 feet off the coast. The marine life that has returned help break waves and stifle erosion — a natural wall.

In Lower Manhattan, the East River and Wagner Parks have been raised to protect residents from the next major storm like Sandy. The redesign of Wagner Park in Battery Park City, which took two years and cost $300 million, included wooden steps as barriers against storm surges. Similar work is underway at nearby Battery Park. The city’s first flood gate was built below the Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive on the East Side, designed to slide closed when necessary.

A most ambitious and controversial option under consideration includes a huge storm surge barrier with retractable sea gates, stretching over six miles across the mouth of the NY harbor. It could protect 96% of the areas around the harbor at a cost of $119 billion. Those opposed say it will cost much more and if the gates stay closed for a certain amount of time, it will harm the estuary that is the Hudson River up to Troy, NY.

Another controversial possibility is moving people out of harm’s way. Hurricane Ida, in 2021, drowned at least 13 people, mostly in basement-level apartments in Queens and Brooklyn. Some 80,000 homes in the NY area are projected to flood over the next 15 years. How to relocate 1.4 million in NY’s floodplain who could be at risk by 2080, to safer places? With about 29,000 people per square mile, NYC is the country’s most densely populated major city, which makes such “retreat” particularly expensive and challenging.

After Hurricane Sandy there was a short-lived buyout program, mostly on Staten Island, that offered financial assistance for those willing to move out of harm’s way. Since then, developers have continued to build in areas prone to flooding. In other vulnerable areas, such as the Rockaways, few people opted to leave.

Washington DC

The Trump administration announced in late September that it will relax a Biden-era rule that requires grocery stores, air-conditioning companies, semiconductor plants and others to sharply and rapidly reduce some powerful GHGs used in cooling equipment. The EPA plan would unravel what many industry leaders and environmentalists view as a rare success for the climate: a bipartisan agreement that those man-made chemicals, known as hydrofluorocarbons, or HFCs, should be rapidly phased down. HFCs, are super pollutants, thousands of times more potent than CO2 at warming the planet.

EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said the Biden administration’s plan for cutting the production and consumption of the chemicals, which aimed for an 85% reduction by 2036, did not give companies enough time to meet their deadlines. “With this proposal, E.P.A. is working to make American refrigerants affordable, safe, and reliable again,” he said.

Phasing out HFCs worldwide could avert up to 0.5C of global warming by the end of the century, which could help avert some of the worst consequences of climate change. In Trump’s first term, he signed a law directing EPA to phase down the climate pollutant.

Unlike efforts to curb fossil fuels, plans to reduce HFCs have won broad support from both Democrats and Republicans, as well as industry groups and environmental organizations. With other countries moving away from HFCs, many supporters described the Biden rule as protecting the $206-billion-a-year cooling industry by helping to put all manufacturers on a level playing field and by helping to support alternatives. “We liked the rule that came out at the end of the Biden administration,” said Francis Dietz, vice president of public affairs at the Air-Conditioning, Heating, and Refrigeration Institute.

Under the proposal, the residential air-conditioning sector, the retail food refrigeration sector, cold storage warehouses and semiconductor manufacturers would have five more years to switch to alternative coolants. Environmentalists said the changes would have marginal effects on businesses and huge effects on the climate. The public will have 45 days to comment on the proposal once it appears in the Federal Register, and EPA said there would also be a virtual public hearing on the plans before changes are finalized.

The nation’s leading scientific advisory body issued a major report in mid-September detailing the strongest evidence to date that CO2, methane and other planet-warming GHGs are threatening human health. The report, published by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, could complicate the Trump administration’s efforts to revoke a landmark scientific determination, the endangerment finding, that underpins the federal government’s legal authority to control GHGs that are driving climate change.

In July, the Trump administration proposed to rescind the endangerment finding and contended that subsequent research had “cast significant doubt” on its accuracy. The proposal is one of Trump’s most significant steps yet to derail federal climate efforts. If the move is upheld in court, future administrations would have no authority under the Clean Air Act to regulate GHG emissions from the burning of fossil fuels.

The National Academies assessment contradicts the administration’s claims. The 136-page report, assembled by a committee of two dozen scientists, concludes that the original endangerment finding was accurate and “has stood the test of time.” It says that there is now even stronger evidence that rising GHG levels can threaten public health and well-being, and that new risks have been uncovered. The report notes that climate change is exacerbating a wide variety of health risks like intense heat waves and increased wildfires and smoke. Climate-driven changes in temperature and rainfall patterns have also led to negative effects on crops and water scarcity.

Under federal law, EPA solicited public comment on its proposal (the comment period ended Sept 22) to revoke the finding and must respond to all the comments it received. Representative James Comer of Kentucky, the leading Republican on the House Oversight Committee, wrote that the issuance of the report was “a blatant partisan act to undermine the Trump Administration” and said that some of the members overseeing the report had “shown partisan bias.”

In response to the report, Carolyn Holran, an EPA spokeswoman, said, “The endangerment finding has been used by the Obama and Biden administrations to justify trillions of dollars of greenhouse gas regulations covering new motor vehicles and new motor vehicle engines. As we saw in the 16 intervening years since the endangerment finding was made, many of the extremely pessimistic predictions and assumptions E.P.A. relied upon have not materialized as expected.”

The average level of CO2 in Earth’s atmosphere climbed by the largest amount on record between 2023 and 2024, as per the World Meteorological Organization. Last year, 2024, was Earth’s hottest year in recorded history. The record recent jump in CO2 is the largest since modern measurements began in 1957, according to the organization, which is the weather and climate agency of the UN.

In 2024, the atmosphere’s average concentration of CO2 reached 423.9 parts per million, an increase of 3.5 ppm from the year before. That edged out a 3.3 ppm increase in 2016 that was previously the largest ever measured. Year-to-year rises in CO2 concentrations have accelerated since the 1960s, when the average pace of increase was 0.8 ppm.

An increase in emissions from wildfires was likely a factor in 2024’s record jump, as was decreased absorption of CO2 by the land and the ocean, the agency said. Severe drought and forest fires can degrade the ability of soil and plants to draw down CO2 from the atmosphere while rising ocean temperatures lessen seawater’s capacity to hold the gas.

CO2 that is not absorbed by the land or by the sea can remain in the atmosphere for centuries, influencing the climate long after its original release. “The heat trapped by CO2 and other greenhouse gases is turbocharging our climate and leading to more extreme weather,” Ko Barrett, the WMO’s deputy secretary general, stated. “Reducing emissions is therefore essential not just for our climate but also for our economic security and community well-being.”

Since 1960, humankind has released roughly 500 billion tons of carbon into the atmosphere. China is currently the world’s top emitter. The US has historically emitted the most GHGs. Under Trump, the nation is retreating from measuring and reporting its emissions. In April, the EPA missed an annual deadline to submit data on planet-warming pollution to the UN. In September, the agency said it would stop requiring thousands of polluting facilities to report the amount of GHGs they release into the air.

The Energy Department cancelled $7.5 billion in Biden-era awards for clean energy projects. It likely will cause significant job losses and disruptions. Internal DOE documents suggest that the agency is contemplating deeper cuts. The agency’s termination of more than two dozen grants in NYS alone threaten more than 1,000 jobs and nearly $500 million in investments in the state.

The funding cuts so far have largely targeted Democratic-led states and its growing clean energy sector. They are part of Trump’s stated intention to maximize the pain of the government shutdown for his political opponents. But his cuts to the growing renewable energy sector have made many lawmakers and companies fear that DOE could soon cancel funding for projects in Republican-led states. An internal DOE document suggests that the agency may terminate an additional $12 billion in Biden-era awards, including funding for two large projects in Louisiana and Texas to remove CO2 from the atmosphere.

Technology that removes CO2 is supported by oil and gas companies that want to use that captured gas to extract more crude from mature oil fields. One of the federal hubs would have been in the Louisiana district of Rep. Mike Johnson, the Republican House speaker.

In NY, most of the canceled funding would have benefited Democratic congressional districts. But some of the money would have benefited Republican districts including those of Representatives Nick Langworthy and Mike Lawler. DOE had awarded more than $26 million to two companies in Mr. Lawler’s Hudson Valley district, including a company developing advanced batteries.

In the Central NY district of Representative John Mannion, a Democrat, a factory that makes parts for electric heat pumps may no longer pursue a $25 million expansion after the Energy Department canceled a $5 million grant to help pay for the project. The expansion of the Bitzer Scroll plant would have created 20 jobs. “The whole thing of Trump bringing jobs back to America is completely running in reverse for us,” John Allcott, vice president of North American operations for Bitzer Scroll, said. “It’s just killing us.”

In September, the Energy Department sent the White House’s Office of Management and Budget a list of roughly $23 billion in funding that it had marked for potential termination. The Trump administration initially chose to slash a subset of those funds, about $7.5 billion, that were largely concentrated in blue states. “Nearly $8 billion in Green New Scam funding to fuel the Left’s climate agenda is being canceled,” Russell T. Vought, the White House budget director, wrote in a social media post.

In Georgia, the Trump administration canceled a $7 billion program intended to help low- and moderate-income families install rooftop solar panels. Across the country, electricity bills have increased. Yet Trump has rescinded billions of federal dollars for renewable energy like solar and wind power that could reduce the strain on working-class households. And the cuts are dealing a disproportionate blow to the Republican-led states that propelled him back to office.

The Solar for All program was established by the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. The program was designed to help more than 900,000 households get access to solar energy. The intent was to reduce the use of fossil fuels while also helping participants reduce their electric bill by $400 annually. Veteran energy analysts were surprised when EPA terminated the program as the beneficiaries were in Republican-led states like Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina.

“This program was the rainbows and puppies of clean energy — it was truly apolitical,” said Andy Posner, the founder and chief executive of Capital Good Fund, a nonprofit group that provides small loans to low-income people for projects such as home energy-efficiency. EPA Administrator Zeldin said in a video posted to social media that the program was a “boondoggle” that would waste “billions of green slush fund dollars.”

On average, residential customers of Georgia Power have seen their bills rise by $518 a year, or 33%, since 2023. Georgia residents now pay among the highest utility bills in the country, trailing only Alaska, Connecticut, Hawaii and West Virginia. Georgia Power has increased its residential rates six times in the past two years, largely to cover the costs of a nuclear power plant expansion that ran $17 billion over budget.

A lawsuit filed in September in federal court in Rhode Island challenged EPA’s termination of the Solar for All grants. The lead plaintiff is the Rhode Island AFL-CIO, a group of labor unions that had trained workers to install solar panels following a $49.3 million grant to the Rhode Island Office of Energy Resources. The complaint accused EPA of illegally revoking the grants without congressional approval. “We’re in court fighting because the E.P.A. ripped away this program from families with no basis,” said Nick Torrey, a senior attorney at the Southern Environmental Law Center. “There’s a lot at stake for this particular program and for the administration’s power over spending decisions overall.”

In September, an appeals court ruled against several nonprofit groups that had $16 billion in such grants frozen by EPA In a 2-1 ruling, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit found that it lacked jurisdiction to hear the case and that the Trump administration had acted legally in its attempts to claw back the funds.

Judge Neomi Rao, a Trump appointee, said that because the case was essentially a dispute between the government and grant recipients, it belonged in the Court of Federal Claims. The lawsuit filed in October is unlikely to face a similar setback, legal experts said, since it was not brought by the grant recipients.

The Trump administration said it intends to scrap climate-monitoring satellites to save money. The satellites, known as the Orbiting Carbon Observatory missions, represent an $800 million investment and are in “perfect health” according to a government report issued in January. It’s like buying a car “and then running it into a tree after a few years, just to save the price of a tank of gas,” said David Crisp, a former scientist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory who led the missions to launch the satellites. The satellites have more than a decade of life left in them, Dr. Crisp said.

In May 2025, the Trump administration proposed a fiscal year 2026 budget that included a nearly 25% overall reduction to NASA's budget, a cut of over $6 billion, and to cut spending for Earth and climate science in half. Bethany Stevens, the NASA spokeswoman, said the president’s 2026 budget aimed to realign the agency with the “core mission of space exploration.”

The two satellites provide precise global measurements of CO2. The data has been used in climate reports issued by both the US and the UN and has been an important resource for other countries as they assess ways to cut GHG emissions.

Before the Orbiting Carbon Observatory missions were approved by the George W. Bush administration in 2002, scientists relied on Earth-based sensors to measure atmospheric CO2. The longest-running monitoring station, the Mauna Loa observatory, will also be eliminated if the NOAA budget is cut as proposed.

Of the two orbiting OCOs, one (OCO2) could end up incinerating in the Earth’s atmosphere if it were decommissioned. The other monitoring device, OCO 3, orbits the Earth affixed to the International Space Station. Together, the two satellites produce data that helps scientists understand where atmospheric CO2 comes from, where it goes, and where plant life is thriving. The data can also be used to monitor wildfires, ocean health and agricultural outlooks. “We built these satellites and got them approved and got taxpayer dollars to build them because they serve critical functions in commerce, in national security, in food security, in water security,” Dr. Crisp said.

Without funding to operate them, the two missions are at risk of going offline along with three older missions — known as Terra, Aqua, and Aura — that are also still producing valuable climate and weather data. Another imperiled mission that monitors the atmosphere, Sage III, has been attached to the International Space Station since 2017.

The data stream likely will be interrupted as there are no other satellites with the same monitoring capabilities. “The measurement network that we currently have is very fragile and not as resilient as people think it is,” said Ben Poulter, a senior scientist studying GHG emissions with Spark Climate Solutions, a nonprofit group.

This scarcity was illustrated in 2023, when the Lahaina fire devastated Maui, Hawaii. Because the timing of satellites passing over didn’t line up with the blaze, Mr. Poulter said, “What you ended up having was one of the most catastrophic fires that the U.S. has had, and not enough observations from space.” Services provided by the satellites, like understanding disasters in real time or getting weather forecasts on our phones, is “something we take for granted.”

If you terminate one satellite mission and then try to start another one, it’s scientifically difficult to account for the gap in the data, said Steve Volz, assistant administrator for the NOAA’s Satellite and Information Service. “That’s why continuity and bridging missions across different generations is really important.”

Speaking at the United Nations General Assembly in late September, Trump not only called climate change the “greatest con job” he also said scientific consensus on global warming was created by “stupid people.” He then berated countries, including close US allies, for adopting renewable energy.

Wind and solar power are generally among the cheapest forms of energy in much of the world, according to independent energy analysts. “Trump continues to embarrass the U.S. on the global stage and undermine the interests of Americans at home,” said Gina McCarthy, who served as the US climate policy director under Biden. “He’s rejecting our government’s responsibility to protect Americans from the increasingly intense and frequent disasters linked to climate change that unleash havoc on our country.”

Taylor Rogers, a White House spokeswoman, defended Trump’s comments: “Whether it’s called global cooling, global warming, or climate change, the radical climate agenda continues to destroy many great countries around the world.”

European lawmakers say the expansion of clean energy ensures their energy security and reduces reliance on imported oil and gas. Trump wants Europeans to buy more US oil and gas. The administration has received a pledge from the EU to buy $250 billion in US energy every year through the rest of Trump’s term in exchange for some tariff relief.

The EU has a law that mandates a 55% reduction in its GHG emissions by 2030 and zeroing them out by 2050. Burgum called this “climate ideology” and said “We need to worry about the humans that are on the planet today. The real existential threat right now is not one degree of climate change” but the risk of losing the global race for artificial intelligence.

A new study by Oil Change International found that the US currently subsidizes the fossil-fuel industry nearly $31 billion per year. That figure has more than doubled since 2017. And it is likely a vast understatement, due to a lack of transparency and reliable data from government sources, as per the report.

The Wall Street Journal reported that Big Oil is getting a hefty return on its huge campaign contributions in 2024. ConocoPhillips, EOG Resources, Occidental Petroleum and Devon Energy recently told investors that thanks to Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill, they collectively expect to save more than $1.2 billion in taxes in 2025—and much more in the coming years. British giant BP, which operates in the U.S., said the tax savings would likely cancel any costs from tariffs.

Trump has signed executive orders to expand the burning and mining of coal, the dirtiest fossil fuel. “I’ve been right about everything and I’m telling you that if you don’t get away from the green energy scam, your country is going to fail,” he said.

Despite Trump’s remarks, the EU climate commissioner, Wopke Hoekstra, said that his 27-country bloc, is “doing the exact opposite of what the U.S. is doing, which, by the way, I find concerning and problematic.” He said the Trump administration on climate is “basically checking out.”

The lawmakers of the EU have yet to finalize their 2035 climate targets. It has tentatively agreed to reduce its emissions in the range of 66 to 72% by 2035, compared with 1990 levels. The EU is accelerating its ban on imports of Russian liquefied natural gas which may benefit American gas suppliers.

In late September, Judge Royce Lamberth of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia granted a preliminary injunction in a lawsuit that the Danish energy company Orsted, the developers of Revolution Wind, had filed challenging the Interior Department’s stop-work order. The injunction allowed work to resume while the case moves forward. The 65-turbine wind farm is 80% complete and sits off the coast of Rhode Island. It is a $6.2 billion dollar project that will generate electricity to power more than 350,000 homes in RI and Connecticut by next spring. The Trump administration could appeal the ruling.

The court’s decision is the first significant legal setback to Trump’s efforts to stifle the US offshore wind industry. The administration has also sought to rescind permits for offshore wind projects off the coasts of Massachusetts and Maryland.  The White House has also directed a half-dozen federal agencies to find new ways to thwart offshore wind as part of a governmentwide effort to suppress the industry (see Blog 60).

Every four years US intelligence officials have published Global Trends, a public document that predicts what challenges the US, and the world, will face in the coming decades. Past editions warned of threats and shifts that came to pass, including climate change, new immigration patterns and a pandemic. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence, led by Tulsi Gabbard, announced in late September that it is eliminating the group that compiles the report. Ms. Gabbard’s office said that the National Intelligence Council’s Strategic Futures Group had “neglected to fulfill the purpose it was created for” and had pursued a partisan political agenda, which officials suggest referred to climate change.

The elimination of the report and the team that crafted it was done with a stroke of a pen. If a future administration wants to revive either, it will be harder because the reports are based on months of work by intelligence officers working under the previous White House. A new administration will have to start from scratch and try to fill data gaps from other sources. Jake Sullivan, the Biden administration’s national security adviser, said “The United States is not going to be as prepared and as capable to contend with this challenge [climate change] going forward.”

In late September, The Trump administration outlined its plan to revive the mining and burning of coal. The Interior Department said it would open 13.1 million acres of federal land for coal mining and reduce the royalty rates for companies extracting coal. The Energy Department intends to offer $625 million to upgrade existing coal plants in the US, which have been closing as solar and wind farms are cheaper to operate and produce energy at less cost.

EPA said it intends to repeal dozens of Biden regulations to curb CO2, mercury and other pollutants from coal plants. The agency would also revise a regulation limiting wastewater pollution from power plants that the industry considers costly.

Energy production from coal plants once generated nearly half of America’s electricity, they produced 16% in 2024. Hundreds of coal plants have retired in the past 20 years as utilities switched to natural gas, wind and solar power. Stricter regulations on air and water pollution have increased the cost of burning coal. Coal mining, which causes air pollution, water contamination and black lung disease in coal miners, has also faced increased regulation. “This is an industry that was under assault,” said Secretary Burgum, who along with EPA administrator Zeldin, blamed regulations on what they described as an ideological war on coal. The officials described coal as an economic necessity. “In addition to drill, baby, drill, we need to mine, baby, mine,” Mr. Burgum said.

The growth of artificial intelligence and the data centers that require the immense amount of energy necessary to run AI is causing a surge in electricity demand which has led utilities to keep more than 50 coal-burning units open past their scheduled closure dates. As demand for energy increases and as the Trump administration attempts to loosen pollution limits on coal power, more plants may stay open and run more frequently. The high costs of doing so will be borne by consumers both in terms of higher bills and increased health consequences.

Wells Griffith, the undersecretary for energy, said that a recent Energy Department study found that if too many coal plants retire, America’s grid faced a higher risk of blackouts. Clean-energy groups and Democratic-led states objected to the study for down-playing the ability of fast-growing sources like wind, solar, batteries and natural gas to supply the necessary energy.

An enormous solar power project in the Nevada desert that would have been one of the world’s largest has been canceled, according to the Interior Department. No reason for the cancellation was given.  It may be the latest casualty of the Trump administration’s efforts to thwart the construction of solar and wind energy projects on public lands.

The project, known as Esmeralda 7, would have comprised a sprawling network of solar panels and batteries across 118,000 acres of federally owned land northwest of Las Vegas. It was expected to produce up to 6.2 gigawatts of energy, enough to power nearly two million homes.

The Interior Department is now requiring dozens of formerly routine approvals for wind and solar projects to undergo new layers of review by the interior secretary’s office, which is causing significant permitting delays. The agency is also opening investigations into bird deaths caused by wind farms and withdrawing millions of acres of federal waters previously available for leasing by offshore wind companies.

At the same time, the Trump administration has continued to approve permits for new oil and gas drilling and to encourage coal mining. During the government shutdown, the Interior Department designated employees who process oil drilling permits as excepted from the shutdown while other workers were furloughed (sent home without pay).

The International Monetary Fund calculated the total U.S. subsidy of the US oil and gas industry, including direct and implicit costs, was approximately $757 billion in 2022. According to the Center for Responsive Politics' OpenSecrets, a nonpartisan group that tracks political spending, the oil and gas industry's contributions in the 2023–2024 election cycle was $248.7 million. About 88% went to Republicans, more than four times the amount contributed to Democrats.

After the Trump administration stopped updating a database tracking the costs of the extreme weather that caused at least $1 billion in damage in the US, a non-profit group, Climate Central, revived it. The average number of billion-dollar disasters has increased from three per year during the 1980s to 19/year over the last 10 years, the data show.

Record-breaking impacts of climate change continue to accelerate as humanity fails to decrease its carbon emissions. One notable record is the growing number of expensive extreme weather events. In the first six months of 2025, disasters in the US caused more than $101.4 billion in damage. That is the most expensive start to any year on record. Fourteen disasters each caused at least $1 billion in damage through the first half of 2025.

Trump has not only stopped accounting, but he has also stopped Federal Emergency Management Agency from providing aid and said he will shift the financial and logistical burden of disaster relief and recovery from the federal government to the states.

The database had been used by the insurance industry, policymakers and researchers to understand and plan for a future which almost certainly will include increasing numbers of extreme storms, floods, fires and other hazards of increasing intensity and devastation.

Andrew Rumbach, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute who studies climate change, said the billion-dollar disaster list “has been one of the most effective bridges to the public communicating the increasing costs of disasters.” Damage from the Los Angeles wildfires exceeded $60 billion, according to the Climate Central report. That was nearly twice as costly as fires that burned through Northern California, including the town of Paradise, in 2018. If the database is updated in January, it will include the deadly July 4 floods in central Texas that killed at least 136 people and caused around $20 billion in damages.

The above views are my own.

Teraine Okpoko assisted with the Facts on the Ground.

Carl Howard, Co-chair, Global Climate Change Committee

NYS Bar Association – Environmental & Energy Law Section

Follow me at: @Howard.Carl