Clean energy, carbon capture, green hydrogen, and the tech racing to cool the planet.
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Residents of Hawaii's western islands spent a third consecutive week under storm alerts as one powerful cyclone after another formed in El Nino-warmed Pacific waters.
The annual bulletin says conventional pollution models may undercount fire-related deaths by as much as 93 percent, complicating the case for mass-based air quality targets.
Entire communities have shut schools and workplaces as smoke from routine land-clearing fires drifts across national borders once again.
Panama and Peru are under official emergency declarations as forecasters expect the Pacific's strengthening warming pattern to approach the most intense levels seen since modern record keeping began.
With more than 1,300 dead and 5,000 missing after August glacial floods, Kathmandu is pressing major emitters to fund recovery as an obligation, pointing to a damage bill estimated near $2.6 billion.
The assessment, led by Inger Andersen, warns that warming is already near 1.4 degrees and rising about 0.25 degrees each decade, and it calls on the heaviest emitters to zero out their releases first and then remove more carbon than they add.
The world's biggest emitter has reached a symbolic turning point in how it builds power plants, even as its coal fleet keeps running around the clock. Capacity figures tell only part of the story, because panels generate far fewer hours than boilers, and the real test of the milestone lies in storage, transmission and the grid's willingness to absorb a steep daily solar ramp.
The new winter minimum for grid demand, reached at the height of a sunny afternoon, highlights how fast household panels are eroding the business of large generators and stiffening the case for storage and flexible demand.
Sales of debt earmarked for climate projects hit a quarterly peak of $193 billion, powered by a 34% jump from European issuers, according to Moody's. The regional divide shows capital rushing toward Europe's green rules while the United States retreats from climate finance.
A study published in Science on August 27 reconstructed 1,000 years of sea surface temperature from Galapagos corals and found El Nino variability is about 36% greater than pre-industrial levels, pointing to human-caused warming as the driver.
Forecasters warned of 110°F heat in the Southwest, flash flooding in the Mid-Atlantic, and active wildfires in the Pacific Northwest on August 27, capping a summer that ESA data shows was the second-warmest globally on record.
Thailand plans to generate 60 percent of its electricity from solar, wind, and hydro within 25 years, double its previous goal, as the Iran war pushes the country away from imported gas, Bloomberg reported.
The Natural Resources Defense Council published analysis on August 25 projecting that Trump's fossil fuel agenda will cost $700 billion in lost clean-energy investment, add 69,000 early deaths over a decade, and double power-sector CO2 by 2035.
The Copernicus Climate Change Service said average sea-surface temperatures reached 21.10°C on August 22, edging past the March 2024 record and confirming a 'super' El Niño still some way from its expected peak between November and January.
Global mean sea-surface temperature hit a record 21.18°C on August 23, 2026, surpassing the previous record from August 2023 by 0.07°C, according to NOAA and the Copernicus Marine Service. The Guardian and AP linked the new record to a strengthening El Niño and warn of cascading effects on coral reefs and storm intensity.
The Supreme Court granted cert in Suncor Energy v. Boulder County on August 22 and will hear oral argument in its October sitting. A ruling for the energy companies could shut down more than two dozen similar state-law climate suits and shift billions in adaptation costs onto local taxpayers.
The UK Met Office said on August 21 that the developing El Niño is on track to peak above 3 °C above normal in the tropical Pacific — 'unheard-of in modern climate records' — and will very likely make 2027 the hottest year on record globally. Wildfires in Indonesia are already approaching 1997–98 emission levels.
A World Weather Attribution analysis published August 20 found that human-caused climate change added roughly 2°C of warming to the Mediterranean and 1.4°C to the seas around western Europe this summer. The findings are the clearest attribution signal yet that coastal ecosystems and extreme weather are now structurally reshaped.
Adam Scaife says he has 'never seen an El Niño signal this intense in our forecasts' — the Met Office expects 2027 to replace 2024 as the hottest year on record, while Indonesia is already burning through 200,000+ hectares and Sri Lanka is trucking water to 72,000 people.
NOAA's August 13 update puts the probability of the developing Super El Niño becoming the strongest on record at nearly 70 percent, with global sea-surface temperatures already at a new preliminary high as of August 5. The same week, Iran reported more than 30 deaths from August 12–13 flash floods that swept across multiple provinces.
A Stanford-led modeling study published August 18 in The Lancet Planetary Health finds that elderly people face far more dangerous heat than existing models predict. At 1.5°C of warming, 22 percent of people over 60 — a billion people — would be exposed to unsafe heat for at least a month every year; at 3°C, the worst-hit regions would face dangerous heat day and night for three straight months.