Arctic seals are being pushed closer to extinction by climate change and more than half of bird species around the world are declining under pressure from deforestation and agricultural expansion, according to an annual assessment from the International Union for Conservation of Nature.
One bright spot is green sea turtles, which have recovered substantially thanks to decades of conservation efforts, the IUCN said Friday as it released its latest Red List of Threatened Species.
While many animals are increasingly at risk of disappearing forever, the updated list shows how species can come back from the brink with dedicated effort, Rima Jabado, deputy chair of the IUCN Species Survival Commission, told The Associated Press.
“Hope and concern go hand in hand in this work,” Jabado wrote by email. “The same persistence that brought back the green sea turtle can be mirrored in small, everyday actions — supporting sustainable choices, backing conservation initiatives, and urging leaders to follow through on their environmental promises.”
The list is updated every year by teams of scientists assessing data on creatures around the world. The scope of the work is enormous and important for science, said Andrew Farnsworth, a visiting scientist at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology who studies bird migration and wasn’t involved with the IUCN report.
“Every time one is done and every time there’s revision, there’s more information, and there’s more ability to answer questions” on species, some of which are still largely a mystery to researchers, Farnsworth said.
Because all the marine mammals native to the Arctic — seals, whales and polar bears — rely on the habitat provided by sea ice, they’re all at risk as it diminishes because of human-caused climate change, said Kit Kovacs, co-chair of IUCN’s Species Survival Commission Pinniped Specialist Group, which focuses on seals.
The three species highlighted in the latest IUCN report — harp, hooded and bearded seals — have been moved up to a designation of greater concern in the latest update, indicating they are increasingly threatened by extinction, Kovacs said.
The same melting of glaciers and sea ice destroying seal habitats also “generally will bring escalation in extreme weather events, which are already impacting people around the globe,” wrote Kovacs.
“Acting to help seals is acting to help humanity when it comes to climate change,” Kovacs said.
The update also highlighted Madagascar, West Africa and Central America, where Schlegel’s asity, the black-casqued hornbill and the tail-bobbing northern nightingale-wren were all moved to near-threatened status. Those are three specific birds in trouble, but numbers are dropping for around three-fifths of birds globally.
Deforestation of tropical forests is one of a “depressing litany of threats” to birds, a list that includes agricultural expansion and intensification, competition from invasive species and climate change, said Stuart Butchart, chief scientist at BirdLife International.
“The fact that 61% of the world’s birds are declining is an alarm bell that we can’t afford to ignore,” Butchart said.
The annual U.N. climate summit will be held in November in Belem, Brazil, with much attention on the Amazon and the value of tropical forests to humans and animals. But Farnsworth, of Cornell, said he was “not so confident” that world’s leaders would take decisive action to protect imperiled bird species.
“I would like to think things like birds are nonpartisan, and you can find common ground,” he said. “But it’s not easy.”
One success story is the rebound of green sea turtles in many parts of the world’s oceans. Experts see that as a bright spot because it shows how effective human interventions, like legal protections and conservation programs, can be.
Still, “it’s important to note that conservation efforts of sea turtles can take decades before you realize the fruits of that labor,” said Justin Perrault, vice president of research at Loggerhead Marinelife Center in Juno Beach, Florida, who wasn’t involved with the IUCN report.
The overall success with green sea turtles should be celebrated and used as an example with other species, some of which, like hawksbills and leatherbacks, aren’t doing nearly as well, said Nicolas Pilcher, executive director of the Marine Research Foundation.
And even for green sea turtles, areas still remain where climate change and other factors like erosion are damaging habitats, Pilcher said, and some of those are poorer communities that receive less conservation funding.
But in the places where they have recovered, it’s “a great story of, actually, we can do something about this,” Pilcher said. “We can. We can make a difference.”
The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump was passed over for the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday despite jockeying from his fellow Republicans, various world leaders and — most vocally — himself.
Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado was awarded the prize. The Norwegian Nobel Committee said it was honoring her “for her tireless work promoting democratic rights for the people of Venezuela and for her struggle to achieve a just and peaceful transition from dictatorship to democracy.”
Trump, who has long coveted the prestigious prize, has been outspoken about his desire for the honor during both of his presidential terms, particularly lately as he takes credit for ending conflicts around the world. He has expressed doubts that the Nobel committee would ever grant him the award.
“They’ll have to do what they do. Whatever they do is fine. I know this: I didn’t do it for that. I did it because I saved a lot of lives,” Trump said Thursday.
The Hostages Families Forum in Israel issued a statement Friday continuing to support Trump. “President Trump’s unprecedented achievements in peacemaking this past year speak for themselves, and no award or lack thereof can diminish the profound impact he has had on our families and on global peace,” they said.
Although Trump received a number of nominations for the prize, many of them occurred after the Feb. 1 deadline for the 2025 award, which fell just a week and a half into his second term. His name was, however, put forward in December by Republican Rep. Claudia Tenney of New York, her office said in a statement, for his brokering of the Abraham Accords, which normalized relations between Israel and several Arab states in 2020.
Nevertheless, Trump and his supporters are likely to view the decision to pass him over for the award as a deliberate affront to the U.S. leader, particularly after the president’s involvement in getting Israel and Hamas to initiate the first phase of ending their devastating two-year-old war.
A long history of lobbying for the prize
Jørgen Watne Frydnes, chair of the Norwegian Nobel committee, said the committee has seen various campaigns in its long history of awarding the peace prize.
“We receive thousands and thousands of letters every year of people wanting to say what for them leads to peace,” he said. “This committee sits in a room filled with the portraits of all laureates, and that room is filled with both courage and integrity. So we base only our decision on the work and the will of Alfred Nobel.”
The peace prize, first awarded in 1901, was created partly to encourage ongoing peace efforts. Alfred Nobel stipulated in his will that the prize should go to someone “who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.”
Three sitting U.S. presidents have won the Nobel Peace Prize: Theodore Roosevelt in 1906, Woodrow Wilson in 1919 and Barack Obama in 2009. Jimmy Carter won the prize in 2002, a full two decades after leaving office. Former Vice President Al Gore received the prize in 2007.
Obama, who was a focus of Trump’s attacks well before the Republican was elected, won the prize early in his tenure as president.
“He got the prize for doing nothing,” Trump said of Obama on Thursday. “They gave it to Obama for doing absolutely nothing but destroying our country.”
Wars in Gaza and elsewhere
As one of his reasons for deserving the award, Trump often says he has ended seven wars, though some of the conflicts the president claims to have resolved were merely tensions and his role in easing them is disputed.
But while there is hope for the end to Israel and Hamas’ war, with Israel saying a ceasefire agreement with Hamas came into effect Friday, much remains uncertain about the aspects of the broader plan, including whether and how Hamas will disarm and who will govern Gaza. And little progress seems to have been made on the war between Russia and Ukraine, a conflict Trump claimed during the 2024 campaign that he could end in one day — he later said he made that remark in jest.
Trump invited Russian President Vladimir Putin to Alaska in August — but not Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy — for a summit aimed at reaching peace, but he left empty-handed, and the war started by Russia’s invasion in 2022 has since raged on.
As Trump pushes for peaceful resolutions to conflicts abroad, the country he governs remains deeply divided and politically fraught. Trump has kicked off what he hopes to be the largest deportation program in American history to remove immigrants in the U.S. illegally. He is using the levers of government, including the Justice Department, to go after his perceived political enemies. He has sent the military into U.S. cities over local opposition to stop crime and crack down on immigration enforcement.
He withdrew the United States from the landmark Paris climate agreement, dealing a blow to worldwide efforts to combat global warming. He touched off global trade wars with his on-again, off-again tariffs, which he wields as a threat to bend other countries and companies to his will. He asserted presidential war powers by declaring cartels to be unlawful combatants and launching lethal strikes on boats in the Caribbean that he alleged were carrying drugs.
The full list of people nominated is secret, but anyone who submits a nomination is free to talk about it. Trump’s detractors say supporters, foreign leaders and others are submitting Trump’s name for nomination for the prize — and, specifically, announcing it publicly — not because he deserves it but because they see it as a way to manipulate him and stay in his good graces.
Others who formally submitted a nomination for Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize — but after this year’s deadline — include Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Manet and Pakistan’s government, all citing his work in helping end conflicts in their regions.
Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
CANBERRA (Reuters) -Australia’s Queensland state government said on Friday it would run coal power plants at least into the 2040s, reversing a previous plan to pivot rapidly to renewables and in turn making national emissions reduction targets harder to achieve.
The centre-right Liberal National Party won last year’s election in Queensland, a huge chunk of land in Australia’s northeast where more than 60% of electricity comes from coal-fired plants that are mostly owned by the state.
“The former Labor government’s ideological decision to close coal units by 2035, regardless of their condition, is officially abolished,” said Queensland Treasurer and Energy Minister David Janetzki, laying out a five-year energy plan.
“Queensland’s coal-fired fleet is the youngest in the country and state-owned coal generators will continue to operate for as long as they are needed in the system and supported by the market,” he said.
The announcement highlights the divide between Australia’s major political parties on climate policies.
Labor, which holds power in the federal parliament and most states and territories, advocates the rapid development of renewable energy.
The federal government committed last month to cutting national emissions by 62%-70% from 2005 levels by 2035. Queensland’s previous Labor government said 80% of the state’s power would be from renewables by then, and it would have “no regular reliance on coal”.
Many Liberal and National Party figures, however, oppose what they see as a too-rapid rollout of renewable energy that would blight the landscape and hobble the economy.
Janetzki said sticking with coal generation in Queensland – a major coal producer – would save consumers money.
His plan envisions running coal plants at least as long as they were designed to run, which in several cases is until around the 2040s. The plants’ lifespans could also be extended where needed, according to the plan.
The five-year roadmap also calls for construction of a new gas-fired plant in the state and commits A$1.6 billion ($1.1 billion) to maintain the state’s coal, gas and hydroelectric plants, and A$400 million to drive private investment in renewables, gas and energy storage.
“This is a sensible and pragmatic plan, built on economics and engineering, not ideology,” Janetzki said.
U.S. President Donald Trump’s bid to win the Nobel Peace Prize has drawn added attention to the annual guessing game over who its next laureate will be.Longtime Nobel watchers say Trump’s prospects remain remote despite a flurry of high-profile nominations and some notable foreign policy interventions for which he has taken personal credit.Experts say the Norwegian Nobel Committee typically focuses on the durability of peace, the promotion of international fraternity and the quiet work of institutions that strengthen those goals. Trump’s own record might even work against him, they said, citing his apparent disdain for multilateral institutions and his disregard for global climate change concerns.Still, the U.S. leader has repeatedly sought the Nobel spotlight since his first term, most recently telling United Nations delegates late last month “everyone says that I should get the Nobel Peace Prize.”A person cannot nominate themself.Public lobbying campaigns but a private committee decisionTrump’s boasts and previous high-profile nominations make him the blockbuster name on the list of bookmakers’ favorites. But it’s unclear whether his name comes up in conversation when the five-member Nobel committee, appointed by Norway’s parliament, meets behind closed doors.Trump has been nominated several times by people within the U.S. as well as politicians abroad since 2018. His name also was put forward in December by U.S. Rep. Claudia Tenney (R-NY), her office said in a statement, for his brokering of the Abraham Accords, which normalized relations between Israel and several Arab states in 2020.Nominations made this year from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Pakistan’s government occurred after the Feb. 1 deadline for the 2025 award.Trump has said repeatedly that he “deserves” the prize and claims to have “ended seven wars.” Last week, he teased the possibility of ending an eighth war if Israel and Hamas agree to his peace plan aimed at concluding the nearly two-year war in Gaza.“Nobody’s ever done that,” he told a gathering of military leaders at Marine Corps Base Quantico in Virginia. “Will you get the Nobel Prize? Absolutely not. They’ll give it to some guy that didn’t do a damn thing.”Israel and Hamas have since agreed to the first phase of the peace plan for Gaza, paving the way for a pause in the fighting and the release of the remaining hostages held by Hamas in exchange for Palestinian prisoners. In the early hours of Thursday, families of hostages and their supporters started chanting “Nobel prize to Trump” as they gathered in Tel Aviv’s hostages square.Sustained peace efforts prioritized over quick winsNobel veterans say the committee prioritizes sustained, multilateral efforts over quick diplomatic wins. Theo Zenou, a historian and research fellow at the Henry Jackson Society, said Trump’s efforts have not yet been proven to be long-lasting.“There’s a huge difference between getting fighting to stop in the short term and resolving the root causes of the conflict,” Zenou said.Zenou also highlighted Trump’s dismissive stance on climate change as out-of-step with what many, including the Nobel committee, see as the planet’s greatest long-term peace challenge.“I don’t think they would award the most prestigious prize in the world to someone who does not believe in climate change,” Zenou said. “When you look at previous winners who have been bridge-builders, embodied international cooperation and reconciliation: These are not words we associate with Donald Trump.”Avoiding political pressureThe Nobel committee was met with fierce criticism in 2009 for giving then-U.S. President Barack Obama the prize barely nine months into his first term. Many argued Obama had not been in office long enough to have an impact worthy of the Nobel.And Trump’s own outspokenness about possibly winning the award might work against him: The committee won’t want to be seen as caving in to political pressure, said Nina Græger, director of the Peace Research Institute Oslo.Trump’s prospects for the prize this year are “a long shot,” she said. “His rhetoric does not point in a peaceful perspective.”The Nobel announcements began with the prize in medicine on Monday, and continued with physics on Tuesday and chemistry on Wednesday. The literature prize is being awarded on Thursday. The winner of the prize in economics will be announced on Monday.
STAVANGER, Norway —
U.S. President Donald Trump’s bid to win the Nobel Peace Prize has drawn added attention to the annual guessing game over who its next laureate will be.
Longtime Nobel watchers say Trump’s prospects remain remote despite a flurry of high-profile nominations and some notable foreign policy interventions for which he has taken personal credit.
Experts say the Norwegian Nobel Committee typically focuses on the durability of peace, the promotion of international fraternity and the quiet work of institutions that strengthen those goals. Trump’s own record might even work against him, they said, citing his apparent disdain for multilateral institutions and his disregard for global climate change concerns.
Still, the U.S. leader has repeatedly sought the Nobel spotlight since his first term, most recently telling United Nations delegates late last month “everyone says that I should get the Nobel Peace Prize.”
A person cannot nominate themself.
Public lobbying campaigns but a private committee decision
Trump’s boasts and previous high-profile nominations make him the blockbuster name on the list of bookmakers’ favorites. But it’s unclear whether his name comes up in conversation when the five-member Nobel committee, appointed by Norway’s parliament, meets behind closed doors.
Trump has been nominated several times by people within the U.S. as well as politicians abroad since 2018. His name also was put forward in December by U.S. Rep. Claudia Tenney (R-NY), her office said in a statement, for his brokering of the Abraham Accords, which normalized relations between Israel and several Arab states in 2020.
Nominations made this year from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Pakistan’s government occurred after the Feb. 1 deadline for the 2025 award.
Trump has said repeatedly that he “deserves” the prize and claims to have “ended seven wars.” Last week, he teased the possibility of ending an eighth war if Israel and Hamas agree to his peace plan aimed at concluding the nearly two-year war in Gaza.
“Nobody’s ever done that,” he told a gathering of military leaders at Marine Corps Base Quantico in Virginia. “Will you get the Nobel Prize? Absolutely not. They’ll give it to some guy that didn’t do a damn thing.”
Israel and Hamas have since agreed to the first phase of the peace plan for Gaza, paving the way for a pause in the fighting and the release of the remaining hostages held by Hamas in exchange for Palestinian prisoners. In the early hours of Thursday, families of hostages and their supporters started chanting “Nobel prize to Trump” as they gathered in Tel Aviv’s hostages square.
Sustained peace efforts prioritized over quick wins
Nobel veterans say the committee prioritizes sustained, multilateral efforts over quick diplomatic wins. Theo Zenou, a historian and research fellow at the Henry Jackson Society, said Trump’s efforts have not yet been proven to be long-lasting.
“There’s a huge difference between getting fighting to stop in the short term and resolving the root causes of the conflict,” Zenou said.
Zenou also highlighted Trump’s dismissive stance on climate change as out-of-step with what many, including the Nobel committee, see as the planet’s greatest long-term peace challenge.
“I don’t think they would award the most prestigious prize in the world to someone who does not believe in climate change,” Zenou said. “When you look at previous winners who have been bridge-builders, embodied international cooperation and reconciliation: These are not words we associate with Donald Trump.”
Avoiding political pressure
The Nobel committee was met with fierce criticism in 2009 for giving then-U.S. President Barack Obama the prize barely nine months into his first term. Many argued Obama had not been in office long enough to have an impact worthy of the Nobel.
And Trump’s own outspokenness about possibly winning the award might work against him: The committee won’t want to be seen as caving in to political pressure, said Nina Græger, director of the Peace Research Institute Oslo.
Trump’s prospects for the prize this year are “a long shot,” she said. “His rhetoric does not point in a peaceful perspective.”
The Nobel announcements began with the prize in medicine on Monday, and continued with physics on Tuesday and chemistry on Wednesday. The literature prize is being awarded on Thursday. The winner of the prize in economics will be announced on Monday.
Susumu Kitagawa, Richard Robson and Omar M. Yaghi were awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for developing a new form of molecular architecture called metal-organic frameworks that can harvest water from desert air, capture carbon dioxide, store toxic gases or catalyze chemical reactions.
The structures, metal ions connected by carbon-based linkers, have large holes that allow other molecules to flow in and out, almost like rooms in a house. They can capture and release gases, water or other substances. Changing the size or shape of its components can make a countless amount of new frameworks designed for specific substances, reactions or to conduct electricity.
Standing by a barn brimming with hundreds of bleating sheep, Jesus del Socorro Cuevas leads the far right’s charge against “dictatorial” EU environmental regulation in his corner of rural Spain.
“The enlightened gentlemen of Europe are always coming up with new things,” thundered Socorro Cuevas, 63, a long-time farmer who is the far-right Vox party’s agriculture councillor in the central municipality of Socuellamos.
“A farmer cannot dedicate himself to agriculture,” he told AFP as tractors rumbled past and dogs snoozed on the ground at a party supporter’s farm.
“You have to tell them what you do every day, what you prune, if you collect the vine shoots, if you plough, if you fertilise… freedom no longer exists.”
The third-largest party in Spain’s hung parliament, Vox has made the battle against “climate fanaticism” a rallying cry in a bid to harvest rural votes from mainstream parties.
Its climate-sceptic campaigning mirrors that of like-minded formations across Europe as the issue of climate change splits along right-left lines.
Spain sweltered through its hottest summer on record this year, an example of the extreme weather that scientists say human-driven climate change is exacerbating.
The European Union’s Green Deal, a flagship law legally binding the bloc to becoming carbon neutral by 2050, is the main target of Vox’s scorn.
“Globalist policies” such as the Green Deal and the 2015 Paris climate agreement “strangle our agricultural system”, said Ricardo Chamorro, a Vox MP who sits on the Spanish parliament’s agriculture committee.
Rodrigo Alonso, Vox’s national spokesman for work and agriculture, said the strict requirements of the Green Deal were causing European-grown goods to be displaced by ones made outside the bloc using cheaper labour and laxer environmental standards.
“Principles of EU preference are not respected, the single market is not respected,” he added, denouncing “unfair competition”.
– ‘Sector will disappear’ –
Mass protests by farmers shook Europe last year over environmental constraints and non-EU imports which producers say undercut them and flout the climate and animal welfare rules they must meet.
Buoyed by the discontent, far-right parties like Vox made gains at subsequent European Parliament elections.
Clad in blue overalls, farmer Julio Torremocha Marchante said he used to back Spain’s main conservative Popular Party (PP) but switched to Vox around 10 years ago.
He recounted how, faced with extra bureaucratic and financial burdens, he gave up on organic agriculture, saying activity “was going elsewhere” amid competition from larger farms.
“Family businesses in the livestock sector will disappear,” the 61-year-old told AFP on his modest holding of around 400 sheep and 16 hectares (39 acres) of vineyard.
The central Castilla-La Mancha region to which it belongs is the land of literary lore — immortalised by Miguel de Cervantes’s 17th-century novel Don Quixote, about an idealistic knight roaming the area’s flat expanses.
But a prosaic reality has replaced the poetic chivalry of yore for so-called “empty Spain” — places such as Socuellamos, where around 12,000 people live.
These vast but sparsely populated regions suffer demographic decline and depend heavily on agriculture.
– ‘Only party helping us’ –
“Vox has always had a discourse that has tried to over-represent the needs of the rural world,” according to Javier Lorente Fontaneda, a politics expert and professor at Madrid’s King Juan Carlos University.
Historically conservative rural areas have provided fertile terrain for its growth, while in the short term it has exploited a “protest vote” spurred by “discontent about depopulation, the lack of opportunities”, he explained.
Even as the EU supports farmers through the Common Agricultural Policy, they “feel very overwhelmed and heavily scrutinised” by the bloc, he added.
“And Vox is the only party in Spain that is truly critical of the European Union.”
In a sign of Vox’s inroads, the left-leaning UPA farming union warned the Green Deal was being “targeted by major disinformation campaigns that have intoxicated the professionals of the primary sector”.
Miguel Bravo Ruiz, another farmer in Castilla-La Mancha, does not vote for Vox but understands why some of his peers have.
“Vox up to now is the only party helping us, at least in word,” the 60-year-old told AFP by telephone.
Vox has wielded power at local and regional level, usually in coalition with the PP, as in Socuellamos town hall.
Some polls have put it close to 20 percent of the vote, making it a potential kingmaker if the next election scheduled for 2027 yields another hung parliament.
“There is scepticism and I think that is bringing us many votes,” MP Chamorro said. “The working classes and the people in the villages increasingly view Vox with sympathy.”
Inhalers that provide fast-acting treatment for people with certain respiratory conditions are contributing to greenhouse gas emissions, which can worsen both climate change and the conditions themselves, according to new research.
In the study, published Monday in the Journal of the American Medical Association, researchers found inhalers approved for asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, or COPD, generated an estimated 24.9 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent emissions in the United States from 2014 to 2024. This is equivalent to the emissions of about 530,000 gas-powered cars each year, according to the study.
“Scaled across tens of millions of inhalers dispensed annually, these emissions drive global warming, exacerbating the very respiratory conditions inhalers are meant to relieve,” authors of a supplemental editorial note wrote of the findings.
Researchers found metered-dose inhalers — the boot-shaped treatment modality many picture — were the most harmful to the environment, accounting for 98% of emissions over the decadelong period.
But it’s not the medication that’s the problem. These inhalers contain hydrofluoroalkane propellants, which are potent greenhouse gases widely used in products like aerosol sprays, the study explained.
“Inhalers add to the growing carbon footprint of the US healthcare system, putting many patients with chronic respiratory disease at risk,” lead author Dr. William Feldman, a pulmonologist and health services researcher at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, said in a news release. “On the upside, there is tremendous opportunity to make changes that protect both patients and the planet by utilizing lower-emission alternatives.”
The study found other types of inhalers — such as dry inhalers and soft powder mist inhalers — are less harmful, delivering medication to the lungs without the need for propellants.
BRASILIA, Brazil — BRASILIA, Brazil (AP) — Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva asked U.S. President Donald Trump during a phone conversation Monday to lift the 40% tariff imposed by the U.S. government on Brazilian imports.
The leaders spoke for 30 minutes, exchanged phone numbers, and Lula reiterated his invitation for Trump to attend the upcoming climate summit in Belem, according to a statement from Lula’s office.
The Trump administration had imposed a 40% tariff on Brazilian products in July on top of a 10% tariff imposed earlier. Lula reminded Trump that Brazil was one of three G20 countries with which the U.S. maintains a trade surplus.
The Trump administration justified the tariffs saying that Brazil’s policies and criminal prosecution of former President Jair Bolsonaro constitute an economic emergency. Earlier this month Bolsonaro was convicted of attempting a coup after losing his bid for reelection in 2022 and a panel of the Supreme Court sentenced him to 27 years and three months in prison.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
BRASILIA, Brazil (AP) — Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva asked U.S. President Donald Trump during a phone conversation Monday to lift the 40% tariff imposed by the U.S. government on Brazilian imports.
The leaders spoke for 30 minutes, exchanged phone numbers, and Lula reiterated his invitation for Trump to attend the upcoming climate summit in Belem, according to a statement from Lula’s office.
The Trump administration had imposed a 40% tariff on Brazilian products in July on top of a 10% tariff imposed earlier. Lula reminded Trump that Brazil was one of three G20 countries with which the U.S. maintains a trade surplus.
The Trump administration justified the tariffs saying that Brazil’s policies and criminal prosecution of former President Jair Bolsonaro constitute an economic emergency. Earlier this month Bolsonaro was convicted of attempting a coup after losing his bid for reelection in 2022 and a panel of the Supreme Court sentenced him to 27 years and three months in prison.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
The planet would be a whole lot hotter if it weren’t for fecal pellets. Across the world’s oceans, tiny organisms known as phytoplankton harvest the sun’s energy, gobbling up carbon dioxide and releasing oxygen. They’re eaten by little animals called zooplankton, which poop out pellets that sink to the seafloor. What is essentially a giant toilet, then, flushes carbon at the surface into the depths, where it stays locked away from the atmosphere, thus keeping the amount of CO2 up there in check.
But as humans pump ever more carbon into the sky, relentlessly raising ocean temperatures, worrying signals are flashing that this commode could be changing in profound ways. Consider the northeastern Pacific, off the coast of Alaska, where two major heat waves took hold of the sea, one from 2013 to 2015 and the other from 2019 to 2020. A new study found the two events transformed the composition of phytoplankton and zooplankton, essentially clogging the toilet and preventing the downward transport of carbon into the depths.
“These long-term studies help put everything into context and also really sound the alarms,” said Anya Štajner, a PhD candidate in biological oceanography at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, who wasn’t involved in the research. “The ocean is changing. And not only is it going to affect the ocean — it’s going to affect the life in the ocean. And eventually that’s going to affect us, because we rely on the ocean for our air, our food, our climate regulation.”
Of course, each bit of the world’s oceans has its own unique chemistry, biology, and ecology, so what happens there might not happen everywhere. But with these bursts of heat, this swath of the sea saw declines in its ability to sequester the gas that’s heating the planet. That’s a precarious situation, given that the oceans capture a quarter of humanity’s CO2 emissions. “While we can generalize that maybe what we saw here would happen in general across other marine heat waves in the ocean, like the carbon accumulation, I think it’s important to assess that regionally as well,” said Colleen Kellogg, a microbial oceanographer at Canada’s Hakai Institute and co-author of the paper, which published today in the journal Nature Communications.
The researchers tapped a decade of data from Biogeochemical Argo floats, which autonomously wander up and down the water column taking readings of ocean chemistry. When they reach the surface, they ping that data to a satellite. In this way, the scientists got a 10-year stream of readings without having to constantly be on a boat in the northeastern subarctic Pacific Ocean, which is not known for hospitable winters.
The two ocean heat waves started like those we experience on land, with the atmosphere warming things up. Indeed, the ocean has absorbed 90 percent of the additional heat that humans have created. Accordingly, while in the 19th century just 2 percent of the ocean surface experienced bouts of extreme temperatures, that figure is now well over 50 percent. Such events will only grow more common and more intense unless humanity dramatically reduces its greenhouse gas emissions, and fast. As it happens, the northern Pacific has once again been smashing records of late, perhaps in part due to regulations in 2020 cutting the amount of aerosols generated by ships, which usually cool the planet by reflecting the sun’s energy back into space.
Like our most ferocious atmospheric blasts of heat, a lack of wind during the two events made matters even worse. Typically, after the seawater warms in the spring and summer, winter winds blow across the surface, pushing it along. This forces deeper, cooler waters to race upward to fill the void, keeping the water column more uniform, temperature-wise. This didn’t happen during both heat waves, and the sea remained more stagnant, as it normally does later in the year.
Because warmer water is less dense, it remains at the surface, creating a sort of cap. “Then in the subsequent spring and summer, that water is even warmer, because it didn’t cool the winter before,” said Mariana Bif, a marine biogeochemist at the University of Miami and lead author of the paper. (Bif conducted the research while at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute.) “So the impact of marine heat waves starts in the atmosphere, and then it’s transferred into the ocean.”
The two heating events were not created equal, though. The first coincided with an El Niño — a band of warm water off the coast of South America — that raised temperatures in the northeast Pacific even higher. The second saw a marked decrease in salinity due to changes in ocean circulation. Because water with lower salinity is less dense, it hangs around the surface, as the saltier stuff sinks. This further strengthened the warm cap.
The lack of winter churning also meant the nutrients typically drawn from deeper waters were cut off, denying the phytoplankton in that cap of the elements they needed to grow. Together, the high heat and low nutrients at the surface totally changed the environment for the organisms living and processing carbon there.
That transformed the ecosystem. Like plants on land, different types of phytoplankton need different amounts of nutrients, and in different proportions. “Usually, for example, in areas where you have this great mixing and great nutrients, you have a bunch of large phytoplankton that produce a lot of carbon — a lot of biomass,” Bif said.
As conditions changed during the heat waves, it was the littlest of phytoplankton species that benefited. These needed less nutrients to bloom, so they proliferated as larger species declined. And because different species of zooplankton dine on differently sized phytoplankton, the smaller ones that ate the smaller species suddenly had much more sustenance. “Those guys are going to make smaller fecal pellets, which would kind of float in the water more than sink,” Kellogg said. “So that could be contributing to the reduction in carbon moving from the surface to the deep ocean.”
Because the researchers had access to that data up and down the water column, they could monitor how all that carbon was sinking during the heat waves. Or rather, how it wasn’t — because the ocean’s carbon toilet was malfunctioning. In the first event, carbon particles were piling up 660 feet deep, and in the second, between 660 and 1,320 feet. In these zones, zooplankton grazers continued to chew on the particles, breaking them into smaller bits that couldn’t sink. In the second marine heatwave, an increase in particularly small zooplankton meant more production of tinier, non-sinking fecal pellets.
Not only was the toilet not properly flushing carbon, but more and more waste was being added to these waters as the heat waves rolled on. This gave bacteria lots of organic matter to break down, adding CO2 back into the sea. Eventually, currents would bring that CO2-rich water back to the surface, where the gas can be released back into the atmosphere.
Now scientists will have to monitor more heat waves in other parts of the world’s oceans to see if the same dynamics are at play, and how much that might be hobbling the sea’s ability to sequester carbon. At the same time, phytoplankton and zooplankton are suffering through crises other than heat, like ocean acidification potentially interfering with some species’ ability to grow protective shells.
If there’s less phytoplankton, there will be less oxygen coming out of the oceans, and less food for the zooplankton that feed all manner of other animals in the sea, including whales. “Paying attention to what’s happening at the base of the food web is going to give us a lot of information,” Štajner said, “both about how things are going to trickle up to these larger marine animals that we care about, but also insights about our climate.”
Luckily, with thousands of Biogeochemical Argo floats collecting data around the planet, researchers are getting an ever-clearer picture of how seas are changing, and phytoplankton along with them. “The oceans are very under-sampled, very understudied,” Bif said. “But they play a central role in climate. We can’t understand what we can’t observe.”
In January, firefighters spent nearly a month battling more than a dozen wildfires across Los Angeles. Despite their best efforts, the two largest—the Eaton and Palisades fires—now rank as the second- and third-most destructive in California history, together burning 38,000 acres, torching 16,000 structures, and killing 31 people.
A large part of what makes this story so devastating is that it isn’t unique. All across the world—from Chile to Canada, Greece, Australia, Portugal, Algeria, and the U.S.—highly destructive, unruly disasters like the Palisades and Eaton fires are becoming the status quo. A new study published Thursday in the journal Science reveals the extent of this global surge, finding that areas of high wildfire risk close to human populations cover 10% of Earth’s landmass.
“The rise in wildfire disasters isn’t just a perception, it’s reality,” said co-author Crystal Kolden, associate professor and director of the Fire Resilience Center at the University of California, Merced, in a university release. “For decades, wildfires primarily impacted largely unpopulated areas, but contemporary catastrophic fires are killing more people and destroying more homes and infrastructure.”
The rising global cost of wildfire
The researchers analyzed global wildfire disaster records from 1980 to 2023 using data from global re-insurer Munich Re’s private database and a public international disaster database. They specifically looked at events that killed 10 or more people or ranked among the 200 most economically damaging.
Of those 200 most costly fires, 43% occurred within the past 10 years. This reflects a fourfold increase in economic wildfire disasters and a threefold increase in wildfires responsible for 10 or more deaths since 1980.
The surge of devastation has unfolded against a backdrop of skyrocketing firefighting investment. In the U.S., federal fire suppression spending nearly quadrupled to $4.4 billion by 2021, yet disasters like the LA fires, the Lahaina fire, and the Durkee fire have become increasingly common.
The team also developed a model that looked beyond the study period to identify areas of high wildfire risk close to human communities. This revealed the deadly risk to 10% of Earth’s land area, and allowed the researchers to successfully forecast major disasters such as the LA fires and Chile’s deadly Las Tablas fire in 2024.
“This provides a roadmap for where the next catastrophic disasters are most likely to occur,” said co-author David Bowman, professor and director of the Fire Center at the University of Tasmania, in the release. “But climate change has fundamentally altered the game. We need to adapt to how we live with fire, not just fight it.”
Climate change drives “hellacious” fire weather
The researchers found that extreme “disaster weather” conditions have become far more common, with severe fire weather and atmospheric drying more than doubling since 1980. Meanwhile, severe droughts have more than tripled. Half of all the disasters they analyzed struck during the most wildfire-conducive conditions on record.
“A majority of global fire disasters occurred with hellacious fire weather that overwhelmed fire suppression efforts,” said co-author John Abatzoglou, a professor and climatologist at UC Merced, in the release. “Moreover, such extreme fire weather conditions are becoming more likely, increasing the odds of disastrous fires,” he added. “While we have seen this play out in catastrophic fires in California, the same factors have played out across the globe.”
“It is unambiguous and it is clear climate change is playing a role,” lead author Calum Cunningham, a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Tasmania’s Fire center, told The Guardian. “These aren’t just bigger fires, they’re fires occurring under increasingly extreme weather conditions that make them unstoppable.”
Speaking by video at the UN Climate Summit in New York last week, China’s president Xi Jinping laid out his country’s climate ambitions. While the stated goals may not have been aggressive as some environmentalists would like, Xi at least reaffirmed China’s green commitment.
“Despite some countries going against the trend, the international community should stay on the right track, maintain unwavering confidence, unwavering action, and undiminished efforts,” he said. Any reference to Donald Trump and the United States was surely intended (though not explicit).
The march of the energy transition is a long one, but it has to start somewhere. And with this approach, China has already taken quite a few steps.
Beijing Stands (Mostly) Alone
Today, there is no race to be a climate leader. The world is a far fry from the COP26 conference in November 2021, when tackling the threat of climate change seemed like a global priority. A few months later, Russia invaded Ukraine; the ensuing energy crisis and inflation kicked climate off of many political agendas.
While Joe Biden and the United States responded to soaring prices with the Inflation Reduction Act, which prioritized investment in renewable energy, Donald Trump subsequently withdrew the US from the Paris Agreement—an international accord to limit global warming—for the second time. The European Union has also stuttered: Too internally divided, it did not go beyond a drab declaration of intent at the UN Climate Summit. There hasn’t been much movement from India, a country of nearly 1.5 billion people. And other nations’ emissions are simply too small to matter.
Given this background, it becomes easy to understand how, in this scenario, China has become a global leader in the clean energy transition. Xi’s speech did not go into much detail, but it did mention all the main points of China’s strategy.
Cut Emissions Between 7 Percent and 10 Percent by 2035
In New York, Xi acknowledged the importance of the transition, and for the first time, agreed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions rather than simply promise to slow them down. China’s stated goal is between 7 percent and 10 percent reduction by 2035.
How do you evaluate these pledges? While the commitment is vague, it’s still significant; previously the regime had merely promised to reach peak emissions by 2030, tying the cuts to economic growth. In Xi’s speech you can seen China transition from a developing country approach to a role more akin to that of industrialized countries, whose emissions have been declining for decades.
Slow Going?
It should be pointed out that reducing emissions at the pace promised by Beijing means a decline of about 1 percent a year. According to an analysis by William Lamb of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, this is a slower pace than that held by most industrialized nations. Italy, for example, has reduced them by an average of 3.2 percent every 12 months since their peak in 2006; the United Kingdom by an average of 2.8 percent since 2004; France by 2.3 percent.
“China has often promised little and achieved much,” notes Andreas Sieber, associate director for policy and campaigns for the global climate nonprofit 350.org, suggesting that China might overdeliver. The country’s lack of democracy also means its policies are not at risk of reversal every election cycle.
On Renewables
Xi Jinping’s speech included a commitment to reach 3,600 gigawatts (GW) of installed wind and solar capacity by 2035, six times the country’s 2020 figures. This is already the leading country in terms of installed renewable power, and a giant on the technology front as well, with universities churning out environmental and climate tech research at full speed, and attracting scientists from abroad across numerous fields. He also announced a commitment to an energy mix with more than 30 percent renewables.
On Electric Vehicles
Mobility has long been an issue for China, which has moved from bicycles, ubiquitous until the 1990s, to the mass automobile. The images of the 2008 Beijing Olympics are unforgettable: A blanket of smog buried the city. The government has in recent years given a strong boost to electric mobility: At the Climate Summit it announced plans to make EVs “mainstream,” that is, prevalent in sales. It helps that it has ready access to rare earth minerals that are essential for building batteries. And for that matter, the country hosts giant automotive companies like BYD and Catl, which supplies batteries to some 50 global brands including Tesla and Volkswagen.
On the carbon market
Xi has declared his intention to expand the national carbon emission trading market to more emission-intensive sectors than today.
On forests
China made additional commitments on forests, which it says will reach an extent of 34 billion cubic meters.
China has reshaped the market for green technologies.
To skeptics expecting broader measures and the mantle of true global leadership from China, well, that’s not a particularly coveted title these days—especially if the US continues to reverse course on climate science. As senior advisor Bernice Lee of the think tank Chatham House notes, China invested $625 billion in the clean energy transition last year alone; that’s nearly a third of the gobal total.
Not only that: Research and massive adoption of renewable technologies have led to the dramatic drop in prices, and China’s very large domestic market is a formidable driver in this regard. “The rise of Chinese renewables is reshaping the global economy and replacing coal in the domestic market,” Lee says.
The hope is that other countries, reassured by that commitment, will follow China’s example rather than America’s.
BRUSSELS (Reuters) -Dozens of countries have yet to secure accommodation at next month’s COP30 climate summit in Brazil and some delegates are considering staying away as a shortage of hotels has driven prices to hundreds of dollars per night.
Small island states on the frontline of rising sea levels are confronted with having to consider reducing the size of delegations they send to Belem, while two European nations said they were considering not attending at all.
COP30 organisers are racing to convert love motels, cruise ships and churches into lodgings for an anticipated 45,000 delegates.
Brazil chose to hold the climate talks at Belem, which typically has 18,000 hotel beds available, in the hope its location on the edge of the Amazon rainforest would focus attention on the threat climate change poses to this ecosystem, and its role in absorbing climate-warming emissions.
LATVIA SAYS ROOMS ARE TOO EXPENSIVE
Latvia’s climate minister told Reuters the country has asked if its negotiators could dial in by video call.
“We already basically have a decision that it’s too expensive for us,” Melnis said. “It’s the first time it’s so expensive. We have a responsibility to our country’s budget.”
A second eastern European country, Lithuania, also said it may stay away after being quoted prices for accommodation exceeding $500 per person per night.
A spokesperson for Lithuania’s energy ministry, which covers climate affairs, said the legitimacy and quality of negotiations would suffer if governments could not attend because of the costs.
A spokesperson for Brazil’s COP30 presidency said the decision was up to each government.
COP30 HOTEL PRICES LEAVE DELEGATIONS OUT OF POCKET
Days after Brazil opened a booking platform in early August, the website showed rates from $360 to $4,400 a night. Prices this week started at $150 per night, the platform showed.
The host country has dismissed calls to relocate the summit and said it would provide 15 rooms priced below $220 per day for each developing country delegation, and below $600 for each wealthy nation delegation. The United Nations has also increased its subsidy to help low-income countries attend.
Less than six weeks out from COP30, 81 countries remain in negotiations over hotel rooms while 87 countries have reserved accommodation, according to Brazil’s COP30 Presidency.
Evans Njewa, chair of the Least Developed Countries group that represents the world’s poorest nations in U.N. climate talks, said it was still assessing countries’ attendance plans.
“We’re receiving a high volume of concerns … and numerous requests for support,” Njewa told Reuters. “Regrettably, our capacity is limited, which may affect the size of delegations.”
CLIMATE ACTION UNDER THREAT
This year’s COP summit takes place after U.S. President Donald Trump has sought to lead a shift away from climate action and Europe’s priorities change as economies struggle.
Ilana Seid, chair of the Alliance of Small Island States, said the lack of affordable accommodation placed its members at a “severe disadvantage”. Small island countries have used previous COPs to secure more funding to adapt to climate change.
Smaller delegations would leave island nations “lacking expertise needed to effectively participate in the negotiations which decide our future,” Seid said.
(Reporting by Kate Abnett in Brussels; Additional reporting by Jason Hovet, Luiza Ilie, Manuela Andreoni; Editing by Richard Lough and Barbara Lewis)
Some dolphins found stranded on beaches may have ended up their because they suffer from a form of Alzheimer’s disease linked to toxins in the water.
This is the conclusion of a study led by researchers from Florida’s Hubbs-SeaWorld Research Institute, who suspect that—just like some adult humans with dementia are occasionally found wandering far from their homes—dolphins may become similarly disoriented when suffering from Alzheimer’s.
Their findings, published in the journal Communications Biology, point to chronic exposure to toxins produced by microorgansims known as cynobacteria—which are frequently found in freshwater, estuarine and marine waters—as a possible trigger.
The cyanobacterial toxin β-N-methylamino-L-alanine (BMAA), as well as its isomers 2,4-diaminobutyric acid (2,4-DAB), and N-2-aminoethylglycine (AEG), have been found to be extremely toxic to neurons.
BMAA triggers Alzheimer’s-like neuropathology and cognitive loss in experimental animals. These toxins can be biomagnified as they accumulate up the food chain in the marine ecosystem towards top predators like dolphins.
The resarcher’s study, which involved 20 common bottlenose dolphins stranded in the Indian River Lagoon in eastern Florida during the summer cyanobacterial bloom season, identfied markers of Alzheimer’s disease.
The duration of cyanobacterial blooms is increasing due to climate change and nutrient pollution from agricultural runoff and sewage discharges. Cyanobacterial-laden waters have often been released down the St. Lucie River from Lake Okeechobee into the Indian River Lagoon, intensifying exposure risks even in humans.
“Since dolphins are considered environmental sentinels for toxic exposures in marine environments, there are concerns about human health issues associated with cyanobacterial blooms,” said paper author and neuropathologist Dr. David Davis of the University of Miami said in a statement.
Studies of villagers on the island of Guam show that chronic dietary exposure to cyanobacterial toxins are associated with misfolded tau proteins and amyloid plaques characteristic of Alzheimer’s disease.
“Among Guam villagers, exposure to cyanobacterial toxins appeared to trigger neurological disease,” explained Dr. Paul Alan Cox, of the Brain Chemistry Labs in Jackson Hole, in a statement.
In 2024, Miami Dade County had the highest prevalence of Alzheimer’s disease in the United States.
“Although there are likely many paths to Alzheimer’s disease, cyanobacterial exposures increasingly appear to be a risk factor,” adds Dr. Davis.
Do you have a tip on a science story that Newsweek should be covering? Do you have a question about dolphins? Let us know via science@newsweek.com.
Reference
Noke Durden, W., Stolen, M. K., Garamszegi, S. P., Banack, S. A., Brzostowicki, D. J., Vontell, R. T., Brand, L. E., Cox, P. A., & Davis, D. A. (2025). Alzheimer’s disease signatures in the brain transcriptome of Estuarine Dolphins. Communications Biology, 8(1), 1400. https://doi.org/10.1038/s42003-025-08796-0
WASHINGTON — Earth’s nastiest and costliest wildfires are blazing four times more often now than they did in the 1980s because of human-caused climate change and people moving closer to wildlands, a new study found.
A study in the journal Science looks at global wildfires, not by acres burned which is the most common measuring stick, but by the harder to calculate economic and human damage they cause. The study concluded there has been a “climate-linked escalation of societally disastrous wildfires.”
A team of Australian, American and German fire scientists calculated the 200 most damaging fires since 1980 based on the percentage of damage to the country’s Gross Domestic Product at the time, taking inflation into account. The frequency of these events has increased about 4.4 times from 1980 to 2023, said study lead author Calum Cunningham, a pyrogeographer at the Fire Centre at the University of Tasmania in Australia.
“It shows beyond a shadow of a doubt that we do have a major wildfire crisis on our hands,” Cunningham said.
About 43% of the 200 most damaging fires occurred in the last 10 years of the study. In the 1980s, the globe averaged two of these catastrophic fires a year and a few times hit four a year. From 2014 to 2023, the world averaged nearly nine a year, including 13 in 2021. It noted that the count of these devastating infernos sharply increased in 2015, which “coincided with increasingly extreme climatic conditions.” Though the study date ended in 2023, the last two years have been even more extreme, Cunningham said.
Cunningham said often researchers look at how many acres a fire burns as a measuring stick, but he called that flawed because it really doesn’t show the effect on people, with area not mattering as much as economics and lives. Hawaii’s Lahaina fire wasn’t big, but it burned a lot of buildings and killed a lot of people so it was more meaningful than one in sparsely populated regions, he said.
“We need to be targeting the fires that matter. And those are the fires that cause major ecological destruction because they’re burning too intensely,” Cunningham said.
But economic data is difficult to get with many countries keeping that information private, preventing global trends and totals from being calculated. So Cunningham and colleagues were able to get more than 40 years of global economic date from insurance giant Munich Re and then combine it with the public database from International Disaster Database, which isn’t as complete but is collected by the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium.
The study looked at “fire weather” which is hot, dry and windy conditions that make extreme fires more likely and more dangerous and found that those conditions are increasing, creating a connection to the burning of coal, oil and natural gas.
“We’ve firstly got that connection that all the disasters by and large occurred during extreme weather. We’ve also got a strong trend of those conditions becoming more common as a result of climate change. That’s indisputable,” Cunningham said. “So that’s a line of evidence there to say that climate change is having a significant effect on at least creating the conditions that are suitable for a major fire disaster.”
If there was no human-caused climate change, the world would still have devastating fires, but not as many, he said: “We’re loading the dice in a sense by increasing temperatures.”
There are other factors. People are moving closer to fire-prone areas, called the wildland-urban interface, Cunningham said. And society is not getting a handle on dead foliage that becomes fuel, he said. But those factors are harder to quantify compared to climate change, he said.
“This is an innovative study in terms of the data sources employed, and it mostly confirms common sense expectations: fires causing major fatalities and economic damage tend to be those in densely populated areas and to occur during the extreme fire weather conditions that are becoming more common due to climate change,” said Jacob Bendix, a geography and environment professor at Syracuse University who studies fires, but wasn’t part of this research team.
Not only does the study makes sense, but it’s a bad sign for the future, said Mike Flannigan, a fire researcher at Thompson Rivers University in Canada. Flannigan, who wasn’t part of research, said: “As the frequency and intensity of extreme fire weather and drought increases the likelihood of disastrous fires increases so we need to do more to be better prepared.”
____
The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.
A foundation created by Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google, will fund a project to send drone boats out into the rough ocean around Antarctica to collect data that could help solve a crucial climate puzzle. The project is part of a suite of funding announced today from Schmidt Sciences, which Schmidt and his wife Wendy created to focus on projects tackling research into the global carbon cycle. It will spend $45 million over the next five years to fund these projects, which includes the Antarctic research.
“The ocean provides this really critical climate regulation service to all of us, and yet we don’t understand it as well as we could,” says Galen McKinley, a professor of environmental sciences at Columbia University and the Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory and one of the lead scientists on the project. “I’m just really excited to see how much this data can really pull together the community of people who are trying to understand and quantify the ocean carbon sink.”
The world’s oceans are its largest carbon sinks, absorbing about a third of the CO2 humans put into the atmosphere each year. One of the most important carbon sinks is the Southern Ocean, the body of water surrounding Antarctica. Despite being the second smallest of the world’s five oceans, the Southern Ocean is responsible for about 40 percent of all ocean-based carbon dioxide absorption.
Scientists, however, know surprisingly little about why, exactly, the Southern Ocean is such a successful carbon sink. What’s more, climate models that successfully predict ocean carbon absorption elsewhere in the world have diverged significantly when it comes to the Southern Ocean.
One of the biggest issues with understanding more about what’s going on in the Southern Ocean is simply a lack of data. This is thanks in part to the extreme conditions in the region. The Drake Passage, which runs between South America and Argentina, is one of the toughest stretches of ocean for ships, due to incredibly strong currents around Antarctica and dangerous winds; it’s even rougher in the winter months. The ocean also has a particularly pronounced cloud cover, Crisp says, which makes satellite observations difficult.
“The Southern Ocean is really far away, so we just haven’t done a lot of science there,” says McKinley. “It is a very big ocean, and it is this dramatic and scary place to go.”
Texans have grown accustomed to heatwaves and deadly floods, and, while a hurricane can’t be stopped by a panel of politicians, residents who vote on both sides of the aisle want the government to implement climate change policy solutions, according to a University of Houston Hobby School of Public Affairs survey released last week.
More than 86 percent of about 5,000 survey respondents believe in the effects of climate change, but their thoughts on the causes vary along party lines. About 48 percent of Democratic respondents attributed climate change mostly to human activities, compared to 13.3 percent of Republicans, who attributed it mostly to natural environmental changes.
About 3.7 percent of respondents deny that climate change exists, and 57.7 percent identify the oil and gas industry as one of the main culprits.
Republicans have traditionally not listed climate change as a priority and almost 70 percent say an important consideration for them in any climate policy proposal is keeping consumer costs low, according to a Pew Research Center study released last year and cited in the UH Hobby School survey.
About 5,000 people in nine counties were surveyed on climate change. Credit: University of Houston Hobby School of Public Affairs
So climate change is “a thing,” but what can be done to address it?
Maria Perez Arguelles, lead researcher on the report and a research assistant professor at the Hobby School, said the Texas Legislature considered several measures during its most recent session.
“Lawmakers passed more bills that were aimed at strengthening the power grid or expanding the reliability of energy supply,” she said. “But other bills targeting renewable energy development and those that targeted wind and solar installations, for example, didn’t pass.”
The survey polled residents of nine counties surrounding Houston between August 11 and September 4.
Overall, respondents showed stronger support for policies promoting energy efficiency — such as improving energy use in homes, vehicles, and factories — over more technical solutions like carbon capture. These solutions are seen as more effective and more likely to garner bipartisan support, the report states.
“What these results suggest is that those policies that promote efficiency and visible community benefits — things that people can visualize and see translated into everyday lives — have a higher chance of gaining bipartisan support in the Greater Houston area,” Perez Arguelles said.
Houston and Harris County have climate action plans to address a steady rise in federally declared disasters, including Hurricane Harvey in 2017, severe floods, winter storms, and wildfires.
“These repeated events have underscored the region’s vulnerability and highlighted the urgent need for stronger infrastructure, flood protection, and emergency response systems,” the Hobby School report states.
At a press conference this week on emergency preparedness, County Judge Lina Hidalgo lauded the “first of its kind in the nation” community-focused Climate Justice Plan, adopted earlier this year. The plan’s chief goals are to deploy electric vehicles and charging stations; improve energy efficiency in county buildings; and produce green spaces and native landscaping.
“I’m not going to pretend like there are not challenges right now,” Hidalgo said. “We all know that FEMA has been taking some hits and nobody is sure how they will respond when we need them. There’s a major grant for solar power that we were awarded by the federal government that we were told is not arriving anymore. That’s another challenge, and of course, there are certain things in the budget that just passed that can have an impact on emergency response efforts.”
Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo speaks at a September 30 press conference on emergency preparedness. Credit: April Towery
Within 24 hours of Hidalgo’s press conference, the federal government shut down, adding to the uncertainty facing states and counties that are prone to natural disasters.
Harris County’s Climate Action Plan, adopted in 2023, aims, among other things, to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 40 percent by 2030 through reductions from county buildings, fleet and commuting, procurement, and waste management.
“I want to make sure folks know that we have strong partnerships,” Hidalgo said at the press conference as she stood at a podium with meteorologist Jeff Linder, Harris County Fire Marshal Laurie Christensen. Homeland Security and Emergency Management Coordinator Mark Sloan, and American Red Cross Regional CEO Shawn Schulze.
“There are many things we can’t control about emergencies and disasters, but one thing we can control is the partnerships. That is what a smooth response depends on,” she said.
As city and county leaders work to address climate change through action plans and policies, they’re also reminding the public of how to stay informed and how to best respond when a disaster hits. Although Harris County hasn’t had an active hurricane season this year, tropical storms are expected through the end of November. Some regions of the county are experiencing drought conditions, Christensen said.
Harris County Fire Marshal Laurie Christensen speaks at a September 30 press conference on emergency preparedness. Credit: April Towery
At the September 30 press conference, Christensen urged the public to prepare for disasters on “blue sky days” like the ones Houston has experienced lately.
“Have your chimneys cleaned,” she said. “Make sure that you’ve got a five-foot radius around your fireplace. If you’re burning outside and you’ve got a nice fire pit that you bought at a box store, make sure you have water around it so you can disperse and put the water on it and get the fire out.”
The fire marshal further suggested that families practice evacuation plans for their homes. Several of the speakers at the press conference reminded residents to sign up for Ready Harris emergency alerts.
Houston released its first-ever Climate Action Plan in 2020. The CAP, overseen by the Office of Recovery and Resilience, was part of the Resilient Houston strategy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, achieve carbon neutrality by 2050, and improve urban resilience. It’s cited in the UH report as one of the policy initiatives residents prefer.
The CAP focuses on transportation, energy transition, building optimization, and material management. A two-year update in 2022 highlighted some progress, including a 37 percent drop in emissions since 2005 and 92 percent of municipal facilities powered by renewable energy.
About 5,000 residents were surveyed on climate change by the University of Houston Hobby School of Public Affairs. Credit: University of Houston Hobby School of Public Affairs
Among survey respondents, the most popular policy solution to reduce carbon emissions was to make factories and energy systems more efficient.
“Generally, we observe significant partisan differences in perceptions of carbon reduction strategies,” the report states. “Democrats consistently show higher support for all measures, especially efficiency improvements and cleaner fuels, while Republicans are less supportive of all options, especially carbon capture. We also find that Independents and non-affiliated respondents in the Greater Houston area typically align closer to Democrats.”
VIMIEIRO, Portugal — Under a moonlit sky and the glow of headlamps, workers gingerly pluck grape clusters while much of Portugal sleeps.
They harvest in the Alentejo region, sometimes called the “Tuscany of Portugal” for its rolling vineyards, olive groves and forests that supply cork for the wines. In this vineyard about a 90-minute drive east of Lisbon, the cool autumn night carries the smell of ripe fruit. The workers’ laughter blends with the sound of rustling leaves.
The night harvest is a time-honored practice in viticulture, meant to preserve the freshness of grapes and shield them from the adverse effects of daytime heat, sunlight and oxidation. As summers in Portugal grow longer, hotter and more unpredictable — in part due to climate change — the practice has become more common here.
Bárbara Monteiro, co-owner and manager of the Herdade Da Fonte Santa vineyard said she struggled at first to convince her harvesters to work at night — midnight to 8 a.m. They began doing so in 2019.
“Today, we can say they actually prefer this schedule, as they can often work almost another day, enjoy the day, and avoid the extreme heat we often experience here,” she said.
The wine harvest in Spain, Italy and Portugal generally takes place between late August and October, with variations based on the region, type of grapes and weather conditions.
Some vineyards have been harvesting at night for years. In parts of Italy, others have for more than a decade. The El Coto de Rioja vineyard in Spain’s famed La Rioja region opts for early morning harvests, beginning at 5 or 6 a.m., according to César Fernández, the vineyard’s technical director and winemaker.
In Portugal’s Alentejo region, daytime temperatures particularly in August can reach 40 Celsius (104 Fahrenheit). At night, they can drop by as much as 20 C (36 F) or more.
Grapes are naturally sensitive to temperature shifts. Warmer weather can make them reach sugar maturity before developing a full flavor and ripeness, leading to higher alcohol levels but less complex wines. Intense heat also speeds up acid loss and can trigger early fermentation as wild yeasts and bacteria become more active.
By harvesting at night, vintners can lock in more vibrant flavors that improve the quality of the wine produced.
“Climate change has greatly influenced our harvest and the process and we’ve adapted over the years,” Monteiro said.
Harvesters, too, don’t mind the gentler temperatures.
Foreman Vitor Lucas, 55, says he prefers the night harvest, even though there are some warm nights at the start of August.
Around 3 a.m., workers take a short break to rest and enjoy a meal known as a “bucha,” consisting of cheese, olives, chorizo, bread and even a bit of wine. Then they return to the fields for another four hours before heading home.
The wine harvest here usually ends in September or October. That late in the season, temperatures have cooled significantly when foreman Lucas and nearly 10 others work the fields.
“It’s a harvest we enjoy doing,” he said.
___
Naishadham reported from Madrid.
___
The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.
GENEVA — Switzerland’s glaciers have faced “enormous” melting this year with a 3% drop in total volume — the fourth-largest annual drop on record — due to the effects of global warming, top Swiss glaciologists reported Wednesday.
The shrinkage this year means that ice mass in Switzerland — home to the most glaciers in Europe — has declined by one-quarter over the last decade, the Swiss glacier monitoring group GLAMOS and the Swiss Academy of Sciences said in their report.
“Glacial melting in Switzerland was once again enormous in 2025,” the scientists said. “A winter with low snow depth combined with heat waves in June and August led to a loss of 3% of the glacier volume.”
Switzerland is home to nearly 1,400 glaciers, the most of any country in Europe, and the ice mass and its gradual melting have implications for hydropower, tourism, farming and water resources in many European countries.
More than 1,000 small glaciers in Switzerland have already disappeared, the experts said.
The teams reported that a winter with little snow was followed by heat waves in June — the second-warmest June on record — which left the snow reserves depleted by early July. Ice masses began to melt earlier than ever, they said.
“Glaciers are clearly retreating because of anthropogenic global warming,” said Matthias Huss, the head of GLAMOS, referring to climate change caused by human activity.
“This is the main cause for the acceleration we are seeing in the last two years,” added Huss, who is also a glaciologist at Zurich’s ETHZ university.
The shrinkage is the fourth-largest after those in 2022, 2023 and back in 2003.
The retreat and loss of glaciers is also having an impact on Switzerland’s landscape, causing mountains to shift and ground to become unstable.
Swiss authorities have been on heightened alert for such changes after a huge mass of rock and ice from a glacier thundered down a mountainside that covered nearly all of the southern village of Blatten in May.
Celebrated for decades as Hollywood royalty, Jane Fonda could easily be living a comfortable life of extravagance and leisure.
Instead, the 87-year-old actor and Vietnam War-era provocateur is as likely to be seen knocking on voters’ doors in Phoenix on a balmy summer afternoon as sashaying down a red carpet at a glitzy movie premiere.
Politically active for more than a half-century, Fonda is now focusing her energy, celebrity, connections and resources on fighting climate change and combating the “existential crises” created by President Trump.
Calling fossil fuels a threat to humanity, Fonda created JanePAC, a political action committee that has spent millions on candidates at the forefront of that fight.
“Nature has always been in my bones, in my cells,” Fonda said in a recent interview, describing herself as an environmentalist since her tomboy youth. “And then, about 10 years ago … I started reading more, and I realized what we’re doing to the climate, which means what we’re doing to us, what we’re doing to the future, to our grandchildren and our children.
“Our existence is being challenged all because an industry, the fossil-fuel industry, wants to make more money,” she said. “I mean, I try to understand what, what must they think when they go to sleep at night? These men, they’re destroying everything.”
Rather than hosting fancy political fundraisers or headlining presidential campaign rallies, Fonda devotes her efforts to electing like-minded state legislators, city council members, utility board officials and candidates in other less flashy but critical races.
Fonda said her organization took its cue from successful GOP tactics.
“I hate to say this, but you know, in terms of playing the long game, the Republicans have been better than the Democrats,” she said. “They started to work down ballot, and they took over state legislatures. They took over governorships and mayors and city councils, boards of supervisors, and before we knew what had happened, they had power on the grassroots level.”
Fonda said her PAC selects candidates to back based on their climate-change record and viability. The beneficiaries include candidates running for state legislature and city council. Some of the races are often obscure, such as the Silver River Project board (an Arizona utility), the Port of Bellingham commission in Washington and the Lane Community College board in Oregon.
“Down ballot, if you come in, especially for primaries, you can really make a difference. You know, not all Democrats are the same,” she said. “We want candidates who have shown public courage in standing up to fossil fuels. We want candidates who can win. We’re not a protest PAC. We’re in it to win it.”
Since her birth, Fonda’s life has been infused by political activism.
Her father, the late actor Henry Fonda, witnessed the lynching of a Black man during the 1919 Omaha race riots when he was 14, casting him into becoming a lifelong liberal.
Though such matters were not discussed at the dinner table, Fonda’s father raised money for Democratic candidates and starred in politically imbued films such as “The Grapes of Wrath,” about the exploitation of migrant workers during the Dust Bowl, and “12 Angry Men,” which focused on prejudice, groupthink and the importance of due process during the McCarthy era.
But his daughter Jane did not become politically active until her early 30s.
“Before then, I kind of led a life of ignorance, somewhat hedonistic,” she said. “Maybe deep down, I knew that once I know something, I can’t turn away.”
In “Prime Time,” Fonda’s 2011 memoir, she describes the final chapter of her life as a time of “coming to fruition rather than simply a period of marking time, or the absence of youth.”
“Unlike during childhood, Act III is a quiet ripening. It takes time and experience, and yes, perhaps the inevitable slowing down,” she wrote. “You have to learn to sort out what’s fundamentally important to you from what’s irrelevant.”
In 1972, Fonda appeared in Jean-Luc Godard’s film “Tout Va Bien,” about workers’ rights in the aftermath of widespread street protests in France four years earlier. It was her first role in a political movie and coincided with her off-screen move into activism.
Fonda’s most noteworthy and reviled political moment occurred the same year, when she was photographed by the North Vietnamese sitting atop an antiaircraft gun.
Actor and political activist Jane Fonda at a news conference in New York City on July 28, 1972. Fonda spoke about her trip to North Vietnam and interviews with American prisoners in Hanoi, Vietnam.
(Marty Lederhandler / Associated Press)
The images led to Fonda being tarred as “Hanoi Jane” and a traitor to the United States, which had deployed millions of American soldiers to Southeast Asia, many of whom never returned. Fonda says it is something she “will regret to my dying day.”
“It is possible that it was a setup, that the Vietnamese had it all planned,” Fonda wrote in 2011. “I will never know. But if they did, I can’t blame them. The buck stops here. If I was used, I allowed it to happen. It was my mistake.”
Fonda’s political beliefs have been a through line in her Hollywood career.
In 1979, she played a reporter in “The China Syndrome,” a film about a fictional meltdown at a nuclear power plant near Los Angeles. The movie’s theatrical release occurred less than two weeks before the worst nuclear accident in U.S. history at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania.
The 1980 movie “9 to 5,” starring Fonda, Lily Tomlin and Dolly Parton, was a biting comedy that highlighted the treatment of women in the workplace and income inequality long before such issues were routinely discussed in workplaces.
Dolly Parton, left, Lily Tomlin and Jane Fonda are harassed office workers in the 1980 movie “9 to 5.”
(20th Century Fox)
Two years later, as home VCRs grew popular, Fonda created exercise videos that shattered sales records.
She urged women to “feel the burn,” and revenue from the videos funded the Campaign for Economic Democracy, a political action committee founded by Fonda and Hayden.
This year, Fonda offered signed copies to donors to JanePAC, which she created in 2022.
“I’m still in shock that those leg warmers and leotards caught on the way they did,” Fonda wrote to supporters in April. “If you’ve ever done one of my leg lifts, or even thought about doing one, now’s your chance to own a piece of that history.”
UCLA lecturer Jim Newton, a veteran Los Angeles Times political journalist and historian of the state’s politics, described Fonda as confrontational, controversial and unapologetic.
“She’s remarkable, utterly admirable, a principled person who has devoted her life to fighting for what she believes in,” said Newton, who quotes Fonda in his new book, “Here Beside the Rising Tide: Jerry Garcia, the Grateful Dead, and an American Awakening.”
Newton added that Fonda’s outspoken nature certainly harmed her career.
“I’m sure that there are directors, producers, whatnot, especially in the ‘70s and ‘80s, who passed on chances to work with her because of her politics,” he said. “And I’m sure she knew that, right? She did it. It’s not been without sacrifice. She’s true to herself, like very few people.”
A year after Fonda and Hayden divorced in 1990, she married CNN founder and philanthropist Ted Turner, who she once described as “my favorite ex-husband.” Though Fonda largely paused her acting career during their decade-long marriage, she remained politically active.
In 1995, Fonda founded a Georgia effort dedicated to reducing teenage pregnancy. Five years later, she launched the Jane Fonda Center for Reproductive Health at Emory University.
After Fonda and Turner divorced, she worked with Tomlin on raising the minimum wage in Michigan and then launched Fire Drill Fridays — acts of civil disobedience — with Greenpeace in 2019.
Jane Fonda speaks during a rally before a march from the U.S. Capitol to the White House as part of her “Fire Drill Fridays” rally protesting against climate change on Nov. 8, 2019.
(Alex Wong / Getty Images)
Fonda said she decided to create her political action committee after facing headwinds persuading Gov. Gavin Newsom to create setbacks for oil wells in 2020.
“He wasn’t moving on it, and somebody very high up in his campaign said to us, ‘You can have millions of people in your organization all over California, but you don’t have a big enough carrot or stick to move the governor. … You don’t have an electoral strategy,’” Fonda recalled. “Since we’ve started the PAC, it’s interesting how politicians deal with us differently. They know that we’ve got money. They know that we have tens of thousands of volunteers all over the country.”
Initially concentrated on climate change, JanePAC has expanded its focus since Trump was reelected in November.
“We’re facing two existential crises, climate and democracy, and it’s now or never for both,” Fonda said. “We can’t have a stable democracy with an unstable climate, and we can’t have a stable climate unless we have a democracy, And so we have to fight both together.”
Fonda’s PAC has raised more than $9 million since its creation through June 30, according to the Federal Election Commission.
In 2024, JanePAC supported 154 campaigns and won 96 of those races. The committee gave nearly $700,000 directly to campaigns and helped raise more than $1.1 million for their endorsed candidates and ballot measures. In 2025, they have endorsed 63 campaigns and plan to soon launch get-out-the-vote efforts in support of Proposition 50, Newsom’s ballot measure to redraw California’s congressional districts that will appear on the November ballot.
Arizona state Rep. Oscar De Los Santos, the minority leader in the state’s House of Representatives, recalled Fonda’s support during the 2024 election, not only for his reelection bid but also a broader effort to try to win Democratic control of the state Legislature.
In addition to raising $500,000 at a Phoenix event for candidates, De Los Santos recalled the actor spending days knocking on Arizona voters’ doors.
“It is a moral validator to have Jane Fonda support your campaigns, especially at a time when corporate interests have more money and more power than ever, having somebody in your corner who’s been on the right side of history for decades,” said De Los Santos, who represents a south Phoenix district deeply affected by environmental justice issues.
Voters are often stunned when Fonda shows up on their doorstep.
“I’ve had people walking out of their laundry room and dropping all the laundry,” Fonda said with a laugh.
But others don’t know who she is and Fonda doesn’t tell them.
Jane Fonda
(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)
“It’s amazing. You wouldn’t think that in just a few minutes on someone’s doorstep, you can really find out a lot,” Fonda said, recalling discovering her love of canvassing when she was married to Hayden.”I loved talking to people and finding out what they care about and what they’re scared of and what they’re angry about.”
Fonda does not walk in lockstep with the Democratic party. In 2023, she joined other climate-change activists protesting a big-money Joe Biden fundraiser. They argued that the then-president had strayed from the environmental promises he made when he ran for election, such as by approving a massive oil drilling project on the North Slope of Alaska.
Fonda said she supported Biden’s 2024 reelection despite disagreeing with some of his policies because of the threat she believed Trump poses.
“When you see what the choice was, of course you’re going to vote,” she said. “I get so mad at people who say, you know, ‘I don’t like him, so I’m not going to vote.’ [A] young person said to me, we already have fascism. They don’t know history. You know, we don’t teach civics anymore, so they don’t understand that what’s happening now is leading to fascism. I mean, this is real tyranny.”
But she also faulted Biden and then-Vice President Kamala Harris after she became the 2024 Democratic presidential nominee, as well as 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, for failing to speak to the economic pain being experienced by Americans who backed Trump.
“They’re not all MAGA,” she said.
Many were just angry and hurting, she said, because they couldn’t afford groceries or pay medical bills. Fonda believes many now have buyer’s remorse.
Fonda reflected on the parallels between the turmoil in the 1960s and today. In the interview, which took place before the killing of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, she argued that today’s political climate is more perilous.
“I’m not sure that what we have right now in the U.S. is a democracy,” she said. “It’s far graver. Far, far graver now than it was.”
Fonda said she remains driven, not by blind optimism, but by immersing herself in work that she believes makes a difference.
“This is what I’m going to be doing for the rest of my life,” she said.
