Yes, New England really was colder when you were a kid. Climate change makes snowy winters feel like a treat.

Baby Boomers grew up with two more weeks of frozen lakes than Gen Z is living with now.

By Erin Douglas and Ken Mahan, Boston Globe, March 4, 2025

This is the first in a series of Globe stories examining New England’s changing winters.

Finally. We watched snowflakes glimmer in the light of street lamps. Kids played pick-up hockey on frozen ponds. And skiers relished in the abundant snow cover — a booming ski season was back.

After years of warm winters that limited snow sports and often left the ground muddy instead of blanketed by white, New Englanders this year welcomed back a winter season that felt, well, cold.

This more classic New England winter is thanks to a weak La Niña weather pattern that tends to draw in more cold air and help whip up storms. Even so, this winter doesn’t come close to the hallmark bitter cold winters of Boston: Temperatures trended below average but were generally well within what’s considered normal. And the snowfall in Boston was actually below average between December and late February.

New England winters are now 3 degrees warmer, on average, than they were during the Baby Boom of the late 1940s through the early 1960s, a Boston Globe analysis of weather data found. Winters here are warming twice as fast as summers. Those few degrees of warming caused by climate change have already sparked a big shift in New England’s winter climate. In just three generations, picturesque winter wonderlands and reliably freezing cold temperatures have become the exception. Instead, we’ve seen weather more associated with spring or fall: rainy days, mushy ground, and some chilly weather.

Compared with Gen Z, those born in the late ‘90s and early 2000s, Baby Boomers grew up with two extra weeks of temperatures low enough to freeze ponds and lakes, according to the analysis.

“We’re having winters where snow comes and goes, or maybe it’s a very wet snow — not that big, fluffy snow,” said Gillian Galford, an ecologist and earth system scientist at the University of Vermont. “It’s just a very different winter experience.”

The last time Boston had a February with an average temperature below 30 degrees was 10 years ago. Last year — which was New England’s warmest on record since data collection began in the late 1800s — the average winter temperature in Boston never even reached below freezing (it was 36.4 degrees).

Warmer winters have slowly upended local economies, disrupted ecosystems, and introduced new flooding concerns. With less snowpack and thinner ice, we’re not sledding or snowshoeing as often. Pond hockey games are getting canceled. And ski resorts rely more heavily on artificial snow-making to keep their operations functioning.

We still get snow — occasionally dumping in huge snowstorms — but the gentle and consistent snow days have become irregular and infrequent.

Climate scientists say the long-term trend for winters in the region is toward rain. And as the emissions from fossil fuels continue to heat the planet, winters like the one we just had are only expected to become more sporadic: Boston’s winters are now, climate scientists say, more characteristic of a normal winter in New Jersey, more than 300 miles south.

By the 2080s, only two generations from now, Boston’s winter climate is expected to feel more like Baltimore with temperatures well above freezing, assuming mankind makes an effort to reduce emissions. It could feel like Memphis by then, researchers have found, if fossil fuel emissions are not drastically reduced.

The vanishing winter climate has consequences: In New Hampshire, during the particularly warm winter of 2015-16, skier visits plummeted 25 percent. In Maine, invasive pests are now capable of surviving the winters without harsh freezes, and they’re sickening native animals and plants. In Massachusetts, cranberry and maple syrup production has been disrupted: Cranberry bogs rely on consistent freezes and maple trees require below-freezing temperatures at night to be tapped for syrup.

There just aren’t that many “freezing days” anymore, leading to shrinking snowpack. Hard freezes tend to set in at 20 degrees and below, but New England has lost an average of 16 hard freeze days per year since 1953, with most of that loss occurring in the last 15 years, data from weather stations show.

“Boston’s winter climate is becoming more like a city in the Mid-Atlantic region with warmer winters,” said Jennifer Francis, a senior scientist at Woodwell Climate Research Center. She grew up ice skating on frozen ponds and cranberry bogs, but now, “the ice is rarely thick enough anymore,” she said.

On Lake Sunapee in New Hampshire, the ice melts 11 days earlier than it did in 1973. (New Hampshire has lost almost an entire month of subfreezing nights.) Maine’s lakes, too, are “icing out” one or two weeks earlier and the ice that does form is thinner.

This decline in ice thickness jeopardizes ice skating, pond hockey, ice fishing, and more. Some winter recreation events and activities have already been axed. Last year, the Pond Hockey Classic in Vermont was canceled due to rising temperatures.

At Lake Morey in Vermont, the ice skating resort can only count on about two weeks per year of good ice skating weather, an owner told the Globe last year. In the past, they could bank on more than six weeks.

Less snowpack is also affecting skiing: In Maine, for example, a dairy farm recently said it will no longer offer cross-country skiing on its property.

Portland, Maine has lost an average 7 inches of snowpack since 1940. Vermont, on average, has lost 10 since the 1960s. In New Hampshire, the state typically gets more than three months of deep snow cover; now, scientists estimate that there will only be — at most — two months of deep snow by the end of the century.

The loss of snowpack is not just a symptom of warming winters; it’s also making the problem worse. When the ground is covered in a layer of white, the sun’s energy is reflected from the ground and keeps the surface cooler. Exposed brown dirt absorbs that energy and generally warms the surface — accelerating the warming.

Snowpack also provides cover and camouflage for wildlife, including American martens and snowshoe hares, respectively. Now, the martens don’t have as many safe spaces to hide and the hares turn white while the ground is still brown.

“They are like the picture book story of climate change,” said Alexej Siren, a wildlife researcher at the University of New Hampshire, of the snowshoe hare.

‘Heavier dumps of snow’

Climate scientists say it’s no surprise that New England still gets huge snowstorms in a warming climate. There’s another factor at play aside from temperature: increasing precipitation.

“Even though warming means more rainstorms versus snowstorms, when there is enough cold air, we get heavier dumps of snow because storms now have more moisture to tap into,” Francis said. (For every 1-degree Fahrenheit increase in temperature, the atmosphere can hold about 4 percent more water vapor.)

The snowfall trend is far from uniform, however. Since 1949, Boston’s annual average snowfall has slightly ticked up, mainly due to blockbuster winter storms in 1993, 1996, and 2015 that unleashed enough snow to buck the trend.

But while most Southern New England cities have experienced a decline in snowfall, parts of New Hampshire and Vermont have seen a jump. Portland, Maine, however, has seen a decline of about 7 inches.

‘Dangerous’ rain-on-snow events

With more rain comes more frequent flooding in the winter. When rain falls on snow, the results can be hazardous for nearby communities.

“Rain-on-snow events are really dangerous because you get really rapid melting,” said Galford, of the University of Vermont. “Then, you have not just the precipitation that came down in that storm, but all the snow melt that goes with it.”

This results in “catastrophic” floods, she added.

In New Hampshire last year, an exceptionally warm winter led to a massive “rain-on-snow” storm in December. Six inches of rain fell in under 24 hours — about as much rain as the state would expect from a hurricane.

Instead of powdery snow piling up on the peaks, rain dumped on the mountains and flushed the melting snow and racing water downhill. The National Guard was called in to perform water rescues, and several ski resorts were forced to shut down just before their busiest time of the season due to flooding.

“It was devastating to see the state go through that,” said Elizabeth Burakowski, an earth and environmental research scientist at the University of New Hampshire.

Adapting to a warmer climate

The winter recreation industry has diversified in a warmer climate: some attempt to attract tourists in the summers instead, and ski resorts have spent more money on expensive snow-making equipment.

Loon Mountain Resort in New Hampshire now relies on snowmaking for 97 percent of the resort’s trail acreage. Snowmaking can be very labor and energy intensive, but climate change makes it essential to the business.

Brian Norton, the resort’s president and general manager, said that the ski season now starts later than it did when he first started working at Loon Mountain 25 years ago. Snowmakers frequently battle rain and higher temperatures.

“The drastic swings in temperature were not as common 15 or 20 years ago,” Norton said.

The resort has spent more than $10 million over the last decade on new snowmaking guns that can be turned on with just a push of the button, Norton said. The newer technology allows the staff to get trails ready faster, and take advantage of every little window of time when temperatures are cold enough to make snow.

The lack of deep, consistent snow is slowly, but surely, shifting the experience of growing up in New England. That’s something Burakowski, of the University of New Hampshire, has seen first hand with her family.

She remembers learning to ski in New Hampshire in the second grade. Now, there are fewer places where she can find deep snow packs to ski, and powder days are a rare treat. Most of her ski days are on artificial snow — and her 10-year-old son takes notice.

“[Sometimes], when he looks down from the lift, it’s just bare ground,” Burakowski said. “We’re kind of sliding down this ribbon of white.”

https://www.bostonglobe.com/2025/03/03/science/new-england-boston-warming-winters-snow-rain-climate-change/?et_rid=1745350245&s_campaign=todaysheadlines:newsletter

Farmers Sue Over Deletion of Climate Data From Government Websites

The data, which disappeared from Agriculture Department sites in recent weeks, was useful to farmers for business planning, the lawsuit said.

By Karen Zraick, Feb. 24, 2025

Organic farmers and environmental groups sued the Agriculture Department on Monday over its scrubbing of references to climate change from its website.

The department had ordered staff to take down pages focused on climate change on Jan. 30, according to the suit, which was filed in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. Within hours, it said, information started disappearing.

That included websites containing data sets, interactive tools and funding information that farmers and researchers relied on for planning and adaptation projects, according to the lawsuit.

At the same time, the department also froze funding that had been promised to businesses and nonprofits through conservation and climate programs. The purge then “removed critical information about these programs from the public record, denying farmers access to resources they need to advocate for funds they are owed,” it said.

The Agriculture Department referred questions about the lawsuit to the Justice Department, which did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The suit was filed by lawyers from Earthjustice, based in San Francisco, and the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, on behalf of the Northeast Organic Farming Association of New York, based in Binghamton; the Natural Resources Defense Council, based in New York; and the Environmental Working Group, based in Washington. The latter two groups relied on the department website for their research and advocacy, the lawsuit said.

Peter Lehner, a lawyer for Earthjustice, said the pages being purged were crucial for farmers facing risks linked to climate change, including heat waves, droughts, floods, extreme weather and wildfires. The websites had contained information about how to mitigate dangers and adopt new agricultural techniques and strategies. Long-term weather data and trends are valuable in the agriculture industry for planning, research and business strategy.

“You can purge a website of the words climate change, but that doesn’t mean climate change goes away,” Mr. Lehner said.

The sites under the department’s umbrella include those of the Forest Service, which is responsible for stewardship of forests and grasslands; the Natural Resources Conservation Service, which helps landowners implement conservation practices; and those of other divisions focused on farms and ranches, disaster recovery and rural development.

The directive to delete the pages came by email from Peter Rhee, the department’s director of digital communications, according to the lawsuit.

The plaintiffs allege the actions violated three federal laws and were “arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion, or otherwise not in accordance with law.” They asked the court to compel the agency to restore the pages and to block it from deleting any others.

Wes Gillingham, president of the board of Northeast Organic Farming Association of New York, said that farmers were just heading into planning for the summer growing season. He said taking information down because of a “political agenda about climate change” was senseless.

He has been farming in Livingston Manor, N.Y., in the Catskill Mountains, for 30 years, and now raises Icelandic sheep there. He had previously grown vegetables for a community-supported agriculture program, but stopped about 20 years ago when his operation was wiped out by three massive floods in a five-year period.

Mr. Gillingham said his organization is the largest organic certifier in New York State, which is a major hub for small farms. They often send farmers to the Agriculture Department website for information on things like conservation programs and which agricultural practices qualify for grants and loans. They also direct people to resources like equipment lending.

“Right now, because of climate change and because of what farmers are facing in terms of extreme weather events, we need every piece of available information we can get,” he said. “We don’t have access to that, we’re not going to make it.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/24/climate/agriculture-farmer-website-data-lawsuit.html

GOP Lawmakers Seek to Roll Back Methane Fee

Policy experts say the proposal to permanently kill a fee on excessive oil and gas industry pollution will hurt U.S. LNG competitiveness and public health.

By Phil McKenna, Inside Climate News, Feb. 6, 2025

Every day in oil and gas fields, companies lose gas to leaks and other issues—product they make no money from while venting a potent climate-damaging pollutant into the atmosphere.

In November, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency set a first-of-its-kind fee on those methane emissions so more companies would plug their leaks.

Now, House and Senate Republicans have introduced legislation to roll the rule back—using a mechanism that would prevent the EPA from advancing a similar rule ever again.

“It’s about as wrong-headed as it can be, on every scale,” said Pat Parenteau, emeritus professor of law and senior fellow for climate policy in the Environmental Law Center at Vermont Law School. “The rule requires you to plug leaks and stop wasting a valuable product.”

The methane fee, or Waste Emissions Charge, was part of the bipartisan Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) that Congress passed in 2022. It applies only to large emitters of methane if their emissions exceed certain thresholds.

Facilities in compliance with Clean Air Act standards for oil and gas operations are exempt from the charge. The IRA also included $1 billion in financial and technical assistance to help oil and gas producers monitor and reduce their methane emissions. 

The fee was part of a broader set of regulations designed to reduce methane emissions from the oil and gas sector by nearly 80 percent.

EPA estimated that the methane fee alone would reduce 1.2 million metric tons of methane through 2035—the equivalent of taking nearly 8 million gas-powered cars off the road for a year. Methane is the biggest driver of climate change after carbon dioxide.

But oil and gas industry groups opposed the fee. The American Petroleum Institute called it a “punitive tax” and championed the new legislation to permanently kill it.

“Americans voted for a future where U.S. energy thrives,” Amanda Eversole, API’s executive vice president and chief advocacy officer, said in a written statement.

The Congressional Review Act, which passed as part of Newt Gingrich’s 1996 Contract With America, allows Congress to overturn any regulation finalized within the last 60 working days of the previous Congress. As long as the president agrees with the decision, all it takes is a simple majority vote in the House and Senate—currently controlled by Republicans. Any future administration would then be blocked from implementing a new rule that is “substantially the same.”

That’s what the new legislation seeks to do to the methane rule.

“We are working to get our nation back on the right track, providing needed regulatory and tax relief to deliver real cost savings to American energy producers and consumers,” U.S. Sen. John Hoeven (R-N.D.), who introduced the bill in the Senate, said in a written statement.

U.S. Rep. August Pfluger (R-Texas), who introduced the bill in the House, said in a statement that he was “proud to lead this CRA to rescind this ill-conceived natural gas tax.”

The fee, according to an assessment by Energy Innovation, would create more than 70,000 jobs by encouraging investments in U.S. natural gas and would increase gross domestic product by more than $250 billion from 2023 to 2050. The group is a climate policy think tank with offices in Washington and San Francisco.

By curbing the release of harmful pollutants, the fee would also save lives and prevent asthma attacks, Parenteau said.

“What this says is Republicans don’t give a damn about protecting public health, about conserving important energy resources [and] about achieving energy independence and dominance,” Parenteau said. “If they really did, they would double down on the investments of the IRA, 80 percent of which are going to Republican districts.”

Rick Duke, who served as the U.S. deputy special envoy for climate under President Joe Biden, said rolling back the methane fee would jeopardize the competitiveness of U.S. liquified natural gas exports.  

“This is the definition of self-destructive,” Duke said. “We have a carefully negotiated set of standards, plus a backstop fee legislated by Congress that strong-foots American LNG exporters.”

The methane fee helps ensure that U.S. LNG exports will meet low methane intensity import standards on fuels that will take effect in Europe in 2030, as well as similar standards under development in Japan and South Korea, Duke said.

“This also is something which ensures, over the long haul, that American LNG has a competitive advantage relative to dirty suppliers such as Russia,” Duke said, adding that the rollback would have no impact on the price of natural gas in the U.S.

Rogelio Meixueiro, a Texas community advocate for GreenLatinos, an environmental organization, voiced concerns about the health impacts of a potential methane fee rollback. 

“Latino families, especially those living near oil and gas operations in places like East Texas and the Permian Basin, face daily exposure to toxic emissions from flares and leaks,” Meixueiro said in a statement. “This pollution increases their risk of respiratory illness, cancer, and other severe health conditions.” 

The EPA finalized the implementation rule for the methane fee on Nov. 12, well within the 60 working-day period for the Congressional Review Act. But while the CRA resolution introduced this week by Republican lawmakers can rescind that, it can’t do away with the Waste Emissions Charge mandate Congress passed in 2022 as part of the Inflation Reduction Act. That law requires the EPA to implement a waste fee rule. 

That sets up an almost inevitable battle over future methane fees.

The block on any new rule that is “substantially the same” as the current one could hamstring future administrations intent on reducing methane emissions. And yet the requirement for such a rule under law could land the regulation-adverse Trump administration in court if it doesn’t come up with a replacement.

One potential way to enact a rule that isn’t substantially the same: write a more stringent one.

Fees for excessive methane emissions during the 2024 calendar year are due on Aug. 31 under the current rules.

An EPA spokesperson said the agency is reviewing the legislation “and we do not have any comment at this time.”

“I think the U.S. has really made some huge strides in reducing methane from oil and gas and would be a shame if we backslid and ceded our place on that,” said Darin Schroeder, methane legal and regulatory director for Clean Air Task Force. “There’s a lot of work to go, but I hope what we’ve accomplished as a country is not swept aside.”

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/06022025/gop-lawmakers-seek-to-roll-back-methane-fee/?utm_medium=email&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-_Vd0q_oStrxqi4r9Ewdy1nZLE7Pywfdxq_EZhor05ZDEJT3-9xlJkgdvpru657h9VDHqNsI6iyEkAiutlvCKD-Owp0hQ&_hsmi=346970911&utm_content=346970911&utm_source=hs_email

China Will Be Thrilled if Trump Kills America’s Green Economy

Op-ed by Jennifer Granholm, The New York Times, Jan. 23, 2025

In its heyday in the mid-20th century, the steel mill in Weirton, W.Va., employed 13,000 people and offered workers a relatively stable blue-collar life. In 2003, Weirton Steel filed for bankruptcy. Shops downtown boarded up their windows, and young people moved away from the declining Appalachian town.

Weirton’s prospects were turning around in May 2023 when I made a trip there as energy secretary. Form Energy, which builds large iron-air batteries to store energy for the electric grid, had just broken ground on a 550,000-square-foot factory. Today, the production line is humming, and when the plant reaches full capacity, it will employ more than 750 people, primarily locals who were laid off from the mill.

Form Energy’s plant is one of nearly 1,000 new or expanded clean energy factories announced across the United States in the past four years, along with about 800,000 new manufacturing jobs — proof that America has begun a manufacturing renaissance.

But you can kiss that goodbye if President Trump and the new Congress roll back the laws that made it possible. Our economic competitors are lying in wait to entice companies overseas and turn our innovation into their prosperity.

The United States used to be great at building things. Around the middle of the 20th century we made half the world’s steel and half the world’s cars. By the 1970s, more Americans held manufacturing jobs than ever before.

Then, other countries started poaching our technology. They lured companies abroad with free capital and cheap labor. Back in America, policymakers stuck to their laissez-faire guns. If employers wanted to move production offshore, who were we to question the free market? But our economic competitors weren’t playing by the same rules. The free market didn’t take our jobs; China and Mexico did, by tempting companies with financial incentives.

By the time I became Michigan’s governor in 2003, many workers who had started their careers making the world’s best cars ended their careers without a pension — sometimes even training their replacements overseas before handing in their identification badges. Around 60,000 American factories shut down between 2001 and 2011.

There should be no confusion about why new factories are opening again: America is finally playing hardball with its economic competitors. As president, Joe Biden enacted three laws — the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the CHIPS and Science Act and the Inflation Reduction Act — that created tax credits, grants and loans to make it cost effective to build American products on American soil with American workers. That’s especially true of clean energy technologies like solar panels and batteries.

Form Energy received a grant from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law to help build its factory. It will also claim tax credits through the Inflation Reduction Act for producing batteries. Over the next decade, our clean energy laws could add almost $2 trillion to the U.S. economy.

Yet Mr. Trump seems poised to roll back the very incentives that are reviving American manufacturing. He has promised to kill an electric vehicle tax credit that has helped save auto factories, including in my home state. On his first day in office, he signed an executive order declaring an emergency need for more energy, which he defines almost exclusively as oil and gas. There is no mention of solar, which is generating thousands of new manufacturing jobs and was our largest new source of energy capacity last year.

This is a risky economic strategy. Other governments are waiting with bated breath for us to pare back our grants, loans and tax credits so they can use the same tools to sweet-talk the next generation of factories to their shores.

Consider electric vehicles: It’s no secret China wants to dominate the global market. Today, it accounts for more than half the world’s electric vehicle production. But over 450 electric vehicle battery companies have announced they are moving to America or expanding factories here since the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act — many of them leaving China to do so. It would be a national embarrassment to cede this entire industry back.

And we stand to lose more than jobs or pride. The United States’ electricity demand will grow 15 percent over the next decade because of new data centers, factories and transportation. If the Trump administration forces the loss of wind, solar and other clean energy jobs, we’ll lose access to the technologies that help make up our energy mix. Monthly utility bills will rise, and brownouts and blackouts will become regular experiences.

The administration is also deluding itself if it believes “drill, baby, drill” will create a jobs boom. The United States is already the world’s largest oil producer and gas exporter. A combination of tepid oil prices and subdued market demand has left many industry leaders wary of making major investments to increase output.

The politics of presidential transitions are delicate. Incoming administrations want to turn the page, but some policies, and some people, ought to be exempt from this tug of war. I think of the autoworkers in Michigan and the steelworkers in West Virginia — skilled women and men left asking if America still has use for their talents. It took us too long to respond, but because of these new manufacturing laws, we can finally say yes.

Securing the next generation of U.S. manufacturing jobs will require strong government and private-sector partnerships and continued investment in domestic clean energy production. When we flipped off the lights in our offices on Monday, we left the next occupants a plan for success — already in motion. It will be up to them to decide if they want to make the most of it.

Jennifer Granholm was energy secretary in the Biden administration and governor of Michigan from 2003 to 2011.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/23/opinion/trump-china-ev-batteries.html?searchResultPosition=1

Multiyear droughts are worsening. Here’s where they have the most effects.

More evidence shows multiyear events are increasing. One scientist said no one had characterized these protracted global droughts and their impacts — until now.

By Kasha Patel, The Washington Post, Jan. 16, 2025

More than 13,000 droughts spanning years have overwhelmed our planet across nearly four decades. These severe droughts are becoming hotter, longer and more devastating as our planet’s global temperature increases, new research has found.

Some of the worst drought effects appear in grassland areas — such as in eastern Australia as well as in the western United States, where Los Angeles is battling a spate of deadly and destructive wildfires. Additionally, researchers recently identified thousands of other multiyear droughts that may be overlooked on a global scale.

“We need awareness of these ‘new’ type of droughts, which last for more than one season or year,” said Francesca Pellicciotti, a hydrologist at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria and co-author of the study published Thursday. “Their effects are amplified — up to the point that some of these systems will not recover anymore.”

While there is more evidence that multiyear events are increasing, Pellicciotti said no one had characterized these long-term droughts across the globe and their impacts — until now.

The team analyzed 13,176 multiyear droughts from 1980 to 2018 through two perspectives: a meteorological standpoint, which largely looked at rainfall as well as temperature, and the ecological impact on vegetation, which helped the researchers gauge the severity.

They found that precipitation deficits in the top 100 multiyear droughts increased over the past four decades. The droughts were also getting hotter, in tandem with global average air temperatures also increasing in recent decades. The years with the largest droughts also followed El Niño events.

“Drought can propagate and reinforce themselves significantly,” said Liangzhi Chen, lead author of the study. “If a drought persists, it will persist longer.”

Still, assessing multiyear droughts and changes to them “nevertheless remains a challenge,” in part because of uncertainties in data and relatively limited information about soil moisture, said climate researcher Jason Smerdon, a professor at Columbia University who was not involved in the study.

Plus, not all droughts affect ecosystems the same way, the study found. Droughts in certain biomes — or geographic areas of certain climates, vegetation and animals — had bigger transformative effects on the land. Severe droughts in tropical rainforests were largely not as severe on vegetation as the ones that occurred in grasslands.

For example, one of the longest-lasting meteorological droughts in the study — persisting from 2010 to 2018 — covered nearly 1.5 million square kilometers in the eastern Congo basin. Another drought in the southwestern Amazon lasted nine years and covered nearly the size of the United Kingdom (213,000 square kilometers) at its peak.

Yet these droughts had relatively tame effects on their surrounding ecosystems when compared to others.

Measuring the health of vegetation using satellite data, the researchers found that droughts with the most impactful effects occurred in temperate grasslands — with hot spots in Mongolia, the western United States and eastern Australia.

In forests, Chen said, even a small change in vegetation can have significant effects. But the researchers found that the effects are greatly multiplied in grassland areas for longer-lasting dry spells. In fact, the productivity of grassland vegetation can decrease by three times as much in the second year of a drought compared with the first year.

The drought consequences are easy to spot in the western United States, which experienced some of the most severe drought by meteorological standards and effects on the surrounding ecosystem. As of Thursday, the Eaton and Palisades fires had destroyed thousands of structures and consumed more than 40,000 acres in nine days.

“When the drought gets longer, the vegetation will be drier and they are more flammable,” said Chen, a researcher at the Swiss Federal Research Institute WSL. “The whole system will be drier and soil will be drier. … It can somehow accelerate the fire to develop spatially.”

The study’s results “add to the growing consensus that we can expect larger, more frequent and more intense droughts as the planet warms,” said Matt Rodell, a hydrologist at NASA who was not involved in the study.

In a separate study, Rodell and his colleague showed a notable increase in the frequency of both major droughts and extreme wet events after 2015 — all of which have been among Earth’s top 10 warmest years on record.

Chen’s study stopped analyzing droughts after 2018, but Chen expects that the researchers would find additional intense droughts had occurred in recent years if they were to expand their dataset.

“This is an important piece of detective work that highlights how the character of droughts globally, such as their length and severity, is important to consider beyond just assessments of their occurrence,” Smerdon said.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2025/01/16/multiyear-droughts-severe-western-grasslands-fires/

Trump Wants Greenland and the Panama Canal. It’s About Climate.

Global warming is making both places more important to global shipping and trade.

By Lisa Friedman, The New York Times, Dec. 31, 2024

To imagine the kind of future a hotter, dryer climate may bring, and the geopolitical challenges it will create, look no farther than two parts of the world that Donald Trump wants America to control: Greenland and the Panama Canal.

The president-elect in recent days has insisted that both places are critical to United States national security. He’s called to reclaim control the Panama Canal from Panama and acquire Greenland from Denmark, both sovereign territories with their own governments.

They have something else in common as well: Both are significantly affected by climate change in ways that present looming challenges to global shipping and trade.

Because of warming temperatures, an estimated 11,000 square miles of Greenland’s ice sheets and glaciers have melted over the past three decades, an area roughly equivalent to the size of Massachusetts. That has huge implications for the entire world. If the ice melts completely, Greenland could cause sea levels to rise as much as 23 feet, according to NASA.

Greenland’s retreating ice could open up areas to drill for oil and gas and places to mine critical minerals, a fact that has already attracted international interest and raised concerns about environmental harms. And, ship traffic in the Arctic has surged 37 percent over the past decade, according to a recent Arctic Council report, as sea ice has declined. More melting could open up even more trade routes.

Amanda Lynch, a professor at Brown University who has studied climate change in the Arctic for nearly 30 years, said the new trade routes created by ice melt could also heighten the risk of environmental disasters. Ships from some countries, she said, are not designed to withstand Arctic conditions.

“An oil spill or some other toxic accident on that route is inevitable and could already have happened and we just don’t know it,” she said.

China has shown significant interest in a new route through the Arctic, and in November China and Russia agreed to work together to develop Arctic shipping routes.

“The traffic lanes in the Arctic are changing because of climate change,” Jose W. Fernandez, the State Department under secretary for economic growth, energy and the environment, said in an interview. “It’s something that we are devoting more and more attention to, and any new administration is going to have to address going forward,” he said.

Trump calls climate change a hoax. The Trump transition team did not respond to a request for comment. But his former national security adviser, Robert C. O’Brien suggested on Sunday that climate change was one factor in Trump’s interest in acquiring Greenland.

“Greenland is a highway from the Arctic all the way to North America, to the United States,” he told Fox News. “It’s strategically very important to the Arctic, which is going to be the critical battleground of the future because as the climate gets warmer, the Arctic is going to be a pathway that maybe cuts down on the usage of the Panama Canal.”

Which brings us to the Panama Canal.

Over 51 miles across the middle of Panama, the vital waterway uses a series of locks and reservoirs to connect the Atlantic and the Pacific. The canal spares ships having to go roughly 7,000 additional miles to sail around Cape Horn at the southern tip of South America.

In 2023, a lengthy drought caused widespread disruption at the canal. Water levels at Gatún Lake, the principal hydrological reserve for the canal, sank to historically low levels and the authorities reduced shipping through the canal to conserve the lake’s fresh water. The resulting lines of ships waiting for weeks to cross the canal threatened to trigger a domino effect across supply chains.

Scientists found the immediate cause was El Niño, a natural weather phenomenon that can last several years. But, they found, climate change may also be prolonging dry spells and raising temperatures in the region. The canal authority has proposed a $1.6 billion project to dam the nearby Indio River to secure freshwater.

Climate change is walloping the canal from several angles, said Kevin Trenberth, the former head of climate analysis at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. Its lock system also is facing increased threats from rising sea levels, which could cause floods and erode the canal banks.

Chris Field, director of the Woods Institute for the Environment at Stanford University, said Trump’s interest in both the Panama Canal and Greenland were “kind of an indirect acknowledgment” that climate change is real and creating new global challenges.

“It’s interesting that the narrative from Trump is that if we control these places, it would be better somehow. But the challenge is the climate change component doesn’t go away,” he said.

Trump’s aspirations face some big hurdles. President José Raúl Mulino of Panama has ruled out discussing control of the canal with Trump. And the prime minister of Greenland, Mute Egede, has said control of the island, which is an autonomous territory of Denmark, is “not for sale and will never be for sale.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/31/climate/trump-greenland-panama-canal-climate-change.html