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We’re now a quarter of the way through the 21st century, and it’s indisputable that climate is one of the most important stories of our time. That’s our philosophy here at Heatmap, but just about everything around us illustrates it, too — from government policy and tech to movies and reality TV.
And of course — or maybe, especially — books.
It’s been about 17 years since the term “cli-fi” (or “climate fiction”) was first coined, and in the meantime, books that touch on climate themes in both fiction and nonfiction have taken off like the Keeling Curve. In 2025, we’ll be reading novels that imagine life in San Francisco after years of deluge and investigative reports into subjects such as how companies have gotten away with dumping forever chemicals into the environment for so long. There will be new natural histories to dive into — on the desert, forests, prairies, and even on the chemical compound CO2 — as well as new frames of thinking about climate change and how we approach its solutions.
Because so many 2025 books will touch on climate themes, I’ve set aside a section of honorable mentions at the end of this list that are also worth checking out. The division doesn’t indicate quality; I chose the primary 18 based on my subjective excitement and to showcase different genres, publishers, and authors. It might be in the appendix that you find a book on the topic you’re personally most excited about (Arctic exploration? Solar geoengineering? Florida-set family dramas?) for next year.
Finally, if you want to see all these books in one place or judge them by their (excellent) covers, you can browse our curated list on Bookshop here.
The U.S. government’s Fifth National Climate Assessment section on the Southwest reads like an apocalyptic horror story: “Heat-related mortality,” “increased wildfire risks,” and “longer and more severe droughts” all make it into the opening few paragraphs. The truth is that the hottest and driest region of the United States is home to 60 million people, many of whom will have to adapt to a more extreme future in the coming years. In New Mexico-born journalist Kyle Paoletta’s debut book, American Oasis, he traces the allure of places like Albuquerque, Phoenix, El Paso, and Las Vegas back to the Athapaskan migration from the sub-Arctic around 1100 BCE and through the heydays of Arizona Highways, a magazine from the 1950s, while also charting what lies ahead for those who are drawn to making the desert, however impossibly, their home. Preorder it here.
Speaking of the American desert, on the fiction side of things this winter comes Madeleine Watts’ latest novel, Elegy, Southwest. Watts made a name for herself as a writer of cli-fi after the release of her 2021 novel, The Inland Sea, set against the backdrop of Australia’s fires and floods, and she returns this year with a road trip novel that follows Eloise, a doctoral student studying the Colorado River and climate change. As part of her research, Eloise flies to Las Vegas for a road trip through the Southwest with her husband, Lewis, to whom the novel is addressed. Along the way, Eloise begins to believe she’s pregnant, while Lewis struggles with the fresh grief of losing his mother. As Watts told an interviewer of her process for The Inland Sea, “I wanted to write … about what it’s like to live in the experience of a changing climate that is not always a tangible part of your day-to-day but that’s already there – it’s in the air all around you.” Expect a similar treatment this go-round. Preorder it here.
Eric Puchner’s new novel, Dream State, is the story of two marriages set over 50 years. With the book opening in 2004, that naturally requires some speculation about the future — in this case, the future of “a rapidly warming Montana.” As The Indypendent writes in an early review, “The looming climate crisis — declining snowfall, depleted wildlife, raging seasonal wildfires, and abnormally warm temperatures — is writ large in the book, forming a blistering backdrop, highlighting newfound restrictions on what both residents and short-term visitors can now see and do in the area.” The novel has earned praise from Pulitzer Prize-winner Adam Johnson, who called it “a masterpiece,” as well as author Lynn Steger Strong, who has a climate book of her own on the list below. Preorder it here.
Four years ago, Argentinean author Agustina Bazterrica burst onto Americans’ radars with the English-language translation of her 2017 novel Tender Is the Flesh, a book that imagines a future in which animals have become toxic to humans, leading us to resort to industrialized cannibalism. (Critics have described it, vividly, as “splatterpunk.”) This year, Bazterrica turns her attention from factory farming to the climate catastrophe, telling the story of a member of a “Sacred Sisterhood” cloistered in a mysterious convent who is prompted to reflect on her life outside its walls when a new acolyte arrives. Don’t expect Bazterrica to soften her critiques of capitalism here, though it’s not all doom and gloom; early readers have said The Unworthy “ends on a light note of hope.” Preorder it here.
Charlotte McConaghy’s follow-up novel to her critically acclaimed 2020 debut, Migrations, is set on a fictional research island, Shearwater, located between Australia and Antarctica. Dominic Salt, the caretaker of the island’s seed vault, has called the refuge home for the past eight years — ever since fleeing Australia’s accelerating natural disasters, hoping to find a safer place to raise his three children. But with rising sea levels now threatening the island, Dominic and his family have just seven weeks left before they plan to move on. Just before their departure, Dominic’s oldest daughter discovers a woman who has shipwrecked on shore, and the tension — and mystery — starts to grow. Wild Dark Shore has earned a starred review from Kirkus, which calls it a “terrific thriller.” Preorder it here.
Climatologist, World Weather Attribution co-founder, and 2024 Trailblazing Women in Climate laureate Friederike Otto does not mince words about who is most impacted by extreme weather — and who needs to be involved in the solutions. “If we leave the issue of climate change to white men, it’ll continue to be treated as a physical problem with technological solutions,” she has said, adding, “The more diverse the people working on it, the closer we get to implementing these solutions and making progress on climate change.” Her new book, Climate Injustice, elaborates on her thesis further, using the stories of real people in the Global South to illustrate how exploitation, sexism, and colonialism have created a crisis with unequal impacts. Preorder it here.
Everyone who works in the climate space is familiar with the question posed in the title of this book. Entomologist Douglas W. Tallamy is one of the leading proponents of the native gardens movement, and in How Can I Help?, he answers a query implied in his own earlier book, 2009’s Bringing Nature Home: that “unless we restore native plants to our suburban ecosystems, the future of biodiversity in the United States is dim.” How Can I Help? is structured to address some of the most common questions Tallamy encounters during his lectures about how individuals can become directors of their own miniature national parks at home. Despite the daunting challenge of biodiversity loss, Tallamy offers actionable ideas for helping the planet, with conservation beginning in your backyard. Preorder it here.
If I had to make one prediction for 2025, it’d be that we will hear a lot more about per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances — that is, the “forever chemicals” commonly known as PFAS. The chemicals are found in everything from our dental floss to our clothes, but perhaps most disturbingly, they’re also found in our drinking water. In Poisoning the Well, The Hill staff writers Sharon Udasin and Rachel Frazin follow how PFAS got into our environment in the first place — a story of corporate greed and cover-ups that will be familiar to anyone aware of the fossil fuel playbook. Preorder it here.
Journalist Malcolm Harris’ last book was an “encyclopedic,” 700-page history of the city of Palo Alto, which became a fixture of best-of-the-year lists after it came out last February. Hot on its heels is Harris’ follow-up, What’s Left (which slow readers will be relieved to hear is less of a time commitment, at 320 pages). Harris’ intention with his new work is to explore “our remaining options for saving the world,” all of which involve varying degrees of collective action but which escalate from “progressive” to “socialist” to “revolutionary.” It’s one that you can be sure will have people talking. Preorder it here.
Alan Weisman’s hugely successful 2007 book, The World Without Us, speculated about humanity’s legacy if we suddenly disappeared. (Slate named it in 2019 as one of the 50 best nonfiction books in the past quarter-century.) Now, Weisman turns his attention to helping us stick around. “I am working on a book with kind of a vast topic, which is what are humanity’s best and most realistic hopes for getting through this very difficult century that we have,” he told Bangladesh’s Business Standard in 2022, while visiting the country during the research stage of his new project, Hope Dies Last. Weisman’s book took him all over the world — including the Korean de-militarized zone, the Netherlands, and the Marshall Islands — as he looked to speak with people across disciplines and professions about how we can approach our future. Bill McKibben has described the result as “a nonfiction companion to Kim Stanley Robinson’s Ministry for the Future.” Preorder it here.
In 1999, 24-year-old environmentalist Terence Unity Freitas traveled to Colombia to support the Indigenous U’wa people in resisting Occidental Petroleum, which was interested in drilling to extract some 1.5 billion barrels of oil from beneath the cloud forest. During what was supposed to be a weeklong visit, Freitas was kidnapped by the Armed Revolutionary Forces of Colombia (better known as FARC) along with two other Americans; their bodies were later found, bound and shot, just over the border in Venezuela. Twenty years later, Abby Reyes — the author of this memoir and Freitas’ partner at the time of his death — was recognized as a victim in Colombia’s truth and reconciliation process, resurfacing old griefs, reflections, and questions. “I bring the reader along in my demand for truth before the tribunal while awakening our collective awareness of what the truth demands of all of us in this era of ecological collapse and social transformation,” Reyes has said of her book. Preorder it here.
In Susanna Kwan’s debut novel, Awake in the Floating City, San Francisco is almost entirely underwater. Years of Biblical rain mean most people have already evacuated, but Bo — who lost her mother to the waters — lingers long past when sensible people have fled. Then one day, she receives a note from her neighbor, Mia, a 130-year-old woman who doesn’t want to leave the city, either; together, the two become the last people left in San Francisco. “What post-apocalyptic vision dares be so gorgeous?” marvels the author Meng Jin in one of the book’s early blurbs. Preorder it here.
Identical twin sister arborists teach the Women’s Tree Climbing Workshop. While that sounds like the beginning of a fairy tale, it’s the delightfully real-life starting point of journalist Marguerite Holloway’s Take to the Trees. “I was there to be in trees and to better understand them,” she writes of her attendance at the climbing workshop. “Trees and forests are facing existential threats because of climate change, but it can be a struggle to grasp the extent of the danger.” While not all of us have the time, ability, or inclination to take to such “gut-lurching” heights to learn more, we can read Take to the Trees, which records Holloway’s experience overcoming her fears and learning to appreciate the threat to American forests. Preorder it here.
Natural history is one of my favorite genres, and I’m especially excited for Sea of Grass by Minnesota Star Tribute journalists Dave Hage and Josephine Marcotty about one of the more neglected ecosystems of the genre: the American prairie. The grassland, which makes up a vast swath of the inner United States, is an incredible self-sustaining marvel — and nearly as biodiverse as a tropical rainforest. Yet many people today still either share European settlers’ disinterested view of the landscape or adopt a purely utilitarian one — which is why, after 200 years of plows, drainages, and nitrogen fertilizers, the effects have been “catastrophic.” Still, plenty of people who live on the prairie understand the importance of protecting such a special ecosystem, and Hage and Marcotty follow the effort to work alongside the land, not just against it. Sea of Grass earned a coveted blurb from McKibben, in which he calls the book “well worth the read.” Preorder it here.
We’ve been attempting to predict the weather for as long as humans have existed. Satellites, radars, and computers helped us make a significant leap forward from the days of farmer’s almanacs, but advances in artificial intelligence, drones, and the proliferation of home weather stations have created previously unimaginable opportunities for accuracy. (It’s a tech frontier we’ve covered quite a bit here at Heatmap, as well). In his book, Journalist Thomas E. Weber dives into the wild — and wildly important — world of forecasting, which will hit shelves just in time for hurricane season. Preorder it here.
Climate scientist and Shift Key guest Kate Marvel structured her highly anticipated first book around nine different emotional lenses for looking at climate change. That might seem like an odd angle for a scientist, since researchers are specifically taught not to bring emotion into their work. Still, she contends that just as there is no one way to feel about climate change, there is no one emotion we can tap to guide our response to it, either. From hope to pride to love, Marvel urges readers to get deep into their feels in Human Nature, which also touches on “Greek mythology,” “witches,” “geophysical fluid dynamics,” and “romantic comedies” — though according to Marvel, you won’t find “despair” in its pages. A 120,000-copy initial print run suggests the publisher, Ecco, believes this one will be a hit. Preorder it here.
Addressing climate change will require us to address how we eat, which accounts for a third of our carbon emissions. How to ameliorate that is one of the most significant questions we’re currently staring down as a species — and the topic of journalist and Heatmap contributor Michael Grunwald’s next book. Though the answers he finds might not always fit into our comfortable narratives — Grunwald recently ruffled feathers with a related piece for The New York Times defending industrial agriculture’s high yields on small parcels of land as our “best hope” — We Are Eating the Earth seems certain to reshape how its readers think about food, policy, and our thrice-daily consumptions. I can’t wait to be challenged by it. Preorder it here.
Science journalist Peter Brannen’s last book was about the five times life on our planet almost ended in mass extinctions. His follow-up, The Story of CO2 Is the Story of Everything, will zero in on the collection of molecules that have allowed life to exist in the first place. Of course, the great irony of carbon dioxide is that while it has made our planet habitable, fluctuations in its presence in the atmosphere are also responsible for things like almost killing our ancestors all off in an event known as the Great Dying — and now, of course, we have put our thumb on that scale. By looking backward, often by many millions of years, Brennen gives us a glimpse of our future. You’ll definitely want to preorder this book, if only because it will look great on the shelf next to Brennen’s other Eric Nyquist-designed cover. Preorder it here.
The Edge of Water, by Olufunke Grace Bankole (Feb. 4), a novel about a Nigerian immigrant to New Orleans whose destiny is shaped by a hurricane; Ends of the Earth Journeys to the Polar Regions in Search of Life, the Cosmos, and Our Future, by Neil Shubin (Feb. 4), about what we can learn about life and our future from our world’s most extreme landscapes; Dimming the Sun: The Urgent Case for Geoengineering, by Thomas Ramge (March 4), which makes the case for solar geoengineering to turn down the heat on a warming planet; Bad Nature, by Ariel Courage (April 1), an ecological disaster road-trip novel with a patricide plot; Shelter and Storm: At Home in the Driftless, by Tamara Dean (April 8), a memoir about living through the era of climate uncertainty; The Float Test, by Lynn Steger Strong (April 8), a family drama set against the backdrop of a sweltering Florida summer; Atomic Dreams: The New Nuclear Evangelists and the Fight for the Future of Energy, by Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow (April 8), about the political reversal over nuclear’s place in the energy transition; Phytopolis: The Living City, by Stefano Mancuso (April 22), about how we can adapt our cities, greenly, to the challenges of the future; Carbon: The Book of Life, by Paul Hawken (March 18), about the element both responsible for life and perhaps the biggest threat against it; A Year of Compassion: 52 Weeks of Living Zero-Waste, Plant-Based, and Cruelty-Free, by Colleen Patrick-Goudreau (March 25), about how to protect the planet with small acts of kindness from home; The Lost Trees of Willow Avenue: A Story of Climate and Hope on One American Street, by Mike Tidwell (March 25), a chronicle of record year for climate change as seen on a single Washington, D.C., block; Ocean: Earth’s Last Wilderness, by David Attenborough and Colin Butfield (May 6), the story of one of the planet’s most critical features, co-authored by one of its most beloved natural historians; Arctic Passages: Ice, Exploration, and the Battle for Power at the Top of the World, by Kieran Mulvaney (May 13), about what the age of Arctic exploration can reveal to us about the future of the pole; Hot Takes: Every Journalist’s Guide to Covering Climate Change, by Sadie Babits (June 2), a handbook for incorporating climate science into your reporting.
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Half of all Americans are sweating under one right now.
Like a bomb cyclone, a polar vortex, or an atmospheric river, a heat dome is a meteorological phenomenon that feels, well, a little made up. I hadn’t heard the term before I found myself bottled beneath one in the Pacific Northwest in 2021, where I saw leaves and needles brown on living trees. Ultimately, some 1,400 people died from the extreme heat in British Columbia, Washington, and Oregon that summer weekend.
Since that disaster, there have been a number of other high-profile heat dome events in the United States, including this week, over the Midwest and now Eastern and Southeastern parts of the country. On Monday, roughly 150 million people — about half the nation’s population — faced extreme or major heat risks.
“I think the term ‘heat dome’ was used sparingly in the weather forecasting community from 10 to 30 years ago,” AccuWeather senior meteorologist Brett Anderson told me, speaking with 36 years as a forecaster under his belt. “But over the past 10 years, with global warming becoming much more focused in the public eye, we are seeing ‘heat dome’ being used much more frequently,” he went on. “I think it is a catchy term, and it gets the public’s attention.”
Catching the public’s attention is critical. Heat is the deadliest weather hazard in the U.S., killing more people annually than hurricanes, floods, tornadoes, or extreme cold. “There is a misunderstanding of the risk,” Ashley Ward, the director of the Heat Policy Innovation Hub at Duke University, told me. “A lot of people — particularly working age or younger people — don’t feel like they’re at risk when, in fact, they are.”
While it seems likely that the current heat dome won’t be as deadly as the one in 2021 — not least because the Midwest and Southeastern regions of the country have a much higher usage of air conditioning than the Pacific Northwest — the heat in the eastern half of the country is truly extraordinary. Tampa, Florida reached 100 degrees Fahrenheit on Sunday for the first time in its recorded history. Parts of the Midwest last week, where the heat dome formed before gradually moving eastward, hit a heat index of 128 degrees.
Worst of all, though, have been the accompanying record-breaking overnight temperatures, which Ward told me were the most lethal characteristics of a heat dome. “When there are both high daytime temperatures and persistently high overnight temperatures, those are the most dangerous of circumstances,” Ward said.
Although the widespread usage of the term “heat dome” may be relatively new, the phenomenon itself is not. The phrase describes an area of “unusually strong” high pressure situated in the upper atmosphere, which pockets abnormally warm air over a particular region, Anderson, the forecaster, told me. “These heat domes can be very expansive and can linger for days, and even a full week or longer,” he said.
Anderson added that while he hasn’t seen evidence of an increase in the number of heat domes due to climate change, “we may be seeing more extreme and longer-lasting heat domes” due to the warmer atmosphere. A heat dome in Europe this summer, which closed the Eiffel Tower, tipped temperatures over 115 degrees in parts of Spain, and killed an estimated 2,300 people, has been linked to anthropogenic warming. And research has borne out that the temperatures and duration reached in the 2021 Pacific Northwest heat dome would have been “virtually impossible without human-caused climate change.”
The link between climate change and heat domes is now strong enough to form the basis for a major legal case. Multnomah County, the Oregon municipality that includes Portland, filed a lawsuit in 2023 against 24 named defendants, including oil and gas companies ExxonMobil, Shell, and BP, seeking $50 million in damages and $1.5 billion in future damages for the defendants’ alleged role in the deaths from the 2021 heat dome.
“As we learned in this country when we took on Big Tobacco, this is not an easy step or one I take lightly, but I do believe it’s our best way to fight for our community and protect our future,” Multnomah County Chair Jessica Vega Pederson said in a statement at the time. The case is now in jeopardy following moves by the Trump administration to prevent states, counties, and cities from suing fossil fuel companies for climate damages. (The estate of a 65-year-old woman who died in the heat dome filed a similar wrongful death lawsuit in Seattle’s King County Superior Court against Big Oil.)
Given the likelihood of longer and hotter heat dome events, then, it becomes imperative to educate people about how to stay safe. As Ward mentioned, many people who are at risk of extreme heat might not even know it, such as those taking commonly prescribed medications for anxiety, depression, PTSD, diabetes, and high blood pressure, which interfere with the body’s ability to thermoregulate. “Let’s just say recently you started taking high blood pressure medicine,” Ward said. “Every summer prior, you never had a problem working in your garden or doing your lawn work. You might this year.”
Air conditioning, while life-saving, can also stop working for any number of reasons, from a worn out machine part to a widespread grid failure. Vulnerable community members may also face hurdles in accessing reliable AC. There’s a reason the majority of heat-related deaths happen indoors.
People who struggle to manage their energy costs should prioritize cooling a single space, such as a bedroom, and focus on maintaining a cool core temperature during overnight hours, when the body undergoes most of its recovery. Blotting yourself with a wet towel or washcloth and sitting in front of a fan can help during waking hours, as can visiting a traditional cooling center, or even a grocery store or movie theater.
Health providers also have a role to play, Ward stressed. “They know who has chronic underlying health conditions,” she said. “Normalize asking them about their situation with air conditioning. Normalize asking them, ‘Do you feel like you have a safe place to go that’s cool, that you can get out of this heat?’”
For the current heat dome, at least, the end is in sight: Incoming cool air from Canada will drop temperatures by 10 to 20 degrees in cities like Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., with lows potentially in the 30s by midweek in parts of New York. And while there are still hot days ahead for Florida and the rest of the Southeast, the cold front will reach the region by the end of the week.
But even if this ends up being the last heat dome of the summer, it certainly won’t be in our lifetimes. The heat dome has become inescapable.
On betrayed regulatory promises, copper ‘anxiety,’ and Mercedes’ stalled EV plans
Current conditions: New York City is once again choking on Canadian wildfire smoke • Torrential rain is flooding southeastern Slovenia and northern Croatia • Central Asia is bracing for the hottest days of the year, with temperatures nearing 100 degrees Fahrenheit in Uzbekistan’s capital of Tashkent all week.
In May, the Trump administration signaled its plans to gut Energy Star, the energy efficiency certification program administered by the Environmental Protection Agency. Energy Star is extremely popular — its brand is recognized by nearly 90% of Americans — and at a cost to the federal government of just $32 million per year, saves American households upward of $40 billion in energy costs per year as of 2024, for a total of more than $500 billion saved since its launch in 1992, by the EPA’s own estimate. Not only that, as one of Energy Star’s architects told Heatmap’s Jeva Lange back in May, more energy efficient appliances and buildings help reduce strain on the grid. “Think about the growing demands of data center computing and AI models,” RE Tech Advisors’ Deb Cloutier told Jeva. “We need to bring more energy onto the grid and make more space for it.”
That value has clearly resonated with lawmakers on the Hill. Legislators tasked with negotiating appropriations in both the Senate and the House of Representatives last week proposed fully funding Energy Star at $32 million for the next fiscal year. It’s unclear how the House’s decision to go into recess until September will affect the vote, but Ben Evans, the federal legislative director at the U.S. Green Building Council, said the bill is “a major step in the right direction demonstrating that ENERGY STAR has strong bipartisan support on Capitol Hill.”
A worker connects panels on floating solar farm project in Huainan, China. Kevin Frayer/Getty Images
The United States installed just under 11 gigawatts of solar panels in the first three months of this year, industry data show. In June alone, China installed nearly 15 gigawatts, PV Tech reported. And, in a detail that demonstrates just how many panels the People’s Republic has been deploying at home in recent years, that represented an 85% drop from the previous month and close to a 40% decline compared to June of last year.
The photovoltaic installation plunge followed Beijing’s rollout of two new policies that changed the renewables business in China. The first, called the 531 policy, undid guaranteed feed-in tariffs and required renewable projects to sell electricity on the spot market. That took effect on June 1. The other, called the 430 policy, took effect on May 1 and mandated that new distributed solar farms consume their own power first before allowing the sale of surplus electricity to the grid. As a result of the stalled installations, a top panel manufacturer warned the trade publication Opis that companies may need to raise prices by as much as 10%.
For years now, Fortescue, the world’s fourth-biggest producer of iron ore, has directed much of the earnings from its mines in northwest Australia and steel mills in China toward building out a global green hydrogen business. But changes to U.S. policy have taken a toll. Last week, Fortescue told investors it was canceling its green hydrogen project in Arizona, which had been set to come online next year. It’s also abandoning its plans for a green hydrogen plant on Australia’s northeastern coast, The Wall Street Journal reported.
“A shift in policy priorities away from green energy has changed the situation in the U.S.,” Gus Pichot, Fortescue’s chief executive of growth and energy, told analysts on a call. “The lack of certainty and a step back in green ambition has stopped the emerging green-energy markets, making it hard for previously feasible projects to proceed.” But green hydrogen isn’t dead everywhere. Just last week, the industrial gas firm Air Liquide made a final decision to invest in a 200-megawatt green hydrogen plant in the Netherlands.
The Trump administration put two high-ranking officials at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration on administrative leave, CNN reported. The reasoning behind the move wasn’t clear, but both officials — Steve Volz, who leads NOAA’s satellites division, and Jeff Dillen, NOAA’s deputy general counsel — headed up the investigation into whether President Donald Trump violated NOAA’s scientific integrity policies during his so-called Sharpiegate scandal.
The incident from September 2019, during Trump’s first term, started when the president incorrectly listed Alabama among the states facing a threat from Hurricane Dorian. Throughout the following week, Trump defended the remark, insisting he had been right, and ultimately showed journalists a weather map that had been altered with a black Sharpie market to show the path of the storm striking Alabama. NOAA’s investigation into the incident concluded that Neil Jacobs, the former agency official who backed Trump at the time and is now nominated to serve as chief, succumbed to political pressure and violated scientific integrity rules.
In March, North Carolina’s Republican-controlled Senate passed a bill to repeal the state’s climate law and scrap the 2030 deadline by which the monopoly utility Duke Energy had to slash its planet-heating emissions by 70% compared to 2005 levels. Governor Josh Stein, a Democrat, vetoed the legislation. But on Tuesday, the GOP majorities in both chambers of the legislature plan to vote to override the veto.
Doing so and enacting the bill could cost North Carolina more than 50,000 jobs annually and cause tens of billions of dollars in lost investments, Canary Media’s Elizabeth Ouzts reported. That’s according to a new study from a consultancy commissioned by clean-energy advocates in the state. The analysis is based on data from the state-sanctioned consumer advocate, Public Staff.
For years, a mystery has puzzled scientists: Why did Neanderthal remains show levels of a nitrogen isotope only seen among carnivores like hyenas and wolves that eat more meat than a hominid could safely consume? New research finally points to an answer: Neanderthals were eating putrefying meat garnished with maggots, said Melanie Beasley, an anthropologist at Purdue University. “When you get the lean meat and the fatty maggot, you have a more complete nutrient that you’re consuming.”
Oregon’s Cram Fire was a warning — the Pacific Northwest is ready to ignite.
What could have been the country’s first designated megafire of 2025 spluttered to a quiet, unremarkable end this week. Even as national headlines warned over the weekend that central Oregon’s Cram Fire was approaching the 100,000-acre spread usually required to achieve that status, cooler, damper weather had already begun to move into the region. By the middle of the week, firefighters had managed to limit the Cram to 95,736 acres, and with mop-up operations well underway, crews began rotating out for rest or reassignment. The wildfire monitoring app Watch Duty issued what it said would be its final daily update on the Cram Fire on Thursday morning.
By this time in 2024, 10 megafires had already burned or ignited in the U.S., including the more-than-million-acre Smokehouse Creek fire in Texas last spring. While it may seem wrong to describe 2025 as a quieter fire season so far, given the catastrophic fires in the Los Angeles area at the start of the year, it is currently tracking below the 10-year average for acres burned at this point in the season. Even the Cram, a grassland fire that expanded rapidly due to the hot, dry conditions of central Oregon, was “not [an uncommon fire for] this time of year in the area,” Bill Queen, a public information officer with the Pacific Northwest Complex Incident Management Team 3, told me over email.
At the same time, the Cram Fire can also be read as a precursor. It was routine, maybe, but also large enough to require the deployment of nearly 900 fire personnel at a time when the National Wildland Fire Preparedness Level is set to 4, meaning national firefighting resources were already heavily committed when it broke out. (The preparedness scale, which describes how strapped federal resources are, goes up to 5.) Most ominous of all, though, is the forecast for the Pacific Northwest for “Dirty August” and “Snaptember,” historically the two worst months of the year in the region for wildfires.
National Interagency Coordination Center
“Right now, we’re in a little bit of a lull,” Jessica Neujahr, a public affairs officer with the Oregon Department of Forestry, acknowledged to me. “What comes with that is knowing that August and September will be difficult, so we’re now doing our best to make sure that our firefighters are taking advantage of having time to rest and get rejuvenated before the next big wave of fire comes through.”
That next big wave could happen any day. The National Interagency Fire Center’s fire potential outlook, last issued on July 1, describes “significant fire potential” for the Northwest that is “expected to remain above average areawide through September.” The reasons given include the fact that “nearly all areas” of Washington and Oregon are “abnormally dry or in drought status,” combined with a 40% to 60% probability of above-average temperatures through the start of the fall in both states. Moisture from the North American Monsoon, meanwhile, looks to be tracking “largely east of the Northwest.” At the same time, “live fuels in Oregon are green at mid to upper elevations but are drying rapidly across Washington.”
In other words, the components for a bad fire season are all there — the landscape just needs a spark. Lightning, in particular, has been top of mind for Oregon forecasters, given the tinderbox on the ground. A single storm system, such as one that rolled over southeast and east-central Oregon in June, can produce as many as 10,000 lightning strikes; over the course of just one night earlier this month, thunderstorms ignited 72 fires in two southwest Oregon counties. And the “kicker with lightning is that the fires don’t always pop up right away,” Neujahr explained. Instead, lightning strike fires can simmer for up to a week after a storm, evading the detection of firefighting crews until it’s too late. “When you have thousands of strikes in a concentrated area, it’s bound to stretch the local resources as far as they can go,” Neujahr said.
National Interagency Coordination Center
The National Interagency Fire Center has “low confidence … regarding the number of lightning ignitions” for the end of summer in the Northwest, in large part due to the incredible difficulty of forecasting convective storms. Additionally, the current neutral phase of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation means there is a “wide range of potential lightning activity” that adds extra uncertainty to any predictions. The NIFC’s higher confidence in its temperature and precipitation outlooks, in turn, “leads to a belief that the ratio of human to natural ignitions will remain high and at or above 2024 levels.” (An exploding transformer appears to have been the ignition source for the Cram Fire; approximately 88% of wildfires in the United States have human-caused origins, including arson.)
Periodic wildfires are a naturally occurring part of the Western ecosystem, and not all are attributable to climate change. But before 1995, the U.S. averaged fewer than one megafire per year; between 2005 and 2014, that average jumped to 9.8 such fires per year. Before 1970, there had been no documented megafires at all.
Above-average temperatures and drought conditions, which can make fires larger and burn hotter, are strongly associated with a warming atmosphere, however. Larger and hotter fires are also more dangerous. “Our biggest goal is always to put the fires out as fast as possible,” Neujahr told me. “There is a correlation: As fires get bigger, the cost of the fire grows, but so do the risks to the firefighters.”
In Oregon, anyway, the Cram Fire’s warning has registered. Shortly after the fire broke out, Oregon Governor Tina Kotek declared a statewide emergency with an eye toward the months ahead. “The summer is only getting hotter, drier, and more dangerous — we have to be prepared for worsening conditions,” she said in a statement at the time.
It’s improbable that there won’t be a megafire this season; the last time the U.S. had a year without a fire of 100,000 acres or more was in 2001. And if or when the megafire — or megafires — break out, all signs point to the “where” being Oregon or Washington, concentrating the area of potential destruction, exhausting local personnel, and straining federal resources. “When you have two states directly next to each other dealing with the same thing, it just makes it more difficult to get resources because of the conflicting timelines,” Neujahr said.
By October, at least, there should be relief: The national fire outlook describes “an increasing frequency of weather systems and precipitation” that should “signal an end of fire season” for the Northwest once fall arrives. But there are still a long 68 days left to go before then.