You’re out of free articles.
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
Sign In or Create an Account.
By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy
Welcome to Heatmap
Thank you for registering with Heatmap. Climate change is one of the greatest challenges of our lives, a force reshaping our economy, our politics, and our culture. We hope to be your trusted, friendly, and insightful guide to that transformation. Please enjoy your free articles. You can check your profile here .
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Subscribe to get unlimited Access
Hey, you are out of free articles but you are only a few clicks away from full access. Subscribe below and take advantage of our introductory offer.
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Create Your Account
Please Enter Your Password
Forgot your password?
Please enter the email address you use for your account so we can send you a link to reset your password:
Once used by conservative media to promote climate skepticism, America’s favorite purveyors of pseudoscience are pivoting for the warming era.
Last week, the 2024 edition of The Old Farmer’s Almanac became the ninth bestselling nonfiction paperback in America. “Sales on Amazon … have never been so strong, and copies are also selling briskly at bookstore chains and indie bookstores,” The Washington Post’s book critic Ron Charles reported, going on to admit he is among the millions who are “hooked” on the almanac’s folksy advice, remedies, and, of course, its long-range forecasts.
This winter, The Old Farmer’s Almanac has told its readers to expect “a whole lot of cold” as well as “oodles of fluffy white throughout the season!” The Farmers’ Almanac — the primary competitor of Old Farmer’s, which postdates its founding by a quarter century — has a similar outlook. “The brrr is back!” it predicted, much like it did in the winter before this one (“shake, shiver, and shovel!) and the winter before that (“snowy comeback!).
In fact, for years now, conservative media has used The Old Farmer’s Almanac and The Farmers’ Almanac to promote climate skepticism, leveraging the periodicals’ reliable predictions of the “return” of winter and a “cooling” planet as a kind of gotcha against established science. And for years, the almanacs have played right into that agenda, conspicuously avoiding mention of the one long-range forecast we can accurately make: that the world is getting warmer due to the burning of fossil fuels.
But this is not a story of unrepentant climate deniers. Despite the right-on-cue predictions of a “freezing” winter, there are also encouraging signs the almanacs are starting to clean up their acts.
There is something both laudatory and a bit absurd about this, like if Punxsutawney Phil were suddenly to start consulting greenhouse gas emissions scenarios in addition to his shadow. When The Old Farmer’s Almanac debuted in 1793, the first accurate weather forecast was still 68 years away; almanacs at the time made their forecasts using a combination of folklore, weather proverbs, astronomy, and random guesswork.
Surprisingly, the two surviving Colonial almanacs largely use these same methods today. While The Old Farmer’s Almanac says it considers “all of the latest satellite data for making forecasts,” it also claims to incorporate a secret formula devised by its founder (a contemporary of George Washington) that is kept in a locked black box in the publication’s offices. The Farmers’ Almanac “firmly [denies] using any type of computer satellite tracking equipment” and instead makes its forecasts using its own proprietary formula, supposedly known only to the pseudonymous “Caleb Weatherbee.”
By modern weather modeling standards, such approaches amount to “astrology for weather,” Brian McNoldy, a senior research assistant at the University of Miami’s Rosenstiel School of Marine, Atmospheric, and Earth Science, told me. As he elaborated, “there is no real skill” on the part of the almanacs; needless to say, their secret formulas have not been peer-reviewed.
Indeed, actual farmers long ago abandoned almanacs in favor of agricultural weather stations, and the meteorological community generally agrees that long-term forecasts aren’t accurate more than 10 days out. The almanacs’ dubious claims of 80% accuracy are often chalked up to the same confirmation bias that is at play when you read your horoscope.
If the almanacs were solely in the business of telling you the most auspicious day to color your hair based on the moon’s sign, that would be harmless enough. But it’s the alarmist “brr is back!” headlines, not the eventual, weirder winter results, that get coverage this time of year — including, historically, in conservative media, which has used the almanacs’ predictions to drum up the cold spell fallacy that snowy winters supposedly disprove the world is warming.
“The famous Farmers’ Almanac is going to damper the mood of many man-made global warming alarmists,” Breitbart wrote, for example, in its coverage of the publication’s 2013 winter predictions. The same year, Townhallcrowed that “The Farmers’ Almanac … is predicting a horribly cold winter as the Obama administration prepares to run around Congress to combat global warming.” Fox News ran a similarly celebratory segment and The Daily Callerrecycled the whole argument in 2015.
Sometimes, the almanacs seemed to play along. In 2008, The Old Farmer’s Almanac published an article by Joseph D’Aleo, a “well-known climate change skeptic,” which proposed “another possible explanation for …. climate change” beyond human responsibility: sunspots. Once a common weather forecasting technique, the sunspot theory has since been seized by climate deniers to allege solar activity, not human emissions, is responsible for global temperature fluctuations.
“Studying these and other factors suggests that a cold, not warm, climate may be in our future,” D’Aleo went on under a headline that wondered, “Is Global Warming on the Wane?” The article was eventually even cited by Republican Senator James Inhofe in Congress against bills that would have addressed global warming, according to DeSmog.
When I asked for comment about this episode, though, The Old Farmer’s Almanac surprised me by seeming, well, embarrassed. “While it is true that The 2009 Old Farmer’s Almanac featured a story by Mr. D’Aleo, the Almanac’s editors do not agree with his opinions on climate change,” a spokesperson told me on behalf of the publication, adding that “many articles from previous editions of the Almanac make their way to our website; the fact that his article remained was an oversight. We have removed it.”
Sure enough, recent editions of The Old Farmer’s Almanac haven’t shied away from putting a name to warming trends. “Climate change is happening,” one orchardist is quoted as saying in an article from the 2023 Almanac, while a separate write-up on millet in the same issue states plainly that we’re living in “an era of climate change.” An item in the 2024 edition further frets that “climate change and rising temperatures” could imperil the diet of the Loch Ness Monster. (Before that disspirits you too much, the 2024 edition also explains that “average global temperatures [are steadily increasing] due to greenhouse gas emissions”).
The Farmers’ Almanac is more proudly anti-science than The Old Farmer’s Almanac — dismissing, as it does, that newfangled “computer satellite tracking equipment” — and its editor, Peter Geiger, declined to comment for this article. Previously, though, Geiger told Topic in 2018 that “I won’t get into the battle about global warming because I think it becomes a political debate,” though, of course, the omission is its own kind of commentary.
But if there was a time The Farmers’ Almanac could be evasive, it’s passed. Evidence of climate change has become so omnipresent and urgent that even the Fox News moderators at the Republican presidential debate have to ask about it. Sure enough, one of The Farmers’ Almanac’s 2022 articles notes that “climate change has made nature’s documented cycles unreliable,” although it avoids explaining why that change is happening. A 2023 piece online also quotes the United Nation’s definition of climate change while calling the topic “highly politicized” and therefore outside of the Almanac’s purview. But then, buried in an article published this spring, The Farmer’s Almanac admits that “when excess [greenhouse] gases are released through the burning of oil, coal, gas, and other fuels, the climate warms significantly.” Ah-ha.
Call it adaption: If either The Old Farmer’s Almanac or The Farmers’ Almanac plans to stick around for another century (at which point heat waves in California alone could be 10 to 14 degrees higher than they are now), the publications need to at least have some grounding in the warmer reality their readers will occupy. Ancient formulas will need to be dusted off, perennially “cold” winter forecasts quietly tweaked.
Doing so, in some ways, is anathema to such reluctant-to-change publications (even The Old Farmer’s Almanac’s cover has barely been altered since 1851). But if farmers’ almanacs have a central guiding tenet, it’s that there is a best time for everything.
And for talking frankly about climate change, it seems, they’ve finally realized such a time is now.
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
The nonprofit laid off 36 employees, or 28% of its headcount.
The Trump administration’s funding freeze has hit the leading electrification nonprofit Rewiring America, which announced Thursday that it will be cutting its workforce by 28%, or 36 employees. In a letter to the team, the organization’s cofounder and CEO Ari Matusiak placed the blame squarely on the Trump administration’s attempts to claw back billions in funding allocated through the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund.
“The volatility we face is not something we created: it is being directed at us,” Matusiak wrote in his public letter to employees. Along with a group of four other housing, climate, and community organizations, collectively known as Power Forward Communities, Rewiring America was the recipient of a $2 billion GGRF grant last April to help decarbonize American homes.
Now, the future of that funding is being held up in court. GGRF funds have been frozen since mid-February as Lee Zeldin’s Environmental Protection Agency has tried to rescind $20 billion of the program’s $27 billion total funding, an effort that a federal judge blocked in March. While that judge, Tanya S. Chutkan, called the EPA’s actions “arbitrary and capricious,” for now the money remains locked up in a Citibank account. This has wreaked havoc on organizations such as Rewiring America, which structured projects and staffing decisions around the grants.
“Since February, we have been unable to access our competitively and lawfully awarded grant dollars,” Matusiak wrote in a LinkedIn post on Thursday. “We have been the subject of baseless and defamatory attacks. We are facing purposeful volatility designed to prevent us from fulfilling our obligations and from delivering lower energy costs and cheaper electricity to millions of American households across the country.”
Matusiak wrote that while “Rewiring America is not going anywhere,” the organization is planning to address said volatility by tightening its focus on working with states to lower electricity costs, building a digital marketplace for households to access electric upgrades, and courting investment from third parties such as hyperscale cloud service providers, utilities, and manufacturers. Matusiak also said Rewiring America will be restructured “into a tighter formation,” such that it can continue to operate even if the GGRF funding never comes through.
Power Forward Communities is also continuing to fight for its money in court. Right there with it are the Climate United Fund and the Coalition for Green Capital, which were awarded nearly $7 billion and $5 billion, respectively, through the GGRF.
What specific teams within Rewiring America are being hit by these layoffs isn’t yet clear, though presumably everyone let go has already been notified. As the announcement went live Thursday afternoon, it stated that employees “will receive an email within the next few minutes informing you of whether your role has been impacted.”
“These are volatile and challenging times,” Matusiak wrote on LinkedIn. “It remains on all of us to create a better world we can all share. More so than ever.”
A battle ostensibly over endangered shrimp in Kentucky
A national park is fighting a large-scale solar farm over potential impacts to an endangered shrimp – what appears to be the first real instance of a federal entity fighting a solar project under the Trump administration.
At issue is Geenex Solar’s 100-megawatt Wood Duck solar project in Barren County, Kentucky, which would be sited in the watershed of Mammoth Cave National Park. In a letter sent to Kentucky power regulators in April, park superintendent Barclay Trimble claimed the National Park Service is opposing the project because Geenex did not sufficiently answer questions about “irreversible harm” it could potentially pose to an endangered shrimp that lives in “cave streams fed by surface water from this solar project.”
Trimble wrote these frustrations boiled after “multiple attempts to have a dialogue” with Geenex “over the past several months” about whether battery storage would exist at the site, what sorts of batteries would be used, and to what extent leak prevention would be considered in development of the Wood Duck project.
“The NPS is choosing to speak out in opposition of this project and requesting the board to consider environmental protection of these endangered species when debating the merits of this project,” stated the letter. “We look forward to working with the Board to ensure clean water in our national park for the safety of protection of endangered species.”
On first blush, this letter looks like normal government environmental stewardship. It’s true the cave shrimp’s population decline is likely the result of pollution into these streams, according to NPS data. And it was written by career officials at the National Park Service, not political personnel.
But there’s a few things that are odd about this situation and there’s reason to believe this may be the start of a shift in federal policy direction towards a more critical view of solar energy’s environmental impacts.
First off, Geenex has told local media that batteries are not part of the project and that “several voicemails have been exchanged” between the company and representatives of the national park, a sign that the company and the park have not directly spoken on this matter. That’s nothing like the sort of communication breakdown described in the letter. Then there’s a few things about this letter that ring strange, including the fact Fish and Wildlife Service – not the Park Service – ordinarily weighs in on endangered species impacts, and there’s a contradiction in referencing the Endangered Species Act at a time when the Trump administration is trying to significantly pare back application of the statute in the name of a faster permitting process. All of this reminds me of the Trump administration’s attempts to supposedly protect endangered whales by stopping offshore wind projects.
I don’t know whether this solar farm’s construction will indeed impact wildlife in the surrounding area. Perhaps it may. But the letter strikes me as fascinating regardless, given the myriad other ways federal agencies – including the Park Service – are standing down from stringent environmental protection enforcement under Trump 2.0.
Notably, I reviewed the other public comments filed against the project and they cite a litany of other reasons – but also state that because the county itself has no local zoning ordinance, there’s no way for local residents or municipalities opposed to the project to really stop it. Heatmap Pro predicts that local residents would be particularly sensitive to projects taking up farmland and — you guessed it — harming wildlife.
Barren County is in the process of developing a restrictive ordinance in the wake of this project, but it won’t apply to Wood Duck. So opponents’ best shot at stopping this project – which will otherwise be online as soon as next year – might be relying on the Park Service to intervene.
And more on the week’s most important conflicts around renewable energy.
1. Dukes County, Massachusetts – The Supreme Court for the second time declined to take up a legal challenge to the Vineyard Wind offshore project, indicating that anti-wind activists' efforts to go directly to the high court have run aground.
2. Brooklyn/Staten Island, New York – The battery backlash in the NYC boroughs is getting louder – and stranger – by the day.
3. Baltimore County, Maryland – It’s Ben Carson vs. the farmer near Baltimore, as a solar project proposed on the former Housing and Urban Development secretary’s land is coming under fire from his neighbors.
4. Mecklenburg County, Virginia – Landowners in this part of Virginia have reportedly received fake “good neighbor agreement” letters claiming to be from solar developer Longroad Energy, offering large sums of cash to people neighboring the potential project.
5. York County, South Carolina – Silfab Solar is now in a bitter public brawl with researchers at the University of South Carolina after they released a report claiming that a proposed solar manufacturing plant poses a significant public risk in the event of a chemical emissions release.
6. Jefferson Davis County, Mississippi – Apex Clean Energy’s Bluestone Solar project was just approved by the Mississippi Public Service Commission with no objections against the project.
7. Plaquemine Parish, Louisiana – NextEra’s Coastal Prairie solar project got an earful from locals in this parish that sits within the Baton Rouge metro area, indicating little has changed since the project was first proposed two years ago.
8. Huntington County, Indiana – Well it turns out Heatmap’s Most At-Risk Projects of the Energy Transition has been right again: the Paddlefish solar project has now been indefinitely blocked by this county under a new moratorium on the project area in tandem with a new restrictive land use ordinance on solar development overall.
9. Albany County, Wyoming – The Rail Tie wind farm is back in the news again, as county regulators say landowners feel misled by Repsol, the project’s developer.
10. Klickitat County, Washington – Cypress Creek Renewables is on a lucky streak with a solar project near Goldendale, Washington, getting to bypass local opposition from the nearby Yakama Nation.
11. Pinal County, Arizona – A large utility-scale NextEra solar farm has been rejected by this county’s Board of Supervisors.