Climate — older stories

A new UN report concedes the Paris Agreement's 1.5°C limit will be crossed within years. What happens next is called "overshoot" — and it will shape climate policy for the rest of the century.

A federal judge sided with 22 Republican state attorneys general to block New York's first-in-the-nation climate superfund fee, ruling the Clean Air Act preempts states from making polluters pay for storm and flood damage.

A stationary turbine on a windy day usually isn't broken. It's hit a safety limit, a grid order, or a maintenance window.

A 400-watt panel that plugs into a wall outlet like a toaster is one governor's signature away from being legal in California. Most states still haven't caught up.

After the 2025 Los Angeles fires, California's insurer of last resort needed a $1 billion rescue, its first since 1993. Homeowners who never filed a claim are footing part of the bill.

Record rain overwhelmed small-town Indiana this month. The bigger story is a stormwater system that earned a D on its last national report card, and a $115 billion repair bill nobody's paying.

A carbon credit doesn't expire like a coupon, it gets 'retired' once and only once. Here's how retirement actually works, and the separate durability question it doesn't answer.

The same lightning bolt can sound like a gunshot or a drumroll depending on how far away it struck. Here's the physics behind both.

The White House set a 15% tariff on polysilicon and, separately, a hard minimum price. The two tools do very different jobs, and the gap between them explains why solar makers are watching closely.

It looks like hail and sounds like hail — but squeeze it, and graupel crumbles like styrofoam because it forms almost the opposite way.

Frost can form on a windshield when the forecast still reads in the upper 30s. The gap comes down to where, and how, temperature is actually measured.

Antarctica's interior cools so much that cold, dense air comes crashing downhill toward the coast. Here's how katabatic winds make it the windiest continent on Earth.

When a hurricane's steering winds collapse, the storm can sit in place for days, turning a wind event into a flood catastrophe. Here's why it happens.

Cities don't just run hotter than the countryside — they stay hotter after dark, and the nighttime gap is often wider than the daytime one.

The U.S. hit the top of its five-rung wildfire preparedness scale on July 18, the first time since October 2024. Here's what Level 5 actually changes on the ground.

A wildfire "complex" can bundle dozens of separate blazes under a single incident commander. The federal definition, how names get picked, and why the label says nothing about danger.

When a wildfire burns hot enough, it can build a genuine thunderstorm above itself, one that sparks new fires with dry lightning and can loft smoke into the stratosphere for months.

Wet-bulb temperature measures the limit of evaporative cooling, not just how hot and humid it feels. Here is why the number matters more than the thermometer reading.

Most people assume the white cone on a hurricane graphic shows where the damage will land. It doesn't, and that mix-up has already cost lives.

The number the National Hurricane Center assigns a storm measures wind, and only wind. History's deadliest hurricanes prove that isn't the same as knowing how dangerous one will be.