warming
A Startup's Bid to Dim the Sun
The gloomy arguments in favor of solar geoengineering are compelling; so are the even gloomier counter-arguments. Stardust is the name of a small startup with enormous ambitions. The company, which is based in Israel and registered in Delaware, proposes to do nothing less than dim the sun. Its business plan is modelled on volcanoes. In a major eruption, millions of tons of sulfur dioxide get thrown up into the stratosphere.
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- North America > United States > New York (0.06)
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- Materials > Chemicals (0.70)
- Government (0.70)
- Leisure & Entertainment (0.47)
Deep Learning-Driven Downscaling for Climate Risk Assessment of Projected Temperature Extremes in the Nordic Region
Loganathan, Parthiban, Zea, Elias, Vinuesa, Ricardo, Otero, Evelyn
Rapid changes and increasing climatic variability across the widely varied Koppen-Geiger regions of northern Europe generate significant needs for adaptation. Regional planning needs high-resolution projected temperatures. This work presents an integrative downscaling framework that incorporates Vision Transformer (ViT), Convolutional Long Short-Term Memory (ConvLSTM), and Geospatial Spatiotemporal Transformer with Attention and Imbalance-Aware Network (GeoStaNet) models. The framework is evaluated with a multicriteria decision system, Deep Learning-TOPSIS (DL-TOPSIS), for ten strategically chosen meteorological stations encompassing the temperate oceanic (Cfb), subpolar oceanic (Cfc), warm-summer continental (Dfb), and subarctic (Dfc) climate regions. Norwegian Earth System Model (NorESM2-LM) Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6 (CMIP6) outputs were bias-corrected during the 1951-2014 period and subsequently validated against earlier observations of day-to-day temperature metrics and diurnal range statistics. The ViT showed improved performance (Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE): 1.01 degrees C; R^2: 0.92), allowing for production of credible downscaled projections. Under the SSP5-8.5 scenario, the Dfc and Dfb climate zones are projected to warm by 4.8 degrees C and 3.9 degrees C, respectively, by 2100, with expansion in the diurnal temperature range by more than 1.5 degrees C. The Time of Emergence signal first appears in subarctic winter seasons (Dfc: approximately 2032), signifying an urgent need for adaptation measures. The presented framework offers station-based, high-resolution estimates of uncertainties and extremes, with direct uses for adaptation policy over high-latitude regions with fast environmental change.
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The great climate paradox: Drop in air pollution has INCREASED global warming by making clouds less reflective, scientists warn
New York's new mayor Zohran Mamdani tells Trump'I have four words for you' in blistering victory speech quoting his socialist hero, bragging about'toppling a dynasty' and promising a'new dawn' Driver screaming'Allahu Akbar' ploughs in to pedestrians'trying to hit everyone he encountered' on French holiday island leaving ten injured This Leftist election landslide was caused by the same vile disease that's triggered a GOP civil war. Amazon signals it's finally fed up with Whole Foods' sluggish sales - and is making sweeping, controversial changes Why Mamdani's socialist revolution in New York has sparked a civil war for Democrats... and Trump is secretly loving it Simone Biles details all the plastic surgery she's had after her boob job this summer Inside Kate and William's forever home: Princess is kitting out Forest Lodge in her preferred'classic contemporary style' to create a'lovely but absolutely inoffensive' look REVEALED: Fattest states in America ranked... including region where three-quarters of residents are obese Now he's dead, here's the full story of what happened that day... and the ghastly aftermath no one knows about Shocking moment Mexico's president is groped by man who grabs her breasts and tries to kiss her Miss Universe contestant called'dumb' in humiliating dressing-down by official hits back with powerful speech as furious organisers condemn her treatment and he issues grovelling apology Hollywood A-listers may be blacklisted for'antisemitism' under Paramount's new anti-woke leadership Nepo baby turns heads at Glamour Women Of The Year Awards in a glitzy gold sequin feathered gown - but can YOU guess who her A-list mother is? New footage reveals the moments before football manager collapsed and died mid-match, leaving his players in disbelief, as it emerges he'complained about fish he had eaten' hours before Texas teen'tears masterpiece from wall at the Met in unhinged meltdown' before being handed in by his MOTHER Scientists have been faced with a huge dilemma, as research reveals that reducing air pollution has increased global warming . While smog kills millions of people every year, it also whitens clouds - making them more reflective. So by slashing air pollution, we're inadvertently diminishing the brightness of clouds, which are key regulators of global temperature.
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Physiologically Active Vegetation Reverses Its Cooling Effect in Humid Urban Climates
Borah, Angana, Datta, Adrija, Kumar, Ashish S., Dave, Raviraj, Bhatia, Udit
Efforts to green cities for cooling are succeeding unevenly because the same vegetation that cools surfaces can also intensify how hot the air feels. Previous studies have identified humid heat as a growing urban hazard, yet how physiologically active vegetation governs this trade-off between cooling and moisture accumulation remains poorly understood, leaving mitigation policy and design largely unguided. Here we quantify how vegetation structure and function influence the Heat Index (HI), a combined measure of temperature and humidity in 138 Indian cities spanning tropical savanna, semi-arid steppe, and humid subtropical climates, and across dense urban cores and semi-urban rings. Using an extreme-aware, one kilometre reconstruction of HI and an interpretable machine-learning framework that integrates SHapley Additive Explanations (SHAP) and Accumulated Local Effects (ALE), we isolate vegetation-climate interactions. Cooling generally strengthens for EVI >= 0.4 and LAI >= 0.05, but joint-high regimes begin to reverse toward warming when EVI >= 0.5, LAI >= 0.2, and fPAR >= 0.5,with an earlier onset for fPAR >= 0.25 in humid, dense cores. In such environments, highly physiologically active vegetation elevates near-surface humidity faster than it removes heat, reversing its cooling effect and amplifying perceived heat stress. These findings establish the climatic limits of vegetation-driven cooling and provide quantitative thresholds for climate-specific greening strategies that promote equitable and heat-resilient cities.
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How we picked promising climate tech companies in an especially unsettling year
And what distinguishes the firms that made the 2025 edition of our annual list of Climate Tech Companies to Watch. 's reporters and editors faced a dilemma as we began to mull nominees for this year's list of Climate Tech Companies to Watch. How do you pick companies poised to succeed in a moment of such deep uncertainty, at a time when the new Trump administration is downplaying the dangers of climate change, unraveling supportive policies for clean technologies, and enacting tariffs that will boost costs and disrupt supply chains for numerous industries? We as a publication are focused more on identifying companies developing technologies that can address the escalating threats of climate change, than on businesses positioned purely for market success. But we still don't want to lead our readers astray by highlighting a startup that winds up filing for bankruptcy six months later, even if its demise is due to a policy whiplash outside of its control. So we had to shift our thinking some.
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- Information Technology (1.00)
- Energy > Renewable (1.00)
Hybrid Physics-ML Framework for Pan-Arctic Permafrost Infrastructure Risk at Record 2.9-Million Observation Scale
Arctic warming threatens over $100 billion in permafrost-dependent infrastructure across Northern territories, yet existing risk assessment frameworks lack spatiotemporal validation, uncertainty quantification, and operational decision-support capabilities. W e present a hybrid physics-machine learning framework integrating 2.9 million observations from 171,605 locations (2005-2021) combining permafrost fraction data with climate reanalysis. Our stacked ensemble model (Random F orest + Histogram Gradient Boosting + Elastic Net) achieves R=0.980 (RMSE=5.01 pp) with rigorous spatiotemporal cross-validation preventing data leakage. T o address machine learning limitations in extrapolative climate scenarios, we develop a hybrid approach combining learned climate-permafrost relationships (60%) with physical permafrost sensitivity models (40%, -10 pp/C). Under RCP8.5 forcing (+5C over 10 years), we project mean permafrost fraction decline of -20.3 pp (median: -20.0 pp), with 51.5% of Arctic Russia experiencing over 20 percentage point loss. Infrastructure risk classification identifies 15% high-risk zones (25% medium-risk) with spatially explicit uncertainty maps. Our framework represents the largest validated permafrost ML dataset globally, provides the first operational hybrid physics-ML forecasting system for Arctic infrastructure, and delivers open-source tools enabling probabilistic permafrost projections for engineering design codes and climate adaptation planning. The methodology is generalizable to other permafrost regions and demonstrates how hybrid approaches can overcome pure data-driven limitations in climate change applications.
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CERA: A Framework for Improved Generalization of Machine Learning Models to Changed Climates
Liu, Shuchang, O'Gorman, Paul A.
Robust generalization under climate change remains a major challenge for machine learning applications in climate science. Most existing approaches struggle to extrapolate beyond the climate they were trained on, leading to a strong dependence on training data from model simulations of warm climates. Use of climate-invariant inputs improves generalization but requires challenging manual feature engineering. Here, we present CERA (Climate-invariant Encoding through Representation Alignment), a machine learning framework consisting of an autoencoder with explicit latent-space alignment, followed by a predictor for downstream process estimation. We test CERA on the problem of parameterizing moist-physics processes. Without training on labeled data from a +4K climate, CERA leverages labeled control-climate data and unlabeled warmer-climate inputs to improve generalization to the warmer climate, outperforming both raw-input and physically informed baselines in predicting key moisture and energy tendencies. It captures not only the vertical and meridional structures of the moisture tendencies, but also shifts in the intensity distribution of precipitation including extremes. Ablation experiments show that latent alignment improves both accuracy and the robustness across random seeds used in training. While some reduced skill remains in the boundary layer, the framework offers a data-driven alternative to manual feature engineering of climate invariant inputs. Beyond parameterizations used in hybrid ML-physics systems, the approach holds promise for other climate applications such as statistical downscaling.
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Data Driven Deep Learning for Correcting Global Climate Model Projections of SST and DSL in the Bay of Bengal
Pasula, Abhishek, Subramani, Deepak N.
Climate change alters ocean conditions, notably temperature and sea level. In the Bay of Bengal, these changes influence monsoon precipitation and marine productivity, critical to the Indian economy. In Phase 6 of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP6), Global Climate Models (GCMs) use different shared socioeconomic pathways (SSPs) to obtain future climate projections. However, significant discrepancies are observed between these models and the reanalysis data in the Bay of Bengal for 2015-2024. Specifically, the root mean square error (RMSE) between the climate model output and the Ocean Reanalysis System (ORAS5) is 1.2C for the sea surface temperature (SST) and 1.1 m for the dynamic sea level (DSL). We introduce a new data-driven deep learning model to correct for this bias. The deep neural model for each variable is trained using pairs of climatology-removed monthly climate projections as input and the corresponding month's ORAS5 as output. This model is trained with historical data (1950 to 2014), validated with future projection data from 2015 to 2020, and tested with future projections from 2021 to 2023. Compared to the conventional EquiDistant Cumulative Distribution Function (EDCDF) statistical method for bias correction in climate models, our approach decreases RMSE by 0.15C for SST and 0.3 m for DSL. The trained model subsequently corrects the projections for 2024-2100. A detailed analysis of the monthly, seasonal, and decadal means and variability is performed to underscore the implications of the novel dynamics uncovered in our corrected projections.
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The images of Spain's floods weren't created by AI. The trouble is, people think they were
My eye was caught by a striking photograph in the most recent edition of Charles Arthur's Substack newsletter Social Warming. It shows a narrow street in the aftermath of the "rain bomb" that devastated the region of Valencia in Spain. A year's worth of rain fell in a single day, and in some towns more than 490 litres a square metre fell in eight hours. Water is very heavy, so if there's a gradient it will flow downhill with the kind of force that can pick up a heavy SUV and toss it around like a toy. And if it channels down a narrow urban street, it will throw parked cars around like King Kong in a bad mood.
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Andrew Ng's new model lets you play around with solar geoengineering to see what would happen
The goal of Ng's emulator, called Planet Parasol, is to invite more people to think about solar geoengineering, explore the potential trade-offs involved in such interventions, and use the results to discuss and debate our options for climate action. The tool, developed in partnership with researchers at Cornell, the University of California, San Diego, and other institutions, also highlights how AI could help advance our understanding of solar geoengineering. The current version is bare-bones. It allows users to select different emissions scenarios and various quantities of particles that would be released each year, from 25% of a Pinatubo eruption to 125%. Planet Parasol then displays a pair of diverging lines that represent warming levels globally through 2100.