Happy Earth Day!

Longer summers are not just more time to spend eating watermelon. No! It’s far more sinister! | First Dog on the Moon We have done so much climate change research, if they made a big pile of it you could climb up to the afternoon sun and tape a sheet over it to cool things down

Even the @theguardian.com First Dog on the Moon's Brenda knows longer summers are not just fun and games: www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Ted Scott @climate-ted.bsky.social analyzed temp data from 1961-2023.

The works points to urgent questions:
What will earlier spring heat mean for food supply? Do today’s climate models that inform planning and policy fully capture these trends or do they need updating?
news.ubc.ca/2026/04/summ...

👉 The build up of heat during summer is rising quickly, 3x faster over land since 1990 than over 1961-1990. One way to view this change is that there’s less relief from warm days once summer begins.

More details on our findings and the methodology in the paper. Co-authors @simondonner.bsky.social and Rachel H White.

For those of you who might say, “But it still feels like winter…” We shouldn’t confuse weather (the now) with climate (the trends over time). Places will still have occasional cooler years, and also significantly warmer years, but the data tells us the trends for summer are headed in one direction.

If these trends continue, we can expect strong impacts on the agricultural planting season, the timing and pace of snowmelt and the connection with water supply, the onset and length of the fire season, and especially on the energy demand for cooling.

These changes challenge our baked-in expectations of the natural seasonal cycle being gradual and with a predictable rhythm.

👉 The shoulder seasons are shrinking because the spring to summer and summer to fall transitions are becoming more abrupt.

Minneapolis summers are now over a month longer on average than the early 1990's. Sydney summers now last over one third of the year.

We also examined 10 cities using site-level observational weather data, and a couple stand out: Minneapolis, Minnesota (my hometown) summertime has been lengthening by almost one additional day every year since 1990, and Sydney, Australia added 1.5 additional days in each of those years.

Note: We define typical summer weather based on daily average temperatures during the warmest 25% of days in a given location over 1961-1990.

👉 The number of days with typical summer weather is growing 1.5x faster over the past 30 years than prior reports. On average in the midlatitudes, summers have been expanding by 6 days every decade since 1990. These rates are similar across land, ocean, and even at coastal margins.

We recently published the paper “Summers over land and ocean are becoming longer, transitioning faster, and accumulating more heat” in Environmental Research Letters (iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1...), and here are some highlights:

Do you have the sense that summers feel different than when you were younger? That they start quickly, and remain intense until the fall? You’re not wrong. (thread)

Absolutely this is the reason

Ah, looks like thankfully there was some climate talk at the MSC afterall

Unfortunate that climate is taking a backseat in Munich when climate change is fueling conflict throughout the globe. A great reminder in this essay!

Diagram showing absorption spectra of the most important greenhouse gases (water vapour, CO2, methane, etc.) with % absorption on the y-axis, and wavelength on the x-axis (logarithmic). Someone has gone through and drawn heavy black X's over all the peaks on the longwave part of the spectrum (to the right of the visible wavelengths). Above that is the overall atmospheric absorption peak pattern, and above that is the graph for energy intensity of emissions and the different wavelengths, shown for solar radiation at 5525 K (orange) and radiation emitted by the Earth to space at 210-310 K (blue). The peaks are widely separated. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_window

For his next trick, Trump's going to spend the rest of the day deleting greenhouse gas absorption bands with a Sharpie! Maybe he can open the atmospheric window wide enough to cool the planet -- thank you for your attention to this matter, Mr. President!

I found the nature commentary provocative and useful in identifying a target metric with positive framing, but this thread makes a strong case for keeping 1.5C alive. Why not use both?

I suspect if COPs were switched to a majority voting model instead of consensus we could have seen an actual, substantial, roadmap for phase out.

Canada’s proposed oil and gas expansion is a risky bet – for the planet and our economy Updated pledges before this year’s COP30 meeting in Brazil fell well short of what’s needed to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050.

The prospects for investment in new Canadian LNG and heavy oil export infrastructure are far from promising, both economically and environmentally, write Kathryn Harrison and Simon Donner. www.nationalobserver.com/2025/11/21/o...

Tomorrow should be exciting at #COP30.
Cop30: dozens of countries threaten to block resolution unless it contains roadmap to fossil fuel phase-out

What Authoritarian Regimes Do As we speak, the Trump administration is abandoning principles of democracy and dismantling the rule of law. The willful destruction of the federal science apparatus is but one harmful and onerous asp...

Yep, they are ticking all the boxes in this list...

What Authoritarian Regimes Do  blog.ucs.org/jennifer-jon...

It's time for majority voting at UN climate summits The head of Greenpeace argues that the climate crisis demands urgent UN reform to facilitate an accelerated global response

Like many, I also agree that the pace of progress in global climate action is underwhelming and support the idea of majority voting in climate negotiations by the UNFCCC starting with #COP30. For more read this post by @climatechangenews.com www.climatechangenews.com/2025/09/22/i...

Statement by President of the Republic of Finland, Alexander Stubb, at the General Debate of the 80th Session of the UN General Assembly in New York on 24 September 2025 - Presidentti Check against delivery Madam President, Mr Secretary-General, Excellencies, Ladies and Gentlemen, In its simplest form, foreign policy is based on three pillars: values, interests, and power. I come f...

You can also read it here: www.presidentti.fi/en/statement...

🇫🇮 Finland - President Addresses United Nations General Debate, 80th Session | #UNGA YouTube video by United Nations

How do we best address a collective action problem like anthropogenic global warming? Multilaterally! I'm heartened by most of what I heard from leaders outside the USA at this year's United Nations General Assembly #UNGA80. I really appreciated the address by Finland's President Alexander Stubb

The UN climate process remains indispensable But it must evolve to account for an absent US, and to move from pledge-making to delivery.

I appreciate the inclusion of solutions to improve the international climate negotiation process in this post: www.chathamhouse.org/2025/09/un-c...

An evaporite sequence from ancient brine recorded in Bennu samples - Nature Samples from the asteroid (101955) Bennu, returned by the OSIRIS-REx mission, include sodium-bearing phosphates and sodium-rich carbonates, sulfates, chlorides and fluorides formed during evaporation ...

We sent a probe hundreds of millions of miles across space, set it on a tiny spinning asteroid, collected samples, flew the probe back, landed the capsule with samples on time and target, analysed the samples and discovered the building blocks of life. Science rules.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...