skepticalscience.com

Open access notables Emergence of Uncompensable Heat Stress During Monsoon Season in India, Chuphal et al., AGU Advances Uncompensable heat stress (UHS), characterized by the loss of homeostasis due to excessive environmental thermal loading, causes substantial heat-related health risks in India. However, the spatial and seasonal heterogeneity, as well as temporal changes of UHS in India remain poorly understood. Using observations, reanalysis data, and climate model projections, we highlight the surge of UHS during the monsoon season (July–October) as the climate warms. In the observed period (1979–2021), the frequency and area affected by UHS ha

This is a re-post from The Climate Brink by Andrew Dessler You have likely seen a headline like this: 62,000 people died from record-breaking heat in Europe: link It’s a striking number. It’s also not clear what it means. Is this the number of people killed by extreme heat? Or climate change’s contributions to the ex

This is a re-post from Yale Climate Connections by Bob Henson It might have seemed exotic when it first appeared, but the forecast “cone of uncertainty” used by the NOAA/NWS National Hurricane Center (NHC) is now a familiar part of tropical cyclone readiness in U.S. states and territories. For 2026, NHC has made a couple of key tweaks to its standard cone product. It’s also testing an expanded version of the cone – one made feasible by a new way of understanding how and where forecast errors arise. Since its debut in 2002, the cone has become what a University of Miami writer called “arguably [the cen

A listing of 28 news and opinion articles we found interesting and shared on social media during the past week: Sun, May 31, 2026 thru Sat, June 6, 2026. Stories we promoted this week, by category: Climate Policy and Politics (8 articles) Scilencing The Trump Administration would just as soon we didn't know stuff, especially about our planet The Crucial Years, Bill McKibben, May 31, 2026. Companies No Longer Report Greenhouse Gas Emissions And Climate Risk Progressive lawmakers and environmental groups strongly condemned the decision, ar

From time to time, we announce housekeeping items that cover various changes in the Skeptical Science (SkS) web site. Today, it's an important one for all people who are posting comments on our articles: an update to the Comments Policy. Reasons for the Updates The Comments Policy is an important document at SkS: not only does it provide guidance for the behaviour of commenters, but it also provides guidance to the moderators on how to deal with comment threads that are starting to go off the rails. The moderation team strives to apply a reasonably uniform level of moderation, and the Comments Policy is the set of rules we follow. We have been discussing some updates internally over the past few weeks, and now it is time to have the changes go live. The changes have been prompted by a few recent comments that started to use AI to generate text. (W

Open access notables Historical Volcanic Eruptions Mitigated the Expected Rapid Arctic Sea Ice Decline Prior to 2000, Wang et al., Geophysical Research Letters Arctic sea ice has declined at sharply contrasting rates over the past four decades—modest before 2000 and rapid thereafter. Using observational and model evidence, we show that large tropical volcanic eruptions can trigger decade-long Arctic sea ice recoveries, and that without the 1982 El Chichón and 1991 Pinatubo eruptions, Arctic sea ice would have declined approximately 1.5 times faster before 2000. We further show a model's sensitivity to volcanic aerosol forcing scales with its sens

This is a re-post from The Climate Brink by Andrew Dessler I’ve long been struck by how hard it is to predict the evolution of our energy system, even a few years in advance, never mind 25 or 30 years. I still remember the “peak oil” craze in the mid 2000s, when people were telling me the end of oil was nigh. It sounded convincing right up until it turned out to be wrong. In this post, let me show you how bad previous predictions have been for the electricity sector. evolution of our energy system in 6 charts Each plot below shows annual predictions of how a particular source of electricity will evolve as well as what actually happened. The data come from the Energ

Skeptical Science is partnering with Gigafact to produce fact briefs — bite-sized fact checks of trending claims. You can submit claims you think need checking via the tipline. Do electric vehicles almost always have a lower carbon footprint than gasoline-powered cars? The EPA, IPCC, and many independent studies have found that electric vehicles have lower lifetime emissions than gas-powered vehicles in nearly all cases. “Lifetime” calculations include emissions released during EV manufacture, as well as the generation o

This is a re-post from Yale Climate Connections Thanks to the transition from fossil fuels to clean technologies, what used to be considered the worst-case climate change scenario now appears to be outside the realm of plausibility, climate scientists said in a recent study. That study made headlines in May when President Donald Trump falsely claimed that climate scientists had admitted that their projections had been wrong, a claim akin to an anti-vaxxer gloating that the official end of the pandemic proved that COVID was never a problem. And the study contained sobering news: The best-case climate scenario is close to slipping out of reach, and a business-as-usual scenario is still a very dangerous one, with high risks of

A listing of 28 news and opinion articles we found interesting and shared on social media during the past week: Sun, May 24, 2026 thru Sat, May 30, 2026. Stories we promoted this week, by category: Climate Change Impacts (7 articles) Malnourished Gray Whales of the Eastern North Pacific Are in `Serious Trouble` The population has plummeted over the past seven years as climate change triggers mass starvation in warming Arctic waters. Inside Climate News, By Blaine Harden, May 24, 2026. An Unusually Early Heat Wave Breaks Temp