This website gets skeptical about global warming “skepticism”.
2026 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #01
4 January 2026 @ 3:34 pm
A listing of 28 news and opinion articles we found interesting and shared on social media during the past week: Sun, December 28, 2025 thru Sat, January 3, 2026.
Year 2025 Statistics
As this is the first news roundup of 2026 and we therefore have the complete year 2025 "in the can", we thought that you might enjoy some stats about what we shared during the previous 12 months.
All told, we shared 1470 links from about 270 different outlets, the vast majority of which provided fewer than 10 links and the bulk of shares originated from just 25 different outlets. The Top10 are: The Guardian (190), Skeptical Science (164), Inside Climate News (108), Yale Climate Connections (67), Phys.org (63), Carbon Brief (58), New York Times (54), The Conversation (52), Grist (47), CNN (38), followed by The Climate Brink, The Washington Post, DeSmog, Climate Home News and NPR. Among the shares are also 53 links to Youtube vid
Skeptical Science New Research for Week #1 2026
1 January 2026 @ 10:35 pm
Open access notables
Editorial: Surviving the Anthropocene: the 3 E’s under pressing planetary issues, Sanita Lima et al., Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution
Scientists, including stratigraphists, all agree that our species has changed planet Earth in unprecedented ways. But contention exists around the actual start date and the diachronicity of the global human impact (Boivin et al., 2024). Indeed, the term “Anthropocene” is not the first attempt to name the consequences of human activities on our planet (
Editorial: Surviving the Anthropocene: the 3 E’s under pressing planetary issues, Sanita Lima et al., Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution
Scientists, including stratigraphists, all agree that our species has changed planet Earth in unprecedented ways. But contention exists around the actual start date and the diachronicity of the global human impact (Boivin et al., 2024). Indeed, the term “Anthropocene” is not the first attempt to name the consequences of human activities on our planet (Direct Air Capture
30 December 2025 @ 10:05 pm
This is a re-post from And Then There's Physics
I thought I’d written about this before, but can’t seem to find a post. Either, my searching ability is poor, or my memory is poor. I mostly wanted to highlight an interesting YouTube video by David Kipping that illustrates why Direct Air Capture (DAC) is thermodynamically challenging. I encourage you to watch the video (which I’ve put at the end of this post) but his basic conclusion is that thermodynamic constraints mean that implementing DAC at the necessary scale would require a significant fraction of all global electricity consumption.
I wanted, however, to work through some of the numbers myself and to do the calculation of how much DAC we would need to use in a slightly different way.
A key point is that given an atmospheric concentration of 400 ppm and a temperature of 300K, it ta
IEA: Declining coal demand in China set to outweigh Trump’s pro-coal policies
29 December 2025 @ 8:17 pm
This is a re-post from Carbon Brief by Josh Gabbatiss
China’s coal demand is set to drop by 2027, more than cancelling out the effects of the Trump administration’s coal-friendly policies in the US, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA).
Global coal demand is due to grow by 0.5% year-on-year to reach record levels in 2025, according to the latest figures in the IEA’s annual market report.
Yet this will be reversed over the next couple of years, as a faster-than-expected
2025 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #52
28 December 2025 @ 3:40 pm
A listing of 28 news and opinion articles we found interesting and shared on social media during the past week: Sun, December 21, 2025 thru Sat, December 27, 2025.
Stories we promoted this week, by category:
Climate Policy and Politics (8 articles)
Lost Science - She Tracked the Health of Fish That Coastal Communities Depend On Ana Vaz monitored crucial fish stocks in the Southeast and the Gulf of Mexico until she lost her job at NOAA. New York Times, Interview by Austyn Gaffney, Dec 18, 2025.
Save NCAR
Skeptical Science New Research for Week #52 2025
25 December 2025 @ 8:38 pm
Open access notables
Satellite altimetry reveals intensifying global river water level variability, Fang et al., Nature Communications
River water levels (RWLs) are fundamental to hydrology, water resource management, and disaster mitigation, yet the majority of the world’s rivers remain ungauged. Here, using 46,993 virtual stations from Sentinel-3A/B altimetry (2016?2024), we present a global assessment of RWL variability. We find a median global fluctuation of 3.76 m, with pronounced spatial patterns: significant RWL declines across Central North/South America and Western Siberia, and increases across Africa, Oceania, Eastern
Satellite altimetry reveals intensifying global river water level variability, Fang et al., Nature Communications
River water levels (RWLs) are fundamental to hydrology, water resource management, and disaster mitigation, yet the majority of the world’s rivers remain ungauged. Here, using 46,993 virtual stations from Sentinel-3A/B altimetry (2016?2024), we present a global assessment of RWL variability. We find a median global fluctuation of 3.76 m, with pronounced spatial patterns: significant RWL declines across Central North/South America and Western Siberia, and increases across Africa, Oceania, EasternHow climate change broke the Pacific Northwest’s plumbing
24 December 2025 @ 9:51 pm
This is a re-post from The Climate Brink by Andrew Dessler
Flooding in the Pacific Northwest (PNW) has recently turned deadly serious, as days of intense rain from a powerful atmospheric river have swollen rivers and caused widespread flooding across the PNW.
If you guessed climate change was playing a role in this, you’d be right. Climate change isn’t just making storms “wetter” in a simple sense; it is fundamentally breaking the region’s natural plumbing system.
Here is why:
Fact brief - Do solar panels generate more waste than fossil fuels?
23 December 2025 @ 3:50 pm
Waste from discarded solar panels is dwarfed by the waste from coal, oil, and gas. In addition, solar panel recycling capacity continues to expand and improve.
A 2023 study estimated that from 2016 – 2050, if power systems do not decarbonize, coal ash would be 300 – 800 times heavier than waste Zeke's 2026 and 2027 global temperature forecasts
22 December 2025 @ 8:35 pm
This is a re-post from The Climate Brink
Tis the season for global temperature forecasts. The UK Met Office recently released their 2026 prediction, estimating that it is most likely to end up as the second warmest year on record at 1.46C (with a range of 1.34C and 1.58C) relative to the 1850-1900 preindustrial baseline period.1 This is likely warmer than both 2023 and 2025
2025 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #51
21 December 2025 @ 3:33 pm
A listing of 28 news and opinion articles we found interesting and shared on social media during the past week: Sun, December 14, 2025 thru Sat, December 20, 2025.
Story of the week
As you can see below, five of the six articles in the Climate Policy and Politics category are about the plans to dismantle the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado. If you live in the US and would like to speak out against this ill-advised plan, you can do so via the action page provided by AGU, the American Geophysical Union: Speak Out to Save NCAR today!
Stories we promoted this week, by category:
Climate Policy and Politics (6 articles)