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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

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

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:

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 solar panels generate more waste than fossil fuels? 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

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

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)

Open access notables Widespread Increase in Atmospheric River Frequency and Impacts Over the 20th Century, Scholz & Lora, AGU Advances Atmospheric rivers (ARs) play a dominant role in water resource availability in many regions, and can cause substantial hazards, including extreme precipitation, flooding, and moist heatwaves. Despite this, there is substantial uncertainty about recent and ongoing changes in AR frequency and impacts. Here, we place recent observed trends in their longer-term context using AR records extending back to 1940. Our results show that AR frequency has increased broadly across the midlatitudes, bridging the apparent discrepancy between the obs

This is a re-post from Carbon Brief The past three years have been exceptionally warm globally.  In 2023, global temperatures reached a new high, after they significantly exceeded expectations.  This record was surpassed in 2024 – the first year where average global temperatures were 1.5C above pre-industrial levels.  Now, 2025 is on track to be the second- or third-warmest year on record.  What has caus

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. Are toxic heavy metals from solar panels posing a threat to human health? Toxic heavy metals in solar panels are locked in stable compounds and sealed behind tough glass, preventing escape into air, water, or soil at harmful levels. Most concern focuses on cadmium and lead. 40% of new U.S. panels use cadmium telluride, which does not dissolve in water, easily t

This is a re-post from And Then There's Physics Since effective communication often involves repeating things, I thought I would repeat what others have pointed out already. The underlying issue is that there is a narrative in the climate skeptosphere suggesting that extreme weather events are not becoming more common, or that we can’t yet attribute changes in most extreme weather types to human influences (as suggested in the recent DoE climate report).