“Everybody’s getting free Navajo, Hopi and San Juan Southern Paiute water right now. The seven basin states are all benefiting in the absence of a settlement,” said Ethel Branch, a former Navajo attorney general…adding that the water had been “stolen for over a century.”

Mendocino coastal land returned: “This agreement, the first of its kind in California, gives these three dynamic Native American tribes the rightful opportunity to reclaim sacred lands and cultural traditions on this special piece of earth. And it’s about damn time.” www.latimes.com/california/s...

“Every excavation has become an exercise in triage to decide which pieces of history can be saved before the water reaches them. Jamestown is among the most visible examples of a problem unfolding all along America’s coastlines.” www.theguardian.com/environment/...

“Research has linked wildfire smoke to a range of long-term health issues…The fire service knows that. They all have stories of lung damage or cancer, either their own or their coworkers.” Yet inhaling wildfire smoke was presented as “like sitting around a campfire.” www.latimes.com/environment/...

“Three days after the facility ignited, a temporary air quality monitoring station…in East LA measured an extremely hazardous 755 micrograms per cubic meter of fine particles…For comparison, a Caltech air monitor in Pasadena recorded about 650 micrograms per cubic meter during the Eaton fire.”

Because history repeats itself first as tragedy, then as farce, and finally as heat exhaustion

“The nearby museum records that Roosevelt…busted 44 trusts and protected 230m acres of land. Trump and Burgum, who have sought to roll back protections for wildlife and public lands, gave short shrift to Roosevelt’s conservation legacy.” www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

I’d really like to know what historians of TR think of this new museum/library. (I wonder what it says about his fight with Standard Oil, for example.) I was dubious since it sounds less “archive” and more AI, and thought it was cringe that it features an interactive AI version of TR, and well…

Statistics like this are genuinely shocking, but so too has been the intensity and duration of this extraordinary heatwave in Europe. As a society, we have greatly underestimated--and therefore underpriced--the cost of highly extreme heat events in a rapidly warming world.

“My fear is that that a lot of US towns are facing a slow death. Slow demise is the default, not just for New Orleans but for Miami and Wilmington and lots of other places…we are all sitting around and hoping, playing chicken and hoping that someone else will come in and solve the problem later on.”

“Oceans absorb more than 90% of the excess energy in the Earth system… In 2020, the amount of heat being added to the oceans was equivalent to about five Hiroshima bombs a second. Last year, it was closer to 11 Hiroshima explosions a second.” www.theguardian.com/environment/...

Gift article. The interesting thing here is Europe’s far right parties were unusual in Europe due to their shrill climate denialism, common among US Republicans. Now they claim center & left parties didn’t install AC fast enough to cope with the climate crisis. www.nytimes.com/2026/06/28/w...

Gift article. “While the phrase “particularly dangerous situation” was first used in a tornado outbreak in 1982, it’s only recently that meteorologists, communicating increasing levels of urgency, have begun to apply it to other weather events, including wildfires.” www.nytimes.com/2026/06/29/w...

This is genuinely the Backrooms remembering the Arc de Triomphe.

880 NOAA firings, plus over 1,000 deferred resignations or buyouts. “These forced the National Weather Service to halt or reduce weather balloon launches at 11 locations…And that loss of data then translates into less precise forecasts, more uncertainties in the forecast.”

Climate.us is live. Built by members of the team behind Climate.gov, this new independent nonprofit website keeps trusted climate information easy to find, easy to use, and harder to erase. #ClimateForUs #ClimateUS

“Scientists say Caracas’ seismic risk mirrors that of Los Angeles and San Francisco, where thousands of older, non-ductile concrete, soft-story and brick buildings remain at risk despite decades of tougher codes and some retrofit mandates.“ www.latimes.com/world-nation...

I’ve spent more than a year reporting on how the fossil fuel industry has infiltrated academia over the last 30 years, shaping fundamental paradigms on how to address climate change. My first story in the new @propublica.org and @drilledmedia.bsky.social series, “Carbon Captured”, is out today.

NOAA once again highlighting a rare, highest-end "extremely critical risk" region today around Four Corners/CO Western Slope for exceptionally adverse fire weather conditions amid severe drought. Numerous lightning holdovers are popping up during unusual summer wind event.

I’ve been on the National Mall in good weather, bad weather (swamp inferno hot, rainy, wintry), on random weekdays or at night, etc., and I have NEVER seen it this dead. I mean, I thought it would be bad, but this is amazing.

“Climate scientists have been saying for a long time we’ll have a lot more 2003s.” “Yes it’s climate change, yes it’s us, no it’s not El Niño. Simply put, we remain on a one-way trip towards a more dangerous future, and it’s time we hit the brakes.” www.theguardian.com/environment/...

For cities to cope with heat and the climate crisis, we must do everything: provide cooling, shelter, and healthcare, stop emitting CO2 and methane, and add trees and shade everywhere, from parks to transit stops, so we can help people stay cooler now, and limit even worse heat waves in the future.

Needless to say, determining how exactly the Palisades fire started, who ignited it, and especially what authorities did or did not do while it was apparently smoldering for days before it exploded, is not going to be resolved by this trial outcome.

“The heatwave scorching western Europe is the most severe and widespread ever and is only possible due to the climate crisis… Almost half of Europe’s 850 largest cities are also enduring their worst ever heat stress, a combination of temperature and humidity.” www.theguardian.com/environment/...

Fri–Sun: El Pueblo's Heritage Festival will be a great time to support the #OlveraStreet merchants & explore the museums at El Pueblo. Performers include Ozomatli (on Saturday) and Poncho Sanchez (on Sunday). www.eventbrite.com/e/el-pueblo-...

“No one has ever seen it like this,” he said, “not this dry, not this warm, not this low a snowpack.” The drought “is shrinking a critical water lifeline for about 35 million people and 5 million acres of farmland across the Southwest, from the Rockies to Southern California and northern Mexico.”

I'm teaching my sociology of climate change class in the fall. There's always quite a bit of interest from journalism & comms students. So I am going to put in the curriculum some examples of powerful reporting on the climate crisis. This is a running 🧵 of such articles. Feel free to add to it.

One of the founders of environmental history, and hugely influential in feudal, rural, agricultural, social, and comparative history, among other fields, Bloch emphasized the history of society and nature over narrow elites, incorporated geography and other disciplines, and died fighting fascism. 🇫🇷

In reddest Utah, beset by water scarcity and worries over heat & pollution, a huge data center was WILDLY unpopular. The winner “accused Mr. Adams and Utah’s political establishment of lacking transparency and ignoring their own voters by approving a data center.” www.nytimes.com/2026/06/24/u...

Nickeled and dimed by corporate landlords: “Greystar charged tenants three different billing fees just to be able to pay rent and other fees…and shifted the costs of basic services that are required by law on to tenants.” www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-i...

Well yikes

McSweeney’s ditches humor to use a gross reflecting pool to reflect human grotesquerie: “I admit that, at the end of the day, you were a duck, not a martyr. You had…presumably, no known opinion of “American Flag Blue.” It would be insulting to make you noble simply because we have become grotesque.”

Soon some Silicon Valley startup will announce they’ve “hacked” drought by discovering that rain will follow the plow. All they’ll need is a lot of federal money and investor capital. 19th century climate fabulist William Gilpin would be proud.

"These facility changes support the long-term financial health of the Federal Records Centers Program's revolving fund, reduce expenses for the Operating Expense (OE) fund, and reduce our real estate portfolio in alignment with the administration's priorities.” NOT archival priorities, obviously.

If you can see this, you should! “It was a monumental moment in time, and we captured lightning in a bottle,” Olmos told The Times. “Not only did it change the course of Latinos in theater but it touched the very soul of the culture. It was catching the voice of the pachuco.”

Gift article: “We have adapted, but it is far from enough for what is coming.” “Heat waves become deadlier as they go on, as strain builds up in bodies…The WHO says more than 200,000 people across Europe have died from heat over the past four years.” www.nytimes.com/2026/06/23/c...

“How has climate change made heat waves more common and more severe? A “combination of a warmer climate and more persistent weather patterns means that once a heat wave develops, it is more likely to intensify and linger.” www.nytimes.com/2026/06/22/w...

Olvera Street was an actual historic place remade as tourist history, but now those layers of history intertwine with histories of the LA Plaza, two Chinatowns, Mexican LA, Union Station, and downtown LA’s booms & busts. I hope its businesses can survive as markers of all that continuity and change.

In light of the current fire, the history of how Boyle Heights & East LA fought for clean air, environmental justice, & shaped the history of combatting air pollution, but “continues to have to fight for the basic right of being able to live in clean neighborhoods.” www.latimes.com/california/n...

The threat of hunger in an El Niño that “will be arriving amid unprecedented conditions that will make its effects more complex…next year is almost certain to be the hottest on record, while a host of economic factors have left vulnerable countries more exposed.” www.theguardian.com/environment/...

I promise I’ll eventually quit posting about the dumb reflecting pool!😅 But to paraphrase Renaissance poet Petrarch on the mountaintop, when overwhelmed by the view and the beauty of the physical world, supposedly he prayed for a life of constancy and chastity—but added: “But Lord, not yet.”

This is the projected daily mean temperature for the entire nation—highs and lows, everywhere from warm Occitanie to cool places in the Alps or the northern coast. 30°C nationwide would be historic, and a reminder that France and northern Europe must prepare for the hotter summers to come.

Imagine being deployed to guard an algae bloom while your state is underwater

People happily mixing and mingling in a global city.(OMG the NYT printed a positive story on LA!) Korean and Mexican “Koreatown is…one of the few places where a person can dine on bulgogi tacos or find a taco truck parked in front of a Korean barbecue restaurant.” www.nytimes.com/2026/06/19/u...

Now that landscape architecture, pool maintenance and militarism have merged into a vanishing point of ridiculousness, I hope that somewhere, somehow, Capability Brown and Frederick Law Olmsteds Sr. and Jr. are laughing themselves silly over this.

This good news “follows widespread backlash from scientists and experts who depend on the OOI’s data for research, including estimates of ocean heating rates amid the climate crisis…Losing the system could undermine forecasts and early-warning systems for storms and other severe weather events.”

Depicting data visually is common today in the sciences, social sciences, public health, and environmental studies, and can be an important way to communicate knowledge. You might be surprised to learn how long people have been doing it—Florence Nightingale and W.E.B. Du Bois, for example.

Cause of death? The Anthropocene. 200 years of tourists and vehicles compacting soil, coal mining changing the water table, misguided “help,” and climate change: “Sadly, it seems probable the lack of summer rainfall…coupled with unprecedented high temperatures, have had a significant hand in it.”

“Rising temperatures may trigger a dangerous increase in “hydroclimatic whiplash” in rivers making traditional approaches to flood and drought planning [and existing infrastructure] insufficient…rivers will experience increasingly rapid transitions between heavy downpours and long dry spells.”