Explore the Climate section of The Pulse for in-depth coverage of global warming, environmental change and climate solutions.
On Monday morning, August 31, 2026, Hurricane Karina was churning across the open Eastern Pacific with maximum sustained winds of 145 mph — the kind of…
The West is experiencing warmer days while the Great Lakes see a more variable mix of temperatures to start the month. During this active period, shifting…
Summer is far from over for the Western United States. Labor Day is fast approaching, yet the atmosphere seems to be resisting the advance of the…
The massive downpour in Hawaii in early 2026 resulted in more than two trillion gallons of rain falling on the islands. This amount is enough to…
NOAA forecasts a greater than 90% chance of a very strong El Niño late this year, with a 69% chance of reaching historic +2.5°C levels between…
Intense dust storms swept through the Phoenix area over three days, with two major events occurring in quick succession. Visibility plummeted to roughly half a mile—and…
From 250 miles up, the Pacific Northwest looked like it was disappearing. In late July and early August 2026, astronauts aboard the International Space Station turned…
In early August 2026, a devastating late summer storm slammed into the Denver Metropolitan Area with severe flooding and blizzard-like conditions. Streets in once-peaceful neighborhoods rapidly…
A helicopter empties a bucket over a burned field in Sumatra and pulls away. The water hits, hisses, and soaks in. Minutes later smoke keeps rising out of…
Arctic permafrost holds roughly 1,300 gigatonnes of ancient organic carbon — the compressed remains of plants frozen for millennia. As temperatures rise and coastlines crumble into…
For thousands of years, the Barnes Ice Cap has held its ground on Baffin Island — a remnant of the last ice age, reliably blanketed in…
Pelicans have been spotted wandering into Peruvian ports and pushing through urban streets, searching for food they can no longer find offshore. It’s a strange, almost…
On a mudflat in West Africa a small rust colored bird drives its bill into wet sand and comes up empty. The shellfish are down there,…
Lake Erie is no stranger to stress. Decades of agricultural runoff have loaded the lake with nutrients, fueling seasonal “dead zones” — stretches of water so…
For weeks, a stretch of Pensacola Beach had served as a nursery in plain sight. Black Skimmers and Least Terns were raising their young directly on…
An alarm went off in the middle of a Thursday afternoon in Belem, inside the restricted hall where the negotiating happens. Flames were up in the…
It looks like wasted land, a few acres of cattails and standing water, smelling faintly of mud and buzzing with insects in July heat. So Americans have…
The Pacific is running hot. The tropical Atlantic is running cold. And somehow, both anomalies are pushing the atmosphere in exactly the same direction. A Super…
On a low dirt berm between two canals, twenty five miles south of Miami, something has dug a hole and laid eggs in it. The nest…
Step outside at midnight in Phoenix or Houston on a July night and something feels wrong. It is still brutally hot, even though the sun set…
When Americans picture catastrophic flooding, they picture the big rivers — the Mississippi swelling past its banks, the Ohio swallowing riverside towns, the Missouri pushing levees…
The thermometer outside the White House pushed toward 102 degrees on the Fourth of July. Washington had just logged its hottest Independence Day on record. More…
In Oregon, scientists expected birds to flee a massive wildfire — instead they stayed Wildfire smoke doesn’t respect species lines. When it settles over a landscape…
Before the first frost settles or a single tree sheds its leaves, a migratory bird is already gone — weeks ahead of any visible sign that…
On a blazing July afternoon, two blocks can feel like two different planets. Turn down the street lined with tall maples and the air softens almost instantly. Walk…
Many people view a river in a very visual way. They have banks, moving water, and an obvious pathway through the land. But one river fits…
When a rainstorm swept over the scorched hillsides left by the 2022 McKinney Fire, it seemed like relief was finally arriving. Instead, dissolved oxygen in the…
Picture the entire world’s electricity generation running at full tilt for a year. Now picture that same amount of energy delivered 140 times over, all of…
Something changed in the summer of 2025, and satellites caught the whole thing from above. Greenland’s ice sheet, the largest in the world outside Antarctica, turned…
At dawn, the South Rim of the Grand Canyon offers some of the most spectacular scenery in North America. Hikers arrive early, boots laced, packs loaded,…
El Niño research involves a process that scientists are monitoring more closely than ever before. It is located deep beneath the waters between Indonesia and Australia.…
Stand on the tundra in Alaska and it looks like nothing special. A vast, flat plain of amber grass, shallow ponds, and dark soil stretching to the horizon.…
Picture the Atlantic on a summer afternoon, a thick white quilt of cloud stretching from horizon to horizon, bouncing sunlight back out to space before it…
Every summer, the people of Juneau watch a frozen clock count down. High above the city, tucked behind the vast blue wall of the Mendenhall Glacier,…
Picture the tide going in and out on any beach in America. Now picture that same tide, carrying warm ocean water, surging miles underneath a glacier…
Australia is home to roughly 1,700 native bee species, and on a scorching summer day, two of them might share the same patch of ground. One…
Around 90 percent of New York homes have air conditioning, according to city data. On paper, that sounds like a city that has beaten the summer…
Right now a short video is racing around the internet. It shows a traffic light in Europe slumping sideways, the coloured lamps drooping like candle wax.…
At an extreme height over the Pacific Ocean, a number of satellite systems recorded Sinlaku gravity waves unlike any that had existed. And that’s where what…
Picture a country the size of Alaska, and imagine more than four fifths of it undergoing surface melting in the space of a week. That is…
Stand at any beach and the ocean looks permanent, almost stubborn, a vast bowl of water that rises and falls only when ice melts or freezes.…
Twenty miles of marsh, barely a blip on most maps, is the only natural buffer standing between Lake Pontchartrain and the open Gulf of Mexico. Locals…
Picture a dry, cloudless October morning in Fort Lauderdale. No storm, no rain, no wind worth mentioning. And yet, water is rising through the drains, spilling…
Every summer, the same argument starts somewhere in America. One person inches the thermostat down toward 68 degrees, another nudges it back up. But buried inside…
Superniño global population collapse wasn’t how these numbers were first understood. Large areas of the earth’s surface across three different continents lost their populations over a…
Picture the entire surface of our planet as a single living thermometer, every ocean, forest, glacier and cornfield averaged into one number. For all of recorded…
There is a good chance you already own one. It trails from a shelf or hangs in a corner, heart shaped leaves spilling downward, surviving weeks…
On a July afternoon in 2023, a NOAA buoy anchored off the Florida Keys recorded something that stopped scientists cold: water temperature at 101.1 degrees Fahrenheit, in…
Most mornings along the California coast, it arrives the same way it always has: a grey wall sliding in off the Pacific just before sunrise, swallowing…
Step outside on a summer morning and look up. You see fluffy white clouds drifting past, and your brain files the scene under completely ordinary. You…
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