Becca Dzombak

“Climate change is loading the dice for extreme fire seasons like we’ve seen,” said @climate-guy.bsky.social. “There are going to be more fires like this.”

Recovery can take decades. But there’s no guarantee forests will grow back the same, because with climate change, they might be growing back under different conditions.

Whole forest ecosystems can be lost.

And extreme fire weather is on the rise, one study found.

That’s leading to more forest fires, which emit carbon dioxide, which increases warming… a dangerous loop, experts said.

Biodiversity is also lost in fires.

Forests lost about twice the canopy in 2023 and 2024 than the annual average for the previous two decades, one new study found.

Even remote forests with little human activity burned. That clearly points to climate change as a driver of fires, scientists said.

Climate Change Is Making Fire Weather Worse for World’s Forests

Climate change is whipping up worse fire weather and more severe fire seasons. Longer hot dry spells mean drought-stricken soils and crispy vegetation, and when the winds shift and something sparks—wildfire.

In 2023 and 2024, forests were hit hard, two studies show.

www.nytimes.com/2025/07/21/c...

"It's not just the climate mission that gets compromised," Dr. Spinrad said. "It's going to have dire consequences in terms of public safety, in terms of economic development, and in terms of quality of life."

Carbon dioxide may be the star, but isn't the whole story. The observatories also measure methane, a far more potent greenhouse gas that's especially a concern at northern latitudes. They track radiation and ozone. And they detect smoke, soot, and weather patterns important for firefighting efforts.

"It's not just about getting a number. It's about getting the right number," said Ralph Keeling of Scripps. Precision and being able to compare to NOAA's long-term baseline are critical for understanding changes in greenhouse gases' concentrations and movements over time, he said.

Shutting these down, as the FY26 budget proposes, would be another chip away at the US' climate leadership, Dr. Graumlich said.

And while other countries study the atmosphere, NOAA's program is key for international calibration and collaboration.

But it's not just Mauna Loa that's under threat. Three other NOAA observatories — in American Samoa, the South Pole, and Alaska — give scientists a pole-to-pole view of how greenhouse gases are moving.

And samples sent from all corners of the world to a Boulder lab for processing fill in the rest.

Dr. Rick Spinrad, who formerly led NOAA, likened it to Trump's statement about how not collecting data on COVID-19 would mean fewer cases.

"The analogy here is, if we stop monitoring greenhouse gases, we won't have any climate change," he said.

The Mauna Loa Observatory is perhaps the flagship of this network, home to the famous curve of carbon dioxide that showed the world how humans influence Earth's workings.

That record is a part of climate science that people understand, said @lgraumlich.bsky.social. "That's why it's threatened."

After 7 Decades of Measurements From a Peak in Hawaii, Trump’s Budget Would End Them

NOAA's network of climate monitoring stations and sample collectors is the backbone of tracking global climate change.

Trump's proposed budget would shut it down.

www.nytimes.com/2025/07/17/c...

NASA Website Will Not Provide Previous National Climate Reports

Today NASA backtracked on its statement earlier this month that the National Climate Assessments would be hosted on their website.

“NASA has no legal obligations to host globalchange.gov’s data,” a spokeswoman said today. “We never did and will not host the data.”www.nytimes.com/2025/07/14/c...re

"It's really sad to see," said @leafwax.bsky.social. "There are so many things NOAA does. It really makes no sense to attack it given all the services it provides for such a small amount of investment."

If the budget passes Congress as is, dozens of major laboratories and observatories around the country would close. States would lose key partnerships with scientists and the federal government. Hundreds, if not thousands, of scientists and other staff will be out of jobs.

The program furloughed its current fellows because the funds are delayed. And the program had to inform its finalists that no 2025 fellowships would be awarded, citing uncertainty around future funds.

NOAA's ocean+atmosphere research arm is currently funded at about $600M. That would drop to $0.

Getting one is a career changer, fellows said.

"It meant that the community had confidence in my ability as a researcher," said @solilyquy.bsky.social. "It gave me the freedom to work on the questions I was excited about."

Lily studies ocean carbon and heat. She was furloughed on Monday.

The grants the program provides are intended to support the next generation of big thinkers in climate science. They encourage cross-disciplinary collaborations, creative thinking and high-risk, high-reward studies that can advance our understanding of how the Earth and its climate work.

It's a small but competitive and influential program. Over the program's history, it has supported more than 230 of the world's leading climate scientists. Its alums are at universities and federal agencies across the country and around the world, including two current leaders in NASA.

Recipients of a U.S. Climate Science Fellowship Are Put on Unpaid Leave

The Trump administration's proposed budget would slash NOAA's climate research funds.

It still has to pass Congress, but it's already affecting scientists. A program supporting promising new climate scientists furloughed its current cohort and canceled 2025 awards.

www.nytimes.com/2025/07/09/c...

Congress authorized the Army Corps of Engineers to step back in and help maintain the system of levees, flood walls, pumps, etc. that protects the city.

(FEMA does not have a role in upkeep of the system, but the system matters for insurance.)

And in NOLA, as in other U.S. cities, Black and Hispanic communities are more likely to be located behind levees, so they face higher risk of flood exposure. These communities are also less likely to have funds to do costly monitoring and maintenance, other studies have shown.

Infrastructure managers need precise data that this study provides to prioritize which segments of the levee to shore up and monitor closely.

There's little immediate risk, the authors said. But it's important to know where levees are sinking faster than expected.

Some good news! Much of the city is stable, the study also found, and in some places it's even bouncing back after years of groundwater pumping.

But levees and flood walls, as well as the city's airport and some wetlands, are indeed sinking.

Map of New Orleans Highlights Sinking and Stable City Spots

The levees that protect New Orleans from storm surges are sinking. It's built into their design: they're big and heavy and basically built on mud.

But in some spots, they're sinking faster than expected. A new study shows where and how fast it's happening.

www.nytimes.com/2025/07/07/c...

Three DoD/NOAA satellites that help scientists track sea ice (and hurricanes) are slated to cease providing their data at the end of July due to "cybersecurity concerns."

www.nytimes.com/2025/06/30/c...

The national climate assessment "shows how climate is changing in the places where we live, in ways that matter to people's lives," @katharinehayhoe.com told me. It explains those effects in "clear and unmistakable terms."

The reports' website disappeared on Monday. NASA will now host them online.

(An archived version of globalchange.gov is available on Wayback: web.archive.org/web/20250628... )

“This is just the latest step in a rapidly escalating series of actions that not only signal the lack of climate change as a priority, but actively seeks to expunge climate and climate change from any federal document or priority,” said @weatherwest.bsky.social.