Author: Errica Jensen

Just before Kanye West takes the stage, a certain kind of silence descends upon a packed stadium. Last week, it took place at SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles, where a crowd that had been unsure of how to react to him for years showed up despite holding their breath. Tens of thousands of people bought tickets despite knowing the whole story. People are still drawn to the music despite everything else that has happened, which is quite a bit. Kanye West, now legally known as Ye, currently resides in this tension between the art and the artist, between a catalog…

Faisalabad, a city in Pakistan’s Punjab province with about three million residents, cotton mills, and canal irrigation, stands out in a recent climate mortality report. According to the University of Chicago’s Climate Impact Lab, Faisalabad will have more than 15 times as many heat-related deaths by 2050 as Phoenix, Arizona. One of the hottest cities in the US is Phoenix. It’s similarly hot in Faisalabad. Income, infrastructure, and adaptability are the differences. Phoenix has early warning systems, air conditioning, and a medical network built to handle heat-related crises. There are significantly fewer of all three in Faisalabad. According to the…

Four American Southwest communities experienced temperatures of 112 degrees Fahrenheit on the afternoon of March 20, 2026. In the desert corridor where Arizona empties into Southern California, all four are grouped together within about 50 miles of one another. This is noteworthy because of the date. March. Before winter has officially passed. prior to the region’s air conditioning systems being serviced and prepared for summer. Hospital emergency rooms, public health offices, and cooling center networks weren’t anticipated to be at peak-season capacity. Still, there it was. On a day when San Francisco, which is usually cool and covered in fog…

A certain type of scientific paper appears covertly, published in a journal, distributed in a press release, and noticed by a few climate reporters. It then sits there with information that ought to be on the front page of every newspaper on the planet. One of those studies was written by statistician Grant Foster and Stefan Rahmstorf of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and published in Geophysical Research Letters on March 6, 2026. The conclusion is not nuanced. Since 2015, the rate of global warming has almost doubled. not contrasted with the baseline prior to industrialization. in contrast…

When you drive through Colorado’s Grand Valley on a late summer morning, you’ll notice the unique tranquility of working agricultural land, with irrigation ditches running alongside alfalfa fields and distant mountains still carrying snow that won’t last as long as it once did. As it flows through this area on its way west, the Colorado River performs the same function that it has for many generations: it keeps life alive in a place that would otherwise be reduced to dust. This valley has been farmed by Joe Bernal’s family for almost a century. He is fully aware of it. He…

When James Hansen, a NASA scientist, entered a Senate hearing room in Washington on a hot June day in 1988, he said something that ought to have changed everything. He informed the Senate Energy Committee that “the greenhouse effect has been detected and it is changing our climate now.” It was hot in the room. The city was scorching outside. Hansen purposefully picked the moment so that senators could experience the future he was outlining. After presenting the information and responding to inquiries, he returned to the Washington summer. For a brief moment, everyone took notice. Then it didn’t, for…

Federal researchers at the USDA’s National Center for Agricultural Utilization Research in Peoria, Illinois, have dubbed a certain term “the forbidden C-word.” Though the impact is similar, it’s not because it’s vulgar; it can destroy grants, end careers, and halt years-long research initiatives. Climate is the word.Ethan Roberts, a physical science technician and union president at the Peoria facility who has worked in federal research for almost ten years, recounts the moment the change became official. A memo from USDA’s Agricultural Research Service upper management went viral last year. It directed employees to cease submitting contracts and agreements that contained…

Cathy Richards is always near her phone. She might receive a message on any given night informing her that a tranche of federal climate data is expected to arrive by morning, not because she’s checking social media at odd hours or waiting for a call from a friend. When those messages arrive, sometimes at eleven o’clock, sometimes later, she and her coworkers begin downloading. She works for a nonprofit organization called the Open Environmental Data Project out of Hudson, New York. Not the following day. You get a message at 11 o’clock at night saying, ‘This is going down tomorrow,'”…

Every morning, a bet on the price of corn in three months is being made somewhere, whether it’s in a server farm in suburban New Jersey or a glass-walled trading office with a view of Lake Michigan. The particular field in central Illinois where that corn is growing is not on the trader’s mind. She is considering the latest USDA crop progress report, the La Niña pattern forming over the Pacific, a drought index that is hot throughout the Brazilian soybean belt, and the implications for futures prices on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. It’s highly unlikely that the farmer whose…

Climate value at risk is a term that quietly entered the financial lexicon but has since become a permanent fixture in the minds of central bankers, risk officers, and a growing number of corporate boards. It sounds like something from a scholarly article. However, it is now evident in stress tests, earnings calls, and the working papers distributed prior to significant investment decisions. Whether climate change is a risk to business is no longer the question being asked. The more difficult and significant question is precisely how much that risk is worth in dollars and when it begins to appear…