Author: Errica Jensen

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…

When you enter the Chicago Loop on a typical Tuesday afternoon, you’ll notice the familiar urban weight of the area: commuters passing through underground passageways that connect buildings, the rumble of a CTA train somewhere below street level, and the glass towers of the financial district catching afternoon light. It appears sturdy. It appears to be permanent. After three years of placing sensors throughout that same district and mapping what was going on beneath it, Alessandro Rotta Loria and his team at Northwestern University discovered that the ground beneath it has been subtly deforming for decades, expanding and contracting in…

At first glance, driving through the Sierra Nevada on a clear morning appears to be how mountain forests should appear. The air has a certain sharpness of pine resin and elevation, tall conifers press against the hillsides, and the scale of everything—the trees, the ridgelines, the silence—has a permanence that seems almost geological. It appears to be healthy. enduring. Just the way it ought to be. Examining vegetation data dating back to the 1930s, researchers have discovered that much of what you see isn’t exactly what it seems. The trees are living things. However, the climate beneath about 20% of…

Imagine that there is water in your living room when you wake up. Not a tiny leak. The couch floats. For the second time in five years. When you call your insurance company, you don’t get sympathy or a visit from a claims adjuster. A letter informing you that the policy will not be renewed is the response. In other places, premiums have tripled. The mortgage lender has called. And in a market that has begun to price in risk the way actuaries always knew it should but politicians never permitted, the house—the one you saved for, the one the…

A company called Factorial Energy spent more than ten years in a lab outside of Boston failing at something that everyone in the battery industry told them was almost impossible to manufacture at scale. Co-founded by Siyu Huang and Alex Yu, the team’s goal was to create a solid-state battery that would replace the combustible liquid electrolyte found in modern lithium-ion cells with a solid substance and be able to manufacture enough of them to fit inside a moving vehicle. For years, the factory yield was around 10%. In other words, nine out of ten of the cells they constructed…

You would anticipate certain things when you drive through a mountain town in February: crowded parking lots, the sound of snowguns in the distance, lift lines winding past warming huts, and the smell of wet wool inside a base lodge that has been operating at full capacity since before Thanksgiving. Nowadays, you find something quieter more frequently, in more locations than the industry would like to acknowledge. Emptier. lodges with only half of the regular staff. rental stores that still have equipment on the racks. Tan and patchy slopes that should be white, as though the mountain hasn’t fully committed…