The idea of sucking CO2 out of the atmosphere to combat climate change might be a necessary intervention, but it always sounded like a longshot.

Unfortunately, it seems like the strategy is already hitting a wall. A new report published this week found that ongoing carbon dioxide removal (CDR) efforts are barely putting a dent in the fight against global warming — and that for them to start making an impact, they would need to be scaled up at a rate that rivals the adoption of solar panels.

In other words, we’re not doing it big enough, and we’re not doing it fast enough. And the longer we wait to get the ball rolling, the more carbon removal we’ll need to do to mitigate climate impacts.

“Countries have pledged around 2.7 billion [metric tons] of carbon removal by 2035 and about 3.6 billion by 2050, but climate pathways require much more, especially in the long term,” report coauthor William Lamb, a scientist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, told The Guardian. “This leaves a gap that grows significantly over time.”

Scientists generally agree that CDR efforts will play a small but necessary role in limiting global warming to within 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit — but only as a complement to the primary goal of aggressively reducing our emissions, and eventually hitting net zero emissions by 2050. The International Panel on Climate Change considers carbon removal to be “unavoidable,” or essential to achieving climate targets,

As if oil shortages, perpetual wars, and the existential angst of AI weren’t stressful enough, there’s an El Niño brewing — and it’s looking like it’ll be one of the most severe in over a century.

According to numerous weather models, this year’s El Niño — a prolonged climate event featuring unusually warm temperatures, which pops up every couple of years — could easily be the most severe we’ve ever experienced in the modern age. This year’s warm spell could supercharge ocean temperatures by as much as 5.4 degrees Fahrenheit, the Wall Street Journal reports, resulting in widespread droughts for some, floods for others, and perhaps most chillingly, chaos for global food supplies.

A massive drought coupled with political mismanagement might fully deplete water in a major city: neither in West Asia nor the Horn of Africa, but in the United States of America.

According to Inside Climate News, the city of Corpus Christi, Texas could soon completely out of water in the next year. It’s the eighth largest city in Texas, and a major industrial node in the Gulf Coast.

As Climate News notes, Corpus Christi is on track to be the first American city to completely run out of water, as its reservoirs near empty following a five-year drought. Though nobody can snap their fingers and end a drought, the extremely dry conditions follow decades of warnings that South Texas is posed for a water crisis.

Earlier this week, city manager Peter Zanoni announced Corpus Christi will be forced to cut overall water consumption by 25 percent — nearly 16 million gallons a day — as soon as September. “We have no precedent to follow. There’s no manual, there’s no video,” Zanoni told the city council.

Details are hazy on how the city plans to make those cuts, but the impacts could be massive, as schools, hospitals, and homeowners are forced to do without — to say nothing of commercial and industrial business.

Climate scientists have been warning about the consequences of poor water stewardship for years at this point. As Shannon Marquez, a professor at the Columbia Water Center told climate publication Grist, Corpus Christi could just be the first domino to fall as corporate water use and climate change take their toll on water tables across the country.

“What we’re seeing in Corpus Christi is really not an isolated crisis,” Marquez said. “It’s very consistent with how things are going to unfold if we don’t start to plan.”

A massive drought coupled with political mismanagement might fully deplete water in a major city: neither in West Asia nor the Horn of Africa, but in the United States of America.

According to Inside Climate News, the city of Corpus Christi, Texas could soon completely out of water in the next year. It’s the eighth largest city in Texas, and a major industrial node in the Gulf Coast. Its water infrastructure provides access to over 500,000 Texans, as well as the major chemical plants, oil facilities, and plastics factories which call the Gulf region home.

Uuden tutkimuksen mukaan tärkeän Amoc-merivirran romahtaminen näyttää entistä todennäköisemmältä.

– Löydöksemme oli, että Amoc taantuu enemmän kuin mitä keskiarvoiset ilmastomallit ennustavat. Tämä tarkoittaa, että Amoc on lähempänä keikahduspistettä, sanoo Ranskan Bordeaux’n Inria-tutkimuskeskuksen tutkija Valentin Portmann brittilehti The Guardianille.

Critical Atlantic current significantly more likely to collapse than thought
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/apr/15/critical-atlantic-current-significantly-more-likely-to-collapse-than-thought

Scientists say finding is ‘very concerning’ as collapse would be catastrophic for Europe, Africa and the Americas