Please remember, as I first heard friend of Coyote Gulch Laurna Kaatz say, “Climate Change is water change.” Right now there may or may not be elections this fall, and the results may or may not be heeded, but if elections do occur, please vote for candidates that are serious about the Climate Crisis.

Click the link to read the article on the Technosphere Earth website (James Dyke). Here’s an excerpt:

August 7, 2026

As I write, vast regions of Europe are on fire as heatwave after heatwave pummels the continent. The UK has just experienced its driest July ever. Not a drop of rain has fallen in London for over a month. The situation is so bad that even the otherwise reliably climate-denying Telegraph has published articles that say climate change is real and humans are to blame. Previously, sea level rise inundating small island nations and crop failures in sub-Saharan Africa would barely merit a shrug from this right wing publication. Perhaps seeing Bordeaux’s vineyards go up in smoke was for them the moment when climate change got real. Pray mercy for Merlot, and think of the Chablis – something must be done!

Namely, the rapid phase out fossil fuels, while also making herculean efforts to adapt societies to the hotter and more dangerous world we are entering. This adaptation needs to go well beyond sea walls and AC. I am becoming increasingly concerned that what we regard as tipping points may actually be fracture points; the point at which key institutions and systems break from intense and cumulative stress. It’s this failure of social systems that concerns me just as much as Earth system collapse. They have the potential to amplify initial climate shocks via negative social tipping points. At systemic levels this has the potential to lead to what we call derailment risks – efforts to stop future heating are degraded because of lack of institutional capacity given increasing social, political, and economic disruption. Derailment risks are one of the reasons I am so baffled as to how proponents of solar geoengineering can blithely claim that future societies will be able to continue to operate planetary-scale cooling operations for centuries – but more on that in the future.

I am more than baffled at what some sections of the climate science community have been doing in the midst of this crisis. Over the past few years we have seen the quite astonishing spectacle of this community tying itself up in knots trying to decide what constitutes a worst case scenario when it comes to future heating…

You often hear: another world is possible. Well I am here telling you that another world is inevitable. We either decide to stop burning fossil fuels or the Earth system will stop us. We are well beyond incremental, so-called policy relevant pathways. Think wartime mobilisation, and the command of entire economies. None of the climate scenarios capture this. They are all constrained by what politicians would find palatable, which ultimately is whatever maintains economic growth. This means it is still very much business as usual when it comes to our reckless meddling with the Earth’s climate.

Click the link to read the article on the Inside Climate News website (Jake Bolster):

April 9, 2026

A team including scientists, Indigenous people and conservationists point to the ecosystem connecting Yellowstone and the Yukon as an example of a region where humans and nature are flourishing together.

Governments cannot reach their climate goals without rethinking humanity’s relationship to the Earth. 

That is the overarching takeaway from a new paper published [April 9, 2026] in Frontiers in Science by a global team of scientists, conservationists and Indigenous people. The authors examined a set of climate targets from around the world, including the Paris Agreement, through the lens of a “Nature Positive” approach to climate change, in which biodiversity loss is halted and reversed by 2030 compared to a 2020 baseline.

They found that climate progress cannot happen without widespread attempts to increase biodiversity, protect intact ecosystems and reverse ecological damage from centuries of consumption.

For too long, humanity—particularly in the Global North—has viewed the environment as either a resource to mine, or a hindrance to economic growth, said Harvey Locke, the paper’s lead author and a co-founder of the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative.

“Nature is essential to the functioning of the Earth system, which is in turn essential to people, and people are essential to the economy,” he said. “That is the hierarchy, nothing else.”

The paper characterized the present global economic order as occurring in the “sweet spot” between competing environmental, societal and economic interests, but says that trichotomy has occurred at the expense of other species and the planet. To maintain a habitable planet, humanity must nest its economy within the limits of Earth’s environment, the authors said.

One of the most severe examples of the current imbalance is climate change, Locke said. 

“We’ve wildly exceeded the planetary boundary for putting CO2 into the atmosphere and we’re wildly destabilizing the Earth system through the destruction of nature,” he said. “Everyone in humanity loses—everyone—if we continue to destabilize the Earth system. And everyone wins if we work toward stabilizing it.”

As an example of how economies can grow while ecosystems are preserved and biodiversity is restored, Locke pointed to the Rockies in North America, particularly the region spanning Yellowstone to Yukon.

According to the National Park Service, the greater Yellowstone ecosystem is “one of the largest nearly intact temperate-zone ecosystems on Earth.”

“We have a wider distribution of bears and wolves and bison today than we did thirty years ago. We have more protected areas now than we did thirty years ago. And meanwhile the human population has flourished in that landscape,” Locke said, “in big measure because people value nature.”

The greater Yellowstone area’s growth has not been without its pains. As more people settle in the mountains, urban and suburban enclaves sprawl into forests, increasing fire risks. Grizzly bears and wolves, while magnates for tourists and their dollars, have also become political lightning rods, with some arguing that their rising populations are exceeding the capacity that the growing human settlements in the area will accept.

“If we don’t grow wisely, we will kill the goose that’s laying the golden egg,” Locke acknowledged. 

The idea that humans are just one cog in nature’s fabulously complex and interconnected machine is an Indigenous premise, said Leroy Little Bear, one of the paper’s authors and a member of the Kainaiwa tribe that resides near the border of Canada and Montana.

If Indigenous groups across the world had more stewardship over ecosystems, species and land management decisions, it would go a long way toward restoring biodiversity and creating societies and economies that are better tailored to Earth’s environment, Little Bear said.

“We come from and operate on the basis of relationships,” he continued. “When you’re related to everything else in the environment, everything out there—the water, the rocks, the trees, the birds—are all animate. So if they’re animate then they all have the same kind of spirits as you have. How would I treat my relatives?” 

But European settlers and their descendents have taken a different approach, he said. “In Western thought, we separate ourselves from nature and to a very large extent, we take the Biblical view that everything is made for the benefit of humans.”

To make their point, the authors collected an “enormous number of references to previous work,” said Cara Nelson, a professor of restoration ecology at the University of Montana who was not involved with the paper. By Daniel Case – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=63321074

“I felt they did a really great job of identifying this inherent property of life on Earth: interconnection and interdependency,” she said.

To help change human economies’ relationship to natural systems, Locke said the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative is exploring creating natural asset companies, where the value of the organization is tied to the preservation of nature, not its destruction, so private capital can spur conservation. 

“You basically think about nature like gold. It’s gonna go up in value because it’s perceived to have value,” Locke said. “And we’re not making any more of it.”

Click the link to read the article on the High Country News website (Jonathan P. Thompson):

January 29, 2026

The latest iteration of the Information Age appears to have arrived in full-force, manifested as AI, the digital cloud, remote work and the mass migration from the material world into cyberspace. 

A couple of decades ago, when I was feeling optimistic, I envisioned this future as a Jetsons-esque world, where the noisy clang of machinery would give way to a soft electrified hum while robots and artificial intelligence performed menial and mundane tasks, freeing us to live like George Jetson, working a leisurely nine hours a week as a digital index operator at a space sprocket firm. 

This new era would be a vast improvement over the worn-out Industrial Age, mainly because it would come with an energy transition. We would ditch our clanky old machinery — all the smokestacks and pollution and internal combustion engines — trading them for sleek cars that, if not flying, would at least be electric, powered by cleaner, gentler and quieter forms of energy, like wind and solar. 

But now, the future is here and AI is everywhere, whether you want it to be or not. It can’t yet wash the dishes, and even though it’s begun taking people’s jobs, it hasn’t erased the need to work for a living. It can, however, correct your spelling errors, help researchers crunch huge datasets, diagnose illnesses and even provide what passes for mental health counseling. It can also inject language you never intended into your messages without your knowledge, churn out inane emails and stilted high school essays, and casually plagiarize artists, writers and journalists. 

This new age has its marvelous aspects, I suppose, but it is also disappointing — even baffling. It’s true that it has coincided with the clean(er) energy transition; coal-burning for power generation has been declining since 2007, while solar, wind and battery storage have boomed. And yet instead of allowing us to abandon the most outdated component of the Industrial Age — the production of power via fossil fuel combustion — the Information Age has helped perpetuate this dirty habit. Our most futuristic, newfangled technologies continue to rely on prehistoric energy. 

Every AI query or other cyber-operation that relies on cloud computing is processed by data centers, warehouse-like buildings housing row after row of servers that churn through digital information. Each individual operation might use a fairly small amount of power, but a single data center handling millions of queries per day can guzzle as much electricity as an entire city. 

And now, the buildup of energy-intensive, AI-processing hyperscale data centers threatens to outpace the energy transition, while giving fossil fuel-boosters justification for continuing to rely on dirty energy sources. To meet the burgeoning demand for power, utilities are nixing plans to shutter old coal and nuclear plants, and data center developers are even constructing new natural gas generators to power their facilities. 

Each time you or I queue up an old Jetsons episode on YouTube or ask ChatGPT whether a video was real or fabricated by Grok, the request travels at roughly the speed of light to a data center. Perhaps that data center happens to be a grid-connected facility in, say, the Phoenix metro area, where hyperscale data centers are sprouting like cheatgrass. The facility’s GPUs and CPUs run off electricity funneled in from transmission lines that connect to power plants spread across the utility’s entire grid. 

That means there’s a good chance that some of that power is coming from the Four Corners coal power plant in northwestern New Mexico, or from natural gas plants burning methane from the oil and gas fields in the nearby San Juan Basin. 

How did all that coal and methane get there in the first place? We have to go back some 145 million years to the beginning of the Cretaceous period, when a shallow, briny sea covered much of what is now the Interior West. Over thousands of millennia, the sea advanced and retreated numerous times, laying down layers of sediment — sand, mud, clay — each time, supplemented by silt carried by huge rivers originating in adjacent mountain ranges.

Embedded within the sediment was organic material, including plants, algae, bacteria, plankton and other microorganisms — along with much larger creatures, from Cretalamna (a megatooth shark) to the Sarabosaurus dahli, which might have resembled some combination of fish, seal and lizard. As the sediment piled up and was subjected to heat and pressure, each layer was transformed into a rock formation: the Dakota sandstone, the Mancos shale, the Mesa Verde sandstone and more. Meanwhile, the organisms decomposed in an oxygen-free environment, eventually transforming into crude oil and methane, or natural gas. 

In the Late Cretaceous, before the dinosaurs went extinct 66 million years ago, the sea retreated for the final time, leaving behind vast freshwater swamps in what is now the San Juan Basin. The climate back then was downright sultry — rainy and warm and almost tropical. Trees and plants grew profusely in and around the shallow marshes, and fallen leaves and toppled trees decayed rapidly, leaving behind deep accumulations of decayed vegetal matter, or peat. Ultimately, this, too, would be transformed by pressure, heat and millions of years into thick, methane-infused coalbeds that are now part of the Fruitland formation.

These days, huge draglines with house-sized shovels tear into the earth at the Navajo Mine, exhuming the remnants of those swamps at a rate of about 14,000 tons daily. The carboniferous rocks are then shipped a few miles north to the Four Corners power plant. In the nearby gas fields, drillers have poked tens of thousands of holes in the ground and hydraulically fractured the rock formations to get at the hydrocarbons, the physical memories of ancient sea creatures, which are then processed and piped to natural gas power plants.

The fuels are burned, releasing carbon and other pollutants that have been stored for millions of years underground, to generate enough steam to turn turbines to spark an electromagnetic field and send electrons across the desert in massive transmission lines to the Arizona grid. From there, they travel to the data center’s server banks, businesses and homes, ultimately ending up in the outlet next to your bed where you charge your phone. 

Fossil fuel combustion made the Industrial Age possible and continues to drive much of society, both in and out of cyberspace. Yet when you factor in the immense amounts of time, human labor, energy and downright violence required to extract and process and transport these fuels, the whole endeavor seems increasingly bizarre. The strangeness is only magnified by the fact that this ancient form of energy powers the newfangled technology of the Information Age, especially when the same technology has given us access to an abundance of renewable, cleaner forms of power.