Heat waves pose a growing threat to learning, health and well-being in schools as extreme heat becomes more frequent and intense across the United States, finds a report by the American Psychological Association and the Network for Resilient PK-12 Schools.  

Accurately forecasting extreme temperature events remains a critical challenge for climate adaptation and disaster preparedness. Now, researchers have developed Hankelformer, a novel deep learning architecture that integrates structured Hankel-based augmentation with contrastive learning to significantly improve extreme weather forecasting. Tested on real-world extreme events including the 2021 Texas winter storm and the Pacific Northwest heat dome, Hankelformer achieved up to 34% reduction in prediction error compared to leading baseline models, offering a promising tool for reliable extreme temperature forecasting.

A research team led by Professor YAO Le from the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Paleontology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (NIGPAS), in collaboration with researchers from institutions in China and abroad, has reconstructed the process and mechanism of a major warming event that occurred about 300 million years ago during the Earth's penultimate icehouse, known as the Late Paleozoic Ice Age (LPIA).

Prediction is the goal and test of all science, one might argue. Meteorologists have been curious about the inherent limits of weather forecasting ever since the dawn of numerical weather prediction in the late 1950s. Now, a new study published in Advances in Atmospheric Sciences offers a bold answer: even under perfect conditions, there is a fundamental limit—and it is about 129 days.

New findings challenge the assumption that drivers should keep a functioning gasoline vehicle until the end of its life before switching to an elective vehicle (EV). Despite the carbon footprint of manufacturing the electric car, the study shows, replacing even a brand-new gasoline vehicle with an EV results in lower lifetime greenhouse gas emissions. In the United States, personal vehicles are responsible for more carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions than all other forms of transportation combined, including air, rail, water, and commercial trucking and busing. This dominance makes the transition away from gasoline-powered cars, SUVs, and trucks central to climate policy. Battery electric vehicles (EVs) generally produce far fewer lifetime greenhouse gas emissions than internal-combustion-engine (ICE) vehicles, and their climate advantages are expected to grow as electricity grids become cleaner. However, while the emission benefits of choosing an EV over an ICE vehicle during a new vehicle purchase are well established, just when to retire a working gasoline-powered vehicle and replace it with an EV remains an open question. Keeping the gasoline vehicle on the road avoids the additional manufacturing emissions of producing a new EV, but replacing it early could deliver substantial savings because EVs generate far fewer emissions during operation. To address this question, Elliott Campbell and Roland Geyer estimated the life-cycle CO₂ emissions associated with keeping an ICE vehicle in use versus scrapping it early and replacing it with an EV. They conducted life-cycle analyses across a broad range of retirement scenarios and vehicle classes, taking into account variation in powertrain, battery size and manufacturing, electricity sources, and retirement year. According to the findings, replacing a functioning internal-combustion vehicle with an EV can reduce carbon emissions across a broad range of conditions, even when the gasoline vehicle is relatively new. The authors argue that this result makes vehicle scrappage-and-replacement programs a potentially powerful climate policy.