The Trump administration has been hacking away at federal government websites, taking down information about climate change and anything deemed “woke.” Now, there’s an online tool you can use to track the changes and find missing information.

Researchers initially developed the Federal Environmental Web Tracker to document similar changes during the first Trump administration, and they resurrected the tool this week. It’s basically a big spreadsheet that includes links to webpages that are either down completely or have had significant changes made since Trump stepped back into office. 

By early February, just a couple weeks or so after Trump stepped into office, FEMA was already deleting the term “climate” from its website. As of this morning, the Federal Environmental Web Tracker includes more than 200 entries for federal webpages that have been altered. It’ll be updated weekly by the nonprofit group that made it, called the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative (EDGI). 

Some of the changes are subtle — like an Environmental Protection Agency webpage that shares data on pollution from power plants being renamed “Power Sector Data” instead of “Power Sector Emissions Data.” The data’s still there, and the change in the title might help that information stay online by flying under the radar, as Trump administration officials arbitrarily yank stuff they consider taboo. 

But there are also entire webpages or sections of content that have vanished. Much of that content relates to the ways that certain communities are disproportionately affected by climate change and pollution because of poverty or the history of segregation and racism in the US. EPA pages on climate change, human health, and children’s health, for example, no longer include links to information about “equity.” 

Thanks to EDGI and other groups archiving these webpages, you can use the resurrected web tracker and the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine to see old versions of websites. Documenting the transformation taking place now is crucial for policymakers and advocates who want to make that information publicly available again.

Advocates are already taking action to try to bring resources back online. Organic farmers filed suit against the Trump administration last week for removing content they rely on to help them grow crops, alleging that the US Department of Agriculture’s sudden removal of key online resources broke federal law. It follows a similar lawsuit filed by doctors that led to some federal webpages on health disparities being restored.

The federal agency that produces weather forecasts and leads research on climate and the oceans has canceled leases for research centers and slashed its staff to “devastating” effect, current and former employees tell The Verge. 

Last week, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) laid off hundreds of probationary employees, who make up roughly 10 percent of its workforce. The agency has plans to lay off around 50 percent of its staff in total, according to Andrew Rosenberg, a former deputy director at NOAA and co-editor of the SciLight newsletter.

The agency has also canceled a lease for a building housing the National Centers for Environmental Prediction in Maryland, which produces information for the National Weather Service, Air Force, Navy, and Federal Aviation Administration, Rosenberg tells The Verge. He also says NOAA has canceled a lease for a radar development lab in Oklahoma. NOAA and the universities housing those facilities did not immediately confirm those cancellations with The Verge. Axios reported separately last Friday that NOAA had canceled leases for office space, without mentioning the locations specifically.  

NOAA staffers are demonstrating today outside of the agency’s headquarters in Silver Spring, Maryland, calling attention to risks they see ahead as President Donald Trump and the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) upend an agency that Americans rely on to stay safe from extreme weather events and flooding.

“I can tell you the losses will be and already are devastating,” a NOAA employee, who was granted anonymity because of the risk of retaliation, tells The Verge. “Believe me when I say, you may not know all the work that goes on behind the scenes, but if these cuts continue, you will feel them personally at some point when that work is gone.” 

The employee says that with the types of cuts they’ve heard proposed, some National Weather Service offices won’t be able to staff their operations desks full time. “I’d challenge anyone to work seven to 10 8-hour shifts in a row, with the stress of knowing your job could be cut arbitrarily at any time, and not make any mistakes through all of that,” they say. “Cutting NOAA staff will invariably cost not only lives, but millions — if not billions — of dollars.”

Weather balloon launches, which are needed to collect data for forecasts, were already suspended in western Alaska last week because of a lack of staffing after layoffs. People who lost their jobs at NOAA were given very little time to exit their offices, let alone prepare for a transition in workloads. They were notified by email last Thursday and given around an hour and half to leave the office, according to Rosenberg and a NOAA employee who lost their job last week and who was also granted anonymity.

Both Rosenberg and the other employees are anticipating further risks to NOAA’s work. After storming NOAA headquarters in February, DOGE reportedly intends to cut NOAA’s budget by 30 percent. 

Project 2025, the right-wing manifesto for the second Trump administration, said NOAA “should be dismantled and many of its functions eliminated, sent to other agencies, privatized, or placed under the control of states and territories.” It also proposed leasing out more government allocated radio frequency spectrum for private use, which could lead to more interference with frequencies used for weather forecasting. 

Privatizing weather forecasts — essentially turning a free service into something people have to pay for — could put more Americans at risk during extreme weather events, sources tell The Verge. So, too, does auctioning off too much radio frequency spectrum if that interferes with the collection of data needed to make forecasts.

“Gutting NOAA puts Americans in danger,” says the former employee. “Trump and DOGE aren’t ‘trimming the fat,’ they are hobbling the services that all of us rely on every day to stay safe, to do business, and to live our lives peacefully.”

Apple customers filed a class action lawsuit against the company, alleging it misled consumers with claims that certain Apple Watches are carbon neutral. For a product to be considered carbon neutral, its manufacturer has to offset or cancel out any pollution the item generates.  

Apple said in 2023 that “select case and band combinations” of its Apple Watch Series 9, Apple Watch Ultra 2, and Apple Watch SE would be the company’s first carbon neutral devices. The suit was filed on behalf of anyone who bought those watches. It alleges that the products were not really carbon neutral because they relied on faulty offset projects that didn’t actually reduce the company’s greenhouse gas pollution. 

The lawsuit shows how difficult it is to make promises about a product’s sustainability by attempting to offset or capture the carbon dioxide emissions it generates. Many environmental advocates have instead pushed for tech companies to switch from fossil fuels to cleaner energy, and to make products that last longer and are easier to repair.

The company’s carbon neutral claims were false, and the seven plaintiffs would not have purchased the Apple Watches or paid as much for them had they known that, the lawsuit alleges. “Apple’s false advertising may lead [consumers] to choose its products over genuinely sustainable alternatives,” the complaint filed in a California federal court on Wednesday says.

Apple is standing by its assertions. “We are proud of our carbon neutral products, which are the result of industry-leading innovation in clean energy and low-carbon design,” Apple spokesperson Sean Redding said in an email. 

Redding says the company reduced Apple Watch emissions by more than 75 percent. The company focused on cutting pollution from materials, electricity, and transportation used to make the watches, in part by getting more of its suppliers to switch to clean energy. 

To deal with the remaining pollution, Redding says Apple invests in “nature-based projects to remove hundreds of thousands of metric tons of carbon from the air.” That’s where the new lawsuit finds problems. 

To offset their emissions, many companies buy carbon credits from forestry projects that represent tons of planet-heating carbon dioxide that trees and soil naturally trap. Apple primarily purchased credits from the Chyulu Hills project in Kenya and the Guinan Project in China, the suit says. It alleges that neither of the projects met a basic standard for carbon offsets, which is that they capture additional CO2 that would not otherwise have been sequestered had Apple not paid to support the project. 

According to the complaint:

The Chyulu Hills Project purports to generate carbon credits by preventing deforestation on land which has been legally protected from deforestation since 1983, while the Guinan Project claims to have planted trees on “barren land” that was already heavily forested before the project began. In both cases, the carbon reductions would have occurred regardless of Apple’s involvement or the projects’ existence. And because Apple’s carbon neutrality claims are predicated on the efficacy and legitimacy of these projects, Apple’s carbon neutrality claims are false and misleading. 

Apple is far from the only company to have faced accusations about carbon offset projects. Dozens of big-name brands — including airlines, retailers, banks, and more — have relied on “junk” carbon offsets to make carbon neutral claims, a 2022 Bloomberg investigation found.

This also isn’t the first time Apple’s first carbon neutral products have faced scrutiny. The company needs to be more transparent about its supply chain in order to back its carbon neutral claims, the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs said in a separate report in 2023. That report found that some Apple suppliers’ emissions were growing. 

A better measure of a company’s environmental impact is whether its entire carbon footprint — encompassing its operations, supply chain, and the use of its products — is shrinking. A company can purport to make a more sustainable product, but it could potentially wind up selling so many of those products that the company as a whole has a bigger carbon footprint. 

So, for consumers who want to limit their own carbon footprint, they’re probably better off hanging on to their current devices for as long as they can. For its part, Apple’s carbon footprint as a company got smaller between 2021 and 2023, even without taking carbon offsets into account, according to its latest sustainability report. But Apple still churned out 16.1 million metric tons of CgO2 emissions in 2023, roughly equivalent to the emissions from 42 gas-fired power plants in a year. And while Apple has made some strides, there’s still a long way to go to make devices easier to repair.

Exposure to extreme heat could lead to faster aging, a new study published today in the journal Science Advances suggests. Older people living in hotter areas of the US showed faster aging at the molecular level than people living in cooler areas.

The study looked at measures of a person’s biological, or epigenetic, age, which is based on how a person’s body is functioning at the molecular and cellular levels and doesn’t necessarily match a person’s chronological age based on birth. Longer-term exposure to heat was associated with an increase in a person’s biological age by up to 2.48 years. The impact on the body is comparable to the effects of smoking, according to the study authors.

Extreme heat is already the deadliest type of weather disaster in the US, a threat that’s growing as climate change leads to more frequent and intense heatwaves. The new research shows how there are more subtle, insidious ways that prolonged heat exposure can affect the body beyond heat illness or stroke in the moment.

“We’re kind of surprised [at] how massive this impact could be,” says Eun Young Choi, lead author of the study and a postdoctoral associate at the University of Southern California. “The effects of extreme heat might not show up right away as a diagnosable health condition, but it could be taking a silent toll at the cellular and the molecular level which could years later develop into disability and disease.“

The research included blood samples collected from 3,686 adults aged 56 or older living across the US. The study authors compared those samples with heat index data, a measure of temperature and humidity, between 2010 and 2016. They found a correlation between greater exposure to extreme heat and a bigger jump in epigenetic age. A person living in a place where the heat index is 90 degrees Fahrenheit or above for half the year experienced up to 14 more months of biological aging compared to someone living somewhere with less than 10 days a year that hot.

“The thing that is interesting here is that a lot of observational data focuses on acute impacts of extreme heat exposure – this paper underlines that there may be chronic impacts on epigenetic age that are important predictors of adverse health,” Amruta Nori-Sarma, deputy director of Harvard Chan C-CHANGE and assistant professor of environmental health and population sciences says in an email to The Verge.

Nori-Sarma and Choi say it’s important to keep in mind, however, that the study doesn’t take into consideration whether a person had access to air conditioning or other ways to stay cool. There’s room for more research into what factors might make an individual more resilient or more vulnerable to heat.

“Our finding doesn’t necessarily mean that every person living in Phoenix, Arizona, for example, has an older biological age. This is really an average impact,” Choi says. “Two people in the same neighborhood could have very different levels of personal exposure depending on whether they have air conditioning.”

That also shows that there are steps that can be taken to keep people safe in a warming world. Aside from stopping climate change, that can look like planting more trees and painting rooftops white to prevent urban areas from trapping as much heat, and opening up more public spaces where people can get access to air conditioning. Finding solutions gets easier to do when people are more aware of the potential risks. 

The US Department of Agriculture’s decision to purge information about climate change from its websites harms organic farmers and threatens their livelihoods, a new lawsuit alleges.

Since President Donald Trump stepped into office, the USDA has removed “scores of vitally important webpages” that mention climate change, the suit says. The administration has been racing to destroy public resources that address climate change and civil rights, sparking legal battles to bring those webpages back.

Trump has repeatedly called climate change a “hoax” and has abandoned US efforts to limit the greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels that are causing climate change. There is overwhelming scientific consensus that pollution from fossil fuels are raising global average temperatures and driving more extreme weather.

Plaintiffs in the suit, filed on behalf of the Northeast Organic Farming Association of New York (NOFA-NY) and two environmental groups, say they’ve already seen those effects on their farms. They previously relied on information on USDA websites to prepare for those consequences, helping them make decisions about planting crops and managing their land.

“We have been reacting to extreme weather and making choices to protect our businesses and our food system for years. Climate change is not a hoax. Farmers, fisherman, and foresters know from experience, that we need every piece of science and intergenerational knowledge to adjust to this new reality,” Wes Gillingham, Northeast Organic Farming Association of New York (NOFA-NY) board president, said in a press release.

An online tool called the “Climate Risk Viewer,” for example, used to show the impacts of climate change on rivers and water sheds, and how that might affect future water supplies. It vanished along with other webpages shortly after USDA Director of Digital Communications Peter Rhee sent an email to staff on January on 30th directing them to “identify and archive or unpublish any landing pages focused on climate change,” according to the lawsuit.

The administration also removed information about how to access funding for “climate-smart farming,” including a webpage for a loan program that supports “sustainable agricultural practices that reduce greenhouse gas emissions … and enhance the resilience of farming operations to climate change.” NOFA-NY used those federal webpages to help farmers find funding and share advice through its free “farmer helpline.“

Taking down policy information also makes it harder for farmers to hold the Trump administration accountable for distributing funds they’d been promised. The administration’s funding freeze, and Trump’s threat to claw back Biden-era climate funding, have faced separate legal challenges. NOFA-NY’s new lawsuit alleges that the Trump administration has violated court orders by stopping payments to farmers under USDA conservation and ‘climate-smart agriculture’ programs.

The Natural Resources Defense Council and Environmental Working Group are also plaintiffs in the suit. They say they relied on the previously publicly available information for their research and advocacy.

The USDA’s removal of all these resources violate three federal laws, the complaint alleges. That includes the the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) that gives the public the right to access key records from any federal agency, the Paperwork Reduction Act that stipulates adequate notice before changing access to information, and the Administrative Procedure Act that governs the way federal agencies develop regulations.

The USDA didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment from The Verge, and the Department of Justice declined to comment.

Earlier this month, the Trump administration brought some federal webpages back online to comply with a court order after Doctors for America (DFA), which represents physicians and medical students, similarly filed suit over health data taken off government websites.

A pivotal trial over the embattled Dakota Access Pipeline opens today that could have grave consequences for protests in the US and the future of the environmental group Greenpeace.

Members of the Standing Rock Sioux and more than 500 other tribes protested the development of the pipeline alongside demonstrators who joined from across the US nearly a decade ago. Legal battles are still in motion, even after oil started flowing through the pipeline that runs from North Dakota to Illinois in 2017.

The company that operates Dakota Access, Energy Transfers, is suing Greenpeace for $300 million in a lawsuit that goes on trial this week. Energy Transfers claims that Greenpeace supported protesters’ “unlawful acts of trespass” and property destruction to stop construction. It also alleges that the organization spread false information about the company and concerns about the pipeline’s impact on the environment and cultural sites to the public and to banks financing the project.

Paying that amount in damages would be equivalent to about 10 times Greenpeace USA’s annual budget, according to …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Occidental, the oil giant that has tried to fashion itself as a climate tech leader, is being real clear now about capturing carbon dioxide emissions, which it sees as the next big thing for fossil fuel production.

That shouldn’t be surprising coming from a petroleum company. But Occidental has built up an entire arm of its business purporting to fight climate change. It acquired the startup Carbon Engineering, a pioneer in the development of technologies that filter CO2 out of the air, back in 2023. Occidental subsidiary 1PointFive is building giant facilities in Texas using Carbon Engineering’s tech. Those projects got support from the Biden administration and from big companies, including Amazon and Microsoft, with their own climate goals to meet. Sucking carbon dioxide out of the air is supposed to get rid of the pollution causing climate change.

But that strategy, called direct air capture (DAC), doesn’t get at the root of the problem: extracting and burning fossil fuels is what produces that planet-heating pollution in the first place. What happens to that carbon once it’s captured is an even hairier question. DAC is sold as a climate solution because the captured carbon can be sequestered underground, keeping the greenhouse gas from building up in the atmosphere and raising global average temperatures.

But fossil fuel companies have historically used CO2 in a process called enhanced oil recovery, shooting carbon into depleting oil fields to force out hard-to-reach reserves. In an earnings call this week, Occidental described its DAC business as imperative to the company’s ability to produce more oil.

“We believe the next round of technology that’s going to add significant barrels — 50 to 70 billion barrels of reserves — will be production that comes from the use of CO2 in enhanced oil recovery,” Occidental president and CEO Vicki Hollub said on the call. This was in response to a question about how the company was thinking about its carbon-removal business with the change in administration this year — from one that prioritized action on climate change under Joe Biden to one that aims to “drill, baby, drill” under Donald Trump.

Hollub essentially characterized the use of captured carbon for enhanced oil recovery as the biggest boon for fossil fuels since fracking enabled the US shale revolution. “Taking CO2 out of the atmosphere is a technology that needs to work for the United States, and President Trump knows the business case for this,” Hollub said, adding that she’s had “several conversations” with Trump.

Occidental’s seen a slight slump in its enhanced oil production over the past few years, but company leadership thinks it can turn that around with the help of captured CO2. “There’s not enough organic CO2 in the country to be able to flood all the things that we’re going to need to flood to get that 50 to 70 billion barrels,” according to Hollub.

Direct air capture is still a prohibitively expensive endeavor, however, costing hundreds of dollars per ton of CO2 captured. Its future in the US could hinge on whether the Trump administration keeps Biden-era tax credits for the technology, which Hollub mentioned on the call. After all, the company doesn’t want to risk its DAC plants becoming stranded assets. Its first large DAC plant, called Stratos, is slated to come online this year in Texas, and the company has plans for an even bigger project at King Ranch that was awarded federal funding in 2023.

Microsoft struck a deal with 1PointFive last year for 500,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide removal. And Amazon agreed to pay for 250,000 metric tons of carbon removal from 1PointFive’s first forthcoming DAC plant. Both of those agreements, at least, include stipulations that the captured carbon be permanently sequestered without being used to produce more oil and gas.

But there’s another worrisome outcome with these kinds of deals. The DAC plants Occidental is building have to succeed for that CO2 to be sequestered. Other companies that purchase carbon-removal services budget that into their carbon accounting to meet their own climate goals. Time and money that could have been spent reducing greenhouse gas emissions by other means — say, by switching to cleaner energy sources — could be squandered on carbon-removal technologies that might never become commercially viable.

Occidental will still have its fossil fuel business to fall back on, even if DAC fails, however. And for now, it can profit off its oil and gas business, profit from cleaning up some of the CO2 pollution it creates, and then use the pollution it captures to produce even more fossil fuels.

Mark Flores sits at the kitchen table drawing birthday cakes. At 44, he loves to draw circles, a skill he’s mastered over the past decade of his life. His thick black hair is neatly combed like the Superman cartoon on his T-shirt. Grasping thick Crayola markers, he lines up small circles in rows within larger oblong shapes. Mark has accomplished much more than his mother, Yvette, was told he ever could when he was born — when doctors said he wouldn’t be able to interact with people because of his intellectual disabilities.

Instead, Mark greets most people with a big, toothy smile, stoops over to give them a hug if they’re willing, and is quick to answer most questions with an enthusiastic “yeah.”

When Mark coughs at the table, Yvette asks him if he needs water. “You don’t have to, Mark, you can say no,” she says, her soft brown eyes behind black cat-eye glasses. “We’re learning ‘no,’” she says to me as an aside. Like her son, she’s quick to flash a smile. Her dark hair falls loosely around her shoulders, streaked with silver against her face. 

Yvette was working at a factory in the early days of Silicon Valley when she got pregnant with Mark. An …

Read the full story at The Verge.

China and the US, the world’s two top greenhouse gas polluters, could burn through a lot more electricity over the next couple of years, according to the latest forecast from the International Energy Agency (IEA). The steepest rise in global electricity demand in a while is expected over the next few years, with much of that coming from new data centers and the manufacturing of electric vehicles, batteries, solar panels, and semiconductors in the two countries.

That growth reflects broader changes across the world when it comes to how people consume information and what powers their lives. More vehicles and home appliances run on electricity these days. And new AI tools have led to a boom in energy-hungry data centers. That makes it all the more urgent to deploy new sources of energy that can make sure homes and businesses have enough electricity without creating a lot more pollution in the process.

“The acceleration of global electricity demand highlights the significant changes taking place in energy systems around the world and the approach of a new Age of Electricity. But it also presents evolving challenges for governments in ensuring secure, affordable and sustainable electricity supply,” Keisuke Sadamori, IEA director of energy markets and security, said in a Friday press release.

Globally, growth in demand is expected to be equivalent to adding more than Japan’s entire annual electricity consumption each year between now and 2027, according to the IEA. Most of that growth comes from countries whose economies are considered to be developing or emerging, including China. But so-called “advanced” economies, including the US, are also beginning to consume more electricity than they have in the past.

It’s important to note that rising electricity demand doesn’t necessarily correlate with economic growth. China’s electricity consumption has grown faster than its economy since 2020, according to the IEA. Its manufacturing of solar panels, EVs, and batteries is a big reason why; those three industries accounted for a third of the rise in electricity demand in recent years. Chinese automaker BYD rivals Tesla when it comes to selling the most electric cars in the world. Solar supply chains are still concentrated in China, despite trade sanctions against products tied to accusations of labor and human rights abuses in Xinjiang province. And on Monday, China announced new policies to boost battery production.

Artificial intelligence is a big part of the story, too. China-based startup DeepSeek recently announced major advances in its AI models. That includes significant gains in energy efficiency, which creates more uncertainty about how much energy AI might use in the future. Even so, the IEA says electricity use by data centers in China could double by 2027. The growth of 5G networks in China is also eating up more electricity, according to the IEA.

Electricity demand has either flatlined or fallen over the years in advanced economies including the US, Canada, the European Union, Japan, and Korea. Even with economic growth, that’s been the case since around 2009 thanks to the development of more energy-efficient technologies. Now, the IEA expects demand to rise as a growing number of data centers, EVs, electric heat pumps, and air conditioners suck up electricity from power grids.

After China, the US currently uses the most electricity and creates the most greenhouse gas emissions causing climate change. Its electricity demand dipped by 1.8 percent in 2023 but rebounded last year and is now expected to grow by around 2 percent on average each year through 2027. That might sound like a small percentage, but it adds up to the equivalent of California’s total electricity demand over three years. Data centers are driving that trend, with companies making plans to build out new gas infrastructure and develop new nuclear reactors to satiate growing demand from data centers. Generative AI has also increased demand for semiconductors, and chip manufacturing is forecast to burn through increasing amounts of electricity in the US.

Electrification — getting more buildings and modes of transportation to run on electricity — isn’t necessarily a bad thing as long as that electricity comes from cleaner sources of energy. China and the US are both heavy fossil fuel users, with fossil fuels generating around 60 percent of each country’s electricity mix. The Trump administration just abandoned US climate goals, instead favoring oil and gas development and efforts to make the US the “AI capital of the world.”

Nevertheless, pollution doesn’t have to go up with electricity demand. With solar and onshore wind farms already being the cheapest new sources of electricity in most of the world, renewable energy is growing quickly. Renewables are on track to beat coal and generate more than a third of the electricity the world uses this year and could meet as much as 95 percent of new electricity demand through 2027, the IEA says. It anticipates “record-high” electricity generation from both renewables and nuclear reactors over the same period. That leads to a very hopeful prediction from the IEA — that planet-heating carbon dioxide emissions from generating electricity could plateau globally sometime in the next few years.

A grassroots environmental alliance that called for a “free Palestine” has lost the more than $50 million it was supposed to receive under the Biden administration’s signature climate law, the Inflation Reduction Act.

The Climate Justice Alliance (CJA) became the target of conservative attacks after advocating for a ceasefire in Gaza, and a group of of federal workers wrote an open letter last year signaling that the CJA had been singled out as a result. The CJA was charged with distributing around $50 million in subgrants for locally led environmental projects as one of 11 “grantmakers” the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) named in 2023.

This week, CJA announced that it would sunset its grantmaking program after not receiving the funds. Trump’s appointee to lead the EPA posted on X on Thursday that he cancelled the grant.

The cancelled program “would have channeled resources into projects that not only protect public health and safety but also create sustainable economic opportunities for jobs,” CJA executive director KD Chavez said in an emailed statement. “This program would have clearly benefited taxpayers and working-class families.”

The EPA’s grantmaking program was supposed to make it easier for funding to reach communities living with the most pollution, which are often communities of color in the United States. The CJA includes around 100 grassroots organizations across the US including the NAACP Environmental and Climate Justice Program and the Indigenous Environmental Network.

CJA was chosen to distribute subgrants to EPA regions 8–10, which includes most of the Western US. It was also the national grantmaker responsible for outreach to tribal communities. The CJA told The Verge last year that it had already spent $1.6 million from its own operational budget to get ready to start accepting applications for subgrants.

The Biden administration tried to release a majority of the funding from the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) before Donald Trump, who said on the campaign trail that he would rescind unspent funds, stepped into office. The EPA under Joe Biden ultimately sent funding to every other EPA grantmaker in the program except for the CJA.

“The Biden Administration and the EPA did not heed the call of communities and their legacy is now one of broken promises to frontline communities,” CJA said in a statement this week.

Now, the Trump administration is working to dismantle programs that deal with climate change or the disproportionate health burdens many communities of color face from pollution. It placed around 170 employees in the EPA’s Office of Environmental Justice on administrative leave. It’s also trying to block other pots of Biden-era climate and clean energy funding, including $20 billion for the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund created by the IRA.

The Trump administration is attempting to take back around $20 billion of funding that the Biden administration previously awarded to reduce air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions.

Trump’s appointee to lead the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Lee Zeldin, posted a cryptic video last night and followed up with a press release today claiming “roughly $20 billion of your tax dollars were parked at an outside financial institution by the Biden EPA.” He later clarified that “at this point, there is zero reason to suspect any wrongdoing by the bank,” but that “the financial agent agreement with the bank needs to be instantly terminated” and the money returned to the EPA.

Limited details Zeldin shared about the money seem to point to the $27 billion Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund (GGRF) created when Congress passed the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. The fund is meant to prevent pollution by supporting new clean energy projects, particularly those in low-income neighborhoods, Native and rural communities, and other communities that haven’t had as much access to these technologies in the past.

“They are blocking tens of billions of dollars in public-private partnerships from investing in projects across the country. Whether it is a local credit union offering low interest loans to small businesses to install solar panels and lower their electricity bills, or a municipality securing funding to upgrade century old buildings with modern windows and HVAC systems, these projects are now uncertain,” Kyle Kammien, a policy director at nonprofit Dream.Org, said in an emailed statement.

To make things more confusing, Zeldin refers to the funding as “gold bars,” referencing a video from the right-wing group Project Veritas that filmed an EPA employee talking about distributing funding to nonprofit organizations, states, and tribes. The Biden administration hustled to disburse most Inflation Reduction Act money ahead of Donald Trump stepping into office; Trump campaigned on a pledge to “rescind” unspent IRA funds.

The employee, who appears to have been filmed without their knowledge, says “now we’re just trying to get the money out as fast as possible before they can come in and stop it all … it truly like feels we’re on the Titanic and we’re throwing gold bars off the edge.”

“Fortunately, my awesome team at EPA has found the gold bars,” Zeldin says, talking about $20 billion in funding for groups including a coalition of nonprofits called Climate United. The coalition was awarded close to $7 billion through one of the programs of the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, although Zeldin doesn’t specifically name the GGRF.

The EPA didn’t immediately respond to a press inquiry from The Verge about which programs Zeldin is targeting. Bloomberg and The Washington Post report that his comments indicate that the EPA administrator intends to stop GGRF funding, and the Post reports that the bank Citi is overseeing the distribution of those funds.

Zeldin describes the Biden-era awards as “a rush job with reduced oversight” in his video address. Democratic lawmakers have challenged Donald Trump’s ability to claw back funding approved by Congress through the Inflation Reduction Act, so any effort to place those “gold bars” back on the Titanic is likely to face a legal battle.

The Trump administration brought webpages back online, meeting a court-ordered deadline at 11:59PM on February 11th. 

Doctors for America (DFA), which represents physicians and medical students, filed suit last week against the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and the Department of Health & Human Services (HHS) for taking health data off government websites.

A federal judge granted a temporary restraining order, setting a deadline for those agencies to make that information available again online. The order includes more than a dozen CDC and FDA webpages that were specifically mentioned in the lawsuit. That includes the social vulnerability index and environmental justice index, for example, which are tools that show whether particular populations might face disproportionate health risks.

DFA alleges that the agencies violated the Administrative Procedure Act and the Paperwork Reduction Act by removing public access to the webpages without giving adequate notice in advance. The CDC, FDA, and HHS didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment from The Verge. 

The agencies started taking webpages down after President Donald Trump signed an anti-trans executive order, “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government,” on his first day in office. The CDC’s main data portal went down briefly before going live again with a note saying, “Data.CDC.gov is temporarily offline in order to comply” with the executive order. 

The court order says webpages are supposed to be restored to versions as of January 30th. The Verge wasn’t able to immediately verify whether the restored pages have the same content they had on January 30th.

The plaintiffs claim that removing the data forced DFA members “to scramble in search of alternative resources to guide how they treat patients; slowed their clinical practices or reduced the amount of information they can convey to patients in time-limited visits; and paused or slowed their vital research.” They say a temporary restraining order is necessary to protect their practices and public health while the lawsuit determines whether the defendants’ actions were lawful or not.

Beyond the webpages named in the lawsuit, the defendants are also supposed to work with DFA to identify any other resources that need to be restored, setting a February 14th deadline for those webpages to become available again.

President Donald Trump wants to make America incandescent again. He posted on his social media platform Truth Social that he plans to end Biden-era standards for lightbulbs that accelerated the adoption of LED lighting.

According to that post, he’ll direct his appointee Lee Zeldin to “go back to the common sense standards,” for lightbulbs. Zeldin is the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, although Trump calls him “secretary” in his post. And  while Trump singled out Zeldin, it’s the Department of Energy that sets efficiency standards for light bulbs and appliances. 

Trump said he’s going to sign “orders” to reinstate standards that were in place during his first term. Along with lightbulbs, the president indicated he would weaken standards for sinks, showers, toilets, washing machines, and dishwashers.

Trump has been crusading against more efficient lightbulbs since his first term as president, saying at the time “you look better with incandescent lights” and that “of course being a vain person, that’s very important to me.”

On a more serious note, his administration has taken aim at energy efficiency initiatives as part of a broader effort to derail action on climate change and promote fossil fuels. He signed a sweeping executive order called “Unleashing American Energy” on his first day in office that includes “safeguard[ing] the American people’s freedom to choose from a variety of goods and appliances, including but not limited to lightbulbs.”

Oil and gas companies pumped more than $75 million into Trump’s campaign and Republican efforts during the last election cycle, and now they’re reaping the rewards. Trump picked fossil fuel executive Chris Wright to lead the Department of Energy (DOE), which set higher efficiency standards for lightbulbs before he stepped into office.

The US has been trying to phase out inefficient lightbulbs since 2007, when George Bush signed the Energy Independence and Security Act into law. Trump rolled back those standards in 2019. Then the Biden administration introduced stricter rules on energy efficiency that most incandescent bulbs couldn’t meet. 

Old-school incandescent bulbs are far less efficient than their newer counterparts because they lose about 90 percent of their energy as heat. Household LEDs typically use at least 75 percent less energy than incandescent bulbs and can last up to 25 times longer. And while upfront costs for an LED bulb tends to be higher, an LED is supposed to save consumers money in the long run because of its longevity and through lower electricity bills. It’s no wonder, then, that the LED is already the leading lighting technology in homes globally, according to the International Energy Agency.  

The term “climate change” has started to vanish from Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) website. Its former “climate resilience” website has been rebranded under the title “future conditions.” There are still subtle references to climate change there, but it’s more of a whisper than an urgent warning as it was before.

The edits come as the Trump administration takes a wrecking ball to federal agencies, attempting to slash the government workforce and eliminate initiatives Trump and billionaire ally Elon Musk deem unnecessary. Their anti-diversity crusade has already targeted websites and scientific research mentioning words including “women,” “minority,” and more.

Despite mountains of evidence showing that greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels are exacerbating extreme weather disasters, President Donald Trump has repeatedly called climate change “a hoax” and campaigned on plans to “drill, baby, drill.” So, naturally, information about climate change is in the crosshairs as the Trump administration enacts a broader purge of health and environmental information it doesn’t want conflicting with his pro-fossil fuel message.

The webpage formerly titled “climate resilience” used to say at the top:

“Climate change is the defining crisis of our time. From extreme heat, drought and wildfires to more severe coastal storms, sea-level rise and inland flooding, the consequences of climate change are all around us.”

Reading the current webpage in comparison is like playing one of those games where you have to guess what changed in a picture. (Hint: there’s a double-space typo where the words “climate change” used to be.) The paragraph now says:

“Disaster incidents are rising due to increased human vulnerability, exposure and a changing climate. From extreme heat, drought and wildfires to more severe coastal storms, sea-level rise and inland flooding, the consequences  are all around us.”  

There are several mentions of climate that have been removed from the page, according to an analysis by the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative (EDGI). The group of researchers came together after Trump was first elected in 2016 to document what might happen to public environmental data. The group found a nearly 40 percent drop in the use of the term “climate change” across websites for federal environmental agencies during the first Trump administration.

As the agency that coordinates federal responses to all kinds of disasters from hurricanes to wildfires, FEMA risks developing a major blindspot in its work if it ignores the effects of climate change. Climate change made the deadly Los Angeles wildfires more likely in January, in just one terrifying instance.

FEMA faces more existential threats, of course, under the Trump administration. The president signed an executive order on January 24th establishing a “review council” to assess whether the agency can “capably and impartially address disasters,” alleging “serious concerns of political bias in FEMA.”

FEMA didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment from The Verge. The changes were made on January 21st, a day after Trump’s inauguration. “We do not know the intention of the team who renamed this website,” EDGI wrote in a blog post today. “Perhaps it was to fly under the radar of the new administration; perhaps it was to align with the priorities of the new administration.”

Other webpages for FEMA and other government agencies are a mixed bag when it comes to mentioning climate change. The Department of Transportation took down a webpage for “climate and sustainability” from its “priorities” website. But other longstanding web resources on climate are still online.

EDGI and other groups have been scrambling to archive federal webpages and datasets. But there are still bigger questions about what happens if those agencies stop paying attention to climate change altogether. As the adage goes, you can’t manage what you don’t measure.

Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has reportedly infiltrated the headquarters of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the agency that collects and shares vital weather and climate information. Sources have told The Verge, as well as other news outlets, that they’re worried about drastic changes that could impact the public’s access to weather forecasts, jeopardize cybersecurity, and gut employee morale.

NOAA houses the National Weather Service and National Hurricane Center, which produce forecasts and warn people about approaching storms. News that DOGE has barged into national headquarters has raised fears that the ad hoc group Musk is leading to remake the federal government is about to take a sledgehammer to NOAA — potentially hobbling the agency’s ability to keep the public safe during disasters. One current employee tells The Verge they’re staying on despite “demoralizing” changes at the agency because of how vital their work is — people rely on NOAA for accurate forecasts every day.   

“It seems like a hostile corporate takeover of a government agency that provides a suite of services to the public to protect lives and to protect property,” Juan Declet-Barreto, senior social scientist for climate vulnerability at the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), tells The Verge.

DOGE representatives arrived at NOAA offices in Silver Spring, Maryland, on Tuesday, Axios reports, citing anonymous sources. 

“They blew through security … they walked in and they said, basically, take me to your IT,” says Andrew Rosenberg, a marine scientist who previously held leadership roles at the National Marine Fisheries Service at NOAA and UCS, based on news he’s heard from former and current employees. “This is basically like doing a major computer hack attack, but doing it inside the agency, because, you know, somebody gave you a badge,” Rosenberg tells The Verge.

Rosenberg says DOGE is trying to sniff out anything that “vaguely mentions diversity, equity and inclusion” (DEI) — initiatives that President Donald Trump and Musk are trying to stomp out of existence.

A current NOAA employee, who was granted anonymity because of the risk of retaliation, tells The Verge that ahead of an “external audit,” staff have been instructed to fully delete or take down any materials related to diversity and equity, whether that’s publicly available online, on internal sites, or in physical office spaces. Government webpages for other federal agencies have already removed content that discusses race, gender, and equity issues. 

The employee tells The Verge that posters with information about how to report sexual assault and harassment had also been taken down from their office. Chatrooms and websites for employee resource groups, including one for women, have also gone down.

“To have those supportive spaces just … gone [is] incredibly hard,” the NOAA employee who identifies as queer and neurodivergent said in a message to The Verge. “It’s demoralizing.”

At least one person at the agency was put on administrative leave, that employee says. Similarly, Wired reports that a staff member who leads diversity and inclusion efforts within NOAA was placed on leave on Tuesday. The person had reportedly worked there for decades and was scheduled to retire in a few weeks. 

NOAA employees were told to give DOGE engineer Nikhil Rajpal editor access to NOAA Google sites, according to Wired, citing anonymous sources who say the directive came from acting Secretary of Commerce Jeremy Pelter. A NOAA spokesperson referred The Verge to the public affairs contact for the Commerce Department, which houses NOAA. The Department of Commerce didn’t immediately respond to an inquiry from The Verge.

Rosenberg says his contacts tell him that DOGE has gotten into the agency’s email system to monitor employees to make sure nobody leaks information. The report, which The Verge could not independently confirm, would tally with news from other federal agencies. Employees at other agencies tell The Verge they’ve been told to remove gender pronouns from email signatures. Musk aides have reportedly also kicked workers out of their own computer systems at the Office of Personnel Management. These kinds of incursions into communications and IT systems at federal agencies and the Trump administration’s rushed attempts at slashing the workforce have also raised cybersecurity concerns. 

“They’re into the data systems, but nobody really knows what they’re doing there,” Rosenberg says. “Who knows, you know what is carried along with tapping into these systems? We worked on cybersecurity now for how many decades? And they’re just ignoring that.”

Federal employees received an email last week from the Office of Personnel Management telling them they could opt to take a “deferred resignation” by February 6th or face drastic workplace changes should they choose to stay. Soon after receiving that email, NOAA employees got a rush of spam mail in their inboxes, according to the employee The Verge contacted. The person shared screenshots of some of those emails that included advertising for denim jeans and Scientology Today, as well as other messages containing homophobic and misogynistic slurs. The spam emails were reportedly deleted from staff inboxes by someone within NOAA about an hour after they were sent. 

“Elon Musk and his DOGE hackers are ransacking their way through the federal government, unlawfully gaining unfettered access to Americans’ private information and gutting programs people depend on,” Reps. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) and Jared Huffman (D-CA) said in a statement, The Hill reports.

The turmoil at NOAA comes after DOGE stormed the Treasury Department and is attempting to shut down the United States Agency for International Development, or USAID. And on Tuesday, Trump nominated Neil Jacobs to lead NOAA, who was found to have violated the agency’s scientific integrity policy during the notorious “Sharpiegate” scandal of Trump’s first term. Trump reportedly used a Sharpie to erroneously alter a National Hurricane Center map depicting the expected path of Hurricane Dorian in 2019. Jacobs was acting administrator at the time.

Only around 20,000 workers have reportedly chosen to take deferred resignation as of January 5th across the federal government, which is made up of around 3 million workers. Sweeping layoffs could start soon, Trump administration officials told CNN. 

DOGE intends to slash NOAA’s workforce in half and reduce its budget by 30 percent, Rosenberg wrote in the SciLight newsletter. Since its data also informs resources related to climate change like flood maps, NOAA has been in the crosshairs of the Trump administration’s efforts to downplay the consequences of climate change. Project 2025, the right-wing manifesto for a second Trump administration, said NOAA “should be dismantled and many of its functions eliminated, sent to other agencies, privatized, or placed under the control of states and territories.”

Privatizing weather forecasts could put more Americans at risk during extreme weather, sources tell The Verge. Private companies — and new AI tools for weather forecasting — still rely on data collected by NOAA. One alternative would be to keep collecting data through NOAA but then turn it over to private companies to share with the public. That would turn a free service, weather forecasts, into something for which people would have to pay. And that could have grave consequences if only those who can afford to access that information have it as disasters unfold, sources say.

“How will they know if they need to evacuate and when?” the UCS’s Declet-Barreto says. “Or how hot it’s going to get during a heat wave and when? That is all public information paid by your tax dollars, and that information protects people and saves lives. Project 2025 wants to put that behind a paywall.”

The NOAA employee told The Verge that they have no plans of leaving unless they’re fired and “they physically remove me from the building … I know the work we do is incredibly important.”

House of Representative members from California want to know what led to accidental evacuation alerts that fomented confusion during devastating Los Angeles fires in January.

The Palisades and Eaton wildfires broke out in early January, killing at least 29 people and destroying more than 16,000 structures. In the midst of the chaos, some 10 million people received an erroneous emergency alert on January 9th telling them an evacuation warning was issued for their area. It was only supposed to go to people living in areas most at risk from another blaze, but was instead sent across Los Angeles County.

After the gaffe, the county said it was working with the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to investigate why “echoes” of the alert kept going out to residents’ phones, making it more difficult for people to rely on officials’ warnings.

“Appropriately timed, targeted, and clear emergency alert messages can mean the difference between life and death. However, unclear messages sent to the wrong locations, multiple times and after the emergency has passed, can lead to alerting fatigue and erosion of public trust,” the lawmakers say in letters sent to Los Angeles County, FEMA, the FCC, and software company Genasys.

Led by Representative Robert Garcia (D-CA), the legislators are considering whether more guidance or regulations are needed to keep the same problem from happening again during other emergencies. The letters include a series of questions about how the Los Angeles warning system operates and what’s changed since the January infernos. The recipients have been asked to provide their responses by April 1st. None of them immediately provided responses to inquiries from The Verge.

As the third week of Donald Trump’s presidency begins, workers across federal agencies are scrambling to find their footing among the chaos.

From the US Agency for International Development and the Department of Agriculture, to the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Labor, federal workers are facing an onslaught of changes that threaten to upend their work and the systems that keep the country running. Sweeping orders from the White House threatened to freeze funding for basic grants and programs, before being blocked by a judge and walked back by Trump. Using a made up meme agency, unelected billionaire Elon Musk is attempting to stage a takeover reminiscent of his remaking of Twitter, now X, except this time hollowing out the US government. 

“A lot of us are scared and feel betrayed,” a person who works for USAID told The Verge. “When [people] get hired, they take an oath to protect the constitution.” And with Musk actively dismantling the humanitarian agency, which Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Monday he now runs, workers at other agencies are wondering if the same could happen to their workplaces. “I think everyone is really scared about wh …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Key resources for environmental data and public health have already been taken down from federal websites, and more could soon vanish as the Trump administration works to scrap anything that has to do with climate change, racial equity, or gender identity.

Warnings floated on social media Friday about an impending purge at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), spurring calls to save as much data as soon as possible. The CDC shares data on a wide range of topics, from chronic diseases to traffic injuries, tobacco use, vaccinations, and pregnancies in the US — and it’s just one of the agencies in the crosshairs. 

The CDC’s main data portal, which housed much of those datasets, was offline by Friday night. “Data.CDC.gov is temporarily offline in order to comply with Executive Order 14168 Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government” a notice on the webpage says, adding that it will become available again once it’s “in compliance” with the executive order.

Fortunately, researchers have been archiving government websites for months. This is typical with every change in administration, but there was even more imperative with the return of Donald Trump to office. Access to as much as 20 percent of the Environmental Protection Agency’s website was removed during the first round of Trump’s deregulatory spree. And now, it seems, similar moves are happening fast.

The CDC’s social vulnerability index and environmental justice index — tools that could show whether particular populations might face disproportionate health risks — have both been taken offline within the past week. In 2007, during the Bush administration, social scientists, geographers, and statisticians started developing the social vulnerability index (SVI), which incorporated demographic and socioeconomic factors including poverty, race, and ethnicity over the years. 

The Biden administration launched the environmental justice index (EJI)  in 2022. “Too many communities across our nation, particularly low-income communities and communities of color, continue to bear the brunt of pollution. Meeting the needs of these communities requires our focused attention and we will use the Environmental Justice Index to do just that,” then Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra said in a press release at the time.

Since stepping into office, Trump has tried to undo previous administrations’ work to address health disparities when it comes to race and gender. In an executive order Trump signed to undo Biden-era policies, the president wrote that  “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) has “corrupted” government institutions. 

He also claimed that “climate extremism has exploded inflation and overburdened businesses with regulation.” During his first term in office, there was a near 40 percent decline in the term “climate change” across websites for federal environmental agencies. It’s too soon to know what the damage might be this time around, but some webpages have already vanished. The US Department of Transportation’s “priorities” website has removed pages on both “climate and sustainability” and “equity.” It follows an internal memo sent this week instructing USDOT operating administrations to identify and ultimately “terminate” Biden-era activities relating to climate change and DEI.

Donald Trump’s efforts to limit foreign aid seem to have also led to information being taken down on HIV and AIDS. The data webpage for the US President’s Emergency Plan for Aids Relief (PEPFAR) was taken down this week. PEPFAR has been around since 2003 and helped more than 20.6 million people get access to antiretroviral therapy in 2024 alone, according to a snapshot of the website taken by the Wayback Machine on January 26th, before it was taken down.

The End of Term Web Archive project has saved content on federal government websites during every presidential transition since 2008. The Environmental Data and Governance Initiative (EDGI) that formed after Trump was first elected also documents changes to government websites and works to make archived datasets available elsewhere. It worked with partners including the Open Environmental Data Project to back up data from the CDC’s Social Vulnerability Index and Environmental Justice Index and they’ve shared it on a webpage for The Public Environmental Data Project.

Yet even if these datasets have been archived, they aren’t as helpful when they aren’t updated. “Any dataset has a lifespan of utility,” says Dan Pisut, senior principal engineer at GIS software company Esri.  

Aging datasets might not fully represent what’s actually happening on the ground, so people have to be careful about how they use them, Pisut points out. It could be risky, he says, but “better than nothing.”

Update, February 1st: This post has been updated with information about data.cdc.gov going offline.

Update, February 5th: Data.cdc.gov is now back online with a notice that says, “CDC’s website is being modified to comply with President Trump’s Executive Orders.”

This post has also been updated to include groups that backed up data from the CDC’s Social Vulnerability Index and Environmental Justice Index

DeepSeek startled everyone last month with the claim that its AI model uses roughly one-tenth the amount of computing power as Meta’s Llama 3.1 model, upending an entire worldview of how much energy and resources it’ll take to develop artificial intelligence. 

Taken at face value, that claim could have tremendous implications for the environmental impact of AI. Tech giants are rushing to build out massive AI data centers, with plans for some to use as much electricity as small cities. Generating that much electricity creates pollution, raising fears about how the physical infrastructure undergirding new generative AI tools could exacerbate climate change and worsen air quality.

Reducing how much energy it takes to train and run generative AI models could alleviate much of that stress. But it’s still too early to gauge whether DeepSeek will be a game-changer when it comes to AI’s environmental footprint. Much will depend on how other major players respond to the Chinese startup’s breakthroughs, especially considering plans to build new data centers. 

“It just shows that AI doesn’t have to be an energy hog,” says Madalsa Singh, …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Climate change helped to set the stage for the devastating Los Angeles fires this month, a new study by 32 researchers shows. 

The Palisades and Eaton wildfires broke out in early January and soon killed at least 28 people, destroying 16,000 structures. Hot, dry conditions and extraordinarily powerful winds fanned the flames.

Those conditions were made about 35 percent more likely because of greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels warming the planet, according to the study. Fire risk will only grow unless the pollution causing climate change stops. 

“Realistically, this was a perfect storm when it comes to conditions for fire disasters,” John Abatzoglou, professor of climatology at the University of California, Merced, said in a press call today. 

In today’s climate, the extreme weather that drove January infernos can be expected about every 17 years, according to the study.

The study was conducted by the World Weather Attribution initiative, an international collaboration of scientists that researches the role that climate change plays in disasters around the world. They look at historical weather data and climate models to compare real-world scenarios to what likely would have happened if the planet wasn’t 1.3 degrees Celsius warmer today, on average, than it was before the Industrial Revolution.

If the planet warms by another 1.3 degrees Celsius, which could happen in 75 years under current policies, the kind of weather that exacerbated the fires this month becomes another 35 percent more probable. 

The length of the dry season in the region has already grown by about 23 days, according to the researchers. That increases the chances of arid weather coinciding with the powerful Santa Ana winds that typically pick up in cooler months.

While those winds return each year, they were catastrophically strong this month — reaching hurricane strength at upwards of 100 miles per hour. For now, scientists don’t have enough research to know how climate change affected the Santa Ana winds, specifically. Their research only shows that fire season is encroaching more into windy season because of climate change, and that made these fires more likely.