Climate change

Inside Climate News -   In recent years, extreme heat has devastated species across the animal kingdom. Howler monkeys suffering from heat stroke fell from trees in Mexico, thousands of flying foxes perished during a heat wave in Australia and millions of marine creatures boiled and starved off the United States West Coast and Alaska when ocean temperatures skyrocketed between 2014 and 2016. 

A growing body of research finds the problem will only get worse in the coming decades, with thousands of species facing extinction by 2100 due to extreme heat and land-use change. While this research is crucial for guiding long-term conservation, fewer options are available to forecast potential heat catastrophes for wildlife in the near-term, said Josep M. Serra-Diaz, an ecologist at the Botanical Institute of Barcelona. 

Serra-Diaz told me that analyses often focus on the past or the more distant future, and that “there was a gap here between these two worlds.”

The new early warning system, published Monday in the journal Nature Climate Change and co-authored by Serra-Diaz, is trying to help fill that gap. To identify where animals may experience higher-than-normal heat, the researchers combined forecasts from NASA’s Goddard Earth Observing System with species-specific historical temperature limits for more than 30,000 mammals, birds, reptiles and amphibians. They tested their system by applying it to a past timeframe we already have data for—2024, the hottest year on record globally. 

The system predicted that between May 2024 and February 2025, more than 3,500 species would be exposed to temperatures higher than previously experienced across their known ranges. Geographic ranges for amphibians and reptiles were expected to have the highest percentage of heat exposure, while birds had lower proportions of their ranges in that higher temperature threshold. The forecast showed Mexico would be among the most affected regions, particularly in the state of Tabasco, where the howler monkeys died in droves that year. 

The study found that many regions could have been warned of potential exposure three to five months in advance if the forecast had been available. It also suggests that preventive efforts, such as creating refuges for animals to survive extreme heat, may have aided nearly 500 species of conservation concern across their ranges throughout this time period. 

Inside Climate News - Wildfires have worsened ozone levels across the United States so much over the last decade that they have reversed around four years of progress, a new study has found.  Surface ozone levels, or smog concentrations, steadily increased from 2015 to 2024, deteriorating air quality across the Midwest and Western U.S., researchers at the University of Iowa found in a study released Thursday. According to the study authors, this contributed to an increase of 318 premature deaths per year from fire-sourced ozone since 2013. Their NASA-funded research mapped these ozone levels in kilometer-by-kilometer grids across the entire continental U.S between 2003 and 2024. 

They also used AI and machine learning to incorporate different components, such as satellite observations and air quality forecasts into their models. The researchers said they strengthened this by measuring surface ozone levels by parts per billion (ppb) and comparing it against the data from the Environmental Protection Agency. While the models themselves cannot predict future ozone levels, Weizhi Deng, the principal author on the study, is concerned about the trajectory of ozone levels based on their conclusions.