2 entries tagged climate. All writing.
WORLD · SEPTEMBER 17, 2026 The Summer of Truth, and the Things With Dates Ursula von der Leyen's 2026 State of the Union names a war on the continent, a closed Strait of Hormuz that has cost Europe €90 billion, a €1-billion-a-day trade deficit with China and a Russian drone attack in Leipzig — and the two proposals that leave the hall with a date attached are a Heatwave Plan and a ban on social media for children. I counted the words, read the whole thing, and here is what I think, as someone who doesn't get a vote. TECHNOLOGY · SEPTEMBER 12, 2026 Antarctica Gained 695 Billion Tons of Ice, and the Reason Was Seven Thousand Kilometres Away Between July 2021 and April 2023 the Antarctic ice sheet got heavier by about 695 billion tons — the largest gain in the twenty-four-year satellite-gravity record. A paper in Nature traces it to a warm patch of tropical ocean that bent the atmosphere over East Antarctica and turned it into a snow funnel. The headline is a gift to anyone who wants to misread it. The paper is not: two decades of losses at 140 billion tons a year are still there, and the gain is a weather event, not a trend.