Collective memory, defined as the storage, retrieval, and forgetting of information by a society1,2, interacts with diverse cultural, economic, and political contexts3 to shape how societies experience, document, and respond to extreme events4,5. Given its role in fostering cooperative and adaptive responses to climatic change6, collective memory should be treated as a central component of efforts to confront environmental risks in the 21st century7. This is especially true in highly active fluvial environments, where experiences of, and responses to, drought and flooding are dependent on how collective memory shapes individual perceptions and adaptations8,9. To model contemporary and future human-Earth system interactions in the Anthropocene, it is essential to incorporate the slow variable10 of collective memory and examine its relationship to human perceptions. To do so effectively, however, we must turn our attention to this phenomenon in the past for long-term analysis, which offers an opportunity to observe the variable’s effects and interactions across different contexts and time-scales. Historical documents, inscriptions, monuments, and folk stories are the most common expressions and sources of collective memory (also known as cultural memory, a type of social representation within collective memory)11. For instance, traditional knowledge systems include legends and stories about floods, droughts, and...

Kelly Juarez moved from Reno, Nevada, to Linn County about two years ago, choosing her new home based on Oregon’s cooler climate. But the week she moved, temperatures reached 95 degrees — much hotter than she’d expected. And on the day she moved in, the air conditioning unit was broken. That created a potential health issue for her daughter Sissy, who was 22 years old at the time and has a heart condition that requires her to be in rooms with temperatures of 75 degrees or less to avoid serious health impacts. They stayed with local friends until the heat passed. “I was feeling sick to my stomach,” Juarez told OPB. “Moving is tough enough, but when you add the stress of your AC going KAPUT at the end of summer, the pressure and stress can be overwhelming.” Juarez was right that Oregon is historically much cooler than places like Reno. But as she and her daughter learned, a new climate reality has set in. As climate change worsens, Oregon is enduring double the number of extreme heat days and triple the number of days where wildfire smoke is present, according to a study released this month by the Oregon...

Kelly Juarez moved from Reno, Nevada, to Linn County about two years ago, choosing her new home based on Oregon’s cooler climate. But the week she moved, temperatures reached 95 degrees — much hotter than she’d expected. And on the day she moved in, the air conditioning unit was broken. That created a potential health issue for her daughter Sissy, who was 22 years old at the time and has a heart condition that requires her to be in rooms with temperatures of 75 degrees or less to avoid serious health impacts. They stayed with local friends until the heat passed. “I was feeling sick to my stomach,” Juarez told OPB. “Moving is tough enough, but when you add the stress of your AC going KAPUT at the end of summer, the pressure and stress can be overwhelming.” Juarez was right that Oregon is historically much cooler than places like Reno. But as she and her daughter learned, a new climate reality has set in. As climate change worsens, Oregon is enduring double the number of extreme heat days and triple the number of days where wildfire smoke is present, according to a study released this month by the Oregon...

Imagine following the retreating shoreline of the Dead Sea. As the water withdraws, ground once submerged comes into view. But beneath the remaining water lies a puzzle: why is this shrinking lake also getting warmer? With Jordan to the east and Israel and the West Bank to the west, the Dead Sea is an exceptionally salty lake. Hotter air is an obvious suspect. Yet a new study suggests part of the explanation lies within the lake itself: water loss can contribute to warming, and that warming can sustain further evaporation and water loss – a feedback loop between shrinking and heating. The mechanism could explain how ancient seas produced vast salt deposits without requiring the surrounding climate to have been exceptionally hot and dry. Led by Emmanuel Guillerm of Germany's GFZ Helmholtz Centre for Geosciences and Binghamton University in the US, the team built a model linking water loss, salt concentration and heat exchange. The Dead Sea provides a natural laboratory. Human diversion of incoming water has contributed to falling lake levels and salt precipitation. Between 1979 and 2019, its level dropped by about 34 metres. Over that period, its deep waters warmed by 2.8°C, while its upper layer warmed...

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Globally, across all EEZs, our analysis indicates that univariate extreme environmental conditions significantly increase the likelihood of extreme low fisheries catches (Fig. 1, Supplementary Table 1). Here, extreme events are defined as annual mean anomalies falling beyond the 10th (for NPP) or 90th (for temperature) percentile of the historical distribution (see Method). Odds ratio (OR) quantifies the strength of association between environmental extremes and the likelihood of an extreme low fisheries catch event, with OR > 1 indicating increased odds relative to baseline (non-extreme) conditions in the time-series. We estimated odds ratios using logistic regression models, where the occurrence of an extreme low catch (binary response) was modelled as a function of extreme environmental conditions. For example, OR of 1.5 indicates that the odds of occurrence of low catches are 50% higher during extreme conditions compared to non-extreme years. In contrast, OR below 1 indicates a reduced odds of low catches during extreme conditions. Two consecutive years with high TempX (i.e., concurrent and one-year lagged TempX) showed the largest estimated increase in the odds of an extreme low catch, by 40% (95% CI: odds ratio = 20–65%, Supplementary Table 1) compared to non-extreme conditions. Using the most extreme conditions in...

Spaniards braced for further heavy rain and storms on Wednesday, just two weeks after rain and flash floods prompted rivers to overflow in Valencia and other parts of Spain killing more than 200 people and destroying homes and property.

Want LBC stories before everyone else? Set us as your Preferred Source on Google By Flaminia Luck The Prince of Wales said “devastating” wildfires across Europe are a “stark reminder of the challenges posed by an increasingly extreme climate”. Listen to this article Loading audio... Fire crews and planes are currently attempting to bring a huge wildfire under control in south-west France, with fires also burning out of control around Madrid and in the Valencia region of Spain. The UK Government has also offered military support to tackle the Cairngorms wildfire in Scotland. In a personally signed message on social media, William wrote: “Our thoughts are with everyone affected by the devastating wildfires across France, Spain and the UK. “We are deeply grateful to the firefighters, emergency services and volunteers working tirelessly in extraordinarily difficult conditions. “These events are a stark reminder of the challenges posed by an increasingly extreme climate and the importance of protecting both people and nature.” Across the UK – and Europe, the world’s fastest warming continent – people are facing the rising risk of extreme weather such as heat and drought, fuelled by human-caused climate change, mostly as a result of burning fossil fuels. The...

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As summer approaches, the world is once again bracing for extreme heat. With a powerful El Nino event taking shape and climate models indicating further intensification, unprecedented temperatures are no longer a distant projection — they are an immediate reality. Scientific records show that the 10 warmest years since modern measurements began in 1850 have all occurred within the past decade. Remarkably, 2023, 2024 and 2025 were consecutively the hottest years ever recorded. This trend reflects a broader shift: climate risk is no longer merely an environmental issue discussed in scientific journals. It has become a pressing operational, financial, and asset-related risk for businesses and governments alike. Prolonged heatwaves can halt industrial production, disrupt supply chains and dramatically increase the cost of maintaining comfortable indoor environments. Against this backdrop, a fundamental question emerges: is our energy system resilient enough to withstand increasingly frequent and prolonged climate extremes? China has prepared a solid action-based answer to this question, which is its extraordinary progress in advancing energy transition towards a cleaner and more resilient future. Over the past decade, the country has built the world's largest and most comprehensive renewable energy supply chain. Renewable energy now supplies roughly one-third of the nation's...

The authors declare no competing interests. Ethical approval Ethical approval was not required as the study did not involve human participants. Informed consent This article does not contain any studies with human participants performed by any of the authors. Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this licence to share adapted material derived from this article or parts of it. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. Reprints and permissions...

Global climate change has increased the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events, significantly impacting the net primary productivity (NPP) of vegetation. Understanding the relationship between NPP and extreme climate events in ecologically sensitive areas is essential for effective ecological strategies. This study analyzed the spatiotemporal distribution characteristics of net primary productivity (NPP) from 2000 to 2022 and its response to extreme climate conditions. Utilizing the flexible space-temporal DAta fusion (FSDAF), the study integrated MODIS and Landsat data from 2000 to 2022 to generate a high-resolution NDVI dataset (30 m, 16-day). The NPP was estimated using the Carnegie-Ames-Stanford approach (CASA) model. We also evaluated the effects of 13 extreme climate indices (ECIs) on NPP in the Gaoligong Mountains. The results showed that (1) annual NPP exhibited an upward trend (slope = 1.5), with the most significant increase occuring in January (slope = 0.35, p < 0.001); (2) the climate in the study area has displayed a clear warming trend, with significant increases in extreme temperature indices (TXx, TNx, TN90p, TX90p, TMAXmean, and TMINmean, p < 0.001), while extreme precipitation indices (RX1day, RX5day), showd a relatively small trend of change and not significant; (3) At the seasonal scale, the responses of...

The most abundant fish in the sea is not a mackerel, a trout, or even an anchovy. That title belongs to a group of more fearsome pelagic predators—fish with gnashing teeth and an inky black stare. Granted, most of these fish are only a few inches long. Meet Cyclothone (pronounced sike-lo-tho-nee), a genus more commonly known as bristlemouths. Where myctophids (lanternfish) represent the most abundant kind of fish in the ocean by weight, or biomass, bristlemouths win out by sheer population size—think trees compared with blades of grass. Data from trawl net surveys estimate roughly a quadrillion of these fish live in the ocean today (yes, with a quad!). Like lanternfish, bristlemouths play an outsized role in the ocean’s biological carbon pump—the marine food web responsible for moving planet-warming carbon dioxide from the sea surface into the deep, thus regulating Earth’s temperature. By understanding when these fishes evolved, scientists can assess their resilience to the growing threat of warming ocean temperatures, and with that, the stability of a major cog in the ocean’s carbon sink. Previously, experts thought these fish evolved during the middle Miocene period, roughly 16 million years ago. In a new study, however, paleoceanographers show evidence that...

For years, a worst-case climate scenario served as a stark warning of what could happen if the world failed to curb fossil fuel use. A temperature rise of more than 4 degrees Celsius (7.2 degrees Fahrenheit) by the end of the century would bring with it catastrophic consequences, including deadly heat waves, rising seas, crop failures and mass displacement. But a scientific paper published in April says that doomsday pathway — known as RCP8.5 and later SSP5-8.5 — is now less probable. Designed as a benchmark to help governments prepare for dangerous possibilities, the worst-case scenario was not a prediction. Climate researcher Detlef Van Vuuren, lead author of the new paper, told UK-based climate science platform Carbon Brief that it had always been a "low-probability, high-risk scenario." It reflected the knowledge and energy trends of the late 2000s, when the world was more reliant on burning planet-heating coal, oil and gas. But those trends have now changed. The world is not heading toward the worst-case scenario "because we've actually taken political measures allowing us to move away from that," French climate scientist Christophe Cassou told the AFP news agency. The new assessment attributes the shift to renewable energy build-out happening...