science – My Climate Change Website

A nuclear renaissance fuels research potential and growth at McMaster University

This article was written by Joe Friesen and was published in the Globe & Mail on January 12, 2026.

**A blue glow emanates from the core of the McMaster Nuclear Reactor, which provides neutrons for research and medical isotope production at McMaster University’s campus in Hamilton.**

Funding and new minor studies program attract students keen to work in industry

A mesmerizing deep blue glow emanates from the nuclear reactor nestled in the heart of the campus at McMaster University in Hamilton.

Sunk 10 metres beneath the surface of a pool of water, encased in an air-locked, 15-sided, concrete building, the uranium fuel generates enough power to heat hundreds of homes.

But its significance to the university is far more about its research potential than its three megawatts of power.

At a time when nuclear power is in the midst of a renaissance, McMaster is wrapping itself in the label of Canada’s nuclear university.

The school launched a minor in nuclear studies in the fall and plans for a bachelor’s degree in nuclear engineering are in the works. Last term, 148 students signed up for a new interdisciplinary course on nuclear technology applications. Meanwhile, the university’s reactor produces about 60 per cent of the world’s supply of iodine-125, a medical isotope used for cancer treatment. And its new president, Susan Tighe, is bullish about nuclear’s role in driving the university’s ambitions.

“I think nuclear has great potential from a research perspective, as well as commercialization,” Dr. Tighe said. “And it’s great training for our students.”

Dr. Tighe, who became president of McMaster in July, is the first engineer to hold the top job at the university.

Having previously been provost at McMaster for five years she’s conscious of the financial clouds hanging over the university sector and says she’s determined to keep McMaster operating within its means. She’s proud to note that the school ran a surplus in 2025 and is among the handful of Ontario universities operating in the black.

“What I like to say is we’re a public sector organization that operates with private-sector principles,” she said. “We’re trying to be responsible with what we get.”

In September, the Ontario government announced $18-million in funding to allow McMaster to operate the nuclear reactor around the clock, seven days a week, up from five days. The extended hours will also allow it to boost production of medical isotopes that are crucial to cancer care and to expand research and training opportunities for students.

“We do have this unique research facility, and given that we’ve had support from the provincial government to operate 24 hours a day, it’s enabling more access to the reactor,” Dr. Tighe said.

The McMaster nuclear reactor was built in 1959, when the university had begun to grow beyond its Baptist roots. The project was spearheaded by Harry Thode, a Canadian nuclear pioneer who worked on the Canadian branch of the Manhattan project in the Second World War. He later served as president of the university from 1961 to 1972.

“For Canada to put a research reactor on a campus at that time was really visionary,” said David Novog, a physics professor, who has been leading tours of the reactor since the 1990s.

Prof. Novog said he first came to McMaster as a grad student because he was drawn by the chance to work on the most powerful research reactor on a Canadian campus. He explains that the blue light that surrounds the low-enriched uranium fuel cells in the water of the reactor pool is actually Cherenkov radiation, named for a Nobel-winning Soviet scientist.

Today Prof. Novog supervises grad students such as Jessica Lo, who is looking into neutron imaging of fuel bundles.

She decided to go into the nuclear field after finishing an undergraduate degree in physics. “There’s no other school that compares to McMaster. You have a reactor right on campus,” Ms. Lo said.

The reactor has a few dozen students working at various times in the week, often using its rays for imaging, particularly for close examination of turbine blades.

They also study health physics, looking at the impact of radiation on humans. And there are research applications for mining, too.

For Arianna Santos, a fourthyear engineering student, the chance to attend a university with a nuclear reactor was also too good to pass up.

Ever since watching science shows on television when she was young she has been captivated by nuclear’s potential to serve the world’s energy needs with a minimum of greenhouse gas emissions.

“I’ve been told that all the energy a person needs for their life on Earth could be contained in a single soda can of uranium,” she said.

Many of today’s students would be too young to remember some of the disasters that have led to public skepticism about nuclear technology: notably, the reactor meltdown in Fukushima, Japan, following a 2011 earthquake and the explosion in Chernobyl, Ukraine of the Soviet-built reactor in 1986.

Ms. Santos recognizes there’s public anxiety about the technology. But she feels reassured by the extensive safety protocols in nuclear facilities.

“These buildings are really, really safe,” she said.

Ms. Santos is one of about 150 students who’ve signed up for McMaster’s new minor in nuclear studies. She’s also a member of McMaster’s nuclear club, where students network and explore job opportunities.

Last summer she conducted research in nuclear science, working with a hot cell where she used mechanical arms to manipulate radioactive material. Her dream after graduation is to pursue a career in the nuclear field.

“This small atom, you just split it and it releases so much energy and heat that we barely have to use any uranium. It’s amazing, it’s crazy, it’s fascinating.”

Indigenous entrepreneurs seek bigger piece of energy contracts, closer scrutiny of procurement system

This article was written by Emma Graney and was published in the Globe & Mail on September 30, 2025.

**Canative Energy director Raylene Whitford says First Nations in ‘performative partnerships’ don’t always receive their expected returns.**

When Mike Deranger set up his tipi last month at the site of a hunger strike on the side of Highway 63, which leads from Fort McMurray, Alta., to the oil sands, he was protesting what he and others say is an Indigenous procurement system that does little to advance economic reconciliation.

The problem, they say, is a lack of transparency and oversight combined with barriers faced by Indigenous entrepreneurs when trying to access capital and a system that, in some cases, pits individual business owners against large First Nation development corporations.

Ken Coates, a professor emeritus of public policy at the University of Saskatchewan, also points to what he calls “redwashing,” in which firms partner with a First Nation or an Indigenous representative in order to gain contracts from large companies or governments that have mandated minimum Indigenous spends.

“The new procurement requirements in place are designed to give Aboriginal companies a head start,” but there are numerous examples of companies presenting dubious claims of Indigenous status, Prof. Coates said. “And that kind of stuff is really, really upsetting.”

Mr. Deranger calls them “pretendians.” His company, Derantech Welding Ltd., does mechanical work, maintenance and heavy equipment repair in the Fort McMurray region.

He has been in business for more than 20 years. As oil companies have boosted their commitment to contracts with Indigenous companies, he said, he has seen more multinationals pursuing joint ventures to get in on the action. The problem, he said, is that nobody is really policing it.

“In the last 10 years or so, things went off the rails. So the focus is no longer on building Indigenous companies … it went to just getting the job done and hiring these big companies that now self-identify as Indigenous or have become Indigenous partners,” he said.

Mr. Deranger said more and more Indigenous entrepreneurs are being pushed out of the market as a result.

“It’s not working to the benefit of our Nations. They aren’t getting ahead the way they should be,” he said.

Raylene Whitford, a director of Canative Energy, which works with Indigenous communities affected by the energy sector, has also seen how mandated Indigenous procurement minimums have resulted in “performative partnerships,” in which First Nations see limited financial benefits from resource projects.

Some companies might sign a $100-million contract with an Indigenous joint venture partner and promote the contract in their sustainability report and on their website, she said, “but they don’t acknowledge that only 2 to 3 per cent of that actually flows to the Nation that is a part of that partnership.”

As a result, she said, First Nations don’t receive their expected returns – even as corporations report massive profits.

Jennifer Cooper, spokesperson for Indigenous Services Canada, said in an e-mail that the agency has heard from consultations that joint ventures are a beneficial and effective way for Indigenous businesses to operate when they are thoughtfully and effectively managed.

“Through joint ventures, Indigenous businesses can partner with other businesses, including non-Indigenous businesses, to increase their ability to compete for contracts,” Ms. Cooper said. She added that all businesses on the Indigenous Business Directory must provide documentation demonstrating at least 51-per-cent Indigenous ownership and control, such as shareholder information and corporate governance documents.

Ms. Whitford worries that the shift toward awarding contracts to communityowned organizations, as opposed to individuals, is being interpreted as a proxy for consent or even support for a project.

But to muddy the concept of consent risks undermining Indigenous people’s rights, she said, which sets a dangerous precedent.

Ms. Whitford believes the solution is to educate industry as to what consent actually is and who can give it, combined with tighter regulations that standardize corporate reporting and make it more transparent.

Both government and industry also need to take a more rights-based approach to major projects, she said.

“In an ideal world, all resource-based companies – and any company that has a footprint on Indigenous lands, whether it’s Canada or South America – would unequivocally commit to obtaining free platform consent. But I don’t know if I’ll ever see that in my lifetime.”

Prof. Coates acknowledged that there can be tension between individual entrepreneurs and First Nation development corporations.

Governments and companies tend to gravitate toward those corporations because of their demonstrable ties to an Indigenous community, even when the terms of an agreement don’t necessarily benefit a First Nation as much as they could, he said.

But some are doing things differently. He pointed to the English River First Nation, outside Saskatoon, which set up the Des Nedhe Development Corp. in 1991.

Jordan Baptiste is the president of Creative Fire, one of a number of companies under the Des Nedhe umbrella. Like Prof. Coates, he has witnessed what he calls the “rent a feather” phenomenon of dubious joint partnerships just to secure contracts under Indigenous spends.

Part of it, he said, boils down to companies’ desire to mitigate risk – which also plays into why they tend to lean toward First Nation development corporations instead of individual entrepreneurs.

“English River has always been quite innovative and forward-thinking,” he said. “About 35 years ago, they decided to fully purchase a construction company to put them in control of their destiny.

“Instead of having the relationship be between a construction company and the proponent, it actually becomes a relationship directly between the proponent and the community itself.”

Guelph prof became key to Trump’s climate plan

Academic helped write report being cited in U.S. as a reason to repeal protections and policies

This article was written by Joe McGinty and was published in the Toronto Star on August 31, 2025.

An economics professor from the University of Guelph is one of five researchers whose report is playing a key role as the United States starts repealing the legal foundation for regulating climate change.

Ross McKitrick was one of five coauthors personally picked by the U.S. Secretary of Energy to conduct a study the Trump administration is now citing as a reason to repeal Obamaera climate protections.

The report downplays the effect greenhouse gases have on climate change and challenges decades of global scientific consensus that humans are irreversibly altering the climate.

McKitrick and the Department of Energy did not respond to requests for comments on this story.

Key findings in the report conclude that “carbon dioxideinduced warming appears to be less damaging economically than commonly believed,” and that “aggressive mitigation strategies could be more harmful than beneficial.”

It also stated that U.S. policy, such as the Endangerment Finding, has “undetectably small direct impacts on the global climate.”

This 2009 federal finding recognized that emissions from motor vehicles and engines contribute to greenhouse gas pollution that threatens public health and welfare. It became the scientific underpinning for most climate change policy in the U.S.

McKitrick has played a critical role in the new study. He was called “indispensable” by coauthor Roy Spencer, a meteorologist at the University of Alabama and a climate change skeptic.

“One thing I learned through this process is how prolific and smart a researcher Ross McKitrick (U. of Guelph, Ontario) is. He was indispensable to our effort,” said Spencer on his website.

McKitrick has been known to butt heads with mainstream climate scientists and reject findings by the larger scientific community. He has written numerous letters for conservative think tanks, such as the Fraser Institute, and reports for politicians.

He has also shared his opinions in opeds in various news outlets, particularly on climate change, taking an antialarmist view.

“U.S. climate policy will soon no longer be a thing,” wrote McKitrick in a National Post oped in 2024.

“The incoming Trump administration will not settle simply for stalling on new climate action, it’s more likely to try to dismantle the entire climate bureaucracy.”

The 151page report was conducted by McKitrick; Spencer; John Christy, an atmospheric scientist; Judith Curry, a climatologist; and Steve Koonin, a former physicist with the California Institute of Technology.

The group was selected by Department of Energy Secretary Chris Wright and was given a strict deadline of two months to complete the report, starting in early April and ending on May 28.

In July, the Trump administration announced it would start the process to repeal the Endangerment Finding, targeting emission regulations for gasburning engines.

The report has triggered lawsuits from environmental groups in the U.S. seeking to block the repeal and challenge what they say is a biased report.

Blair Feltman, head of the Intact Centre on Climate Adaptation at the University of Waterloo, said that it would take longer than two months to write an essay in an undergraduate program, let alone a policyshifting report.

“They want to open the door on coal, oil and natural gas development in the U.S.,” said Feltman.

“It’s a little bit suspect as to why a report that’s going to guide U.S. policy on energy use from start to finish would be determined to be done in two months. That makes no sense.”

Having been part of groups that peer review reports before publication, he said to verify a report of this nature would typically take about two years.

“All of a sudden, these guys, and I’m not blaming them, I’m saying, they were basically given a month and a bit … it’s hard to edit a report like this in two months. Never mind, write it,” he said.

In a federal lawsuit, the Environmental Defense Fund and the Union of Concerned Scientists claim the Trump administration “quietly arranged for five handpicked skeptics of the effects of climate change” to write a report rejecting a global consensus on climate change.

Feltman notes everyone is free to their own scientific opinion and is not claiming bad conduct by the researchers.

“The administration in the U.S, the Department of Energy, went through a rolladex and said, `which people are not favourable toward climate change … particularly from the perspective of being humaninduced. Let’s put them together and have them write this report.’ ”

“To have this done in a period of two months, I mean, it’s almost nonsensical,” he said.

Many of the researchers, including McKitrick, posted on their social media and blogs that they were unaware the government would use their report as justification and scientific basis to remove the Endangerment Finding.

“We weren’t involved in the EF (Endangerment Finding) rulemaking discussion. Only knew what was in the news,” wrote McKitrick.

Feltman sides with the scientific community and says climate change needs to be addressed, and policy needs to be put in place to better protect the population.

“It’s unbelievable that a topic of magnitude and consequence as that of climate change would be considered within the context of a report completed within a period of two months from start to finish with five people involved,” he said.

U.S. President Donald Trump's administration tapped Ross McKitrick, a professor of economics at the University of Guelph, below, to help write a report that challenges decades of global scientific consensus that humans are irreversibly altering the climate.

AI is fasttracking climate research, from weather forecasts to sardines

This infrared satellite image from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration shows Hurricane Helene in the Gulf of Mexico last September. When it comes to tracking such events, Microsoft's Aurora is said to be more accurate and cheaper than what has come before.

This article was written by Laura Millan and Yinka Ibukun, and was published in the Toronto Star on August 24, 2025.

Artificial intelligence is giving some climate research projects a much needed boost at a time of worsening extreme weather and funding cuts that threaten science in the U.S. and elsewhere.

While generative AI faces criticism due to the large amounts of power required to train and run sophisticated models, it also holds the promise of advancing science.

“It’s a gigantic step forward,” says Ángel Borja, a biologist at AZTI marine research centre in northern Spain. “It will allow us to process data and get results much faster, so people that make decisions can act faster, too.”

Researchers are teaching existing AI models and creating new ones to perform routine tasks that would require several people to work for weeks or even months. Data gathered in scientific expeditions from the bottom of the oceans to the farthest corners of Antarctica can now be catalogued in a matter of hours.

To be sure, the use of generative AI has its dangers, some scientists warn. Machine learning techniques are tools that should never replace human thinking, writing and analysis, said Jonathan Foley, the executive director of Project Drawdown. The organization, which uses scientific data to provide guidance on climate solutions, has limited the use of AI assistants to simple tasks like checking grammar, formatting documents and scraping information from dispersed sources.

“By definition, generative AI relies on plagiarism (albeit in a statistical sense) and often fabricates information, citations, data, and creative content,” Foley said.

But that hasn’t stopped other researchers forging ahead. Here are three examples.

Researchers now `reach faster conclusions’

Borja remembers gathering data manually and filling databases with hundreds of measurements when he started doing scientific work 45 years ago. The rise of computers and the internet helped speed up some of that work. But AI’s growth over the past three or four years has felt like something completely different and more transformative, he said.

“My younger colleagues worry that AI will steal their jobs, that it will make us unnecessary,” he said. “It’s the other way around: We’re advancing so much because AI is doing routine work that takes us so many hours, and we’ll be able to focus on interpreting that data.”

AI is set to turbocharge what the centre can offer policymakers, Borja said, allowing them to make moreinformed decisions. Scientists at AZTI work closely with policymakers to, among other things, establish fishing quotas and set up marine protected areas.

ATZI researchers have started feeding millions of data points gathered over three decades into an AI model. The data includes everything from water quality to the presence of different types of fish and plankton. The model then produces research notes that tell scientists what information is in the database and how it’s structured, allowing researchers to more easily decide which data sets to use for their investigations.

The centre is also using videos and pictures from research expeditions to train another model to recognize different types of fish and marine life. The task currently requires scientists to watch hundreds of hours of underwater video footage, and manually record which species appear, where, how often and how abundant they are.

“It will allow us to reach faster conclusions on the state of the marine environment in certain places,” Borja said. “I expect within the next five years, we’ll see an explosion of AI applications in scientific fields and in ways I can’t even imagine right now.”

Weather forecasting more accurate

Some AIpowered models are already outperforming conventional forecasting systems. Microsoft’s Aurora has been trained on over a million hours of diverse geophysical data. In 91per cent of the targets established by its creators, it is more accurate than the traditional model from the European Centre for MediumRange Weather Forecasts and Google DeepMind’s AI model GraphCast.

It’s able to predict, among other things, air quality, waves and tropical cyclone paths, according to a research paper authored by Microsoft Research employees in the May edition of Nature. Aurora can perform these tasks at a fraction of the computational cost compared to traditional models, they said.

“AI models such as Aurora can enable climate scientists to explore hundreds of times more scenarios than they can today, helping to unlock new insights at scale,” said a Microsoft Research spokesperson.

AI models are somewhat of a black box compared to their traditional weather counterparts, which worries some forecasters. But highquality weather information is the first step to setting warning systems that give people time to find shelter when extreme events hit.

Citizen scientists get an AI assist

The combination of humans and AI can provide the best results for scientific research, according to a paper published last year in Citizen Science: Theory and Practice. Lead author Nirwan Sharma, a computer scientist at The Open University in the U.K., started using natural language generation — an early name for what’s now known as generative AI — in 2010 for a citizen science project.

People were encouraged to send Sharma and his coresearchers pictures of bumblebees as they walked in the woods or worked in their gardens. AI would then identify which of the 22 U.K. bee species they had spotted, and researchers would verify the AI’s work. Finally, citizen scientists would get an automated email thanking them for the contribution and revealing the type of bee they photographed.

The model, a partnership between Aberdeen University and the Bumblebee Conservation Trust, correctly identified species about half the time, a rate on par with untrained human users. Initially, about 10 people were required to identify the type of bee correctly. As the model learned more, it helped cut down on the number of people required to as little as three.

Using the large amount of pictures gathered over the years, researchers trained the model to identify the plants that bees were photographed on, allowing it to provide planting recommendations depending on the types of bees citizen scientists wanted to attract.

“Much of the knowledge about how to identify species is bottled up in scientific journals or places which are really difficult to access for people,” Sharma said. “AI is another piece to improve our learning — it’s a means to have a dialogue with that knowledge.”

Photos of British bees in the wild, such as this red mason hard at work, have been used to train artificial intelligence which uses the same images to make planting recommendations.

The heat wave that shattered climate certainty

Extreme temperatures in Lytton, B.C. challenged models and forced a rethink on what’s possible in a warming world

In June 2021, Lytton, B.C., experienced an unprecedented heat wave that broke Canadian temperature records three days in a row, reaching 49.6 C. Soon after, a fastmoving wildfire burned most of the village to the ground.

This article was written by Eric Roston and was published in the Toronto Star on July 20, 2025.

How hot can a heat wave really get? Before June 2021, scientists thought they knew.

That’s when one of the most extreme heat spikes ever hit western North America, leaving at least 1,400 people dead.

Visitors brave the heat at Furnace Creek Visitor Center in Death Valley National Park, Calif., in August 2020. Furnace Creek set the highestever recorded temperature of 56.7 C in 1913, according to the World Meteorological Organization.

Lytton, B.C., smashed the 84yearold Canadian heat record on June 26, reaching 46.6 C.

And it smashed that the next day by 1.3 C.

And smashed that the next day by another 1.7 C.

And the next day, Lytton burned to the ground.

When a team of climate scientists assembled days later to analyze the heat wave, they found the local historical weather data offered a paradox: Their standard approach for estimating a heat wave’s rarity concluded the new records were too extreme to occur in the region where they actually did. They were in a sense “impossible” even though they actually occurred, as three American scientists put it earlier this year.

They adjusted their method to accommodate the new reality (and use that approach still), but noted “followup research will be necessary to investigate the potential reasons for this exceptional event.”

In the four years since then, dozens of studies have taken up that challenge, with a tightening focus on a simple question that eludes easy answers: How hot can it get?

The answer has grave implications for humanity, from those living in places where high temperatures are currently rare to those in places that are increasingly on the edge of habitability as climate change makes heat more intense and frequent.

Everyone, everywhere, needs to know the risks about where they live.

There are as many answers to this question as there are thermometers around the globe. To make finding an answer slightly more manageable, scientists look not at absolute temperatures, as anybody would when leaving the house in the morning. Instead, they parse each weather station’s departures from the average.

The 2021 event “shocked everyone, including specialists working on the subject. People were completely stunned,” said Robin Noyelle, a postdoctoral researcher in climate science at ETH Zurich.

Heat can spike in any season or place. The most anomalously warm temperature was actually set in Antarctica, where temperatures rose 39 C above average in March 2022. Temperatures at the North Pole surged 20 C higher than normal in February, just past the melting point in the middle of winter.

Those anomalies are particularly extreme in part because those areas are so dry, and also because it’s easier to heat something cold. But how much normal temperatures could deviate is arguably more pressing in places where people live and where heat is particularly acute in summer.

Years of poring over statistics and model output — on top of basic common sense — has taught scientists that there is a heat limit.

“You can’t have 500 degrees,” said Michael Wehner, a senior staff scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

That research has also shown which meteorological ingredients are most likely to fuel extreme heat.

Cloudless skies and high pressure work to allow more of the sun’s energy to reach the Earth while dark surfaces keep it trapped close to the ground. Lower altitudes have higher pressure, which means they can get hotter.

And lastly, a lack of water can allow heat to build unchecked. Places where these factors are in play are the most likely to see the hottest temperatures.

Many of these elements were in place during the June 2021 western North American heat wave, and they are common in the hottest places on the planet.

“Basically all of these conditions are met in Death Valley, but not in many other places in the world,” said Friederike Otto, a climate scientist at Imperial College London and cofounder of World Weather Attribution, a U.K.based team of scientists who undertook the 2021 heat wave analysis.

Furnace Creek in California’s Death Valley set the highestever recorded temperature of 56.7 C in 1913, according to the World Meteorological Organization. And whatever the upper limit for anomalously high temperatures at a particular location may be, it too will rise with global warming, she said.

Several groups around the world are stalking heat’s theoretical maximum and how it’s set to change, motivated by the need for governments and companies to understand the conditions people and infrastructure will have to withstand in coming decades.

Multiple papers have attempted to tease out how conditions kilometres above the Earth’s surface can drive heat. The “meteorology nittygritty details” are being worked out, said Erich Fischer, a climate scientist at ETH Zurich, but “we now have a much, much better understanding of what sets that thermostat.”

That includes developing new tools and applying them to past episodes of extreme heat, seeking a second opinion on what was or wasn’t possible at the time.

Wehner, the Berkeley National Lab scientist, and two colleagues in a recent paper defined temperatures as “impossible” when they exceed an upper heat limit, as determined by a commonly used statistical approach. They then examined whether that heat was indeed impossible or just superlatively rare in a preindustrial climate.

They found 1,545 unprecedented temperatures that occurred between 1901 and 2022. By drawing additional data from nearby weather stations, they found their method was able to make sense of 86 per cent of the impossible temperatures, compared with 16 per cent with the original approach.

The number of remaining “impossible” events rises through the 21st century, as the world warms more quickly.

“It is clear that whether or not a given historical event is deemed `impossible’ is largely a function of what statistical methods are used,” they wrote earlier this year.

Artificial intelligence is also helping project what maximum heat looks like in the future.

Noah Diffenbaugh, a climate scientist at Stanford University, has begun conducting extreme weather climateattribution studies using AI. His team trains machinelearning programs on physical models that can replay past weather extremes under different greenhouse gas scenarios to estimate the role of climate change.

They are also trying to use this approach to estimate heatrelated deaths. In a working paper not yet accepted by a peerreviewed journal, Diffenbaugh, Stanford postdoc Christopher Callahan and colleagues suggest that if Western Europe’s lethal 2003 heat wave happened in a world slightly hotter than today’s, 17,300 more people would have died in a week. All told, the episode may have killed more than 70,000.

The approach “enables us to make a prediction,” Diffenbaugh said, about what would happen if a past extreme heat wave occurred in a hotter world. “If we get the same weather conditions, how hot would those heat waves be?”

Others are developing new approaches to make global climate models more useful for local officials or citizens who want a plausible understanding of worstcase scenarios. Take Dallas, where out of thousands of simulations across 21 models, two models each project that by the 2040s, the temperature could hit 60 C or above on at least one occasion — an unrealistic simulation.

“If you are, let’s say, trying to insure properties in Dallas, you don’t know if the risk model that you’re using is pulling from that model,” said Robert Rohde, chief scientist of the nonprofit research group Berkeley Earth. “It becomes very challenging to get a clean read.”

Berkeley Earth in December previewed an upcoming opensource project that uses historical data to reduce unrealistic results and hone in on plausible extreme scenarios.

Fischer, whose work on extreme temperatures demonstrated that a June 2021type event was possible just before it happened, has spent the years since studying patterns within heat records. As hot as many events are every year, weather conditions generally fall short of their theoretical ceiling. And as important as understanding how anomalously hot it can get is decoding how long it can last.

“Maybe the next important question to understand is how long that heat could last. There is actually less of an easy constraint,” he said.

Heat waves are typically regarded as persisting for no longer than several days. “We basically have no law of physics that tells us it cannot last longer than three weeks or four weeks,” Fischer said.

Forecast for the next 5 years? Record-breakingly hot, UN weather agency says

Arctic warming at more than 3.5 times the global rate

This article was written by Thomson Reuters and was published by CBC News on May 28, 2025.

Men, who collect recyclables for living, gather as they take bath to cool off from the heat, at a leaking water pipeline, during a hot summer day in Karachi, Pakistan May 25, 2025. — Men who collect recyclables for a living cool off from the heat at a leaking water pipeline in Karachi, Pakistan, on May 25, 2025. The UN weather agency says the next five years are likely to be record-breakingly hot. (Akhtar Soomro/Reuters)

There’s a very high chance that one of the next five years will set a new heat record. It’s also very likely that the next five years will see average temperatures above the lower limit in the Paris Agreement on climate change, the UN weather agency forecasts. And the Arctic is warming at more than triple the global average rate.

The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said Wednesday that this would all fuel more extreme weather.

“Every additional fraction of a degree of warming drives more harmful heatwaves, extreme rainfall events, intense droughts, melting of ice sheets, sea ice, and glaciers, heating of the ocean, and rising sea levels,” it said in a statement.

From this year until the end of 2029, the mean near-surface temperature globally is forecast to be between 1.2 C and 1.9 C higher than pre-industrial levels of the years 1850-1900, the WMO said in a new report.

2024 ‘virtually certain’ to be warmest year on record

Scientists warn that this year could end 1.5 C hotter than pre-industrial times, surpassing the current record of 1.48 C set just last year. Some experts now fear Donald Trump’s less-than-friendly stance on climate change could make the crisis even worse.

There is an 80 per cent chance that at least one of the next five years will see record heat, and a 70 per cent likelihood that average warming will exceed 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.

Last year, the hottest year on record, the WMO reported the first breach of the lower 2015 Paris climate agreement target, which committed countries to “pursue efforts” to limit global warming to 1.5 C, while “holding the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2 C above pre-industrial levels.” However, those targets are based on 20-year average temperatures. That means the measured and forecast temperatures do not yet officially breach the lower limit of the Paris Agreement.

What the Arctic and Amazon can expect

In the Arctic, the above-average projected warming will accelerate ice melt in the Arctic and northwest Pacific Ocean.

The WMO report said Arctic warming was predicted to be more than three-and-a-half times the global average, at 2.4 C above the average temperature during the most recent 30-year baseline period over the next five winters.

2027: the year with no sea-ice?

That’s possible, according to a new study published this week in the journal Nature Communications. An ice-free summer by 2027, they say, is the worst-case scenario — but things can still change if we can limit global warming to 1.5 degrees.

Overall global temperatures will remain at or near record levels until the end of the decade, the report said.

Above-average rainfall is forecast in parts of the world, including the Sahel, northern Europe, Alaska and northern Siberia, for the months between May and September between 2025 and 2029, while drier-than-average conditions are foreseen this season over the Amazon, according to the weather agency.

General Fusion at urgent financial crossroads

This article was written by Ivan Semeniuk and Sean Silcoff, and was published in the Globe & Mail on May 6, 2025.

**The LM26 is seen at General Fusion in Richmond, B.C., last week. The company is seeking US$125-million in additional funding to complete development of the device.**

The B.C.-based company announced on Monday it is actively seeking funding to build ‘break-even’ reactor

Last week was a momentous one for B.C.-based General Fusion, as it conducted a successful test of the machine it hopes will lead to the development of a commercial-scale fusion reactor. That was Tuesday.

By Friday the company had laid off at least one-quarter of its staff and reduced operations in response to a capital shortfall that puts its plans at risk as competitors in the United States and elsewhere push ahead with their own efforts to develop fusion power.

“The last thing we want to do is slow things down and lose this race,” said Greg Twinney, the company’s chief executive officer.

In an open letter issued on Monday, General Fusion announced it is actively seeking new funding from private and government partners to address a situation it described as both unexpected and urgent.

Mr. Twinney told The Globe and Mail the company is seeking US$125-million in additional funding to complete development of its LM26 device and achieve the 100-million-degree temperatures needed to cross “scientific break-even” – a threshold that means the machine would be capable of producing more energy than it absorbs to ignite nuclear reactions.

Such an achievement would set the stage for building a working reactor that is double the size to prove the viability of the technology as a method of commercial power generation.

But with resources running out and investors limiting their risk in an uncertain financial climate, General Fusion says its path has become much more challenging.

“We need to weather the short term to unlock the potential of the company in the longer term,” Mr. Twinney said.

The stakes could hardly be higher. General Fusion has emerged as Canada’s champion in a global effort to harness the same form of energy source that makes the sun shine. If successful, it would be a transformative technology that provides virtually limitless, carbon-free electricity.

The practical hurdles remain enormous but governments and private investors around the world have committed about $8billion to more than 40 companies seeking to develop commercial fusion, according to the U.S.based Fusion Industry Association.

Over the past 20 years, General Fusion has raised about US$350-million in financing, with about three-quarters of that coming from private investors and one-quarter from public sources – primarily the federal government through Canada’s Strategic Innovation Fund.

But the current geopolitical environment – including the Trump administration’s fondness for traditional fossil-fuel industries – and shaky markets for early-stage technologies have eroded the company’s ability to raise additional capital. Investors have been “stepping back and moving a lot slower than previously,” Mr. Twinney said.

We need to weather the short term to unlock the potential of the company in the longer term.

GREG TWINNEY GENERAL FUSION CEO

General Fusion’s existing investors are looking for the company to bring in new sources of capital, he said. That could include financing that cuts the valuation of the company with new investors setting conditions while earlier backers who don’t participate see their stakes sharply diluted.

“We’re going to have to be flexible on valuation to raise the capital we need during this opportunistic time” for investors willing to put up the needed funds, Mr. Twinney said. “There’s going to be a burden carried by existing investors that don’t participate for sure.”

He said the company is also looking to re-engage with the federal government “at the highest levels” in the aftermath of last week’s election.

“We’re an important technology for Canada,” Mr. Twinney said.

Axel Meisen, president of the Fusion Energy Council of Canada, which includes both industry and academic partners, said Ottawa and the government of British Columbia will need to act quickly to arrive at a decision on whether to support General Fusion materially or not.

“It will be a test for the newly elected federal government to consider how to make such decisions,” he said.

Dr. Meisen added that General Fusion’s dilemma could have consequences for hundreds of specialized workers across an industry that is still in its embryonic stages in Canada and is receiving more support in other countries.

“If General Fusion scales down significantly, it will result in a loss of expertise not only at General Fusion but also supplier industries and related research centres,” he said.

Monday’s announcement is the latest twist in a winding journey for the company co-founded in 2002 by physicist Michel Laberge, who sought to revive an approach to nuclear fusion that was shelved in the 1970s. Now called “magnetized target fusion,” the method includes using a metal sheath to momentarily contain and then rapidly compress plasma to reach the temperatures and pressures needed to initiate fusion reactions.

The approach is different from those pursued by other companies, including Commonwealth Fusion Systems of Massachusetts, which had raised more than US$2-billion by last year – the largest capitalization in the industry to date – to build a small tokamak reactor that uses superconducting magnets to confine plasma.

After years of development in B.C., General Fusion announced an agreement with the U.K. Atomic Energy Authority in 2022 to build its own demonstration reactor in Oxfordshire. However, those plans were put on hold a year later when the company said it was focusing on building a new machine in Canada – the LM26 – to prove out its technology.

The machine is not designed to generate electricity because it only uses deuterium, an isotope of hydrogen, rather than the deuterium-tritium mix that can deliver a higher energy return. But it is the precursor to a fullscale fusion reactor that the company envisions as its ultimate goal.

During last week’s test, the LM26 machine successfully compressed and heated deuterium plasma that was injected into a solid lithium liner. The next milestone, which Mr. Twinney said could be achieved in a matter of months, is achieving temperatures in the plasma of 10 million degrees. Prior to downsizing, the company said it was on track to achieve 100 million degrees, needed to ignite fusion reactions, at some point next year.

“The quicker we can get capital in, the quicker we can get back to growth and demonstrating these milestones,” Mr. Twinney said. “We need urgent capital to keep the momentum going.”

Americans increasingly understand how climate change harms health

This report was issued on February 28, 2025.

Dear Friends, We are pleased to release a new report, “Climate Change in the American Mind: Public Perceptions of the Health Harms of Global Warming, Fall 2024,” based on our latest national survey, conducted December 11 – 22, 2024.
Key Findings: 39% of Americans think Americans’ health is currently being harmed by global warming, an 8 percentage point increase from 2014. Compared with 2014, many more Americans think that health problems such as heat stroke, air pollution, asthma and other lung diseases, and pollen-related allergies will become more common in their communities if global warming is not addressed. Compared with 2014, many more Americans trust a broad range of information sources about the health harms of global warming, including half or more Americans who trust primary care physicians (60%), first responders (60%), and climate scientists (50%).

Overall, we find Americans have become increasingly aware of the health harms of global warming, and many understand that certain groups of Americans are more vulnerable to these harms than others. Our findings also highlight the crucial role of health professionals as trusted messengers for engaging the public on the health risks of global warming.
Beliefs about the health harms of global warming
About four in ten Americans (39%) think global warming is currently harming the health of Americans either a “great deal” or “moderate amount” (an 8 point increase since 2014).
Fewer (16%) think global warming is currently harming their own health a great deal or moderate amount. When asked to list health problems related to global warming, two in ten Americans (20%) mention respiratory problems (+5 percentage points since 2014), and one in ten (9%) mention extreme heat (+6 points since 2014). Other health threats commonly mentioned include pollution or contamination of air, water, soil, and food (6%, +3 points since 2014) and extreme weather events such as wildfires, storms, and floods (6%, +2 points since 2014). Forty-nine percent of Americans didn’t answer (+8 percentage points since 2014), while 8% said there are no health harms (-5 points), and 5% said they don’t know (-10 points).
An increasing percentage of Americans think many health harms will become more common in their community over the next ten years due to global warming if nothing is done to address it.
Currently, the health harms most anticipated to become more common include heat stroke (45%, +31 points since 2014), air pollution (44%, +26 points), asthma and/or other lung diseases (43%, +26 points), and pollen-related allergies (41%, +23 points).
Additionally, many Americans think bodily harm from wildfires (40%, +30 points), bodily harm from severe storms and/or hurricanes (39%, +26 points), hunger or malnutrition (39%, +28 points), severe anxiety (38%, +28 points), diseases carried by insects (38%, +26 points), depression (37%, +25 points), illness caused by food and/or water-borne pathogens (35%, +23 points), cancer (34%, +20 points), and bodily harm from flooding (32%, +22 points) will become more common.

Climate change driving up Toronto rat numbers: study

This article was written by Ivan Semeniuk and was published in the Globe & Mail on February 1, 2025.

For city dwellers around the world, the effects of climate change have been widespread and sometimes detrimental, including challenges to air quality, infrastructure and public safety.

But a new study of northern hemisphere cities including Toronto shows that rising global temperatures have benefited at least one urban group: rats.

According to the research, rat populations have been on the rise for at least a decade in the majority of urban centres where data are available. The environmental factor that tracks most closely with rodents’ surging numbers is climate.

The results suggest that without proactive measures – such as better management of garbage and other food sources – issues with rats are likely to increase. This is especially in northern cities, where the rate of warming temperatures caused by fossil fuel emissions is more pronounced than the global average.

“We think we’re explaining the majority of the variation in rat trend numbers across the cities,” said Jonathan Richardson, a biologist at the University of Richmond in Virginia who led the work. “Long-term increase in temperature was by far the strongest predictor.”

Rats are a ubiquitous presence in most cities and a concern for public-health officials because of their potential to spread disease. Even so, comparative, systematic studies of rats across multiple centres are surprisingly scarce.

For their own study, published Friday in the journal Science Advances, Dr. Richardson and his colleagues gathered data from cities on three continents to try to tease out what the numbers are showing. That meant zeroing in on locations where rats have been consistently monitored for a long enough period of time to establish a trend.

Despite public concern about the rodents, they found that – for most municipalities – such information simply does not exist.

“Nobody really knows exactly how many rats live in any city,” said Maureen Murray, a wildlife disease ecologist with Chicago’s Lincoln Park Zoo and a co-author on the study.

To overcome this challenge, the researchers focused on cities where they could access public complaints and inspection reports to get a sense of how rat numbers are changing over at least a seven-year period.

Only sixteen municipalities met those criteria, nearly all in North America, with Toronto as the lone Canadian city in the study. It scored the third highest behind Washington and San Francisco in showing a significant trend toward increasing rat numbers.

Next, the researchers tried to tease out which factors might have an effect on rat populations regardless of how rats were being counted. These included population density and degree of urbanization, which can influence availability of food and habitat, and gross domestic product (GDP), which speaks to the resources a city may be able to draw on for rat management.

Researchers also considered two climate-related factors for each city – the long-term temperature increase and the average minimum temperature.

Among all factors, it was longterm temperature increase that showed the strongest association with increasing rat numbers.

Dr. Murray said that this squares with what is known about the rat’s reproductive rate, which increases in tempo when temperatures rise and food tends to be more available.

“This animal has evolved to reproduce as quickly as possible,” Dr. Murray said.

For cities such as Toronto, which oscillate between cold and warm periods through the year, the study suggests that climate change is allowing rats to spend more time operating at their peak reproductive rate.

Among the factors that were least correlated with rat sightings was GDP, which indicates that wealthy cities are doing as poorly as cities with fewer resources when it comes to managing the problem. This points to a lack of forward planning in containing rat numbers before they balloon, Dr. Murray said.

“Being proactive about rat issues, understanding where the biggest issues are, monitoring sanitary conditions and improving those before you have a rat problem, are so important,” she added. “Because preventing rats is much, much more possible than exterminating rats that have already become established.”

Kaylee Byers, a public-health researcher at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver who was not involved in the study, said there are plenty of reasons to pay attention to rats in urban environments. Among the diseases that rats are known to carry is leptospirosis, a bacterial infection that can be fatal to humans and dogs and can be contracted from rat urine. More broadly, the presence of rats in or near where people live is known to negatively impact mental health.

Dr. Byers said the study’s authors did admirable work with the information available but she added data based on public reports can be affected by numerous factors, including how accustomed people are to the presence of rats and which cities are more or less likely to receive complaints about the rodents.

“It’s the best data we have, but it’s not perfect data,” Dr. Byers said. “I think it’s a really interesting first look and it points towards future questions that we should be asking.”

Those questions could include why four cities in the study – New Orleans, Louisville, St. Louis and Tokyo – showed a decreasing trend in rat reports, presumably for local reasons unrelated to climate.

Dr. Richardson said there was plenty of scope for further work, as well as public interest in the science. “Most people when they find out I study rats, they’re like, ‘Oh gross, but tell me more.’ ” he said. “There’s a visceral repulsion – but also intrigue.”

Fire is both the cause and effect of climate change

Small Things Big Climate | Podcasts

Flames are seen from the Christie Mountain wildfire along Skaha Lake near Penticton, B.C. Wednesday, August 19, 2020. Wildfires in the area have forced several thousand people to be on evacuation alert. Jonathan Hayward/The Canadian Press

This podcast is by Marco Chown Oved, Climate Change Reporter and was published by the Toronto Star on November 13, 2024.

The way we talk about climate change needs to, well, change. Everything is either invisible, like emissions, or incomprehensible, like megatonnes, or inconceivable, like reductions of national emissions 25 years in the future. The cause of climate change is simple: it’s fire. To end global warming, we need to stop burning things.

Guests: Tim Stezik of Toronto Fire Services, Lytton fire survivor and author Meghan Fandrich and Pulitzer Prize finalist and author of Fire Weather, John Valliant.

Aca­demic helped write report being cited in U.S. as a reason to repeal pro­tec­tions and policies

Research­ers now `reach faster con­clu­sions’

Weather fore­cast­ing more accur­ate

Cit­izen sci­ent­ists get an AI assist

Extreme tem­per­at­ures in Lyt­ton, B.C. chal­lenged mod­els and forced a rethink on what’s pos­sible in a warm­ing world