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A Cartoonist Finds Hope Amid the Apocalypse(s)

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Friday, November 14, 2025

Peter Kuper has been publishing political cartoons and graphic novels since the 1980s, but his obsession with insects goes back even further, to when he was four years old and the cicadas emerged around his childhood home in Summit, New Jersey. “I keep this by my table,” says the cartoonist, holding a well-loved paperback copy of the classic Insects: A Guide to Familiar North American Insects up to his webcam. “This is my first insect book. All the pages are falling out.” Photo: The Revelator This year Kuper’s political cartooning and love of entomology intersected with the publication of two new environmental books — or maybe four, depending on how you count them. The first, Insectopolis: A Natural History (W.W. Norton, $35), is a graphic novel — five years in the making — about insects and the scientists who helped uncover their stories. Set after an apocalypse has wiped out all humans, the story follows the insects themselves as they travel through the New York Public Library, uncovering facts about their evolution, cultural importance, ecological roles, and more. It’s a fun, creative, colorful book that conveys Kuper’s fascination with insects and imparts more than a few lessons. Then comes Wish We Weren’t Here: Postcards From the Apocalypse (Fantagraphics, $19.99), a collection of wordless cartoons about climate change, plastic pollution, and other environmental issues originally published in the French satire magazine, Charlie Hebdo. Each one-page, four-panel strip starts with an image that slowly morphs into something more sinister and revelatory — like a drawing of an oil rig that becomes a dying junkie’s used needle. If that sounds confrontational and bleak, it is, but the book also turns the table a few times, transforming images of destruction into reasons for hope.   View this post on Instagram   A post shared by Peter Kuper (@kuperart) Kuper has also published two insect-themed coloring books this year, one based on Insectopolis, and another, Monarch’s Journey, adapting segments of his 2015 graphic novel, Ruins. The Revelator spoke with Kuper about these new books, the state of political cartooning, his new role as an insect conservation advocate, and what people can do to help insects and avoid despair. (This conversation has been edited lightly for brevity and style.) What’s it been like taking this insect conservation message on the road? You’re doing some book signings, some speaking tours. How are people reacting to it? It’s fulfilling the intent I had for the book, I believe, which is to get people who don’t know about insects or are afraid of insects, who generally will kill them first and ask questions later, to recognize that grocery stores would be empty of produce without insects. No chocolate, no coffee, no honey. I can tell every time I give a talk — I’ve seen the expression on people’s faces that something’s moved a little bit. In general, I try not to make my work a “scold.” I wanted to be easing people toward the correct door so that they choose the winning prize of survival. And you’re taking it to these new audiences with a Society of Illustrators show, and the bookstore audience, and the comics audience. Those aren’t necessarily always audiences who would get that conservation message. Right. And the form that it’s taking, I think, is making it a very easy pill to swallow. It’s sugar coated. I’m trying — even with Wish We Weren’t Here — to inject it with humor and have it take those kinds of mental leaps and connections that people can make in seeing something and recognizing it and maybe reconsidering something in a positive way.   View this post on Instagram   A post shared by Peter Kuper (@kuperart) After a lifetime of caring about insects, what did you take away from the five-year process of developing this book? My understanding of history and just coming to understand about the various extinction events that went on in the past, the essence of time and how little we humans can comprehend time. Also, just the miracle of evolution that has made the insects survive the way they have. Even something like the monarch butterfly, which I had learned about while working on Ruins — it goes through these three generations to travel 3,000 miles. The first generation’s one week, the next generation is two, and the last generation is six months. And they still don’t know how all the monarchs know how to get to this one forest in Mexico, which I also got to visit when I lived there. And there’s so many pieces of this history. I had no idea that dung beetles were the first animals — including humans — to navigate by the stars. And that they can follow the Milky Way at night to go in a straight line. And there’s so many fascinating aspects. The shine on apples comes from the lac bug, and 78 RPM records come from that same insect’s excretion. And one of the huge, fabulous aspects was reaching out to the entomologists. If I read a book, I would just look up the author online, reach out and say, “Hey, I’m working on this chapter on bees. Could you talk to me?” And every single one of them was wide open to it. In fact, slipped into Insectopolis are QR codes linking to interviews with four entomologists and the poet laureate from Mexico reading his poem about monarchs. With those interviews, I discovered that entomologists are like comic fans. The same way that comics were always considered low art, entomology was always considered low science. They were sort of put down by the people who were “all lab,” discovering DNA and poo-pooing E.O. Wilson, the ant expert at Harvard, because he was doing this dopey field work. Also, while I was at it, I was digging up entomologists and naturalists who were less known. It’s shocking how many of these people that made huge discoveries are essentially unknown. Margaret Collins, for example, was the first Black entomologist to get her Ph.D. She entered college at age 14. And she had to struggle with civil rights issues and racism and sexism to become the leading scientist on termites. I’m sure some people will be like, “Oh goody, termites.” But still, these are major areas. Architects have learned from the building structures that termites make. There are so many insects that we’ve learned from. The dragonfly has a nearly detachable head, and that’s how they figured out Velcro. Let’s shift and talk about Wish We Weren’t Here — which is a tough title to say. It twists the usual expression, “wish you were here,” and the brain does not want to go there. And I think that’s an interesting aspect of the book itself. You start with one image and twist it to another. How do you approach creating cartoons like that? My enthusiasm for wordless comics goes back to [Mad Magazine’s] “Spy vs. Spy,” which, I ironically ended up doing for 30 years. That and Sergio Aragonés’s wordless cartooning marginals and the books that he did. I get these images when I read an article. They sometimes form almost instantaneously. There’ll be a word in the article, something about “we’re gambling with climate change.” I start seeing the one-armed bandit. They just tend to form these flash images in my brain.   View this post on Instagram   A post shared by Peter Kuper (@kuperart) I just have to do these drawings. I read something in the paper, and I just feel like I need to have a response. And the way I can respond — aside from marching in the streets and knocking on doors, which I also do — is to do a drawing about it and share it. I was anxious to do Wish We Weren’t Here, because we’re right in the midst of even the term “climate change” being erased. So to do a whole book on climate change, it seemed like a rather vital time to do it. And though the comics in there are wordless, each page has the article that I referenced so that somebody could go and look more deeply into the subject. How does political cartooning like this compare to 10 or 20 years ago? Political cartooning has gone through such a contraction, but it’s still so powerful. Is there an audience for it? Is there an appetite for it? There’s a huge appetite for it. It’s just the delivery systems that have altered radically. You can use Instagram and social media to deliver things. I’ll post something, and, depending on the venue, it will get 100,000 likes. Or two. Do you have any advice for other people trying to use the arts or expression or protest as a way to get something out of themselves and to put some good into the world? Well, in every march I’ve been to, you get to see some of the most creative signs. They’re just people, clearly, they’re not professionals. They’re just coming up with a slogan, an image, sometimes a collage of a photo. It’s so powerful to go to a march with a sign that speaks your mind, especially if it’s with humor. Any given march is just loaded with that creative intervention, and I recommend that to everybody.   View this post on Instagram   A post shared by Peter Kuper (@kuperart) And please don’t stomp on insects every time you see them. Just help them out the door.  If you have a lawn, you can un-mow some of it. Don’t mow, and maybe plant the occasional pollinator — just make sure that they’re appropriate pollinators and not some kind of foreign specialty plant that actually is invasive or problematic. There’s just a lot of little actions that one can take all the time — and especially right now, not falling on fear to the point where you don’t get out and protest. That’s really important, because I really feel like what we’re being pushed toward is being scared enough just to stay home and disconnect. Previously in The Revelator: Comics for Earth: Eight New Graphic Novels About Saving the Planet and Celebrating Wildlife The post A Cartoonist Finds Hope Amid the Apocalypse(s) appeared first on The Revelator.

In two powerful new graphic novels, Peter Kuper tackles climate change, disappearing insects, and other tough environmental topics — but gives us reasons to avoid despair. The post A Cartoonist Finds Hope Amid the Apocalypse(s) appeared first on The Revelator.

Peter Kuper has been publishing political cartoons and graphic novels since the 1980s, but his obsession with insects goes back even further, to when he was four years old and the cicadas emerged around his childhood home in Summit, New Jersey.

“I keep this by my table,” says the cartoonist, holding a well-loved paperback copy of the classic Insects: A Guide to Familiar North American Insects up to his webcam. “This is my first insect book. All the pages are falling out.”

Photo: The Revelator

This year Kuper’s political cartooning and love of entomology intersected with the publication of two new environmental books — or maybe four, depending on how you count them.

The first, Insectopolis: A Natural History (W.W. Norton, $35), is a graphic novel — five years in the making — about insects and the scientists who helped uncover their stories. Set after an apocalypse has wiped out all humans, the story follows the insects themselves as they travel through the New York Public Library, uncovering facts about their evolution, cultural importance, ecological roles, and more. It’s a fun, creative, colorful book that conveys Kuper’s fascination with insects and imparts more than a few lessons.

Then comes Wish We Weren’t Here: Postcards From the Apocalypse (Fantagraphics, $19.99), a collection of wordless cartoons about climate change, plastic pollution, and other environmental issues originally published in the French satire magazine, Charlie Hebdo. Each one-page, four-panel strip starts with an image that slowly morphs into something more sinister and revelatory — like a drawing of an oil rig that becomes a dying junkie’s used needle. If that sounds confrontational and bleak, it is, but the book also turns the table a few times, transforming images of destruction into reasons for hope.

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by Peter Kuper (@kuperart)

Kuper has also published two insect-themed coloring books this year, one based on Insectopolis, and another, Monarch’s Journey, adapting segments of his 2015 graphic novel, Ruins.

The Revelator spoke with Kuper about these new books, the state of political cartooning, his new role as an insect conservation advocate, and what people can do to help insects and avoid despair. (This conversation has been edited lightly for brevity and style.)

What’s it been like taking this insect conservation message on the road? You’re doing some book signings, some speaking tours. How are people reacting to it?

It’s fulfilling the intent I had for the book, I believe, which is to get people who don’t know about insects or are afraid of insects, who generally will kill them first and ask questions later, to recognize that grocery stores would be empty of produce without insects. No chocolate, no coffee, no honey. I can tell every time I give a talk — I’ve seen the expression on people’s faces that something’s moved a little bit.

In general, I try not to make my work a “scold.” I wanted to be easing people toward the correct door so that they choose the winning prize of survival.

And you’re taking it to these new audiences with a Society of Illustrators show, and the bookstore audience, and the comics audience. Those aren’t necessarily always audiences who would get that conservation message.

Right. And the form that it’s taking, I think, is making it a very easy pill to swallow. It’s sugar coated. I’m trying — even with Wish We Weren’t Here — to inject it with humor and have it take those kinds of mental leaps and connections that people can make in seeing something and recognizing it and maybe reconsidering something in a positive way.

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by Peter Kuper (@kuperart)

After a lifetime of caring about insects, what did you take away from the five-year process of developing this book?

My understanding of history and just coming to understand about the various extinction events that went on in the past, the essence of time and how little we humans can comprehend time.

Also, just the miracle of evolution that has made the insects survive the way they have. Even something like the monarch butterfly, which I had learned about while working on Ruins — it goes through these three generations to travel 3,000 miles. The first generation’s one week, the next generation is two, and the last generation is six months. And they still don’t know how all the monarchs know how to get to this one forest in Mexico, which I also got to visit when I lived there.

And there’s so many pieces of this history. I had no idea that dung beetles were the first animals — including humans — to navigate by the stars. And that they can follow the Milky Way at night to go in a straight line.

And there’s so many fascinating aspects. The shine on apples comes from the lac bug, and 78 RPM records come from that same insect’s excretion.

And one of the huge, fabulous aspects was reaching out to the entomologists. If I read a book, I would just look up the author online, reach out and say, “Hey, I’m working on this chapter on bees. Could you talk to me?” And every single one of them was wide open to it. In fact, slipped into Insectopolis are QR codes linking to interviews with four entomologists and the poet laureate from Mexico reading his poem about monarchs.

With those interviews, I discovered that entomologists are like comic fans. The same way that comics were always considered low art, entomology was always considered low science. They were sort of put down by the people who were “all lab,” discovering DNA and poo-pooing E.O. Wilson, the ant expert at Harvard, because he was doing this dopey field work.

Also, while I was at it, I was digging up entomologists and naturalists who were less known. It’s shocking how many of these people that made huge discoveries are essentially unknown. Margaret Collins, for example, was the first Black entomologist to get her Ph.D. She entered college at age 14. And she had to struggle with civil rights issues and racism and sexism to become the leading scientist on termites.

I’m sure some people will be like, “Oh goody, termites.” But still, these are major areas. Architects have learned from the building structures that termites make. There are so many insects that we’ve learned from. The dragonfly has a nearly detachable head, and that’s how they figured out Velcro.

Let’s shift and talk about Wish We Weren’t Here — which is a tough title to say. It twists the usual expression, “wish you were here,” and the brain does not want to go there. And I think that’s an interesting aspect of the book itself. You start with one image and twist it to another. How do you approach creating cartoons like that?

My enthusiasm for wordless comics goes back to [Mad Magazine’s] “Spy vs. Spy,” which, I ironically ended up doing for 30 years. That and Sergio Aragonés’s wordless cartooning marginals and the books that he did.

I get these images when I read an article. They sometimes form almost instantaneously. There’ll be a word in the article, something about “we’re gambling with climate change.” I start seeing the one-armed bandit. They just tend to form these flash images in my brain.

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by Peter Kuper (@kuperart)

I just have to do these drawings. I read something in the paper, and I just feel like I need to have a response. And the way I can respond — aside from marching in the streets and knocking on doors, which I also do — is to do a drawing about it and share it.

I was anxious to do Wish We Weren’t Here, because we’re right in the midst of even the term “climate change” being erased. So to do a whole book on climate change, it seemed like a rather vital time to do it. And though the comics in there are wordless, each page has the article that I referenced so that somebody could go and look more deeply into the subject.

How does political cartooning like this compare to 10 or 20 years ago? Political cartooning has gone through such a contraction, but it’s still so powerful. Is there an audience for it? Is there an appetite for it?

There’s a huge appetite for it. It’s just the delivery systems that have altered radically.

You can use Instagram and social media to deliver things. I’ll post something, and, depending on the venue, it will get 100,000 likes. Or two.

Do you have any advice for other people trying to use the arts or expression or protest as a way to get something out of themselves and to put some good into the world?

Well, in every march I’ve been to, you get to see some of the most creative signs. They’re just people, clearly, they’re not professionals. They’re just coming up with a slogan, an image, sometimes a collage of a photo. It’s so powerful to go to a march with a sign that speaks your mind, especially if it’s with humor. Any given march is just loaded with that creative intervention, and I recommend that to everybody.

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by Peter Kuper (@kuperart)

And please don’t stomp on insects every time you see them. Just help them out the door.  If you have a lawn, you can un-mow some of it. Don’t mow, and maybe plant the occasional pollinator — just make sure that they’re appropriate pollinators and not some kind of foreign specialty plant that actually is invasive or problematic.

There’s just a lot of little actions that one can take all the time — and especially right now, not falling on fear to the point where you don’t get out and protest. That’s really important, because I really feel like what we’re being pushed toward is being scared enough just to stay home and disconnect.

Previously in The Revelator:

Comics for Earth: Eight New Graphic Novels About Saving the Planet and Celebrating Wildlife

The post A Cartoonist Finds Hope Amid the Apocalypse(s) appeared first on The Revelator.

Read the full story here.
Photos courtesy of

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The physics of mixing water layers — an interplay of wind, climate and more — makes lakes work. When it stops, impacts can ripple across an ecosystem. The post Mixing Is the Heartbeat of Deep Lakes. At Crater Lake, It’s Slowing Down. first appeared on Quanta Magazine

climate science Mixing Is the Heartbeat of Deep Lakes. At Crater Lake, It’s Slowing Down. By Rachel Nuwer November 14, 2025 The physics of mixing water layers — an interplay of wind, climate and more — makes lakes work. When it stops, impacts can ripple across an ecosystem. Katie Falkenberg for Quanta Magazine climate science Mixing Is the Heartbeat of Deep Lakes. At Crater Lake, It’s Slowing Down. By Rachel Nuwer November 14, 2025 The physics of mixing water layers — an interplay of wind, climate and more — makes lakes work. When it stops, impacts can ripple across an ecosystem. By Rachel Nuwer Contributing Writer November 14, 2025 animals biology climate science ecology physics All topics On a radiant July afternoon, a pair of scientists hung their heads off the side of a boat and peered into the brilliant blue water of a lake known for its clarity. They were watching for the exact moment when a black-and-white, dinner plate–sized object called a Secchi disc disappeared from view in the water column of Crater Lake in Oregon. The disc was being slowly lowered by crane, spinning lazily like a carnival prop. A minute or so after it hit the water, graduate student Juan Estuardo Bocel gave a shout to indicate that he could no longer see the disc: “I am out!” Seconds later, researcher Eva Laiti echoed: “OK, I’m out!” The crane operator, Scott Girdner, a lanky freshwater biologist who has spent most of his adult life at Crater Lake National Park, recorded the disc depth for each call. Then he slowly raised it until the junior researchers piped up again when it was back in view, and he recorded those depths, too. The mean of those readings, known as the Secchi depth, has been used as a simple and dependable measure of water clarity since 1865, when the Italian Jesuit priest Angelo Secchi invented it at the behest of the papacy. The value recorded that afternoon in 2025 — about 78 feet (24 meters), an unusually cloudy reading for Crater Lake — is now part of one of the world’s longest-running datasets on lake physics. The lake’s first Secchi reading was taken in 1886, and in 1983 scientists began to repeat the procedure several times per month every summer. When it comes to lake health, long-term data is treasure. Crater Lake’s size, natural beauty and otherworldly clarity — a reflection of its setting and isolation — make it one of the world’s most iconic freshwater bodies. With a maximum depth of 1,949 feet, it is the deepest lake in the United States. It’s also very likely the clearest large lake on Earth, with a vivid blue hue seldom encountered in nature. Share this article Copied! Newsletter Get Quanta Magazine delivered to your inbox Recent newsletters To measure water clarity, Scott Girdner and Taryn Weller, biologists at Crater Lake National Park, lower a black-and-white Secchi disc (right) and record the depth at which it vanishes. Crater Lake’s first Secchi reading was taken in 1886. Katie Falkenberg for Quanta Magazine “People are just amazed and wowed at the optical blue that you see from pure water itself,” said Sudeep Chandra, a limnologist at the University of Nevada, Reno, who collaborates with Girdner. “That blueness is the reflection of the hydrogen and oxygen hanging out together without any material in it.” Since 2010, however, Girdner and his colleagues have noticed an unexpected change in the Secchi data: Despite the day’s slightly cloudy reading, Crater Lake’s clear water is getting even clearer. This might sound like a good thing. After all, the lake’s remarkable, glasslike transparency and brilliant hue are major draws for the half-million tourists who visit every year. But it might also indicate that something is going wrong with the lake’s physics, chemistry and ecology, and it could be a harbinger of changes to lakes across the world in the age of climate change. As the planet warms, summers are growing longer and winter nights aren’t getting as cold as they used to. As a result, the surfaces of many deep, temperate lakes are warming even faster than the air. This shift to the energy flux of the top layer of water can set in motion a series of physical changes that add up to a breakdown of lake mixing — a fundamental process that acts like a heartbeat for deep, temperate lakes that don’t freeze in winter. Lake mixing is driven by physical properties such as wind, air temperature, water temperature and salinity, and on seasonal or annual cycles it circulates water between the surface and the depths. When mixing stops, oxygen and nutrients don’t get distributed throughout the water column, which can kill fish, trigger unsightly and dangerous algal blooms and invite invasive species to take over. “Many people visit Crater Lake because of its pristine water quality and blueness,” said Sudeep Chandra of the University of Nevada, Reno. “What happens if that changes?” Katie Falkenberg for Quanta Magazine From Italy to New Zealand and beyond, scientists have been alarmed to observe reduced lake mixing. In 2021, Chandra and his colleagues published evidence in Nature of greater stratification in the water column over time — an indicator of weaker mixing — in 84% of 189 temperate lakes for which they could find sufficiently long and robust datasets. Some lakes had stopped mixing altogether. “While each system is unique, the endgame is generally the same: a lack of mixing for these large, deep lakes,” Chandra said. Of the world’s millions of lakes, Crater Lake is one of very few with a monitoring program that stretches back more than 40 years. Scientists are now beginning to realize how crucial those datasets are for unraveling lake physics and how climate change is altering it. “Because local weather can be extremely variable from year to year, it takes many years to capture the range in conditions and measure ‘normal,’” Girdner said. “Hence the advantage of long-term datasets.” Crater Lake is therefore at the center of the first efforts by researchers, including Girdner and Chandra, to compare lake systems to get to the bottom of their breakdown, so they can prepare for the future and perhaps even ward off the most extreme impacts. “Historically, people have studied lakes one at a time,” said Stephanie Hampton, director of the Tahoe Environmental Research Center at the University of California, Davis. In light of how quickly things are changing, that siloed approach no longer works, she said. “We need to learn from each other and synthesize these data to understand what’s happening globally.” In July 2025, researchers journeyed to the remote research station on Wizard Island, the volcanic cinder cone near the western shore of Crater Lake. On the boat dock they ate their meals (including fresh-caught invasive crayfish) and slept out under the stars. Katie Falkenberg for Quanta Magazine Canary in the Lake   In 2006, five deep lakes in northern Italy — Iseo, Como, Garda, Maggiore and Lugano — stopped fully mixing. At first, scientists didn’t think much of it. They had been monitoring the lakes since the 1980s and 1990s, and it was normal for a few years to go by without complete mixing. But as time passed and the clear waters remained stubbornly in place, they began to fear that the pause might be permanent. Their fears seem to have been borne out. “It’s been 20 years that we haven’t observed any full mixing from the top to the bottom,” said Barbara Leoni, a freshwater ecologist at the University of Milan-Bicocca. “I don’t know that it will be possible to return to the past behavior.” While each system is unique, the endgame is generally the same: a lack of mixing for these large, deep lakes. Sudeep Chandra, University of Nevada, Reno Lake mixing is a function of the fact that water has different densities at different temperatures. In deep temperate lakes, this creates stratification in the water column: Lighter, warmer water floats on top, and colder, denser water sinks below. Any number of factors can influence mixing, but it is primarily driven by seasonal temperature changes, wind and waves. Because these features vary from place to place and from lake to lake, mixing does not follow a single formula. In many lakes, complete mixing occurs once or twice a year, usually in spring and fall. In very large lakes, mixing might happen in the shallow upper waters on annual or seasonal cycles, while full mixing to the deepest bottom layer may occur only every few years. By studying different lakes, scientists are hoping to find shared rules. Italy’s deep northern lakes previously achieved complete mixing on an approximately seven-year cycle. During the summer, the lake water would maintain distinct layers as surface waters warmed and remained light and in place. As surface temperatures dropped in autumn and winter, the layers would become closer in temperature; with a push from the wind, the lake would begin to mix. This redistributed heat, oxygen, nutrients and toxins throughout the water column. Researchers pull in a gill net to assess fish populations. Katie Falkenberg for Quanta Magazine That’s not how the Italian lakes work anymore, however. Now, the surface waters fail to get cool enough to sink and trigger mixing. As a result, oxygen is disappearing from the bottom of the stratified lake. It has already been depleted entirely in Lake Iseo. “We have 150 meters of water without oxygen,” Leoni said. This kills off oxygen-breathing life at depth and transforms the biological community. “In lakes where the deep waters have been oxygen-free for a long time, only bacteria survive,” she said. The hearts of Italy’s deep lakes have stopped and are no longer circulating nutrients; they show what can happen when lakes stop mixing. Crater Lake offers a different opportunity: to study how, exactly, warming temperatures can break the fundamental physics of a lake. Mixing Mix-Up On summer days, viewed from the rim of the ancient caldera that holds it, Crater Lake is a perfect mirror reflecting the procession of clouds and colors of the sky above. But beneath that glassy surface, dynamic processes are underway. Scott Girdner, a freshwater biologist at Crater Lake National Park, has run the lake’s long-term monitoring program since 1995. He will retire at the end of 2025. Katie Falkenberg for Quanta Magazine Compared to many other large lakes around the world, Crater Lake is close to pristine. It is surrounded by wilderness and protected as a national park. The air above it is mostly wind blowing off the Pacific Ocean, with few polluting cities or industries nearby. The lake lacks any rivers or streams emptying into it that could bring in pollution from elsewhere; it is filled by rain and melting snow. In July, Girdner and Chandra filled two large water coolers with lake water — enough to keep the team of around 13 visiting scientists, students and National Park employees, plus a journalist and photographer, hydrated overnight. The lake’s water tasted as pure as bottled water, and it maintained a natural, refreshing temperature under the blazing summer sun. Crater Lake has gained 33 additional days of summer weather per year over the past 60 years, as spring arrives earlier and earlier. The water purity does more than provide good drinking: It makes Crater Lake an ideal system for studying climate impacts. Without the confounding factors of agriculture, sewage, parking lot runoff and water withdrawals that tend to affect other lakes, Girdner said, “it’s easier to see the influence of climate change.” Girdner started working at Crater Lake in 1995 and has overseen the long-term monitoring program ever since. He often tells his staff that it’s not enough to just record change; they must also understand its drivers and its implications for the lake’s physics, chemistry and biology. To that end, every night at 8 p.m., a tube-shaped profiler instrument crawls along an anchored metal cable from a depth of 585 meters to Crater Lake’s surface and back down again. On this round trip, it tests twice a second for water conductivity, temperature, oxygen and salinity. Other sensors use light to measure chlorophyll fluorescence and phytoplankton particle density. That dataset and others tell the story of Crater Lake’s health across time. Like virtually all lakes around the world, it’s getting warmer: Average surface water temperatures have increased by 3 degrees Celsius since 1965. In summer, nighttime air temperatures are increasing faster than daytime ones; the coldest summer nights are not as cold as they used to be. And there are more summer nights: Crater Lake has gained 33 additional days of summer weather per year over the past 60 years, as spring arrives earlier and earlier. The remoteness that makes Crater Lake ideal for isolating climate change impacts also makes it a top location for stargazing. On average 98.6% of potentially visible stars can be seen at the site, according to NPS data. Katie Falkenberg for Quanta Magazine In the past, when summer nights grew cold, the lake released the day’s accumulated heat, causing surface water to become denser and sink. This phenomenon drives the shallow mixing that occurs in summer. As nights have warmed, however, this process has weakened, and mixing has slowed. Counterintuitively, as the layer of surface water has become warmer, it has also become thinner. “In the summer, there is half as much warm water floating on the surface now, on average, than there was in 1971,” Girdner said. This creates a sharper density difference with the cold water below, which in turn increases the amount of wind energy required to break through and mix the layers. I think about it like a vinaigrette. There’s resistance to mixing. Kevin Rose, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute “I think about it like a vinaigrette,” said Kevin Rose, a freshwater ecologist at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York who collaborates with Girdner and Chandra. “There’s resistance to mixing.” So what does all of this have to do with the fact that the lake is getting clearer? That’s where biology comes in. In Crater Lake’s warm surface water lives a community of phytoplankton. A thinner warm surface layer means less habitat, so there are fewer phytoplankton, which means fewer particles in the water to scatter light. This boosts the water’s clarity overall and the depth to which light can penetrate. Crater Lake’s winter processes, which mix the lake all the way to the bottom, are undergoing their own profound changes. These transformations involve the weakening of a phenomenon called reverse stratification, in which a layer of very cold water, cooled by frigid winter air, forms on top of a slightly warmer layer that is around 4 degrees Celsius, the temperature at which water is heaviest. (At temperatures below that, water molecules begin to organize into lighter ice crystals.) When strong wind pushes the extra-cold surface water horizontally, as it approaches the lake’s edge some of it is forced down. If it is pushed down far enough, the increased pressure causes it to become denser than the 4-degree water layer. It then sinks to the bottom in a matter of hours, creating a mixing effect. Mark Belan/Quanta Magazine Historically, reverse stratification occurred during 80% to 90% of Crater Lake winters. As winters warm, it is becoming less common. “Crater Lake is sitting on a knife edge where it’s already really close to not being able to form reverse stratification,” Girdner said. This does not bode well for the lake’s future mixing. When Girdner’s colleagues used his data to simulate what might happen under a range of climate scenarios, the model predicted that reverse stratification will become rare within about 50 years. If the process stops entirely, Crater Lake will no longer mix to the bottom at all. Over decades, an oxygen dead zone will begin to form — similar to the ones in the northern Italian lakes. This risks significant ecological impacts, as well as a buildup of toxic compounds that could billow up to the surface if the lake does mix again. Crater Lake is just starting on the path toward such dramatic changes. Another iconic lake a few hundred miles away suggests what might happen next. A Trickle-Down Effect Lake Tahoe, the second-deepest lake in the United States, on the California-Nevada border, once rivaled Crater Lake in its clarity. In the 19th century, rocks glistened through its crystal-clear water. Then, rapid population growth in the 1950s polluted the water, causing algae to start growing offshore. In recent years, those algae have advanced into shallower waters. Secchi disc readings show that, since 1967, clarity in Lake Tahoe has been reduced by nearly 40 feet. The lake’s formerly rich blue hue is now diminished in some places. Jaden Bellamy, a biological science technician at Crater Lake National Park, monitors the lake’s wildlife, including invasive crayfish (left) and rainbow trout (right). Katie Falkenberg for Quanta Magazine These trends will likely continue as climate change advances, said Michael Dettinger, a hydroclimatologist at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego. As Lake Tahoe’s mixing breaks down and summer waters get warmer and linger longer, phytoplankton enjoy an enhanced growing season and cloud the water. Over the next century, more intense and frequent storms are projected to increase water inflows, likely bringing “enormous spikes” of sediments and nutrients into the lake, Dettinger said. Smoke from wildfires also deposits particles, which can change the light structure and nutrient composition of the lake. Such events can affect a lake’s trajectory for years, Chandra said. When combined with altered lake mixing, they create a vicious ecological cycle. Algae blooms are a product of these and other disruptions. In addition to killing fish, the accumulation of oxygen-poor, nutrient-rich water that builds up in a stratified lake — especially one loaded with extra nutrients from runoff and wildfires — can leak to the shoreline, triggering nearshore algae growth that forms a green bathtub ring surrounding a clear center. “That’s one of the working hypotheses for what we think is happening in Lake Tahoe,” Chandra said. Crater Lake suffered its first bloom of shoreline algae in 2021. “It looked like someone took a massive bright green highlighter along the shore,” Girdner said. Because lake tours were closed due to the Covid-19 pandemic that summer, there was no public outcry. Had the bloom occurred during a normal summer — like July 2025, when tourists crowded the lake in passenger boats to marvel at the seemingly bottomless blue abyss around them — the situation might have made national headlines. Researchers process crayfish and fish to monitor the lake’s health. “You can measure vital signs of a human being and get some idea if something seems to be wrong or if things are changing,” Girdner said. “We do similar things in the lake.” Katie Falkenberg for Quanta Magazine When the green ring appeared, Girdner and his colleagues felt overwhelmed. At first they had no idea what could be driving the sudden growth. Then they noticed a telling detail: The greenest places were those with the highest numbers of invasive crayfish. When crayfish move into an area, the population of insect larvae and other aquatic invertebrates that graze on algae declines by about 95%. “They just hammer the insects,” Girdner said. In experiments, Girdner and his colleagues found that about seven times more algae grow in areas with crayfish compared to those without. Yet Girdner suspected there was more than crayfish at work. Those invasive predators had regrettably been introduced to the lake in 1915, but in the intervening century, no other major algae blooms had occurred. He and his colleagues found, instead, that record-breaking water temperatures during the exceptionally hot summer of 2021 had fueled the algae growth. Crayfish had just given it a boost. Milder winters have let the crayfish population grow and spread to new areas of the lake, further disrupting ecosystems. The Mazama newt (or Crater Lake newt), a subspecies found nowhere else in the world, has virtually disappeared. In addition to competing for the same invertebrate prey, the crayfish also capture newts in their pincers and devour the hapless amphibians alive. Similar climate-driven invasive species patterns have been seen in other lakes. These cascading impacts exemplify the fact that lake conditions are inherently and intimately tied to climate, Chandra said. “We cannot divorce the biological composition and interactions within a lake from the climatic conditions within the landscape.” The sun rises over the volcanic heap of Wizard Island on July 23, 2025. Katie Falkenberg for Quanta Magazine Teasing out the interactions between climate, lake mixing and ecology at Crater Lake will give research teams around the globe a blueprint for what to expect as the world continues to warm, and could be key to averting worst-case scenarios. An Uncertain Future Last year, Chandra, Leoni and other researchers were sitting in a cafe near Lake Iseo, comparing notes about climate change at their lakes, when the cafe owner interrupted. “Why do we even need to know this?” Chandra recalled him asking. “There’s not much we can do about it, so why even care?” It’s a sentiment that Chandra often encounters. He harbors hope, however, that some impacts to lakes can be slowed or avoided. While individuals cannot stop the juggernaut of climate change, he said, local interventions could make a difference. Those strategies would be context-dependent, but they could include working to balance a lake’s nutrients, controlling invasive species, cleaning up pollution, or restoring the forests and wetlands surrounding lakes. Collaborations between different groups of scientists could enhance such interventions, said Veronica Nava, a postdoctoral researcher in freshwater ecology at the University of Milan-Bicocca. “If one lake has already experienced what you’re observing, you can come up with better strategies,” she said. A buoy is attached to a mooring sensor, which measures optical chlorophyll fluorescence and turbidity. The NPS has six of these sensors around Crater Lake. Katie Falkenberg for Quanta Magazine Teamwork “is really where freshwater science is moving,” Hampton said. But such efforts are in their early days, as researchers have only started to think about comparing large lake ecosystems over the last few years. Now threats to U.S. research are rattling their newfound collaboration. “The cuts to research funding are going to hit large collaborations pretty hard,” Hampton said. The future of even Crater Lake’s exemplary scientific program is in jeopardy. After spending nearly his entire career at the lake, Girdner is retiring at the end of the year. The federal government has frozen hiring for the National Park Service, so his position will remain unfilled indefinitely. It’s unrealistic, he said, to expect his colleagues to continue the same research output on their own. “We’re going to have to pare down what we’re doing,” he said. Related: Nature’s Critical Warning System How Soon Will the Seas Rise? Simple Equation Predicts the Shapes of Carbon-Capturing Wetlands Until then, they’re focused on what they can do: adding another year’s data to Crater Lake’s history. After a busy day, Girdner steered the vessel back to the dock at Wizard Island, a volcanic cinder cone that juts out of Crater Lake like a pointy hat. In the cluttered boathouse, decades of signatures and sketches coated the wooden walls, bearing witness to the students and scientists who had made some contribution to a better understanding of the lake. Chandra boiled a few invasive crayfish until they were delectably tender, and the group ate them with dabs of hot sauce. They passed around a few bottles of prosecco to toast Girdner’s retirement. As the sun dipped low, the exhausted scientists unrolled sleeping bags on the dock. Girdner had spent countless nights on the island (more than his ex-wife had liked, he admitted). This would be one of his last. The sky’s soft gradient of pink, orange and gold slowly darkened, and the Milky Way twinkled into view. Voices faded, while bats skimmed the water’s still surface. The lake’s future was uncertain. But the urgency of protecting its natural splendor could not have been clearer.

Climate
Water
Animals

South Korea's fishermen keep dying. Is climate change to blame?

An increase in deadly incidents has been partly caused by climate change, an inquiry found.

South Korea's fishermen keep dying. Is climate change to blame?Jean MackenzieSeoul correspondentBBC/Hosu LeeBoat owner Hong Suk-hui says the seas are becoming more dangerousHong Suk-hui was waiting on the shore of South Korea's Jeju Island when the call came. His fishing boat had capsized.Just two days earlier, the vessel had ventured out on what he had hoped would be a long and fruitful voyage. But as the winds grew stronger, its captain was ordered to turn back. On the way to port, a powerful wave struck from two directions creating a whirlpool, and the boat flipped. Five of the 10 crew members, who had been asleep in their cabins below deck, drowned."When I heard the news, I felt like the sky was falling," said Mr Hong.Last year, 164 people were killed or went missing in accidents in the seas around South Korea – a 75% jump from the year before. Most were fishermen whose boats had sunk or capsized."The weather has changed, it's getting windier every year," said Mr Hong, who also chairs the Jeju Fishing Boat Owners Association. "Whirlwinds pop up suddenly. We fisherman are convinced it is down to climate change."South Korean CoastguardFive of Mr Hong's crew members drowned when this fishing boat capsized in FebruaryAlarmed by the spike in deaths, the South Korean government launched an investigation into the accidents.This year, the head of the taskforce pinpointed climate change as one of the major causes, as well as highlighting other problems - the country's aging fishing workforce, a growing reliance on migrant workers, and poor safety training.The seas around Korea are warming more rapidly than the global average, in part because they tend to be shallower. Between 1968 and 2024, the average surface temperature of the country's seas increased by 1.58C, more than double the global rise of 0.74C.Warming waters are contributing to extreme weather at sea, creating the conditions for tropical storms, like typhoons, to become more intense.They are also causing some fish species around South Korea to migrate, according to the country's National Institute of Fisheries Science, forcing fisherman to travel further and take greater risks to catch enough to make a living.Environmental campaigners say urgent action is needed to "stop the tragedy occurring in Korean waters".BBC/Hosu LeeSome fish species are migrating from the waters around South KoreaOn a rainy June morning, Jeju Island's main harbour was crammed with fishing boats. The crews hurried back and forth between sea and land, refuelling and stocking up for their next voyage, while the boats' owners paced anxiously along the dock watching the final preparations."I'm always afraid something might happen to the boat, the risks have increased so much," said 54-year-old owner, Kim Seung-hwan. "The winds have become more unpredictable and extremely dangerous."A few years ago, Mr Kim began to notice that the popular silvery hairtail fish he relied on were disappearing from local waters, and his earnings plunged by half.Now his crews have to journey into deeper, more perilous waters to find them, sometimes sailing as far south as Taiwan."Since we're operating farther away, it's not always possible to return quickly when there's a storm warning," he said. "If we stayed closer to shore it would be safer, but to make a living we have to go farther out."BBC/Hosu LeeFishermen on South Korea's Jeju Island say hairtail fish have become scarcerProfessor Gug Seung-gi led the investigation into the recent accidents, which found that South Korea's seas appear to have become more dangerous. It noted the number of marine weather warnings around the Korean Peninsula - alerting fishermen to gales, storm surges, and typhoons - increased by 65% between 2020 and 2024."Unpredictable weather is leading to more boats capsizing, especially small fishing vessels that are going further out and are not built for such long, rough trips," he told the BBC.Professor Kim Baek-min, a climate scientist at South Korea's Pukyong National University, said that although climate change was creating the conditions to make strong, sudden wind gusts more likely, a clear trend had not yet been established – for that, more research and long-term data is needed.BBC/Hosu LeeCaptain Park fishes for anchovies from this small boatOne foggy morning, we left shore in the dark on a small trawler with Captain Park Hyung-il, who has been fishing anchovies off Korea's south coast for more than 25 years. He sang sea shanties, determined to stay upbeat. But when we reached the nets he had left out overnight, his mood crumpled.As he wound them in, the anchovies could barely be seen among the hordes of jellyfish and other fodder. Once the anchovies had been separated out, they filled just two boxes."In the past, we'd fill 50 to 100 of these baskets in a single day," he said. "But this year the anchovies have vanished and we're catching more jellyfish than fish."This is the predicament facing tens of thousands of fishermen along South Korea's coastlines. Over the past 10 years, the amount of squid caught in South Korean waters each year has plummeted 92%, while anchovy catches have fallen by 46%.BBC/Hosu LeeThere are far fewer anchovies to be sorted by fishing workersEven the anchovies Park had caught were not fit for market, he said, and would need to be sold as animal-feed."The haul is basically worthless," he sighed, explaining it would barely cover the day's fuel costs, let alone his crew's wages."The sea is a mess, nothing makes sense anymore," Park continued. "I used to love this job. There was joy knowing that someone, somewhere in the country was eating the fish I caught. But now, with barely anything to catch, that sense of pride is fading."And, with livelihoods disappearing, young people no longer want to join the industry. In 2023 almost half of South Korea's fishermen were over the age of 65, up from less than a third a decade earlier.Increasingly, elderly captains must rely on help from migrant workers from Vietnam and Indonesia. Often these workers do not receive sufficient safety training, and language barriers mean they cannot communicate with the captains – further compounding the dangers.Woojin Chung, South Korea's chief representative at the UK-based Environmental Justice Foundation, described it as "a vicious and tragic cycle".When you combine more extreme weather with the pressure to travel further, the increased fuel costs this brings, and the need to rely on cheap, untrained foreign labour, "you have a higher chance of meeting disaster", she explained.BBC/Hosu LeeFishermen Jong-un (left) and Yong-mook (right) were killed in a fishing boat accident this yearOn 9 February this year, a large shipping trawler sank suddenly near the coastal city of Yeosu, killing 10 of the crew. It was a bitterly cold, windy day, and smaller boats had been banned from going out, but this trawler was deemed sturdy enough to withstand the gales. The reason it went down is still a mystery.One of those killed was 63-year-old Young-mook. A fisherman for 40 years, he had been planning to retire, but that morning someone called and asked him to fill a last-minute opening on the boat."It was so cold that once you fell in you wouldn't survive the hypothermia, especially at his age," said his daughter Ean, still distraught over his death.Ean thinks it has become too easy for boat owners to blame climate change for accidents. Even in cases where bad weather plays a role, she believes it is still the owners' responsibility to assess the risks and keep their crew safe. "Ultimately it is their call when to go out," she said.BBC/Hosu LeeYoung-mook's daughter Ean (right) wants boat owners to make their vessels saferAs a child, she remembers her father's fridge would be filled with crabs and squid. "Now the stocks are gone, but the companies still force them to go out, and because these men have worked as fishermen their whole lives, they don't have alternative job options, so they keep fishing even when they're too frail to do so," she said.Ean also wants owners to better maintain their boats, which are aging too. "Companies have insurance, so they get compensated after a boat sinks, but our loved ones can't be replaced."The authorities, aware they cannot control the weather, are now working with fishermen to make their boats safer. As we were with Mr Hong, whose boat capsized earlier this year, a team of government inspectors arrived to carry out a series of on-the-spot checks on two of his other vessels.The government's taskforce is recommending that boats be fitted with safety ladders, fisherman be required to wear life jackets, and that safety training be mandatory for all foreign crew. It also wants to improve search and rescue operations, and for fisherman to have access to more localised and real-time weather updates.Some regions are even offering to pay fishermen for the jellyfish they catch, to try to clean up the seas, while squid fishermen are being given loans to protect them from bankruptcy, and encourage them to retire.BBC/Hosu LeeBecause the problem will likely worsen. The UN's Food and Agricultural Organisation forecasts that total fish catches in South Korea will decline by almost a third by the end of this century, if carbon emissions and global warming continue on their current trajectories."The future looks very bleak," said the anchovy fisherman Captain Park, now in his late 40s. He recently started a YouTube channel documenting his catches in the hope of earning some extra money. Park is the third generation of his family to do this work and likely the last."Back then it felt romantic getting up early and heading out to sea. There was a sense of adventure and reward.""These days it's just really tough."Additional reporting by Hosu Lee and Leehyun Choi

Climate
Animals
Government

London Judge Finds Global Mining Company BHP Group Liable in Brazil’s Worst Environmental Disaster

A London judge has ruled that BHP Group is liable for Brazil’s worst environmental disaster

LONDON (AP) — A London judge ruled Friday that global mining company BHP Group is liable in Brazil’s worst environmental disaster when a dam collapse a decade ago unleashed tons of toxic waste into a major river, killing 19 people and devastating villages downstream.High Court Justice Finola O’Farrell said that Australia-based BHP was responsible, despite not owning the dam at the time, finding its negligence, carelessness or lack of skill led to the collapse.Anglo-Australian BHP owns 50% of Samarco, the Brazilian company that operates the iron ore mine where the tailings dam ruptured on Nov. 5, 2015. Sludge from the burst dam destroyed the once-bustling village of Bento Rodrigues in Minas Gerais state and badly damaged other towns. Enough mine waste to fill 13,000 Olympic-size swimming pools poured into the Doce River in southeastern Brazil, damaging 600 kilometers (370 miles) of the waterway and killing 14 tons of freshwater fish, according to a study by the University of Ulster in the U.K. The river, which the Krenak Indigenous people revere as a deity, has yet to recover.A decade later, legal disputes have prolonged reconstruction and reparations and the river is still contaminated with heavy metals. Even as Brazil tries to define itself as a global environmental leader while hosting the U.N. COP30 climate summit, advocacy groups say the dam collapse is a reminder of industry-friendly policies that have ecological protection. Victims of the disaster called the ruling a historic victory in seeking justice.“We had to cross the Atlantic Ocean and go to England to finally see a mining company held to account," said Mônica dos Santos of the Commission for Those Affected by the Fundão Dam. Gelvana Rodrigues, whose 7-year-old son, Thiago, was killed in a mudslide, celebrated the step forward and said she wouldn't rest until those responsible are punished."The judge’s decision shows what we have been saying for the last 10 years: it was not an accident, and BHP must take responsibility for its actions,” Rodrigues said. The judge agreed with lawyers representing 600,000 Brazilians and 31 communities in the class-action case who argued that BHP was heavily involved in the Samarco operation and could have prevented the disaster, but instead encouraged raising the dam to allow more production. “The risk of collapse of the dam was foreseeable,” O'Farrell wrote in the 222-page decision. "It is inconceivable that a decision would have been taken to continue raising the height of the dam in those circumstances and the collapse could have been averted."BHP said that it plans to appeal.The claimants are seeking 36 billion pounds ($47 billion) in compensation, though the ruling only addressed liability. A second phase of the trial will determine damages. The case was filed in Britain because one of BHP’s two main legal entities was based in London at the time.Under the agreement, Samarco — which is also half owned by Brazilian mining giant Vale — agreed to pay 132 billion reais ($23 billion) over 20 years. The payments were meant to compensate for human, environmental and infrastructure damage.BHP had said the U.K. legal action was unnecessary, because it duplicated matters covered by legal proceedings in Brazil.The judge ruled that those who were compensated in the settlement in Brazil could still bring claims, though they might be limited by any waivers they signed. Brandon Craig, BHP’s president of Minerals Americas, said that nearly half of the claimants could be eliminated from the group because of settlement agreements they signed in Brazil.BHP shares fell more than 2% on the London market after the ruling and the company said that it would update its financial provisions.Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.Photos You Should See – Oct. 2025

Climate
Indigenous
Waste

The climate paradox of having a dog

My dog contributes to climate change. I love him anyway.

I’ve been a vegetarian for over a decade. It’s not because of my health, or because I dislike the taste of chicken or beef: It’s a lifestyle choice I made because I wanted to reduce my impact on the planet. And yet, twice a day, every day, I lovingly scoop a cup of meat-based kibble into a bowl and set it down for my 50-pound rescue dog, a husky mix named Loki.  Until recently, I hadn’t devoted a huge amount of thought to that paradox. Then I read an article in the Associated Press headlined “People often miscalculate climate choices, a study says. One surprise is owning a dog.”  The study, led by environmental psychology researcher Danielle Goldwert and published in the journal PNAS Nexus, examined how people perceive the climate impact of various behaviors — options like “adopt a vegan diet for at least one year,” or “shift from fossil fuel car to renewable public transport.” The team found that participants generally overestimated a number of low-impact actions like recycling and using efficient appliances, and they vastly underestimated the impact of other personal decisions, including the decision to “not purchase or adopt a dog.”  The real objective of the study was to see whether certain types of climate information could help people commit to more effective actions. But mere hours after the AP published its article, its aim had been recast as something else entirely: an attack on people’s furry family members. “Climate change is actually your fault because you have a dog,” one Reddit user wrote. Others in the community chimed in with ire, ridiculing the idea that a pet chihuahua could be driving the climate crisis and calling on researchers and the media to stop pointing fingers at everyday individuals.  Goldwert and her fellow researchers watched the reactions unfold with dismay. “If I saw a headline that said, ‘Climate scientists wanna take your dogs away,’ I would also feel upset,” she said. “They definitely don’t,” she added. “You can quote me on that.” Loki grinning on a hike in the Pacific Northwest. Claire Elise Thompson / Grist The study set out to understand how to shift behavior by communicating climate truths. Instead, its media coverage revealed a troubling psychological trade-off: When climate-related messaging strikes a nerve, it may actually turn people off from the work of shifting societal norms.  It’s an instinct I understand on some level. I love Loki, and my knee-jerk reaction is to defend the very personal choice of sharing one’s life with a dog. I also sympathize with redirecting the blame toward the biggest polluters: billionaires and fossil fuel companies (not Bon-Bon, the pet chihuahua in question). But is it irresponsible to shrug off any conversation about the environmental impact of our pets — something far more within our control than, say, the overthrow of capitalism?  Is there a way to have a frank discussion about the climate impact of our personal lives without it going to the dogs? Oftentimes, when I’m questioning how a particular climate behavior might fit into my life, I try to imagine how it looks in my vision of a sustainable future. It’s why, for instance, I don’t own a car and am dedicated to riding public transit, even though it isn’t always super convenient. I’m keen to be an early adopter of systems I believe in. But I struggle to imagine a future without companion animals, even knowing about their environmental impact — which is admittedly substantial. Dogs and cats eat meat-heavy diets, which is where the bulk of their carbon pawprint comes from. A 2017 study from UCLA found that dogs and cats are responsible for about 25 to 30 percent of the environmental impact of meat consumption in the United States. That’s equivalent to a year’s worth of driving by 13.6 million cars. For pets that eat traditional kibble or wet food, that protein may come from meat byproducts — otherwise-wasted animal parts, such as organs and bones, not approved for human consumption. But an increasing number of pet owners are opting to feed their fur babies “human-grade” meat products, which requires additional resources and generates extra emissions.  After they eat, of course, they poop. A lot. At least for dogs, that poop typically gets bagged in plastic and sent to the landfill. And it turns out all the biodegradable poop bags I’ve diligently bought over the years don’t help matters much; they also release greenhouse gases in landfills, and most composting programs don’t accept pet waste. With more dogs around than ever before — the U.S. dog population has steadily increased from 52.9 million in 1996 to a new peak of 89.7 million in 2024 — their overall climate toll is more than a chihuahua-sized issue. But pets are also more than just sources of carbon pollution. According to a 2023 Pew Research poll, 97 percent of owners say they consider their pets to be part of their families, with 51 percent of respondents saying they are on the same level as a human family member. So whenever their climate impact crops up in the discourse, as it has periodically, it makes sense that people tend to get defensive. Read Next Rez dogs are feeling the heat from climate change Taylar Dawn Stagner This don’t-you-dare-take-away-my-dog-you-horrible-environmentalist backlash is certainly not the first time the climate movement has been accused of depriving people of the things they love. Climate policy has long been painted as a force for austerity, coming for your burgers, your gas stoves, your coal-mining jobs. That framing has been politically potent, used by fossil fuel interests and their allies to stoke resentment and delay government action. Big Oil at once wants us to believe that the climate crisis is our fault and that we shouldn’t have to give up anything to fix it.  For some climate advocates, the solution has been to shift messaging away from individual responsibility and focus instead on big, systemic changes like overhauling our electricity and transit systems through governmental investment in clean energy. In her essay “I work in the environmental movement. I don’t care if you recycle,” author and podcaster Mary Annaïse Heglar wrote: “The belief that this enormous, existential problem could have been fixed if all of us had just tweaked our consumptive habits is not only preposterous; it’s dangerous … It’s victim blaming, plain and simple.”  Heglar and others have taken a strong stance against environmental purity — the idea that you can’t care about or advocate for systems-level change if you aren’t first changing your own habits. But not everyone agrees that individual actions should be completely deemphasized in the climate conversation. Kimberly Nicholas, a climate scientist and author of the popular book Under the Sky We Make, has argued that wealthy people living in wealthy countries — and globally, “wealthy” is a lower bar than you might think — do have a responsibility to slash their outsize carbon emissions. And particularly for those of us living in democracies, personal action isn’t just about the choices we make as consumers.  “There’s still an ongoing tension between personal and system change, or individual and collective action,” Nicholas said. “It’s really hard to get that right — to get the right balance there that acknowledges the role and the importance of both, and to talk about and study and describe both in a way that motivates people to take high-impact actions.” Goldwert saw that tension play out in her maligned climate communications study. In the experiment, participants reviewed 21 individual climate actions (like eating less meat) and five systemic actions (like voting) and rated their commitments to taking each action. Two test groups then received clarifying information about the relative impact of the 21 individual actions — one group was asked to estimate their ranking before learning how they actually ranked, the other group received the information straight-up. But participants didn’t receive any data about the carbon-mitigation potential of the five collective actions, which would be far more difficult to quantify.  What Goldwert’s team found surprised them: The teachings did nudge people toward higher-impact personal actions, but their stated likelihood of engaging in collective ones actually went down — a backfire effect that hints at the perils of focusing too much on personal lifestyle choices. “It might be kind of like a mental substitution,” Goldwert said. “People feel like, ‘OK, I’ve done my part individually. I kind of checked the box on climate action.’”  Participants were also asked to rate the “plasticity” of each of the actions, or how easy it would be to adopt. And those measurements revealed another nuance in how people view different forms of climate action. For the individual-focused options, participants were more likely to commit to actions they saw as requiring little effort. For the systemic actions, they were more interested in whether it would have an impact — something researchers are still working on quantifying.  “If you think voting or marching is just symbolic or ineffective, you’re not going to engage,” Goldwert said. “We have to show people evidence that their voice or their vote can shift policy, corporate practices, or social norms.” I, for one, was surprised to see that participants rated the commitment to “not purchase or adopt a dog” as easy. When I asked Goldwert what might be behind that, she noted that dog ownership is a decision people don’t make very often. It also doesn’t require any action at all for people who already don’t own dogs. The results surely would have been different if the listed action was “get rid of your existing dog.” (Which it was not — a point that readers seemed to miss, based on Reddit comments about the study and the “crazy emails” Goldwert said she received.) Still, for an animal lover like me, the idea of never adopting another dog doesn’t feel easy to commit to at all. It feels like an immense sacrifice. The sadness I feel at the thought of a future without dogs points me to another important factor when it comes to motivation for climate action: joy.  Loki in one of his most dramatic napping positions. Claire Elise Thompson / Grist Actions we take to try and mitigate the climate crisis may be partially driven by how easy they are for us or how effective we believe them to be — but any choice we make is also driven by what we find joy in. It’s an essential part of staying committed and resilient in the fight for a better future. In this way, carbon-intensive activities like dog ownership have value beyond their weight in emissions. “People have an emotional attachment to the people and animals and creatures that we love,” Nicholas said. “And that is actually, I think, very powerful. We’re not only going to solve climate change by lining up all the numbers — we certainly need to do that, but we have to tap into what people really care about and realize all those things are on the line and threatened by the amount of climate change we’re heading for with current policies.”  Would I fight to ensure that dogs, like my beloved Loki, can continue wagging happily on this planet? Heck yes, I would. I’ve always felt that being a pet person goes hand-in-hand with a sense of altruism and responsibility. And if not giving up our pets means fighting climate change, by voting, marching, donating, advocating, and consuming like our pets’ lives depend on it, I think we can all get on board.  That might also mean adjusting our pets’ diets. While making my dog a full vegetarian seems challenging (though technically possible), just cutting out beef has a significant impact — shifting to “lower-carbon meats” was even one of the high-impact actions included in Goldwert’s study. That’s one Loki can easily commit to. And we already buy insect-based treats, which leave a pungent odor in my pockets but seem to please his taste buds. There are also ways that dog ownership intersects with other climate-related behaviors. Anecdotally, I would say I travel less because I have a dog whose care I need to think about. Walking him every day has also made me vastly more connected to my local environment, the goings-on in my neighborhood, and my neighbors themselves — all of which are important aspects of building climate resilience. Some dogs have even been trained to sniff out invasive species and help identify environmental contaminants. (Not Loki, who has never worked a day in his life.) Read Next Dogs are sniffing out a legacy of pollution on the Blackfeet nation Zoya Teirstein Though I’d never thought about it quite this way before I read Goldwert’s study, the climate actions I take have a lot to do with the love I feel for Loki. Not because I want to leave a better world for him — I recognize the reality that I will almost certainly outlive him — but because my feelings for him bring me closer to the love I feel for all living things on this planet. This “ice age predator” who shares my home, as the anthropologist and comedian David Ian Howe puts it, is a living reminder of the relationship humans have with other species, going back many thousands of years. As the saying goes, “‘Be the person your dog thinks you are.’” And next time you get a little worked up about the realities of the climate crisis and your accountability within it, consider taking yourself on a walk. This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The climate paradox of having a dog on Nov 14, 2025.

Climate
Animals
Energy

Plan for Australia’s largest carbon capture project near Darwin criticised as creating ‘dumping ground’

Climate advocates fear the project, proposed by Japanese oil and gas giant Inpex, would turn the area into the ‘world’s largest carbon dumping ground’Sign up for climate and environment editor Adam Morton’s free Clear Air newsletter hereOil and gas giant Inpex has proposed Australia’s largest carbon capture facility in waters off the Northern Territory, which climate advocates have warned could turn Darwin into a carbon dumping ground.The Bonaparte carbon capture and storage (CCS) project proposes to pipe and store 8m to 10m tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2) into an underground aquifer located about 250km offshore west of Darwin, according to documents lodged with the federal environment department. Continue reading...

Oil and gas giant Inpex has proposed Australia’s largest carbon capture facility in waters off the Northern Territory, which climate advocates have warned could turn Darwin into a carbon dumping ground.The Bonaparte carbon capture and storage (CCS) project proposes to pipe and store 8m to 10m tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2) into an underground aquifer located about 250km offshore west of Darwin, according to documents lodged with the federal environment department.Analysts said those volumes – if achieved – would make it one of the largest CCS projects in the world, while noting that most failed to meet their targets.The Bonaparte project, a joint venture between Inpex, TotalEnergies and Woodside Energy, involved sourcing CO2 from “a range of industrial facilities in the region”, including nearby liquefied natural gas plants, and eventually imports from the Asia Pacific. Carbon emissions would be transported offshore via a pipeline through Darwin harbour. Sign up to get climate and environment editor Adam Morton’s Clear Air column as a free newsletterEnvironmentalists have raised concerns that the project would be used to justify the further expansion of fossil fuels in the territory.Globally, 77 CCS projects were now in operation, capturing about 64m tonnes a year, according to an industry status report.Josh Runciman, the lead Australian gas analyst at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, said most CO2 captured by the industry was used for enhanced oil recovery, a way to extract more oil and gas from reservoirs.In practice, he said most CCS projects designed purely to capture and store carbon dioxide had “massively underperformed”, and many ceased operation sooner than intended.Australia now had two commercial scale CCS projects: Santos’s Moomba project in South Australia and Chevron’s Gorgon facility in Western Australia. The Inpex proposal would be much larger.“A 10m tonne per annum target would make this the largest CCS project globally,” Runciman said – but even assuming it reached those targets, that would be a “very small fraction” of the CO2 emissions globally from oil and gas.The Gorgon facility, which started injecting carbon dioxide in 2019, had captured less than half of the volumes it had originally intended, at a cost of more than $200 a tonne, he said.The Guardian contacted Inpex for comment but did not receive a response. In July, the company’s managing director, Tetsu Murayama, said in a statement: “The Bonaparte CCS project could substantially contribute to decarbonising northern Australia and potentially the wider Indo-Pacific region.”skip past newsletter promotionSign up to Clear Air AustraliaAdam Morton brings you incisive analysis about the politics and impact of the climate crisisPrivacy Notice: Newsletters may contain information about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. If you do not have an account, we will create a guest account for you on theguardian.com to send you this newsletter. You can complete full registration at any time. For more information about how we use your data see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.after newsletter promotionThe Bonaparte project was one component of larger plans to convert Darwin’s Middle Arm Peninsula into a hub for carbon import and storage, with Dutch company Vopak separately developing a dedicated import terminal for liquefied CO2.Environment Centre NT said the proposals risked turning the Top End into the “world’s largest carbon dumping ground”.The group’s senior climate campaigner, Bree Ahrens, said: “This is a dirty deal to import the world’s pollution, and the Albanese Government needs to rule it out.”The environmental organisation expressed concerns that CCS was being used to greenwash a massive expansion of gas production in the Northern Territory.“Carbon capture and storage is just a fossil fuel industry’s excuse to keep extracting coal and gas while pretending to care about climate change.

Climate
CO2
Water

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Chicken Soup for the Soil

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Land Use
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The Wisdom To Survive: Climate Change, Capitalism & Community

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Climate
Business
Extinction

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