Around the world, the impacts of global warming are already being felt, as the Earth sees warmer than average temperatures. Last year was the warmest on record—and the first to see the average global temperature exceed 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. As the warming trend continues, experts say the four seasons as we know them will change—and it stands to have drastic impacts on the environment. “The Earth’s system is a very precarious balance,” says Ben Kirtman, professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Miami. “And so when the length of the seasons [starts changing], you can affect the Earth’s system in a way that is unanticipated.” How are the seasons being impacted by rising global temperatures? As Earth continues to warm, summers will get longer. “The length of the summer is going to extend,” says Akintomide Akinsanola, assistant professor at the University of Illinois Chicago. “Looking at the end of the 21st Century, we are likely going to have about six months, half a year of summer.” This means that the spring and autumn seasons will grow shorter, says Kirtman. “The longer summers are going to be eating into the fall on the one end and the early onset of summer is going to be spring on the other end.” The winter months will also shorten—and bring more rain or snow to much of the United States, says Kirtman. “You have the possibility of a slightly warmer atmosphere able to hold more water, which then can produce more snowstorms.” What are some of the biggest impacts we will see? Warmer temperatures are expected in all parts of the world. “Irrespective of your locality or your county, the extension of the summer length is going to affect everywhere,” says Akinsanola. The impact will vary depending on where you are. A longer summer can increase wildfire risks in the West, while the Northeast and Midwest are expected to see an increase in winter precipitation, according to Akinsanola. Changes to the seasons will also have big impacts on the environment—altering the growing seasons for plants and changing migration patterns for animals. “If you shorten the spring, you're severely restricting the planting cycle,” says Kirtman. How will people’s lives be affected? Changes to the seasons will impact our lives, says Akinsanola. “This has implications for humanity.” Increase in precipitation could leave areas with aging infrastructure at greater risk of flooding—especially in regions that were not built to withstand rain or snow. And the agricultural industry will be forced to adapt to longer, warmer summers—and potentially less water. “If you extend the length of the summer, elevated temperature can also cause intensified droughts,” says Akinsanola. “This also has an impact on water resources, agricultural productivity and the overall economy.” Climate change also exposes people to greater health risks. Factors like air pollution and extreme heat have been known to increase risks for respiratory and cardiovascular disease and stroke. Low-income communities will bear the brunt of it. The climate crisis disproportionately impacts the lowest income countries, and within the U.S., low-income and communities of color face higher risks of illness and death from extreme heat, climate-drive floods and air pollution. “This risk is more high for regions that are already vulnerable,” says Akinsanola.

Earth may be home to the most glorious beaches in the solar system today, but 3 billion years ago, Mars might have claimed the crown. That’s the conclusion of a new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, based on the work of a Chinese and American team of researchers working from data gathered by China’s Zhurong Mars rover. Where there’s a beach, the researchers suggest, there might well have been life. It’s long been all but settled science that Mars was once home to copious amounts of water. Its surface is stamped with ocean and sea basins and etched with ancient riverbeds, deltas, and alluvial fans. The water didn’t last long—just the first 1.5 billion years of the planet’s 4.5 billion year lifetime. Relatively early in its history, Mars lost its magnetic field, which allowed the solar wind to claw away most of its atmosphere; with that, much of the water sublimed into space. It’s in the sites of the vanished water that NASA and the Chinese National Space Administration have landed their rovers, studying not just the ancient geology, but the possibility of signs of ancient biology. One such formation, Utopia Planitia, a large plain in Mars’s northern hemisphere, was selected as the landing site for Zhurong, which touched down on Mars on May 15, 2021. The northern lowlands are believed to have been home to oceans that covered up to one third of the Martian surface. Zhurong has conducted some of its sleuthing into Utopia Planitia’s watery past with high-resolution cameras, which captured images of rocks that have the layered, pebbly look of sedimentary objects. But it is the rover’s ground-penetrating radar that has returned the most newsmaking finds. The instrument is capable of penetrating up to 330 feet below the surface, but Zhurong did not have to go nearly that deep to hit paydirt. Along a 0.8-mile stretch in Utopia Planitia, it discovered 76 geological reflectors—or discrete regions of rock that bounce seismic or radar waves back to the surface. Reflectors are hardly uncommon below ground; they’re what the shallow innards of worlds are basically made of. But these reflectors were special. For one thing, they were all sloping in the same direction, at an angle of six to 20 degrees. They also extended to depths ranging from 30 to 115 feet. That made them strikingly similar to the depth and inclination of underground beachfront formations on Earth. The researchers cited the Bay of Bengal as a close Earthly analog to the Martian reflectors, but they also matched them up against 21 other beaches on Earth, which incline at angles of four to 26 degrees. “We’re finding places on Mars that used to look like ancient beaches and ancient river deltas,” said Benjamin Cardenas, assistant professor of geology at Penn State University and a co-author of the paper, in a statement that accompanied its release. “We found evidence for wind, waves, no shortage of sand—a proper, vacation-style beach.” It wasn’t a given that the angled reflectors were indeed formed by a vanished ocean. They could have been sculpted by wind, but the investigators ruled that out because there would have been more chaotic variation in the angles along the 0.8-mile stretch, rather than the gradual sloping that Zhurong documented. Rivers could have been responsible too, but the area Zhurong studied lacked the telltale river valleys that would have been left behind after the water evaporated. “Therefore,” the authors wrote, “we conclude that the dip reflectors under the Zhurong landing site are most consistent with those formed in a coastal environment.” Could that coastal environment have given rise to life? The authors do not rule it out. “This stood out to us immediately because it suggests there were waves, which means there was a dynamic interface of air and water,” Cardenas said. “When we look back at where the earliest life on Earth developed, it was in the interaction between oceans and land, so this is painting a picture of ancient habitable environments, capable of harboring conditions friendly toward microbial life.”

If you’re like every other earthling, you may want to keep your head down on Dec. 22, 2032. That’s the day an asteroid dubbed 2024 YR4 may strike our planet. Cosmic bookmakers don’t make an impact terribly likely—but the risk is on the rise. According to NASA’s Center for Near Earth Object Studies (CNEOS) and the European Space Agency (ESA) the likelihood of a collision was originally just 1.2%, per a calculation made in late January. However, on the week of Feb. 10, that number jumped to 2.3%, as 2024 YR4’s trajectory was more closely tracked. But on Feb. 18, the CNEOS raised the risk further, to 3.1%. That breaks the record previously held by the asteroid Apophis, an 1,100-ft. object discovered in 2004 that was at first given a 2.7% probability of colliding with us—before further observations lowered that probability to near zero any time within the next century. Now 2024 YR4 takes the crown. The object’s original 1.2% risk estimate pushed it past the 1% threshold that requires reporting the danger to multiple planetary defense authorities, including the U.S. Office of Science and Technology Policy, the United Nations’ Space Mission Planning Advisory Group, and the U.N.’s Office for Outer Space Affairs. Despite that red alert, the space rock does not remotely pose an existential threat to life on Earth even if it does collide with us. It measures 130 to 300 feet across, a pebble compared to the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs, which is estimated to have been six to nine miles in length. On the other hand, on Feb. 15, 2013, an object that measured just 65 feet across exploded in the skies over Chelyabinsk, Russia, damaging 7,200 buildings and injuring 1,500 people. At up to five times the size of the Chelyabinsk object, 2024 YR4 has the potential to do a lot more than five times the damage. According to volcanologist and science journalist Robin George Andrews, every time an asteroid’s radius doubles, it increases its kinetic wallop eight-fold. Astronomers rank the danger an asteroid poses on something known as the Torino Scale, a zero to 10 hazard index that starts with rocks that pose no risk to us at all and runs to those that are “capable of causing global climatic catastrophe that may threaten the future of civilization as we know it.” The asteroid making so much news today ranks as a three, representing “a chance of collision capable of localized destruction.” So should you worry? Almost certainly not. For all of the talk about fraying global alliances and the challenge governments have handling crises competently and well, protecting the Earth from incoming ordnance is one area in which political leaders, scientific minds, and public policy makers have their act together. A global web of space agencies, private observatories, and both Earth- and space-based telescopes are keeping a constant watch on the skies, tracking thousands of asteroids that pose even a minimal risk to Earth. What’s more, in the event a space rock does represent a threat, a NASA spacecraft proved in 2022 that the basic technology exists to intercept and deflect it before it comes anywhere near us. It’s only recently that we became aware of 2024 YR4 at all. The rock was discovered on Dec. 27, 2024, by the NASA-funded Asteroid Terrestrial-Impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) telescope in Chile. The size, trajectory, and speed of the asteroid immediately made it a cause of concern. Not only is it bigger than the Chelyabinsk object and potentially headed for Earth, it is also moving fast—about 38,000 mph, according to NASA’s calculations, or more than twice the velocity of an Earth-orbiting satellite. It’s that screaming speed that causes even a relatively small asteroid to pack such destructive force, since the faster an object moves the more energy it carries—energy that is dissipated when it collides with something like a planet. The location of 2024 YR4 qualifies it not just as any asteroid, but a near-Earth object (NEO). NEOs are defined as asteroids that hug the inner solar system, where we live, coming within 1.3 astronomical units of the sun. A single astronomical unit is the distance from the sun to the Earth, or 93 million miles. Once 2024 YR4’s NEO status was established, ATLAS astronomers acted fast, alerting not only the U.S. Office of Science and Technology Policy and the U.N., but the ESA, the CNEOS, and perhaps most important, the International Asteroid Warning Network (IAWN), a consortium of no fewer than 59 governments, national space programs, and observatories that keep their eyes on the skies, cataloguing and tracking the flight paths of hundreds of thousands of asteroids, with special attention paid to the NEOs. Currently NASA, the IAWN, and other sky-watchers are monitoring about 38,000 NEOs, continually tracking their trajectories to determine if any changes in their flight paths warrant moving them either up or down the Torino Scale. At the moment, 2024 YR4 is close enough to Earth to be easily visible to telescopes. That will change, however, in April, when its flight path carries it around the sun, making it impossible to see until June of 2028. NASA is taking advantage of the time it has left before 2024 YR4 vanishes, reserving observation time on the James Webb Space Telescope—the most powerful off-Earth observatory ever built—to further investigate the rock’s size, mass, and flight path. Not only can all of these observations help predict when and if an asteroid will strike Earth, it can also provide at least a general range of what the impact point on the planet would be. With roughly 70% of Earth’s surface covered by ocean, that by itself means only a 30% chance a population center will be struck. For now, NASA astronomers have sketched out a very general 2024 YR4 impact risk corridor running from the eastern Pacific Ocean to northern South America, the Atlantic coast of Africa, the Arabian Sea, and South Asia. That’s an awful lot of earthly real estate, but when the asteroid becomes visible again and draws closer to us, a much more precise ground-zero could be determined. The question, of course, is what do we do if calculations determine that we are in the cosmic cross hairs? With months—even years—to prepare, evacuation of endangered population centers is always possible. In January of 2021, the then-outgoing Trump Administration published a study of NEO emergency protocols, which reached the conclusion, shared by astronomers, that “mitigation measures that can be taken on Earth to protect lives and property include evacuation of the impact area and movement of critical infrastructure.” Sheltering in place is also an option, depending on the size of the asteroid and its anticipated destructiveness. A 2024 study in Acta Astronautica concluded that, at least outside of the bullseye of the impact zone, “seeking shelter in the basement of a reinforced concrete building or storm shelter, or in a home-built shelter in the basement of a house would suffice as alternatives to evacuation.” The authors of the paper saw hurricane preparedness measures as a good model for asteroid preparedness. But humanity does not have to be a passive target. In 2022, NASA launched the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft, whose sole goal was to fly 7 million miles to the 525-foot asteroid Dimorphos, and crash into it at 14,000 miles per hour. Dimorphos is a moonlet of the larger 2,560-ft asteroid Didymos, making one revolution around its parent rock every 11 hours and 55 minutes. The purpose of the mission was to see if the impact could change the speed and direction of Dimorphos—a proof-of-principle exercise to determine if the same kind of planned collision could deflect an incoming asteroid. The mission succeeded wildly, accelerating Dimorphos’s orbit by 32 minutes, tripling NASA’s most optimistic projections. “This mission shows that NASA is trying to be ready for whatever the universe throws at us,” said then-NASA Administrator Bill Nelson when the results were released. “NASA has proven we are serious as a defender of the planet.” Building a fleet of asteroid-deflecting spacecraft takes time and money, of course, and one mission to one harmless moonlet is a long way from deploying a global, Iron Dome-style anti-asteroid system. Until that hardware is in place, humanity is doing the next best thing, joining hands to scan the skies and sound a timely alert should our collective welfare ever be threatened.

Pluto will mark a birthday of sorts on March 23, 2178. No one is likely to be there to celebrate it, of course. Even if humanity is a multi-planet species by then, it would be a decided challenge to visit the tiny, distant world, which measures just 1,477 miles in diameter—or little more than half the coast-to-coast distance of the continental U.S.—lies up to 4.67 billion miles from Earth, and features a surface temperature as low as -400°F. Still that date will be one to circle on cosmic calendars. It takes Pluto slightly over 248 Earth years to orbit the sun, which means that on March 23, 2178, one Plutonian year will have elapsed since the dwarf planet was first spotted, on Feb. 18, 1930. “NINTH PLANET DISCOVERED ON EDGE OF SOLAR SYSTEM; FIRST FOUND IN 84 YEARS,” the New York Times announced in a front-page, all-caps headline in its March 14, 1930 edition, the day after the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Ariz., announced its big find. “In the little cluster of orbs which scampers across the sidereal abyss under the name of the solar system,” the Times went on, “there are, be it known, nine, instead of a mere eight worlds.” This Feb. 18 marks 95 years since the Lowell Observatory hit paydirt, an achievement made not by one of the observatory’s professional astronomers, but by amateur Clyde Tombaugh, who at the time was just 24 years old. Not long before coming to work at the observatory, Tombaugh had built his own telescope with which he had conducted observations of Mars and Jupiter. He made drawings of the two planets—drawings he sent to the Lowell Observatory, hoping the astronomers there would offer comment and critique. Vesto Slipher, the director of the observatory, did Tombaugh one better, offering the eager stargazer a job. His assignment would be equal parts tedious and transformative: scanning hundreds upon hundreds of images of the skies, looking for the elusive world known at that point only as Planet X. Percival Lowell, the astronomer and businessman who built the observatory, had long theorized that a ninth planet existed somewhere out in the cosmic void, reckoning that it accounted for wobbles that astronomers had observed in the orbits of Uranus and Neptune. He searched for Planet X from 1905 until his death in 1916, without luck. It would take another generation before the observatory, aided by the patient Tombaugh, would at last have success. The 95 years since then have been ones of changing fortune for little Pluto. For decades after the first eight planets were barnstormed, orbited, and landed upon by spacecraft from Earth, Pluto remained the only one of the solar system’s major worlds that never received a visit—a slight that was not rectified until the New Horizons spacecraft flew by it in 2015. In 2006, after New Horizons was launched but before it could complete its nine-plus year journey, Pluto suffered the indignity of being demoted from planet to dwarf planet by the International Astronomical Union (IAU). And it’s as a dwarf planet that Pluto is taught to students today. But Pluto has in many ways only grown in astronomers’ estimations. It is now known to be part of an entire system of objects, gravitationally anchoring a cluster of five moons; it has a surface marked by mountains and craters and valleys and plains; it is home to abundant quantities of water ice and may even harbor a liquid ocean beneath its surface, making it an improbable—but not impossible—home for extraterrestrial life. “New Horizons shattered a major paradigm of planetary science,” says Alan Stern, the mission’s principal investigator. “Pluto turns out to have as much complexity as Mars or Earth, so much so that I know planetary scientists who call Pluto ‘the other Red Planet.’” None of the new discoveries about Pluto would have been made, of course, had the little world not been spotted in the first place—an achievement that took sublime attention to detail. Tombaugh performed his cosmic sleuthing thanks to a telescope with a 13-in. mirror. He used it to gather images of parts of the night sky about as large as a fist held at arm’s length, all in a large area in which the late Lowell had predicted Planet X would be found. Tombaugh captured two images of each spot of sky on photographic plates. The second image of every pair was typically taken several days after the first. Over that relatively short period, background stars would not have moved at all, but a foreground object like a planet would have detectably shifted its position. During the days, when stargazing was impossible, Tombaugh would analyze the photographic plates with an optical device known as a blink comparator. Beams of light from two microscopes in the instrument would shine through both plates in each pair, and Tombaugh would turn a dial, flipping the focus of the comparator first to one plate and then to the other, looking for a single point from among the spangle of points on each image that had moved. He discovered multiple objects this way—but they were too small and moved too fast to be a planet, and instead had to be asteroids. Finally, on two plates taken on Jan. 23 and Jan. 30, 1930, he found the right-sized point in the right patch of sky moving the right amount for a distant planet. The point shifted its position by just 3 millimeters on the plates, which factored out to a world approximately 43 times farther from the sun than the Earth is. Pluto had been found. “All observations indicate the object to be the one which Lowell saw mathematically,” said the observatory in a statement. The new world got its name not long after, thanks to 11-year-old Venetia Burney, of Oxford, England. Over breakfast on the day after the announcement was made, Venetia’s grandfather was reading the account of the new planet aloud from the paper and the young girl straightaway recommended the name Pluto, the ruler of the underworld. Her grandfather mentioned the idea to an astronomer he knew who in turn cabled it to the Lowell Observatory, where it was quickly approved. “I don’t quite know why I suggested it,” Venetia said in a 2006 interview with NASA. “My grandfather read out at breakfast the great news and said he wondered what it would be called. For some reason, after a short pause, I said, ‘Why not call it Pluto?’ I did know, I was fairly familiar with Greek and Roman legends from various children’s books that I had read, and of course, I did know about the solar system and the names the other planets have. And so I suppose I just thought that this was a name that hadn’t been used. And there it was. The rest was entirely my grandfather’s work.” Lonely Pluto would eventually turn out to be not so lonely after all. In 1978, astronomers at the U.S. Naval Observatory discovered a bulge in their images of Pluto—one that moved around the planet once every 6.4 days. The 1,477-mile wide world had a 751-mile wide moon—the largest moon relative to the size of its parent body in the solar system. The newly discovered satellite was dubbed Charon, and astronomers would ultimately find that the two bodies were gravitational co-equals, with Charon not orbiting a stationary Pluto, but with both worlds orbiting each other in a loop-de-loop pas de deux. From 2005 to 2012, the Hubble Space Telescope would ultimately discover four more smaller moons—dubbed Nix, Hydra, Kerberos, and Styx. The complexity of the Plutonian system is reflected in the complexity of Pluto itself. New Horizons discovered that Pluto is home to the largest glacier in the solar system, one measuring more than 386,000 square miles, or larger than Texas and Oklahoma combined. What’s more, the glacier is pristine, with no craters, meaning that it is regularly being resurfaced. “The glacier was born yesterday, geologically,” says Stern. “We find examples all over the planet of young terrains, middle-aged terrains, and ancient terrains. Pluto has been active for four and a half billion years.” The secret to all of that activity is Pluto’s probable underground ocean. The water ice on the surface of the world suggests that there should be more water hidden below ground. Over the course of the past 4.5 billion years, that water has been slowly freezing, a process that is likely still underway. That provides the world with energy. “It’s physics 101 that as water freezes it releases latent heat,” says Stern. “That is probably a part of the energy source that’s powering Pluto’s geology. The ocean will continue to freeze for the next one or two billion years, and Pluto will continue to be active.” The question for planetary scientists and exobiologists is whether Pluto’s ancient ocean may have been able to cook up life. The solar system’s 293 moons include several believed to harbor oceans, including Saturn’s Enceladus, Jupiter’s Europa, and Neptune’s Triton. Enceladus regularly emits frosty water geysers, produced when the gravity of Saturn flexes the much smaller moon. The Cassini spacecraft flew through the plumes in 2015 and detected organic compounds that could be precursors of life. “I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to say we might find biology in some of these ocean worlds,” says Stern. “And who knows? Pluto could be one of them.” For all of this promise, Pluto struggles for respect, with the “dwarf planet” label continuing to rankle Pluto partisans. The IAU defends the definition based on Pluto’s orbit. Unlike other planets that have a more or less circular, equatorial orbit around the sun, Pluto’s is sharply inclined and highly elliptical, with a perihelion, or close approach to the sun, of roughly 2.7 billion miles, and an apehelion, or furthest remove from the sun, of 4.67 billion miles. That, plus Pluto’s small size—smaller than our moon—suggested that the world did not accrete in its current orbit from the primordial gas and dust that gave rise to the sun and the planets, but rather formed farther out, in the Kuiper Belt, a vast band of icy, rocky bodies that surrounds the solar system. From there, it broke free and entered its screwy orbit. Allow little Pluto to keep its planetary status and you would have to confer the same honor on Eris, a Kuiper Belt object of about the same size, as well as any other, similar worlds that might be discovered—raising the prospect of a solar system with an uncounted number of planets. Stern thinks the dwarf planet distinction is nonsensical—an arbitrary parsing of cosmic definitions. “Small planets are planets too,” he says. “Just because the sun is a small star we don’t call it a dwarf star. We’re not afraid of large numbers of planets; we’re not afraid of schoolchildren having to learn all their names. After all, kids don’t have to memorize every element in the periodic table.” Further exploration of Pluto is not likely anytime soon. New Horizons has long since soared billions of miles into deep space and no other Plutonian missions are currently planned. Still, the oddball world at the edge of our solar system will continue to intrigue astronomers. “My little saying in public talks is that Pluto defies all of the textbooks,” says Stern. “What that proves is that Pluto doesn’t read the textbooks.”

With much of the U.S. blanked in snow this week, many might be wondering what our warming climate means for the future of our winters. The impacts of climate change might be far more noticeable during the summer—in 2024 the U.S. had its fourth hottest summer on record. But rising global temperatures are changing winters too. And people are noticing; 66% of Americans think global warming is affecting weather in the United States, according to a fall 2024 survey released this month by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication. “The existence of winter doesn't disprove climate change,” says Stuart Evans, assistant professor of geography at the University of Buffalo. “Climate change is a long term trend that makes winter warmer, but it's not erasing the occurrence of winter.” Here’s how winters are impacted by climate change: How will snow storms be impacted by climate change?? Most of the U.S. can expect to see more winter precipitation due to climate change, whether that be rain or snow, says Evans. “A warmer atmosphere will carry more moisture,” he explains. This means that more of that moisture will be released as precipitation. A slightly warmer but still below freezing temperature can also produce more snow than during extreme cold, so some areas might see more snow as temperatures rise. Some places will also see unique changes. For example, storm systems are shifting to different regions, says Chris Forest, professor of climate dynamics at Penn State University. “We're seeing a lot more developments that are not occurring to our west, but they're occurring to the Northwest,” he adds. As a result, he says, the rain that would previously drop over the west is now falling as snow over the Great Plains. In some places—like Michigan or New York—“lake effect snow” might also become more common. The phenomenon occurs when warmer temperatures prevent the lakes from freezing over, causing the warmer water to evaporate into passing cold fronts and fall down as snow. What parts of the country will be most affected? Most of the country will be affected—in fact, many people already are. In the U.S., 283 million people—about 85% of the population—experienced at least one winter day with warm average temperatures last winter, according to Climate Central’s 2024 Climate Shift Index. The impact will look differently depending on where in the country you are. The west coast is seeing warmer, drier winters than 20 years ago, while the Mid-West has fewer days below freezing, says Forest. “Twenty or 30 years ago, we wouldn't have had as many of these contrasts of the warm West with the cold East,” says Forest. One fall 2024 study in the journal npj Climate and Atmospheric Science found that overall winter precipitation and extreme weather events will increase across most of the country. The Northeast and Midwest are expected to see the greatest change, while the southern Great Plains—including Texas and Oklahoma—will see more frequent extreme dry events instead. Will winters get shorter with climate change? Yes. “Winters will get shorter everywhere, simply because there will be fewer days below freezing, or fewer days of frost, or whatever the metric of winter that you want to use,” says Evans, who notes that, though some places will warm faster than others, within the U.S. those differences will be modest. For some, this might be a welcome change. “If you think that winter is cold and unpleasant and you like it when it's warm, well then winter’s gonna get better,” says Evans. But for others dependent on snow or cold temperatures—whether for sports or agriculture—this change likely isn’t good news. What are the consequences of warmer winters? Warmer, shorter winters will have a noticeable impact. A shorter winter could have big impacts on U.S. agriculture produced in the Midwest. “Snowfall is probably the most important thing, because it's supplying water for the Great Plains during the winter time,” says Forest. “Midwestern states are primarily agriculture, and therefore the water that's coming in is a necessary necessity to have in order to make sure that our crops are growing.” Milder winters can also put crops at greater risk for pests and diseases that thrive at warmer temperatures. Stone fruits, walnuts, and almonds produced in California’s Central Valley are already at risk. Plants and animals that have evolved to acclimatize to intense, cold periods might find it challenging to adapt. Polar bears might lose their habitats as snow melts earlier, while insects and animals might lay eggs earlier as they take seasonal cues from the warmer weather. Meanwhile, infrastructure might not be prepared for heavy snowstorms—especially as storms spread to places that might not be accustomed to snow—as we saw earlier this year, when a snowstorm shut down the roads, highways, and bridges in Florida, as most cities lacked snowplows to remove the snow. “We need to be ready,” says Forest.

President Donald Trump is known to drink many Diet Cokes, but one thing you’re not likely to ever see him using again is a paper straw. “We’re going back to plastic straws,” Trump announced after signing an Executive Order on Feb. 10 that declared it U.S. policy to end the use of paper straws. “I’ve had [paper straws] many times, and on occasion, they break, they explode,” Trump said. “It’s a ridiculous situation.” Trump’s crusade against paper straws is nothing new. His 2020 presidential campaign branded them as “liberal” and sold nearly half a million dollars worth of Trump-branded plastic straws. Here’s what to know about the history of—and controversy over—plastic and paper straws. Why do we need straws at all? Humans have historically needed assisting tubes to drink—the earliest indications of straw use were found in an ancient Sumerian tomb dating back to 3,000 B.C. Straws also play a huge role for people with disabilities. The Center for Disability Rights says those with mobility and strength issues may have difficulty lifting glasses to their mouths, and others may need straws to ingest their medication. What’s wrong with plastic straws? Single-use plastics, which are not recyclable, have long been the bane of environmental and public health advocates. Some of the earliest campaigns specifically against plastic straws began in 2011, including nine-year-old Milo Cress’ Be Straw Free and Jackie Nuñez’s The Last Plastic Straw. But the anti-plastic straw movement really took off in 2015 after an eight-minute video from marine researchers showed a sea turtle whose nostril was blocked, prompting one of the researchers to have to use a pair of pliers to bloodily pull out the culprit: a plastic straw. The World Wildlife Fund has warned that straws—and other plastic waste—pose risks to animals if not properly disposed of, with many marine animals mistaking them for food. Plastic pollution has been estimated to kill 100,000 marine mammals yearly, according to the WWF. And nonprofit Ocean Conservancy says it has collected nearly 14 million plastic straws and stirrers on beaches and waterways globally over the last 35 years. Straws and other single-use plastic items can also disintegrate over time, shedding particles known as microplastics into our water and food, which studies say can cause serious health issues like cancers and respiratory disorders. In 2017, Entourage star Adrian Grenier’s foundation Lonely Whale launched the Strawless Ocean initiative, which invited the public and celebrities to commit to stopping the use of single-use plastic straws altogether. How did paper straws come about? The modern drinking straw was invented by American inventor Marvin C. Stone in 1888, and his patented version was actually made out of paper and wax. As plastic became increasingly cheaper to produce after World War II, the 1960s saw a plastic version produced en masse, according to the National Geographic, with variations such as jumbo and crazy plastic straws booming in the 1980s. The paper straw didn’t regain prominence until plastic straws were pushed aside for environmental concerns. In July 2018, Seattle became the first major U.S. city to enforce a ban on plastic straws in food service, offering compostable alternatives upon request. Months later, California signed into law a ban on full-service restaurants automatically giving customers plastic straws. Other U.S. cities and states like Oregon and Vermont followed suit with similar laws restricting plastic straw use. The private sector also pitched in. American Airlines and Alaska Airlines rolled out initiatives in 2018 to phase out plastic straw use, as did Disney and McDonald’s (though the latter admitted that the new paper ones weren’t recyclable). Starbucks removed plastic straws completely from their stores by 2020. Outside the U.S., other countries have also made progress in eliminating plastic straw use. In 2018, Vanuatu made history as the first country to ban plastic straws altogether. In July 2021, the European Union banned the sale of certain single-use plastics, including straws, in E.U. markets. China also enacted a plastics ban in 2021 that prohibited restaurants from providing single-use straws. In 2024, as President Joe Biden’s term drew to a close, his administration announced that the federal government—the world’s largest buyer of consumer goods—would phase out plastic straws and other single-use plastics from federal food services by 2027 and from all federal operations by 2035. The backlash against paper straws “They want to ban straws. Has anyone tried those paper straws? They’re not working too good,” Trump said at a 2020 campaign rally, in large part echoing public sentiment. Even liberals argued against paper straws as early as 2019, raising questions about their efficacy as well as whether they’re actually any better for the environment. A 2020 paper from researchers in Brazil found that plastic drinking straws have “better environmental performance” compared to paper and reusable alternatives, and a U.K. government study said paper straws have greater carbon dioxide emissions when they rot in landfills compared to plastic ones. And a 2023 study published in the journal Food Additives & Contaminants found that “forever chemicals”—also linked to a bevy of health issues—were found in higher amounts in paper straws compared to their plastic counterparts. Trump’s executive order The Trump Administration branded the campaign against plastic straws “irrational” and ordered a reversal of the Biden-era policies regarding their use by the federal government. It directed paper straws to be no longer procured and provided in agency buildings and a National Strategy to End the Use of Paper Straws to be devised within 45 days that would address the elimination of policies against plastic straws nationwide. The plastics industry has welcomed the order. “Straws are just the beginning,” said Plastics Industry Association President and CEO Matt Seaholm. “‘Back to Plastic’ is a movement we should all get behind. We appreciate President Trump’s leadership in recognizing the value of plastics and look forward to working with his Administration to advance our industry.”But environmentalists aren’t so happy. “Once again, President Trump is pretending to be a populist while siding with his Big Oil buddies over the public interest,” said Greenpeace USA’s senior plastics campaigner Lisa Ramsden in a statement. Trump’s move headed in the “wrong direction,” Christy Leavitt, U.S. plastics campaign director of non-profit conservation group Oceana, said in a similar statement. “Trump is announcing executive orders that are more about messaging than finding solutions.”

If the earth is warming, why are we still getting winter storms? Climate change is leading to shorter and warmer winters in North America, experts agree. But that doesn’t mean that winter storms will become a thing of the past. In fact, climate change is making storms more intense. As the Earth’s atmosphere warms, it’s able to collect and hold more moisture—which means more precipitation. “The atmosphere behaves a bit like a sponge, and that means that it can suck up more moisture when it's warmer, but also that when you wring the sponge out, more moisture can fall out of the sky in the form of precipitation, and in the winter, snowfall,” says Daniel Horton, associate professor in the Department of Earth, Environmental and Planetary Sciences at Northwestern University. As a result, some areas are beginning to get more precipitation year-over-year. “Winter storms themselves are starting to produce a lot more extreme precipitation totals, freezing rain, sleet, even snowfall, in some of these areas,” says Jason Furtado, associate professor of meteorology at the University of Oklahoma. “This year in particular, a lot of this snow is actually happening in places we don't think about it happening like New Orleans or on the Florida Gulf Coast.” As the Arctic warms, high pressure systems build in the region’s atmosphere, displacing cold fronts and causing them to move south, creating stronger storms. Though the phenomenon has been occurring for years, warming temperatures means these intrusions are occurring more frequently. “We start to get these big, large, high pressure systems that build across the Arctic, and that serves to actually displace and remove some of that cold air and start to surge it more into our latitudes,” says Furtado. Storms feed off of the temperature difference between the cold Arctic air and warmer lower latitudes. The result is two-fold, says Furtado: “Now we will have more energetic storms that are able to also hold more moisture from oceans because the atmosphere is slightly warmer.” Lakeside regions—like New York and Michigan—will also find themselves vulnerable to a phenomenon called “lake effect snow” as the regions see warmer temperatures. “Our lakes are warming, and they stay warm longer through the winter season,” says Horton. Because of that, they don’t ice over as much as they used to, and the warmer water evaporates into the passing cold fronts. “They have more of a capacity to release their moisture when the cold, Arctic air flows over them.” It’s just one example of how, around the United States, winters are no longer looking like they once did. “We've been used to a certain climate regime for the past fifty plus years,” says Furtado. “And we're going through this transition now where things are rapidly changing.”

The second full moon of 2025, dubbed the “snow moon” will be at its peak this week. The moon, named after the winter season’s heavy snowfall, arrives just as much of the U.S. is expected to be impacted by back-to-back snowstorms. Here’s what to know about the snow moon. When is the snow moon? The snow moon will reach peak illumination Wednesday morning at 8:53 a.m. EST, according to earthsky.org. The moon will be below the horizon at this time, so the Almanac’s moon guide recommends looking for it on Tuesday or Wednesday night. The moon will peak above the horizon around sunset, and reach its highest point in the sky around midnight. How can I see it? You can view the snow moon with your naked eye, but try stargazing in an area with less light pollution to appreciate its full beauty. If you’re not able to catch a glimpse on Wednesday, the moon will also appear full in the days before and after its peak—though with most of the U.S. expected to be impacted by storms this week, some stargazers might find it hard to catch it. Why is it called the snow moon? Many early Native American tribes kept track of time through phases of the moon, and some of the names were adopted by European colonists. The “snow moon” was named in reference to the heavy snow that falls during the winter season. Because the season also brought bad weather that made hunting difficult, it was also referred to as the “Hunger Moon.” When's the next full moon after this one? The next full moon, named the “worm moon” will take place in mid-March. Until then, keep an eye out for Venus, the planet named after the Roman goddess of love, which will reach peak brightness on Feb. 14—just in time for Valentine’s Day.

The giant, 40-ft. space telescope resting in the airtight, climate-controlled clean-room at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., wants nothing to do with the microscopic dust particles clinging to your clothing. So before you enter the room, you first must stand in a chamber that blows high-powered, compressed air at you from head to toe, sweeping you clean. Next you dress up in surgical scrubs—booties, head covering, mask, blouse, and pants—and pass through a series of doors that take you into successively more-sterile ante rooms. Only then, when your dust can pose no danger to the delicate machine in the center of the room, can you join the Nancy Grace Roman Space telescope on the factory floor. There, technicians are busy completing its assembly in preparation for its launch in May 2027 to a spot in space close to 1 million miles from Earth. From there it may transform our understanding of the cosmos. “The vast discovery power of this telescope is going to expand our window of knowledge by orders of magnitude,” says Jamie Dunn, the Roman telescope’s project manager. “You’re going to have a tremendous amount of data available to tens of thousands of scientists. It’s just mind-boggling.” “We [will be able to] move quickly and map out very large areas of the sky,” adds Josh Schlieder, the telescope’s wide-field instrument scientist. “We [will] detect hundreds of millions of galaxies to very high accuracy with very deep imaging.” Roman will indeed do all that and more. The telescope will be able to look at a patch of sky 100 times larger than both the Hubble Space Telescope and the James Webb Space Telescope can. It will be able to peer up to 13.2 billion light years away, collecting images of the 13.8-billion year old universe when it was just 600 million years old. The 18 detectors in its wide-field infrared imaging camera are equipped with 16 million pixels each, providing exquisite image resolution. And its 5.6 ft. (1.7 m) high-gain antenna will be able to send a firehose of pictures and data back to Earth at unprecedented speed. What’s more, all of this data will be open-source—available to the world. “Roman will deliver one terabyte of data a day,” says Rob Zellem, deputy project scientist for communications. “That’s the equivalent of one gaming computer a day.” That gusher of findings will include new observations of exoplanets—or planets orbiting other stars; new surveys of the structure of the Milky Way; and new studies of dark energy, the mysterious, invisible force that causes the universe to expand continuously at an ever-accelerating rate. “Part of our core science for Roman is to do surveys that allow us to measure the properties of very large numbers of galaxies throughout cosmic history,” says Schlieder, standing just feet from the Roman telescope on the clean-room floor as bunny-suited technicians tend to it. “By measuring their positions, their velocity, how fast they're moving toward or away from us and their shapes, we'll be able to place new constraints on the properties of dark energy.” The telescope has a lot of assembly and other work ahead of it before it finally takes to space atop a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket two years down the line and begins to perform that work. It may be getting pampered today but it will be punished before long as it goes through testing—set to begin late this spring—to ensure that it can tolerate the harsh conditions of deep space and the violent, high-energy shaking that the Falcon will subject it to as its 27 engines light, putting out 5 million pounds of thrust. “The testing includes electrical testing; vibration testing; acoustical testing, to simulate the sound of a launch; and a thermal vacuum test, [in which] we take it in a big chamber, pump out all the air, and go through warm to cold temperatures, to test out all of its components in a real space-like operating environment,” says Schlieder. Only if the $4 billion telescope survives that pounding will it get its chance to leave the planet. In keeping with the potentially epochal science Roman will perform once it’s in space, NASA has decided to fling its findings and discoveries open to the world. Typically, the data returned and the discoveries made by space observatories like Hubble and the Webb have a period of 6 to 12 months during which they are available only to the astronomers who did the work. Roman’s findings will be made immediately available to the public—lay people and scientists alike—on a universally accessible website. That’s because Roman’s huge field of view will allow many astronomers—and non-astronomers—at once to gather data from uncounted regions of the sky, with no single principal investigator directing the observation. “We will not have individual teams that get proprietary access to the data,” says Schlieder. “The data will be obtained, it'll be downloaded to the Earth, it'll be processed, and it will be posted in an archive for anyone to go grab and do what they want.” “Every single Roman observation will have huge and broad science return,” adds Julie McEnery, Roman’s senior project scientist. “The Roman surveys are defined collaboratively by the science community and collectively owned by the science community.”

If you were among the 68,500 fans in the stands to watch the National Football League’s (NFL) San Francisco 49ers host the Arizona Cardinals on Oct. 6, 2024, you could be forgiven for forgetting that football is a fall and winter sport. Temperatures at game time that day peaked at 98°F—hot enough that the 49ers swapped out their uniforms, switching from red jerseys and gold pants to red jerseys and white pants, to reflect more heat away. “Hopefully [that] helps a little,” 49ers coach Kyle Shanahan told ESPN before the game. The two teams got through the day without serious injury, but athletic exertion in extreme heat can be dangerous—even deadly. Players are at risk of heat exhaustion, characterized by symptoms including faintness, dizziness, fatigue, weak or rapid pulse, and low blood pressure; and heat stroke, with symptoms including high core body temperature, change in mental or emotional state, racing heart rate, rapid breathing, nausea, and headache. In extreme cases, excessive heat can lead to organ damage, heart failure, and death. The league’s Kansas City Chiefs and Philadelphia Eagles won’t face anything like that punishment during this Sunday’s Super Bowl, which will take place in New Orleans, where the forecast high for game day is 75°F. And, in any case, the game will be played in an indoor stadium. Either way, there is no escaping the fact that the world is steadily—and dangerously—heating up. This year was the first to see the planet register average temperatures 1.5°C (2.7°F) higher than pre-industrial levels, the benchmark established by the 2015 Paris Climate Accord, which seeks to limit future warming to well below 2°C in the 21st century, with a preferred target no higher than 1.5°C. The NFL might seem like an afterthought in an existential crisis like climate change, but the league is, all the same, feeling the pain. In a new survey conducted by the research and communications group Climate Central, analysts used open source data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to track the temperature trends in all 30 NFL cities during football’s September to December regular season, from 1970 to 2024. The result: over that time, temperatures have risen in every one of those cities by an average of 2.8°F. Las Vegas and Minneapolis warmed the most (5.1°F and 5°F respectively), and Los Angeles warmed the least at 0.4°F. Every city but L.A. experienced at least 1°F of warming. Those cities are, of course, getting especially hot in the summer, often subjecting players to dangerous conditions not only during training camp, which begins in July, but into the first month of the season too. “In some of these places it’s a minor concern,’” says Jen Brady, senior data analyst for Climate Central. “But in some of these southern cities we could have serious health issues playing in September. We’ve seen a pretty steady climb [in temperatures] everywhere.” No surprise, it’s those sun belt cities that are experiencing things especially acutely. Phoenix, home to the Cardinals, saw an increase of 4.4°F. The Houston Texans and the Dallas Cowboys are feeling 3.5°F and 3.3°F of warming respectively. The Tampa Bay Buccaneers are getting a 3.2°F bump. New Orleans and their Saints register at 3.8°F. But some northern-tier cities, like Minneapolis, score high as well. Cleveland, home to the Browns, clocks in at 3.3°F. The Buffalo Bills are experiencing a 3.2°F increase, the Philadelphia Eagles 3.1°F, and the Green Bay Packers, in Wisconsin, are seeing 4.4°F of warming. Detroit’s Lions play in an indoor stadium, but outdoors, things have gotten 3.8°F hotter. “Upper Midwest cities are warming aggressively,” says Brady. “They are all seeing a lot of temperature increases in the winter.” Paradoxically, that can lead to more snow storms during games, like the blizzard that buried the Buffalo Bills’ stadium when they played the San Francisco 49ers on Dec. 1, 2024. That, explains Brady, is because the Great Lakes aren’t freezing, leading to an increase in lake effect storms. Those are caused when the atmosphere picks up moisture from open water and then dumps it back on land in the form of snow. Some cities, for the moment, have been less affected by the warming trend. Sunny Jacksonville, where the Jaguars play, has seen only a 1.5°F increase, as has mid-Atlantic Baltimore, home to the Ravens. Washington, home to the Commanders, has nearly mirrored nearby Baltimore, with just a 1.6°F increase. Temperatures in New York, where the Jets and the Giants share a stadium, have risen just 2°F. In Kansas City, the Chiefs’ home, the increase is a comparatively modest 2.2°F. Climate Central tracks not just average rising temperatures, but extremely hot days, which are defined as days on which the thermometer hits or exceeds 91°F. Here, the findings have been troubling. Among 242 locations analyzed around the U.S., 172, or 71%, now experience at least one more week of extremely hot days than they did in the early 1970s. The 30 NFL cities exceed that, registering, on average, 14 more extremely hot days than in 1970. “Heat is the number one weather killer in the U.S. and that’s often overlooked,” says Brady. “It can do a lot of things to your body—to your heart and your lungs and your breathing.” All of this is just one more red flag that Earth’s climate is heading into new and perilous territory. “It’s definitely at a point at which you say, ‘OK, we’re getting to dangerous levels here,’” says Brady. “We’ve seen it with the hurricanes that have been so large and disastrous and with wildfires and high temperatures. It’s not a tipping point yet, but it’s a warning.”