In late August of last year, a climate scientist named Patrick Brown, along with seven co-authors, published a study in the journal Nature about the connections between wildfires in California and global warming.

Their paper was, in many ways, standard fare for the prestigious journal. It took a deep dive into environmental measurements; it used machine learning and evaluated complex climatic comparisons; it concluded that climate change was making wildfires more extreme.

It was also, Dr. Brown claimed publicly just a month later, untrustworthy.

Dr. Brown confessed in a Free Press article that he had framed his research not just to reflect the truth, but to fit within what he described as the climate alarmist storyline preferred by prestigious journals in the United States. He did this, he says, by intentionally focusing only on climate as a factor in wildfires, and not on the myriad other causes that contribute to the blazes consuming ever more land across the country.

It wasn’t that he was hiding anything, or that the research was wrong. It was just that the paper was deliberately focused in one narrow direction – the direction most likely, he claimed, to capture the attention of journal editors.

The formula for getting published, he wrote, “is more about shaping your research in specific ways to support pre-approved narratives than it is about generating useful knowledge for society.” And when it comes to climate science, he alleged, that preapproved narrative is that “climate change impacts are pervasive and catastrophic.”

Almost immediately, people who questioned the reality of climate change began citing Dr. Brown’s essay as “proof” that global warming is a hoax, perpetrated by academics consumed by a “woke” agenda. 

Coutesy of Patrick T. Brown

“I think there is a certain section of the population that has way too little trust in climate science, and then a section that has too much trust in ... what climate science is.” – Patrick Brown, co-director of the Climate and Energy Team, The Breakthrough Institute

The reaction was also swift within his field. The editors of Nature denied any bias and said that Dr. Brown had “poor research practices” and was “highly irresponsible.” They pointed to a number of articles that seemed to go against Dr. Brown’s assertions. And climate advocates skewered Dr. Brown as being everything from unhinged to unethical. His words, they said, would bolster what watchdog groups say is a new wave of climate denialism. 

“We’ll be hearing echoes of Brown’s impulsively emotional blurt for a very long time,” wrote Doug Bostrom on the website Skeptical Science, which was created to debunk climate misinformation. “Brown has caused durable material harm to climate progress. It’s to no good end.”

But privately, Dr. Brown insists, fellow researchers have expressed sympathy. He was never questioning the reality of climate change itself, he says, or its importance. Neither was he making up data or violating academic standards – nothing about his paper, he points out, has required a retraction. He was just pointing out a place where he saw the scientific community not living up to science’s own ideals. 

Dr. Brown, co-director of the Climate and Energy Team at The Breakthrough Institute, a research center in Berkeley, California, has long been fascinated by the way research transforms into widespread knowledge. How does the stew of individuals and institutions and media each combine in various ways to form popular understandings?

He and his co-authors had decided to focus on the real impacts of climate factors on wildfires. But they had also decided to not focus on some of the other factors that have equally real impacts. These include land-use choices and varying forest management policies. 

Their findings were sound. But as he reflected on this work, Dr. Brown says, he had to admit that he chose to focus on climate instead of other factors because he believed that’s what would make his study more likely to be published.

He thought it was only fair for him to delve into his own decision-making process as part of an honest, and important, critique of the culture within his field.

“I think there is a certain section of the population that has way too little trust in climate science, and then a section that has too much trust in a perception of what climate science is, that it’s this all-encompassing thing that tells global society what to do,” he says. 

A more nuanced stance, however, can be difficult to maintain in today’s crisis-driven world of climate science.

Ng Han Guan/AP/File

Visitors attempt to cool down at a misting station during the 2023 Australian Open in Melbourne, Australia.

Indeed, this is a field where researchers face increasing attacks from politicians, organizations funded by the fossil fuel industry, and social media trolls. In other words, tension is high, and, many believe, the stakes are even higher.

“Deniers and skeptics say climate scientists are alarmist. We are not alarmist enough,” says Astrid Caldas, senior scientist for community resilience at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “If we could, we would scream to the four winds and say, ‘People, wake up! Things are not looking good.’”

But if climate science doesn’t make space for alternative viewpoints, it risks its foundational ideals of open inquiry and debate and rigorous, evidence-based critiques, some analysts say. And while there is an important distinction between asking honest, skeptical questions and purveying false narratives, it’s not always crystal clear where that line lies.

Questioning mainstream assumptions about climate change without denying its import or reality – “threading the needle,” as Dr. Brown puts it – can be a much-maligned path.

“I don’t think he was prepared for the anger and vitriol,” says Roger Pielke Jr., professor at the University of Colorado Boulder. Dr. Pielke has been labeled a climate change denier himself – a characterization he vehemently rejects. “He didn’t say anything wrong. All of us think about, how do we construct our papers so we have the best chance of getting published? The climate space is no different.”

The role of uncertainty in climate science

Except, many scientists insist, it is different.

There are few scientific topics so complicated, with so many potential impacts on humanity, as climate change. And there are few areas of science that have been so undermined.

Science historians often point to the late 1800s as the moment when researchers began recognizing that the Earth was warmer than it should be, and when they began connecting this to carbon dioxide, one of the main gases that trap heat within the atmosphere. 

Since then, scientists have repeatedly measured and analyzed the Earth’s rising temperatures, as well as the impact of increasing greenhouse gases, and in particular CO₂ , which is released when humans burn fossil fuels. They have found, with increasing precision and surety, that the emissions of the modern world have indeed heated the Earth.

This is a point worth emphasizing, since this is as close to fact as one often gets in science. We know the Earth is getting hotter. We know human activity has played a significant role.

“It has as solid evidence as gravity,” says Benjamin Houlton, dean of the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at Cornell University. There are valid scientific debates about the consequences of this heating, he says. “The uncertainty is pretty significant; there’s nothing settled about the future” – but only a scattered handful of outliers still argues against the overwhelming evidence that the planet is warming.

Owen Humphreys/PA/AP/File

A public service announcement advises motorists traveling on the A19 road toward Teesside, England, to “carry water,” during a July 2022 heat wave.

Still, those skeptics have had an outsize impact on Americans’ trust in climate science. And that may be intentional, some argue.

In their widely acclaimed 2010 book, “Merchants of Doubt,” Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway detail how a small group of scientists denied connections between smoking and lung cancer, sulfur dioxide and acid rain, and aerosols and ozone damage. Their goal was often to slow down government regulation. Today, some of these same scientists have been connected to climate denial movements funded by intensely free-market, anti-environmentalist organizations.

The partisanship around global warming has eased some in recent years. More than half of younger Republicans say the government is doing too little to reduce the effects of climate change, according to the Pew Research Center. But the difference between Republicans and Democrats is still stark. 

Gavin Schmidt is a NASA climate scientist who in 2021 served as the agency’s acting senior adviser on climate. He says that many of his colleagues were taken aback when partisanship crashed into their profession.

When he got his Ph.D. in the early 1990s, he recalls, the question of global warming was politically salient, but the scientists studying it were, well, scientists. They were individuals interested in the fascinating but seemingly esoteric qualities of clouds and dinosaurs, of ice cores and carbon. “It was a bit of a niche thing,” he says. He and his colleagues were happy to work in the lab and the field, focused on calculations and peer-reviewed journals. For the most part, they didn’t see public debate and policymaking as part of their world.

And then that started to change.

In 1995, a controversy exploded around the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s second assessment report, which for the first time stated that “the balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate.”

Free market think tanks and policymakers, along with some scientists connected to these groups, accused climate modeler Ben Santer, a co-author of the report, of professional dishonesty, saying he skewed his research for political reasons, The allegations soon became personal and increasingly threatening. At one point the scientist found a dead rat left on his doorstep. It didn’t matter that Dr. Santer and his colleagues repeatedly debunked the accusations. The harassment still remained virulent.

Habibur Rahman/Abaca Press/Reuters

Children in Bogra, north of Dhaka, Bangladesh, cool off in irrigated paddy fields on the banks of the Jamuna River, May 8.

In 1998, a scientist named Michael Mann published a graph in Nature magazine shaped like a hockey stick – illustrating the exponential heating of the Earth over the last century compared with the previous millennium. A few years later, Al Gore used that graph in his narration of the climate change documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth.” 

Dr. Mann also began receiving death threats. Congressional leaders accused him of fraudulent research practices. In 2012, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a libertarian think tank, published a blog post comparing the investigation into Dr. Mann’s work to the investigation into former football coach Jerry Sandusky, who was convicted of sexually abusing children. (Dr. Mann sued the bloggers for defamation. This year he won a judgment of $1 million.)

Climate change skeptics, occasionally funded by fossil fuel interests, began focusing their ire on other scientists as well. “I remember when I first started getting attacked and people started putting down lawsuits and [Freedom of Information Act] requests and insulting me in public,” Dr. Schmidt says. “That was a big shock.” 

In 2011, a group of climate-conscious entrepreneurs, legal scholars, and scientists decided to fight back, creating the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund to protect climate scientists from threats and censorship.

Today, that group is busier than ever, says Lauren Kurtz, its executive director. Her team of lawyers is defending scientists who say they have faced governmental backlash for their research, or who have been disciplined by academic departments for speaking publicly about what they see as the harms of climate change. Sometimes, online abuse of climate scientists has expanded into real-world intimidation, says Ms. Kurtz, who has passed along information to police departments.

Ringo H.W. Chiu/AP/File

Wind whips embers from a hot spot during a 2022 wildfire in Castaic, California.

It is in this world that Dr. Brown wrote his article.

“On a fundamental level, some amount of skepticism is appropriate, wanted, in science,” she says. “You want scientists to look at each other’s research and try to pull it apart; you want people to double-check and triple-check it, re-create it. ... At the same time, I think that approach has been weaponized by people who want to dispute the scientific reality of climate change, sometimes from a very disingenuous perspective.”

From honest critique to hoax

This is where it gets tricky. Because what’s disingenuous to one person can be an honest critique to another. And the newest wave of climate disinformation has helped undermine the trust needed to decipher between the two. 

A decade ago, the primary claim by climate skeptics was that the Earth is not actually warming. Some still take this line. For instance, a documentary released this spring called “Climate: The Movie” calls global warming a hoax. 

Yet for the most part, the denialist arguments have shifted. In January, the Center for Countering Digital Hate published a report on what it described as a movement from “Old Denial” to “New Denial.” After analyzing thousands of hours of social media content, for example, researchers found that 70% of denial material on YouTube focused either on attacking climate solutions as unworkable, or on attacking the integrity of climate scientists and their research.

“People who want to stop action on climate change have changed their strategy from denying that climate change is real or man-made, to saying that it is real but there is no hope, that the solutions don’t work or the scientists themselves don’t really understand it. None of which is true,” says the group’s CEO, Imran Ahmed. “It shows their cynicism, in that they’ve pivoted so easily from claiming that climate change is fake to, ‘Climate change is real, but there’s no way to fix it,’” he says.

George Walker IV/AP

Valerie Bernhardt looks through debris at her storm-damaged home May 9 in Columbia, Tennessee. A wave of deadly tornadoes crashed over parts of the South earlier this year.

Many researchers say this sort of denialism has been effective. Nearly 80% of Americans say they trust medical scientists, and around 75% say the same for scientists in general, according to the Pew Research Center. But only a third of Americans think climate scientists understand “very well” whether climate change is happening. Only a quarter say climate scientists really understand the effects of climate change on extreme weather events, or know what we should do about it.

“We’re crashing on the rocks of disinformation,” says Brenda Ekwurzel, climate scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

But the notion of “disinformation,” like any idea, can be debatable. Dr. Pielke, for example, is listed on the Skeptical Science website as a spreader of disinformation. Except, he says, he’s not. His career is entirely within “the establishment,” he says.

Dr. Pielke began his career as “one of the many nerds” at the National Center for Atmospheric Research before joining the faculty at the University of Colorado in 2001. His Ph.D. dissertation explored the importance of climate science in public policy. In the early 2000s, he wrote papers urging a broader description of climate change, more in line with that proposed by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which still cites his work, to enable effective government responses. He votes Democratic and says he has deep concerns about the way humans are changing the Earth’s energy balance.

But Dr. Pielke argues that many of the widely cited cost estimates connecting weather disasters to climate change are mistaken. (Climate advocates regularly assert that climate change is costing the U.S. billions of dollars every year.) His research, he says, shows that extreme weather appears costlier because properties are more valuable. In other words, wealth increase is the real story. He regularly takes issue with media portrayals of extreme weather, and with what he sees as a knee-jerk reaction that connects every wildfire, flood, or hurricane to climate change. The reality is more complex, he says.

He also argues against some of the ways scientists estimate the future impacts of climate change, saying they are unrealistic and extreme. All of this puts him in the “climate change isn’t so bad” misinformation category, according to some groups.

“All you have to do is increase the uncertainty, make these claims, and you delay action,” says Dr. Ekwurzel of the Union of Concerned Scientists. 

But to Dr. Pielke, it just makes him a scientist. He stands by his research and has faced his own sort of harassment. A congressional investigation probed whether his work was secretly funded by fossil fuel interests. (The investigation cleared him of this charge.)

“I’m still establishment,” he says. “I’m one of the few people in the world whose peer-reviewed research is in three working groups of the IPCC. I didn’t leave the mainstream. The mainstream left me.”

Nasir Kachroo/Nurphoto/AP

Snow sledge owners, guides, and ski instructors sit at a ski resort in Gulmarg, Jammu and Kashmir, India, in January. The lack of snow hit Gulmarg businesses hard last winter. The resort’s slopes remained lifeless, without the usual tourist buzz.

“The best way of gaining trust is to be trustworthy”

Most people within the climate field agree that the dynamics of science have shifted in recent years. An increasing number of younger people have come into the field to “make a difference.” Older scientists, meanwhile, worry that their inability to effectively communicate the seriousness of their findings was partly why policymakers have not taken dramatic action on climate change.

Both of these factors compelled more scientists to engage in advocacy. But this hasn’t necessarily been advocacy in a purely political sense. Most of the scientists interviewed for this article view the Earth’s warming with great alarm. They and others are simply trying to get across the urgency of their work.

Yet political leanings do come through. Scientists, along with most academics, are more politically liberal than the country as a whole, according to recent studies about political donations. And this, some researchers say, has helped undermine trust in science among those who lean Republican.

Matthew Burgess, a self-proclaimed “moderate Canadian” and assistant professor at the University of Colorado Boulder, says the politics he noticed within academia prompted him to study polarization around climate change – and to look for common ground.

“It felt like the conversations in the hallways were about how we need to change all of society over decades. But the only ones who were trusted or who could do anything about it were the left-most third of the Democratic Party,” he says. “That’s a dumb theory of change.”

He decided to do outreach on college campuses about polarized climate discussions. He says he spoke with conservatives and progressives and everyone in between, finding eager audiences among each and a willingness to be open – that is, to trust.

“Scientists sometimes overcomplicate the problem of being trusted,” he says. “The best way of gaining trust is to be trustworthy.”

That means acknowledging the downsides of climate action, he says. It means acknowledging where scientific expertise ends and personal, subjective opinion begins. It means acknowledging the big, ethical questions that come along with it. For instance, is it fair to prevent lower-income countries from developing the same fossil fuel-based energy systems that helped make the U.S. and Europe rich?

It also means keeping partisanship and incivility off social media. “The worst thing to happen to climate scientists on Twitter was climate scientists on Twitter,” he says.

And it means better explaining how science actually works.

Habibur Rahman/Abaca Press/Reuters

A woman checks on two of her puppies in Channelview, Texas, after her neighborhood was evacuated due to severe flooding May 4.

Science, many in the field point out, is an evolving body of knowledge. There are some physical findings that move toward fact – such as the world is getting warmer, and humans are a cause. Other assumptions  continue to change as researchers gather more information.

“Science is not ‘yes or no’ because science is constantly evolving,” says Dr. Caldas of the Union of Concerned Scientists. Take the pandemic, she says. “One of the best examples that we have of this is COVID, and how much the recommendations changed. ... ‘You don’t need to wear a mask.’ ‘You need to wear a mask.’ ‘There are N95s, and you need to wear those.’ ‘You need to do this.’ ‘You need to do that.’ It kept changing. Why? Because knowledge kept evolving.”

In the case of the Earth’s energy systems, evolving knowledge includes all sorts of scenarios about what will happen in the future. Scientists use complex computerized models, with billions of data points, to evaluate everything from ocean currents to the carbon sequestration within soil to the ripple-down impact of cleaner air or melting glaciers. They then make predictions about future climate impacts.

Much of the modeling has proved to be highly accurate. But there are still uncertainties when it comes to future projections.

“What can you predict with 100% accuracy?” asks Dr. Houlton, the Cornell dean. “The bar that is being placed on climate science is a bar that has been placed on nobody else in society. The future is, by definition, unknown. That can’t be the conversation. I don’t think any climate scientists can say how bad it is going to get.”

As a society, we calculate and act on risk all the time, he and others point out, whether it’s in military preparedness or in car insurance. In climate science, most researchers believe that the more the atmosphere warms, the greater the risk of negative impact. But that’s not a universal opinion. And we as humans are tempted by what we want to hear, including a rosy message that our
climate-altered future won’t be so bad after all, and our children and communities will cope just fine.

“The value judgments are tough,” Dr. Houlton says. “I have great colleagues who are ringing alarm bells. I have individuals I respect who say, ‘No, it’s not going to be so bad.’ I get both perspectives.”

The problem, he and others say, is that without trust, the conversation between these two sides can devolve.

“Trust is a foundational attitude,” says Brian Kennedy, a senior researcher at Pew who researched public confidence in various professions and institutions for years. That’s why he and others study it, he explains.

Indeed, says Dr. Brown at The Breakthrough Institute, trust was the purpose of his controversial critique of his own research.

“After saying what I said, the perception that I got was, ‘You are on the bad side; you are a bad person,’” he says. “That’s unfortunate because I am trying to thread the needle; I am trying to be in the middle and say what I think. ... It’s difficult because people like to be on teams. A lot of people see this as a good-team-versus-bad-team thing, and the goal is to defeat the bad team. We can do better.” 

Editor's note: This article has been updated to more accurately reflect the relationship between the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund and local police departments. 

Musa was eating dinner with his wife and three children at their farm in northern Mozambique when the rattle of gunfire in the distance suddenly broke the calm. 

On that February evening, he knew immediately what was happening: His village was under attack by Islamist militants. They would likely kill or enslave anyone they managed to catch, and then burn the homes and farms they left behind. 

Musa – who uses that pseudonym for his safety – did the only thing he could think of. He ran, joining a panicked throng taking cover in a nearby forest. 

Only after the chaotic escape did he make a horrifying discovery: His 8-year-old son, Ismael, was not with him. 

Since 2017, a group of extremist militants pledging allegiance to the Islamic State (ISIS) has waged a fierce terror campaign in Mozambique’s northernmost province, Cabo Delgado. Around 6,000 people have died in the fighting, and more than a million have been displaced. This year alone, 100,000 people have fled their homes. Some 60,000 of them are children, deepening the trauma of a generation that has grown up in the shadow of a brutal guerilla war that is largely invisible to the outside world. 

Each of those children has a story. This is the story of Ismael and his father Musa. 

A desperate search

Ismael – also using a pseudonym – was only 1 year old in 2017, when news of a strange new wave of terror attacks began to arrive at his parents’ farm in Chiúre, a farming region in the south of Cabo Delgado. Young men would enter nearby villages at night, spray them with bullets, and take prisoners. They called themselves Al Shabab – or “the youth” in Arabic – and claimed to be waging a holy war to establish an Islamic government in Cabo Delgado.

Sophie Neiman

A boy walks along a beach strewn with fishing nets in Pemba, the regional capital of Cabo Delgado, the northernmost province in Mozambique, in March 2024.

The militants – loosely affiliated with ISIS – were angry at having watched Mozambique’s government fail to develop the region for decades, even as privileged locals and foreigners grew rich extracting its rubies, graphite, gold, and timber. Over the next few years, the insurgency spread through the poor and isolated province.

In 2021, the conflict made international headlines when insurgents captured the town of Palma, the site of a $20 billion natural gas project. Foreign troops soon restored the peace, but late last year, Al Shabab began a fresh wave of attacks in sparsely guarded areas in the south of Cabo Delgado. 

All along, Musa knew that his young son was particularly at risk. Al Shabab specifically targeted schools, and as its support among local people dwindled, the group often kidnapped young boys to serve as fighters. 

So when the war arrived at Musa’s doorstep on that day in February, he feared the worst for Ismael. After the attack, he fled south on foot to Eráti, a town in the neighboring province of Nampula. As he traveled, he made panicked calls to friends and neighbors. Over and over he heard the same thing: “Sorry. We ran for our lives, too. We didn’t see Ismael.”

Musa wasn’t the only parent frantically searching. UNICEF registered nearly 200 cases of children separated from their parents in Chiúre. 

But he was fortunate. Three days after he arrived in Eráti, Musa got word that some neighbors had found Ismael in the frightened crowd fleeing into the forest, and had taken him with them. 

Recalling the moment he saw Ismael again, Musa says the joy was nearly impossible to describe. “I recovered everything,” he says simply.

Stay or go? 

But displacement took other tolls on his family. Living in a small town overflowing with uprooted people like themselves, they did not have enough to eat, and they couldn’t work.

Sophie Neiman

A burned-out truck sits on the roadside in March 2024, a grim reminder of the harm done by insurgents operating in northern Mozambique.

With much of the world’s attention and money focused on crises in places like Gaza and Ukraine, “the funding [for displaced people] is not enough, and the presence of [humanitarian] actors is low” in northern Mozambique, says Ulrika Blom, country director for the Norwegian Refugee Council. Aid workers are stretched thin in a remote province roughly the size of Maine with few paved roads, where insurgents still roam freely. 

That lack of support drives many displaced people back to their villages, even when the threat of violence still looms.“They say that they prefer to die at home in the attacks instead of dying in the displacement camps,” says Tomás Queface, who heads Cabo Ligado, an organization monitoring the conflict.

And so, a little more than a week after he fled, Musa and his family made the return journey, heading for the house in Chiúre he’d built by hand.  

“Home is home,” he says. “Whenever you need something, you can ask your neighbors and they will help you. Being away from here is like being in a foreign country.”

But he found Chiúre transformed. His chickens and ducks were gone. The burned-out husk of a truck set aflame by the insurgents sat on the road leading to his farm. 

Musa also watched how somber and timid Ismael and his friends had become, drained of the innocence they had displayed before the fighting in their village. 

“They don’t play as they used to, because now they’re aware that there’s a war,” he says.

More than 100 schools in Cabo Delgado and neighboring Nampula have shut down because of the conflict, disrupting classes for 50,000 children, according to the latest figures from UNICEF. Ismael is studying, Musa says, but many of his classmates are afraid to go back to school.

This is common in Cabo Delgado, says Lindsay Shearer, a child protection specialist for UNICEF in the province. After seeing schools destroyed, “it takes time for [children] to build trust again and feel safe.”

When a Monitor reporter met Musa in March, just a few weeks after the family’s return home, he and Ismael were taking their new life one day at a time. 

“Every night when you go to bed, you say thank you to God that you survived the day. They didn’t find us. They didn’t come,” he says. 

Then, in late April, Al Shabab forces attacked Chiúre once more, burning 50 homes and beheading a man. Musa longs for a normal life. “We are crying for an end to the war, crying for an end to the war, so that we can relax,” he says.

Reporting for this story was supported by Oxfam.  

LM Otero/AP/File

Bleached coral, due to rising ocean temperatures, is visible at the Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary, off the coast of Galveston, Texas, Sept. 16, 2023.

Oceans are changing as global temperatures increase, a shift that could have huge consequences for everyone on Earth. But the story of this portion of the planet’s surface is also one of hope and potential, especially when it comes to climate change, according to scientists and environmental advocates.

These dual messages are the focus of this year’s World Oceans Day, an international holiday occurring every June 8. First suggested by the Canadian government in 1992, the day has evolved into a global effort to get land-focused humans to pay more attention to the water that covers 70% of our planet. This year the theme is “catalyzing action for our ocean and climate” – an effort to explicitly link the issues of ocean health and climate change.

“Most people see the ocean as that wet place they go in a boat,” says Tom Pickerell, a marine scientist who is the global director for the Ocean Program at the World Resources Institute. “But it’s key to our survival.”

Humans have explored only a tiny fraction of the ocean. A regular saying among marine scientists is that we know more about the moon than we do about our own watery ecosystem. But we do know some key facts: The ocean is central to Earth’s climate system. And it’s changing as humans alter the atmosphere. 

How do the world’s oceans affect Earth’s climate?

The oceans are the planet’s temperature regulators. They not only absorb most of the heat that comes into our atmosphere from the sun, but also distribute that warmth around the globe through a system of conveyor belt-like currents. This keeps the equatorial regions of the world, which get a disproportionate amount of solar radiation, from being unbearably hot, and the northernmost and southernmost regions from being unbearably cold. (The United Kingdom, for instance, has a mild temperature despite its high latitude thanks, in large part, to the Gulf Stream.)   

Robert F. Bukaty/AP/File

Max Oliver moves a lobster to the banding table aboard his boat while fishing off Spruce Head, Maine, Aug. 31, 2021. America's lobster fishing business dipped in catch that year, faced with challenges including a changing ocean environment.

“Life on Earth exists because of the ocean,” says Lisa Suatoni, deputy director of the oceans divisions for the Natural Resources Defense Council. “It moderates our climate so that every point on Earth is habitable.”

Around half of the world’s oxygen comes from the ocean (thanks largely to photosynthesizing phytoplankton). About one-sixth of the animal protein that humans consume comes from ocean animals. And this might seem obvious, but the oceans give us ... water. Almost all of the world’s rain comes from evaporating ocean water. That atmospheric moisture gets carried around the globe by trade winds, forms rainstorms, falls on land, and supports the hydrological systems that in turn support us. 

This complex, churning system is controlled by a slew of different factors: winds, salinity, the Earth’s rotation, the gravitational pull of the moon – and, of course, temperature.

What’s climate change doing to the oceans?

There’s a lot of talk about how Earth is getting hotter, and how that’s resulting in heat waves such as the one that sent temperatures in India and Pakistan last week soaring above 120 degrees Fahrenheit. But the ocean is actually absorbing most of the extra heat caused by human activity – as much as 90%, says Dr. Pickerell.

“Without that buffer, we’d be in a much warmer place,” he says.

Last year was the ocean’s warmest year in recorded history, according to NASA. The past 10 years were the warmest decade since at least the 1800s. That heat makes an impact. On a basic physics level, warmer water expands more than colder water, which in the oceans means sea level rise. Warmer water also melts ice. Think about what happens to your ice cubes in a glass of lukewarm water left outside in the summer. Although more complex, on some level that’s what’s happening to sea ice at the poles.   

David Keyton/AP/File

Chinstrap penguins stand on floating ice off the coast of the South Orkney Islands, north of the Antarctic Peninsula, March 9, 2023. The penguins face stresses from a lack of krill, their main prey.

That melting ice means even more sea level rise for island and coastal communities. But warmer water and melting ice also affects those finely tuned currents that distribute heat around the world.

While scientists have conflicting views about how fast, and even whether, currents such as the cold Labrador Current or the warm North Atlantic Drift will break down, the risk of them doing so is high enough that many researchers are alarmed. (In some scenarios, researchers have predicted extreme storms and frigid weather in the U.K. to accompany a weakening of the Gulf Stream.)   

It’s not only humans who are affected. Marine species are already migrating rapidly because of changing ocean temperatures.

“We’re just seeing really rapid changes in marine ecosystems because of that heat,” says Dr. Suatoni. “Marine animals are cold-blooded. They respond more rapidly than other animals. Fish are racing to the poles.” 

But heat isn’t the only thing going into oceans. Scientists estimate that oceans have absorbed around 30% of the carbon dioxide emitted by humans. This is having a chemical effect in the water, making the oceans more acidic. (The oceans are more acidic now than they have been at any point in the past 2 million years, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.)   

While humans putting their hands in the water might not notice the shift, the increased acidity is having a big impact on marine life, particularly on the bottom of the food chain. Larvae, for instance, are particularly sensitive to acidity; creatures also have a harder time forming shells.

Are there ocean-based solutions to climate change?

But even as oceans bear the brunt of climate change, Dr. Pickerell points out, they also offer some of the world’s most hopeful solutions. The world could dramatically lower its net emissions by using ocean-based technology it already has, according to a report by The Ocean Panel, an international group of world leaders focused on ocean health. That includes restoring and supporting ocean ecosystems such as mangroves, which capture large amounts of carbon dioxide.

Bruna Prado/AP

An aerial view of a mangrove forest recovered from deforestation in the Guapimirim environmental protection area on Guanabara Bay, Brazil, May 22, 2024. Four years ago, the Mar Urbano nongovernmental organization planted 30,000 mangrove trees in the deforested area, that today reach up to 4 meters high.

“If we just conserved and restored degraded blue carbon ecosystems – mangrove, seagrasses, sea meadows, and so on, we could reduce emissions by 2.8 gigatons of carbon. That’s like retiring 76 coal-fired power plants each year,” Dr. Pickerell says.  

Ocean-based climate solutions could also involve decarbonizing ocean transport, better managing fisheries, and eliminating food waste. Researchers are looking at other higher-tech solutions, as well. Scientists and entrepreneurs have tested carbon-capture methods that range from burying seaweed to “storing” ocean CO₂  by using chemical reactions and capsules. Off-shore wind farms could help supply clean energy, some researchers say. 

But while there may be potential in these initiatives, some scientists also caution against what they see as a growing industrialization of the ocean. It’s important to make sure that by seeking solutions to the challenge of climate change, we don’t inadvertently make the overall situation for ocean health worse.  

In fact, some researchers also see potential in the ocean for safe havens. 

Efforts are growing to develop marine protected areas in both national and international waters. 

“Climate change is obviously going to profoundly change our marine ecosystems,” says Dr. Suatoni. “But we’d like to give them the chance to adapt to these changes.”  

I was sitting on my haunches weeding when a couple passed by on the sidewalk. “Nice garden,” one of them said, so I thanked her. She shrieked. I believe she’d mistaken me for a gnome. Once we had all agreed I was not a ceramic, we had a nice chat and I gave them a garden tour.

“You don’t have any lawn at all?” they said. “That’s really smart. Lawns are so much work!”

“Huh,” I said.

Well. I had just spent 20 minutes handpicking weeds in an area the size of a bath mat. The way lawns work, you take a machine to the thing, and apply fossil fuel and a mess of decibels, and your property is nicely coiffed in a jiffy. Maybe you edge it, too, if you’re fussy. But compared with what I do in my garden, inch by inch, on a double lot in the city, lawn maintenance is like giving Michelangelo the Sistine Chapel gig and handing him a paint roller.

There’s a whole no-lawn movement out there, and plenty of good reasons for it. You can conserve water, encourage pollinators, and eschew fertilizers and pesticides. Better yet, going lawn-free confers on the gardener a priceless stamp of virtue. Here in Portland, Oregon, you can even display a “Certified Backyard Habitat” yard sign as a badge of honor. You can annoy no end of people with one of those.

I’m happy to assume that mantle of purity, but the main reason my garden is turf-free is that there was always something more interesting to plant. And there’s only so much space. I used to have a lawn, but bit by bit it got carved out for flowers, ferns, and other floral frippery. By the time the lawn had dwindled to a dot, there was no point to it at all.

And for a good two months before summer sets in, I am squatting gnomelike in that garden coaxing out the plants I don’t want in favor of those I do. The plan is that when I get everything cleared, I’ll lay in a mountain of mulch. Except by the time I’ve weeded the whole place, I need to start over. I’m never quite done.

It sounds like the very definition of tedium. But the puttery nature of it is immensely gratifying. It reorders the brain. I couldn’t say what I’m thinking about while I work my way through the beds – certainly nothing coherent. But there’s satisfaction on a cellular level in seeing those weeds slip out of the soil. The clear spaces gained have their counterparts in my mind, in the recesses where worry and regret might otherwise clump up. Even the fragrance of healthy soil is restorative. And weirdly familiar, like an ancient memory. Maybe we’re not so very far from our microbial ancestors.

I like being close to the ground. There’s a lot of life down there, if you’re gardening right. Things are wriggling, scuffling, jetting by your ear on the way to nectar. They’re busy doing the best they can with what they have to work with. In the face of all that industry, my own concerns are revealed to be trivial. So what if my wireless is down for the day? There are juncos mining my yard debris for nesting material. There are larvae with a lot to learn before they can become journeymen butterflies.

I can’t say I don’t interfere. Sometimes I unearth some tasty arthropod and flip it topside to see if I can interest a bird with it. The case can be made that grown-ups should have better things to do than fling grubs to scrub jays, although none come immediately to mind.

I’m not sure what sort of mental real estate I enter when I putter in the garden, but I can get to the same neighborhood with art, or music, or writing. All of it quiets the mind and clears out clutter, rearranges the cerebral furniture for a better flow, and gives creativity room to stretch out.

This garden plot has already got an outline. Its characters have been developed. I don’t have the ending worked out, and I’m always editing. It’s an act of creation like any other, and it is beautiful. There’s no explaining what beauty does for us. No denying it, either.

So yes: I spend many hours at something that looks like labor in my garden. But my new friends from the sidewalk are right. For many people, a lawn is a lot of work. It demands perfection and steals part of their precious weekend. If something gets in the way of your downtime, it’s work.

But if it’s what you wish you were at home doing when you’re at work, it’s not.

If any scene captures the feeling of a visit to the Bangladeshi capital, Dhaka, it’s the thousands of cycle rickshaws rolling down the city’s thoroughfares. Decorated with pictures of bright flowers, birds, historic scenes, and movie stars, rickshaws don’t just get Bangladeshis from point A to point B. They also are part of the country’s urban folk art, and they define the mood of this dizzying and chaotic city.

But the art form is in danger of fading away. Panels that were once painted by hand to adorn the backs and sides of the three-wheeled human-powered vehicles are now printed by machine. Rickshaw drivers wanting to personalize their bikes are turning to digital art, which is cheaper and faster than commissioning an artist to create the pictures. That’s why UNESCO, in December, designated rickshaws – which are increasingly being replaced by motorized versions – and their decorative paintings as part of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.

Syed Ahmed Hossain has been a rickshaw artist since 1969. His work has become so well known that he has presented it in exhibitions from Britain to Japan. He says he has even hosted ambassadors at his home, off a side alley in the heart of Dhaka. But he finds little market for rickshaw decorating today.

Instead, he paints tin panels – as he is in the photo at bottom right – that he sells as artwork. This writer and photographer both purchased small panels – the perfect memento of any trip to Bangladesh.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

A chaotic mix of pedestrians, rickshaws, and vehicles squeezes into the narrow streets of the old city.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

A rickshaw seat features a colorful scene. UNESCO has recognized the importance of rickshaws and their art as a cultural treasure.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Pictures of Bangladeshi movie stars decorate a cycle rickshaw in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Rickshaw drivers personalize their bikes with art ranging from photos to hand-painted designs.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Syed Ahmed Hossain paints a scene on tin in his home. The artist used to do paintings for rickshaws, but that is a dying art. Mr. Hossain now sells to tourists and fans of his work.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

A painting of a mosque adorns the back of a cycle rickshaw.

AP

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy stands inside a printworks destroyed May 26 in a Russian airstrike. He used the site for a interview by Central Asian journalists

Perhaps no other national leader has traveled the world over the past year as often as Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the president of Ukraine. Most of his trips have been to corridors of traditional power, such as a NATO summit, to drum up war supplies or money to help defeat Russia’s military. Lately, his mission has gone deeper and wider.

The former TV star has taken to talking over the heads of diplomats and directly to people everywhere, often through journalists or social media. His goal: rebuild the grassroots consensus on the territorial integrity of all countries. It is a cause he sees akin to ensuring the integrity of rights and liberties for each individual.

Without the restoration of a global norm for the sovereignty of national borders, Ukraine may not win the war. Too many countries either support Russia’s violation of that norm or remain outwardly indifferent to it. Mr. Zelenskyy finds himself on the front lines of a war for public opinion.

A good example of his new mission was an interview in late May with journalists from Central Asia. The region, once part of the Soviet Union, still treads carefully with Moscow, which has hinted at retaking parts of the region as it has done in Ukraine.

“Everyone [in the region] found a balance with the Russians, with their policies – economic, military, and so on, so as not to awaken the beast,” he told the journalists inside a building bombed by Russia in the city of Kharkiv. “But the fact is that the beast does not ask anyone: it wakes up when it wants.”

He wants Central Asians to see “the real consequences of the war, what the Russian world brings and what it will definitely try to bring” to their region. “I believe that your peoples are our friends,” he added, implying that Ukraine is fighting for the principle of sovereignty for all nations.

Official ties between Ukraine and Central Asian governments remain weak. But “people-to-people relations are a different story,” with citizens in the region offering support to Ukrainians, wrote journalist Nurbek Bekmurzaev in the media outlet Global Voices.

Mr. Zelenskyy’s new cause faces a test at a June 15-16 peace summit sponsored by Switzerland. Most nations plan to attend, but Russia is pressing countries to skip it. The reason: The summit’s main topic is how to restore the territorial integrity of Ukraine. 

“The only way to end the war is to force Russia to agree to the beginning of a peace settlement, whose principles will be developed not in Moscow, but in Kyiv, together with the partner states and having a broad international consensus,” wrote Ihor Solovei of Ukraine’s Centre for Strategic Communication and Information Security, in the Kyiv Post.

That task of renewing that consensus now relies on Mr. Zelenskyy’s campaign – when he’s not also commanding a military to restore Ukraine’s borders.