LONDON, May 21 (Reuters) – Wind and solar combined generated more electricity than gas globally in April for the first month ever, data analysed by UK-based think tank Ember showed on Thursday.
Ember said the move was a broader trend rather than a reaction to soaring fossil fuel prices following the Iran conflict, but added it comes at a time when wind and solar generation is helping reduce reliance on gas imports for many countries hit by the crisis.
Together, wind and solar generated 22% of global electricity in April, compared with 20% from gas.
“The current energy crisis has further strengthened the economic case for renewables compared to imported gas, while also adding greater political urgency to accelerate deployment,” said Kostantsa Rangelova, global electricity analyst at Ember.
April is often a strong month for renewables as spring conditions in the Northern Hemisphere – where most global solar capacity is concentrated – typically combine strong wind output with rising solar generation.
Globally, combined wind and solar output is estimated to have grown 13% year-on-year, with gains in several markets including China (+14%), the European Union (+13%), Britain (+35%), the United States (+8%), Australia (+17%), Chile (+24%) and Brazil (+4%).
The analysis is based on reported data from 36 countries and uses conservative estimates for countries yet to publish April figures.
Reporting by Susanna Twidale. Editing by Mark Potter.
The U.S. was among eight countries that voted against endorsing the nonbinding ruling that said all nations must take steps to limit temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius.
Vanuatu’s Climate Change Minister Ralph Regenvanu attends an International Court of Justice session on July 23, 2025, in The Hague, Netherlands. Credit: John Thys/AFP via Getty Images
The United Nations General Assembly on Wednesday voted overwhelmingly in favor of a climate justice resolution championed by the small Pacific Island nation of Vanuatu. The resolution welcomes the historic advisory opinion on climate change issued by the International Court of Justice in July 2025 and calls upon U.N. member states to act upon the court’s unanimous guidance, which clarified that addressing the climate crisis is not optional but rather is a legal duty under multiple sources of international law.
“Last year, the International Court of Justice ruled that countries have a legal duty to protect the climate, and today the world has not only reaffirmed that ruling, but committed to making it a reality. This must be a turning point in accountability for damaging the climate,” Vishal Prasad, director of Pacific Island Students Fighting Climate Change—the group that initiated the campaign to request a climate change advisory opinion from the ICJ—said in a statement.
While nonbinding, the court’s opinion is widely viewed as an authoritative interpretation of existing law. Legal experts say it could be used as persuasive authority in domestic climate litigation and in diplomatic arenas like the annual U.N. climate summits.
In its opinion, the ICJ—the principal judicial body of the United Nations—affirmed that limiting long-term global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius remains the primary goal for global climate action. It clarified that customary legal obligations apply to all countries regardless of whether they are parties to the U.N. climate treaties, and that protection of the environment is a precondition for the enjoyment of human rights.
The court also said the countries have a duty to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions, including by regulating private actors, and it suggested that continued boosting of fossil fuels could be considered an internationally wrongful act.
The resolution adopted by the General Assembly on Wednesday seeks to operationalize the court’s opinion. It calls upon countries to comply with their international obligations as clarified by the court. It also urges countries to implement measures to achieve the 1.5-degree objective, including by transitioning away from fossil fuels. And it requests that the U.N. Secretary-General issue a report exploring ways to advance compliance.
When the vote finally came, following some procedural wrangling over proposed amendments, it passed by a resounding majority with 141 member states voting in support, and 28 abstaining.
Only eight countries, Belarus, Iran, Israel, Liberia, Russia, Saudi Arabia, the United States and Yemen, voted against the resolution.
Prior to the vote, the U.S. delivered an oral statement strongly opposing the proposal and urging all countries to vote against it. “The United States continues to have serious legal and policy concerns about this resolution,” Tammy Bruce, deputy representative of the United States to the United Nations, said on the assembly floor. She called it “highly problematic” in directing states to comply with “so-called obligations,” including the duty to prevent transboundary harm to the global climate, which she said was “legally wrong.”
“The resolution includes inappropriate political demands relating to fossil fuels and on other climate topics,” Bruce added. She further argued that it makes “alarmist political statements such as the idea that climate change is an unprecedented challenge of civilizational proportions.”
In a speech before the General Assembly in September 2025, President Donald Trump called climate change the “greatest con job” in history and described renewable energy and other measures to reduce carbon emissions as a “green scam,” urging member nations to reject climate measures and consume American oil and gas.
The court itself stated in its opinion, aligning with warnings from top climate and Earth system scientists, that climate change is an “existential problem of planetary proportions that imperils all forms of life and the very health of our planet.”
In the months leading up to the vote on the resolution, the U.S. had reportedly tried pressuring other countries to oppose it and demand that Vanuatu withdraw it altogether. Vanuatu did not drop the resolution, but it did make some compromises on the text, such as eliminating a call to establish a global registry to track climate-related loss and damage.
In the end, though, the resolution endorsing the court’s opinion passed by a considerable margin, without any last-minute amendments that climate justice advocates say would have weakened the text even further. Advocates celebrated the milestone.
“Today’s vote marks an important step in advancing climate justice,” said Camile Cortez, senior campaigner on climate justice at Amnesty International. “This resolution brings renewed momentum towards ensuring accountability for climate-driven human rights harms and protecting present and future generations.”
Joie Chowdhury, senior attorney and climate justice and accountability manager at the Center for International Environmental Law, said the resolution’s power comes from the “strong majority” of countries voting yes. “It sends a clear signal in very troubled times that governments remain committed to the rule of law, and to collective action to protect the climate,” Chowdhury told Inside Climate News. “And it’s a victory for constructive multilateralism and cooperation.”
“It demonstrates the collective refusal by the global majority to let a handful of holdouts block the path to climate justice,” Chowdhury added. “And crucially, it helps ensure that the ICJ’s advisory opinion is not a one-off breakthrough, but is a lasting compass for advancing ambition and equity.”
A articulação ainda pode levar à aprovação de mais textos, a exemplo da proposta que dá ao Ministério da Agricultura o poder de vetar a classificação de espécies em risco de extinção.
As propostas agora devem seguir para o Senado. Se forem aprovadas na casa, vão passar então para o Executivo, que pode sancioná-las ou vetá-las.
Nesta quarta, o ministro do Meio Ambiente, João Paulo Capobianco, chamou a iniciativa da bancada de “rolo compressor”.
Operação Maravalha, do Ibama, aplicou R$ 110 milhões em multas por exploração de madeira ilegal no Pará – Divulgação/Ibama
O projeto que afeta o Ibama proíbe que órgãos ambientais atuem com base apenas em tecnologias remotas, como imagens de satélite. A técnica é aplicada pelo órgão para detectar e punir a destruição irregular da floresta.
O método consiste em cruzar informações de desmatamento aferidas via imagens de satélite com, por exemplo, áreas em que há autorização para supressão de vegetação. Quando é constatado que não houve permissão para derrubada da floresta, o órgão aplica a punição e abre um processo. O proprietário rural pode reverter o caso, se provar que tinha aval de algum órgão para sua ação.
A estratégia possibilitou aos agentes de fiscalização uma ação em escala inédita, uma vez que antes era necessário ir pessoalmente a cada fazenda realizar a verificação da destruição ilegal. Ruralistas, por sua vez, reclamam que o método apresenta falhas e estaria punindo fazendeiros incorretamente.
A tática permitiu a realização da operação Maravalha, que nos últimos meses apreendeu 15 mil m³ de madeira ilegal e aplicou R$ 110 milhões.
As ações geraram a revolta inclusive do então governador do Pará, Helder Barbalho (MDB), que mobilizou políticos e pressionou o governo Lula (PT) contra a medida.
“Fica vedada a imposição de embargo ou de outras medidas administrativas cautelares com base exclusivamente em detecção remota de alteração de cobertura vegetal potencialmente caracterizadora de infração, sendo garantida a notificação prévia do autuado”, diz o projeto.
Redução de floresta
A Floresta Nacional do Jamanxim foi criada em 2006 na cidade de Novo Progresso, no Pará, com 1,3 milhão de hectares. Ela fica próxima ao Parque Nacional do Jamanxim, em uma região que desperta o interesse de produtores rurais e também por onde deve passar a ferrovia chamada de Ferrogrão. Este empreendimento visa escoar a produção agropecuária, é criticado por ambientalistas e tem sua construção questionada no Supremo Tribunal Federal (STF).
Originalmente, o projeto sobre a floresta nacional foi apresentado pelo Executivo em 2017, gestão de Michel Temer (MDB). Porém, desde então, a tramitação estava parada.
O texto voltou a caminhar em maio deste ano, quando foi apresentado um requerimento de urgência para que pudesse ir direto para votação no plenário.
A proposta entrou na pauta nesta terça-feira (19), por articulação da bancada ruralista. O governo Lula pediu, então, a retirada do item da pauta, já que era de autoria do Executivo.
Mas, no mesmo dia, o deputado Isnaldo Bulhões (MDB-AL) apresentou um projeto de lei igual ao que havia sido proposto pelo governo Temer. Com essa manobra, a proposta avançou.
Designado relator, José Priante (MDB-PA) apresentou o seu relatório já nesta quarta. Horas depois, foi aprovado o regime de urgência para a matéria e, pouco depois, também o seu mérito.
O projeto reduz 486 mil hectares da Floresta Nacional do Jamanxim e reorganiza sua área, transformando esse pedaço em uma APA (Área de Preservação Ambiental), um modelo com menor proteção e que permite atividades produtivas, com planos de manejo.
O objetivo dos ruralistas é permitir que fazendeiros utilizem a área para produção. A proposta fala em regularização fundiária de propriedades já existentes na área, o que abre espaço para a legalização de áreas griladas.
Na prática, a proposta pode fazer com que proprietários, que utilizavam irregularmente a área da floresta nacional, possam conseguir autorização para suas atividades. O texto ainda tem um dispositivo que permite a realização de “atividades minerárias” dentro do território da floresta.
Among a flurry of posts on social media last weekend, US president Donald Trump declared “good riddance” to a specific emissions scenario used in global climate projections.
The “RCP8.5” scenario, which envisages a future of very high carbon emissions, was “wrong, wrong, wrong”, the president wrote in block capitals.
The post was quickly picked up by right-leaning media, amplifying Trump’s misrepresentation of emissions scenarios and the role of the IPCC.
His claim follows the publication of a new set of emissions scenarios that will feed into the next IPCC reports.
While the new scenarios no longer include such high emissions as in RCP8.5, they also show it is “not possible” to limit global warming to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels without significant “overshoot”, one of the authors tells Carbon Brief.
Moreover, projections suggest that the world is still on course for between 2.5C and 3C of warming, another author says.
This level of warming was previously described as “catastrophic” by the UN.
In this factcheck, Carbon Brief looks at Trump’s comments, the debate around RCP8.5 and the “good” and “bad” news within the latest scenarios.
In the late evening of Saturday 16 May, Trump posted the following message on his Truth Social social-media platform:
“Dumocrats” is a derogatory nickname for Democrat politicians, debuted by the president in a televised Fox News interview on Thursday 14 May, according to the Independent.
By “top climate committee”, the president was presumably referring to the IPCC, the UN body responsible for assessing science about human-caused climate change.
However, the IPCC does not develop, control or own climate scenarios. Moreover, it has not published anything stating that any climate scenario is “wrong”. (For more, see: How is the IPCC involved?)
Nevertheless, right-leaning media outlets have reported on Trump’s comments, in many instances repeating his false assertion that the RCP8.5 climate scenario had been developed by the IPCC.
The New York Post misleadingly claimed that the IPCC “had quietly adjusted” its framework of emission scenarios. The Daily Caller, a pro-Trump conspiratorial US outlet, adds its own falsehoods stating that “IPCC researchers revised their modelling approach last month, swapping the extreme pathway for seven alternative scenarios”. The climate-sceptic Australian claimed that scientists had “quietly scrapped the apocalyptic forecasts that have terrified policymakers and the public”.
With Fox News also covering Trump’s comments, along with an earlier article by the Times, much of the reporting around RCP8.5 in recent days has been driven by media controlled by the climate-sceptic mogul Rupert Murdoch.
It is not the first time the Trump administration has attacked RCP8.5. In an executive order issued in May 2025 – entitled, “Restoring gold-standard science” – the White House included the climate scenario in a list of examples of how the previous government had “used or promoted scientific information in a highly misleading manner”.
Excerpt from White House executive order, issued in May 2025.
Federal agencies, it claimed, had been using RCP8.5 to “assess the potential effects of climate change in a higher warming scenario”, despite scientists warning that “presenting RCP8.5 as a likely outcome is misleading”.
The executive order came after Project 2025 – a policy wishlist for Trump’s second term published in 2023 by the Heritage Foundation, an influential rightwing, climate-sceptic thinktank in the US – criticised the climate scenario.
The manifesto said a “day-one” priority for the new government should be to “eliminate” the US Environmental Protection Agency’s “use of unauthorised regulatory inputs”, such as “unrealistic climate scenarios, including those based on RCP8.5”.
What is RCP8.5?
Scientists use emissions scenarios to explore potential future climates, based on how global energy and land use could change in the decades to come.
These scenarios are not predictions or forecasts of what will happen in the future. Therefore, Trump’s declaration that projections under RCP8.5 were “wrong, wrong, wrong” misrepresents the purpose of emissions scenarios.
Different modelling groups have produced thousands of different scenarios over the years. RCP8.5 was developed by scientists back in the early 2010s as one of a set of four consistent “representative concentration pathways”, or RCPs, for climate modellers to use.
As their name suggests, the RCPs were representative of the vast array of scenarios in the scientific literature.
Their corresponding numbers – 2.6, 4.5, 6.0 and 8.5 – do not describe temperature rise (as some mistakenly assume), but the level of “radiative forcing” that each pathway reaches by 2100. This forcing level is a measure of the change in the Earth’s “energy balance” (in watts per square metre) caused by human-caused greenhouse gas emissions.
As the highest forcing of the set, RCP8.5 was a scenario of very high emissions and extensive global warming.
When it was originally published in 2011, RCP8.5 was intended to reflect the high end – roughly the 90th percentile – of the baseline scenarios available in the scientific literature at the time.
“RCP8.5 was developed as a no-climate-policy scenario, often called ‘reference’ or ‘baseline’ scenarios. These are used to benchmark the actions of climate policy.”
Under RCP8.5, the IPCC’s fifth assessment report (AR5) in 2013 projected a best estimate of 4.3C of temperature rise by 2081-2100, compared to the pre-industrial period, with a “likely” range of 3.2C to 5.4C.
The RCPs were succeeded in 2017 by the “shared socioeconomic pathways”, or SSPs. The SSPs included a set of five socioeconomic “narratives”, which described factors such as population change, economic growth and the rate of technological development.
The SSPs were then used in the IPCC’s sixth assessment (AR6) cycle, which ran over 2015-23. The upper end of the AR6 temperature projections was provided by the successor to RCP8.5, known as SSP5-8.5, which indicated warming of 4.4C by 2081-2100, with a “very likely” range of 3.3C to 5.7C.
Why is RCP8.5 so hotly debated?
Prof Detlef van Vuuren from Utrecht University, a leading figure in the development of emissions scenarios for many years, tells Carbon Brief that RCP8.5 is a “low-probability, high-risk scenario and it was always meant like that”.
The scenario assumed a world without climate policy and was designed to explore the consequences of high levels of greenhouse gases and global warming. It was not, van Vueren says, a “best-guess scenario” of what the future held in store.
However, in some research papers, RCP8.5 was characterised as “business as usual”, suggesting that it was the likely outcome if society did not pursue climate action.
This was “incorrect”, says van Vuuren, noting that RCP8.5 “is not a likely outcome”. He adds: “It’s never been a likely outcome.”
Over time, RCP8.5 became hotly debated in academic circles, with some scientists arguing that such high emissions were becoming increasingly unlikely and others claiming that RCP8.5 was still consistent with historical cumulative carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions.
Carbon Brief unpacked the arguments in this debate in a detailed explainer in 2019.
The charts below, originally included in a 2012 Nature commentary and then updated each year by the authors, shows how projected CO2 emissions under RCP8.5 (red line) compares with the other RCPs (bold coloured lines) and observations (black line).
The left-hand chart shows total CO2 emissions, including land-use change, while the right-hand chart shows CO2 emissions from burning fossil fuels and producing cement – the dominant drivers of 21st century emissions.
Global total CO2 emissions from fossil fuels and land use (left) and global fossil CO2 emissions (left) for historical observations (black lines) and the four RCP (coloured bold lines) for 1980-2050. Originally produced as part of Peters et al. (2012) and since updated by Glen Peters and Robbie Andrew.
While emission trends up to the early 2010s approximately tracked RCP8.5, a flattening of emissions growth in the years since has meant they have not kept pace with the sustained rises that were assumed in the scenario.
Over the past decade, global emissions have more closely tracked RCP4.5, one of the two “medium stabilisation scenarios” of the original four RCPs.
The debate around RCP8.5 has not just focused on current emissions, but also on the scenario’s underlying assumptions for the future.
When it was published in 2011, the world had just seen unprecedented growth in global CO2 emissions, which had increased by 30% over the previous decade. Global coal use had increased by nearly 50% over the same period. Cleaner alternatives remained expensive in most countries and the idea of continued rapid growth in coal use seemed realistic.
Critics of RCP8.5 point to its assumptions for a dramatic expansion of coal use in the future, as well as high growth in global population.
For example, in a 2017 paper, two scientists argued that the “return to coal” envisaged in RCP8.5 would require an unprecedented five-fold increase in global coal use by the end of the century. Such an outcome was “exceptionally unlikely”, the authors wrote.
However, others have argued that while high-emissions scenarios are becoming increasingly unlikely, they still have an important role to play. For example, they highlight risks that only emerge under higher levels of warming.
In addition, research has shown that feedbacks in the climate system – where warming triggers the release of more CO2 and methane, which warms the planet further – could mean that human-caused emissions lead to a higher radiative forcing and have a greater climate impact than initially assumed.
How has RCP8.5 been replaced?
As the IPCC heads into its seventh assessment cycle (AR7), scientists have been developing the emissions scenarios and climate model projections that will – eventually – feed into its reports.
For the emissions scenarios, that process – known as ScenarioMIP – started back in 2023 at a meeting in Reading, UK. This involved scientists representing “different climate research communities”, explains van Vuuren.
This “brainstorming” session devised the outlines for the new scenarios, he says. After more meetings, these were subsequently developed into a proposal that was – after review – translated into a journal paper. After review from scientists and the public, the final paper was published in April.
The paper sets out seven all-new emissions scenarios, replacing the SSPs (and its predecessors, the RCPs). For simplicity, the new scenarios are named according to their levels of greenhouse gas emissions.
The figures below show the emissions (left) and the estimated global temperature changes (right) under the proposed scenarios, from the “low-to-negative” emissions scenario (turquoise) up to a “high-emissions” scenario (brown).
The greenhouse gas emissions for each of the CMIP7 climate scenarios (left) and the associated estimated average temperature change over 2000-2150 from a 1850-1900 baseline (right) using the FaIR emulator. Source: Adapted from Van Vuuren et al. (2026)
(It should be noted that, while the ScenarioMIP paper has been published, there remains an embargo on using the scenario data produced by integrated assessment models – often referred to as IAMs – to publish academic papers, analysis or even social media posts until 1 September this year. Carbon Brief will publish a detailed explainer on the new scenarios once the embargo lifts.)
When compared to the SSPs that came before, the range in future emissions in the new scenarios “will be smaller”, the authors say in the paper:
“On the high-end of the range, the…high emission levels (quantified by SSP5-8.5) have become implausible, based on trends in the costs of renewables, the emergence of climate policy and recent emission trends…At the low end, many…emission trajectories have become inconsistent with observed trends during the 2020-30 period.”
In other words, the combination of technological progress and action on climate change that, to date, remains insufficient, means that scenarios of very high or very low emissions are now not considered plausible.
Another way of looking at it is that the “range of potential futures has narrowed”, explains Smith, one of the authors on the paper.
If you “draw a fan or plume of potential future emissions that start in 2025”, it lies entirely within the spread of scenarios from a decade ago, he says:
“So you’ve ruled out futures at the high end. You’ve also ruled out futures at the low end – so it’s now not possible to limit warming to 1.5C, at least in the short term or the medium term.”
This is a mix of “good” and “bad” news, Smith adds.
“In the latest set of scenarios, the lowest [scenario sees] peaking at about 1.7C, so we’ve also lost that low end, but the good news is we’ve lost the high end…Back in 2010, RCP8.5 wasn’t an implausible future, we’ve now made it an implausible future, because we’ve actually bent the curve [on emissions] enough to eliminate that possibility.”
The new “high” scenario projects warming in 2100 of closer to 3.2C (with a range of 2.5C to 4.3C).
To be clear, this “high” scenario would still come with catastrophic climate impacts, even if the level of warming would remain slightly below what was set out in RCP8.5.
Van Vuuren adds that the world is “now on a trajectory to 2.5-3C of warming”. As a result, “we don’t have any scenario anymore that can reach 1.5C with limited overshoot – we will have a significant overshoot”.
How is the IPCC involved?
Contrary to Trump’s claims, the common set of future emissions scenarios used by climate scientists are not developed by the IPCC, the UN climate-science body that produces landmark reports about climate change.
Instead, the development process described above is driven by a group of Earth system modelling experts convened by the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP).
CMIP – an initiative of another UN body, the World Climate Research Programme – coordinates the work of dozens of climate modelling centres around the world.
Working in six-to-eight year cycles, CMIP asks modelling centres around the world to run a common set of climate-model experiments – simulations that use the same inputs and conditions – that allows for results to be collected together and more easily compared.
For experiments that explore how the climate might change in the future, modelling centres are instructed to run simulations against a fixed set of future climate scenarios, each with different levels of concentrations of greenhouse gases, aerosols and other drivers of climate change.
These future emissions scenarios are revisited each time CMIP embarks on a new “phase” of climate-modelling coordination, to reflect advances in scientific understanding and the pace of real-world climate action.
The group tasked with producing the design of future scenarios, as well as the “input files” for climate models, is the “scenario model intercomparison project”, or ScenarioMIP.
CMIP aligns its work with the schedule of the IPCC, coordinating a new set of model runs for each IPCC assessment cycle.
For example, the IPCC’s AR5 in 2013 featured climate models from the fifth phase of CMIP (CMIP5), whereas AR6 in 2021 used climate models from CMIP’s sixth phase (CMIP6).
AR7 will feature models from CMIP’s ongoing seventh phase (CMIP7). The first results from CMIP7 model runs are expected later this year.
The IPCC is consulted during the CMIP process, van Vuuren tells Carbon Brief, but its input is “no different from any other review comment” that the ScenarioMIP team received.
Thus, while the IPCC relies on model runs coordinated by CMIP in its landmark reports, it does not play a role in designing future emissions scenarios, nor in deciding when they should be retired.
Dr Robert Vautard, co-chair of IPCC AR7 Working Group I, tells Carbon Brief that the IPCC does not “do or coordinate research”. Its role, he says, is to “synthesise existing knowledge” and produce “regular” reviews of climate-science literature.
He adds that ScenarioMIP is just one set of scenarios the climate-science body assesses in its reports:
“IPCC assesses all scenarios, or sets of scenarios, that the scientific community produces. IPCC does not produce scenarios. CMIP7 will be [one] set of scenarios assessed by IPCC [for AR7] – but there will be many others.”
Chennai was not on the list this time, but is no stranger to high temperatures. In the south-eastern coastal capital of Tamil Nadu, extreme humidity and heat are inescapable facts of life.
“The heat is by no means manageable, but we have no choice but to deal with it,” said Mohammed S, a 29-year-old grocery platform delivery worker, speaking to Carbon Brief.
Last year, Chennai became India’s first ever city to roll out air-conditioned lounges for millions of gig workers, like Mohammed, navigating India’s increasingly hotter cities.
Gig workers leave their slippers outside the lounge. Credit: Ishan Tankha / Scorched
Through the building’s tinted windows, workers wearing synthetic jerseys emblazoned with food delivery app logos are stretched out on wooden benches meant to seat 25 people.
The lounge has charging points for phones, a water cooler and a unisex toilet. It might not seem like much, but workers tell Carbon Brief that it has made a “huge difference” to their lives – even on a day when the air conditioner stopped working.
“Before this, life was very difficult,” said Mohammed. He continued:
“We would park our [electric] bikes and try to find a tree to sleep under, stop for tea and tea shop owners would tell us we couldn’t sit there for more than 10 minutes, try to rest in a building’s stairwell and be chased away, then try to find shade under a flyover. Now we can sit in the AC and avoid the worst of the heat.”
Dinesh, 27, said his day starts at dawn before the sun is up, picking up packages from companies in north Chennai – another critical heat hotspot.
For the next seven hours, there is no “off point” or breaks for Dinesh as apps rush deliveries.
Some of Chennai’s gig workers told Carbon Brief they try to avoid the worst of afternoon temperatures from noon to 3pm, but for many – especially migrant workers – sitting back in the lounge is not a choice they can afford. One of them explained:
“If you don’t have cash to cover your bills or have to send money back home, you head out into the heat for a 12-hour shift and hope for the best.”
Dinesh checks his orders in the gig worker’s lounge. Credit: Ishan Tankha / Scorched
Feeling ‘gear’
In Chennai, heat might be normalised, but it has its own vocabulary. Speaking to Carbon Brief, the city’s gig workers, auto rickshaw drivers and fish sellers used an all-encompassing term – “gear” – to describe their symptoms, including dizziness, exhaustion and nausea.
Last summer, researchers offered Delhi’s gig workers a Rs 200 (roughly £2) cash transfer on the first day of a heatwave, to provide them with a means to achieve “real-time” adaptation to heat risk. Workers who received a cash transfer reported fewer heat-related symptoms, according to the study.
Asked if they would accept similar incentives to stay home on 40C days, workers in the T Nagar lounge expressed disbelief. Dinesh – who also trains technicians on how to repair air conditioners to support his income – told Carbon Brief:
“They [the apps] offer us incentives to go out in the heat when there are fewer riders.”
Barring a few, none of the dozens of outdoor workers Carbon Brief spoke to had an air conditioner at home or in their hostels, making the lounge the only place they could cool down.
Anna Bawden Health and social affairs correspondent
Sat 16 May 2026 05.00 BST
The climate crisis should be declared a global public health emergency by the World Health Organization, or millions more people will die unnecessarily, leading international experts have said.
The international spread of vector-borne disease, such as dengue and chikungunya, as well as the health impacts of extreme weather events, global heating, food insecurity and air pollution make a Pheic necessary, said the commission’s report, which will be presented to European ministers on Sunday before the WHO’s world health assembly starts on Monday.
Pheics are the highest level of health alert. Previous declarations include infectious diseases such as Covid and Mpox. While declaring one would not on its own reverse climate change, it would trigger the kind of coordinated international response that the scale of the health crisis demands but has not yet materialised.
The 11-strong independent commission, which includes former health and climate ministers, said: “Far from being a fading priority or fake news, climate change poses an immediate and long-term threat to health, economic, food, water, environmental, personal, community and national security.”
Andrew Haines and Katrin Jakobsdóttir, the commission’s chief scientific adviser and chair respectively. Photograph: WHO/Hedinn Halldorsson
In an interview with the Guardian, Katrín Jakobsdóttir, a former prime minister of Iceland who chaired the commission, said: “The climate crisis may not be a pandemic, but it’s still a public health emergency that threatens humanity’s very health and survival. And if we don’t act more quickly and comprehensively, many millions more people could die or face life-changing illness.”
Sir Andrew Haines, a professor of environmental change and public health at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, and the commission’s chief scientific adviser, said: “WHO has already recognised that climate change is a major threat to global health. What we’re asking for is a step further.”
He added: “If we carry on emitting at current rates, that will accelerate the risks to health for both current and future generations including: more people suffering and dying from excess heat, floods and infectious diseases, air pollution from wildfires, more preterm births and more food insecurity.”
The commission also urged governments to stop subsidising fossil fuels, which are directly responsible for 600,000 premature deaths a year in Europe alone. The region spends about €444bn (£387bn) a year on subsidies for oil and gas production, the report said. In 12 European countries, fossil fuel subsidies exceeded 10% of national health expenditure in 2023 and in four exceeded the entire health budget, the report observed.
“This is not a sustainable energy policy. It’s really more of a public health failure,” Jakobsdóttir said. “And it’s one that could get a lot worse. New subsidies for fossil fuels as well as countries considering redrilling in the wake of the Iran crisis would be catastrophic for health.
“European governments are subsidising the very industries responsible for their own citizens’ premature deaths. We need health leaders to really step into the climate debate and not just be on the receiving end of it.”
The commission urged governments to stop subsidising fossil fuels, which are responsible for 600,000 premature deaths a year in Europe. Photograph: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images
The report also called for measures to tackle disinformation, greater use of national climate health impact assessments, as well as recognition that climate change was also a mental health crisis.
Jakobsdóttir said: “The way to challenge climate scepticism and misinformation is simple: make it personal. Climate change is not happening somewhere else, to someone else, in the future. It is shortening lives in European cities right now. It is filling hospitals. It is driving anxiety and stress and other mental health issues. And the policies that would fix it – clean air, active travel, insulated homes, sustainable food – are exactly the policies that make people healthier and happier today.
“When the health argument and the climate argument are the same argument, it becomes very hard to oppose.”
The report also recommended that countries’ healthcare systems needed to become more resilient to the rapidly changing environment in order to try to adapt as much as possible.
“Every country needs to be aware of where its health facilities are situated, how likely it is to be flooded and how they would deal with an extreme and prolonged heatwave,” Haines said, pointing out that hospitals were often built on floodplains and frequently were not energy efficient.
“Even in the UK, which is a temperate country, we know that many hospitals struggle when it comes to extreme heat,” he added. “Many of the buildings were designed before climate change.”
The healthcare sector accounts for 5% of global emissions worldwide, so needs to prioritise adaptation to become more resilient, the report concluded.
Members of the emergency military unit try to extinguish a wildfire in Ourense province, Spain, in August 2025. Photograph: Pablo Blázquez Domínguez/Getty Images
Responding to the recommendations, Dr Hans Kluge, the WHO’s regional director for Europe, said: “The conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East have clearly shown what fossil fuel dependency really means – not just higher bills, but strained or broken health systems, disrupted food and fuel supplies and societies under pressure.
“The case for acting on climate now is not just environmental. It is a security argument, a health argument and an economic argument, all at once. And it is a moral imperative.”
Kluge added: “The decisions taken by governments today will determine the disease burden carried by people who are currently in primary school. It now falls to the rest of us to act on their recommendations and protect future generations. I commit to ensuring that climate change is treated as the health emergency it is across the 53 member states of the WHO European region.”
Johan Rockström, the director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, welcomed the report. He said: “The current state of the planet, where we are breaching multiple planetary boundaries, and which manifests itself as public health threats impacting millions of people across the world, provides ample scientific evidence that climate change should be declared a public health emergency of international concern.”
Original photo by Verry R. Wibawa 09/ Shutterstock
Physicist Amos E. Dolbear is known for his work on early telephones and other inventions, but an 1897 issue of The American Naturalist contained a different type of scientific contribution: the hypothesis that cricket chirps are linked to air temperature. Dolbear’s observations (likely of snowy tree crickets, or Oecanthus fultoni) led him to theorize that the frequency of their chirps increased with warmer weather, and slowed as the thermometer fell. Surely, the phenomenon could be used to “easily compute the temperature when the number of chirps per minute is known,” Dolbear wrote. Most entomologists now agree that his theory — called Dolbear’s Law — is pretty spot-on, thanks to how insects respond to environmental changes. As cold-blooded creatures, crickets are unable to regulate their body temperatures internally, relying on the sun’s heat to fuel their metabolisms and provide the energy they need. Warmer temperatures allow the six-legged critters to use more energy, allowing more of the chemical reactions in their bodies that produce muscle contractions (and thus chirps) to occur — which we hear in the form of faster-paced songs.
You can easily test Dolbear’s Law on the next warm, buzzing night. Tune in to one cricket’s song, count the number of chirps you hear in 15 seconds, and add 37 for an approximate forecast in degrees Fahrenheit. (If math isn’t your strong suit, the U.S. National Weather Service has a handy cricket chirp converter that also provides a Celsius conversion). There are some limitations to using a cricket temperature gauge, however: Most crickets won’t sing when temps dip below 55 degrees or when heat pushes the thermometer past 100. And while many crickets respond to temperature shifts this way, not all chirp at the same rate. Fortunately, the snowy tree cricket is widespread throughout the United States — where, perhaps unsurprisingly, it’s also known as the thermometer cricket.
Stardust Solutions says its tiny spheres can reflect the sun’s rays without harming people or the environment. Critics say private companies have no business altering Earth’s atmosphere.
A company at the forefront of solar geoengineering — the notion that blocking radiation from the sun could cool a warming planet — has disclosed details of the materials it wants to sprinkle in the atmosphere.
Stardust Solutions, led by former members of Israel’s nuclear energy program, is publishing research on Thursday that reveals the chemical properties of its particles, how they would affect the atmosphere and how high-flying aircraft would disperse the material.
The privately held company, founded in 2023, is farthest ahead in the contest to take an idea that was once the stuff of science fiction and move it into the mainstream. It has attracted $75 million from investors, has applied for a patent and is submitting its research to scientific journals for peer review.
Its chief executive, Yanai Yedvab, said Stardust Solutions had only tested its materials in its laboratory and had no plans to conduct outdoor tests. Outdoor trials would only be done in collaboration with a government that would set ground rules and guardrails, he said in an interview.
As humans continue to burn fossil fuels and greenhouse gas emissions reach record levels, Dr. Yedvab and others say that managing solar radiation deserves serious consideration.
“This is a very powerful tool that will be ready for testing very soon, and we want policymakers to start thinking seriously, ‘What will it take in practice?’” he said.
But the idea of manipulating the atmosphere to turn down the temperature of the Earth remains contentious, and more than 600 scientists and academics have called for an international ban.
Prakash Kashwan, a professor of environmental studies at Brandeis University, is among them. He said solar geoengineering could tamper with weather patterns, damaging food production and local economies.
It’s especially worrisome for residents of South Asia and parts of East Africa and Latin America who rely on yearly monsoon rainfall to irrigate crops, Dr. Kashwan said.
“There’s this social risk for at least two billion people that is directly connected to the lack of scientific understanding about how interfering with the global temperature thermostat is going to interfere with the monsoon formation,” he said. “We don’t have a solution for those kinds of risks.”
Yanai Yedvab, the Stardust chief executive, at the company’s offices in Ness Ziona, Israel.Credit…Avishag Shaar-Yashuv for The New York TimesA Stardust engineer in a testing chamber.Credit…Avishag Shaar-Yashuv for The New York Times
Dr. Yedvab said that Stardust officials were having preliminary conversations with policymakers in the United States and Europe about the company’s proposal but declined to identify them. Stardust Solutions spent $370,000 last year on federal lobbyists, according to OpenSecrets, which tracks lobbying spending.
The materials produced by Stardust are made from amorphous silica, which is used as a food additive and in some consumer products, and calcium carbonate, a compound found in eggshells and limestone. The company said its particles were biodegradable, were not harmful to people or animals, and would not accumulate in the oceans or soil. Released in the upper atmosphere, the particles could reflect a small amount of sunlight away from Earth, the company said.
Until Thursday, the company kept the ingredients under wraps, requiring anyone who wanted to see its data to sign a nondisclosure agreement.
Michael S. Diamond, a professor of meteorology at Florida State University, said he was surprised by the simplicity of the Stardust particle.
“It’s quite an elegant idea, and I like that it is using relatively well known particles,” said Dr. Diamond, who studies how aerosol particles affect the climate. “I’m a little bit surprised that they’ve kept this so secretive. I thought they were going to do something really out there, but amorphous silica itself is a very widely used product.”
David Keith, professor of geophysical sciences at the University of Chicago who has researched the idea of slowing climate change with reflective particles for more than two decades, said he needed more information.
“This is really good idea, it’s cool and it might be useful,” Dr. Keith said. “But the big question is, what is this environmental impact? The answer has to be, from anybody, is that we don’t know.”
An enlarged image of Stardust particles in a lab in Ness Ziona. Credit…Avishag Shaar-Yashuv for The New York TimesTechnicians prepared to test Stardust particles to understand how they might behave in the atmosphere.Credit…Avishag Shaar-Yashuv for The New York Times
Dr. Yedvab likened his company to a drug development lab that conducted its initial work behind closed doors before applying for approval from the Food and Drug Administration.
“Solar reflection technology is heavy lift,” Dr. Yedvab said during an interview. “You want to make sure that you’re doing it when you can say credibly. You don’t want to say, ‘Yeah, I overlooked something or something was missing and I need to go back and correct it.’ This was the responsible thing to do.”
In addition to concerns about unintended consequences, environmental groups have worried that geoengineering could reduce pressure on countries and industries to reduce the emissions that are driving climate change. But in the past several years, record global temperatures, increasing risk of drought and wildfire, and the increasing intensity of severe storms and floods, have pushed many researchers and some environmentalists to accept the notion that solar geoengineering must at least be studied.
Dozens of academic labs in the United States, Europe, and Asia are now modeling how spraying various amounts of reflective particles in different locations might cool the planet. A team from the University of Cambridge and Harvard University, with backing from the British government, plans to launch a high-altitude drone sometime next year to test reflective particles in a metal tray without releasing them into the atmosphere.
From left, magnesium calcite cores, calcium carbonate cores, calcium carbonate cores enclosed within amorphous silica shell, and intentionally fractured amorphous silica shells.Credit…Stardust Solutions
Most of these efforts have contemplated using sulfur dioxide, a compound released during volcanic eruptions that changes from a gas to sulfate, an aerosol particle that reflects sunlight. Because sulfate particles in some concentrations can damage the protective ozone layer, and because they might warm the stratosphere, Stardust officials said they chose something different.
Stardust Solutions is registered in Delaware as a U.S. company with an Israeli subsidiary called Stardust Labs. Its laboratory is in Ness Ziona, Israel, about 12 miles south of Tel Aviv, near the renowned Weizmann Institute of Science.
Dr. Yedvab, co-founder Amyad Spector and a team of 25 researchers have developed two kinds of particles. The first is made of amorphous silica and coated in a material to prevent it from interacting with atmospheric gases. The second particle is a shell of amorphous silica around an inner core of calcium carbonate.
The company said the amorphous silica would be used as in initial effort to reflect up to 1 percent of the coming sunlight, while the silica-carbonate particle could be used at higher concentrations to block more than 1 percent.
Using a chamber that mimics the subzero conditions of the stratosphere, Stardust researchers tested the silica particle with atmospheric trace gases to see how they would react.
A floor plan of the enclosed test chamber.Credit…Avishag Shaar-Yashuv for The New York TimesInside the enclosed chamber.Credit…Avishag Shaar-Yashuv for The New York Times
The second silica-carbonate particle has similar surface chemistry to the first one but is still being tested, Dr. Yedvab said.
Stardust also tested a dispersion system to make sure the particles would spread out after being sprayed from an aircraft and would not react with water vapor to form ice crystals and drop toward the ground.
Stardust executives said that initial effort to begin atmospheric cooling would cost about $10 billion. That would cover the material, the aircraft that could disperse it at high altitudes and a monitoring system using a chemical tag to track the particles in the air and, later, on the ground.
By adding 10 million tons of the reflective particles to the atmosphere over the course of several years, the atmosphere could be cooled by 1.5 degrees Celsius, the company said. There are no known health effects from exposure to amorphous silica at the levels found in the environment or in commercial products, according to the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, a branch of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But some scientists said they wanted more information about how the particles might affect human respiratory health.
Dr. Yedvab noted that the Department of Homeland Security sprayed amorphous silica into the New York City subway system in 2016 as part of an experiment to test emergency preparedness against a potential bioterrorism attack. The silica was used as a nontoxic tracer to check how a potential pathogen might spread in the subway.
Shuchi Talati said the idea of geoengineering technology as corporate intellectual property was “massively problematic.” Credit…Haiyun Jiang for The New York Times
Still, the conflict between Stardust and some critics is not over the safety of its particles but whether a private company should be involved in geoengineering research at all and Stardust’s lack of transparency until now.
Daniele Visioni, professor of earth and atmospheric sciences at Cornell University, said Stardust should follow the traditional path of announcing scientific discoveries by presenting data at a conference and answering questions from scientists working in the same field.
“I keep seeing that all the moves they make are the wrong ones process-wise,” Dr. Visioni said.
The American Geophysical Union, the Natural Resources Defense Council and two other nonprofit groups have formed a coalition to write a code of ethics for research into cooling the planet.
Shuchi Talati, who founded the coalition, said she was troubled by the idea that a private for-profit company could own the rights to a something that could profoundly affect the planet.
“There’s no trust whatsoever,” Dr. Talati said. “Where has the scientific merit review and the transparent public review process been for the last two years for this alleged particle? This idea of intellectual property with solar radiation management is massively problematic.”
Dr. Yedvab said that research into geoengineering had been stalled and that Stardust was shaking things up. “We feel that our role is to disrupt this field to make sure that governments have options,” he said.
Etnias do Alto Xingu se reúnem anualmente no Kuarup: origem dos povos nativos é mais complexa do que se sabia (foto: Mário Vilella / Funai)
Maria Guimarães | Pesquisa FAPESP – Os povos indígenas que habitam a América do Sul descendem de três ondas migratórias. A novidade é que uma delas, mais representada na população atual, veio da Mesoamérica por volta de 1.300 anos atrás, de acordo com estudo feito apenas por pesquisadores do continente. Isso revela uma maior complexidade na história dos povos nativos, com maior diversidade genética do que se antecipava. A pesquisa estampa a capa da última edição (07/05) da revista científica Nature. “Chegamos a essas conclusões por meio de um trabalho muito intenso do ponto de vista de colaborações”, conta a geneticista Tábita Hünemeier, do Instituto de Biociências da Universidade de São Paulo (IB-USP). Ela coordenou o estudo, no qual vem trabalhando há mais de uma década, e se surpreendeu com a diversidade genética mais alta do que esperava.
Foram 128 genomas sequenciados por inteiro, representando 45 povos de oito países latino-americanos – Argentina, Bolívia, Brasil, Colômbia, Equador, México, Paraguai e Peru –, e comparados a outras 71 sequências disponíveis em bancos de dados. A ideia foi estimar as afinidades genéticas entre todos os grupos indígenas americanos, levando em conta genomas antigos. A pesquisadora celebra a presença, entre os autores, da biomédica Putira Sacuena, da Universidade Federal do Pará (UFPA). “Ela foi a primeira mulher indígena a trabalhar com antropologia genética”, afirma. A colaboração indígena em estudos que dizem respeito aos povos nativos é considerada pelos pesquisadores uma novidade bem-vinda na busca por compreender essa história.
Esse trabalho acrescenta informações importantes sobre o que se sabe da colonização humana da América do Sul. A primeira onda migratória deixou registros com idades de até 12 mil anos na Lapa do Santo (leia mais em: revistapesquisa.fapesp.br/os-povos-de-lagoa-santa/) e na gruta do Sumidouro, na região mineira de Lagoa Santa, e no Chile. Por volta de 9 mil anos atrás, mais uma migração deixou marcas distintas no registro genético e arqueológico, no Peru e na Argentina. Mas o Holoceno Médio, período entre 8 mil e 4,2 mil anos atrás, trouxe mudanças ambientais que prejudicaram ecossistemas e a disponibilidade de recursos, afetando também as populações humanas.
Os povos indígenas que hoje habitam o continente, em parte por isso, descendem também de indivíduos que chegaram cerca de 1.300 anos atrás a partir de onde agora é o México. Essa terceira onda, que não estava documentada até agora, é a grande novidade. As análises do DNA indicam também que após a chegada dos europeus no século 16, os grupos indígenas se tornaram menos populosos e mais isolados uns dos outros. No tronco Tupi, o estudo detectou sinais de endocruzamento – quando a reprodução se dá entre grupos pequenos, sem possibilidades de migração – nos povos Sirionó, Suruí e Karitiana, indicando um colapso populacional provavelmente resultante de epidemias, escravização, perturbações nas possibilidades de subsistência e no conhecimento tradicional. É possível enxergar uma recuperação recente em algumas regiões da parte ocidental da América do Sul. A diversidade genética é maior na América Central e no Cone Sul.
Um enigma foi encontrar trechos genômicos muito antigos característicos da Australásia (Austrália e ilhas na região), de neandertais (da Europa) e de denisovanos (do leste asiático), preservados no DNA sul-americano. A hipótese é de que esses genes antigos tenham um papel benéfico ainda desconhecido e foram mantidos por seleção natural. O foco do artigo era a diversidade e os percursos das populações, e não os aspectos funcionais, mas a identificação de regiões associadas à resposta imune, a traços cardiometabólicos, à fertilidade e a traços antropométricos sugere que estudos futuros podem explorar mais a fundo o papel da evolução humana no continente. De acordo com Hünemeier, os marcadores genéticos usados em pesquisas anteriores tinham sido desenhados a partir de populações europeias e africanas, e não eram adequados para entender a América. “Agora temos parâmetros.”
O importante – e que contraria algumas visões sobre os grupos nativos – foi documentar a permanência prolongada de grupos humanos em muitas áreas, com uma diversidade genética pronunciada. Isso indica a necessidade de uma representação mais completa desses povos em bancos genômicos globais. “O mundo inteiro dispunha de dados genômicos para contar a história de sua população, só o Brasil não tinha”, avalia o arqueólogo André Strauss, do Museu de Arqueologia e Etnologia (MAE) da USP, que não participou do estudo. Ele remete a um artigo publicado por ele em 2018 na revista Cell, sobre a história antiga da população sul-americana (leia mais em: revistapesquisa.fapesp.br/quando-havia-indios-em-lagoa-santa/), que deixou um mistério no ar: se os povos de Lagoa Santa não eram os ancestrais diretos dos indígenas atuais, quem são esses ancestrais? “O artigo de agora confirma as duas levas migratórias anteriores e caracteriza a terceira.”
Strauss tem o objetivo de encontrar essa onda no registro arqueogenético. “Boa parte dos esqueletos que temos são mais antigos, há muito poucos dos grupos ceramistas”, explica ele. Um motivo é que as cavernas e os sambaquis são ambientes mais propícios à preservação dos esqueletos, enquanto em locais como a Amazônia eles se decompõem. Do que é possível contar a partir dos dados moleculares, há mais a caminho. “Já temos mais mil amostras sequenciadas”, afirma Hünemeier. “Entendemos que, para enxergar a diversidade da América e sua complexidade, o melhor é ter poucos indivíduos de muitas populações.”
A investigação foi apoiada pela FAPESP por meio dos projetos 15/26875-9 e 21/06860-8.
Entidade indicou noite estável em Copacabana, enquanto chegada de frente fria provocou chuva neste domingo e mantém mar agitado até terça-feira
Bandeira com alerta de alto risco por conta da ressaca na praia de Copacabana — Foto: Domingos Peixoto
03/05/2026 – 16:11
Previsão do Cacique Cobra Coral acerta tempo para show de Shakira no Rio
Durante o show de Shakira em Copacabana, no sábado, a previsão do Cacique Cobra Coral se confirmou com tempo firme, ao contrário do domingo, quando uma frente fria trouxe chuva e agitação marítima. A Fundação Cacique Cobra Coral, ligada à médium Adelaide Scritori, foi procurada pela produção do evento. O convênio com a prefeitura foi suspenso após a saída do ex-prefeito Eduardo Paes. A chuva deve cessar até terça-feira.
Sem uma gota de chuva durante o megashow de Shakira em Copacabana, no sábado, a previsão associada ao Cacique Cobra Coral acabou se confirmando. Procurada diante do risco de instabilidade climática, a entidade indicava tempo firme no horário da apresentação — cenário que se manteve ao longo de toda a noite, garantindo condições estáveis para o público que lotou a orla.
Ao GLOBO, Osmar Santos, porta-voz da Fundação Cacique Cobra Coral, deu a entender que a entidade foi acionada pela produção do evento. A fundação é ligada à médium Adelaide Scritori, que afirma incorporar o espírito do cacique, conhecido por supostamente atuar sobre as condições climáticas em grandes eventos. Casos como esse costumam gerar repercussão, especialmente quando coincidem com mudanças previstas no tempo. Apesar do acerto, Osmar garante que o convênio com a prefeitura não foi renovado após a saíde de ex-prefeito Eduardo Paes, que irá disputar o governo do estado.
— Nós só terminamos um pedido anterior da equipe do Dudu (Eduardo Paes) antes dele deixar a prefeitura. Pois foi Dudu que teve a iniciativa de trazer a pop star nos últimos dias do governo dele. Com a saída do Dudu, o convênio está suspenso, pois quem estiver a frente da prefeitura precisa manifestar o interesse em manter o convênio e não somos nós que vamos atrás deles. Já temos o mundo atrás de nós e temos que atender quem nos procura —disse.
A virada no tempo veio na sequência. Já neste domingo, o Rio amanheceu com céu encoberto e registro de chuva, sob influência da chegada de uma frente fria. A mudança, prevista para depois do espetáculo, marcou um contraste evidente com a noite anterior, de tempo estável e sem precipitações na Zona Sul.
Segundo o sistema Alerta Rio, às 15h20, havia atuação de nuvens baixas e núcleos de chuva no entorno do Maciço da Tijuca e em pontos das zonas Oeste e Sudoeste, provocando chuva fraca e isolada ao longo da última hora. A previsão indica continuidade de chuva fraca, podendo ser pontualmente moderada, também de forma isolada, nas próximas horas.
Para esta segunda-feira, a tendência ainda é de instabilidade, com previsão de chuva moderada em diferentes momentos do dia. As temperaturas devem variar entre 17°C e 33°C. De acordo com os sistemas meteorológicos da prefeitura, a partir de terça-feira (5), a chuva não deve atingir a cidade, cenário que tende a se manter ao menos até quinta-feira.
Médium atua remotamente no show de Shakira para garantir clima favorável
A médium Adelaide Scritori, que incorpora o espírito do Cacique Cobra Coral, participa remotamente do show de Shakira no Rio de Janeiro, enquanto está em Marrocos tratando de tempestades de areia. Conhecida por influenciar o clima em grandes eventos, sua fundação foi consultada por empresários preocupados com o clima para a apresentação. O tempo no show promete calor e nuvens, sem chuva, com possível mudança no domingo.
Personagem presente em praticamente todos os megaeventos realizados no Rio nos últimos 20 anos, dessa vez a médium Adelaide Scritori, que diz incorporar o Cacique Cobra Coral, espírito que teria capacidade de manipular as condições climáticas, vai atuar no show de Shakira, neste sábado, na Praia de Copacabana. Mas, ao contrário do que aconteceu nas apresentações de Madonna (2024) e Lady Gaga (2025), primeiras atrações do evento Todos no Rio, dessa vez não será presencialmente.
Segundo Osmar Santos, porta voz da Fundação Cacique Cobra Coral e marido de Adelaide, eles estão bem longe do palco da Loba. Desde a semana passada, a médium mantém uma série de de reuniões em Marrocos, a 7,1 mil quilômetros da Cidade Maravilhosa. Mas divide seus pensamentos com o evento no Rio de Janeiro.
— Todos sabem que a Fundação colabora com vários países, prestando consultoria climática. Fomos chamados por empresários com negócios na África que pediram ajuda para reduzir o impacto das tempestades de areia. Vamos voltar na semana que vem— contou Osmar.
Sem citar nomes Osmar disse que a Fundação Cobra Coral foi procurada há dois meses por empresários brasileiros preocupados que as condições climáticas da cidade em maio não fossem adequadas para a apresentação da cantora colombiana.
Previsão do tempo
Coincidência ou influência espiritual, o fato é que a previsão do tempo para a hora do show é de um cenário típico de virada de tempo: calor, muitas nuvens e ausência de chuva durante a apresentação, mas com mudança nas condições climáticas nas horas seguintes. Pode chover no domingo.
A previsão para o dia do show aponta temperatura mínima de 21°C e máxima de 32°C. A Sensação térmica pode chegar a 26°C. Segundo o meteorologista Guilherme Borges, de manhã e tarde terá sol entre muitas nuvens. A noite o céu entra com bastante nebulosidade.
— O sol deve aparecer bastante ao longo do dia de sábado e não tem expectativa de chuva. Vai ser um dia bastante quente a temperatura. No horário do inicio das apresentações, às 17h até 23h teremos temperatura entre 27°C e 25°C. Ou seja, temperatura bastante agradável — contou Borges.
Segundo ele, a mudança no tempo será mais perceptível no domingo, principalmente nas primeiras horas do dia, em que pode chover.
Ativistas indígenas participam de um protesto climático durante a Cúpula Climática da ONU COP30, em Belém. A maneira como as populações indígenas e tradicionais amazônicas lidam com a biodiversidade está inseparavelmente ligada às suas cosmo-ecologias, que concebem uma floresta animada por seres espirituais, nos permitindo compreender outros modos de se relacionar no ambiente. AP Photo/Andre Penner.
Thiago Mota Cardoso – Professor do Departamento de Antropologia, Universidade Federal do Amazonas (UFAM)
Carlos Calenti – Doutorando em Antropologia Social, Universidade Federal do Amazonas (UFAM)
Eduardo Soares Nunes – Professor do Programa de Pós-Graduação em Antropologia e Arqueologia, Universidade Federal do Oeste do Pará (UFOPA)
Miguel Aparicio – Pesquisador do Laboratório de Estudos Sociais (LAES/INPA), Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas da Amazônia (INPA)
Nicole Soares-Pinto – Professora do Departamento de Ciências Sociais, Universidade Federal do Espírito Santo (UFES)
Rafael Vitorino Devos – Professor Associado no Departamento de Antropologia, Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina (UFSC)
A situação climática global e suas consequências têm colocado a Amazônia no centro do debate sobre as possibilidades de futuro. O extenso relatório publicado pelo Painel Científico para a Amazônia (SPA) informa que a maior floresta tropical do mundo continua a ser tomada como uma frente de expansão para o capital neoextrativista e agroindustrial, mas também que há uma crescente preocupação e esforços locais e globais com a conservação e proteção da Amazônia em função dos serviços ecossistêmicos que presta ao planeta e por sua enorme sociobiodiversidade.
As vozes dos povos da floresta — indígenas, ribeirinhos e quilombolas, ecoando cada vez mais fortes e atingindo uma audiência cada vez maior — têm sido fundamentais para o reconhecimento tanto da imensa diversidade que constitui a Amazônia quanto dos riscos e agressões a que a floresta e seus povos estão atualmente expostos.
Os conhecimentos indígenas têm um papel ativo no manejo histórico das paisagens, contribuindo para a atual conformação das ecologias amazônicas. Ainda assim, é da perspectiva da governança global e da ciência ocidental que a “proteção” e a “conservação” da Amazônia e de sua biodiversidade são usualmente encaradas.
Os conhecimentos tradicionais nunca estiveram tão em voga e foram tão valorizados nas soluções para a crise climática e ambiental como o são atualmente mas, em boa medida, seguem sendo medidos e pesados frente às ciências naturais, que considera estas ciências ancestrais apenas como suplementares ao conhecimento científico naturalista. Em outras palavras: “explicações culturais” para “fenômenos naturais”.
Ao mesmo tempo, como aponta um recente relatório das Nações Unidas, os povos indígenas e comunidades tradicionais estão sendo deixados para trás nos esforços de enfrentamento às mudanças climáticas, onde encontram barreiras estruturais que os impedem de ter acesso aos financiamentos climáticos internacionais.
Mas o que acontece quando os conhecimentos indígenas, ribeirinhos e quilombolas desafiam os pressupostos das ciências naturais e das estratégias de conservação ambiental, quando desafiam seu entendimento do que é o mundo e de como ele se mantém?
Tudo vai bem quando os conhecimentos tradicionais podem ser traduzidos em termos das taxonomias e dos processos naturais que sustentam as práticas científicas. Mas e quando as populações amazônicas apontam para a existência de seres espirituais como responsáveis pela criação e reprodução de determinadas espécies animais e vegetais ou pelo cuidado e proteção de lugares e ambientes?
As cosmo-ecologias amazônicas
As cosmologias dos povos amazônicos descrevem o mundo como habitado por uma pluralidade de seres espirituais. Dentro de sua multiplicidade e complexidade existencial, impossível de resumir aqui em tão poucas linhas, chamamos atenção especialmente para o que podemos nomear genericamente de “espíritos”.
São entes que nutrem uma relação particular, de controle ao mesmo tempo que de cuidado, com determinadas espécies, com lugares específicos ou com o próprio equilíbrio do mundo: são os donos, mestres, encantados e mães de espécies vegetais, animais e minerais, espíritos auxiliares de xamãs, santos ou visagens.
Os “donos”, “mestres” ou “mães”, por exemplo, são seres que se situam em diversos patamares (celeste, terrestre, aquático, fundo da terra), vivem em lugares sob seus domínios (lagos, igarapés, florestas, serras) e controlam e cuidam de determinadas espécies, sendo responsáveis pela existência desses animais e vegetais, bem como por sua reprodução.
Em seus domínios cósmicos, esses seres criam porcos do mato, tartarugas e outros animais em “currais”, e deixam suas criações sair dali para que as pessoas humanas possam delas se alimentar. Essa é uma imagem bastante difundida entre diversos povos amazônicos. Outros seres estabelecem essa relação de domínio com lugares específicos, como um lago, um trecho do rio, uma árvore de grande porte, ou uma porção da mata. É deles que vêm a fertilidade e a potência de vida desses lugares – as espécies que ali coabitam, a água que corre no igarapé etc. Se eles se afastam ou morrem, seus lugares também perecem – os animais somem, as plantas morrem, os igarapés secam.
Há ainda os “espíritos” que ativamente mantêm o equilíbrio dinâmico do mundo. Um exemplo disso são os xapiri, descritos pelo povo Yanomami, que sustentam o céu, como nos conta o xamã Davi Kopenawa no livro A queda do céu, escrito em conjunto com o antropólogo francês Bruce Albert: se os xapiri se afastarem, a floresta morrerá, o céu caíra sobre a terra e não haverá mais mundo.
A existência desses seres é muito bem conhecida e extensamente documentada, sobretudo em pesquisas antropológicas, como podemos observar nos diversos capítulos do relatório Povos Tradicionais e Biodiversidade no Brasil publicado pela Sociedade Brasileira para o Progresso da Ciência (SBPC). No entanto, a existência desses entes espirituais nos ecossistemas e suas relações com a biodiversidade na Amazônia ainda é uma lacuna nos estudos biológicos e antropológicos sobre criação e conservação da biodiversidade.
Se é verdade que novas espécies são identificadas em estudos com a participação de povos amazônicos, geralmente a rede de saberes, histórias e práticas que conecta tais espécies identificadas a seus donos, mães e lugares de origem é cortada do conhecimento produzido.
Foi a partir dessa constatação que propusemos o projeto “Ecologia dos Espíritos: conhecimentos tradicionais e conservação da sociobiodiversidade na Amazônia”, contemplado na Iniciativa Amazônia+10, com financiamento do CNPq, e das fundações de amparo a pesquisa dos estados do Amazonas (Fapeam) e do Pará (Fapespa).
O projeto de pesquisa
Nosso projeto busca produzir um panorama de conhecimentos etnográficos sobre o manejo e conservação da sociobiodiversidade por parte de uma diversidade de povos indígenas e comunidades tradicionais da Amazônia, tomando como foco esses seres espirituais e suas existências em assembleias socioecológicas e as relações que estes povos estabelecem com eles.
Acreditamos que os resultados da pesquisa darão sustentação empírica para a ideia de que a maneira como as populações indígenas e tradicionais amazônicas lidam com a biodiversidade está inseparavelmente ligada às suas cosmo-ecologias, que concebem uma floresta animada por seres espirituais, nos permitindo compreender outros modos de se relacionar no ambiente.
Para isso, é preciso levar a sério os conhecimentos tradicionais desses povos, não como meras alegorias culturais para fatos naturais, mas como conhecimentos legítimos sobre a constituição do mundo. Não reduzir as formulações locais sobre a existência dos seres espirituais como “crença”, “cultura”, “lenda” ou “folclore”, mas sim tomá-los como modos de existência, ou como formas de estar no mundo que não se encontram separadas das relações com pessoas, plantas, fungos, animais e outros agentes minerais relevantes na paisagem.
Levar a sério, portanto, implica em desenvolver práticas científicas que se abram para conversações com as criatividades presentes nas cosmo-ecologias dos povos da Amazônia, reconhecendo o papel dos seres espirituais para a conservação da biodiversidade e na mitigação das mudanças climáticas, o que continua sendo um fator subestimado, pouco pesquisado e mal compreendido para explicar os desafios da Amazônia contemporânea.
Iniciado neste ano e com duração prevista até o início de 2028, o projeto se encontra ainda nas fases iniciais de execução. Dentre os resultados planejados, destacamos a produção de uma coleção digital multimodal de dados e narrativas, oriundos das pesquisas nos diferentes territórios, constituindo uma forma imediata de conhecer e visualizar a diversidade de formas de conservação da sociobiodiversidade a partir da relação dos povos amazônicos com os seres espirituais.
Esperamos que o projeto Ecologias dos Espíritos, realizada em rede por meio de um conjunto de pesquisas colaborativas, implicadas e reflexivas, possa nos fornecer uma imagem da Amazônia e de seus povos que contribua para o tensionamento, no âmbito do debate científico e do debate público, dos pressupostos que animam os discursos hegemônicos sobre a conservação da sociobiodiversidade amazônica.
Se a Amazônia aparece cada vez mais como o centro do debate sobre as possibilidades de futuro(s), é preciso multiplicar entendimentos, sendo a partir dos conhecimentos tradicionais dos povos amazônicos que as estratégias e ações presentes precisam ser formuladas.
Este artigo contou com a colaboração e co-autoria dos seguintes pesquisadores do projeto: Darlem Teixeira Penaforth (indígena Kaixana, engenheiro de pesca e Mestrando em Antropologia Social pela UFAM); Elaine Cristina Guedes Wanderley (indígena Parintintin, arqueóloga, historiadora e Doutoranda em Antropologia Social pela UFAM); Emerson Saw Munduruku (indigena Munduruku, Pedagogo e Mestre em Sustentabilidade junto a Povos e Territórios Tradicionais – UnB); Gilberto Oliveira (pesquisador quilombola, farmacêutico e Mestrando em Antropologia Social pela UFAM); Izabel Maria Bezerra dos Santos (Jornalista e Mestranda em Antropologia Social pela – UFAM); José Carlos Almeida Cruz (indígena Piratapuia, pedagogo, Mestre e Doutorando em Antropologia Social pela UFAM); Mariana Spagnuolo Furtado (Doutoranda em Antropologia Social pela Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina – UFSC); Mario dos Santos Cruz (indígena Omágua-Kambeba, pedagogo, Mestre e Doutorando em Antropologia Social pela UFAM); Melanie Theresia Peter (Mestre e Doutoranda em Antropologia Social pela UFAM); Nayara Marcelly Ferreira da Silva (Doutoranda em Antropologia Social pela UFAM); Rosijane Fernandes Moura (indígena Tukano, licenciada em Letras, Mestre e Doutoranda em Antropologia Social pela UFAM).
Declaração de transparência
Carlos Calenti recebe financiamento do CNPq.
Eduardo Soares Nunes recebe financiamento da Fundação Amazônia de Amparo a Estudos e Pesquisas (FAPESPA).
Miguel Aparicio é membro do Observatório dos Direitos Humanos dos Povos Indígenas Isolados, organização na qual atua como presidente
Nicole Soares-Pinto é membro da Assembléia Geral do Centro de Trabalho Indigenista. Já recebeu financiamento de pesquisa do CNPQ, FAPERJ, FAPES e Ford Foundation.
Rafael Vitorino Devos recebe financiamento do CNPq (Bolsa PQ).
Thiago Mota Cardoso não presta consultoria, trabalha, possui ações ou recebe financiamento de qualquer empresa ou organização que poderia se beneficiar com a publicação deste artigo e não revelou nenhum vínculo relevante além de seu cargo acadêmico.
AI forecast models offer some clear benefits over traditional physical models, but they are ill-equipped to handle the increasing volatility of a warming climate.
On November 12, 1970, the Bhola cyclone slammed into the coast of what was then East Pakistan. The storm brought maximum sustained wind speeds of 130 miles per hour (205 kilometers per hour) and a 35-foot (10.5-meter) storm surge, killing an estimated 300,000 to 500,000 people.
Today, the Bhola cyclone remains the deadliest tropical storm on record. But if it had struck a decade later, it might not have been so devastating. Weather forecasting changed dramatically in the 1970s as meteorologists adopted physics-based computer models that improved storm prediction. With the rise of AI, forecasting is evolving again—but this time, experts worry the new models may be less reliable when it comes to predicting unprecedented weather events.
Researchers are calling this the “gray swan” problem. Gray swan weather extremes are physically plausible but so rare that they are poorly represented in training datasets. The trouble is, climate change is leading to more first-of-their-kind weather extremes. Think: the 2021 Pacific Northwest heatwave. This event was so severe that it would have been virtually impossible without climate change.
Physical forecast models can simulate gray swan events like the Pacific Northwest heatwave, though they are labeled extremely rare. They can do that because they are built on the laws of physics. AI models are trained on past weather data, wherein gray swans are practically nonexistent.
“They fail on gray swans,” Pedram Hassanzadeh, an associate professor of geophysical sciences at the University of Chicago, told Gizmodo. He and his colleagues published a study last April that removed all Category 3 through 5 hurricanes from an AI model’s training dataset, then tested it on Category 5 storms. The results showed that AI models cannot accurately forecast previously unseen events, as this would require extrapolation.
“The concern isn’t occasional misses. It’s that AI models can miss silently, producing confident forecasts of unremarkable weather while a record-breaking event is unfolding,” Rose Yu, an associate professor of computer science and engineering at the University of California San Diego, told Gizmodo in an email.
“Other risks matter too,” she said. “AI models can violate conservation laws in subtle ways that don’t show up in standard metrics. When they bust a forecast, diagnosing why is harder. They depend on stable observing systems, which is a real concern given current pressure on satellite programs. And institutionally, if we consolidate around AI too quickly and let physics-based infrastructure atrophy, we lose the redundancy that currently catches AI’s failures.”
The case for AI forecasting
Despite these pitfalls, meteorologists are rapidly adopting AI forecast models, and it’s actually easy to understand why. They’re faster, cheaper, and require far less computational infrastructure than physical models. When it comes to predicting typical weather patterns and events (not gray swans), their accuracy is comparable and improving rapidly.
“The typical rate of progress for most state-of-the-art physical models has been something like a day more accurate per decade, which doesn’t sound like a lot, but that’s consequential,” Andrew Charlton-Perez, a professor of meteorology and head of the School of Mathematical, Physical, and Computational Sciences at the University of Reading, told Gizmodo.
“The rate of accuracy growth for machine learning models has vastly exceeded that,” he said. “They are now competitive, and two-three years ago, they were not even in the same ballpark.”
During the 2025 Atlantic hurricane season, for example, Google DeepMind’s model outperformed nearly every physical model on storm track and intensity. In fact, since 2023, leading AI models such as GraphCast, Pangu-Weather, and the ECMWF’s AIFS have matched or outperformed the best physical models on medium-range forecasting metrics, according to Yu.
AI models are proving especially valuable in parts of the world that lack traditional forecasting resources—regions that are often on the frontlines of climate change. Hassanzadeh co-directed an initiative that provided 38 million farmers across India with AI-based monsoon forecasts, giving them up to four weeks’ advance notice of the rainy season’s onset.
“A lot of countries were left behind in that first revolution of weather forecasting, because [traditional] weather forecasting requires a supercomputer, hundreds of millions of dollars, various fields, workforce, and experts,” Hassanzadeh explained. AI models, by comparison, are far more accessible to lower-income countries.
Filling the knowledge gaps
Still, rapidly adopting these models without addressing the risks would be dangerous, especially in parts of the world highly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. Shruti Nath, a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Oxford, recently co-authored an editorial calling for more rigorous testing of AI forecast models before public agencies widely adopt them.
“There is still a lot of work to be done in understanding the limits of these models, alongside where they could supplement physical models and why,” she told Gizmodo in an email.
Nath’s editorial outlines a framework for testing AI forecast models that would deliberately withhold a designated set of “iconic” extreme events (like the Pacific Northwest heat wave, for example) from the training dataset. These events would be reserved solely for testing in order to assess the models’ ability to extrapolate unprecedented weather extremes, or gray swans.
Actually implementing this AI Retraining Without Iconic Events (AIRWIE) protocol “would require the meteorological community to agree on which high-impact events constitute a rigorous benchmark,” the editorial states. This would be a great undertaking, but Nath believes most researchers agree that there is an urgent need for this kind of testing.
“We need to be a bit more organized, however, in ensuring that proper protocols can be followed and that robust safeguards are put in place and maintained by the community,” Nath said. “This is difficult when things are in such a hype phase and no one wants to miss out on the bandwagon.”
Other researchers, like Hassanzadeh, are developing ways to teach AI forecast models to predict gray swans. He and his colleagues are investigating whether combining AI systems with “relevant sampling” methods—which allow them to generate samples of gray swan events—can improve the models’ ability to extrapolate unprecedented extremes.
Efforts to understand and address the limitations of AI forecasting will be critical, because there’s no turning back now. AI is already reshaping the way we predict the weather, and as the climate becomes increasingly volatile, meteorologists will need every tool in their arsenal to be sharp and reliable. Despite their current limitations, there is much to gain from continuing to push these systems forward and figuring out how to best integrate them with physical forecasting.
“The research agenda is about making AI models physically consistent, well-calibrated, and robust to distribution shift,” Yu said. “Abandoning this approach because of the gray swan problem means giving up the biggest improvement in forecasting in a generation.”
A panel of global experts has been launched to provide scientific input for countries that want to reduce their dependence on fossil fuels and manage the growing risks of high oil prices, geopolitical conflict and extreme weather damage.
The initiative was announced on the opening day of a groundbreaking climate action meeting in Santa Marta, where the Colombian hosts set out a draft roadmap for their own national energy transition.
It marked a high-ambition start to the first global conference on transitioning away from fossil fuels. The event, from 24-29 April, has brought together more than 50 nations, dozens of subnational governments and an estimated 2,800 civil society representatives in a “coalition of the willing” aimed at reinvigorating international efforts to reduce planet-heating emissions from oil, gas and coal.
The new science panel for global energy transition is intended to add intellectual weight to those efforts. Experts in climate, economics and technology will offer advice to policymakers looking to create roadmaps out of the fossil fuel era.
Based partly on the model of the UK’s climate change committee, it includes national and sector-level milestones for eliminating fossil fuels in line with scenarios that return global heating to 1.5C by the end of the century.
The panel will be chaired by Vera Songwe, the Cameroonian co-chair of the High Level Expert Panel on Climate Finance; Ottmar Edenhofer, the German director and chief economist of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research; and Gilberto M Jannuzzi, a Brazilian professor of energy systems at Universidade Estadual de Campinas.
Jannuzzi said there was still time to bring about an energy transition. “Technically, there is no problem. The problem is how to disseminate the information and secure the financing,” he said.
The panel’s formation follows calls by the president of Cop30 in Belém to establish roadmaps for accelerating the transition away from fossil fuels and deforestation.
“We encourage governments and institutions to draw on the panel’s analyses, policy briefs and country-level engagement to strengthen nationally determined contributions, inform sectoral strategies and accelerate implementation of just and orderly energy transitions across different national contexts,” André Aranha Corrêa do Lago said.
The Colombian and Dutch hosts of the Santa Marta meeting have also expressed support for the initiative, which has been convened by Johan Rockström of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and Carlos Nobre of the University of São Paulo.
Rockström said the presence of a third of the world’s countries at Santa Marta would help keep the transition from fossil fuels on the global agenda and demonstrate how it can be achieved. “These are solvable problems that can create better futures for local communities,” he said. “The science panel can play a unique role in providing updates on what needs to happen year by year.”
The 54 countries that are attending the fast track transition conference include major fossil fuel producers such as Nigeria, Mexico, Brazil and Angola, for whom giving up a major source of income will be challenging.
Those challenges, and their possible solutions, were outlined in the new draft roadmap for Colombia, which gets about half of its export revenues from fossil fuels. Drawn up by global experts with Colombian officials, the plan says that a rapid switch to cheaper and more efficient renewables would bring long-term benefits to energy security, health, the climate and the economy.
Reducing fossil fuel use by 90% by 2050 would allow energy demand to continue growing while generating direct economic benefits estimated at $280bn over the next 24 years, the roadmap calculates. “Considerable upfront investment is needed to achieve this transition, but by the early 2040s, this delivers annual net savings to the Colombian economy,” the plan states.
The authors stressed this outline needs to be debated and refined, but they hoped it could help to inform the national debate.
“We are really excited about the roadmap,” said Prof Piers Forster, director of the Priestley Centre for Climate Futures at the University of Leeds. “It shows that it is cost effective to phase out petrol and diesel. And also very cost effective to build renewables. And now we all appreciate the importance of energy security.”
He said he hoped other countries would follow suit and develop their own roadmaps and climate councils. “We want to work with countries to build internal capacity to do it themselves because they understand the opportunities, roadblocks and political sensibilities within their countries.”
An illustration of Reflect Orbital’s proposed constellation of satellites. Reflect Orbital
A new startup has come up with a way to sell sunlight on demand, proposing a constellation of satellites that would reflect beams of light onto Earth.
Reflect Orbital wants to deploy up to 50,000 in-space mirrors mounted on satellites to create sunlight after dark, The New York Times reported. The California-based startup has applied to launch a 59-foot-long (18 meters) prototype satellite named Earendil-1 later this year to test its idea, with hopes to be able to illuminate dark areas at a steep price.
Astronomers are deeply concerned that the proposed constellation poses significant risks to the night skies, which have been severely compromised by the thousands of satellites already in Earth orbit.
Sunlight after dark
The idea is fairly simple: bouncing sunlight off a mirror and reflecting it onto a designated area. The scale, however, is enormous.
Reflect Orbital would use its satellite constellation to illuminate areas up to 3 miles (5 kilometers) at a time with intensities ranging between 0.8 and 2.3 lux. By comparison, a full Moon provides an illumination of around 0.05 to 0.3 lux on a clear night.
The company wants to use its technology to illuminate disaster zones and search-and-rescue missions, extend working hours for industrial sites, boost agricultural yields and extend cycles, reduce light pollution by replacing city lights, and provide light for defense operations, according to Reflect Orbital’s website.
All this extra sunlight comes at a price. Reflect Orbital envisions charging about $5,000 per hour for the light of a single mirror in space and potentially splitting the revenues earned by solar farms from the electricity they would generate using the satellite constellation.
Death to night skies
The proposed constellation of in-space mirrors sounds equally ridiculous and hazardous. The light from the illuminated satellites would largely disrupt ground-based astronomical observations and create persistent interference to telescopic imagery. A constellation of its size also has the potential to increase the amount of space debris in Earth orbit and poses an additional risk to orbital collisions.
Astronomy groups dedicated to protecting the sanctity of the night skies are opposed to the idea. DarkSky International issued a statement in response to the proposed constellation, advocating for “transparency, environmental review, and public accountability before any such systems are approved or deployed.”
“Orbital illumination systems represent an unprecedented environmental intervention. Based on current scientific evidence, DarkSky does not see a viable pathway for such systems to align with responsible lighting principles or with our mission to protect natural darkness,” the statement reads. “These systems would introduce significant ecological, human health, safety, and astronomical risks at a global scale.”
Reflect Orbital is awaiting approval from the Federal Communications Commission before it can launch its first satellite. If the company does manage to make its far-fetched idea somehow work, it would have grave consequences for our view of the night skies.
Na última noite do Grupo Especial, nessa terça (17/02), foram 800 atendimentos médicos nos seis postos da Secretaria Municipal de Saúde (SMS) instalados no Sambódromo. Desses, mais de 300 foram causados pelo calor. E olha que os termômetros marcavam “apenas” 28°C na região da Apoteose – mas imaginem usando uma fantasia de 20 kg, plumas, paetês, luz de refletores e muito calor humano misturado ao álcool?
Entre as principais ocorrências, além da turma derretida, estão a descompensação de doenças crônicas, picos de pressão, mal-estar e fadiga por esforço, dor de cabeça, cortes, entorses, lesões ortopédicas, contusões e intoxicação por consumo exagerado de bebidas alcoólicas.
No balanço geral de todos os dias de desfile, foram 2.843 atendimentos. Destes, 167 precisaram ser encaminhados para hospitais da rede. Durante a passagem de algumas escolas, foi possível ver o resgate de integrantes na pista e de foliões nas frisas e arquibancadas.
Fevereiro no Rio é mistura de loteria climática com teste de sobrevivência, a cidade já viveu carnaval debaixo d’água e sob calor escaldante. Segundo pesquisas sobre aquecimento global, não há Fundação Cacique Cobra Coral que resolva contrato com o clima em definitivo. Num futuro não muito distante, o carnaval vai precisar mudar o calendário?
O biólogo Mario Moscatelli diz: “A conta climática é imprevisível, e estamos longe de entender perfeitamente como o sistema funciona. O Rio não consegue resolver nem os velhos problemas estruturais, quanto mais se preparar para os novos. Ondas de calor estão cada vez mais frequentes, enchentes seguem devastadoras, e a perda de biodiversidade — apontada por especialistas como a sexta extinção em massa — já é uma realidade”.
Ele lembra ainda que ano de eleição também é ano de escolha: “A forma de mudar esse ecocídio global passa pelos votos de pessoas mais antenadas com a questão ambiental e menos com as páginas policiais relacionadas a superfaturamentos, desvios de verbas, criação de mais facilidades para as castas públicas e por aí vai. Quem não for 300% competente na gestão dessa nova realidade vai pagar um preço muito alto, tanto do ponto de vista de perdas materiais, como humanas e ambientais. Acabou a fase da improvisação”.
Skardu, Pakistan – As Pakistan grapples with the effects of rising temperatures that are melting its glaciers, residents in the country’s high-altitude Himalayan region have adopted a traditional technique, known as glacier grafting, to counter water scarcity.
Pakistan, home to an estimated 13,000 glaciers, ranks among the top 10 most climate-vulnerable nations, even though it contributes less than one percent of global emissions.
As global warming worsens, the effect of more glaciers melting is “likely to be significant”, Pakistan’s National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) said last year.
What is glacier grafting?
Glacier grafting, locally known as glacier marriage, is a technique that involves “planting” ice at carefully chosen high-altitude locations to create new artificial glaciers – a process that experts say dates back centuries.
The technique involves storing ice fetched from glaciers closer to human settlements amid periods of water scarcity.
According to Zakir Hussain Zakir, professor and researcher at the University of Baltistan in Skardu, the earliest recorded instance of glacier grafting goes back to the 14th century, when the Sufi saint Mir Syed Ali Hamadani grafted a glacier in the village of Giyari.
“That glacier blocked the route through which invaders from Yarkand came to loot the people,” Zakir, who has researched the practice in the Himalayan region, told Al Jazeera.
Over time, what began as a defensive act evolved into a method for managing water scarcity in one of the world’s most fragile mountain ecosystems.
People in the Ladakh region across the border on the Indian side also use traditional knowledge to preserve ice amid climate change and receding natural glaciers. A relatively newer technique has been developed in Ladakh to create an “ice stupa”, which is formed after spraying water in freezing temperatures. The conical shape ice structure remains frozen for a longer period as its surface is not fully exposed to the sun.
How is glacier grafting carried out?
So-called “male” and “female” ice is sourced from different locations and brought together to create an artificial glacier. Villagers where this technique has been implemented as well as experts told Al Jazeera that volunteers go out to collect around 200kg (441 pounds) of “male” ice from one valley and “female” ice from another. Male ice is typically black in colour, while female ice is usually lighter, providing more fertile water that enhances agricultural productivity, according to locals.
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In ancient times, due to the absence of available transportation as well as steep, narrow and slippery routes through the mountains, volunteers would travel on foot for several days, carrying the ice in traditional wooden cages on their backs.
The process requires specific materials: coal, grass, salt and water collected from seven different streams. Before setting out to the grafting site, the group would recite Quranic verses, perform spiritual rituals and pray for success.
The material, including both sets of ice blocks, would be carried to the site while “strictly following environmentally respectful and culturally sacred practices”, the locals said.
They would avoid the use of plastics, refrain from immoral actions and only consume locally produced foods such as wheat, barley, apricots and homemade bread during the process.
Humour, music, or harm to living creatures is strictly prohibited, as the procedure was viewed as both a spiritual and ecological responsibility.
At the grafting site, a small trench would be dug in a safe area, away from avalanche or flood-risk zones. The male and female ice pieces would be carefully layered together, mixed with salt, coal and grass.
“The male pieces are put on the right, while on the left, female ice pieces,” Zakir said.
Pakistan is home to an estimated 13,000 glaciers [Faras Ghani/Al Jazeera]
Water collected from the seven streams would slowly be dripped over the ice to help bind the layers.
Over several months, the pieces fused into a single ice mass. If the site received seasonal snowfall, the mass would gradually develop into a glacier. After surviving for at least three years and enduring seasonal snow cycles, the artificially grafted glacier would expand. Over the next few years, it would become a reliable water source.
Zakir added that site selection is critical in the process: north-facing slopes, strong winds, less sun exposure and protection from direct flowing water are essential.
Rituals, discipline and collective labour
Locals and experts told Al Jazeera that the deep spiritual and cultural aspects surrounding this technique are what distinguish glacier grafting from purely technical interventions.
Ice pieces are never allowed to touch the ground and must remain in continuous motion from collection to planting.
“Often, vehicles that carry these ice pieces are never switched off,” Zakir recalled, adding that those helping out are forbidden from speaking, using plastic or relieving themselves near the site.
“If one volunteer feels tired, without lying down, he will pass the basket [carrying the ice] to another volunteer.”
Historically, glacier grafting has also concluded with local music known as Gang Lho that is sung directly to the ice. One such song, the professor recalled, addresses the glacier as a living being, calling it “my dear baby glacier” having “pastures to grow… mountains to climb”.
Often, volunteers and villagers would have tears in their eyes, praying for the glacier’s establishment and survival in order to aid their survival and livelihood.
How long does glacier grafting take? Is it guaranteed to survive?
A successfully grafted glacier can start supplying water within two decades, making it a long-term investment in water security.
However, experts warn that the process is vulnerable – not only to a failure of the natural process, a lack of snowfall, drops in temperatures, and climate change, but also to conflict.
“In abnormal climatic conditions, such as during war, the process may fail,” Zakir warned.
“Both India and Pakistan have deployed military forces in the glaciers, and the bullets they use, as well as the movement of soldiers and equipment, are very harmful to glaciers.”
The South Asian neighbours have fought three wars over the disputed Kashmir region, which they both govern parts of.
Can glacier grafting solve water scarcity problems?
The mean temperature in Pakistan since the 1950s has risen by 1.3 degrees Celsius (2.34 degrees Fahrenheit), which is twice as fast as the global mean change, according to the World Bank.
With temperatures rising globally, glacier grafting may not be able to offer a wholesome solution to Pakistan’s melting glaciers problem. But it remains a powerful example of how Indigenous knowledge, culture and collective care have long shaped survival in the mountains.
Locals told Al Jazeera that glacier grafting is now more critical than ever to counter water scarcity and erratic snowfall that cause problems for irrigation, domestic consumption and livestock.
They also worry that the practice of glacier grafting is rapidly disappearing. Younger generations, drawn to urban centres and alternative livelihoods such as tourism, education and business, no longer engage in traditional irrigation.
This shift has disrupted the intergenerational transfer of Indigenous knowledge, they lamented.
This story was produced in partnership with the Pulitzer Center.
A China tenta aumentar artificialmente seus índices de chuva desde a década de 1950 por meio de um método conhecido, embora ainda controverso: a semeadura de nuvens
Ally Hirschlag, BBC Future
17 fevereiro 2026
Em março de 2025, uma frota de 30 aviões e drones lançou partículas de iodeto de prata no céu do norte da China. Ao atingirem o ar, o pó amarelo-pálido em seu interior emergiu e logo se transformou em “fios” acinzentados, entrelaçando o céu enquanto as aeronaves as liberavam em padrões cruzados. Muito abaixo delas, mais de 250 geradores terrestres lançavam foguetes com as mesmas partículas.
O objetivo era trazer alívio à seca nas regiões norte e noroeste, conhecidas como o cinturão de grãos do país. A grande operação foi o projeto “chuva de primavera”, conduzido pela Administração Meteorológica da China, e planejada para beneficiar as plantações no início da temporada de plantio.
A enorme operação foi aparentemente um sucesso, tendo supostamente produzido 31 milhões de toneladas adicionais de precipitação em 10 regiões suscetíveis à seca.
A China tenta aumentar artificialmente seus índices de chuva desde a década de 1950 por meio de um método conhecido, embora ainda controverso: a semeadura de nuvens.
Esse método busca estimular as nuvens a produzir mais umidade com o uso de partículas minúsculas, geralmente de iodeto de prata, cuja forma e peso são semelhantes aos de uma partícula de gelo.
A semeadura de nuvens há muito tempo gera preocupações, que vão desde os possíveis riscos ambientais e os impactos dos produtos químicos utilizados até possíveis danos a populações em áreas vizinhas, decorrentes de alterações nos padrões de chuva, além de tensões de segurança que possam surgir como consequência.
E, mesmo enquanto o país mais populoso do mundo intensifica a prática, cientistas e especialistas continuam questionando o quanto ela realmente funciona.
Caminho para a chuva
Nos últimos anos, a China intensificou de forma significativa seus esforços de semeadura de nuvens, em grande parte graças ao avanço das tecnologias de drones e de radar. O país realiza hoje modificações climáticas em mais de 50% de seu território, principalmente para aumentar a precipitação, embora também esteja tentando reduzi-la em determinadas áreas.
A técnica chegou a ser empregada para gerenciar as condições meteorológicas em datas específicas, como nos Jogos Olímpicos de Pequim, em 2008, e nas comemorações do centenário do Partido Comunista Chinês, em 2021.
A modificação do clima se tornou “um projeto vital para o desenvolvimento científico das nuvens atmosféricas e dos recursos hídricos, servindo ao país e beneficiando o povo”, afirmou Li Jiming, diretor do Centro de Modificação do Clima da China, à época da operação “chuva de primavera” de 2025. “É um componente crucial para a construção de uma nação meteorológica forte”, acrescentou, ao destacar a necessidade de impulsionar a China “de grande protagonista na modificação artificial do clima a líder global”.
Funcionários do departamento meteorológico chinês se preparam para disparar projéteis de artilharia para semeadura de nuvens em Yongchuan, em 2009
O crescente interesse da China em controlar a precipitação é óbvia: desde a década de 1950, o país vêm enfrentando secas cada vez mais frequentes e severas, com impactos sobre a agricultura e a economia do país.
Os experimentos chineses com semeadura de nuvens começaram em 1958, quando uma aeronave supostamente teria provocado chuva sobre a província de Jilin, atingida pela seca. A técnica, porém, havia sido descoberta nos Estados Unidos uma década antes e, como tantas ideias inovadoras, totalmente por acaso.
Na década de 1940, Vincent Schaefer era pesquisador da General Electric e trabalhava para evitar que as aeronaves ficassem muito geladas durante o voo. Ele havia desenvolvido um refrigerador especial para demonstrar como o gelo se forma nas nuvens.
Um dia, ele chegou ao laboratório e descobriu que o equipamento havia desligado. Quando colocou um pedaço de gelo seco (dióxido de carbono sólido, em temperatura extremamente baixa) dentro dela para resfriar o interior, testemunhou uma reação surpreendente: cristais de gelo surgiram subitamente, flutuando dentro do compartimento. Ele havia produzido precipitação de forma artificial.
Um ano depois, em 1946, Schaefer lançou quilos de gelo seco sobre nuvens super resfriadas acima das montanhas Adirondack, no Estado de Nova York. O experimento aparentemente desencadeou uma queda de neve.
Depois dessa experiência, iniciativas de semeadura de nuvens surgiram ao redor do mundo, embora com resultados variados e inconclusivos, marcados por dificuldades na medição de dados.
Para demonstrar resultados efetivos da semeadura de nuvens, cientistas precisam de um cenário meteorológico de controle quase idêntico àquele em que tentam intervir na natureza. “Não conseguimos fazer a mesma nuvem acontecer duas vezes. Portanto, não podemos realizar um experimento controlado”, afirmou Robert Rauber, professor de ciências atmosféricas na Universidade de Illinois em Urbana-Champaign (EUA).
Semeadura de neve
Na China e em outras partes do mundo, a semeadura de nuvens, tanto para experimentos quanto para o uso prático, é realizada com mais frequência em áreas montanhosas para produzir neve, principalmente porque a neve é mais fácil de enxergar e medir do que a chuva.
Os cientistas usam radares para encontrar nuvens que contenham água líquida super-resfriada (entre -15°C e 0°C). Em seguida, liberam nelas partículas minúsculas de iodeto de prata por meio de aeronaves ou geradores instalados no solo. Essas partículas congelam ao entrar em contato com a água super-resfriada, formando cristais de gelo nas nuvens, que se tornam mais pesados e, por fim, caem no solo como neve ou gelo.
A semeadura de nuvens em clima quente funciona de maneira semelhante, mas utiliza sal para estimular pequenas gotículas de água a se unirem e aumentarem de tamanho até cair no solo. No entanto, é menos comum, porque nuvens mais quentes costumam se deslocar mais rapidamente e contêm menos água super-resfriada, além de a água não se acumular de forma tão visível quanto a neve, o que dificulta o monitoramento.
O químico americano Vincent Schaefer, que demonstrou e testou a ideia da semeadura de nuvens, tenta transformar sua respiração em cristais em 1949
A primeira base operacional de semeadura de nuvens da China foi estabelecida em 2013, e hoje o país conta com seis bases que colaboram em pesquisas. Seu programa de modificação do clima é agora o maior do mundo, e as ambições de indução de chuvas cresceram na mesma proporção.
Em particular, a enorme iniciativa Tianhe (“rio do céu”, em tradução livre) do país, que visa criar um corredor de vapor de água do Planalto Tibetano até a região seca do norte da China, por meio de milhares de geradores instalados no solo.
Mas a China também enfrenta críticas diante de preocupações com os impactos mais amplos dessas operações. “Aplicadas em escala suficientemente grande, essas tecnologias de modificação climática podem representar riscos à habitabilidade e à segurança de países vizinhos”, disse Elizabeth Chalecki, pesquisadora em relações internacionais e governança tecnológica na Balsillie School of International Affairs (Canadá).
Um relatório recente argumentou que uma intervenção de tão grande escala no Planalto Tibetano poderia levar ao controle unilateral da China sobre recursos hídricos compartilhados com países vizinhos, como a Índia, levando a tensões geopolíticas. Por outro lado, uma análise ainda não publicada, baseada em 27 mil experimentos de semeadura de nuvens na China, concluiu que o impacto sobre outras nações foi mínimo.
Os potenciais danos da semeadura de nuvens podem ser exagerados, segundo Katja Friedrich, professora de ciências atmosféricas e oceânicas da Universidade do Colorado (EUA). Por exemplo, “não há indicação de que a semeadura de nuvens saia do controle e de repente você tenha essa explosão que gera uma tempestade”, disse ela em referência às inundações em Dubai, em 2024, e no Texas, em 2025, ambas erroneamente atribuídas à semeadura de nuvens.
Ainda assim, especialistas como Chalecki alertam para a ausência de políticas internacionais capazes de prevenir eventuais impactos transfronteiriços à medida que o programa chinês de modificação do clima avança. A China poderia até ser capaz de obter “um benefício de segurança auxiliar ao degradar discretamente o meio ambiente e a habitabilidade de um Estado rival”, sugere ela.
Falta de evidências
Há, no entanto, outro problema com a semeadura de nuvens: segundo cientistas, a China pode simplesmente não estar produzindo a quantidade de chuva que afirma gerar. “Acho que as alegações não são suficientemente sustentadas pelos dados”, afirmou Rauber, da Universidade de Illinois.
Na última década, o governo chinês divulgou repetidas vezes que seu programa de semeadura de nuvens estaria alcançando resultados expressivos. Um comunicado à imprensa afirmou que a iniciativa “chuva de primavera” de 2025 aumentou a precipitação na área-alvo em 20% em comparação com 2024. Já a agência meteorológica chinesa declarou, em dezembro de 2025, que as operações de chuva e neve artificial haviam produzido 168 bilhões de toneladas adicionais de precipitação (volume equivalente a cerca de 67 milhões de piscinas olímpicas) desde 2021.
O experimento Snowie, considerado referência na área, reuniu dados que indicam de forma clara que a semeadura de nuvens levou à produção de neve
“Há muitas alegações [globalmente], seja por parte de agências governamentais ou de empresas que podem se beneficiar de operações de semeadura de nuvens”, disse Jeffrey French, cientista atmosférico da Universidade do Wyoming (EUA). “Acho que há muitas declarações [vindas da China] que não podem ser validadas cientificamente nem comprovadas.”
Em 2017, French liderou um avanço significativo nas evidências sobre a técnica, quando o projeto “Snowie”, nas montanhas Payette, no Estado de Idaho (EUA), conseguiu coletar dados que demonstraram de forma inequívoca a produção de neve por meio da semeadura de nuvens. Desde então, os resultados repercutiram internacionalmente.
“Conseguimos, em diversos casos, identificar exatamente onde o material de semeadura estava nas nuvens e realizar medições diretamente nessas áreas”, afirmou French, pesquisador principal do projeto. Isso foi possível apesar de haver “tamanha variabilidade natural, tantas variações na natureza das nuvens e da precipitação”, disse.
Os pesquisadores também realizaram medições adicionais em áreas próximas, a 1 a 2 quilômetros de distância, o que permitiu comparar as duas regiões e demonstrar uma diferença clara entre a quantidade de neve produzida naturalmente e a gerada artificialmente pelo mesmo sistema de nuvens.
Foi o mais próximo que um estudo financiado de forma independente já chegou de um experimento controlado bem-sucedido na natureza. O extenso conjunto de dados do Snowie representou um marco: não apenas demonstrou que a semeadura de nuvens pode funcionar, mas também evidenciou o equilíbrio complexo de quando e como a técnica apresenta melhores resultados. Os dados viraram referência para um campo científico que carecia de comprovação empírica.
O estudo de referência foi citado em diversas pesquisas chinesas sobre semeadura de nuvens publicadas em periódicos com revisão por pares, incluindo uma que afirma que o trabalho “demonstra rigorosamente que a semeadura de nuvens realmente criou nuvens precipitantes e aumentou a precipitação na superfície”.
Resultados modestos
Ainda assim, os resultados do Snowie indicaram que o impacto da semeadura de nuvens é, no fim das contas, limitado. “É por isso que as pessoas tinham dificuldade em demonstrar o efeito nesses sistemas de precipitação”, disse Friedrich, da Universidade do Colorado. E, embora a técnica tenha sido comprovada em certa medida em outros contextos, até mesmo os cientistas que observaram os resultados de perto questionam se ela é eficaz o suficiente para justificar o esforço.
Alguns também avaliam que o uso da tecnologia avançou mais rápido do que a pesquisa científica, e que ainda não há dados confiáveis em quantidade suficiente para sustentar os resultados divulgados. “O problema desses programas de semeadura de nuvens é que a maioria é conduzida por governos, como na China ou nos Emirados Árabes Unidos”, disse Friedrich. “Mas há pouquíssima análise independente.”
Isso é relevante porque continua extremamente difícil distinguir entre a precipitação gerada pela intervenção e aquela que as nuvens produziriam naturalmente. “Em geral, é muito difícil saber se a semeadura de nuvens funciona em todos os casos”, afirmou Adele L. Igel, professora associada de física de nuvens na Universidade da Califórnia em Davis (EUA). “A teoria e a ciência indicam que deveria funcionar, mas é difícil verificar essas previsões de forma rotineira com observações e medições.”
Um soldado carrega projéteis usados na semeadura de nuvens durante uma operação para combater a seca em Xigu Township, na Província de Shanxi, no norte da China, em fevereiro de 2011
Persistem ainda inúmeras limitações para que a técnica funcione de forma previsível. A semeadura de nuvens, por exemplo, não produz efeito se não houver nuvens com potencial de precipitação. Também é muito menos eficaz nos meses mais quentes, quando são raras as nuvens com água super-resfriada.
Isso significa que, em muitos casos, o custo pode superar os resultados, sobretudo quando se utilizam métodos aéreos. As técnicas baseadas em solo — que dependem de geradores que lançam iodeto de prata ou outro agente para as nuvens por meio de correntes de ar — são mais baratas, mas muito menos previsíveis. “A semeadura aérea é bastante eficiente, mas também muito cara, por isso as pessoas recorrem aos métodos terrestres”, disse Friedrich, da Universidade do Colorado.
Também é impossível prever com precisão quais serão os efeitos de modificações climáticas amplas e contínuas, seja na China ou em outros países. “É muito difícil avaliar, quanto mais prever, impactos climáticos regionais e anomalias remotas decorrentes de operações de modificação do tempo”, disse Manon Simon, professora da Universidade da Tasmânia (Austrália), que pesquisou extensivamente as implicações geopolíticas potenciais do programa chinês. Segundo ela, é particularmente complexo determinar se programas de longo prazo podem resultar em secas ou inundações mais frequentes ou intensas. A identificação desses riscos, acrescenta, exige monitoramento permanente e ampla cooperação internacional.
Uma nova fronteira
Nos quase dez anos desde o projeto Snowie, as técnicas de semeadura e as tecnologias de radar evoluíram, o que pode significar maior produção de precipitação. Com o avanço recente dos drones, a China ampliou o uso de equipamentos mais sofisticados e passou a recorrer à inteligência artificial (IA) para aumentar a precisão na liberação de iodeto de prata.
China e Emirados Árabes Unidos também experimentam métodos como o flare seeding (semeadura com sinalizadores, em tradução livre) e o envio de cargas de íons negativos às nuvens para estimular a união de gotículas, processo que leva à precipitação.
Ainda assim, como ocorre com a semeadura tradicional, permanece escassa a pesquisa independente que comprove de forma conclusiva que esses novos métodos produzem mais chuva. Os cientistas temem que o aumento das secas no mundo, impulsionado pelas mudanças climáticas, acelere a adoção da tecnologia sem que haja, na mesma proporção, estudos que indiquem quando e onde ela funciona com bom custo-benefício.
Os especialistas concordam que mais dados independentes ajudariam a identificar em que circunstâncias a semeadura pode surtir efeito e quando é improvável que funcione. As mesmas informações poderiam orientar medidas de proteção para proteger países vizinhos de eventuais impactos adversos.
Tudo isso, porém, demanda tempo, um argumento difícil de sustentar quando a escassez de água já é realidade, e muitos países buscam soluções imediatas.
For-hire Pennsylvania groundhog “Wolfgang” spotted his shadow at Brooklyn’s McCarren Park in front of a crowd of ecstatic hipsters Saturday, whispering his weather prediction to perennial mayoral candidate Curtis Sliwa — who claimed he’d don his own groundhog costume next year.
The woodchuck predicted six more weeks of frigid wintery temperatures to the delight of hundreds in Williamsburg who chanted Sliwa’s name and even bid for the Republican’s autograph.
Hundreds of hipsters descended on a popular Williamsburg, Brooklyn park to watch a groundhog whisper its weather predictions into the ear of ex-mayoral candidate Curtis Sliwa Saturday.Nicole Rosenthal
The offbeat gathering, now in its second year, is the brainchild of political journalist Riley Callanan, 26, who told The Post that she shelled out $2,250 to rent the varmint from an animal rental service — and invited the animal-loving Sliwa as a “shot in the dark” due to his “New York icon” status among youngsters.
“Next year, I’m going to come and I’m going to audition with many of you and become a human [groundhog] next year to determine the shadow,” Sliwa suddenly declared after speaking with his “fellow animal welfare friends” at the event.
Curtis Sliwa poses with Gen Zers in McCarren Park.Nicole Rosenthal
Th groundhog “look-alike” contest will be a “nice pre-show ceremony” to Brooklyn’s new boozy bar crawl tradition, he said.
However, Callanan told The Post that she’s still “hoping” to use a real woodchuck.
Callanan previously told The Post she was inspired to begin organizing a yearly Groundhog Day tradition as a “silly way to party” in the “darkest time of the year.”
“It’s just a wholesome reason to keep fun alive,” she said.
Animal rights activists, including those from anti-horse carriage advocacy group NYCLASS and Humane Long Island, had urged organizers hours before the event to cancel over animal cruelty concerns.
“Groundhogs naturally hibernate in the winter, and forcing one into a stressful, unnatural environment with a drunk and raucous crowd of potentially thousands of people following a bar crawl is cruel and dangerous,” NYCLASS said in a statement.
The news comes after animal rights activists urged organizers to cancel the event over animal cruelty concerns.Nicole Rosenthal
Sliwa, who has been outspoken on animal welfare issues like converting the city’s animal shelters to a no-kill policy, said Thursday he wasn’t sure where the groundhog had come from — but insisted he wouldn’t be holding the critter himself.
“I’m well-aware that I am not a skilled groundhog handler,” Sliwa said.
“I’m there simply to see if the groundhog sees its shadow. … I will certainly not make the mistake that Bill de Blasio did.”
Edita Birnkrant, executive director of NYCLASS, said the young organizers agreed not to use another live animal in the wintertime tradition after advocates blasted the event on social media, but Callanan argued they “did [that] to appease the protesters … and am still hoping to use a real groundhog next year.
“It was great to meet the handler and hear how well the groundhog was cared for,” she explained. “He was rescued as a baby after his family was killed in a backhoe accident and lives in the handlers’ greenhouse.
“His favorite treat is a PB&J and I’m glad his handler gave him one to munch on during the ceremony.”
The city’s rodent prognosticator signaled warmer temps and fairer skies ahead just days after the New York region got rocked by a powerful storm, dumping more than a foot of snow in some sections of Queens.
Chuck appeared after a video message from Mayor Eric Adams – the “very special honorary guest” mentioned by organizers on Facebook ahead of the annual city ritual.
Adams, a former New York City police officer, was instead set to attend the funeral of slain NYPD cop Wilbert Mora later Wednesday morning at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, where he was scheduled to address mourners.
But the mayor took time to send the borough’s most famous groundhog a message of encouragement from the safety of City Hall just before Chuck made his early spring prediction for the second consecutive year.
Staten Island Chuck has predicted an early spring to come for the Big Apple.Steve White
“Happy Groundhog Day, New York City,” Adams said on the clip. “It’s so great to celebrate this beloved tradition with the Staten Island Zoo.”
Ahead of Chuck’s call, Adams urged the “furry meteorologist” to portend an early spring, which he later obliged.
“I think I can speak for all New Yorkers when I say, Chuck please don’t see your shadow,” Adams said. “Bring on the sunny days! Time to see what our weatherman has to say.”
Punxsutawney Phil predicted six more weeks of winter this year.AP Photo/Barry Reeger, File
Moments later, Staten Island District Attorney Michael McMahon formally introduced Chuck, while noting he gained a few pounds over the winter months — much like many of the borough’s residents.
“That’s something we can all relate to,” McMahon joked.
Chuck then ambled out of a wooden enclosure and declared an early spring, prompting cheers from organizers.
“Lots of clouds,” McMahon said. “Ladies and gentlemen, I’ve just heard from Staten Island Chuck here at the Staten Island Zoo. He did not see his shadow, we will have an early spring!”
Chuck also predicted an early spring last February — a call that zoo officials said was accurate. Punxsutawney Phil, however, had a different forecast for the second year in a row, again signaling six more weeks of winter on Wednesday during the annual Groundhog Day ceremony at Gobbler’s Knob in western Pennsylvania.
Adams, meanwhile, hopes to join the Groundhog Day festivities in coming years, mayoral spokesman Fabien Levy told The Post Tuesday.
A ideia exposta no filme “Blade Runner”, de robôs com consciência, parece que se aproxima da realidade.
No Vale do Silício, o tema já é tratado como uma religião pelo movimento conhecido como transumanismo. É um bom momento para discutir a relação entre espiritualidade e ciência.
O Brasil, especialmente o mundo popular, é profundamente religioso. Ainda assim, mesmo leitores desta coluna que acreditam em Deus podem estranhar a ideia de misturar fé e ciência. Mas por que não? Se você acredita na existência de Deus e que a consciência é mais que o resultado de combinações aleatórias que produziram a vida, por que não pesquisar sobre isso?
Responder a essa pergunta se tornou a missão do psiquiatra brasileiro Alexander Moreira-Almeida (UFJF), fundador do Núcleo de Pesquisas em Espiritualidade e Saúde (Nupes). Seu trabalho, que investiga a relação entre espiritualidade e saúde mental, tem ganhado reconhecimento internacional.
Cena de “Blade Runner, O Caçador de Androides” – Divulgação
Neste ano, ele recebeu o Prêmio Oskar Pfister, concedido anualmente pela American Association of Psychiatry (APA) a pesquisadores que estudam temas na intersecção entre ciência e religião. O neurologista Oliver Sacks, o historiador Peter Gay e o filósofo Paul Ricoeur estão entre os agraciados de edições anteriores.
A força do trabalho de Alexander está no fato de ele produzir ciência dentro da universidade, com metodologia médica e atuação internacional. Ele foi coordenador da seção de saúde mental e espiritualidade da Associação Mundial de Psiquiatria e também se dedica à divulgação científica, publicando conteúdo acessível ao público não especializado.
No livro “Ciência da Vida após a Morte” (Springer, 2022), feito com dois coautores, ele alerta para a influência de uma ideologia dominante —o fisicalismo materialista— que considera a espiritualidade uma fantasia humana, embora a ciência jamais tenha provado que a consciência morre junto com o corpo físico.
A segunda parte da obra apresenta evidências empíricas que sugerem a possibilidade de sobrevivência dessa consciência. Entre os estudos analisados estão pesquisas sobre mediunidade, experiências de quase-morte e reencarnação.
Curioso? Na próxima semana você poderá fazer perguntas diretamente a Alexander. Ele participará de um debate com o diretor de Redação desta Folha, o jornalista Sérgio Dávila, e com a psicóloga Marta Helena de Freitas, professora da Universidade Católica de Brasília e presidente da International Association for the Psychology of Religion (IAPR).
O evento faz parte da série Conversas Difíceis, da qual sou curador. Será na segunda-feira (13), às 19h, no espaço Civi-co (rua Dr. Virgílio de Carvalho Pinto, 445 – Pinheiros, SP). A entrada é gratuita, mas as vagas são limitadas. Haverá transmissão ao vivo pelo canal do YouTube do Instituto Humanitas360.
O que mudaria se a ciência admitisse —e eventualmente comprovasse— que a vida não termina com o corpo? Como isso afetaria nossa visão de mundo e o modo como escolhemos viver e morrer?
O cientista sueco Johan Rockström, diretor do Instituto Potsdam para Pesquisa de Impacto Climático (PIK), é reconhecido mundialmente por ter desenvolvido a estrutura dos limites planetários
Por Naiara Bertão
Um Só Planeta — São Paulo
28/08/2025
cientista sueco Johan Rockström, diretor do Instituto Potsdam para Pesquisa de Impacto Climático (PIK), — Foto: Naiara Bertão / Um Só Planeta
O cientista sueco Johan Rockström, diretor do Instituto Potsdam para Pesquisa de Impacto Climático (PIK), voltou a chamar atenção para os riscos que a humanidade corre ao avançar sobre os limites ambientais que garantem a estabilidade da Terra. Reconhecido mundialmente por ter desenvolvido a estrutura dos limites planetários em 2009, Rockström afirmou que já estamos numa situação perigosa, em que a própria sobrevivência de sociedades humanas complexas está em jogo.
O cientista participou nesta terça-feira (26) do encontro Futuro Vivo, evento organizado pela empresa de telecomunicações Vivo com o objetivo de ser um espaço de debate sobre os limites da tecnologia e de como desenvolver soluções sustentáveis para o meio ambiente.
Os limites planetários mostram exatamente os espaços seguros para um planeta estável — Foto: Divulgação/Netflix
Na palestra, ele retomou o conceito dos nove limites planetários que regulam o funcionamento da Terra para alertar a todos sobre os riscos que a humanidade corre ao ultrapassar os limites ambientais que garantem a estabilidade do planeta.
“Estamos começando a atingir o teto dos processos biofísicos que regulam a resiliência, a estabilidade e a habitabilidade da Terra”, disse em sua palestra.
“Seja em São Paulo, em Estocolmo ou em Pequim, o que acontece em diferentes partes do planeta interage e influencia a estabilidade de todo o sistema climático, da hidrologia e do suporte à vida na Terra. É por isso que precisamos definir um espaço operacional seguro para o desenvolvimento humano no planeta.”
A teoria dos limites planetários definiu estes princípios: clima, biodiversidade, uso da terra, ciclos de nitrogênio e fósforo, recursos hídricos, oceanos, poluição do ar, camada de ozônio e poluentes químicos. “O grande avanço científico não foi apenas identificá-los, mas quantificá-los”, explicou.
Segundo o cientista, a noção de que era possível explorar recursos sem limites ficou no passado. “Há 50 anos, não precisávamos disso. Hoje, ocupamos o planeta inteiro e não há mais espaço para sermos insustentáveis.”
Logo no início de sua palestra, Rockström lembrou que o planeta atravessou, nos últimos 10 mil anos, o período mais estável de sua história recente: o Holoceno. Foi nessa era que surgiram a agricultura e as civilizações humanas, sustentadas por condições climáticas e ecológicas favoráveis. “O Holoceno é o único estado do planeta que sabemos com certeza ser capaz de sustentar nossa vida. É o que eu chamo de Jardim do Éden”, afirmou.
Seca histórica ameaça valiosas colheitas na Califórnia, maior produtora de amêndoas no mundo — Foto: Justin Sullivan / Getty Images
Contudo, essa estabilidade está sendo rompida com a ascensão do Antropoceno, a era em que o ser humano é a principal força de mudança no planeta. “O sistema econômico global está no banco do motorista, superando os impactos de erupções vulcânicas, variações solares e terremotos. Essas forças naturais ainda existem, mas nós as dominamos e até as sobrepujamos.”
Para Rockström, a pressão sobre os sistemas naturais pode levar a mudanças abruptas e irreversíveis.
“O planeta é um sistema complexo e auto-adaptativo, que tem pontos de inflexão. Se empurrarmos demais, a Amazônia, a Groenlândia ou os recifes de coral podem colapsar e passar para estados que deixarão de nos sustentar. Esses pontos de virada não apenas reduzem a resiliência dos ecossistemas, mas também ameaçam diretamente economias e sociedades.”
Para o cientista, os dados não deixam dúvidas. “Estamos em uma situação perigosa. Estamos ameaçando a saúde de todo o planeta.” Ele explica que foram definidas zonas seguras, zonas de incerteza e zonas de alto risco na metodologia dos limites planetários.
“O problema é que, em 2023, já mostramos que seis desses nove limites estão sendo ultrapassados — clima, biodiversidade, mudanças no uso da terra, consumo de água doce, excesso de nitrogênio e fósforo, e a enorme carga de substâncias químicas no sistema terrestre.”
Sobrevoo do Greenpeace mostra a expansão do garimpo na terra Yanomami em 2021 — Foto: Christian Braga/Greenpeace
Essa constatação tem relação direta com o debate sobre políticas públicas no Brasil e no mundo. A Amazônia, por exemplo, é um dos sistemas mais próximos de um ponto de inflexão — quando mudanças irreversíveis podem ser desencadeadas. “O planeta é um sistema complexo e auto-adaptativo, que tem pontos de inflexão. Se empurrarmos demais, a Amazônia, a Groenlândia ou os recifes de coral podem colapsar e passar para estados que deixarão de nos sustentar”, alertou.
Apesar do alerta, o cientista vê na pesquisa uma ferramenta de esperança. Desde 2009, a metodologia dos limites planetários foi refinada e hoje já permite oferecer parâmetros para políticas públicas e decisões empresariais. “Hoje conseguimos oferecer à humanidade um mapa de navegação do Antropoceno. Definimos as fronteiras seguras para o futuro da vida na Terra. Isso nos dá a possibilidade de sermos responsáveis em escala planetária”, disse.
Para Rockström, reconhecer esses limites não é apenas uma questão científica, mas de sobrevivência. “Estamos ameaçando a saúde de todo o planeta. Esse é o diagnóstico da ciência, e ele deve servir como base para qualquer estratégia de desenvolvimento daqui para frente.”
A boa notícia, diz, é que já temos as soluções e já sabemos o que deve ser feito. Seguir o Acordo de Paris e buscar frear o aquecimento do planeta em 1,5ºC é primordial e, segundo ele, é possível. Mas o ritmo de mudanças precisa acelerar urgentemente.
Papel da política internacional e da COP30
A fala de Rockström chega em um momento estratégico: o Brasil se prepara para sediar a COP30, em Belém (PA) em novembro. A conferência deve ser marcada pelo foco em florestas tropicais e na transição justa para países em desenvolvimento. O conceito dos limites planetários, cada vez mais adotado por governos e empresas, oferece um “mapa de navegação” para esse processo.
“Hoje conseguimos oferecer à humanidade um mapa de navegação do Antropoceno. Definimos as fronteiras seguras para o futuro da vida na Terra. Isso nos dá a possibilidade de sermos responsáveis em escala planetária”, disse.
Para especialistas, integrar esse tipo de ciência ao processo político será crucial para que a COP30 avance em compromissos concretos — especialmente em temas como desmatamento zero, proteção da biodiversidade e financiamento climático.
“Estamos ameaçando a saúde de todo o planeta. Esse é o diagnóstico da ciência, e ele deve servir como base para qualquer estratégia de desenvolvimento daqui para frente”, concluiu Rockström.
Any legal system that fails to compensate people for epistemic harm is unjust. Their damage must be named and remedied
Mitch Woolery is a former partner at the law firm Kutak Rock in Kansas City. He is now an adjunct professor in philosophy at Park University in Parkville, Missouri.
Sheilah Miller (a fictional character, though representative of a widespread phenomenon) is a 39-year-old Black woman who was admitted to the hospital to give birth to her child. But there were complications. Hours later, she had lost a lot of blood and suffered a debilitating stroke. Her physician, Dr Smith (likewise, fictional but representative), a white man, repeatedly ignored her complaints of pain and discomfort due to his prejudice against her identity. The baby lived but Ms Miller was paralysed from the neck down. As a patient, she had knowledge to share about her pain, her discomfort, her suffering. But, for more than 10 hours, Dr Smith refused to consider her knowledge due to his bigotry.
Ms Miller suffered enormously as a result of Dr Smith’s medical malpractice. She was harmed financially with medical expenses from her hospitalisation, and lost wages due to time away from work. Her physical harm, paralysis, is obvious, and her emotional harm may manifest itself as anxiety or depression or other emotional maladies. But there is another kind of harm she suffered: epistemic. Epistemic harm, while real, is not widely known.
The term ‘epistemic’ is derived from the Ancient Greek word episteme, meaning knowledge. Knowledge, and especially seeking and giving knowledge, is essential to being human, as essential as breathing and loving. As profoundly social creatures, humans are givers of knowledge but, according to the philosopher Miranda Fricker in her groundbreaking book Epistemic Injustice (2007), epistemic harm prevents, denies and rejects that. If our ability to give knowledge is rejected, then so is our humanness and our dignity. To be harmed epistemically is to be humiliated and degraded as a human being; it is to be treated not as a someone but as a something. People don’t need to listen to things or regard them with respect or credibility. As the philosopher Pamela Ann Boongaling put it in 2022:
Suppose, for example, that we deny someone the right to be heard or the right to explain their position on an important issue based on a prejudice that we have regarding the social group that the person belongs to. By denying them that right, we would have, in effect, denied them as well of an essential part of their own humanity. After all, other things being equal, human beings possess rationality and autonomy, and these characteristics are constitutive of what it means to be a human being. Thus, an injustice of this kind cuts deeply since it affects the very core of what it means to be a human being.
A victim of epistemic harm is not regarded as a rational human being but as an infant or an animal or a piece of furniture.
A great injustice of the United States’ legal system is that it will allow Ms Miller to be compensated for her financial, physical and emotional harm but not her epistemic harm. Think about that: Ms Miller suffered serious epistemic harm and yet cannot be compensated for it, even though all (or almost all) of the other harms flowed from her original epistemic harm. Her attempt to give her knowledge was rejected and ignored for 10 hours. Imagine how frustrated and scared she must have felt – hours of pleading and yet being ignored by Dr Smith as one unworthy of care or credibility. At some point, Ms Miller may have started to doubt herself and her objectivity and reasoning. She might have thought: ‘Maybe I’m not in pain – after all, he’s the expert,’ or ‘Maybe I’m just being irrational or emotional.’
If Ms Miller did not suffer epistemic harm, she likely would not have suffered the other harms. Fix the epistemic harm, and the other harms likely never arise. If she is to be made whole, she needs to have a legal remedy for her epistemic harm.
How prevalent is serious epistemic harm resulting from bigotry? We don’t know precisely, but two recent empirical studies show that Black patients are more likely than white patients to suffer epistemic harm. Mary Catherine Beach and co-authors found that physicians discredited Black patients’ assertions more frequently than white patients’, concerning their pain levels. This is similar to what happened to Ms Miller; she expressed the severe pain she was suffering but her doctor ignored her. In another study, Kelly M Hoffman and co-authors concluded that some medical personnel have ‘false and fantastical’ beliefs about Black patients as compared with white patients, including such appallingly racist beliefs as that ‘Black people’s skin is thicker than white people’s.’ As a result, Black patients are expected to endure pain that white patients are not expected to tolerate. Dr Smith might have assumed that, as a Black patient, Ms Miller was just tougher and could endure more pain.
In common law jurisdictions (like in the US and Great Britain), victims of civil wrongs can bring tort claims against their transgressors and seek monetary redress for wrongs. The US tort legal system purports to compensate victims for each type of harm they suffer (assuming certain legal standards are met like the burden of proof, timely bringing of claims, and the like). Damages are intended to make the victims whole (trying to return them to the status quo ante). In Ms Miller’s case, if she lost $100 in wages due to Dr Smith’s negligence, she could recover as damages the $100 she lost. For physical and emotional harm, the system approximates her damages with the intent to make her whole. Ms Miller’s legal complaint would have Claim I (for physical harm), Claim II (for emotional harm) and Claim III (for financial harm). But it could not have Claim IV (for epistemic harm) because epistemic harm is not legally cognisable. As I learned on my first day of law school: a right without a remedy is no right at all. Failure to compensate her for epistemic harm means that she has been injured but is not being made whole.
Various injustices can produce epistemic harm but often it results from ‘testimonial injustice’, a term coined by Fricker. Epistemic harm is inherent in testimonial injustice – it occurs in every case. In Ms Miller’s case, her epistemic harm resulted from Dr Smith’s testimonial injustice, which has three elements:
Negative identity prejudice: the hearer (someone like Dr Smith) is bigoted against the speaker (someone like Ms Miller). (Identity prejudice can be negative or positive but testimonial injustice focuses mostly on negative identity prejudice.)
Unjustified credibility deficit: the hearer unjustifiably gives the speaker less credibility than the speaker is due because of the hearer’s negative identity prejudice against the speaker.
Epistemic harm: the speaker suffers epistemic harm from the unjustified credibility deficit.
Dr Smith’s negative identity prejudice against Ms Miller produced an unjustified credibility deficit. He should have listened to her complaints. Because he did not, Ms Miller suffered from Dr Smith’s testimonial injustice and experienced epistemic harm. Negative identity prejudice is what it sounds like: the hearer is bigoted or negatively prejudiced against some aspect of the speaker’s identity. The prejudice is based upon the speaker’s identity characteristics that are (more or less) permanent, characteristics that track the speaker through her life, such as race, gender, disability, ethnicity, accent and a panoply of other attributes.
Judges have inherent legal authority to recognise new remedies for civil wrongs
Unjustified credibility deficit occurs when the hearer does not afford the speaker the credibility she would otherwise be due. In other words, there is a gap between the credibility that the speaker is owed and what the speaker is actually afforded due to negative identity prejudice. When Ms Miller repeatedly told Dr Smith that she was in a lot of pain, he might have thought she was lying or was an incompetent judge of her pain. But it is unlikely she lied for 10 hours, and even more unlikely she was not competent to judge her own pain. His negative identity prejudice – perhaps unconsciously – kept him from believing her.
Epistemic harm is different from emotional harm. The latter may result in PTSDs (post-traumatic stress disorders) or severe anxiety or depression or other debilitating emotional conditions. An epistemic-harm victim is prevented from giving her knowledge because the aggressor epistemically objectifies her. Objectification includes denying the victim’s autonomy and denying the victim’s subjectivity. Dr Smith might be denying Ms Miller’s autonomy, meaning she lacks self-determination and should be treated as a child or an incompetent person. Alternatively, Dr Smith might be treating her not as a rational subject but as an object like furniture, ie, one whose feelings and experiences need not be accounted for.
Tort claims can be created legally by legislatures and by courts. I will focus on courts. Judges have inherent legal authority to recognise new remedies for civil wrongs. As society changes, and the types of wrongs change, courts can recognise and then remedy the wrongs. This happens gradually. The law is conservative; it takes its cues from culture and society and, as appropriate, fashions remedies responsive to society’s demands. In broad patterns, the path involves naming, dissemination and acceptance. Naming a thing allows people to identify it and therefore focus on it. As Plato writes in Cratylus, naming a thing can be instrumental to understanding the thing named. Dissemination involves a broader societal understanding of the thing.
The case of #MeToo is instructive. Named in 2006, it did not have societal dissemination until 2017 when the actress Alyssa Milano Tweeted #MeToo, acknowledging she had been sexually harassed and assaulted. After that, the Tweet went viral and millions of people used the hashtag, sharing their own experiences of sexual harassment and assault. The sheer number of women sharing their stories profoundly altered the social landscape and, despite some immediate pushback, society started to accept that sexual abusers could not be tolerated any longer.
Acceptance comes in two forms: societal acceptance and legal acceptance. Societal acceptance almost always precedes legal acceptance. When societal acceptance occurs, the intent is for the thing named to be preserved and enhanced (in the case of a societal good), or to be rejected and diminished (in the case of a societal harm). Legal acceptance is when the thing named has a legally cognisable status. In the case of #MeToo, society is still working through what legal acceptance means.
Two tort claims – privacy rights and emotional distress – have followed this route of naming, dissemination and acceptance, and epistemic harm claims could too. Around the year 1900, courts and plaintiffs in the US recognised that the technology of photographic images could invade one’s private life, but a direct remedy for this privacy invasion did not exist. Society wanted privacy protected and courts fashioned a remedy for this wrong, relying in part on Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis’s seminal legal article, ‘The Right to Privacy’ (1890). Prior to publication, there was not a name for privacy rights but, afterwards, it was named and identified. Once named, it became easier to protect. In 1905, one of the first reported privacy rights cases was successful in the US.
Legal remedies for emotional distress took a more circuitous path. Although emotional distress claims are rooted in the ancient tort for outrage, courts were cautious in recognising emotional distress claims. Judges were sceptical, thinking emotional distress claims could be too speculative or frivolous. At first, judges allowed emotional distress claims only if they were based upon the aggressor’s intentional conduct or if they were tied to physical injury to the victim (or a close bystander). Later, these guardrails were relaxed or even abandoned in some jurisdictions as courts became comfortable with emotional distress claims. The courts allowed claims based upon the aggressor’s negligence. These are called NIED (or ‘negligent infliction of emotional distress’) claims. In addition, the courts allowed standalone claims, meaning the claims were tied to emotional distress only and did not require physical injury.
The concepts of testimonial injustice and epistemic harm need their #MeToo moment
The ‘naming’ moment came in 1980 when the American Psychiatric Association updated the third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-III) to recognise PTSDs. Recognition by the DSM-IIImeant there was ‘[g]reater rigor in diagnosing emotional harm’, according to the commentary to the Restatement (Third) of Torts. Courts then had an independent assessment of emotional harms, as recognised by the psychiatry profession. As society understood the dangers from PTSD and other emotional harms, it demanded victims be compensated and wrongdoers be held liable. As an example of a standalone NIED claim, a mother sued her doctor for malpractice when her baby died after his umbilical cord was wrapped around his neck, causing deprivation of oxygen during his birth. The Supreme Court of California in 1992 allowed the mother to seek damages for her emotional anguish even though she was not herself physically injured.
Legal acceptance of epistemic harm claims could follow the same path as claims for privacy violations and emotional distress. Epistemic harm claims today are somewhere between naming and dissemination, but not quite at broad societal acceptance. The concepts of testimonial injustice and epistemic harm are fairly well known in academic circles, but they need greater dissemination to the general public. They need, in other words, their #MeToo moment. If that ever comes, epistemic harm might find social and ultimately legal acceptance but the process could take decades from naming to the first successful legal case (privacy rights claims took 15 years, and standalone NIED claims took 12 years).
Epistemic harm claims, if and when legally recognised, could parallel NIED claims because the types of injury claimed are adjacent (epistemic vs emotional), and both would be negligence claims, whose elements are familiar to courts. In a civil tort lawsuit, to prove a defendant is liable for a NIED claim, a victim must prove the following elements by a preponderance of evidence: the defendant was negligent; the victim suffered ‘serious emotional distress’; and the defendant’s negligence caused victims’ serious emotional distress. A similar process could well hold for epistemic harm. Of course, courts may become concerned about victims bringing meritless and frivolous claims for epistemic harm and, as such, might impose guardrails such as tying epistemic harm to victims’ physical injury. Ms Miller’s would be a good test case because physical harm resulted from her epistemic harm. Courts could later decide whether to allow standalone epistemic harm cases.
All negligence claims are predicated on defendants having a legal duty to certain persons to exercise reasonable care. The legal term ‘duty’ has a specific meaning in negligence torts, and is different from the philosophical term. Philosophers often think of duties as derived from natural rights or epistemic principles and as being imposed uniformly on everyone. Legal duties, however, are not imposed uniformly on all persons but apply only to limited persons, and are imposed solely by statute or contract and from common law relationships like the duties parents owe minor children, attorneys owe clients and doctors owe patients. Legal liability for negligence is imposed only on a person who has a legal duty to another person. ‘Negligence in the air’ (that is, negligence to the general populace, without a corresponding duty) is not a legally cognisable concept.
Applying the proposed epistemic harm elements to Ms Miller’s case shows that Dr Smith negligently caused her epistemic harm. Dr Smith, as a physician, had a legal duty to exercise reasonable care in his medical treatment of his patient, Ms Miller. That duty is implicit in the physician-patient relationship and is likely made explicit by various applicable statutes and contracts. Dr Smith was negligent: he had a negative identity prejudice against Ms Miller that produced an unjustified credibility deficit. Dr Smith did not believe Ms Miller and, in fact, he did not even listen to her, in breach of his duty of reasonable care. Ms Miller would be entitled to monetary damages from Dr Smith for any serious epistemic harm she suffered. Thus, she could add Claim IV (epistemic harm) to her legal complaint.
The doctor’s notes would be produced if they included incriminatory or exculpatory language
Unjustified credibility deficit may be the most difficult legal element to prove because hearers generally do not have any obligation to afford credibility to speakers. Hearers can listen to speakers, or not; believe them, or not; believe select parts, or not. Legally, hearers don’t have to extend any credibility to anyone unless they have a legal duty to that person. The extent of the credibility that is due varies from situation to situation, and any formulation must be flexible in recognising this. There is not some Platonic ideal providing an algorithm that the speaker is owed, say, 70 units of credibility but received only 30 units, leaving a 40-unit deficit. Rather, it is the legal duty that provides the context for what credibility is due. So a balance must be struck.
How much credibility is the speaker owed and was the speaker’s credibility decreased due to the hearer’s negative identity prejudice against the speaker? Typically, plaintiffs would try to establish an unjustified credibility deficit through testimonial, documentary, expert and other evidence, which is then sifted and weighed by the jury. Ms Miller may be able to adduce her own testimony (‘I told Dr Smith repeatedly I was in pain!’) and perhaps nurses or other staff could corroborate her statements. Expert testimony might be shown allowing the jury to infer that doctors, in general, may have negative identity prejudices or unduly assign credibility deficits to Black patients, citing the aforementioned Beach and Hoffmann studies. The doctor’s notes would be produced if they included incriminatory or exculpatory language. Consider, in the alternative, the following statements from Dr Smith’s hypothetical notes about Ms Miller:
Note 1: ‘Patient’s pain is 8 on a scale of 10.’
Versus
Note 2: ‘Patient claims her pain is 8 on a scale of 10.’
In a lawsuit, Note 1 might be used to assert that Dr Smith knew of Ms Miller’s pain and yet did nothing for it. Note 2 is ambiguous but one reading is Ms Miller ‘claimed’ she was in pain but Dr Smith did not believe her. There is a significant but unfortunate difference between a doctor describing the pain of a Black patient as she ‘is in pain’ and as she ‘claims she’s in pain’, according to a 2024 study by Courtney R Lee and co-authors.The Lee study reviewed clinicians’ notes about their patients and found clinicians were more likely to cast doubt when Black patients said they were in pain, compared with white patients. As one Black patient put it, doctors ‘just don’t believe us.’ In philosophical terms, the clinicians had an unjustified credibility deficit against the Black patients likely due to a negative identity prejudice. Proving an unjustified credibility deficit may be difficult but it should not be insuperable.
Philosophers have named the concept of epistemic harm. Now it is being disseminated into the broader society. Miranda Fricker stated that her goals for exploring testimonial injustice are identifying it, protesting it, and avoiding it. These goals are laudable. To that list, I would add one more goal: remedying it.
Dados dos Centros de Controle e Prevenção de Doenças mostram que o calor extremo é o fenômeno climático mais mortal dos EUA. — Foto: NASA
No dia 28 de junho de 2021, a americana Julie Leon, de 65 anos, foi encontrada inconsciente em seu carro, no caminho para casa. Paramédicos tentaram reanimá-la, mas sem sucesso. Mais tarde, o legista determinou que a causa da morte foi hipertermia, condição na qual a temperatura corporal aumenta de forma excessiva e perigosa, geralmente acima de 40°C.
Agora, passados quase quatro anos, a filha da vítima, Misti, entrou com um processo inédito em Washington contra ExxonMobil, BP, Chevron, Shell, ConocoPhillips e Phillips 66.
A ação por homicídio culposo é a primeira movida em nome de uma vítima individual das mudanças climáticas nos Estados Unidos, e busca responsabilizar essas empresas pelo papel que desempenharam na causa da morte.
Na época em que Leon faleceu, áreas do noroeste do Pacífico dos Estados Unidos e Canadá experimentaram temperaturas nunca antes observadas, com recordes quebrados em muitos lugares em vários graus Celsius. Em Seatle, onde ela vivia, no dia da sua morte, a temperatura subiu acima de 38°C pelo terceiro dia consecutivo.
Cientistas da World Weather Attribution (WWA) avaliaram, com base em observações e modelagem, que a onda de calor do Pacífico Noroeste de 2021, como foi chamado o fenômeno, seria virtualmente impossível sem as mudanças climáticas causadas pelo homem.
A WWA é uma iniciativa científica internacional que busca avaliar a influência das mudanças climáticas, causadas por atividades humanas, principalmente queima de combustíveis fósseis, em eventos extremos de clima, como ondas de calor, secas, inundações e tempestades.
“As grandes petrolíferas sabem há décadas que seus produtos causariam desastres climáticos catastróficos que se tornariam mais mortais e destrutivos se não mudassem seu modelo de negócios. Mas, em vez de alertar o público e tomar medidas para salvar vidas, mentiram e deliberadamente aceleraram o problema. Agora, pessoas estão morrendo, e esses arquitetos da negação e da mentira climática terão que responder por sua conduta em um tribunal”, disse Richard Wiles, presidente do grupo de defesa Centro para Integridade Climática (CCI), em comunicado.
Ele acrescentou que as vítimas das grandes petrolíferas merecem responsabilização: “Esta é uma indústria que está causando e acelerando condições climáticas que matam pessoas. Elas sabem disso há 50 anos e, em algum momento, precisarão ser responsabilizadas”
Misti quer que as empresas de petróleo, gás e carvão paguem indenizações em valores que serão determinados em julgamento, e, também, está tentando forçar essas companhias a realizar uma campanha de educação pública para corrigir “décadas de desinformação”.
Theodore Boutrous, advogado da Chevron, criticou a ação. “Explorar uma tragédia pessoal para promover litígios políticos sobre danos climáticos é contrário à lei, à ciência e ao bom senso”, afirmou à NPR. “O tribunal deveria adicionar essa alegação absurda à crescente lista de processos climáticos sem mérito que tribunais estaduais e federais já rejeitaram.”
Representantes da Shell, ConocoPhillips, BP e Phillips 66 não quiseram comentar. E um porta-voz da ExxonMobil disse que um comentário da empresa não estava disponível no momento.
Processos por todo os EUA
Petrolíferas enfrentam vários outros processos climáticos movidos por estados e municípios americanos por supostamente enganarem o público durante décadas sobre os perigos da queima de petróleo, gás e carvão, a principal causa das mudanças climáticas.
Segundo o CCI, 10 estados (Califórnia, Connecticut, Delaware, Havaí, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nova Jersey, Rhode Island e Vermont), o Distrito de Columbia e dezenas de governos municipais, distritais e tribais de Califórnia, Colorado, Havaí, Illinois, Maryland, Nova Jersey, Nova York, Oregon, Pensilvânia, Carolina do Sul, Washington e Porto Rico, entraram com ações judiciais contra elas.
Esses casos, em conjunto, representam mais de 1 em cada 4 pessoas que vivem nos Estados Unidos. E, conforme destaca o NPR, buscam recursos para ajudar comunidades a lidar com os riscos e danos do aquecimento global, incluindo tempestades, inundações e ondas de calor mais extremas.
Até agora, os resultados foram mistos. Por exemplo, na Pensilvânia, um juiz rejeitou recentemente uma ação climática movida pelo Condado de Bucks contra diversas petrolíferas. Segundo ele, como se tratava principalmente de emissões de gases de efeito estufa, essa era uma questão que caberia ao governo federal, de acordo com a Lei do Ar Limpo.
Por outro lado, em janeiro, a Suprema Corte rejeitou uma tentativa de empresas de petróleo e gás de bloquear uma ação climática movida por Honolulu, e em março os juízes rejeitaram um pedido de procuradores-gerais republicanos para tentar impedir ações climáticas movidas por estados como Califórnia, Connecticut, Minnesota e Rhode Island.
Em declaração enviada à agência NPR na época, o Instituto Americano de Petróleo (ANP) disse que estava decepcionado com as decisões da Suprema Corte, pois as ações são uma “distração” e um “desperdício de recursos do contribuinte”.
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Uma (in)certa antropologia 
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