climate change

Ars Live recap: Climate science in a rapidly changing world

Berkeley Earth, climate change, Earth science, global temperatures, Science / Beth Washington / July 10, 2025

The conversation then moved to the record we have of the Earth’s surface temperatures and the role of Berkeley Earth in providing an alternate method of calculating those. While the temperature records were somewhat controversial in the past, those arguments have largely settled down, and Berkeley Earth played a major role in helping to show that the temperature records have been reliable.

Lately, those temperatures have been unusually high, crossing 1.5° C above pre-industrial conditions for the first time and remaining elevated for months at a stretch. Scientists have been coming up with a number of explanations and figuring out how to test them. Hausfather described those tests and what we’re learning about how these things might be influencing the trajectory of our warming.

From there, we moved on to user questions, which addressed issues like tipping points, the potential use of geoengineering, and what things Hausfather would most like to see in terms of better data and new questions to answer. For details on these issues and the answers to viewer questions, see the video above. We also have a full transcript of the conversation.

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Ocean acidification crosses “planetary boundaries”

climate, climate change, ocean acidification, Science, syndication / Beth Washington / June 10, 2025

A critical measure of the ocean’s health suggests that the world’s marine systems are in greater peril than scientists had previously realized and that parts of the ocean have already reached dangerous tipping points.

A study, published Monday in the journal Global Change Biology, found that ocean acidification—the process in which the world’s oceans absorb excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, becoming more acidic—crossed a “planetary boundary” five years ago.

“A lot of people think it’s not so bad,” said Nina Bednaršek, one of the study’s authors and a senior researcher at Oregon State University. “But what we’re showing is that all of the changes that were projected, and even more so, are already happening—in all corners of the world, from the most pristine to the little corner you care about. We have not changed just one bay, we have changed the whole ocean on a global level.”

The new study, also authored by researchers at the UK’s Plymouth Marine Laboratory and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), finds that by 2020 the world’s oceans were already very close to the “danger zone” for ocean acidity, and in some regions had already crossed into it.

Scientists had determined that ocean acidification enters this danger zone or crosses this planetary boundary when the amount of calcium carbonate—which allows marine organisms to develop shells—is less than 20 percent compared to pre-industrial levels. The new report puts the figure at about 17 percent.

“Ocean acidification isn’t just an environmental crisis, it’s a ticking time bomb for marine ecosystems and coastal economies,” said Steve Widdicombe, director of science at the Plymouth lab, in a press release. “As our seas increase in acidity, we’re witnessing the loss of critical habitats that countless marine species depend on and this, in turn, has major societal and economic implications.”

Scientists have determined that there are nine planetary boundaries that, once breached, risk humans’ abilities to live and thrive. One of these is climate change itself, which scientists have said is already beyond humanity’s “safe operating space” because of the continued emissions of heat-trapping gases. Another is ocean acidification, also caused by burning fossil fuels.

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Renewable power reversing China’s emissions growth

carbon emissions, china, climate change, Energy, renewable energy, Science, solar, Wind / Shannon Garcia / May 15, 2025

China has been installing renewable energy at a spectacular rate, and now has more renewable capacity than the next 13 countries combined, and four times that of its closest competitor, the US. Yet, so far at least, that hasn’t been enough to offset the rise of fossil fuel use in that country. But a new analysis by the NGO Carbon Brief suggests things may be changing, as China’s emissions have now dropped over the past year, showing a one percent decline compared to the previous March. The decline is largely being led by the power sector, where growth in renewables has surged above rising demand.

This isn’t the first time that China’s emissions have gone down over the course of a year, but in all previous cases the cause was primarily economic—driven by things like the COVID pandemic or the 2008 housing crisis. The latest shift, however, was driven largely by the country’s energy sector, which saw a two percent decline in emissions over the past year.

Image of a graph, showing a general rise with small periods of decline. A slight decline has occurred over the last year. — China’s emissions have shown a slight decline over the last year, despite economic growth and rising demand for electricity. Credit: Carbon Brief

Carbon Brief put the report together using data from several official government sources, including the National Bureau of Statistics of China, National Energy Administration of China, and the China Electricity Council. Projections for future growth come from the China Wind Energy Association and the China Photovoltaic Industry Association.

The data indicate that the most recent monthly peak in emissions was March of 2024. Since then, total emissions have gone down by one percent—a change the report notes is small enough that it could easily reverse should conditions change. The report highlights, however, that the impact of renewables appears to be accelerating. The growth of clean power in the first quarter of 2025 was enough to drive a 1.6 percent drop compared to the same quarter a year before, outpacing the overall average of a one percent decline.

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Dangerous clear-air turbulence is worsening due to global warming

airlines, climate change, flight, jet stream, Science, syndication / Kelly Newman / May 7, 2025

“Global warming is faster at the poles,” Faranda said, “and it’s melting ice and it’s also warming differently in oceans and on continents.”

As global warming jars climatic patterns, it affects the jet streams, he said.

Williams, the University of Reading scientist, was “the first to understand that if the jet stream is affected, then turbulence in the jet stream is affected, and therefore flight operations are affected,” Faranda said.

In his EGU presentation, Williams said it’s important to look at vertical wind shear because the signal in the data is much stronger compared to the noise.

“Why do we care about stronger wind shear? Well, of course, it’s because we fly through it,” he said, showing a photo of a grounded jet plane that lost an engine in severe clear-air turbulence. The data shows there has been a 55 percent increase of severe air turbulence since the 1970s, he added.

Climate models show that, under the most realistic greenhouse gas emissions scenarios, a “hotspot in the tropical upper troposphere will continue to grow, which means an even stronger midlatitude temperature gradient,” he said.

That hotspot in the upper troposphere is an area of amplified warming resulting partly from water vapor feedbacks, as moist, hot air steams off the tropical oceans. That heat bulge is increasing the temperature gradient in areas near some of the busiest flight paths, including transatlantic routes.

If rapid warming continues, Williams said, studies show vertical wind shear could increase 29 percent by 2100, or 17 percent if global emissions are halved by mid-century and keep dropping.

“This, of course, means a lot more turbulence in not that many years from now,” he said.

Faranda added that his own experiences and research on clear-air turbulence won’t keep him from flying. New measurements by weather instruments and greater awareness of the potential for such turbulence will help keep most flights safe, and changes to wing design and plane construction could make them less vulnerable, he added.

“In principle, you can fly through these areas without consequences in most cases,” Faranda said. But with projections for more intense and frequent turbulence, it’s important to maintain observation programs, he added.

“With the new global political situation, there is a lot of talk of reducing instruments for monitoring the weather and the climate, and this would produce worse weather forecasts,” he said. And fewer weather observations will likely lead to shakier flights.

This story originally appeared on Inside Climate News.

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Trump’s National Climate Assessment: No funding and all authors cut loose

climate assessment, climate change, Law, Policy, Science, trump administration / Shannon Garcia / April 29, 2025

As part of the Global Change Research Act of 1990, Congress mandated that every four years, the government must produce a National Climate Assessment. This document is intended to provide an overview of the changing state of our knowledge about the process itself and its impact on our environment. Past versions have been comprehensive and involved the work of hundreds of scientists, all coordinated by the US’s Global Change Research Program.

It’s not clear what the next report will look like. Two weeks after cutting funding for the organization that coordinates the report’s production, the Trump administration has apparently informed all the authors working on it that their services are no longer needed.

The National Climate Assessment has typically been like a somewhat smaller-scale version of the IPCC reports, with a greater focus on impacts in the US. It is a very detailed look at the state of climate science, the impacts warming is having on the US, and our efforts to limit warming and deal with those impacts. Various agencies and local governments have used it to help plan for the expected impacts of our warming climate.

But past versions have also been caught up in politics. The first Trump administration inherited a report that was nearly complete; it chose to rush the report out on the Friday after Thanksgiving, hoping it would be largely ignored. The administration did not start work on the subsequent report; as a result, the Biden administration produced a typically detailed report, but it was done slightly behind schedule.

Biden’s team also started preparing the next report (the sixth in the series), which, by law, would need to be completed by 2028. As a result, the second Trump administration inherited a process that was well underway. But in early April, the government canceled contracts with an outside consulting firm that coordinates with the Global Change Research Program and provides temporary staffing to complete the report. This raised questions about whether the report could be completed within its legally mandated timeline.

Trump’s National Climate Assessment: No funding and all authors cut loose Read More »

Can the legal system catch up with climate science?

attribution, climate change, costs, liability, Science / Shannon Garcia / April 24, 2025

Similarly, it’s possible to calculate the impact of emissions within a limited number of years. For example, Callahan and Mankin note that internal oil company research suggested that climate change would be a problem back around 1980, and calculated the impact of emissions that occurred after people knew they were an issue. So, the approach is extremely flexible.

From there, the researchers could use empirical information that links elevated temperatures to economic damage. “Recent peer-reviewed work has used econometrics to infer causal relationships between climate hazards and outcomes such as income loss, reduced agricultural yields, increased human mortality, and depressed economic growth,” Callahan and Mankin write. These metrics can be used to estimate the cost of things like flooding, crop losses, and other economic damages. Alternately, the researchers could analyze the impact on individual climate events where the financial costs have been calculated separately.

Massive damages

To implement their method, the researchers perform lots of individual models, collectively providing the most probable costs and the likely range around them. First, they translate each company’s emissions into the impact on the global mean surface temperature. That gets translated to an impact on extreme temperatures, producing an estimate of what the days with the five most extreme temperatures would look like. That, in turn, is translated to economic damages associated with extreme heat.

Callahan and Mankin use Chevron as an example. By 2020, Chevron’s emissions were responsible for 0.025° C of the warming that year. If you perform a similar analysis for the ears between 1991 and 2020, the researchers come up with a range of damages that runs from a low of about $800 billion all the way up to $3.6 trillion. Most of the damage affected nations in the tropics.

Carrying on through the five companies that have led to the most carbon emissions, they calculate that Saudi Aramco, Gazprom, Chevron, and Exxon Mobile have all produced damages of about $2 trillion. BP brings up the rear, with “just” $1.45 trillion in damage. For the full list of 111 carbon majors, Callahan and Mankin place the total damages at roughly $28 trillion.

Can the legal system catch up with climate science? Read More »

Drunk man walks into climate change, burns the bottoms of his feet off

asphalt, burns, climate change, health, Science / Mike M. / April 23, 2025

In the burn unit, doctors gave the man a pain reliever, cleaned the burns, treated them with a topical antibiotic, and gave them an antimicrobial foam dressing. At a follow-up appointment, the wounds appeared to be healing without complications.

While the man recovered from the injury, the author of the case study—Jeremy Hess, an expert in emergency medicine and global environmental health at the University of Washington—warned that the risk of such injuries will only grow as climate change continues.

“Extreme heat events increase the risk of contact burns from hot surfaces in the environment,” he wrote. “Young children, older adults, unhoused persons, and persons with substance use disorder are at elevated risk for these types of burns.”

Last year, The New York Times reported that burn centers in the southwest have already begun seeing larger numbers of burns from contact with sidewalks and asphalt during heat waves. In some cases, the burns can turn fatal if people lose consciousness on hot surfaces—for instance, from overdoses, heat stroke, intoxication, or other health conditions. “Your body just literally sits there and cooks,” Clifford Sheckter, surgeon and a burn prevention researcher at Stanford University, told the Times last year. “When somebody finally finds you, you’re already in multisystem organ failure.”

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Trump throws coal a lifeline, but the energy industry has moved on

climate change, coal, Energy, Science, syndication, Trump / DJ Henderson / April 9, 2025

As President Donald Trump signed a slew of executive orders Tuesday aimed at keeping coal power alive in the United States, he repeatedly blamed his predecessor, Democrats, and environmental regulations for the industry’s dramatic contraction over the past two decades.

But across the country, state and local officials and electric grid operators have been confronting a factor in coal’s demise that is not easily addressed with the stroke of a pen: its cost.

For example, Maryland’s only remaining coal generating station, Talen Energy’s 1.3-gigawatt Brandon Shores plant, will be staying open beyond its previously planned June 1 shutdown, under a deal that regional grid operator PJM brokered earlier this year with the company, state officials, and the Sierra Club.

Talen had decided to close the plant two years ago because it determined that running the plant was uneconomical. But PJM said the plant was necessary to maintain the reliability of the grid. To keep Brandon Shores open while extra transmission is built to bolster the grid, Maryland ratepayers will be forced to pay close to $1 billion.

“There’s some people who say that Brandon Shores was retiring because of Maryland’s climate policy,” says David Lapp, who leads the Maryland Office of People’s Counsel, which fought the deal on behalf of ratepayers. “But it was purely a decision made by a generation company that’s operating in a free market.”

Cheaper power from natural gas and renewable energy has been driving down use of coal across the United States for roughly 20 years. Coal plants now provide about 15 percent of the nation’s electricity, down from more than 50 percent in 2000.

In some cases, state and local officials have raised concerns over whether the loss of coal plants will make the grid more vulnerable to blackouts. In Utah, for example, the Intermountain Power Agency’s 1,800-megawatt coal power facility in Utah’s West Desert is the largest US coal plant that was scheduled to shut down this year, according to the US Energy Information Administration. IPA is going forward with its plan to switch to natural gas plants that can be made cleaner-operating by using hydrogen fuel. But under a new law, IPA will shut down the coal plants in a state where it can be easily restarted, said IPA spokesman John Ward. The Utah legislature voted last month in favor of a new process in which the state of Utah will look for new customers and possibly a new operator to keep the coal plant running.

Trump throws coal a lifeline, but the energy industry has moved on Read More »

Federal funding freeze endangers climate-friendly agriculture progress

agriculture, climate change, Science, syndication, Trump, USDA / Kelly Newman / April 4, 2025

For decades, environmental and farm groups pushed Congress, the USDA and farmers to adopt new conservation programs, but progress came in incremental steps. With each Farm Bill, some lawmakers threaten to whittle down conservation programs, but they have essentially managed to survive and even expand.

The country’s largest farm lobby, the American Farm Bureau Federation, had long denied the realities of climate change, fighting against climate action and adopting official policy positions that question the scientific consensus that climate change is human-caused. Its members—the bulk of American farmers—largely adhered to the same mindset.

But as the realities of climate change have started to hit American farmers on the ground in the form of more extreme weather, and as funding opportunities have expanded through conservation and climate-focused programs, that mindset has started to shift.

“They were concerned about what climate policy meant for their operations,” Bonnie said. “They felt judged. But we said: Let’s partner up.”

The Trump administration’s rollbacks and freezes threaten to stall or undo that progress, advocacy groups and former USDA employees say.

“We created this enormous infrastructure. We’ve solved huge problems,” Bonnie added, “and they’re undermining all of it.”

“It took so long,” Stillerman said. “The idea that climate change was happening and that farmers could be part of the solution, and could build more resilient farming and food systems against that threat—the IRA really put dollars behind that. All of that is at risk now.”

Burk says he plans to continue with conservation and carbon-storing practices on his Michigan farm, even without conservation dollars from the USDA.

But, he says, many of his neighboring farmers likely will stop conservation measures without the certainty of government support.

“So many people are struggling, just trying to figure out how to pay their bills, to get the fuel to run their tractors, to plant,” he said. “The last thing they want to be doing is sitting down with someone from NRCS who says, ‘If I do these things, maybe I’ll get paid in a year.’ That’s not going to happen.”

This story originally appeared on Inside Climate News.

Federal funding freeze endangers climate-friendly agriculture progress Read More »

EPA accused of faking criminal investigation to claw back climate funds

attorney general, Citibank, climate change, Environmental Protection Agency, EPA, fbi, greenhouse gas reduction fund, Policy / Mike M. / March 13, 2025

Citibank has until March 15 to provide more information on orders to freeze funding. More details on that front were shared today, however, in a court filing in a lawsuit raised by Climate United—one of eight NCIF awardees whose funding was suddenly frozen.

In a motion opposing a request for a temporary restraining order forcing Citibank to unfreeze the funds, Citibank argued that it plays only an administrative role in managing accounts.

According to Citibank, it cannot be liable for freezing the funds because it’s legally required to follow instructions from the EPA and the Department of the Treasury, and those agencies ordered Citibank “to pause all further disbursements from GGRF accounts, including those held by Climate United, until further notice.”

Citibank told the US district court that orders came to freeze the funding after “the government informed Citibank that the GGRF program was subject to an ongoing criminal investigation.”

Supposedly, the FBI received “credible information” that Climate United’s Citibank account was “involved in possible criminal violations,” allegedly including conspiracy to defraud the United States and wire fraud, Citibank’s filing said. In a footnote, Citibank said that it also “learned” that the EPA was “deeply” concerned about “matters of financial mismanagement, conflicts of interest, and oversight failures.”

So, freezing the funds was viewed as necessary, the filing alleged, to prevent “misuse of funds.” And Citibank claimed it had no authority to dispute “lawful” orders.

“Citibank is not vested with discretion to second-guess the government’s concerns regarding the ‘misconduct, waste, conflicts of interest, and potential fraud’ that the government has stated is occurring,” Citibank’s filing said.

Climate United, which describes itself as “a public-private investment fund that removes financial barriers to clean technologies,” said in a press release that freezing the funds had already harmed “hard-working Americans who are struggling to pay for groceries and keep the lights on.”

“Small businesses and developers are unable to draw committed funds for project expenses, critical programs are delayed or paused, and Climate United’s reputation as a lender is impacted,” Climate United said, rounding up stories from stakeholders already struggling through the freeze and urging, “this isn’t about politics; it’s about economics.”

EPA accused of faking criminal investigation to claw back climate funds Read More »

What the EPA’s “endangerment finding” is and why it’s being challenged

climate change, Earth science, EPA, greenhouse gasses, Policy, Science, trump administration / Shannon Garcia / March 11, 2025

Getting rid of the justification for greenhouse gas regulations won’t be easy.

Credit: Mario Tama/Getty Images

A document that was first issued in 2009 would seem an unlikely candidate for making news in 2025. Yet the past few weeks have seen a steady stream of articles about an analysis first issued by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in the early years of Obama’s first term: the endangerment finding on greenhouse gases.

The basics of the document are almost mundane: Greenhouse gases are warming the climate, and this will have negative consequences for US citizens. But it took a Supreme Court decision to get written in the first place, and it has played a role in every attempt by the EPA to regulate greenhouse gas emissions across multiple administrations. And, while the first Trump administration left it in place, the press reports we’re seeing suggest that an attempt will be made to eliminate it in the near future.

The only problem: The science in which the endangerment finding is based on is so solid that any ensuing court case will likely leave its opponents worse off in the long run, which is likely why the earlier Trump administration didn’t challenge it.

Get comfortable, because the story dates all the way back to the first Bush administration.

A bit of history

One of the goals of the US’s Clean Air Act, first passed in 1963, is to “address the public health and welfare risks posed by certain widespread air pollutants.” By the end of the last century, it was becoming increasingly clear that greenhouse gases fit that definition. While they weren’t necessarily directly harmful to the people inhaling them—our lungs are constantly being filled with carbon dioxide, after all—the downstream effects of the warming they caused could certainly impact human health and welfare. But, with the federal government taking no actions during George W. Bush’s time in office, a group of states and cities sued to force the EPA’s hand.

That suit eventually reached the Supreme Court in the form of Massachusetts v. EPA, which led to a ruling in 2007 determining that the Clean Air Act required the EPA to perform an analysis of the dangers posed by greenhouse gases. That analysis was done by late 2007, but the Bush administration simply ignored it for the remaining year it had in office. (It was eventually released after Bush left office.)

That left the Obama-era EPA to reach essentially the same conclusions that the Bush administration had: greenhouse gases are warming the planet. And that will have various impacts—sea-level rise, dangerous heat, damage to agriculture and forestry, and more.

That conclusion compelled the EPA to formulate regulations to limit the emission of greenhouse gases from power plants. Obama’s EPA did just that, but came late enough to still be tied up in courts by the time his term ended. The regulations were also formulated before the plunge in the cost of renewable power sources, which have since led to a drop in carbon emissions that have far outpaced what the EPA’s rules intended to accomplish.

The first Trump administration formulated alternative rules that also ended up in court for being an insufficient response to the conclusions of the endangerment finding, which ultimately led the Biden administration to start formulating a new set of rules. And at that point, the Supreme Court decided to step in and rule on the Obama rules, even though everyone knew they would never go into effect.

The court indicated that the EPA needed to regulate each power plant individually, rather than regulating the wider grid, which sent the Biden administration back to the drawing board. Its attempts at crafting regulations were also in court when Trump returned to office.

There were a couple of notable aspects to that last case, West Virginia v. EPA, which hinged on the fact that Congress had never explicitly indicated that it wanted to see greenhouse gases regulated. Congress responded by ensuring that the Inflation Reduction Act’s energy-focused components specifically mentioned that these were intended to limit carbon emissions, eliminating one potential roadblock. The other thing is that, in this and other court cases, the Supreme Court could have simply overturned Massachusetts v. EPA, the case that put greenhouse gases within the regulatory framework of the Clean Air Act. Yet a court that has shown a great enthusiasm for overturning precedent didn’t do so.

Nothing dangerous?

So, in the 15 years since the EPA initially released its endangerment findings, they’ve resulted in no regulations whatsoever. But, as long as they existed, the EPA is required to at least attempt to regulate them. So, getting rid of the endangerment findings would seem like the obvious thing for an administration led by a president who repeatedly calls climate change a hoax. And there were figures within the first Trump administration who argued in favor of that.

So why didn’t it happen?

That was never clear, but I’d suggest at least some members of the first Trump administration were realistic about the likely results. The effort to contest the endangerment finding was pushed by people who largely reject the vast body of scientific evidence that indicates that greenhouse gases are warming the climate. And, if anything, the evidence had gotten more decisive in the years between the initial endangerment finding and Trump’s inauguration. I expect that their effort was blocked by people who knew that it would fail in the courts and likely leave behind precedents that made future regulatory efforts easier.

This interpretation is supported by the fact that the Trump-era EPA received a number of formal petitions to revisit the endangerment finding. Having read a few (something you should not do), they are uniformly awful. References to supposed peer-reviewed “papers” turn out to be little more than PDFs hosted on a WordPress site. Other arguments are based on information contained in the proceedings of a conference organized by an anti-science think tank. The Trump administration rejected them all with minimal comment the day before Biden’s inauguration.

Biden’s EPA went back and made detailed criticisms of each of them if you want to see just how laughable the arguments against mainstream science were at the time. And, since then, we’ve experienced a few years of temperatures that are so high they’ve surprised many climate scientists.

Unrealistic

But the new head of the EPA is apparently anything but a realist, and multiple reports have indicated he’s asking to be given the opportunity to go ahead and redo the endangerment finding. A more recent report suggests two possibilities. One is to recruit scientists from the fringes to produce a misleading report and roll the dice on getting a sympathetic judge who will overlook the obvious flaws. The other would be to argue that any climate change that happens will have net benefits to the US.

That latter approach would run into the problem that we’ve gotten increasingly sophisticated at doing analyses that attribute the impact of climate change on the individual weather disasters that do harm the welfare of citizens of the US. While it might have been possible to make a case for uncertainty here a decade ago, that window has been largely closed by the scientific community.

Even if all of these efforts fail, it will be entirely possible for the EPA to construct greenhouse gas regulations that accomplish nothing and get tied up in court for the remainder of Trump’s term. But a court case could show just how laughably bad the positions staked out by climate contrarians are (and, by extension, the position of the president himself). There’s a small chance that the resulting court cases will result in a legal record that will make it that much harder to accept the sorts of minimalist regulations that Trump proposed in his first term.

Which is probably why this approach was rejected the first time around.

John is Ars Technica’s science editor. He has a Bachelor of Arts in Biochemistry from Columbia University, and a Ph.D. in Molecular and Cell Biology from the University of California, Berkeley. When physically separated from his keyboard, he tends to seek out a bicycle, or a scenic location for communing with his hiking boots.

What the EPA’s “endangerment finding” is and why it’s being challenged Read More »

“Bouncing” winds damaged Houston skyscrapers in 2024

architecture, climate change, derecho, hurricanes, Science / 9u50fv / February 22, 2025

“Bouncing” winds

Damage sustained by the Chevron Building Auditorium during the derecho: a) damaged side of the building, b) global damage view, c) & d) localized glass damage. Credit: Padgett et al., 2024

Elawady decided to investigate why the Houston derecho’s structural damage was so much more extensive than one might expect. He and his colleagues analyzed the impact of the derecho on five of the city’s most notable buildings: The Chevron Building Auditorium, the CenterPoint Energy Plaza, the El Paso Energy Building, the RRI Energy Plaza, and the Wedge International Tower.

The Chevron Building Auditorium, for instance, suffered significant damage to its cladding and shattered glass windows, mostly on the side facing another skyscraper: the Chevron Corporation Tower. The CenterPoint Energy Plaza’s damage to its double-skin facade was concentrated on one corner that had two tall buildings facing it, as was the damage to two corners of the El Paso Energy building. This suggested a wind-channeling effect might have played a role in that damage.

Next Elawady et al. conducted wind tunnel experiments at the FIU Natural Hazards Engineering Research Infrastructure’s “Wall of Wind” facility to determine how the winds may have specifically caused the observed damage. They placed a revolving miniature tall building in the tunnel and blasted it with wind speeds of up to 70 meters per second while placing an identical mini-model at increasing distances from the first to mimic possible interference from nearby buildings.

The results confirmed the team’s working hypothesis. “When strong winds move through a city, they can bounce due to interference between tall buildings. This increases pressure on walls and windows, making damage more severe than if the buildings were isolated,” said co-author Omar Metwally, a graduate student at FIU. For example, in the case of the Chevron Building Auditorium, the channeling effects intensified the damage, particularly at higher elevations.

“On top of this, downbursts create intense, localized forces which can exceed typical design values for hurricanes, especially on the lower floors of tall buildings,” Metwally added. The problem is only likely to worsen because of accelerating climate change. Glass facades seem to be particularly vulnerable to this kind of wind damage, and the authors suggest current design and construction guidelines for such elements should be re-evaluated as a result of their findings.

Frontiers in Built Environment, 2025. DOI: 10.3389/fbuil.2024.1514523 (About DOIs).

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