Warming has brought extreme rainfall to the parched African Sahel, which is seeing aquifers refill after decades of drought. But heavier downpours alone cannot explain the groundwater revival. Experts say efforts to harvest rainfall may also be paying dividends.

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I recently read this analysis by Ember:

https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/bottleneck-to-the-next-phase-of-renewable-energy-growth-in-india/

This post summarizes my understanding of it.

Are you concerned about climate change and how it will affect India? Do you believe India simply needs to generate more solar electricity? If yes, you must read this post and the above analysis.

Over the past year, a new obstacle has emerged in India’s renewable-energy transition. India curtailed around 2.1 TWh of renewable electricity in FY 2025–26, worth approximately ₹629 crore.

Why would a country waste clean electricity?

The electricity grid is the network that carries power from generators to consumers. The electricity entering the grid must roughly equal the electricity being used. In simple terms, supply must match demand.

Solar complicates this balance because its generation is volatile. It produces heavily during daylight hours and nothing at night. Coal plants, meanwhile, cannot instantly switch off when solar generation rises. They have a minimum technical load ( MTL), below which they cannot safely reduce output. Restarting a coal plant can take hours or even days and is more polluting. India’s current MTL for coal plants is 55%. So, if a coal plant can produce a maximum of 1,000 units, it may not be able to reduce its generation below 550 units. 

Suppose the grid needs 100 units of electricity. Solar is producing 60 units, while coal plants are already operating at their minimum output of 55 units. Total generation is now 115 units. Since coal cannot be reduced further, in this case, at least 15 units of solar power must be switched off. When we curtail renewable electricity, we are wasting clean electricity that is available, not because there is no demand, but because the coal plants have a technical limit.

This is why simply installing more solar is not enough. If new solar panels generate electricity when existing solar power is already being discarded, we have not solved the immediate problem. Reducing curtailment and improving grid flexibility should come before blindly adding more solar capacity.

Battery storage offers a solution. Batteries can charge when excess solar power is available and discharge after sunset, when electricity is needed more urgently. However, Ember’s analysis argues that India’s regulations prevent batteries from operating efficiently. Under the General Network Access (framework governing transmission access), BESS (Battery Energy Storage System) projects seeking access during non-solar hours must provide at least 2 hours of storage and build a “commensurate” renewable plant from which to charge. The 2-hour requirement is not the problem. The second condition is.

Imagine a battery tied to one solar farm. That farm may have no surplus electricity, while another solar plant elsewhere is being ordered to shut down. The battery remains empty even though clean electricity is being wasted on the wider grid. The author’s proposal is simple: allow batteries to charge from the grid whenever transmission lines have spare capacity, and restrict them only where charging would genuinely overload the network.

Adding solar panels without building the storage, grid flexibility, and regulations needed to use that electricity is not serious climate policy. People who genuinely care about climate change must educate themselves about these challenges. Slogans are easy. Understanding the roadblocks and nuances will help us make better demands! We must make more educated demands!

I’m trying to understand why we aren’t investing more into large-scale algae farms for carbon removal.

Forests naturally absorb around 10–12 billion tonnes of CO₂ per year.
Oceans absorb another ~10–11 billion tonnes per year.
The remaining ~20 billion tonnes accumulate in the atmosphere.

The obvious answer is: "plant more trees."

But trees have limitations:

• they grow slowly (decades before reaching maximum carbon uptake);
• they require enormous amounts of land;
• forests can burn;
• we also need land for food production.

So I started looking at algae.

Algae can grow much faster than trees and capture CO₂ through photosynthesis.

The idea:

CO₂ → algae → carbon-based materials → long-term storage

Instead of letting algae decompose, could we turn them into:

• construction panels,
• wood alternatives,
• insulation,
• composites,
• bioplastics,
• biochar?

Compared with Direct Air Capture:

• DAC can remove CO₂ but is currently very expensive and energy intensive.
• Algae uses sunlight and could create valuable products while capturing carbon.

What am I missing?

Could algae-based carbon-negative materials become a major climate solution, or is there a fundamental reason this won’t work?

Would love feedback from people in climate tech, biology, engineering, or carbon removal.

This study should be frequently referenced. It's not scientists or think tanks or politicians. This study was commissioned by an INSURANCE company. Actuaries do their best to calculate reality (insurance liabilities). They need to know what damage to expect regardless of how the green transition goes. Please note the GDP losses in the developing world v Rich world. Someone is going to do something desperate (Geoengineering)

There are 901 active wildfires in Canada, according to the Canadian Wildland Fire Information System. To date this year, there have been 3,951 fires that have burned 3 million hectares.

... "So far this year, 40,771 fires have burned more than 3.9 million acres across the United States," according to the (U.S.) National Interagency Fire Center newsroom. "Fires in the Northwest and the fires in northern Minnesota pose the greatest demand for firefighting resources. Resource assignments are being prioritized based on life and property risk, operational impact, and probability of success."

Many of the fires are burning in remote, hard-to-combat, unreachable areas, which then rely on wet weather to extinguish them. Where feasible, aircraft and ground crews work feverishly to safeguard communities from the flames.

Sometimes containment efforts work, but most attempts only slow the progress of the fires enough to allow people in the path to evacuate. In backwoods areas, where there are no roads or the distance is too far to fly in tanker aircraft with visual ground support, the fires are left to burn and let nature take its course.

Insect infestations (Spruce Budworm, Emerald Ash Borer and Mountain Pine Beetle) and drought have damaged or killed scores of trees, which then become potential fuel during droughts, lightning activity and when humans create ignition sources. Resins from certain trees and brush can accelerate fire ignition and spread.

Smoke is a product of fires, and its density depends on available fuels. Certain types of evergreen and deciduous foliage can emit much more smoke than simple grassland fires.

How Canadian wildfire smoke impacts the U.S.:

Winds fan the flames and carry smoke for hundreds and thousands of miles. How high or low the smoke is relative to the ground depends on atmospheric conditions, such as turbulence, humidity and precipitation. High-flying smoke may only cause the sky to appear hazy. Low-lying smoke can pose serious health risks and create dangerously low visibility.

The main driver of smoke from their origin points in western Ontario to the Midwest and Northeast is the prevailing jet stream dip over the eastern part of North America. Steering winds from the northwest will scoop up the smoke and whisk it southeastward.

EDIT: Worst Ontario wildfire season in history.

https://canada.constructconnect.com/dcn/news/resource/2026/07/this-is-ontarios-worst-wildfire-season-early-estimates-suggest-its-not-over-yet

Full disclosure, this is my project, so treat the claims sceptically.

Climate science has a terminology problem that makes literature search unreliable. The same underlying phenomenon accumulates names over decades. Tipping points, critical transitions and rate-induced tipping overlap. On the aerosol side you have the Twomey effect, indirect effects, semi-direct effects and rapid adjustments describing a related mess of processes. If you search using this decade's vocabulary, the older work is effectively invisible to you.

I built unkwn42 to attack that specifically. You enter a research idea and it tells you whether it has already been done, surfacing prior work including the renamed and drifted versions, plus who is publishing in the area and where it seems to be heading. Every statement is tied to an actual paper, not generated from memory.

There's also Reviewer2, which takes an abstract or a rough idea and plays the hostile referee: it finds the papers someone could cite against your novelty claim, ranks them by how dangerous they are, states the attack, and drafts the defence for how your work differs.

Free during beta. Sign up at unkwn42.com, code REDDIT-CLIMATE.

The ask: if you work in climate or atmospheric science, run it on a topic where you already know the literature better than any tool does, and tell me what it got wrong. I would much rather hear that it missed an obvious 1980s paper than hear that it looked nice.

As wildfires rage across Canada and the American West, the announcement from federal forecasters that an El Niño warming is forming thousands of miles away in the tropical Pacific Ocean may offer some regions relief — next year, at least.

The El Niño climate pattern materializes erratically every two to seven years and can last up to a year. During its tenure, El Niño often brings wetter conditions to the Southern United States. While extra rain can bring flooding and landslide risks, it can also keep vegetation moist, lowering the potential for wildfires.

Forecasters with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which announced in June that El Niño had arrived, predict this iteration will be “very strong,” bringing a greater promise of a wet winter.

Read more at the link.