The main purpose of this ongoing blog will be to track planetary extreme, or record temperatures related to climate change. Any reports I see of ETs will be listed below the main topic of the day. I’ll refer to extreme or record temperatures as ETs (not extraterrestrials).😜
Main Topic: For Earth Day, a Few Hopeful Signs for Our Planet
Dear Diary. Happy Earth Day 2026 everyone. Ever since the first Earth Day in 1970 people have been celebrating together to commit to improving the environmental state of our planet. On this Earth Day there are true signs the efforts from individuals to large organizations have paid off such that we as a species will get ahead of pollution and even the climate crisis, at least from a report penned at the New York Times.
Before reprinting that I have a short message of my own. Trump has done his sociopathic best to ruin our environment and with his fossil fuel loving billionaire buddies make the climate crisis worse. For my U.S. readers, work hard this year until a critical November midterm election to vote out every single Republican possible. Organize and rally for the vote. If Democrats get both the House and Senate, Trump and his toxic policies can be corralled until at least 2029 when he officially will leave office.
The Republican Party has become a cesspool of corruption and anti-science policy, so much so that they must go the way of the dodo bird then emerge as perhaps both a pro-business and pro-environment party sometime in future decades that will support a sustainable society.
Now here is that New York Times piece:
For Earth Day, a Few Signs of Hope for Our Planet – The New York Times
For Earth Day, a Few Signs of Hope for Our Planet
In a year of grim climate and environment news, we’ve compiled several hopeful signs about our planet’s future.
The view of home from the other side of the moon.Credit…NASA
By David Gelles
April 21, 2026
As astronaut Victor Glover made his way to the moon earlier this month on NASA’s Artemis II mission, he reflected on the incredible miracle that is planet Earth.
“You are special,” Glover told an interviewer. Space, he said, “is a whole bunch of nothing.”
But in the midst all that nothing, Glover could see a bright blue dot out the window of his spaceship. “You have this oasis,” he said, “this beautiful place that we get to exist together.”
Glover is right. The only planet in the universe known to be capable of supporting life, our common home is one lonely speck of extraordinary abundance in a cold, infinite vacuum.
On the climate and environment team at The Times, we spend a lot of time documenting the myriad ways in which human activity is wreaking havoc on Earth’s ecosystems. And there’s no question it’s been another tough year for the planet. Temperatures keep rising. Biodiversity loss is increasing. The United States has withdrawn from global action against climate change.
But ahead of Earth Day tomorrow, we also wanted to highlight some of the many things that are going right in the push to slow global warming and protect the planet.
The energy transition
Curbing climate change will require replacing substantially all of the energy produced by fossil fuels with energy produced by clean sources, like solar and wind power. And on this front, there’s much to celebrate.
While the growth of clean power has slowed in the United States as a result of the Trump administration’s policies, the adoption of renewable and low-carbon energy sources is booming around the world.
For the first time, a renewable source — solar — was the biggest single contributor to new energy supply worldwide, accounting for more than 25 percent of energy growth last year, according to data released this week by the International Energy Agency.
Globally, electric car sales jumped 20 percent last year, to more than 20 million vehicles. And installations of new wind energy jumped 40 percent over last year with more than 160 gigawatts installed in 2025.
“The economics of clean energy are now on our side,” said Manish Bapna, chief executive of the Natural Resources Defense Council. “Today, clean energy is the cheapest and quickest way to meet our growing energy demand. As a result, we’re seeing bright spots of hope all over the world.”
With rollout of renewables on the rise, emissions have started to fall in some key markets.
In the European Union, greenhouse gas emissions fell 3 percent between 2023 and 2024. With that drop, the E.U.’s total emissions are 40 percent lower than 1990 levels, even as the population and economy have grown substantially.
In China, carbon dioxide emissions fell by 1 percent in the final quarter of 2025, according to an analysis by Carbon Brief. That likely will result in a slight overall decline in annual emissions, meaning that the world’s biggest polluter has managed to keep its CO2 emissions either “flat or falling” for nearly two years now.
And in India, emissions were flat for the first time since the 1970s, excluding the pandemic years. Wind and solar installations in India jumped nearly 60 percent last year, the largest increase among major nations.
“It’s not a matter of ‘if’ but ‘when’ the world transitions to clean energy,” Bapna said, “and what countries will lead the way and reap the economic reward.”
Corporate action continues
Earlier this year, I wrote about how Wall Street turned its back on climate change. That dynamic hasn’t changed. But elsewhere in the corporate world, many businesses continue to take action.
A record $2.3 trillion was allocated to clean energy projects last year, according to BloombergNEF, and more than 10,000 companies now have goals to reduce their emissions.
“That’s not retreat,” said Mindy Lubber, chief executive of Ceres, a nonprofit organization that helps companies with sustainability efforts. “That’s acceleration.”
Lubber added that while some Wall Street firms have gone quiet on climate issues, many institutional investors continue to assess climate risk and publicly held companies are required to track the issue. “Fiduciary duty hasn’t changed, and neither has their focus,” she said.
And across the country, states including California, Illinois and Massachusetts are implementing policies that will push businesses to reduce emissions, even as some Northeast states are pulling back.
“This isn’t a straight line, and it’s definitely not fast enough,” Lubber said. “But overall, the direction is clear: markets, companies, investors, and policymakers are still moving forward.”
A resilient blue dot
There’s some good news from around the planet, too.
Scientists have found that rainforests can recover from deforestation in mere decades, my colleague Sachi Mulkey reports. A large-scale study, conducted across two nature reserves in Ecuador, suggests that hundreds of millions of acres of formerly deforested land across the world are thought to be regrowing.
“This is a message of hope,” one tropical forest ecologist said of the study. “The exciting thing is that nature is capable of recovering by itself.”
From Oregon to Maine, rivers are being restored, allowing salmon to return. (California, for its part, is building literal bridges for wildlife.) And citizens in all 50 states are coming up with innovative fixes to climate problems large and small.
None of these developments alone will single-handedly stop climate change, or reverse the damage that has already been done. But together, they offer promise that even in challenging and complicated times, humanity can summon the will to care for our common home.
“You guys are talking to us because we’re in a spaceship really far from Earth,” Glover said while zooming away from the planet. “But you’re on a spaceship called Earth, that was created to give us a place to live in the universe and the cosmos.”
Here are some “ETs” recorded from around the U.S. the last couple of days, their consequences, and some extreme temperature outlooks, as well as any extreme precipitation reports:
Here is More Climate News from Wednesday:
(As usual, this will be a fluid post in which more information gets added during the day as it crosses my radar, crediting all who have put it on-line. Items will be archived on this site for posterity. In most instances click on the pictures of each tweet to see each article. The most noteworthy items will be listed first.)