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A cartoon by Clay Jones. Related | Trump takes phony victory lap after Iran disaster…

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This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The oceanic phenomenon known as El Niño, which increases temperatures worldwide, has officially begun, according to US weather forecasters at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. 

Meteorologists have warned that this could be the strongest El Niño this century. It is expected to drive extreme weather events around the world, including both severe droughts and heavy rainfall, likely leading to major disruptions in agricultural production and food security. 

El Niño is part of a cyclical, naturally occurring weather pattern that redistributes warm air, surface water temperatures, and moisture across the tropical Pacific Ocean. During El Niño, trade winds that typically blow east-to-west from the Americas to southeast Asia slow down or sometimes reverse. Normally, these winds push warm water along the equator—but during El Niño conditions, that warm water shifts back east. Although El Niño does not follow a specific timeline, it typically occurs every two to seven years. 

Certain policies may ensure there’s “enough food,” but “that’s not going to take care of the people whose livelihoods depend on” agriculture.

Beginning in the summer, El Niño typically peaks around December or the following January. (The pattern was named El Niño—Spanish for little boy—by fishermen in South America who noticed warmer waters around Christmas time, and associated it with the birth of Jesus Christ.) That means the most significant impacts of the cyclical weather phenomenon may not be felt until months from now.

NOAA’s most recent calculations show a high likelihood of a “very strong” El Niño, meaning average surface temperatures in the Pacific jump by more than 2 degrees C. (Some experts are calling this year’s a “super” El Niño, although some agencies, like the World Meteorological Organization, reject this language.)  

Because it impacts a “diverse set of geographies,” said Weston Anderson, a climate scientist at the University of Maryland, “there is no one set of impacts.” El Niño can contribute to severe droughts in one part of the world and heavy rainfall in others—both of which can disrupt growing seasons in key breadbaskets of the world. 

But the ways in which this year’s El Niño will interact with the effects of global warming—and what that means for food security—is something scientists are still actively observing and untangling. “That question is still really important open science,” said Jennifer Burney, a professor at Stanford’s Doerr School of Sustainability whose work focuses on climate and food security. 

History can give us some examples. In 1877, one of the strongest El Niños ever recorded was associated with historic droughts across Asia, as well as in parts of Brazil and northern Africa. These droughts, “along with colonial policies, contributed to famines in many regions which were really devastating,” said Deepti Singh, an associate professor at Washington State University who co-authored a study on this period of global famine. 

The fatalities associated with these famines, upward of 50 million people, said Singh, “are humbling to think about.”

The last El Niño occurred in 2023 and 2024. It was one of the five strongest El Niños ever recorded, according to the World Meteorological Organization, and is considered to have contributed to the historic temperatures in 2024, making it the hottest year on record. 

The exact way that this El Niño will unfurl is yet unknown.

That year came with devastating consequences for growers, especially in arid regions where agricultural producers primarily rely on rainfall to irrigate their crops. Droughts driven by El Niño across southern Africa contributed to increased food insecurity and malnutrition in several countries. 

Burney noted that in some vulnerable regions, local governments may have adaptive strategies in place to grow key crops earlier in the growing season or to increase imports during El Niño years, which can help offset food insecurity. But even in those cases, local farmers who depend on growing and selling crops to support themselves and their families may still experience economic setbacks. In other words, certain policies may ensure there’s “enough food,” but “that’s not going to take care of the people whose livelihoods depend on” agriculture, Burney said. 

This year, El Niño conditions are expected to impact a number of growing areas—another setback for agricultural producers who have faced higher input costs stemming from the Iran war. Although the United States and Iran are potentially set to unveil an agreement to reopen the all-important Strait of Hormuz, through which much of the world’s oil flows, farmers worldwide have already been impacted by fertilizer shortages and price hikes since the passage closed this spring. 

Weather variability fueled by El Niño will add to growers’ woes. India, where the majority of the world’s rice comes from, is projected to have a weaker monsoon season, which could reduce yields. Drier, hotter conditions could lead to diminished maize production in southern Africa. The southern US states, from California all the way to the eastern seaboard, will experience a wetter year than normal, which could lead to flooding and upend crop production. 

But the exact way that this El Niño will unfurl is yet unknown. As El Niño interacts with the additional warming and moisture currently in our atmosphere caused by climate change, “there is likely to be a change in which regions are likely to be affected” by extreme weather, said Singh. Still, she added, we can expect “the severity, extent, and likelihood” of extreme weather events like droughts “to be higher” in today’s warmer climate.

In the wake of Operation Epic Fury, both supporters and critics of the president have described the joint U.S.- Israeli bombing campaigns as “exquisite.” Iran’s supreme leader, in addition to vast swaths of the security cabinet and IRGC command were wiped out at the same time that Iranian missile production capabilities were severely degraded. The intelligence was, in some senses, so captivating, so advanced, and so hyper targeted, that military experts on both sides of the political spectrum set aside the liabilities of escalating a hot war to celebrate the god-like perfection of its initiation. But if this new intelligence apparatus, powered by AI and irresistible to America’s top commanders is hastily integrated into the nuclear arsenal, the fallout will be anything but “exquisite.” 

An examination of government documents, private sector contracting records, and the little noticed statements of military commanders suggests that the same artificial intelligence that allowed frictionless decapitation in Iran is now coming to the nuclear arsenal—with potentially world-altering consequences. While much noise has been made about safeguarding the nuclear command from AI, with constant reassurances of “human-in-the-loop” safeguards, a different escalatory threat has fallen by the wayside: left of launch operations. 

With worst-case scenarios of nuclear engagement, most people think of Strangelove-esque military planners fomenting support for a doomsday machine. During the Cold War, near-misses occurred with terrifying frequency, such as the occasion when a flock of geese was mistaken for a soviet nuclear bombing campaign. Most of these almost catastrophic mistakes revolved around mistaking things for missiles that had already been launched. 

With the integration of AI into the nuclear command and control infrastructure, escalation may soon begin on the ground, before the launch codes have been entered and the bunkers sealed. This new doctrine is known as “left of launch” and AI is increasingly being integrated into the systems used to predict when a nuclear weapon is being launched, as well as the assets that could be degraded to prevent a first strike. 

As we have seen time and time again, the frictionless intelligence that led to  a perfect exfiltration in Venezuela, or the targeted killings in Iran, may soon grease the wheels of preemptive strikes on nuclear capabilities, an escalation into untested terrain for both artificial intelligence, and humanity.

What Is “left of launch?” The first public use of the term appears to be a 2014 memo between Army and Navy chiefs discussing the need for new technologies for U.S. missile defense. That memo states that “Now is the opportunity to develop a long-term approach that addresses homeland missile defense and regional missile defense priorities—a holistic approach that is more sustainable and cost effective, incorporating ‘left-of-launch’ and other non-kinetic means of defense. The proposed strategy would serve as the capstone for the Department to balance priorities, inform resourcing decisions, and restore our strategic flexibility.”

This memo marked a strategic shift, putting an increasing focus on the idea of stopping adversaries’ nuclear missiles before they’re launched, a tactic that proved effective during the Obama era for degrading North Korea’s ballistic missile tests. Since the 2014 memo, cyber attacks and sabotage have been added to preemptive air or missile strikes on foreign missile launchers and facilities under the umbrella of “left of launch.” 

Five years after the term “left of launch” began cropping up inside the Department of Defense, the Trump administration commissioned and released a review of American “policies, strategies, and capabilities…to counter the expanding missile threats posed by rogue states and revisionist powers.” The report called for an escalatory build-out of new capabilities. Among those was a new framework for advancing the notion that preemptive action is actually just another form of defense. 

As Laura Grego of the Union of Concerned Scientists wrote at the time, the report increased the escalation cycle with America’s enemies by “bringing attack operations into the overall missile defense posture as a triad along with active defenses, such as interceptors, and passive defenses, such as hardening and dispersal of potential missile targets.” This, according to Grego, created what amounts to “a kinetic version of left of launch” that no longer reflects traditional deterrence but instead is a first-strike capability. 

Grego also pointed out that the report’s interpretation by other nuclear powers, namely Russia and China, will not abide by America’s framing that new satellites and hypersonic ballistic missiles are for defensive capabilities, something Russia quickly made explicit. 

During the Cuban missile crisis, President John F. Kennedy was pushed from all sides, including by the joint chiefs of staff, to launch a preemptive bombing campaign against the Soviets to obliterate their nuclear capacity on the island. Instead, JFK opted for a passive blockade and diplomatic back channeling that resolved the issue without kinetic force or the potential for catastrophic escalation. But new AI technology being sold to the U.S. government may forestall a similarly de-scalatory approach in the coming decades. 

In June of 2010, General Stanley McChrystal, then America’s top commander in Afghanistan, was forced to resign after a long string of incidents suggested contempt for civilian control of the American military. First, he publicly called for tens of thousands of troops to surge in Afghanistan before a confidential document codifying his opinion leaked to the press, two breaches in protocol that resulted in accusations of subversion of the chain of command.  Soon after he and various other commanders and staff were revealed to have disparaged the president andvice presidentv in an article for Rolling Stone. He prepared his resignation the same day it was published. 

Now, McChrystal is advising an AI technology firm that bills itself as being better at predicting the future of nuclear warfare than both civilian and military commanders. In a lengthy opinion piece penned in Foreign Policy, McChrystal wrote that the firm Rhombus, where he serves as an advisor, predicted the invasion of Ukraine by Russia better than the American national security apparatus. “The quantity of data we analyze helps predict the next card in an opponent’s deck with previously unimaginable confidence.”

Rhombus CEO Anshu Roy cites Sun Tzu to summarize his firm’s premise: “Battles are won before they start.” Roy’s firm has won a $200 million dollar contract from the U.S. Air Force for “an artificial intelligence platform for strategic decision making in defense and national security enterprises,” and has been sanctioned by the CCP for his firm’s work on behalf of the Taiwanese military. In 2024, Carrier management wrote that Rhombus Power also tracks North Korean missile launches for an unnamed government client, suggesting its potential for left of launch applications has been in motion now for some time. 

As The New Republic reported last year, Rhombus’s Ambient product, described as a “digital nervous system, made approximately 32,000 predictions in 2023. Of those tens of thousands, 25,000 were accurate. That’s a .780 batting average, which while great for baseball, might not be high enough for initiating nuclear conflict. 

In his article, McChrystal acknowledges that “while AI can make the picture clearer, it only makes decision-makers’ choices more complex”—an apparent nod to civilian control of the military. Nonetheless, there is a subtle un-truth to the idea that AI integration into systems used to detect adversaries’ nuclear command and control infrastructure will be a merely passive tool to provide commanders options in the situation room. 

As we’ve seen in the Trump administration’s use of incredibly powerful weaponry and detection technology, intelligence fueled by AI greases the wheels of the national security apparatus, whether the outcomes of kinetic action will have long term beneficial impacts or not. In an interview with Politico, Rhombus officials countered this point by pointing to de-escalating a flare up of hostilities between India and Pakistan by “identifying activity at Pakistani bases that could have been mistaken for nuclear arms escalation…but was not.”

But while the generals advising Rhombus about the promise of AI’s use on the battlefield are charging full steam ahead, not every retired general is in alignment. Prior to his retirement, Lt. Gen. John N.T. Shanahan served as director of the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center, a Department of Defense component studying the integration of AI onto the battlefield. 

In an article for the Arms Control Association Shanahan wrote: “One especially destabilizing scenario involves the widespread application of AI to detect and continuously monitor the ground, sea, and airborne nuclear forces of other states. Adversary integration of AI-enhanced systems … could erode confidence in a state’s assured retaliation posture. This loss of confidence could in turn increase incentives for preemptive strikes, weakening the logic of deterrence and undermining strategic stability. The problem becomes even more acute if such surveillance and tracking technologies are paired with AI-enhanced automation of decision-making or launch processes, heightening first-strike incentives during a crisis.”

His conclusion ultimately found that even small scale errors at the input level of AI systems could “produce disproportionate upstream consequences once multiple AI models are embedded across interconnected platforms and decision-support systems.”

As AI integration into “left of launch” ramps up, job listings obtained by The New Republic show the extent to which AI is already being injected into United Strategic Command, which is responsible for maintaining and operating the nuclear arsenal. The command’s official remit includes overseeing Strategic Deterrence, NC3 (Nuclear Command, Control, and Communication) Enterprise Operations, Joint Electromagnetic Spectrum Operations, and Global Strike and Missile Threat Assessment.

These job offers include a General Dynamics listing for an AI engineer to work at Stratcom to reduce the complexity of command and control through AI and machine learning, and an AI advisor to oversee AI integration into the Tomahawk weapon systems threat mission planning center. 

Elsewhere, a contractor called DEFCON AI is hiring a subject matter expert to support the development of a modeling and simulation environment who has “deep expertise in U.S. Strategic Command (STRATCOM) programs to help model strategic capabilities, planning constructs, and operational decision frameworks” to “support analysis across the nuclear deterrence mission set.”

Meanwhile, Lockheed Martin posted a listing for a staff AI research engineer based out of STRATcom’s headquarters in Nebraska to work on integrating AI into the nuclear deterrence mission. Taken together, these postings show that AI is being increasingly integrated into both the nuclear command and control infrastructure and into the conventional weapons systems that could be used in a “left of launch” first strike scenario. 

AI integration across the Department of Defense has ramped up with executive orders and a new AI-styled space race with great power competitors like China and Russia. But one development over the past two years has integrated AI into the “left of launch” framework with the result of escalating tensions with nuclear powers who claim a new “defensive capability” is an outright escalation on the nuclear battlefield. 

In his second term, Donald Trump unveiled his plans for the Golden Dome, a network of space detection satellites, high energy weapons, and ground and sea based interceptor missiles to shield America from missile threats. The program is expected to cost $185 billion, with an initial capability delivered by 2028 and the full system in place in 2035. (Some analysts have put the figure closer to $3.5 trillion.) 

The U.S. Space Force has already handed out billions in contracts for prototype interceptor missiles, but the escalatory potential for the system is not found in explosive hardware, but the detection capabilities proposed for the system. Firefly Aerospace and its recently acquired SciTec have touted their products for the Golden Dome, including missile warning systems, surveillance and reconnaissance, autonomous command and control, all in addition to “AI-enabled systems designed for low latency operations to support advanced threat tracking and response across multiple domains.”

Also involved in AI, data processing, and command control systems for the Golden Dome are Palantir, Anduril, and Booz Allen Hamilton. The Space Force General in charge of the Golden Dome, Michael Guetlein, let slip in an interview to the Washington Examiner that “left of launch counterattacks” will also be a core component of the Golden Dome. 

Russia and China have taken note, releasing a joint statement criticizing the integration of “left of launch” into Donald Trump’s new project, describing it as a “complete and ultimate rejection to recognize the existence of the inseparable interrelationship between strategic offensive arms and strategic defensive arms, which is one of the central and fundamental principles of maintaining global strategic stability. The project also provides additional impetus to the further development of kinetic and non-kinetic means providing for the left-of-launch defeat of missile weapons and the infrastructure that supports their employment.” In other words, a new arms race is on. 

Over the past year, members of congress have introduced tepid legislation to curb the integration of AI into weapons systems and the nuclear arsenal. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand introduced the Secure and Accountable Military AI Act. The bill would essentially mandate something that already exists: a human in the loop for AI targeting and control systems. This will accomplish little more than introduce a new button-pusher into vast and allegedly omniscient AI systems. 

Sen. Elissa Slotkin introduced her own bill months before that sought not only to ban AI for the use in a first strike nuclear launch but also to restrict the application of AI to domestic surveillance. But even if these bills were to pass, the full-scale AI arms race with China suggests there may be little hope of stopping the ever-present drift towards a frictionless Department of Defense that moves towards strikes with a will of its own. 

As “left of launch” capabilities are streamlined with AI, potential response times for action may decrease. The grace period for escalatory phone calls and meetings also becomes condensed. Both America and its enemies will have access to vast flows of satellite data, social media intelligence, internal communications from hostile actors, and even psychological profiling, all wrapped together into a blaring warning strobe. Maybe this technology really will make us safer, enabling first strike or cyber attacks to prevent and degrade a future launch. But maybe it won’t.

In the Stanley Kubrick film Dr. Strangelove—the most famous on-screen critique of the nuclear arms race—the president asks the mad Dr. Strangelove about the contours of the doomsday machine, an ultimate deterrence mechanism that would bring about the total annihilation of the world. “How is it possible for this thing to be triggered automatically and at the same time impossible to untrigger?” He asks. “Mr. President,” Dr Strangelove replies, “it is not only possible, it is essential.” As AI creeps into “left of launch” operations, in addition to every other nook and cranny of the Department of Defense, the logic underpinning this drive to replace human judgment with a tangle of AI algorithms sounds very Strangelovian indeed. 

Explaining the Right is a weekly series that looks at what the right wing is currently obsessing over, how it influences politics—and why you need to know. President Donald Trump doesn’t understand American patriotism. He certainly believes that he understands the concept—which millions of schoolchildren from coast to coast are able to grasp—but his recent actions underline the fact…

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A cartoon by Jack Ohman. Related | MAGA kooks are drowning in dirty reflecting pool conspiracies…

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Federal officials must move quickly to carry out the president’s executive order if they want measures in place by the November election. By Dion Nissenbaum for Votebeat President Donald Trump is in a race against time. Since returning to office last year, Trump has repeatedly tried to remake American elections, including by issuing two executive orders that would erect new federal…

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This week, the DOJ was bold enough to say that antitrust law is for suckers, right? Also, the government just can’t stop stepping on rakes when forced to actually defend their actions in court. The Trump administration has eagerly backed Paramount’s effort to buy Warner Bros., just ignoring that whole antitrust problem that arises here. Paramount is one of the oldest and biggest movie…

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A cartoon by Mike Luckovich. Related | Everything Trump touches dies—except for algae in the Reflecting Pool…

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President Donald Trump is blaming “Vandalism” by “Radical Left Lunatics” for some of the struggles of his beloved Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool remodeling project.

“Just like three days ago, they destroyed the grass outside of the Pool, they’ve also done everything possible to hurt the inside surface that was just installed,” Trump posted to Truth Social on Friday night. “Law Enforcement is actively investigating this situation.”

Just six minutes later, he posted an image of what appears to be a green-haired protester wearing a shirt with the words “TEAM ALGAE,” presumably as evidence of said vandalism.

This appears to be the president’s "proof" that vandals are sabotaging the Refelecting Pool.

— Justin Baragona (@justinbaragona.bsky.social) 2026-06-20T03:00:18.373Z

Although Trump announced the renovation in April—which he initially said would take one week and cost just $2 million—the Reflecting Pool is still not “American flag blue,” as fighting the algae has proved to be a larger task than the administration can handle.

As the Washington Post noted that month, major projects on the National Mall not only typically require congressional authorization, but are subjected to federal reviews. That doesn’t appear to have happened with Trump’s pool makeover.

Indeed, the sequence of events here follows a pattern characteristic of many of the presidents’ projects and policies. While the steps may occur in different orders, they end in the roughly the same place: failure, with regular people paying the price. Let’s take a look at Trump’s destruction playbook:

1. Make the thing in my image and promise perfection

After vowing to clean “Biden filth and incompetence” from the Reflecting Pool last November, he posted on Truth Social in April that although he was warned it could take years to make it “much more beautiful,” it would in fact only “take a fraction of that time, at a fraction of the cost.”

2. Declare success, despite overspending

The Trump administration said it finished the renovation on June 4 and it would fill the pool with water within days. According to a summary of the Department of Interior’s contract with Atlantic Industrial Coatings reviewed by CNN, the price ballooned up to $14.7 million, despite promises it would cost a seventh that figure.

3. Sprinkle some inside dealing

According to a Thursday report by the New York Times, a company with connections to a longtime Trump supporter was handed a no-bid contract worth $1.7 million to install a new water purification system. A larger $14.7 million-contract to put blue waterproofing material on the Reflecting Pool’s floor also had no other bidders.

4. Trouble emerges

CNN reported on Thursday that blue material on the bottom is starting to peel off. Also, the algae is back.

5. Blame the left

Ludicrous claims of sabotage? With Trump’s Friday night post, it looks like we’re at this step right now.

6. Forget it

Trump has publicly downplayed previous failed projects, dating back to his US-Mexico border wall through, most recently, his Kennedy Center takeover.

Last month, after a federal judge ruled his name be removed from the performing arts institution, Trump said he had “no interest” in continuing his remodeling project there. “Unless I am free to do what I do better than anyone else,” he posted, “we are going to be working with Congress to transfer this failing Institution back to them.”

As nature clearly outpaces efforts to clean the pool, keep your eyes peeled for this one.

The week began with claims of victory by the Trump administration in their war with Iran. That victory quickly dissipated as details of the supposed deal revealed a far weaker position than had originally been negotiated during the Obama administration. And then Donald Trump went to France for the G7 summit, leaving vice president—and painfully unpopular—JD Vance to try and spin yet another MAGA…

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On Saturday, Iran’s military announced it had closed shipping along the Strait of Hormuz, saying the US violated its deal to end the war by allowing Israel to continue to bomb Lebanon. Iran had just signed on to a preliminary agreement with the US to reopen the strait and allow for safe passage of commercial vessels for 60 days.

Lebanon’s state media and civil defense officials reported that Israeli strikes killed at least 16 people on Saturday morning, and the country’s health ministry said at least 47 people were killed on Friday. The Israel Defense Forces stated on Friday that four of its soldiers were killed in Lebanon. It also claimed its airstrikes hit 80 targets connected to the militant group Hezbollah, killing “dozens” of its members. 

This isn’t the best start. 

Israel and Hezbollah had agreed to a ceasefire in Lebanon on Friday after the fighting looked like it would break up talks between the US and Iran in Switzerland. Earlier in the day, Iranian officials declined to meet with US negotiators, citing the fighting in Lebanon. JD Vance, on who Trump and Republicans have pushed responsibility for the negotiations, also postponed a trip to Switzerland.

As I wrote on Wednesday, the first point in the US-Iran deal released this week requires Iran, the US, and all of their allies to immediately end all military operations, with the text explicitly including a close to bombing in Lebanon. But Israel did not agree to the deal, after repeatedly stating it will continue attacking southern Lebanon. Trump has recently criticized Israel for its military campaign in Lebanon, noting that it could dismantle his announced deal.

Before Israel and the United States launched their current war, roughly 20 percent of global crude oil and natural gas transited through the strait. Closing the passage has led to massive increases in petroleum prices. 

This week, the Trump administration said it would commit to finalizing an agreement to end the war in 60 days. Getting Iran to close the Strait of Hormuz again isn’t the best start. 

The Trump family seems to follow strict gender roles: The men drum up business and broker deals while the women are the face of brands and commodities. Kai Trump, the 19-year-old daughter of Donald Trump Jr. and ever-present granddaughter of the sitting president, is no exception—and she’s taking advantage of her proximity to the spotlight. Donald Trump’s daughter Ivanka opted to step…

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Caribbean Matters is a weekly series from Daily Kos. Hope you’ll join us here every Saturday. If you are unfamiliar with the region, check out Caribbean Matters: Getting to know the countries of the Caribbean. This month is Caribbean American Heritage Month. The National Parks Service explains that on June 20,1965, “Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. laid a wreath at Marcus Garvey’s grave in…

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A cartoon by Pedro Molina. Related | Trump’s birthday bash leaves an ugly, swampy stain on DC…

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This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Hidden underground around the world lie 110 quadrillion kilometers of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungal networks—webs of ultrathin threads that, if connected in a single line, would stretch almost a billion times the distance between the Earth and the sun, according to new research published in Science on June 11. 

These fungal communities form intimate relationships with the roots of plants, which they provide with nutrients like phosphorus and nitrogen in exchange for carbon, 1 billion tons of which the networks sequester underground annually, previous research has found. If the fungal network wasn’t storing it, that carbon would be warming the atmosphere.

But those networks have never been mapped globally until now. The new study led by Society for the Protection of Underground Networks (SPUN), an organization founded to map mycorrhizal fungi networks, used a combination of literature review, soil samples from around the globe, machine learning, and laboratory testing to estimate the distribution and mass of these systems and map where they are densest. 

“This is the moment where we went from knowing that this system exists to really knowing where it is, how dense it is and where it’s been,” said Toby Kiers, executive director and co-founder of SPUN and a co-author of the study.

“You’re getting a win-win. The plants are growing better, and carbon’s being drawn down. ”

For decades, researchers have known arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi form intimate symbiotic relationships with roughly 80 percent of the globe’s plant species and are found nearly everywhere plants are. But the extent of those networks and where they are densest, such as grasslands, and where they are being lost, like in agricultural areas, hasn’t been well understood until now.

“[The study] helps us come to grips with how important these below ground organisms can be to everything that we see above ground,” said James Bever, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Kansas who studies the interactions between plants and microbes like fungi in soils but was not involved in the new study. 

Justin Stewart, an evolutionary ecologist at SPUN and lead author of the study, said previous studies the team had done on biodiversity of fungi were similar to asking someone to describe the forest outside their home.  

“They could say, ‘Well, there are three tree species in it.’ That’s great. That tells me about the biodiversity,” he said. “But you don’t actually know how big the forest is, how far apart the trees are. You don’t have information on its structure.”

Mycorrhizal fungal networks are made up of hyphae, each smaller than a strand of human hair. These living pipes transport the nutrients and carbon between the plants and fungi.

Because they are so long and thin, Stewart said, they can reach deeper into soils than roots, getting nutrients deep underground that plants can’t reach, while simultaneously storing carbon where it can stay put for a long time under the right conditions. 

“You’re getting a win-win,” Stewart said. “The plants are growing better, and carbon’s being drawn down. That all depends on having dense fungal networks and soils that are active and alive.”

Quantifying these fungal networks started with a review of existing studies on mycorrhizal fungi. Those studies contained 16,000 core samples taken from ecosystems around the world to understand the length of the fungal threads in a volume of soil. Each sample was geolocated, and from there the team was able to use machine learning to create predictive maps of fungal networks globally, and identify where the model is performing well and where uncertainties show more data is needed.

Working with AMOLF, a research institute in Amsterdam, they developed a technique using a robot with a camera that recorded fungal networks growing over time in a lab, to get better estimates of their widths. From there, the team was able to calculate the network’s mass, which amounted to about five times the weight of all humans on Earth.

The study only covers living arbuscular mycorrhizal fungal networks, Stewart said, and doesn’t include dead fungal networks, which also help to store carbon and add to the total biomass and influence of the networks on ecosystems. Research into dead fungal networks is still being explored.

Ninety percent of fungal communities across the globe are unprotected.

The study also found where these networks are most threatened. Fungal network densities across croplands are about half of what they are in wild ecosystems. Meanwhile, wild grassland ecosystems hold about 40 percent of the world’s arbuscular mycorrhizal biomass. Yet those grasslands are among Earth’s least protected ecosystems, and they are converted into farmland at four times the rate of forests, posing a potential threat to these networks and the benefits they bring to plant life and carbon storage. 

Previous research from SPUN has found 90 percent of fungal communities across the globe are unprotected, and many ecosystems, like the deserts of the American Southwest, are understudied.

What exactly is driving mycorrhizal fungi losses, and the consequences of that decline, need to be explored next, the researchers said, which is why the SPUN team will be at this year’s United Nations Climate Change Conference—COP31—to present to policymakers about the importance of the networks and the role they could play in protecting ecosystems and sequestering carbon. 

Understanding mycorrhizal fungi more deeply at the ground level is key, said Corentin Bisot, an AMOLF biophysicist and co-author of the study.

“We’re still far from completely understanding how, if you have a grassland next door, and you want to [increase] microbes and fungi there,” Bisot said. “We don’t have the toolbox for you to do it.” 

This study, Stewart said, is just the first map. And like the first maps the Spaniards drew of California—which presented the state as an island, he said, there will be new discoveries about the density of fungi networks around the globe to grow the public’s understanding of them.

The publisher of The New York Times recently made an extraordinary speech about AI, journalism, and the public square that’s received surprisingly little public reaction. What makes A.G. Sulzberger’s speech extraordinary is that it was unabashedly crusading, and crusading is a stance New York Times publishers have rarely if ever adopted over the newspaper’s 175-year history. What makes the scant reaction surprising is that the speech’s audience—fellow leaders of some of the world’s most powerful news organizations—have a commercial self-interest in the crusade Sulzberger is advocating for. What’s more, the accusations Sulzberger made, the plainspoken language he used, the alleged villains he called out by name—Google, Meta, OpenAI—are the stuff of high drama.

Sulzberger’s core argument when addressing the annual WAN-IFRA World News Media Conference on June 1 was that Big Tech is stealing the news media’s property and undermining democracy, and that the only solution is for news organizations to work together to resist it. 

Big Tech’s “hijacking of the public square is made possible by the original sin that animates their AI products—a brazen theft of intellectual property that has occurred at an unprecedented scale,” Sulzberger argued. “Tech giants strip-mine news websites without permission or compensation. They repackage these stolen goods as their own, siphoning off the audiences and revenue that otherwise would go to the news organizations that created this work.” 

If such stealing is allowed to continue, he continued, we risk a “future where a crucial wellspring of a healthy society and a stable democracy—the truth, understanding and accountability provided by original journalism—continues to dry up.… The news industry’s only path to counteracting [Big Tech’s machinations] … is by working together” to protect the industry’s property rights, including through lawsuits. (The Times, he noted, has spent $20 million on such lawsuits.)

In sum, the publisher of one of the world’s most influential newspapers has accused some of the richest, most powerful companies on earth of being criminals; of building their vast fortunes on a foundation of lies and theft at grand scale. And he urged the rest of the media to join the Times in fighting back, for the sake of not only their own commercial survival but the survival of a free press and the democracy it nourishes.

Bravo to Le Monde, Variety, and Press Gazette for writing about the speech, and to The Seattle Times for publishing excerpts on its opinion page. But given the big names, enormous sums, and profound stakes involved, why has there been so little other coverage? Why are those outlets the exceptions?

Here’s a hint: The Times itself didn’t report on the speech. Instead, the business side of the paper issued a press release containing the text. But there was no mention of the speech in the news, business, opinion, or other sections of the paper. That absence reflects a view long held by newsroom traditionalists: We (almost) never report on ourselves. The corollary—nor do we report on our competitors—likely explains why the rest of the media has been silent.

Perhaps such coverage is still to come; certainly Sulzberger’s call to arms warrants the attention of any specialist outlet focused on the news media. And maybe there are executive conversations taking place right now that will result in other newsrooms joining Sulzberger’s movement. After all, his speech did invite journalists and news executives to get in touch, offer their own ideas, and explore possible collaborations.

Covering Climate Now welcomes this opportunity, and we urge fellow journalists around the world to consider pursuing it, as well. We find Sulzberger’s analysis of the dangers facing our industry and our society persuasive, and highly pertinent to our core concern of how journalism reports on the climate emergency and its solutions.  

AI, in case it isn’t obvious, is bad for the climate because its data centers demand gargantuan amounts of scarce water and costly electricity, but it is also bad because building AI chatbots, among other things, sucks away revenue that rightfully belongs to news outlets. That theft is one reason why, as Sulzberger noted, the U.S. has “lost 75% of its journalists and more than 3,000 newspapers” over the last two decades. That’s 3,000 newspapers that will never tell the climate story. 

Even for news outlets that remain in business, shrunken revenues make it challenging to cover even routine subjects, much less a story like climate change. AI is no friend to a free press or a livable climate, and it’s time journalists grapple with how we respond.

This article is published as part of the global journalism collaboration Covering Climate Now.

The World Cup is here. 

For the first time, the tournament is happening in three countries at once: the United States, Mexico, and Canada. It’s bigger than ever, with more teams, more games, more viewers, and more money on the line.

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This special World Cup episode of Reveal looks beyond the spectacle of the beautiful game to the organization behind it: FIFA. The global soccer body stands to take in billions from the tournament, while fans face soaring ticket prices and host cities pay massive sums for transportation, security, and infrastructure.  

“Sport is this incredible glue that brings people together,” human rights advocate Mustafa Qadri tells Reveal. But he says that also makes it “highly vulnerable to cynical people coming in and exploiting it for their own gain.”  

This week, reporters Alex Shephard, Tim Murphy of Mother Jones, and Reveal producer Artis Curiskis follow the money, power, and politics behind the World Cup—and ask who gets to be part of the world’s biggest game.

Juneteenth is the celebration of Black emancipation from slavery in the United States. The commemoration began after President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 and the news finally reached Galveston, Texas, on June 19, 1865, freeing 250,000 Black people still enslaved in the isolated state. It became a federally recognized holiday under President Joe Biden in 2021.

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