Winter Olympics Forecast, Climate Mental Health Support, and an EU Clean Win

Welcome to The Climate Roundup newsletter. Your weekly edit of the climate and environmental stories shaping our planet and our culture and how the two are deeply connected. We live in a global ecosystem shaped by human decisions. Let’s make good ones.

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Love Notes:

🥰 A positivity boost challenge: try waking up every morning, looking out the window, and saying out loud to Mother Earth: “good morning, I love you!”. I do this, and it’s a wonderful feeling.

🦅 For more happy vibes, here’s a best bird photos article.

Philanthropy At Work:

👩‍💻 Reminder to sign up for the February 5th webinar, “Thriving in an Age of Disasters: How to build emotional resilience and take action” hosted by Climate Mental Health Network. It looks to be a very worthwhile discussion with experts on the topic of dealing with our emotions when it comes to this existential crisis. Yes, we all need tools to cope.

🧠 CMHN also released their 2025 Impact Report. Lots of great achievements in there regarding their growing reach to teachers, students, and parents all learning to cope with the very natural human emotions that the climate crisis provokes (see above). But my favorite part of their report is in the relatable quotes from the community, like this one from a parent: “[I feel] a lot of guilt, a lot of sadness, anger. Kind of the whole gamut depending on the day. There are some days where I feel really inspired and hopeful. And other days where I’m almost in tears.” Truth. CMHN is helping to normalize these feelings and offering help to deal with them.

😅 Three cheers and a huge sigh of relief that our boy Alex Honnold, founder of The Honnold Foundation, successfully free-solo’d a skyscraper, and lives on to tell about it…and to continue the good work of expanding access to reliable solar energy in communities around the world.

Environmental News:

⚡️ Last year in the EU, wind and solar energy generated more electricity than fossil fuels did. The win was only by a 1% margin, with clean energy responsible for 30% vs dirty’s 29%. But this is an exciting stat! We are living in a tipping point moment. Take it in, folks, there’s no doubt that clean energy is the horse to bet on in the long run, and we are finally starting to see real world examples of the big energy transition flip. You don’t have to be an energy nerd to appreciate that!

👨‍⚖️ Evidence was surfaced by court order that last year’s anti-climate ‘scientific’ report published by the Trump administration was politically coerced and tailored to falsely suggest that climate change isn’t a problem. The admin’s motivation for creating this report was to support their ongoing quest to kill the endangerment finding, which is our country’s strongest tool to limit greenhouse gas pollution. A huge thanks to the many people who did not let this document sail quietly into the night, and instead fought back strongly, including publishing hundreds of pages of rebuttals to all the misinformation. That led to environmental groups, including our friends at EDF, challenging the legality of Trump’s so-called Climate Working Group in court, and hence this aforementioned court order. Legally discrediting this report could be key in preventing the EPA from fulfilling its pro-pollution mission, if we are so lucky.

👀 A potentially comforting thought is that much of the damage that Trump has done and is doing when it comes to climate hasn’t been from changing law, but rather by executive order and ‘political dominance’. Meaning much of it can be undone just as easily, though some changes may take longer to reverse, like revoking the EPA’s abovementioned endangerment finding if that happens.

👩‍🔬 Here’s an interactive and visual summary of all the cuts Trump made last year to our nation’s scientific community, in case you were wondering. Scrolling through, I find it quite important information to be aware of. Of the 7,800 grants that were cancelled, the most were at hubs in New York, and specifically Columbia University, my alma mater. Science is truth, and truth has no place in this administration.

🪧 Climate censorship continues. At Fort Sumter, a South Carolina national monument, park rangers were ordered to remove a sign that educated visitors about climate change and sea level rise. Park signs have been removed across the country, following an executive order to revise history and remove stories that “disparage” Americans. In response, a group of librarians and historians created a hub called “Save Our Signs”, where you can submit and view the casualties of, again, the war on truth and fact.

🚰 “Water stress” is a term we will start seeing more of. It refers to a point when “water withdrawals for public water supply and industry are close to exceeding available supplies, often caused by poor management of water resources exacerbated by climate breakdown”. Hence, freshwater being the most precious resource. A new study finds that 50% of the world’s largest cities are already experiencing high water stress. Most people take our access to freshwater for granted, but can you imagine living in scarcity of this essential element of life? It’s another reminder that we do not live in a fantasy land of infinite resources.

Climate Meets Culture:

⛷️ The Winter Olympics are coming, which means we must talk about climate change. Winter sports athletes are the small island nation equivalent for experiencing the impacts of climate change up close and personal. They are on the frontlines. In fact, 90% of winter athletes and coaches surveyed in a study say climate change is negatively affecting their sport. This has led many of them to become climate activists, trying to raise awareness for what they are seeing. Consistently warmer winters and less natural snow are two realities that have greatly impacted their sport and training, canceling competitions and shrinking their suitable playground, causing them to have to chase after snow just to be able to practice. The point here is that for them, it’s already the future. Climate change is a reality in their day-to-day. They are living the consequences now that other cohorts of us humans may not see so consistently in our day-to-day for decades (a modern day omen: listen to the winter athletes, because before long, winter will not be coming!).

A warmer planet means less reliable locations to host the Winter Olympics, too, a fact that the International Olympic Committee is already all over. They project that by 2050, there will only be 4 suitable locations on Earth to host the games without the aid of human-made snow, where the location can also handle the logistics of this massive event with consistently cold enough temperatures. For the upcoming Games starting February 6th in Italy, they’ve had to rely heavily on fake snow. Nobody enjoys fake snow, plus it requires a lot of water, which is becoming more and more of a precious commodity and less and less acceptable to drain for non-life-sustaining activities.

I wonder if it’s time for the IOC to consider a fixed location or a few, to rotate among for hosting the Olympics. Yes, it’s nice to learn about the culture and natural features of the host countries, but we may not have the luxury to do that anymore in its current form, plus it’s incredibly inefficient for cities to build new infrastructure for a one-time event. If the Games cycled through a handful of logistically and atmospherically great locations, perhaps there could still be a new host country each time, where they can be the creative directors and bring their culture and ideas to the Games versus the other way around. We will have to start doing things differently across many activities. As our planet changes, so must we. But we can also change our mindsets and instead of being stubborn and stuck in old ways til the death, we can be creative and progress. That is in fact what these current times are clearly pushing us towards. If only the rest of our species could see it.