Climate and environment updates: 7 key measures of Earth's health in danger, report warns

Droughts often unfold quietly, lacking the dramatic visuals of hurricanes or flash floods. Yet their impacts can be equally devastating, and increasingly so, as human-amplified climate change fuels more frequent and intense droughts worldwide.

According to a new report by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the global land area affected by drought has doubled in the last 120 years, with 40% of the planet experiencing more frequent and intense droughts in recent decades.

The OECD’s Global Drought Outlook provides a comprehensive worldwide assessment of drought risks, impacts and policy responses, examining how countries can strengthen drought management to adapt to a changing climate. The report highlights that the growing effects of drought are fueled by multiple compounding factors, including deforestation, urban development, unsustainable farming and human-amplified climate change.

The new analysis reveals a sharp rise in the economic costs of drought, which, on average, have at least doubled since 2000. The report estimates that by 2035, a drought event could cost a national economy at least 35% more than it does today. Globally, agriculture is the most affected sector, with crop yields declining by as much as 22% during the driest years.

In California, for example, the 2021 drought alone resulted in $1.1 billion in agricultural losses, underscoring the vulnerability of even advanced economies. The human toll of drought is equally concerning. While droughts account for only 6% of natural disasters, they are responsible for 34% of all disaster-related deaths, according to the report.

Worsening drought impacts can also influence other weather events, such as heat waves. A recent study published in the Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climatology showed that drought doesn’t just accompany heat; it can also extend the duration of heat waves when the two overlap.

Effectively addressing the escalating drought threat, according to the OECD, requires a coordinated global response and decisive, proactive action from stakeholders. For example, building more efficient irrigation systems could significantly reduce global water use and expanding the number of drought-tolerant crops can help mitigate drought impacts and strengthen long-term climate change resilience.

-ABC News meteorologist Dan Peck

Google has developed a new AI weather model that can help forecast tropical cyclones and is partnering with the National Hurricane Center to make their models available to forecasters for testing.

Google's Weather Lab website allows users to interact with its AI weather models and compare live and historical tropical cyclone tracks to traditional weather forecasting models.

"When read together, these predictions can help weather agencies and emergency service experts better anticipate a cyclone's path and intensity," Google wrote in a recent press release. "This could help experts and decision-makers better prepare for different scenarios, share news of risks involved and support decisions to manage a cyclone's impact," they added.

The new AI model is trained using key historical data from nearly 5,000 observed cyclones over the past 45 years, along with a comprehensive global weather re-analysis dataset comprising millions of weather observations.

Unlike traditional weather models, which rely on atmospheric and physics-based simulations that require significant time and computing power to complete, AI weather models can produce forecasts within seconds. The new AI model is also capable of generating 50 possible scenarios for a tropical cyclone's formation, track, intensity, size and shape up to 15 days in advance.

Google found that their new AI tropical cyclone model performed at a comparable level in most cases to traditional models and outperformed them in a few tests.

In addition to their partnership with the National Hurricane Center, Google's Weather Lab team is working with the Cooperative Institute for Research in the Atmosphere at Colorado State to evaluate the new model's performance. According to Google, CIRA scientists found the new AI model had "comparable or greater skill than the best operational models for tracking and intensity."

-ABC News meteorologist Kyle David

The Earth has hit another climate milestone, and it's a stark reminder that when it comes to climate change, the planet is moving in the wrong direction.

For the first time, the monthly average of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has surpassed 430 parts per million at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii. The May 2025 number is higher than it's ever been in human history and marks a significant jump from the previous year.

Scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego have been taking daily CO2 measurements from the Mauna Loa site since 1974.

"Another year, another record," Ralph Keeling, director of the Scripps CO2 Program, said in a statement. "It's sad."

Carbon dioxide is a key gas in Earth's atmosphere, contributing to the greenhouse effect by trapping heat. Since the Industrial Revolution, its levels have increased due to rising human activities, particularly the emission of fossil fuels.

Researchers at the University of Utah, who participated in a 2023 study with nearly 100 scientists from 16 countries, found that the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is higher than it has ever been in human history and the highest in at least 14 million years.

The increasing amount of carbon dioxide in our planet's atmosphere has altered the planet's weather patterns and intensified the frequency and severity of extreme events, such as heat waves, droughts, wildfires, heavy rainfall and flooding, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

-ABC News meteorologist Kyle David

Last month was the second-warmest May on record globally, trailing only the previous May, according to new data analyzed by the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S). And in the Northern Hemisphere, spring also ranked as the second-warmest on record, again behind 2024.

Notably, May marked the first month since July 2024 in which the global average temperature did not exceed the 1.5-degree Celsius warming threshold established in the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement. Instead, it registered 1.40 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial reference period (1850-1900). The Earth's average surface air temperature came in at 60.42 degrees Fahrenheit, or 15.79 degrees Celsius.

A short-term drop in global temperatures was anticipated due to the recent La Niña event in the equatorial eastern Pacific Ocean, a climate pattern that typically brings a temporary dip in global average temperatures. However, climate scientists caution that this pause is unlikely to last, as human-caused greenhouse gas emissions continue to fuel the long-term warming trend.

Global daily sea surface temperatures across much of the world's oceans remained well above average in May, with the second-highest value on record for the month, according to Copernicus.

Unusually warm sea surface temperatures across portions of the Atlantic Basin could play a key role in tropical cyclone development during the Atlantic Hurricane Season, which is now underway. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) predicts that Atlantic tropical cyclone activity will likely be above average this year, citing elevated ocean temperatures as a contributing factor.

-ABC News meteorologist Dan Peck