Starting this Monday morning, I’m trying something new.

The Barometer goes LIVE from 7–10 AM Eastern every Monday.

That’s three hours of news, science, accountability, interviews, fact-checking, and the stories I think deserve more attention than they’re getting.

Think of it as a Monday-morning briefing for people who want to know not just what happened, but why it matters and what may be coming next.

And for our first show, we have a big one.

Newly released records are shedding more light on what New York City officials knew about the toxic air around Ground Zero after 9/11, when they knew it, and what information was withheld from the public.

We’ll dig into the documents, the science, the health consequences that continue more than 25 years later, and the question that still hasn’t gone away:

What is owed to the people who were told the air was safe?

But that’s only part of Monday’s show.

We’ll also be talking about the increasingly strong signals for a major El Niño, the aftermath of Hurricane Lowell, fact-checking some claims making the rounds, accountability stories involving government and Big Tech, elections, democracy, and more.

And because The Barometer is live, you’ll be part of the show, too. I’ll be taking questions, corrections, comments, and story suggestions from the audience throughout the morning.

THE BAROMETER
LIVE MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 14
7:00–10:00 AM EASTERN

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This is something I’ve wanted to build for a long time: a place where science, public health, climate, politics, technology, democracy, and accountability aren’t treated as separate worlds, because in real life, they aren’t.

The forecast isn’t just about the weather.

It’s about the conditions we’re living through and what’s headed our way.

I hope you’ll join me Monday morning, airing LIVE on YouTube, and (hopefully, technology permitting) multi-broadcasted here, on X, Instagram, Facebook, and Tiktok. Click here to find me on all the other social media apps!

UNITED NATIONS FUNDRAISING UPDATE:

Thanks to your amazing generosity, I have raised enough money to cover the fee for next month’s Climate Change Programme at the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland. Now I just have to pay for my plane ticket and a place to stay!

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Thank you again to everyone who has donated!

If you’re a free subscriber to Mesoscale News, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription! Your monthly or annual gift helps keep this work going!

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I have an incredible opportunity — and very little time to make it happen.

I’ve been offered the chance to attend the United Nations Climate Change Study Programme in Geneva next month, an intensive, in-person program limited to just 30 participants from around the world, right before the COP31 conference held in Turkiye in November.

I need to raise $3,000 ASAP to pay the program fee, secure my place, and get my visa in time. My total goal is $8,000 to cover the program, airfare, lodging and travel expenses.

Click here to donate!

This opportunity feels like the culmination of nearly two decades of work.

I’ve studied hurricanes and climate change, contributed to National Climate Assessment research, modeled sea-level rise and future hurricane risks, worked on coastal resilience and with Indigenous communities confronting climate impacts, built public data systems, and spent years communicating science to the public.

Now I have the chance to take that experience directly into the UN climate system, meeting experts and institutions shaping global climate policy and building relationships that could open the door to the next chapter of my work.

The first $3,000 is the emergency goal.

If you can give $5, $10, $25 or more, it adds up. If you can’t donate, sharing this could put it in front of someone who can.

And if you, your business or your organization would like to sponsor part or all of this trip, please contact me directly.

Help send me to the United Nations in Geneva!

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More than 1,000 people are dead after part of a glacier and mountainside in the Himalayas collapsed, unleashing a wall of ice, rock, mud and water through Nepal and Tibet. Thousands more remain missing.

Three months earlier, scientists had gathered with government officials in Kathmandu to talk about almost exactly this.

Experts met with government officials in May to discuss the growing danger from glaciers and glacial lakes along the shared Nepal-Tibet Himalayan border. They called for hazard mapping, monitoring, information-sharing, and early-warning systems.

By the time the mountain came down in late August, those warning systems still did not exist.

There is a terrible simplicity to what happened next.

The mountain moved.

This wasn’t an ordinary flood

Calling what happened a “flood” almost understates it.

Most floods begin with water. Rain falls. Rivers rise. Meteorologists watch the storm on radar; gauges record rainfall and river levels; models estimate where the water will go. Even flash floods generally have an identifiable meteorological cause developing before the water arrives.

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This disaster began with the ground itself giving way.

On August 26, a huge mass near Langtang Lirung catastrophically failed. Early reports described a glacier collapse, but subsequent satellite analysis indicated that bedrock beneath the glacier failed with it.

An enormous section of mountain — rock, ice and everything attached to it — started falling.

The collapse released enough energy that seismic instruments initially registered what appeared to be an earthquake. The U.S. Geological Survey later concluded there had been no earthquake. The mountain falling apart had itself generated seismic energy equivalent to a magnitude 5.2 earthquake.

Gravity did the rest.

As the avalanche accelerated downhill, it collected soil, boulders, sediment, trees, ice and water. It entered streams and river channels and collected still more material. The narrow Himalayan valleys acted like a chute, concentrating all that mass and energy and directing it downstream.

The resulting debris flow traveled nearly 100 kilometers, destroying everything in its path.

One engineer assisting with the rescue effort estimated portions of it may have moved faster than 160 kilometers per hour.

That is the geographic reality of a disaster like this.

The sky doesn’t have to be raining.

The river doesn’t have to slowly rise.

The mountain can simply come down.

Scientists saw the danger

That doesn’t mean this was unforeseeable.

Scientists examining satellite imagery found changes on the glacier before the collapse. A rapid assessment by the scientific group HiRISK identified “pre-event indications” of instability.

Scientists had also spent years warning that the Hindu Kush Himalaya needed better monitoring and early-warning systems as its glaciers rapidly changed.

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For people immediately below the collapse, there may have been little anyone could have done. When millions of tons of mountain begin moving above you, geography allows very little time for negotiation.

But geography also means the farther downstream you are, the more time exists between collapse and impact.

Scientists estimated some communities could have had ten minutes or more of warning. That doesn’t sound like much until the alternative is zero.

Ten minutes is enough to leave a riverbank.

Ten minutes is enough to run uphill.

Ten minutes is enough to stop traffic from entering a bridge or evacuate workers from a hydropower facility.

Ten minutes can be the difference between a disaster and a mass casualty event.

Instead, the avalanche tore through a landscape increasingly crowded with infrastructure. Roads, bridges, villages, hydropower plants and workers’ camps occupy the same narrow valleys through which gravity inevitably sends water, rock and ice.

Twelve hydropower facilities and a solar plant (together representing roughly 10% of Nepal’s operational electricity capacity) were shut down after the disaster.

That is another lesson here: climate disasters rarely remain politely confined to one category.

A glacier collapses.

It becomes a landslide.

The landslide becomes a debris flow.

The debris flow becomes a flood.

The flood becomes an energy crisis, an infrastructure disaster and a humanitarian catastrophe.

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The mountains are changing

The underlying physics isn’t a mystery.

The Himalayas are warming. Glaciers are retreating. Permafrost (the frozen material that can help bind high mountain slopes together) is thawing.

Remove enough ice from fractures in a mountainside and you change its structural stability. Retreat a glacier and you remove enormous amounts of weight while exposing slopes that may not have been uncovered for centuries. Melt enough ice and water collects behind unstable natural dams, creating glacial lakes capable of bursting catastrophically.

Across the Hindu Kush Himalaya, glacier loss accelerated by 65% between the decades beginning in 2000 and 2010.

Even if humanity manages to keep warming below 2°C (a threshold we have already temporarily surpassed), researchers project the region’s glaciers could lose roughly 30–50% of their volume by the end of this century. Under current emissions trajectories, losses could approach 80%.

And this isn’t only Nepal’s problem.

The Hindu Kush Himalaya is sometimes called Earth’s “Third Pole” because of the enormous volume of ice stored there. Its snow and glaciers feed river systems that sustain communities across Asia.

What happens high in these mountains does not stay high in these mountains.

Neither does global warming.

We have spent decades talking about climate change as something coming toward us: a future crisis, measured in fractions of degrees and projections for 2050 or 2100. But the reality has always been the climate change is a disaster that is right here, right now, and does not have to only be measured in future possibilities.

Measure it in a glacier retreating up a valley.

Measure it in permafrost disappearing from the cracks holding a mountainside together.

Measure it in a river carrying boulders where, minutes earlier, people were working.

Measure it in the distance between a scientist’s warning and a government’s failure to act on it.

Because that may be the most damning part of what happened in Nepal and Tibet.

The mountain did not betray anyone.

The glacier did not ignore a warning.

Scientists identified the danger. They asked for monitoring. They asked for hazard maps. They asked for early-warning systems.

Then the climate kept warming.

The ice kept melting.

And we kept waiting.

Until heat and gravity answered for us.

Scientists are warning us where this is headed. My job is to make sure those warnings don't disappear into another report until after the next disaster. If that work matters to you, please support Mesoscale News with a paid subscription.

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I’ll be mutli-casting here, on YouTube, and on other social media websites. You can find all the ways to find and follow me here.

There will be opportunities for you to call in, ask questions, join the discussion and more!

So whether you’re getting ready for or on your way to work, enjoying your coffee, or just starting your day, I invite you all to join me on Mondays from 7 am - 10 am!

To keep up with all that’s going on, be sure to subscribe!

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There is something profoundly wrong happening in American politics right now, and perhaps the most disturbing part is how ordinary we have allowed it to become.

Then again, much of American politics has devolved into rage, hate, and ignorance. We’ve come to expect that from MAGA. But one of the types of bigotry even the Democrats are at best ignoring and at worst participating in is hatred and discrimination toward Muslims.

Rampant anti-Muslim sentiment has been normalized during this election cycle — not merely in the fever swamps of the internet, but among elected officials, political operatives, and institutions that would recoil, correctly, from employing the same language about almost any other religious minority.

Muslim candidates are expected to answer for Muslims they have never met. Their names, families, religious practices, and associations become legitimate subjects of suspicion.

Michigan Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed has been subjected to a barrage of attacks, incl…

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Another hottest month. Another hottest ocean. Another heat wave that would have been extraordinarily unlikely without climate change. Another drought. Another wildfire season. Another chart whose line suddenly shoots above everything that came before it.

So many records are being broken so often, I often worry the public is becoming numb to the message and the urgency of confronting this crisis.

So let’s strip away the charts for a moment and talk about what actually matters.

The planet is extremely hot right now. The oceans are even more alarming. And one of the strongest El Niño events scientists have ever observed is developing on top of all of it.

That last part is important, because El Niño isn’t causing climate change.

Think of climate change as steadily raising the floor beneath us. El Niño is temporarily jumping on top of the roof.

And that combination could make the next year extraordinary.

Climate Central scientist Dr. Zachary Labe summed up the situa…

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While writing this piece, I received an alert that Donald Trump is dispatching agents to polling stations in Detroit, Hamtramck, Lansing, and East Lansing today to “monitor” polling stations for “transparency.”

These four cities are not just democratic stronghold cities — they’re the cities in Michigan that are considered the most progressive and leftist cities in the state.

Hamtramck stands out on this list not because of its leftist politics, but rather because of its population — half of the city are legal immigrants, and Hamtramck has some of the largest populations of Bangladeshi-American and Yemeni-American citizens in the nation. The city is majority Muslim, and the targeting of Hamtramck (as opposed to other equally far-left cities, like Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti) makes it clear that Trump’s actions here are to intimidate Muslim and minority voters in a primary that is very much about the genocide in Israel.

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I first met Elijah Manley five years ago, while I was in the throes of my fight against DeSantis over COVID-19 and DeSantis’ attacks on my family.

When you’re fighting a tyrannical government, much of the rest of the world becomes background noise and few things break through the chorus of calamity.

Elijah cut through the noise like a hot knife.

Elijah possesses a rare combination of lived experience, intelligence, empathy, and determination, all guiding him to be one of the most passionate and authentic people I’ve ever met in politics.

Elijah paved his own path - from living in a car to successfully suing DeSantis over election delays in 2022.

Donate to Elijah Manley

Having the privilege to know Elijah as he’s broken barriers and continued his fight for justice has been one of most amazing parts of my own journey in Florida.

We need leaders who will fight back, leaders who know what’s at stake, and leaders who will live to see the policies they’ve enacted.

Leaders w…

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Why One of Congress’ Most Polarizing Democrats Is Finally Facing a Serious Primary Challenge

After years of reporting on Jared Moskowitz’s political evolution, I sat down with the only Democrat trying to unseat him.

For years, Jared Moskowitz has cultivated a national image as one of the Democratic Party’s sharpest critics of Donald Trump. His viral committee exchanges and cable news appearances have made him one of the party’s most recognizable faces.

But I know Jared. We were friends once. And I know the facade he presents is nothing like the man underneath the mask.

Before the pandemic, I worked alongside Moskowitz while he led the Florida Division of Emergency Management. After I was fired from the Florida Department of Health for opposing the state’s misleading COVID messaging, he became an unlikely source, communicating with me privately even as I publicly challenged Gov. Ron DeSantis’ pandemic response. That relationship—and the political dynamics surrounding it—was later documented by the Miami Herald in an extensive investigation.

As Moskowitz’s political career moved to Congress, so did my reporting.

What I found increasingly conflicted with the public image many Democrats had of him. His campaign finance, political relationships, and, most importantly, his legislative record painted a more complicated picture than the one presented on television.

Last year, I published a legislative analysis examining dozens of key House votes where only a small fraction of Democrats broke with the party. Rather than measure speeches or social media posts, I looked exclusively at how members actually legislated. Moskowitz consistently ranked among the Democratic members who most frequently sided with Republicans on high-profile, divisive legislation.

Now, for the first time, that record is being directly challenged at the ballot box.

A Different Kind of Democrat

Oliver Larkin isn’t running as a moderate.

He’s running as a Democratic Socialist.

Conventional political wisdom, often by paid consultants who prefer safety over progress, would suggest that makes winning a competitive South Florida district difficult. Larkin argues exactly the opposite.

His campaign is built on the idea that voters are looking for Democrats willing to fight unapologetically for working-class families rather than compromise with Republicans. During our conversation, he repeatedly returned to two themes he hears from voters: protecting democracy and addressing the rapidly rising cost of living.

For Larkin, those issues are inseparable.

He argues that concentrated corporate wealth has not only driven higher housing, insurance, and health care costs, but has also distorted American democracy through campaign financing and political influence.

That philosophy shapes nearly every part of his platform: Medicare for All, banning congressional stock trading, rejecting corporate PAC money, universal child care, paid family leave, and stronger labor protections.

The Campaign’s Central Argument

Perhaps the most interesting part of our conversation came when I asked Larkin how he responds to Democrats who argue that Democratic Socialists fall outside the party mainstream.

Rather than argue he is further left than today’s Democratic Party, he argued he is actually more loyal to it.

Larkin contends that his disagreements with Democratic leadership come from pushing for stronger protections for civil liberties, labor rights, and economic equality — not from supporting Republican priorities. By contrast, Moskowitz’s voting record frequently places him among the small minority of Democrats willing to support GOP-backed legislation.

Whether voters ultimately agree with that assessment remains to be seen.

But it reflects a broader debate now unfolding within the Democratic Party over whether moderation is still an electoral asset — or whether voters increasingly want representatives willing to draw sharper contrasts.

In 2024, a party-wide shift to the right, of which Kamala Harris’ campaign fell victim to, resulted in major election losses across the board.

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Climate Still Matters

As readers of Mesoscale News might expect, our conversation eventually turned to climate change.

Unlike many congressional interviews where climate becomes an afterthought, Larkin spoke at length about Everglades restoration, protecting Florida’s coral reefs, investing in renewable energy, modernizing the electric grid, and opposing the rapid expansion of energy-intensive AI data centers.

For a state already grappling with sea-level rise, worsening hurricanes, insurance instability, and ecosystem collapse, those issues aren’t abstract policy debates.

They’re existential.

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Democracy Begins in the Primary

Democrats often ask why voters lose faith in institutions.

Part of the answer is that too many incumbents stop being seriously challenged.

Primaries are not acts of disloyalty. They’re one of democracy’s most important accountability mechanisms.

Whether Oliver Larkin ultimately succeeds is as important as the questions his campaign forces Democratic voters to confront.

Should representatives be judged primarily by viral moments and television appearances?

Or by the bills they sponsor, the votes they cast, and the coalitions they build?

Those questions extend far beyond one congressional district in South Florida.

Florida’s Democratic primary for the 25th Congressional District will be held on August 18, with early voting beginning in early August depending on the county. Whatever the outcome, Democratic voters now have a choice, and, perhaps more importantly, a conversation that has been overdue for years.

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Record Versus Reputation

One reason this race matters is because it raises a larger question than who represents Florida’s 25th Congressional District.

How much should voters weigh legislative records against political branding?

Over the past two years, my reporting has focused on that disconnect.

I’ve written about Moskowitz’s relationships with prominent Florida Republicans, his campaign financing, and the contrast between his media persona and congressional voting history. My legislative index was designed specifically to remove personality from the equation, evaluating members solely on votes cast and legislation supported.

The results consistently placed Moskowitz among the Democratic caucus’ most significant outliers. As one of the most MAGA democrats, it would difficult to downgrade outside of electing a Republican.

Larkin is someone whose ambitions are to serve the people, not himself.

And for that, we should all be rallying around him.

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Disclosure: I worked with Jared Moskowitz while we were both at the State Emergency Response Team during multiple hurricanes and the COVID-19 pandemic. To learn more about our relationship, read this article by the Miami Herald.

To read my previous warnings about Jared Moskowitz, click here.

Exclusive interviews and first-looks at scientific research before it’s public are just two of the perks given to paid subscribers of Mesoscale News.

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Climate Change, This Global Coral Crisis Wouldn’t Exist

For decades, scientists believed global coral bleaching events were primarily driven by El Niño.

New research suggests they wouldn’t happen at all without human-caused climate change.

In an interview with Mesoscale News, Climate Central Chief Program Officer Dr. Andrew Pershing discussed a new study concluding that global coral bleaching events, the most recent one of which began in 2018 and continues today, is almost entirely the result of human-caused warming.

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That won’t happen in television studios.

It happens in union halls, church basements, campaign offices, community centers, college campuses, and living rooms across the country.

That’s where I intend to be.

From August through Election Day, I’m launching the largest reporting project in Mesoscale News’ history: traveling across the country to cover the 2026 midterm elections from the ground, not from behind a studio desk.

I’ll interview candidates from across the Democratic Party. I’ll challenge them when they dodge questions. I’ll speak with organizers, scientists, teachers, veterans, election officials, workers, and voters. I’ll report from races national media often overlook until they’re suddenly “surprising.”

Democracy only works when people have access to honest information, and honest, independent reporting has never been more important.

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Norovirus is sweeping through cruise ships. Cyclospora is spreading through the nation’s food supply.

At the very moment these diseases are making headlines, the federal government weakened several of the public-health programs created to detect, investigate and contain exactly these kinds of outbreaks.

I know how important those systems are because I’ve built one.

Before I became known as the Florida COVID-19 whistleblower, I was the scientist who built and managed Florida’s public-facing COVID-19 dashboard and data surveillance systems. My job wasn’t simply to publish numbers. It was to provide an accurate, real-time picture of an evolving outbreak so physicians, researchers, local governments, and families could make informed decisions.

That experience taught me lessons I’ll never forget, including: You cannot control an outbreak you refuse to accurately monitor.

Disease surveillance isn’t bureaucracy. It’s infrastructure. It tells us what pathogens are circulating, where they’re spread…

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While the sparsely-attended July 4 fireworks topped off a failed 16-day “American fair” in Washington, DC, a constitutional crisis was unfolding in Louisiana.

Louisiana crossed into territory that few Americans alive have ever witnessed inside the United States — and it began with the election of an exonerated man.

Calvin Duncan spent nearly thirty years in prison for a murder he did not commit. An armed robbery in the Treme left a 23-year-old man dead and his 15-year-old white girlfriend as the only witness. The police had no leads, and targeted Duncan after Duncan’s ex-girlfriend called in a tip. Duncan was held without trial for three years. His trial lasted one day, despite no evidence connecting him to the case, and he was found guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced to life without parole.

Du…

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Climate change isn’t just threatening our future. It’s erasing our past.

The story you’re about to read begins with a Climate Central investigation into the threats facing Jamestown. It led me back to my own research on disappearing Indigenous sites along the Gulf Coast — places that preserve histories thousands of years older than the United States itself.

This kind of reporting takes time: digging through academic literature, historical records, scientific studies, and the lived experiences of communities whose stories are too often overlooked. If you believe science journalism should connect data to people, history, and power, please consider becoming a paid subscriber.

Paid subscriptions make investigations like this possible and help ensure these stories aren’t lost, too.

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At Jamestown, Virginia, archaeologists are racing against the water.

More than four centuries after English settlers established the first permanent English colony in North America, researchers are working methodically to excavate the site before rising seas and recurrent flooding claim what remains.

Climate Central recently documented the growing threat facing Jamestown, where sea level has risen approximately 1.6 feet over the last century and is projected to rise several feet more in coming decades. Archaeologists there now describe their work as a form of triage: deciding what pieces of history can be saved before they disappear.

It’s a sobering question.

But along the Gulf Coast, another race against time has been underway for decades, largely outside the national spotlight.

Seas are rising at a rate of 5.27 mm per year in Virginia. However, the rate of sea level rise in south Louisiana is 8.44 mm per year.

In Louisiana, climate change is not only threatening historic sites associated with the founding of the United States. It is erasing places that preserve histories that predate the nation itself — Indigenous landscapes, sacred places, archaeological sites, burial grounds, and oral histories that stretch back thousands of years.

And unlike Jamestown, many of these places were never fully documented to begin with.

The First Americans’ Vanishing Coast

Louisiana loses land faster than almost anywhere else in North America.

A combination of sea level rise, land subsidence, oil and gas development, saltwater intrusion, and increasingly destructive hurricanes has transformed large portions of the state’s coastline over the last century. Entire communities have relocated. Others remain trapped in a cycle of rebuilding and retreat.

For Indigenous nations whose histories are inseparable from the wetlands and bayous of south Louisiana, the consequences extend far beyond economics or infrastructure.

The land itself is the archive.

For generations, archaeologists and historians have treated Indigenous communities primarily as observers of environmental change. But my own research on Indigenous sites along the northern Gulf Coast has suggested a different perspective: Indigenous peoples were not simply witnesses to environmental catastrophe. They documented it through stories, migration patterns, settlement choices, burial practices, and the physical landscapes they constructed.

In many cases, those landscapes may contain records of extreme weather events that occurred centuries or even millennia before modern meteorological observations began.

Today, those records are disappearing.

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The Stories the Land Remembers

Long before satellites and weather stations, Indigenous communities across North America developed sophisticated systems for observing and interpreting environmental change.

Researchers working with Indigenous communities in Australia, Canada, and the Pacific Islands have found that traditional ecological knowledge systems often preserve detailed observations about changing weather patterns, species behavior, sea levels, seasonal cycles, and environmental disruptions across generations.

These observations are not simply folklore. They represent long-term environmental datasets encoded in stories, practices, language, and lived experience.

In British Columbia, Indigenous elders have documented changes in species distributions, weather patterns, and ecosystem behavior occurring over their own lifetimes. Researchers there argue that Indigenous communities possess unique adaptive knowledge precisely because they have spent millennia living with environmental change.

The same is true along the Gulf Coast.

For the Houma, Point au Chien and Isle de Jean Charles people of south Louisiana, hurricanes are not historical anomalies. They are part of a collective memory passed from one generation to the next.

“Hurricane stories are an integral part of Houma folklore,” writes T. Mayheart Dardar, Vice Principal Chief of the United Houma Nation. “The tales of winds and water have been told and repeated over the generations.”

The Chenière Caminada hurricane of 1893. The storms of 1915 and 1926. Betsy. Camille. Katrina. Ida.

These storms are remembered not simply because they were destructive, but because surviving them required adaptation, migration, rebuilding, and the preservation of communal knowledge.

For centuries, the pattern was familiar: a storm would come, communities would rebuild, and life would continue.

Climate change is altering that equation.

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When the Land Doesn’t Come Back

Dardar’s account of returning to his hometown after Hurricane Camille in 1969 is haunting.

“Houses were destroyed, tossed about like toys,” he wrote. “Trees were uprooted, cars flooded, boats scattered on the bank, and dead animals were hanging from trees.”

But his community returned.

The wetlands remained. The fisheries survived. The land endured.

Today, many Indigenous communities across coastal Louisiana face a fundamentally different reality.

The islands are shrinking.

The marshes are disappearing.

The cemeteries are flooding.

Sacred places and archaeological sites that survived hundreds or thousands of years of hurricanes are now disappearing beneath rising seas and accelerating erosion.

Many were never mapped.

Many were never excavated.

Some survive only in oral histories passed between generations.

Once these places disappear, they cannot be reconstructed.

NY Times: Isle de Jean Charles

Who Gets Remembered?

Climate Central’s reporting on Jamestown raises an uncomfortable but necessary question: in an era of climate change, what can we save?

Some places can be protected.

The Cape Hatteras Lighthouse was moved inland. Jamestown’s seawall has been reinforced. Archaeologists there are deploying sophisticated technologies to preserve as much of America’s colonial history as possible.

But many places cannot be relocated.

And some histories have never received the resources, recognition, or political attention required to preserve them.

The irony is difficult to ignore.

The United States is mobilizing to save the birthplace of colonization while many of the places preserving the histories of the people who lived here long before the nation’s founding are disappearing with comparatively little public attention.

Climate change is forcing us to confront a question far larger than sea walls or archaeological excavations.

It is forcing us to decide whose history matters enough to save.

Because along the Gulf Coast, the water is not only claiming land.

It is claiming memory.

And unlike Jamestown, many of these stories exist nowhere else.

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If this story resonated with you, I hope you’ll consider becoming a paid subscriber.

At Mesoscale, I don’t just cover climate change as a future threat. I investigate how it intersects with history, democracy, public health, and the communities living through it right now. That means original reporting, archival research, interviews, scientific analysis, and, sometimes, revisiting research I’ve spent years pursuing to tell stories that larger outlets often miss.

As seas rise and storms intensify, we’re not only deciding what kind of future we want to build. We’re deciding what parts of our shared past are worth saving — and whose stories get remembered.

Your subscription helps make sure those stories continue to be told.

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The milestone comes after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth intervened in a series of military promotion decisions that disproportionately affected women and minority officers.

Military promotion boards selected 31 officers for advancement after determining they were the most qualified candidates within their respective competitive categories.

Hegseth ultimately canceled or withdrew nine promotions.

All seven women selected by the boards were removed.

The only other officers denied promotion were two Black men.

No white men selected by the boards were removed.

The military’s promotion boards are designed to identify the most qualified officers for advancement based on performance, command experience, evaluations, and service records.

Their recommendations are traditionally given significant weight because they are intended to reduce political …

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The future of science policy is increasingly being shaped by people who neither practice science nor appear particularly interested in it.

At Mesoscale News, I travel directly to conferences, hearings, communities, and disaster zones to document what is actually happening — not what officials say is happening. That means sitting through the speeches, asking uncomfortable questions, interviewing the experts being pushed aside, and reporting what larger outlets often miss.

If you value independent investigative journalism focused on science, climate, public health, and democracy, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. Your support makes this reporting possible.

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