As part of the budget proposal for NASA submitted earlier this year, the Trump administration proposed cancelling more than 40 missions, including at least 14 Earth science missions.
Agency employees have already been instructed to do the preparatory work for ending these satellite and instrument programs, according to a NASA scientist who spoke with the Bulletin.
On a warm Sunday morning in early June, I boarded a train in central Athens headed towards Kifissia, an affluent suburb to the north of the city. We had just rattled away from the station for the Athens Olympic Sports Complex in Marousi when I spotted a spire of smoke rising in the distance, behind a ridge of mountains.
It was quite the coincidence, since I was on my way to see Giorgos Dertilis, the head of the Volunteer Forest Firefighting and Rescue Team in Ekali, part of the Kifissia municipality.
When Dertilis met me at the station a short time later, I asked him about it. He wrinkled his brow at me in surprise and hopped on the radio to learn more. Back at headquarters, it was confirmed: Someone had been burning tires, probably to recover scrap metal. There’s a blanket ban on outdoor fires during Greece’s fire season, which extends from the first of May to the end of October, but that doesn’t stop people from testing fate. In July 2018, a man burning brush in his yard kicked off a deadly conflagration that swept through the seaside resort town of Mati, 20 miles from central Athens, killing 104 people.
Although the number of wildfires recorded annually in Greece has decreased since 2000, wildfires are getting larger, burning nearly 1,500 acres more on average with each passing year. In 2023, a wildfire broke out in the Evros region in northeastern Greece, near the Turkish border. It burned for more than two weeks, eventually scorching more than 237,000 acres—the largest recorded wildfire in Europe since the European Forest Fire Information Service began keeping track—and killed 20 people, including 18 Syrian asylum seekers.
Fires are also becoming more common outside of the traditional fire season, with the number of fires between November and April increasing by 47 percent since 2012; these fires are also burning larger areas with each passing year. There are myriad factors at play in these dangerous trends; two of the biggest are land-use and climatic changes.
I was in Athens for a little over a week, which was just enough for me to get a taste of the hot and windy climate that can nurture any stray spark into an inferno. I climbed to the top of the Acropolis, sweating in the early evening sun with other tourists. I spent a day with volunteer firefighters, driving around to see the burn scars from blazes they battled last summer. I was buffeted by gusts while visiting an observatory that narrowly escaped the flames last year. I hiked through Parnitha National Park and saw new pine trees growing in the shadow of blackened tree trunks. The threat of fire seemed ever present, especially at the edges of the city, where drones hovered on high-risk fire days, part of Greece’s burgeoning early-detection program.
Some of my taxi drivers, upon hearing of my interests, regaled me with tales of heroism and loss: One told me of a friend who lost his house in a wildfire last year. Another said he evacuated his parents from his childhood home and then went back to personally ensure the building did not burn; the fire came into their yard and consumed all the vegetation, but the house is still standing.
I was left with the impression of a city and country on edge—doing its best to adapt and cope, but in general, and like many other fire-prone regions, ill-prepared for the kind of extreme wildfires that climate change is unleashing. As I was finalizing this story, wildfires driven by gale-force winds broke out at multiple locations around Athens, forcing evacuations, as other fires raged to the west in the Peloponnese and on multiple Greek islands.
Since President Trump was inaugurated in January, he has unleashed a barrage of attacks on federal institutions, employees, laws, and regulations. Agencies that deal with climate, energy, and environmental policy have been on the receiving end of many of these attacks, more than a few of which are of dubious legality and go far beyond anything Trump attempted in his first term.
With Democratic minorities in the House and Senate, and virtually no resistance from Republicans in Congress, Trump’s agenda has rolled out with only the judicial branch as a “last bulwark” against it. Some have countered that the bulwark is leaky or partly collapsed, and “courts alone can’t save us.” Even so, lawsuits against various parts and officials of the Trump administration continue to pile up. The question is whether the administration will prompt a constitutional crisis by ignoring or defying judicial decisions it dislikes. Whether the United States is already in a constitutional crisis, or merely rapidly approaching one, is a matter of vigorous debate.
Michael Burger, the executive director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University, said this debate hinges on whether the Trump administration must defy the Supreme Court to launch a full-blown constitutional crisis, or if defying a lower court is enough.
But in Burger’s opinion? “We’re already there,” he said. “The only question is, how far is it going to go?”
Amid a supremely chaotic news environment—dominated by Trump’s deportations, Trump’s funding cuts and layoffs, Trump’s tariffs and, of course, the tumultuous stock market the tariffs produced—one carefully calibrated science story managed to break through the noise and make global headlines this week: A biotechnology company called Colossal Biosciences claims to have resurrected the dire wolf, a species that went extinct over 10,000 years ago.
Republished by Mother Jones here.
Much of the Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on Tuesday was taken up by questions about the use of a private, encrypted messaging app by leaders of the US intelligence community to discuss the details of an upcoming attack on Yemen. The Signal chat included the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, CIA Director John Ratcliffe, Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and the national security adviser, Michael Waltz, as well as the editor of the Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, who was apparently added by mistake in what many security analysts consider an appalling and even mortifying security breach.
But while concerns about this “sloppy, careless, incompetent behavior” (per Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia) dominated the hearing, there was also a brief, telling exchange between Sen. Angus King of Maine and DNI Gabbard, in which King grilled Gabbard about the 2025 Annual Threat Assessment by the US intelligence community, which made no mention of climate change for the first time in 11 years.
Republished by Mother Jones here.
Jessica S. McKenzie