James' World 2

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The melting of the Greenland ice sheet is causing more extreme heat in Europe, contributing to the major heatwaves experienced there so far this year.

The surge of cold meltwater into the North Atlantic is altering ocean temperatures and shifting the jet stream to favour heatwaves in western Europe and the Mediterranean, a study undergoing peer review has found. As Greenland ice loss accelerates, Europe may suffer more frequent and intense heatwaves than climate models currently predict.

This newly discovered “atmospheric bridge” played a major role in the unprecedented heatwaves this summer, according to Marilena Oltmanns at the UK’s National Oceanography Centre, who is one of the study’s authors.

“Europe heats up faster. This is because of the jet stream shift,” she says. “In future years… it will be even more extreme. In the future we will think this [year’s heatwave] was not a heatwave; this was nice.”

The steady rise in global temperature has increased heatwaves. But it’s still debated whether changes in prevailing weather patterns are also contributing.

In the past 30 years, high-pressure ridges – large areas of elevated air pressure that look like a ridge or upside-down U on weather maps – have been forming more frequently over Europe, the study finds, leading to sunny skies and extreme heat. These ridges are caused by waviness in the jet stream, the band of strong winds that circles the northern hemisphere. When the more or less straight-flowing jet stream meanders northward around western Europe, it allows warm air from the central Atlantic and Sahara desert to pour into the ridge that’s been created.

Years with extensive high-pressure ridges over Europe have resulted in heatwaves like the one that killed 70,000 people in 2003.

The researchers say the formation of the ridges can be traced back to Greenland through a cascade of climate events. In the summer before years of extensive ridging, an average of 81 billion tonnes more meltwater rushes off the ice sheet, they found. The cold meltwater lowers sea surface temperatures as it spreads through the North Atlantic in the autumn and winter. Its freshness inhibits mixing with saltier, warmer deep layers, further cooling the surface.

These pulses of meltwater cooling come on top of the “cold blob,” a long-term decline in ocean temperatures in the North Atlantic that some scientists blame on the weakening of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) system of currents. Together, they create a sharp temperature front between the cold waters and the warmer surface waters further south in the Atlantic.

As warm air masses rise to the south of the front and cold masses descend to the north of it, they begin to swirl and generate cyclones. This makes the jet stream wavier. It tends to meander southward of these cyclones, then back northward over western Europe, creating the persistent, high-pressure ridges and heatwaves there.

Most worryingly, climate models don’t fully capture this process, according to Oltmanns.

“This is a big problem,” she says. “It’s going to be even more intense in terms of heatwaves and droughts, in particular in the Mediterranean region, so the weather extremes are likely underestimated.”

A study in July found that the jet stream has shifted southward in the Atlantic in recent decades, similar to the pattern shown in the study. But it concluded that this was due to natural fluctuations in the climate and would eventually reverse.

Meltwater from Greenland could be forcing the jet stream to meander, according to John Methven at the University of Reading, UK, who was one of the authors of the July study. But the weakening of the AMOC or changes in atmospheric circulation over the North Atlantic could also be causing this shift.

“That’s the weak link as far as I’m concerned; the link between the cold blob and whatever’s melting in Greenland is not established, and there might be other things going on,” he says.

If North Atlantic cooling continues to affect the jet stream, it could cause not just heatwaves but also other extreme weather, according to Oltmanns. The research linked it to an unprecedented derecho, a stream of thunderstorms and strong winds, in the Mediterranean in 2022. Winds reached more than 60 metres per second, and fist-sized hail killed 12 people.

“We [will] have more droughts at some locations, flooding events at others, and the variability on top of this increases,” she says.

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The diplomats’ letter states: ‘Nothing justifies Israel’s systematic policy of destruction of Gaza and its population.’ Photograph: Mahmoud Issa/Reuters

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The U.S. federal debt has hit $40 trillion. Add the debt owed by U.S. states, corporations and consumers, and the figure rises to about $77 trillion in debt, set against an annual G.D.P. of about $32 trillion. The interest on all of it is compounding constantly. It’s not just the U.S., either. Globally, there is $350 trillion in debt, roughly treble global G.D.P. It’s like snowpack on a mountainside. It may look stable right now, but it’s creating the conditions for an avalanche. We are past the point where we can deal with our current debts in normal ways. The options open to us are extremely unlikely or highly destructive: Grow our way out of it, raise taxes, inflate the debt away, or wait for the economic fallout.

Ancient societies had another method to deal with debt. It was called an amargi — a blanket declaration of public debt cancellation. All public debts written off. Disappeared. It sounds laughable, I know. But, really, that’s just because the idea has been buried so deeply in history you’ve probably never heard of it. In the ancient world, it presented a pragmatic solution to an intractable problem. And now, faced with impossible-to-repay debts that are weighing down our economy, is the time to look at the amargi and the lessons it offers about how to think about finance.

The ancient Mesopotamians are credited with inventing money. They invented loans and compound interest. They understood this system and its propensity for breakdowns when debts spiraled. That’s why they invented something else, too. About 4,400 years ago, a Mesopotamian king named Enmetena issued an edict. Essentially all public debts, he declared, were canceled. (Amargi typically left debts between merchants in place.) People who had been sold into bondage were freed. Similar edicts gave back land to farmers who had lost it to creditors. The campaign itself was called “return to mother,” the origin of the Sumerian word “amargi.” The word loses something in the translation across eons and languages, but essentially it’s a synonym for “freedom.” The concept was codified in the Old Testament book of Leviticus, which decreed a “year of the Lord’s favor” every 50 years.

The amargi was a response to a persistent problem that was recognized in the ancient world: Debt compounded until it destabilized society. Get enough citizens sold into slavery and enough abandoned farms and society crumbles. Nobody to grow the crops. Nobody to serve in the armies. The amargi was a relief valve, a final rebalancing tool. It was declared in the ancient Near East regularly when new rulers came to power. These actions were magnanimous but also practical. They allowed society to reset rather than being forced into monetary collapse.

People who were owed money were, predictably, not always happy about the amargi. In Athens, the ruler Solon instituted a series of reforms around 594 B.C. that canceled debts. The changes were bitterly opposed by the ruling elite. Solon managed to make the reforms stick, but only after leaving town for a decade and making his people promise not to change the new laws in his absence. Three centuries later, a Spartan king wiped out debt by dragging all the city’s records into the public square and burning them. The city’s elite, aghast, had him arrested and hanged — along with his mother and grandmother. Another two centuries later, the Roman Gracchi brothers were both killed, largely in response to their proposed social reforms. After centuries of elite opposition, the amargi disappeared into obscurity.

The reason the practice often worked in the first place was because the ancient world understood something about our monetary system we have mostly forgotten: Money is an invented social construct. It isn’t real, not in the way a tree or a stone is real. The system of money and credit is a thing humans made up. It’s a record-keeping device for distributing resources. And since money is a human creation, we can alter it when needed.

It’s hard to predict what will happen if we don’t address our debt, but it’s not hard to predict that the outcome will be bad. Governments can borrow to cover up other problems only for so long. Sometimes what comes next is a hyperinflationary spiral and economic collapse, as in Zimbabwe or Weimar Germany. Sometimes it’s a national default that rocks financial markets, such as in Egypt and Anatolia under the Ottoman Empire in the 1870s. And sometimes it’s just a steadily slipping quality of life as debt saps people’s ability to build their own wealth.

Money represents resources, or at least access to resources. When so much of it is going to debt repayment, it means money that could be spent on goods or services is diverted. The federal government now spends over $1 trillion a year on debt interest — money that could otherwise be spent on roads, schools or health care. Rising debts also result in investors demanding higher interest rates to buy that debt; higher government debt rates push up rates across credit markets, including for mortgages. Public debt financing contributes to inflationary pressure, too.

Widespread public debt forgiveness should be taken seriously, at least as a mechanism to reframe economic thinking. While its recent track record is patchy — including both failed debt relief for developing countries and the extremely positive debt relief for the defeated Axis powers — it is an important tool for policymakers to consider. We are unlikely to see a modern amargi, but as a set of principles for reconsidering our relationship with money, its applicability is rich.

Our debts aren’t going to just disappear. Absent a conscious effort, we are just waiting for an increasingly likely economic meltdown. The ancient world had a different understanding of the nature of money, which is why debt forgiveness became a standard feature of their cultures. We need to start seeing money and debt the way people saw it back then: As a system to distribute resources that, like any system, can be periodically reset.

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Illustration by The New York Times

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The already superlative El Niño that began earlier this year is looking to be the largest El Niño in living memory and likely the strongest since the 19th century, the U.K. Met Office reports.

“We should be clear that this is an unprecedented event,” said Adam Scaife, the Met Office’s head of long-range forecasting, in a statement. “I have never seen an El Niño signal this intense in our forecasts.”

El Niño is a cyclical climate phenomenon where a “warm pool” in the tropical Pacific shifts from its usual spot in the west to the east. This El Niño has steadily gained steam since it was declared in early June, setting a sea surface temperature record for that time of year. And because El Niño typically peaks in late fall to early winter, this event is likely to be a blockbuster.

During an El Niño, temperatures in the eastern tropical Pacific generally rise by about one to two degrees Celsius (1.8 to 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above normal, “with 2^o C being a really big event,” Scaife said. This year’s event is predicted to hit around three degrees C (5.4 degrees F) above normal, well into the territory of what is colloquially termed a “Super El Niño.” If that forecast bears out, “then 2026 will far exceed our recent experience of El Niño and its worldwide climate influences,” he added. The most recent very strong El Niños occurred in 1982–1983, 1997–1998 and 2015–2016.

El Niño changes the weather around the world by adjusting where heat is released into the atmosphere, which alters major wind patterns. In fact, this event has already juiced Hurricane Lala, whose rainfall devastated Hawaii (though it is keeping a lid on Atlantic hurricane activity) and has contributed to well-below-normal rainfall from the Indian monsoon.

The strength of this El Niño could cause 2026 to become the hottest year on record—it will certainly be among the hottest years. But 2027 may be more likely to take the top slot because the effects of El Niño’s heat release happen on a delay. (Both 1998 and 2016 were record hot years, but both have since fallen down the rankings as climate change has made record hot years more likely.) Either way, 2027 will probably be “another year to temporarily exceed +1.5 C above the preindustrial period,” the Met Office’s Nick Dunstone said in the statement.

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As the mom to a lively nine-year-old autistic boy, I know how following a predictable routine can make or break our day. When we move through our tasks and chores smoothly, we both feel more confident. Other days it feels like getting my son to walk 10 feet to the car will break me. I want him to put on his shoes; he wants to roll on the floor. I want to go to school; he wants to play one more game on his Pop It—as though we haven’t already done this 900 times.

As we head back to school, here’s what I’m doing to save my sanity.

Routines Help Us All Thrive

Back-to-school season can be especially hard. Summer routines are changing. There are new teachers and after-school activities. Our kids may be waking up earlier or doing homework for the first time. “Kids rely on structure to regulate their emotions and feel safe. When a child knows what’s coming next, they’re calmer and more confident,” says Nathalie Stratton, the co-founder of the digital calendar Hearth Display. And checking the schedule helps me remember that I set an intention, we’re on track, and even though life feels chaotic in the moment, when I step back, I can see we are making progress and meeting our goals. On rushed mornings, that’s almost as valuable as the schedule itself.

I’m not naturally drawn to keeping a strict schedule. I don’t time block my calendar, and I stopped using a planner years ago. But I still have grown-up responsibilities, like helping my son get ready for school, and it’s easy for both of us to spiral when our routine is disrupted. So I’ve found it helpful to surrender to the idea of following a schedule. As Stratton told me, “You’re already running a family calendar. It just lives in your head. The first step is getting it out.”

Transitions are especially hard for my son, but most young kids need help shifting from what they want to be doing to whatever comes next. Speech-language pathologist Lauren Salles Gumpert, says, “Kids move gradually from concrete to abstract thinking during elementary school, which explains why time is so difficult to grasp.” While there are no magic buttons or perfect solutions, using simple visual cues has made it easier for me and my son to follow the daily routine, whether it’s during the chaos of summer or a big transition like the first week back at school.

A visual schedule can reduce the back and forth we all struggle with. Parent coach Shelley Miller uses visual schedules to “break down complicated, multi-step routines for children, like in the morning when kids have to get dressed, eat breakfast, brush teeth, and pack a backpack.” And, she adds, “Visual schedules don’t solve problems that stem from deeper stressors like sensory overwhelm. But they can be an amazing tool that brings stability and structure to the family routines.”

How I Started Creating Schedules For My Kid

I’ve been using the Lil Planner app this summer, which tells us what’s up next on the schedule. For example, this summer my goal was to read and tidy up with my son before iPad time. Opening an app and saying, “The schedule says we need to read” lands differently than me unexpectedly declaring that we need to read. Instead of “Surprise! It’s time to do a hard thing,” it became “Let’s follow the schedule.”

Maybe when my son is older we’ll make the schedule together, but for now he seems to see the schedule more as a guide than as the trigger for a power struggle. Allie Klein, the co-founder of the personalized Charmspring boards, notes, “Once a schedule’s in place, it saves countless reminders, negotiations, and repeated directions, because children have a visual tool they can rely on instead of needing a parent to tell them what comes next.” When less energy is directed to predicting what will come next, more energy can be directed to getting ready and following the rules. That feels good for everyone.

I find it helpful to check in regularly and see when the schedule is being used, if it reflects reality, and how it’s being received. I make changes as needed. Stratton says, “Give yourself permission to adjust. Kids can change so much in just three months. A schedule that worked in spring might not fit who they are in September. Treat it like a living document, not a contract.” I don’t update our schedule every day, but I do check in each night to see if it makes sense for the next day. Miller recommends trying a few options and setting up a version a couple weeks before school starts to ease the adjustment.

Back-To-School Doesn’t Have to Feel Like A Daily Emergency

Our current schedule lives on my phone. I open the Lil Planner app when I need to give my son a quick overview of the day. We look at it together throughout the day, and my son taps the checkmark when each task is done. I’ve also used mini schedules when there’s something out of the ordinary, like we’re going to the doctor, then home, and on to a birthday party. In that case, I might just draw something or put a couple pictures on a Velcro strip and take it with us in the car. I keep this dry-erase version on the table in my son’s room, so he can see it as he gets ready for bed. I like that I can customize it with my son’s phrasing and interests. I’ve also had my eye on these Mighty and Bright stay-on-task bracelets too. The Skylight Buddy is designed to make routines feel engaging without being distracting. The truth is that the best visual schedule is the one you’ll actually use. It doesn’t have to be beautiful—it just has to make tomorrow morning a little easier.

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Routines and visual reminders keep all of us on track.

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A team from the Cicero Institute, an upstart think tank, flew to Indiana this year to help make it a crime for homeless people to sleep on the street.

It was their third attempt. Even in the conservative state, previous efforts to ban street camping had failed. Catholic leaders said the measure would hurt the poor, and sheriffs had warned that arrests would crowd the jails. “We’re Hoosiers — we’re better than that,” a Republican state senator, Ron Alting, said last year, urging a more caring approach.

But much had changed since the group, founded by Joe Lonsdale, a billionaire ally of President Trump’s, had made its initial efforts. Mr. Trump had issued an executive order on homelessness that so fully reflected Cicero’s agenda it was hard to tell where the group stopped, and White House policy began. The sponsor of the Indiana law was fresh from a Cicero conference, Cicero lobbyists worked the bill, and three Cicero analysts testified that the threat of arrests would push homeless people into treatment for mental illness or addiction.

The ban passed just before the legislature adjourned.

With homelessness near record levels, Republicans have embraced tough measures to clear the streets, and no group has led the way more than the Cicero Institute. Mr. Lonsdale formed the institute eight years ago with vague goals — to promote “liberty, accountability, and transparency” — and no mention of homelessness. Now it has commandeered Republican homelessness policy, upending debate over an intractable problem with life-and-death stakes and showing how rich donors can shape the safety net.

Twenty-one states have considered camping bans or other Cicero-backed homelessness laws in recent years, and 16 have passed them. But the group’s sway goes further: It is working with the Trump administration to transform federal homelessness aid away from housing subsidies and toward the forced treatment of substance abuse or mental disorders.

Echoing Cicero’s thoughts and at times its very words, the administration says federal policy, called Housing First, neglects the root causes of homelessness by providing rental subsidies but leaving treatment optional. Opponents of Mr. Trump’s plan, which is blocked in court, say that forced treatment fails and housing aid gets people off the street.

Substantial evidence shows that Housing First succeeds in getting the chronically homeless housed, at least in the short term. But it is expensive, and the evidence also shows it has not consistently improved mental or physical health or lowered death rates. The treatment-first approach that Cicero favors has not been rigorously studied.

For many years, Housing First enjoyed bipartisan consensus; the first Trump administration took office embracing it. Cicero has helped make it a conservative epithet. “Obviously, our work has been one of the main influences” in shaping administration views, Mr. Lonsdale said in an interview.

The White House and the Department of Housing and Urban Development declined to comment on Cicero’s influence.

A co-founder of Palantir, the data-mining firm, Mr. Lonsdale, 43, is an unlikely force in homelessness policy. He brings to it vast wealth but no experience with homeless services and a distrust of conventional expertise. He argues that his outsider’s perspective gives him and the young generalists he hires a fresh view.

A pugnacious presence on social media — he recently called for public hangings of repeat violent offenders — Mr. Lonsdale said he is fighting in part to defend “capitalist society.” He argues that a corrupt “homelessness industrial complex” dominated by liberal social service groups wants to increase homelessness to discredit society.

“Some of them are cynical Marxists who clearly want mayhem and want to show that our civilization is broken,” he said.

Many on the left return the scorn, calling Mr. Lonsdale an emblem of the inequality that creates homelessness — a billionaire fighting a reverse class war to preserve an unjust order.

“He’s using the homelessness crisis to deflect attention from the broken economic system that both causes homelessness and enables people like him to become billionaires in the first place,” said Jesse Rabinowitz of the National Homelessness Law Center, a progressive advocacy group.

As Mr. Lonsdale taps his fortune to shape views, it is easy to see a story of money and politics. But it is also a story of public fatigue. With unsheltered homelessness up more than half in a decade to about 266,000 people, Cicero succeeded in part by putting the status quo on trial.

A signature Cicero line is that there is “nothing compassionate” about leaving people on the street. Echoed by Mr. Trump, it may send an army of marginalized people down an untested path.

Banning Public Sleeping, State by State

Asked why he focused on homelessness, Mr. Lonsdale often begins by saying that a homeless person harassed his wife as she pushed their child in a stroller in San Francisco. “She just got screamed at, multiple times, and threatened by someone who has clearly lost their mind,” he said in an interview.

But Mr. Lonsdale’s conservatism took root much earlier. He cites Ayn Rand and Austrian free-market economists as teenage influences and used his perch as editor of The Stanford Review, a conservative publication, to assail “political correctness.” He blasted a student movement to raise custodians’ pay, warning it “destroys incentive for them to improve themselves.”

The magazine’s alumni include Peter Thiel, the libertarian investor who helped start PayPal, where Mr. Lonsdale landed an internship and found a mentor. They helped start Palantir in 2003 when Mr. Lonsdale was 21. He left after six years and became a tech investor. Forbes now estimates his fortune at $3.5 billion.

The subject of homelessness never arose in 2019 when Mr. Lonsdale hired Cicero’s first analyst, Judge Glock, who tackled technocratic topics like zoning laws and published into a vacuum.

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Joe Lonsdale, founder of the Cicero Institute, is an ally of President Trump’s whose group has commandeered Republican policy on homelessness. Credit…Jonathan Alcorn/Reuters

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A few years ago, I wrote a memorable and quite controversial story about Jeanne Calment, who was then – and remains now – the official holder of the world longevity record. She was born in 1875 and died in 1997, aged 122 years and 164 days. At least that’s the official version of events. According to some doubters, the woman who died as Jeanne Calment was actually her daughter Yvonne, who fraudulently assumed her mother’s identity when Jeanne died in 1934. Yvonne was 23 years Jeanne’s junior. Still a good innings, but not a record-breaking one.

The matter remains unresolved, and so, for now, Calment remains one of the most important data points in biogerontology. When we ask, “how long can a person live?”, the answer is “at least 122 years and 164 days” – assuming Jeanne Calment really did live that long.

Whether a person could live longer has long troubled scientists. It’s an important question in biogerontology because, if we want to achieve life extension, we need to know what we’re aiming for. But it’s surprisingly hard to answer. Calment is an outlier: nobody else has reached 120, which is one reason for the suspicion. The second-longest-lived person was Kane Tanaka, who racked up 119 years and 107 days, and the oldest person today has just turned 117. Aside from a few mavericks, however, everyone agrees that there is a natural limit.

But where is it? There are two main ways of tackling this question. One is by studying demographic data on verified supercentenarians. One such frequently cited analysis produced an estimate of roughly 115, but did not rule out somebody living to 125. Another concluded that Calment’s record is likely to be broken fairly soon.

Another approach is by computer modelling. One such model analysed short-term fluctuations in red and white blood cell counts in adults aged 85 and over, which the researchers converted into a measure of their resilience to terminal age-related disease. At some point, resilience breaks down completely, marking the point of no return. The researchers concluded that this varies from person to person, usually kicking in at about 120. But even for the most resilient individuals, there is a hard upper limit of 150.

There’s a big difference between 125 and 150, and we’ll get onto this. But one thing these studies don’t take into account is future advances in medicine. In the 1920s, scientists believed that it was impossible to live past 105, according to biogerontologist Richard Faragher at the University of Brighton, UK. But over the following century, medical breakthroughs steadily added years to people’s life expectancies, helping (along with better nutrition and sanitation) to nudge the longevity record upwards.

What happens if that trend continues? To find out, a team at the Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology and the Artificial Intelligence Research Institute, both in Moscow, Russia, ran a thought experiment. Imagine, they said, that we manage to cure all the theoretically curable causes of ageing. The only unfixable one is damage to the DNA in our cells, which accumulates remorselessly as we age. In that scenario, the upper limit of a human life soars to 194 years.

I’ll stick my neck out and say it ain’t going to happen in my lifetime, and also point out that the causes of ageing are not yet fully understood. Even so, it suggests there’s quite a lot of room for improvement.

But back to the real world. Why do upper age estimates vary so much? Re-enter Jeanne Calment. When I was reporting that story, I spoke to a longevity researcher called Saul Newman, then at the Australian National University in Canberra. He had just published a paper showing that a small number of errors or fraudulent entries in paper records such as birth certificates can significantly distort longevity data. He told me he suspected the Calments’ alleged identity fraud was just the tip of the iceberg.

Newman, now at the University of Oxford, has just published a book, Morbid: Debunking modern longevity science, revealing the shocking extent of those errors and frauds. In Greece, for example, around 70 per cent of centenarians were found to be dead, kept alive on paper so their relatives could keep on drawing their pensions. Even higher levels of pension fraud were discovered in Japan. People have historically inflated their age for many other reasons, to join (or dodge) military service, get married or get a job. Clerical errors are rife too, especially from the time when today’s centenarians and supercentenarians were born.

These errors inevitably feed into estimates of the upper limit of human longevity. If the demographic data used as an input is riddled with inflated ages, the output is probably also inflated. Garbage in, garbage out. People used in modelling studies are also tagged with an age, which could well be wrong. When the journal Nature asked Newman where this leaves the debate about a maximum human lifespan, he answered: “in an absolute shambles.”

When I was researching the Calment story, I also came across a 2011 paper that found that, across the whole world, 98 per cent of claims of lifespans over 115 could not be verified. The same paper also found that, in countries with rigorous birth records going back more than 150 years, not one person has been proved to have lived past 115. That, I think, is the best estimate we’ve got. Five score years and fifteen. I’m halfway there.

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First you hear the collars, like a chorus of bells softly ringing. Then, the patter of paws. You look up and see a mirage of floppy ears, wagging tails, and fur—it’s a pack of dogs approaching, shepherded by their seemingly fearless leader: the dog walker.

On any given day in New York City, there are countless dog walkers out and about, tending to some of the city’s estimated 600,000 dogs. And aside from caring for the beloved pets of New York while their owners are at the office or otherwise occupied, many dog walkers are a fixture of their neighborhoods—bringing a daily jolt of joy to kids at the bus stop, holding the door for postal workers, generally keeping an eye on things. They know the rhythm of the city, and they help keep things in tune.

For some, dog walking is a part-time job; for others, it’s a trade and a passion. For many New Yorkers, it’s a way to make ends meet so they can pursue creative interests as artists, performers, and writers. No matter their backgrounds, though, every good dog walker has one thing in common: a love of animals. They care about them, and connect with them. They’re able to divine things from the dogs, based on a tug of the leash or the tiniest twitch: Riley’s riled up; Cookie wants to fight; Lou needs to pee.

Costello Caldwell, 78

Costello Caldwell has been walking dogs on the Upper West Side since the early 1980s.

He grew up next door to a boarding kennel in Maryland, where he worked after school and during the summer, and quickly fell in love with dogs. When he moved to New York, he worked in fashion, retail, and restaurants until he got sick with pneumonia. As he recovered, he would sit in the park and see dog walkers who seemed happy. One day, he had an idea.

“I bought uniforms for five of my friends, dressed us all the same way, borrowed all the dogs in the neighborhood that I knew, and we took a walk down Amsterdam and Columbus Avenue. I called it ‘goin’ fishing,’” he says with a laugh. He had business cards with his business name—Royal Wolves Academy—made, and he styled not only the people but the dogs, too, with special leashes.

“This is New York City, and they love a drama. They see five people walking down the street with a bunch of dogs all dressed the same way, they will stop their conversation and pay attention.” It worked. By the end of the day, he had his first seven clients. “That’s how it all began.”

Caldwell, 78, who is an artist and has made headlines for his eye-catching style, lives in the neighborhood. He walks dogs in Riverside Park, seeing the same people every day. “They call me the mayor of this area,” he says.

“Clothing is part of my art,” he says, describing his look as an eclectic mix, like Indiana Jones meets the Marlboro Man, meets Peaky Blinders. “It’s easy for me to love walking dogs because I put fashion into it. I give them leather collars and leather leashes, and I write their names on everything. I make diaries for the owners to look at in leather-bound agendas. I burn their names into the leather. So to me, all of this is art.”

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“They call me the mayor of this area,” says Costello Caldwell, a dog walker on the Upper West Side known for his eclectic style. Photographed by Peter Fisher

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Federal officials on Friday sharply cut how much water Arizona, California and Nevada can draw from the Colorado River over the next two years in an attempt to stabilize a system on the verge of collapse because of climate change and overuse.

The existing rules governing use of the river and of the nation’s largest reservoirs, Lakes Powell and Mead, were set to expire this year, just as drought constricts the Colorado’s flow and both lakes shrink to record lows. Friday’s announcement by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation reduced the allocation for the three states by about a quarter, in total, reducing Arizona’s share by the most, about a third.

The plan formalized voluntary cuts the states had already offered to accept and settles months of uncertainty over how the water supply will be managed in the coming years. But it does little to solve the underlying crisis: The river’s flow is diminishing, and reservoirs are drying up, but communities and farms still use unsustainable amounts of water.

“If the next couple of years are dry, the risk to Colorado River water users is extraordinary,” said Jennifer Pitt, who directs the Colorado River Program at the National Audubon Society. “There is no buffer to rely on anymore.”

In the short term, the cuts will require the three states, which make up the river’s lower basin, to rely more on groundwater, to limit or cut off some users, and to invest more in water-efficiency projects. They could also increase pressure on the agriculture industry, which uses the majority of the river’s water. Nearly half of the water goes toward growing crops used for animal feed, such as alfalfa.

That burden will fall hardest on Arizona, which holds some of the most junior water rights in a byzantine priority system based on the longest-standing uses of the river and a century-old agreement among seven Western states and Mexico.

Tom Buschatzke, Arizona’s Colorado River negotiator, said the state would rely heavily on aquifers where it has stored unused portions of its Colorado River water allocations in past years. The Arizona Water Banking Authority reports that it has built up a store that is slightly larger than the state’s total annual river allotment.

The Colorado supplies water to 40 million people, 5.5 million acres of farmland and about two dozen native tribes. Two Mexican states also use the river.

But the waterway has transformed since communities first began tapping it. Its flow has diminished by about 20 percent across two decades of drought, a period scientists say is the driest for the Southwest in 1,200 years.

The Trump administration’s plan sidestepped a conflict over how to bring water consumption in line with that dwindling supply, a question that water officials say may ultimately be up to the U.S. Supreme Court.

The downriver states had already volunteered to make the cuts announced Friday in an effort to break a deadlock in negotiations. But the administration didn’t impose any mandatory water use cuts that upstream states — Colorado, Utah, New Mexico and Wyoming — have refused to accept.

Andrea Travnicek, assistant secretary for water and science at the Interior Department, which includes the Reclamation Bureau, said in a statement that the administration would continue to work with states to find consensus.

The lower basin states said the cuts reflect their willingness to share in the pain of a shrinking water supply. Upper basin water officials have maintained that communities there cannot commit to permanent cuts when their water supply each year is largely determined not by reservoir levels, but by year-to-year fluctuations in winter snowpack. Snowpack hit record lows this winter, driving major water shortages and sending reservoir levels plummeting.

Gov. Jared Polis of Colorado, a Democrat, said that officials there “remain hopeful that a longer-term seven-state agreement can be reached over the coming months.” Becky Mitchell, the state’s chief negotiator on Colorado River issues, added that the state remains “committed to developing a solution.”

J.B. Hamby, California’s chief Colorado River negotiator, called the plan issued Friday “a bridge, not a permanent solution” and called for upstream states to step forward with “robust action” of their own in the coming years.

“The Lower Basin has shown what meaningful action looks like,” he said in a statement. “Now

we need the entire basin to do the same.”

Mr. Buschatzke said the focus should now shift to “a longer-term, equitable, basin-wide outcome that includes shared sacrifices.”

Gov. Katie Hobbs of Arizona, a Democrat who is running for re-election, stressed that the state stands ready to “fight” in court for any water it is owed.

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The Colorado River at Horseshoe Bend near Page, Ariz., last month. Credit…Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

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Two decades ago, renewable energy was a bit player on the world stage. Today renewables account for nearly half of all global electrical capacity, according to the International Renewable Energy Agency, and there’s a lot more in the pipeline. It’s a stunning surge showing that the renewable revolution appears unstoppable. Clean energy still faces challenges, though. To meet them, countries and companies are taking some big swings to push this revolution into a new phase—with ambitious projects that may or may not pan out.

One of the most significant problems is that solar and wind are intermittent, and the lithium-ion batteries currently available can’t store enough energy from renewables to reliably meet demand. To squeeze the most juice out of solar and wind, we need longer-term storage, leading some in the industry—notably in China—to reach for a technology that has been shelved for decades. Chinese companies are also pushing the limits on how large and how far offshore turbines can be so they can take advantage of steadier, stronger winds. Other ventures are trying to broaden the appeal of geothermal energy and crack the code on tidal power, one of the biggest untapped sources of power on the planet. Here are some of the most audacious of these projects. —Andrea Thompson

Geothermal Energy for (Almost) Anywhere

Pulling heat from the earth without perfect geology

Name of project: Fervo Energy’s Cape Station
Location: Utah
Name of technology: Enhanced geothermal systems (EGS)
Power generation: A projected 100 megawatts by early 2027, with 500 megawatts in total under construction

How it works: Fervo drills down and then sideways, creating a network of long fractures in rock as deep as almost 2,750 meters (although future depths may vary); it then pushes water through these cracks to draw heat out of the earth. The large network of fissures exposes much more water to much more hot rock than single-pipe geothermal setups do, increasing efficiency. To execute the design, Fervo has translated oil and gas fracking’s pressurized fluid injections from softer sedimentary shale rock to hotter, harder volcanic rock. (Experts say seismic monitoring is advanced enough that work can be paused if risks of quakes above magnitudes people can feel rise too high.) At a demonstration facility called Project Red, Fervo connected test wells to a preexisting power plant, where it has been generating three megawatts of power since late 2023.

Why it’s needed: Unlike solar and wind, geothermal energy can be used 24/7. But to be economical, traditional geothermal requires perfect geology: hot rock that water naturally passes through and a reliably recharged water source to keep the heat flowing. This necessity has limited its use to a handful of spots on Earth. By adding fractures, EGS creates more places where geothermal is economically feasible. Other companies have targeted different geothermal strategies, and geothermal has been met with a wave of enthusiasm from the U.S. government.

What the experts say: Jefferson Tester, a Cornell University engineering professor, says he’s excited by the work Fervo is doing but worries that the company might have promised its funders too much too soon. “You’ve got to prove that this thing actually works for a sustainable period of production,” he says. “The proof will come only with what you find out in the field.” (Fervo Energy did not reply to interview requests.) —Meghan Bartels

The Power of the Tides

Predictable motions of the ocean can provide reliable, renewable energy

Name of project: MeyGen
Location: Scotland
Name of technology: Tidal stream energy
Power generation: Six megawatts (increasing to 65 megawatts by 2031)

How it works: Since 2016, MeyGen, located between the Scottish mainland and the Orkney Islands, has been the world’s largest tidal stream energy project. It exploits the fact that the tides that ebb and flow along our planet’s coastlines carry tremendous energy, with a harvestable potential estimated at 1,200 terawatt-hours per year, more than a quarter of annual power generation in the U.S. That energy can be harnessed in much the same way that wind farms harness moving air. “In very simple layman’s terms, you’re putting a wind turbine underwater,” says Drew Blaxland, CEO of Proteus Marine Renewables, which developed MeyGen’s four 1.5-megawatt turbines. The turbine blades spin with each incoming and outgoing tide, capturing the ocean’s kinetic energy to power a generator that produces electricity.

Why it’s needed: Unlike other renewable energy sources, tides are highly predictable. “We can tell at any point in time, any day, exactly how much energy we’re producing,” Blaxland says, “which you can’t do with wind or solar.” Tides are as brutal as they are reliable, though; saltwater corrosion, ocean debris and the sheer force of rushing water often cause turbines to fail. But one of MeyGen’s turbines has reached a major milestone in performance, running for more than seven years without unplanned maintenance. Built on massive foundations and equipped with blades that adjust to align with the tide, the turbines are engineered to withstand extreme, fast-flowing marine currents. MeyGen plans to add 20 turbines by 2031, boosting its capacity to 65 megawatts. According to Ampeak Energy, which owns the project, the site could ultimately produce nearly 400 megawatts.

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