articles

“One Planet” appeals to the sense of wonder as viscerally as any of its predecessors, but to a purpose. Here is this beautiful, rare thing, each episode says. It didn’t used to be rare! But it is now. And here is how we’re responsible. And here is a tangible thing we might do to fix it. The arc of each installment runs from beauty to loss to a concrete, hopeful example of a battered ecosystem that’s recovered.

Global warming has caused such extensive damage to the Great Barrier Reef that scientists say its coral may never recover. According to a study published Wednesday in the journal Nature, baby coral in Australia's Great Barrier Reef have declined by 89% due to mass bleaching in 2016 and 2017.

The Thwaites Glacier on Antarctica’s western coast has long been considered one of the most unstable on the continent. Now, scientists are worried about the discovery of an enormous underwater cavity that will probably speed up the glacier’s decay.

Earth’s oceans had their warmest year on record in 2018, a stark indication of the enormous amount of heat being absorbed by the sea as greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise, scientists reported Wednesday. The analysis by an international team of scientists confirms that the oceans are heating up much faster than previously recognized and that the pace of warming has accelerated sharply since the 1990s.

In “Climate Leviathan: A Political Theory of Our Planetary Future,” Joel Wainwright, a professor of geography at Ohio State University, and Geoff Mann, the director of the Center for Global Political Economy at Simon Fraser University, consider how to approach a problem of ... international dimensions.

What should we eat? Depends on who is eating. That’s one of the principal conclusions of a comprehensive report that sets out targets on how to feed the world in a way that’s good for human health and the health of the planet. Its lightning-rod recommendation is around beef and lamb, the two forms of livestock that require enormous amounts of land and water and produce heaps of methane.

Greenland’s enormous ice sheet is melting at such an accelerated rate that it may have reached a “tipping point” and could become a major factor in sea-level rise around the world within two decades, scientists said in a study published on Monday.

Scientists say the world’s oceans are warming far more quickly than previously thought, a finding with dire implications for climate change because almost all the excess heat absorbed by the planet ends up stored in their waters.

In just two years, President Trump has unleashed a regulatory rollback, lobbied for and cheered on by industry, with little parallel in the past half-century. Mr. Trump enthusiastically promotes the changes as creating jobs, freeing business from the shackles of government and helping the economy grow.

Greenhouse gas emissions worldwide are growing at an accelerating pace this year, researchers said Wednesday, putting the world on track to face some of the most severe consequences of global warming sooner than expected.

Persistent warming in the Arctic is pushing the region into “uncharted territory” and increasingly affecting the continental United States, scientists said Tuesday. The Arctic has been warmer over the last five years than at any time since records began in 1900, the report found, and the region is warming at twice the rate as the rest of the planet.

For decades, opposition to drilling has left the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge off limits. Now the Trump administration is hurriedly clearing the way for oil exploration.

In the video, Ms. Gill zoomed in on a six-foot-long, stiff, glistening dolphin carcass, its mouth frozen into a toothy smile. The creature was one of more than 20 dead bottlenose dolphins that had washed up on local beaches in recent days.

Rising sea levels are bringing more nest-flooding tides that threaten to push the birds that breed in coastal marshes along the Atlantic Coast to extinction.

A worldwide catastrophe is underway among an extraordinary group of birds — the marathon migrants we know as shorebirds. Numbers of some species are falling so quickly that many biologists fear an imminent planet-wide wave of extinctions.

On his first day as Secretary of the Interior, last March, Ryan Zinke rode through downtown Washington, D.C., on a roan named Tonto. When the Secretary is working at the department’s main office, a staff member climbs up to the roof of the building and hoists a special flag.

Thomas Edison once said, “I’d put my money on the sun and solar energy. What a source of power! I hope we don’t have to wait until oil and coal run out before we tackle that.” The sun keeps rising and the costs keep falling! ...[T]he cost to produce one megawatt-hour of solar fell an incredible 86 percent between 2009 and 2017... solar in 2017 was less than half the price of coal the same year.

A landmark report from the United Nations’ scientific panel on climate change paints a far more dire picture of the immediate consequences of climate change than previously thought and says that avoiding the damage requires transforming the world economy at a speed and scale that has “no documented historic precedent.”