Climate change is messing with time itself. The melting of polar ice due to global warming is affecting Earths rotation and could have an impact on precision timekeeping, according to a paper published Wednesday in the journal Nature. The planet is not about to jerk to a halt, no...

Its official: For the past 12 months, the Earth was 1.5 degrees Celsius higher than in preindustrial times, scientists said Thursday, crossing a critical barrier into temperatures never experienced by human civilizations. According to the European Unions Copernicus Climate Change...

Every Friday around sunset, I close my laptop. For 24 hours, my work is done. No email. No news. No social media. If its work-related, it waits. What I try to do is nothing at all. Or, rather, I spend time with people I love, usually outdoors. I swim or surf. I share a meal with...

For those who like clutching at straws, its still technically possible to believe civilization can prevent the Earths temperature from rising more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above the average of the preindustrial era the strong recommendation of climate scientists. But most people...

As a year of surprising global warmth came to a close, a record high annual average temperature was already assured . Now, some scientists are already speculating: 2024 could be even hotter. After all, vast swaths of Earths oceans were record-warm for most of 2023, and it would t...

The Dec. 28 front-page article Observers at odds on the pace of warming , about the question of how fast climate change is happening, offered the thoughts of two leading climate scientists, James E. Hansen and Michael Mann. But an important point must be recognized. Regardless o...

For the past several years, a small group of scientists has warned that sometime early this century, the rate of global warming which has remained largely steady for decades might accelerate. Temperatures could rise higher, faster. The drumbeat of weather disasters may become m...

DUBAI Global temperatures are poised to surpass a key climate threshold many thought was still years away so quickly that some climate activists and scientists say world leaders should give up on the pretense they can still prevent disastrous levels of warming. Britains Meteoro...

Your decision to buy that heat pump or induction stove might feel like it came after much deliberation and research. You might want to thank your friends and family. Your trusted inner circle is one of the most potent and overlooked weapons to stave off the worst of climate chang...

Many of the worlds biggest oil companies announced Saturday that they would slash methane emissions from their wells and drilling by more than 80 percent by 2030, an ambitious plan that could help curb runaway global warming. The unexpected pledge, which could be one of the most ...

ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia Scientists, government officials and farmers are reviving neglected crops and boosting agricultural productivity in a race to cushion Africa from growing food shortages exacerbated by climate change. But only a trickle of donor funds and almost no private c...

BALTIMORE At a fiery news conference at the Four Seasons hotel here Tuesday, speakers denounced climate change as a hoax perpetrated by a global cabal including the United Nations, the World Economic Forum and many leaders of the Catholic Church. It might have seemed like a frin...

with research by Vanessa Montalbano Good morning and welcome to The Climate 202! Today we have a scheduling update: The newsletter will publish from Monday through Wednesday next week before taking Thanksgiving off. Well be back in your inbox on Monday. Not a subscriber? Sign up ...

Thirty-five years ago, NASA climate scientist James Hansen stood in front of Congress with a bold declaration: Humans are causing an increase in greenhouse gas emissions, and its changing our climate. Some scoffed, but, in the decades that followed, people saw how prescient this ...

Bill Ripple had never been an activist. The Oregon State University ecologist had spent his career wandering through the hills and canyons of Yellowstone National Park , tracking the health of wolves and other large carnivores. Nor was he particularly outspoken: As a college stud...

Fatima Bhutto is a Pakistani writer and novelist. Her latest book is New Kings of the World. This past summer, the primordial elements conspired to ravage Greece, the birthplace of Western civilization. The Mediterraneans many islands were swept by water, air and especially fire,...

As the effects of climate change become more pronounced, more people now appreciate that the individual choices in our daily lives can have a profound impact on the future of the planet. Join Washington Post Live for conversations with White House National Climate advisor Ali Zai...

More than 40 percent of Antarcticas ice shelves have dwindled in the past 25 years, potentially accelerating sea level rise by allowing more land ice to flow into the ocean, according to new research released Thursday . The extent of ice shelves thinning is more widespread than p...

Its getting harder to grow coffee , tea , and grapes for wine on a hotter planet and now researchers say, climate change may be coming for your IPA. A new study out Tuesday found drought and higher temperatures will lead to a decrease in the quality and quantity of hops, the aro...

After years of promises of new climate funding, the developing world is coming to grips with a disappointing reality: Money still isnt coming through fast enough to address the mounting challenges of climate change . Promises from some of the worlds biggest economies, including t...

You know the story: Slowly turn up the heat on a frog in a pot of water, and the frog wont hop out. Oblivious to the imperceptible increase in heat, it will stay put until well, until it croaks. When it comes to the effect of rising global temperatures on amphibians, the proverb...

Nearly all of the worlds population experienced higher temperatures because of climate change this summer, according to an analysis of 202 countries and territories. The past three months shattered heat records and brought raging wildfires to swaths of the world including in the ...

A parable about the perils of ignoring climate activists has just played out in the Nevada desert. As Burning Man 2023 began on Aug. 27th, protesters temporarily stopped traffic heading to the arts festival by parking a 28-feet (8.5 meter) trailer across the road. Then, just a fe...

RHODES, Greece As flames approached the 19th-century Monastery of Panagia Ipseni, the nuns inside steeled themselves. A village seer in the 1990s dreamed of women in charge of the sanctuarys cloistered life, prompting the Orthodox church to replace its male monks with sisters. N...

UNITED NATIONS The United Nations chief is going globetrotting to four major meetings before the biggest meeting of all the annual gathering of world leaders at the U.N. General Assembly starting Sept. 18. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres heads first to Nairobi on Saturday fo...

... a clean and healthful environment ... ... a clean and healthful environment ... ... a clean and healthful environment ... A decade ago, the idea of young people suing their governments for failing to act on climate change seemed naive. How would they prove in court that plane...

The Aug. 28 Metro article Construction resumes on contested pipeline reported that the Mountain Valley Pipeline is expected to be completed by years end. As of January, more than 400 water crossings remained to be completed. There are at least three key rivers yet to be crossed...

Youre reading the Todays Opinions newsletter. Sign up to get it in your inbox. In todays edition: It reads like a dystopian novel: I have told my kids that if they see smoke coming from the forest ... just go, run, fly on your bikes. Ill find you. But A.E. Stallingss essay reads ...

Rising oceans substantially worsened the devastating storm surge that Hurricane Idalia flung at the Florida coast on Wednesday, according to scientific experts and data analyzed by The Washington Post. An unusual, dramatic surge in sea levels in the Gulf of Mexico, which began ar...

CEDAR KEY, Fla. Less than 24 hours after ferocious winds passed over this tiny town as Hurricane Idalia headed for landfall some 60 miles north, the power was back for most of the island on Thursday. The water came on before noon. Volunteers moved boxes of records out of the flo...

BANGKOK When temperatures in Thailand shot past 112 degrees earlier this year, the government issued extreme heat warnings for large swaths of the country. It wasnt safe, officials said, to be outdoors. But Rungnapa Rattanasri, 51, didnt work outdoors. She worked inside, on the ...

The deadly wildfires raging in Sicily in July put the effects of climate change on tourism into high relief, as thousands struggled to flee the island while firefighters took on what they estimated were some 650 fires over a three-day period in late July. The fires also shined a ...

Youll hear lots of pledges from companies and governments to cut the greenhouse gases they release to net-zero. Thats because they need to completely halt their release of carbon emissions to avoid some of the worst consequences of climate change. But how to get there? In many ca...

OQUOSSOC, Maine Every morning this week, Ive woken up to a sea of yellow birch and balsam fir in this northern stretch of the Appalachians. The wind whipping off Mooselookmeguntic Lake stirs millions of leaves with a sound like the ocean. Once darkness falls, the loons arrive, t...

Standing atop of the Greenland ice sheet, it was easy to feel as though the whole world was frozen. The glittering, white expanse stretched as far as I could see in every direction, its windswept surface rippling like the ocean. But I knew the landscape is actually incredibly vul...

Hurricane Idalia, fueled by extremely warm ocean waters, rapidly intensified over the Gulf of Mexico into Tuesday night, exploding from a Category 1 storm with winds near 75 mph to a Category 4 storm with winds near 130 mph, before making landfall on Floridas Gulf Coast on Wednes...

EASTERN EGG ROCK, Maine On remote islands off the Maine coast, a unique bird held its own this year in the face of climate change. Atlantic puffins clownish seabirds with colorful bills and waddling gaits had their second consecutive rebound year for fledging chicks after suff...

GENEVA A scientific study published Monday projects that over half of Europes ski resorts will face a severe lack of snow if temperatures rise 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, while nearly all would be affected by an increase of 4 degrees presenting challenges for...

A slim majority of Americans think their individual actions can reduce the effects of climate change, according to a Washington Post-University of Maryland poll . But do they know which actions are the most effective? Not quite. The poll finds most people believe recycling has a ...

Frank Coyne, representing opponents of a wind farm off Ocean City, N.J., declared, Were not going to back down or give up, as reported in the Aug. 23 front-page article East Coast wind power may ride on a beach town . Guess what else doesnt back down or give up. An ocean propell...

During a quiet Monday morning at home in Flagstaff, Ariz., Tia Hatton took a break from work and checked social media. What she saw left her stunned and exhilarated. The Montana kids won! she repeated with disbelief to her fiance. In a groundbreaking decision, a Montana court rul...

The story of emissions over the past two decades has been written in Chinese. Since it joined the World Trade Organization in 2001 and became the worlds factory, China has contributed nearly two-thirds of the growth in carbon pollution globally. Even in per-capita terms, its now ...

ARMILA, Panama It was just past midnight when marine conservation biologist Callie Veelenturf spotted the telltale tiny zipperlike trails in the sand on a remote Caribbean beach. Under the beams of red-light headlamps, she and a group of volunteers from the local Indigenous Guna...

A growing population and rising temperatures will strain the worlds freshwater supplies over the next 30 years, jeopardizing available water for drinking, bathing and growing food, according to new research. An analysis of newly released data from the World Resources Institute (W...

In a decision that made headlines around the world, a Montana judge on Monday ruled in favor of the young plaintiffs who took to the courts to argue that the state violated their right to a clean environment. In doing so, the district court struck down a provision in the Montana ...

The decision sounds monumental: A Montana court has ruled that climate change is real and caused by humans and that governments owe their constituents children a clean environment. Surely this will eradicate the last traces of Americas climate denialism and accelerate the transit...

Hurricanes have become deadlier and have disproportionately affected the most socially vulnerable communities, according to a study released Wednesday in Science Advances. The study estimated that, from 1988 to 2019, Atlantic hurricanes caused nearly 20,000 direct and indirect de...

Good morning and welcome to The Climate 202! Today were researching the best birthday gifts for a 1-year-old. ( Narwhal finger puppets , anyone?) Not a subscriber? Sign up for The Climate 202 to get scoops and sharp analysis in your inbox each morning. In todays edition, well cov...

(a tradition that harks back to the Indus Valley Civilizations.) Sources Information on the Rakhigarhi from Nature Journal and well as Outlook India article: Recent Excavations In Haryanas Rakhigarhi Throw New Light On Indus Valley Civilisation. Sources to understand the monsoon ...

On the same day that climate agencies in the United States confirmed that July was the planets hottest month on record, historic August heat was occurring around the Northern Hemisphere. From the United States to Asia and the Middle East, Monday saw a continuation of extreme heat...

To limit the damage caused by climate change, the world needs to rapidly reduce carbon dioxide emissions everywhere, not just in rich countries. To get there, poor and middle-income places will require trillions of dollars for replacing coal plants with cleaner energy, improving ...

The worlds top climate scientists have been alarmingly clear. If were to avoid the most calamitous consequences of warming our planet, theyve said, we must radically cut greenhouse gas emissions and get as good at taking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere as weve been at puttin...

Climate change, as scientists have long anticipated, is making the weather more extreme and unpredictable . This summer, were being taught the tragic lesson that we all need to prepare for unlikely disasters as well as familiar ones, and to look for risk in new places. The deadly...

In the first ruling of its kind nationwide, a Montana state court decided Monday in favor of young people who alleged the state violated their right to a clean and healthful environment by promoting the use of fossil fuels. The court determined that a provision in the Montana Env...

A graphic with the Aug. 8 news article Poll: Most disapprove of how Biden handles climate change issues said that many Americans remain unaware of the ways the Inflation Reduction Act specifically responds to the climate crisis. Nothing could be further from the truth regarding...

As scientists weigh the influence climate change may have had in fueling Hawaiis wildfires , there isnt one standout factor they point to. Rising temperatures likely contributed to the severity of the blaze in several ways. But global warming could not have driven the fires by it...

Jennifer Balch is a fire scientist and director of the Environmental Data Science Innovation and Inclusion Lab at the University of Colorado at Boulder. The loss of life and property in Lahaina, Hawaii, is shocking even to a fire scientist. I have long assumed the next wildfire d...

Midway in Denis Johnsons 1983 novel, Angels , a character is sweltering outside a Phoenix supermarket. The summer heat has made the parking lot a shimmering lake of molten asphalt. The cars AC hardly makes a dent: The unit was feeble against the heat; when it blew in her face, h...

In the wake of the devastating Hawaii wildfires, experts fear a broader environmental catastrophe is only just starting to unfold. The fires have torn through vegetation and probably left toxic chemicals in their wake that could easily be flushed into creeks and the ocean. The ex...

The Biden administration is betting big on giant carbon-sucking vacuums as a climate solution, announcing that it will help jump-start two mammoth projects in Texas and Louisiana that will be a global testing ground for the new technology. The move positions the United States as ...

While the world watched in horror as Maui burned , Florida educators were busy adopting a new climate-change curriculum that minimizes teaching about the dangers of global warming and distorts scientific information. If only Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) were stupid enough to believe all...

The West Nile virus is more commonly contracted in warmer climates, where hot and tropical temperatures allow the mosquitoes that carry it to thrive. Health experts are increasingly concerned that climate change could worsen the spread of the virus in less common places and even...

Bloomberg Businessweek and Bloomberg Green published a cool infographic a few weeks ago showing how many billion-dollar climate disasters had struck each US state and territory since 1980. Of the 52 locales in the graphic, only one had avoided any such catastrophe for the past 30...

President Biden said in an interview broadcast Wednesday that practically speaking he has already declared a climate emergency, a move that liberal lawmakers and environmentalists continue to advocate to unlock far-reaching executive powers to address global warming. During an in...

The Aug. 3 news article Planting a trillion trees would do little to curb global warming largely neglected the indisputable value of our future forests as a tool in the fight against climate change. A trillion trees alone cannot solve climate change. The Intergovernmental Panel...

This year is increasingly likely to become the hottest year on record, due to a rapidly strengthening El Nino weather pattern and unprecedentedly hot summer. According to climate scientist Zeke Hausfather, 2023 now has an 85 percent chance of becoming the hottest year in the book...

Nearly one year after President Biden enacted a sprawling package to combat harmful emissions and boost clean energy, his administration is struggling to demonstrate the laws value to weary voters and stave off a widening array of new political threats. Most Americans 57 percen...

For almost three decades, the United Nations has been holding an annual summit on the climate known as COP, which stands for Conference of the Parties. Delegates travel to a chosen city from around the world to try to find ways to prevent or ameliorate the worst effects of global...

PANAMA CITY, Fla. Five years later, the scars of Hurricane Michael are still visible across Tyndall Air Force Base. The snapped and jagged trunks of once-towering pines protrude across its 29,000 acres, leaving expansive views toward the Gulf of Mexico where thick forests once s...

The appeal of a good old-fashioned culture war fight is so much greater than thinking about the hard problems of energy planning and security. So its hardly surprising that the decision of Australias Victoria state to ban natural gas connections to new properties has turned into ...

When temperatures are extreme, the accuracy of a weather forecast can be the difference between life and death. New research shows that even small errors in temperature predictions as little as one degree Celsius lead to more deaths, and that improving forecasts would save thou...

It has been described as landmark litigation, groundbreaking and first-of-its-kind . But behind one of the nations most watched climate lawsuits aimed at demonstrating that Montanas promotion of fossil fuels violates the states constitution are 16 young people, driven by p...

Before our current, carbon-fueled global warming trend took off during the 20th century, the most consequential temperature bump in recorded history was the Medieval Warm Period. This week, scientists announced in the journal Nature that theyve found a new way to decipher the cli...

As the story goes, mathematician Sir Isaac Newton was sitting in an orchard after supper when he saw an apple fall from a tree. He wondered why apples always fall straight to the ground, instead of sideways or even up. He would later develop the law of universal gravitation. But ...

The world has just gotten its first real taste of a planet that is 1.5 degrees Celsius or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit hotter than preindustrial times. According to data from the Copernicus Climate Change Service, July of this year was the most scorching July on record, clocking in a...

Forget the international shock of British Prime Minister Rishi Sunaks about-turn on climate policies this week. The really consequential political reversal on global warming may be happening 8,000 kilometers (5,000 miles) to the east. Beijing went from an antagonist in climate ne...

Make hay while the sun shines, people sometimes say to my husband, Adam, when he tells them hes a hay farmer. All they know about hay, I imagine, is that proverbial instruction to make the most of the moment. See also: Strike while the iron is hot. For most of us, these expressio...

July 2023 will go down as the hottest month on record across the globe, and perhaps the hottest in at least 120,000 years, according to climate scientists . During this sweltering month for the planet, countless daily, monthly and all-time record high temperatures were reached in...

When House Speaker Kevin McCarthy toured a natural gas drilling site in Ohio in June, the California Republican vowed to boost U.S. production of oil and natural gas, major contributors to climate change. God has blessed America with resources, McCarthy said . If we have the abil...

The iconic green cornfields of the American Midwest are about to shrink not in acreage, but in stature. A new genetically modified (GMO) corn varietal stands on fatter stalks and grows less than 7 feet tall, about a third shorter than the height of conventional corn. Dubbed Smar...

Extreme heat has blanketed much of the world this summer. The World Meteorological Organization reports that July was the hottest month ever recorded on Earth. The frequency of heat waves has been steadily increasing in the United States, from an average of two per year in the 19...

LONDON We are now living on a planet with a record number of record-breaking climate events. News of the hottest June was quickly eclipsed by the declaration of Earths hottest day , a record that would be broken 16 more times before the end of July, which registered as Earths ho...

Explore cartoons and animations from Ann Telnaes and her best cartoons of 2022 Explore cartoons from Michael de Adder and his best cartoons of 2022 Explore cartoons from Edith Pritchett Explore cartoons from Michael Ramirez Explore cartoons from Ellis Rosen Explore cartoons from ...

Youre reading an excerpt from the Todays WorldView newsletter. Sign up to get the rest free , including news from around the globe and interesting ideas and opinions to know, sent to your inbox every weekday. U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres has a habit of making apocalypt...

A glimpse of a more tumultuous future seemed on full display throughout July, a month packed with weather anomalies that exceeded any definition of normal. It brought deadly and historic rains to parts of India and Vermont , and raging wildfires that delivered dangerous air to pa...

An earlier version of this article included an image of the Matterhorn summit in Oregon instead of the mountain in Switzerland. This image has been updated. The remains of a German mountaineer who had been missing for almost four decades were discovered in the melting ice just of...

Most of us have an idea of summer in our heads. It generally involves beaches. Americans head to their coasts avoiding only fog-shrouded San Francisco and Europeans to the Mediterranean or Aegean. We all strip down to near nakedness and sit around in the sun, occasionally froli...

Large swaths of the world are sweltering amid a scorching hot summer. July is shaping up to be the Earths hottest month in recorded history, with heat waves expected to become more frequent and unrelenting. But even those who have never experienced this kind of extreme heat befor...

Chinas commanding lead in electric vehicles, solar panels and other low-carbon technologies was built in part by showering local manufacturers with state subsidies. Now the US is racing to catch up, marshaling $370 billion in tax credits and other incentives to further its own gr...

There he was. Just before 6 p.m. eastern on July 26 the very same day 480 Otis emerged from hibernation in 2021 fans spotted the parks beloved brown bear on a live camera at Brooks Falls in Alaska . This year, the grizzly bear seen holding a fresh salmon and trudging through th...

The U.N. chief issued a stark warning on climate change this week: The era of global warming has ended; the era of global boiling has arrived, Antonio Guterres declared in a news briefing, as scientists confirmed that July is set to become Earths hottest month on record . Climate...

Theres a big winner in the record heat waves baking the United States, China and other countries fossil fuels. The United States is setting records for natural gas consumption this week at the power plants that keep the nations air conditioners humming, according to estimates fr...

Exposure to extreme temperatures combined with suffocating air pollution can double the risk of dying from a heart attack, according to Chinese researchers who analyzed more than 200,000 cardiac deaths in China between 2015 and 2020. Experts, who already believe that prolonged he...

Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) is a leading progressive voice on Capitol Hill and was first elected to the Senate in 2008. Merkley joins The Posts Leigh Ann Caldwell, co-author of The Early 202 newsletter, to discuss his opposition to how the Transportation Security Administration is...

In this age of climate crisis, the world is consuming more crude than ever. Peak oil demand? Not yet. Maybe one day, perhaps even soon, around 2030. For now, however, the global economy still runs on oil. It will take a while before governments certify it, but every piece of data...

All U.S. cities experience some level of heat island effect, in which heat reflects off hard surfaces, intensifying the impact of the hottest days. But as climate change intensifies, nine U.S. cities are special islands unto themselves, according to an analysis released Wednesday...

Theres no question: This week has been weirdly hot. Most of the Lower 48 is experiencing its hottest week this year and its one of the hottest months ever on record . Earlier this week, I shared with readers of my Climate Coach column how the way we measure heat is confusing whe...

Explore cartoons and animations from Ann Telnaes and her best cartoons of 2022 Explore cartoons from Michael de Adder and his best cartoons of 2022 Explore cartoons from Edith Pritchett Explore cartoons from Michael Ramirez Explore cartoons from Ellis Rosen Explore cartoons from ...

The Atlantic Oceans sensitive circulation system has become slower and less resilient, according to a new analysis of 150 years of temperature data raising the possibility that this crucial element of the climate system could collapse within the next few decades. Scientists have...

Global climate activist Greta Thunberg was forcibly removed by police for blocking oil tankers in a road as part of a climate demonstration in the Swedish city of Malmo just hours after appearing in court for a similar protest last month. Thunberg, hours after she was fined for ...

MS. EILPERIN: Hello, and welcome to Washington Post live. Im Juliet Eilperin, the deputy climate and environment editor at The Washington Post. Today we're joined by longtime climate journalist, Jeff Goodell. He is the author-- MR. GOODELL: Hi, Juliet. MS. EILPERIN: Hey. He is th...

The deadly, protracted heat waves that have scorched parts of North America and Europe this month would have been virtually impossible without climate change, according to a new study published Tuesday. The analysis by the World Weather Attribution network, a coalition of scienti...

If proponents of climate policies thought this years scorching summer temperatures and extreme weather events would propel the world to embrace rapid action to lower greenhouse gas emissions, they were sorely mistaken. If there is to be any hope that governments might address thi...

This summer has been the hottest in recorded human history. It may also be the coolest summer well ever enjoy again. Thats nearly impossible to imagine in places that already are suffering under extreme effects from global warming places like Phoenix, Arizona. The broiling deser...

The July 21 Metro article Farm, coastline pollution part of Moores targeted Chesapeake Bay cleanup reminded me that the efforts to clean up the Chesapeake Bay and its estuaries are a sobering indicator of our inability to address human impact on our environment. As a volunteer ...

The worlds most populous nation is more poorly endowed with farmland, per capita, than Greece or Algeria. Thats going to make life harder as a warming planet destabilizes the cycles of rain and sun that have kept it fed for millennia. India last week suspended exports of non-basm...

A recent analysis published in the Journal of Animal Ecology finds that smaller, lighter-colored tropical butterflies might lose out in a warming world. Researchers caught over 1,000 tropical butterflies in Panama, then measured the temperatures of 54 species of the insect, homin...

Beachgoers around the world would probably give different descriptions of the ocean. Those gazing at the Caribbean Sea might describe clear or turquoise water, while those along Argentinas coastline, where major rivers empty into the Atlantic Ocean, could report a light brown, se...

The summer of 2023 has featured the most intense heat in modern records averaged over the planet . June was Earths hottest on record, and the oceans are exhibiting unprecedented warmth. Far and wide, already-exceptional weather events are being pushed into record territory by the...

Its not just a record-hot day or two , unprecedented heat waves or abnormally warm ocean waters : All indications are that this will be the hottest single month on Earth on record, and possibly in more than 100,000 years. Every day this month has set records for average global an...

As soon as Andrew Christ peered at the sample inside his microscope, he knew he had found something special. Bits of tiny twigs, moss and leaves were mixed with sediments extracted from deep beneath a Cold War military facility on the Greenland ice sheet. It was as if hed opened ...

Between this summers biblical floods, apocalyptic fires and life-threatening heat domes, people are starting to wonder whether weve lurched over some sort of climate tipping point. Climate scientists and ecologists who study tipping points say what were seeing are merely extreme ...

Anyone kicking off the summer holidays with a trip to the Mediterranean will have been greeted by back-to-back heat waves, starting with Cerberus, aptly named by Italian meteorologists after the three-headed hound of Hades that guards the gates of the underworld in Greek mytholog...

As parts of the Northern Hemisphere reach heat close to the limits of human survival , Chinese leader Xi Jinping declared in remarks reported Wednesday that Beijing alone will decide how and how quickly it addresses climate change. Xis comments to top Communist Party officials,...

As the Northern Hemisphere approaches summers peak, heat is testing the limits of human survival in Earths hottest spots and demonstrating the extremes that are increasingly possible and probable against the backdrop of accelerating global warming. In recent days, China set an a...

U.S. special climate envoy John F. Kerry praised Chinas incredible job expanding renewable energy sources Monday, while urging the worlds largest greenhouse gas emitter to stop building coal-fired power plants. Kerrys arrival in Beijing where he will hold three days of talks co...

Changing weather patterns in northwest China are putting ancient Silk Road cave murals and statues at risk, new research has found, underscoring how a warming atmosphere threatens some of the countrys most precious historical artifacts. Research released Monday by Greenpeace has ...

As someone who has worked on climate change for more than 40 years at the International Finance Corporation and the University of Maryland, I appreciate the growing number of front-page articles focusing on extreme weather events, including the July 13 article Alarms for a plane...

President Joe Bidens green pitch has long had two prongs: saving the planet and outpacing China. The two are now combined in one elemental form: Graphite. The Department of Defense announced on Monday morning a $37.5 million grant for Graphite One Inc., a start-up developing Nort...

Regarding the July 11 Style article Waving goodbye to the ocean this summer : There are wild and scary things about the ocean. And there are wild and wonderful things about the ocean. It is this push and pull that has horrified, delighted and fascinated us for millennia. Take a ...

A historic heat wave reached its maximum intensity across the southwestern United States and California on Sunday and established numerous records well above 100 degrees. Death Valley, Calif., infamous for its heat, hit 128, setting a new daily record but fell short of 130, which...

A brutal heat wave across the southern and western states is expected to peak this weekend, causing dangerously hot weather from Florida to Texas to Arizona and California to Washington state, with the most extreme temperatures in the Desert Southwest. During the peak, Death Vall...

LONDON William Ward was nervous about disrupting arguably the most prestigious tennis tournament in the world, with its television audience of millions. The All England Club is a sacred space for tennis fans. Its also a rule-abiding place, where quiet, please instills an instant...

If youre tossing and turning trying to fall asleep on a hot summer night, youre not alone. Sleep experts say a cool environment helps you drift off and stay asleep . But in many places around the world, nights have warmed faster than daytime temperatures and research suggests th...

Youre reading an excerpt from the Todays WorldView newsletter. Sign up to get the rest free , including news from around the globe and interesting ideas and opinions to know, sent to your inbox every weekday. One can grow numb to the temperature records that keep ascending around...

with research by Vanessa Montalbano Good morning and welcome to The Climate 202! We made it to Friday after a busy week. You otter take some time this weekend to check out this California otter who steals surfboards . Not a subscriber? Sign up for The Climate 202 to get scoops a...

The world is getting hot. Last month was the planets hottest June on record, according to an analysis from the European Unions Copernicus Climate Change Service, with substantially higher-than-usual temperatures recorded on land and sea. The highest average daily global temperatu...

The heat wave plaguing the southern United States is expected to stretch into early next week, with temperatures persisting well above 100 degrees throughout much of Texas, Florida and Southern California. As of Wednesday, residents in El Paso, had experienced a record-breaking 2...

It reads like a script for an ad promoting German engineering prowess: an intractable problem, billions of dollars at risk, old-fashioned industrial design and, voila, a solution. The problem, exacerbated by the climate crisis, is ever-lower water levels on the Rhine, a river of ...

Last spring, visitors to BlackRocks webpage on sustainable investing saw a striking image of a building covered in bright green moss. Beneath it, the worlds largest asset manager boasted: We are committed to supporting the goal of net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 or soon...

Regarding the July 7 front-page article, Unprecedented heat lies ahead, scientists warn : With record temperatures across the globe, the effects of humanitys irresponsible consumption of fossil fuels are devastatingly apparent. As Im a high school student, and given the implicat...

The world is hotter than its been in thousands of years, and its as if every alarm bell on Earth were ringing. The warnings are echoing through the drenched mountains of Vermont, where two months of rain just fell in only two days. India and Japan were deluged by extreme flooding...

LUDLOW, Vt. When Jake Baraw descended the steps into his bar on the main street of this small town on Tuesday, he found mud and darkness. The Black River, swollen by Vermonts worst flooding in more than a decade, had filled the space nearly to the ceiling before receding. The wa...

If you think its hot walking around a city, its worse underground. Beneath the high rises in downtown Chicago, the ground has been heating up significantly for decades. In some locations, the excessive heat is causing deformations in the land and destabilizing buildings, accordin...

Over a sweltering span of five days in July 1995, Chicago a city that once burned to ground had never felt hotter. Unprecedented heat and humidity plunged the city into crisis, with temperatures that peaked at 106 degrees and humidity that made it feel as hot as 120. Residents ...

With every record-smashing day, week, month and year of global warming that goes by, finding solutions to climate change becomes more urgent. Capitalism helped get us into this mess, and it will have to help us get out of it. But it isnt capable of doing the work alone. Eco-capit...

Daniel Etter is a Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer, feature writer and filmmaker based in Berlin. In March, I traveled to drought-stricken Somalia. At one point during my visit to a camp for displaced people, I was surrounded by a raucous crowd of children who were laughing an...

Observations from both satellites and the Earths surface are indisputable the planet has warmed rapidly over the past 44 years. As far back as 1850, data from weather stations all over the globe make clear the Earths average temperature has been rising. In recent days, as the Ea...

The old debate about the existence of climate change is dead, immolated in 110-degree heat or asphyxiated on wildfire smoke or drowned in a flash flood. The idea that the world was getting warmer, the butt of both sincere and opportunistic mockery a decade ago, is harder to deny ...

A remarkable spate of historic heat is hitting the planet, raising alarm over looming extreme weather dangers and an increasing likelihood that this year will be Earths warmest on record. New precedents have been set in recent weeks and months, surprising some scientists with th...

Wine growers are always nervous in spring. They feel the excitement of a new vintage as the vines bud, push shoots, flower and set their clusters to produce the years crop. And they worry that Mother Nature may have a capricious surprise in store. This year weve seen destructive ...

The world touched a global record on July 3, the hottest day ever, as climate change raises temperatures. Heat waves are also more frequent and more acute. Factor in humidity, and extreme weather is already testing the limits of the human body. Last year, when blistering heat hit...

SMITH ISLAND, Md. Ten summers ago, Maryland offered to buy residents off this iconic bit of land in the Chesapeake Bay known for picturesque watermens villages, famous cakes and pyrotechnic sunsets. Hurricane Sandy had damaged homes and climate change models offered the direst o...

What price tag would you put on preserving a functioning human civilization? Would $200 trillion just about cover it? Could that even be a bargain? Bloomberg NEF, Bloombergs green-energy research team, estimates in a new report this week it could cost $196 trillion in investments...

Tuesday was the hottest day on Earth since at least 1979, with the global average temperature reaching 62.92 degrees Fahrenheit (17.18 degrees Celsius), according to data from the U.S. National Centers for Environmental Prediction. As a result, some scientists believe July 4 may ...

Megan McArdle was right in her June 28 Wednesday Opinion column, The bagel-shaped dam in the way of building back better . It takes far too long to complete necessary infrastructure projects. The risks of delay are especially acute in our fight to save our planet. With the Infla...

LONDON In a clubby mid-rise on the River Thames, its lobby filled with models of container ships and oil tankers, a rather obscure United Nations group is gathering this week to make a momentous decision that will influence whether the world can meet its promise to limit perilou...

Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen jets to Beijing this week in a test of the Biden administrations ability to improve relations with China while pursuing an economic strategy aimed at reducing U.S. companies reliance on Chinese factories. Her trip comes as Chinas economic reboun...

Canadian wildfire smoke is back with a vengeance as, once again, millions of Americans were told to stay inside last week or wear masks to protect themselves from dangerously high levels of air pollution. As an asthmatic, I fear for my fellow sufferers. Wildfire smoke containing...

Scroll to continue KOULKIME, Chad Alhadji Yaro was a teenager when Boko Haram militants stormed onto his island in the vast, blue-green waters of Lake Chad and made villagers an offer at gunpoint. We will give you good lives, he recalled the fighters saying as they urged young m...

The deadliest animal in the world is smaller than a pencil eraser and weighs around two-thousandths of a gram less than the weight of a single raindrop. Every year, it kills an estimated 700,000 people by partaking in what scientists grimly call a blood meal . Its the mosquito ...

Extreme heat kills more people than nearly every other weather event combined. But does the government respond to these potentially lethal events as they do with hurricanes and floods? Not yet. A disaster declaration by the president could allow states to be reimbursed for taking...

In some corners of Texas, the ongoing heat wave has been so oppressive, so relentless, that a day in which temperature records dont fall has come to seem more surprising than one that brings yet another high. Del Rio only tied the record high for today, the National Weather Servi...

Carbon emissions arent like parking tickets. You cant just pay a little money to clear your record and avoid the dreaded boot, thus freeing yourself to blithely park someplace else. Yet too many companies use the market for carbon offsets this way. They buy credits that dont come...

Once upon a time, the UK was a climate champion, setting the pace in tackling the worlds most urgent crisis. But the current administration is squandering that lead and putting Britains global standing at risk as other nations move ahead with bold, economy-shaping climate policie...

The first step in solving a problem is recognizing you have one. And indeed, most Americans say they know were facing a monumental climate threat. They just need to be convinced that other people tend to feel exactly the same way and that they have the power to do something about...

with research by Vanessa Montalbano Good morning and welcome to The Climate 202! ICYMI, The Washington Post is dropping its paywall through Thursday. You can read as many free articles as you want, as long as you provide your email address. Not a subscriber? Sign up for The Clima...

For many people, beating the heat this summer means one thing: cranking up the air conditioner. Experts say having access to air conditioning isnt just about comfort. During extreme heat events , which are becoming more frequent and prolonged due to climate change, being in an ai...

Shipping is the backbone of the global economy, carrying more than 80% of traded goods. But it also accounts for about 3% of man-made carbon dioxide emissions, with the overwhelming majority of the worlds fleet running on fossil fuel. If the sector is to decarbonize in line with ...

Intensity of extreme rainfall 0 2 4 6 8 in. per hour Precipitation expected to occur once in 100 years Seattle Boston Chicago New York San Francisco D.C. Los Angeles Atlanta Dallas Houston Miami Data not available for Alaska or Hawaii Source: First Street Foundation Intensity of ...

I bet you didnt know that Spruce Pine, a small town about two hours drive northwest of Charlotte, North Carolina, is critical to the global semiconductor industry. Its home to the only known mines in the world that consistently produce quartz pure enough to be made into crucibles...

A dive in international waters. A submersible transported on a Canadian ship. A subsidiary company registered in the Bahamas. OceanGate, the owner of the submersible that imploded attempting to visit wreckage from the Titanic killing all on board appears to have gone to great l...

Lawton Pearson has seen bad years. So has his father. And his father before him. As a fifth-generation peach farmer at the core of Georgias peach-growing region, he knows how fickle growing the states signature fruit can be. Yet after Georgia endured record-breaking warmth this w...

SINGAPORE Vietnam has arrested a leading environmental activist just months after it signed a deal to receive billions of dollars of international aid to tackle climate change, partly on the condition that the government would involve grass-roots activists in the effort. Hoang T...

Manufacturing giant 3M announced late Thursday that it has reached a sweeping settlement with U.S. cities and towns over claims that the company contaminated water supplies with forever chemicals, long-lasting compounds that can harm human health. The company, known for producing...

The ocean waters surrounding the United Kingdom and much of Europe are baking in an unprecedented marine heat wave that scientists say is being intensified by human-caused climate change. Scientists are astounded not only by how much the waters have warmed during the past month b...

with research by Vanessa Montalbano Good morning and welcome to The Climate 202! Happy Friday. As a scheduling note, the newsletter wont publish on Monday or Friday next week, with Congress out of town. Well be back in your inbox on Tuesday. Not a subscriber? Sign up for The Clim...

When Iowa meteorologist Chris Gloninger got an email notification last June, it read: Getting sick and tired of your liberal conspiracy on the weather. Whats your address, another asked Gloninger a few days later. We conservative Iowans would like to give you an Iowan welcome you...

By Joseph R. Biden Jr., Fumio Kishida, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, Emmanuel Macron, Charles Michel, Mia Mottley, Cyril Ramaphosa, William Ruto, Macky Sall, Olaf Scholz, Rishi Sunak, Ursula von der Leyen and Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan We are urgently working to deliver mor...

Texas is no stranger to searing heat, but the heat wave that arrived last week is becoming exceptional for its intensity and duration. Air temperatures have soared past 100 degrees for multiple days, even exceeding 110 in spots, and the sizzling heat index has reached as high as ...

Scroll to continue Locals used to say that Crawford Lake was bottomless. Its waters ran deeper than people could reach. Anything that dropped into the basin, it seemed, would fall till the end of time. Yet when scientists finally looked into the lakes murky depths, they found not...

The worlds climate is changing faster than we can keep up with it. With the first El Nino in four years now under way, hot and dry conditions are spreading across areas where a huge share of the worlds population lives: South and Southeast Asia, northern China, southern Africa, a...

PALO ALTO, Calif. Touring a coastal wetland here Monday, President Biden sought to tout his environmental record and offer assurances that bills he signed during the first two years of his presidency would help communities protect themselves from natural disasters for decades to...

If climate change is a shark, then water is its teeth. That analogy, coined by climate expert James P. Bruce, is increasingly apt. Higher temperatures are straining H2O availability at the same time as demographics and economic growth increase its usage. By 2030, its predicted th...

When President Biden signed his sprawling economic spending package into law last August, he heralded its massive investments in health care and climate change as an achievement that defied the odds. The American people won, and the special interests lost, Biden proclaimed at the...

When investment magnate George Soros recently announced his plan to cede control of his philanthropic empire, his 37-year-old son Alex inherited a $25 billion war chest. Democrats cheered and Republicans sneered when the scion told the Wall Street Journal that he would be more po...

Orange juice may become pricier and less sweet over the next several months as Floridas famous groves yield the smallest crop of citruses in nearly a century. The states orange trees have suffered from hurricane winds and a mounting epidemic of disease this year, accelerating a 2...

Modern humans generally think of panic as unhelpful, triggering stampedes at concerts, collapses at cookouts and endless hours of therapy. But our species evolved panic as a kind of superpower to avoid being eaten. In certain circumstances, and in measured doses, a little existen...

More than 4.5 billion years ago, Earth began forming from a blend of dust and gas that was around our young Sun. Eventually, it grew larger and larger until it became similar to the planet we live on today a process scientists now say happened much faster than they once thought....

with research by Maxine Joselow Good morning! This is Vanessa Montalbano , the Climate 202 researcher, taking over the top of the newsletter today. As a scheduling note, we wont publish on Monday in observance of Juneteenth . Well be back in your inbox on Tuesday. Not a subscribe...

Mexico recently pledged to reduce its emissions by 35 percent by 2030 though it remains the only Group of 20 country without an established net-zero goal. Join Washington Post Live for a conversation with Luisa Palacios, senior research scholar at Columbia Universitys Center on G...

Vietnam has much at stake as the climate changes: 2,026 miles of coastline that will be vulnerable to rising seas; a heavy reliance on fossil fuels, especially coal; and an energy-hungry industry that is already experiencing power outages. Vietnams leaders ought to be listening t...

ALBANY, Ga. The Department of Defense produces the most carbon emissions of any single institution in the world, but the military base in this rural corner of Georgia generates as much renewable electricity as it consumes. Marine Corps Logistics Base Albany, a leafy expanse in t...

A steady and remarkable rise in average global ocean temperatures this year is now outpacing anything seen in four decades of satellite observations, causing many scientists to suddenly blare alarm over the risks and realities of climate change. But even those typically aligned o...

The June 8 front-page articles Wildfire haze chokes U.S., cancels events and A burning truth: Climates health threat is inescapable quoted experts linking the catastrophic fires to climate change that is causing extreme health dangers and weather disasters worldwide. There is...

Theres little doubt that avoiding the worst climate change scenarios requires phasing out power plants that burn coal, the biggest source of carbon dioxide emissions. Thats proving much easier said than done. Twice in the past decade, global consumption of coal turned downward, o...

Russias war in Ukraine, climate change and inflation are contributing to record-high levels of food insecurity worldwide. Join Washington Post Live for back-to-back conversations with Isobel Coleman, USAID deputy administrator for policy and programming, and Alexandre Chequim, CE...

In the climate change discourse, Africa is typically cast as a victim. But what if it could instead become our hero? The continent is suffering the consequences of the climate emergency, despite bearing little responsibility for the carbon emissions that have caused it. As of 202...

Climate Coach readers are thinking hard about the next industrial revolution. The first energy transition from biomass to fossil fuels transformed society in the 1700s. The next one will tap carbon-free energy to electrify everything. How this will come together remains unclear. ...

More than a million species face potential demise in what might be the biggest extinction event since an asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs. But efforts to enlist private capital in the fight to protect the Earths biodiversity have barely gotten off the ground. One obvious model is...

As climate change dropped its calling card on the East Coast last week in the form of thick, dangerous smoke , millions of Americans and Canadians shared the jarring experience forced to retreat indoors, cancel plans, wear masks and breathe hazardous air. The smoke that Canadian...

Before climate change rose to its current pre-eminence as the worlds most-pressing environmental problem, another looming catastrophe worried scientists and politicians the loss of the ozone layer. Chlorofluorocarbons or CFCs a group of compounds used as refrigerants and aeroso...

When the sky over New York City turned a thick, silty orange on Wednesday, 8 million residents woke up in a new era. Until this week, the East Coast had remained cocooned, thousands of miles away from the walls of choking smoke that have become commonplace in Washington state, Ca...

For weeks in 2020, toxic plumes of wildfire smoke painted Californias skies red and polluted the usually pristine air around the San Francisco Bay. The smoke was so dense that it blocked out the sun. A dark orange hue hung over everything, and particles from hundreds of miles awa...

As insurance companies scale back coverage in disaster-prone states because climate risks have become too costly, U.S. lawmakers have launched an investigation into seven major carriers for continuing to insure and invest billions of dollars in fossil fuel projects, according to ...

An unassuming but remarkable piece of legislation was introduced in the Senate this week: a bipartisan carbon emissions bill . The bill, introduced by Christopher A. Coons (D-Del.) and Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.) and co-sponsored by seven other senators, would require the U.S. governme...

The world has eliminated half of its remaining carbon budget to keep warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius compared with preindustrial levels in just the last three years, scientists said Thursday. In early 2020, scientists at the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimated...

The infamous climate pattern El Nino has returned for the first time in four years, according to scientists, a declaration of extreme weather risks and a probable acceleration in global warming over the coming year. Climate scientists say El Nino will probably push average global...

The earworm that I couldnt shake Thursday was Purple Haze by Jimi Hendrix. No, the noxious smoke that befouled the nations capital was not violet in hue. But it was so bad that local officials issued a rare Code Purple alert meaning the air quality was very unhealthy for everyon...

Youre reading an excerpt from the Climate Coach newsletter. Sign up to get the rest , and for advice on how we can navigate life on our changing planet every Tuesday and Thursday. When I ask people about the moment climate change became real for them, the answer, often, is: a nat...

The cloud of smoke inundating the East Coast on Wednesday fueled by more than 400 active fires burning across Canada, with more than half of them considered out of control underscored how climate changes threat to human health can transcend national boundaries. Dozens of East C...

Homeowners are bracing for hurricane and fire seasons, but with insurance premiums rising and carriers pulling back coverage in riskier states, more and more residents dont know whether they can afford to insure their home if and when a disaster hits. State Farm, following Allst...

In a rare example of a bipartisan climate policy, momentum is growing on Capitol Hill for a plan to tax imports from China and other countries with looser environmental standards. Sens. Christopher A. Coons (D-Del.) and Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.) on Wednesday will introduce a bill tha...

If the U.S. health-care system were a country, it would rank 13th in the world for greenhouse gas emissions. You read that right: Our nations health-care system by itself contributes more to the climate crisis than the entirety of most other countries. After a recent column on ho...

Despite rising awareness about global climate change and its devastating impacts, carbon dioxide levels keep treading in the wrong direction. This years annual increase of CO2 levels is one of the largest on record, representing an accumulation of the heat-trapped gases not seen ...

Toby Kiers is a professor of evolutionary biology at Amsterdams Vrije Universiteit whose research on fungi has led her to revelations about how nature itself can solve the climate crisis. Kiers is looking beyond the astonishing diversity of mushrooms we see growing above ground t...

with research by Maxine Joselow Good morning and welcome to The Climate 202! This is Vanessa Montalbano , your Climate 202 researcher, taking over the top of the newsletter today. We hope you had a great weekend despite the heat. Send story ideas and tips for staying cool to vane...

Jay Famiglietti moved to Arizona this year after a career using satellites to study how the worst drought in a millennium was sapping groundwater beneath the American West. He has documented that the decline of groundwater in Californias Central Valley accelerated dramatically in...

Hope youre enjoying the afternoon sunshine and pleasant (albeit it below average) warmth. A few early showers this morning for you luckiest folks werent widespread perhaps I should have kept a Nice Day stamp for today, after all? Tomorrow looks a bit warmer and sunnier to star...

The waters below No Hands Bridges concrete arches usually make for a picturesque and popular northern California swimming hole, appearing inviting enough for Victor Nguyen to jump in on a late April visit. But fast-moving currents were too much for the 22-year-old. He was among t...

Its already a wildfire season for the record books in Canada, with the blistering heat of summer and howling winds of fall still ahead. About 200 wildfires are currently burning across the country, and more than half are out of control. Major fires were ongoing in more than half ...

A team of top scientists says that it has assessed the planets health against eight key thresholds needed to protect life on Earth and that human activities have led to seven of the eight of the boundaries already being breached. The window is rapidly shutting; were very close to...

For the second year in a row, a late-spring heat wave is forcing schools in the Northeast, Mid-Atlantic and Great Lakes region to close, send kids home early or shift to remote learning. Climate change is making hot days before the end of the school year more common across northe...

Seemingly overnight, weve ended up co-existing with artificial intelligence. Its making spoof photos of the pope, scaring the stock market with fake explosions and helping us with our emotional issues. But some are wondering whether there are better uses for the technology: Thoug...

A lunchtime newsletter featuring political analysis on the stories driving the day. with research by Caroline Anders A lunchtime newsletter featuring political analysis on the stories driving the day. Welcome to The Daily 202! Tell your friends to sign up here . On this day in 19...

Historically the federal government has done very little to push banks to address climate risk in the financial system. The last major wave of environmental legislation passed in the 1960s and 1970s, when banks were nowhere near as big as they are now. Back then, the primary targ...

MR. BIRNBAUM: Good afternoon, and welcome to Washington Post Live. My name is Michael Birnbaum, climate reporter here at The Washington Post. My guest today is Ryan Panchadsaram of Kleiner Perkins, here to talk about betting big on innovations that might curb the effects of clima...

with research by Vanessa Montalbano Good morning and welcome to The Climate 202! Michael Birnbaum , a climate reporter for The Washington Post, wrote the top of todays newsletter. We hope you enjoyed the holiday weekend, even if you can relate to this meme. Not a subscriber? Sign...

The Biden administration is searching for ways to push the worlds largest polluter to reduce carbon emissions, as superpower rivalries engulf a fragile bilateral relationship that could determine the future of global warming. Since negotiations between U.S. climate envoy John F. ...

An El Nino that is predicted to develop in the coming months could trigger widespread extreme weather events , upending local economies, fish populations and even your daily coffee fix. The naturally occurring weather phenomenon , which typically lasts nine months to a year, dis...

The trash burning industry was eager to show it is not a polluting relic but a pioneering clean tech sector worthy of millions of dollars in new federal subsidies . But its invitation to the Environmental Protection Agency to visit a Michigan waste-to-energy facility needed to be...

A pileup of ancient logs nearly as big as Manhattan is trapping millions of tons of carbon in northern Canada and much of that stored material could be released into the atmosphere due to climate change, according to a recent study. The fallen, jumbled-up wood has in some cases ...

If youre going to try and defend your industrys carbon emissions, youd do well not to aim at peoples beloved pets. But thats exactly what Patrick Hansen, chief executive officer of private-aircraft operator Luxaviation Group, did at the Financial Timess Business of Luxury summit ...

In politics, its easy to shake a fist. Its harder to shake a hand. But more progress is made through cooperation than conflict. That truth is worth bearing in mind as the latest dust-up over the next UN climate conference unfolds. Recently, a group of elected officials from the U...

When a deal to protect the Colorado Rivers water supply finally came together after a year of contentious negotiations and a marathon weekend of last-minute haggling by phone and video calls that ran well past midnight, whatever sense of achievement the participants felt seemed o...

Two climate activists were indicted by a federal grand jury following an April protest that included smearing paint on the case protecting Edgar Degass Little Dancer Aged Fourteen sculpture in the National Gallery of Art, the U.S. attorneys office in Washington said Friday. The c...

SANTA CRUZ, Calif. Among the coveted places to live in this city, if you have the money, is West Cliff Drive. How much longer that will be true is the question. The cliff-top road is falling into the Pacific in large chunks, leaving gaping holes and closing lanes along a normall...

The May 21 Business article Anti-woke attacks cool BlackRock climate efforts noted the governments lack of a coherent transition plan to net-zero emissions. This is extremely challenging yet vital. Government, however, is likely incapable of producing the plan on its own. Techn...

France which has made headlines for forbidding lots of things, such as outdoor heaters and smoking in forests , in an attempt to curb climate change became the first country to ban short-haul flights this week, cutting several domestic routes that can be easily reached by train...

Paying for restaurant meals is a cost. Taking classes to learn how to cook your own meals is an investment. Similarly, suffering through the effects of climate change is a cost, but spending money to avoid the worst climate outcomes is an investment. The difference is meaningful ...

BERLIN German police launched a series of raids early on Wednesday across the country against a group of climate activists known for attacking art and gluing themselves to roads to raise awareness. The searches targeted 15 properties across seven states, linked to members of the...

VATICAN CITY Three Italian environmental activists face their second trial hearing at the Vatican on Wednesday for having glued themselves to the famous statue Laocoon and His Sons in the Vatican Museums last summer. Ester Goffi, a 25-year-old art history student, and Guido Vier...

South Korea, long a laboratory for technological innovation, has made growing investments in electric cars and battery technology that could accelerate its push to a greener economy. Join Post Lives global This is Climate series from Seoul about South Koreas carbon reduction goal...

Millions of people across the American West can breathe a sigh of relief this week. On Monday, after months of negotiations, the seven states in the Colorado River Basin announced a deal with the Biden administration on use of the waterway. The Lower Basin states of Arizona, Cali...

Under normal circumstances, a quiet Atlantic hurricane season would be a safe bet this year: The global climate pattern known as El Nino is fast developing , and its known to diminish tropical cyclone activity in the Atlantic basin. But unusually warm waters in some areas settin...

More than 130 members of Congress and the European Parliament on Tuesday called for the ouster of the oil executive leading the next U.N. Climate Change Conference in the United Arab Emirates this fall. Tuesdays letter represents a remarkable rebuke of the decision to name Sultan...

Global warming will force more than a fifth of the worlds population out of the climate niche most conducive to human life by 2100 if temperatures continue rising, a new study estimates, articulating the dire toll across many parts of the world in the coming decades if policymake...

A somewhat subjective rating of the days weather, on a scale of 0 to 10. 10/10: Wow, another Sunday, another taste of perfection. Enjoy comfortable warmth thanks to dry air dew points in the 40s to near 50. Weather bliss! Perhaps weve earned todays perfection. It arguably lasts ...

Any complaints? Didnt think so. My challenge in such good weather is to keep the forecast short, but I want to wax poetic about all the perfect little things going on at once. We dont have many days like this! Monday should have a bit less breeze and a few more clouds, especially...

Nick Obradovich couldnt fall asleep, again. And now he was getting grumpy. It was October 2015, and San Diego was experiencing historically warm fall temperatures in the mid-70s. The normally cool and dry city logged its three warmest October nights on record at the time during a...

At least 13 people are dead and tens of thousands displaced after floods hit northern Italy, upending production in agriculture-rich areas and prompting the countrys prime minister to cut short her trip to Japan for the Group of Seven summit. Frankly, I cant stay so far away from...

In the rush to paint the activists of Just Stop Oil as vandals complete with four photographs the May 12 editorial, This is not a protest , missed the point of the movement and the message. As the great American historian Howard Zinn said almost 50 years ago, from time to time...

An earlier version of this article incorrectly said that a federal court is reviewing a youth lawsuit against Montana. It is being considered in a state court. The article has been corrected. Montana is the land of big skies, glaciers and fly-fishing where natural beauty is so i...

Nine years ago, a team of scientists studying a violet-blue, thumb-sized butterfly found only two remaining in a rolling landscape of dunes along southern Lake Michigan. The pair, the last two Karner blue butterflies ever seen in the area, had emerged two years after an unusually...

Nobody should have been surprised when Californias Pajaro River burst through a levee this spring, flooding homes and dislocating thousands of people. Warnings that the levee system was inadequate date back decades. Californias recent drought, the worst in 1,200 years, dried out ...

An all-too-familiar scene is playing out in western Canada this week: forests in flames amid extreme heat while hazardous smoke engulfs cities downwind of the fires. Over the last several years, similar scenes have unfolded across the globe, including in Australia, California, th...

Water loss in large lakes around the world was more widespread during the past three decades than previously thought, according to a study of nearly 2,000 such lakes published in the journal Science on Thursday. A warming climate and human water consumption drove at least half of...

A wave of companies has announced new investments in renewable energy, electric vehicles and other sustainable initiatives to slow the effects of climate change. Join Washington Post Live for conversations with Ryan Panchadsaram, technical adviser at Kleiner Perkins, Mekala Krish...

For a long time, people have mistakenly thought of global warming as a sort of zero-sum game with obvious winners and losers. Places with fairly cool climates will remain comfortable, the thinking went, while the rest of the planet cooks. A third Pacific Northwest heat wave in as...

(The Day After Tomorrow, Twentieth Century Fox) (Snowpiercer, Moho Film) (Don't Look Up, Hyperobject Industries) Heres how Hollywood has been treating climate change: A series of disastrous storms tip the world into an apocalyptic ice age. The Day After Tomorrow (2004) Apocalypse...

Arresting climate change requires, among other things, the widespread adoption of electric vehicles. But managing the transition from gas-powered cars wont be easy. President Joe Bidens administration has proposed new rules to sharply limit tailpipe emissions, with the aim of com...

In just the past week, the coast of Myanmar has been hit by the equal-strongest cyclone ever seen in the northern Indian Ocean. A record heatwave spread across Southeast Asia, while the mercury in Beijing and Portland, Oregon, rose to the mid-30s Celsius (mid-90s Fahrenheit). Wit...

The World Meteorological Organization virtually guarantees that one of the next five years will be the warmest on record, announcing Wednesday that a developing El Nino pattern will overlap with worsening human-caused climate change to push Earths temperatures into uncharted terr...

Venture into my backyard and youll see a kale patch, a riotous row of Cascadia snap peas and some straggly tomatoes that, except for one banner August, succumb each year to San Franciscos foggy summers. My vegetable patch is a produce factory. Every week, I can pick a hearty sala...

BAO LOC, Vietnam For decades, the world of coffee has had one star: the arabica bean. It is complex and deliciously refined, according to companies such as Starbucks that have refused to use any other bean. It has engendered obsession among java aficionados. But climate change, ...

Just as the machine-smashing Luddites of the 19th century were wrong about the consequences of technical progress for jobs, so may be the champions of the more recent theory of degrowth. Sold as our best chance against global warming, it threatens to trap 80% of the worlds popula...

Some enjoyable warmth today for moms happy with it being slightly above-average? I think dry, comfortable dew points in the 40s have helped sell the warmth without many (if any) complaints. Few, if any, weather worries through Monday. Listen to our daily D.C. forecasts: Apple Po...

When extreme weather rolls through an area, a power outage may be on its heels. And some U.S. communities are at particular risk from power grid failures, research suggests especially as human-caused climate change progresses. The research , published in April in Nature Communic...

Simba is in trouble. African lions, those icons of the savannah, have vanished from 94% of their historical range. With fewer than 25,000 remaining in the wild, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature lists them as vulnerable to extinction. Their problems are many ...

Large parts of the Pacific Northwest from Oregon and Washington to British Columbia are bracing for unusually high temperatures this weekend. Some areas could see daily averages up to 30 degrees above normal, which could pose health problems to people who have not had a chance to...

Paper is the environmentally superior alternative to plastic. Except, what if its not? In a series of recent studies, researchers presented hundreds of shoppers with two granola bars, and asked which is more environmentally friendly: the one in a plastic wrapper enclosed in an ad...

Olive oil lovers might have to start pouring less of the golden fruity liquid into the pan. A prolonged dry spell in Spain, the worlds biggest olive oil producer, has parched olive groves and scorched blooms, slashing this seasons harvest. The effects of the drought are reverbera...

The Environmental Protection Agency on Thursday announced a proposal for the tightest limits ever on power plants planet-warming pollution, a policy it must enact to meet President Bidens pledge to halve U.S. emissions by 2030 compared with 2005 levels. The move, which builds on ...

Winegrowers are adapting to climate change in many ways. Some consider abandoning traditional grape varieties long associated with their regions for vines that may be better suited to earlier and more variable growing seasons. Others look up to more northerly latitudes or higher...

Ditching fossil fuels to minimize climate disruption wont be cheap or easy. But with every billion-dollar disaster, were reminded that failing to do so will be increasingly expensive, and deadly. Already this year the US has suffered seven natural disasters costing $1 billion or ...

The potential for a historic heat wave is building in much of western Canada and parts of the United States, a region that has been dealing with early, major wildfires enhanced by an ongoing drought. Its set to reach its peak Friday through early next week. The system is starting...

Even if you hate the beach, live inland and arent bothered by dwindling fish, the latest spike in ocean temperature matters to you. The ocean is like a huge closet where weve been able to store 90% of the excess heat trapped by greenhouse gases. That closet is now stuffed. The la...

Since the Climate Coach column launched in January, youve asked a lot of questions on chats, podcasts and social media. This week, Ill share some answers. Ive gathered up a few of our exchanges, lightly edited for brevity and clarity, and offered some responses to your big questi...

A historic heat wave is bringing largely unprecedented temperatures to Southeast Asia, delivering a dangerous heat stress that could pose grave threats to vulnerable populations and smashing all-time records. Both Vietnam and Laos have recorded their hottest temperatures ever obs...

Scientists studying one of Greenlands largest glaciers say it is melting far faster than expected in its most vulnerable region, a worrying sign that glaciers perched in the ocean could contribute to sea level rise more quickly than currently forecast. The scientists fear the phe...

Last week, two protesters affiliated with Declare Emergency, a climate group, walked into the National Gallery of Art in Washington and made their way to Edgar Degass sculpture Little Dancer Aged Fourteen , a masterpiece that dates to 1881. They plastered their hands with red an...

An earlier version of this story misspelled the name of BlackRock executive Mark Wiedman. Just after Thanksgiving, dozens of state lawmakers packed into a hotel ballroom in downtown Washington to plan their next assault on a movement that pushes companies to confront global warmi...

HUASCARAN NATIONAL PARK, Peru The path to the Pastoruri glacier is grueling. At more than 15,000 feet above sea level, the wind is fierce and the sun unforgiving. Although the trail isnt steep, I find myself gasping for breath in the thin mountain air. The dry, bitter cold makes...

I joined The Washington Post last year, and it has been great getting to know so many of you in the Climate Coach community of people who share my climate optimism. I love to engage in spirited conversation in my email inbox, and on Thursday we brought that discussion here in rea...

Good morning and welcome to The Climate 202! Your regular author, Maxine Joselow, will be back Monday. In todays edition of information we didnt know we needed, but are so glad we do: What to do if you get attacked by bees? Run in a straight line, find an enclosed space and dont ...

When Washington Gov. Jay Inslee (D) announced this month that he would not seek a fourth term in 2024, he listed multiple accomplishments he was proud of over the past decade. But atop that list, he said, was that his state had adopted the nations best climate policies. Inslees r...

To repair the damage weve inflicted on the planet, its generally agreed that as well as reducing how much carbon we emit in the future, carbon dioxide will need to be removed from the atmosphere and stored somewhere else, permanently. The ocean is a pretty attractive destination....

As the worlds most vulnerable populations suffer from rising temperatures, global leaders will likely seek quick fixes to ease the suffering. One such technology is solar geoengineering , which uses aerosols to block the suns heat. Compared to other methods, its likely to be chea...

JEROME COUNTY, Idaho This rural, wind-swept basin carpeted with golden grass and littered with dark lava rock is the kind of spot the Biden administration sees as the future of energy in America. Close to high-voltage transmission corridors, its well-situated for installing a ma...

During the depths of Californias latest drought, much of the Golden State was brown. But hidden beneath the parched, cracked and sometimes charred earth, life was waiting to emerge. The torrents of rain that cascaded across California this winter broke records, flooded fields a...

What if climate change itself provided a lifeline to fossil fuels? Thats whats shaping up to happen in Asia this summer. The continents largest economies have been racing to install more renewable generation, with India targeting 500 gigawatts of renewables by 2030 and China like...

Scientists, companies and governments worldwide are racing to find innovative solutions to limit carbon emissions. Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.), co-chair of the Climate Solutions Caucus, Evelyn Wang, director at the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E), and leading cons...

An earlier version of this story included an incorrect figure for the estimated costs of a proposed climate risk disclosure rule for insurance companies. The Federal Insurance Office estimates the rule would cost an additional $1.1 million to $4 million for the industry, not for ...

Earth is under an El Nino watch as scientists eye signs that the climate pattern is developing. Its arrival could mean significant impacts worldwide, including a push toward levels of global warming that climate scientists have warned could be devastating. Since March, a rapid in...

Sally Quinn is an author and journalist who has written extensively for The Post. Last November, soon after his mothers death, the new King Charles III was scheduled to attend COP27, the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, to deliver a major address. The Egy...

PORT ARTHUR, Tex. A half-hours drive from where the modern oil and gas industry was born, a new power plant provides a glimpse into one possible future for fossil fuels. In this Texas region called the Golden Triangle named for the riches produced a century ago from the first m...

Regarding Peggy ODonnell Heffingtons April 23 op-ed, Want a baby boom? Fight climate change. : The last thing the world needs now is a baby boom. Had the world population been constant since 1970, rather than approximately doubling as it has done, assuming the same growth of per...

In Europe, nothing screams climate crisis like an extreme heat alert in the spring. Temperatures in the southern tip of Spain reached 38.7C on Thursday, provisionally breaking the record for the hottest day ever set in April. As a point of comparison, the average temperature in t...

A rapid surge in global ocean temperatures in recent months is raising the specter of a climate pattern shift that could accelerate planetary warming and supercharge trends that already are fueling extreme storms, deadly heat waves, and ecological crises on land and sea. On the h...

After being exiled from Iceland for manslaughter, a Viking known as Erik the Red headed west in search of a new home. The bearded, red-haired explorer ventured 180 miles away, arriving on land that was not yet part of any European settlement. He spotted a green meadow and named t...

East Africas worst drought in at least 40 years, which has displaced more than a million people and pushed millions more to the brink of famine , would not have happened if not for human-caused climate change, a network of extreme-weather scientists said Thursday. Rising global t...

Theres a famous 2016 cartoon by Matt Bors, which has since become a meme, in which a medieval peasant says, We should improve society somewhat. A smug man, trying to catch the peasant in hypocrisy, responds, Yet you participate in society! Curious! When it comes to climate change...

When you visit wineries this year, take a look around the vineyards. If you see a tractor going through the vine rows, listen closely. You may not hear the chug-chug of a diesel engine, but instead the quiet whir of an electric motor. The electric vehicle revolution has reached t...

By the end of the century, Alabama cherry trees might find themselves unwelcome in Montgomery, replaced by blue jacarandas, now native to Latin America. In Washington, D.C., cabbage palmettos the state tree of Florida and South Carolina could thrive, while Fraser firs popular ...

A new study identifies regions that are underprepared and most at risk from sweltering heat, highlighting the need to prepare for extreme temperatures around the world. Led by researchers at the University of Bristol , the study found that unprecedented heat, coupled with growing...

When Jenn Duff heard that Meta , the parent company of Facebook, wanted to build yet another data center in Mesa, Ariz., she was immediately suspicious. My first reaction was concern for our water, Duff said. The desert city of half a million residents was already home to large d...

Good morning and welcome to The Climate 202! We hope you had a great Earth Day on Saturday. (The rain in D.C. unfortunately kept us from going for a hike.) Reading this online? Sign up for The Climate 202 to get scoops and sharp analysis in your inbox each morning. Below, well c...

The good news is that after nearly half a century, 1.1C of global heating and countless natural disasters, people for the most part finally accept the basic science of human-caused climate change. The bad news is that they still dont seem willing to do very much about it. A new s...

When you think of dangerous animals, the ones that typically spring to mind have teeth or claws. But what about wings and a proboscis? In many countries, mosquitoes are nothing more than a nuisance. But in others, they spread tropical diseases that kill at least 700,000 people a ...

Four environmental activists in Vietnam are in prison for tax evasion. But that is not the real reason. They were close associates working on a campaign to reduce Vietnams reliance on coal, and they were trying to build a civil society movement. Three of them had created nongover...

A Harvard scholar who sits on the board of ConocoPhillips the company spearheading the contentious Willow oil drilling project in northern Alaska has become the flash point of a debate on the merits of environmentalists trying to change corporations from the inside. Jody Freema...

The Biden administration is preparing to unveil a proposal to require power plants to drastically reduce their greenhouse-gas emissions by 2040, another attempt to regulate one of the countrys biggest contributors to climate change after the Supreme Court struck down the first ef...

In a first-ever finding that could increase protections for remaining U.S. forests, the federal government estimated Thursday that more than 100 million acres of old-growth and mature timberlands are still standing on public lands, despite decades of commercial logging, wildfires...

President Biden on Thursday announced new plans to fight climate change, including pledging $500 million to help Brazils efforts to end deforestation of the Amazon rainforest, and he called on other countries to step up our ambitions to stave off devastating global warming. In a ...

Warm day at the baseball park? Your chances of seeing a home run are slightly higher. As soon as it gets warm, the ball carries a lot better, Washington Nationals manager Dave Martinez told The Post. I usually tell everybody, right about the middle of May, the balls will start fl...

Physicians, nurses and other front-line providers know firsthand the health impacts of climate change. Air pollution exacerbates asthma and emphysema ; extreme heat worsens heart and kidney conditions; and rising temperatures increase the occurrence of a wide range of illnesses, ...

The link between warming global temperatures and extreme weather is clearest with unprecedented heat waves and extraordinary amounts of precipitation . While its harder to identify the relationship between climate change and tornado outbreaks such as the ones that killed more th...

When Sean Youra was 26 years old and working as an engineer, he started watching documentaries about climate change. Youra, who was struggling with depression and the loss of a family member, was horrified by what he learned about melting ice and rising extreme weather . He start...

I dearly hope to have children of my own some day. What they do with their time on Earth is theirs to choose, but the type of world theyll inhabit will be determined by me and all of us now while theyre still a figment of my imagination. Its a simple concept, but that doesnt ke...

Our children will never experience a childhood as cool as ours. And our childhood wasnt that cool. Thats one of the stark realities underlined by the latest report from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Within that new report, a key graphic show...

If we take bold, coordinated, global action now in this decade we can limit climate change to a tolerable level. But if we stay on our present course, then heaven help us all . That is the stark message of a new report , taking stock of the latest research, from the United Nati...

The world is likely to pass a dangerous temperature threshold within the next 10 years, pushing the planet past the point of catastrophic warming unless nations drastically transform their economies and immediately transition away from fossil fuels, according to one of the most ...

Rebecca Solnit, a writer and historian, is the author of more than 20 books and co-editor of the anthology Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story From Despair to Possibility, publishing in April . A monastic once told me renunciation can be great if it means giving up things th...

A previous version of this article misstated the amount of carbon dioxide U.S. geothermal plants could capture. It is 12.8 million tons, not 12.8 billion tons. The article has been corrected. Sucking carbon dioxide out of the sky or direct air capture , as it is known by expert...

Global warming will reshape the economies of American cities, and at the top of the list of metro areas that will be worst hit is San Francisco, according to a report by Moodys Analytics released Thursday. The economic research firm looked at the way climate-change-driven challen...

Both heat and cold can kill. But cold is far more deadly. For every death linked to heat, nine are tied to cold. The scientific paper published in the June 2021 issue of the journal Nature Climate Change was alarming. Between 1991 and 2018, the peer-reviewed study reported, more...

LONDON The devastating effects of climate change on Earth could become so overwhelming that they undermine humanitys capacity to tackle climate changes root causes, researchers warned Wednesday. They are calling it a doom loop. The self-reinforcing dynamic, outlined in a report ...

As temperatures rise, many tropical species once confined to the warmest parts of the globe are expected to climb to higher altitudes and creep farther from the equator. That already may be happening with mosquitoes carrying malaria, one of the worlds most devastating diseases an...

with research by Vanessa Montalbano Good morning and welcome to The Climate 202! We hope you had a great Valentines Day yesterday, whether or not your boo bought you emissions-intensive flowers . Reading this online? Sign up for The Climate 202 to get scoops and sharp analysis i...

Shes from Florida. Hes from Michigan. Hes vigilant about recycling and turning off the lights. Shes not as consistent. She accepts climate change is caused by humans. He doesnt. They have been married for nearly 15 years. Id say that we have very different political views, said M...

Almost 10 years ago, a solo researcher published a jaw-dropping statistic that changed how many people thought about climate change. Just 90 large companies, he determined , released almost two-thirds of all greenhouse gas emissions between 1751 and 2010. (Big players like Chevro...

No one knows for sure what happened to the ancient Hittite Empire. For nearly 500 years, its dominion extended across much of modern Turkey and into Syria and Lebanon. Its kings dwelled in massive stone palaces inside a gated capital city . Large-scale farming, sophisticated irri...

Imagine a world where global warming on Earth has meaningfully diminished. Fossil fuels are on the back burner. Affordable renewable energy sources run most of our activities. Oh, and theres a cannon on the moon shooting lunar dust into space to help partially shield sunlight to ...

This is a story about a curious seal, a wayward robot and a gigantic climate change disaster that may be waiting to happen. Scientists tagged a southern elephant seal on the island of Kerguelen, an extraordinarily remote spot in the far southern Indian Ocean, in 2011. The seal wa...

Mounting delays threaten to undercut President Bidens climate agenda, worrying activists and lawmakers who say the president might miss a narrow window to make vital progress on the nations ambitious goals. The delays, which affect everything from the vehicles Americans drive to ...

Some of the worlds largest central banks are joining the fight against climate change. Though melting glaciers may be a huge leap from monetary policy, policy makers say they must respond to threats that have the potential to disrupt the global economy. Some critics say climate p...

In recent weeks, a slew of storms has slammed California, bringing torrential rains and deadly flooding. Storms are typical in the winter, including those associated with atmospheric rivers, or long and wide plumes of water vapor flowing from the tropics. But as Earth warms, clim...

In the not-so-distant past, scientists predicted that global temperatures would surge dramatically throughout this century, assuming that humans would rely heavily on fossil fuels for decades. But they are revising their forecasts as they track both signs of progress and unexpect...

UMOJA, Kenya Pilot Lenaigwanai covers her mouth as she speaks. She is trying to hide her broken tooth, a bitter reminder of all she endured before finding refuge at a shelter for abuse survivors in northern Kenya . The mother of three arrived here in July after being forced from...

TENNANT CREEK, Australia In a forgotten restaurant behind a gas station in this countrys red center, only metal and plastic parts remain unscathed. Chris Cook grabs at a timber door frame, which crumples like paper in his hand. This has all just collapsed, says Cook, a manager a...

The data is clear: Rising global temperatures mean winters are getting milder, on average, and the sort of record-setting cold that spanned the country Friday is becoming rarer. But at the same time, global warming may be altering atmospheric patterns and pushing harsh outbreaks ...

For over a decade, the largest scientific uncertainty about how the planet will respond to warming temperatures hasnt come from how much carbon dioxide will be soaked up by the ocean or absorbed by the trees. Its come, instead, from clouds. The fluffy, whimsical collections of wa...

Jane Fonda is back. The actress and activist, who will turn 85 in a few weeks, arrives at an upscale Washington hotel looking chic in a snappy charcoal blazer, a gray newsboys cap and an array of tasteful gold jewelry pieces. Shes just come from Capitol Hill, where shes been lobb...

When Meera Sanghani-Jorgensen was in her 30s, she and her husband began to discuss having children. They both wanted to have kids, but Sanghani-Jorgensen couldnt shake the feeling that, by giving birth, she might be doing something bad for the earth. I wanted to have a child, but...

clarification After this article was published, researchers with the Potsdam Institute revised the challenging threshold for methane emissions reductions by 2050, from 54 percent to 48 percent. The new threshold is now reflected in the article and the final chart shows six "reas...

MUDDUSJARVI, Finland Pauliina Feodoroff walks through one of the worlds last ancient forests, with lingonberries, wild mushrooms and reindeer droppings crunching gently beneath her dirt-caked boots. But her stride falters as she enters a clearing littered with tree stumps, limb...

This article is the first installment of the new Hidden Planet column, which explores wondrous, unexpected and sometimes funny science of our planet and beyond. Dating and mating have never been hotter and thats not always a good thing. Take the male dragonfly, which tries to im...

SHARM EL-SHEIKH, Egypt The final decision of the U.N. Climate Change Conference on Sunday yielded a breakthrough in addressing the hazards already ravaging the planet but made little progress on emissions-cutting measures that could avert even worse disasters to come. It was a d...

The womens World Cup Alpine ski season begins this weekend in Levi, Finland, where Mikaela Shiffrin, Petra Vlhova and an international field of stars will run two slalom races in temperatures that, finally and mercifully, will peak in the teens. This event comes five weeks after ...

SHARM EL-SHEIKH, Egypt The European Unions top climate negotiator on Friday pitched a plan to tie disaster funding to emissions reductions as a final offer to avoid failure in the dwindling hours of the worlds annual climate summit. The new proposal at the U.N. Climate Change Co...

Devastating floods this summer and fall displaced 1.5 million Nigerians and killed 612. In all of West Africa, more than 800 people died. Researchers have determined that human-caused climate change made the excessive rainfall behind the flooding 80 times more probable, according...

SHARM EL-SHEIKH, Egypt Nations will likely burn through their remaining carbon budget in less than a decade if they do not significantly reduce greenhouse gas pollution, a new study shows , causing the world to blow past a critical warming threshold and triggering catastrophic c...

Last years United Nations climate conference in Glasgow , Scotland, had the same optimistic energy as the first day of a new school year. The United States a truant since the nation withdrew from the Paris agreement under President Donald Trump was back at the table. The cool k...

Climate change is unleashing far-reaching and worsening calamities in every region of the United States, and the economic and human toll will only increase unless humans move faster to slow the planets warming, according to a sprawling new federal report released Monday. The thin...

GIZA, Egypt In her crowded neighborhood on the west bank of the Nile River, her friends call her the mother of children. At 32, Rana Ragab already has five kids and just found out she is pregnant with her sixth. She and her husband, a butcher, are thrilled. He keeps telling eve...

PENNINGTON, N.J. There was one minute left on Suzanne Horsleys stopwatch and the atmosphere remained thick with carbon dioxide, despite the efforts of her third graders to clear the air. Horsley, a wellness teacher at Toll Gate Grammar School, in Pennington, N.J., had directed t...

Last fall, at a high-profile global climate summit in Scotland, the countries of the world embraced what seemed like a significant commitment in the quest to combat climate change. Acknowledging that progress had been too slow, leaders agreed to revisit and strengthen their nat...

Sundays victory by Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva in Brazils presidential election represents the latest in a year of unexpected developments that are leading to better international prospects to combat climate change, reducing the odds that global warming will exceed the worst foreca...

Youre reading an excerpt from the Todays WorldView newsletter. Sign up to get the rest free , including news from around the globe and interesting ideas and opinions to know, sent to your inbox every weekday. The climate news is as grim as ever. Despite the stated ambitions of th...

Despite a high-profile promise to boost ambitions at last years U.N. climate summit, nations have shaved just 1 percent off their projected greenhouse gas emissions for 2030, a new United Nations report found leaving Earth on track to blow past a safe temperature threshold by al...

The amount of methane in the atmosphere is racing ahead at an accelerating pace, according to a study by the World Meteorological Organization, threatening to undermine efforts to slow climate change. The WMOs Greenhouse Gas Bulletin said that global emissions have rebounded sinc...

It is the only animal that dares to breed during the Antarctic winter. It endures gale-force winds and freezing temperatures to lay and protect a single egg. Now climate change threatens Antarcticas emperor penguin with extinction, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service declared Tues...

The worlds oceans have been warming for generations, a trend that is accelerating and threatens to fuel more supercharged storms, devastate marine ecosystems and upend the lives and livelihoods of millions of people, according to a new scientific analysis. Published this week in ...

with research by Vanessa Montalbano Good morning and welcome to The Climate 202! Today we're wishing a happy 50th anniversary to the Clean Water Act , which Congress passed on this day in 1972. In other news, we're thrilled that Tim Puko is joining The Washington Post as a clima...

When it rains, it pours. A paper published Tuesday in the journal Geophysical Research Letters finds that its raining harder in most of the United States. The study, written by researchers at Northwestern University, tied the results to climate change and to warmer airs ability t...

with research by Vanessa Montalbano Good morning and welcome to The Climate 202! On this Indigenous Peoples' Day , we're rereading this piece about what Indigenous people can teach us about fighting climate change. ICYMI, President Biden will travel to Colorado this week to desig...

A statement in this article from Amanda Korstjens, a professor of behavioral ecology at Bournemouth University in the United Kingdom, was incorrectly attributed to Andrew Bernard, a doctoral candidate in anthropology at the University of Michigan. It has been updated. The stresse...

The typical nuclear bro is lurking in the comments section of a clean energy YouTube video, wondering why the creator didnt mention #nuclear. He is marching in Central California to oppose the closing of the states Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant. His Twitter name includes an e...

As Hurricane Ian barreled toward Florida this week, it did what six other storms did over the past six years as they approached the United States: It intensified, quickly. A few factors help account for the shift, including the warming waters fueled by climate change that give ...

Denmark will direct about $13 million to assist vulnerable countries that have suffered loss and damage from climate change the first time in U.N. history a wealthy member state has pledged compensation for the consequences of emissions in the developing world. The landmark an...

Although a majority of Americans say they are concerned about climate change , it appears many arent really talking to their close friends and family about it. According to a 2022 survey conducted by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, 64 percent of Americans report...

clock A previous version of this article incorrectly included a Chinese earthquake among the disasters influenced by climate change. The section has been removed. This summer has been dominated by extreme weather and natural disasters across the globe. There are wildfires in Cal...

clock For decades, environmentalists have made their mark by stopping things. Petroleum facilities that spew toxic air pollution . Pipelines that cut across Indigenous lands . Drilling for oil and gas. But climate change is about to change everything. To cut U.S. greenhouse gas ...

clock The economic toll of deadly heat waves, crop-killing droughts and rising seas that each additional ton of carbon dioxide levies on society is much higher than the U.S. government tallies when considering new regulations, according to a new analysis published Thursday. A so...

clock The National Association of Evangelicals has unveiled a sweeping report on global climate change, laying out what its authors call the biblical basis for environmental activism to help spur fellow evangelicals to address the planetary crisis. Creation, although groaning un...

clock Since mid-June, torrential rain has changed the landscape of Pakistan, submerging villages and fields, destroying homes and killing at least 1,000 people. But if the human toll is catastrophic, the financial toll is almost unimaginable: According to Pakistans finance minis...

clock Climate change is wreaking havoc across Africa. Increasingly severe droughts are striking the Sahel; East African glaciers are melting ; Cyclone Idai in 2019 and deadly floods in KwaZulu Natal have devastated southern Africa. Next week in Gabon, Africa Climate Week (ACW 20...

clock Five weeks. Five instances of 1,000-year rain events. If it seems like the weather across the Lower 48 as of late has been bonkers, youre not imagining things. Its been a maelstrom of weather extremes, a seesaw fluctuating wildly from significantly dry to record wet condit...

clock The plight of the bumblebee has been well documented. In recent years, researchers and advocates have reported worrying population declines across North America and Europe as climate change menaces the fuzzy insects. But scientists have been limited in their ability to pin...

clock Tax breaks for electric vehicles. Huge incentives to ramp up carbon-capture facilities, urge green hydrogen production and boost U.S. manufacturing of solar panels, wind turbines and next-generation batteries. The landmark Inflation Reduction Act that passed Friday include...

clock For residents of the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard, the United States recent success in clinching a major piece of climate change legislation may feel like too little, too late. Over the past 40 years, as the worlds largest historical emitter of greenhouses gases repea...

clock As temperatures rapidly rise, some lizards are giving birth to young that are already old. In central France, temperatures are accelerating so quickly that many lizards enter the world with DNA thats already damaged and aged, according to new research published Monday, dim...

clock In recent years, hardly a day has gone by during the summer season without warnings of record-breaking heat, wildfire smoke, flash floods and disasters, or fast-escalating hurricanes. Air quality has declined, traditions have been suspended, and what has historically been ...

clock The higher temperatures observed today across the world, implicated in everything from extreme heat to drought and worsening wildfires, are the result of many decades of rising greenhouse gas emissions that trap heat and warm the globe. And there are many more emissions to...

clock A week after taking office, President Biden signed a sweeping executive order that established a new federal office focused on addressing the health consequences of climate change, which disproportionately affects poor communities and communities of color. The administrati...

clock Illegal ivory poaching once posed a significant threat to Kenyas elephants. But now the giants of the animal kingdom are facing an even bigger risk: climate change. As Kenya battles its worst drought in four decades, the crisis is killing 20 times more elephants than poach...

clock As people across four continents were vividly reminded this week, the world is facing a climate crisis. A blistering heat wave in Europe forced thousands in Spain and France to flee dramatic wildfires, while Britain recorded its hottest day since at least the 1850s on Tues...

clock Good morning! Climate 202 researcher Vanessa Montalbano is back again writing todays newsletter. What we're watching: A package of six spending bills that passed 220-207 in the House on Wednesday. The funding targets issues such as decarbonization of the power grid and cl...

clock You wanna take mine or yours? That was the question posed by Kylie Jenner, the 24-year-old millionaire businesswoman, on her Instagram accompanying a photo of two private jets: one for the reality TV star and one apparently for her partner, rapper Travis Scott. The backla...

clock As summer temperatures spiked in Oklahoma heading toward at least 110 degrees Fahrenheit on Tuesday the city of Tulsa pondered what to do about its 36-hole municipal golf course. Should it replace the fescue turf with Bermuda grass thats resistant to heat and drought? Th...

clock SYDNEY Australias unique wildlife is increasingly under threat from wildfires, drought and climate change , according to a much-anticipated expert report described as shocking by the countrys new environment minister. The worlds driest inhabited continent has already lost...

clock Historical U.S. greenhouse gas emissions Billion tons CO2e 6 Projected 4 U.S. emissions dropped because of the pandemic. President Bidens pledge 2 0 1990 2020 2030 Note: Chart shows the center of a range of projected emissions under current U.S. policies Source: U.N. Frame...

clock Good morning! Climate 202 researcher Vanessa Montalbano is taking over today while Maxine is on vacation this week. : In today's edition , we have an exclusive about a bipartisan group of former Environmental Protection Agency administrators who are pushing the Senate to q...

clock The trees had stood for more than 1,000 years. Their sturdy roots clung to the crumbling mountainside. Their gnarled limbs reached toward the desert sky. The rings of their trunks told the story of everything theyd witnessed every attack theyd rebuffed, every crisis theyd...

clock Big fish sightings appear to have spiked around the world: In the last year-and-a-half, there have been reports of a 661-pound, record-breaking stingray in Cambodia , a 240-pound lake sturgeon outside Detroit and a 100-pound opah fish on the Oregon coast. As these fish sho...

clock The Supreme Court on Thursday sharply cut back the Environmental Protection Agencys ability to reduce the carbon output of existing power plants, a blow to the Biden administrations plans for combating climate change. The ruling infuriated President Biden and environmental...

clock with research by Vanessa Montalbano Good morning and welcome to The Climate 202! Today at 10 a.m. Eastern, the Supreme Court could rule in West Virginia v. EPA , a challenge to the Environmental Protection Agency 's authority to cut carbon emissions from power plants. We'...

Overnight low temperature Difference from 1991-2020 average Cooler Warmer Friday June 17 Thursday June 16 Wednesday June 15 Tuesday June 14 Monday June 13 Sunday June 12 Saturday June 18 Last week, 96 percent of people in the contiguous United States experienced nighttime tempera...

clock Rhiana Gunn-Wright, 32, is one of the architects of the Green New Deal and the director of climate policy at the Roosevelt Institute, a New York-based think tank. She lives in Chicago with her husband and son. Its probably best for us to begin with definitions of climate j...

clock with research by Vanessa Montalbano A previous version of this newsletter incorrectly said that Brazil was not a member of the Global Methane Pledge. The article has been corrected. Good morning and welcome to The Climate 202! Today we're wondering what kind of pizza senat...

clock LISMORE, Australia The parade had been held for a hundred years, but never like this. It was two months since this river town of 30,000 had been swallowed by an unprecedented flood. Two-story buildings had disappeared underwater. Cars and airplanes had been tossed around ...

clock ALLIGATOR RIVER NATIONAL WILDLIFE REFUGE, N.C. As the first light of day flickers across the Croatan Sound, Scott Lanier surveys the gray, barren tree trunks that stand in every direction, like massive gravestones marking the once-vibrant landscape. The forest is just ret...

clock Shifting climate conditions can put humans, animals and even plants on the move. Take trees: As the climate warms, familiar trees such as the yellow poplar are expected to expand northward in search of cooler temperatures. Some of those changes occur without prompting. But...

clock Not since an asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs along with at least half of all other beings on Earth has life in the ocean been so at risk. Warming waters are cooking creatures in their own habitats. Many species are slowly suffocating as oxygen leaches out of the seas. E...

clock Rising energy prices and mounting inflation have triggered a crisis of short-termism in some Western capitals. Fears over economic contraction have compelled Germany, Europes biggest economy, to toe an awkward line on weaning itself off Russian oil and gas. In a panic over...

clock Twitter is banning advertisements that promote climate change denial in an effort to curb the reach of groups seeking to downplay the extent of the environmental crisis. Under the new policy, advertisements that contradict the scientific consensus on climate change will be...

clock At The Washington Post, were dedicated to covering the impacts of climate change and a warming world both in the United States and around the world. Were dedicated to covering solutions , too. But we dont believe in shying away from the extent of the problem and the impac...

clock Its still possible for humanity to avoid the most catastrophic consequences of climate change, a group of the worlds top energy experts, economists and social scientists said Monday but only if societies take immediate, drastic action to put the planet on a safer path. Th...

clock The world is on track to blaze past a crucial climate target within eight years, some of the planets top researchers, economists and social scientists said in a sober assessment Monday. 1 / 4 Whether humanity can change course after decades of inaction is largely a questio...

clock When Hurricane Michael hit the Florida Panhandle in October 2018, Becky Nixons home in Panama City was damaged by limbs falling from the old oak and pine trees that once surrounded her triple-wide trailer. Everywhere the trees fell, they left holes in the roof, Nixon says....

clock When Miyuki Hino bought a house in Chapel Hill, N.C., in 2020, she checked an online map that showed the damage caused by Hurricane Matthew in 2016 to evaluate the neighborhood. We wanted to know our flood risk before buying, although were aware that every storm is differe...

clock The head of the United Nations on Monday warned that the world is sleepwalking to climate catastrophe, as the ongoing pandemic, the war in Ukraine and a lack of political willpower undermine humanitys efforts to slow the warming of the planet. There is no kind way to put i...

clock The Securities and Exchange Commission on Monday approved a landmark proposal to require all publicly traded companies to disclose their greenhouse gas emissions and the risks they face from climate change . The proposed rule from the Wall Street regulator mandates that hu...

clock As the war in Ukraine has raised oil prices and launched Western leaders on a global hunt for new sources of energy, environmentalists have tried to leverage the chaos in energy markets to move the United States off fossil fuels. But theres a problem: Despite major advance...

clock The coldest location on the planet has experienced an episode of warm weather this week unlike any ever observed, with temperatures over the eastern Antarctic ice sheet soaring 50 to 90 degrees above normal. The warmth has smashed records and shocked scientists. This event...

clock Hydrogen, the lightest and most abundant gas in the universe, is increasingly being used as a fuel. The gas releases relatively few planet-warming emissions as a fuel source, and proponents say it could be key in the fight to curb climate change. Yet others warn that using...

clock The latest report from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is a warning letter to a world on the brink. A sweeping survey of the most advanced climate science on the planet, it recounts the effects rising temperatures are already having and project...

Our world is undergoing a radical transformation. This is the unmistakable message of the latest report on Monday from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Unchecked greenhouse gas emissions, mostly from burning fossil fuels, are warming the planet...

clock In the hotter and more hellish world humans are creating, parts of the planet could become unbearable in the not-so-distant future, a panel of the worlds foremost scientists warned Monday in an exhaustive report on the escalating toll of climate change. Unchecked greenhous...

clock The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy will hold a first-of-its-kind roundtable with some of the nations leading scientists on Thursday to discuss the urgent need to combat the climate crisis and to counter arguments for delaying climate action. The event,...

clock Heres the thing: Small changes alone wont save our planet. To keep the Earth from warming above the critical 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) limit, climate action needs to happen at an institutional level. The Washington Post has built a tracker to keep you up t...

clock A recent court ruling that bars the Biden administration from accounting for the real-world costs of climate change has created temporary chaos at federal agencies, upending everything from planned oil and gas lease sales to infrastructure spending. The Feb. 11 decision by...

clock OBERWOLZ, Austria At the Lachtal ski resort, high in the eastern Alps of Austria, skiers immediately pull out their phones after sliding off the chairlift not to take selfies, but rather to snap pictures of the windmills that have become part of the mountainous vista. Wh...

clock Back in 2008, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and former speaker Newt Gingrich recorded a television ad in which they acknowledged their bitter political differences, but made a shared commitment on one critical issue. We do agree, said Gingrich, our country must tak...

clock The U.S. Army released its first climate strategy this week, an effort to brace the service for a world beset by global-warming-driven conflicts. The plan aims to slash the Armys emissions in half by 2030; electrify all noncombat vehicles by 2035 and develop electric comba...

clock Some of the worlds best-known corporations have clamored to show how seriously they are taking climate change, with an increasing number pledging to eliminate their carbon footprints in the decades ahead. But many of those firms are not yet doing nearly enough to back up t...

clock How would you describe the scent of winter? Unlike spring, summer and fall, which have strongly defined aromas (flowers in bloom, beaches, decaying leaves), the current season is marked by the scent of nothing. Nothings growing. Nothings dying. Its a kind of olfactory paus...

clock A growing constellation of methane-detecting satellites is giving researchers new and disturbing insights into super emitters around the globe from pipelines in Russia to North Americas oil fields. But as the reams of data reveal the depth of the problem, they also have m...

clock Saturdays tremendous coastal storm pushed a band of heavy snow into southern New England, burying cities under a snowpack up to two feet deep. These near-record snowfall totals continue an astonishing run of historic storms to impact the Northeast in recent years, probably...

clock Climate change will cause the nations flooding losses to jump more than 26 percent over the next three decades, with disadvantaged communities shouldering an outsize share of the economic burden, a study published Monday predicted. Researchers at the University of Bristol ...

clock New research raises the uncomfortable possibility that climate change will not only make weather more severe but also harder to predict, potentially giving us less time to prepare for extreme floods, storms and heat waves in the years to come. While scientists have long wo...

clock The House Committee on Oversight and Reform has broadened its investigation into the role of fossil fuel companies in misleading the public about climate change, asking members of the boards of directors of ExxonMobil, BP, Chevron and Shell Oil to testify before Congress n...

clock with research by Alexandra Ellerbeck Good morning and welcome to The Climate 202! Sarah Bloom Raskin was nominated as the Federal Reserve 's top banking cop last night, The Washington Post's Rachel Siegel scooped . More on that below. But first: The Biden administration h...

clock The warmth of the worlds oceans hit a record. Again. A new analysis, published Tuesday in the journal Advances in Atmospheric Sciences , showed that oceans contained the most heat energy in 2021 since measurements began six decades ago accelerating at a rate only possible...

clock Why dont Americans care about climate change? Thats the question behind the star-studded political satire Dont Look Up . Rather than directly address the climate crisis, the movie uses an analogous disaster: a world-destroying comet. The action begins when two astronomers...

clock If you grab your fishing pole and head to a river in Montanas Rocky Mountains, you may easily make a catch. But thanks to human-caused climate change, that fish is more likely to be a nonnative species. A study in Science Advances shows that Montanas changing climate is ca...

clock 2021 ended as it began: with disaster. Twelve months after an atmospheric river deluged California, triggering mudslides in burned landscapes and leaving a half-million people without power, a late-season wildfire destroyed hundreds of homes in the suburbs of Denver. In be...

clock TAOS, N.M. Mike Reynolds never worried too much as the world inched closer to doomsday. In the spring of 2020, motorists lined up in their cars outside grocery stores waiting for food as the coronavirus pandemic first wrapped its tentacles around the global supply chain. ...

clock The raging inferno that erupted in Boulder County, Colo., on Thursday afternoon became the most destructive wildfire in the states history as it burned through hundreds of homes in densely populated suburbs. The fire was fueled by an extreme set of atmospheric conditions, ...

GLASGOW, Scotland It was July 2003, and Richard Nugee, a British army officer, was baking inside the sweltering brick building that Saddam Husseins sons used as a smugglers hideout. Until a few months prior, it had been a port authority office in Saddams Iraq. Now it was Nugees ...

CIUDAD OBREGON, Mexico In the foothills of the Sierra Madre mountains, the carcasses of starving cattle rotted in a bone-dry reservoir. Useless fishing nets hung on dusty fences. Rowboats were stranded in the sand. Down on the valley floor, Rafael Parra bent to the work of feedi...

clock A few years after Independence Day premiered in theaters, Roland Emmerich faced immense pressure to write and direct a sequel. His sci-fi disaster movie was the highest-grossing film of 1996, raking in more than $300 million at the domestic box office and $800 million worl...

clock Al Roker, 67, is a producer, an entrepreneur and the weather anchor for NBCs Today show. He lives with his wife and children in New York City. No one seems to trust anyone these days, but it occurs to me that you are one of the very few people who can claim to be trusted b...

clock Scores of studies presented this week at the worlds largest climate science conference offered an unequivocal and unsettling message: Climate change is fundamentally altering what kind of weather is possible, and its fingerprint can be found in the rising number of disaste...

clock The ice shelf was cracking up. Surveys showed warm ocean water eroding its underbelly. Satellite imagery revealed long, parallel fissures in the frozen expanse, like scratches from some clawed monster. One fracture grew so big, so fast, scientists took to calling it the da...

clock Russia has vetoed the passage of a United Nations Security Council resolution that for the first time would have treated climate change as a threat to peace, even as many Western powers increasingly take climate risk into account as part of their security strategies. The r...

clock The rising sun illuminated entire cities in ruin as morning broke Saturday in western Kentucky. Piles of bricks appeared where buildings had stood. Roofs torn open revealed mangled furnishings inside. Bicycles and refrigerators dangled from trees like ornaments. The deadly...

clock When an aircraft fails, the black box is there to help explain why. With the world in trouble from climate change, a group of Australians is borrowing the same idea to show future generations the struggles of a warming planet. Jutting out of a plain in the Australian state...

clock The report reads like the basis for a science-fiction novel. In one scenario, humanity fights climate change by fertilizing the ocean, boosting the growth of tiny photosynthetic creatures that pull carbon out of the atmosphere. In another, scientists change the chemistry o...

clock with research by Alexandra Ellerbeck Good morning and welcome to The Climate 202! Please tell your friends and colleagues to sign up here . But first: U.S. climate envoy John F. Kerry is facing criticism from some climate experts for suggesting that the private sector is k...

clock A new study provides a glimpse into the future of Western U.S. snow and the picture is far from rosy: In about 35 to 60 years, mountainous states are projected to be nearly snowless for years at a time if greenhouse gas emissions continue unchecked and climate change does ...

clock Southern Madagascar is suffering its worst drought in decades, devastating crops and leaving more than a million people in need of urgent food aid. And for months, United Nations officials have warned that the African island nation is on the brink of the worlds first clima...

clock SLAUGHTER BEACH, Del. Road flooding has become more common in the 45 years that Kathy Lock has owned a home in this beach community on the Delaware Bay. A marsh rises five or six times a year to swallow one of the two routes into town the one used by school buses. These ...

Climate change has officially arrived at our Thanksgiving tables. As the past year has made even more clear, the consequences of a warming world have challenged farmers and food systems throughout the United States. Drought, blistering heat waves and raging wildfires have gripped...

clock A previous version of this article said that the new energy division of the Office of Science and Technology Policy would coordinate climate policy. The new division will help craft climate policy. The article has been corrected. The White House has launched a new energy d...

clock Just last month, ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods assured lawmakers his company neither disputed the scientific consensus on climate change nor lobbied against efforts to cut carbon pollution. But a lobbyist for the oil giant struck a different tone less than two weeks later, a...

clock Good morning! We hope you had a lovely weekend. Just a reminder that The Climate 202 will only publish three days this week because of the Thanksgiving holiday. But first: As the dust settles on the COP26 climate change conference in Glasgow, Scotland, health professionals...

clock Articles in this guide describe key features of legislation passed by the House to advance President Bidens Build Back Better agenda and overhaul social and climate policy in the United States. The bill now moves to the Senate. The budget reconciliation proposal passed by ...

clock TAMPA For months, supply chain issues and labor shortages have been putting the squeeze on Mikes Pies, a popular commercial bakery here thats been selling pies based off owner Mike Martins mothers recipes for three decades. But another powerful factor climate change is ...

clock Youre reading an excerpt from the Todays WorldView newsletter. Sign up to get the rest , including news from around the globe, interesting ideas and opinions to know, sent to your inbox every weekday. The United States and China are the two most powerful nations in the wor...

clock Many world leaders and activists expressed disappointment this weekend with the climate deal that emerged from two weeks of heated negotiations in Glasgow, Scotland warning that countries will have to strengthen their commitments if they want to avert disastrous consequen...

clock GLASGOW, Scotland Exhausted negotiators from nearly 200 nations struck a deal Saturday intended to propel the world toward more urgent climate action, but without offering the transformative breakthrough scientists say must happen if humanity is to avert disastrous planet...

This coverage is no longer live GLASGOW, Scotland Following two weeks of high-profile negotiations for urgent climate action, world leaders have come to an agreement at COP26. The deal pushes countries to strengthen near-term climate targets and move away from fossil fuels faste...

After two weeks of talks in Glasgow, diplomats from almost 200 countries have agreed to ramp up their carbon-cutting commitments, phase out some fossil fuels and increase aid to poor countries on the front lines of climate change. [ At COP26, nations speed climate action but leav...

clock Even as windstorms became more powerful, wildfires grew more deadly and rising seas made damaging floods more frequent, Americans views about the threat of global warming over the past few years remain largely unchanged, a Washington Post-ABC News poll finds . A clear majo...

This coverage is no longer live GLASGOW, Scotland The U.N. climate summit has officially blown past its Friday-evening deadline as leaders and negotiators continue to work to strike a deal that could spare the world the most dire effects of global warming. 1 / 3 Understanding ou...

clock How much warming can the world bear? That question is one of the fundamental issues in dispute at the ongoing U.N. climate change summit, known as COP26, in Glasgow, Scotland. Heres what different levels of warming would look like, and how global temperature targets have b...

clock GARSTANG, England Moor, bog, fen, mire, flush, swamp, slough. Peatlands have gotten a bum rap. Theyre inhospitable, useless. Too wet to plow, too dry to fish, the old farmers say. Scorned as anaerobic wastelands, dissed in the popular imagination, imagined as the eerie De...

clock GLASGOW, Scotland The United States and China jolted the United Nations climate summit here with a surprise announcement Wednesday, pledging the two countries would work together to slow global warming during this decade and ensure that the Glasgow talks result in meaning...

This coverage is no longer live GLASGOW, Scotland The presidents and prime ministers are gone. The protesters have largely dispersed. The pomp and promises that marked the initial days of the COP26 climate conference are giving way to the difficult task of hammering out an agree...

Malaysias latest catalogue of its greenhouse gas emissions to the United Nations reads like a report from a parallel universe. The 285-page document suggests that Malaysias trees are absorbing carbon four times faster than similar forests in neighboring Indonesia. The surprising ...

clock The seasons are strange now in Beverly Longids home of Cordillera, in the Philippines. The crops dont ripen at the usual times. The sun beats down hotter than ever before. The springs she always relied on for water have run dry. Human-caused climate change has taken so muc...

clock GLASGOW As Malawis minister of education landed in Scotland for COP26, a storm pummeled several villages in her country and damaged numerous schools she couldnt afford to lose. That was destroying schools where, as minister of education, Im struggling to provide quality ...

clock Europes hottest summer on record would have been almost impossible without human induced climate change, according to a new analysis that predicts such heat could now occur every three years. The Hadley Center at Britains weather service released the findings Wednesday as ...

clock At the Glasgow climate conference, President Biden declared climate change an existential threat to human existence as we know it. No, its not. Climate change is not a meteor hurtling toward Earth to destroy humanity. Rather, it is a chronic, manageable condition humanity ...

clock GLASGOW, Scotland For years, militaries around the world saw protecting their citizens as contradictory to protecting the environment. But the presence of top defense leaders, including NATOs secretary general, at a U.N. climate change conference on Tuesday suggested that...

clock Breitbart is the most influential producer of climate change denial posts on Facebook, according to a report released Tuesday that suggests a small number of publishers play an outsize role in creating content that undermines climate science. The far-right news and comment...

clock Climate change is an issue rife with scientific terminology and seemingly endless acronyms. And with the COP26 global climate summit underway in Glasgow, Scotland, the news is bound to be full of potentially perplexing terms over the next couple of weeks. To help, weve def...

At the upcoming U.N. climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland COP26 for short countries will face pressure to make more ambitious pledges to cut greenhouse gas emissions with the goal of keeping average global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, compared to...

This coverage is no longer live A global summit convened in Glasgow, Scotland, widely seen as the most important international climate negotiations since the landmark 2015 Paris climate accord, began on Monday with speeches by world leaders, including President Biden, who warned ...

clock For the first time ever, top executives in the oil industry were grilled by federal lawmakers for their alleged role in misleading the public for decades on climate change and stalling efforts to reduce the use of their products, a major contributor to global warming. The ...

clock The White Houses Build Back Better plan unveiled Thursday represents the biggest clean-energy investment in U.S. history, with a $555 billion package of tax credits, grants and other policies aimed at curbing greenhouse gas emissions that are fueling climate change . Altho...

clock Bruce M. Beehler is a naturalist and author of 12 books, including Birds of Maryland, Delaware, and the District of Columbia and North on the Wing . It is late October, and I just closed my back door to shut out the fast-flying Asian tiger mosquitoes that have become a ...

Intense rainfall, raging wildfires and deadly heat waves. The effects of climate change are no longer an abstraction. They are happening now, and with greater frequency. At least 85 percent of the worlds population has felt its effects, according to research published in the jour...

clock The worlds major economies, many of which helped fuel the Earths warming over the past century through massive greenhouse gas pollution, are still failing to do their part to adequately tackle the problem, a United Nations report found Tuesday. The annual U.N. emissions ga...

clock Youre reading an excerpt from the Todays WorldView newsletter. Sign up to get the rest , including news from around the globe, interesting ideas and opinions to know, sent to your inbox every weekday. The major COP26 climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland, is less than a week...

clock NEW YORK On a recent afternoon at the United Nations, as boats meandered 38 stories below along the sun-splashed East River, the worlds top diplomat was talking about his three granddaughters. And, in particular, what they might think of him at the end of this century. I ...

clock Taking climate action can be difficult at any age, but especially so for young people. While research has shown that youths are anxious about the warming planet, they can also feel powerless to act on it. What can I do as a teenager who isnt allowed to go outside my house,...

clock As the United States and nations around the world struggle to blunt the effects of rising temperatures and extreme weather, sweeping assessments released Thursday by the White House, the U.S. intelligence community and the Pentagon conclude that climate change will exacerb...

clock An earlier version of this article said that in sub-Saharan Africa, climate change could lead to as many as 50 additional deaths every hour in the future. This story has been corrected. Climate change is set to become the defining narrative of human health, a top medical j...

clock Good morning and welcome to The Climate 202! A Washington Post investigation published this morning found that Russia allows methane leaks at the planet's peril. But first: As Democrats in Congress face pressure to lower the price tag of their $3.5 trillion tax-and-spendi...

clock A half century ago, Jane Goodall was spending months at a time sitting in the Gombe forest in what is now Tanzania waiting for wild chimps to approach her so that she could observe their behavior. Her superhuman patience paid off. The young researcher discovered that chimp...

clock DENALI NATIONAL PARK, Alaska Denali National Park has just one road in and out. And each year, hundreds of thousands of visitors fill the parks trademark buses for tours, hoping for a glimpse of a wolf or a brown bear in the shadow of North Americas highest peak. The road...

clock England will suffer devastating floods like the ones that submerged parts of Germany this summer if the country fails to protect itself against more severe weather brought on by climate change, a government agency said Wednesday. It is adapt or die, the head of the Environ...

clock Cliches, however shopworn, can retain their usefulness provided they continue to describe their object with some accuracy. One cliche that has lost almost all value is speaking truth to power. These days, it almost invariably is attached not to an act of genuine courage bu...

Its so different from anything Ive baked with, says my baking partner, Jenny Starrs. Were standing in the tiny kitchen of my D.C. apartment, examining palmfuls of a dark, coarse, rich-scented flour. Its unfamiliar because it was milled from Kernza, a grain that is fundamentally u...

clock At least 85 percent of the global population has experienced weather events made worse by climate change, according to research published Monday in the journal Nature Climate Change. After using machine learning to analyze and map more than 100,000 studies of events that c...

clock The history of Napa Valley wine courses through Robin Lails veins. Her great-granduncle, Gustave Niebaum, founded Inglenook Vineyards in 1879 and helped establish Napa Valleys reputation for quality wine. Her father, John Daniel Jr., expanded that reputation during Napas s...

clock Before social media and smartphones, restaurant owner Nancy Aldrich took meticulous notes about her business on a clipboard. Starting in the 1960s, she documented how many people ate at Pollys Pancake Parlor down to the hour of the day and noted the weather. Then, in 1975,...

clock Tens of thousands of people from every corner of the globe are preparing to gather in Glasgow, Scotland, for a two-week United Nations summit that could shape how and whether the world effectively slows climate change in the years ahead. Here are answers to some key ques...

clock Climate change is wiping out coral reefs and will kill more if oceans keep getting warmer, researchers warned on Tuesday in a new study that spanned much of the globe. The world already lost 14 percent of its coral between 2009 and 2018 or what amounts to more than all th...

clock Swedish climate and environmental activist Greta Thunberg denounced the worlds so-called leaders during a speech at Italys Youth4Climate summit on Tuesday, accusing politicians of failing to act on climate change and describing their promises as 30 years of blah blah blah....

clock Adriana Bottino-Poage is 6 years old, with cherub cheeks and curls that bounce when she laughs. She likes soccer, art and visiting the library. She dreams of being a scientist and inventing a robot that can pull pollution out of the air. She wants to become the kind of gro...

clock This story was supported by the Pulitzer Center. MOUNTAIN VILLAGE, Alaska Francis Waskeys house used to stand four feet above ground on wooden stilts. Now, the mud underneath it has swallowed them whole. As the posts sank over the years into the thawing, carbon-rich froze...

clock LONDON Young people around the world spilled into streets, city squares and local parks on Friday, following the call of Swedish teen Greta Thunberg, for the first big, in-person, coordinated climate protests since the start of the coronavirus pandemic. Thunberg, who star...

clock With its shattering footage of the 2019 and 2020 Australian wildfires, the upcoming documentary Burning would seem to hold plenty of appeal for people committed to the environment. The movie makes an eye-opening case for government action to avert more catastrophes. Its di...

clock The Washington Post did a recent poll on the attitudes of teens on various subjects, and there was a surprising result on what they see as the biggest threats to their generation: Only 49 percent said they view climate change as a major threat at a time when the world has ...

clock President Biden announced plans Tuesday to double the funding the United States provides each year to help developing nations cope with the ravages of climate change and build greener economies. Speaking at the United Nations, Biden framed the move as part of a broader ret...

clock President Biden launched a government-wide strategy Monday to combat extreme heat, including the development of new federal labor standards aimed at protecting workers from the impact of rising temperatures linked to climate change. Extreme heat has cost the lives of hundr...

clock LOS ANGELES Many try and fail to make it in L.A. But one group is proving unstoppable: mosquitoes, which have taken over Southern California and are driving the humans here crazy. New invasive, disease-bearing species originating from Asia and Africa are thriving in the i...

clock As world leaders gather at the United Nations this week, they face no shortage of divisive issues: An ongoing global pandemic, economic strife on numerous continents, and conflict and human rights concerns from Afghanistan to Haiti. But with only six weeks left until a cru...

clock LONDON The United Nations warned Friday that based on the most recent action plans submitted by 191 countries to curb greenhouse gas emissions, the planet is on track to warm by more than 2.7 degrees Celsius by the end of the century far above what world leaders have sai...

clock A week after taking office, President Biden signed an executive order aimed at finding ways to combat climate change. Among the provisions was a directive to figure out how to establish the first-ever Civilian Climate Corps. In July, dozens of Democratic lawmakers sent a b...

clock Nearly three-quarters of residents of countries with some of the worlds most advanced economies worry that climate change will one day create suffering in their own lives, according to a far-reaching survey published Tuesday by the Pew Research Center. The findings, based ...

clock The intense rains that fell across western and southern Germany in July were both devastating and historic. Up to eight inches of rain fell in less than 24 hours, flooding communities and causing more than 200 fatalities. In some areas, rainfall so intense was expected onl...

clock This summer, the extraordinary heat in the Pacific Northwest, floods across the Northern Hemisphere and Hurricane Idas swath across the country have awakened more people to the dangers of climate change. As professionals working on climate change, we receive many requests ...

clock The worlds natural disasters of late may be filling you with climate change dread. How could it not? Fires, hurricanes, floods and earthquakes have overtaken headlines recently. While we tend to think of cars, SUVs and coal burning power plants as major climate change cont...

clock YOUNTVILLE, Calif. Standing outside the French Laundry on a warm August night, a couple from Florida tells me they canceled their reservation because they couldnt stomach the price tag: $350 per person. Thats before wine. Instead they went with Bouchon Bistro, a sister re...

clock Nearly 1 in 3 Americans live in a county hit by a weather disaster in the past three months, according to a new Washington Post analysis of federal disaster declarations. On top of that, 64 percent live in places that experienced a multiday heat wave phenomena that are no...

clock The resonances were eerie as Hurricane Ida, a Category 4 storm, broached Louisianas coast on in September, 16 years to the day after Hurricane Katrina ravaged the same area. Its very painful to think about another powerful storm like Hurricane Ida making landfall on that a...

clock In a study released Thursday in the journal Science, the devastating Texas cold wave in February is linked to a stretching of the polar vortex in the stratosphere miles above ground level. This stretching mode, only recently categorized, has become more common over the las...

clock Racial minorities in the United States will bear a disproportionate burden of the negative health and environmental impacts from a warming planet, the Environmental Protection Agency said Thursday, including more deaths from extreme heat and property loss from flooding in ...

clock A previous version of this article incorrectly said that congressional Democrats were working on a $3.5 billion reconciliation bill. The proposed bill is $3.5 trillion. The article has been corrected. When Hurricane Ida made landfall on the coast of Louisiana Sunday, the C...

clock From its birth, the storm was destined to become a monster. It formed from air that was hot, moist and thick with clouds. It incubated in the sultry Gulf of Mexico, drawing power from water that was unusually warm. By the time Hurricane Ida made landfall in Port Fourchon, ...

clock Janet Rice never suspected that Trace Creek could get so high. It would take an ocean surging 500 miles from the coast to her rural town in middle Tennessee. Then the weekend happened. More than 17 inches of rain fell in a single day on Saturday, overtopping the regions ma...

clock At a time when President Biden is urging international leaders to address global warming quickly, court actions this week make it clear that the U.S. judiciary is shaping the United States climate trajectory as much as the White House. On Monday, the Interior Department sa...

clock Journalism about climate change has a high ratio of certitude to certainty when reporting weather events or climate projections, such as this weeks U.N. report . There is a low ratio of evidence to passion in todays exhortations to combat climate change with measures inter...

clock In the spring, inspired by the coronavirus pandemic, I taught a course titled The End of the World and What Comes After , about the myriad ways that modern civilization could come to an end: financial collapse, pandemics, cyberwarfare, thermonuclear war or more exotic pos...

clock The new report from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is the most comprehensive look ever at the state of climate science. And, its massive. The full report is nearly 4,000 pages long, with 234 authors and some 14,000 citations to existing...

clock The latest United Nations climate report is not exactly light beach reading. The sweeping assessment released Monday by more than 200 scientists with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change paints a picture of a planet in dire straits. The concentration of greenhouse...

clock More than three decades ago, a collection of scientists assembled by the United Nations first warned that humans were fueling a dangerous greenhouse effect and that if the world did not act collectively and deliberately to slow Earths warming, there could be profound cons...

clock From record-crushing heat waves to ruinous floods and fires, extreme weather has punished the planet in recent months. Human-caused climate change is intensifying these devastating extremes and will make them even worse in the coming decades, a panel from the United Nation...

clock One place where no one will be reading the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Changes massive new report on the evolution and future of global warming is at the library in Greenville, Calif. The library, a small building with a sloped roof , no longer exists beyond a few f...

clock Youre reading an excerpt from the Todays WorldView newsletter. Sign up to get the rest free , including news from around the globe, interesting ideas and opinions to know, sent to your inbox every weekday. If the headlines dont already feel rather apocalyptic, they are abo...

clock Human-caused warming has led to an almost complete loss of stability in the system that drives Atlantic Ocean currents, a new study has found raising the worrying prospect that this critical aquatic conveyor belt could be close to collapse. In recent years, scientists hav...

clock In July 1936, the central United States roasted during one of the most notable summers of the Dust Bowl-era. Parched lands, low rainfall and a strong ridge of high pressure over the region led to record-breaking temperatures in the Upper Mississippi River Valley a handful...

clock Scientists have long been worried about what many call the methane bomb the potentially catastrophic release of methane from thawing wetlands in Siberias permafrost. But now a study by three geologists says that a heat wave in 2020 has revealed a surge in methane emission...

clock An influential, highly publicized theory that a warming Arctic is causing more intense winter outbreaks of cold and snow in midlatitudes is hitting resistance from an ongoing sequence of studies, including the most comprehensive polar modeling to date. The idea, first pu...

Deadly heat waves have swept the globe and will continue to because of climate change. The trends are prompting doomsday questions: Will parts of the world soon become too hot to live in? How will we survive? When it comes to heat, the human body is remarkably resilient its the ...

clock The panicked commuters of Zhengzhou, China, could only stand on seats and cling to poles in a desperate attempt to keep their heads above the muddy torrent this past week, as floodwaters from record-breaking rains inundated the subway system . On the other side of the plan...

clock If youve ever witnessed a group of cooped-up children released outside to play, its not unlike a flock of birds taking flight. Potential energy converts to kinetic in one great burst, little legs whirling over the grass, dyads and triads spinning off into their own miniatu...

clock Youre reading an excerpt from the Todays WorldView newsletter. Sign up to get the rest , including news from around the globe, interesting ideas and opinions to know, sent to your inbox every weekday. Across the world, covid-19 is again surging. The global number of new co...

clock Surging temperatures across the West Coast this summer are exposing another way that the changing climate threatens the countrys future: the danger it poses to workers, particularly those who work outside and in warehouses. The issue has become such a concern that the Labo...

clock SPRAGUE RIVER, Ore. Youth pastor Matt Wolff and his wife, Jennifer, followed Gods direction when they settled at the end of a rutted dirt track in the pine forests above this southern Oregon town. And they have prayed plenty in the past two weeks as the plume of smoke tha...

clock In the coming decades, higher tides coupled with sea-level rise will cause U.S. coastlines to experience a dramatic uptick in flooding, a new NASA study finds. By the mid-2030s, scientists project that there could be a rapid increase in the frequency of high-tide flooding ...

clock The Biden administration has tapped scientist Allison Crimmins from the Environmental Protection Agency to guide the U.S. governments next authoritative report on the consequences of climate change. The report, known as the National Climate Assessment, may take on unsurpas...

clock On Thursday, more than 40 progressive groups sent a letter to lawmakers and President Biden, urging them to stop the demonization of China and to start cooperating with it. The letter argues that the United States must end the new Cold War with China to address our current...

clock Even if our planet were exactly the same as it was in 1950, key elements of the United States infrastructure are in need of repair. Highways need to be resurfaced or rebuilt. Bridges need to be reinforced. Public transit needs to be overhauled. Communications systems need ...

clock By all estimates, last weeks heat wave in the Pacific Northwest and British Columbia was essentially unprecedented. Seattle hit 108 degrees, Portland spiked to 116 and Canada broke its national temperature record three days in a row, hitting 121 degrees on June 29 . Hundre...

clock PORTLAND, Ore. The emergency department at Oregon Health & Science University had rarely been this busy, even during the worst stages of the covid-19 pandemic. Physicians raced to provide fluids to patients who arrived breathless, dizzy and drenched in sweat. Others were ...

clock PORTLAND, Ore. On the heels of one of the worst wildfire years on record, the federal government is struggling to recruit and retain staff as firefighters grapple with low wages, trauma and burnout from increasingly long and intense fire seasons. Heat waves have toppled t...

clock Youre reading an excerpt from the Todays WorldView newsletter. Sign up to get the rest , including news from around the globe, interesting ideas and opinions to know, sent to your inbox every weekday. In Madagascar, hunger has already left people eating raw red cactus frui...

clock Youre reading an excerpt from the Todays WorldView newsletter. Sign up to get the rest , including news from around the globe, interesting ideas and opinions to know, sent to your inbox every weekday. In only the first month of summer in much of the Northern Hemisphere, th...

clock Thea Riofrancos is an associate professor of political science at Providence College. Mark Paul is an assistant professor of economics and environmental studies at New College of Florida. Last week, President Biden and a bipartisan group of senators proudly announced their...

PETERSBURG, N.Y. A heavy snow was falling here in the Taconic Mountain Range outside Albany when Leah Penniman moved to the farm she bought with her husband. It was the day after Christmas, Penniman recalled, and I cried. They were not tears of joy. Penniman was having second th...

clock The record-crushing temperatures in the Pacific Northwest are mind-blowing: 116 degrees in Portland. 118 degrees in British Columbia. 108 in Seattle. Its so hot that streetcar power cables are searing in Portland and pavement is buckling in western Washington. Many have ex...

clock Yellowstone National Park visitors hoping to see its geysers, wolves and bears can expect warmer weather and less snow as climate change alters the parks environment, according to a report by U.S. government and university researchers released last week. Average temperatur...

clock In a rapidly warming world, there are plenty of proposals for stopping, or even slowing down, climate change. Yet in the United States, divided by partisanship and special interests, it has been impossible to forge an ambitious climate policy possessing the speed and scale...

clock For understandable reasons, hearings held by the House Natural Resources subcommittee on national parks, forests and public lands do not generally attract a great deal of attention. National parks tend to be controversy-free, and the questions from members of the House aim...

clock From his home in Bhutans capital of Thimphu, high in the Himalayas, Sonam P. Wangdi has witnessed climate change speed the retreat of glaciers and fuel flash floods in his country. He has watched other developing nations confront rising seas encroaching on Pacific islands ...

clock Economies worldwide nearly ground to a halt over the 15 months of the coronavirus pandemic, leading to a startling drop in global greenhouse gas emissions. But the idle airplanes, boarded-up stores and quiet highways barely made a dent in the steady accumulation of carbon ...

clock Long before the era of fossil fuels, humans may have triggered a massive but mysterious carbon bomb lurking beneath the Earths surface, a new scientific study suggests. If the finding is correct, it would mean that we have been neglecting a major human contribution to glob...

AUSTINMER, Australia During a TED talk, Australian inventor Saul Griffith wanted to show his audience how much a persons individual choices can affect the planet. The person, in this case, was himself. And so, the tall engineer with tousled brown hair pulled up a chart on a big ...

clock ExxonMobil shareholders voted Wednesday to install at least two new independent directors to the companys board, a resounding defeat for chief executive Darren Woods and a ratification of shareholders unhappiness with the way the company had been addressing climate change ...

clock Why is the impact of population growth infrequently mentioned? A couple producing more than two children will impact carbon emissions to a greater degree than any other activity. That impact cannot be offset by any practicable lifestyle change; switching to vegetarianism d...

clock Hurricane Sandy, which struck coastal New Jersey in October 2012 as a potent cyclone, caused over $60 billion in damage, claiming at least 125 lives in the United States and knocking out power to more than 7 million customers. It was the nations most expensive storm since ...

clock The Biden administration has reinstalled the director of the federal climate program that produces the U.S. governments definitive reports on climate change, after the Trump administration removed him in November . Michael Kuperberg, the climate scientist who ran the progr...

clock Suddenly, meat is out in the high-end food world. Eleven Madison Park , a New York City restaurant with three Michelin stars, recently announced that when it reopens after a pandemic-forced hiatus, the menu will be vegan. The cooking site Epicurious is no longer publishing...

clock For years, President Donald Trump and his deputies played down the impact of greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels and delayed the release of an Environmental Protection Agency report detailing climate-related damage. But on Wednesday, the EPA released a detai...

The world was running out of time, and so was Joanne Chory. The 63-year-old biologist was nearing the end of a distinguished career researching how plants grow. Now shed won the most prestigious honor in her field, the Breakthrough Foundations life sciences prize , which came wit...

clock Biden is not coming for Americans Big Macs, chicken wings or bacon. Over the weekend the Twitterverse exploded with GOP fears that, to meet the administrations goals of cutting greenhouse gas emissions in half by the end of the decade, Americans would be required to curtai...

clock What is your opinion about global warming? We ask this question of political candidates, Supreme Court nominees and ourselves. But there is something more fundamental we should ask first, because it changes the framing of the discussion. The more fundamental question is: I...

clock On the eve of President Bidens virtual environment summit , Brazil has approached the United States with an offer it cant refuse . The Wall Street Journals Paulo Trevisani and Timothy Puko reported on Wednesday that Brazils government, widely criticized by environmental gr...

clock Spring has returned to the California coast, bringing with it abundant sunshine and calmer seas. Storm-tossed sands settle. Nourishing cold water floods in from offshore. It is time for a climate superhero to emerge. Giant kelp is among the best organisms on the planet for...

clock Thursday is Earth Day, a day that a decade or two ago transitioned from being a weirdo-hippie celebration to being an opportunity for businesses to sell things made out of wood instead of plastic. Theres probably a term for the tipping point at which something goes from a ...

clock The United Mine Workers of America released a remarkable document on Monday, an articulation of how the countrys largest union representing coal miners understood the future of the industry. Change is coming, whether we seek it or not, read the report, titled Preserving Co...

clock President Biden will convene dozens of world leaders this week for a virtual climate change summit, marking not only an effort to restart the global push to address the rising threat but also the new presidents first grand gesture as a world leader. Biden is using a two-da...

clock When meteorologists issued their forecasts for Typhoon Surigae on Friday, they knew the Category 2-equivalent storm had the potential to intensify quickly. But by Saturday morning, the storm had exceeded forecasters wildest expectations, attaining Category 5 status and pra...

clock White House officials have removed Betsy Weatherhead , an experienced atmospheric scientist tapped by a Trump appointee to oversee the U.S. governments definitive report on the effects of climate change, from her position. According to two officials, she has been reassigne...

clock The United States and China vowed late Saturday to work together in coming months to combat climate change with the seriousness and urgency that it demands, a move that signaled a rare collaboration even as they clash over trade frictions, Chinas harsh treatment of Uyghurs...

clock In the weeks after President Bidens inauguration, as the oil industry was facing a far less welcoming White House, a ConocoPhillips executive went pheasant hunting with the Democratic senator poised to wield tremendous power in an evenly divided Congress. The trip was a po...

The week Texas froze over , in mid-February, poet Naomi Shihab Nye couldnt save one of the marvelous gray mourning doves that flock in her yard near the San Antonio River but she was determined to save the others. The doomed one crashed into her office window and died on the fro...

clock This story was featured in The Optimist newsletter. Sign up here to receive stories of kindness, resilience and the best among us every Wednesday and Sunday. As vaccine rollouts allow us to plan for a post-pandemic world, we face another looming emergency: the climate cris...

The loss of forests critical to protecting wildlife and slowing climate change accelerated during 2020, despite a worldwide pandemic that otherwise led to a dramatic drop in greenhouse gas emissions, a global survey released Wednesday has found. The Earth saw nearly 100,000 squar...

clock Amid an exceptionally warm March in Japan, the cherry blossoms in Kyoto peaked Friday, the earliest in more than 1,200 years of records. The record bloom fits into a long-term pattern toward earlier spring flowering, a compelling indicator of climate change, experts say. T...

clock On Thursday, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that the federal carbon pricing backstop, designed to ensure a price on pollution in provinces that do not adopt their own scheme, is constitutional. The 6-3 ruling in a reference case brought to the court by Ontario, Saskatch...

clock In far-flung corners of the federal government, staffers have been busy calculating how quickly the United States could embrace electric cars or phase out the last of the nations coal-fired power plants . They are estimating how fast the country can construct new battery-c...

clock The White House has appointed Jane Lubchenco, a well-known marine scientist at Oregon State University and former head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, to a high-level position coordinating climate and environmental issues within its Office of Scienc...

clock This story was featured in The Optimist newsletter. Sign up here to receive stories of kindness, resilience and the best among us every Wednesday and Sunday. Humanity has no better friend on this planet than the ocean. It provides more than half the oxygen we need to breat...

clock The Environmental Protection Agency on Thursday relaunched a webpage dedicated to climate change that had gone dark under President Donald Trump, who frequently dismissed the scientific consensus that humans are warming the planet. The restoration of the climate website co...

clock At first, Andrew Christ was ecstatic. In soil taken from the bottom of the Greenland ice sheet, hed discovered the remains of ancient plants. Only one other team of researchers had ever found greenery beneath the mile-high ice mass. But then Christ determined how long it h...

This story was featured in The Optimist newsletter. Sign up here to receive stories of kindness, resilience and the best among us every Wednesday and Sunday. TUCSON The giant saguaro, an icon of the American West, is beloved in this state. Arms raised in a perpetual hello there,...

clock This story was featured in The Optimist newsletter. Sign up here to receive stories of kindness, resilience and the best among us every Wednesday and Sunday. The recent horrors in Texas, as millions went without electricity and water during a historic winter storm and cold...

clock During President Bidens first formal meeting with the nations labor leaders, Mark McManus played the skunk at the garden party: Joking that he drew the short straw, the president of the pipe fitters union complained about Bidens job-killing veto of the Keystone XL pipeline...

clock Hundreds of butterfly species across the American West are vanishing as the region becomes hotter, drier and more vulnerable to the effects of climate change, according to a study released Thursday. In a swath of 11 states, from California to Montana, and from New Mexico t...

clock For the month of March, newly confirmed U.S. ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield will serve as the rotating president of the U.N. Security Council, where climate change has become an increasingly discussed topic. President Biden has called climate change an existential thre...

clock President Biden on Friday dramatically altered the way the U.S. government calculates the real-world cost of climate change , a move that could reshape a range of consequential decisions, from whether to allow new coal leasing on federal land to what sort of steel is used ...

clock Pledges made by so far by countries around the globe to cut greenhouse gas emissions fall strikingly short of the profound changes necessary to avoid the most catastrophic impacts of climate change, the United Nations said Friday. The U.N. analysis comes as presidents and ...

clock This story was featured in The Optimist newsletter. Sign up here to receive stories of kindness, resilience and the best among us every Wednesday and Sunday. I have a gross confession: Last week, when I cleaned out my fridge for the first time in Id-rather-not-say-how-long...

clock A new front has opened in the battle over climate change: The kitchen. Cities and towns across the country are rewriting local building codes so that new homes and offices would be blocked from using natural gas, a fossil fuel that when burned emits carbon dioxide into the...

clock The scientists told us three years ago that we had 12 years to avert the worst consequences of the climate crisis. We are now three years gone, so we have nine years left. John F. Kerry, special presidential envoy for climate, in an interview with CBS This Morning , Feb. ...

Bill Gates, 65, is an entrepreneur, philanthropist and self-described technologist. He co-founded Microsoft in 1975 with childhood friend Paul Allen and turned it into one of the largest companies in the world. With his wife, Melinda, he now co-chairs the Bill & Melinda Gates Fou...

clock Some of the climate impacts of a grocery store trip are obvious, like the fuel it takes to get there and the electricity that keeps its lights glowing, conveyor belts moving and scanners beeping. But then there are the invisible gases seeping out into the atmosphere when y...

Middle East BTALLOUN, Lebanon The autumn chill came late, descending suddenly on Lebanon with the arrival of November. The sun weakened, the fog settled in, electric heaters whirred, and the few grapes still hanging off Sarmad Salibis vines trembled in the wind. Despite the cold...

clock The snowstorm that brought travel to a halt in the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast this week may have set a state record for the most snow in a single day in New Jersey, with numerous reports of snow totals between 25 and 35 inches. Blockbuster winter storms, which unload such ...

clock Michael Regan, President Bidens choice to lead the Environmental Protection Agency, told lawmakers Wednesday that he would restore science and transparency at the agency, focus on marginalized communities and move with a sense of urgency to combat climate change. Facing a ...

clock Youre reading an excerpt from the Todays WorldView newsletter. Sign up to get the rest , including news from around the globe, interesting ideas and opinions to know, sent to your inbox every weekday. We knew President Biden would chart a different course from his predeces...

clock The world's richest and most powerful country is back in the fight against climate change. That is hugely important news for everyone already on the planet, and for our grandchildren yet to come. The executive orders President Biden signed Wednesday will not, by themselves...

clock President Biden made tackling Americas persistent racial and economic disparities a central part of his plan to combat climate change Wednesday, prioritizing environmental justice for the first time in a generation. As part of an unprecedented push to cut the nations green...

clock Global ice loss has increased rapidly over the past two decades, and scientists are still underestimating just how much sea levels could rise, according to alarming new research published this month. From the thin ice shield covering most of the Arctic Ocean to the mile-th...

clock with Alexandra Ellerbeck Newly inaugurated President Biden spent much of his first day in office jump-starting his agenda for addressing climate change signing orders, staffing up departments and laying plans for the days ahead. The new administration is trying to do a lo...

clock During his first moments in the Oval Office on Wednesday, President Biden returned the United States to the Paris climate accord and directed federal agencies to begin unraveling Donald Trumps environmental policies the first step in what Biden has vowed will be a sustain...

The year 2020, which witnessed terrifying blazes from California to Siberia and a record number of tropical cyclones in the Atlantic, rivaled and possibly even equaled the hottest year on record, according to multiple scientific announcements Thursday. Only the super El Nino year...

clock The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy has reassigned Trump appointees David Legates and Ryan Maue, senior officials at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) who were appointed by President Trump, for their role in producing and publis...

clock What world have I brought my child into? the new mom pleaded. What can I do to make sure my baby isnt brought up in a world thats being destroyed? It was 2019, and climate researcher Katharine Hayhoe was at a church breakfast in Fairbanks, Alaska, when a young woman tapped...

clock Speed kills. Thats why firing bullets from a gun is more dangerous than tossing them by hand. Why skydivers use parachutes. Why roads have speed limits. And why its critical to understand how quickly human activity will drive the climate to change, compared with past rates...

clock In one of the biggest victories for U.S. climate action in a decade, Congress has moved to phase out a class of potent planet-warming chemicals and provide billions of dollars for renewable energy and efforts to suck carbon from the atmosphere as part of the $900 billion c...

clock The year is 2050, and everything in your home perhaps in your entire life is electric. Your car runs on battery power. Your home heating runs through a highly efficient heat-pump system that has long since replaced the gas furnace. Not even the burners on your stove prod...

clock The worlds wealthy will need to reduce their carbon footprints by a factor of 30 to help put the planet on a path to curb the ever-worsening impacts of climate change, according to new findings published Wednesday by the United Nations Environment Program. Currently, the e...

clock The Arctic as we once knew it, an inhospitable, barely accessible and icebound place, is gone. Climate change has transformed it into a region that can heat up to 100 degrees , is beset by ferocious wildfires, and is covered in permafrost that is no longer permanent. The s...

clock When President-elect Joe Biden takes office in January, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is expected to rise to new prominence as the premier climate research agency in an administration that intends to place climate change at the top of its agend...

clock How many times in recent years do you recall ambling outside in 70-degree weather totally bewildered during the winter months? Thanks mostly to a combination of human-caused climate change and urbanization, winters in Washington are warming hastily and taking on an entirel...

clock This year will be one of the three hottest on record for the globe, as marine heat waves swelled over 80 percent of the worlds oceans, and triple-digit heat invaded Siberia, one of the planets coldest places. These troubling indicators of global warming are laid out in a U...

clock When I was a child ... The snow got knee-deep several times a winter. I could walk across the bay in winter. It got so hot you could fry an egg on the sidewalk. How many weather stories begin that way? There are several reasons people tell such stories. One is that when yo...

Climate Solutions For 10,000 years, the Swinomish tribe has fished the waters of northwestern Washington, relying on the bounty of salmon and shellfish not only as a staple of its diet but as a centerpiece of its culture. At the beginning of the fishing season, the tribe gathers ...

clock with Alexandra Ellerbeck Want more emails like this? Sign up for The Energy 202 newsletter. The latest sign that Joe Biden plans to make tackling climate change a priority is his choice for chief climate diplomat. The president-elect is tapping John Kerry, the former secre...

clock Elisabeth Malkin is a freelance journalist based in Mexico City who has covered Central America for more than a decade, most recently for the New York Times. As Central America buckled under the force of two fierce hurricanes that struck within days of each other this mont...

Climate Solutions EAST TAUNTON, Mass. Billy McCaffrey trawled his hands through the cold, clear water, creating a small wake in the calm. Below the surface, the flooded vines of the cranberry bog looked like a Christmas tree garlanded with shining red bulbs, pressed up close aga...

clock Kevin Rudd, a former prime minister of Australia, is president of the Asia Society Policy Institute. Bill Hare is chief executive and senior scientist at Climate Analytics. President-elect Joe Biden has pledged to begin the process of rejoining the Paris agreement with the...

clock Jeff Bezos said Monday he is giving $791 million to 16 groups fighting climate change, the first grants from his Earth Fund, saying the money is just the beginning of my $10 billion commitment to fund scientists, activists, NGOs, and others." More than half of the donation...

clock A second Trump political appointee who questions the seriousness of global warming has been assigned a key role in the program that oversees the federal governments definitive report on climate change. Ryan Maue , the newly installed chief scientist at the National Oceanic...

clock David Legates, a meteorologist who claims that excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is good for plants and that global warming is harmless, has been tapped to run the federal agency that oversees a major scientific report on how climate change is affecting the United St...

clock Joe Biden, the projected winner of the presidency, will move to restore dozens of environmental safeguards President Trump abolished and launch the boldest climate change plan of any president in history. While some of Bidens most sweeping programs will encounter stiff res...

clock with Alexandra Ellerbeck Want more emails like this? Sign up for The Energy 202 newsletter. With less than a week until Election Day, Joe Biden s presidential campaign is looking to bolster turnout among young people concerned about climate change. And it s doing so with...

clock Years from now, when we savor wines from the 2020 vintage, what will we remember of the history captured in those bottles? A pandemic, to be sure. Social distancing, face coverings as political fashion statements in a weirdly contentious election season. The wines may carr...

clock President Trump and former vice president Joe Biden laid out starkly different visions Thursday night on whether the United States needs to transition away from fossil fuels to address climate change, in the lengthiest exchange two presidential candidates have ever had on ...

clock What is the link between climate change and the natural disasters we are currently experiencing? Magdalena, Maryland By many measures, 2020 has been disastrous. Hurricanes in the Atlantic are so numerous that there are not enough letters in the Latin alphabet to name them...

clock In the 19th century, eastern forests looked very different. Huge American chestnut trees, their trunks up to 10 feet in diameter, dominated forests from Maine to Mississippi . Their bright yellow foliage gilded Appalachia every autumn. Then, a shipment of imported trees ar...

clock with Alexandra Ellerbeck Questions about how the Supreme Court would rule on climate cases are now officially a campaign issue. Amy Coney Barrett, President Trump's nominee for the high court, acknowledged during her confirmation hearing yesterday that the novel coronaviru...

clock with Alexandra Ellerbeck President Trump's nominee to replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the Supreme Court demurred when asked broadly what she thought of climate change. Amy Coney Barrett said late during her confirmation hearing Tuesday that while she has read up on the issu...

clock Four years ago, Shreya Dave left MIT with a doctorate in mechanical engineering and an idea that just might revolutionize the way the world makes chemicals and paper. She and two colleagues had invented a new filtration system that could slash energy costs for a wide swath...

clock with Alexandra Ellerbeck The Supreme Court will review a key aspect of a big case in which Baltimore is suing Big Oil over damages from climate change. The question the high court plans to consider next year is a narrow procedural one. But its answer could have broad impli...

clock The layers of the worlds oceans arent mixing like they used to due to climate change, potentially speeding up how fast the planet will warm in the coming decades. This new finding, contained in a study published Monday in the journal Nature Climate Change, finds that the r...

clock with Alexandra Ellerbeck Polls show many voters say they care about climate change. But they probably won't be hearing much about it during the first presidential debate, moderated by a Fox News host. Chris Wallace, who will be questioning President Trump and former vice p...

clock Fall in New York typically means environmental groups, international corporations, government leaders and U.N. officials flocking to the Big Apple for Climate Week. Last year, they promised more meaningful action to tackle climate change and hundreds of thousands of young...

clock When President Trump and Democratic nominee Joe Biden meet on the debate stage next week, many West Coast wildfires will almost certainly still be raging. Moderator Chris Wallace should ask the candidates about climate change, an issue on which they are starkly divided . B...

clock How long does the world have left to act before an irreversible climate emergency alters human existence as we know it? A new digital clock unveiled in Manhattans Union Square over the weekend promises to tell you down to the very second. The Climate Clock unveiled by art...

clock Art Cullen is editor of the Storm Lake Times in northwest Iowa. He is author of the book Storm Lake: Change, Resilience, and Hope in Americas Heartland. They call the storm a derecho , and it blasted through Tim Gannons central Iowa farm at 100 mph on Aug. 10, wrecking a m...

clock More than a dozen states, counties and cities, from fire-ravaged California to flood-prone South Carolina, are suing oil companies to hold them responsible for the damage they say their products have caused due to climate change. In a wave of recent lawsuits, local governm...

In 1981, architects Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk broke ground on the vacation town of Seaside, Fla. Seaside was a planned community designed to cut through the (then-literal) smog of Americas car dependency. To make driving both unnecessary and undesirable, the husban...

clock The searing heat and roaring winds may be slowly giving way to calmer, slightly more temperate conditions in the West, but the toll from the wildfire crisis continues to grow, disrupting lives for tens of millions. Deaths in Washington, Oregon and California have increased...

clock with Alexandra Ellerbeck A growing number of environmentally minded lawmakers and activists are calling on moderators to ask something anything about climate change during the presidential debates. The steady rise in global temperatures was almost entirely ignored during...

clock In a rare show of defiance of the Trump administration, key Senate Republicans joined Democrats on Thursday in agreeing to phase out chemicals widely used in air conditioners and refrigeration that are warming the planet. Despite the Trump administrations refusal to join a...

clock The worlds largest dam is under pressure in the massive flooding thats wiping away billions of dollars of value in China. The predicament symbolizes a looming crisis for Beijing. Climate change is bringing more frequent and intense deluges that threaten the economic heartl...

clock Surveying the Gulf of Mexico late Tuesday afternoon, National Hurricane Center experts saw a Category 1 hurricane dangerous, but not likely to cause major damage. Forecaster Jack Beven put the storms maximum sustained wind speed at around 80 mph, forecasting a strong Cate...

clock with Alexandra Ellerbeck Democrats took another step toward a single agenda for tackling climate change with the release of a Senate report on Tuesday. The 260-page blueprint for comprehensive climate legislation from Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) outl...

clock . Across the United States, there are signs of climate disaster . In California, two of the worst wildfires in the states history took place simultaneously, scorching more than a million acres of land, including a beloved forested national park. On the Gulf Coast, residen...

clock with Alexandra Ellerbeck The Democratic race to represent Massachusetts in the Senate features two candidates from two generations both trying to one-up each other as advocates of the Green New Deal. The most persuasive climate change arguments could ultimately determine ...

clock SAN FRANCISCO First came the lightning, with cracks of thunder that woke Hope Weng from sleep. I thought it was someone wheeling out one of the garbage bins, the 23-year-old said. Then came the wildfires, mixing with the unbearable heat that was tough to escape in her Mou...

clock Will the Covid-19 pandemic change peoples attitudes and trust towards climate change science? Anna Baranova, Toronto The cartoon flashed across Katharine Hayhoes social media timeline in mid-July: Two doctors in lab coats scrutinize a box labeled covid-19 science" while o...

Climate Solutions DAPHNE PRAIRIE, TEX. B.F. Hicks is doing 70 mph down a two-lane road in Franklin County, Tex. He pulls up in his truck to a gated property thats closer to Arkansas than Dallas. Waist-high bluestem grass sways in the wind across 922 acres that stretch out before...

clock In the midst of a historic heat wave in the West, the mercury in Death Valley, Calif., surged to a searing 130 degrees on Sunday afternoon, possibly setting a world record for the highest temperature ever observed during the month of August. If the temperature is valid, it...

Middle East BAGHDAD This city roars in the summertime. You hear the generators on every street, shaking and shuddering to keep electric fans whirring as the air seems to shimmer in the heat. Iraq isnt just hot. Its punishingly hot. Record-breakingly hot. When one of us returned ...

clock With climate change bearing down on the planet and the novel coronavirus upending the fossil fuel business, one of the worlds biggest oil and gas companies on Tuesday mapped out how it plans to navigate the next decade by radically cutting back on its oil and gas business....

clock During a recent virtual fundraiser focused on climate action, former vice president Joe Biden made a direct appeal to voters young enough to be his grandchildren. I want young climate activists, young people everywhere, to know: I see you. I hear you. I understand the urge...

clock Will sea walls replace accessible beaches in our lifetimes? Emily Hardy, Oceanside, Calif. For almost as long as people have been building near beaches, they have been protecting those buildings with sea walls. These barriers, which deflect strong waves and prevent coasta...

100% 38% 28% Clean electricity Share of U.S. electricity generation from zero- carbon sources 2001 2019 2035 This month the Democratic presumptive presidential nominee, Joe Biden, outlined an ambitious plan for tackling climate change that shows how far the party has shifted on t...

clock The Arctic summer of 2020 is one that has been marked by raging fires in the Far North, with smoke extending more than 1,000 miles downwind, along with alarming new temperature records and ice melt. While rapid Arctic climate change is not exactly news the region is warmi...

clock The current pace of human-caused carbon emissions is increasingly likely to trigger irreversible damage to the planet, according to a comprehensive international study released Wednesday. Researchers studying one of the most important and vexing topics in climate science ...

clock THE LIGHTBULB The United Nations is out with a report that paints a grim picture of what needs to happen to stave off the worst effects of climate change. Only with drastic and rapid action can world leaders avoid widespread and disastrous impacts of warming, according to ...

clock with Meryl Kornfield Want more emails like this? Sign up for The Energy 202 newsletter. THE LIGHTBULB The night of the Iowa Democratic caucus ended in chaos and without an announced winner. One thing that is clear: Climate change was a top priority among caucus-goers. More...

clock THE LIGHTBULB TALLAHASSEE Florida Rep. Chris Sprowls, a Republican, declared it so in September 2019 at a speech designating him the next speaker of the House: We need to stop being afraid of words like climate change and sea level rise. And Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis h...

clock In a stark new finding, a study shows that six straight months of anomalously mild conditions in large parts of northern Siberia so far this year, along with an Arctic temperature record of 100.4 degrees (38 Celsius) that occurred in June, would have been virtually impossi...

clock The young climate activists clamoring today for rapid cuts to the worlds fossil fuel emissions could be well into their 30s or 40s before the impact of those changes becomes apparent, scientists said in a study published Tuesday. As if curbing climate change wasnt tough en...

clock The nations automakers would manufacture only electric cars. Utilities would have to stop producing pollution linked to climate change. And the federal government would double its investment in mass transit. All this and more was proposed by House Democrats on Tuesday unde...

clock What does racism mean for climate change and vice versa? Sarah Kaplan, Post climate reporter Normally, I use this column to respond to questions from readers about climate change. But amid our ongoing national reckoning with racism prompted by the unequal impacts of the...

clock . We may be living inside the biggest annual carbon crash in recorded history . The quarantines, shutdowns and trade and travel stoppages prompted by the spread of the coronavirus led to a historic plunge in greenhouse gas emissions . In some places, the environmental cha...

Number of properties at substantial flood risk in 2020, by county 5,000 50,000 200,000 Number of properties at substantial flood risk in 2020 by county 5,000 50,000 200,000 Number of properties at substantial flood risk in 2020 by county 200,000 5,000 50,000 WASH. MAINE MONT. N.D...

clock Nearly two-thirds of Americans believe the federal government should act more aggressively to combat climate change, and almost as many say the problem is already affecting their community in some way, according to a survey released Tuesday by the Pew Research Center . In ...

Climate Solutions RANCHI, India Dusk was falling as Sadanand Jha drove his electric three-wheeler through the streets of this north Indian city, passing vegetable markets, tea stalls and tiny storefronts on a cool evening before the pandemic. He wove in and out of rush-hour traf...

Science Chad Deering trudges up a dry river channel on the north side of Rincon de la Vieja, one of Costa Ricas active volcanoes. He wears a baseball cap emblazoned with the phrase Semper Fi, a token of his tour of duty with the Marines, and lugs a peculiar apparatus, part of a s...

clock What are the fastest warming places on Earth and why are they warming so fast? John, Grass Valley, Calif. John, did my editor pay you to ask this? Just this month, several of my colleagues on The Washington Posts climate team were awarded a Pulitzer Prize for their report...

Estimated daily carbon emissions in 2020 100 million metric tons of carbon dioxide per day Range of uncertainty 50 0 Jan. May 1960 2000 2019 2020 1980 Source: Le Quere et al., Nature Climate Change Estimated daily carbon emissions in 2020 100 million metric tons of carbon dioxide...

clock A new study provides observational evidence that the odds of major hurricanes around the world Category 3, 4 and 5 storms are increasing because of human-caused global warming. The implications of this finding, published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy ...

clock Shahzeen Attari , 38, is an associate professor at the School of Public and Environmental Affairs at Indiana University. Shes particularly focused on the way people perceive their personal energy use and the decisions they make in their daily lives, and how that impacts gr...

clock Last month tied for the warmest April on record for the globe, as 2020 hurtles toward the warmest year milestone. New data, released Tuesday from the European Unions Copernicus Climate Change Service, lends further support to the prediction that 2020 will rank among the to...

clock Just like insects, birds and animals, humans have a particular climate niche, scientists have found, with 6,000 years of human history demonstrating how society thrives when we stay within it and the turbulence that ensues when it is pushed out of this zone. In a stark new...

clock When researchers assess communities vulnerabilities to climate change, they look at an areas physical, biological and human systems. But new research suggests they might want to look at historical injustice, too. In research published in the journal PNAS, a pair of archaeo...

clock . Amid its horrors and tragedies, the coronavirus pandemic has driven home a startling reality . Travel bans and lockdowns have cleaned the globe, flushing the murk from Venices canals, clearing Delhis polluted smog , making distant snowy peaks visible for the first time ...

Climate Solutions All right: Time to see if youve been paying attention to The Posts climate-related coverage. If you have, this quiz should be an easy A. Answer: C. The Earth balances its climate using the carbon cycle, which moves carbon between the atmosphere, the ocean, plant...

clock Is the coronavirus pandemic connected to climate change? Tom, France The short and incomplete answer to this question is: not really. Although climate change is expected to worsen many kinds of disease, especially tropical illnesses carried by insects, coronaviruses lik...

On Richmond Crescent in Norfolk, Va., more than a dozen homes rise in varying heights, forming a streetscape bar graph tracing the past decades increasing threat of flooding from an inlet of the Lafayette River. A green house with a prominent front porch is a modest four feet off...

clock As cases of covid-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus , rapidly increase in the United States and other parts of the world, epidemiologists and other researchers are urgently trying to learn more about the pathogen involved. One question that some virus special...

Humans have seemed unable to get a handle on climate change, with global emissions of greenhouse gases continuing to grow every year. But a microscopic pathogen, so structurally simple that it does not even have a single cell and is arguably not even alive, may be capable of acco...

clock For climate skeptics, its hard to compete with the youthful appeal of global phenomenon Greta Thunberg . But one U.S. think tank hopes its found an answer: the anti-Greta. Naomi Seibt is a 19-year-old German who, like Greta, is blond, eloquent and European. But Naomi denou...

Climate Solutions All right: Time to see if youve been paying attention to The Posts climate-related coverage. If you have, this quiz should be an easy A. Answer: A . The fires started ravaging the Australian bush in October 2019 and continued through January 2020. In all, the fi...

Outlook The economists and activists who hope to stop global warming know that small measures wont cut it. Which is why conscious consumption taking individual actions to reduce your carbon footprint often looks like a distraction: Purchasing hybrid cars, embracing plant-based ...

clock Since the winter solstice on Dec. 21, Washingtons weather has taken an excursion toward a far more southern clime. With an average high temperature of 54 degrees, the weather has best matched the typical winter conditions in Atlanta. Because of human-induced climate warmin...

clock Three-quarters of the worlds ocean waters have sped up their pace in recent decades, scientists reported Wednesday, a massive development that was not expected to occur until climate warming became much more advanced. The change is being driven by faster winds, which are a...

clock During the 1970s, Nashville averaged just under a foot of snowfall each winter. Nowadays, Music City is lucky to see half that in a season. The same is true in Knoxville, El Paso and Albuquerque; all have seen their typical wintertime snowfalls slashed by half in the past ...

The teenagers pour off buses near Denvers Union Station under a baking September sun. Giggling with excitement at skipping out on Friday classes, they join a host of others assembled near the terminal. Native American drummers and dancers rouse the crowd, and theres a festive fee...

clock Bruce Westerman, a Republican congressman from Arkansas, has a plan to help save the planet one he thinks may also help save his party. His proposal, which calls for planting a trillion trees to suck carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, was warmly received last month when ...

clock The year is 2100, and the worlds 12 billion people are still burning fossil fuels with abandon. Compared with preindustrial times, the planet has warmed by 4.5 degrees Celsius, or 8.1 degrees Fahrenheit. The atmosphere is filled with greenhouse gases, and parts of the Eart...

clock The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists is moving the Doomsday Clock up to 100 seconds to midnight a metaphor for the end of the world in a recognition of growing threats from nuclear war, climate change and disinformation. It is the first time the clock has passed the two...

clock What are climate or warming targets? How are these goals determined? McKenzie, Georgia The Post has reported that the world must halve emissions by 2030 if humanity is to avoid the worst effects of warming. What exactly are these worst effects? What global temperature inc...

clock BlackRock, the worlds largest money manager, will make sustainability and climate risks key tenets of its investing strategy, a move that its chief executive said should push financial institutions to prioritize climate change issues. But activists noted the firms lacklust...

clock The planet registered its second-hottest year on record in 2019, capping off a five-year period that ranks as the warmest such span in recorded history. In addition, the 2010s will go down in history as the planets hottest decade, according to the Copernicus Climate Change...

clock For the first time, scientists have detected the fingerprint of human-induced climate change on daily weather patterns at the global scale. If verified by subsequent work, the findings, published Thursday in Nature Climate Change , would upend the long-established narrativ...

clock Americans remain shaky on the details of climate science even as they have grown increasingly concerned about human activity warming the Earth, according to a national poll by The Washington Post and the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) that probed the publics understanding ...

clock Extreme weather patterns associated with heat waves and droughts are raising the risks of simultaneous harvest failures of vital crops worldwide such as wheat, maize and soybeans, two studies published Monday found. This is pushing the world closer to the edge of potential...

clock Its a common refrain from those who question mainstream climate science findings: The computer models scientists use to project future global warming are inaccurate and shouldnt be trusted to help policymakers decide whether to take potentially expensive steps to rein in g...

clock See if you can spot the problem in comments President Trump made about climate change during a conversation with reporters on Tuesday, after The Washington Posts Philip Rucker asked whether he was thinking about climate change. I think about it all the time, Phil. And, hon...

clock CHARLOTTE Swinging cranes and clawing excavators have reshaped the landscape here, elevating Charlottes skyline, expanding its girth and transforming this former cotton-shipment town into the Souths financial hub and one of Americas fastest-growing cities. But the Queen C...

clock The world has squandered so much time mustering the action necessary to combat climate change that rapid, unprecedented cuts in greenhouse gas emissions offer the only hope of averting an ever-intensifying cascade of consequences, according to new findings from the United ...

Climate Solutions Climate change can feel confusing, and big, and scary. Trust us: We get it. Just take a deep breath, and let it back out again (it will be full of carbon dioxide, for the record). With this first quiz, well start with some of the basics and then work our way up...

clock This year is increasingly likely to be the planets second- or third-warmest calendar year on record since modern temperature data collection began in 1880, according to data released this week by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. This reflects the growin...

The companies at the top of the fashion pyramid spent much of the fall previewing their luxury wares for spring 2020 and making their semiannual argument for the value of beauty, craftsmanship, and lots and lots of stuff. In their pursuit of the next new thing to entice consumers...

clock The Great Lakes water levels broke records this past July and August, with some basins experiencing the highest levels ever recorded since 1918. Unusually high water has plagued their shores this year, causing beach erosion and disappearing waterfronts. Even as we head int...

clock A new report by 11,258 scientists in 153 countries from a broad range of disciplines warns that the planet clearly and unequivocally faces a climate emergency, and provides six broad policy goals that must be met to address it. The analysis is a stark departure from recent...

clock So its official. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, this summer was the hottest recorded in the Northern Hemisphere . But is anyone really surprised anymore? Were five decades into warnings about the climate catastrophe rushing toward us, but...

clock A global agreement to make fossil fuel burning more expensive is urgent and the most efficient way of fighting climate change, an International Monetary Fund study found on Thursday. The group found that a global tax of $75 per ton by the year 2030 could limit the planets ...

clock Climate change is already having staggering effects on oceans and ice-filled regions that encompass 80 percent of the Earth, and future damage from rising seas and melting glaciers is now all but certain, according to a sobering new report from the United Nations. The warm...

clock Although the United Nations effort to extract new climate-change commitments from world leaders stalled, a substantial number of companies stepped up this week with large commitments to curb global warming. Even without new government policies to dictate action on climate ...

clock Teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg had one question for the global leaders assembled at the United Nations: How dare you? Days after telling U.S. lawmakers listen to the scientists, she made the same demand on an international scale. Thunberg chastised leaders for pra...

clock NEW YORK In one of the largest youth-led demonstrations in history, millions of people from Manhattan to Mumbai took to the streets around the globe on Friday, their chants, speeches and homemade signs delivering the same stern message to world leaders: do more to combat ...

clock Two articles in the Sept. 13 paper spoke to the worlds greatest threat besides politics: the overwhelming use of fossil fuels. Reed Hundts Friday Opinion essay, Firms need to cooperate to fight climate change , favored allowing automakers to cooperate on increasing fuel e...

clock In a coastal town in Washington state, climate change has a high school junior worried about the floods that keep deluging his school. A 17-year-old from Texas says global warming scares him so much he cant even think about it. But across the country, teens are channeling ...

clock On every avenue of public discourse today, there seems to stand a proverbial man with a sandwich board proclaiming, The End Is Nigh. The latest doomsayer is the novelist Jonathan Franzen, who in the New Yorker last week argued that we should relinquish any hope of stopping...

clock A growing number of Americans describe climate change as a crisis, and two-thirds say President Trump is doing too little to tackle the problem. The results, from a poll conducted by The Washington Post and the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF), point to a growing disconnect ...

clock Climate change is here . Short of getting rid of the filibuster in the Senate, it will take both parties to agree to start legislating seriously on climate change, and so far that hasnt happened. So will there ever be a tipping point when Republicans will get on board? The...

clock In the middle of a winters night in 2017, Frank Luntzs cellphone alerted him to a nearby wildfire. The longtime analyst of public opinion opened his bedroom curtains and saw, less than a mile away, flames chewing the dark sky over Los Angeles. Luntz who specializes in how...

Outlook About 70 percent of Americans believe that the climate is changing, most acknowledge that this change reflects human activity, and more than two-thirds think it will harm future generations. Unless we dramatically alter our way of life, swaths of the planet will become ho...

clock Huge tracts of the Amazon, which serves as the lungs of the planet by taking in carbon dioxide, storing it in soils and producing oxygen, are ablaze. Smoke from the widespread fires have turned day into night in Sao Paulo, and intensified a controversy over the Brazilian g...

clock Extreme weather events, cuts to worker productivity and other effects of climate change could cause major global economic losses unless greenhouse gas emissions are significantly curtailed in the next few decades, according to a new working paper published Monday. The pape...

clock Forty million people were under heat alerts Tuesday across the Central and Southern United States as a hot and sultry air mass led to dangerously hot conditions. Houston hit 100 degrees Sunday and Monday, Dallas has reached 101 on three days since Friday, and Oklahoma City...

2C: Beyond the limit 2C: Beyond the limit LAKE HOPATCONG, N.J. Before climate change thawed the winters of New Jersey, this lake hosted boisterous wintertime carnivals. As many as 15,000 skaters took part, and automobile owners would drive onto the thick ice. Thousands watched a...