The coronavirus pandemic—sadly—has introduced or reintroduced many people to the concept of an exponential curve, in which a quantity grows at an increasing rate over time, as the number of people contracting the virus currently is doing. It is this curve that so many of us are trying to “flatten” through social distancing and other mitigating measures, small and large.

The ozone layer is continuing to heal and has the potential to fully recover, according to a new study. A scientific paper, published in Nature, heralds a rare success in the reversal of environmental damage and shows that orchestrated global action can make a difference.

Climate change is dramatically changing the abundance of marine life around the world. As oceans warm, populations of species that can adapt to elevated local temperatures have increased nearer to the poles, while those that live closer to the equator are shrinking in size.

England is in danger of experiencing droughts within 20 years unless action is taken to combat the impact of the climate crisis on water availability, the public spending watchdog says. The National Audit Office (NAO), in a report published on Wednesday, says some parts of England, especially the south-east, are at risk of running out of water owing to decreased rainfall and a need to cut the amount taken from natural waterways.

When Christiana Figueres took the reins of the United Nations’ international climate negotiations in 2010, hopes were not high that the world would come together to forge an agreement to tackle global warming—especially after talks had fallen apart in Copenhagen the previous year. In fact, when she was asked at a press conference if she thought such a global agreement would ever be possible, she replied, “Not in my lifetime.”

You know that gnawing feeling of “oh, God, we’re in the midst of something horrible” you have because of the coronavirus? Are you looking around at this crisis sweeping across the world and feeling helpless because you have limited power to stop it?

Antarctica and Greenland are losing ice six times faster than in the 1990s, a pair of studies in the journal Nature show. According to the international team of climatologists behind the research, the unprecedented rate of melt has already contributed 0.7 inches (1.78 centimeters) to global sea level rise in the last three decades, putting the planet on track for the worst-case climate warming scenario laid out in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) latest report.

Last year’s summer was so warm that it helped trigger the loss of 600bn tons of ice from Greenland – enough to raise global sea levels by 2.2mm in just two months, new research has found. The analysis of satellite data has revealed the astounding loss of ice in just a few months of abnormally high temperatures around the northern pole. Last year was the hottest on record for the Arctic, with the annual minimum extent of sea ice in the region its second-lowest on record.

The community is fearful of what will happen once it shutters.

In the last 22 years, one giant glacier in Antarctica has retreated almost three miles. If it fully thaws, sea levels would rise almost 5 feet.

The rich are primarily to blame for the global climate crisis, a study by the University of Leeds of 86 countries claims. The wealthiest tenth of people consume about 20 times more energy overall than the bottom ten, wherever they live. The gulf is greatest in transport, where the top tenth gobble 187 times more fuel than the poorest tenth, the research says.

2020 was supposed to be pivotal for the environment. The end date of a raft of corporate sustainability goals, the year the Paris Agreement kicks into gear. “But now we’re here, it’s clear business and governments are falling short of what needs to be achieved," say risk analysts Maplecroft.

Small levels of global warming can increase the likelihood of extreme events, new research warns. That’s prompting scientists to question how accurately disasters in the recent past can be used to predict extreme events today.A study published Wednesday in Science Advances suggests that some research attributing climate change to individual disasters has underestimated the probability of certain extremes in the last decade. That’s especially true of unprecedented hot and wet events.

On Thursday, political risk research and consulting firm the Eurasia Group released an updated version of its “Top Risks 2020” report to show how coronavirus has sped up the trends that worry the group the most. The new report warns that the public health crisis will pull attention and resources away from addressing climate change.

The 2019/2020 winter has been the warmest on record for Europe, with average temperatures 1.4C above the previous high of 2015/2016. Winter is defined as the months of December, January, and February. The Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) says the warmth was very evident in the north and east of the continent where a number of local temperature records were being broken.

Tropical forests are taking up less carbon dioxide from the air, reducing their ability to act as “carbon sinks” and bringing closer the prospect of accelerating climate breakdown. The Amazon could turn into a source of carbon in the atmosphere, instead of one of the biggest absorbers of the gas, as soon as the next decade, owing to the damage caused by loggers and farming interests and the impacts of the climate crisis, new research has found.

No Cobra meetings, no sombre speeches, yet the consequences of runaway global heating are catastrophic, says Guardian columnist Owen Jones

Danie Slabbert points toward the cattle that brought his farm back to life. Down the slope ahead of him, 500 black Drakensberger and mottled Nguni cows graze cheek by jowl.

The research, used to help avoid a ban, claimed ‘severe impacts’ on farming if glyphosate was outlawed

Coal, oil, and gas are responsible for much more atmospheric methane, the super-potent warming gas, than previously known.