This country may be run by a rabid climate denier, but when it comes to the existential issue of our time, most Americans aren’t taking their cues from President Trump. Quite the opposite: More Americans than ever say climate change is real and that they’re worried about it. Those are the results of a new poll by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication and the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication. In nearly every way pollsters asked, the 1,114 people surveyed in November and December expressed more awareness of climate change and its impacts...

The question is no longer whether or not we are going to fail, but how are we going to comport ourselves in the era of failure? By Dahr Jamail.

A record number of Americans understand that climate change is real, according to a new survey, and they are increasingly worried about its effects in their lives today. Some 73 percent of Americans polled late last year said that global warming was happening, the report found, a jump of 10 percentage points from 2015 and three points since last March. The rise in the number of Americans who say global warming is personally important to them was even sharper, jumping nine percentage points since March to 72 percent, another record over the past decade.

On Monday, dozens of regional and state emergency managers were scheduled to convene in Miami for a weeklong course preparing them for the upcoming extreme weather season. The annual Emergency Management Institute, as it is formally called, is the main way federal authorities train their state and local counterparts on the basics of navigating deadly natural disasters, including when to begin evacuations and how to prepare for the effect of a storm surge.

Before a heat wave in Australia last November, the country was home to an estimated 75,000 spectacled fruit bats (also known as the spectacled flying fox). The bats reside mostly in the northeast state of Queensland. A heat wave hit the region between November 24 to 30, 2018. On the hottest days, November 26 and 27, temperatures were above 42 degrees C (about 107 degrees F), and the effect on the fruit bats was dramatic: At the time, locals reported seeing bats fall out of trees en masse.

Mega-storms the size of England are increasingly savaging countries across the Sahel, a five-year project backed by the UK government has found. Already a troubled region, the Sahel – which hugs the Saharan desert from Senegal to Eritrea – has seen a threefold increase in mega-storms over the last 35 years. The ferocious storms – which produce roughly the same amount of energy in 12 hours that the entire UK consumes in a year – can devastate everything in their path with powerful winds and torrential rain. They can grow as high as 16km, satellite images show.

Vancouver City Council voted unanimously Wednesday night to declare a climate emergency. The motion was introduced by OneCity Coun. Christine Boyle. Now that the motion has passed, city staff will come up with new ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and set new climate change targets. Boyle says her motion passing unanimously proves how important it is to be a greener city.

At a time when the science of global warming is under attack and many people complain of climate change fatigue, some cheering news occurred last month: A book about climate change became a New York Times bestseller in its first week of publication. Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming, edited by environmentalist Paul Hawken, is the first environmental book to make such a splashy debut since Elizabeth Kolbert’s Field Notes from a Catastrophe in 2006.

Despite some positive climate action, new fossil fuel infrastructure is still being built and deployed. Dozens of new coal power plants are currently planned or under construction, for instance, while petrol car sales will nearly hit 100m in 2019.

In the welter of daily demands upon physicians, it might be easy to imagine that weaning the world off its reliance on fossil fuels is asking a bit too much. But preventing sickness and averting premature death are squarely in a physician’s wheelhouse. And dramatic increases in both are projected for the foreseeable future as the world’s continued...

Whether halving the population would help to reduce the production of man-made CO2 and other greenhouse gases is open to doubt. We contribute about 20,000 megatonnes per year. Even if 3.5 billion bodies needed to be cremated to stop the spread of a viral pandemic, this would only add an extra one hundred megatonnes of CO2 to the atmosphere, far short of our current annual contribution.

Several companies are diversifying their businesses, from biofuels to electric vehicles

More Americans are taking climate change seriously. A new report by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication reveals that 8 percent of participants in three separate surveys said they had changed their mind on the topic over the previous year—and of those, 84 percent said their level of concern had increased. While this shift cut across party lines, many conservatives remain resistant to acknowledge the reality of the phenomenon, and its potentially catastrophic consequences.

Key Democratic lawmakers say the Trump administration is putting U.S. armed forces at greater risk by not properly acknowledging and preparing for the effects of climate change. A law Congress passed in 2017 reauthorizing Department of Defense programs mandates the Pentagon spell out how rising sea levels, intensifying wildfires and other risks posed by a warming planet threaten to military installations.

Climate change-induced melting will raise global sea levels for decades to come

A team of Chinese and U.S. scientists estimated that the world’s oceans are warming by up to 40% faster than previously thought. The oceans are warming faster than previously estimated, setting a new temperature record in 2018 in a trend that is causing major damage to marine life, a Science article published Thursday warns. "How fast are the oceans warming?" was the main question addressed by a team of Chinese and U.S. scientists in a research which demonstrates that "global warming is here and has major consequences already. There is no doubt, none!"

Climate change could be kept in check if a phaseout of all fossil fuel infrastructure were to begin immediately, according to research. It shows that meeting the internationally agreed aspiration of keeping global warming to less than 1.5C above pre-industrial levels is still possible. The scientists say it is therefore the choices being made by global society, not physics, which is the obstacle to meeting the goal.

The hillside groves of eucalyptus trees that tower over the Santa Cruz shoreline would, not so long ago, be teeming with monarch butterflies at this time of year. Boughs would be bent under the weight of black and orange clusters, as hundreds of thousands of the magical invertebrates nestled into the leaves, waiting out the frost on the California coast before returning north.

An analysis concluded that Earth’s oceans are heating up 40 percent faster on average than a United Nations panel estimated five years ago, a finding with dire implications for climate change.

Imagine during the Cold War that one political party, in the face of overwhelming evidence that the Soviet Union was engaged in espionage against the United States, had a nuclear arsenal pointed at the United States, kept Eastern Europe under its thumb and imprisoned dissenters, refused to consider the Soviet Union a danger — of any sort — to the United States or other Western democracies. And they would offer no credible evidence to the contrary, but rather assert that it was all a hoax.

If a future of relentless fires, droughts, superstorms and rising sea levels makes you feel like you need a strong caffeinated beverage, there is some bad news: climate change is coming for the world’s coffee beans. Greg Meenahan, the partnership director at the non-profit institute World Coffee Research, puts it this way: “Demand for coffee is expected to double by the year 2050 and, if nothing is done, more than half of the world’s suitable coffee land will be pushed into unsuitability due to climate change. Without research and development, the coffee sector will need up to 180m more bags of coffee in 2050 than we are likely to have.”

The fall lasts long enough that I have time to watch the blue ice race upward, aeons of time compressed into glacial ice, flashing by in fractions of seconds. I assume I’ve fallen far enough that I’ve pulled my climbing partner, Sean, into the crevasse with me. This is what it’s like to die in the mountains, a voice in my head tells me. Just as my mind completes that thought, the rope wrenches my climbing harness up. I bounce languidly up and down as the dynamic physics inherent in the rope play themselves out. Somehow Sean has checked my fall while still on the surface of the glacier.

Buried deep under the Greenland ice sheet is a unique archive of life on Earth 40,000 years ago. Scientists are using this information to try to predict future changes to the planet...

Scientists and engineers have urged a re-evaluation of nuclear power as a source of energy, and have suggested that this area may help us to reduce the impact of climate change in the future. Numerous voices in the technological and political community are re-asserting that nuclear power can be a positive and beneficial energy source, and that its low environmental impact is a strong justification for investment and maintenance of this area.

Democrats put climate change back on the forefront of their governing agenda Thursday, portraying the issue as an "existential threat" even as the caucus remains split over how forcefully to respond. Speaker Nancy Pelosi brought up the issue in her opening address while touting a new select panel to come up with ideas on how to solve it, and the Energy and Commerce Committee announced that climate change would be the subject of its very first hearing this year.

Here is what I want everyone in the climate change movement to hear: People are not going to be frightened into caring. Scientific predictions about what will happen 10, 20, or 50 years in the future are not going to make them care, not enough. What we need is the level of energy and commitment that we saw at Standing Rock. We need the breadth of activism we saw in Flint, Michigan, where everyone from yoga teachers to biker gangs joined in relentless protest against lead contamination.

A study was published last week by the same scientists, which stated that oceans are absorbing heat more than imaginations and estimations of the scientists. This is a major threat to the planet.

Dahr Jamail, staff writer at Truthout, has been writing about the global emergency of climate change for nearly a decade. In his new book, The End of Ice: Bearing Witness and Finding Meaning in the Path of Climate Destruction, which is being released today, Jamail shares his firsthand accounts of returning to beloved spaces in the natural world. He observes the drastic ways in which they’ve been destroyed due to humanity’s relentless burning of fossil fuels, and mourns over how many of them are unlikely to recover over the duration of human existence.

Late last year, ‘yellow vest’ protests erupted across France. One trigger was a planned hike in the price of petrol. Fuel-tax rises, now on hold, are part of France’s strategy to reduce carbon emissions by 40% from 1990 levels by 2030 and phase out petrol and diesel vehicles by 2040. Clearly, public opposition might hinder these efforts.

For all those that rely on that cup of coffee to get you going in the morning, here’s another eye-opener: A majority of wild coffee might be going extinct. That info is courtesy of a new study finding roughly 60 percent of wild coffee species are at risk of going extinct. We don’t drink these wild, unsavory strains often, but they could help our beloved arabica and robusta beans adapt to climate change, resist pests and ward off diseases.

With oceans growing warmer and more acidic as a result of climate change, the world’s coral reefs are under siege. Recent research shows that the number of coral bleaching events has risen drastically in recent years, and in 2016 and 2017 about half of the coral making up Australia’s Great Barrier Reef died off. But researchers at two Australian universities have developed an underwater robot that could help turn the tide in the ongoing struggle to save at-risk reefs.

Natural disasters cost $155 billion this year, and several of them struck the United States particularly hard. Hurricanes Michael and Florence, the California wildfires and Hawaii’s volcano eruption are all on the list of the most expensive global disasters of 2018, according to the Zurich-based reinsurance company Swiss Re. “Like last year, the losses from the 2018 series of events highlight the increasing vulnerability of the ever-growing concentration of humans and property values on coastlines and in the urban-wildlife interface...

Despite federal climate policy rollbacks, governors and cities have decided to take up the mantel on climate leadership. Nine Northeast and Mid-Atlantic governors and the mayor of Washington, D.C. announced that they will move forward with a plan that prioritizes clean transportation and ambitious climate goals.

Driving beyond South Africa's Limpopo province, into the village of Chivadini, people and grassland are scarce. But the oldest living organisms in Africa -- baobab trees -- are abundant. These spectral behemoths blend into the Saharan countryside and have been an icon of the African savannah since millennia. As the oldest seed producing trees in the world, their resilience -- some are more than 2,000 years old -- have earned them many names in myths, legends and folklore.

Each year, the Oscars present an In Memoriam – a roundup of the famous faces the world lost in the past 12 months. And as the year that’s seen warnings of apocalyptic worldwide extinctions with effects lasting millions of years into the future finally draws to its close, it’s only fitting that we do the same. So here’s IFLScience’s In Memoriam: a tribute to all the species we lost in 2018. Fittingly, the first wildlife obituary belongs to a movie star: the Spix’s Macaw. The star of Rio’s brilliant blue plumage has now been seen in the wild for the last time – around 100 of the birds still exist, and all are in captivity.