More than a century of burning fossil fuels has unleashed fiercer heat waves and droughts, heavier downpours that cause massive floods and other extreme climate disruptions. If we want to avoid even worse effects of climate change in the future, humans need to keep the rise in global temperatures as far below two degrees Celsius as possible.

There’s a narrative that the climate crisis will lead us down one of two pathways. The road towards sustainability, where a radical social transformation is triggered so that each person’s needs are met within environmental limits. Or, the road towards armageddon — where we continue full steam ahead with business of usual, which leads to some apocalyptic end-of-the-world scenario where everyone dies. It’s a crude narrative that wouldn’t be out of place in a budget sci-fi film.

On 16 December 2021, a group of men dressed in the sober, branded casual wear of the Silicon Valley startup gathered on the asphalt at an airstrip outside Salinas, California. In front of them stood a black shiny capsule on three spindly legs, which resembled the offspring of a suppository and a golf trolley, with a V-tail like a humpback whale. Its single cross-span wing had four banks of three rotor blades – six at the front and six at the back – which made the sound of a loud hairdryer.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is expected to make a groundbreaking announcement this week that will make the majority of new US car sales EVs by 2032, according to a breaking New York Times scoop.

In a plot reminiscent of the 2004 movie The Day After Tomorrow?, Australian scientists are warning that the Southern Ocean’s deep “overturning” circulation is slowing and headed for collapse.

Melting fjords, increasing avalanches, imperiled wildlife. Our photographer documented the effects of climate change through all four seasons in Svalbard, Norway.

Colleagues and students query role of Jody Freeman, who won prestigious research grant despite sitting on ConocoPhillips board

Rapidly melting Antarctic ice is causing a dramatic slowdown in deep ocean currents and could have a disastrous effect on the climate, a new report warns. The deep-water flows which drive ocean currents could decline by 40% by 2050, a team of Australian scientists says. The currents carry vital heat, oxygen, carbon and nutrients around the globe.

Thirty percent of Americans live in a community near a coastline. While those people don't have the power to unilaterally solve the underlying problem of climate change, some communities are now grappling with how to adapt.

Protecting or expanding the populations of nine key groups of animals, including wolves and whales, would remove huge amounts of carbon from the atmosphere

As climate change makes storms warmer and wetter, the state’s flood control system is struggling to keep up.

Berlin votes on Sunday on making the city climate neutral by 2030, in a binding referendum that will force the new conservative local government to invest heavily in renewable energy, building efficiency and public transportation.

A United Nations report has warned of a looming global water crisis and an "imminent risk" of shortages due to overconsumption and climate change. The world is "blindly travelling a dangerous path" of "vampiric overconsumption and overdevelopment", the report says. Its publication comes before the first major UN water summit since 1977.

Hundreds of millions of people lack access to safe water and sanitation. Will the first UN conference on water in nearly 50 years make a difference?

Five Levels of Ruin — And Where Our Civilization Ranks

After five years of meetings, reports and debate, the world’s scientific community has delivered an ultimatum on the climate crisis: “Act now to secure a liveable sustainable future for all.” The so-called “synthesis report” was published on Monday by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a body made up of hundreds of international scientists from a dizzying array of disciplines.

Ex-vice-president says new projects ‘are a recipe for climate chaos’ ahead of Biden administration’s decision on Willow development

A new way of sucking carbon from the air is up to three times more effective than current technology.

Warmer temperatures in the Arctic are thawing the region’s permafrost — a frozen layer of soil beneath the ground — and potentially stirring viruses that, after lying dormant for tens of thousands of years, could endanger animal and human health.

Emissions from the food system alone will drive the world past 1.5C of global heating, unless high-methane foods are tackled. Climate-heating emissions from food production, dominated by meat, dairy and rice, will by themselves break the key international target of 1.5C if left unchecked, a detailed study has shown.