The age of climate panic is here. Last summer, a heat wave baked the entire Northern Hemisphere, killing dozens from Quebec to Japan. Some of the most destructive wildfires in California history turned more than a million acres to ash, along the way melting the tires and the sneakers of those trying to escape the flames. Pacific hurricanes forced three million people in China to flee and wiped away almost all of Hawaii’s East Island.

After years of failing to pass a carbon tax, climate hawks are now rallying behind a bold new proposal for tackling global warming. Known as the Green New Deal, this economic stimulus package for the planet promises to dramatically cut carbon emissions through government spending on clean energy jobs, technologies, and infrastructure.

When they arrived in the Americas centuries ago, European colonists brought pestilence and death. Their arrival was so devastating, in fact, that it may have contributed to a period of global cooling, according to a new study. The research, to be published in the March issue of the journal Quaternary Science Reviews, represents an ambitious attempt to show that, through a series of events, human activity was affecting the climate long before the industrial revolution and global warming.

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.

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.

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.

At 15, Greta Thunberg has many decades of living with the effects of climate change ahead of her—and she doesn't want to tell her grandchildren she didn't try to stop it. At an address to the United Nations COP24 conference in Poland last week, the Swedish activist accused world leaders of stealing the future of her generation and said they weren't mature enough to act, CNN reports. "You say you love your children above all else and yet you are stealing their future in front of their very eyes," she told the conference, which was attended by delegates from 190 countries.

Jordan Peterson is many things. He’s a best-selling author, although not in France, unsurprisingly. He’s a former Professor at the University of Toronto, now on likely permanent leave. He’s famous for refusing to use the gender pronouns preferred by his students for reasons he claimed were related to freedom of speech. He’s been adopted by the alt-right and incels as one of their preferred intellectuals, over his very faint protests.

What do scientists see when comparing our future climate with the past? In less than 200 years, humans have reversed a multimillion-year cooling trend, new research suggests. If global warming continues unchecked, Earth in 2030 could resemble its former self from 3 million years ago, according to a study published Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences finds.

President Donald Trump's administration and its allies in the climate denial community have mounted a campaign to try to discredit the Fourth National Climate Assessment, an effort that has escalated in intensity since the report's release during the Thanksgiving weekend. Trump could not halt the peer-reviewed assessment by the U.S. government's climate scientists. The report—the most comprehensive and authoritative report on climate change and its impacts in the United States—is mandated by a law Congress passed in 1990.

A major climate report will say coal-generated electricity must be phased out globally by 2050 if the world is to avoid the most catastrophic impacts of global warming, including the total destruction of the Great Barrier Reef. The report prepared by the United Nations body for climate change, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, distils more than 6000 scientific references – including those from Australian researchers – and will outline the impacts of global warming of 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels.

The role of forests in combating climate change risks being overlooked by the world’s governments, according to a group of scientists that has warned halting deforestation is “just as urgent” as eliminating the use of fossil fuels. Razing the world’s forests would release more than 3 trillion tons of carbon dioxide, more than the amount locked in identified global reserves of oil, coal and gas. By protecting and restoring forests, the world would achieve 18% of the emissions mitigation needed by 2030 to avoid runaway climate change, the group of 40 scientists, spanning five countries, said in a statement.

What time is it in California? If voters decide to abolish the clock-changing practice in November, answering that could become more difficult.

Environmental data for 2017 are pouring in, and the results might not be what you’d expect. In the United States, where President Trump has promised to unshackle the coal industry and to abandon an international climate change treaty, greenhouse-gas emissions fell last year and are expected to continue falling. In Europe, where political leaders consider climate change an urgent priority, emissions rose last year.

This summer people have been suffering and dying because of heat waves and wildfires in many parts of the world. The past three years were the warmest ever recorded, and 2018 is likely to follow suit. What we do in the next 10-20 years will determine whether our planet remains hospitable to human life or slides down an irreversible path to what scientists in a major new study call “Hothouse Earth” conditions.

This summer, the arctic burned. Boreal forests, usually caked in ice, were charred. Further south, from Quebec to Japan, hundreds of people dropped like scorched flies in the heat, as though under a giant magnifying glass. Across Europe, the same: deaths, drought and crop failure. As heatwaves multiply in the future, so will heat-related deaths: 7,000 a year in the UK alone. Droughts will be more intense, leading to food shortages.

Alan Jacobs’s latest book is a guide for thinking seriously in an age of distraction—but it falls prey to the very kind of habits which he aims to counter. By Mike St. Thomas.

The window for hope is closing rapidly for the planet. But young activists are demonstrating their power at the ballot box to push for a different future.

Is polygamy justifiable? Is it lawful to eat swine's flesh? By Sarah Laskow.

AGHAST at the defection of millions who voted for Barack Obama in 2012 but for Donald Trump in 2016—notably working-class whites in the Midwest—the left wants the Democratic Party to snatch up the banner of economic populism and declare war on Wall Street, big business and other global elites. At post-election gatherings like the Democracy Alliance conference in Washington, DC, it is an article of faith that Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, the snowy-haired, finger-jabbing scold who lost the Democratic presidential primary to Hillary Clinton, would have trounced Mr Trump in the general election.