The average temperature of the planet has been rising since the 1700s and its Industrial Revolution. Three years ago, in 2015, 195 nations signed onto what is known as the Paris Accord. In it, they agreed to curb greenhouse gas emissions to limit that warming by 2100. The goal is not to let it exceed 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) over preindustrial times. But a new report says there may be big benefits to setting an even lower target.

Just two years ago, amid global fanfare, the Paris climate accords were signed — initiating what seemed, for a brief moment, like the beginning of a planet-saving movement. But almost immediately, the international goal it established of limiting global warming to two degrees Celsius began to seem, to many of the world’s most vulnerable, dramatically inadequate; the Marshall Islands’ representative gave it a blunter name, calling two degrees of warming “genocide.”

Al Gore, the former U.S. Vice President and co-founder of Generation Investment Management, continues to ring the alarm that climate change and environmental damage is a global emergency. “This is the biggest challenge we’ve ever faced,” Gore said at the Summit LA18 festival. “Nuclear war is the only one in the same category, and we’ve held that at bay pretty successfully. This is an existential threat to our civilization and potentially our species.”

A new study has found that people would change their consumption habits to help the climate - even if this would have implications for their personal lives and shopping habits - and that this could play a significant role in helping the UK to reduce its carbon emissions.

Climate change is altering America’s first national park so quickly that plants and animals may not be able to adapt.

A collective-risk dilemma experiment with members of the public in Barcelona has shown that people are more or less likely to contribute money to fighting climate change depending on their how wealthy they are. And the results indicate that participants with fewer resources were prepared to contribute significantly more to the public good than wealthier people, sometimes up to twice as much.

Climate change could reduce fertility rates in male insects by at least half, according to a study published Tuesday in Nature Communications. This is bad news for bugs and humans alike, because insects play a crucial role in pollinating our crops and stabilizing many of the food webs and ecosystems that we rely on. Led by Kirs Sales, a postgraduate researcher at the University of East Anglia in the UK, the research found that increasingly intense heat waves pose a serious threat to the reproductive fitness of insects worldwide.

At least 44 people have been killed in California a result of the wildfires that have burned more than 100,000 acres of land in the state. The most vulnerable populations, including the elderly and people with disabilities, are at the highest risk of perishing in the fires, which were made more likely by climate change that exacerbated dryness and tinder availability in fire-prone areas.

Apple reaffirmed its commitment to the Paris Agreement on climate change with a senior company official telling the Web Summit in Lisbon, Portugal, that the iPhone maker could continue to profit while being environmentally responsible. "The air we breathe and the planet we leave to our children doesn't belong to any one party, it doesn't belong to any one ideology...

FOR THE PAST eight years, climate science has been under a sort of spell in the House of Representatives. Instead of trying to understand it better or even acknowledging some of the field’s current uncertainties, House Science Committee Chairman Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas) used his position to harass federal climate scientists with subpoenas while holding hearings on “Making the EPA Great Again” or whether “global warming theories are alarmist” and researchers are pursuing a “personal agenda.”

Despite being banned in 2010, about 40,000 tons of carbon tetrachloride, an ozone-depleting compound, are still emitted into the atmosphere every year. But the origins of the illegal emissions have long baffled scientists. Now, an international team of researchers has tracked down the source of nearly half of the emissions to eastern China, according to a recent study published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

"It could be a game-changer in the fight against climate change," the executive director of the Sierra Club said.

With a growing world population and climate challenges that are causing agricultural areas to shrink, many are wondering where sustainable food will come from in the future. A professor of gastrophysics from the Department of Food Science at the University of Copenhagen and a chef offer a suggestion in a new research article: The cephalopod population (including squid, octopus and cuttlefish) in the oceans is growing and growing – let’s get better at cooking them so that many more people will want to eat them!

Researchers in the US have scaled up a new low-cost system that could provide efficient cooling for homes while using very little electricity. The team has developed a roof-top sized array, built from a highly reflective material made from glass and polymers. In tests, the system kept water around 10C cooler than the ambient air when exposed to midday sunlight in summer. The approach could also be scaled up to cool power stations and data centres.

Wind speeds around the world seem to be decreasing in a phenomenon known as 'stilling' and European scientists are hoping to find out why.

HERSCHEL ISLAND, ALSO KNOWN AS Qikiqtaryuk, is fragile and losing ground. The whalers are long gone, and the Inuvialuit who once called it home now only pass through every once in a while, as a seasonal place to camp, or as a stopover while they’re out hunting. This 45-square-mile island in the Beaufort Sea, north of the Arctic Circle, is largely abandoned, and threatened by erosion and rapidly vanishing permafrost.

We’re not managing our crops to support global nutritional needs: In fact, we use a disproportionate amount of land used to grow grains, fats, oils, and sugar, and not enough land to grow the fruits and vegetables that we need to survive, a new research paper asserts.

An estimated 50,000 people marched in Montreal to show their support for climate action on Saturday, as part of a wider campaign with sister marches happening in cities throughout Quebec. The march was organized by a group called The Planet Goes to Parliament. Spokesperson Nathalie Roy said that the movement was born out of increasing frustration from citizens during the recent provincial election campaign.

Bill Gates shares his plan for fighting climate change.

Worsening weather conditions are driving farmers in Bangladesh out of their homes. Nearly 200,000 coastal residents will be forced to migrate to inland areas to find alternative livelihoods, according to a recent study. This will be caused by increased inundation and saline contamination of the soil, hitting crop production and incomes, said the study by Valerie Mueller, a research fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), and Joyce Chen, associate professor at Ohio State University.

‘There ain’t no flounder around here no more – they all up there in Rhode Island.’: As warming oceans make summer flounder scarce, a town loses its livelihood.

It may sound small, but a half-degree of temperature change could lead to more dire consequences in a warming world, according to a sweeping new scientific assessment.

The impacts and costs of 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit (1.5 degrees Celsius) of global warming will be far greater than expected, according to a comprehensive assessment by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released Sunday in Incheon, South Korea.

The Australian government has backed coal-fired power, despite the recommendations of a major report on climate change. Phasing out coal is considered crucial to limiting global warming to within 1.5C, as set out in the UN report released yesterday. Australia's deputy prime minister has said the country should "absolutely" continue to use and exploit its coal.

Major study also finds huge changes to farming are needed to avoid destroying Earth’s ability to feed its population

Hurricane Michael, the third most intense storm on record to make landfall in the U.S., has caused widespread destruction, turning places like Mexico Beach, Florida, into a hellscape of broken homes and overturned cars. It will be a while before we learn the full extent of the damage — and the human suffering and death — caused by the storm’s 155 mph winds and the 14-foot storm surge that swamped the coastline.

Climate change isn’t just about starving polar bears or melting ice, writes Sheila Watt-Cloutier. It is about human rights, human health, food security, poverty, loss of traditional knowledge, and global insecurity as traditional ways of life that are lost to glacier melt, coastal erosion, permafrost melt, rising seas, extreme drought, floods and violent weather.

From catastrophic climate change to alien invasion, the theoretical physicist’s thoughts about what might lie ahead were often far from optimistic.

A parasitic fungus that grows wild throughout the Himalayas and sells for more than its weight in gold could vanish if current harvesting and climate trends continue, according to new research from Stanford University.

In the face of global warming, polar bears continue to lose ground. The gradual withdrawal of the ice could lead to periods of scarcity with worrying repercussions. Among the victims of global warming, polar bears are probably the most iconic. These creatures have probably survived previous warm periods in the Arctic with stranded whale carcasses. However, this source of power may no longer suffice with the gradual removal of ice, reducing the number of platforms on the surface of which they can hunt seals.

Satellite images revealing an Arctic ice cap destabilizing at “unexpected and unprecedented” speed have scientists questioning the stability of some polar ice caps.

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.

New labelling on food packaging will enable consumers in Denmark to see the effect of their shopping on the environment. Food products will be marked with stickers showing their environmental impact, according to a proposal expected to be included in a new climate package to be presented by the government this week. “We want to give consumers the means to assess in supermarkets the environmental impact of products,” Minister for the Environment Lars Christian Lilleholt said.

A new study led by the University of Washington found that while dead whales are valuable sources of fat and protein for some polar bears, this resource will likely not be enough to sustain most bear...

As Floridians and Georgians in the U.S. wake up as just the latest global victims of the kind of storm that scientists say will become only more frequent and powerful in years ahead as the Earth's temperature continues to climb, international advocates for aggressive climate action announced plans on Thursday to directly rally political leaders and decision-makers around the world to "wake up," end their support for the fossil fuel industry, and urgently usher in an era of dramatic and urgent transformation "before it's too late."