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...

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.

There are only a few places in the world with a worse record of air pollution than large cities in China, where the occasional deep blanket of rolling smog force people indoors. The authors of a study released Monday in the journal Nature Human Behaviour believe that the dramatic nature of the smog that pervades some Chinese cities may contain an important lesson for us all: Air pollution is making people in China unhappy.

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.

The good news is, our collective efforts to reduce, reuse, recycle and compost have made San Francisco the most successful big city in America at reducing what goes to landfill. The bad news is, plastics have become a huge issue for all of us. “60 Minutes” recently aired a powerful segment on plastic waste and its impact on the environment, along with the (as yet unsuccessful) efforts to clean up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. A portion of that feature was filmed at Recycle Central at Pier 96 in San Francisco, which is Recology’s largest and most technologically advanced recycling facility.

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.

Tens of thousands of Londoners died of cholera from the 1830s to the 1860s. The causes were simple: mass quantities of human waste and industrial contaminants were pouring into the Thames, the central waterway of a city at the center of a rapidly industrializing world. The river gave off an odor so rank that Queen Victoria once had to cancel a leisurely boat ride. By the summer of 1858, Parliament couldn’t hold hearings due to the overwhelming stench coming through the windows.

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.

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.

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.

The first science-based diet that tackles both the poor food eaten by billions of people and averts global environmental catastrophe has been devised. It requires huge cuts in red meat-eating in western countries and radical changes across the world. The “planetary health diet” was created by an international commission seeking to draw up guidelines that provide nutritious food to the world’s fast-growing population. At the same time, the diet addresses the major role of farming – especially livestock – in driving climate change, the destruction of wildlife and the pollution of rivers and oceans.

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.

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.

Earth's north magnetic pole is on the move, unpredictably lurching away from the Canadian Arctic and toward Siberia. It's wandered so much, that the current representation of the entire globe's magnetic field, just updated in 2015, is now out of date. And so, geologists have come up with a new model. This updated model, called the World Magnetic Model, was supposed to be published Jan. 15, but it's now been delayed to Jan. 30, on account of the government shutdown.

Like most economists, I favor taxing carbon dioxide to cut carbon pollution. A carbon tax makes fossil fuels like oil and coal more expensive. That, in turn, leads consumers and industries to use less of them. At the same time, it boosts demand for alternative energy sources like wind and solar powered electricity.

Late last year, the Trump administration released the latest national climate assessment on Black Friday in what many assumed was an attempt to bury the document. If that was the plan, it backfired, and the assessment wound up earning more coverage than it probably would have otherwise. But much of that coverage perpetuated a decades-old practice, one that has been weaponized by the fossil fuel industry: false equivalence.

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!"

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.

Parts of the world will be excluded from the internet for decades to come without major efforts to boost education, online literacy and broadband infrastructure, experts have warned. While half the world’s population now uses the internet, a desperate lack of skills and stagnant investment mean the UN’s goal of universal access, defined as 90% of people being online, may not be reached until 2050 or later, they said.

Scientists were set to release a new World Magnetic Model after accelerating changes in earth's magnetic field, but the US government shutdown stopped them from for now. Navigation as we know it could be in jeopardy.

Climate action by way of litigation has become a key frontline action, with cases against governments and fossil fuel companies spiralling across the world. The Irish Government is next in the dock, as an environmental group has claimed the national response is inadequate and contravenes the human rights of Irish citizens. The case is due to commence on January 22nd and follows similar proceedings in the Netherlands.

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...

When people say "the climate has changed before" these are the kinds of changes they are talking about.

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.

While the endangered state of southern resident killer whales received plenty of attention in 2018, the humpback whale population has seen a resurgence. According to numbers collected for a year-end report by the Marine Education and Research Society — which conducts research into marine life — the humpback whale population off northeastern Vancouver Island, reached 86 in 2018, up from seven in 2004.

When the dinosaur-killing asteroid collided with Earth more than 65 million years ago, it did not go gently into that good night. Rather, it blasted a nearly mile-high tsunami through the Gulf of Mexico that caused chaos throughout the world's oceans, new research finds. The 9-mile-across (14 kilometers) space rock, known as the Chicxulub asteroid, caused so much destruction, it's no wonder the asteroid ended the dinosaur age, leading to the so-called Cretaceous-Paleogene (K-Pg) extinction.

Nearly 200 countries signed a U.N. resolution in Nairobi to eliminate plastic pollution in the sea, a move some delegates hoped would pave the way to a legally binding treaty. If current pollution rates continue, there will be more plastic in the sea than fish by 2050, said the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) which organized the meeting.

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.

BP's investment in next-generation technology just paid off to the tune of a billion barrels of oil. The British energy company has discovered 1 billion barrels of crude at an existing oilfield in the Gulf of Mexico. BP also announced two new offshore oil discoveries and a major new investment in a nearby field. BP is the Gulf of Mexico's biggest producer, and it's making strides to hold that title.

It's sparkly, it's festive and some scientists want to see it swept from the face of the Earth. Glitter should be banned, researcher Trisia Farrelly, a senior lecturer in environment and planning at Massey University in New Zealand, told CBS. The reason? Glitter is made of microplastic, a piece of plastic less than 0.19 inches (5 millimeters) in length. Specifically, glitter is made up of bits of a polymer called polyethylene terephthalate (PET), which goes by the trade name Mylar. And though it comes in all sizes, glitter is typically just a millimeter or so across, Live Science previously reported.

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.

During a research cruise to the Sargasso Sea in fall 1971 marine biologist Ed Carpenter first noticed peculiar, white specks floating amidst the mats of brown sargassum seaweed. After some investigating he discovered they were tiny bits of plastic. He was stunned. If thousands of the broken down particles were showing up in in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, 550 miles from any mainland, he says, “I figured it’s all over the place.”