When Reuters photographer Lucas Jackson headed to Greenland in June, he traveled with a heavy, oversized rolling bag containing a crucial piece of equipment to document climate change. Jackson, one of a handful of Reuters photographers licensed to operate a drone, spent seven rainy days camped alongside Greenland's Helheim glacier, near the small seaside village of Tasiilaq. Using an Inspire 1 Pro drone, Jackson captured more than 700 gigabytes of footage and images in Greenland.

A trial is underway to restore damaged coral on the Great Barrier Reef using electricity. The reef has been severely assaulted in recent years by cyclones and back-to-back heatwaves. Nathan Cook at conservation group Reef Ecologic and his colleagues are attempting to regrow surviving coral fragments on steel frames. The frames are placed on damaged parts of the reef and stimulated with electricity to accelerate the coral’s growth (see video).

Targeted engineering projects to hold off glacier melting could slow down the collapse of ice sheets and limit sea-level rise, according to a new study published in the European Geosciences Union journal The Cryosphere. While an intervention similar in size to existing large civil engineering projects could only have a 30% chance of success, a larger project would have better odds of holding off ice-sheet collapse. But study authors Michael Wolovick and John Moore caution that reducing emissions still remains key to stopping climate change and its dramatic effects.

Fossil fuel interest groups will continue debating the reality of human-caused climate change until the seas swallow us all, but among scientists the matter is settled. Last week, the National Science Teachers Association (NSTA) put out a position statement affirming as much and telling the naysayers to piss off.

One day in 1961, an American economist named Daniel Ellsberg stumbled across a piece of paper with apocalyptic implications. Ellsberg, who was advising the US government on its secret nuclear war plans, had discovered a document that contained an official estimate of the death toll in a preemptive “first strike” on China and the Soviet Union: 300 million in those countries, and double that globally.

Mosquito larvae that grow up in water contaminated with plastic accumulate the litter in their bodies – and some of it remains there even after the larvae emerge as adult flies. The mosquitoes may exacerbate the problem of plastic contamination when they are eaten by animals living on land.

Planet on brink of 'tipping point' as thawing soil and sediment releases large volumes of carbon dioxide and methane into atmosphere. The world is on course to exceed global warming limits set out in the Paris climate agreement much earlier than previously thought, scientists have warned, following the first comprehensive study of the impact of melting permafrost.

There is no such thing as a category 6 hurricane or tropical storm – yet. The highest level – the top of the scale for the most powerful, most devastating hurricane or tropical storm capable of destroying entire cities like New Orleans or New York – is a category 5 storm. Meteorologists and scientists never imagined that there would be a need for a category 6 storm, with winds that exceed 200 miles per hour on a sustained basis, sweeping away everything in its path. Until now, such a storm wasn’t possible, so there was no need for a new category above category 5.

Humans looking back on this period of history in future will be astonished by the huge amount of plastic this generation left behind – because rubbish waste is now so prolific it will become fossilised, a scientist has said. Dr Dan Parsons, professor of sedimentology at Hull University, says that it is inevitable there will be a record of the thousands of tonnes of plastic waste we generate as microplastics are already seeping into the earth and into the food chain.

If we want to avoid mass extinctions and preserve the ecosystems all plants and animals depend on, governments should protect a third of the oceans and land by 2030 and half by 2050, with a focus on areas of high biodiversity. So say leading biologists in an editorial in the journal Science this week.

The map looks terrifyingly unfamiliar. Not because of the outlines of the continents; those are comforting in their hooks, tails, splotches, and whorls. It’s the storms. Across the globe’s tropics right now, seven superstorms are swirling over oceans. Hurricane Florence is butting into the Carolinas on North America’s southeastern coast. Tropical storms Helene, Isaac, and Joyce are hovering over the Atlantic like jets stacked on approach to Charlotte.

Just a cosmic hop, skip and jump away, an Earth-size planet orbits the closest star to our sun, Proxima Centauri. Ever since the discovery of the exoplanet—known as Proxima Centauri b—in 2016, people have wondered whether it could be capable of sustaining life. Now, using computer models similar to those used to study climate change on Earth, researchers have found that, under a wide range of conditions...

Lakes across Alaska and Siberia have started to bubble with methane, and the release of this highly potent greenhouse gas has scientists worried. Last month NASA released footage showing the bubbling Arctic lakes, which are the result of a little known phenomenon called “abrupt thawing.” It occurs when the permafrost—ground that has been frozen for potentially thousands of years—thaws faster than expected.

It is now official that solar power is recognized to be the cheapest source of energy power in countries with low income, providing companies and governments to let go of the coal and gas in exchange of renewable energy. Bloomberg New Energy Finance or BNEF provided a data that shows that in 2016, the average solar energy price in nearly 60 countries declined per megawatt to $1.65 million, with wind energy source at $1.66 million per megawatt.

Tomorrow’s atmospheric scrubbers will suck carbon straight from the air

Two leading scientists have issued a call for massive swathes of the planet’s land and sea to be protected from human interference in order to avert mass extinction. Current levels of protection “do not even come close to required levels”, they said, urging world leaders to come to a new arrangement by which at least 30 per cent of the planet’s surface is formally protected by 2030. Chief scientist of the National Geographic Society Jonathan Baillie and Chinese Academy of Sciences biologist Ya-Ping Zhang made their views clear in an editorial published in the journal Science.

Strong action to combat climate change could cumulatively add at least $26 trillion to the world economy by 2030, according to a study on Wednesday which seeks to dispel fears that a shift from fossil fuels will undermine growth.

After decades of damning reports, bleak images, and depressing headlines, one new report claims to have a “positive update” on the Great Barrier Reef (GBR). The Reef & Rainforest Research Centre (RRRC), a non-profit organization, has published a report for the Queensland State Government that claims parts of the GBR are showing some “signification signs” of recovery from years of bleaching.

We are facing deep-rooted climate, social, and environmental crises. The current dominant economic system cannot provide solutions. It is time for system change. For Friends of the Earth International this means creating societies based on peoples’ sovereignty and environmental, social, economic, and gender justice. We must question and deconstruct the capitalist logic of accumulation. The climate catastrophe is interwoven with many social and environmental crises, including oppression, corporate power, hunger, water depletion, biodiversity loss and deforestation.

The Trump administration, taking its third major step this year to roll back federal efforts to fight climate change, is preparing to make it significantly easier for energy companies to release methane into the atmosphere. Methane, which is among the most powerful greenhouse gases, routinely leaks from oil and gas wells, and energy companies have long said that the rules requiring them to test for emissions were costly and burdensome.

Rising levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide have reduced protein in goldenrod pollen, a key late-season food source for North American bees, a Purdue University study shows. Researchers found that the overall protein concentration of goldenrod pollen fell about one-third from the onset of the Industrial Revolution to the beginning of the 21st century.

A new study highlights a lesser-known but serious consequence of the climate crisis for hundreds of millions of people around the world—major nutritional deficiencies that are likely to hit impoverished populations the hardest, as carbon dioxide emissions seriously affect the quality of food crops. The study, completed by scientists at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and published in the journal Nature Climate Change, found that in just three decades, crops being grown around the world will lose many of their nutritional benefits...

Crops grown in a high CO2 atmosphere are less nutritious, containing less protein, zinc and iron. Rising levels of carbon dioxide could make crops less nutritious and damage the health of hundreds of millions of people, research has revealed, with those living in some of the world’s poorest regions likely to be hardest hit. Previous research has shown that many food crops become less nutritious when grown under the CO2 levels expected by 2050, with reductions of protein, iron and zinc estimated at 3–17%.

Climate change is one of the issues on which the late Sen. John McCain was roundly praised for bucking his party. But McCain was arguably the reason we don’t have a sane climate law in place right now. The Arizona Republican’s early work on climate change with then-Democratic Sen. Joe Lieberman (Conn.) was indeed groundbreaking, producing the 2003 and 2005 iterations of the proposed Climate Stewardship Act. While those bills had little chance of success, they were presented at a time when the George W. Bush administration was prevaricating on...

As access to cheap, plentiful energy dries up and the effects of climate change take hold, we are entering a new era of profound challenge ― and free market capitalism cannot dig us out. This is the conclusion of a report produced for the United Nations by Bios, an independent research institute based in Finland.

Calling for greater international action on climate change, Samoa’s long-serving prime minister minced no words in a recent speech lambasting world leaders who don’t believe global warming is occurring— saying such skeptics are “utterly stupid” and should be taken to a mental institution.

A senior United Nations (U.N.) official has warned that government inaction has put the world on track to a catastrophic climate change situation, in which the global community fails to keep temperature rises below the vital 2 degree Celsius (3.6 degree Fahrenheit) cap. The warning comes ahead of climate-change discussions in Bangkok, Thailand, this week. Patricia Espinosa, who is head of the Executive Secretary of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), said nations have been too slow to reach to the threats posed by global warming.

Australia has two pressing environmental problems: climate change and finding a leader who can tackle it. Large swathes of the country are suffering the effects of a seven-year drought, the bush fire season has hit those parts two months early, and the destruction of the Great Barrier Reef grows more severe each year. Yet late last month, the country’s attempts to make some modest changes to its energy policy to help reduce greenhouse-gas emissions blew up an internal storm in the ruling Liberal party that cost Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull his job.

Rising sea levels could cost the global economy around $14 trillion annually by 2100 if the 2°C warming limit agreed at the Paris climate talks is breached, according to a study published in the journal Environmental Research Letters. The Paris Agreement proposed to keep the increase in global average temperature to well below 2°C higher than pre-industrial levels in order to mitigate the worst effects of climate change. It also required nations to pursue efforts to limit the increase to 1.5°C, if possible.

Colombia’s Serrania del Chiribiquete has been declared the world’s largest tropical rainforest national park following decades of efforts by environmental experts and conservationists. The park, which is home to nearly 3,000 animal and plant species, has been expanded by more than 50 per cent – an area equivalent to the size of Northern Ireland. Its forests provide a home to rare and iconic species including jaguars, manatees and vulnerable brown woolly monkeys.

New bioplastics are being made in laboratories from straw, wood chips and food waste, with researchers aiming to replace oil as the source of the world’s plastic. The new approaches include genetically modifying bacteria to eat wood and produce useful chemicals. But the bioplastics are currently significantly more expensive to make than fossil fuel-based plastics. Land and seas around the world, from high mountains to deep oceans, have become polluted with plastic, prompting major public concern. The world has produced 8bn tonnes of plastic since the 1950s and demand is still rising.

Future global warming may eventually be twice as warm as projected by climate models under business-as-usual scenarios and even if the world meets the 2°C target sea levels may rise six meters or more, according to an international team of researchers from 17 countries.

Ireland is set to ban onshore fracking after its Senate passed legislation on Wednesday that outlawed the controversial drilling technique. The Petroleum and Other Minerals Development (Prohibition of Onshore Hydraulic Fracturing) Bill 2016 now awaits Irish President Michael D. Higgins' signature. The president is expected to sign it into law "in the coming days." The Emerald Isle will join three other European Union member states, France, Germany and Bulgaria that have banned the practice on land.

Tourist operators on the Great Barrier Reef are shifting their stance on climate change, with the peak industry body opposing Adani's "mega coal mine", and acknowledging fossil fuel use has to be phased out. In an unprecedented declaration, a year in the making, the Association of Marine Park Tourism Operators (AMPTO) and Australian Marine Conservation Society (AMCS) called on "all our political leaders...to fight for the future of our reef".

Collapsing polar ice caps, a green Sahara Desert, a 20-foot sea-level rise. That's the potential future of Earth, a new study suggests, noting that global warming could be twice as warm as current climate models predict. The rate of warming is also remarkable: “The changes we see today are much faster than anything encountered in Earth’s history. In terms of rate of change, we are in uncharted waters,” said study co-author Katrin Meissner of the University of New South Wales in Australia.