The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request did not provide any scientific evidence to back Administrator Andrew Wheeler's claims that the consequences of climate change were still “50 to 75 years out.”

Reservoirs across the country are recording reduced inflows as the climate warms and dries, which is likely to force cities to bolster the security of water supplies.

THE GLOBAL RESPONSE to the “ozone hole,” as it came to be known in the 1970s, has long been held up as a model for environmental problem-solving — and the hope that we might yet be able to fix the climate crisis. After scientists realized that chemicals used for cooling and in aerosol sprays were causing the Earth’s protective ozone layer to thin, threatening to cause vast increases in cancers and other diseases, countries around the world came together to fix it.

Last year Australia’s central bank hoped that several interest-rate cuts would mark a turning point for its slowing economy. That was before the worst bushfires in Australia’s history hit tourism, consumer confidence and growth forecasts for this year. There is now a good chance the bank will cut interest rates again soon.

When healthy, the Amazon rainforest is one of the planet's most critical defenses against further climate change. But a new study warns that this key barrier is in danger due to increasing wildfires, and that the forest could begin contributing more heat-trapping carbon to the atmosphere than it absorbs in the coming decades.

The Guardian and Observer 2019 charity appeal has raised more than £1m for its climate emergency campaign in support of projects which aim to plant and protect trees, woodlands and rainforest. More than 13,000 readers donated an average of £75 each to the appeal, which totalled £1,015,000 on Thursday night. The money will be shared between four charities: Woodland Trust, Trees for Life, Trees for Cities and Global Greengrants Fund UK.

Grasses and shrubs have been found growing in increased numbers around Mount Everest and across the Himalayas as ice in the area continues to melt. Scientists used satellite data to study the proliferation of subnival vegetation – plants which grow between the treeline and snowline – in the vast region.

Western Norway is experiencing a rare heatwave for early January, at a time when temperatures should normally be below freezing. The highest temperature of 19C (66F) - more than 25C above the monthly average - was measured in the village of Sunndalsora.

Climate breakdown could render investments held by millions of people “worthless”, the outgoing governor of the Bank of England has warned. Mark Carney suggested the financial sector had not yet woken up to the looming crisis and was “not moving fast enough” to divest from fossil fuels.

Carbon Engineering's groundbreaking plant is one of many projects hoping to help in the fight against climate change by turning its main driver — carbon dioxide — into a useful product that can be profitably removed from the atmosphere.

A huge trash-collecting system designed to clean up plastic floating in the Pacific Ocean is finally picking up plastic, its inventor announced Wednesday. The Netherlands-based nonprofit the Ocean Cleanup says its latest prototype was able to capture and hold debris ranging in size from huge, abandoned fishing gear, known as "ghost nets," to tiny microplastics as small as 1 millimeter.

One of the biggest ironies of the right-wing trope accusing socialists of wanting “free stuff” is that in reality, the entire capitalist economy would immediately collapse if it couldn’t continue to rely on free stuff. Without free or artificially cheap access to things like natural resources, care work, labor and a whole array of other elements, capitalism could not stay afloat. In fact, the only way that capitalism was ever able to even emerge was through a process of “primitive accumulation” — where things like slavery and colonialism were utilized to extract free labor and resources.

According to traditional knowledge, in Southeast Asia at the end of the last Ice Age, “fenua imi,” the swallowing of land, forced people to relocate to faraway atolls in a region now called Oceania. About 4,500 years of global stability allowed for the island cultures to develop and thrive in ways specifically tied to the local environment.

Nearly 50 years ago, three chemists named Mario Molina, Sherwood Rowland and Paul Crutzen found evidence that chlorofluorocarbons, chemicals known as CFCs and released from aerosol sprays, were weakening the ozone layer that functions as the earth’s natural sunscreen protecting humans, animals and plants from harmful radiation.

Mysterious seismic hums detected around the world were likely caused by an unusual geologic event — the rumblings of a magma-filled reservoir deep under the Indian Ocean, a new study finds. These odd hums were an unconventional geologic birth announcement. A few months after the sounds rippled around the Earth, a new underwater volcano was born off the coast of the island of Mayotte, located between Madagascar and Mozambique in the Indian Ocean.

The Chinese paddlefish and its close relatives have been around for at least 200 million years. The species, reaching up to 23 feet in length, survived unimaginable changes and upheavals, such as the mass extinction that killed the dinosaurs and marine reptiles like plesiosaurs that it swam alongside. In its time, flowering plants evolved, and came to populate the shores of its ancestral home, the Yangtze River, in modern-day China.

Growing concern about the climate crisis and the “Greta Thunberg effect” are driving huge increases in individuals and businesses choosing to offset their emissions by investing in carbon-reducing projects in developing countries. NGOs and organisations involved in carbon offsetting have seen as much as a fourfold increase in investment from people who want to try to mitigate their carbon footprints.

We have heard from the scientists on climate change, with their meticulous data on ecosystem degradation and species loss. We have heard from the climate deniers, with their desperate attempts to deploy countervailing arguments. Both groups have mobilized substantial blocs of voters in pivotal countries, producing gridlock in global efforts to slow the pace of global warming.

As Greta Thunberg departs the US to sail across the Atlantic for the second time in a few months, she is leaving behind a simple message for those who care about the climate crisis: you must vote.

On the hairpin bend of a Swiss mountain pass, a Victorian-era hotel built for tourists to admire the Rhone Glacier has been abandoned now that the ice has retreated nearly 1.2 miles uphill. Where mighty glaciers once spilled into Swiss valleys like frozen rivers of ice, a residue of gray scree and boulders remains, spliced through with raging streams.