The 2015 Paris Agreement was a landmark, but countries need to raise their ambition again to complete the transition away from fossil fuels. Produced by ElevenLabs and News Over Audio (NOA) using AI narration. O n December 12 , 2015, the 195 country parties to the United Nations ...

We mourn glaciers and forests lost to climate change. Why not streets and sewers? Produced by ElevenLabs and News Over Audio (NOA) using AI narration. This is an edition of The Weekly Planet, a newsletter that provides a guide for living through climate change. Sign up for it her...

How will they help Americans deal with the extreme weather battering the country? Produced by ElevenLabs and News Over Audio (NOA) using AI narration. Tonights presidential debate was held while wildfires rage in Nevada, Southern California, Oregon, and Idaho. Louisiana is bracin...

The U.S. could sink billions into curbing emissions without altering the fate of the places climate change affects most. Produced by ElevenLabs and News Over Audio (NOA) using AI narration. Gray Streams family has thrived in Louisiana oil country for generations. One great-aunt w...

Humans have managed to slow the Earths spin and shift its axis. Produced by ElevenLabs and News Over Audio (NOA) using AI narration. Updated at 5:26 p.m. ET on August 7, 2024 Any planet, in our own solar system or beyond, is shaped by a certain set of influences: the whirlwind ci...

Clean-energy investment in America is off the chartsbut it still isnt translating into enough electricity that people can actually use. Listen to this article 00:00 10:46 Produced by ElevenLabs and News Over Audio (NOA) using AI narration. I n August 2022 , the U.S. passed the mo...

Climate change is threatening to turn sublime summer stone fruits disgusting, or rob us of their pleasures entirely. Listen to this article 00:00 05:47 Produced by ElevenLabs and News Over Audio (NOA) using AI narration. Summer, to me, is all about stone fruit: dark-purple plums,...

Its too late to stop global warming entirely. That doesnt mean humanity is doomed. Listen to this article 00:00 07:20 Produced by ElevenLabs and News Over Audio (NOA) using AI narration. One of the only things we can say for certain about the future is that it will be hotter. Hum...

If you think its bad now, strap in. Listen to this article 00:00 08:32 Produced by ElevenLabs and NOA, News Over Audio, using AI narration. In January 1995, when The Atlantic published In Praise of Snow , Cullen Murphys opus to frozen precipitation, snow was still a mysterious s...

War and deforestation have a complicated relationship. The Belgian empire invaded the Congo rainforest during the late 19th century and swiftly established itself as the cruelest imperial force in Africa. The Congo is the worlds second-largest rainforest behind the Amazon, and Ki...

We all just lived through our first 2-degree Celsius day. On Friday, November 17, 2023, the Earth appeared to have crossed a threshold into new climatic territory. That day was the first that the average air temperature near the surface of the Earth was 2 degrees Celsius warmer t...

The math isnt adding up. Youd be forgiven for thinking that the fight against climate change is finally going well. The clean-energy revolution is well under way and exceeding expectations. Solar is set to become the cheapest form of energy in most places by 2030, and the remarka...

Billion-dollar disasters are breaking records, but the accumulation of small disasters can be devastating too. The Louisiana wildfire that upended Katie Hendersons life was barely a blip on this years string of catastrophes. On August 24, just after shed brought her 7-year-old so...

Household food waste is a problem for the planetbut a few simple changes can help. If you have children, you probably already understand them to be very adorable food-waste machines. If you do not have children, I have five, so let me paint you a picture. On a recent Tuesday nigh...

How you consume matters to the planet. How you invest does too. Listen to this article 00:00 07:41 Listen to more stories on hark A decade and change ago, as the world woke up to the catastrophe of climate change, campus activists were looking for ways to heal the environment at ...

The core four dynamics shaping 2024 Like so many bands of wind and rain, hurricane-strength squalls of bad news have battered former President Donald Trump all year. Since April, hes been indicted four times, on 91 separate felony charges, compared with zero counts for all of his...

Telecommuting allows caregivers to manage a workload that is, if anything, way too big. Carolyn Vigil has spent most of her career in Big Tech. She is also the primary caregiver for her 23-year-old autistic son, Jax. Managing these two roles has never been easy, and at various ti...

The internet was supposed to kill in-person shopping. But have you been to a Bass Pro? Listen to this article 00:00 09:56 Produced by ElevenLabs and NOA, News Over Audio, using AI narration. This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors r...

The following six titles are correctives to isolation. Anytime Ive felt adrift or lonely, literature has been a bridge leading me back to other people. When I moved to a new country after living in the same city for three decades, I sought out literary events to meet fellow artis...

A writers roundtable about the business of drinks This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. In recent years, a massive selec...

The addition of the star to Only Murders in the Building has, unsurprisingly, made the shows new season much more worth watching. Only Murders in the Building is easy to watch. Each season follows Charles (played by Steve Martin), Oliver (Martin Short), and Mabel (Selena Gomez), ...

The relationship between imagined futures and real technology goes both ways. This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. The ...

A very strange climate drove Hurricane Idalia. Scientists cant predict whether more storms like it are coming. Updated at 5:29 p.m. on August 31, 2023 Earlier this week, mission control commanded the International Space Station to turn its cameras toward the Gulf of Mexico. Giant...

Alicia Kennedys new book is a paean to a life without meat. But shes driven more by curiosity than a desire to convert her readers. I n 2011, the Long Islandborn writer Alicia Kennedy went vegan. By the following year, she was running a vegan bakery; four more years, and she was ...

I used to make my students write essay after essay. There was always a better way. Last December, Moby-Dick made one of my students gasp. It wasnt the first time this had happened (weird book), but nothing about the text itself produced the response. For the final project in my E...

The syringe tideswaves of used hypodermic needles, washing up on landterrified beachgoers of the late 1980s. Their disturbing lesson was ignored. T he first tide of syringes washed ashore on Thursday, August 13, 1987. Hundreds of unmarked hypodermic needles spilled out of the sur...

Matters of character were a recurring theme. Welcome to Up for Debate. Each week, Conor Friedersdorf rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here. Last ...

Insurers are trying to send a message. The government is trying to suppress it. Having worked for decades in conservation nonprofits, Beth Pratt, who lives high in the Sierra Foothills in Midpines, California, understands how climate change is putting her home at ever greater ris...

Corporate America is leaning into the most promising trend in tech. This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. AI was not alw...

Despite the heat, the regions cities are growing fast. They have three factors to thank. Listen to this article 00:00 10:26 Listen to more stories on hark When it gets hot enough, as it has across the South in recent weeks, barefoot toddlers suffer second-degree burns from steppi...

Chili peppers thrive in hot and dry conditions. But even they have their limits. Listen to this article 00:00 08:43 Listen to more stories on hark For more than a year, life for many sriracha lovers has been an excruciating lesson in bland . Shortages of red jalapenosthe key ingr...

The Inflation Reduction Act let me break up with fossil fuels. Last April, I decided to break up with my gas company. It wasnt me; it was them. Like so many other fossil-fuel companies, SoCalGas was lobbying against clean energy while it continued to spew carbon pollution into th...

A new chronicle of redwood logging exposes how a cadre of wealthy industrialists reaped a fortune in the name of environmentalism. I n 1934, an industrialist and obsessive book collector named A. Edward Newton wrote an article for The Atlantic recounting a trip he had recently ta...

Richard Nixon decided a powerful new medium should appeal to the marketplace, not to citizens. The cable-news industry that Americans know today is a cautionary tale in what happens when democracy collides with consumerism. For years, CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News raked in profits whi...

The worlds widest glacier is meltingand changing predictions about our planets future. Out on the bow of the R/V Nathaniel B. Palmer, the air is dense and almost warm. We have punched through miles of Antarctic ice floes to reach the Amundsen Seas foggy interior. I want to honor ...

A poem for Sunday We park beside the lighthouse keepers garden. A hummingbird is unbalancing hibiscus flowers; a nuthatch, tidying up the trunks of trees. I didnt know its name the last time we were here. What else did I not know? What else has happened? This is a place we dont s...

Watch the full episode of Washington Week With The Atlantic , August 11, 2023 After former President Donald Trump was arraigned for trying to overturn the 2020 election results, a strange question looms over the 2024 race: Will the former president and current GOP front-runner wi...

Shark teeth and caribou antlers are helping unlock where animals can live in a changing climate. This article was originally published in Knowable Magazine . Conservationists seeking to restore shark populations off the Atlantic coast of Panama were facing a problem all too famil...

Embrace chaos. Dont show up. Years ago, when I lived in Southern California, I worked with an extremely responsible project manager Ill call Rocco. Rocco was reliable to the point of neurosis. Accountable to a fault, he was a first-guy-in-the-office guy whose shirts were always p...

The world doesnt need more reminders that climate change is accelerating. But were going to keep getting them. In November 1886, at a royal jubilee in honor of his 50th birthday at Iolani Palace in Honolulu, King David Kalakaua showed off a rather remarkable object that had recen...

Its common now for people to linger as digital ghosts after they die, transforming the nature of loss. This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic , Monday through Friday. Sign up for it he...

Wildfires on Maui prove once again that the world must face the dawn of the pyrocene. Updated at 9:15 p.m. ET on August 10, 2023 A few days ago, the hurricane forecasts looked good. Dora was going to miss Hawaii, passing by far to the south . And yet the storm still ended up wrea...

You dont need a massive garden and a green thumb. Just put a pit in a pot. So many of my friends are what Id call garden curious. The dream is simple: ample backyard space where they can grow their own food, compost, and live out their most cherished ideas for a greener life. The...

Morality police have returned to city streets that have become a testing ground for womens rights and everyones courage. After a months-long pause, Irans dreaded modesty squads are back on the job of policing womens dress. Many Iranian men are quietly asking themselves and one an...

Spiral Jetty never stops changing. R obert Smithsons Spiral Jetty was built by pushing 6,650 tons of earth and basalt into the Great Salt Lake, forming a spiral 1,500 feet long and 15 feet wide. As massive as the earthwork is, however, it defers to its surroundings. These photogr...

A story about three trees, an angry community, and power in Washington, D.C. I ts almost like the governments imposing its will on its residents, Trayon White, the D.C. council member for Ward 8, said at the councils June 6 legislative meeting. He wasnt talking about a proposed h...

The online frenzies that followed LK-99 and ChatGPT reveal a resurgent techno-optimismand a shared longing for a new technology that will free us from human limits. Listen to this article 00:00 07:28 Listen to more stories on curio I remember the first time I saw the floaty rock....

The world is getting hotter. Prepare to be damp. This summer, I, like so many other Americans, have forgotten what it means to be dry. The heat has grown so punishing, and the humidity so intense, that every movement sends my body into revolt. When I stand, I sweat. When I sit, I...

Mindless energy consumption can no longer be the status quo. Listen to this article 00:00 08:25 Listen to more stories on hark Every Texan I know has what you might call grid anxiety, a low-humming preoccupation with electricity that emerged after brutal winter storms kneecapped ...

These titles self-consciously aim to grab their readers attention. When I teach a literature class to undergraduates, one of my most important tasks is to help my students relearn how to read in the age of distraction. I assign them an exercise: Set a timer for 20 minutes and div...

Entertainment musts from Morgan Ome This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. Welcome back to The Dailys Sunday culture edit...

Millions of people are losing Medicaid because of paperwork. Across America right now, parents face a possible nightmare: taking a sick child to the doctor, only to be told at the front desk that their health insurance is no longer valid. The reason is that millions of low-income...

Crabs and fish werent built for oceans this acidic. This article was originally published by Hakai Magazine . Dungeness crabs hunt by flicking their chemical-detecting antennae to and fro. Sensing the waterthe underwater equivalent of sniffing the airis a well-known strategy for ...

Americas hottest city is still booming. In Phoenix, a high of 108 degrees Fahrenheit now somehow counts as a respite. On Monday, Americas hottest major city ended its ominous streak of 31 straight days in which temperatures crested past 110. The toll of this heata monthly average...

Republicans are trying to make it harder to enshrine abortion rights in Ohio. Will voters go along? F or the 150 or so people who filled a church hall in Toledo, Ohio, for a Thursday-night campaign rally last week, the chant of the evening featured a profanity usually discouraged...

Mortality numbers often end up having more to do with politics than science. The autopsy should have been a piece of cake. My patient had a history of widely metastatic cancer, which was pretty straightforward as far as causes of death go. Entering the various body cavities, my c...

Google Maps eco-routing feature wants to help me conserve two teaspoons of gas. All my life, I thought there was just one way to get to my hometowns ShopRite: right on Fair Street, right on Gleneida Avenue, right into the parking lot. That was until I plugged ShopRite into Google...

Plus: One moment that could have weakened Donald Trumps influence Welcome to Up for Debate. Each week, Conor Friedersdorf rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the n...

Earths precious water made life possible. Now its simmering. The ocean off the coast of southern Florida is having a long, hot summer. For weeks, surface temperatures hovered around 90 degrees Fahrenheit, before dropping to the 80s last week. The worlds third-largest barrier reef...

The festival to host live storytelling with Spike Lee, and debut screening of forthcoming docuseries, Big Vape . The Atlantic is today announcing the complete agenda, evening programming, and additional speakers for the 15th annual Atlantic Festival , taking place on Thursday, Se...

The platforms new logo seems a little juvenile. So does the internet. I woke up Sunday to find I had begun using the social network formerly known as Twitter. The app had updated to show the new name chosen by its owner: X. Now, underneath the friendly and familiar blue icon with...

Light sparring might mean getting hit. But it has its own benefits. Outside the door, I heard a flurry of thudding that reverberated back through the floor. I looked at my friend, then stepped in behind her. The room was damp and stuffy, despite a fan droning loudly in the corner...

With Russian imperialism on full display, reviving Ukrainian, and expanding it to encompass new speakers and experiences, has become a national project. Growing up in the bilingual city of Kyiv in the 1990s, I studied the Ukrainian language like a museum objectintensely, but at a...

The defining problem driving people out is ... just how American life works in the 21st century. Nearly everyone I grew up with in my childhood church in Lincoln, Nebraska, is no longer Christian. Thats not unusual. Forty million Americans have stopped attending church in the pas...

Plus: How to increase diversity at the top Welcome to Up for Debate. Each week, Conor Friedersdorf rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here. Im stil...

Welcome to the age of tremors. Parenthood has always involved unpredictability : wake-ups at 2 a.m., calls from school, the dreaded words my stomach hurts . This daily variance frequently stems from a sick or scared child, and is part of the basic dynamic of family life. Yet toda...

The letter can be a meaningful signifier or a generic stand-in. Why is it so compelling? This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it...

Authoritarians would have you think that they can do certain things better than their counterparts who have to deal with checks, balances, and public opinion. Dont believe it. Last week, at a Fox News town hall (where else?), former President Donald Trump called Chinas despot, Xi...

In much of the South, electricity is in the hands of the U.S. government, not private companies. Is anyone better off? O n November 10 of last year, at a place called Paradise in western Kentucky, the Tennessee Valley Authority blew up the cooling towers of a large coal-fired pow...

Their saliva is a secret weapon. Listen to this article 00:00 08:02 Listen to more stories on hark In the three-plus decades I've been alive, I have never been bitten by a tick. Actually, that may be a lie, and I have no way of knowing for sure. Because even though ticks have har...

A short guide to help you get into the game Updated at 3:50 p.m. ET on July 23, 2023 This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it her...

The country is joining the European mainstream, with its political class struggling to counter rising far-right support and an economy that is no longer best-in-class. A sked what came to her mind when thinking about Germany, former Chancellor Angela Merkel once said , I think of...

As temperature and weather records fall, Earth may be nearing so-called tipping points. Ever since some of the earliest projections of climate change were made back in the 1970s , they have been remarkably accurate at predicting the rate at which global temperatures would rise. F...

Then the rain came. Updated at 5:19 p.m. ET on July 21, 2023 Lamoille County, Vermont, is home to 26,000 people living in small towns nestled among the woods and mountains. Its known for two ski resortsStowe and Smugglers Notchand a winding river where locals and tourists fly-fis...

Electric cars fix one pollution problemand worsen another. Electric vehicles, you might have heard, are miraculous. Just a sliver of new cars sold in the United States are EVs, but these machines have united a mishmash of people eager to move America away from gasoline. Environme...

Powell joins from The New York Times ; Schlanger to cover climate and write The Weekly Planet newsletter The journalists Michael Powell and Zoe Schlanger will join The Atlantic as staff writers, editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg announced today. Michael has been a reporter at The ...

I led the Occupational Safety and Health Administration under Obama, and I understand why it hasnt stepped up to address the threat of climate change. This summer, the climate crisis has brought intense heat and toxic wildfire smoke to much of the country. These conditions are th...

The conversation often foregrounds large-scale issues such as productivity and company culture, but the question of where an employee works is intensely personal. This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps ...

After a year of botched executions, the state is eager to prove that it can kill someone without incident. Listen to this article 00:00 11:17 Listen to more stories on curio Last year, the state of Alabama made history by botching three consecutive executions in its death chamber...

The conventional wisdom about the global economy is that the rich have been getting richer and the poor have been getting poorer. What if that isnt true? D uring the Great Recession, public discourse about the economy underwent something of a Great Disappointment. For much of the...

A poem for Sunday They wont stop. Leaves, slick, wet Curled around shrubs, blanketing the funeral garden where ravens rest. Why am I married to longing & lament? Id like to slap the face of my unseemly devotion. Wake up. Dont be afraid. Wag your beauty like a dirty dog. Trees she...

Whats surprising isnt that Kennedy voiced an anti-Jewish conspiracy, but that it took this long. Last week, at a dinner event in Manhattan, the Democratic primary candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. shared his unvarnished thoughts about the nature of the coronavirus. Theres an argume...

Why do Pennsylvania elk sound different from Colorado elk? This article was originally published by High Country News . Its a crisp fall evening in Grand Teton National Park. A mournful, groaning call cuts through the dusky-blue light: a male elk, bugling. The sound ricochets acr...

Entertainment musts from Alan Taylor This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. Welcome back to The Dailys Sunday culture edi...

Hatchery-raised salmon tend to stray from home. The smell of brewers yeast could help lure them back. This article was originally published by Hakai Magazine . Of all the traits that make salmon extraordinary migrantstheir leaping prowess, their tolerance of both fresh and salt w...

A recent flurry of diplomatic talks shouldnt be taken to mean that Beijing is looking for compromise with Washington. A parade of senior American policy makers is traveling to Beijing on diplomatic missions to mend tattered relations between the United States and China. The U.S. ...

What traveling with my parents as an adult taught me This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. A childs job is to be oblivio...

Yes, its hot out. Here are some ideas about our heat reality that go beyond the temperature. Updated at 10:53 p.m. on September 5, 2023 Below is a list of ideas, arguments, and practical tips from Atlantic stories to help you navigate this heat. Hydrate smarter. Here are some dos...

Climate change feels more real now than ever. Its getting hard to keep track of all the overlapping climate disasters. In Phoenix, Arizona, the temperature has broken 110 degrees for nearly two weeks running. The waters off the Florida coast are approaching hot-tub hot , and befo...

In Vermont this week, were glimpsing the future. In the farther reaches of my town of Cavendish, in southeastern Vermont, is a bywayyou can hardly call it a roadcharismatically named Chaos Turnpike. Right now, it is washed out by the storm that just hit New England. Because other...

Air-conditioning and swimming pools are sustaining my community. I worry about the day when they wont be enough. Listen to this article 00:00 07:44 Listen to more stories on hark In the desert, summer starts in earnest in May. Its the beginning of dry season, with highs in the 90...

Americas deficit could soon become a drag on the economy. I s it time to start worrying about the debt? This feels like a weird question to ask, I admit. The bond market is placid. Voters are preoccupied with other issues . The many dire things that fiscal hawks said would happen...

Between record-setting heat and warming ocean water, this summer feels like the start of an unsettling new era. Did you think it would all happen this fast? The heat domes, the thousand-year floods, the apocalyptic wildfires, that horrific orange sky? This summers convergence of ...

The latest jobs data suggest that workers may be losing some of the leverage they gained during the pandemic. This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in cu...

Gravitationally speaking Earth, in most renderings, is a smooth sphere with a glossy complexion a blue marble , as pictures snapped from space have shown us. Earth scientists know thats not exactly true. Earth, in fact, is an ellipsoid, a little bit squashed at the poles and fat ...

The quietest sounds might still disturb wildlife. This article was originally published by High Country News . The first grainy film clip shows a black bear exploding out of the trail cameras frame. In another, a mule deer stops munching wildflowers, backs away, and takes off in ...

Entrepreneurs have invested billions in plant-based and lab-grown meats, and the possibilities are endless. This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic , Monday through Friday. Sign up for ...

Liberals find themselves in the strange position of having won most of their major battles of this century. Updated at 2:00 p.m. ET on July 10, 2023 The Democratic Party, for decades the progressive bastion of the United States, is emerging today as the party of the status quo. T...

Summer is getting too hot and dangerous, killing the childhood of our imaginations. A heat dome in Texas. Wildfire smoke polluting the air in the East and Midwest. The signs are everywhere that our childrens summers will look nothing like our own. In this episode, we talk with th...

Since the Supreme Court struck down his forgiveness plan, the president has been moving fast, but little about this process will be quick. This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, ...

The artist talks about her new album, My Back Was a Bridge for You to Cross , which explicitly aligns her with the American protest-music tradition. One of the most uncompromising artists of the 21st century, Anohni Hegarty makes gorgeous music to warn humankind of its demise. Wh...

How should we memorialize January 6? Consider the walking tour. Standing on the Ellipse, between the White House and the Washington Monument, I heard President Donald Trump deliver his fiery address. Youre never going to take back our country with weakness. You have to show stren...

Tourism campaigns tout the archipelago as a diorama of prehistory. But that narrative could help degrade the islands even further. This spring, I was standing on the forward bow of the MS Santa Cruz II, bird-watching with a group of tourists under the cliffs of the Galapagoss lar...

Take Antarctica off your travel bucket list. Listen to this article 00:00 12:18 Listen to more stories on curio This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic , Monday through Friday. Sign up ...

Demanding that everyone embrace the same values will inevitably narrow the pool of applicants who work and get hired in higher education. John D. Haltigan sued the University of California at Santa Cruz in May. He wants to work there as a professor of psychology. But he alleges t...

The Titan disaster raised a perennial question: How much should the government protect people who put themselves in harms way? In 2017, as Hurricane Harvey came barreling toward Texas, Patrick Rios, the mayor of a coastal community called Rockport, had a morbid message for reside...

Published in The Atlantic in 2011 On January 24, 2017 , the poet Jane Hirshfield was boiling mad. Five days into Donald Trumps presidency, his administration had cut mentions of climate change from its website; in several federal agencies , including the Environmental Protection ...

Moral panics repeat, again and again. T he riot , when it finally happened, was a leisurely one. In the weeks leading up to August 11, 1834, the people of Boston had been openly discussing burning down the Ursuline Convent that stood just outside the city, in what is now Somervil...

One thing is certain: More extreme smoke days are coming. The smoke is back. Large swaths of America are once again engulfed in a toxic haze thats drifted down from Canada, which is experiencing its worst fire season on record . Our northern neighbor has burned through a record-b...

Southerners are used to heat. Were not used to this. A few weeks ago, as the first wave of smoke from the Canadian wildfires rolled south, I was getting ready to drive from Charlottesville, Virginia, about 18 hours west to my hometown of Rogers, Arkansas, to visit family. I figur...

Eileen Changs slyly observant essays about day-to-day realities double as a manual for surviving history. It is unnerving to know you are living in history. In the past decade, as words Id first encountered in books erupted into my daily lexiconwords like fascism , global pandemi...

After chaos last summer and winter, flights had been running relatively smoothlyuntil storms hit the Northeast this past week. This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommen...

What is anyone supposed to do with the knowledge that diet sodas maybe, possibly, just might perhaps have some sort of potential link to cancer? In 2016, I gave up Diet Coke. This was no small adjustment. I was born and raised in suburban Atlanta, home to the Coca-Cola Companys g...

Weve just learned that the whole universe is humming around us. Now what? Listen to this article 00:00 06:57 Listen to more stories on hark The whole universe is humming. Actually, the whole universe is Mongolian throat singing. Every star, every planet, every continent, every bu...

The gap between a more diverse America and less diverse elite colleges will only grow. With todays decision curtailing affirmative action in higher education, the Supreme Court has landed another powerful blow for older white America in its struggle against the kaleidoscopically ...

An indifferent response to a warlords march on Moscow heralds the dawning realization that Russia has no good way out in Ukraine. Updated at 1:07 p.m. ET on June 30, 2023. Yevgeny Prigozhin had his reasons for launching a mutiny over the weekend. Russias military leadershipinclud...

What eight decades of Goofus and Gallant illustrate about societys changing expectations of children This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic , Monday through Friday. Sign up for it here...

Cultural pessimism is widespread. But theres a way out. Listen to this article 00:00 13:38 Listen to more stories on curio This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic , Monday through Frida...

How to Write a Book by Yourself, and other ideas for fresh new content T he Meghan Markle and Prince Harry content farm is facing contradictory supply and demand challenges. On the one hand, Netflix is reportedly threatening that the couple had better come up with some more shows...

Atlantic writers explain how to make sense of the weekends events. This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. A short recap o...

In standing by Russias embattled strongman, Chinese leader Xi Jinping signals just how high a priority he has made of undermining the power of the West. This weekends tumultuous events showed just how big a gamble the Chinese leader Xi Jinping took by partnering with Moscow. Russ...

Early heat can be disastrous for people, animals, and plants. This article was originally published by High Country News . Around the middle of April, spring in the still chilly and wet Pacific Northwest seemed a long way off. Just two weeks later, though, Spokane hit a daily rec...

Can Buddhism fix AI? Updated at 2:46 p.m. ET on July 14, 2023. T he monk paces the zendo , forecasting the end of the world. Soryu Forall, ordained in the Zen Buddhist tradition, is speaking to the two dozen residents of the monastery he founded a decade ago in Vermonts far north...

Because I was in the public eye, somebody synthesized explicit videos of me. Recently, a Google Alert informed me that I am the subject of deepfake pornography. I wasnt shocked. For more than a year, I have been the target of a widespread online harassment campaign, and deepfake ...

One of the core beliefs that binds the modern GOP coalition is rejection of the idea that minorities and women face structural bias in American society. The sharp exchange between former President Barack Obama and two nonwhite 2024 GOP presidential candidates captures how divergi...

Warmer, saltier water is threatening the species that live further North. This article was originally published in Hakai Magazine . In the Fram Strait off Greenlands west coast, Veronique Merten encountered the foot soldiers of an invasion. Merten was studying the regions biodive...

Without incorporating time into our calculations, we will always be too late. T he United States is at risk of paralysis. Time and time again, in one sector after another, we articulate strategies and set objectives, but we usually fall short, because weve failed to take into acc...

Im dismayed that any academic institution would encourage us to use chatbots rather than our intellects. I used to drive a stick-shift car, but a few years ago, I switched over to an automatic. I didnt mind relinquishing the control of gear-changing to a machine. It was different...

Listening to books is more passive than reading them. That might be a good thing. I n 1883, Evert Nymanover, a Swedish scholar at the University of Minnesota, proposed a new invention that some thought would affect the future of humankind: a device that played recordings of books...

Generative-AI programs may eventually consume material that was created by other machineswith disastrous consequences. In the beginning, the chatbots and their ilk fed on the human-made internet. Various generative-AI models of the sort that power ChatGPT got their start by devou...

Additional security may work in the short term. But migrants quickly adapt by taking alternative, more dangerous routes. E veryone expected chaos . Since March 2020, the government had been turning away asylum seekers en masse without processing their claims under Title 42, a pan...

Twenty-five years later, the films most powerful insight isnt about reality TV so much as the complicities of modern life. Listen to this article 00:00 13:37 Listen to more stories on hark Truman Burbank, the unwitting star of the worlds most popular TV show, is supposed to be an...

Artificial intelligence will redefine some of our deepest assumptions about the makeup of the world around us. Foul whisperings are abroad: unnatural deeds Do breed unnatural troubles ... Some years ago, the satellite-radio and pharmaceutical entrepreneur Martine Rothblatt decide...

A commitment to knowing our neighbors can help us feel more connectedand may allow us to experiment with the feeling of being known. In this episode of How to Talk to People, author Pete Davis makes the case for building relationships with your neighbors and offers some practical...

Entertainment musts from Maya Chung This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. Welcome back to The Dailys Sunday culture edit...

Or can the industry recover? L ast week , the Securities and Exchange Commission filed 13 charges against Binance, the worlds largest crypto exchange, accusing it of mishandling customer funds and a litany of other white-collar crimes. It also charged Coinbase, a public company a...

The newest season of Black Mirror is a stale collection of shallow, unfulfilling stories. Joan is an ordinary woman with ordinary complaints. She wishes the coffee at her office tasted better. She thinks her new hairstyle might be a bit much. She loves her fiance, but worries the...

Young activists capture peoples attention. They also bear an impossible weight of expectation. In 1860, Anna Elizabeth Dickinsonthe daughter of Quaker abolitionistsattended a public debate in her native Philadelphia titled Womens Rights and Wrongs. She had not planned to speak. B...

Extreme heat is changing summer for kids as we know it. Listen to this article 00:00 06:23 Listen to more stories on hark Long afternoons at the playground. Swimming at the local pool. Sing-alongs and smores at camp. The American summer vacation is an institutionand much of it ta...

If you want to rebuild America, start with its code. Things did not go smoothly when, as the coronavirus pandemic took hold in spring 2020, Congress turned to the unemployment system to help people who found themselves out of work. The under-resourced state agencies that carry ou...

A new study maps the relationship between human-caused warming and Californias summer fires over the past five decades. Updated at 10:50 a.m. ET on June 13, 2023 In the past six years, California has logged three of its five deadliest fires on record, and eight of its 10 biggest....

Two recent biographies, of Plato and Diogenes, show the divergent path Western thought could have taken. D iogenes of Sinope, a beggar who lived on the streets of Athens in the fourth century B.C.E., has been hailed as the progenitor of performance art , an inspiration for the Oc...

A road trip across my adopted America Listen to this article 00:00 27:19 Listen to more stories on curio Do you like being by yourself ? How do you experience your own company? Its a fundamental human question. Id invited my friend Johnrazor intellect, gamma-ray eyeballsto drive ...

From the use of subtitles to viewing times, television habits can vary even within the same household. This is an edition of The Wonder Reader, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a set of stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Sign up here to get it e...

Everywhere needs to be prepared for everything. The response came too late and all wrong. By the time New York City had provided guidance to and marshaled resources for the public, the acrid, eye-burning, otherworldly wildfire smoke had been choking the city for days. The smoke a...

How to rock your work rather than let the work rule you Listen to this article 00:00 08:51 Listen to more stories on curio Want to stay current with Arthurs writing? Sign up to get an email every time a new column comes out. I f the job-search firm Monster.com is right in its sur...

A conversation with Tim Alberta about his reporting on the network and its former leader The Atlantic s Tim Alberta spent long stretches of the past year talking with CNNs then-CEO Chris Licht about his grand experiment to reset the cable giant as a venue more welcoming to Republ...

The worlds two leading powers have come to see their economic links to each other as risky, but disentanglement will come at a cost. The idea of a rising China has become so entrenched in the Western imagination that it can seem inevitable. But economics rarely operates in straig...

Researchers are only just starting to ask how wildfire smoke affects cognition. Keith Bein is a storm chaseror whatever the wildfire equivalent of that is. An air-quality researcher at UC Davis, he drives toward fires, grabbing air samples, analyzing some on the scene and transpo...

The underground reserves that fill mega-basins are not an infinite resource. These are not your average reservoirs. The plastic-lined cavities span, on average, 20 acresmore than 15 American football fields. Nicknamed mega-basins, they resemble enormous swimming pools scooped int...

The leak in 2013 of NSA documents detailing mass surveillance of electronic communications seemed to have seismic significance. Today, the legacy looks less clear. T en years ago , an unorthodox reporting team flew from New York to Hong Kong to meet someone claiming to be a spy w...

A guide to what comes nextand what this moment explains about our warming planet This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. T...

The first five months of 2023 have produced an encouraging overall trend for the first time in years. Official crime statistics are only released after a substantial delay, so for nearly a decade Ive collected and compiled big-city crime data as a way to assemble a more real-time...

We need a cultural and philosophical movement to meet the rise of artificial superintelligence. Listen to this article 00:00 17:28 Listen to more stories on curio This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read ...

Thanks to AI, every painting can now have an expanded border, every minor character a ChatGPT-written spinoff series. Late last month, during yet another inexplicable rebranding exercise, HBOs Max streaming service changed the way it organizes film credits. Rather than separate o...

What comes next? As part of the deal to extend the debt limit, President Joe Biden and Congress agreed to rescind about $30 billion that had originally been allocated in 2021s American Rescue Plan, some of which was going to be sent to state and local governments for a variety of...

Tunisia was the best case, Sudan the last hope, Syria the bloodiest of all: The countries that not long ago sparked optimism for a democratic wave in the Arab world have descended into dictatorship, and Washington shouldnt ignore them. The past few months have brought despair to ...

America has paid a steep price for devoting too much space to storing cars. Listen to this article 00:00 14:31 Listen to more stories on curio This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic , ...

The Canary Islands have somehow become a major nursery for a critically endangered species. This article was originally published by Hakai Magazine . Out in the Atlantic Ocean, roughly 62 miles off the northwest coast of Africa, lies an archipelago known as the Canary Islands, cr...

China is a more formidable adversary than the Soviet Union ever was, and the world is less divisible. A new cold War has come to seem all but inevitable. Tensions between China and the United States are mounting in step with Beijings growing power and ambition. Russias invasion o...

The U.S. is returning to a tired old playbook: If at first you fail to make something a universal right, try making it an employee benefit. For a brief moment, it looked like America could get a real child-care systemone that wasnt defined by lengthy waitlists, sky-high fees, and...

What to make of two strikingly different series finalesand worldviews This article contains spoilers through the series finales of Succession and Ted Lasso . Succession ended on Sunday with a series finale whose title, like the three season finales before it, was taken from a Joh...

Big Techs warnings about an AI apocalypse are distracting us from years of actual harms their products have caused. On Tuesday morning, the merchants of artificial intelligence warned once again about the existential might of their products. Hundreds of AI executives, researchers...

Environmental hype has crowded out any concern for people outside the vehicle. Last month, General Motors announced that it would stop producing the Chevy Bolt , an electric hatchback known for its low price (under $20,000, after federal incentives) and modest size (about 3,600 p...

Experts are predicting a warmer-than-usual summer for many Americans. This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. As my collea...

Vulnerable birds, snakes, and frogs are clinging to survival in the lawns next to taxiways and runways. Listen to this article 00:00 08:51 Listen to more stories on hark For the past several decades, Portsmouth International Airport at Pease, in New Hampshire, has hosted a freque...

The biggest hurdle to mass adoption of electric cars is not the cars themselves. Sign up for The Weekly Planet, The Atlantic s newsletter about living through climate change, here. Five years ago, when Bill Ferro would take a road trip in his electric BMW i3, he needed to be read...

Two new books scrutinize the natural world, and not for what it might offer us. Silent observers of our lives, trees are on most peoples radar only at moments of transition or death: We mark springtimes budding and autumns flamboyance, note somberly the tree felled by a storm or ...

The large brown algae is uniquely hard to preserve. It's also uniquely important. This article was originally published by Hakai Magazine . Kelp is common along temperate shorelines around the world. For millennia, this large brown algae has been vital to coastal Indigenous peopl...

The Pacific Northwests early heat wave is a warning for the world. This story was originally published in High Country News . As 90-degree temperatures bore down on the Pacific Northwest in May, real-time reporting to the CDC showed that heat-related emergency-room-visit rates we...

Republicans portray ESG as the epitome of woke capital. The truth is closer to the opposite. I n March, 19 Republican governors issued a statement warning of a direct threat to the American economy, individual economic freedom, and our way of life. The threat in question was not ...

The photographer Emin Ozmen has spent his career watching his country transform from an aspiring democracy to a dystopian autocracy. The Magnum photographer Emin Ozmen remembers the day in 1993 when radical Islamists set fire to the Madmak Hotel in his hometown of Sivas, Turkey, ...

And why local governments hate it Listen to this article 00:00 18:19 Listen to more stories on curio O n a Wednesday afternoon in March, the Montview Boulevard Presbyterian Church, in Denvers South Park Hill neighborhood, was packed. The local chapter of the progressive group Ind...

Forget changing only the names that honor the horrors of the past. Some biologists now argue no species should ever be named after a single individual. Updated at 6:36 p.m. on May 26, 2023 Stephen Hampton has been watching birds for more than 50 years, and for almost all of that ...

Vegetarianism is more popular than everbut so is meat consumption. How can this be? H ow do you persuade the whole world to stop eating meat? I have been trying for half a century. My book Animal Liberation was published in 1975, when I was 29 years old. I argued that our treatme...

The podcaster Chris van Tulleken has strong opinions about soft bread and candy that never decays. Listen to this article 00:00 12:38 Listen to more stories on hark Chris van Tulleken refuses to tell me what to have for breakfast. Everyone thinks that I have a strong opinion abou...

The WNBA player has a different perspective on The Star-Spangled Banner but hasnt given up the cause of justice. Playing in her first real WNBA game in 579 days, Brittney Griner did something Friday night in Los Angeles that national television audiences hadnt seen her do in a lo...

The next generation of AI is leaving behind the viral chatbot. Listen to this article 00:00 10:13 Listen to more stories on curio Last week, at Googles annual conference dedicated to new products and technologies, the company announced a change to its premier AI product: The Bard...

Health concerns keep shrinking the roster of approved artificial dyes. But Americans still cant seem to go cold turkey on ultra-colorful foods. In 1856, an amateur chemist named William Henry Perkin mixed a batch of chemicals that he hoped, in vain, would yield the malaria drug q...

HBOs new limited series White House Plumbers explores the banal oafishness behind the Watergate scandal. In 2009, John Rogers, the creator of the crime drama Leverage , wrote a blog post describing how an episode of the show had come together. In it, he noted one of the things he...

In his new book, the historian Quinn Slobodian writes about the ideologues who believe that society should prioritize capital, not people. By 2017, the billionaire financier Ray Dalio had grown his company, Bridgewater Associates, into the worlds biggest hedge fund. And like many...

Even a less punishing season than recent summers would be hotter than historical norms. The weeks leading up to summer ring with anticipation. Here come beach days and lazy evenings on the grass and fingers sticky with ice cream. Here come the minor irritationssweaty clothing and...

Readers share their views on the tragedyand on individuals responsibility to one another. Welcome to Up for Debate. Each week, Conor Friedersdorf rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful re...

When my tears disappeared, so did any possibility of an honest emotional life. There was no pivotal moment when I stopped crying. I cant remember any traumatic incident in which I wept openly, was gruesomely mocked, and swore off tears. Yet by my early 20s, as surely as if I had ...

Vivek Ramaswamy has burst into the Republican primary race with ultra-Trumpy politics and super-tall hair. Vivek Ramaswamy is a tall man with tall hair. And last week, when he stood in front of a crowd in Iowa wearing a black T-shirt under a black blazer, he looked like Johnny Br...

When the fate of the country depends on a rich boys childhood trauma, were all doomed. This story contains spoilers through the eighth episode of Succession Season 4. After a night of dirty politics, the authoritarian-leaning presidential candidate Jeryd Mencken (played by Justin...

Fire retardant is toxic to fish. An Oregon nonprofit is arguing that it shouldnt be used at all. This article was originally published by High Country News . On a hot, dry August day in 2002, air tankers swooped over a small wildfire south of Bend, Oregon. The Forest Service hope...

As the new ecological status quo emerges, well all need to rethink our place on the planet: Your weekly guide to the best in books For millennia, human society has been organized around the predictable march of the seasons: The weather has controlled what we eat, where we live, w...

After the tourists go home, a museums collection tells its own story. This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic , Monday through Friday. Sign up for it here. A t the Vatican Museums , the...

The best way of trying to change the world is the one that will offer you happiness too. Want to stay current with Arthurs writing? Sign up to get an email every time a new column comes out. T he extent of the mental-health crisis in the United States todayespecially among young ...

In his sweeping new book, Peter Frankopan looks at how the climate has changed human societyand how we have changed the climate. D oes climate change directly influence the weather we experience? Until recentlyfor the past 40 years or sothat question has followed nearly every maj...

How the insufferably perfectionist duo captured the hearts of a new generation of listeners This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic , Monday through Friday. Sign up for it here. T he fi...

How a small-town auto mechanic peddling a green-energy breakthrough pulled off a massive scam Listen to this article 00:00 51:26 Listen to more stories on curio Updated at 10:01 a.m. ET on May 11, 2023 This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which ou...

Entertainment musts from Yasmin Tayag This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. Good morning, and welcome back to The Dailys...

As the world celebrated the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement, a Belfast family instead grieved. E very time Paula McCartney drives across a bridge to the Belfast neighborhood known as the Markets, she crosses the River Lagan, which she now associates with the deaths ...

Climate change is pumping the air with pollen, and its a problem even for people who dont think theyre allergic. Listen to this article 00:00 08:17 Listen to more stories on hark These days, many Americans are muddling through an antihistamine haze. Between the sniffling, sneezin...

Moscow claims Ukraine struck the Kremlin. The truth is likely worse. This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. Two drones st...

Things look calm right now. They may even stay that waybut we wont know for sure for a good long while. By all official countsat least, the ones still being talliedthe global situation on COVID appears to have essentially flatlined . More than a year has passed since the world la...

Bono illustrates President Zelensky for June cover The future of democracy worldwide depends in part on whether the Ukrainian army can break the current stalemate and achieve complete victory. In a new cover story reported from frontline Kherson, President Volodymyr Zelenskys off...

If youre in search of a boost or motivation to change your life, these seven books may help. My last personal slump was brought on by a succession of blows: a job change, bad luck and bad judgment in love, and a daunting milestone birthday. Less , Andrew Sean Greers hilarious and...

People seem to be losing trust in one another. This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. In recent years, Americans appear t...

Discomfort with intimacy seems to be on the riseand no ones quite sure why. Listen to this article 00:00 08:37 Listen to more stories on hark A bout a decade ago, the social psychologist Sara Konrath led a study that yielded some disturbing results. As a researcher at Indiana Uni...

A California oil refinery shut down during the pandemic. A year later, former employees were not all right. In 2006, James Feldermann got hired as a trainee at a refinery in Martinez, California, in the Bay Area. It was hard work, with 12-hour-minimum shifts, but Feldermann came ...

Climate change is stripping plants of their nutrients. That could be a disaster for the animals who feed on them. This article was originally published in Knowable Magazine . Its tough out there for a hungry grasshopper on the Kansas prairie. Oh, theres plenty of grass to eat, bu...

Skeptics dont understand why Kyiv insists on holding a city of modest strategic value. For many months now, Ukrainian and Russian forces have been waging a bloody battle over what might look like the most insignificant of locations. On tiny patches of land around small cities in ...

The debate unfolds between groups with different points of reference. Welcome to Up for Debate. Each week, Conor Friedersdorf rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for t...

Life online is losing chaos, unpredictability, and delightall of the things that made it fun. This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up f...

The rice cooker has been perfect since 1955. This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic , Monday through Friday. Sign up for it here. In January, Timothy Wus electric rice cooker started a...

Leading California is more than a full-time joband neglecting it to do PR stunts in red states is frivolous and irresponsible. During Gavin Newsoms campaign to win another term as governor of California last year, I complained that rather than focusing on how to solve the Golden ...

A strong title can do more than entertainit can also provoke, challenge, educate, or soothe. As soon as my kids were born, I began reading to them. Theyd gurgle up at me, chewing their adorable fingers, as I chanted the words to The Real Mother Goose or When We Were Very Young . ...

A grim pattern is recurring after the latest high-profile killing by police officers. In late January, when authorities in Memphis charged several police officers in the death of Tyre Nichols and released footage of the incident , Chief C. J. Davis promised that the Memphis Polic...

Dont curb your enthusiasm. How to Build a Life is a column by Arthur Brooks, tackling questions of meaning and happiness. Click here to listen to his podcast series on all things happiness, How to Build a Happy Life . O ne of my friends, more so than anyone else I know, has a r...

Performing fairness can make us fairer. F ew people are neutral about neutrality these days. Sophisticated thought, certainly, has turned against it. The very ideal, were told, is misconceived, at best a ruse for prettifying partisanship. Following the recent contretemps at Stanf...

For the tech worlds most attention-grabbing man, performance comes before substance. This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it her...

The oceanic soup of plastic fragments is becoming a new kind of ecosystem. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch does not seem like it would be a hospitable place. It is more than 1,000 miles from the nearest streak of land. The sun is brutal and unrelenting there, the waters nutrient ...

Pets love beachesand wreak havoc on their wildlife. This story was originally published by Hakai Magazine . Kit saw the ocean for the first time on an iron-skied February afternoon. My wife and I had spent the past three years in eastern Washington State, a region landlocked by h...

Just how far can this climate momentum take us? Sign up for The Weekly Planet, The Atlantic s newsletter about living through climate change, here. It is a good time to be in the decarbonization business in the United States. The Inflation Reduction Act with its $374 billion corn...

The most famous climate goal is woefully misunderstood. Sign up for The Weekly Planet, The Atlantic s newsletter about living through climate change, here. How hot is too hot for planet Earth? For years, theres been a consensus in the climate movement: no more than 1.5 degrees Ce...

Runaway climate change once seemed like it could spur violence. Now a different risk has emerged. Back in 2015, when I started covering climate change, climate war meant one thing. At the time, if someone said that climate change posed a threat to the world order, you would assum...

Just because the two powers have every reason to cooperate on the issue doesnt mean they will. The latest round of international negotiations on climate change, which concluded on Sunday, achieved a significant breakthrough by creating a fund to compensate poor countries for dama...

Smearing soup on paintings is a stunt. What does real work look like? What is worth more: art or life? That was the provocative question that the demonstrator Phoebe Plummer asked onlookers at Londons National Gallery last month. Seconds before, Plummeralong with another activist...

An oceanic cold spot breathes life into the archipelago. How long can it last? This article was originally published by Hakai Magazine . As a result of climate change, almost every part of the ocean is heating up. But off the west coast of the Galapagos Islands is a patch of cold...

As the climate changes, hyperlocal projects are helping keep disadvantaged areas livable. Grandma, is the air on? Kisha Skipper was worried. Shes the vice president of the Yonkers NAACP and a member of the Climate Safe Yonkers Task Force, a group thats planning projects to make t...

A new report suggests that the Inflation Reduction Act could be even bigger than Congress thinks. Sign up for The Weekly Planet, Robinson Meyers newsletter about living through climate change, here. Late last month, analysts at the investment bank Credit Suisse published a resear...

Hurricane Ian shows some symptoms of global warming. But saying anything beyond that is folly. Hurricane Ian is one of the most destructive hurricanes ever to hit Florida. A day after the storm made landfall, hundreds of people have been rescued and, as of this morning, millions ...

Wishful thinking hampers the clean-energy revolution. Since the 1960s, fighting for the environment has frequently meant fighting against corporations. To curb pollution, activists have worked to thwart new oil drilling , coal-fired power plants, fracking for natural gas , and fu...

The electricity industry knew about the dangers of climate change 40 years ago. It denied them anyway. The MIT professor was unequivocal. If we had to stop producing CO2, no coal, oil, or gas could be burned, Carroll Wilson declared. The world would have to adopt nuclear energy e...

To fight climate change, get a white roof. Updated at 12:30 p.m. ET on August 31, 2022 T ime was , we didnt worry much about summer heat on the wet side of the Pacific Northwests Cascade Curtain. A hot day meant 80 degrees Fahrenheit; over 90 was a rare scorcher, and 100 was unhe...

Democrats in the Senate passed a bill that would, for the first time ever, use Congresss power to push the U.S. to decarbonize. Updated at 5:19 p.m. on August 7, 2022 Climate change was born as a modern political issue in the United States Senate. On a hot June day in 1988, a sen...

What word might describe losing your home while staying in one place? From above, an open-cut coal mine looks like some geological aberration, a sort of man-made desert, a recent volcanic eruption, or a kind of terra forming. When the Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht first g...

In the 1880s, Vancouvers seafood joints served lots of salmon. These days they serve squid. This post was originally published by Hakai . Vancouver, British Columbia, is nothing short of a seafood paradise. Situated at the mouth of the formerly salmon-rich Fraser River, the city ...

Climate change is altering wine as we know it. This article was originally published by Knowable Magazine . Soon after the devastating Glass Fire sparked in Californias Napa Valley in September 2020, wine chemist Anita Oberholsters inbox was brimming with hundreds of emails from ...

A new anthology about climate change acknowledges that we are both willing participants in and at the mercy of the systems that are destroying us. Greek mythology can be helpful when trying to make sense of the climate crisis. The imminent threat of total ecological collapse carr...

The party doesnt even seem to realize that its blowing a once-in-a-decade chance to pass meaningful climate legislation. Sign up for The Weekly Planet, Robinson Meyers newsletter about living through climate change, here. MIAMI BEACH, Fla.On Monday night, I saw one of the most de...

Planetary warming is no longer the sole province of climate fiction. Its creeping into all kinds of writing. Our stories about environmental catastrophe used to be set in distant futures: the desolate endlessness of The Road , or the hopeless, cutthroat scrounging in the Parable ...

By completely rewiring the network of animal viruses, climate change is creating a new age of infectious dangers. For the worlds viruses, this is a time of unprecedented opportunity. An estimated 40,000 viruses lurk in the bodies of mammals, of which a quarter could conceivably i...

The two paths to avoid the worst of climate change would still dramatically change the world as we know it. Sign up for The Weekly Planet, Robinson Meyers newsletter about living through climate change, here. Earlier this month, the United Nationsled Intergovernmental Panel on Cl...

Could bears hold the key to better treatments for stroke, osteoporosis, and Alzheimers? This article was originally published by Knowable Magazine . Every spring, as days in the north stretch longer and melting snow trickles into streams, drowsy animals ranging from grizzlies to ...

It was once the pinnacle of humanitys climate ambitions. A new UN-led climate report essentially concedes that its out of reach. The worlds most ambitious climate goalto keep the planets average temperature from rising more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above its preindustrial levelis...

Extreme rain, rising sea levels, and more frequent wildfires are all making landslides more likely. It is easy to view the ground as stable, as fixed, as immovable, even when deep down we know that its not. Sometimes the earth seems to shudder, as with an earthquake, and sometime...

Temperatures are rising, and theyre taking pollen counts with them. This article was originally published by The Conversation . Brace yourselves, allergy sufferers: New research shows that pollen season is going to get a lot longer and more intense with climate change. Our latest...

Even a minor skirmish would wreck the planet. When we talk about what causes climate change, we usually talk about oil and gas, coal and cars, andjust generallyenergy policy. Theres a good reason for this. Burning fossil fuels releases carbon dioxide, which enters the atmosphere,...

Here are three big takeaways from the new UN-led report, which warns that global warming is a threat to human well-being and planetary health. Yesterday, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published another one of its tomelike reports on the dangers of global warming. ...

Local meteorologists are better positioned than anyone else to talk their communities through the facts about climate change. T he weathermans striped tie is still snug on his neck as he starts an evening bath for his three kids, one of whom bolts naked from the bathroom and does...

It requires building new factories. Lots of them. Every week, our lead climate reporter brings you the big ideas, expert analysis, and vital guidance that will help you flourish on a changing planet. Sign up to get T he Weekly Planet , our guide to living through climate change, ...

Its one of the most cost-effective climate policies the U.S. has ever considered, according to a new analysis. Over the past year, my climate reporting has had a few preoccupations. They include: Now, I have an occasion to bring all three together! A new analysis from researchers...

Facing sea-level rise, flooding, and landslides, the citys residents are finding resiliencebecause they have little other choice. R ain had been falling for several hours on the night of July 18, 2021, when the Tiwaris called their relatives and told them to evacuate their house....

Extreme weather and energy uncertainty are already sending prices soaring. The McMansions of the mid-2000s might be the most American form of housing, but they were not, in general, grown in America. Although the United States is home to more than 200 billion trees, the type of l...

New report on cobalt mining and the clean-energy revolution In a new series of in-depth features, The Atlantic is canvassing the globe to report on some of the biggest questions and consequences of how we experience and adapt to climate change. This new reporting focus is part of...

Living in the era of climate change might make us feel guilt, or grief, or anger. How do those who think about these problems every day keep going? Usually, a story like this starts with a quick roundup of alarming statistics and a reminder of all the latest climate disasters: he...

This is a supply-side problem. This is unlike any other market that any of us lumber traders have ever experienced. Last year, lumber turned into the surprise superstar of the U.S. economy when it briefly outperformed bitcoin, gold, and the S&P 500 to become the hottest commodity...

If Democrats fail to pass a climate policy, they will all but guarantee that the world will warm a dangerous degree and that the U.S. will surrender its technological advantage to China. I try to avoid despair when writing about climate change. Having covered the topic for five y...

The thick layer of mucilage that covered the Sea of Marmara for weeks was an unsettling glimpse of climate changes more oozy effects. M y first sight of it came one morning in June, as I rode the ferry through the Bosporus strait: a toxic glint on the seas surface. I initially th...

Climate-concerned donors should focus on helping to pass climate policy, not offset their emissions, an advisory group says. On a dollar-for-dollar basis, where will your money do the most to fight climate change? The economist Daniel Stein has a clear answer: You should give to ...

John Doerrs new book, Speed and Scale: An Action Plan for Solving Our Climate Crisis Now, is a checklist for global action. Every week, our lead climate reporter brings you the big ideas, expert analysis, and vital guidance that will help you flourish on a changing planet. Sign u...

Warming oceans could be driving albatrosses to divorce unnecessarily. Albatrosses do not fall in love the way humans do. When the birds couple up, its almost always for keeps. Their lives start lonelyalbatross parents lay only one egg at a time, and may leave their offspring unat...

Negotiations in Washington, D.C., are far more important than those in Glasgow, Scotland. It has been bizarre, over the past few weeks, to see the attention lavished on the United Nations climate conference in Glasgow, Scotland. The summit was lauded as the worlds last, best hop...

Lizards feet are morphing, squid are shrinking, rats teeth are getting shorter. Whats in store for us? I n June of this year, not long before the midwinter solstice, catastrophic floodwaters draining from the Gippsland Plain, in southeastern Australia, left in their wake an other...

Environmental movements have shifted public awareness about climate change. How many more people will need to join them for their demands to be met? Although world leaders were gathered in Glasgow for the United Nations Climate Change Conference last week, Greta Thunberg said cha...

What happens when we do somethingbut not enoughto stop climate change? The COP26 international climate-change negotiations have just begun in Glasgow, Scotland, and the vibes are ... ambivalent. The leaders of Russia and China havent bothered to attend, but did promise to help en...

For people living in Oceania, climate change is the fight of our lives, and we need more than science to win. We need stories. I know nothing of the night sky. This saddens but does not surprise Larry Raigetal, a master navigator who is chewing betel nut beneath a canopy of stars...

New Mexicos Hatch Valley faces its biggest test yet. In the village of Hatch, New Mexico, at a chile shop cloaked in red ristrasthe ornamental strings of chiles that adorn many doorways and windows in the stateJessie Moreno, the young farmer who owns the store, tallies up sales, ...

The country shows the power of self-determination when it comes to development and climate policy. F ifty years ago , Bangladesh won independence from Pakistan amid devastating climate disaster. The year before, in 1970, the Bhola cyclone had killed up to half a million people. T...

A generation facing an intractable problem debates whether to bring a new generation into the world. Miley Cyrus vowed not to have a baby on a piece-of-shit planet. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez mused in an Instagram video about whether its still okay to have children. ...

And what they have to do with climate change. This is an excerpt from The Atlantic s climate newsletter, The Weekly Planet. Subscribe today . The climate scientist Ken Caldeira recently tweeted a joke meant to charm carbon-tax advocates. If we don't want people to drink so much a...

This summers weather has forced a kind of continuous awareness of climate change. Every week, our lead climate reporter brings you the big ideas, expert analysis, and vital guidance that will help you flourish on a changing planet. Sign up to get T he Weekly Planet , our guide to...

Some Hurricane Ida survivors may have no choice but to leave. Sooner or later, people across the country will be in the same bind. When I met Flynn Hoob on Monday, he was standing in front of his home. Or rather, what was left of his home. It was the day after Hurricane Ida , and...

Cities simply dont have enough time to run from a storm like Ida. Seventy-four hours. Thats roughly how much time separated the moment that Tropical Depression Nine formed in the Caribbean from the moment that the storm, transformed into a ruthless Category 4 hurricane named Ida,...

The island was once a place of working-class ingenuity and Black daring. I caught the fast ferry from Hyannis to Nantucket, 30 miles off the coast of Massachusetts. As the boat plowed the waves, I was taken aback by my first view of the island. I could see it all at once, end to ...

Disastrous environmental events are converging like never before. Updated at 12:47 p.m. ET on September 8, 2021. A fter this summers first searing heat wave baked the Pacific Northwest, the environmental scientist Robert Rohde posted an unusual observation on Twitter. Looking thr...

As the world reckons with the grim reality of the climate crisis, right-wing populists are adapting their message. Perhaps the 234 scientists behind this weeks landmark climate assessment had hoped that their reportpublished during a summer of deadly flooding , wildfires , and he...

Understanding global warming intellectually is not the same as feeling its presence in your daily lifeor seeing photos of a 50-foot wall of fire. Last summer the temperature in London, where I live, climbed above 37 degrees Celsius or 100 degrees Fahrenheit. It was hotter outside...

The latest UN report is clear: Climate change is here, its a crisis, and its caused by fossil fuels. A new United Nationsled report from hundreds of climate scientists around the world makes it clear: The human-driven climate crisis is now well under way. Earth is likely hotter n...

At least for now, we cant just trap carbon in the soil. The hope was that the soil might save us. With civilization continuing to pump ever-increasing amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, perhaps plantsnatures carbon scrubbersmight be able to package up some of that exc...

It reshaped how the world thought about climate change. But its prized traitbloodless economic efficiencywon it few friends on the right or left. The American carbon tax, an alluringly simple policy once hailed by environmentalists, scholars, and politicians as a cure-all for cli...

William Saville-Kent was a pioneering coral photographer. Was he also hiding a grisly secret? I n the summer of 1893 , an unusual volume appeared on the shelves of London booksellers. The Great Barrier Reef of Australia: Its Products and Potentialities , published by W. H. Allen ...

A green vortex is saving Americas climate future. Here, at least, is the standard story: The past decade has been abysmal for climate-change policy in the United States. In 2009, a handsome new president took office pledging to pass a comprehensive climate bill in Congress. He di...

A pair of new studies on sea-level rise show that a crucial climate clock is ticking now. Every week, our lead climate reporter brings you the big ideas, expert analysis, and vital guidance that will help you flourish on a changing planet. Sign up to get T he Weekly Planet , our ...

Bidens team is split on how to think about climate change. Every week, our lead climate reporter brings you the big ideas, expert analysis, and vital guidance that will help you flourish on a changing planet. Sign up to get T he Weekly Planet , our guide to living through climate...

But two simple changes can help. Whats for dinner? On a planet wracked by rising seas, expanding deserts, withering biodiversity, and hotter temperatures, thats a fraught question to answer. Food production accounts for roughly a quarter of the worlds greenhouse-gas emissions, an...

Call it the Gates Rule. Every Tuesday, our lead climate reporter brings you the big ideas, expert analysis, and vital guidance that will help you flourish on a changing planet. Sign up to get T he Weekly Planet , our guide to living through climate change, in your inbox . Lately,...

If youre retiring in the 2060s, you should make sure you can enjoy the 2060s. Every Tuesday, our lead climate reporter brings you the big ideas, expert analysis, and vital guidance that will help you flourish on a changing planet. Sign up to get T he Weekly Planet , our guide to ...

Our climate models could be missing something big. Photo Illustrations by Brendan Pattengale | Maps by La Tigre Images above: Glaciers from the Vatnajokull ice cap, in Iceland Brendan Pattengale is a photographer who explores how color can convey emotions in an image. In his phot...

Among all possible climate actions, recycling ranks pretty low in its impact. One of the few things Americans largely agree on is recycling. This simple act is popular with Democrats, Republicans, free-market diehards, and environmental advocates alike, data consistently show. An...

U.S. carbon pollution hasnt been this low in decadesthats the bad news. Every Tuesday, our lead climate reporter brings you the big ideas, expert analysis, and vital guidance that will help you flourish on a changing planet. Sign up to get T he Weekly Planet , our guide to living...

Joe Bidens victory isnt on the list. Every Tuesday, our lead climate reporter brings you the big ideas, expert analysis, and vital guidance that will help you flourish on a changing planet. Sign up to get T he Weekly Planet , our guide to living through climate change, in your in...

You cant understand the history of American energy use without them. A new visual history puts them in context. Every Tuesday morning, our lead climate reporter brings you the big ideas, expert analysis, and vital guidance that will help you flourish on a changing planet. Sign up...

These are the most effective carbon offsets and climate-advocacy groups, according to a new evidence-based group. Every Tuesday morning, our lead climate reporter brings you the big ideas, expert analysis, and vital guidance that will help you flourish on a changing planet. Sign ...

Smoggy-looking daguerreotypes in 19th-century London foreshadowed todays muted smartphone photos of California fires. I knew something was wrong the minute I woke up. On September 9, the sky was still dark at 7:15 a.m. Eventually it revealed a deep-orange light, darker and dustie...

He could have the best chance to fight carbon pollution of any American leader in a decade. Every Tuesday morning, our lead climate reporter brings you the big ideas, expert analysis, and vital guidance that will help you flourish on a changing planet. Sign up to get T he Weekly ...

Introducing Atlantic Planet Ive been covering climate change for The Atlantic for five years, or nearly a sixth of the time Ive been alive. Thats long enough to watch the world change around me. I covered Americas adoption of the Paris Agreement and our plan to depart it; in 2017...

At last nights debate, the president got confused about his own policyand Joe Bidens. The painting style of Jackson Pollock is called gestural abstraction, but before last nights debate, I never knew that it was also a governing philosophy. The debate featured many decisions from...

Extreme-weather events represent an irresistible force for action. But an immovable object is in the way. Mary Nichols has been part of the struggle to prevent catastrophic climate change for about as long as anyone in American life. For years, shes directed Californias pathbreak...

Dont depersonalize climate change. My newly adopted home state is on fire again: Scorching heat and lightning strikes have sparked dozens of fires across California, burning an area the size of Rhode Island. Iowa is reeling from a deadly derecho. The Mountain West is suffering th...

In the heat of COVID-19 and climate change, its too easy to forget what flourishing feels like. On the first day of summer, Siberia and I were the same temperature. In Verkhoyansk, roughly 3,000 miles northeast of Moscow, a searing week ended in an afternoon hotter than any befor...

The states heat waves, blackouts, and firesamid a pandemicoffer a warning of our fossil-fuel future. When I moved to California five years ago, I planted a tree in my yard. It was a Red Baron peach, chosen for its showy, bright-pink blossoms and its ability to grow fruit with few...

If the fate of American democracy is on the ballot in November, so too is the future of the planet. With former Vice President Joe Biden leading in the polls and Democratic control of the Senate possible, the United States may soon have the chance, for the first time in more than...

Theyre hoping that the vice-presidential nominee will be as malleable as Joe Biden. The far left of the Democratic Party spent much of the primary attacking Kamala Harris, decrying her as an untrustworthy cop whose overtures to the left were half-hearted and opportunistic. But wi...

Boris Johnson has faced his share of blame for the countrys death count. But the British system was failing long before the coronavirus struck. F aced with the coronavirus pandemic, Britains leaders asked their people to do three things, captured in one pithy slogan: Stay home. P...

Its difficult to imagine the party nominating two white men for president and vice president ever again. In the final rally Joe Biden held before COVID-19 shut down the country in March, he clasped hands on a stage in Detroit with a group of emerging Democratic stars. I view myse...

Saudi leaders have figured out what makes the president tick like few others have. T he joke, a throwaway quip , somehow captured the man and the momentthe end of one era, and the beginning of another. It was January 2017, and thenBritish Prime Minister Theresa May was in the Whi...

We look at the charged debate around whether universities should hold in-person instruction. Every weekday evening, our editors guide you through the biggest stories of the day, help you discover new ideas, and surprise you with moments of delight. Subscribe to get this delivered...

A long obsession with Mars makes all the other worlds seem a little neglected. Paul Byrne loves Mars. He wrote his doctoral thesis and several research papers about the planet. Most of his graduate students study Mars. And yet, earlier this year, he posed this question on Twitter...

One scientist started in the Arctic Ocean and ended up crossing the Russia-Finland border on a folding bicycle procured in Germany. Shortly after he arrived on the RV Polarstern at the end of February, Alexey Niubom learned he would not be going home as planned. The 32-year-old e...

Trees now cover most of the exclusion zone, and climate change is making them more likely to burn. I n the clear , calm, early hours of May 15, 2003, three miles west of the hulking ruins of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, Vasyl Yoschenko was bustling around a stand of Scotch ...

Writers and editors from around our newsroom pick ones worth revisiting. Every weekday evening, our editors guide you through the biggest stories of the day, help you discover new ideas, and surprise you with moments of delight. Subscribe to get this delivered to your inbox . Poe...

Saying nothing often is saying something. Supreme Court justices typically write opinions that say more than what is strictly necessary to decide the case before them. In those opinions, the justices also communicate with their colleagues, other courts, and the country about the ...

How I got co-opted into helping the rich prevail at the expense of everybody else F rom my parents teenage years in the 1930s and 40s through my teenage years in the 1970s, American economic life became a lot more fair and democratic and secure than it had been when my grandparen...

Over five decades, the GOP has transformed into something I no longer recognize. I have been immersed in national politics in Washington for five decades. Over my time here, as an academic, a congressional staffer, a think tanker, and a commentator and public figure, I have gotte...

The coronavirus could change lingering cultural assumptions about what makes for a full and happy life. A few weeks into the pandemic, a meme circulated among some of the mothers I follow on various social-media platforms. Check in on your friends with little kids, the words in a...

The Democratic representative hasnt come up with a good rationale for challenging progressive Senator Ed Markey in Massachusetts. But with a name like his, it may not matter. WORCESTER, Mass.The words tumble out of Joseph Patrick Kennedy III so quickly that the sense of urgency, ...

Perceived as a moderate, he has embraced strikingly progressive goals without facing any political backlash. Almost halfway through Chris Wallaces July 19 interview with Donald Trump, an exchange occurred that encapsulates the current state of the presidential race. The president...

A virus has brought the worlds most powerful country to its knees. Image above : A masked worker cleans a New York City subway entrance. Updated at 1:12 p.m. ET on August 4, 2020. H ow did it come to this? A virus a thousand times smaller than a dust mote has humbled and humiliat...

The South China Morning Post is arguably the worlds most important newspaperfor what it tells us about media freedoms as Chinas power grows. O n the night of August 31, 2019 , police officers rushed into a Hong Kong subway station, swinging their batons and chasing suspected anti...

The ranking reveals a sad reality: People are really bored right now, and that leaves a lot of room for mediocre content to flourish. Last summer, I made a grievous mistake while getting my hair braided. As I eased into the chair, mentally preparing myself (well, my glutes) for t...

For the first time in 41 years, researchers have provided a new answer to one of the thorniestand most fundamentalquestions in Earth science. The project began, in one telling, five years ago, in a castle that overlooks the Bavarian Alps, where three dozen of the worlds most succ...

Legalizing marijuana is extremely popular. So why wont Joe Biden embrace the idea? Democratic political consultants dream of issues like marijuana legalization. Democrats are overwhelmingly in favor of it, polls show. So are independents. A majority of Republicans favor it now to...

Six experts explain how to recognize the many new faces of grief during a pandemic. As of this writing, the coronavirus pandemic has killed more than 50,000 people in the United States and more than 200,000 people worldwide. These deaths inevitable companion is grief, but the tur...

Nationwide forced isolation, along with media coverage of the pandemics toll in U.S. jails and prisons, could shift public perceptions of carceral punishment. E arlier this month , Ellen DeGeneres attracted public ire for something she said during the first at home edition of her...

The Courts decision to make oral arguments more accessible and transparent is unprecedentedand should be the norm even after the pandemic. Like so many parents who have been sheltering in place with their children, I have been conscripted into the role of homeschool teacheror, mo...

In Hungary, the pandemic was just an excuse. This article was updated at 10:05 a.m. ET on April 3, 2020 Viktor Orban is the prime minister of Hungary. He has been in power since 2010. During that time, he has underinvested in hospitals. Instead, public money has gone to pet proje...

The country is not aiming for 60 percent of the populace to get COVID-19, but youd be forgiven for thinking so based on how badly the actual plan has been explained. Updated at 1:13 p.m. ET on March 16, 2020. There was a time when it seemed possible for the world to contain COVID...

For Democrats, climate change is now one of the two most important issues in politics, according to a new poll. Updated at 1:05 p.m. ET on February 21, 2020. Its not a fluke, an error, or an outlier. In poll after poll, the results are clear: Climate change is one of the most imp...

In the past few years, the American Petroleum Institute and its allies have fought against climate-friendly policies in at least 16 different states. Some of the most important fights over climate change arent being waged in Washington. Theyre happening state by state, in a melee...

Jeff Bezos has pledged more money to battling climate change than anyone ever has before. But where will it go? Jeff Bezos, the chief executive of Amazon and the worlds richest man, announced yesterday that he would give $10 billion to fight climate change. He didnt say much else...

It will be a long time before we understand what the outbreak did to the global economy. So far, less than 0.0008 percent of the humans on Earth have been diagnosed with the disease caused by the coronavirus known as COVID-19. But thanks to the circulation of disease and capital,...

When our peers take actions to preserve the planet, were more likely to follow suit. How the human instinct to conform could help us address the climate crisis. I t is worse , much worse, than you think, reads the frightening first sentence of The Uninhabitable Earth , David Wall...

Twenty-one children brought a lawsuit arguing that the government needs to act on climate change. A federal court dismissed it. The American Revolution had scarcely been over a month when, in a farewell letter to the Continental Army, General George Washington admitted something ...

2019 was the hottest year on record, with one exception. The 2010s were the hottest decade ever measured on Earth, and 2019 was the second-hottest year ever measured, scientists at NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced today. After a year of flash...

Ive never thought we should stop having children. But I will have to teach our son to wonder at the world before he learns to fear for it. Our first child was born at the end of August. I am not a young parent; I was born in 1974, and in the span of this one generation, global ca...

Even as the country fights bushfires, it cant stop dumping planet-warming pollution into the atmosphere. Updated 3:00 p.m. ET on Jan. 4, 2020. Australia is caught in a climate spiral. For the past few decades, the arid and affluent country of 25 million has padded out its economy...

As UN climate negotiations faltered, bankers on Wall Street brought good news for the climate. Whats even happening? So lets say you have one (1) global economy. It currently generates most of its energy by burning carbon-based fuels, which is fine, but then it disposes the resul...

For nearly 30 years, Americas four biggest rail companieswhich move the majority of the countrys coalhave spent millions to deny climate science and block climate policy. In the fight against climate change, the nations freight railroads have painted themselves as heroes. Rail is...

In an interview, the former secretary of state talks about the climate news that makes him want to curse, and his new alliance with Arnold Schwarzenegger and Leonardo DiCaprio. As for the sordid saga of American politics and climate change, John Kerry has not quite seen it all, b...

Why it feels like everything is going haywire Suppose that the biblical story of Creation were true: God created the universe in six days, including all the laws of physics and all the physical constants that apply throughout the universe. Now imagine that one day, in the early 2...

The president is withdrawing the U.S. from the Paris Agreement on climate change because he just cant quit carbon. The United States began the formal process of leaving the Paris Agreement on climate change yesterday, withdrawing on the first day it was legally possible. Barring ...

PG&Es blackouts in California are a bleak preview of the disruptions that will become routine in a warmer world. California has always promised Americans a glimpse of the future. But this week, the Golden State is forecasting a future that nobody wants to live in. Millions of peo...

Most registered voters are in favor of spending trillions on weatherized buildings and renewable-energy infrastructure. For the first time in yearsand maybe everDemocrats are getting ambitious about climate change. Several presidential candidates have proposed $1 trillion plans t...

Sea-level rise will become unmanageable, and life will flee the worlds tropical oceans, if carbon pollution keeps rising, a new report from the UN climate panel says. Today a baby girl was born. Consider the years of her lifehow shell think back to her childhood in the 20s (the 2...

Especially in private, she sounds a lot like ... a teenager. In a very short time, Greta Thunbergwith her searing stare, Pippi Longstocking braids, and hand-painted sign reading SKOLSTREJK FOR KLIMATET has become a global icon. A year ago, the 16-year-old Swedish climate activis...

A pair of authors tries to maintain optimism about the worlds changing landscapesbut at what cost? In October, the residents of Newtok, Alaska, are expected to begin relocating because of climate change. And its not just the people who are moving. The town is packing up everythin...

As a global climate crisis deepens, even professional travelers should cut back on their air miles. The sun was still beating down when, one late afternoon earlier this year, I arrived at a dust bowl of baked earth where there should have been water. Lake Abbe, a soda lake on the...

Bernie Sanders released a massive plan for a Green New Deal this week. Whats the point of all these climate plans? Its a historic week for climate change in the Democratic Party. In the same 12-hour span, Senator Bernie Sanders unveiled his plan to pass a gargantuan $16 trillion ...

Theyre a single-use, disposable consumer itema greener option, but not a green one. The bright, cold, bitter tang. The soft notes of walnut and dirt. The anticipation of the jolt of electricity. The feeling of wet cardboard in my mouth. Nowadays this is what I get when I grab my ...

Here are seven ways of understanding the IPCCs newest climate warning. 1. There is no shortage of scary facts in the major new report on climate change and land, a summary of which was released today by a United Nationsled scientific panel. Chief among them: For everyone who live...

Democrats have figured out how to talk about climate change with urgency and air real differences among the candidates ideas for dealing with it. How should Democrats even debate climate policy? Its a harder question than it may seem. Climate change is a sprawling, scary, cinemat...

The Federal Reserve should act aggressively to reduce that risk, a leading economic historian argues. A few years ago, Mark Carney, a former Goldman Sachs director who now leads the Bank of England, sounded a warning. Global warming, he said, could send the world economy spiralin...

Fleeing to higher ground isnt an adaptation policy. During the primary debates, Democratic candidates repeatedly accused each other of using Republican talking points. But it was Andrew Yang who actually deployed a hyper-conservative argument on Wednesday nightalbeit one that had...

Steve Bullock just wasnt right. Amid the fireworks of Tuesday nights Democratic primary debate, there was a moderately interesting exchange about the inherently political task of dealing with climate change. It happened among the not-so-killer Bs: the moderates Steve Bullock, Bet...

While parts of the world have warmed or cooled in the past, modern climate change is happening just about everywhere at the same time. From the planets perspective, one of the most significant events of the past 2,000 years occurred on April 5, 1815, when the Indonesian volcano M...

Each degree of warming causes way more fire than the previous degree of warming did. And thats a really big deal. On a hot July evening last year, a rancher tried to use a hammer and stake to plug a wasps nest. The hammer slipped, a spark flew, and a patch of dry grass ignited, a...

Farmers in Bangladesh are adapting to climate change, and its having an impact in faraway placesincluding on restaurant menus. DHAKA, BangladeshHere at Binni, a slightly run-down restaurant in one of Dhakas trendier neighborhoods, beef, chicken, and mutton dishes are slapped down...

Democrats are trying to do their prep work now so they can hit the ground running if they win a majority in 2021. It will be almost another 18 months until Democrats can even think of passing climate legislation. In the 2020 election, they must defeat President Donald Trump, recl...

They did try, though. Ill be honest: It was just nice to hear them talk about climate change. Not that they did it very well or entirely coherently. But stillmore than eight minutes of discussion about climate policy! Among national politicians! On broadcast TV! What a concept! A...

Of course Democratic candidates should square off on the issue. Heres what a moderator should ask. For the past week, the Democratic Partys presidential candidates, grassroots organizers, and national committee have fought over whether it would be a good idea to have a climate-ch...

Previously light on policy, his campaign hasfor the momentthe most detailed plan on climate change in the Democratic primary. The first 2020 presidential candidate out with a comprehensive climate-change policy is ... Beto ORourke? I was surprised, too. The former congressman fro...

Since 1972, the giant islands ice sheet has lost 11 quadrillion pounds of water. The Greenland Ice Sheet is the worlds second-largest reservoir of fresh water sitting on the worlds largest island. It is almost mind-bogglingly huge. If Greenland were suddenly transported to the ce...

The space agency is exploring what three Earth-observation start-ups can teach it about the planet. SAN FRANCISCO The sky has filled with eyes, and NASA is starting to notice. Over the past several years, venture-funded start-ups have hurled hundreds of inexpensive satellites int...

Its time for leafy-green justice. In hindsight, there were plenty of indications over the past decade that American politics were headed toward the partisan sniping and low-stakes media obsessions that crowd the news cycle today. Take Arugulagate. In 2007, Barack Obama was in Iow...

For the first time in years, a broad spectrum of climate advocates is playing offense. Suddenly, climate change is a high-profile national issue again. Its not just the Green New Deal. Around the country, the loose alliance of politicians, activists, and organizations concerned a...

A new book from Barry Lopez underscores how the genre has evolved as planetary conditions have worsened. Its easy to make the mistake when traveling abroad of finding only the good or only the bad in a place, easy to miss how complicated the weave of bad with good is, Barry Lopez...

Geo-engineering wont hurt a bit, at least compared with climate changeand it deserves serious investigation, according to the authors of a recent study. The year is 2055, and climate change has fully set in. Months-long heat waves regularly kill infants and the elderly , and food...

Nuclear power might be part of a Green New Deal, but it cant meet all U.S. energy needs. When the fate of the planet is at stake, a single precedent starts to seem like a blueprint. Most Americans, as far as pollsters can tell, want the United States to honor its commitment under...

A person fretting about a scorching day might find the same temperature unremarkable within five years, a new study finds. In the past 50 years, climate change has altered the weather of the United States, leading to milder winters, warmer nights, and sweltering summer heat waves...

The Washington governor thinks a focus on climate change will win him the White House. In the crowded 2020 Democratic presidential field, sticking out is hard. Whatever qualification makes a candidate seem special, another boasts the same distinctive trait or experience. Governor...

David Wallace-Wells, author of the new book The Uninhabitable Earth , describes why climate change might alter our sense of time. The year is 2100. The United States has been devastated by climate change. Super-powerful hurricanes regularly ravage coastal cities. Wildfires have o...

NASA and NOAA are both shut down, so outside scientists affirmed the milestone this week. 2018 was hotter than any year in the 19th century. It was hotter than any year in the 20th century. It was hotter than any year in the first decade of this century. In fact, with only three ...

More Americans than ever are worried about climate change, but theyre not willing to pay much to stop it. A surging number of Americans understand that climate change is happening and believe that it could harm their family and the country, according to a new poll from Yale and G...

Local emissions over the subcontinent make summer storms more erratic, and may have global consequences. Over the next decade, more than 400 large dams will be built on the Himalayan riversby India, China, Nepal, Bhutan, and Pakistanto feed the regions hunger for electricity and ...

Alas, a brief cold spell does not undo decades of scientific fact. Its something of an annual tradition for the president. On Sunday morning, as the eastern half of the country endured driving snow and frigid winter winds, Donald Trump asked on Twitter how climate change could be...

Were a lot closer than we should be, one Stanford scientist warned. The year 2018 was not an easy one for planet Earth. Sure, wind and solar energy kept getting cheaper , and an electric car became Americas best-selling luxury vehicle . But the most important metric of climatic h...

Deep in shady forests and at the bottom of towering canyons, climate refugia could provide the stability that vulnerable species need. Its a four-hour drive from Toni Lyn Morellis home near Amherst, Massachusetts, to her field sites on the slopes of the White Mountains in New Ham...

The former vice president discusses how the politics of the environment have changed considerably over his decades of advocacy. Al Gore is mostly done with politics these days. Though he popped up at a campaign stop with Hillary Clinton in 2016, hes otherwise safely in the very s...

The denial of climate change and the denial of racism rest on the same foundation: an attack on observable reality. For two years, they formed a community of experts, about 1,000 in all, including 300 leading climate scientists inside and outside 13 federal agencies. For two year...

Global warming may have turned an already historic dry spell into the third-worst drought of the past 1,000 years. Every so often, the American West seems to lurch into something called a mega-drought. The rains falter, the rivers wither, and the forests become tinder boxes waiti...

The country now has a suite of buildings that generate more energy than they use. The European Union has a target of making all new buildings zero-energy by 2020, but in Norway, carbon neutrality isnt enough. A consortium in Oslo made up of architects, engineers, environmentalist...

Experts say mounting environmental pressures will make people sicker, and that the health-care system will play a major role in averting disaster. C limate change can seem almost too big to fathom. Reports such as the recent National Climate Assessment and the United Nations Inte...

The worst extinction in Earths history offers chilling predictions for the planets futureand for humanitys efforts to keep climate doom at bay. Identifying a killer can be difficult when it seems like every murder weapon imaginable has been used in the crime, and when the victim ...

The system of government gets in the countrys way. The federal government released a devastating report last week documenting the immense economic and human cost that the U.S. will incur as a result of climate change. It warns that the damage to roads alone will add up to $21 bil...

According to the UN, most major polluters are not on track to meet their Paris goals. But critics say that accounting may be too pessimistic. Humanity is losing ground in its battle against climate change. On Tuesday, a new UN report warned that the world is farther than it was l...

Thirteen federal agencies agree: Climate change has already wreaked havoc on the United States, and the worst is likely yet to come. On Friday afternoon, the U.S. government published a major and ominous climate report. Despite being released on a holiday, when it seemed the smal...

In a massive new report, federal scientists contradict President Trump and assert that climate change is an intensifying danger to the United States. Too bad it came out on a holiday. On Friday, the busiest shopping day of the year, the federal government published a massive and ...

The dust is settling on the 2018 midtermsand no plan to fight global warming has emerged unscathed. There were some elections last week in the United States. The results were pretty good for the climate-concerned. Democrats swept into the House of Representatives, winning nearly ...

What will climate adaptation look like? A million individual products, each precisely targeted on social media to the intersection of a consumer culture and a catastrophe. As the red sun hung in the smoke-filled air outside, as the exhaust from the Camp Fire swept over the Bay Ar...

With the executive and legislative branches refusing to act, the judicial branch might be the last hope. Climate change is crashing into Americas courts. As the science gets more conclusive, the reality more sobering, and the predictions more dire, the executive and legislative b...

Aint no mountain high enough to escape climate change. In 1985, John Fitzpatrick hiked up a ridge called Cerro de Pantiacolla, in the Peruvian Andes, in search of birds. On an eight-kilometer uphill walk, he and his team meticulously documented all the birds that lived on the mou...

Major disasters and challenging long-term weather conditions are weakening local governments, increasing racial and class inequality, and reducing trust in government. T he damage from Hurricane Michael is still being cataloged. After the Category 4 storm made landfall in the Flo...

The need to understand strange events like the Carnian Pluvial Episode has taken on new urgency." In Italy, the dawn of the greatest empire in the history of the world is marked, not by broken marble pediments strewn across the seven hills of Rome, but modest three-toed footprint...

Again. Election Day 2012 was an important day for Donald Trump. It may have been important for the planet, too. As Americans across the country traveled to the polls to select their next president, Trump tweeted 46 times. He endorsed Mitt Romney. He congratulated himself for The ...

The field has a data gap problem that wont be easy to solve. Its easy to talk about how climate change will alter Earths surface in the century to come. It will raise sea levels, flood cities, and set off droughts. As this months dire United Nations report shows, decades of clima...

A growing body of research suggests that models of the warming world have underestimated a crucial ingredient: vegetation. When Abigail Swann started her career in the mid-2000s, she was one of just a handful of scientists exploring a potentially radical notion: that the green pl...

It tries to find hope against a backdrop of failure. People must be burned out on major climate reports, and can you really blame them? Every year, it seems, yet another group of scientists compiles what we know about climate change. And every year, with few exceptions, the broad...

The company will begin estimating local carbon pollution from cities around the world. In the next decade or so, more than 6,000 cities, states, and provinces around the world will try to do something that has eluded humanity for 25 years: reduce their emissions of greenhouse gas...

The group, whose states represent half of U.S. GDP, pledged $1.4 billion to support electric cars, plus a new set of policies to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. In his 20 months in office, President Donald Trump has stripped out huge swaths of federal climate policy. He has canc...

As people flock to see the worlds receding frozen wonders, theyre also encountering freak accidents. In the summer of 1987, a woman visiting Alaska was crushed by a 1,000-pound chunk of ice. According to news reports at the time, Thais Grabenauer, 59, had been taking pictures wit...

William T. Vollmanns latest opus is brilliant, but it offers no comfort to its readers. A uthors like to flatter themselves by imagining for their work an ideal reader, a cherubic presence endowed with bottomless generosity, the sympathy of a parent, and the wisdom of, well, the ...

Climate change will mean more insects, and less food for humans. Since the dawn of agriculture, humans have been unwillingly nourishing insects by growing plants that they then devour. Their mandibles consume somewhere between 10 and 20 percent of crops produced around the world....

If carbon emissions continue to grow, anyone who works with the land could face unprecedented challenges. If climate change continues unabated, nearly every ecosystem on the planet would alter dramatically, to the point of becoming an entirely new biome, according to a new paper ...

President Trump may be leading the rich, English-speaking world to scale back environmental policies. Last Thursday, Malcolm Turnbull was the prime minister of Australia. By the end of this week, hell be just another guy in Sydney. Turnbull was felled by climate-change policy. Hi...

With a new global summit approaching, communities in the southern United States are calling attention to the disaster scenarios they currently face. In the new global reality, where each passing year is the hottest on record, the final month of summer foretells calamity. Its alwa...

During the rise of mammals, Earth's temperatures spiked in a scary way that the planet may experience again soon. They were strange days at the beginning of the age of mammals. The planet was still hungover from the astonishing disappearance of its marquee superstars, the dinosau...

By portraying the early years of climate politics as a tragedy, the magazine lets Republicans and the fossil-fuel industry off the hook. The New York Times Magazine has tried to make the release of its new article , which details a decade of climate history, as momentous as possi...

Unusually hot days have profound effects on mental health and human physiology. For almost two centuries now, scientists have noticed a places suicide rate bears troubling links to the changing of the seasons and the friendliness of its climate. In 1881 , the Italian physician En...

Trumps pick for the Supreme Court affirms climate changebut thats not necessarily good news for the EPA. It probably isnt surprising that Judge Brett Kavanaugha longtime member of the conservative movement whom President Trump nominated to the Supreme Court on Mondayhas written a...

American withdrawal from the Paris agreement is a test for the future of the globe, but also for the international order. One year ago, President Trump announced that he planned to withdraw the United States from the Paris climate agreement. The decision derived from Trumps insis...

A Harvard professor says his company should be able to suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, at industrial scales, by 2021. A team of scientists from Harvard University and the company Carbon Engineering announced on Thursday that they have found a method to cheaply and dire...

Scientists recently modeled a range of interactions between energy-intensive civilizations and their planets. The results were sobering. The universe does many things. It makes galaxies, comets, black holes, neutron stars, and a whole mess more. Weve lately discovered that it mak...

I also know that we human beings are contributing to it in a major way, Jim Bridenstine said, taking an unusual stance for his administration. The new administrator of NASA held a town hall Thursday at the agencys headquarters in Washington, D.C. Jim Bridenstine is about four wee...

Millennials in the GOP want more government action on environmental issues than the older generation. The newest version of the Pew Research Centers annual environmental poll covers a lot of familiar ground. It finds that most Americans believe the government should be doing more...

Marine protected areas have been an environmental success story. But a new study finds that most wont withstand global warming. We shouldve known, said John Bruno, but we really didnt. Bruno is a professor of marine biology at the University of North Carolina. Recently, he and hi...

As a reporter covering the environment, I'm all too aware of what the next 50 years could hold. As a 9-year-old, she's notand for now, she wants to stay that way. Late last year, a local middle-school teacher asked me to talk to her class about my work as a science journalist. Wh...

"A lot of young conservatives are frustrated by the false choice between no climate action and a big government regulatory scheme." Consider the life of a current college sophomore, a 20-year-old. She was born in 1998, at the time the warmest year ever measured, when a monster El...

A new paper questions the growing body of evidence that weather fluctuations can prompt wars, but researchers have doubts about its value. Updated on February 13, 2018 Its one of the most important questions of the 21st century: Will climate change provide the extra spark that pu...

An exhibition in Manhattan is the first step in a grand attempt to change the national conversation around global warming. Since January 25, after sunset, the shades on a window-walled gallery in Manhattans Greenwich Village have rolled up, and the sidewalk outside has been cast ...

We have endured floods, and fires, and storms, he said, without saying what made them all worse. President Donald Trump didnt mention climate change or global warming in his State of the Union address on Tuesday night. This is, on one hand, the most predictable thing in the world...

Its a shameours and his. In the first novel ever written about Sherlock Homes, we learn something peculiar about the London detective. Holmes, supposedly a modern man and a keen expert in the workings of the world, does not know how the solar system works. Specifically he is unfa...

Seven of the states 10 largest modern wildfires have occurred in the last 14 years. Massive wildfires are raging across Southern California, threatening thousands of homes and cultural landmarks like the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. Some of the largest fires were still barely con...

The more 90-degree days a fetus or infant endured, the lower his or her earnings in adulthood. Even if countries take moderate action on climate change, by the end of this century , Phoenix is expected to have an extra month of days above 95 degrees Fahrenheit, while Washington, ...

Theres no magic bill waiting in the wingsand no quick path to arriving at one. Theres a wrinkle in how the United States talks about climate change in 2017, a tension fundamental to the issues politics but widely ignored. On the one hand, Democrats are the party of climate change...

What lurks in the Arctics thawing permafrost? F rom the air , the coast of Greenland appears vast and tranquil. Hundreds of fjords, their surfaces a mirror of blue sky and cloud bottoms, divide the territory. In the gaps between them, the terrain folds over itself, hill over hill...

The National Climate Assessment arrives as President Trump is dismantling the most sweeping U.S. climate policy. Climate change is real. Its caused by greenhouse-gas pollution released by human industrial activity. Its consequences can already be felt across every region and coas...

A new study in The Lancet makes the case that global warming is already ailing public health worldwide, but experts disagree on its methodology. Climate change is already afflicting human health worldwide, exposing tens of millions of elderly people to excess heat while possibly ...

And thats only counting the floods caused by hurricanes and tropical storms. New York is a city on the water. For hundreds of years, its rivers and harbor have worked to its advantage, bringing it speedy transportation and pleasant temperatures. The next couple hundred years may ...

The most aggressive dismantling of the former presidents environmental rules yet Ten months in, and the presidency of Donald Trump has acquired a reputation for ineffectiveness. Trumps attempt to repeal Obamacare has failed three times; he has taunted and alienated some congressi...

How a warming world could affect rockfalls like Yosemite's Last Wednesday and Thursday, there were two major rockfall events at Yosemites El Capitan, a rock formation extremely popular with climbers. Wednesdays rockslide killed one person, the first rockfall-related fatality in t...

A note on the false dichotomy between prevention and treatment In an interview with CNN on Thursday, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt said that now is not the time to talk about climate change. Heres the issue, he said. To have any kind of focus on the c...

It was supposed to be a quiet year. This wasnt supposed to be a bad year for Western wildfires. Last winter, a weak La Nina bloomed across the Pacific. It sent flume after flume of rain to North America and irrigated half the continent. Water penetrated deep into the soil of West...

The human contribution can be up to 30 percent or so of the total rainfall coming out of the storm. Every so often, the worst-case scenario comes to pass. As of Sunday afternoon, the remnants of Hurricane Harvey seem likely to exceed the worst forecasts that preceded the storm. T...

On an Alaskan island, one of natures greatest spectacles is shutting down, as brown bears abandon fish in favor of a surprising alternative. In the summer of 2014, William Deacy and Jonathan Armstrong returned to Kodiak Island, Alaskaa place where the worlds biggest grizzly bears...

With one dietary change, the U.S. could almost meet greenhouse-gas emission goals. Ecoanxiety is an emerging condition. Named in 2011, the American Psychological Association recently described it as the dread and helplessness that come with watching the slow and seemingly irrevoc...

A falcon war in Greenlands frigid north is a preview of habitat contests to come. NUUK, GreenlandFar up the coast of this ice-dominated islandnorth of the Arctic Circle; north of the glacier that spawned the Titanic -sinking iceberg; and north of the northernmost American militar...

Why it's so hard to talk about the worst problem in the world No one knows how to talk about climate change right now. I dont have an idea about where to begin, and I write about it professionally. On the one hand, the natural consequences of climate change seem increasingly seve...

Global warming will intensify regional inequality in the United States, according to a revolutionary new economic assessment of the phenomenon. Climate change will aggravate economic inequality in the United States, essentially transferring wealth from poor counties in the Southe...

Yes, but it didnt act alone. Weather always makes good news, but the role of climate change in altering weather, especially extreme weather, has made the subject a lightning rod for unease. A case in point this week: A heat wave is triggering record temperatures in the Southwest....

Nations like China and India remain committed to the Paris climate change agreementwith or without the U.S. The Trump administrations reported announcement that it is withdrawing from the Paris climate change agreement has prompted nations and world leaders to reiterate their com...

As record-breaking high tides overwhelm Hawaii, people are getting a preview of what life will be like in the decades to come. The water is everywhere. For the second time in a month, Hawaiis coastlines have been swamped by epic tides. The phenomenon, known as a king tide, is act...

Environmental differences that show up in fungi might give researchers a glimpse of climate shifts that have only just begun. The mushroom Amanita thiersii dots American lawns from Texas to Illinois, a small white button on the grasss emerald expanse. Unlike similar mushrooms, A....

A 765,000-person study argues that unusually warm nights are a public-health hazard. In the fall of 2015, the worst heatwave in 25 years struck Southern California. Los Angeles saw two back-to-back 100-degree days, which set an October record and plagued the Long Beach marathon. ...

Climate change explains only 20 percent of the movement. As the consequences of climate change strike across the United States, ecologists have a guiding principle about how they think plants will respond. Cold-adapted plants will survive if they move upthat is, as they move furt...

A new study explains why the controversial hiatus doesnt amount to much. It is the first year of the new Republican presidents term. He has taken over a healthy economy from his Democratic predecessor, and, with it, the freedom to branch out beyond the typical Reaganism. He has a...

A new study aims to answer: When do we know if bad weather can be blamed on global warming? This past winter was an exceptionally strange one across North America. Rain deluged California, as unseasonable warmth fanned across the Midwest and Eastern seaboard. In New York, sales o...

... but he wont cop to it. The newest columnist at The New York Times is Bret Stephens, a 43-year-old Never Trumper and the former editor-in-chief of the The Jerusalem Post. The Times picked him up from The Wall Street Journal, where he helped edit the opinion section. Five years...

Polls and studies reveal its the long, tiring grind that changes opinions about global warming. Were facing a week with three environmental news pegs: Its Earth Day, the March for Science is today, and senior advisors at the White House will soon meet to decide whether the United...

The giant mammals are extremely vulnerable to changes in the ecosystem, making their health a good barometer for the state of the environment. They stood on the top bridge of the cruise ship National Geographic Explorer , peering through binoculars at the vast icy Weddell Sea. It...

Air quality in Beijing has a lot to do with snowstorms in Siberia. When smog gets bad, the air becomes more than a coolness on your skin or a haze on the horizon. When smog gets bad, you can taste it. Today, Shanghai air really has a layered taste. At first, it tastes slightly as...

A group of GOP lawmakers have signed a resolution warning that the consequences of a changing climate have the potential to adversely impact all Americans. Will it translate to legislative action? At a time when President Donald Trump is working to dismantle former President Bara...

He has no evidence. Hell successfully mislead people anyway. It was a bright warm day in March, and while the clocks werent quite striking thirteen , something was awry. Scott Pruitt, the new chief of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, was rejecting the international scien...

The weather is nice, but it reminds us of the problems to come. This is not how February is supposed to feel. From D.C. to Denver , from Charlotte to Chicago , towns and cities across the United States have posted strings of record-breaking summery days in what is normally the fi...

Both are excuses for inaction. There has been a subtle shift recently in the rhetoric of many conservative pundits and politicians around climate change. For decades, the common refrain has been flat-out denialeither that climate change is not happening, or that any change is not...

When Avery McRae decided to take on the governments environmental policies, she had no idea who shed be up against. It was supposed to be Avery McRaes first day back at school after winter break, but fat snowflakes were falling outside and class was canceled. Her horseback-riding...

Billy Barr moved to the Rocky Mountains four decades ago, got bored one winter, and decided to keep a notebook that has become the stuff of legend. It was a year into his life alone in Colorados Rocky Mountains when Billy Barr began his recordings. It started as a curiosity, a ta...

The former oilman downplayed humanitys responsibility for raising the global thermostat on Wednesday. As chairman and CEO of ExxonMobil, Rex Tillerson admitted that climate change is real. In January 2009, he said the company was in favor of a carbon tax. A few years later, Exxon...

Meet the eco-right. Not everyone interested in curbing climate change is tearing their hair out about Donald Trump's election. Though the president-elect seems to be packing his administration with climate deniers and fossil fuel industry veterans, a small, unconventional band of...

The science of man-made global warming has only grown more conclusive. So why have Republicans become less convinced its real over the past decade and a half? Denial of the broad scientific consensus that human activity is the primary cause of global warming could become a guidin...

Areas of the country Trump won by large margins are particularly vulnerable to the environmental devastation wrought by climate change. On the heels of President-elect Donald Trumps meeting this Monday with environmentalist and former vice president Al Gore, 97 percent of the wor...

Talk like a maverick. Act like an extremist Republican. Theres a pattern shaping up in the Trump administration, at least when it comes to climate change. It works like this: Donald Trump, the president-elect himself, says something that sounds like he might be moderating on the ...

The president-elect appeared to consider its existence while speaking to The New York Times on Tuesday. What does the president-elect think about climate change? Who even knows anymore? Speaking at the offices of The New York Times on Tuesday, Donald J. Trump appeared to vacillat...

He could prove cataclysmic. If he fulfills his campaign promises, President-Elect Donald J. Trump and his future administration could prove cataclysmic for the planets climate. Trumps policies will likely ensure that the global mean temperature rises higher than 1.5 degrees Celsi...

The difference between 1.5 and 2 degrees of global warming might be dramatic. When the nations of the world ratified the Paris Agreement, they adopted two different goals for how much they hoped they could limit climate change. While pledging to keep global warming well below 2 d...

Western ideaswhich many in the West believe are universalcollide with the ideals of Middle Eastern societies in ways that aren't always obvious. This month, in a piece called Among the Post-Liberals , The New York Times 's Ross Douthat offered an exposition on how on how the new...

He wont be the last. Lately Ive been thinking back to something that John Kerry told The Atlantic s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, earlier this year. Asked about the importance of the Middle East to the United States, Kerry answered entirely about the Islamic State. Imagine w...

Climate skeptics arent generally more science illiterate than everyone else, according to a new poll. The most hopeful news in Tuesdays big Pew report on climate change and partisanship isnt particularly uplifting, honestly. The research agency found that 70 percent of Americans ...

A musician translated the changing ecology of a forest into song. The Alexander Archipelago, a 300-mile-long sweep of islands off the southeastern coast of Alaska, is known for its isolation, its heavy rain, and its thick, ancient forests of hemlock, pine, spruce, and yellow-ceda...

The agency is forging ahead despite slashed budgets and outdated policies. Five years ago, just after archaeologist Marcy Rockman joined the National Park Services new climate change response program, the GOP-controlled Congress slashed its budget by 70 percent. Republicans were ...

A new study suggests that giant bears, sloths, and saber-toothed cats died because warming temperatures cocked the gun, and people pulled the trigger. South America was once a land of giants. Its plains and forests were home to elephant-sized ground sloths , mace-tailed armadillo...

The 200-year-old novel is a testament to the innovation that can spring from environmental disaster. Between 2 and 3 oclock in the morning on June 16, 1816, during a restless night in a villa on Lake Geneva, 18-year-old Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin had a waking dream. As the moon s...

Seven years ago, the presumptive Republican nominee called for urgent action to stop climate change. By its final year, it was obvious that the 2000s were going to be the warmest decade in history. 2005, after all, set records as the hottest year ever recorded . And 2007 was the ...

In deserts around the world, creatures and plants are struggling as their habitats warm. Desert ecologist Cameron Barrows is a sand country cowboy. His white-brown beard and wide cotton hat deflect the brutal sun as he leads volunteerscitizen scientiststhrough Joshua Tree Nationa...

In which the red knot is the canary, and the planet is the coalmine. Every year, flocks of red knots criss-cross the globe. In the summer, these shorebirds breed in the Arctic circle, making the most of the exposed vegetation and constant daylight. Then, anticipating the returnin...

Why its so difficult to talk about the new bombshell climate paper There has never before been a scientific study quite like the one released this week by James Hansen, a climate scientist and the former director of NASAs Goddard Institute for Space Studies. The paper, published ...

Its not enough to let the market handle it or depend on geo-engineering. A&Q is a special series that inverts the classic Q&A , taking some of the most frequently posed solutions to pressing matters of policy and exploring their complexity. There is one convenient thing about cli...

Scientists are struggling to figure out the timeline for how climate change will affect vulnerable waterfront communities. Between 1901 and 2010, global sea levels rose an average of 0.19 meters, or roughly seven inches. Over the next century, theyll continue to risebut at this p...

Researchers are beginning to tease out the environmental factors that play a role in helping the virus to spread. Last year, a team of researchers made a surprising discovery: Aedis aegypti mosquitoesthe species that spreads West Nile Virus, dengue, chickungunya and, most recentl...

The Clean Power Plan is in bad shape, but the planet might not be. That might be overstating the case. Some advocates had hoped that even before the Clean Power Plan kicked in in 2022, it would shape how energy markets worked . The EPA could regulate, the story went, through the ...

Experts on ecology, conservation, and climate change offer their reasons for optimism and pessimism going into 2016. The two words climate and change are so routinely strung together that just saying them as a pairclimate changeseems to somehow obscure the full weight of the phen...

The timescales of global warming This is Not Doomed Yet, The Atlantic s weekly newsletter about global warming. It lives here in the science section; you can also get it in your inbox : Enter your email address powered by TinyLetter So, Paris happened. The last time I wrote, ther...

John Ruskins warnings about a plague-wind offer one way of looking at the Paris deal. The first time John Ruskin noticed the gray clouds of the plague-wind was in 1871, decades into the industrial era . Walking home from work at the University of Oxford one spring day, the renown...

Is climate change to blame for the Eastern United Statess warm spell? Man, its a warm one. At least, here in the eastern half of the United States it is. Since late last week, cities from Chicago to Atlanta to Boston have experienced decidedly un-seasonal heat, with temperatures ...

Despite changes, a key Democrat says the bill would block climate work. A key Democratic lawmaker says that a bipartisan, bicameral agreement on a customs bill still contains language that would block the U.S. from using trade pacts to cut back on greenhouse-gas emissionsand hes ...

Its not just the temperature thats different. The tools used to measure it are different, too. In November 1966, the Arno River in Florence, Italy, flooded the Piazza del Duomo, located in the heart of the Renaissance citys historic center, submerging millions of classic pieces o...

A guide to the most contentious issues and how theyre discussed in the agreement Climate change is a slow story. The permafrost thaws. The oceans acidify. The cost of solar power falls. And meanwhile humanity keeps adding more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. The climate worse...

Many Americans say global warming is real. But far fewer believe its a pressing national priority. Its a well-documented paradox that the average American citizen believes climate change is a much bigger deal than the average American legislator does. That was the case in 1997 wi...

Sanders new platform envisions steeper long-term carbon cuts and tougher auto mileage rules than Obama has pledged. Bernie Sanders didnt join the Democratic Senate delegation that just visited the global climate talks in Paris, where the 10 lawmakers tried to publicly reassure ot...

Big nations and private-sector titans arrived in Paris vowing to open their wallets for green energy technology. But can the U.S. make good on its promise? Even a transatlantic flight cant completely untether President Obama from congressional Republicans when it comes to cementi...

The Earth is warming, but Washington is frozen, so localities keep finding new ways to muddle through. Do you believe in climate change? As an international summit meeting on climate change gets underway in Paris this week, the political conversation around global warming in the ...

Like cigarette warning labels, but for fuel In the near future, motorists filling their tanks in North Vancouver might ask themselves not only What is this costing me? but also What is this costing the planet? Thats because the Canadian city just passed a bylaw requiring stations...

Republicans have the ability to offer a market-based solution to climate change, so why arent they doing it? William F. Buckley, widely considered the father of modern conservatism, once opined: Conservatives pride themselves on resisting change, which is as it should be. But int...

Climate change is ever more destructive. Why arent we heeding natures warnings? Lately, it seems, Mother Nature has been trying to get our attention. Its signals are increasingly loud, strident, and hard to miss. Some have been lethal. The year 2015 is poised to become the hottes...

Candidates who say humans are heating up the planet and want action are vanishing from viewliterally. Until the final moments of Tuesday nights Republican presidential debate, nearly everything viewers heard about global warming and energy came during the commercials. The America...

A study suggests you should hug a Finn, but not a Brit. Do you greet a stranger by kissing them on the cheek or giving them a firm handshake? In the largest study ever quantifying where people were comfortable being touched and by whom, 1,300 men and women were asked the same que...

No one wants to pay $30 to read a research paper from 1987. Most academic journals charge expensive subscriptions and, for those without a login, fees of $30 or more per article. Now academics are using the hashtag #icanhazpdf to freely share copyrighted papers. Scientists are tw...

The economic damage could be especially severe for poor countries. If left unchecked, climate change could worsen the gap between rich and poor countries, according to a new studya finding that could add more urgency to international negotiations at the end of the year. The study...

Satellites and GPS are vulnerable to cyber attack, but celestial-navigation techniques arent. Sometimes old-school is best. In todays U.S. Navy, navigating a warship by the stars instead of GPS is making a comeback. The Naval Academy stopped teaching celestial navigation in the l...

And even then, victory is far from guaranteed. As the 19th century entered its final decade, the War of Currents was nearing its peak. On one side of this war was Thomas Edison, who had invested heavily in direct-current (DC) technology. Tesla and Westinghouse backed alternating-...

Bill Gates has committed his fortune to moving the world beyond fossil fuels and mitigating climate change. In his offices overlooking Lake Washington, just east of Seattle, Bill Gates grabbed a legal pad recently and began covering it in his left-handed scrawl. He scribbled arro...

The climate-denier-skeptic-doubter debate has new life thanks to a change in the AP style guide. When Jim Inhofe threw a snowball on the floor of the Senate to protest the scientific consensus on climate change, was he being a climate denier? Or a climate skeptic? Or a climate do...

Rep. Chris Gibson of New York is leading the charge, and nine other Republicans are on board. A coalition of House Republicans is gearing up to make waves by calling for action to fight climate change on the eve of Pope Franciss visit to Capitol Hill. Ten Republicans have so far ...

A weekly summary of global-warming news, for people who want to pay more attention to it. I remember the first time I learned about climate change. I was sitting at a fancy restaurant with my parents, reading a science magazine under the table. (I think it was Kids Discover , whi...

Climate change means the end of our world, but the beginning of anotherone with a new set of species and ecosystems. A few years ago in a lab in Panama, Klaus Winter tried to conjure the future. A plant physiologist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, he planted seedl...

The Ohio governor suggests that action to fight global warming could kill jobs. Ohio Gov. John Kasich suggested that man-made climate change may not be real and that action to fight it could kill jobs during an interview on NBC's Meet the Press on Sunday. "We don't want to destro...

Relocating to a landlocked city isnt enough. Put simply: Climate change poses the threat of global catastrophe. The planet isnt just getting hotter, its destabilizing. Entire ecosystems are at risk. The future of humanity is at stake. Scientists warn that extreme weather will get...

Conservatives mock the Democratic presidential candidate Martin OMalley, but theres evidence of a connection between drought and the Syrian civil war. Its the dog days of summer for U.S. presidential candidates, when Donald Trump is dominating the airwaves and candidates who seem...

When billionaires Tom Steyer, a climate-change activist, and David Koch, a confirmed skeptic, met for the first time, they found a basis for conversation. Tom Steyer and David Koch, the billionaires who waged bitter battles across the airwaves over climate and the environment dur...

Franciss first encyclical is a cry to save the environmentand make a priority of theology over politics. The majority of people living on our planet profess to be believers. It is a statement of fact, an intellectual premise, a gentle claim of territory. In his new encyclical on ...

Key takeaways from the Vatican's encyclical on climate change. Pope Francis has unveiled an encyclical a rare and influential Vatican statementon climate change and the environment. The highly anticipated document says that global warming is real, is caused partly by human activi...

It calls on world governments to work together to fight climate change. An Italian magazine has leaked a draft of Pope Francis's anticipated encyclical on climate change, which says global warming is a threat to the world's poor and calls on governments to work together to solve ...

Francis has been preparing an official text on the environment for over a year. An Italian newspaper leaked an early version of the documentheres whats important to know. According to the Catholic Church, a number of acts qualify as mortal sins: murder, apostasy, stealing from th...

Lawmakers want to cut Earth-monitoring program in favor of space travel. NASA controls more than a dozen satellites and spacecraft, monitoring everything from melting ice to water storage to rain and snow. To the agency's scientists and supporters, these programs are essential to...

Scott Kelly's year-long stay in space will make him age faster and slower than his Earth-bound brother. Today NASAs Scott Kelly, along with two Russian cosmonauts, blasts off for the International Space Station, where they plan to spend 342 days. Kellys identical twin brother Mar...

Shoppers detest gray fillets, so producers rely on pigmentation pellets to achieve the natural orange hues found in the wild. So distinctive is salmons orangey-pink hue that Crayola named a crayon after it . Its an accurate representation of the flesh of wild salmon, but not that...

New research argues that global warming added to problems that caused Syria's civil war Before civil war engulfed Syria, the Middle Eastern nation suffered through a punishing drought. That droughtSyria's worst in recorded historyhelped create a powder keg of civil and political ...

Between now and 2050, forests are one of our "most promising" geo-engineering tools. When people talk about technologies that might offset climate change, they often evoke not-yet-invented marvels, like planes spraying chemicals into the atmosphere or enormous skyscrapers gulping...

An existing law requires companies to give employees paid time off. A new one would make them use it. The Japanese government is considering making it mandatory for workers to take at least five days of vacation time a year. Currently some 52 percent of paid leave granted to Japa...

How Elsa, Anna, Olaf, and Co. could help fight global warming. A high-ranking State Department official wants to enlist Princess Elsa and a talking snowman to teach the American public about the Arctic. Adm. Robert Papp, the U.S. special representative for the Arctic, told an aud...

Scientists say that poorer countries will see devastating effects much sooner than richer ones. In 2013, the world spewed nearly 40 billion tons of carbon emissions into the atmosphere. Climate scientists overwhelmingly agree that the greenhouse gas will cause a slew of future pr...

These GOP lawmakers and candidates could shape their party's future on global warming. Several Republicans who aren't the usual suspects could play important roles in the next battles over global warming. At the highest-profile posts, the GOP climate positions are basically set i...

New data about young companies confirms some old assumptions. The word startup evokes an image of a bunch of highly-paid twentysomethings, long on technology skills, and short on loyalty. But how true is the stereotype of the startup? Using a dataset of more than 20,000 companies...

The pontiff plans to issue a rare and controversial plea for Catholics to consider the environment. Recent polls show his message just might resonate. Pope Francis has ambitious environmental plans for 2015. Come March, he will deliver a 50 to 60-page edict urging his 1.2 billion...

Activists are pushing educators to teach that human-caused global warming is an opinionrather than a factby issuing textbook ratings of their own. "As the amounts of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases increase, the Earth warms. Scientists warn that climate change, caused b...

What a new report on theology and global warming means for public policy Snowmageddon, snowpocalypse, snowzilla, just snow . Superstorm Sandy, receding shorelines, and more . Hurricanes Isaac, Ivan, and Irene, with cousins Rammasun, Bopha, and Haiyan. The parade of geological cha...

A story about looking for a new world is more exciting than a movie about saving an ailing one. There is already plenty of evidence of Americas alarming inability to reckon with climate change, but perhaps none is more surprising than this: Even Hollywood doesnt get it. The enter...

A new U.N. report, integrating the findings of more than 800 climate scientists, says there's still a chance to reverse climate change. A new report from the United Nation's panel of climate scientists offers little in the way of surprises: Climate change, it says, is almost enti...

Studies have shown that improved access to birth control can be a valuable tool in slowing global warming, but many politicians are afraid to broach the subject. The equation seems fairly simple: The more the world's population rises, the greater the strain on dwindling resources...

New research suggests famous musicians face higher rates of accidental death and suicide. The 27 Club is a myth. Pop stars are not more likely than the general population to die at age 27. But they do tend to die much younger than the rest of us. Now, we might have a better idea ...

Happy Spreadsheet Day! It's time to celebrate the tooland fear its capacity for destruction. On this day in 1979, a computer program called VisiCalc first shipped for the Apple II platform, marking the birth of the spreadsheet , a now-ubiquitous tool used to compile everything fr...

Pledges to battle global warming are piling up around this week's United Nations meeting, but assessing the final results may take awhile. A parade of more than 120 heads of stateincluding President Obamawill pledge their commitment to tackling rising greenhouse emissions at Tues...

An interview with author and activist Naomi Klein For more than a decade, Naomi Klein has been calling attention to the invisible, abstract concerns that hide in the shadows of global trade: the exploitation of far-off workers, the environmental destruction, the corruption that c...

During the summer of 1924, workers at a refinery in Bayway, N.J., started to get sick. First, they complained of irritability, insomnia, and memory loss. Symptoms progressed to convulsions and collapse. Then tragedy struck: Five workers died from lead poisoning. By the fall, the ...

Texas Board of Education member David Bradley wants to set the record straight on global warming. "Whether global warming is a myth or whether it's actually happening, that's very much up for debate," Bradley said. "Don't listen to anyone who tells you otherwise." Bradley is not ...

The accepted wisdom in Washington holds that energy and the environment are fraught, partisan subjects on which there is little room for compromise. Time and again, Republicans question the existence of climate change, Democrats question the scientific literacy of Republicansand,...

District attorney in Massachusetts dismisses charges against activists, citing threat of global warming. When two environmental activists used a lobster boat to block a shipment of coal to a power plant, they planned to cite the urgency of climate change to justify their actions ...

Environmentalists warn us that apocalypse awaits. Economists tell us that minimal fixes will get us through. Here's how we can move beyond the impasse. Not long ago, my newspaper informed me that glaciers in the western Antarctic, undermined by the warmer seas of a hotter world, ...

Get ready for a big downgrade. We all know that climate change threatens to devastate coastal cities, disrupt food production, and trigger a refugee crisis of untold proportions. Its also bad for a nations credit rating, according to a report released Thursday by Standard & Poors...

Crunching the numbers on social media after the BJP's landslide victory Twitters India head Rishi Jaitly has called it the Twitter election . Indeed, according to the social media companys own data, 56 million tweets were sent about Indias elections between January 1 and May 12,...

Partisan politics and electoral gamesmanship are forcing the White House to take unilateral action....

The "post-colonialist and Orientalist" undertones of the ubiquitous acacia tree Last week, Africa Is a Country, a blog that documents and skewers Western misconceptions of Africa, ran a fascinating story about book design. It posted a collage of 36 covers of books that were eithe...

The White House will be going hard on climate change all week, thanks to a new National Climate Assessment report looking at what climate change means for the U.S., short and long-term. The White House will be going hard on climate change all week, thanks to a new National Climat...

As the world heats up, the Himalayas are becoming more volatile. The deadly avalanche on Everest earlier this month wasn't technically an avalanche. It was an "ice release"a collapse of a glacial mass known as a serac . Rather than getting swept up by a rush of powdery snow acros...

LEDs spell the end of a time-honored laundry detergent trick. LED lightbulbs are incredibly energy efficient , but they could do a number on your crisp white button-downs: According to a new study led by Kevin Houser , a professor of architectural engineering at Penn State Univer...

The pressing importance of figuring out how rising temperatures will affect people and places around the world When Hurricane Sandy pummeled the east coast of the U.S. and the Caribbean in October 2012 it exposed millions of people and billions of dollars worth of economic assets...

It's all a matter of how the issue is framed and what values activists appeal to. Both last month's Senate Climate Talkathon and Tom Steyers $100 million dollar pledge to back environment-friendly candidates indicate the same thing: Democrats are getting serious about global warm...

A $100 million fund gives homeowners low-cost loans for energy efficiency upgrades to one of the biggest sources of global warming their houses. The latest series of reports from the United Nation Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned in stark terms the catastrophic c...

Just over one-third of Americans worry "a great deal" about climate change, down one percent from 1989. That despite nearly every other climate change metric continuing to steadily increase. Just over one-third of Americans worry "a great deal" about climate change, down one perc...

Iceland's prime minister is ready to ride the wave of melted polar ice caps to increased food production and export opportunities for his arctic island. Iceland's prime minister is ready to ride the wave of melted polar ice caps to increased food production and export opportuniti...

The international body has issued a manual for adapting to a warming world. The United Nations' latest report on climate change contains plenty of dire warnings about the adverse impact "human interference with the climate system" is having on everything from sea levels to crop y...

A bleak report released by the UN's IPCC makes several things clear: climate change is well underway, it will affect food supplies and global stability, and politicians particularly American ones should be embarrassed at their inaction. A bleak report released by the UN's Inter...

It may be impossible to reach the U.N.'s goals without significant changes in global diet, a new study finds. If we really want to cut down on global greenhouse emissions, we're going to have to do something about cow farts*. That's the conclusion of a study published today in th...

A Senate hearing Thursday on the proposed Keystone XL pipeline produced a clear piece of news: The U.S. Chamber of Commerce isn't especially fond of talking about humans' contribution to global warming. Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Robert Menendez asked the Chamber...

If you are not the sort of person who watches Meet the Press , allow us to provide a point-by-point fact-check of the Bill Nye-Marsha Blackburn debate. In short: Blackburn was full of misinformation and Nye seemed sleepy. If you are not the sort of person who watches Meet the Pre...

And there isn't much economic evidence to prove otherwise. San Francisco, thanks to outrage over swarming tech workers and rising rents, has become the symbol of gentrifications ills. But San Franciscos unique situation is giving gentrification a bad name; it doesnt have to be th...

Lots of people like a bit of liquor every now and again, but that doesnt mean they agree on what to fill the glass with. Lots of people like a bit of liquor every now and again, but that doesnt mean they agree on what to fill the glass with. The only liquors considered were the s...

Move over, China. Turkey is the real titan of tea. China is far and away the largest consumer of tea, at 1.6 billion pounds a year. But per person, as illustrated in the map above, the picture is a lot different: Turkey, Ireland, and the United Kingdom are home to the worlds bigg...

In the middle of a weird weather week, the EPA quietly published one of its first significant climate proposals. Warming reality notwithstanding, we're entering a ferocious new era of Washington climate brawls. In the middle of a week marked by weird weather, the EPA quietly publ...

Liberal Senate Democrats who are launching a new effort to seize the political offensive on climate change say they have enthusiastic backing from the chamber's Democratic leadership team. Senate Environment and Public Works Committee Chairwoman Barbara Boxer and Sen. Sheldon Whi...

Guys, did you hear that a "global warming" expedition got trapped in ice and also it's been pretty cold recently? Yes, you did, because both stories have been used as a rationale to deny the existence of climate change. Guys, did you hear that a "global warming" expedition got tr...

Fed up with slow (or in some cases, backwards ) progress on climate change, environmental advocates are mulling desperate measures. Emerging at the head of this pack is arguably the worlds most prominent climate scientist: James Hansen, a former NASA researcher turned activist. S...

As a teaching assistant in the economics department at Columbia , I too inflated student grades, but for none of the suspected reasons. I just didnt want to deal with all the complaining. The revelation that the median grade at Harvard is an A- prompted lots of discussion, especi...

"Knowledge workers" tend to be more unfocused in both the early morning and mid-afternoon. Why force them to work when they're least productive? Today, workers are putting in increasingly more hoursso much so that the 40-hour week has become a relic of the past . But pushing empl...

Money collected from fines is meant to finance social services. Instead, it lines politicians' pockets. Perhaps Chinas most famous film director, Zhang Yimou, is known for bringing Raise the Red Lantern , The House of Flying Daggers and Hero to the silver screen. Lately, however,...

Both The New York Times and Politico published stories this week based off a climate change report , but somehow came to very different conclusions about what the report means. Both The New York Times and Politico published stories this week based off a climate change report from...

Welcome to the Great Green North. While delegates to the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Warsaw continued fiddling while Rome burns, the government of Ontario, Canada, today moved to permanently ban coal-fired power plants . Our work on eliminating coal and investing ...

The number of stalkers aged 70 and older has increased 460 percent in the last decade. When people retire, they often find new hobbies to fill the timegolf, maybe, or contract bridge. Perhaps Xbox. Rising numbers of elderly Japanese, however, are picking up a more sinister pastim...

Say Fukushima, and most people probably dont think refrigerators. Thanks to the 2011 disaster in Japans Fukushima province, things like radiation or nuclear leak are more likely to spring to mind. Say Fukushima, and most people probably dont think refrigerators. Thanks to the 201...

With an aging population and extremely limited urban space, one company is even planning a huge IPO. As plum real estate in China grows scarce and prices soar, it isnt just luxury condo buyers who are paying out the nose to secure a plot of soil. Shrinking land supply and booming...

It's just not worth the cost to our planet. Last week, when a panel of the worlds best scientists issued a new report on climate change (pdf), I did my best to read it like a meteorologist. The facts led to a simple conclusion: Humans cause global warming. And without an immediat...

Spurred by global warming, the insects have accounted for more than two dozen deaths in the country. A plague of hornets, each the size of a human thumb, have descended on Shaanxi province this summerat least 28 have been stung to death , while another 419 have been injured, acco...

A United Nations climate panel has released its latest report on the state of our planet, and is now ready to declare it a virtual certainty that human activity has led to a rise in global temperatures. A United Nations climate panel has released its latest report on the state of...

Should fossil fuel use continue on its current trajectory, the future for life on planet Earth is bleak. In a landmark report, a global panel of leading scientists again called the evidence for climate change unequivocal and for the first time said humans are extremely likely to ...

How certain are scientists that climate change is caused by human activity? As Friday's release of a key climate report suggests: as certain as they are that cigarettes cause cancer. So why do we keep smoking? How certain are scientists that climate change is caused by human acti...

Even though nearly 57 percent of the country's college graduates are women, only about a fifth of them enter the workforce. A new project might change that. Its hard for women in Saudi Arabia to find good work. For many businesses, cultural norms and strict gender segregation mak...

China has inked a deal to farm three million hectares (about 11, 583 square miles) of Ukrainian land over the span of half a centurywhich means the eastern European country will give up about 5% of its total land, or 9% of its arable farmland to feed Chinas burgeoning population....

People are planting more trees, thinking carefully about coastal development, and anticipating the future of California's wineries. In March of this year, a Gallup poll highlighted an interesting tension in American thinking on global warming: While a majority of respondents said...

A report out this week from Distimo, an app analytics firm, estimates that revenue generated by the Google Play Store, from which many Android users get their apps, has grown 67 percent over the past half-year. By contrast, Apples App Store revenue grew 15 percent, according to D...

There are no easy solutions to global warming, but progress is on the horizon. If we're to avoid destructive climate fluctuations, scientists say we need to slow, and eventually halt, the emission of greenhouse gases that do and will continue to produce global warming. A big chun...

Wendys, the American fast-food chain best known for square hamburger patties and its now-deceased founder Dave Thomas, is trying to reinvent itself. Earlier this year, Wendys rolled out a new, simpler logo for its stores and packaging: Wendys, the American fast-food chain best kn...

The country's web developers have taken "selfies" to a whole new level. Selfies, the young American term for self-portraits taken with a cell phone, just took a new turn in China. A new version of a recent Chinese smart phone app allows users to enhance photos of themselves by wi...

Ideas of the Year 2013 No specific incidence of freak weather can be definitively attributed to climate change. But most scientists agree that the phenomenon will increase the likelihood of freak weather over time. The average global temperature has risen by 1.4 degrees Fahrenhei...

Was Oklahoma's massive storm an inevitable side effect of higher atmospheric temperatures, or was it simply a bad storm, like so many before? Here's a survey of opinions so far. Unlike climate change itself, there is legitimate debate on the role warmer temperatures may have play...

Advocates of action on climate change hold a trump card. When the Supreme Court in 2007 determined that carbon dioxide is a pollutant, the EPA got a mandate to regulate it. But, what the court giveth, the court can rescind in a tightly contested vote. Advocates of forceful action...

It is true that there is not unanimity in the scientific community over the role of humans in climate change. But with nearly every scientific paper for 20 years agreeing that warming is linked to human behavior, we're as close to unanimity as we'll get. It is true that there is ...

Climate deniers threw all their might at disproving the famous climate change graph. Here's why they failed. Back in 1998, a little known climate scientist named Michael Mann and two colleagues published a paper that sought to reconstruct the planet's past temperatures going back...

About twice a year, Yale University's Project on Climate Change Communication releases a survey assessing how Americans feel about the environmental threat. On Thursday, it released the latest version. We've extracted the four most important graphs. About twice a year, Yale Unive...

The Guardian on how climate change affects British wine, National Journal on the difficulty of regulating carbon, The Daily Beast on who works where in the energy sector, The Nation on New York City's fracking threat, and The New York Times Magazine on the economics of food truck...

New research takes the deepest dive ever into historic climate records. Back in 1999 Penn State climate scientist Michael Mann released the climate change movement's most potent symbol: The "hockey stick," a line graph of global temperature over the last 1,500 years that shows an...

The president heartened environmentalists with the strongest presidential statement on warming in history. All that's left to see is how he follows through. President Obama followed up his Inaugural Address with more strong words for climate protection in his State of the Union ,...

If current trends continue, the landscapes of states like New Mexico and Arizona may soon be unrecognizable. The fire that burned through Forest Canyon, a breathtaking stretch of wilderness ringed by snowy peaks in Rocky Mountain National Park, Colorado, started in October and bu...

Stopping global warming might be a hopeless cause, but that doesn't mean we can't find creative solutions to live with it. This week the National Climate Data Center confirmed what most had long believed: 2012 was the warmest year on record for the United States. Ever. And not ju...

The organization's major global warming conference brought almost 200 countries together in Doha for the last two weeks, and, well, there was a lot of bickering. Everyone from the World Bank to Neil Young says that now's the time to act on global warming. But the U.N. which has ...

Two new reports highlight the alarming consequences of staying our current course. Two new reports highlight the alarming consequences of staying our current course. Two major organizations released climate change reports this month warning of doom and gloom if we stick to our cu...

President Obama's election night reference to global warming kindled a bit of hope among liberals that his administration might make a concerted effort to tackle the issue in its second term. And unless we all plan on getting used to an annual superstorm season, we should hope so...

By modeling climate change's local effects, we may finally be able to grasp what it means. Earlier this year, the journal Nature Climate Change published a paper that measures hurricane behavior in our warming world. The study was as innovative as it was prescient. Combining mode...

The presidential debates are over and to the chagrin of earthly-minded individuals, the topic of global warming was roundly ignored by the moderators and both candidates. The presidential debates are over and to the chagrin of earthly-minded individuals, the topic of global warmi...

Warming could be a winning issue, but President Obama isn't pushing on it -- and experts finger one of his top aides as the culprit. "It was always going to be the case that whenever the visible reality of climate change became so painfully obvious that you couldn't deny it any m...

For years, he's been arguing that talking about the science of warming is a winning political strategy. Now, new polling data are backing him up. He's been called " America's fiercest climate blogger ." And as a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, a former Clinton ...

Surprising new polling data shows swing voters are going green. It was quite the messaging turnaround. In his September 6 acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, President Obama -- whose reticence about so much as mentioning global warming has flummo...

The GOP is ceding important ground by tolerating and encouraging denialism on this critical topic. Mitt Romney's remarks on NBC's Meet the Press earlier this month rankled environmental activists hoping for a bipartisan approach to climate change. "I'm not in this race to slow th...

The ice over the Arctic Ocean is shrinking at record rates this year, a stark signal of global warming, scientists say. How bad is it? Watch this striking animated GIF of the past few decades' of ice shrinkage from climate change blog Open Mind . The ice over the Arctic Ocean is ...

Among Americans who grew up on MTV and grunge, a campaign of disinformation has created deep apathy about our warming planet. Generation Xers grew up with MTV, Nirvana, and the dot-com bubble. Today, Americans born roughly between 1961 and 1981 are better educated and work longer...

North America is witnessing the largest pine-beetle epidemic in recorded history. Temperature rises are more than likely to blame, but why is it so hard to admit that? A Mountain Pine beetle is seen during the examination of trees in the White River National Forest near Vail, Col...

Guest post by Jonathan H. Adler, a professor at the Case Western Reserve University School of Law and regular contributor to the Volokh Conspiracy No environmental issue is more polarizing than global climate change. Many on the left fear increases in atmospheric concentrations o...

While climate change may be complex and difficult terrain, rediscovering our industrial infrastructure is compelling. The Rio+20 UN summit is just around the corner, the latest in a decades-long string of international meetings that attempt to address one of the world's greatest ...

On April 22, 2011, Texas Governor Rick Perry, who has resisted the science of man-made global warming, led the state in prayer: "I, Rick Perry, Governor of Texas, under the authority vested in me by the Constitution and Statutes of the State of Texas, do hereby proclaim the three...

Discovered: What makes plants better at being thirsty, climate change hasn't had a horrible impact on streams, forest might save us from our climate change woes and snowy areas are in trouble. Discovered: What makes plants better at being thirsty, climate change hasn't had a horr...

Events of 2011 show that no matter how solid the science, some people will never accept that humans are causing global warming. One version of the myth of King Midas holds that he was not greedy. Instead, he loved his daughter so much that he longed to leave her a stable future. ...

Seaweed farms have the capacity to grow huge amounts of nutrient-rich food, and oysters can act as an efficient carbon and nitrogen sink For decades environmentalists have fought to save our oceans from the perils of overfishing, climate change, and pollution. All noble efforts -...

I am upstaged in the gardening department by my own compost pile. All kinds of things take root in it. Two years ago, some member of the squash family -- possibly a cross-pollinated wild hybrid of some kind -- planted its seedling flag atop the steamy, south-facing slope and bega...

With wheat prices surging as major producers are hit by droughts and other extreme weather events, it's costing everyone more to eat Writing on page one in the New York Times Justin Gillis recently sounded the alarm on what Lester Brown has been warning us for years: Climate chan...

From the increase in frequency of heatwaves to the spread of infectious diseases, changing weather patterns are already affecting us all The consequences of climate change sometimes appear far off. But warming and changing weather patterns are already driving changes in public he...

I've been kicking around an idea recently that crystallized in the form of a short "Room for Debate" op-ed on green jobs that I wrote for The New York Times yesterday. Here's the relevant snip: The nugget of the argument here is the framing fighting climate change as a way to hel...

Via Jonathan Adler , I see that a group of scientists doing " scenario analysis " on the potential outcomes of human contact with extra-terrestrial intelligence is worried that global warming will encourage those aliens to wipe us out : It was ever thus . . . it's really remarkab...

The issue demonstrates how Republicans are encouraged to take needlessly extreme positions with little real world benefit In order to understand how talk radio encourages politicians to make needlessly polarizing statements, ponder the recent back and forth on climate change amon...

Data featured in Al Gore's film turns out to be more complicated than simple graphs Two different climate change scientists at opposite ends of the political spectrum have backtracked on their positions in the last couple of days, indicating that Al Gore's method of simultaneousl...

A new study suggests it's all in the wording Last September, the White House decided that it was going to phase out the use of the term "global warming" in favor of the even-clunkier "global climate disruption." The thinking apparently went that "warming" was an oversimplificatio...

Last week, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies announced that 2010 had registered as the hottest year on record. Nothing new here: nine of the last 10 years have been among the warmest ever. The news highlighted one o...

Climate-watchers are losing patience 2010 has tied 2005 for the planet's hottest year on record , according to data collected by NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The past decade has included 9 of the 10 hottest years on record. Those records go back t...

New documentary aims to be counterpoint to An Inconvenient Truth Last week, Cool It a documentary billed as a counterweight to An Inconvenient Truth debuted in a limited number of theaters. The brain behind the project is Bjorn Lomborg, author of 2001's The Skeptical Environmenta...

Best fringe benefit of curbing emissions? A stronger economy. Thanks to the folks at the Climate Desk for bringing this conversation together, and to Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus for their introduction. So much has been written about the inability of policymakers to pro...

Representative John Shimkus of Illinois is vying to chair the House Energy Committee as the Republicans organize their caucus. Shimkus would have jurisdiction over any global warming legislation to come through the House of Representatives in the coming session if appointed. Shim...

Their ideology is unique in the free world With Democrats and President Barack Obama unable to pass any significant climate change legislation despite scientific consensus on the severity and immediacy of the threat, a number of political commentators are turning their attention ...

After my recent column on how big business is coming together to defend global warming legislation in California, I was overwhelmed by the number of notes I received asking about the state of the global warming debate. The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change is ...

The international politics of addressing climate change are so complicated , so contentious , and so hysterical , that some exasperated observers have suggested we just deal with it later . But why is this issue so difficult? There are many reasons, of course: the influence of po...

Dave Roberts at Grist delivers an eloquent riff on why climate change is too big a challenge for environmentalism. "Environmentalism has a well-defined socioeconomic niche in American life. There are distinct cultural markers; familiar tropes and debates; particular groups design...

>This week, Harry Reid unveiled the Democrats' latest attempt at an energy package. Unlike earlier drafts, this legislation has some chance of passing. Trouble is, it will do very little about climate change (rather ironic for something we used to call a climate change bill). It ...

The New Republic debates the costs, benefits, and uncertainties Back in June, Al Gore argued in The New Republic for a calm and numerical risk-assessment approach to dealing with environmental issues. Now conservative Jim Manzi has taken up the challenge in the same publication, ...

A new study claims to show that the few scientists who doubt human-caused global warming are less expert than their climate-change-believing peers. In other words: the climate skeptics aren't just in the minority--they're not very good scientists, either. Though you'd expect some...

The idea that malaria and climate change are strongly connected still has wide currency among casual environmentalists, even though those who know what they are talking about have been quietly retreating from this position for some time. The Economist draws my attention to a new ...

>< In yet another unnerving sign that China may not be on the same page as other major countries combating climate change, its top climate negotiator said there was still uncertainty about the causes of global warming. "There are still two different viewpoints in the scientific f...

A risk perception expert explains why it's hard to get worked up about climate change. >< A majority of people in most places agree that the earths climate really is changing in dramatic ways, that human activity is at least part of the cause, and that we ought to act now to addr...

Fox News headliner Glenn Beck usually isn't much of a friend to the environmentalist movement; it was only a few days ago that he included "global warming" in a list of destructive lies foisted on the American public, and a few days before that that he seemed to recommend ritual ...

It's already looking like Phil Jones will not return to his position as the head of the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit, because of his attempts to thwart a Freedom of Information request. But today the Guardian is reporting that its research into the emails rev...

Like canaries in the coalmines of yore, low-lying islands in the midst of the world's vast oceans face the possibility of extinction. Rising waters from global warming could literally drown many of them in the decades to come. At the climate change conference in Copenhagen, voice...

Photo by pawelbak/Flickr CC Climate change has been blamed for a host of alarming phenomena, from Arctic ice melt to rising pollen counts . Warming is also bad news for food lovers, as recent reports warn rising temperatures could jeopardize some of the world's finest beer and wi...

This morning George Will offered another in his series of reassuring columns about the "overstated" threat of climate change. Today's version: "When New York Times columnist Tom Friedman called upon 'young Americans' to 'get a million people on the Washington Mall calling for a p...

I have been meaning to write something about this ever since Jim Manzi linked to Indur Goklany's Cato paper climate change a couple weeks ago and wrote that "before anybody gets on a high horse about how CO2-laden economic development is such a threat to the poor of the developin...

The recent focus on climate change has been the House of Representatives, which is scheduled to vote on the Waxman-Markey bill today (or possibly tomorrow.) But a number of parallel, nonprofit efforts to cut carbon emissions are also ramping up. They include the Clinton Global In...

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, under fire from key members for its opposition to Democratic climate-change legislation, distributed a letter Congress-wide "highlighting our support for comprehensive, sensible legislation to address global climate change."...

This morning, Lisa Jackson was sworn in as Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency. Not three hours later, President Obama ordered her to reconsider a waiver requested by California to require that automakers meet tight emissions standards by 2011. Later in the day, ...

Climate change in the next century (and beyond) could be enormously disruptive, spreading disease and sparking wars. It could also be a windfall for some people, businesses, and nations. A guide to how we all might get along in a warming world Coastal cities inundated, farming re...

Climate change is popularly understood to mean greenhouse warming, which, it is predicted, will cause flooding, severe windstorms, and killer heat waves. But warming could lead, paradoxically, to drastic coolinga catastrophe that could threaten the survival of civilization. One o...