Climate Science News

While it’s clear that soil can help limit the impacts of climate change, leveraging its power requires a menu of solutions at many scales. Most of them require big policy…

For 20 years, researchers stared at the dark side of the moon to measure its faint but visible “earthshine,” a glow created by sunlight reflecting off Earth and onto the…

With vulnerable nations enraged as oil nations censor critical COP26 Glasgow accord language, the world is struggling mightily today to hammer out an agreement to truly curb climate change.

Some 1,800 lawsuits attempting to hold nations and corporations responsible for their climate change pledges — assumed to be non-legally binding — are wending their way through the legal system.… And some are being won.

The E.U. continues to struggle with the irony of a commitment to conserving forests, while also burning forest biomass and ignoring the carbon emissions that causes — all in order to achieve a mandate to end burning oil, gas and coal.

The Glasgow climate summit is failing to address the danger of burning forests to make energy — a practice classified as carbon neutral, though science shows that its emissions exceed that of coal per unit of energy produced.

International forest and climate experts have released a “playbook” for ecosystem restoration with a set of 10 principles that they say, if followed, could be a game-changer. The Political Ecology…

More than 100 scientists have issued a letter urging U.S. President Biden and Congress to remove provisions promoting logging, forest biomass and fossil fuels from the multitrillion-dollar infrastructure and reconciliation (Build Back Better) bills.

It is a commendable goal to end and reverse deforestation within a decade, one which if met would protect both people and the planet, but this is a crisis now.…

The Glasgow Declaration on Forests pledges to end deforestation by 2030. But critics say there’s a catch: Will natural forests continue being cut, and land converted to plantations, causing CO2 emissions to rise and biodiversity to fall?

With humanity emitting more carbon skyward, nature-based climate solutions — and their ecosystem carbon storage capacity — are put at risk by agribusiness and extraction industries. Will world leaders act in time to conserve forests?

New research has tracked biomass industry carbon emissions, finding that U.S. wood pellet production, transatlantic shipping, and U.K. and E.U. pellet burning, plus a loss of stored forest carbon, combine in substantial unreported emissions.

Exequiel Ezcurra was dubious when he first heard about the possibility of mangroves on the San Pedro Mártir River in southern Mexico from Carlos Burelo-Ramos, a botanist at Mexico’s University…

2020 will forever be remembered as the year a global pandemic brought the world to its knees. But at the rate the planet’s temperature is rising, forever might not be…

Industrial agriculture feeds billions of people and created the modern world. But the nitrogen and phosphorus it’s fertilized with is putting the biosphere, and humanity, at risk.

Though September sea ice extent appeared to offer a short-term recovery this fall, “that’s not the full story,” says one Arctic scientist, with low ice concentration seen in 2021, and lack of multiyear ice setting a new record.

With scientists, advocates and communities across the world making increasingly dire assessments and warnings about the planet’s health, knowing what problems to focus on becomes ever more complex. Over the…

This story was supported by the Pulitzer Center. Mario Quispe Hermoza, 37 years old and from the Peruvian Andes, is a man with long hair, deep reflections on nature and…

The EU and the forestry industry say burning wood to make energy is carbon neutral and cleaner than coal. But critics say biomass is a disaster for forests, biodiversity and the climate. Mongabay reviews the evidence on both sides.

Farming in eastern Wyoming is not for the faint of heart. The semiarid landscape receives unpredictable weather and is considered an unforgiving environment for agriculture. Despite this, farmers have grown…

The great drought and megafires that the Amazon experienced in recent years caused the death of 2.5 billion trees and vines in the Lower Tapajós River Basin, one of the…

Is harnessing the storage power of soils the global carbon solution we have been searching for? Understanding soil-formation and function is a first step to finding out.

A huge debate has raged among climate modelers for decades as to how climate change will alter clouds, making Earth cooler or warmer. New research using a machine learning model agrees with the majority view: Clouds will make for a warmer world.

Record extreme weather in the U.S., Brazil, China and elsewhere is impacting food production this year, with the future expected to be far worse. Agriculture requires “transformational change” to meet the climate crisis, say experts.

New agri-technologies and traditional farming practices done right could combine to offer significant benefits and hope for the global environment and health.

Record floods are battering the western and central Amazon, inundating Manaus and other communities and wrecking crops. To prevent future extreme weather events, deforestation and carbon emissions must be controlled.

Researchers are seeking to pinpoint climate change “tipping points,” but defining what that means exactly, when it will come, and what makes it happen, is unimaginably difficult when faced with the chaotic complexities of a vast Earth biome.

The biomass industry says that burning wood to make energy is carbon neutral. Environmentalists say biomass is a disaster for forests, biodiversity and the climate. Mongabay reviews independent scientific evidence on both sides.

Sea ice fell to its lowest extent on record for this time of year, while new studies find Arctic coastal ice may be receding 70-110% faster than thought, winter ice is failing to regrow fully, and last multi-year ice refuge is under assault.

Though Shell, Chevron and others have abandoned the quest for the Holy Grail — a revolutionary algae biofuel that could be scaled up to replace oil — ExxonMobil continues the search; but is it all just greenwash?