Next time you have a bad day at work, consider Sisyphus. His annual appraisal by the ancient Greek gods was so bad (over the previous 12 months he demonstrated deceitfulness, greed, malice and homicide) that he was reassigned to rolling a massive boulder up a steep hill only to find that when he neared the top, the boulder would somehow always slip through his grasp and return back to the bottom.

This essay updates my earlier effort to tally and describe self-reinforcing feedback loops with respect to climate change. At that time, seven months ago, we had strong evidence of nine such catastrophic phenomena. The nineteen

So in 2000, with seed money from TNC and a large donation from Quito’s water company, the FONAG Fund for the Conservation of Water was created. Quito’s electrical company signed up, as did private companies such as a local brewery, Cervercería Nacional, and a water bottling company, Tesalia Springs.

Despite the significant benefits they have and will continue to provide, the traditional approaches of protected areas and in situ conservation management alone cannot shield vulnerable species from the growing threats they face.

There is no silver bullet for tackling climate change, US scientists say. The only option is for every part of society to accept the need to adapt to it. Senior US scientists have some fresh advice for governments concerned at the prospect of climate change. It’s happening, they say. Get used to it. Evolve with it. Adapt, or go under.

I recently had the opportunity to engage in conversation with Guy McPherson about a number of topics and subsequently began reading his book Walking Away From Empire, Guy’s personal journey of leaving a tenured professorship to radically alter his living arrangements in preparation for the collapse of industrial civilization.

Dutch scientists have thought up a new use for all the carbon dioxide that pours from the chimneys of fossil fuel-burning power stations: harvest it for even more electricity. They could, they argue, pump the carbon dioxide through water or other liquids and produce a flow of electrons and therefore more electricity.

The world’s coral reefs are under threat. Some scientists say doses of cloud brightening could provide a solution to the problem. Here’s a new twist to the geoengineer’s dilemma: just change the climate locally – over the bit you want to protect – and leave the rest of the planet alone.

Trees may be getting more efficient in the way they manage water. They could be exploiting the higher levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, growing foliage from a lower uptake of groundwater. If so, then the carbon dioxide fertilisation effect – predicted by theorists and observed in laboratory experiments – could be real.

Research into one of the world’s oldest and driest deserts has unearthed evidence of the evolutionary timeline for species that have avoided extinction by adapting to dramatic climate change

Two more US states say they will require insurance companies to reveal how prepared they are to cope with risks related to climate change.

With Arctic sea ice thinning and shrinking rapidly in recent years, the U.S. military and scientific agencies are scrambling to cope with the looming prospect of a seasonally ice-free Arctic Ocean. At a meeting in Washington last week, top U.S. Arctic officials at the Coast Guard, Navy, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and other agencies acknowledged that the U.S. lags behind other nations in dealing with the rapidly changing Arctic environment.

One of the great stumbling blocks of climate talks in the last 15 years has been that America refuses to move to cut emissions of greenhouse gases until China does – but at the weekend leaders of the world’s two great polluters reached agreement to phase out one of the most potent of them hydrofluorocarbons (HCFs).

One of Africa’s most distinguished scientists insists that in a warming climate the world needs to adopt genetically modified crops on a massive scale in order to feed the planet’s growing population.

The good news is that some coral can recover from periodic warming of the oceans: the bad news is it might take too long.

A flagship UN policy designed to help to save the world’s forests faces rejection by indigenous groups in Panama, who believe it is being used in an attempt to usurp their ownership.

As the carbon dioxide in the air hits 400 parts per million for the first time in human history, some are arguing that the best way address climate change is to use the controversial practice of geoengineering — the deliberate altering of the Earth’s ecological and climate systems to counter the effects of global warming.