5 Things The UK Must Do To Prepare For The Next Heatwave

The 2018 summer heatwave in the UK broke records – and it won’t be the last spell of such severe heat. In fact, climate change means that hot summers which would once occur twice a century may soon occur twice a decade.

Antarctica is further from civilisation than any other place on Earth. The Greenland ice sheet is closer to home but around one tenth the size of its southern sibling. 

The world has witnessed a shocking series of disastrous events in 2017. Devastating hurricanes and Mexico’s 7.1 magnitude earthquake were just some of the catastrophes to captivate our collective attention.

The claim that humanity only has just over a decade left due to climate change is based on a misunderstanding.

In November 2018, the Woolsey Fire scorched nearly 100,000 acres of Los Angeles and Ventura counties, destroying forests, fields and more than 1,500 structures, and forcing the evacuation of nearly 300,000 people over 14 days.

In a post-apocalyptic future, what might happen to life if humans left the scene? After all, humans are very likely to disappear long before the sun expands into a red giant and exterminates all living things from the Earth.

Green growth has emerged as the dominant narrative for tackling contemporary environmental problems.

Over the past few days there has been a lot of talk about the Paris climate agreement, from which the United States is planning to withdraw. 

Removing salts and other impurities from water is really difficult. For thousands of years people, including Aristotle, tried to make fresh water from sea water.

Carbon dioxide concentrations in Earth’s atmosphere have reached 415 parts per million – a level that last occurred more than three million years ago, long before the evolution of humans.

Around the world, the health care debate often revolves around access. Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, head of the World Health Organization, recently announced: “All roads lead to universal health coverage.”

Those least responsible for global warming will suffer the most. Poorer countries – those that have contributed far less to climate change – tend to be situated in warmer regions, where additional warming causes the most devastation.

Climate change is no longer a financial problem, just a political one. Mitigating climate change by decarbonizing our economy would add trillions of dollars in new investments

In cities around the world, trees are often planted to help control temperatures and mitigate the effects of the “urban heat island”. But while trees have been called “nature’s air conditioners”, in practice, scientists often have difficulty demonstrating their cooling properties.

Whenever I visit the Sahara I am struck by how sunny and hot it is and how clear the sky can be.

I have eagerly awaited the final season of Game of Thrones, and its strange blend of fictive medieval Britain, supernatural monsters and pornography. 

Managed retreat in the face of sea level rise will be a mixed bag, researchers predict.

According to a recent major UN report, if we are to limit temperature rise to 1.5 °C and prevent the most catastrophic effects of climate change, we need to reduce global CO₂ emissions to net zero by 2050. 

Scientists have been making projections of future global warming using climate models of increasing complexity for the past four decades.

The Australian continent has a remarkable history — a story of isolation, desiccation and resilience on an ark at the edge of the world.

After one of the hottest years on record, Sir David Attenborough looks at the science of climate change and potential solutions to this global threat.

You might find your car dying on the freeway while other vehicles around you lose control and crash.

Supporters of the Green New Deal are launching a nationwide tour Thursday to build support for the congressional resolution to transform the U.S. economy through funding renewable energy while ending

As the push for the Green New Deal builds momentum in the United States, The Intercept has released a short illustrated video imagining a future shaped by the progressive environmental movement.

Many of us think that rapid environmental change is a quintessentially modern crisis.

The Sierra Nevada mountain streams that naturalist John Muir extolled are now in peril, research finds.

The only explanation for why heat waves affected so many areas over several months last summer is climate change, according to new research.

Today, as part of the UNSW Grand Challenge on Inequality, we release a study entitled A Climate Dividend for Australians that offers a practical solution to the twin problems of climate change and energy affordability.

Search online for “climate change” and “tipping points” and you’ll find some scary results.

Energy Secretary Rick Perry has repeatedly expressed concern over the past year about the reliability of our national electric power grid.

U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Ed Markey are calling for a “Green New Deal” that would involve massive government spending to shift the U.S. economy away from its reliance on carbon.

Researchers are investigating a method of creating power from fast moving streams that many rural areas in Nepal use.

Nearly half a billion more people could be at risk for contracting mosquito-borne diseases in the next 30 years as a result of climate change.

Flooding in the Midwest, triggered by an intense “bomb cyclone,” has devastated parts of the region, which has been plagued by flood events in recent decades.

The school climate strikes show that young people want to fight climate change, but their enthusiasm for collective action is largely untapped.

The year 2018 brought particularly devastating natural disasters, including hurricanes, droughts, floods and fires – just the kinds of extreme weather events scientists predict will be exacerbated by climate change.

Coral reefs may not be able to survive another human decade because of the environmental stress we have placed on them, says author David Wallace-Wells. He posits that without meaningful changes to

The ideas behind regenerative farming are simple and ancient. The way to stop climate change might be buried in 300 square feet of earth in the Venice neighborhood of Los ­Angeles, amid kale and potatoes.

One reason why people find it difficult to think about climate change and the future may be their understanding of human history.

The dire climate change situation continues to make headlines and inspire actions like the Sunrise Movement.

Many parts of Queensland have been declared disaster zones and thousands of residents evacuated due to a 1-in-100-year flood.

Climate change is already occurring, with impacts that will become more intense for decades into the future.

If we don’t make a fundamental change to the way we are living, the world faces the destruction of entire eco-systems, flooding of coastal areas, and ever more extreme weather.

Many parts of Australia have suffered a run of severe and, in some cases, unprecedented weather events this summer.

The Green New Deal endorsed by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and more than 40 other US Representatives has been criticized as imposing a too-heavy burden on the rich and upper-middle-class taxpayers who will have to pay for it, but taxing the rich is not what the Green New Deal resolution proposes.

When it comes to sea level rising by feet or meters, the biggest fear is melting mountains of ice piled up on Antarctica. Recently NASA scientist Eric Rignot told us those glaciers are melting six times

Due to food shortages related to climate change, the Earth may experience a net increase of 529,000 adult deaths by 2050, according to a new review article published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Evidence of the devastating impacts of anthropogenic climate change are stacking up, and it is becoming horrifyingly real.

Environmental activists are teaming up with fresh faces in Congress to advocate for a Green New Deal, a bundle of policies that would fight climate change while creating new jobs and reducing inequality.

A record-breaking cold wave is sending literal shivers down the spines of millions of Americans. Temperatures across the upper Midwest are forecast to fall an astonishing 50 degrees Fahrenheit (28 degrees Celsius) below normal this week – as low as 35 degrees below zero.

Rising temperatures are weakening the jet stream, allowing frigid Arctic air to reach further south.

You've seen pictures of crowds in Chinese cities with masks over their faces. The smog of rapid industrialization is thick, but Chinese authorities are working overtime to clear the air. But will air

Here is the latest shocking headline in this age of climate change: “Antarctica losing six times more ice mass annually now, than 40 years ago”. To explain the breaking science we are joined by Dr.

Massachusetts is leading the charge in dual-use solar installations, making it possible to grow some crops and pasture animals while generating clean energy.

Scientists say the answer is in the ice. Scientists know that sea levels have risen more in some places during the past century than in others.

A carbon tax makes fossil fuels like oil and coal more expensive. That, in turn, leads consumers and industries to use less of them.

Is your morning coffee an espresso or a skinny latte? Is it from a darkly roasted French or Italian blend?

Do you think coal power is disappearing, being replaced by cleaner natural gas and renewable energy? Think again. According to data released by the International Energy Agency in 2018, coal consumption

I spend many hours working on my computer while sitting in front of sliding glass doors so as to be part of nature.

Rapid progress towards clean energy is needed to meet the global ambition to limit warming to no more than 1.5C above pre-industrial temperatures.

2018 has been a year of unprecedented weather extremes around the world.

Climate change news can be incredibly depressing. But things cannot be entirely bad, can they? We asked some climate researchers to peer through the smog and highlight a few positive stories from 2018.

As the scale and impacts of climate change become increasingly alarming, meat is a popular target for action. Advocates urge the public to eat less meat to save the environment. Some activists have called for taxing meat to reduce consumption of it.

It seems like a day doesn’t pass without the release of yet another study that shows human actions will inevitably increase the Earth’s average temperature past a tipping point that will lead to runaway climate change.

The relationship between supply and demand, a fundamental economic concept, holds that when the price of something rises, people use less of it. Similarly, when prices fall, they use more.

The kind of hot, dry conditions that can shrink crop yields, destabilize food prices, and lay the groundwork for devastating wildfires are increasingly striking multiple regions simultaneously as a result of a warming climate, according to a new study.

The latest National Climate Assessment paints a grim future if U.S. cities and states don’t take serious action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Hopes for fewer large wildfires in 2018, after last year’s disastrous fire season, are rapidly disappearing across the West.

Drought, crop failure, storms, and land disputes pit the rich against the poor, and Central America is ground zero for climate change. Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador lie in the trajectory of the so-called “dry corridor” of Central America that stretches from Southern Mexico to Panama. This epithet is a recently adopted description of the region, to describe the droughts that have risen in intensity and frequency over the last 10 years.

What do your car, phone, soda bottle and shoes have in common? They’re all largely made from petroleum. This nonrenewable resource gets processed into a versatile set of chemicals called polymers – or more commonly, plastics. Over 5 billion gallons of oil each year are converted into plastics alone.

Kwan Phayao, a large, crescent moon of a lake in Northern Thailand, is home to about 50 fish species, several hundred small-scale farmers and fishers, and the city of Phayao, where 18,000 people live.

Opposition Leader Bill Shorten announced last week that a federal Labor government would create a Just Transition Authority to overseee Australia’s transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy.

Once again, the summer and fall of 2018 in the Northern Hemisphere has brought us an epidemic of major wildfires. These burn forests, houses and other structures, displace thousands of people and animals, and cause major disruptions in people’s lives.

As temperatures rise, wildfires may get worse in areas that already experience them and become more prevalent in areas where they’re not yet a big risk, a new study warns.

As the price of renewable energy drops and storage technologies mature, hydrogen fuel is drawing fresh attention. Perhaps, finally, hydrogen’s moment has arrived. Japan is planning to use the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games to showcase its vision for a hydrogen society and has invested US$348 million in establishing hydrogen refueling stations and other infrastructure. Germany has launched the world’s first hydrogen-powered trains...

A lazy buzz phrase – ‘Is this the new normal?’ – has been doing the rounds as extreme climate events have been piling up over the past year. To which the riposte should be: it’s worse than that – we’re on the road to even more frequent, more extreme events than we saw this year.

New research digs into how links between economic development, technology, politics, and decision-making affect actions people are willing to take against climate change.

Will taxing meat products based on their carbon footprint reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and improve public health? The answer is maybe, but not notably — and it will come with significant costs.

The latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has been called a “deafening” alarm and an “ear-splitting wake-up call” about the need for sweeping climate action. But will one more scientific report move countries to dramatically cut emissions?

The burning of unwanted gas associated with oil production—called “flaring”—remains the most carbon-intensive part of producing oil, according to a new analysis.

I was recently sent a slick piece of fossil-fuel-propaganda that was mostly full of half-truths to tell a lie. If nothing else, it does make one listen to arguments on possible needed limits to free speech. However, limiting access for venues of speech is a slippery slope, but so is damaging the public with untruths. Is it OK to tell lies for financial gain that harms the public?

The price of beer could double under unchecked climate change, as droughts and extreme temperatures cause barley yields to drop. That’s one conclusion of research we recently published in Nature Plants.

Museums, archaeological sites and historical buildings are rarely included in conversations about climate change, which tend to focus on the wider impact and global threats to our contemporary world. Yet these threats impact everything, from local cultural practices to iconic sites of outstanding universal value. In light of this, it’s worth exploring the relationship between our heritage and the changing global climate in more detail.

As part of the Paris Agreement on climate change, the international community committed in 2015 to limit rising global temperatures to “well below” 2C by the end of the 21st century and to “pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase even further to 1.5C”.

Persistent weather conditions, including dry and wet spells, that have increased in the United States may be a result of rapid Arctic warming, according to a new study.

Exposure to air pollution has a staggering effect on human health. It is thought to cause around 7m premature deaths each year worldwide, with around 40,000 occurring in Britain.

Two generations of Australians, Generations X and Y, say climate change is their number one cause for concern, according to a new report. Contrary to stereotypes of young generations being narcissistic or complacent, researchers say both groups are united in concerns about the future of the environment.

Shortly after Hurricane Helene formed off the coast of West Africa on September 7, it did something unusual. Instead of following most hurricanes westward across the Atlantic, Helene turned north towards the UK and Ireland. Now downgraded to an “ex-hurricane”, Storm Helene is nonetheless expected to bring strong winds across much of England and Wales when it hits on September 17.