Pollution, industrial fishing and climate change have killed off half of marine life in the last four decades, according to a WWF report released Wednesday. A quarter of shark and ray species face extinction, largely due to overfishing.
Researchers knew California's drought was already a record breaker when they set out to find its exact place in history, but they were surprised by what they discovered: It has been 500 years since what is now the Golden State has been this dry.
Inadequate national targets for curbing climate-altering greenhouse gases meant emissions would be "far above" the level required to stave off disastrous global warming, analysts warned Wednesday.
Describing the "urgent and growing" threat that was not being addressed quick enough, Obama sketched the problems already facing people living in one of the United States' last wilderness frontiers.
The new numbers up the stakes for coastal communities across the globe. "People need to be prepared," Josh Willis, an oceanographer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, said. "We're going to continue to have sea level rise for decades and probably centuries."
In 2013, China's total carbon emissions were 14 percent less than the figures used by the U.N.'s panel of experts tasked with providing the scientific framework for global climate talks, new research shows.
The best historical precedent for the Environmental Protection Agency's action comes from Ronald Reagan. He's not exactly known as the environmental president, but he took the decisive steps toward solving an earlier air pollution problem: destruction of the ozone layer.
On Monday, the Obama administration plans to release the finalized Clean Power Plan, the president's flagship policy to combat global warming. The plan is aimed at the electricity sector, which generates the largest single slice, 31 percent, of U.S. greenhouse-gas emissions.
The rule, if it stands, could substantially alter the U.S. energy landscape, driving the expanded use of "clean" energy while further diminishing coal's long dominance as a source of power for homes and businesses.
