Climate Change | featured news

Greenland’s surface ice cover experienced a broader thaw during a three-day period this month than in nearly four decades of satellite record-keeping, according to three independent satellite measurements analyzed by NASA and university scientists.

Some of the weather extremes bedeviling people around the world have become far more likely because of human-induced global warming, researchers reported on Tuesday. Yet they ruled it out as a cause of last year’s devastating floods in Thailand, one of the most striking weather events of recent years.

Coral reefs along Panama's Pacific coast completely collapsed for 2,500 years due to natural climate cycles, researchers reported in a study Thursday, adding that there's a lesson in the data for man-made climate change: ease up on greenhouse gasses and reefs will restore themselves.

If you want a glimpse of some of the worst of global warming, scientists suggest taking a look at U.S. weather in recent weeks. Horrendous wildfires. Oppressive heat waves. Devastating droughts. Flooding from giant deluges. And a powerful freak wind storm called a derecho. These are the kinds of extremes climate scientists have predicted will come with climate change, although it's far too early to say that is the cause. Nor will they say global warming is the reason 3,215 daily high temperature records were set in the month of June.

ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson says fears about climate change, drilling, and energy dependence are overblown... Tillerson blamed a public that is "illiterate" in science and math, a "lazy" press, and advocacy groups that "manufacture fear" for energy misconceptions in a speech at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Each year, the International Energy Agency puts out a study of which technological advances are needed to keep global warming below two degrees Celsius. The 2012 report is out and the grades are dismal: Aside from a recent boom in wind and solar power, the world isn’t making much progress.

Global warming is leading to an unprecedented onslaught of deadly and costly weather disasters, a panel of climate scientists says.

By 2050, the global average temperature could rise by 1.4-3C above levels for late last century, a mass computer simulation suggests.

Drought, floods and a lack of fresh water may cause significant global instability and conflict in the coming decades, as developing countries scramble to meet demand from exploding populations while dealing with the effects of climate change, U.S. intelligence agencies said in a report released Thursday.

Some states have introduced education standards requiring teachers to defend the denial of man-made global warming. A national watchdog group says it will start monitoring classrooms.