#climate change

#climate change

The United Nations General Assembly meets amid Gaza genocide, Ukraine war and global volatility. The United Nations General Assembly is due to hold debates next week. Crises, including the Gaza genocide, Ukraine war and climate change, are placing the world body under severe scrutiny. It is also facing pressure from the administration of US President Donald Trump. What role can the gathering of world nations play?

Fishermen have been under a moratorium on catching shrimp for more than a decade because of low population levels that scientists have attributed to climate change and warming oceans. The harvesters were allowed to catch a small number of shrimp this past winter as part of an industry-funded sampling and data collection program. The fishermen didn't catch much though, and recent changes allow regulators to extend the moratorium for five years at a time instead of just one, Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission officials said Monday.

Every summer, the same devastating story repeats across America: lakes that families have cherished for generations suddenly turn toxic green. Half a million people in Toledo lose their drinking water when Lake Erie blooms with poison algae. Or, Florida's red tide costs the state billions in lost tourism. But some of the most damaged bodies of water in America are getting a cleanup.

Now a review of 11 recent academic studies by Scientists for Global Responsibility has found that each additional $100bn of military spending leads to an estimated 32m tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (tCO2e) being dumped into the atmosphere. The emissions come from direct sources such as fuel-guzzling combat planes, warships and armored vehicles, as well as indirect emissions from transporting equipment, complex global supply-chains, and the effects of war fighting itself.

As human activities alter local-to-global environments, people are reporting stress, distress, depression, anxiety, worry, psychological trauma, and other negative emotions. Phrases coined to describe these responses include solastalgia, eco-anxiety, climate change anxiety, climate fear, and ecological grief. Scientifically, all these ideas are in their infancy. To improve understanding and to really get to the basics of how human beings respond to different environmental changes, researchers are developing scales and indices, some of which are clinical and some of which are not.

I love the way clouds billow above your head, drift lazily across blue skies and cast fleeting shadows on the ground below. These ever-shifting sculptures of vapor and light are among nature's least appreciated marvels. That's why 20 years ago, I started the Cloud Appreciation Society, to remind people to look up. Now climate science is catching up, revealing that clouds aren't just poetic; they're pivotal in helping to regulate Earth's temperature.

It's no secret Americans consume too much sugar, according to public health guidelines. Now, researchers have found one possible trigger that pushes people to reach for sweet things: hot weather. Researchers tracked Americans' grocery receipts over several years and found that sugar intake rises in the summer and the spike in consumption is driven largely by consuming more sugary beverages like sodas, energy drinks, and sweetened juices.

Large whites were the most common butterflies spotted in the UK this year with a record number of sightings, more than doubling from last year's Big Butterfly Count. Recognisable by their creamy white wings with black L-shaped markings, they are also commonly referred to as cabbage butterflies or cabbage whites due to their staple diet. Their numbers are up 47% over the past 15 years Photograph: Keith Warmington/Butterfly Conservation

There will be drastic differences in fall foliage across this country this year,

NPR enlisted the band Bettis And 3rd Degree to sonify rising temperatures in New Orleans. As the temperature rises from 1980 to present, listen as the music tempo speeds up. Between 1980 and 2000, the average annual temperature in New Orleans goes up by more than a quarter of a degree, and it may not seem like much if you're just looking at the data in a spreadsheet, but it is significant.

From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, 'The A Word', which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messaging. At such a critical moment in US history, we need reporters on the ground. Your donation allows us to keep sending journalists to speak to both sides of the story.

Farmers and experts warn Iraq's historic rivers are vanishing, threatening survival, identity and stability. Iraq, once known as Mesopotamia, the Land of the Two Rivers, is facing its worst water crisis in living memory. The Tigris and Euphrates lifelines of agriculture and civilisation for millennia are running dry. Climate change, upstream dams and decades of mismanagement have turned fertile land into dust, forcing families from their homes and threatening national stability.

As I write these words, the No 1 trending story on the Guardian is titled: The history and future of societal collapse. It is an account of a study by a Cambridge expert who works at something ominously called the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk; he concludes that we can't put a date on Doomsday, but by looking at the 5,000 years of [civilisation], we can understand the trajectories we face today and self-termination is most likely.

The climate crisis will continue making lightning-sparked wildfires more frequent for decades to come, which could produce cascading effects and worsen public safety and public health, experts and new research suggest. Lightning-caused fires tend to burn in more remote areas and therefore usually grow into larger fires than human-caused fires. That means a trend toward more lightning-caused fires is also probably making wildfires more deadly by producing more wildfire smoke and helping to drive a surge in air quality issues from coast to coast,

For the second time in three years, catastrophic monsoon floods have carved a path of destruction across Pakistan's north and central regions, particularly in its Punjab province, submerging villages, drowning farmland, displacing millions and killing hundreds. This year, India Pakistan's archrival and a nuclear-armed neighbour is also reeling. Its northern states, including Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand and Indian Punjab, have seen widespread flooding as heavy monsoon rains swell rivers on both sides of the border.

Scientists are seeing "mega-drying" regions that are immense and expanding - one stretching from the western United States through Mexico to Central America, and another from Morocco to France, across the entire Middle East to northern China. There are two primary causes of the desiccation: rising temperatures unleashed by using oil and gas, and widespread overpumping of water that took millennia to accumulate underground.

Landslides are the most common geological event. That's a fact. They affect millions of people and cause many thousands of deaths. They often occur in countries with poor or inadequate infrastructure such as in Sudan's Marra Mountains region in late August 2025. Just the year before, in 2024, there were two major landslides in the same region. In Papua New Guinea, a reported 2,000 people were buried alive following a landslide in May 2024.

"Shark teeth, despite being composed of highly mineralized phosphates, are still vulnerable to corrosion under future ocean acidification scenarios,"

I was immediately seduced by the silence and the immense landscape. There's something beautiful about it: You feel like a very small person, you're made vulnerable, and you realize you don't mean that much in the world. It was the start of winter and the temperature was 20 degrees below zero, but I couldn't really feel the cold because I was so excited to be part of this journey that I forgot about everything else.

At issue was whether oil companies could be held liable for damage from future wildfires caused at least in part by climate change. The state Senate Judiciary Committee vote on the measure came just two days after a Louisiana jury held oil giant Chevron liable by for $744.6 million to restore damage to Louisiana's coastal wetlands. The case was the first of many pending against oil companies that have supposedly lied about whether their policies

Katrina, which was a Category 3 hurricane when it made landfall in southeast Louisiana on Aug. 29, 2005, remains the costliest U.S. storm on record, with damage estimated at upward of $200 billion when adjusted for inflation, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. About 1,400 people died in five states. The failure of the federal levee system inundated about 80% of the city in floodwaters that took weeks to drain.

On July 8, New Mexico's Rio Ruidoso unbound from its banks for the second year in a row and swelled to 20 times its typical knee-high depth. The cascade of water roared like a train, Kathy Papasan, a longtime resident on the river's edge, told me, and dark waves battered her porch. She and her husband had to flee uphill to a neighbor's house.