Sunlight plays off the Canada Glacier in Antarctica's Wrigth Valley, one of the McMurdo Dry Valleys. (Peter Doran/National Science Foundation) One of the biggest question marks surrounding the fate of the planet’s coastlines is dangling from its underbelly. The melting of the Antarctic ice sheet has long been a relatively minor factor in the steady ascent of high-water marks, responsible for about an eighth of the 3 millimeters of annual sea-level rise. But when it comes to climate change, Antarctica...

A leaked draft of a new United Nations report on climate change says global warming has already arrived and is probably already causing harm –and the heating trend could be irreversible, the Associated Press reported Tuesday. The news comes from the final draft of a 127-page synthesis report from the Nobel Prize-winning U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which summarizes the results of its three gigantic documents released over the past year. The AP notes that there is little in...

A young boy walks near a burning pile of trash in the Anlong Pi landfill in Siem Reap, Cambodia. (Omar Havana/Getty Images) Much of the world's air pollution can be blamed on burning garbage, including discarded plastics, busted electronics, broken furniture and food scraps, according to a new study that estimates more than 40 percent of the world's garbage is burned. Burning trash throws pollution and toxic particles into the air than governments are reporting, according to the study published...

There's a place in Death Valley National Park where a mystery that has puzzled scientists and park visitors for decades finally has been solved. Across a dry lake in the park known as the Racetrack Playa, hundreds of rocks scattered along the ground -- many weighing up to several hundred pounds -- seem to move all on their own. They leave behind long, winding trails in the lakebed, evidence that something has been pushing or sliding them across. Researchers have...

A section of Gordon Street in Boston's Brighton neighborhood is covered in snow in February 2013, after a powerful winter storm knocked out power to more than 650,000 and dumped over two feet of snow in parts of New England. (Jared Wickerham/Getty Images) So if the world is warming, that means winters should be less snowy, right? Well, it’s a bit more complicated than that. OK, it’s a lot more complicated. While the average annual snowfall in most parts of...

Last November, weather.com published Losing Louisiana, a look at the people whose homes and land are being lost as the Gulf of Mexico slowly swallows the state’s southern tip. Today, ProPublica continues the story with a massively interactive feature on the subject, documenting the land loss, the history that led the region here and the economic and environmental devastation that may lie in the future. Using satellite imagery, historic maps and photography, the online feature shows in clear green and...

An emaciated polar bear is seen on a small sheet of ice in this image taken in August in Svalbard, north of mainland Norway. (Kerstin Langenberger) While it's difficult to appreciate the dangers of Earth's changing climate for many of us in the U.S. -- especially after the winter of the "polar vortex" and a summer without any sustained heat waves so far for the eastern two-thirds of the country -- global warming is having dramatic impacts around the world....

Dozens of Tons of Dead Fish Wash Ashore in Mexico Fishermen collect dead 'popocha' fish at the lagoon of Cajititlan in Tlajomulco de Zuniga, Jalisco State, Mexico, on Sept. 1, 2014. Hundreds of thousands of dead fish washed ashore at a lake in western Mexico last weekend, and local authorities believe the massive die-off may have been caused by low water levels or pollution from a nearby wastewater treatment plant. More than 50 tons of rotting fish were removed from...

The southwestern U.S. has at least a 50 percent chance of experiencing a decade-long drought this century thanks to global warming, and the region's chances of a "megadrought" -- one that lasts multiple decades -- lies anywhere from 20 to 50 percent, according to a new study. Set for release in an upcoming issue of the American Meteorological Society's Journal of Climate by scientists from Cornell University, the University of Arizona and the U.S. Geological Survey, the study urges the...

Losing 3,243 Square Miles of Forest in One Year A view of stumps in a recently deforested section of natural forest that will become a pulp and paper plantation in Riau province, Sumatra, Indonesia, in July 2014. Indonesia lost nearly twice as much of its natural forests as Brazil in 2012, despite its forests being a quarter of the size of the Amazon rainforest. (Photo by Ulet Ifansasti/Getty Images) Sumatra and Borneo, two of the biggest among the approximately 17,000...

(ClimateCentral.org) The remnants of two tropical systems — one from the Gulf of Mexico, the other just west of Baja California — are expected to serve as wells of moisture fueling rains this weekend over portions of the country’s two main drought hotspots, namely parts of the Southern Plains and Southern California. But while those rains could make dents in the Plains drought, they are likely to make little difference in California, local weather experts said. Both the Southern Plains...

India's Smog: The World's Dirtiest Air Smog covers buildings in New Delhi, India, in this aerial photo from May 2014. The World Health Organization reported in May that the Indian capital had the dirtiest atmosphere in the world, as it has the world's highest annual average concentration of airborne particles known as PM2.5. (AFP/Roberto Schmidt) Millions of tons of India's major crops were lost in 2005, worth more than $1 billion and enough to feed tens of millions of people...