Australia had to add a new color to its weather maps this week. Meteorologists used royal purple to denote an off-the-charts high temperature of 50 degrees Celsius (122 degrees Fahrenheit), part of an unprecedented heat wave and ongoing wildfires occurring down under this month. On the other side of the globe, 2012 proved the hottest [...]

“I am a firm believer that climate change is real, that it is impacted by human behavior and carbon emissions. And, as a consequence, I think we’ve got an obligation to future generations to do something about it.” So spoke newly re-elected President Barack Obama at a press conference on November 14 when questioned by [...]

Remember when climate change contrarians professed outrage over a few errors in the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s last report? One of their favorite such mistakes involved an overestimation of the pace at which glaciers would melt at the “Third Pole,” where the Indian subcontinent crashes into Asia. Some contrarians back in 2010 proceeded [...]

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times”—Dickens’s phrase might serve to sum up the reactions to what is now officially called the “Durban Platform for Enhanced Action” on climate change. This two-page document, reminiscent in its brevity of the Copenhagen Accord from 2007, purports to set the global community on [...]

DURBAN, South Africa—When roughly 25,000 people descend on a city to talk climate change, you can expect at least two things: mountains of waste and copious emissions of the greenhouse gases that they’ve come to talk about so seriously. To offset the hundreds of thousands of tons of these lightweight gases emitted in the pursuit [...]

After more than 15 years of international climate negotiations, it has become ever more clear that all the carbon dioxide emitted to shuttle diplomats from city to city to hash out a regime to curb climate change has been largely wasted. The success of harried diplomacy in Kyoto in 1997 has given way to Japan [...]

The U.S. has begun to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from power plants—quietly, with little fanfare and starting in Texas. The Thomas C. Ferguson Power Plant in Llano County is being modernized with the installation of a combined cycle natural gas-fired turbine for improved efficiency at generating electricity. The refurbished “peaker” plant—so-called because it is fired [...]

Did the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency err when it found in 2009 that greenhouse gases, like carbon dioxide, endanger public health? Based on a new report from the agency’s Inspector General, climate change denier and U.S. Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., would like you to think so, trumpeting in a press release headline that the “EPA [...]

An additional 150 people join the ranks of humanity every minute, a pace that could lead our numbers to reach nine billion by 2050. Changing that peak population number alone could save at least 1.4 billion metric tons of carbon from entering the atmosphere each year by 2050, according to a new analysis—the equivalent of [...]

The bulk of the world’s nations ignored a January 31 deadline to submit action plans to combat climate change under the terms of the Copenhagen Accord (pdf). But the majority of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions will be affected by commitments that were submitted to the United Nations in recent days, in keeping with the [...]

At the beginning of this year, the Golden State officially launched its long-discussed market-based system to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. California’s GHG cap-and-trade program is not the first of its type. Carbon trading schemes are popping up around the world. But, it’s only the second program to takeoff in the U.S. The first, the [...]