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Absent heroic efforts, the world has locked in dangerous climate change. That’s according to a much-anticipated report released on Monday in South Korea by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a U.N.-sponsored collection of the world’s top scientists. That stark, blunt assessment comes after years of deliberation at the request of the world’s most vulnerable nations to assemble pathways that could limit global warming to no more than 1.5 degrees C, now believed to be the upper limit that would preserve the stability of the world’s interconnected ecological and societal systems. Some key conclusions: The world has already warmed by...

You now have permission to freak out ~snip~ The New York Times declared that the report showed a “strong risk” of climate crisis in the coming decades; in Grist, Eric Holthaus wrote that “civilization is at stake.” If you are alarmed by those sentences, you should be — they are horrifying. But it is, actually, worse than that — considerably worse. That is because the new report’s worst-case scenario is, actually, a best case. In fact, it is a beyond-best-case scenario. What has been called a genocidal level of warming is already our inevitable future. The question is how much...

Trump is ‘actively making the problem worse’ Hurricane Florence is now bearing down on North Carolina, and the media is looking to score political points. On MSNBC, host Chris Hayes invited meteorologist Eric Holthaus on to argue global warming is making hurricanes worse, and that President Trump is to blame. "We have a president that is denying the impacts of, you know, this hurricane season last year and this year and actively making the problem worse by, you know, not addressing this root cause of worsening storms,” Holthaus told to a nodding Hayes. On CNN, political analyst John Avlon, in...

The sun has not risen above the North Pole since mid-September. The sea ice—flat, landlike, windswept, and stretching as far as the eye can see—has been bathed in darkness for months.

The U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has just completed a series of landmark reports that chronicle an update to the current state of consensus science on climate change. Its conclusion: On our current path, climate change could pose an irreversible, existential risk to civilization as we know it, but we can still fix it if we decide to work together. But in addition to the call for cooperation, the reports also shared an alarming new trend: Climate change is already destabilizing nations and leading to wars. That finding was highlighted in last week's premiere of Showtime's climate change docu-drama...

Full title: " 'No children, happy to go extinct', tweets weatherman after grim climate-change report made him cry (now he's considering a vasectomy)" A meteorologist who has covered weather for the Wall Street Journal tweeted that he has decided not to have children in order to leave a lighter carbon footprint, and is considering having a vasectomy. He also vowed to stop flying after the world's recent climate-change report made him cry. Eric Holthaus was reacting to the findings from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change which released a report on Friday that found it was ‘extremely likely’ that humans...

Eric Holthaus, who used to do weather for Wall Street Journal, was reacting to Friday's findings from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Scientists found in the report that it was 'extremely likely' that humans are causing warming trends Holthaus said he has decided not to have children in order to leave a lighter carbon footprint, and has considered having a vasectomy He tweeted on Friday 'no children, happy to go extinct' The weatherman also said he is committed to stop flying as 'it's not worth the climate' His next tweet said: 'Its a very emotional decision. Mixed feelings. adios...