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Policymakers at this week’s international climate negotiations in Germany meet amid sobering news that gives their work new urgency. After three years of flat growth, global fossil fuel emissions are rising again, according to a series of reports from the Global Carbon Project, a group chaired by Stanford scientist Rob Jackson.

The final warning was issued on Tropical depression Haiku on Nov. 12 as it was dissipating due to strong vertical wind shear. NASA-NOAA's Suomi NPP satellite passed over the storm as it was fading.

We’re all familiar with tipping points, when crossing what might seem a minor threshold can lead to drastically different outcomes—the Super Bowl favorite that falls to last place with injury to a single lineman, a tomato seedling that surges skyward the moment it tops the shadowy confines of its clay pot.

Human well-being will be severely jeopardized by negative trends in some types of environmental harm, such as a changing climate, deforestation, loss of access to fresh water, species extinctions and human population growth, scientists warn in today’s issue of BioScience, an international journal.

As the city of Houston continues to recover and rebuild following the historic flooding unleashed by Hurricane Harvey, the region will also have to prepare for a future in which storms of Harvey’s magnitude are more likely to occur.