National parks and nature reserves in South America, Africa and Asia, created to protect wildlife, heritage sites and the territory of indigenous people, are reducing carbon emissions from tropical deforestation by a third, and so are slowing the rate of global warming, a new study shows.

They account for just three per cent of the Earth’s surface but play a major role in offsetting carbon dioxide emissions – and now a team of scientists led by the universities of Southampton and Utrecht has discovered that the plants that make up peat bogs adapt exceptionally well to climate change.

NASA-NOAA's Suomi NPP satellite and NASA's Aqua satellite imagery showed wind shear was still affecting Tropical Storm Saola.as it moved through the Philippine Sea.

Tropical Storm Selma formed in the Eastern Pacific Ocean off the coast of El Salvador and NASA infrared satellite imagery revealed the storm has very cold cloud top temperatures indicating the potential for heavy rain.

Tens of thousands of monarch butterflies that should be in Texas by now, en route to their wintering grounds in Mexico, are still in the northern U.S. and Canada, their migrations delayed due to above-average temperatures and strong winds this fall.

New study from world’s leading lemur expert paints grim picture for future of dietary specialists

What are the best ways for U.S. cities to combat climate change? A new study co-authored by an MIT professor indicates it will be easier for cities to reduce emissions coming from residential energy use rather than from local transportation — and this reduction will happen mostly thanks to better building practices, not greater housing density.

The study analyzes how extensively local planning policies could either complement the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan (CPP) of 2015 or compensate for its absence. The CPP is intended to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from power plants. In early 2016, a U.S. Supreme Court ruling halted the measure’s potential enactment; the legal case is unresolved and the Trump administration has announced it intends to unwind the CPP.   

As Earth’s climate continues to warm, the urban heat island effect raises concerns that city-dwellers will suffer more heat stress than their rural counterparts. However, new research suggests that some cities actually experience a cooling effect. 

More than 60 percent of urban areas in India experience a day-time cooling effect, according to the study, which was published in Scientific Reports. The cooling effect has been observed in the past, but this paper is the first to directly identify a cause: lack of moisture and vegetation in non-urban areas surrounding the city.

Thousands of marks on the Antarctic seafloor, caused by icebergs which broke free from glaciers more than ten thousand years ago, show how part of the Antarctic Ice Sheet retreated rapidly at the end of the last ice age as it balanced precariously on sloping ground and became unstable. Today, as the global climate continues to warm, rapid and sustained retreat may be close to happening again, and could trigger runaway ice retreat into the interior of the continent, which in turn would cause sea levels to rise even faster than currently projected.

In the past decades, large areas of forest in Sumatra, Indonesia have been replaced by cash crops like oil palm and rubber plantations. New research, published in the European Geosciences Union journal Biogeosciences, shows that these changes in land use increase temperatures in the region. The added warming could affect plants and animals and make parts of the country more vulnerable to wildfires.