Cities are almost always hotter than the surrounding rural area but global warming takes that heat and makes it worse. In the future, this combination of urbanization and climate change could raise urban temperatures to levels that threaten human health, strain energy resources, and compromise economic productivity. Summers in the U.S. have been warming since 1970. But on average across the country cities are even hotter, and have been getting hotter faster than adjacent rural areas. Urban heat measured by...

Strong waves crash against rocks in southwestern France during high tide on the Atlantic Ocean in February 2014. A recent study suggests that the global warming slowdown of the past 15 years may be due to heat 'hiding' deep in the Atlantic. (GAIZKA IROZ/AFP/Getty Images) Global warming accelerated rapidly from the 1970s through the 1990s but abruptly slowed down after that, and exactly why has been a puzzle climate scientists have been trying to solve ever since. This pause or...

Methane Seeping From Seafloor Methane bubbles flow in small streams out of the sediment on an area of seafloor offshore Virginia north of Washington Canyon. Quill worms, anemones, and patches of microbial mat can be seen in the seepage area. (NOAA Okeanos Explorer Program) At hundreds of places deep beneath the ocean surface along the U.S. Atlantic coastline, scientists have discovered plumes of bubbles streaming toward the surface that may contain methane, a heat-trapping gas many times more powerful than...

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...