During Stephen Harper’s tenure as Prime Minister of Canada, scientific research on polar bears was politicized, the type of development American scientists fear under Donald Trump.PHOTOGRAPH BY JOE BUNNI / GETTY

The Canadian biologist Ian Stirling has spent much of his life with polar bears. Now seventy-five years old, he joined the Canadian Wildlife Service in the early nineteen-seventies, at a time when no one was doing much in the field beyond tagging the bears and waiting to see where they went...

A research ship is on Greenland’s northwest coast during a NASA mission to survey the seafloor. (NASA/JPL-Caltech)

In 2015, in a moment of science communication genius, NASA created a mission called “OMG.” The acronym basically ensured that a new scientific mission — measuring how quickly the Oceans are Melting Greenland — would get maximum press attention...

Ed King making a solar panel

This week’s top climate politics and policy stories...

Solar Impulse soars above Egypt's pyramids on its historic flight earlier this year (Pic: Solar Impulse/Flickr)

As he hands the secret Climate Home editor codes and knackered laptop to Karl Mathiesen, Ed King reflects on the five years since he launched the site...

Anthony Kendall, courtesy Flickr

Nowhere is the climate changing faster than in the Arctic. The region is warming at about twice the rate of the global average, with atmospheric temperature anomalies as much as 13 degrees Fahrenheit above normal reported in January...

NOAA

Our rapidly warming climate has profound geophysical, ecological and biological, as well as socioeconomic, impacts worldwide. Glacial melt, for instance, is changing the shape and raising the elevation of land masses, while rising sea levels threaten the sustainability of coastal cities and communities, reshape ocean basins and alter the Earth’s rotation and gravitational field...

Lewes, Del., faces steeply rising flood risks as seas rise. Credit: Mike Mahaffie/Flickr

The lawns of homes purchased this year in vast swaths of coastal America could regularly be underwater before the mortgage has even been paid off, with new research showing high tide flooding could become nearly incessant in places within 30 years...

Juan Gonzalez of MTD Farms in Firebaugh, Calif., despairingly holds a baby tomato that was planted the day before. But it had not been watered and is near death.Nathan Weyland

Drought is not an easy subject to record in pictures, and yet such images are vital to understanding water problems. Photographer Nathan Weyland describes why he devoted himself to documenting California’s drought...

Bill Nye, better known as the Science Guy, walking the runway during the Men’s New York Fashion Week last month. Credit Karsten Moran for The New York Times

As he prepares to launch a fact-filled show into a fact-challenged world, Bill Nye, a.k.a. the Science Guy, is looking on the bright side...

Rep. Don Beyer (D-VA) dons a hat suggesting the hearing should be renamed ‘Keep the EPA Great’ Photograph: House Science, Space, and Technology Committee

Fake news propagates through the conservative media to the halls of Congress where science is under attack...

The young plaintiffs in a climate change lawsuit against the U.S. government say they hope the suit prevents future damage to the planet by President Trump. Photo courtesy of Robin Loznak, ZUMAPRESS.com

Landmark suit against the U.S. government replaces Barack Obama as defendant with President Trump, argues that climate action is a constitutional right...

Pancake ice in the open sea in the Arctic. Image: Shutterstock / Solodov Aleksey

This Arctic winter has startled even the most even-keeled scientists, with records set for low sea ice extent, high temperatures and other indicators of a climate gone awry...

Critics say the move could imperil families across America...

A vector control team vehicle displays a sign warning before the early morning spraying of a neighborhood due to increasing numbers of mosquitoes having tested positive for West Nile virus in San Diego, California, U.S. May 18, 2016. REUTERS/Mike Blake

More severe drought in the United States in the next 30 years may double the size of future epidemics...

NASA

Nobody knows which day of the week a six mile-wide asteroid crashed into what would someday be the Yucatan Peninsula. What people do know is that day was around 65 million years ago, and that the days that came after were colder, darker, and filled with fewer and fewer dinosaurs...

As CEO of ExxonMobil, Rex Tillerson met Russian President Vladimir Putin on several occasions. Credit: Kremlin.ru, CC BY 4.0

On February 3, the Republican-led Senate used an obscure procedural tool to end a bipartisan provision meant to fight corruption and overseas oil bribery, a rule opposed by Rex Tillerson as head of ExxonMobil...

Distortion? False information? Conspiracy theories? Hacked email? Climate scientists have known all this for decades. What can be learned from their rich experience with climate propaganda...

(Pic: Flickr/Pavel Kazachkov)

Kremlin wants new plan by mid-2018, as brief sent to regions highlights focus on extreme weather events, permafrost thawing...