Human rights issue ... deforestation in Sumatra. Photograph: Ulet Infansasti/AFP/Getty

We can overcome the problems of delivering collective action on climate change by treating mining, deforestation, ocean degradation and more as violations of human rights...

Last week in Paris, I watched happily as the world passed the final text of a truly global and surprisingly ambitious climate change agreement. Through clever geopolitical maneuvering by vulnerable, low-lying states — buttressed by social movements, activist groups, and NGOs — the world agreed to a deal stating that global temperature increases will be held, “well below 2°C ” above pre-industrial levels, and that countries will go further, “pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 °C.” It has been a long time coming...

Photo Credit: lculig | Shutterstock 

Caught in the crosshairs of an ongoing New York Attorney General investigation exploring its role in studying the damage climate change could cause since the 1970's and then proceeding to fund climate science denial campaigns, ExxonMobil has announced an interesting job opening...

Photo Credit: Jirsak | Shutterstock

The ongoing push to lift the ban on exports of U.S.-produced crude oil appears to be coming to a close, with Congress agreeing to a budget deal with a provision to end the decades-old embargo...

It can be difficult to win an argument when you have no viable position. However, when you are the oil industry, you can just buy the win. Which is what the oil industry is poised to do regarding the lifting of the crude oil export ban...

A world map showing climate anomalies at the summit in Paris. Emissions targets are set, but does the agreement buy us enough time? Photograph: Stephane Mahe/Reuters

Will the deal agreed in Paris be enough to save the planet? Emissions cuts and investment are promised, but legal responsibilities are thin on the ground...

cartoon by Adam Zyglis

Strong, smart adults do not want to be fed false hopes, false targets or false facts. They want to know the way things really are so that they can adapt to or effectively manage what actually is there. If you would like to quickly cut through the Paris Climate Conference media spin as well as other greenwashing from the poorly informed concerning the Paris agreement and results, keep reading…

Friends,

I just want to thank you for everything you've contributed to 350's work before, during and after the Paris summit. Together, we aimed high, and what we accomplished is huge...

Boys play with kites in a favela in Brazil. The Paris climate change deal ‘doesn’t go far enough to improve the fragile existence of millions around the world’, Harjeet Singh at ActionAid says. Photograph: Peeter Viisimaa/Getty

COP21 agreement excludes poor and fails to put humanity’s interests above short-term goals, say environmentalists and financial experts...

Labourers work at a coal stockyard in East Jaintia Hills in Meghalaya, September 16, 2015.

Reuters/Krishna N. Das/Files

India still plans to double coal output by 2020 and rely on the resource for decades afterwards, a senior official said on Monday, days after rich and poor countries agreed in Paris to curb carbon emissions blamed for global warming...

A woman walks past a coal-fired power plant in Shanxi. While China has committed to reduce its carbon dioxide emissions by 2030, this commitment excludes other emissions. Photograph: Kevin Frayer/Getty Images

 Thinktank data shows that 55% of CO₂ emitted in 2030 will be produced by states that have reached peak levels

Commitments made during the UN climate talks in Paris will lead to a critical mass of countries reaching their CO₂ emission peaks by 2030, research by an environmental thinktank suggests.

The global climate summit in Paris forged a landmark agreement on Saturday, setting the course for a historic transformation of the world's fossil fuel-driven economy within decades in a bid to arrest global warming...

French foreign minister and president of the talks Laurent Fabius brings down the gavel to mark the adoption of the agreement. Photograph: Francois Mori/AP

Two decades of talks have come to this: an ambitious agreement to hold states to emissions targets – but already low-lying countries are worried...

December 12, 2015

Youth respect good-faith efforts at COP but aren’t relying on politicos to save their planet. They intend to do it themselves.

It is the big surprise of the Paris talks: the growing acceptance of a call from small nations most vulnerable to climate change for the conference to declare warming should be halted at 1.5 degrees Celsius...

President Barack Obama holds a news conference before leaving the COP21 climate talks in Paris. His deputies will remain behind.
"I actually think we're going to solve this thing," he told the press...

350* is building a global grassroots climate movement that can hold our leaders accountable to the realities of science and the principles of justice.

That movement is rising from the bottom up all over the world, and is uniting to create the solutions that will ensure a better future for all. Our online campaigns, grassroots organizing, and mass public actions bring together a global network active in over 188 countries...

As pollution from burning fossil fuels continues to heat the atmosphere, the world’s glaciers are melting at an accelerating rate. Scientists widely agree that this meltwater has been a major factor in raising global sea levels about seven inches over the 20th century...

An undercover investigation by environment group Greenpeace has found some of the world’s most vocal climate science denial groups were willing to accept cash from fossil fuel interests in return for writing articles and reports that reject the impacts of greenhouses gases.

People attend a demonstration inside the World Climate Change Conference 2015 (COP21) at Le Bourget, near Paris, France, December 9, 2015. (Photo: Jacky Naegelen/Reuters)

A new draft of the accord would keep temperature rise below 2 degrees Celsius, but other crucial issues remain to be resolved...

Another brutally honest global warming education organization that we admire at Job One For Humanity has brilliantly taken on the illusion being forwarded by fossil fuel vested interests, their lobbyists and the poorly informed that there is an allowable amount of carbon, which we can continue to put up in the atmosphere as we burn fossil fuels.

NGO representatives and participants stage a sit-in protest closed to the plenary session to denounce the first climate deal draft during the COP21, United Nations Climate Change Conference in Le Bourget, north of Paris, France, Wednesday, Dec. 9, 2015.Image: Francois Mori/Associated Press

LE BOURGET, France — The U.N. Climate Summit kicked into high gear on Wednesday, with French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius producing a 29-page draft agreement that succeeded in pleasing few, if any, of the ministers taking part in the talks...

Representative Ted Lieu (D-Calif.) seen here on on September 30, 2015 in Washington, DC. Credit: Kris Connor/Getty Images for "Food Chains"

Letter to the CEOs of six of the country's largest fossil fuel companies seeks information on the firms' climate change history and policy positions.

SURVIVOR. Marinel Ubaldo is a young advocate who has been raising awareness of the risks of climate change. Photo from Plan International Philippines

A young woman who survived the super typhoon is at COP21, pushing for climate action...

If international climate talks really stall, don't be surprised if there might be an ever-so-slight intervention by Pope Francis...

Photos: www.commerce.senate.gov

Here are some crazy, detached folks that also happen to be enablers of crippling denial at the

highest levels of the United States Congress...

To be a climate change skeptic in Paris this week means facing heavy odds...

Flared natural gas is burned off at operations in the Permian Basin of the Barnett Shale formation in Texas. Emissions of methane from oil and gas production in the Barnett Shale are at least 90 percent higher than the EPA's estimates, according to a new scientific study. Credit: Spencer Platt/Getty Images

The Barnett Shale's emissions have been vastly underestimated, sweeping Environmental Defense Fund-backed study finds...

US Secretary of State John Kerry gestures upon his arrival at Le Bourget airport in the outskirts of Paris, Monday, Dec. 7, 2015.

PARIS — The United States is in favor of incorporating an ambitious 1.5-degree Celsius warming limit into the climate agreement at the ongoing U.N. Climate Summit in Paris, also known as COP21, provided that the aspirational language wouldn't replace the previously agreed-upon 2-degree target, Secretary of State John Kerry told Mashable on Monday.

Japanese coal plant (Photo: Chris Lewis, Flickr CC BY-NC 2.0)

Coal-fired power plants have provided cheap energy for over a hundred years, and despite coal-burning’s high emissions, about 2,400 are planned globally. A new study calculates that emissions from global energy generation must reach zero before the middle of the century to keep climate change below a two-degree Celsius temperature rise. Niklas Hohne of the New Climate Institute discusses the study with Living on Earth’s Helen Palmer and explains why building these plants is inconsistent with emissions control commitments countries have given...

Pope Francis prayed Sunday for the success of the global climate summit in Paris, where another week of negotiations are underway to reach an agreement that would limit the warming of the planet...

Activists have targeted the French owner of the Hazelwood brown-coal power station for its sponsorship of the Paris climate summit, calling on it to accelerate plans for the plant's closure in the spirit of the negotiations to tackle global warming...

Some of the event's sponsors might be part of the problem, not the solution...

Buildings are seen near the ocean in North Miami, Florida in March 2014. (Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

As we get deeper into the Paris climate negotiations, activists are poring over confusing texts full of noncommittal brackets. Upon this, it seems, does the fate of the planet depend...

The December 2015 Paris Climate Conference initiated by the United

Nations Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change (IPCC) will be

attended by leaders of most of the nations of the world.

But poorest half of world’s people contribute to just 10% of emissions, says British charity as negotiators work on UN climate change deal in Paris. An average person among the richest 1% of people emits 175 times more carbon than his or her counterpart among the bottom 1%, Oxfam said...

Ice broken off from Perito Moreno glacier floats in Los Glaciares national park, part of the Southern Patagonian Ice Field, the third largest ice field in the world, in Santa Cruz, Argentina. Most glaciers in the park have been retreating over the past 50 years due to global warming. Photograph: Mario Tama/Getty Images

Negotiators in Paris are trying to craft a deal at the UN climate talks that will keep global temperature rise below 2C. But what does that mean in reality - and what difference will a couple of extra degrees really make?

Wind turbines at the Sere Wind farm, close to Vredendal, in South Africa. (RODGER BOSCH/AFP/Getty Images)

When it comes to electric power, Africa is still the dark continent. More than half of its 1.1 billion inhabitants lack access to electricity, and Africa’s total generating capacity, from Cairo to Cape Town, is only 160 gigawatts, or about half as much as Japan, a country with one-tenth of its population.

© The Washington Post

The man who helped launch the personal computer revolution says the nations of the world aren’t doing nearly enough to boost the search for new energy sources that could help humans avoid a global-warming calamity.

Nik Spencer/Nature

Countries have pledged to limit global warming to 2 °C, and climate models say that is still possible. But only with heroic — and unlikely — efforts.

Turn the knobs on a new interactive map and see what future emissions, adaptation strategies...

AFP/Getty Images: A conference attendee looks at a projection of the Earth on Monday, the opening day of the COP 21 United Nations conference on climate change, in Le Bourget, on the outskirts of Paris.

The business community is well-represented at the United Nations climate summit underway in Paris — and it will be much more engaged in finding positive solutions than ever before...

(Image: Icy waters, rising steam, gas jets via Shutterstock; Edited: JR/TO)

Tuesday, 13 January 2015 09:23 By Dahr Jamail, Truthout | News Analysis

During a recent hike in Washington State's Olympic National Park, I marveled at the delicate geometry of frost-covered ferns. White crystalline structures seemed to grow from the green leaves, encasing them in a frozen frame of temporary beauty...

French President Francois Hollande, right, speaks with United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon as they attend "The Climate Challenge and African solutions" event during the COP21, the United Nations Climate Change Conference, in Le Bourget, north of Paris,Tuesday, Dec. 1, 2015. (Philippe Wojazer, Pool via AP)

President Barack Obama said Tuesday that parts of the global warming deal being negotiated in Paris should be legally binding on the countries that sign on, setting up a potential fight with Republicans at home...

While the world is watching and waiting for world leaders to act on climate at the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference, or COP21, things are already heating up for French climate activists...

Pope Francis pauses while answering questions from journalists aboard his flight from Bangui, Central African Republic, to Rome Nov. 30. (CNS photo/Paul Haring)

While Pope Francis has expressed hope that world leaders meeting in Paris for discussions on confronting climate change will find solutions to the problem, he has also said the inaction on the issue up to now is approaching global suicide...

World leaders kicked off the two-week climate change summit in France on Monday with warnings that this conference is the most important, and possibly the last, opportunity governments have to make a difference concerning climate change.

U.S. President Barack Obama speaks at the COP21 session of statements by heads of state and government at the climate summit in Paris, France November 30, 2015. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque

attended by leaders of most of the nations of the world.

Policemen fight with activists during a protest ahead of the 2015 Paris Climate Conference at the place de la Republique, in Paris, Sunday, Nov. 29, 2015. More than 140 world leaders are gathering around Paris for high-stakes climate talks that start Monday, and activists are holding marches and protests around the world to urge them to reach a strong agreement to slow global warming. (Laurent Cipriani/Associated Press)

The soap opera of global climate talks has been playing for 20 years. As it comes to Paris on Monday, Suzanne Goldenberg reviews the tears, the bloodshed and the unspeakable catering...

Policemen fight with activists during a protest ahead of the 2015 Paris climate conference at the Place de la Republique. Photograph: Laurent Cipriani/AP

• Millions expected to take to streets ahead of Paris climate summit
• Sydney to Seattle, via Hong Kong, Berlin, London and Sao Paulo, march on Sunday
• Climate change protests take place across Australia
• Keep it in the ground: the Guardian’s climate change campaign
• Interactive: why we are joining the global climate march

The time has finally arrived!

We're on the Eurostar heading to Paris for the COP21 climate conference kick-off...

In this Nov. 25, 2015 photo, President Barack Obama speaks in the Roosevelt Room of the White House in Washington...

Hamstrung by Congress, GOP opposition, Obama heads to Paris to clinch global climate agreement...

President Barack Obama meets in October with leaders from across the U.S. to discuss climate change. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)

President Barack Obama heads to a terror-scarred Paris Sunday night to tackle one of the most important priorities of his second term — climate change...

A new study published today in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science (PNAS) shows that the climate denial echo chamber organizations funded by ExxonMobil and Koch family foundations produced misinformation that effectively polluted mainstream media coverage of climate science and polarized the climate policy debate.

Almost 200 nations will meet in the French capital on Nov. 30 to try and seal a deal to prevent the planet from warming more than the 2 degrees Celsius that scientists say is vital if the world is to avoid the most devastating effects of climate change...

When he puts it like that, it seems totally worth a try...

The December 2015 Paris Climate Conference initiated by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change (IPCC) will be attended by leaders of most of the nations of the world...

Umiujaq (Canada) (AFP) - On the front line of climate change in the Canadian Arctic, scientists hunt for clues to a potentially catastrophic global warming trend: melting permafrost.

Still reeling from the worst terrorist attacks in French history, Paris will host nearly 140 world leaders gathering next week to spearhead a climate pact tasked with keeping Earth liveable for humanity...

Paris climate talks: the issues

Climate change is starting to have a personal impact on billions of people and we need to cut back on greenhouse gases and adapt to a warmer world...

Men work on the site where the upcoming COP21 World Climate Summit will be held at Le Bourget, near Paris, France, November 19, 2015. Reuters/Benoit Tessier

Heads of state invited to climate talks in Paris starting on Nov. 30 have confirmed they will attend even after the Nov. 13 attacks by Islamic State militants that killed 130 people, a French presidency source said.

This graphic provided by National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) shows land and ocean temperatures for October 2015. Even for a record breaking hot year for Earth, October stood out as absurdly warm. The hottest October on record by a third of a degree over the old mark, a large margin for weather records. (NOAA via AP)

WASHINGTON (AP) — Even in a record-breaking hot year for Earth, October stood out as absurdly warm.

This image obtained November 16, 2015 from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) shows the satellite sea surface temperature departure for the month of October 2015, where orange-red colors are above normal temperatures and are indicative of El Nino. (AFP Photo/Handout/NOAA)

Matters seem to have escalated in the current dispute between Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas), chair of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

THE CURRENT GLOBAL WARMING EMERGENCY CONDITION

WE MUST MOBILIZE FOR A SAFE CLIMATE!

Time is running out to protect our miraculous planet. Our task ahead is clear: we either phase-out fossil fuels now or we end humanity. No gradual, decades-long plan for emissions reductions or carbon budgets can plausibly protect a livable climate—despite widespread belief otherwise.

A new video simulation from NASA is so beautiful to watch, it's easy to forget it's tracking one of the biggest disruptors of our climate...

People hold placards at last year’s climate march in Paris. Photograph: Tom Craig/Demotix/Corbis

People around the world should protest ‘on behalf of those who can’t’, say organisers of climate march forbidden in light of Paris terror attacks...

U.S. Senate Republicans on Wednesday said Congress would not approve the Obama administration's $500 million request for its first payment into a United Nations climate fund, a move they said would undermine the upcoming climate change summit in Paris.

Climate change is increasingly understood as an issue of inter-generational justice, and it has become a truism that today's children will bear the brunt of our inaction. In spite of this, children are rarely addressed in climate change policy - or given a seat at the table when climate change agreements are being discussed. In countries around the world, the voice of the generation with the most at risk is mostly unheard...

A residential block covered in smog in Changchun, northeast China's Jilin province (AFP Photo/STR)

Don't forget public health at Paris Climate talks: WHO

Livestock is responsible for 65% of all human-related emissions of nitrous oxide – a greenhouse gas with 296 times the global warming potential of carbon dioxide, and which stays in the atmosphere for 150 years...

Can the earth be saved by bureaucrats in long meetings, reciting jargon and acronyms while surrounded by leaning towers of documents?

France will limit a U.N. climate summit in Paris starting in two weeks' time to core negotiations and cancel planned marches and concerts after the attacks that killed 129 people, Prime Minister Manuel Valls said on Monday.

Paris (AFP) - If mankind fails to curtail global warming, we will have to deal with fallout ranging from massive refugee crises and submerged cities to scorching heatwaves and drought, scientists say.

President Obama and other world leaders will still meet in Paris later this month, despite the recent spat of terrorist attacks. In fact, Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius says the meeting is essential, and must go forward...

The Paris climate talks are set to begin at the end of this month. Here’s what you need to know about which nations are involved, what policies they will be hashing out, and what the chances are of substantial progress...

  The goal of COP-21 – the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) 21st Conference of the Parties – in Paris at the end of November is to produce an international agreement to ensure greenhouse gas emissions are reduced by an amount necessary to prevent a 2 degrees Celsius rise in global average temperature this century. With that as a goal, the conference is doomed to failure. Three reasons why:

The Forests of Oregon, viewed from Bend. Credit: Rod Parmenter

Efforts to foster forests and slow deforestation, which is one of the leading causes of global warming, are largely being glossed over by most nations as they prepare for a historic round of climate negotiations.

US secretary of state, John Kerry, has said that any climate deal in Paris is ‘definitively not going to be a treaty’. Photograph: Brendan Smialowski/AP

US warned that any agreement in Paris will be enshrined in law after secretary of state said it would ‘definitively’ not be a treaty

An island in the Maldives, which is vulnerable to rising seas.
Credit: Alessandro Caproni/Flickr

If rich countries don’t agree to help poorer ones recover after storms amplified by global warming tear villages apart, or help communities prosper even as their homes sink into rising seas, climate negotiations in Paris risk being scuttled...

Nnimmo Bassey

“…it boils down to the fact that the world is in a state of potential destruction. There’s no use worrying about anything else.”

—Ansel Adam’s final interview, Summer of 1984.

1000 MILLENNIALS TOOK THE STREETS FOR JUSTICE ON RACE, CLIMATE, IMMIGRATION

On November 9th, a wave of people power swept over Washington, DC. In an epic demonstration of unity, 1,000 millennials took the streets for justice on race, climate, and immigration.

Haze shrouds the Musi River as vehicles drive across the Ampera Bridge in Indonesia. (Dimas Ardian/Bloomberg)

President Barack Obama looks at Bear Glacier during a boat tour of the Kenai Fjords National Park Seward, Alaska last September. | Getty

It's no accident the president rejected the Keystone pipeline before he seals a global deal to combat climate change.