Michael E Mann, a climate scientist at Penn State University. ‘Michael has most certainly become a lightning rod,’ said MIT climate scientist Kerry Emanuel. Photograph: Supplied

Researchers will have to deal with attacks from a range of powerful foes in the coming years – and for many, it has already started...

British Antarctic Survey

It’s summer in Antarctica, which has scientists scurrying around the seventh continent carrying out various research experiments. That includes monitoring the massive crack that has spread across the Larsen C ice shelf, located on the Antarctic Peninsula...

Goats with ribs showing crowd around a a trough of well water in Somaliland region of Somalia, which is experiencing a devastating drought, on Feb. 9, 2017. (VOA/Jason Patinkin)

BURAO, SOMALILAND — Even the hyenas won't eat the carcasses of Mohamed Aden Guleid's sheep, goats and camels, which litter the landscape in Somalia's northwest Somaliland region...

An iceberg in the East Antarctic basin, seen from a drone launched from the RV Investigator. Instruments on the vessel are taking taken continuous readings of atmospheric conditions. Photograph: CSIRO

Australian scientists seek to understand how non-carbon aerosolised particles affect global temperatures...

wens Branch, a small tributary of the Nanticoke River, was part of a Nature Conservancy property near Riverton before it was transferred to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. (Dave Harp)

Subtle changes in nutrient levels, vegetation lurking beneath river’s sublime beauty...

The temperature of the North Sea is increasing with climate change. Good news for immigrant species - bad news for cold-loving residents...

The kelp is not getting enough cold, nutrient-rich water. credit: Mick Baron

There are fears Tasmania's giant kelp forests are almost extinct...

TODAY file photo

PARIS — Tiny natural ponds pose an overlooked danger for speeding up global warming, according to a study published on Monday (Feb 20) in the journal Nature Climate Change...

When the glaciers that fed La Paz, Bolivia, its water vanished, citizens woke to dry taps, civil unrest—and a Water General’s reign. Photograph by Christina Holmes

The city is high and dry after losing its glaciers...

An Obama administration regulation aimed to reduce the environmental and climate impact of mountaintop removal coal mining and Donald Trump's reversal could threaten some rare species. Credit: Getty Images

The stream protection rule finalized under President Obama would have reduced emissions and the harmful effects of coal mining on thousands of waterways...

Arctic sea ice has reached record lows this winter around Greenland and elsewhere, following the predictions of remarkably accurate models based on global warming. Credit: Getty Images

Study from decades ago proved remarkably accurate in showing how global warming would affect the Arctic's sea ice, currently in steep decline...

Newly bleached corals discovered near Palm Island on the Great Barrier Reef. Photograph: Australian Marine Conservation Society

Exclusive: Coral bleaching found near Palm Island as unusually warm waters are expected off eastern Australia, with areas hit in last year’s event in mortal danger...

A cyclist pedals on a flooded path in Marin during a king tide. (Sarah Craig)

Charges of Russian meddling in the 2016 election, cybersecurity and terrorism are topics that have recently dominated the national security conversation...

This simulation shows what the view of the Mountain Valley Pipeline would look like from Giles High School in Pearisburg. Courtesy of Hill Studio for Roanoke Valley Cool Cities Coalition

An organization that describes its mission as exposing the true costs of fossil fuels contends that the proposed Mountain Valley Pipeline and the separate but similar Atlantic Coast Pipeline would be “climate disasters”...

Members of an APU glacier travel and glaciology field course traverse the upper basin of Eklutna Glacier. (Louis Sass)

The days are numbered for the glacier that provides most of the drinking water for Alaska's largest city. Fortunately for Anchorage's current generations, that number of days is high...

Scientists, science advocates, and community members rallied in Copley Square in Boston on Sunday. Jessica Rinaldi/Globe Staff

“Without science, there’s no America,” said one attendee at the rally in Copley Square in Boston on Sunday...

Canada's glaciers and ice caps are now a major contributor to sea level change, a new UCI study shows. Ten times more ice is melting annually due to warmer temperatures. Seen here is the edge of the Barnes Ice Cap in May 2015. (NASA/John Sonntag)

Since 2005, study finds that surface melt off glaciers in the North has risen by 900%...

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Zack Labe ✔ @ZLabe

Prelim NSIDC (daily) data indicates #Antarctic sea ice has dropped below its previously all-time lowest #seaice extent on record (satellite)

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Arctic temperatures have finally started to cool off after yet another winter heat wave stunted sea ice growth over the weekend. The repeated bouts of warm weather this season have stunned even seasoned polar researchers, and could push the Arctic to a record low winter peak for the third year in a row.

Meanwhile, Antarctic sea ice set an all-time record low on Monday in a dramatic reversal from the record highs of recent years....

A boy after a rally on World Environment Day in Kathmandu, in 2012. Navesh Chitrakar / Reuters

In recent weeks, “Energy Kids” has cut information about fossil fuels’ environmental impacts. Effort meant to inform younger generations about energy and the environment sees sentences reworked and pie charts eliminated...

Credit: Jeremy Lips for Live Science

ATLANTA — Climate change is poised to affect the world's food supply in three key ways, experts say...

A small tortoiseshell butterfly near the M8 motorway, Glasgow. Photograph: Cath Scott

Pesticides, paving and higher temperatures have put huge strain on butterflies in cities over past two decades, finds study...

Newport Beach in Southern California. A powerful storm swept through that region of the state on Saturday. Credit Mark Rightmire/The Orange County Register, via Associated Press

A powerful storm with near hurricane-force winds swept through Southern California on Saturday, killing at least two people and causing widespread disruptions, but providing a definitive respite from five years of drought...

In this installment of our “Climate Diaries” series, CBS News correspondent Mark Phillips continues his reporting from Antarctica, one of the most remote places on earth. He shows us the dramatic shifts happening around a half-century-old research base. The icescape and the area’s penguin population reveal the impact of the rapid pace of climate change...

CBS News

“We’re counting the penguins every year,” said Shawn Farry. He is called the “bird man.” But lately, he’s had a lot fewer birds to study...

Gyldenlove Glacier, Greenland (Pic: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center)

Environment minister says warm temperatures and low levels of Arctic sea ice are an early warning to world that climate change is biting...

Harvesting coffee cherries at a plantation on the slopes of the Agua volcano in Guatemala. Dec. 17, 2015. Bloomberg via Getty Images

What’s happening in Guatemala is, in many ways, a harbinger of what’s to come throughout the world...

Rex Tillerson (Pic: World Economic Forum/Michael Wuertenberg)

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

A unified scientific approach has been called for to help protect one of the most threatened little known ecosystems on earth.

Seagrass is an underappreciated marine organism. New research shows how important it is to the health of the oceans, and people, too...

Via NASA Climate Change’s Facebook page: “Two of the three top January temperature anomalies have been during the past two years.”

If you peruse NASA’s social media feeds dedicated to climate change, you would have no clue a new administration has taken power that has expressed doubts about the reality or seriousness of the issue...

JOSH HANER

Climate change is threatening to push a crowded capital toward a breaking point...

Illustration by Luisa Rivera

Many U.S. corporations have adopted environmentally friendly practices and touted themselves as green companies. But when it comes to government climate policy, these businesses have been largely silent and support politicians who oppose taking any action...

Petrochemical complex, La Porte, Texas Credit: Roy Luck, CC BY 2.0

On the heels of the shale gas rush that's swept the U.S. for the past decade, another wave of fossil fuel-based projects is coming — a plastic and petrochemical manufacturing rush that environmentalists warn could make smog worse in communities already breathing air pollution from fracking, sicken workers, and expand the plastic trash gyres in the world's oceans...

Al Gore. Climate Reality

Experts paint a dire portrait of climate change’s public health impacts, but leave a little room for hope...

Former Vice President Al Gore, the founder and chairman of The Climate Reality Project, opens the Climate & Health Meeting at The Carter Center in Atlanta on Thursday, Feb. 16, 2017. The conference, which was organized after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention canceled its own conference on climate change and health, brought together scientists, public health officials and health care providers. (Alex Sanz/Associated Press)

Hear from experts how the climate crisis effects public health...

Hroexperts how the climate crisis affects public health.

The frightening thing is that the amount of pertinent stories are frighteningly snowballing...

COMING STORM A Kyrgyzstan shepherd stands in front of a yurt as a storm approaches in the upper reaches of the Chon-Kemin Valley. John Wendle

Rising temperatures are bringing ethnic tensions to a boil in Central Asia...

Photo: Supplied / Christchurch City Council

Fires like the huge one burning in the Port Hills are rare in New Zealand but are likely to become more common, a rural fire expert says...

Things aren't looking great, but we can fix it according to a new book. Image: Stuart McEvoy/Newspix/REX/Shutterstock

We may think we're clever with our internet-connected fridges and such, but the reality is much of what sustains us depends on simple things...

Many scientists, led by those doing climate work, have expressed concern about the Trump administration's actions and the future of federal science. Credit: Wikimedia

Fearing an assault on science from the Trump administration, the Union of Concerned Scientists is creating a way for federal scientists to report abuses...

Video: William Happer: who is Trump’s likely science adviser?

William Happer, of Princeton University, has described some climate science as ‘like Hare Krishna or something like that’. Photograph: Ralph Lee Hopkins/Alamy

William Happer, frontrunner for job of providing mainstream scientific opinion to officials, backs crackdown on federal scientists’ freedom to speak out...

Before and after satellite imagery show an iceberg breaking off the calving front of the Pine Island Glacier.
Credit: NASA Earth Observatory

The growing crack in the Larsen C ice shelf is the most dramatic example of change in Antarctica right now. But it isn’t the continent’s only frozen feature changing in a warming world...

Cracks are seen on the Fourcade glacier near Argentina's Carlini Base in Antarctica, January 12, 2017. REUTERS/Nicolas Misculin

Sea ice around Antarctica has shrunk to the smallest annual extent on record after years of resisting a trend of man-made global warming, preliminary U.S. satellite data showed on Tuesday...

Ocean Beach in San Francisco was hit hard by erosion last winter.
Credit: Nick/Flickr

As California reels from record-breaking erosion following punishing waves last winter, the federal government is turning to mud and sand from dredging projects to slow land losses and ease flooding nationwide as seas rise and storms intensify...

The remains of the St. Francis Dam in California, which burst just before midnight on March 12, 1928, and killed more than 400 people. Credit Associated Press

LOS ANGELES — The St. Francis Dam was a proud symbol of California’s engineering might and elaborate water system — until just before midnight on March 12, 1928, when it collapsed, killing more than 400 people in a devastating wall of water. Ever since, the state has had a reputation of diligent inspections as it has built the largest network of major public dams in the nation...

Credit: UNICEF Ethiopia/flickr

World Bank reports "a race" underway to secure sustainable energy, but a money gap leaves poorer nations—particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa—lagging...

Former U.S. Secretary of State James Baker speaks about a plan to repeal and replace the Clean Power Plan at the National Press Club in Washington February 8, 2017. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque

Representatives from a coalition of veteran Republican officials — including five who have either served as treasury secretary or as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers — met Wednesday with White House officials to discuss the idea of imposing a national carbon tax, rather than using federal regulations, to address climate change...

Melting sea ice is a troubling sign of record warmth in the Arctic. Credit: Getty Images

Record-high temperatures spike concerns about climate change's new normal in the melting Arctic and an already-hot Australia...

An African elephant, Nxai Pan, Botswana, Africa. Elephants’ ability to adapt to climate change is curtailed by their slow reproductive rates. Photograph: Jami Tarris/Getty Images

Climate change is threatening about 700 endangered species and policymakers must act urgently to lessen impact...

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau met with President Trump on Monday, with no sign that they discussed climate change. Credit: Reuters

A year after Justin Trudeau and Barack Obama pledged cooperation on climate goals, Canadian PM's first meeting with President Trump produced no mention of them...

Greenhouse gas emissions caused by humans over the past 45 years have increased the rate of temperature rise to 1.7 degrees celsius per century. Photograph: ISS/NASA

Researchers behind ‘Anthropocene equation’ say impact of people’s intense activity on Earth far exceeds that of natural events spread across millennia...

A pelagic red crab is seen here in San Diego, California. The crabs, also known as tuna crabs, normally live off Baja California, Mexico. As oceans warm, dozens of marine species off the coasts of the United States are shifting their ranges. Credit: David McNew/Getty Image

Q&A with Malin Pinsky, an ecologist studying how climate change is reshuffling marine species, and its ripple effects on society...

A Somali woman trudges through the arid landscape in northeastern Somalia, amid warnings the country could confront famine later this year. (Mohamed Abdiwahab / AFP/Getty Images)

 In Somalia, the farm animals are dying. The water holes have dried up. The crops have failed. With no food, water or money, people are trudging off their land, taking the long, dry walk to the nearest town to look for help...

Arctic sea ice under the midnight sun. Photograph: Solent News/Rex/Shutterstock

Temperatures are now so high at the north pole that scientists are contemplating radical schemes to avoid catastrophe...

Flying foxes roost in trees during the day. On Monday, 700 were found dead after a heatwave struck the Australian state of New South Wales (Photo: James Niland)

On a weekend rural communities suffered dangerous climate events, the government doubled down on coal...

Photo: olgalngs/iStock

We're not running out of fossil fuels, they're just not going to be worth it...

Temperature difference from normal, Feb. 10, 2017. (University of Maine Climate Re-analyzer)

Peer at a map of the Arctic and it glows fluorescent red. The warmth, compared to normal, is again nearly off the charts. It’s crazy and perhaps unsettling, but we have seen it coming...

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...

Cottages at Birling Gap were once one of seven properties. The fifth pebble-dash end-of-terrace was demolished in March 2014. Photograph: Mike Hewitt/Getty Images

From Wordsworth’s gardens to the south’s white cliffs and salmon rivers in Wales, climate change is wrecking historic sites, finds report...

PBS/AP

DURHAM -- Duke University researchers say the fish they caught in three North Carolina lakes that’ve taken power plants’ coal-ash waste showed relatively high levels of selenium, an element left over from the combustion process...

Green workers install a residential grid-tied solar array on a hillside in Malibu, California, USA. (Citizen of the Planet/Education Images/UIG via Getty Images)

Putting solar panels on rooftops and arrays is a labor-intensive process. You need people to design and manufacture the panels. Then people to market the panels to homes, businesses, and utilities. Then people to come and install them...

Abnormally warm air is expected to reach the North Pole by Thursday.
Credit: Climate Reanalyzer

Weird. Strange. Extreme. Unprecedented...

Folsom Reservoir near Sacramento, shown in a depleted state in August 2015, after the driest winter ever recorded. Dams like Folsom are trapping massive amounts of sediment that isn't available to rebuild eroding shorelines, a bill that will come due as sea level rise increases.Randall Benton, Sacramento Bee

Rivers are supposed to transport sediment. We need that sediment to combat sea level rise. But the dams we need for water are holding back the dirt, a problem that may become acute very soon...

Smoke billows from smokestacks and a coal-fired generator at a steel factory in China. Scientists have developed a new method for tracking countries' compliance with the goals set forth in the Paris Agreement. (Kevin Frayer / Getty Images)

 If the United States and its fellow Paris Agreement signatories are to meet global climate targets, they’re going to have to make serious commitments that attack the problem on multiple fronts, including reducing coal use, raising renewable energy, accelerating carbon-capture technologies and electrifying more of our automotive fleet, a new analysis shows...

Russian President Vladimir Putin, shaking hands with then-Exxon chief executive Rex Tillerson during a 2013 ceremony awarding oil company heads and employees, now finds himself aligned philosophically with the U.S. on a lack of enthusiasm for the Paris climate agreement. Credit: Sputnik/Michael Klimentyev/Kremlin/via REUTERS/File Photo

The only big emitter to not ratify the Paris climate agreement, Russia may find it easier to slough off climate action with the U.S. matching its oil-focused view...

Norway, Credit: Dean/flickr

The history of climate and human health gives us a glimpse of the dramatically amplified risks we face if present trends continue...

Michael Eisen in his lab at the University of California in Berkeley, Calif. Dr. Eisen registered the Twitter handle @SenatorPhD and declared his intention to run in the 2018 election for a seat in the United States Senate. Credit Jason Henry for The New York Times

Michael Eisen, an evolutionary biologist, is among the elite of American scientists, with a tenured position at the University of California, Berkeley, and generous funding from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute for his research on fruit flies...

NOAA researchers have faced unprecedented requests for access to their unpublished research from conservative groups and politicians. Credit: Getty Images

As researchers strive to keep their unpublished work private, many brace for more anti-science government interference under Donald Trump...

Rich Pedroncelli/AP

New measurements of the Sierra Nevada snowpack show California's snowiest winter in 20 years. But it may be too soon for sweeping policy changes...

Buddhist prayer flags drape an ice stupa in Ladakh, India. TRF/Athar Parvaiz

A glacial lake that threatens to burst needs to be drained to prevent disaster - but could its water be saved for future use?

Tenants Harbor fisherman and seaweed harvester Hale Miller maneuvers his barge while harvesting rockweed off the Muscle Ridge Islands in July 2016. credit: Merritt Carey

BOOTHBAY, Maine — Seaweed cultivation has been promoted in recent years in Maine as a way to produce local nutritious food and to boost the coastal economy...

Andrew Philip/Tearfund

Despite January rains heavy enough to cause flooding in some areas, the effects of severe drought continue to be felt keenly in many areas of Bolivia, affecting about 125,000 families. A resourceful village in Mizque province has come up with ways to eke out what little water is available...

This story is based on a radio interview. Listen to the full interview...