I’ve got a complicated relationship with my Roomba, Keith, who sometimes refuses to charge but also works his wheels off ridding my home of dust. I hate dust, both because I’ve got allergies and because a good chunk of the particulates are toxic microplastics. Modern humans wage an unwinnable battle …

Next week, world leaders will head to Dubai for the Conference of the Parties—the United Nations’ annual climate meeting—to finalize the first “global stocktake,” assessing progress toward the Paris Agreement’s goals. The UN Environment Programme is not mincing words about how far from those goals nations are. Today, ahead of …

Solar panels and wind turbines get all the attention, but an underappreciated device is helping slash emissions in a big way: the heat pump. Instead of generating heat by burning natural gas, like a furnace does, an electric heat pump extracts warmth from outdoor air and transfers it inside. In …

Hot off a summer of record heat, a savage wildfire that destroyed Lahaina, and hurricanes that rapidly intensified into monsters, the United States today released its Fifth National Climate Assessment. The report—done with input from over 750 experts from every US state—exhaustively lays out the already severe effects climate change …

Boom and bust don’t hit much harder than in the Bering Sea. After reaching historically high numbers, the population of snow crabs there cratered by 90 percent following a heat wave in 2018 and 2019. Some 10 billion disappeared. Water temperatures had risen 3 degrees Celsius, but that probably didn’t …

Climate change would be much worse if it weren’t for the oceans, which have absorbed 90 percent of the excess heat humanity has pumped into the atmosphere. That warming of the oceans has already been devastating for the organisms that live there, but it’s also come back to bite us …

Five stories off the ground at Colorado State University, a highly unlikely garden grows under a long row of rooftop solar panels. It’s late October at 9 am, when the temperature is 30 degrees Fahrenheit and the wind is cutting. Not long before my arrival, researchers had pulled the last …

One of the most consequential places on earth is also one of its least accessible: Antarctica’s icy underbelly. The grounding line is where the terrestrial ice sheet reaches the sea and begins floating, becoming the ice shelf. As global temperatures rise, seawater is eating away at that belly, forcing the …

It’s no surprise that as the planet warms, we’re losing snow. What is surprising is that this loss isn’t just a consequence of more greenhouse gases heating the atmosphere, but of more particulate pollution from fossil fuels. When tiny bits of black carbon fall on snow, they darken it. The …

Salmon are legendary for their commitment to procreation. You know the drill: They wander the ocean before returning to rivers where they hatched, fire themselves upstream to spawn, and then drop dead. It’s not such a rigid life cycle, though. In fact, it’s a system that’s allowed a species like …