By Bob Berwyn

Research released this week raises new questions about how much more Earth may warm, or cool, if and when human carbon dioxide emissions zero out. Best estimates to date suggest that the global surface temperature would stabilize within a few decades, but the new paper in the journal Frontiers in Science examines the uncertainties around that conclusion, including how the planet’s key carbon dioxide-absorbing systems, like forests and oceans, will respond. 

By Nicholas Kusnetz, Lee Hedgepeth, Amy Green, Phil McKenna, Dylan Baddour, Aydali Campa, Wyatt Myskow, Marianne Lavelle and Kristoffer Tigue

If there is one overarching message from the nation’s latest climate assessment, it is that nowhere will be spared. 

By Marianne Lavelle, Katie Surma, Kiley Price, Nicholas Kusnetz

WASHINGTON—In a sprawling, multimedia report that stresses it is not too late to act, the Biden administration on Tuesday delivered a sobering catalog of climate change’s impacts in every corner of the United States—from battered coasts to parched cornfields to blazing forests. It measures the human toll, including at least 700 people dying of heat-related illness each year, in a nation warming 60 percent more quickly than the world as a whole.

By Kristoffer Tigue, Georgina Gustin, Liza Gross, Victoria St. Martin

WASHINGTON—Whether it’s the likelihood of living in a flood zone, lacking access to parks or having fewer resources to recover from a destructive storm, the consequences of climate change are not experienced equally in the United States. That’s a key message from some of the nation’s leading climate scientists, public health experts and economists in a landmark federal report released Tuesday.

By Amy Green

ORLANDO, Fla.—It used to be the water spilled over Lake Okeechobee’s southern shore, flowing eventually into the sawgrass prairies of the Florida Everglades. For thousands of years the marsh vegetation flourished and died here in an endless cycle, the plant remains falling beneath the slow-coursing water to form a rich layer of organic soil called peat.

By Bob Berwyn

During the past year, the needles on the climate dashboard for global ice melt, heatwaves, ocean temperatures, coral die-offs, floods and droughts all tilted far into the red warning zone. In summer and fall, monthly global temperature anomalies spiked beyond most projections, helping to drive those extremes, and they may not level off anytime soon, said James Hansen, lead author of a study published today in the journal Oxford Open Climate Change that projects a big jump in the rate of warming in the next few decades.

Interview by Jenni Doering, “Living on Earth”

From our collaborating partner “Living on Earth,” public radio’s environmental news magazine, an interview by Managing Producer Jenni Doering with Bob Berwyn Reid of The Allegheny Front.

By Amy Green

ORLANDO, Fla.—A new federal proposal calls for creating a conservation area that would span 12 counties in Florida, from the Everglades’ headwaters in the center of the state to sawgrass prairies further south, preserving a region that is home to imperiled species like the Florida panther, the official state animal.

By Wyatt Myskow

The Phoenix summer of 2023 was one for the record books.

By Lee Hedgepeth

An Alabama judge on Wednesday ordered that the municipal water utility in Prichard, a Mobile suburb, be placed under receivership after witnesses described crisis conditions in the majority Black city due to failing water infrastructure that loses nearly 60 percent of its capacity each month to leakage.