Associated Press

The large mysterious drones reported flying over parts of New Jersey in recent weeks appear to avoid detection by traditional methods such as helicopter and radio, according to a state lawmaker briefed on Wednesday by the Department of Homeland Security.

In a post on the social media platform X, the assemblywoman Dawn Fantasia described the drones as up to 6ft in diameter and sometimes traveling with their lights switched off. The Morris county …

By Jillian Ambrose, Energy correspondent

Shell has agreed to settle its controversial multimillion-dollar lawsuit against Greenpeace after its campaigners boarded an oil rig last year as part of a peaceful protest.

The oil company threatened to sue Greenpeace for $2.1m (£1.6m) in damages in one of the biggest legal threats against the group after its campaigners occupied a moving oil platform off the coast of the Canary Islands for 13 days to protest against the …

By Jessica Washington

On the morning of December 14, 2023, an Israeli airstrike killed three generations of Ahmad Nasman’s family in Gaza. In a single blow, his wife, three children, parents, and sister were gone. It would be days before Nasman would find the body of his 3-month-old daughter, Ayla, under the rubble. His eldest daughter, Arwa, only 5 years old, was decapitated in the blast.

“My body survived but my spirit died with my …

Rainforests are home to about 50% of all known plant and animal species, even though they cover only 6% of the Earth’s surface.

Every carbon atom in your body has cycled through the Earth’s atmosphere, oceans, and rocks many times over billions of years.

Rainforests are home to about 50% of all known plant and animal species, even though they cover only 6% of the Earth’s surface.

Bristlecone pines in California are some of the …

Negotiators have failed to reach agreement on a landmark treaty to curb plastic pollution, the diplomat chairing the talks has said.

Nearly 200 nations are taking part in a meeting in Busan, South Korea, which is intended to result in a landmark agreement after two years of discussions. A week of talks has failed to resolve deep divisions between “high-ambition” countries seeking a globally binding agreement to limit production and phase out harmful chemicals, and …

By Amy Goodman

The U.N. climate summit known as COP29 is underway in Baku, Azerbaijan, where negotiators are trying to make progress on reducing emissions and preventing the worst impacts of the climate crisis. Many activists, however, have criticized the decision to hold the talks in an authoritarian petrostate. The host country is also facing accusations that it is using the climate talks for business, after the head of the talks, Elnur Soltanov, was caught …

By Ben Noll

Blooming flower buds next to trees with changing leaves. Fans and air conditioners working overtime. Iced coffees instead of hot ones. Temperatures more like Florida than the Mid-Atlantic. The weather has been weirdly warm in the eastern two-thirds of the United States as November gets started — more than 10 degrees above average across parts of over 20 states.

Want to know how your actions can help make a difference for our …

By Ellen Nakashima, John Hudson and Josh Dawsey

President-elect Donald Trump spoke with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Thursday, the first phone conversation between the two men since Trump won the election, said several people familiar with the matter.

Sign up for Fact Checker, our weekly review of what's true, false or in-between in politics.
During the call, which Trump took from his resort in Florida, he advised the Russian president not to escalate the …

By Manuela Andreoni

What if financial markets treated trees like shareholders?

Enter the Tropical Forests Forever Facility, a new fund that Brazil, which is home to about a third of the planet’s tropical forests, is pitching to the world and that would pay developing countries a fee for every hectare of forest they maintain.

The project, first presented at the global climate summit in Dubai, last November, is now in its final stages of design …

By Raymond Zhong

Over the past 500 million years, our planet has gone from hot to cold to hot again. The oceans have risen and fallen. Ice caps have melted and reformed. It is a story with several acts, and sunlight and carbon dioxide are the main players.

The better scientists can reconstruct the climate’s story so far, the better they might predict how it will play out in the future, now that there’s a …

By SARAH EL DEEB

DAMASCUS, Syria (AP) — Hundreds of Syrians marched through central Damascus on Thursday in the funeral procession of a well-known anti-government figure, chanting calls for justice for the activist who was killed in prison during the last days of President Bashar Assad’s rule.

Unimaginable only a week earlier, the procession for Mazen al-Hamada recalled the funerals-turned-protests of the early days of the uprising against Assad 13 years ago.

With the fear …

By Tom Perkins

Mineral water from several European nations has been found for the first time to be contaminated with TFA, a type of PFAS “forever chemical” that is a reproductive toxicant accumulating at alarming levels across the globe.

The finding is startling because mineral water should be pristine and insulated from manmade chemicals. The contamination is thought to stem from the heavy application of pesticides containing TFA, or compounds that turn into it in …

By Austyn Gaffney

With about a month and a half left until the Trump administration takes over the White House, I called Bill McKibben, a journalist, author and activist, to ask where the climate movement goes next.

(I also reported on how youth climate activists are evolving — changing tactics and growing up.)

The outlook for the movement that McKibben has helped lead for more than three decades may seem grim. Donald Trump, who has …

By Hiroko Tabuchi

For decades, a little-known company now owned by a Goldman Sachs fund has been making millions of dollars from the unlikely dregs of American life: sewage sludge.

The company, Synagro, sells farmers treated sludge from factories and homes to use as fertilizer. But that fertilizer, also known as biosolids, can contain harmful “forever chemicals” known as PFAS linked to serious health problems including cancer and birth defects.

Farmers are starting to find …

By Abe Streep for ProPublica

Black Butte is an inactive volcano that rises from the high desert in eastern Oregon. In May 2022, a turboprop plane approached its pine-blanketed slopes, carrying about 10 men wearing bulky Kevlar outfits. They were smokejumpers with the United States Forest Service, the agency that directs the majority of the nation’s efforts to manage wildfires. Within the vast and hierarchical fire service, smokejumpers occupy a singular niche, parachuting into remote …

By Oliver Milman

Donald Trump’s cabinet picks have been eclectic and often controversial but a unifying theme is emerging, experts say, with the US president-elect’s nominees offering staunch support to fossil fuels and either downplaying or denying the climate crisis caused by the burning of these fuels.

Trump ran on promises to eviscerate “green new scam” climate policies and to “drill, baby, drill” for more oil and gas, and his choices to run the major …

By Brad Plumer, Reporting from the COP29 climate summit in Baku, Azerbaijan

For years at global climate summits, nuclear energy was seen by many as part of the problem, not part of the solution.

Sama Bilbao y Leon has been attending the annual United Nations climate change talks since 1999, when she was a student of nuclear engineering. And for most of that time, she said, people didn’t want to discuss nuclear power at all.

…

By Victor Mather

It was a day as Australian as you can get: Sun, waves and surfing at the beach.

And then something distinctly un-Australian turned up.

Aaron Fowler and a friend were heading back to the parking lot after a day in the waves. “We saw something coming out of the water,” Mr. Fowler, a 37-year-old drywall repairman, said. “We thought it was a seabird, but then we thought, ‘Oh, that’s way too big,’ …

By Somini Sengupta, Photographs and Video by Andrew Testa

Were Heathcliff to roam the blustery moors around Wuthering Heights today, he might be interrupted by a ping on his cellphone saying something like this: The wind is raging, so power is cheap. It’s a good time to plug in the car.

OK. So the 18th-century literary occupants of these windswept hills received no such pings.

But Martin and Laura Bradley do. They live in Halifax, …

By Damian Carrington

Many of Earth’s “vital signs” have hit record extremes, indicating that “the future of humanity hangs in the balance”, a group of the world’s most senior climate experts have said.

More and more scientists are now looking into the possibility of societal collapse, says the report, which assessed 35 vital signs in 2023 and found that 25 were worse than ever recorded, including carbon dioxide levels and human population. This indicates a …

By Katie Surma

Amid the corporate events pervading New York’s “Climate Week,” an international people’s tribunal held an emotional hearing that spotlighted the ecosystems and people living in the shadow of fossil fuel projects.

Representatives from communities around the world, scientists and advocates told stories of human and nonhuman forced displacement, degraded heath, ruined economies and lost histories to the International Tribunal on the Rights of Nature on Sunday.

In India, coal mines are degrading …

The South American jungle, spanning nine countries, is seen as crucial to the fight against climate change due to its ability to absorb planet-warming carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

Deforestation, mainly for mining and agricultural purposes, has led to the loss of 12.5 percent of the Amazon's plant cover from 1985 to 2023, according to RAISG, a collective of researchers and NGOs.

This amounts to 88 million hectares (880,000 square kilometers, 339,773 square miles) of …

By Reuters

TEFE, Brazil, Sept 19 (Reuters) - The carcass of a baby dolphin lay on the sand bank left exposed by the receding waters in an Amazon lake that has been drying up in the worst drought on record.
Researchers recovered the dead animal on Wednesday and measured water temperatures that have been rising as the lake's level drops. In last year's drought, opens new tab, more than 200 of the endangered freshwater dolphins …

By Becky Ferreira

If you were to look up from Earth some 466 million years ago, you might have seen a gleaming ring stretching across the sky, some scientists say.

A study published this month links an uptick in impact craters during the Ordovician Period, an era before animals lived on land, to a ring made of asteroid debris that encircled our planet for millions of years.

Scientists have long speculated about the origin of …

By Sheera Frenkel, Ronen Bergman, and Hwaida Saad

The pagers began beeping just after 3:30 in the afternoon in Lebanon on Tuesday, alerting Hezbollah operatives to a message from their leadership in a chorus of chimes, melodies, and buzzes.

But it wasn’t the militants’ leaders. The pagers had been sent by Hezbollah’s archenemy, and within seconds the alerts were followed by the sounds of explosions and cries of pain and panic in streets, shops and …

By Gary Hartley

It is easy to get mired in a sense of hopelessness about the biodiversity crisis, but amid the doom and gloom, there are more than a few reasons to remain upbeat. For one thing, research this year underlined that conservation action works.

Thanks to the efforts of dedicated organisations, scientists, engaged private-sector partners and thousands of committed local people, there is an abundance of biodiversity success stories springing up in the UK. …

By Max Bearak

With her hair pulled back into a tight ponytail, her arms and legs covered with 20 tattoos, and her compact frame fitted out in athleisure, Crystal Smith, the elected chief of the Haisla people, looked more like the hometown basketball star she once was than the fossil fuel exporter she’s about to become.

Ms. Smith, 45, lives in an apartment that overlooks a nearly 100-mile-long inlet — a fjord, really — whose …

by Oliver Milman in Washington

Scientists are still puzzling over the reasons behind a streak of unexpected, record heat that scorched 2023 and into this year, sparking fears that the climate crisis could be moving faster than previously thought.

Is it the clouds? Or shipping? Or maybe a huge volcanic eruption?

A parade of climate researchers presented potential reasons for the apparent surge in global heating at the American Geophysical Union (AGU) meeting in Washington …

The Dutch have a reputation for obtaining energy by means of a windmill. This energy was used for all kinds of purposes, such as milling of raw material, water pumping, etc .. Today, the windmill is a means to generate sustainable energy.

The Dutch MSc Marinus Mieremet has been working since 2003 on a new and more efficient way of generating power by a wind turbine.

It is a windmill that yields more energy, produces …

By Cecilia Nowell

Take a drive through the Salinas or Central valleys in California and you’ll pass from town to town advertising its specialty fruit or vegetable: strawberries in Watsonville, garlic in Gilroy, pistachios in Avenal and almonds in Ripon. More than 400 types of commodities are grown in the Golden state – including a third of the vegetables and three-quarters of the fruits and nuts produced in the United States.

Much of that food …

By Michael E. Miller

SHEAS NOB STATE FOREST, Australia — The ecologist drove his weathered pickup truck through thick and shady eucalyptus forest. But as he reached a ridgeline, the woodland suddenly gave way to a sunbaked clearing of barren dirt and splintered wood the size of a football field.

“This was all koala habitat,” said Mark Graham, shaking his head. He pulled over to examine a gray gum tree that had been cut down …

By José Bautista and Amelia Nierenberg

Manuel Yerai, a farmer in southern Spain, watched helplessly on Monday night as hail the size of tennis balls ripped through the plastic sheeting covering his pepper plants, as Spain faced one of its most destructive rainfalls this year.

“My greenhouses look like they had been shot at,” Mr. Yerai, 40, said on Tuesday afternoon, speaking by phone from his farm in El Ejido, an agricultural region in Andalusia. …

By Betsy Reed

It was around dawn on a chilly day last November when West Virginia state troopers forcibly extricated Jerome Wagner out from a 25ft-deep pit where he was locked to a drilling machine being used to finish construction of a beleaguered gas pipeline.

The veteran climate activist was trying to draw attention to the Mountain Valley pipeline (MVP) – a 300-mile (480km) fossil fuel project mired by environmental controversies and blocked by court …

By Sarah Kaplan and Simon Ducroquet

An ambitious effort to understand the Earth’s climate over the past 485 million years has revealed a history of wild shifts and far hotter temperatures than scientists previously realized — offering a reminder of how much change the planet has already endured and a warning about the unprecedented rate of warming caused by humans.

The timeline, published Thursday in the journal Science, is the most rigorous reconstruction of Earth’s …

By Hiroko Tabuchi

Allison Jumper’s family was a picture of healthy living. Active kids. Wholesome meals. A freezer stocked with organic beef from her in-laws’ farm in Maine.

Then in late 2020, she got a devastating call from her brother-in-law. High levels of harmful “forever chemicals” had been detected on their farm and in their cows’ milk, and they were getting shut down.

At first, Mrs. Jumper worried only about her in-laws’ livelihoods. But soon, …

By Nicolás Rivero

Here’s a way you can help protect the U.S. food system from pests, disease and climate change. All you have to do is plant a seed.

Each year, hundreds of American gardeners sign up for a citizen science program run by Seed Savers Exchange, a nonprofit that preserves thousands of heirloom crop varieties from around the United States. The Iowa-based group is looking for information about where these crop varieties will thrive …