Zoë Schlanger

Since the 1970s, more than 93% of excess heat captured by greenhouse gases has been absorbed by the oceans. To understand how much heat that is, think of it this way: If the oceans weren’t absorbing it, average global temperatures on land would be far higher—around 122°F, according to researchers on the documentary Chasing Coral. The global average surface temperature right now is 59°F.

People who live in mild weather are statistically more likely to be social, agreeable, open, and conscientious, according to new research that lends a layer of scientific credibility to a widespread American trope: Californians have way more chill.

The US Environmental Protection Agency is currently holding its only scheduled public hearing to repeal the country’s largest omnibus effort to reduce energy-sector emissions. And they’re doing it right in the middle of the most beleaguered portion of America’s coal country: West Virginia. (You can watch the hearing live here.)

Thanksgiving Day will be the 1,308th day of the Flint water crisis. For residents, that’s 1,308 days without being able to drink from the tap. Flint’s presence has waned in the news, but it remains a very real crisis for those in the city that still stack pallets of water bottles in the corner of their kitchen and can’t turn on the faucet for a glass of water.

Nebraska state regulators approved a new route for the Keystone XL oil pipeline across the state in a 3-2 vote on Monday (Nov. 20), removing the last permitting hurdle for the $8 billion project after nine years of controversy and delay. If completed, the Keystone XL would move oil-sands crude from Alberta, Canada, to southern Nebraska, where it would connect to existing Keystone pipelines. From there, the oil-sands crude would flow to refineries along the Texas Gulf coast.

In 1982, in the little town of Afton, North Carolina, residents sat down in the street, blocking trucks filled with toxic soil from heading to a local dump. The predominantly black town had been chosen as a dump site for the soil, which was contaminated with polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs. (The soil was dug out of the shoulders of state highways, where a local trucker had illegally dumped thousands of gallons of PCB-laden oil.) In a TV news-broadcast from the protest, one young woman tells the camera, “We are marching because we do not want this to affect our future.”

Crews are responding to an oil spill along the Keystone pipeline route in Amherst, South Dakota, according to TransCanada, the company that operates the pipeline.

When the US government is deciding which products and pollutants to limit or ban, it doesn’t just depend on science, no matter how clearly researchers are able to demonstrate harm. In most cases, officials from various federal health-related offices decide what science to listen to, which benefits outweigh which costs, and whether (and how) to conduct testing at all. For example, the decision to regulate a toxic substance in drinking water comes down to the “sole judgement” of the person running the Environmental Protection Agency.

Donald Trump arrived in Da Nang, Vietnam, today (Nov. 10), to a friendlier audience than he has found elsewhere. Whereas globally, a median of just 22% have confidence in the US president’s ability to guide international affairs, 58% of Vietnamese feel confident in him, according to a Pew survey.

In what has become a chronic condition for the city of 22 million, New Delhi is once again choking on extremely high levels of air pollution. In parts of the city, air quality index (AQI) readings have hit 999—the equivalent of smoking 45 cigarettes a day.

It takes a lot to convince the US Environmental Protection Agency to limit how much of a toxin can legally show up in America’s drinking water. The threshold for determining probable human harm is very high, and even if harm is detected, the toxin has to show up in enough public water sources with enough frequency, and at levels sufficiently high, before the EPA considers it significant enough to regulate. And even after all the exhaustive studies are done, the decision ultimately comes down to “the sole judgment of the Administrator,” the head of the agency, who may or may not be swayed by the data.

The new $1,000 rectangle from Apple has a troubling security flaw.

In many places across the globe, water access depends partly upon atmospheric “rivers,” bands of water vapor propelled along jets of air that trace swirling routes above the Earth. These rivers can change weather conditions in an instant. They drop vast amounts of rain in some places and not others, causing a patchwork of flooding and drought where their influence is strongest.

If you live in the US and speak English, chances are the “face with tears of joy” emoji is always in the recently-used section of your emoji keyboard.

The US published a much-anticipated report on climate change Friday (Nov. 3), coauthored by 13 federal agencies, that unequivocally confirms three conclusions:

Throughout his campaign and into his first year as president, Donald Trump vowed to bring back US coal jobs and revitalize the dying industry. He heralded the opening of the first new coal mine of his era this summer as a fulfillment of his campaign promises. The Acosta mine, owned by Corsa Coal, is set to employ fewer people than the average supermarket.

On Halloween weekend in 1948, two dozen people in a small American town suddenly died. The killer came in on the air—or rather, it was the air.

Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere increased a record amount from 2015 to 2016, leaving the air laden with a concentration of the potent greenhouse gas not seen for at least the last 800,000 years, the period for which we have direct measurements from ice cores. The increase essentially guarantees that in the absence of rapid and dramatic cuts to emissions, catastrophic temperature increases “well above” those the Paris agreement sought to avoid will become a reality by end of the century, according to Petteri Taalas, the head of the World Meteorological Organization.

The US Food and Drug Administration’s ban on triclosan in hand soaps and body wash took effect September, 2017. But the antimicrobial and its chemical relatives are still legally on the ingredient lists for loads of other products Americans and people all over the world put on their skin and in their mouths. Prime among the triclosan-ridden products are toothpastes—and toothpaste may be causing us to ingest more triclosan than we think.

Power lines can cause wildfires. If one comes in contact with a dry tree—of which California has plenty—it can cause a spark, then a flame. On the night of Oct. 8, when the wildfires that have ravaged northern California began, local fire crews were called to at least 10 different locations along Pacific Gas & Electric’s power lines after 911 calls reported sparking wires and other problems.

As expected, Nicaragua has signed on to the Paris climate agreement, which sets a planet-wide goal of keeping the global average temperature well below 2°C above the pre-industrial age. That leaves Syria as the only nation never to have signed on; the US joins war-torn Syria as one of only two nations currently opposed the agreement.

What was set to be a regional conference on the ecology of a New England watershed turned into a yet another spectacle of the Trump administration’s fixation on scrubbing mentions of climate change from the federal lexicon. This time, instead of rewriting web pages or deleting data, the US Environmental Protection Agency canceled its scientists’ speaking gigs.

A common backyard bird evolved an extra-long beak in a stunningly short period of time, researchers have found, and the reason might be the very human (and specifically very British) phenomenon of bird feeders.

Since the 2013 release of the documentary Blackfish, which lambasted SeaWorld for its treatment of orcas, attendance at the company’s entertainment parks has been dropping, and dropping further.