Explore the Great Acceleration — the explosive post-1950 surge in human activity reshaping Earth's climate, biodiversity, and ocean systems.
Climate change
Present-day climate change includes both global warming—the ongoing increase in global average temperature—and its wider effects on Earth's climate system. Climate change in a broader sense also includes previous long-term changes to Earth's climate. The modern-day rise in global temperatures is driven by human activities, especially fossil fuel burning since the Industrial Revolution. Fossil fuel use, deforestation, and some agricultural and industrial practices release greenhouse gases. These gases absorb some of the heat that the Earth radiates after it warms from sunlight, warming the lower atmosphere. Earth's atmosphere now has roughly 50% more carbon dioxide, the main gas driving global warming, than it did at the end of the pre-industrial era, reaching levels not seen for millions of years.
Daniel Christian Wahl: “Bioregional Futures: Reconnecting to Place for Planetary Health” - The Great Simplification
In the past century of abundant energy surplus, humanity’s globalized, large-scale approach to problem-solving
Global Warming Is Rapidly Accelerating, New Paper Finds
A new study found the first statistically significant evidence that global warming is ramping up at a horrifying rate.
The shock of the anthropocene: the earth, history and us
Dissecting the new theoretical buzzword of the "Anthrop…
BBC Earth | Environment, Climate Change, AI, Food, Health, Social, & Technology
As we face the world’s greatest environmental challenges, BBC Earth brings you solutions in psychology, food, climate change, health, social trends, and technology that can make the world a more sustainable place.
BBC Earth | Environment, Climate Change, AI, Food, Health, Social, & Technology
As we face the world’s greatest environmental challenges, BBC Earth brings you solutions in psychology, food, climate change, health, social trends, and technology that can make the world a more sustainable place.
BBC Earth | Environment, Climate Change, AI, Food, Health, Social, & Technology
As we face the world’s greatest environmental challenges, BBC Earth brings you solutions in psychology, food, climate change, health, social trends, and technology that can make the world a more sustainable place.
How to solve climate change and make life more awesome
We already have all the tools we need to fix climate change. We just need to use them.
Appropriate Technology, Permacomputing, Post Growth, and Ecomodernism.
To adapt to the changing climate, we need to radically rethink how and why we do the things we do. From technology, to social movements, to economics. The world is at stake. And we can change it.
The Climate of History in a Planetary Age
For the past decade, historian Dipesh Chakrabarty has been one of the most influential scholars addressing the meaning of climate change. Climate change, he argues, upends long-standing ideas of history, modernity, and globalization. The burden of The Climate of History in a Planetary Age is to grapple with what this means and to confront humanities scholars with ideas they have been reluctant to reconsider—from the changed nature of human agency to a new acceptance of universals. Chakrabarty argues that we must see ourselves from two perspectives at once: the planetary and the global. This distinction is central to Chakrabarty’s work—the globe is a human-centric construction, while a planetary perspective intentionally decenters the human. Featuring wide-ranging excursions into historical and philosophical literatures, The Climate of History in a Planetary Age boldly considers how to frame the human condition in troubled times. As we open ourselves to the implications of the Anthropocene, few writers are as likely as Chakrabarty to shape our understanding of the best way forward.
The “Anthropocene”
Human activities are exerting increasing impacts on the environment on all scales, in many ways outcompeting natural processes. This includes the manufacturing of hazardous chemical compounds which are not produced by nature, such as for instance the...
The great nutrient collapse
The atmosphere is literally changing the food we eat, for the worse. And almost nobody is paying attention.
We asked our climate reporters to highlight one idea for positive change. We got a chronicle of global transformation
There are countless initiatives around the world that can inspire people and spur them into action. Amid the devastation of the climate crisis, our journalists strive to highlight these stories of hope
Safeguarding human health in the Anthropocene epoch: report of The Rockefeller Foundation–Lancet Commission on planetary health
Far-reaching changes to the structure and function of the Earth's natural systems represent a growing threat to human health. And yet, global health has mainly improved as these changes have gathered pace. What is the explanation? As a Commission, we are deeply concerned that the explanation is straightforward and sobering: we have been mortgaging the health of future generations to realise economic and development gains in the present. By unsustainably exploiting nature's resources, human civilisation has flourished but now risks substantial health effects from the degradation of nature's life support systems in the future.
Climate-driven depopulation and adaptation realities in America’s coastal ground zero
With global temperatures poised to exceed the 1.5 °C Paris Agreement threshold—a level that triggered substantial ice-sheet collapse during the Last Interglacial—low-elevation coastal zones face sea-level commitments far beyond current planning horizons. With this geological frame of reference, we examine the impact of sea-level rise on what may be the most physically vulnerable coastal zone in the world using prehistoric and contemporary patterns of human mobility. We highlight the positive aspects of the recently commenced out-migration in this region and argue that the fate of communities landwards of this coastal zone will be decided in the next few decades.
