Hot Mess

By the end of 2016 in the U.S., over 1 million homes had solar panels, with four times as many installed that year compared to just four years earlier. But if you don’t own the roof over your head, or can’t afford this kind of upgrade, are you left out of the solar energy revolution?

Coral reefs cover less than one percent of the seafloor, and yet they’re home to a quarter of all marine life, making them some of the most biodiverse places on Earth. But their future looks bleak. Decades of environmental threats like warming waters and ocean acidification have pushed reefs to the brink. Can we use science to bring them back?

Energy efficiency standards have quietly been saving people mountains of money and helping avoid planet-warming emissions at the same time.

Deforestation is a big problem for the climate. This kind of land use releases more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than any single country, besides the United States or China. And most of the deforestation in the world today happens because people want to put farms where forests are. So, figuring out how to farm with trees instead of just chopping them down could help us fight climate change.

About half the world has internet access. That’s 3.6 billion people surfing the web. How much energy is that using? And what is our online world doing to our planet’s climate?

As the world figures out how to live with a rapidly changing climate, traditional knowledge from indigenous cultures could help us understand just how things are transforming.

Imagine that aliens landed and gifted us a clean, limitless energy source. Instead of killing each other over this technology, we decided to transform the world into a carbon-free society. This wondrous source would power our homes, industries, cars and planes, and humanity’s annual rate of carbon pollution would almost instantly fall to zero. What would that mean for global warming?

Thanks to climate change, disease carrying critters are expanding their ranges, and their seasons are getting longer -- meaning they have more space and more time to take a bite out of you or me.

Earth’s atmosphere naturally contains greenhouse gases. Without them, the world would be way too cold for humans. But we are adding extra greenhouse gases, which are causing Earth to heat up and disrupting weather patterns worldwide. So which of these many gases is heating Earth the most?

In 2017, storms, floods, and droughts displaced 18 million people from their homes worldwide. And by some estimates, over the next three decades, 200 million people may need to leave their homes to escape the same kind of disasters, made worse by climate change. Where in the world will all these people go?

It’s impossible to say that climate change is responsible for any individual storm or hurricane, but climate change is making these storms stronger. How much stronger? It turns out, Hurricane Harvey is the ideal test case to measure how a warming planet and warming oceans, amplify our worst storms.

We're putting more and more carbon dioxide and other gases into the atmosphere, which are trapping the sun's energy, and lo and behold, our planet is heating up in response. To fix this, we could cut carbon dioxide emissions, but that’s been hard. What if there were a shortcut? What if we could reflect some of the sun’s energy away before it had a chance to get trapped? Like… with space mirrors!?