A part-time resident of Kauai is fined $40,000 for shooting and killing four endangered nene near his luxury home. His attorney says that the 72-year-old man was just trying to scare the birds away and “didn’t know a duck from a nene.”

Warmer waters off the Pacific coast trigger a 60-fold population explosion of “evil” purple sea urchins, which are decimating the region’s kelp forests. 

Donald Trump boasts, falsely, that the United States has the cleanest air in the world “BY FAR.” Trump’s EPA is rolling back clean-air standards.

Trump is confused about the nature of rivers. Water in California, he says, “naturally flows” to farms, but state officials “have—like a valve, but massive. Like from a faucet, but massive. And they turn it and the water goes pouring out into the Pacific Ocean.”

For the first time, the Trump administration approves oil drilling in federal waters off Alaska, in the Beaufort Sea.

Bristol Bay has a wildly successful salmon season, accounting for 42 million of the 50 million sockeye salmon caught in Alaska this year. An enormous copper mine is proposed in the area of the bay’s most productive salmon streams. 

The U.S. Geological Survey ranks 18 U.S. volcanoes as a “very high threat.” Top five: Kilauea, Mount St. Helens, Mount Rainier, Redoubt, and Mount Shasta. 

Three-quarters of Utah is experiencing severe, extreme, or exceptional drought. Analysts from Moody’s Investors Service warn that the drought may soon affect the state’s credit rating.  

Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts stays the Children’s Trust lawsuit against the U.S. government, which was to have gone to trial on October 29. The suit, brought by 21 young people, alleges that the government is causing them irreparable harm by allowing the burning of fossil fuel to continue. 

New York sues ExxonMobil, saying that the oil giant defrauded shareholders by playing down the dangers of climate change.

To the surprise of Wall Street, Tesla Motors delivers on CEO Elon Musk’s promise of a profitable third quarter. 

Aboriginal people in Australia have direct memories of events from 10,000 years ago—including the rise of sea levels at the end of the last ice age.

NASA photographs a mile-long, perfectly rectangular iceberg that calved from Antarctica’s Larsen C ice shelf. 

The year’s strongest storm, super typhoon Yutu, strikes U.S.territories in the Pacific that are home to 50,000 people.

East Island, an 11-acre atoll northwest of Hawaii that is critical habitat for the endangered Hawaiian monk seal, is entirely washed away by a hurricane. 

A team of “rat-eradication experts” searches for a rogue rodent on previously rat-free St. Paul Island in the Bering Sea off Alaska.

London has more trees than people.