Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro claims, without evidence, that the recent fires in the Amazon were financed by Leonardo DiCaprio.

Oil from an unknown source washes up on Brazil’s beaches. In most areas, little effort is being made to clean it up.

A 10-year-old sperm whale that washed up dead on a beach in Scotland has 220 pounds of netting, rope, and plastic in its stomach. 

Meltwater lakes in Greenland are draining through cracks in the ice to the bedrock below, speeding the progress of glaciers to the sea. One lake drained at the rate of one Olympic-size swimming pool every three seconds. 

Russia is taking advantage of increasingly ice-free Arctic waters to ship coal from the Taymyr Peninsula in northern Siberia to India. 

As the world’s nations meet in Madrid for COP25, the United Nations’ Framework Convention on Climate Change, researchers reveal that atmospheric concentrations of CO2—far from declining sharply as they must to avoid catastrophic warming—instead hit a record high in 2019. 

The city government of Portland, Oregon, is getting rid of its gasoline-powered leaf blowers. 

Moody’s downgrades the Canadian province of Alberta because of the volatility of its reliance on tar sands oil. 

Seven men found guilty of the murder of Honduran environmental leader Berta Cáceres are sentenced to terms of 30 to 50 years.

William Ruckelshaus dies. He was the first head of the Environmental Protection Agency and later deputy attorney general, a position from which he resigned in 1973 rather than follow then-president Richard Nixon’s order that he fire special Watergate prosecutor Archibald Cox in what came to be known as the “Saturday Night Massacre.” 

In a large-scale trial on several continents, the release of mosquitoes deliberately infected with a bacterium called Wolbachia results in a drop of 70 percent or more in the number of people infected with deadly dengue and chikungunya. 

The last Sumatran rhinoceros in Malaysia dies of cancer. 

A southern white rhinoceros conceived via artificial insemination is born at the San Diego Zoo.   

The Guardian newspaper’s Australian Bird of the Year poll is marred by voter fraud.

The band Coldplay will stop touring until it can offer carbon-neutral concerts.

When British prime minister Boris Johnson fails to appear at a climate debate, Britain’s Channel 4 puts a melting ice sculpture in his place. Johnson’s Conservative Party threatens to review the station’s broadcasting permit if it wins the upcoming general election.

The Trump administration orders rangers from national parks as far away as Wrangell-St. Elias in Alaska and the Great Smoky Mountains in North Carolina to patrol the Mexican border. 

Oxford Dictionaries chooses “climate emergency” as 2019’s word of the year. Dictionary.com goes with “existential.”