Speculators are buying up large swaths of West Texas desert to mine sand to sell to fracking operations. 

U.S. home-builders are constructing more three-car garages than one-bedroom apartments.

Hurricane Maria hits Puerto Rico, knocking out power to the entire island, perhaps for several months. As much as three feet of rain fall in a single day.

In the wake of Hurricane Irma, no living person is left on the Caribbean island of Barbuda.

San Francisco and Oakland sue the world’s five largest fossil fuel corporations for the cost of sea walls and other infrastructure necessary to protect the cities from sea-level rise and other consequences of climate change. 

A new study finds a 5 percent chance that warming greater than 5ºC will occur by the end of the century, posing an “existential threat” to humanity. 

Agents from the Department of Agriculture’s Wildlife Services unit shoot and kill a Mexican gray wolf in Arizona. The Mexican gray wolf is the rarest of gray wolf subspecies in the United States and has been listed as an endangered species since 1976.

Body mass is found to be a strong predictor of extinction risk. The smallest vertebrate species are at special risk of losing their habitat, while the largest are frequently killed by humans. 

A leaked memorandum from Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke shows that he intends to shrink six national monuments, including Grand Staircase–Escalante and Bears Ears in Utah, Cascade-Siskiyou on the Oregon-California border, and Nevada’s Gold Butte.

Thirty to 40 percent of cocoa beans from the world’s three largest cocoa traders are from trees grown illegally in national parks and other ostensibly protected areas in the Ivory Coast. 

Nicaragua will join the Paris climate accord, leaving only the United States and Syria outside the pact.

Representative Jim Bridenstine (R-Okla.), Donald Trump’s nominee to head NASA, is a climate skeptic who once demanded that President Obama apologize for funding climate research. He is, however, interested in studying climate change on Mars.

Faced with exploding populations of jellyfish in Mediterranean waters, Italians are trying to figure out how to eat them. 

A patch of snow in Scotland’s Cairngorms mountain range known as the Sphinx is disappearing. It has melted only five times in the past 300 years.