They're popping up all over America's public lands, bringing toxic chemicals and dangerous pollution to beautiful wild areas and nearby farms and communities. Fracking rigs have spread like poisonous mushrooms across land managed by the federal government, which leases millions of acres a year to oil and gas...

It's been one brutal piece of bad news after another. First, we learned that 2012 was the hottest year on record in the contiguous United States. Then, a federal report revealed that climate change is already affecting America -- and could raise U.S. temperature by as much as...

Coming face to face with wild polar bears is like nothing else I've ever done. This week, I have the extraordinary privilege of joining a group of scientists observing polar bear migration season from Polar Bear International's Buggy One on the Arctic tundra.

If you tune in to...

Remember your last job interview? Did you get to pick the questions or ignore hard issues?

Me neither. So why are the two candidates interviewing for America's top job dodging tough questions about their specific plans for tackling climate change?

And why aren't our political watchdogs -- from pundits...

This is how an ecosystem dies. The extent of summer sea ice across the Arctic recently reached the lowest point on record, according to satellite measurements from the National Snow and Ice Data Center.

If the polar meltdown continues at this pace, some experts say, the Arctic...

Reality can be profoundly persuasive. As Americans sweat out one of the hottest summers on record, we've watched in dismay as drought has withered endless acres of crops and pushed the federal government to declare "natural" disasters in more than half the nation's counties.

As temperatures have...

Some 17,000 people live in Boone, N.C. -- and none are movie stars, as far as I know. But this charming little mountain town does share at least two things with the city of Los Angeles.

Both Boone and L.A. are going to be hit hard by climate change....

Polar bears are in deep trouble. Without help, more than two-thirds of these amazing animals, including all the polar bears in Alaska, will likely be gone by 2050 -- driven off the planet by diminishing sea ice.

So it boggles the mind that the Obama administration recently announced plans to...

The hard truth about the this year's climate conference in Durban, South Africa, is that the outcome -- essentially committing to make an agreement a few years down the line to start cutting emissions a decade from now -- is horrendously inadequate for the scale and immediacy of the climate...

This week I'm out on the tundra in Wapusk National Park in Manitoba, Canada, on the shores of western Hudson Bay, for educational webcasting and blogging with Polar Bears International. Polar bears gather in this area every fall, waiting for the bay to freeze...

On Monday, a federal judge struck down a Bush administration rule that prohibited regulation of greenhouse gases under the Endangered Species Act to save polar bears from extinction. That provision has, since 2008, been the biggest hurdle to using all possible means to address the most pressing threat...

You've changed your light bulbs. You ride your bike or take public transportation. But averting the impending climate disaster requires more. We already have a proven-effective, time-tested law for dramatically reducing greenhouse gas pollution: the Clean Air Act. We need our national leaders to use it.

Unfortunately, the Obama administration...

You can say this for 2011: There's never been a year quite like it.

Dangerous summer heat waves scorched the Midwest and East with record-high temperatures, causing at least 64 deaths. An unprecedented drought in Texas forced the government to declare the entire state a

The onset of the Obama administration was supposed to mean a lot of things, including an end to the Bush-era war on science, especially when it came to climate change and endangered species. No agency needed these changes more than the Department of the Interior, which among other things was...