Humans are on track to release so much greenhouse gas in less than three years that a key threshold for limiting global warming will be nearly unavoidable, according to a study to be released Thursday. Scientists suggest this will produce unprecedented heat waves, extreme hot drought, extreme rainfall events, and bigger storms.

Climate change has tripled the frequency of atmospheric wave events linked to extreme summer weather in the last 75 years and that may explain why long-range computer forecasts keep underestimating the surge in killer heat waves, droughts and floods, a new study says.

Climate change is accelerating the melting of the world's mountain glaciers, according to a massive new study that found them shrinking more than twice as fast as in the early 2000s.

The White House announcement, which came as Trump was sworn in Monday to a second term, echoed Trump's actions in 2017, when he announced that the U.S. would abandon the global Paris accord. The pact is aimed at limiting long-term global warming to 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit (1.5 degrees Celsius) above pre-industrial levels or, failing that, keeping temperatures at least well below 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit (2 degrees Celsius) above pre-industrial levels.

Last year's global average temperature easily passed 2023's record heat and kept pushing even higher. It surpassed the long-term warming limit of 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit ) since the late 1800s that was called for by the 2015 Paris climate pact, according to the European Commission's Copernicus Climate Service, the United Kingdom's Meteorology Office and Japan's weather agency.

Countries at the United Nations climate summit amped up the pressure on themselves on Friday by entering the last scheduled day of talks with no visible progress on their chief goals.

Just as a simple lever can move heavy objects, rich nations are hoping another kind of leverage — the financial sort — can help them come up with the money that poorer nations need to cope with climate change.

Cities in Asia and the United States emit the most heat-trapping gas that feeds climate change, with Shanghai the most polluting, according to new data that combines observations and artificial intelligence.

Global efforts to fight climate change stumbled but survived the last time Donald Trump was elected president and withdrew the United States from an international climate agreement. Other countries, states, cities and businesses picked up some of the slack.