View an illustrative guide to climate change for kids

Explore Earth's future climate under different levels of warming

An incredible interactive project showing how global warming is projected to affect the world, from temperatures to rainfall, droughts and flooding, and more.

Discover trends in Earth's climate system: What are indicators of climate change?

A comprehensive deep dive tracking components of the climate system over time, such as temperature, sea level, sea ice amounts, ocean heat, greenhouse gases, and more (w/charts and graphs).

Explore a series of interdisciplinary explainers on climate science

From animations on the quantum mechanics of greenhouse gases to a photo essay on how scientists acquire climate data, this collection provides detailed explorations of how different branches of science have contributed to our understanding of climatology.

A map of extreme weather events and their links to climate change

To track how the evidence on this fast-moving topic is stacking up, Carbon Brief has mapped every extreme-weather attribution study published to date. Read more about the findings from the comprehensive analysis.

Climate science 101: climate change, its impacts, and potential solutions

How do we know that this warming is happening and that it’s caused by humans? How strong is the evidence? What risks can we expect and what can we do about them?

Greenhouse gas emissions from human activity accelerate recent global warming

These gases exacerbate the greenhouse effect—warming that results when the atmosphere traps heat radiating from Earth toward space. The most abundant atmospheric greenhouse gas is carbon dioxide, which is released from the burning of fossil fuels.

What should you eat to help the climate?

Climate change is impacted by what we eat and what we don't eat. Did you know, for instance, that livestock accounts for 14.5 percent of the world’s greenhouse gases each year? Eating less meat and dairy and more protein-rich plants like beans,...

Earth has shifted between extreme warming and cooling phases for 500 million years

Earth is in an interglacial period of the Quaternary glaciation, resulting in receding glaciers and mild temperatures. However, today's warming trend is occurring much faster than previous warming periods in the climate record.

Understanding how the El Niño-Southern Oscillation is affected by climate change

An analysis of El Niño and La Niña patterns from 1901 to 2020 suggests that anthropogenic warming—global warming caused by humans—has at least partly contributed to increased ENSO variability in recent decades. While ENSO increases the likelihood of droughts and flooding across different regions, researchers say these severe weather events are made more extreme by greenhouse gas emissions.

Climate change is influencing the spread of disease

Rising temperatures and water levels are forcing animals and pathogens beyond their typical boundaries. This article and its data visualizations explore the proliferation of climate-driven diseases.

Climate tipping points are irreversible changes to Earth's environment

Earth's natural systems have prevented these events—including the mass death of coral reefs, loss of the Amazon rainforest, and shutdown of Atlantic currents—but scientists believe they are unlikely to withstand continued stressors from climate change.

Understanding the 1.5 degree Celsius climate benchmark

As more parts of the world are facing extreme weather, from high temperatures to increased natural disasters, there is much debate about what can be done. MIT News explores and explains the 1.5-degree benchmark for limiting the effects of climate change. Read to understand where the planet stands in relation to this threshold and what can be done at the global, regional, and personal levels to “keep 1.5 alive.”

How is the climate like baseball?

A two-minute video taking a lighthearted look at an unexpected analogy, explaining why some people call carbon dioxide (and the other greenhouse gases) the steroids of the climate system.

What's the difference between weather and climate?

A five-minute TedEd video exploring the differences between weather and climate – what they are, how we predict them, and what those predictions can tell us.

An overview of the anthropocene: the scale of human influence on Earth

Human activity has fundamentally changed our planet. We live on every continent and have directly affected at least 83% of the planet’s viable land surface.

How salt, sunlight, and wind drive ocean currents

The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation plays a critical role in regulating earth's climate, but is threatened by climate change. Explore the effects of temperature, density, and salinity on ocean currents in this 13-minute PBS video.

Scientists can determine Earth's past climate conditions by analyzing air trapped in microscopic bubbles within ice cores—columns of compressed snow layers that build up over hundreds of thousands of years.

Clouds' subtle climate effects require significant computational power to simulate

Responsible for reflecting sunlight and preventing thermal energy from entering the Earth system while also trapping energy and keeping it in the system, clouds are understood to substantially influence climate predictions. Because even supercomputers struggle to accurately model their dynamic behavior, researchers have used AI to indirectly incorporate clouds into climate models.

Data suggests fossil fuels are the dirtiest and most dangerous energy sources

Although all energy sources have trade-offs, fossil fuels emit the most greenhouse gases per unit of energy and have the highest rate of accidents. Low-carbon energy sources—including nuclear power—have the lowest death rates and fewest adverse climatic effects.

Why is sea level rising?

Rising global sea level is one of the most commonly cited consequences of climate change, but it’s often unclear how it might affect people living on the coasts. Read this explanation of why global sea level is rising and why sea level rise happens at different rates in different locations.

Favorable conditions for wildfires are becoming more frequent in the western US

A new study of the American West shows that climate change is driving more days that are hot, dry, and windy—the perfect conditions for deadly wildfires.

Why we have different seasons

Visualize just how exactly seasons come to be with this animation of the earth in relation to the sun, and see how earth's tilt determines our seasons.

Renewable energy basics

Discover the many benefits to using renewable energy resources, but what is it exactly? From solar to wind, it’s the fastest-growing source of energy in the world – and how we can use it to combat climate change.

What did Earth look like when dinosaurs roamed?

The face of the Earth isn’t remotely the same as when the dinosaurs ruled the roost. The passing of millions of years, plate tectonics, and a spotty track record with asteroid collisions have changed the planet’s surface. Use this interactive globe to see what the Earth looked like millions of years ago.

An overview of the sun, from its formation to its role in fueling and protecting life on Earth

With a surface gravity almost 28 times Earth's, the sun's mass exerts enough pressure to raise temperatures in its core above 15 million degrees Celsius (27 million degrees Fahrenheit) and enable nuclear fusion. These reactions produce the energy that sustains Earth's photosynthesis-dependent food chains, while the sun's magnetic field protects the solar system from cosmic ionizing radiation.

A breakdown of Earth's atmospheric layers, including why it can get colder or hotter with altitude

Gases in the troposphere—the atmosphere's lowest layer—cool with increasing height as they get farther from the thermal energy emitted by Earth's warm surface. In the next layer—the stratosphere—ozone is increasingly heated by the sun's ultraviolet radiation with height. Because cooler air sinks and hotter air rises, the cooler troposphere and hotter stratosphere form a natural boundary keeping Earth's weather in the lowest layer.

Poison ivy will likely become both larger and more resilient due to climate change.

While El Niño moves warm Pacific Ocean waters east along the equator, La Niña moves them west, shifting where rainfall will become more common for months.

Visualize the path of every solar eclipse from 1900 to 2099 and see what each looks like when observed from different locations on Earth.

Learn how your body is, scientifically, like a firework with its own slow, controlled burn.

Chaos theory—informally known as the butterfly effect—is the reason why weather forecasts are presented with probabilities rather than certainties.

Explore the history, structure, and species of Australia's Great Barrier Reef with this interactive journey narrated by Sir David Attenborough.

Stars appear to twinkle because turbulence in the motion of molecules in Earth's atmosphere causes light to bend and wiggle rapidly on its way to the surface—a phenomenon called scintillation.

Children are now three times more likely to say they want to be a YouTuber when they grow up than an astronaut, with some even attending 'YouTube camps' that teach kids how to create content for the platform.

See the 25 of the best photos of auroras from around the world.

The boiling temperature of water decreases with increasing elevation because the molecules need less energy to overcome the lower atmospheric pressure associated with thinner air.

Electrical grids worldwide must double their power delivery capacity by 2050 to meet surging demand from AI and electric vehicles.

The deadliest aspect of volcanic eruptions is often not lava, but pyroclastic flows—avalanches of ash, gas, and rock that can move more than half the speed of sound.

Visualize how CRISPR-Cas9—a type of immune system used by single-celled organisms to attack invasive viruses—targets and makes precise changes to a gene's DNA.

An investigation suggests a Scottish island became awash in forever chemicals via seafoam and seaspray—raising questions about what that means for the safety of other coastal areas.

After NASA's Voyager 1 captured Earth as a single pixel as it left the solar system in 1990, astronomer Carl Sagan used the image to reflect on humanity's fragility and the responsibility to protect 'the only world we've ever known.'

While the sun's gravity keeps the planets in orbit, their gravity also pulls on the sun, causing it and everything else in the solar system to orbit around a mutual balance point called the barycenter—the true center of the solar system.

Mid-century modern graphic designers, known for their bright colors and bold lines in advertising, also found success with children's books.

The price of gas is a composite made up of several different factors, with the federal gas tax making up less than 20% of what drivers pay at the pump.

US housing costs have risen by roughly 175% between 1991 and 2026—but a growing number of Gen Zers are becoming homeowners anyway. In 2025, 4% of homebuyers were Gen Z, up from 3% the year before.

Browse a detailed visual analysis of over 200,000 similes—comparisons that often use 'like' or 'as'—from popular fiction to see how frequently writers the same idiomatic expressions.

The United States has had a tumultuous relationship with Cuba since its 1959 revolution, highlighted by a nuclear crisis and a decades-long trade embargo.

Play the role of a student in a game where you try to navigate college and remain debt-free, selecting different income levels, high school experience, race, ethnicity, and more.

Doctors differentiate between a phobia and fear by asking patients whether their fear interferes with their day-to-day activities.

How the most famous Ebola book, The Hot Zone, which sold 3.5 million copies and was translated into 30 languages, got aspects of the disease so wrong.