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That's the promise of the Paris Agreement on climate change, which 132 countries, including the United States, have ratified or accepted, pledging to make the air less deadly and to prevent the most catastrophic consequences of global warming

he United States could not actually nullify the global agreement on its own, and withdrawing from the agreement would take one to four years, depending on the approach. But that may not matter much. The White House says it wants to revive coal, oil and natural gas production, all of which pollute the atmosphere, contributing to the likelihood of mass extinction, worsening droughts, deadlier heat waves, flooded coastal cities and other climate disasters.

There's only so much carbon the world can pump into the atmosphere before we're assured of screwing up the targets set in the Paris Agreement, which aims to limit warming to 1.5 or 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.

decline is the latest chapter in a story dating to the 1960s. The trends unleashed in that era — not only the sexual revolution, but also consumerism and materialism, multiculturalism and relativism — threw all of American Christianity into crisis, and ushered in decades of debate over how to keep the nation’s churches relevant and vital.

The most successful Christian bodies have often been politically conservative but theologically shallow, preaching a gospel of health and wealth rather than the full New Testament message.

The defining idea of liberal Christianity — that faith should spur social reform as well as personal conversion — has been an immensely positive force in our national life. No one should wish for its extinction, or for a world where Christianity becomes the exclusive property of the political right.

A new study by 22 biologists and ecologists has found that environmental changes on our planet are reaching a point of no return that leads to mass extinctions and harms human welfare. The situation, said one scientist, “scares the hell out of me.”

How soon do these scientists expect the world as we know it to end? Gillis writes, "within a few human generations, if not sooner." The most frightening thing is that this finding isn't about what will come if we do not act, but that our effects on the planet's environment -- global warming, population growth, and overall resource extraction -- means that we've already passed a "tipping point." This isn't a plea for change. These are things scientists have been warning us about for decades.

two new studies have traced the history of Neanderthal DNA, and have pinpointed a number of genes that may have medical importance today.

Among the findings, the studies have found clues to the evolution of skin and fertility, as well as susceptibility to diseases like diabetes. More broadly, they show how the legacy of Neanderthals has endured 30,000 years after their extinction.

Both studies suggest that Neanderthal genes involved in skin and hair were favored by natural selection in humans. Today, they are very common in living non-Africans.

One Gallup report issued last week found that 42 percent of Americans believe “God created humans in their present form 10,000 years ago.”

Even among people who said that they were “very familiar” with the theory of evolution, a third still believed that God created humans in their present form 10,000 years ago.

compared with other developed countries, America stands out for the level and intensity of its religiosity. People are generally more likely to  say that religion is an important part of their daily lives in relatively poor countries, but as Gallup pointed out in a 2010 report:

The site in Happisburgh was 900,000 years old, a time when mammoths and hippos still roamed in these parts. No human bones or prints that old had ever been found in Britain.

Standing on the ridge above Cardigan Bay in Borth, Dr. Bates described what the area would have looked like at the height of the last ice age some 20,000 years ago: more than half a mile of ice overhead and dry land stretching across today’s North Sea. The sea level was 400 feet lower than it is today.“You could have walked from Denmark to Yorkshire in those days,”

suggest that they walked upright and looked much like modern humans, though their brains were smaller. If they had language, it was primitive. Living at the tail end of an interglacial era, as winters were growing colder, they may have had functional body hair. So far, there is no evidence that they used clothes, shelter, fire or tools more complex than simple stone flakes.

the history of American capitalism has emerged as a thriving cottage industry. This new work portrays capitalism not as a given (something that “came in the first ships,” as the historian Carl Degler once wrote) but as a system that developed over time, has been constantly evolving and penetrates all aspects of society.

Slavery plays a crucial role in this literature. For decades, historians depicted the institution as unprofitable and on its way to extinction before the Civil War (a conflict that was therefore unnecessary).

cotton, the raw material of the early Industrial Revolution, was by far the most important commodity in 19th-century international trade and that capital accumulated through slave labor flowed into the coffers of Northern and British bankers, merchants and manufacturers. And far from being economically backward, slave owners pioneered advances in modern accounting and finance.

Narratives are inevitably moralistic; they are never created spontaneously from “the facts” but are rather stories imposed upon a range of phenomena that always include implicit ideas about what’s right and what’s wrong

sustainability-minded thinkers question whether the Industrial Revolution has jeopardized humankind’s ability to live happily and sustainably upon the Earth. Have the fossil-fueled good times put future generations at risk of returning to the same misery that industrialists were in such a rush to leave behind?

in many ways, the ecological crisis of the present day has roots in the Industrial Revolution.

fear recognition and the fight-or-flight reflex embedded in our neurochemistry is part of what has enabled our survival and evolution from chest-pounding primates to iPad-wielding bipeds

major catastrophes spark widespread anxiety in the countries where they hit. A great example of this is how incredibly overinflated Americans' fears about terrorism grew after 9/11. In one poll that was conducted in the aftermath of the attacks, respondents said that the average American had a 48 percent chance of being injured in a terrorist plot over the next year. As it turned out, the odds were more like 0 percent.

Americans have become extremely vulnerable to the pressures of the 21st century. For the past 50 years, we've been getting progressively more anxious in good economic times and bad, so we can't even blame it on the recession. As I was conducting research for the book, psychologists pointed to three basic reasons why our psychic state is deteriorating. The first is a simple matter of social disconnection. As we spend more time with our electronic devices than we do with our neighbors, we lose our physical sense of community. Social isolation flies in the face of our evolutionary history. The second major cause is the information overload that we're experiencing with the Internet and the 24-hour media cycle. We're all aware of it, but I'm not sure we realize how big an impact it's having on our brains. The third explanation can be attributed to what one psychologist refers to as a culture of "feel goodism" -- the idea that we shouldn't ever have to be upset and that all our negative emotions can be neutralized with a pill. This to me feels like a distinctly American phenomenon.

the artifacts associated with the Kents Cavern fossil confirm “what researchers have long suspected, that the human newcomers spread the Aurignacian culture.”

the earlier dates for these fossils meant “that early humans must have coexisted with Neanderthals in this part of the world, something which a number of researchers have doubted.”

The confirmed early appearance of modern humans in Europe gave them more time for contacts with Neanderthals before the latter’s extinction about 30,000 years ago.

At the rate things are going, the Earth in the coming decades could cease to be a “safe operating space” for human beings.

“What the science has shown is that human activities — economic growth, technology, consumption — are destabilizing the global environment,” said Will Steffen, who holds appointments at the Australian National University and the Stockholm Resilience Center and is the lead author of the paper.

The paper contends that we have already crossed four “planetary boundaries.” They are the extinction rate; deforestation; the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere; and the flow of nitrogen and phosphorous (used on land as fertilizer) into the ocean.

A team of scientists, in a groundbreaking analysis of data from hundreds of sources, has concluded that humans are on the verge of causing unprecedented damage to the oceans and the animals living in them.

"I see this as a call for action to close the gap between conservation on land and in the sea," said Loren McClenachan of Colby College, who was not involved in the study.

Humanity has had to cash in on its insurance policy earlier than expected.

Known as the "Doomsday Vault," this seed bank -- operated by the Norwegian government and containing a seed of just about every known crop in the world -- is meant to be humanity's backup in the event of a catastrophe that devastates crops.

The bloody conflict in Syria has left scientists at an important gene bank in Aleppo -- where new strains of drought- and heat-resistant wheat have been developed over time -- unable to continue their work in recent years.

, the agreement would set an ambitious goal of halting average warming at no more than 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial temperatures -- and of striving for a limit of 1.5 degrees Celsius if possible.

"This didn't save the planet," Bill McKibben, the co-founder of 350.org, said of the agreement. "But it may have saved the chance of saving the planet."

If this [the Paris Agreement] is adopted as this currently stands then countries have united around a historic agreement that marks a turning point in the climate crisis."

We have been studying Washington politics and Congress for more than 40 years, and never have we seen them this dysfunctional. In our past writings, we have criticized both parties when we believed it was warranted. Today, however, we have no choice but to acknowledge that the core of the problem lies with the Republican Party.

The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.

When one party moves this far from the mainstream, it makes it nearly impossible for the political system to deal constructively with the country’s challenges.

whenever I can, I take the boy along with me. He is excellent company and possesses the key virtue of any co-traveler — the ability to roll with the punches.

I’ve taken him to Central America and the Middle East and Africa and Europe, and everywhere it is the same, an inspection of ephemerality. “Look at that bird,” I say, pointing to a white cotinga in Costa Rica. “Look before it goes.”

It is a fleet thing coursing through the mangrove forest, soaring over the black branches, out of view. I hold back a word. I do not say, “Look before it goes extinct.” But that is what I mean.

Our politics, our societies, are arranged around individual and group interests.

From that beginning, we construct the three overlapping, interacting R’s of recognition, representation and rights.

with climate change, as an existential challenge to humanity, is that the interest-based model of society and politics doesn’t work. Most of the people in whose interest we are demanding action aren’t here. They haven’t been born yet.

For decades, Jordan has taken in millions of Palestinian, Iraqi, and Syrian refugees, earning it a reputation as an island of peace.

Yet Jordan also deports and blocks aid access to refugees and asylum seekers, regularly violating basic humanitarian principles, all in the name of maintaining that same “security.”

Years ago, this man was an ornithologist, he said. He’d worked at a reserve in the central Syrian Desert with more than a thousand Arabian gazelles and oryxes, specializing in tracking the bald ibis, a rare bird that once migrated between the Levant, the Gulf, and Central Africa. Then he had to flee from Palmyra to Raqqa to Rukban, where his six children and wife are living among at least 50,000 displaced people in tents and mud shelters. The bald ibis has since gone extinct in the Middle East.

His new book revisits that approach, expanding his portrait of a planetary nightmare that, to judge by climatologists’ assessments, will soon take over our waking life

Wallace-Wells is more concerned with the prospect of human suffering and even extinction.

The harms of global warming tend to fall disproportionately on poorer people and poorer countries, but the “cascades” already set in motion will eventually grow so enormous and indiscriminate that not even the rich will be spared.