A new deal inked at the United Nations climate talks in Mexico paves the way for rewarding nations for maintaining their forests.

Most insights come as a surprise: a burst of understanding, an elegant solution to a problem. This decade's main insight in climate science was a different breed. For 40 years, researchers had wrestled with three big questions: Is the world warming? If so, are humans behind the warming? And are natural processes likely to rein it in?

The world's most authoritative climate science body has performed well enough so far, says a new independent review of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). But the report, from a panel convened by a coalition of national science academies, says the increased public scrutiny IPCC is facing and the growing importance of its work mean that it must do better than that.

Amid mounting attacks on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a small number of its volunteer leadership has tried to respond to the horde of bloggers and reporters as well as explain themselves to colleagues. Prominent among them has been ecologist Christopher Field of the Carnegie Institution for Science. Science excerpts a 5 February phone interview with him.

educing emissions of black carbon and other short-lived pollutants that contribute to global warming could buy the world crucial time while governments begin the slow overhaul of global energy systems that will be required to reduce emissions of CO2, climate modelers reported in Nature Geosciences.

An international body has for the first time placed restrictions on experiments designed to fertilize large swaths of the world's oceans with a view to combating global warming.

Scientists hope that the next U.S. president will devote more of the billion-dollar climate change research program to impacts.

Researchers are running out of time to finish updating an important U.S. climate change model that has been hamstrung by the budget woes of its home institution, the National Center for Atmospheric Research.

Measuring the costs and benefits of projects intended to offset the emission of greenhouse gases is one of many thorny issues that the state of California must tackle as it begins drafting a cap-and-trade system of carbon credits.

Once, plant breeders dreamed of plumper tomatoes, heartier soybeans and juicier corn kernels. These days, visions of squat poplars and earless corn stalks are dancing in their heads. They are hoping these new fangled crops will make cost-effective biofuels.