Last year, climate change scientists thought they had driven a silver stake through the idea that fluctuations in solar activity were behind global warming in the last century. Now, a high-profile team led by geophysicist Vincent Courtillot, director of the Institut de Physique du Globe in Paris, has sought to raise the dead in a paper linking changes in Earth's magnetic field to temperature variations in recent millennia.

An outstanding climate anomaly 8200 years before the present (B.P.) in the North Atlantic is commonly postulated to be the result of weakened overturning circulation triggered by a freshwater outburst. New stable isotopic and sedimentological records from a northwest Atlantic sediment core reveal that the most prominent Holocene anomaly in bottom water chemistry and flow speed in the deep limb of the Atlantic overturning circulation begins at '8.38 thousand years B.P., coeval with the catastrophic drainage of Lake Agassiz.

Many biofuels are associated with lower greenhouse gas emissions but have greater aggregate environmental costs than gasoline.

China's economic growth in the past three decades has been the fastest among major nations, with an almost 10% annual increase in gross domestic product. However, its environmental degradation has also accelerated, and its environmental sustainability index is near the bottom among the countries of the world.