In 1957, Hollywood released 'The Deadly Mantis,' a B-grade monster movie starring a praying mantis of nightmare proportions. Its premise: Melting Arctic ice has released a very hungry, million-year-old megabug, and scientists and the U.S. military will have to stop it. In the late 1940s, Arctic temperatures were warming and the Cold War was heating up. The U.S. military had grown increasingly nervous about a Soviet invasion across the Arctic. It built bases and a line of radar stations. The movie used actual military footage of these polar outposts. In response to those concerns, the military created the Snow, Ice and Permafrost Research Establishment, a research center dedicated to the science and engineering of all things frozen: glacier runways, the behavior of ice, the physics of snow and the climates of the past. As I was writing 'When the Ice is Gone,' my recent book about Greenland, climate science and the U.S. military, I read government documents from the 1950s and 1960s showing how the Pentagon poured support into climate and cold-region research to boost the national defense....

MIT aerospace engineers have found that greenhouse gas emissions are changing the environment of near-Earth space in ways that, over time, will reduce the number of satellites that can sustainably operate there. In a study appearing today in Nature Sustainability, the researchers report that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases can cause the upper atmosphere to shrink. An atmospheric layer of special interest is the thermosphere, where the International Space Station and most satellites orbit today. When the thermosphere contracts, the decreasing density reduces atmospheric drag ' a force that pulls old satellites and other debris down to altitudes where they will encounter air molecules and burn up. The team carried out simulations of how carbon emissions affect the upper atmosphere and orbital dynamics, in order to estimate the 'satellite carrying capacity' of low Earth orbit. These simulations predict that by the year 2100, the carrying capacity of the most popular regions could be reduced by 50-66 percent due to the effects of greenhouse gases....

This article emerged from discussions in the Corporate Growth and International Management Working Group of the Schmalenbach-Gesellschaft, a German association that brings together corporate practitioners and business scholars. Authors Martin Glaum and Ralph Schweens head the working group; Alexander Gerybadze and Thomas Muller-Kirschbaum are members. Whether driven by regulation or by conscience, many large companies have made commitments to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions as part of worldwide efforts to limit global warming. Doing so is particularly challenging for industrial companies that have energy-intensive production processes or sell products that consume a great deal of energy during their use. European Union programs and directives have put the identification, monitoring, and mitigation of carbon emissions unequivocally on the corporate agenda. As compliance with those regulations compels EU-based organizations to tackle the transition away from fossil fuels with greater urgency than many of their peers in North America, advances in practice are emerging....

In what seems like a blink of an eye, climate change's effects have gone from future theory to daily threat for people everywhere. Last year, 70% of the global workforce was at risk of injury or death from extreme heat. Of the 120 million people displaced in 2024, 75% were in countries heavily affected by climate change. And around the world, 1 in 5 people is malnourished. We're seeing threats to people worldwide ' and to decades of progress. Speed is a critical component to bring to this fight, but sadly, philanthropy's slow turn to climate has been well documented. Funding for climate change mitigation represented less than 2 percent of all philanthropic giving as of 2022, amounting to between $7.8 and $12.8 billion. Collectively, we clearly need to invest more. But capital alone is not enough, and it's also finite. Our institutions and our partners must think and work differently ' and more quickly ' to deliver results for the people we serve amid climate change. The very nature of the challenge we are up against demands that we set our strategies, invest, and measure things differently. Climate change is urgent, complex, and ever-changing. Therefore, in the context of The Rockefeller Foundation's five-year, $1-billion commitment to advancing solutions that are good for people and planet, we've been making changes to how we work and how we generate evidence and measure our impact....