The extreme cold weather hitting North America in the run-up to Christmas holidays is due to a phenomenon called a "bomb cyclone."

For thousands of years, predictions of apocalypse have come and gone. But with dangers rising from nuclear war and climate change, does the planet need to at least begin contemplating the worst?

When the world rang in 2022, few would have expected the year to feature the U.S. president speaking of the risk of doomsday, following Russia's threats to go nuclear in its invasion of Ukraine.

Buffalo residents have hovered around space heaters, hunted for cars buried in snow drifts and looked for more victims, after 28 people died in one of the worst weather-related disasters ever to hit western New York.

The rest of the United States also was reeling from the ferocious winter storm, with at least another two dozen deaths reported in other parts of the country.

A brutal winter storm has brought Christmas Day danger and misery to millions of Americans as intense snow and frigid cold gripped parts of the eastern United States, with weather-related deaths rising to at least 32.

For years, airlines have offered passengers concerned by climate change an option: For an extra cost, cancel out the carbon dioxide pollution from their share of a flight, by paying to protect trees.

That's the idea behind forest carbon credits. Trees absorb carbon from the atmosphere. Forest carbon credits are promises that companies, individuals and governments can purchase to counteract their emissions by paying to plant or protect trees. Here's a look at this type of carbon credit.

Polar bears in Canada's Western Hudson Bay — on the southern edge of the Arctic — are continuing to die in high numbers, a new government survey of the land carnivore has found. Females and bear cubs are having an especially hard time.

Researchers surveyed Western Hudson Bay — home to Churchill, the town called 'the Polar Bear Capital of the World,' — by air in 2021 and estimated there were 618 bears, compared to the 842 in 2016, when they were last surveyed.

Three lions were shot dead in Sudan after trying to escape from their cages inside a base of Sudan's feared paramilitary forces, an animal shelter official said Thursday.

The Great Lakes have endured a lot the past century, from supersized algae blobs to invasive mussels and bloodsucking sea lamprey that nearly wiped out fish populations.

Now, another danger: They — and other big lakes around the world — might be getting more acidic, which could make them less hospitable for some fish and plants.

Chunks of ice float in milky blue waters. Clouds drift and hide imposing mountaintops. The closer you descend to the surface, the more the water roars — and the louder the "CRACK" of ice, as pieces fall from the arm of Europe's largest glacier.

The landscape is vast, elemental, seemingly far beyond human scale. The whole world, it seems, lies sprawled out before you. Against this outsized backdrop, the plane carrying the man who chases glaciers seems almost like a toy.

A day after negotiators reached a landmark biodiversity agreement, the pressure was already growing on countries, business leaders and the environmental community to deliver on its ambitious promises to protect the planet — and not repeat the failures of past deals.

Delegates expressed optimism Tuesday in Montreal that this time will be different, mostly due to greater financing provisions in the global biodiversity framework and stronger language around reporting, measuring and verifying progress by nations. There is also growing public awareness about threats facing rainforests, oceans and other ecologically important areas.