From National Geographic:

Glacier area on Mount Kilimanjaro on the Kenya/Tanzania border in East Africa decreased 85% 1912-2007; from 12.06km2 to 1.85km2. While the loss of glaciers in temperate regions (such as those in the U.S.) has been attributed to warming temperatures from climate change, glacier loss on Kilimanjaro is more likely a result of a local climate change in East Africa that occurred in the late 1800s, resulting in a drier climate. However, causes of the dramatic glacier loss remain largely unknown.

Source: Thompson, L. G., Hardy, D. R., Mark, B. G., Brecher, H. H., & Mosley-Thompson, E. (2009). Glacier loss on Kilimanjaro continues unabated. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 106(47), 19770-19775.

Brad Plumer in the Washington Post explains a new study on the dramatic drop in carbon emissions in the U.S. over the past five years. This graph shows a hypothetical level of emissions that were projected based on trends from 1990-2005, compared to the actual level of emissions in 2012. It then breaks down the causes.

Plumer explains:

The recession and financial crisis, obviously, made a big difference. A weaker economy has meant less demand for energy — that was responsible for more than half the drop compared with business as usual.

Meanwhile, Houser and Mohan find the U.S. economy actually hasn’t become vastly less energy-intensive over time (the blue bar). Yes, overall efficiency has gone up — Americans are buying more fuel-efficient cars and trucks, etc. But the country is also no longer shedding manufacturing jobs as quickly as it was during the 1990s. So the amount of energy we use per unit of GDP has generally followed historical trends, improving only gradually.

The real change has come in the type of energy that the United States is using. The country is now relying more heavily cleaner forms of energy than it used to, and that explains about half of the fall in emissions

From The Guardian:

In the past two decades, 10% of the earth’s wilderness has been lost due to human pressure, a mapping study by the University of Queensland has found... These pristine wild places exist in inhospitable locations: the deserts of Central Australia; the Amazon rainforest in South America; Africa; the Tibetan plateau in central Asia; and the boreal forests of Canada and Russia. They are being encroached on by logging, oil and gas exploration, mining, roads and agriculture.

A recent report from the Energy Information Administration found that U.S. plant owners and operators are getting ready to retire 27 gigawatts’ worth of coal generation, or about 8.5 percent of the coal fleet, between now and 2016. Considering the substantial contribution of burning coal to climate change, coal plant retirements are one of the greatest ways to reduce carbon emissions.

From mic.com:

This map traces the ideal deployment of solar energy plants in the Sahara Desert to generate electrical power for the world's population. It might not look like a lot, but there are some major caveats here. For one, this map seems to assume 100% efficiency. In reality, current solar panel technology is only able to capture around 20% of solar energy, even in the desert. So the 254-by-254 kilometer area in the Sahara Desert that could theoretically absorb enough rays to power the entire world would have to be five times larger. Second, large amounts of electric power are lost over large transmission distances, meaning that a single power plant could never really power the entire planet.

Still, this map is a good illustration of how little space would be needed to power the entire planet. According to May, some 3.49 million square kilometers are available for solar thermal power facilities in Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya and Egypt alone. Worldwide, the potential high-energy solar sites far outstrip any plausible need.

Harvard political scientist Theda Skocpcol analyzed the failure of the 2009 Cap & Trade bill to determine what caused climate legislation to fail while health care reform succeeded. In her report, she claims that a major failure was that the environmental coalition focused on gaining republican support (which was reasonable, as Republicans had previously supported cap and trade, including 2008 Republican Presidential nominee John McCain), without recognizing that the environment had become a politically polarized issue, with Republicans turning against environmental legislation.

In an interview with The Washington Post's Brad Plumer, she states:

One of the things that really surprised me in my research came from pulling together scores from the [League of Conservation Voters]. And you see a clear pull on politicians from grassroots conservative opinion around 2006 and 2007. Climate-change denial had been an elite industry for a long time, but it finally penetrated down to conservative Republican identified voters around this time. That created new pressures on Republican officeholders and candidates. And I don’t think most people noticed that at the time. Even John McCain. I have this figure that shows him moving up on LCV scores for most of the last decade [i.e., casting more pro-environmental votes] and then pulling back suddenly to the lowest level starting in 2007.

As wold population increase following grey wolf reintroduction to Montana, Wyoming, and Idaho, ranchers have become the wolves’ greatest antagonist, blaming them for killing their livestock. But coyotes are the primary source of livestock loss, and wolves can help drive coyotes out of areas.

“thanks to oil and gas wastewater injected deep into the ground, parts of [Oklahoma] can now also claim the dubious distinction of being among the most likely places in the United States to experience a damaging earthquake in 2016... The [USGS] report suggests that seven million people in parts of Oklahoma, Kansas, Colorado, New Mexico, Texas, and Arkansas face increased risks from human-induced earthquakes in the next year.” - National Geographic

In the U.S., clean energy and carbon pollution regulation are very popular. What is the disconnect between public opinion on these issues, and Federal actions?