A group of business and academic leaders have bemoaned the “huge gap” between what experts say ought to be done to decarbonize Australia’s economy and the public’s willingness to accept such a policy.

They want Australia’s leaders to restart a conversation after the federal election about the need to transition the economy towards renewable and cleaner energy.

The United States, Canada and Mexico will promise on Wednesday to generate half their overall electricity from clean energy by 2025, the White House said.

"We believe it is an aggressive goal, but that it is achievable continent-wide," Brian Deese, senior advisor to US President Barack Obama, said Monday.

Climate change, habitat destruction, extinctions — the Earth has seen it all before, thousands of years ago. And humans may have been partly to blame for many of those changes in nature, too.

A new study published Friday in Science Advances shows that the arrival of humans in Patagonia, combined with a changing climate, led to the extinction of many species of megafauna about 12,000 years ago in the southern portion of what is now South America. The research offers a significant moment in the natural history of the continent: a definitive date of the mass extinction of megafauna — large or giant animals, like mammoths and giant sloths — in this part of the world. It also suggests a potential relationship between threatened species and climate change in our own time.

It is not news that Earth has been warming rapidly over the last 100 years as greenhouse gases accumulate in the atmosphere. But not all warming has been happening equally rapidly everywhere. Temperatures in the Arctic, for example, are rising much faster than the rest of the planet.

Patrick Taylor, an atmospheric scientist at NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, says that one of the main factors for the Arctic's rapid warming is how clouds interact with frozen seawater, known as sea ice.

Atmospheric concentrations of CO2 will shatter the symbolic barrier of 400 parts per million (ppm) this year and will not fall below it our in our lifetimes, according to a new Met Office study.

We're officially living in a new world.

Carbon emissions stopped growing in 2015 for the first time in 10 years as the world turned its back on coal and embraced energy efficiency and renewable power with increased vigour, according to a new set of statistics.

The Paris floods, that saw extreme rainfall swell the river Seine to its highest level in decades, were made almost twice as likely because of the manmade emissions driving global warming, scientists have found.

It is not news that Earth has been warming rapidly over the last 100 years as greenhouse gases accumulate in the atmosphere. But not all warming has been happening equally rapidly everywhere. Temperatures in the Arctic, for example, are rising much faster than the rest of the planet.

Patrick Taylor, an atmospheric scientist at NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, says that one of the main factors for the Arctic's rapid warming is how clouds interact with frozen seawater, known as sea ice.

Our security and prosperity depend on a successful response to climate change, the most urgent challenge of our time. So does any prospect of a transition to a way of living together that is just and sustainable. And if we fail on climate, we lose the very capacity to shape our destiny that makes sovereignty worth having.

Today’s European Union is, yes, tired, damaged and in need of reform. But without the EU the climate struggle would have been lost already.