Time and time again we hear news about the danger the world's coral reefs are in. Now, the first-ever comprehensive international assessment of their conservation status reveals that the fate of coral is worse even than scientists previously believed.

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Tell me this isn’t a summer blockbuster—as man faces the catastrophic effects of increased carbon dioxide levels, plants flourish. German researchers from the Thuenen Institute confirmed as much Tuesday, when they released findings showing that crop yields boom when plants are exposed to high levels of CO2. Jets sprayed the plants with extra CO2—enough to match the amount that scientists predict will fill the atmosphere by 2050—and the outputs of barley, beets and wheat jumped 10 percent.

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In addition to drowning polar bears and winning Al Gore a Nobel Prize, climate change may have serious public health consequences. But thanks to Vice President Cheney, you may not find out what those health implications are until you feel them. Today a former Environmental Protection Agency official said Cheney pushed for the deletion of key components of congressional testimony.

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This summer, for the first time in recorded history, there may be no ice on the North Pole. In a dramatic symptom of climate change, the thick frozen layer at the pole is likely to melt away entirely, turning the top of the world from sea ice to sea water.

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In our annual Future of the Environment issue, we take a look at the monumental problems facing our world as we continue into the 21st century, as well as solutions ranging from the audacious to the everyday to, quite literally, save the planet.

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The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced yesterday that 2008 could be a busy hurricane season. Between twelve and 16 storms may be big enough to earn names, and six to nine should be intense enough to be qualified as hurricanes. And of those, two to five could be major.

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A team of scientists led by V. Ramanathan of the University of California, San Diego have begun using autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles, or AUAVs, to study the link between air pollution and climate change. While some of today's top robot drones are operated via remote control, this new fleet of eight-foot-long, sub-50-pound Manta AUAVs fly all on their own.

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It's official: polar bears are in trouble. Secretary of the Interior Dirk Kempthorne has announced that he is accepting the recommendation of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to list the polar bear as a "threatened" species under the Endangered Species Act. That means the bear is just one step from becoming "endangered," a category reserved for species on the brink of extinction.

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Tropical Cyclone Nargis slammed the Burmese coast with 130 mph winds and bursts of up to 160 mph—the equivalent of a category 3 or low-level category 4 hurricane. It reportedly led to thousands of deaths, and as of Monday, thousands more were missing. Now NASA has released a set of images that show how drastically the flooding has drenched Burma's coast.

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MIT meteorologist Kerry Emanuel got a ton of attention in 2005 when he published a paper in Nature demonstrating a link between global warming and hurricanes—especially since Katrina hit New Orleans just three weeks later.

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