"OSLO - Sales of electric and hybrid cars exceeded half of new registrations in Norway in 2017, a record aided by generous subsidies that extended the Nordic nation’s lead in a shift from fossil-fuel engines, data showed on Wednesday."

"A Danish biotechnology company is trying to fight climate change — one laundry load at a time. Its secret weapon: mushrooms like those in a dormant forest outside Copenhagen."

"An Irish county council on Thursday gave a golf resort owned by President Trump approval to build two sea walls, a reduced version of an earlier plan but one that still generated opposition from environmentalists."

"More than 65 million people are displaced from their homes, the largest number since the Second World War, and nearly 25 million of them are refugees and asylum seekers living outside their own country. But that number doesn’t include people displaced by climate change."

"Tiny bits of plastic are contaminating mussels from the European Arctic to China in a sign of the global spread of ocean pollution that can end up on people’s dinner plates."

"The Beaufort Gyre, a key Arctic Ocean current, is acting strangely. Scientists say it may be on the verge of discharging a huge amount of ice and cold freshwater that could kick off a period of lower temperatures in northern Europe."

In 2017, the New York Times launched a new desk to cover climate, and produced many stories presenting unique views of climate change and its impacts using in-depth journalism and stunning interactive graphics. The New York Times collected the stories December 6, 2017.

"The amount of medicinal products containing illegal wildlife tissue seized by EU authorities has risen sharply in the last six years, according to monitoring group TRAFFIC and includes items from a range of animals including tigers, bears and snakes."

"Extreme weather left its mark across the planet in 2016, the hottest year in recorded history. Record heat baked Asia and the Arctic. Droughts gripped Brazil and southern Africa. The Great Barrier Reef suffered its worst bleaching event in memory, killing large swaths of coral. Now climate scientists are starting to tease out which of last year’s calamities can, and can’t, be linked to global warming."

"A senior executive at the Russian nuclear processing plant suspected of being behind a spike of radioactivity over Europe this fall admitted Wednesday that the isotope recorded does emerge as part of the plant’s production cycle but said its levels are negligible."