Nations around the world are trying to come up with plans to reduce their greenhouse-gas emissions before the UN Climate Change Conference in Paris this December, with a goal of trying to prevent global temperatures from rising more than 2 degrees centigrade above pre-industrial levels.

While many scientists think that at least that much of a temperature rise should be expected at this point, if not more, most agree that anything we can do to limit greenhouse-gas emissions could help prevent some of the human suffering and instability that will come with the side effects of a warmer planet: rising waters, extreme weather events, and elevated food costs.

After all, the more carbon in the air, the warmer the planet gets.

But where are the greenhouse gases responsible for a warming planet coming from?

The World Resources Institute just released an interactive infographic based on 2012 data that shows exactly what percentage of greenhouse-gas emissions top emitters are responsible for. The graphic also breaks down the industries primarily responsible for those emissions.

In the graphic itself, the center circle represents all greenhouse gas emissions. The first ring shows the top 10 emitters compared the rest of the world — as you can see, that group is responsible for almost 75% of greenhouse gas emissions. The next ring breaks emitters down into national entities. China is the biggest gas emitter in the world, followed by the US. The 28 EU nations are counted as one entity there. Finally, the outer ring breaks down emissions for each national entity into the industry responsible for those emissions, with energy and agriculture usually responsible for the majority of emissions. 

Check it out here:

The energy sector is responsible for more than 75% of greenhouse gas emissions, which is why moving to more sustainable energy sources is considered essential if we want to prevent the worst effects of climate change. 

Since this graphic shows the biggest emitters based on 2012 data, it doesn't capture the full historical record. China is the biggest emitter (though not on a per-capita basis) now, but other nations led the list in the past. And until recently, the top 10 didn't have as many developing countries as it does now. Figuring out a fair way to help ensure that developing countries can grow their economies while also preventing catastrophic temperature change is an important issue that needs to be solved.

For more climate data, check out the WRI's new Climate Data Explorer.

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The Chinese city of Guiyu, in Guangdong province, is famous for one reason: It is the world's largest dumping ground for electronic waste.

The city, with a population of 150,000, receives some 15,000 metric tons of waste every day.

In addition to devastating effects on the environment, the massive quantities of electronic waste are harmful to the residents of Guiyu, most of whom work in the recycling industry.

Many of the workers toil away in poorly ventilated workshops with little or no protective gear, according to Reuters. And children who live there have "abnormally high levels of lead in their blood," a research from Southern China's Shantou University found, Reuters reported.

Reuters photographer Tyrone Siu recently visited the city to document how its residents lived. Keep scrolling to see what life is like in the world's largest e-waste dump.

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Guiyu employs thousands of people to recycle the truckloads of electronic waste that arrive daily, including hard drives, mobile phones, and computers from around the world, according to Reuters. Here, a recycling factory is seen in the distance.

The electronic waste is sent to Guiyu from countries all over the world, including the US. In many cases, it's less expensive to send the defunct products to China than to recycle them in an environmentally safe way.

In the past, most of the e-waste was imported into Guiyu from other countries. But as China's population has grown wealthier and electronics have become widespread, more of the waste now comes from within the country.

Going out to a restaurant for a Maine lobster dinner puts a dent in anyone's wallet.

Even when the price per pound of lobster goes down at the docks, the prices we pay in restaurants stay high.

The situation seems intractable: A "reasonable" lobster dinner in a big city is one of the most expensive menu items, ranging from $30 to $45 for a lobster weighing 1 to 1 1/2 pounds. The price can run even higher depending on where someone dines and when.

A few important factors contribute to the steep prices.

Unlike with most fisheries, there aren't any commercial farms to cheaply provide a lot of lobsters.

Lobster farming is difficult: The crustaceans grow slowly, eat a lot, and are susceptible to a very contagious disease, and their eggs are difficult to raise. The first commercial lobster farm is in development, but it's unclear whether it will succeed.

So markets must rely on lobsters caught in the wild. To get live Maine lobster — if you don't live near Maine, that is — you need to have it shipped to you. Keeping lobsters alive when shipping is challenging because they need to stay cool and moist while having enough oxygen to breathe and live.

If someone in California wants to order live Maine lobster, for example, the shipping itself can be more than $40 per crustacean. But the lobster could arrive dead, so it's better to order in bulk, and the cost of those dead lobsters gets cooked into the one you're eating.

Lobster tastes best when cooked alive. It's tough and rubbery if frozen or cooked when dead. That means most of the lobster you eat anywhere in the country comes through the live-lobster market.

Another reason you want your lobster cooked alive is that bacteria love to live inside the animals. This can infect people and make them sick if the lobster isn't cooked right away. If the lobster dies long before it is cooked, then the bacteria has ample time to grow and spoil the meat.

The live market accepts only harder-shelled lobsters for restaurants or stores where people can buy live lobsters. Those with softer shells get sold to processing plants.

But processing soft-shelled lobster isn't the easiest feat. The meat is the only part of the animal desired, and it's difficult to get it out of the shell when uncooked — and cooking it before packaging makes the meat tough. One lobster-processing company is using high water pressure to more easily separate the meat, but the industry as a whole is still underdeveloped.

Either processed or live, a lobster changes hands many times on its way from the ocean floor to your plate. Typically it goes from the fisherman to a dealer, then to either the live market or a processor, then to a grocery store or a restaurant for consumers to purchase. The price increases each time a lobster is passed along.

As Linda Bean, who owns lobster-processing plants, told the Portland Press Herald:

People get paid for each step along the way and we have to account for the losses. That's how a lobster roll costs $17 and a white tablecloth, fancy lobster dinner costs $60 in a big city.

Another reason lobster is such an expensive delicacy could be that humans enjoy eating expensive food.

In the mid-1900s, lobster underwent a huge change from its original role as fertilizer into the luxury it is today, fueled by railroads and tourism.

As James Suroweicki writes in The New Yorker:

In the process, high prices became an important part of lobster's image. And, as with many luxury goods, expense is closely linked to enjoyment. Studies have shown that people prefer inexpensive wines in blind taste tests, but that they actually get more pleasure from drinking wine they are told is expensive. If lobster were priced like chicken, we might enjoy it less.

Also, because the shellfish is so delicate, cheap lobster raises suspicion that it is of inferior quality or potentially dangerous, according to a 1996 study.

One respondent in that study said people would feel it was "some kind of scam." Another said: "Lobster is perceived as an expensive, high-end product. You don't want to confuse that image by setting the price too low."

If you do want cheap lobster, it will most likely cost you travel expenses out to the coast during lobster season — just make sure the lobsters have molted.

SEE ALSO: Something strange is happening to the Maine lobster population this year — and it could drastically raise prices

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Traditionally, we've thought of health as living longer — fighting diseases that cut our lives short and reducing infant mortality rates.

Focusing on these things has helped humanity accomplish tremendous things. Life expectancy in developed countries has almost doubled since 1840.

But thinking of health just in terms of human lifespan is incomplete, according to a new report published by a commission organized by the Rockefeller Foundation and The Lancet. When we talk about health, we also need to take into account the environment surrounding us.

They call this concept "planetary health."

We need to redefine health and talk about people and the planet together because, according to the Rockefeller Foundation-Lancet commission, we've been operating as if we can keep on improving health forever and living longer without simultaneously considering the changes occurring in our surrounding environment. That's short-sighted and probably wrong.

And if we look at those environmental changes, we might currently be headed towards a crisis.

Why we need to redefine health

The improvements we've made to human health and lifespan around the world are impressive, but they have come at a cost.

"We may have mortgaged the future in order to sustain our current level of health and development," explained Sir Andy Haines of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, the chair of the commission that wrote the report.

Haines, speaking at a discussion releasing the report on July 16, said that "most concepts of health ... just assume any benefit to health is good and it can be sustained indefinitely." Planetary health, meanwhile, says "we need to pay attention to these natural systems on which our human health and development is founded."

As we've improved our lives up to this point, we've simultaneously changed the world, taxing its resources. Population and life expectancy have boomed and poverty has fallen, especially in the past 50 years, the report shows.

Yet at the same time, energy use has skyrocketed, along with tropical forest loss, water use, fertilizer use, fishing capture, ocean acidification, and carbon dioxide emissions. This has led to extreme water shortages, higher temperatures, and biodiversity loss.

The world is still growing, and as economic situations improve, each person on the planet consumes more of its resources. We don't want poverty rates to rise or life expectancy to fall, but at some point, this strain on resources will become unmanageable unless we take steps to address it. By 2040, the world will need to produce 50% more food than it does now.

Urbanization and globalization have also exposed humanity to new disease threats. Polluted air can lead to respiratory ailments and airborne diseases spread more easily in densely populated areas. As wild environments are destroyed, people are exposed to more and more animal diseases that could potentially jump species — like Ebola and HIV both did.

These changes threaten to reverse some of our greatest achievements in health over the past century and could mean that future generations don't just have to deal with a changing climate – we could also be headed for food and water shortages and new infectious diseases, along with extreme weather events.

Solutions

Without doing anything, we'd essentially be "betting that the inherent ingenuity of the human species will be enough to transcend the problems," said Richard Horton, the editor-in-chief of The Lancet.

But that's a bet with disastrous consequences if we're wrong.

As part of creating this new interdisciplinary health concept, the report outlines some of the potential ways to address the environmental challenges we face.

Up to 30% of agricultural land right now produces food that's wasted, so cutting food waste could significantly help ensure we don't deforest more land — while still providing enough to feed the world. Technological innovations like genetic modification could help improve plant productivity.

Economic incentives to produce more sustainable energy (instead of subsidizing fossil fuels, as we do now) could make a significant difference.

But perhaps most importantly, governments and businesses need to better value the environmental and planetary resources that we have.

As Dr. Judith Rodin, President of the Rockefeller Foundation, explained: "We are in a symbiotic relationship with our planet, and we must start to value that in very real ways."

SEE ALSO: Scientists are on the cusp of these 15 discoveries that will transform the world

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What looks like a lake and feels like a lake isn't necessarily always a lake. Well, at least it's not always that deep.

Welcome to Green Lake, Austria — a hiker-and-scuba-diver's dream.

This body of water literally shape-shifts throughout the seasons. During the winter, it's more like a shallow pond. But come spring, it gets deep enough to dive and swim in.

Eventually, what was once along the pond's edge becomes submerged underwater, transforming the lake into an incredible underwater oasis.

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Green Lake is surrounded by an Austrian village called Tragöß. It is a county park where hikers tromp through the lush Hochschwab mountains and forests year round.

When the snow in the nearby karst mountains begins to melt from rising temperatures in the spring, it trickles into the lake basin and fills it with water.

From July through about mid-May, the lake looks like this.

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GENEVA (Reuters) — Nearly 20 million people were forced to flee their homes due to floods, storms and earthquakes last year, a problem likely to worsen due to climate change, but which could be eased by better construction, a report said on Monday.

Asia is particularly prone to natural disasters, accounting for almost 90% of the 19.3 million displaced in 2014, led by typhoons in China and the Philippines, and floods in India, the Norwegian Refugee Council said.

"Disaster-related displacement is on the rise and threatens to get worse in coming decades," Alfredo Zamudio, director of the NRC's Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, told a news briefing.

Since 2008, an average of 26.5 million people have been displaced every year by disasters, the report said, and although 2014 figures were lower than that, the NRC said there was a rising long-term trend.

"Our historical analysis reveals you are 60% more likely to be displaced by disasters today than you were in the 1970s," Zamudio said, adding: "Climate change is expected to play a strong role in the future by increasing the frequency and intensity of such hazards."

UN scientific experts say greenhouse gas emissions are stoking extremes such as heat waves and heavy rains.

As well as extreme climate events, rapidly growing and poorly built settlements in areas vulnerable to natural disasters are putting more people at risk, Zamudio said, citing areas around cities such as Mexico City, Mumbai, Karachi, and Port-au Prince.

Extreme weather has struck Haiti and Cuba with different results. More than 300,000 people died in the 2010 quake in Haiti, where 60,000 still live in tents, said William Lacy Swing, director-general of the International Organization for Migration (IOM), which collected data for the report.

"Cuba is extremely well-prepared for disasters: hurricanes, typhoons, whatever happens. They have a shelter system, they have a public education system. Everyone knows what to do when disaster strikes," he said.

Being uprooted by disaster is not limited to poor countries.

"The largest case we found is in Japan, where some 230,000 people are still displaced today following the Tohoku earthquake and the tsunami disaster in 2011, including thousands displaced from the area around the damaged Fukushima nuclear plant," Zamudio said.

More than 50,000 people in the United States still need housing assistance following Hurricane Sandy in 2012, he said.

The vast majority of people fleeing disasters remain within their own country, but may still face "an emerging anti-migrant sentiment, particularly in the developed world," Swing said.

"This simply adds to the number of people who will be, in many cases, moving without proper papers and therefore subject to being criminalized, or sent home forcefully, deported or otherwise.

"This is simply a further complication and exacerbation of this global phenomenon of migration in our time."

(Editing by Robin Pomeroy)

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Does the sight of discarded plastic swirling in the Pacific ocean — the so-called Great Pacific Garbage Patch— haunt you every time you throw away a soda bottle?

Dutch construction company VolkerWessels has found a unique way to make you feel less guilty.

As part of a concept called PlasticRoad, VolkerWessels aims to build roads entirely from recycled plastic that has been salvaged from oceans and incineration plants.

Shortly after it was unveiled in July, the idea attracted attention from the Rotterdam city council. The Netherlands city has now offered VolkerWessels a pilot location to test PlasticRoad. The first road will actually be a bicycle path and, as The Guardian reported, building it will take three years.    

According to the plan, sections of the road will be crafted in a factory and then assembled — Lego-like — at the construction site. This means that grooves for traffic sensors and light poles could be worked in even before the panels leave the factory. The design also leaves room for hollow space below the surface, making it easier to lay cables and pipelines later. 

Once the plastic road wears out, VolkerWessels hopes to recycle it again and build a new PlasticRoad.

If all goes well, there's no reason why the PlasticRoad design can't be used elsewhere in Rotterdam and beyond.

But what makes plastic a potential alternative to asphalt, the thick black sticky substance that has long been the material of choice for highway engineers?  

A road fashioned out of recycled plastic, according to the company, would be able to survive temperatures as low as -40 degrees and as high as 80 degrees Celsius. In fact, the road would last three times as long as a normal road — potentially as long as 50 years. A plastic road would also be "unaffected by corrosion" and require less upkeep, which theoretically would mean fewer traffic jams. 

Ditching asphalt for plastic also makes sense if you consider what the more traditional building material does to the environment. Asphalt is to blame for 1.6 million tons of CO2 that stream into the atmosphere every year. That makes up 2% of all road transport emissions, according to The Guardian.

For now, VolkerWessels' plan exists only on paper. 

But we've already seen hints of how it can work. The city of Jamshedpur in India has paved nearly 50 kilometers of roads partly, if not entirely, with recycled plastic. Bottles and wrappers are reportedly hauled to collection centers, shredded, and mixed with asphalt. 

At the very least, the idea floated by VolkerWessels is a promising step on the road to solving the world's crippling plastic problem. 

SEE ALSO: Hawaii is throwing up a Hail Mary to solve America's crippling plastic problem

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In a feat of photographic excellence, amateur and professional drone nerds have proven a point they've been trying to make for years: drones can shoot.

Photographs, that is; and stunning ones at that.

Dronestagram— the first social network dedicated solely to drone snaps — announced winners of its second annual aerial photography contest earlier this month.

A panel of experts, including Ken Geiger, a National Geographic photographer and Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer, and Jean-Pierre Vrignaud, editor in chief of National Geographic France and Dronestagram, selected nine of the best photographs from more than 5,000 entries.

We refer to the photographersspa here by their Dronestagram handles, not their full names.

The winning images are breathtaking. Check them out:

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Photographer Ricardo Matiello took this incredible snap high above the clouds in Maringá, Paraná, Brazil on a rare, foggy day by flying his drone as high as he could before it disappeared into the fog.

"Above the Mist" won two awards: first place in the category, Places and first place in the category, Popular Prizes (most liked picture). Check out Ricardo Matiello's Dronestagram profile here.

Kdilliard took this image moments after the start of the annual La Jolla Pier-To-Cove Swim in San Diego at 9 a.m. on June 20, 2015. The photographer’s fiance competed in the 1 ½ mile swim during low tide in the comfortable 70-degree water.

"La Jolla" won second place in the category, Nature. Check out Kdilliard's Dronestagram profile here.

Dronestagram user Tahitiflyshoot captured the sparkling waters near Mo'orea island in French Polynesia at the moment a group of sharks happened to swim by.

"Snorkeling with sharks" won first place in the category, Nature. Check out Tahitiflyshoot's Dronestagram profile here.

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Climate and environmental scientists are vital to the future of our civilization. After all, they dedicate themselves to studying the planet we call home to solve climate problems despite the criticism they face.

We pulled five of the most impressive environmental scientists from our recent list of groundbreaking scientists who are changing the way we see the world. 

From a glaciologist who studies the melting West Antarctic Ice Sheet to an activist who battles politicians' "quick fixes" to climate change, here are five environmental scientists who are working to help remedy the worst problems our planet faces.

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Eric Rignot is drawing public attention to the irreversible impacts of climate change.

Glaciologist Eric Rignot used satellite-radar observations to conclude that the West Antarctic glacier is quickly melting, and that there's no way to reverse it. For his remarkable 2014 study, Rignot and a team of researchers looked at the five Amundsen Sea glaciers in West Antarctica, mapping the bedrock under the ice. Because there's no ridge holding the ice in place, nothing exists to help slow the ice sheet's inevitable collapse. "Ice is going to retreat from this sector for decades and centuries to come, and we can't stop it,"Rignot told Nature.

Rignot recently coauthored an alarming study, led by NASA's former lead climate scientist James Hansen, that concludes that glaciers in Greenland and Antarctica will melt 10 times faster than previous consensus estimates, resulting in a sea-level rise of at least 10 feet in as little as 50 years. 

Rignot is a professor at the University of California at Irvine.

Gavin A. Schmidt is pinpointing the roots of climate change.

Climate is affected by tons of different variables, including tiny, uncontrollable shifts in our oceans to the massive amounts of greenhouse gases humans are adding to the atmosphere. As the director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), Gavin A. Schmidt develops detailed climate models that illustrate the effects of each of these factors. In 2009, he and photographer Joshua Wolfe coauthored "Climate Change: Picturing the Science" to show how climate change is changing the face of the planet.

Schmidt is the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies and principal investigator for the GISS ModelE Earth System Model.

Ian Joughin made a stunning discovery about the future of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet.

The Thwaites Glacier will inevitably collapse in less than a few hundred years, raising sea levels by about 2 feet total all on its own. The Thwaites holds the entire West Antarctic Ice Sheet together, and its loss means the inevitable loss of the entire sheet, the researchers said.

That will cause sea levels to rise up to 13 feet when it melts completely. Glaciologist Ian Joughin and his team were able to model the glacier’s deterioration over the last 18 years, and used that data to predict how the melting will look in coming decades.

Joughin is an affiliate professor of Earth and space sciences at the University of Washington.

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WASHINGTON (Reuters) - If you want to know the secret behind the success of Tyrannosaurus rex and its meat-eating dinosaur cousins, look no further than their teeth.

Scientists on Tuesday unveiled a comprehensive analysis of the teeth of the group of carnivorous dinosaurs called theropods, detailing a unique serrated structure that let them chomp efficiently through the flesh and bones of large prey.

Theropods included the largest land predators in Earth's history. They first appeared about 200 million years ago and were the dominant terrestrial meat-eaters until the age of dinosaurs ended about 65 million years ago.

The study involving eight theropod species revealed their previously unknown tooth complexity. Internal dental tissues were arranged in a way that reinforced the strength and prolonged the life of teeth that were serrated like steak knives for easy dismembering of other dinosaurs.

University of Toronto Mississauga paleontologist Kirstin Brink said fossil evidence showed that T. rex's teeth could crush bone. Its teeth have been found embedded in the bones of its prey and chunks of bone appear in its fossilized dung.

"But the serrations were most efficient for piercing flesh and gripping it while ripping off a chunk of meat, called the 'puncture and pull' feeding style," Brink said.

The researchers analyzed slices from fossil teeth using a powerful microscope and a sophisticated device that revealed tooth chemical properties.

They studied teeth from: the early and relatively small Coelophysis; bird-like Troodon; large predators Allosaurus, Gorgosaurus, Daspletosaurus, Tyrannosaurus and Carcharodontosaurus; and big, semi-aquatic Spinosaurus.

The teeth of Tyrannosaurus and Carcharodontosaurus measured up to 9 inches (23 cm) long.

"In theropods, the serrations are larger and deeper than the superficial view suggests, making them stronger and longer lasting, less likely to get damaged or worn," University of Toronto Mississauga paleontology professor Robert Reisz said.

Dinosaurs were able to continuously grow teeth throughout their lives. When a tooth was broken, another could replace it.

"It could take up to two years for a tooth to grow back in the big theropods like T. rex. Therefore, having specially reinforced teeth means less tooth breakage and less gaps in the jaw, leading to more efficient eating," Brink said.

The Komodo dragon, a lizard up to 10 feet (3 meters) long from Indonesia, is the only living reptile with serrated teeth closely resembling those of theropods although these teeth evolved independently of those of the dinosaurs, Brink said.

The research appears in the journal Scientific Reports.

(Reporting by Will Dunham; Editing by Sandra Maler and Eric Walsh)

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Four in 10 adults throughout the world have never heard of climate change, according to a new Yale-led study in "Nature."

Using data from the 2007-2008 Gallup World Poll, the researchers looked at what the world's population thinks about climate change and why. 

“This is the first and only truly global study where we have climate change opinion data from over 100 countries, so it allows us to compare the findings across the world,” lead author Tien Ming Lee, a Princeton University researcher, said in a statement.

In general, the main difference was how aware people in developed and developing countries were of climate change:

In many developed countries (e.g. North America, Europe, Japan), over 90% of the population is aware of climate change. In developing nations though, the percentage is much smaller — although people reported having noticed changes in local weather.

Co-author Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication and study lead, said that the results clearly showed that improving education was vital for public support of climate change. 

“Overall, we find that about 40% of adults worldwide have never heard of climate change, this rises to more than 65% in some developing countries, like Egypt, Bangladesh, and India," Leiserowitz said.

The researchers noted that while previous studies had found that Americans' view on climate change was strongly linked to their politics, but that there is little global data looking at how political ideology influences climate change views.

Check out the study >

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London residents share space with 13,000 wildlife species, 3,000 parks, and 8.3 million trees.

The city was officially declared an urban forest in 2002. Now London could become a national park — sort of.

Advocates of the idea handed out their ambitious proposal to Londoners in July. Their bid is part of a larger campaign urging lawmakers to officially declare London the world's first National Park City, and it's gaining steam — the movement has drawn support from London's Assembly members, four London Councils and at least 100 organizations.     

If you can't wrap your head around the idea of London as a national park, it might help to imagine a city where a self-governing body is responsible for looking after and increasing the amount of green space in the city. That's not too different from how a national park runs.

The United Kingdom already has 15 of those — protected areas of mountains, meadows, woods and wetlands stretching out in rural areas where locals bodies shape the landscape.   

It was a trip to these national parks in 2013 that got geographer Daniel Raven-Ellison — founder of the Greater London National Park City initiative and one of National Geographic's emerging explorers — thinking.

"Considering that 10% of England and 7% of the UK is urban, I began to wonder why this very distinct and important kind of landscape wasn’t represented within our family of national parks," he tells Tech Insider. "We go to national parks because we know they’re special places where people care more for nature and enjoy the great outdoors. What if we applied exactly the same idea to the urban environment?"

For the past 18 months, Raven-Ellison has been trying to bring the national park model to the London landscape, which is home to 8.3 million people.

His movement aims to make green spaces easily accessible, connect kids with nature, clean up the city's air and water, and build affordable green homes.

Raven-Ellison imagines that city-dwellers could play a part, re-planting their paved-over front gardens and giving green makeovers to vast unused open spaces.

The bare bones

Turning London into an urban national park won't be easy. 

The first problem: Campaigners are asking the government to officially declare London a National Park City. That would only be possible if at least two-thirds of London's 649 electoral wards — the smallest political unit — and the mayor give the nod. 

London Mayor Boris Johnson is unlikely to do that. He's reportedly said that while "the idea of a national park is an engaging way of sparking debate ... [he] does not have the powers to create a new class of urban national park."  

But that hasn't stopped the activists from soldiering on. Even withou the official go-ahead, they can create a non-profit body that cares for the National Park City. 

Another issue: To become a national park in in the U.K., a landscape has to be an "extensive tract of country"— which London isn't.

Instead, the idea is to create a new kind of national park that sits outside of legislation. "Because it doesn’t exist at the moment, we’re in a privileged position to define it for ourselves," said Raven-Ellison.

For now, the campaigners have come up with a working definition of a National Park City:   

"A large urban area that is managed and semi-protected through both formal and informal means to enhance the natural capital of its living landscape. A defining feature is the widespread and significant commitment of residents, visitors and decision-makers to allow natural processes to provide a foundation for a better quality of life for wildlife and people."

Is it realistic?

The costs won't be too hefty compared to designated national parks in the U.K., which get grants of more than $6 million annually from the government. In its early years, a National Park City will only need an estimated $900,000 each year to spend on staffing and project development. 

The projects will run on philanthropic donations and private sector aid, according to the proposal.

Raven-Ellison believes businesses will also have reason to sponsor new innovations in the National Park City. For example, an insurance company might want to fund a project that aims to reduce flood risk in an area, since fewer people dying in floods would mean fewer insurance claims. Similarly, greening pavements would result in business opportunities for horticulturalists. 

Some businesses seem to be taking note. The movement already counts architectural design heavyweights Aecom and Farrells among its advisors and backers. 

And the most daunting part of the challenge — the fact that London is a city with millions of people in it, not an empty green space  — hardly bothers Raven-Ellison.

"I see people as an opportunity, not a challenge," he says. "Think about it this way. A child born four years [from now] could be born in a National Park City, where everyone is connected to nature."

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Grand solutions to the world's ever-sharpening threat of climate change are usually met with a mix of skepticism and fear.

Geoengineering — the practice of intervening with Earth's natural systems to stop global warming —is especially thought to be messing with fire.

Take a dramatic action like spraying sulfate aerosols (water vapor and sulfur) into the atmosphere, increasing Earth's ability to reflect sunlight back into space, and we might be able to cool down the Earth. But global warming could go into overdrive if we ever stop that cooling process.

Reversing climate change doesn't necessarily need to come with such heavy baggage.

That's why, in 2007, philanthropist and tie-loathing adventurer Richard Branson launched the Virgin Earth Challenge (VEC).

From more than 10,000 entrants, 11 finalists were chosen.

Due to a mix of obstacles, none of the proposed solutions ultimately earned the $25 million prize, awarded to a solution that is scientifically sound, low-impact, viable outside of a lab, scalable, and economically feasible.  But Branson remains hopeful.

"We believe with more research a solution is possible," Branson wrote in 2014. 

Here are some of the more promising (but still failed) entrants to keep an eye on:

Carbon Capture

One of the most popular routes that companies are taking to clean up the atmosphere is a straightforward one: removing carbon dioxide directly. 

Sweden's Climeworks, Canada's Carbon Engineering, and the US's Coaway and Global Thermostat all made the finals of the VEC with their techniques for taking large batches of air and isolating the carbon dioxide inside. The extracted CO2 can then be repurposed into plastic or fuels or compressed for other applications.

Each company uses giant fans or filters to swallow up the surrounding air. Once inside the closed-loop system, CO2 molecules are drawn out and held in separate reservoirs for later use. Meanwhile, the CO2-free air is recycled back into the environment.

Plants do this already, but the costs of land and maintenance make artificial air capture the better option. The main challenge, as many see it, is getting the infrastructure in place and actually getting some use out of the leftover CO2 once the process ends. 

While effective in theory, those steps take considerable amounts of time — possibly on the order of decades.

Enhanced Weathering

Normal weathering happens when the many forces of nature break down rocks on the earth's surface. Certain rocks, such as olivine and serpentine, have the interesting property of essentially reabsorbing CO2 when they weather. 

Smartstones, a VEC finalist from the Netherlands, wants to mill olivine and spread it around in places where it will get weathered naturally. 

"One should follow the KISS principle (Keep It Simple, Stupid), and leave the weathering to nature," Smartstones states on its website. "Instead, many researchers try to develop techniques to speed up the carbonation. This costs extra energy and money, by which mineral carbonation is pricing itself out of the market."

Time, however, is still a point of contention. One 2009 study found olivine grains would need between 700 and 2,100 years to fully sequester CO2 at a steady rate. Meanwhile, other research says that figure is highly flawed and "grossly understates the uptake rate in natural settings."

Biochar

Most people use charcoal in their outdoor grills. Environmental scientists at Full Circle Biochar and Soil Reef Biochar use it to reduce the amount of CO2 in the air. 

To get biochar, wood and feedstock gets burned at nearly 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit, with limited oxygen involved. This carbonizes the biomass through a process called pyrolysis. In its new state, the biochar has the distinct property of preventing carbon from reentering the atmosphere when used in soils. It can also provide energy to plants and increase crop yield.

Humans currently produce about 37 gigatons (that's 37 billion tons) of CO2 a year. According to one 2010 study, biochar could help reduce the human-caused emissions by up to 12%. Over a century, the scientists claim, that could yield a 130-gigaton drop "without endangering food security, habitat, or soil conservation."

Like all other proposals to reverse climate change, biochar relies on a concerted effort to succeed. The plan might be the brainchild of a lone few, but to offset the massive effects of industrialization, it must be embraced by all.

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For years now, “Extinction Countdown” readers have followed the slow slide toward extinction of the northern white rhino (Ceratotherium simum cottoni). In 2014 we lost two members of the species, bringing the world population down to five. Now comes word that one more has died, leaving only four.

Nabiré, a 31-year-old female, passed away on July 27 at Dvůr Králové Zoo in the Czech Republic, where she has spent her entire life. She had been suffering for years from an untreatable cyst, which the zoo recently drained. Even then it weighed an estimated 40 kilograms. She also had cysts in one of her ovaries and was incapable of giving birth due to other abnormalities.

"It is a terrible loss,” zoo director Přemysl Rabas said on the Dvůr Králové Zoo website. “Nabiré was the kindest rhino ever bred in our zoo. It is not just that we were very fond of her. Her death is a symbol of the catastrophic decline of rhinos due to a senseless human greed.”

Nabir&eacute's death leaves an elderly female at the San Diego Zoo, plus one male and two females at Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Kenya. All of them spent some if not most of their lives at Dvůr Králové, the only facility that ever managed to breed the species in captivity. Ol Pejeta has spent the past few years trying to breed its rhinos, with no success.

Dvůr Králové says Nabir&eacute's loss is not the end. The zoo has collected her functional ovary and other genetic material and will preserve it all, in case future techniques could enable reproduction or even the resurrection of the species.

Northern white rhinos were hunted to the verge of extinction for their horns, which are valued in traditional Asian medicine. The last wild individuals were killed in Garamba National Park in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 2006.

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The 2016 Summer Olympics kick off in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in a little over a year, marking the first time the games will be hosted by a South American nation.

Reports regarding the country's preparation for the event, however, have not been great. In April 2014, IOC vice president John Coates called the preparation"the worst ever." This April, the AP reported that the Rodrigo de Freitas lagoon, one of two central waterways to be used for sailing and rowing events, was plagued by a fish-die off.

It was at least the second fish die-off in 2015. The first occurred in February at Guanabara Bay — where other water events are schedule to take place.

A local photographer named Alex Moutinho told the AP, "Every year there are these die-offs, sometimes bigger, sometimes smaller. It's one more Brazilian shame."

With just over a year until the opening ceremonies, held at the famous Maracana stadium in Rio on August 5, the IOC head Thomas Bach said Wednesday that cleaning up Guanabara Bay will be the biggest challenge Rio 2016 faces in the final year of preparation for the Olympics. As of right now, sewage, debris, and dangerous bacteria are all commonplace in the bay. These massive fish die-offs are common occurrences, too, and likely the result of such heavy pollution.

Some athletes are demanding that the windsurfing and sailing events be moved to cleaner bodies of water, but Rio officials have denied this request and said that trash-collecting boats will protect the athletes. IOC officials, meanwhile, have acknowledged that although Guanabara Bay will not be completely free of pollution, they will be improved and safe enough for competition. 

Thousands of twaite shad fish died in the Rodrigo de Freitas lagoon in Rio in April.

More fish in the Rodrigo de Freitas lagoon, where rowing events will take place.

Guanabara Bay will host sailing events at the 2016 Summer Olympics. A massive fish die-off occurred here in February 2015.

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Traditional carbon capture methods collect CO2 from smoke stacks, but the company Carbon Engineering has discovered how to capture CO2 already in the atmosphere. Using this method engineers could hypothetically use the CO2 in the atmosphere to make cheap and sustainable fuel.

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Google Earth has given us tours of deserts, shipwrecks, fictional lands like Middle Earth, and even revealed to us lies about gunned down passenger planes. 

In its latest move, Google joined forces with Aclima, a startup that designs, deploys and manages environmental sensor networks, to monitor air quality in urban environments using Google's Street View vehicles on Tuesday. 

Google cars equipped with Aclima's mobile sensing technology are able to monitor molecules that can negatively affect health and climate changes like nitric oxide, black carbon, methane, carbon dioxide, ozone and Volatile Organic Compounds. 

Aclima recently customized three Google Street View vehicles — the same ones that are normally used to snap photos of surroundings that appear in Google Maps — to drive around the Denver metropolitan area and assess the atmosphere for 750 hours. 

The Environmental Protection Agency regulates the air with their own equipment, but the Aclima blog says that its tools can provide us a more detailed picture of our immediate surroundings -- what we breathe in as soon as we step out of a subway station. Google and Aclima plan to bring the project to the San Francisco Bay Area in the Fall. 

"With more than half of the world's population now living in cities, environmental health is becoming increasingly important to quality of life," CEO of Aclima Davida Herzl wrote on the San Francisco-based company's blog. "Today we're announcing the success of our integration test with Google, which lays the foundation for generating high resolution maps of air quality in cities."

Check out the video to find out more about Google and Aclima's joint endeavors:

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Close to half of all living species on the Earth could disappear by the end of this century, and several recent studies suggest humans will be the cause.

Keeping that in mind, the folks at Signature African Safaris put together a map uisng data from the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) to show where in the world the most endangered animal species are located. The dark red regions denote the areas where the critically endangered animals reside, while the lighter shaded regions signify animals living in that area that are endangered. The box at the bottom right is a map key.

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When we think about the deserts of the world, water abundance is one of the last things that come to mind. But that might change for the Taklamakan Desert in northwest China.

While studying the amount of carbon dioxide in the desert's air, a team of researchers were surprised to learn that large amounts of the greenhouse gas were disappearing around a region of the desert called the Tarim basin.

The most likely explanation, they recently reported in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, is a massive underground ocean that has more water than all of the great lakes in North America combined.

"Never before have people dared to imagine so much water under the sand," professor Li Yan — who led the study at the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Xinjiang Institute of Ecology and Geography in Urumqi, the Xinjiang capital — told the South China Morning Post, where we first learned about the study. "Our definition of desert may have to change."

A basin is, by definition, a valley that collects water from drainage systems, like water that has melted and is running down the face of nearby, snow-capped mountains. Two mountain ranges border the Tarim basin: to the north are the Tian Shan mountains and to the south are the Kunlun Mountains.

But, if you look at the Tarim basin, you won't see any water:

That's partly because locals collect most of the melt water to irrigate crops. The rest either seeps into the ground or evaporates into the dry desert air.

The team visited nearly 200 different locations across the desert to collect deep, underground water samples. They then measured the amount of carbon dioxide in each water sample, and discovered that it had high concentrations of carbon dioxide — enough that suggested the ground was absorbing about 500 billion pounds of the greenhouse gas each year. (For comparison, 500 billion pounds is about 0.0005% of the amount of carbon dioxide stored in Earth's oceans.)

This qualifies the Tarim basin as what experts call a carbon sink zone, where carbon dioxide is absorbed from the atmosphere in significant amounts. Most carbon sink zones are densely populated with plants that absorb carbon dioxide from the air and produce oxygen. Being sparse of plants, deserts are not usually considered for this title.

So how did this desert come to be such an active carbon dioxide sucker?

It dates back to 2,000 years ago when settlers in the region began irrigating the land, the scientists suspect. And the soil of the local farmlands is salty, like the ocean, which dissolves carbon dioxide from the air more readily than fresh water.

"As a result, agricultural development over human history has enhanced the carbon sink," they write in their report.

The team also used their carbon dioxide measurements from underground water samples and compared it with CO2 levels in the surface water to calculate how much water had seeped into the basin over time and overall amount of water underground. They estimate that as much as 10 times the amount in all of the great lakes could be down there, they told South China Morning Post.

The scientists don't advise locals to go digging for it, though, because it's extremely salty and highly carbonated from all of the carbon dioxide it's been absorbing for the last two millennium.

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