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Mark Fischetti, senior editor at Scientific American, explains why this winter has been unusually warm and dry across most of North America.

This week’s Please Explain, the third in our series How to Save the World, is about climate change and how to stop it. David Archer, professor of geophysical sciences at the University of Chicago, and author of The Long Thaw: How Humans are Changing the Next 100,000 Years of the Earth’s Climate, and Global Warming: Understanding the Forecast; and Klaus Lackner, Director of the Lenfest Center for Sustainable Energy at Columbia University’s Earth Institute join us to talk about carbon in the atmosphere, how and why it is causing climate change, and how to slow or stop climate change by using sustainable energy and carbon sequestration.

Gernot Wagner, economist at the Environmental Defense Fund explains why the things individuals do—buying local produce, eating less meat, bringing reusable bags to the grocery store—won’t end up making much of a difference in halting global warming. Instead he argues that economics will. In But Will The Planet Notice: How Smart Economics Can Save the World he puts the onus for curbing global climate change on smarter economics, not science, politics, or activism.

On Tuesday the National Center for Science Education, a nonpartisan group of scientists that works to promote the instruction of evolution in American public schools, announced a new initiative aimed at teaching climate science. The NCSE claims global warming and climate change have become increasingly charged topics in classrooms around the country. The initiative is a way for teachers to be supported in states like Texas, Louisiana, Tennessee, and Oklahoma where regulations are being considered that would require educators to justify the denial of global warming as a valid scientific position.

On Wednesday, the European Union's highest court will rule on a lawsuit filed two years ago by two U.S. airlines and a industry trade association attempting to halt the E.U.'s plan to charge for carbon emissions pollution. It would include the industry in the worldwide cap and trade market. If the court decides to uphold the 2008 European law, on January 1, airlines will be forced to reduce their carbon emissions to an historic low, or buy emission credits from companies that pollute less than the base rate.  

It was a long two weeks with plenty of drama, but UN delegates from around the globe agreed on Sunday in Durban, South Africa to forge a new deal to combat climate change. For the first time, the Durban Platform will force all the biggest polluters to limit greenhouse gas emissions, including emerging economies like China and India.

It was hot at Ground Zero. A rally was scheduled to begin at noon, the exact moment that the sun would finish climbing over the skyscrapers and flush out the shade. Inside the Federal Building in downtown Manhattan, officials with the Regional Greenhouse Gas Inititative (RGGI, or "Reggie") were auctioning off carbon permits—the price for businesses to release CO2 into the atmosphere

From the tornadoes in Joplin, to a record drought in Texas and the floods in Mississippi, and giant earthquakes off the coast of Japan, why is the Spring of 2011 so terrifying and terrible? Is our environment really getting scarier, or is it just our short-term memory? Professor Katharine Hayhoe is an atmospheric scientist at Texas Tech University and author of "A Climate for Change: Global Warming Facts for Faith-Based Decisions." She says our unpredictable spring is part of climate change and that Spring is coming earlier and earlier each year.

Travel writer Sara Wheeler uncovers the beautiful, brutal reality of the Arctic in her latest book, The Magnetic North: Notes from the Arctic Circle. Wheeler travels with the crew of a Russian icebreaker, herds reindeer across the tundra with the Lapps, and shadows the Trans-Atlantic pipeline with truckers, all in an effort to understand the role of the Arctic in public and in private life.

Elizabeth Kolbert explains how climate change caused by humans—building cities, changing the land through agriculture and deforestation, and carbon emissions from cars and industry—has risen to the level of geologic significance. Her article “Enter the Anthropocene—Age of Man” looks at the “Anthropocene,” the new epoch defined by humans’ massive impact on the planet. It appears in National Geographic magazine’s March issue.

This week, 15,000 delegates and 110 heads of state from 192 nations are in Copenhagen to (we hope) negotiate a treaty to address the causes of climate change. It turns out that a number of artists have also arrived in the Danish capital, intent on delivering their own messages about what is at stake.