"The Evidence Is Overwhelming"
Scientists tend to err on the side of being ultra-conservative. It’s built into the system. Their work is always being reviewed and picked apart by other…
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Climate Change: from War to Brain Damage
As climate change accelerates, our warming planet is driving crises that range from war on one side of the globe to brain-damaged babies on the other. A few reports from recent…
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Climate News to Make Your Blood Boil
What a week for climate change. A blizzard of new studies and reports. Let’s start in the Middle East – you know, that place where we dig up more oil than anywhere else in…
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Ocean Circulation May Be Shutting Down
Remember the 2004 movie The Day After Tomorrow, where fresh water from melting polar ice pours into the North Atlantic, pushing down the warm salt water and causing ocean currents…
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Almost Toast
You might reasonably assume that the red line in this diagram illustrates what happens if humankind takes no action at all on climate change. But no, what the red line actually…
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What Really Sparked the War in Syria
Satellite image showing Syria at focal point of Middle East drought. It’s horrific, intractable, seemingly endless … and quite possibly the shape of other wars to come.…
Anything Missing from This Word Cloud?
Climate Change for Dummies
Global Warming As Sung by a Violin
Move Over, H7N9 – Here Comes MERS
Climate Change for Dummies
I’ve read enough to know that much of the damage climate change will do is now irreversible, and that we’ve already gone over several tipping points.…
‘The End of Antibiotics – Period.’
For a long time, there have been newspaper stories and covers of magazines that talked about “The end of antibiotics? (question mark)” Well, now I would…
What Really Sparked the War in Syria
Satellite image showing Syria at focal point of Middle East drought. It’s horrific, intractable, seemingly endless … and quite possibly the shape of other wars to…
Global Warming As Sung by a Violin
A climate change “violin sonata” Last week, I posted the video of Daniel Crawford’s “cello sonata” on climate change – one note per year from 1880…
The Earth from Saturn
A distant view of Earth from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft , which has been exploring the Saturn system since June, 2004. You can barely see a very…
Global Warming As Sung by a Cello
The notion is simple: one note per year from 1880 to 2012 – the coldest year set to the lowest note (open C) on the cello;…
The Pinwheel Galaxy
Great photo of one of our cosmic neighbors, the Pinwheel Galaxy – our nearest face-on spiral galaxy, just 27 million light years away. This photo was…
Fires Seen from Space Station
The Indonesian fire that’s burning down forests for palm oil plantations, killing more of the remaining orangutans, and choking nearby Singapore. [readon] The West Fork Complex…
Move Over, H7N9 – Here Comes MERS
While the latest scary bird flu is still killing people in China and can’t quite make up its mind whether or not to mutate into a…
Why Prince Charles’s Environmental Plan Can Never Work
As Britain’s Queen Elizabeth commemorates the 60th anniversary of her coronation, her son and heir, Prince Charles, worries increasingly about the kind of world his own…
Beginner’s Guide to the Sixth Mass Extinction
Not sure what we mean by the Sixth Mass Extinction? What were the other five? Is there really a sixth one going on? Will we all…
What Happened to My Home?
Take note, fellow humans: What we do to the koalas’ homes we’re ultimately doing to our own home. (This little person’s home was demolished in Australia’s…
Earth Day – Still All About Us
There’s something almost a little hubristic about our celebration of “Earth Day.” As though we generously give the Earth a day each year – and the…
Israel, Palestine, Peace and Water
This morning, President Obama spoke clearly to the Israeli people about why they should seek peace with their neighbors, the Palestinians. He talked about the need…
The End of the World: 2028, Says Bill McKibben
Echoing Bill Clinton’s famous “It’s arithmetic” speech during the election campaign, environmental activist Bill McKibben is saying: “Just do the math.” On a lecture tour around…
Aquatic Animals Shrink as Oceans Warm
Global warming is causing aquatic animals to shrink – up to 10 times more than land-dwellers. That’s the conclusion of a major study of animals from…
How the Jet Stream Is Causing Weather Extremes
Here’s a simple explanation, from The Wildlife News, of the jet stream and how it can cause some of the extremes of weather we’ve been seeing…
Five Stages of Climate Change Grief (Plus One)
In the 1970s, psychologist Elisabeth Kubler-Ross explained that when we suffer the death of a loved one, we go through five stages of grief. This process…
River Recognized as a Legal Person
It’s a first in modern legal history: A river in New Zealand has been recognized as a legal person having certain rights and interests. Under a…