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With the official results contradicting the original reports in Iowa and a candidate who had seemed discounted now winning South Carolina it looks like we’ll be enjoying an extended stay from the circus that is the Republican Primaries. It will come complete with more character assassination, negative advertising, and vitriol. In fact, let me do [...]
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A study recently published in the journal Environmental Research Letters explores the trends towards colder winters that have been occurring throughout certain parts of the Northern Hemisphere. Reuters’ coverage of this study describes that observation as “counter-intuitive.” The article also begins with a reminder of the extreme cold that visited parts of Europe and the [...]
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The phrase “clean coal” is an oxymoron. No matter how much the polluting emissions from coal are reduced, it can never qualify as “clean,” and that fossil fuel will have no place in the infrastructure of a truly sustainable future. However, current news from the Philippines illustrates a growing trend in the production of alternatives [...]
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Happy New Year (almost)! 2012 cometh, and if you listen to certain New Age types you know what that means: the end of the Mayan Calendar, and therefore the end of the world. Maybe. But probably not. The rational thing to do is recognize that no civilization, however arcane and exotic it may seem, has [...]
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So far, December in my hometown has had precious little snow, but a good deal of rain. The prospect of a white Christmas was fairly reliable when I was a child, and I still have the expectation of a winter wonderland arriving early and lasting through the season. But the fulfillment of that expectation has [...]
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The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization recently released the results of a satellite-based survey of global forest area. The study, which tracked deforestation and new growth between 1990 and 2005, shows that the net loss of forest area was less than had been previously expected. It is important to resist the temptation to read [...]
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Halloween is without a doubt my favorite holiday. With so many other holidays emphasizing brightness and joy and optimism, Halloween seems delightfully unique and somehow more real by comparison. I truly appreciate the fact that there is one day a year that is devoted to fear and horror. Of course, I know a lot of [...]
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The primary talking point of global warming denial essentially boils down to little more than a reminder that the global climate has always existed. Self-described skeptics tend to use the world “cyclical” with monotonous regularity when describing the overall character of climatic changes. Weather patterns, they say, have always changed in every time and every [...]
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There’s not really any chance that Herman Cain will be nominated as the Republican presidential candidate, is there? I understand that this “outsider status” thing is good rhetoric for campaign season, but when it comes time to actually vote, people don’t really opt for the least experienced candidate specifically because he is the least experienced, [...]
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In the northeast Indian state of Tripura, scientists at the Department of Forest Research and Development have introduced new methods of cultivating bamboo which promise quicker establishment and higher yields of a crop that is already characterized by its heartiness and speed of growth. The process involves growing bamboo in environmentally controlled conditions, then using [...]
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Global emissions of carbon dioxide reached an all-time high of 33 billion tons in 2010, according to a new report. Despite a one percent drop in 2009, which fueled some absurd talking points among global warming deniers, 2010 more than made up for it with a staggering five percent increase. Together, the industrialized nations who [...]
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I remember being a teenager and having my first encounter with the term “air stagnation warning” on a local weather report. It was evidently a new addition to the meteorological phrasebook, so the reporter had to give an ad-libbed explanation of just what that meant. As he explained that light winds over the course of [...]
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Yesterday the earth shook in both the western and eastern United States, thereby proving my dad’s theory that I should have never left the safe and sound Midwest. And while I found it amusing that our local news stations here went into Earthquake 2011! mode for a tremble that most of us barely felt, it [...]
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I have been keenly aware of the population crisis all my life. I was only fourteen when the world population surpassed six billion, and now, just twelve years later, we are poised to have seven billion human beings living on Earth. With the threat that this presents to the resource security of entire nations, this [...]
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There’s good news and there’s bad news. That seems to be a common refrain when one takes a broad overview of new research and reporting on topics related to global warming. Observed weather patterns and ecological changes, along with projections of the effects of recent carbon emission data usually constitute bad news. Yet there’s good [...]
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After two weeks of negotiations, the Bonn climate talks ended on Friday and made effectively no progress on efforts to curtail global warming. Participants in the talks are giving credit to all parties for making progress on various technical issues, but the most prominent and crucially important areas of discussion have come to naught, with [...]
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In April, I discussed an editorial that attempted to downplay the danger of carbon emissions, in part by pointing out that the rate of carbon release to the atmosphere had slowed down in recent years. I tried to emphasize that a reduction in the rate of increase does not mean that everything’s suddenly okay. Generally [...]
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There was an editorial put out online last week, which seems to have been widely circulated among conservative blogs. It says that United States carbon dioxide emissions decreased between 2008 and 2009, then takes that as a jumping-off point for a series of absurd statements about the lack of need for emissions standards, and how [...]
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