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OK, fine. It’s not quite the case—as you might have concluded from my Going Green piece earlier this week—that the U.N. climate negotiations, now under way in Durban, are completely useless. On Tuesday negotiators agreed on where next year’s summit should be held, with the Middle Eastern nation of Qatar just beating out South Korea. [...]
The makers of electric cars have a serious challenge before them. Right now electric vehicles like the Nissan Leaf or the Tesla Roadster offer significantly inferior range at much higher prices than conventional cars. Of course, the cost to recharge an electric car is considerably less than the price of gassing up a conventional vehicle—especially [...]
You might remember that a few weeks ago the U.S. Commerce Department opened up an investigation into alleged unfair trade practices by Chinese solar manufacturers. The investigation — instigated at the behest of some, though not all, U.S. solar manufacturers — had been brewing for some time, as Chinese solar companies were accused of essentially [...]
Earth history is different from ordinary history: it’s much harder to nail down specific dates when everything happened millions of years ago and over huge, slow timescales. But it can be done, as shown by paleontologists who have pinpointed the exact date of the largest mass extinction to ever occur on earth. The end-Permian mass [...]
Earlier this week unknown hackers—following up from a similar attack two years ago—released a cache of stolen emails from climate scientists. Climate skeptics—just as they did two years ago—jumped on the emails hacked from the Climatic Research Unit as Britain’s East Anglia University, claiming that they show a conspiracy to hide the lack of evidence [...]
Does anyone else think it’s strange that Thanksgiving—a holiday meant to commemorate the moment when white settlers in America were essentially saved from starvation—now involves the biggest day of overeating in the calendar? (Actually, no, that makes perfect sense.) In any case, Thanksgiving will involve food, and lots of it—the National Turkey Federation estimates that [...]
It was the go-to soup for emperors of centuries past — a tradition revered in Chinese culture that ultimately symbolized wealth, status and prestige. But as China has gotten richer, shark fin soup consumption has increased. And with that, so has the scrutiny surrounding the issue increased, even in Asia. But as environmentalists and the [...]
There are exactly two lessons I can immediately draw from what’s being called Climategate 2, the apparent hack and release of thousands of emails between climate scientists. One: get a better email password! This cache of emails was taken from the hard drives of the CLimatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in [...]
I wrote a piece recently for the paper magazine—sadly behind the paymoat—on the viral ecologist Nathan Wolfe. Wolfe’s Global Viral Forecasting group has set up research teams in hotspots around the world—places like central Africa, China and Southeast Asia—where animal diseases are likely to cross over to human beings. That spillover has seeded most of [...]
The Delaware River Basin Commission (DRBC)—a five-member committee that governs the water resources around the Delaware River—was supposed to meet today to decide on whether hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, should be allowed in the river’s watershed. There’s currently a ban on drilling for natural gas within the 13,539 sq. mi Delaware Basin, which includes land bordering [...]
