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Before we move to the green news of 2012, let’s take a look at some holiday leftovers: like Climategate. This past November—right before the latest U.N. climate change summit—an unknown person or person released another batch of hacked emails from the databases of the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at Britain’s East Anglia University. As I [...]
However you slice it, the scientific news has not been good on the pace of greenhouse gas emissions and climate change. The weekend saw a pair of new studies that confirmed the fact that—far from curbing greenhouse gas emissions—we’re warming the atmosphere faster than ever, even as the slow-moving U.N. climate talks underway now at [...]
Last week I wrote about a study that said something unusual—climate change may not turn out to be as serious as our worst fears. Well, there was a reason why that study was such an outlier—most of the science on climate change is dire and getting direr. Case in point: a new article in this [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Intelligence work and climate science have a lot in common. They both involve grappling with uncertainty, trying to make sense of a signal amid the noise of ambient data and preparing to fight threats to country. So it makes sense that in 2009 the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) opened the Center on Climate Change and [...]
On the basics, the science of climate change is pretty straightforward. Carbon dioxide released into the air—whether through the burning of fossil fuels, deforestation or other natural causes—adds to the greenhouse effect, which traps more solar energy in the atmosphere and warms the planet. But just how this will happen—how fast and exactly how the [...]
The 125-year-old Coca-Cola Company doesn’t like to mess with its brand image. That’s in part because it’s so valuable—according to Interbrand Coke has the best brand in the world—but also because previous efforts to tweak its image haven’t always worked out so well, and sometimes lead to things like this. So perhaps it’s a measure of [...]
The people of Soay Island, off the west coast of Scotland, have notice something strange. Over the years, their sheep have begun to shrink, as I wrote in 2009: Why? In short, because of climate change. Generally, the sheep’s life cycle goes like this: they fatten up on grass during the fertile, sunny summer; then [...]
