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The numbers tell the story better than anything else could: after 85 days, 16 hours and 25 minutes, oil at last stopped flowing from BP’s busted well in the Gulf of Mexico. Since the evening of April 20, when the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded, between 93.5 million and 184.3 million gallons of crude have [...]
The future of fish—at least the sort that end up on our dinner plates—is not in the ocean. As we’ve steadily overfished the seas, the stock of wild fish have been declining fast. Only around 25% of commercial stocks are in a reasonably healthy state, and some 30% of fish stocks are already considered collapsed. [...]
It’s always about this time of year—when the first air-sucking, clothes-wilting, soul-smothering heat wave hits a big swath of the country—that people who rarely think about climate change start to worry. Never mind that a single sweltering summer can never be traced directly to global warming. Hot weather causes even some of the noisiest climate-change [...]
When Iceland resumed commercial whaling in 2006, an old whaling station in a deep, beautiful green fjord called Hvalfjordur — or ‘whale fjord’ — was dusted off about an hour’s drive outside the capital of Reykjavik. The company that had lobbied the government to resume commercial whaling was, in fact, the only company that still [...]
Science publishes a special issue this week on “Changing Oceans.” Perhaps the most striking article in the issue is a review on “The Impact of Climate Change on the World’s Marine Ecosystems.” The article begins by pointing out how oceans, which currently cover 71% of the earth’s surface, nurtured life on our planet. The paper [...]
The world’s polar regions are warming up faster than the global average, but the western edge of the Antarctic Peninsula is especially steamy. Over the past 50 years, winter temperatures have shot up by an almost unbelievable 6°C—more than five times the global average, according to a paper just published in Science.
From the beginning of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, there have been questions over just how much crude really is bleeding out of BP’s well. The first figure—supplied by the company—was 1,000 barrels a day. The government later upped that to 5,000 barrels, a number that stood despite the skepticism of a raft of [...]
It’s axiomatic in the recovery field that addicts don’t get better until they hit bottom. For some, the bottom is shallow—a single DWI may be enough. Others sink much deeper, sobering up only after years of lost jobs, busted relationships and wrecked cars. The U.S.—famously addicted to fossil fuels—has been struggling for years to find [...]
