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Yesterday afternoon, as we were closing this week’s issue of Time, I ended up in a debate with one of my editors over how the air travel system had responded to a December of terrible weather. I’d written a short piece coming out in the magazine describing the travel Armageddon the storm had created for [...]
There are a lot of perks that come with being a primate. You get to be smart. You get to be social. You get to have opposable thumbs — which are very handy things to have. Most of all, you get to keep living even during hard times. If the history of humans indicates anything, [...]
Getting out of harm’s way isn’t easy when you’re a plant. If the water is rising or a fire is approaching, anything that can run, fly or slither can at least move to higher ground. But trees and other vegetation are pretty much stuck. That’s at least true with high-speed, real-time dangers like floods, but [...]
A new report released by Oxfam this week has some good news and some bad news for the state of world hunger. The good news: last year, the FAO recorded the first significant dent in world hunger in 15 years, with a decrease from a record 1.02 billion people going hungry in 2009 after the [...]
“2010 is becoming the year of the heatwave, with record temperatures set in 17 countries,” The Guardian newspaper reported today. For those following the deadly heatwave that has hit eastern Europe in the last 6 weeks, it should comes as no surprise that record highs have been recorded in Russia, Belarus and Ukraine. But also [...]
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 [...]
Okay, I know it’s weird to keep writing about Greenland from Hong Kong, but what can I say. Greenland’s constantly shifting landscape is a busy place. The latest spasm of geography on the world’s largest island was recorded last week, when between July 6 and 7, scientists monitoring satellite images of Jakobshavn Isbrae glacier in [...]
People who live in the Amazon basin are not likely to forget the great storm of January, 2005. Over the course of two days, a squall line measuring 620 miles (1,000 km) long and 124 miles (200 km) wide raged across the region from southwest to northeast, with buzzsaw-like winds of 90 mph (146 km/hr) [...]
The current heat wave is about to moderate here on the U.S. east coast. Temperatures will “only” be in the 90’s for the next week or so, compared with the 100-plus we’ve been sweating profusely under . For those of us who write about climate, extreme weather events—not only heat waves, but also floods, droughts, [...]
By time I was up and walking to work around 8 AM this morning in New York, the temperature was already 84 degrees and it’s forecast to hit a record-setting 102 degrees by 3 PM. The streets are a griddle, the offices are oppressive—more than usual—and I don’t even want to talk about the subways. [...]
