A new analysis by the NASA climatologist for the first time ties specific weather events to human-induced climate change
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Contributors
Today about 360,000 new people, give or take a few thousand, will enter the world. Significantly fewer than that will shuffle off it, which is why we’re adding about 200,000 people a day. Global population has already passed 7 billion, and we’re well on our way to 9 billion or more by the middle of [...]
Polar bears are classified as marine mammals, like a seal or a walrus, which might come as a surprise given that they’re usually pictured on land. But polar bears spend a lot of their time in the waters of the Arctic, fishing or swimming among the sea ice. They may look awkward in the water, [...]
-JAMES LOVELOCK, British scientist and creator of the ‘Gaia hypothesis,’ in an interview with MSNBC last week. The 92-year-old scientist has long been a hero to the green movement for his groundbreaking theory that the Earth essentially functioned as a single organism—one that could react violently to our interference. In the past Lovelock had sounded [...]
U.S. PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA, speaking to Rolling Stone publisher Jann Wenner in a new interview. Obama went on to defend his nuanced positions on the Keystone XL pipeline and Canadian tar sands, arguing that while he was unhappy with Republican attempts to circumvent the pipeline approval process, Canada was likely to develop the tar sands no matter what [...]
Up close, an electric vehicle is clearly cleaner than a gasoline-powered car. No matter how efficient a combustion engine becomes—and some gasoline-powered cars can be very efficient—it still, well, combusts, spewing carbon and other exhaust gases into the atmosphere. But nothing at all comes out the tailpipe of an electric car. It’s as clean as [...]
A wildfire inside the confines of a major city is nothing new in the U.S. It’s a little strange , though, when that city isn’t Los Angeles—constantly threatened by the dry Santa Ana winds of autumn—but rather, New York City. Yet early this week a five-alarm brushfire swept through the former Fresh Kills landfill in [...]
That’s how much higher the average U.S. temperature in March was above the 20th century norm for that month, according to new statistics from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). That made last month the warmest march in U.S. history since record keeping began back in 1895, and the second-most extreme month—meaning the biggest [...]
A simplified version of the scientific method goes like this: ask a question, make a hypothesis, test the hypothesis in a controlled experiment, analyze results, draw conclusions. But as a team of scientists showed in a recent study of a New England forest, that approach won’t always yield perfect results—particularly in the natural world—if we [...]
History is a valuable teacher—to natural systems as well as humans, apparently. In a study that could critically shape marine conservation efforts for years to come, scientists have found that sea life can learn from the past just as human beings do. Researchers discovered that corals with heat stress on their health records—meaning periods of [...]
