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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 [...]
-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 [...]
Last week the climate world was rocked — or at least, strongly buffeted — by the publication of memos that were allegedly from the Heartland Institute, a nonprofit research group that takes a strongly skeptical attitude toward climate science. The memos detailed budget information — including news that groups like the archconservative Koch Foundation and corporations like [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
If you want to see global warming in action, head to the Arctic. The seasonal shrinking of the sea ice over the North Pole is one of the most visible symptoms of the gradual warming of the planet. Every winter, Arctic ice builds up in the polar darkness, and then in the summer, it melts. [...]
Though he’s the single person most associated with climate change, over the last couple of years Al Gore had kept a somewhat lower public profile on the issue. It’s not that the former Vice President disappeared entirely—he continued advocacy work through his Alliance for Climate Protection, testified on climate science at Congress and came out [...]
From the outside, the science of warming-related sea level rise doesn’t seem that complicated. Carbon enters atmosphere, planet warms up, land ice melts and runs into the oceans, sea level rises. Minus the greenhouse effect, you can pretty much see that reaction in action by heating an ice-cube over a stove. In the real world, [...]
Chances are you’ve heard about—if not read—Al Gore’s 7,000-word essay in Rolling Stone on America’s ongoing failure to act on the climate crisis. (If the whole piece is a bit too much for your Wednesday lunch hour, Mother Jones has a nice summary.) The media, unsurprisingly, has focused Gore’s criticism of President Obama’s inaction on [...]
