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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 [...]
Republican Presidential candidate Rick Santorum, speaking to supporters in Gettysburg, PA last night after losing the Republican primary in Illinois to Mitt Romney. Santorum has repeatedly emphasized that he—unlike Romney and former Speaker Newt Gingrich—has always rejected the scientific consensus that man-made greenhouse gases are causing dangerous climate change. (For their part, Romney and Gingrich [...]
There are two things you can be certain about when it comes to flu pandemics: they’re inevitable and you never know when one will strike. That unpredictability makes it difficult to prepare for a pandemic — some 40 years passed between the pandemic of 1968 and 2009, yet only a little more than a decade [...]
Human beings have notoriously bad memories about weather, like just about everything else. We tend to overemphasize extreme events and downplay the dull normal, which is why your Granddad’s stories about walking uphill in the snow, both ways, probably aren’t true. But if you think that the daily weather has gotten weirder lately—more extremes and [...]
Al Gore’s televised, 24-hour PowerPoint extravaganza last month predictably sparked some hot debate – much of it not about the science itself, but about Gore as its mouthpiece (common themes: he’s a hero, he’s become irrelevant, he’s a hypocritical capitalist). But a key message within Gore’s Climate Reality Project was that our recent strange weather [...]
Usually when Texas beats Oklahoma it’s something for the Lone Star state to celebrate, like when the Longhorns defeat the Sooners in college football’s storied Red River Rivalry. But not every record is worth holding. This year Texas set a new national record for the hottest months of June through August, besting a record formerly [...]
For several years now, a few academics have been fighting a civil war over the possible effects of climate and global warming on, well, civil war. In 2009 Marshall Burke, an economist at the University of California-Berkeley, co-authored a paper arguing that higher temperatures increased the risk of civil conflict—and that the warming predicted by [...]
As if the stifling, tripe-digit temperatures gripping much of nation weren’t bad enough, the heat wave is also contributing to dangerously high levels of air pollution—especially around the cities of the Northeast and the Mid-Atlantic region. The Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) air quality rankings range from 0 to 500—500 being the worst—and the air quality [...]
As I emerged from the hellmouth that is the New York City subway system in July and walked into the Time-Life building in midtown Manhattan this morning, I noticed something odd. Most of the lights in the lobby were switched off. For a moment I hoped we were having the summer equivalent of a snow [...]
