Photo: Shay HaasThis essay was originally posted on OutsideOnline and is reprinted here with their kind permission. If there's snow around, and you give an Inuit child one ski, or a Moroccan elder a plastic bag, both will naturally do one thing. They’ll slide downhill. Why? Because having fun is a piece of being human. A big piece. That's why 1,500 youth, but also some grandparents and half a dozen infants, gathered Sept. 23 on a rainy night in Whistler, British Columbia, for the world premiere of All.I.Can, a new ski film by some young and ambitious Canadian upstarts called …

This was originally published by High Country News' Writers on the Range syndicate. Thanks for their permission to reprint it here. Last month, three little girls, ages 8, 5 and 2, and their mother, were killed in a Wyoming flash flood that washed away their van. It was the kind of torrential downpour climatologists predict will increase as the planet warms. Their father survived. He alone can speak of the horror of trying to save his family, only to realize he could barely save himself. In the rushing water, he ran up against the greatest fear humans can experience: that …

One of the hallmarks of tipping points is that you don't know when you're in one. There's growing agreement that peak oil, for example, happened between 2004 and 2008. Still, you're never sure about such inflection points until well after the fact. This week, though, sure feels like the tipping point on public opinion on climate, and so I'm going to stick a fork in it right here, folks. Climate opinion just tipped. Why do I say that? In the last week: Australia, with huge coal reserves -- but rapidly passing the Arctic as ground zero for climate impacts with …

Recently U.S. Rep. Scott Tipton came to Aspen to speak to his Republican supporters here. He said that he drove an F150, and that that wasn't even his biggest truck. And then he lamented the fact that it cost $78 to fill his tank halfway. And so we should drill for more oil in the US. When I heard, that I wondered both what he was trying to say, and what people thought of it. Do Republicans, even tea partiers, like to flaunt how unthrifty they are, or how much of  America's resources they use? No Republican president from TR …

I published an op-ed in the Denver Post today about climate change's first casualty, which might be joy. The article isn't terrible, really, and it's posted here: http://www.denverpost.com/opinion/ci_18201745 if  you care to read it.  But I urge you to look in particular at the comment section, where every single one of the 59 or so comments is from a denier, and most of them call me a fool and an idiot. In fact, most of the stuff I write for mainstream publications garners the same response. (Making a strong case for the argument that I am a fool and an idiot, but not so much making …

Yesterday, I was at the park with my kids after dinner, a "night session" as we call it. The dandelions, ubiquitous this time of year, had a distinctly sinister curve to their stems that meant they'd been sprayed recently with 2-4-D, the world's most widely used herbicide. You can smell it vaguely in the air, too, the sweet smell that wafts from outside a nursery. The health effects of 2-4-D are unclear -- it's a synthetic plant hormone -- and there's some concern it can be linked to cancer and Lou Gerhig's disease. Or, others say, there is no concern. …

If you're like me and have to talk about climate science in public forums a lot, you struggle with the denier community and how to talk about the issue. Personally, I find the denial world so outrageously out of touch that I mostly hit the science head on and then blow the deniers out of the water with facts if they challenge me. But straight science isn't always the best approach for all audiences, especially very conservative ones. You need to skirt the question  sometimes. Over the years, there have been a number of ways to dodge the issue. One …

Here'a repost from my Climateprogress.org blog today:   A business colleague and friend recently had a nice conversation with his brother, a doctor visiting from the South. His brother doesn’t think climate change is a problem. It went something like this: Brother: “I’ve been reading some interesting articles about climate change that don’t….” Colleague: “Shut the $%& up, you’re a %$&ing DUMBASS!!!” Unfortunately his mom then piled on the denial train. And my colleague, who has been retrofitting boilers and lights as part of his work in finance, and reading dense climate science I hand him (Hansen on paleoclimatology, Stephen …

Every day, I hear the same thing from parents of grown children. "Enjoy it while you can, it goes so fast." With a 3-year old boy, Elias, who consistently wakes up in the middle of the night "needing sumfin" and a 6-year-old girl, Willa, who also wakes up frequently, saying "I just can't get back to sleep," a house so colossally messy I tell my wife it looks like crazy people live here, and extreme time poverty that makes taking a shower difficult (let alone getting to work on time or weeding the front yard), I find this advice baffling. …

The holy grail of solving climate change, according  to climate scientists like Jim Hansen, is shutting down coal plants. That's easier said than done, of course, because each year we run these old, dirty civilization destroyers gives us anoother year of cheap power. But Colorado, showing world leadership, is actually working on closing plants. In fact the Public Utilties Comission might even close the deal this morning. Here's Colorado Conservation Voters' Pete Maysmith on killing king coal. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/pete-maysmith/taking-on-king-coal_b_792073.html