Thanks to global warming, the permafrost is no longer very perma, nor very frosty. I've noted before about how the ultimate release of huge amounts of greenhouse gases formerly trapped in the tundra could create a "self-perpetuating climate time bomb." But we shouldn't ignore the severe local impacts. The New York Times has a front-page story on what global warming has done to the Alaskan village of Newtok: Sea ice that would normally protect coastal villages is forming later in the year, allowing fall storms to pound away at the shoreline. Erosion has made Newtok an island .... The village …

"Lose-lose: the penalties of acting alone stall collective effort on climate change" is an article the Financial Times ran a while back. While the piece gives a panoramic analysis of the international prisoner's dilemma, there are two other angles that are missing. The first is the penalties of no one acting. According to the UK's environmental minister, the economic rationale for inaction is that the first country to act risks undergoing some degree of economic hardship. This, he explains, is "the last refuge of the deniers -- the idea that it's not worth anyone doing anything unless everyone does it." …

Sea level rise of 5 meters in one century? Even if most scientists will not say so publicly, that catastrophe is a real possibility, according to the director of NASA's Goddard Institute Of Space Studies. It may seem like I single Hansen out for recommended reading. But that's only because he: is the nation's top climatologist writes prolifically speaks with unusually bluntness for a scientist has been more right than just about any climate scientist He has written a terrific piece for the open-access Environmental Research Letters on "Scientific Reticence and Sea Level Rise": I suggest that a "scientific reticence" …

U.S. carbon dioxide emissions dropped 1.3% in 2006, as the Energy Information Administration reported yesterday. President Bush immediately took credit: "We are effectively confronting the important challenge of global climate change through regulations, public-private partnerships, incentives, and strong economic investment." [Please, no laughing.] In spite of the fact that Bush has actually gutted programs aimed at the promoting clean energy technologies, last year's emissions dropped because of: higher gasoline prices, a sharp drop in heating demand from an unusually warm winter, which helped bring about a decline in natural gas prices (and hence more use of this clean fuel for …

While Planet Gore now has the market cornered on entertaining global warming disinformation, Michael Crichton perfected it. For those last two or three people who still think the technothriller writer has his facts straight, check out reasic's terrific post on Crichton's inane 2003 talk, "Aliens Cause Global Warming." Yes, Crichton, a real medical doctor, actually said: Nobody believes a weather prediction twelve hours ahead. Now we're asked to believe a prediction that goes out 100 years into the future? And make financial investments based on that prediction? Has everybody lost their minds? Wow! Not knowing the difference between weather and …

A stunning new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) finds that the growth rate of CO2 emissions has tripled in recent years: CO2 emissions from fossil-fuel burning and industrial processes have been accelerating at a global scale, with their growth rate increasing from 1.1 percent/year for 1990-1999 to >3 percent/year for 2000-2004. The emissions growth rate since 2000 was greater than for the most fossil-fuel intensive of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change emissions scenarios developed in the late 1990s. That's right. CO2 emissions are rising faster than in the most pessimistic U.N. scenario. So …

As discussed last week, Planet Gore's Sterling Burnett was upset with the media for supposedly ignoring "the recent reports by MIT and the CBO [PDFs] detailing the substantial costs and regressive nature of the costs that are estimated to arise if any of the current domestic proposals restricting carbon emissions to combat global warming are enacted." Given that the MIT report in fact concluded the exact opposite of what Sterling claimed -- and given the fact that the National Review typically doesn't complain about the regressive nature of, say, tax cuts for the wealthy -- I'm guessing you won't be …

Probably half the media queries I get concern hydrogen -- thanks to my last book, The Hype about Hydrogen. Yesterday's New York Times Magazine had an exceedingly long article, "The Zero-Energy Solution," on a solar-hydrogen home. The author refers to me as "an environmental pragmatist," no doubt because I don't automatically embrace every environmental solution that comes along, but judge each on its technical and practical merit. I have written a number of articles arguing that hydrogen has been wildly overhyped as an energy and climate solution, when in fact it holds little promise of being a cost-effective greenhouse gas …

This story deserves singling out because it is on an important but too-neglected subject -- the connection between energy and water. "Climate change puts nuclear energy into hot water," from the International Herald Tribune. Key point: Nuclear power "requires great amounts of cool water to keep reactors operating at safe temperatures. That is worrying if the rivers and reservoirs which many power plants rely on for water are hot or depleted because of steadily rising air temperatures." Factoid of the day: "During the extreme heat of 2003 in France, 17 nuclear reactors operated at reduced capacity or were turned off." …

If this were the daily sunset you had gotten used to growing up, you would understand the hesitancy of even Bill McKibben, a renowned environmentalist, to okay wind turbines on the horizon, interfering with bird migration in order to generate electricity. However, in an opinion article in which McKibben confesses his sentiment, entitled "One world, one problem," he ultimately resolves: In this world, the threat to that landscape, and to those birds, comes far more from rapid shifts in temperature than from a few dozen towers. McKibben goes on to write a testament to the gravity of climate change and …