Sure, climate change threatens animals and people and cities and all that life-as-we-know-it stuff, but apparently it can also make Bejeweled Blitz run super-slow. OUTRAGE! Something must be done! Seriously, I half suspect this of being a hoax by old people who think young people are only motivated by the Facebook anymore, but a government report in the U.K. warned today that climate change could threaten WiFi internet access. Higher temperatures can reduce the signal range, increased rainfall can affect reliability, and more severe storms could lead to more outages.  Other parts of the infrastructure are also at risk, the …

Liberty and _____ for all.Photo: Ludovic BertronU.S. politics is at an interesting inflection point. On one side, the American right grows ever more homogeneous: ethnically, socioculturally, and ideologically. On the other, the American left is an unwieldy coalition of minorities, unions, single working mothers, Blue Dogs, feminists, young people, knowledge workers, culture and entertainment elites, scientists, GLBT folks, environmentalists, social justice groups, Jews, Muslims, atheists, moderates, socialists ... even Joe Lieberman for a while. Precisely because it is homogeneous, the right is intense. There is no political force more potent than a privileged class in the process of losing its …

Wouldn’t it be nice to get to know trees while they’re still around? Leafsnap can help. The new app, developed by a team of researchers at Columbia, University of Maryland, and the Smithsonian Institution, contains a database of beautiful photos of leaves, barks, flowers, and fruits. All the lazy naturalist has to do to identify a tree is take a picture of one little leaf. It turns out, however, that you can't just point your iPhone camera at a tree, snap a picture, and find out what in the world it is. After gathering a leaf, fruit, flower or other …

While the rest of the world is seeing its agricultural productivity decimated by climate change, the U.S. and Canada are continuing to experience weather that's within the range of "natural variability." So says a new study in Science from researchers at Stanford and Columbia. If true, this has a couple of kind of crazy-making implications: 1. It's difficult or impossible to attribute recent extreme weather events in North America to climate change. Tornadoes, floods, drought -- pretty much all we can conclude from them, say scientists, is that sh*t happens. 2. We know that humans' belief in climate change is …

Getting hot in here.Photo: Josh KelloggClimate change is the issue of our time. Its ill effects will fall heaviest on the people who have least contributed to it: billions in the global south. But no one will escape the impact of the warming climate, and one place it will manifest most obviously is on our plates. If we look at chile peppers, for example, it's easy to see how the negative effects of climate change have affected the food on our plates and the farmers behind that food. In their new book, Chasing Chiles: Hot Spots Along the Pepper Trail, …

The House voted yesterday to fast-track new offshore drilling lease sales in the Gulf of Mexico and off the coast of Virginia. Look for $0.99 gas within a few weeks. As a group, the drilling bill's primary sponsors raked in more than $8.8 million in donations from the oil and gas industry. Climate change is damaging the world's food supply, according to a new study by Stanford researchers. Over the past 30 years, they found, corn production dropped nearly 4 percent and wheat production dropped 5.5 percent. President Obama will tour an Indiana plant that makes hybrid vehicle technology this …

Who's the giant in this scenario?In his Climate Shift report, Matt Nisbet purports to compare the lobbying efforts of climate-bill supporters and opponents. He finds that, in 2009, the former spent $394 million and the latter $259 million. In other words, greens and their allies outspent their opponents. "The narrative [that] this is David versus Goliath does not match the numbers on the ground," says Nisbet. As a bunchload of people have pointed out, the way Nisbet gets these numbers is kind of dodgy. The full lobbying budgets of all participants in the U.S. Climate Action Partnership are counted toward …

Okay, normally it makes me throw up in my mouth a little to say "Mother Earth," but 16-year-old environmental activist Alec Loorz is just too cute, and he's helping to organize worldwide youth marches for the environment on Mother's Day. So the joke is inevitable. Your fault, adorable activist teen! Anyway, if you're looking for something green to do with your mom, there's probably a march in your town, and if there's not, you can start one! (Some of the marches aren't actually this Sunday, because of scheduling conflicts.) Here's the marches' raison d'etre, and if this doesn't make you pump your …

It's common knowledge that global warming deniers are prone to confusing climate with weather, as in this video that we posted last year but which I am embedding anyway because it's awesome. But a study in this month's Psychological Science confirms that your average schmo is more likely to believe in global climate change on unseasonably warm days than unseasonably cold ones. That's true even after controlling for political affiliation -- Democrats were more likely to believe in climate change, but the weather had an effect nearly two-thirds as strong as preexisting political commitments. "It is striking that society has …

While a quarter of Americans have a net worth of zero, Jeremy Grantham controls a hedge fund worth $107 billion, and he has a message for the world: Resource scarcity, peak oil, and climate change could mean big bucks for those who can get out ahead of the disaster. Well, okay, not BIG bucks -- just nonzero bucks. "Our goal should be to get everyone out of abject poverty, even if it necessitates some income redistribution," Grantham says in his latest quarterly letter. Hippie! But even that level of success, he argues, will depend on us reconfiguring our expectations to …