Latest Articles

Underwater homes: A visual guide to NYC's future floods

A New York City artist brings climate change home by mapping the coming floods and drawing them on the actual cityscape.

Sorry, kids: Halloween candy is a human rights nightmare

Here's a really scary story for your Halloween: The candy you're handing out might have been made by foreign students who were tricked into factory labor. Hershey's, which also distributes Cadbury candy in the U.S. and Nabisco candy in Canada, charged students up to $6,000 for a "summer work and travel" program, which actually consisted of drudgery at the packing plant.

Quantum levitation: Probably not the secret to hover-trains, but still amazing

A few places around the internet are calling this phenomenon — quantum levitation — the first step to magical hover-trains. This is probably not true, according to my physics source (it's my husband). Maglev trains use superconducting magnets, but that's just a type of electromagnet — it has nothing to do with the Meissner effect, […]

Keystone pipeline's last defense: Cold, hard cash

With all the facts against them, proponents of the climate-decimating tar-sands pipeline are playing their final hand: big piles of money.

How to fix fish farms

Following the possible appearance of a dangerous fish disease on the west coast, the author of Four Fish says: "We have to think about how we might separate the farms from the wild."

Perry and Paul were for energy subsidies before they were against them

Texas Republicans hate federal energy subsidies. Unless, of course, those energy subsidies are going to Texas! Both presidential candidate and Texas Gov. Rick Perry and Texas Rep. Ron Paul pleaded with the energy department in 2008 for a loan guarantee. The project they were supporting was a nuclear facility. (Clean energy!)

Here is what Perry had to say about energy subsidies this Tuesday:

Is this outrageous climate denier secretly Borat?

Well, no. He's not. But that's the beauty of this clip, where Australian comedian Craig Reucassel interviews completely over-the-top climate denier Lord Monckton as though he were a Sascha Baron Cohen creation. It's a masterpiece of layered irony — Reucassel gives a deadpan interview worthy of Ali G while pretending that Monckton is doing the same. […]

Use peer pressure to make your friends go green

Peer pressure gets a bum rap -- you hear it and you think of vaguely threatening junior high schoolers going “come on man, what are you, chicken?” But it’s not always bad news. For instance, peer pressure works to change the environment -- when people see their friends and neighbors going green, they’re more likely to change their habits. This infographic gives a taste of how that works; for more instructions on the science of peer pressure, check out the whole thing.

Dems go after $122 billion in oil subsidies

The supercommittee that's supposed to be killing the country's deficit asked the rest of Congress to submit ideas for places to cut. Thirty-five members of Congress submitted a motion that would do away with oil subsidies worth $122 billion.

Scientists are underplaying climate effects

So, talking about global warming is "alarmism"? Hardly. In many cases, it now turns out, climate reality has been much worse than climate scientists predicted. The Arctic now has ice-free summers, 90 years in advance of predictions. Animals are fleeing to higher elevations twice as fast as models said. Extinction rates are double what was expected, […]