Latest Articles
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Greenland ice sheet is meeeelllting, it’s meeelllting!
The Greenland ice sheet is melting at an alarming rate! As in, faster than it has since satellite measurements began in 1979, and with 10 percent more melting in 2007 than in the previous record year of 2005. Allow researcher Konrad Steffen to put it into perspective for you: “The amount of ice lost by […]
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Gore will not serve under any future administration
Al Gore says that he will not serve in a future administration. If he returns to politics, which he still “does not expect” to do, it will be as a presidential candidate. Virtually every Dem candidate for president — most explicitly Obama — has dropped hints about recruiting Gore for their administration. Guess that won’t […]
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What happens to a woman without a country?
By Amanda McKenzie, national coordinator of the Australian Youth Climate Coalition.
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Along with 10 other young Australians, I traveled to Bali to bring the voice of Australia's youth to the U.N. Climate Change Conference. We have been reminding world leaders that our future is threatened. However, my personal concerns about my future were eclipsed when a young woman named Claire from the small island nation of Kiribati stood up in front of 200 international youth and told her story. For Claire, climate change is more than a future concern. It is right here, right now.
Youth from all over the world, including Australia, had come together to share their stories and successes in raising awareness and taking action on climate change in their home countries. Every participant was humbled by Claire, who offered her heartfelt thanks to all of us for our efforts. Her home, only two meters above sea level, is rapidly being inundated by the rising ocean. Two islands that make up Kiribati have already been submerged. Claire's island, home, culture, and future are all under imminent threat from climate change. It is likely that her entire nation will have to be evacuated in the near future. Where do you go when your country simply vanishes?
Claire's voice, and the voices of the Pacific, are largely absent from the U.N. Climate Change Conference. These nations are small in terms of their size, population, wealth, and greenhouse-gas emissions. That's the irony: those who have contributed the least -- and benefited the least from the extraction and burning of fossil fuels -- will suffer first. Kiribati will be underwater before the bulk of the Australian population realizes that climate change is the most serious issue on the planet.
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Notable quotable
“And we ought to declare that we will be free of energy consumption in this country within a decade, bold as that is.” — Mike Huckabee, Republican presidential candidate, 10 Dec. 2007 [UPDATE: It appears Huckabee was misquoted in an early draft of the transcript. His quote now reads, “And we ought to declare that […]
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And other revelations from the latest big-media expose of local food
About a year ago, The Economist ran a big article purporting to show that eating locally is actually worse for the environment than typical supermarket fare. I debunked the article here. About six months later, the NYT op-ed page ran a piece making similar arguments. And I responded again. In both of these pieces, the […]
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House report condemns “systematic” Bush admin climate-science manipulation
“The Bush administration has engaged in a systematic effort to manipulate climate change science and mislead policymakers and the public about the dangers of global warming,” concludes a report from the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. The report, written by the Democratic majority, is the product of a 16-month investigation into the Bush administration’s […]
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Western states and feds agree to new pact on Colorado River drought rules
The seven states served by the Colorado River agreed with federal officials last week on new rules for how to manage the river’s all-important water in times of drought. The agreement stipulates through 2026 what water levels must be maintained in the region’s two main reservoirs, Lake Mead and Lake Powell, triggering conservation measures when […]
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It’s too late to stop climate change, argues Ross Gelbspan — so what do we do now?
As the pace of global warming kicks into overdrive, the hollow optimism of climate activists, along with the desperate responses of some of the world's most prominent climate scientists, is preventing us from focusing on the survival requirements of the human enterprise.
The environmental establishment continues to peddle the notion that we can solve the climate problem.
We can't.
We have failed to meet nature's deadline. In the next few years, this world will experience progressively more ominous and destabilizing changes. These will happen either incrementally -- or in sudden, abrupt jumps.
Under either scenario, it seems inevitable that we will soon be confronted by water shortages, crop failures, increasing damages from extreme weather events, collapsing infrastructures, and, potentially, breakdowns in the democratic process itself.
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Start with the climate activists, who are telling us only a partial truth.
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A third of avian species on land could disappear this century as a result of climate change
In more depressing bird news, researchers at my alma mater estimate that up to 30 percent of all land-dwelling bird species could be extinct by 2100 as a result of global climate change. The study, published this week in the journal Conservation Biology ($ub. req'd), modeled bird population responses to changes in vegetation for over 8,000 species and 60 scenarios, and is one of the first analyses of extinction rates to incorporate information from the recent IPCC reports. I think I'm going to go cry now.
