Latest Articles
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Why Ask Why? Try Everything Dry
American Southwest soon will face permanent drought, says study Tired of depressing climatic news? Too bad, here’s more! A new study in Science predicts that as early as 2021, global warming could create Dust Bowl-like conditions in the American Southwest. Much of the region has been severely dry since 2000, and researchers say 18 of […]
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What else might we do with our time?
Every week, 30 million people tune in to at least a couple hours of American Idol. Whether this show has truly "jumped the shark" this year or not remains to be seen, but I submit that if a portion of these folks would join the ranks of the American Idealists instead, we'd all be in for a more interesting Wednesday night.
Idealist.org's brand new connections platform is already linking up 28,000+ people who are meeting up to build community in their towns and cities. It's worth a visit just to read the myriad of quirky personal profiles, and hey, you just might find a gathering to join on a Wednesday ...
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Brakes on a Plane
Flight ads should carry health warnings, says U.K. group Advertisements for flights should include a health warning, tobacco-style, to remind people of their contribution to climate change, a U.K. think tank said this week. (So creative, those Brits!) “The evidence that aviation damages the atmosphere is just as clear as the evidence that smoking kills,” […]
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We Hear Mars Is Nice This Time of Year
Top scientists say global warming is triggering ecosystem changes around the globe The natural world is already getting knocked around by climate change, the world’s top climate experts said today. In the second of four reports being released this year by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the group looked at the impacts of global […]
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As expected, the news is mostly bad, and then worse, and then worse still
Climate change is already having big impacts on the natural world and notable effects on human societies, according to the latest climate report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, being released on Friday. In short, climate change isn’t in the future; it’s in the right now. The previous installment from the IPCC, released in […]
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Sometimes you have to take risks to save endangered species
I received an irate email the other day from Luke Hunter, who is the (taking a deep breath) Global Carnivore Program Coordinator for the Wildlife Conservation Society and an Associate Conservation Scientist in the Science and Exploration Program.
Apparently, somebody ratted me out and sent him a copy of one of my posts where I made a passing comment about the absurd amount of darting and radio collaring that is now going on in this human-dominated world:
Here is another article where two proud researchers first trapped, then darted, then radio collared cheetahs in Iran. The process will of course be repeated over and over again until their grant money runs out.
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When people ask silly questions
"If fossil fuels are the problem, wouldn't running out of them be good?"
There's an old joke about economists and other Panglossians that bears on this question:
A man leaps off the top of a skyscraper and, as he passes by each floor, true to his optimistic tendencies, he says, "Well, so far, so good."
Running out of fossil fuels is like this man running out of floors. The critical thing is not to jump ... i.e., not to commit all that carbon to the atmosphere in the first place.
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Canucks 1, US 0
Turns out that springing forward a month early didn’t save any electricity at all in the U.S. From Reuters: But other than forcing millions of drowsy American workers and school children into the dark, wintry weather three weeks early, the move appears to have had little impact on power usage. “We haven’t seen any measurable […]
