Latest Articles

C’est Fin

Sushi popularity means bad news for tuna, WWF warns The popularity of sushi is sending tuna stocks into a downward spiral, says the World Wildlife Fund, warning that Mediterranean and eastern Atlantic bluefin tuna will go extinct if commercial fishers continue hooking them at current rates. “The fishery is running out of control,” WWF says […]

Place Invaders

A warming Antarctica is threatened by invasive species As more tourists and researchers head to Antarctica — gotta see that ice before it’s gone! — scientists are worrying about a different sort of invasion: flora and fauna. “The more individuals of an alien species or nonnative species get there, the more likely something will be […]

Candid Cameron

Tories and Labor swap positions on nuclear power in U.K. In an interesting switcheroo, the U.K.’s Conservative Party, pro-nuclear in the past, and Prime Minister Tony Blair, skeptical of nuclear in the past, have flip-flopped. Blair this week all but promised to build new nuclear power plants to replace old ones set to go out […]

Can We Get Back Into the Frying Pan?

Climate change making wildfires worse, study finds Wildfires in the Western U.S. are increasing in frequency and size, and our drier, hotter climate seems to be to blame, says a new study published in Science. Researchers analyzed 1,166 large fires in the West and found that wildfire frequency increased “suddenly and dramatically” in the mid-1980s. […]

Gore’s sources

I forget who sent me this, but there's a nifty post over on unbossed.com about the sources used for Al Gore's famous slideshow.

Samuelson’s counsel of despair

A column by Robert Samuelson in the Washington Post has conservatives all a-twitter -- appropriate, I guess, since it gathers all the state-of-the-art conservative talking points on global warming in one place.

Browse around at reactions and the impression you will get above all is that conservatives just don't take the subject very seriously. They're looking for some clever arguments so they can move onto other stuff that gets their viscera churning (terrorism, evil liberals, etc.). This headline is typical: "WaPo: Global Warming a Bunch of Bull."

Of course, that's not what the column says at all. What the column says is that we can't really do anything about global warming, and any politician who says otherwise is a hypocrite. It advocates despair and surrender.

There are two primary points in the column, and one conclusion that follows from the two points. Let's take them in order.

Goldberg grapples with the big question

Both Matt and Ezra have commented on this question, quoted approvingly by Jonah Goldberg from a reader email:

If Al Gore were to be convinced that global warming WAS a natural phenomena, would he be so worked up about it?  I don't think so, yet the consequences would be the same.

Let's address this in three ways.

1. Would it make a practical difference if global warming were natural? Would it change our response? Of course. I don't know how to put it any more simply than I did in this post:

What if the world cared about sustainability as much as soccer?

Over the last few weeks, much of the world has clustered around TVs, watching World Cup rivals fight for the right to hoist what may be the ugliest trophy in sport. Inevitable arguments have broken out over who ought to win, and who invented “the beautiful game.” As we head toward the final match this […]

An Incandescent Truth

Just change your dang light bulbs already If efficient, low-energy lighting were installed all around the world, global energy costs could be cut by nearly a tenth, says the International Energy Agency. The technology is widely available, would curb light pollution, and, according to a new IEA report, could keep up to 16 billion tons […]

All’s Wells That Lends Well

Big banks sign on to stricter environmental and social guidelines Big financial institutions are increasingly talking green — and some of them might even mean it. Forty-one lenders from around the world, including Citigroup and J. P. Morgan Chase, have signed on to the three-year-old Equator Principles, which call for investment projects to avoid harming […]