Latest Articles
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Giving Us Tropopause
The tropopause has risen by an average of 650 feet globally in the last 22 years because of global warming and ozone depletion, according to a study published in the latest issue of the Journal of Geophysical Research. For those of you who’ve forgotten your junior high school science, the tropopause is the atmospheric layer […]
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Green groups work together to counter the Bush attack on the environment
It’s been nine weeks since voters turned the national government over to Republican lawmakers, many of whom explicitly vowed to help President Bush and his industrial allies complete what former GOP House Speaker Newt Gingrich (Ga.) failed to do in 1995: dismantle the nation’s basic protections for water, air, wild lands, forests, and public health. […]
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Job None
Following the collapse of the Northwest timber industry in the 1990s, thousands of workers lost their jobs. The conventional wisdom has been that these workers were absorbed by a boom in the region’s high-tech industry — but a new study of a decade’s worth of employment records questions that conclusion. True, the region’s economy as […]
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The Rain in Lesotho Caused Mainly Lots of Pain
Rain. Drought. Hailstorms. Tornadoes. Frost. You’d be hard-pressed to name a weather phenomenon that hasn’t afflicted the African kingdom of Lesotho in recent times, destroying its crops and leaving one-third of its 2.1 million people on the brink of starvation. Now, many scientists are saying that those people, along with nearly 40 million other Africans […]
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Yurok Me Like a Hurricane
The Bush administration is to blame for last fall’s die-off of 33,000 salmon along the Klamath River in Northern California, biologists from the state’s Department of Fish and Game have determined. They say the fish kill — the largest ever recorded in the West — was the result of the administration’s decision to divert water […]
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Smokin’, Joe
Despite inevitable resistance from the Bush administration and fellow Congress members, Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Joseph Lieberman (D-Conn.) plan to unveil a proposal this week that would force all U.S. industries to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. The legislation would require all industries to limit their emissions to 2000 levels by 2010 and 1990 […]
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Jeff Reifman, Antarctic traveler
Jeff Reifman, a recent traveler to Antarctica, is a technologist in Seattle. Click here to view Jeff’s Antarctica photo album. Monday, 6 Jan 2003 SEATTLE, Wash. Somehow I knew the Antarctic would be unique and amazing — and it was, despite the 15,000 pounds of C02 emissions created by my journey there and back. Paradise Harbor on […]
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Barking Up the Wrong Tree?
Forest management has long been one of the most contentious issues in the Western United States, often placing enviros, locals, and government land managers at loggerheads (so to speak). But in some small pockets around the West, people are banding together to balance conflicting interests in local forests, a trend policy makers call community-based forest […]
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Silverado — Why Don’t We Come to Our Senses
General Motors, the largest automaker in the world, announced today that it will sell a variety of gas-electric vehicles over the next four years, a move that could help push hybrids into the mainstream. The company will sell hybrid versions of cars, pickup trucks, and SUVs, thereby creating some competition for Honda and Toyota, currently […]
