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Environmental education in Guinea Bissau
The Presidential Palace. The Presidential Palace in Guinea Bissau lies derelict and burnt out. You can walk amongst the shards of broken crockery, blackened banisters, and singed carpets. Its empty rooms are a fitting metaphor for this failing state. Teachers in the public sector have not been paid in years. Portuguese, the official language, is […]
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Skeptics claim global warming is fake after top scientists’ emails hacked at CRU
Shucks, we shoulda known!Photo courtesy Andrew Ciscel via Flickr With the Copenhagen climate talks upon us we learn that hackers recently broke into thousands of emails and internal documents from a leading climate research center and dumped them onto an anonymous Russian server. The hacked emails (160 MB worth, unzipped) came from the University of […]
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FOX News and TrollCat agree: Global warming is BUNK!
FOX News evidently agrees with Global Warming Skeptic Trollcat (see above): Thousands of emails from the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit were hacked recently and dumped on a Russian web server. Fox News and right-wing bloggers believe the illegally obtained emails prove that “global warming is a MYTH.” Oops, that’s Global Warming Skeptic […]
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‘Heretic’ battles straw man
Energy Self-Reliant States [PDF], a flawed study on local Renewable Energy availability from the Institute for Local Self-Reliance (ISLR) found that 18 of the 50 states could not meet their electricity needs with local renewables. In fact, no state can meet its electricity demand through local renewables without expensive electricity storage. On a national basis, […]
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New photography project provides stark proof of melting glaciers on the roof of the world
Global warming is melting 18,000 Himalayan glaciers — the largest concentration of glaciers outside the great polar ice sheets. If the present melt rate continues, many of these glaciers will be gone by the middle of this century, disrupting the perennial water supply to hundreds of millions of people. To explore this growing collection of […]
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Cast your vote for the best climate journalism
The climate problem is incredibly complex. Heck, it’s unfathomably complex to most folks, as it involves chemistry, computer models, economic development, and, of course, the weather. This complexity demands strong, explanatory journalism — the kind of fact gathering and storytelling that too many news organizations are ignoring in an era of declining budgets and celebrity […]
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Clean energy opportunities
Earlier this month, the Department of Energy announced $155 million worth of grants to clean energy projects -- specifically targeted to CHP, waste heat recovery, and district energy. There's an even better backstory.
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Copenhagen 101: The essentials on the climate talks
Welcome! It’s not too late to get up to speed on the climate-change jamboree that begins Dec. 7. Here’s a short primer. What is this Copenhagen thing? It’s a gathering of negotiators from every United Nations member country who will try to come up with a plan to protect the world from catastrophic climate change. […]
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Inferno on Earth: Wildfires spreading as temperatures rise
The following is a Plan B Update by my colleague Janet Larsen, the Director of Research for the Earth Policy Institute, about the connection between the increase of wildfires and rising temperature. Future firefighters have their work cut out for them. Perhaps nowhere does this hit home harder than in Australia, where in early 2009, […]
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Global boiling declares war on Thanksgiving
Paul Bakus in a ruined pumpkin patch.Photo: Wonk Room Cross-posted from the Wonk Room. Our increasingly extreme climate is devastating American agriculture. Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, strengthened by global warming, caused $1.6 billion in agriculture damage in Louisiana alone. Now it appears that a Thanksgiving mainstay — pumpkin pie — is next on the global […]