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Can a number save the world?
500 marshmallows organize for climate action.Robert van Waarden / Spectral QIt can if that number is 350. That’s the safe upper limit of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere: 350 parts per million (ppm). It’s also the rallying cry of a creative campaign to raise awareness of the climate crisis and build grassroots support for the […]
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National Solar Observatory, NASA say no “Maunder Minimum”
The sunspot cycle is about to come out of its depression, if a newly discovered mechanism for predicting solar cycles – a migrating jet stream deep inside the sun – proves accurate. And that will add a small amount of warming in the next few years, which were already predicted to be record-setting by two […]
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The Radioactivity of the Breakthrough Institute: lies, misstatements, and critically flawed analyses
Once again, The Breakthrough Institute (TBI) and its founders Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus are lying about President Obama and publishing very bad analyses designed to push their anti-climate-action, anti-environmental agenda. Their statements and analyses should be seen as a radioactive by any serious journalist or policy analyst protective of his or her professional reputation […]
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NOAA: Fourth warmest May on record; model predicts a long and strong El Niño
Fast on the heels of the fifth warmest April on record, NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center reports: Based on preliminary data, the globally averaged combined land and sea surface temperature was the fourth warmest on record for May, the fifth warmest for boreal spring (March-May), and tied with 2003 as the sixth warmest January-May year-to-date […]
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Ohio officials tout plans for new nuclear power plant
Ohio media sources are reporting that Piketon, a small town 60-miles south of Columbus, could be in line to get a new nuclear power plant. Gov. Ted Strickland (D), Sen. George Voinovich (R), Rep. Jean Schmidt (R) and officials from Duke Energy and French nuclear company Areva were in Piketon Thursday to announce plans for […]
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Coal ash sites kept secret, while industry works to prevent regulations
This week’s blog post is co-written by Mary Anne Hitt, deputy director of the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal Campaign. If you lived near a dump site where the hazardous waste was so toxic it could increase your cancer risk to as high as a staggering 1 in 50, wouldn’t you want to know about it? […]
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Audit finds Tennessee Valley Authority misled on ash spill disaster
The Tennessee Valley Authority’s Inspector General released a critical audit this week on the federal company’s response to last December’s massive ash spill disaster at its Kingston power plant in eastern Tennessee’s Roane County. The incident involved a failure in a coal ash containment pond that released more than a billion gallons of toxic waste […]
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Daring protesters target mountaintop-removal sites
Four daring protestors accomplished something today that no high ranking member in the Obama administration involved in the recent mountaintop removal mining policy decisions has ever bothered to do: These four American patriots made an actual visit to a mountaintop removal site. They also went beyond the call of duty. Scaling a towering 20-story dragline […]
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Raining on the climate parade
At the Bonn climate talks, environmental groups showed their displeasure with Japan’s proposed carbon emissions cuts by comparing Prime Minister Aso with former U.S. president George W. Bush.Climate Action Factory via FlickrEven the skies wept last week when the latest cold front slammed into the ongoing effort to draft a new international climate treaty. The […]
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Bonn was disappointing, and Copenhagen will be too. Who to blame?
Photo: rolandFirst up, the climate talks are not going very well. After a rousing start in Rio in 1992, from which we returned with the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, the negotiations have been anything but inspiring. 1997’s Kyoto Protocol defined the rich-world actions – the first steps – that would put meat on […]
