Climate Climate & Energy
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Earth hotter now than in past 2,000 years
The “hockey stick” graph is a reconstruction of Northern Hemisphere temperatures over the past thousand years. It showed a sharp rise starting about a century ago. Global warming deniers and doubters have long attacked the graph asserting that we were as warm if not warmer hundreds of years ago. But a 2006 National Academy of […]
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It begins with a T-shirt
Matt Stoller explains the magic of clean coal fairly well, but for a more sophisticated take, let’s turn to the Clean Coal Girlz at the RNC:
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Another large section of Canadian ice shelf breaks loose
In a predictable yet mildly troubling reminder of the Arctic’s continued ice melt, researchers say yet another massive ice chunk has broken off from an ice shelf in Canada. The Serson Ice Shelf just saw its mass more than halved when two large sections broke off recently, leaving it about 47 square miles smaller. For […]
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One farmer says ‘peak oil’ prompted energy-saving steps
Admit it, climate change is the kind of problem that leaves you wondering, “What the heck can any one person do about it?” That’s exactly how Patrick Holden said he felt about it during the “Climate Change and Food” panel discussion last week at the Slow Food Nation conference in San Francisco. Holden has been […]
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Why future Katrinas and Gustavs will be much worse, part 2
A lot of knee-jerk deniers (please don’t write in — I know that is redundant) misread “part 1,” as I knew they would. I was not wading into the issue of whether global warming has already made intense tropical storms more common. That remains a great subject of debate, mostly because of the inadequacy of […]
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Warming seas make strong storms stronger, says new study
As Gustav, Hanna, Ike, and Josephine become household names, more research has been added to the ongoing debate over the impact of climate change on hurricanes. A new study published in Nature indicates that warming seas have not increased the intensity of your everyday hurricane, but have made the mightiest storms even mightier. In essence, […]
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Why global warming means killer storms worse than Katrina and Gustav, part 1
Hurricanes can get much, much bigger and stronger than we have so far seen in the Atlantic. The most intense Pacific storm on record was Super Typhoon Tip in 1979, which reached maximum sustained winds of 190 mph near the center. On its wide rim, gale-force winds (39 mph) extended over a diameter of an […]
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How did so much water get into a New Orleans canal?
Here’s a question I’d like to know the answer to. Hurricane Gustav dealt New Orleans a glancing blow, passing it by to the west. Yet as the world saw, the city’s Industrial Canal — a large ship channel running north-south close to neighborhoods — filled nearly to the top, and there was some alarming, if […]
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North Pole an ‘island’ for first time in 125,000 years
The fabled Northwest and Northeast passages are now open. That makes the North Pole an island for the first time in human history, most likely for the first time “since the beginning of the last Ice Age 125,000 years ago.” In the last few days, however, Arctic ice melt has slowed, so we might not […]
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Deniers’ talking points spread via the same process as that of all urban legends
John McGrath, a contributor to Grist, made an important comparison between how the internet contributes to making urban legends look legitimate and how it is used in spreading climate chaos denialism: It highlights the odd dynamic of the Internet: tiny, vocal, crazy-ass minorities can nevertheless be numerous enough on the Internet to appear more impressive […]
