Climate Climate & Energy

Umbra on canola oil

Dear Umbra, I recently saw “organic canola oil” on a salad dressing bottle. I looked up the origin of canola oil, and it looks like it is a genetic modification of rapeseed. I thought organic certification disallowed genetically modified foods. What’s the scoop? Tom Grundy Nevada City, Calif. Dearest Tom, Have you noticed yet that […]

Al Gore on Today show

Hey, NBC's Today is focusing on -- wait for it -- climate change! Check out Katie Couric's interview with Al Gore. (Sigh, requires IE.)

Kennedy You Hear Me Now?

Another wind-power project proposed for Massachusetts waters Wind-power developers can’t get enough of Massachusetts, it seems. Nantucket Sound has the contentious Cape Wind project; now a new wind farm is being proposed for nearby Buzzards Bay. The South Coast Offshore Wind project would consist of three clusters of 30 to 40 turbines each, up to […]

Old Pipeful

National parks’ air and land under threat from energy development Thousands of miles of new pipelines and power lines could soon snake through national parks, national forests, and other public lands in the West. The energy bill signed into law last year called on federal agencies to speed up approval of new energy corridors by […]

Gone to Speed

Globe will warm faster than predicted, new studies say Global warming won’t be as bad as we thought, says new research — it’ll be worse. Two separate climate-change studies factored in increased carbon dioxide released from warming soil, forests, and oceans, and came up with similar results: current climate models may underestimate warming by 15 […]

Gore-backed group will spend big to convince Americans climate change is real

Al Gore wants you to understand climate change. Photo: © 2006 Paramount Classics.  Think you’ve been hearing a lot about global warming lately? If a new climate-focused group hatched by Al Gore has its way, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet. After nine months of behind-the-scenes planning and wrangling, the Alliance for Climate Protection is now […]

Al Gore’s slideshow

Climate Change Action has unearthed a video of Al Gore's complete climate-change slideshow -- the one An Inconvenient Truth is based on. It's a huge file, but if you're curious, there it is.

Update [2006-5-19 10:42:12 by David Roberts]: Speaking of Gore (do we speak of anything else?), Matthew Nisbet has an interesting post discussing why Gore didn't campaign more heavily on climate change in 2000. It's based on a passage from Joe Klein's new book Politics Lost. Klein's a tool, but I suspect he's more or less right on this subject.

What’s Methane, Chopped Liver?

Conservative think tank launches climate-skeptic TV ads “Carbon dioxide: They call it pollution; we call it life.” Nope, not a story in The Onion. That’s the punch line of two TV ads that the industry-funded Competitive Enterprise Institute began airing in 14 U.S. cities yesterday, timed to correspond with the big-screen debut of Al Gore’s […]

My Name Is Prince and I Am Gunky

Exxon Valdez disaster still screwing up Prince William Sound Wildlife in Alaska’s Prince William Sound is still threatened by oil spilled from the tanker Exxon Valdez in 1989. According to a new study by researchers at the National Marine Fisheries Service, some 100 tons of oil still pollute the sound shoreline and are potentially accessible […]

Why skeptics are skeptics

A few months ago, on the Scientific American blog, George Musser lamented the malcommunication between global warming skeptics and proponents. He asked readers who were skeptical about the GW consensus to tell him why in comments. They did, to the tune of 170 comments.

In a follow-up post, Musser tried to summarize and taxonomize the objections (then, in response to tons of feedback, tried again).

I doubt we have many skeptics here, but if you're curious about what trips laypeople up -- rather a wider array of things than I would have thought -- it's worth checking out. And now I can finally close that tab on my browser.