Climate Climate & Energy

Quick on the Thaw

Melting Arctic sea ice may have hit point of no return, scientists fear Experts on the climate of the Arctic have been busy this summer altering their dire predictions for a globally warmed future — to make them even direr. According to scientists at the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of […]

Hurricane You Hear Me Now?

Warming oceans linked to increase in powerful hurricanes and storms Severe hurricanes and cyclones have become more common worldwide as ocean temperatures have increased, according to a study published today in the journal Science. Georgia Tech climatologist Judith Curry and colleagues studied satellite data from the past 35 years as well as computer models before […]

Dead radioactive birds piling up at British nuclear plant

One more reason to oppose nuclear: the radioactive birds.  

Make that the dead, frozen, expanding pile of radioactive birds.

At a nuclear plant in Britain, concerned about birds potentially spreading radiation from the site, managers hired snipers -- yes, snipers -- to assassinate birds that land in the area, mostly pigeons and seagulls. Which they've been doing for a while now.

Well, problem solved then, right? Not exactly.

Now, instead of live radioactive birds that could fly away and contaminate things, there are dead radioactive birds, deemed low-level radioactive waste, that aren't going anywhere. Hundreds of them, actually, the managers guess. But unlike other, conventional forms of radwaste, the birds rot -- enough to be deemed "putrescent" -- so they must be kept out of the normal nuke waste dump.

Which means that now the Brit nuke plant has the same problem as avid hunters trying to cut down on their meat consumption -- freezers and freezers full of their kill, with more arriving all the time. And until a special nuclear-bird landfill can be built where they'll be dumped, the nuke plant's freezers will keep overflowing with the hot cold birds.

Freezer-burned nuclear gull, anyone? Yum.

Continental Wreck-Fest

Europeans adapting to the realities of a disrupted climate While Americans quibble ignorantly over whether climate change is really happening, Europeans are already adapting to it. Swedish foresters are being told to plant trees that will thrive in warmer temperatures. Planners of a new subway system in Copenhagen, Denmark, raised all structures to accommodate an […]

The environmental take on Hurricane Katrina

When Hurricane Katrina ripped through the Gulf Coast, it stirred up not just gale-force winds and untold misery, but a host of difficult environmental questions. How did heedless coastal development exacerbate the hurricane’s toll? What’s behind the socio-economic disparity in environmental planning — and emergency response to environmental disasters? Did global warming make the storm […]

Soil Ain’t Green

British soil is losing carbon — and may be contributing to global warming Dirt may be one of the world’s biggest greenhouse-gas emitters — and that could throw a very heavy wrench into efforts to fight climate change. In the journal Nature, researchers report that as the soil in England and Wales has warmed over […]

Romancing the Stove

States sue DOE, press for energy-saving standards for appliances New York City and 15 states have filed suit against the U.S. Department of Energy, saying the agency has failed to update energy-saving standards for nearly two dozen household appliances — changes that would save gobs of energy. According to the suit, the DOE has violated […]

Umbra on why we shouldn’t waste energy

Dear Umbra, I am doing a big geography project at school on saving energy and recycling. My part is to comment on what will happen if we keep wasting energy. I know the basic information, but I am not sure what to write, as it is to be given out to adults (and I’m only […]

Hurricane Katrina brings a foretaste of environmental disasters to come

If the images of skyscrapers collapsed in heaps of ash were the end of one story — the U.S. safe on its isolated continent from the turmoil of the world — then the picture of the sodden Superdome with its peeling roof marks the beginning of the next story, the one that will dominate our […]

A hurricane expert explains the climate-change connection

As the world watched New Orleans’ devastating descent into squalor last week, questions about connections between global warming and hurricanes reemerged. A few politicians and activists leapt to offer their views, most of which were unmeritorious. So what does the science say? Swifter, higher, stronger? Investigations of the climatology of tropical cyclones (the generic name […]