Climate Climate & Energy

Unilateralism Is Starting to Look Pretty Good, Huh?

E.U. battles with U.K. over CO2 emissions Tony Blair has fashioned himself a climate champion of late, vowing to make the issue of global warming central to the U.K.’s 2005 leadership of the G8 nations. So it’s rather embarrassing for him that the E.U. has just threatened to take legal action against the U.K. over […]

Ain’t it funny how time slips away

We are late on this one -- later than J Lo's apology for sucking, later than the U.S. signing on to Kyoto -- but just in case you missed it: Willie Nelson is getting into the biodiesel business! The iconic singer and three partners have formed "Willie Nelson's Biodiesel," and they're marketing "BioWillie" (a name that somehow conjures former President Clinton, but never mind) to truck stops across the country.

Lots of bloggers have gushed about this already. But here's my favorite part: "I got on the computer and punched in biodiesel and found out this could be the future," Nelson told MSNBC. Willie Googles!

That doesn't make me think of President Clinton at all.

Cloudy Day, Sweeping the Doom Away

Artificially enhanced clouds may ease global warming, scientists say With gloomy scientific report after gloomy scientific report warning about our globally warmed future, finally one group of scientists is offering a ray of sunshine — in the unlikely form of clouds. Low-altitude, lumpy gray clouds, called stratocumulus, have the desirable quality of being especially reflective […]

Seeing Is Believing

Dramatic weather convinces many Westerners of global warming As the Western U.S. increasingly suffers from what many scientists believe are the effects of climate change — reduced snowpack, massive forest fires, alternating drought and torrential rain — more and more residents are accepting the reality of the phenomenon. “Do I believe in global warming? Absolutely,” […]

Who Will Screensave Us Now?

Big climate-modeling experiment predicts disaster A worldwide, collaborative climate-modeling study has produced its first results, and the news is not good. More than 95,000 volunteers from 150 countries participated in the study by downloading a program, run as a screensaver, which created slightly different climate simulations on each computer and sent them back to researchers. […]

Drought, Drought, Let It All Out

Drought is up, and climate change seems partly to blame, report says The proportion of the planet’s land area suffering from drought has more than doubled since the 1970s, to about 30 percent, according to a recent study by the National Center for Atmospheric Research. Researchers attribute about half of that change to rising temperatures […]

Seabirds suffer as climate change unravels North Sea food web

Guillemots are disappearing … Photo: Dr. Brian Wilson, Centre for Bioscience ImageBank. On the south side of the isle of Shetland, off the coast of Scotland, there are more than 1,200 guillemot nests. Last spring, all of them were empty. No pear-shaped eggs, no downy chicks, no next generation of guillemots. Elsewhere on Shetland, the […]

Hope Against Slope

Bush admin poised to open sensitive Alaska North Slope land to drilling The Bush administration plans to open to drilling more than 400,000 acres of Alaska’s North Slope thought to be vital to migratory birds and caribou, after the Bureau of Land Management determined that drilling can be done with “minimum impact” on wildlife. Interior […]

The Terminal

Enviros gear up for international battle over Siberian oil pipeline Russia’s 2,565-mile, $15.5 billion trans-Siberian oil pipeline — currently under construction — is at the center of a major emerging international environmental brouhaha. At issue is the Pacific terminal site. Recently, the terminus was abruptly moved from Vostochny, Russia’s main Pacific industrial port, to Perevoznaya, […]

Trees: The Quicker Picker-Upper?

Study says trees can play crucial role in battle against global warming Planting forests to remove carbon dioxide from the air — a form of carbon sequestration — would be roughly as effective in the battle against global warming as conserving energy or switching to new fuels, according to a new study from the Pew […]