Climate Science
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The doctor and the life coach: A question for Andy Revkin
I’m working on one last follow-up to my brutal-logic posts, but lemme just take a time-out to ask a question of my friend, NYT journo-blogger Andy Revkin, who seems to have thrown his lot in with Bjorn Lomborg and decided that talking about greenhouse-gas emissions is a drag. First, to frame things, a thought experiment: […]
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Methane in the Arctic: The end of the world, or what?
Russian scientists have discovered that the Arctic is releasing hundreds, perhaps thousands, of enormous plumes of methane from the seafloor directly into earth's atmosphere. The scale and volume of the methane release has astonished the head of the Russian research team who has been surveying the seabed of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf off northern […]
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New species from Asia include noseless monkey named ‘Snubby’
There are still way more kinds of creatures out there than science knows about — we're discovering new species all the time, and it always seems like the new ones are the weirdest yet. The World Wildlife Fund just released info about their 2010 discoveries in Asia's Mekong River region, which traverses Vietnam, Thailand, Myanmar, […]
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Climate change for sale: How climate activists can wake up the American public
Over the last few years, three Columbia University professors learned how important language is when it comes to combating climate change. They queried 275 randomly selected U.S. citizens for their opinions on raising money to fund alternative energy projects and the like by adding fees to earth-warming activities such as driving cars and flying in […]
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The top five takeaways from the Durban climate talks
Talking about climate-policy developments gets tedious. Bear with us for the verdict on Durban.After running 36 hours into overtime, the climate talks in Durban, South Africa, finally wrapped up this weekend. As usual, all the dramatic stuff happened in the last 12 hours, after everyone had been beaten into submission by sheer exhaustion. I do […]
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Brits make disused landfill into wildlife sanctuary
There are a few options of what to do with an old landfill: cover it over and leave it alone; turn it into a field for solar panels; convince people to play soccer on top of it. One town in England is going a step further and returning a decommissioned landfill to nature. The 16-acre […]
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What exactly happened at Durban?
Ok, kids, Durban is over, and it's time for the world to return to its regularly scheduled programming of carbon-induced DOOM. What exactly did the world's long-suffering climate negotiators accomplish? They agreed on a "platform" outlining how they’ll keep trying to create a new climate treaty. Well, it’s … progress towards progress? Here are the […]
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Critical List: Durban is over; Rick Perry is an idiot
The Durban round of COP talks ended over the weekend with a "platform" that outlines how work towards a new climate treaty will progress over the next few years. But that's really not good enough. Rick Perry thinks the company called Solyndra is a country called Solynda. That's in Africa, right? It's easier to find […]
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Lights, camera, activism: Filming the story of environmentalism
This OnEarth story was written by Bruce Barcott. In a creaky wood-floor office overlooking San Francisco Bay, the documentary filmmaker Mark Kitchell removes his glasses, runs his hand through his hair, and glares at a computer screen filled with thumbnail images of film clips. Kitchell, 59, is in the throes of a dilemma. He’s spent […]
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The frog and the polar bear: The real reasons Americans aren’t buying climate change
As international leaders trek home from Durban, South Africa, after a week of plotting the world’s response to global warming, the debate rages here at home — over whether Americans even care. The New York Times ran a story in October headlined, “Where did global warming go?” that cited polls suggesting that Americans had lost […]