Climate Science
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Watch a whale jump for joy after being freed from a net
It's worth watching a guy scramble around in a Speedo to see this boatload of conservationists save a humpback whale caught in a net. If you don't want to sit through tense Speedo-clad net-cutting, though, you can skip ahead to about 6:30 and watch the newly freed whale repeatedly leaping into the air in what […]
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NYC Mayor Bloomberg gives $50 million to fight coal
Michael Bloomberg has always wielded his power as mayor of New York to fight climate change, but now he's putting his personal fortune where his mouth is.
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Limbaugh: Heat index is a liberal government conspiracy
[vodpod id=ExternalVideo.1011854&w=425&h=350&fv=] Heat wave? What heat wave? That’s just the government TELLING you it’s hot outside, for its own nefarious reasons. You know the (evocative but false) parable about the frog and the boiling water? Rush is the frog standing in the pan, slowly dissolving into soup, wearing a lumberjack hat and yelling “BOY IT […]
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Monkeys go on looting spree in Rio
This video is in Portuguese, so just mute it and cue up a bit of old Ludwig Van as you watch sneaky monkey thugs infiltrate a Brazilian home. With humans perpetually up in their business, monkeys in Rio de Janeiro are fighting back by turning to a life of crime.
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The only weather map you'll need this summer
Linda Sharps (@Sundry) has preempted your need to check Weather.com for at least the next week or so.
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What's the legal status of a country that gets swallowed by the ocean?
By the end of this century, it's likely that at least a handful of island nations will find out what it means to become a "deterritorialized" state, writes Rosemary Rayfuse in the Times.
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Bill McKibben avoids the fetal position
Bill McKibben's new Global Warming Reader brings together a range of writing on climate change.
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How a company you've never heard of could destroy the ocean ecosystem
Omega Protein, Inc. (a company you've never heard of) is quickly overfishing the Atlantic menhaden (a species you've never heard of). As a result, a number of fish that you have heard of -- striped bass, bluefish, tuna, dolphin, seatrout, and mackerel -- as well as the ocean ecosystem as a whole, the Chesapeake Bay, and the Long Island Sound (which you’ve heard of) are suffering.
Menhaden are tiny, bony, oily fish that humans can't eat, but which, according to marine scientists, are "the most important fish in the sea." Menhaden are the main consumers of phytoplankton, and without them, areas like the Chesapeake Bay and Long Island Sound are clogged with algae. They are also a staple food for bigger, tastier fish, who, deprived of menhaden, are growing sad and malnourished.
In the past 25 years, the menhaden population has shrunk from 160 billion to about 20 billion. -
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Study: Earth losing its climate change defenses
Like your body, the planet can heal itself a little bit. Some places, like forests and oceans, are carbon sinks -- they absorb carbon from the atmosphere, slowing down the rate at which everything goes to hell. But climate change is no papercut, and as it gets worse, it’s actually breaking the planet’s immune system. Two new studies in Nature argue that two types of carbon sinks -- oceans and soil -- are becoming less effective as climate change advances.
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2011 natural disasters cost a record $265 billion
Politicians might not believe in climate change, but insurance companies do. They track disasters, and it turns out that disasters just in the first six months of this year already cost the world more than any other year of disasters on record.
The price tag for 2011 disasters reached $265 billion.
