Opening night film relives 1960s activism, but who even cares anymore?

Not to further the dirty hippie debate any, uh, further, but it’s on my mind here in Utah as I...

Let’s put bison back on the praries

Every once in a while, a pearl tossed to the swine (we Gristmill commenters) by a fellow Sus scrofa domestica (that's for you, Canis) sticks in my ear. Blame this one on amazingdrx. He mentioned that a concerted effort to restore our prairies could sequester underground much of our carbon without any new technology or the warming effect of temperate tree plantings.

Harvesting a mix of prairie grasses to displace coal in a power plant is many times more efficient and ecologically benign than converting it to liquid fuel, and would tie in nicely with the URGE2 concept. I'm not licking boots here. URGE2 is a powerful idea.

School board official defends the decision

Remember the story about how the Federal Way school board put a "moratorium" on showings of An Inconvenient Truth? David...

Umbra on tree planting

Dear Umbra, My wife recently heard a program on NPR where an expert on global warming said that planting trees...

Heat, hotness, and hotitude

Here are the second five of my "Top 10 climate stories of 2006," in no particular order. (The first five are here.)

2005 was hot: In early 2006, it was revealed that 2005 was a statistical tie with 1998 for the hottest year of the past 400. However, 1998 was warmed by the biggest El Nino of the 20th century, while 2005 had no such help. That means something else contributed to making 2005 so warm, and that something was almost certainly human activity. With a mild El Nino going on right now, my prediction is that 2007 will eclipse 1998 and 2005 as the hottest year of the instrumental record.

More from Lester Brown on ethanol and food costs

Worried that no one's going to post on ethanol today? Let me ease your troubled mind ...

The world may soon be facing the highest food prices in history, according to Lester Brown of the Earth Policy Institute. The group released a missive today that says increased corn demand caused by the ethanol boom will dramatically raise food costs in the near future:

Umbra on which wood to burn

Dear Umbra, I live in Maine, land of many loggers. My home is heated by an oil furnace, and I...

Business leaders honed in on climate, carbon, and concrete at Davos

The snow at Davos didn’t melt away worries about climate change. Photo: Benjamin Zurbriggen/World Economic Forum There was something different...

‘We are just recovering from the LIA’–Why should we expect this to happen?

(Part of the How to Talk to a Global Warming Skeptic guide)

Objection: Today's warming is just a recovery from the Little Ice Age.

Answer: This argument relies on an implicit assumption that there is a particular climatic baseline to which the earth inexorably returns -- and thus that a period of globally lower temperatures will inevitably be followed by a rise in temperatures. What is the scientific basis for that assumption?