‘Climate’ Archives
Veterans Day, 2030
The worst direct impacts to humans from our unsustainable use of energy — over the next few decades — will, I think, be Dust-Bowlification and extreme weather and food insecurity: Hell and High Water. But all of the impacts occurring simultaneously will have an even more devastating synergy (see “An Illustrated Guide to the Science of [...]
In a Win for Public Health and Environment, Rand Paul Loses Bid to Weaken Air Quality Standards
Kentucky Senator Rand Paul has failed in his bid to overturn key air quality standards that were finalized this summer. Environmental groups were on edge today as they awaited a vote in the Senate on a Congressional Review Act that would have killed the Environmental Protection Agency’s Cross-State Air Pollution Rule. The CSAR requires 27 [...]
The Carbon Bomb: Mini Keystone XLs All Across America
Photo: RL Miller by RL Miller in a repost The Keystone XL pipeline symbolizes our national debate. It’s a governmental policy to be made that will set policy, for good or bad, for years to come: claimed energy security (access to friendly North American oil) and jobs vs environmental ruin and carbon bomb continuing our addiction to [...]
The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Don’t Believe in Science (or Many Other Inconvenient Truths)
by Chris Mooney, in a DeSmogBlog cross-post Over the last year here at DeSmogBlog, my writings have converged around a set of common themes. On the one hand, I’ve shown just how factually incorrect today’s political conservatives are, documenting the disproportionate amount of misinformation believed by Fox News watchers and the [...]
Power for the People: Energy For the 99 Percent
Photo: Tom Giebel, Flickr by Kate Gordon The Occupy Wall Street protests are focusing Americans’ attention on the fact that power is increasingly consolidated into the hands of very few individuals and corporations. This is especially true in the energy sector. Just last week the country’s five largest oil companies—BP, Chevron, [...]
Times Atlas map of Greenland to be corrected
We were pleased to hear from the University of Arizona’s Jeff Kargel that the Times Atlas folks are now updating their atlas of Greenland. As we reported earlier, the first edition was completely in error, and led to some rather bizarre claims about the amount of ice loss in Greenland. Kargel reports that HarperCollins (publisher of the [...]
Urban Homesteading is a Popular Trend, but It’s also Ruffling Some Feathers
by Cole Mellino Urban homesteading, in which households grow their own food and often raise animals for food in an urban environment, is becoming more and more popular as people decide to opt out of our globalized, industrialized agricultural system. Concerned about the state of agriculture and the impact our farming methods are having on the [...]
October 7 News: Climate Change, Beetle May Doom Rugged Pine
There’s just a deadly synergy between beetles, blister rust and climate change,” said Jesse Logan, a whitebark expert in Montana. Other key stories below: Secret ‘Watch List’ Reveals Failure to Curb Toxic Air; Wind Power Surges in the Third Quarter Climate Change, Beetle May Doom Rugged Pine The bug lady scoots through [...]
On record-breaking extremes
It is a good tradition in science to gain insights and build intuition with the help of thought-experiments. Let’s perform a couple of thought-experiments that shed light on some basic properties of the statistics of record-breaking events, like unprecedented heat waves. I promise it won’t be complicated, but I can’t promise you won’t be [...]
How Can It Be Warming When It’s (Almost) Always Cooling?
The Koch-funded Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Study (BEST) verified three things we already knew: Recent global warming has been “on the high end.” It’s accelerating. The data won’t stop the deniers and their media allies from spreading disinformation, including the myth that it has stopped warming. Figure 1: BEST [...]
