For my weekly Going Green column on the Time.com mainpage, I have a piece examining why belief in climate science—especially among conservatives—has waned so much in America lately. Tuesday’s climate science hearings in the House of Representatives—which featured significantly more politics than science—seemed to show that facts …
Climate Science
Why Dismissing Climate Skeptics—Even When They’re Wrong—Is a Bad Idea
Right now the Energy and Power Subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee is holding hearings into climate science. You can watch them here, if you’re really masochistic, or you can follow expert live blogging from Science magazine’s Eli Kintisch and others over here. I’m at a hydraulic fracturing expert panel for the …
Why Men Are Worse for the Planet
A guest post from TIME’s Tara Kelly:
There’s a long history of research that reveals women are the greener gender-at least when it comes to their attitudes and preferences. But now a study published by France’s National Institute of Statistics and Economics shows that the fairer sex’s environmental conscience may actually …
UPDATED: New Studies Show That Climate Change Is the Culprit in Extreme Rain
Update [2/17/11 5:05 PM]: A few bloggers and scientists have taken issue with the two Nature studies, arguing that they underplay the uncertainties still at work in the climate system. Judith Curry, an atmospheric scientist at Georgia Tech who tends to be a bit more skeptical of mainstream climate research, wrote that she doubted the …
Australia’s Cyclone: Climate Change, or Just Really Bad Weather?
The cyclone that thrashed a still-soggy Queensland yesterday has re-energized an ongoing debate Down Under over what Australia can expect from a warmer planet and what the nation – the world’s largest emitter of carbon dioxide per capita – should do about it.
Front and center in the fray is Ross Garnaut, the government’s …
Weather Watch: The Rains Felt Round the World
Residents of Brisbane, Australia must have woke up Thursday morning with at least some sense of relief. The swollen Brisbane River that runs through the nation’s third largest city did not reach the catastrophic levels as they were predicted to overnight. With at least 25 dead and a dozen still missing, Australia did not face an easy …
Climate: Federal Scientists Say 2010 Tied As the Warmest Year on Record
New Yorkers like myself awoke this morning to a fluffy layer of fresh snow. (And the sound of scores of plows sweeping the streets clean, as our billionaire mayor tries to make us forget about the Blizzard of 2009.) New Englanders are being walloped with a full-on major snowstorm—though hardened Bostonians just shrug it off—while the …
Climate: Unstoppable Global Warming
One of the biggest obstacles to reducing carbon emissions is the simple fact that political time and climatological time are very, very different. Politicians in elected democracies think on two- or four-year cycles—if that—while even the leaders of an autocratic state like China, without the pressures of an election, are still …
Climate: Student Reporters Take on Climate Change and Security
Coincidences abound—just after posting an item on Representative Gabrielle Giffords’s focus on climate change and renewable energy as a national security issues, I run across a new multimedia project from Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism that explores: climate change and national security. Called “Global Warning,” the website …
Climate: The EPA Gears Up to Regulate Greenhouse Gas Emissions
Over on the Time.com homepage, I have a piece on the coming war over the Environmental Protection Agency’s efforts to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from industrial and power sources—the first of which began on January 2. Regulation will be the story for climate politics in the U.S. this year—check out the piece here.