Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words, especially when you’re on a magazine deadline and time for blogging is short.
What you’re looking at is a massive dust storm—known in Arabic as a haboob—that enveloped much of Phoenix last night. Sand kicked up by strong downdrafts covered parts of the city, producing pictures …
If you’ve ever looked up at the sky when you hear the hum of an airplane, chances are you’ve seen the channels, streaks, and halos that sometimes pattern the sky in the aircraft’s wake. These cloud constellations can happen because of temperature changes as airplanes pass through certain clouds, as we learned in 2010. But this …
It’s not hard to imagine the damage weird weather inflicts on our planet. Hurricane Katrina, for example, obliterated coastal communities, wiped out businesses and left hundreds of dead bodies in its wake. Quantifying the cost of such a one-off (we hope) event is pretty easy too: Katrina left us with a bill of $81 billion, …
The start of summer officially kicked off on Tuesday at 1.16 pm ET with the beginning of the summer solstice and the Northern Hemisphere’s longest day of the year. That day, the Northern Hemisphere absorbed more sunlight than it has or will have on any other day of 2011. Our planet will release that sunlight in the coming weeks in …
Environmentalists can be a gloomy bunch, but they’re also realistic. In the past several years, most have given up on the idea of stopping climate change altogether; there’s just too much greenhouse gas already in the system for that. Instead, the refrain has essentially been: adapt or die. Even as we try to curb future greenhouse-gas …
Remember that inconvenient truth from half a decade ago? Even if you don’t, it seems like most of modern science, politics, and popular culture does – though they are often wildly divided on the issue. These days it seems like everything is in some way linked to “climate change.” There was the extreme rain that may cause a …
In the middle of the night on Tuesday, in a hotly contested move, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers blasted open a two-mile long hole in a levee along the Mississippi River, sending the rain-swollen waterway gushing over 100,000 acres of Missouri farmland. The flooded area – sparsely populated but fertile farmland – has long been …
The South is reeling from what could be one of the deadliest tornado systems in U.S. history. Yesterday storms and tornadoes ripped through Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, Georgia and Virginia, killing as many as 200 people, and potentially far more. At least 139 separate tornadoes were reported yesterday. That number is almost certain …
We often use this little corner of the intertubes to think about how globalization is physically changing the earth – be it via our addiction to air travel or jeans made on the cheap. But we’re not sticklers. Recent research published in the journal Science presents archaeological evidence that might shed new light on exactly the …
Environmentalists: Wake up! There is a greater and more urgent threat to the climate than even global warming: the threat posed by nuclear weapons.
Why are nuclear bombs an environmental problem? We have long known that a large-scale nuclear war would lead to a sudden change in climate—called a nuclear winter—that could …
