EcocentricPolitics
Back in 1979—when the economy was suffering and the U.S. was facing a serious energy crisis, a situation in no way similar to what’s happening now—President Jimmy Carter installed solar panels on the roof of the White House. It was a symbol of Carter’s push to get the U.S. to face up to its energy problems, beginning with the most …
EcocentricOceans
Over the past few weeks I’ve been immersed in the details of marine protected areas (MPAs) as I prepare a TIME story on the oceanographer Sylvia Earle and her crusade to defend the endangered oceans. Much of that focus has been on the Sargasso Sea in the Atlantic Ocean, where Earle and I visited last week. But as promising as the …
EcocentricRegulation
Unruly winds were still spreading the fires late into the night on Thursday in San Bruno, California, after an explosion in the San Francisco satellite community set more than 50 homes on fire. People in the area thought they had witnessed a plane crash, hearing a loud rumbling and watching a fireball lift up into the afternoon sky. …
EcocentricUncategorized
It’s not easy to spot an insect from space, but NASA has figured out a way to do it—sort of. Long before the confected debate on whether climate change was real or just a theory was resolved in favor of science, the space agency was turning the eyes of its weather satellites on the problem, looking at global temperature and …
EcocentricUncategorized
A little good news/bad news on the climate and energy front. In the Sept. 10 Science, Steven Davis and Ken Caldeira of Stanford University have a study that estimates what future carbon emissions—and consequent global warming—would be from existing energy and transportation infrastructure. (In other words, what would happen if we …
EcocentricEcocentric
It’s one of the most pressing questions facing climate scientists today: how vulnerable are the vast ice caps on Greenland and Antarctica to rising temperatures? An unfathomable amount of ice is stored on those two land masses, and as that ice melts and flows into the oceans, global sea levels rise—if all the ice on Greenland …
EcocentricEcocentric
Say this about Marshall Burke and Halvard Buhaug—they know how to title their papers. Late last year Burke, an economist at the University of California-Berkeley, co-authored a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) titled “Warming increases the risk of civil war in Africa,” which sums up the argument …
EcocentricOil
With the blown Macondo well essentially sealed, and with the oil remaining under the water dissipating (though to uncertain ecological effects), focus is now turning to the ongoing investigations into the cause of the biggest oil spill in U.S. history. Wednesday morning BP released the results of its own internal investigation into the …
EcocentricOceans
Over on the Time.com mainpage, I have a piece up about my trip to the Bermuda Institute of Ocean Science (BIOS) in, unsurprisingly, Bermuda. The visit was part of a longer reporting trip I took to the island last week with the oceanographer and environmentalist Sylvia Earle, for a piece on ocean health I’ll be writing soon for the …
EcocentricOceans
The anti-whaling movement scored a partial victory today in Tokyo, where two Japanese activists affiliated with Greenpeace were convicted of stealing whale meat, but were given a suspended sentence. Junichi Sato and Toru Suzuki were found guilty of stealing 50 lbs. (23 kg) of whale meat from a delivery company’s warehouse in April 2008, …
