EcocentricWeather
Okay, I know it’s weird to keep writing about Greenland from Hong Kong, but what can I say. Greenland’s constantly shifting landscape is a busy place.
The latest spasm of geography on the world’s largest island was recorded last week, when between July 6 and 7, scientists monitoring satellite images of Jakobshavn Isbrae glacier in …
EcocentricOil
I’ve already asked whether President Obama’s deepwater drilling moratorium is a smart policy, given the fact that it won’t do much unless we attack oil demand at the source. But I still thought that a temporary timeout for certain sorts of deepwater drilling made sense. The Deepwater Horizon accident proved not just that well blowouts …
EcocentricTechnology
There is probably no more sorry field of clean energy research than fusion. The quest to harness the power of the sun—without carbon emissions—has long attracted quixotic dreamers, amateur fusioneers and straight hucksters.
But by its own, low standards, fusion research is in a sorry state. The only large, serious, potentially …
EcocentricOil
A brief update on BP’s containment procedures while I wait for the presidential oil spill commission to begin its second day of hearings here in New Orleans. (By the way, you can watch the hearing, which begins at 9 AM Central, here.) Yesterday evening BP managed to successfully connect the new containment cap—the 3 ram stacking …
EcocentricOil
Frustrated twice by the federal courts—which had overturned his original temporary moratorium on deepwater drilling—President Obama Monday evening decided to do what most of us have probably wanted to do when denied by someone in a position of authority: he went ahead anyway. (Sometimes it’s good to be President.) Interior Secretary …
EcocentricEcocentric
Well, not really—unless you spent a decade studying some of the most complex science in the world in college, graduate school and postdoctoral training, and know the ins and outs of a General Circulation Model. But as climate researchers struggle to cope with a changing media landscape, persistent skepticism and hostile attacks …
EcocentricOil
Greetings from New Orleans, where I’m about 1200 miles closer to BP’s complex containment procedures above the site of the Deepwater Hozion sinking—yet I’m pretty much still dependent on subsea camera web feeds like the rest of you. I’m here to check out how the spill—and the cleanup—are progressing, and how the community is …
EcocentricWeather
People who live in the Amazon basin are not likely to forget the great storm of January, 2005. Over the course of two days, a squall line measuring 620 miles (1,000 km) long and 124 miles (200 km) wide raged across the region from southwest to northeast, with buzzsaw-like winds of 90 mph (146 km/hr) causing widespread damage to property …
EcocentricOceans
The future of fish—at least the sort that end up on our dinner plates—is not in the ocean. As we’ve steadily overfished the seas, the stock of wild fish have been declining fast. Only around 25% of commercial stocks are in a reasonably healthy state, and some 30% of fish stocks are already considered collapsed. A famous study that …
EcocentricEcocentric
Over at Dot Earth, Andrew Revkin has gotten his hands on a couple of documents being sent to the 831 researchers who will be contributing to the fifth assessment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—the report that sums up the state of research on global warming, and which is set to be finalized in 2014. Both have to do …
