Human beings have notoriously bad memories about weather, like just about everything else. We tend to overemphasize extreme events and downplay the dull normal, which is why your Granddad’s stories about walking uphill in the snow, both ways, probably aren’t true.
But if you think that the daily weather has gotten weirder
…
Maybe we should retire the term “global warming,” which makes climate change sound like a nice, pleasant bath. It’s true that climate change—caused chiefly by the rapid increase in manmade carbon emissions—will result in warmer temperatures, fewer cold days and longer and more intense heat waves. But the real damage, both …
It’s now eight months since a devastating earthquake and tsunami hit northern Japan, badly damaging the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear complex. That accident eventually resulted in a meltdown, and the accident as a whole was rated a 7 on the International Nuclear Event Scale’s 1 to 7 rating. Explosions in the plant threw large amounts of …
Deforestation is a major cause of climate change, responsible for perhaps 15% (PDF) of the world’s overall greenhouse gas pollution. That’s because trees sequester carbon, and when those trees are cut down or burned, they release that carbon back into atmosphere. And as we lose trees, we lose a valuable carbon sink—each year the …
You probably wouldn’t know it from the U.S. media, but there’s a whole continent south of the U.S. Latin America rarely gets the media or public attention it deserves in part because of good reasons—years of relative political stability after the civil wars and juntas of the Cold War era, along with generally prosperous …
Intelligence work and climate science have a lot in common. They both involve grappling with uncertainty, trying to make sense of a signal amid the noise of ambient data and preparing to fight threats to country. So it makes sense that in 2009 the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) opened the Center on Climate Change and National …
Jia Lynn Yang of the Washington Post has a nice piece this morning on the real impact of government regulations on employment, pivoting off the tightening environmental rules that have led some coal plants to close early. She finds that on the whole, regulations don’t have much impact on jobs:
Some jobs are lost. Others are created.
…
Give Bill McKibben and the thousands of other protesters who put their safety and freedom on the line in protest after protest against the proposed Keystone XL oil sands pipeline: they won their battle. Today the State Department—which has jurisdiction over the project because it connects the U.S. with Canadian oil sands— …
The International Energy Agency released its annual World Energy Outlook yesterday, and it made for depressing reading if you care about the future of the planet. Barring a change in policy, energy demand—led by the still rapidly growing developing world—will continue to skyrocket, and with it, carbon emissions. Oil prices could …
Is it just me, or is the past getting past faster than ever before? It wasn’t that long ago—a little more than a year and a half—that President Obama stood at Andrews Air Force Base and outlined an ambitious energy deal. Greens would get the carbon cap-and-trade legislation they had been working for since the start of his time in …