EcocentricOil
A few weeks after the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, triggering the biggest oil spill in U.S. history, I wrote the first cover story for TIME on the accident. We called it “The Meaning of the Mess,” and while I spent a few pages recounting how the explosion had occurred, and what the spill would likely mean for …
EcocentricWater
The Hoover Dam may be the Eighth Wonder of the World, but to me the more impressive achievement has always been Lake Mead, the man-made reservoir—which can contain nearly 10 trillion gallons of water—that the dam holds back. Lake Mead is a vast, living tank of water in the middle of the Nevada desert, as unexpectedly remarkable …
EcocentricEcocentric
Not to use an overly technical term here, but there’s a neat paper in this week’s Science that explains clearly why carbon dioxide (CO2) is the main agent behind changes in the Earth’s climate—now and in the geologic past. First a bit of background: one argument you might hear from skeptics of manmade climate change is that CO2 is much …
EcocentricEcocentric
I’m at the Mexico City airport now—at the Chili’s actually, eating a way-too-big for one person basket of chips—leaving the B4E Climate Summit. After Al Gore’s keynote speech yesterday afternoon, the conference organizers divided the audience into five sectors: transport and logistics; energy and utilities; food, water and …
EcocentricUncategorized
I’m still at the B4E Summit in Mexico City (though it’s not so much Mexico City as the business district of Santa Fe, which is less than walkable—my hotel and the gargantuan convention center are next to each other, but getting from one to the other is a 15-minute walk around streets designed for cars, not people). Al Gore—former …
EcocentricOil
I’ve spent the last few days flying, coptering and driving around northern Alberta with the director James Cameron, taking a close look at the massive oil sands developments in the Canadian province. (As this 2008 piece from TIME shows, Alberta’s underground oil sands reserves have made Canada a world player on the global energy …
EcocentricEcocentric
After I sit down with Christiana Figueres, the energetic new chief UN diplomat on climate change, she asks me if I made it to last year’s global warming summit in Copenhagen, which was plagued with logistical problems. I tell her I had, and that the first day I’d waited outside in the Danish cold with thousands of other people …
EcocentricUncategorized
When we think about the climate, we think about the atmosphere. Changes in the atmosphere—winds, clouds, precipitation, even thunderstorms—seem to give us weather, and it’s the accumulation of carbon and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere that is gradually warming the planet. But the atmosphere is just one part of the climate …
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 …
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 …
