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 …
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
Over on the Time.com mainpage, I have a piece on the worrying bleaching events ocurring to coral reefs around the world, thanks largely to warming ocean temperatures. Though the sudden bleachings we’re seeing in places like Indonesia immediately have to do with unusually warm water temperatures caused in part by this year’s El Nino, …
EcocentricUncategorized
Update [11:11 PM EDT]: It’s worth taking a look at some of the recommendations made by the IAC report:
The IAC report makes several recommendations to fortify IPCC’s management structure, including establishing an executive committee to act on the Panel’s behalf and ensure that an ongoing decision-making capability is maintained. To
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EcocentricEnergy
Bill Gates—through his Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation—revolutionized the health world by focusing vast amounts of money on diseases of the developing world that hadn’t responded to traditional philanthropy. (That’s why TIME put Gates, his wife Melinda and U2 frontman Bono on the cover as People of the Year in 2005.) Lately, …
EcocentricOil
There seem to be two rules to being a passenger on a Greenpeace ship. One: if you take a beer from the refrigerator, always remember to log it on the drinks sheet. (And pay your bar bill before you leave the boat—otherwise, I believe they make you walk the plank.) Two: there is no such thing as a passenger on a Greenpeace ship. …
EcocentricEnvironmentalism
Update: Big mistake on my part here—I did not give proper credit to Andrew Dermont, the writer from Big Think who originally interviewed Hawking. You can access Dermont’s original post and story on the Hawking interview here, which contains Dermont’s own take on Hawking’s thoughts as well. Complete mistake on my part—the post I’d …
EcocentricFood
Hot enough for you? If you live in one of the more than 15 states that were suffering under a heat advisory or excessive heat warning on Tuesday, I’m going to guess the answer is yes, God, please make it all stop. The oppressively high temperatures that gripped much of the U.S. during June—the hottest month on record worldwide, …
EcocentricEcocentric
They haven’t gotten anywhere near the attention they deserve, but the floods that have struck much of Asia over the past couple of weeks may be the biggest humanitarian disaster in recent memory—bigger even than the earthquake that hit Haiti in January and the 2004 Asian tsunami. Both of those catastrophes killed far more, but the …
EcocentricEcocentric
Positive feedback cycles—they’re what keeps climatologists up at night. The term describes the way that certain ecological responses to a warming climate can further accelerate warming, creating a feedback cycle that can spiral out of control. Take the billions and billions of tons of methane buried beneath the Arctic permafrost. …
