EcocentricHealth
Crossposted from TIME’s Healthland:
For about 36 million Americans with seasonal allergies, torture time is just around the corner. As spring flowers, the pollen will flow, resulting in nasal congestion, red itchy eyes and overall awfulness. It’s not just cosmetic either—for an estimated 23 million Americans with asthma, …
EcocentricWeather
The cyclone that thrashed a still-soggy Queensland yesterday has re-energized an ongoing debate Down Under over what Australia can expect from a warmer planet and what the nation – the world’s largest emitter of carbon dioxide per capita – should do about it.
Front and center in the fray is Ross Garnaut, the government’s …
EcocentricOceans
A few weeks ago when the floods first hit eastern Australia, I wrote about their potential impact on the Great Barrier Reef as fresh water plumes send sediment and nutrients into the waters offshore. Here’s my longer take in this week’s international editions of the magazine on why the world’s largest protected coral system is in …
EcocentricWeather
Residents of Brisbane, Australia must have woke up Thursday morning with at least some sense of relief. The swollen Brisbane River that runs through the nation’s third largest city did not reach the catastrophic levels as they were predicted to overnight. With at least 25 dead and a dozen still missing, Australia did not face an easy …
EcocentricEcocentric
New Yorkers like myself awoke this morning to a fluffy layer of fresh snow. (And the sound of scores of plows sweeping the streets clean, as our billionaire mayor tries to make us forget about the Blizzard of 2009.) New Englanders are being walloped with a full-on major snowstorm—though hardened Bostonians just shrug it off—while the …
EcocentricEcocentric
It’s another miserable day for flood-stricken Queensland, with parts of Brisbane being evacuated after the city’s river burst its banks on Tuesday afternoon. Local reports say the Brisbane roads that haven’t been closed due to flooding are choked with fleeing residents.
Yesterday, flash floods roared through a valley nearby, crashing …
EcocentricEcocentric
One of the biggest obstacles to reducing carbon emissions is the simple fact that political time and climatological time are very, very different. Politicians in elected democracies think on two- or four-year cycles—if that—while even the leaders of an autocratic state like China, without the pressures of an election, are still …
EcocentricMedia
Coincidences abound—just after posting an item on Representative Gabrielle Giffords’s focus on climate change and renewable energy as a national security issues, I run across a new multimedia project from Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism that explores: climate change and national security. Called “Global Warning,” the website …
EcocentricRegulation
Over on the Time.com homepage, I have a piece on the coming war over the Environmental Protection Agency’s efforts to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from industrial and power sources—the first of which began on January 2. Regulation will be the story for climate politics in the U.S. this year—check out the piece here.
EcocentricEcocentric
With the failure of carbon cap-and-trade legislation this year, and a passel of Republicans taking over the House who seem to doubt that global warming exists, Congress has become a dead-end for fighting greenhouse gas emissions. But the Supreme Court has given the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) the power to regulate …
