climate change
kkrisberg | December 9, 2015As world leaders are gathered in Paris to discuss international efforts to combat climate change, Michelle Chen writes that workers in the Global South will “need to build livelihoods that can mitigate ecological crisis — and leap ahead of the dominant fossil-fuel based economies, which historically have both controlled and stifled their development.” Reporting for The Nation, Chen starts her article with a report from the New Delhi-based Just Jobs Network, which notes that climate-driven migration has the potential to drive down wages and working conditions in urban areas. Chen writes:
But…
pgleick | December 9, 2015On December 9th, National Public Radio broadcast an interview between NPR’s Steve Inskeep and Senator Ted Cruz on the subject of climate change. Below is an annotated transcript of that interview with my [bracketed] responses to the consistently false scientific claims made by Senator Cruz. Effectively, every single scientific point he made was wrong – a classic “Gish Gallop” of long-debunked talking points of those who dispute the unambiguous scientific evidence of climate change. In these bracketed annotations I have provided a few hyperlinks to each of the myths he repeats. I have tried…
jdupuis | November 29, 2015I think this post might signal the birth of a new all-consuming blogging obsession -- climate change in general and specifically how the realities of climate change play out in the Canadian context, especially as it relates to public policy.
With the COP21 climate talks coming up in Paris, this seems like as good a time as any to focus more carefully and closely on what is probably the most defining issue of our times.
Not that this is the first time I've blogged about climate change. I've kept track of the issues fairly closely over the years and that has spilled into the blog, mostly in the…
gregladen | November 17, 2015Changes in the daily variability of high and low temperatures in certain regions may stress wild bird populations. A new study of semi-wildish Zebra Finches demonstrates this. I have a post on the research here, at 10,000 birds. Have a look!
milhayser | October 30, 2015New reporting by Inside Climate News shows that petroleum giant Exxon knew, more than thirty years ago, that burning too much fossil fuel would cause catastrophic climate change. Comparing Exxon's subsequent emphasis on profits over planetary health to the efforts of Big Tobacco hiding the dangers of cigarettes, PZ Myers writes "the future is going to look back on rabid capitalism as one of the damning pathologies of our history." Now that the wider public is accepting the fact that anthropogenic global warming will transform and could destroy our way of life, Exxon is very much on the hook.…
pgleick | October 26, 2015 (Photo: Peter Gleick 2008)
The recent severe drought in the Western United States -- and California in particular -- has shined a spotlight on a range of water-management practices that are outdated, unsustainable, or inappropriate for a modern 21st century water system. Unless these bad practices are fixed, no amount of rain will be enough to set things right. Just as bad, talking about many of these bad practices has been taboo for fear of igniting even more water conflict, but the risks of water conflicts here and around the world are already on the rise and no strategy that can reduce…
kkrisberg | September 23, 2015For years, scientists have described climate change as a slowly emerging public health crisis. But for many, it’s difficult to imagine how a complex planetary phenomenon can impact personal well-being beyond the obvious effects of natural disasters, which climatologists say will happen more frequently and intensely as the world warms. That disconnect is what piqued my interest in a new study on old infrastructure, heavy rainfalls and spikes in human illness.
Drinking water quality is among the many adverse effects that climate change is expected to have on human health. But what exactly does…
gregladen | September 1, 2015I've got a press release from the University of Southern California that seems important, but I don't have time today to read the study. So, you can look at the press release and tell me what you think of it.
Climate Change Will Irreversibly Force Key Ocean Bacteria into Overdrive
Scientists demonstrate that a key organism in the ocean’s foodweb will start reproducing at high speed as carbon dioxide levels rise, with no way to stop when nutrients become scarce
Imagine being in a car with the gas pedal stuck to the floor, heading toward a cliff’s edge. Metaphorically speaking, that’s what…
gregladen | September 1, 2015Alaska is being called the poster child (state?) for climate change because things have been so strange there lately. One reason for this is the extreme warm conditions in the North Pacific and associated (probably) changes in the jet stream, as well as overall warming, which has caused coastal Alaska to become a warm place, glaciers to melt, and (in the farther north) sea ice to be less. And now, President Obama has made a trip there and given a big speech.
President Obama's speech:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FvIrlaXU28A
More information on the President's trip here.
Meanwhile,…
dr. dolittle | August 19, 2015Another new study published in Nature Communications shows follows along with the prior post and shows that ancestral dogs were ambush hunters that evolved from forest dwelling animals similar to a mongoose (or a cat).
These early ancestors to dogs were ambush predators. The image shows Hesperocyon (left) and later Sunkahetanka (right). Image from Discovery News, by Mauricio Anton
An international team of researchers studied archived samples of elbows and teeth of multiple species of dogs that lived between 40 - 2 million years ago. According to a quote from …
illconsidered | August 19, 2015A gentle reader recently asked for a "status of the blog" report. As the two week delay between ask and answer can attest to, things are rather slow moving around here at the moment and I am mainly just my own lurker. I do have some new content that I will offer very shortly and a post or two in the slow cooker.
I guess in general I have been feeling like I have over the years said what I needed to say and was now only repeating myself. This is despite quite a few interesting developments over the past year ranging from juicy insider-blog gossip to political theatre to remarkable…
milhayser | June 16, 2015Climate change denialists are apt to grasp at straws, which may explain their heralding of a global warming "hiatus" or "pause" that since 1998 has supposedly invalidated scientific consensus and its models of climate change. Clearer and more clever heads have renamed the hiatus a "faux pause," playing off the French faux pas which means false step or blunder. For one thing, the data showed only a relative slowdown in warming, not a pause; temperatures were still increasing. As Greg Laden says, "a hiatus or a pause in global warming is at present physically impossible." Now a new paper…
oracknows | April 14, 2015I spent a nice long weekend in New York at NECSS, which has grown to quite the big skeptical conference since the last time I was there five years ago. The Friday Science-Based Medicine session went quite well and, as far as I could tell, appeared to be well-received; so hopefully we will be doing something like it again next year. And, heck, I got to meet Bill Nye. How cool is that?
One topic that came up over and over at NECSS had to do with what is the best way to communicate science and, in particular, contrast it to the unfortunately all-too-common denialist antiscience doctrines of the…
gregladen | April 13, 2015According to the best available research, we are going to have to double food supplies, globally, by 2050. Think about that for a moment. Children born today will be in their 40s at a time that we need to have already doubled food production, yet during the last 20 years we have seen only a 20 percent increase in food supply. Assuming a steady rate of increase in production (which might be optimistic) we should expect to fall far short of demand over the next few decades. This is a problem. The problem is expected to most severely affect poorer people, people in less developed nations, and…
illconsidered | April 13, 2015I haven't seen this making the climate blog rounds (though I don't pay as close attention anymore as I used to...) so I thought supporters of science and detractors alike might like to know that the cat is out of the bag and the Global Warming Hoax has been exposed.
See below:
Continental drift and evolution surely fall into that that same mix.
pgleick | March 17, 2015California’s hottest and driest drought in recorded history has shifted the sources of electricity with adverse economic and environmental consequences. The Pacific Institute has just completed and released a report that evaluates how diminished river flows have resulted in less hydroelectricity, more expensive electricity from the combustion of natural gas, and increased production of greenhouse gas emissions.
The current severe drought has many negative consequences. One of them that receives little attention is how the drought has fundamentally changed the way our electricity is produced.…
pgleick | February 26, 2015
If there is anything that the past few decades of research and study of major global challenges tells us, it is that truly effective solutions to sustainability challenges require truly integrated approaches across disciplines, fields of study, data sets, and institutions. We are not going to solve 21st century global problems with 20th century tools.
The planet is faced with a wide range of regional and global threats: air and water pollution, loss of biodiversity, a rapidly changing climate and new risks from extreme weather events, energy and food security, conflicts over resources such…
gregladen | February 2, 2015Bjørn Lomborg wrote an opinion piece that is offensively wrong
Bjørn Lomborg is the director of the conservative Copenhagen Consensus Center. He is author of two books that seem to recommend inaction in the face of climate change, Cool It, which appears to be both a book and a movie, and “The Skeptical Environmentalist.”
This is apparently the Copenhagen Consensus Center, Copenhagen Consensus Center USA, 262 Middlesex St, Lowell MA .
He is well known as a climate contrarian, though I don’t subscribe to the subcategories that are often used to divide up the denialists. Let’s just say that…
gregladen | January 27, 2015The Blizzard continues. The center of the low pressure system moved to the northeast more than expected, so the maximum snowfall amounts have also moved deeper into New England, and it the storm may end up dropping the largest amounts Downeast, in Maine, rather than around New York and southern New England. Nonetheless maximum snow totals are heading for 20 inches in many areas west of Boston.
Here, I wanted to alert you to a recent study that talks about "Changes in US East Coast Cyclone Dynamics with Climate Change," which has this abstract:
Previous studies investigating the impacts of…
