climate change

Thomas Jones writes: The greenhouse effect was first hypothesised in 1824 by Joseph Fourier – though his analogy was the bell jar rather than the greenhouse – and proved experimentally by John Tyndall in 1859. In the 19th century it could be seen as unambiguously a good thing: if carbon dioxide and other trace gases [...]

University of East Anglia: More than half of common plants and one third of the animals could see a dramatic decline this century due to climate change – according to research from the University of East Anglia. Research published today in the journal Nature Climate Change looked at 50,000 globally widespread and common species and [...]

Overheated: The Human Cost of Climate Change — a review: The dedication of Andrew Guzman’s book makes obvious what he hopes to convey in the couple of hundred pages to follow. “To Nicholas and Daniel,” he writes, referring to his sons, “Whose Generation Will Face The Consequences.” Many authors have written about how global warming [...]

Scientific American: Why did James Hansen retire on April 2 after 32 years as director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies? As he told the enterprising students of Columbia University’s Sustainability Media Lab who captured him in the following video, “I want to devote full time to trying to help the public understand the [...]

Christian Science Monitor reports: Over the past century, global average temperatures appear to have risen faster than at any time since the end of the last ice age 11,300 years ago, and perhaps longer. Meanwhile, the magnitude of the increase has been unmatched in at least the past 4,000 years. Researchers say those are the [...]

Bill McKibben writes: The list of reasons for not acting on climate change is long and ever-shifting. First it was “there’s no problem”; then it was “the problem’s so large there’s no hope.” There’s “China burns stuff too,” and “it would hurt the economy,” and, of course, “it would hurt the economy.” The excuses are [...]

Jeff Goodell writes: Among all the tests President Obama faced in his first term, his biggest failure was climate change. After promising in 2008 that his presidency would be “the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal,” President Obama went silent on the most crucial issue [...]

Diana Donlon writes: This past year treated us to a climate change preview in spades: crazy heat waves, prolonged drought, and epic storms like Sandy. To help us stabilize the climate, before we reach the point of no return, we must tap the immense potential of our food system. Since becoming an agrarian society, we’ve [...]

The Guardian reports: The US space agency Nasa warned last week that the Amazon rainforest may be showing the first signs of large-scale degradation due to climate change. A team of scientists led by the agency found that an area twice the size of California continues to suffer from a mega-drought that began eight years [...]

Chris Hedges writes: Clive Hamilton in his “Requiem for a Species: Why We Resist the Truth About Climate Change” describes a dark relief that comes from accepting that “catastrophic climate change is virtually certain.” This obliteration of “false hopes,” he says, requires an intellectual knowledge and an emotional knowledge. The first is attainable. The second, [...]