From the monthly archives: June 2010
A new study led by the University of Colorado at Boulder suggests that the Arctic climate system may be more sensitive to greenhouse warming than first thought.
The international study suggested that the current levels of Earth’s atmospheric carbon dioxide could be high enough to cause significant and irreversible shifts in the various [...]
Geoengineering the clouds to reflect more light might not be so bad for the land underneath.
Concerns have been raised in the past regarding the effects of seeding clouds to make them more reflective and thereby reduce the radiation absorbed by the Earth. Researchers have believed that by doing so the global rainfall [...]
Farming has always been hard, and in the last 50 years has become incrementally harder with the need to make more, pollute less, satisfy everyone while still supporting yourself.
All of this has to happen with increasingly scarce natural resources and the looming crisis of climate change and the effect farming is having [...]
Two Cornell bio-engineers, Faping Duan and John C. March, successfully transformed a strain of E. coli into a ‘commensal communicator’ that blocked the virulence of V. cholerae, the bacteria that causes cholera, in mice.
The Sunday Times has just retracted its horrible and misleading Amazongate story, five months after being published.
Remember Amazongate? It was a “big” news story that was supposed to show corruption and misrepresentation of data by climate change scientists. Well, if you couldn’t guess it before, the not-so-big news (as in, hardly covered [...]
A new study looking at more than 900 climate researchers have found that the majority of scientists with prominence and credentials in climate research believe humans are behind global warming.
The small number of scientist’s who have come out against anthropogenic (human-caused) climate change have far less expertise in the area and much [...]
Scientists are beginning to suspect that a change in global wind patterns helped end the last major ice age.
In a new review paper published this week in the journal Science a team of researchers looked to a global shift in winds to explain why Earth suffered such an extreme warming despite evidence [...]
Eminent Australian scientist Professor Frank Fenner believes that humanity will die out, maybe in one hundred years.
In a recent and rare interview, Fenner, who is emeritus professor of microbiology at the Australian National University in Canberra, said that homo sapiens will not survive the current population explosion and what he termed the [...]
Climate scientists are turning the heat up on Alaska in a hope to test the effects of global warming on the region.
American’s Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory researchers have already conducted extensive studies on the impact of climate change on temperate regions such as East Tennessee. But less is known [...]
Toronto hosts G20 and violent protests create serious environmental costs, in addition to the hefty monetary bill that can be attributed to the hosting of delegates from 20 countries.
It might not be receiving the same level of international coverage, but in Canada, we have all been sitting glued to TV screens [...]
In this Earth Policy Institute post, Lester R. Brown discusses the problem of water shortages across the world and potential solutions to this problem.
Lester R. Brown
With water shortages constraining food production growth, the world needs an effort to raise water productivity similar to the one that nearly tripled land productivity [...]
10 beautiful photos of the Gulf of Mexico and the Gulf of Mexico’s beautiful beaches.
I grew up on the Gulf of Mexico coast in Southern Florida. It has been horrible and scary to see what is happening and to read about what might happen as a result of the BP [...]
Sir Paul McCartney said those who don’t believe in global warming are similar to those who don’t believe there was a Holocaust.
I’m a huge Beatles fan. Not only were the band members amazing songwriters and musicians, but they were vocal activists as well. John Lennon is best known for promoting peace while [...]
Millions of people in Bangladesh have been poisoned with arsenic, due to well-meaning efforts of international development groups.
Apparently, this is not a new problem or newly acknowledged problem, but a new report out by the British medical journal The Lancet finds that 77 million people in Bangladesh are exposed to arsenic in [...]
Nearly $1 trillion in minerals were reportedly just “discovered” in Afghanistan. Will this huge discovery actually benefit the unstable country, though?
The NYTimes recently reported that the US just “discovered nearly $1 trillion in untapped mineral deposits in Afghanistan, far beyond any previously known reserves and enough to fundamentally alter the Afghan [...]
Endangered sea turtles are being burned alive in BP oil spill “clean-up” efforts. Bad enough, right? But why are rescue crews hired by BP to save and protect these turtles being blocked from doing so? Is this on purpose in order to burn costly legal evidence?
Yes, you read that title correctly, endangered [...]
