Category Archives: climate

Andrew Revkin, who has been covering climate change for the NYTimes for going on twenty years, stirred up a controversy with his latest piece on an emerging "middle stance"on global warming. On the left hand side of the dial, the likes of David Roberts, my editor at Grist, labeled this as "High Broderism," and complainedContinue reading “Looking for a Middle Ground in the Climate Change Debate”

That’s according to former national security advisor Richard Clarke, who was one of the first to challenge the Current Occupant over his disastrous war in Iraq. Now, in a characteristically fiery op-ed called While You Were at War,  he uses a sports metaphor from second grade to again confront "Washington’s grown-up 7-year-olds." This time heContinue reading “Global Warming A National Security Issue, Says Richard Clarke”

In global warming and the environment, everything seemed to change in 2006–at least in terms of public awareness. Here’s an a-to-z accounting of just some of those changes: A IS FOR “AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH,” Al Gore’s scientific but surprisingly human documentary on the threat of climate change, which was expected to take in at mostContinue reading “A 2006 Environmental A to Z”

Yesterday the Washington Post ran a story on climate change and insurance companies. This is not a new subject, but the story by Joel Garreau was unusually well-written and thorough, and does have some genuinely fresh news…such as the fact that Allstate has stopped writing new homeowner policies in the New York area, fearing itContinue reading “Climate Change Hits Insurance Industry”

Tim Barnett, a leading oceanographer just retired from Scripps Institution of Oceanography, this Monday gave a talk to a convention of fire ecologists in San Diego called Future Climate of Earth: A Sneak Preview. Barnett began by saying that he had seven grandkids, and he didn’t like to think about the world they were goingContinue reading “The Bush Plan: Burn All the Fossil Fuels as Fast as You Can”

The Australian Tourism Minister, Fran Bailey, recently said that using shade cloth could protect the Great Barrier Reef from the harmful effects of global warming, according to a report on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation: One of the suggestions is to attach the shade cloth to pontoons, which is an idea Ms Bailey says is worthContinue reading “Shade Cloth against Global Warming”

Note: Over the last two weeks, I’ve conducted an interview with a mentor of mine, Bill Patzert, a meterologist and oceanographer with JPL. I’ve never met Bill, and only talked to him a few times on the phone, and I don’t even remember why exactly I first contacted him years ago, but he’s been hugelyContinue reading “Global Warming, Super El Ninos and Ultra La Ninas: An Expert Explains”

Here’s mine, with the climatologist Kelly Redmond, in Grist. Here’s Andrew Revkin’s, with genius scientist James Lovelock, in the NYTimes. Lovelock is predicting flat-out doom from "global heating," and within twenty years. He told the Washington Post: "Our global furnace is out of control. By 2020, 2025, you will be able to sail a sailboatContinue reading “A Couple of Q&A’s”

A first-rate post in Real Climate by Gavin Schmidt with a great graph makes clear an important point that is, I think, little understood. Climate models are not speculative; they’re checked against observations. No one doubts the complexity of the challenge, but what is not generally understood  is how remarkably accurate the biggest and bestContinue reading “Graph of the Week: GCMs Accurately Predict Ocean Heat”

Here’s a graph, from a good clear NOAA website called Artic Change. (Amazingly, this site seems to have escaped the Bush administration meddling that has marred some other gov sites on this topic.) This graph breaks down climate not in terms of temperature but in terms of change, using principal component analysis. It’s a potentContinue reading “Graph of the Week: Indications of Change”