Climate Change

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Storm Warning: The Unlearned Lessons of Katrina

New Orleans and its surrounding areas are a petri dish for global climate change. What's happening there will show up in your neighborhood sooner than you think. Part one of a three-part series.

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| Sun Aug. 26, 2007 12:00 AM PDT

A Hundred Katrinas: Climate Change and the Threat to the U.S. Coast

If you thought Katrina was the big one, wait till you see what's coming to your neighborhood.

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| Sun Aug. 26, 2007 12:00 AM PDT

Broken: The Army Corps of Engineers

Plodding, complacent, careless—the agency whose lapses led to the near-destruction of New Orleans now must fortify the entire U.S. coast for an era of rising seas, global warming, and more powerful storms. But first it must fix itself.

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| Sun Aug. 26, 2007 12:00 AM PDT

Glacier Surfing

New climate, new sport. Opportunity in the midst of chaos? JULIA WHITTY...

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| Thu Aug. 23, 2007 8:49 PM PDT

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Where Are All the Dolphins?

Worrying news from Europe on the lack of cetaceans (whales and dolphins) in the Bay of Biscay this summer. Researchers from the wildlife conservation group Marinelife have been conducting scientific surveys of whales, dolphins and seabirds in the English Channel and Bay of Biscay every month for the last 13 years. All told they've counted more than 20 cetacean species and more than a...

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| Wed Aug. 22, 2007 5:09 PM PDT

Underwater Turbines Set To Generate Record Power

Here's a preview of the future. Twin underwater turbines are set to generate 1.2 megawatts of electricity off the coast of Northern Ireland by year's end. New Scientist reports how the world's largest tidal power project will use underwater turbines that look and work like wind power turbines, with blades up to 60 feet wide. Tidal currents will rotate the rotors at 10 to...

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| Tue Aug. 21, 2007 5:44 PM PDT

Weird - er, New-Normal - Weather Watch: Too Hot to Cool Nuclear Reactors

Frank Strait's blog at Accuweather informs us that it's so hot in the east that nuclear reactors in the Tennessee Valley are being shut down because the water drawn out of the Tennessee River is too warm to cool them. That's a first. The Tennessee Valley Authority said it would compensate for the loss of power by buying power elsewhere—though just Thursday they announced...

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| Sun Aug. 19, 2007 7:39 PM PDT

Arctic Sea Ice Shrinks To Record Low (Again)

The National Snow and Ice Data Center reports that Arctic sea ice broke an ominous record yesterday, with the least Arctic sea ice ever measured by satellite. The previous record low was set in September 2005 (see MoJo's Has The Age Of Chaos Begun?). Yesterday's record, August 16th, 2007, falls a full month shy of the typical summer low — which means there's a...

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| Fri Aug. 17, 2007 4:54 PM PDT

'Cool Farms' Mask Global Warming

You've heard of urban heat islands that generate pockets of hot air. Now researchers confirm the existence of their opposite: cool farm patches that tend to cool things down, reports New Scientist. These have been felt in California for more than a century, in areas of intensive irrigation, like the Central Valley, where "cool farms" have counteracted global warming. Researchers from the Lawrence Livermore...

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| Wed Aug. 15, 2007 9:25 PM PDT

Rising Temps Will Stunt Rainforests

In case you think the climate naysayers trotting out their tired 10-year-old studies are in the forefront of science — this is for you. Just one example of the overwhelming quantity and quality of science being published on the many facets of climate change. A new study in the prestigious journal Nature finds that global warming could cut the rate at which trees in...

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| Mon Aug. 13, 2007 5:44 PM PDT

Butterflies Suffering From Changing Climate

Well, this is sad news. Expanding forests in the Canadian Rocky Mountains are slowly isolating groups of alpine butterflies from each other. A new study from the University of Alberta suggests this isolation may lead to the extinction of some species. Global warming is raising the altitude of treeline, and this problem is exacerbated by a policy not to initiate prescribed burns for forest...

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| Mon Aug. 13, 2007 5:10 PM PDT

Finding the Leaders Among Us

Think we're short on leaders? Then become one. Bill McKibben's put out the call through StepItUp.org for an event on...

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| Fri Aug. 10, 2007 12:11 AM PDT

Coral Reefs Disappearing Twice As Fast As Rainforests

Corals in the central and western Pacific Ocean are dying faster than previously thought. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill researchers have found nearly 600 square miles of reef have disappeared per year since the late 1960s, twice the rate of rainforest loss. The reefs are now disappearing at a rate of one percent per year, a decline that began decades earlier than...

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| Wed Aug. 8, 2007 12:43 PM PDT

European Heat Waves Last Twice as Long As In 1880

Heat waves in Europe have doubled and the frequency of extremely hot days has nearly tripled in the past century. The new data show that many previous assessments of daily summer temperature change underestimated heat wave events by 30 percent. The results are published in the Journal of Geophysical Research-Atmospheres, a publication of the American Geophysical Union. "These findings provide observational support to climate...

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| Fri Aug. 3, 2007 12:12 PM PDT
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Brodner's Person of the Day: Saddam Claus

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| Fri Aug. 3, 2007 12:00 AM PDT

Retrofitting Two-Stroke Engines Good For Everyone

An independent nonprofit out of Colorado has developed and disseminated a retrofit kit designed to reduce emissions from the ubiquitous two-stroke motorcycle taxis in the Philippines. A single motorcycle taxi with a traditional two-stroke engine emits as much pollution as 50 modern automobiles, and the Asian Development Bank estimates 100 million two-stroke vehicles ply the roads in Southeast Asia &mdash that's right, the...

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| Thu Aug. 2, 2007 7:47 PM PDT

People Powered Farms?

Two grad students from MIT want to harvest the energy of human movement in urban settings. The so-called "Crowd Farm" would turn the mechanical energy of people walking or jumping into a source of electricity. James Graham and Thaddeus Jusczyk of MIT's School of Architecture and Planning say a Crowd Farm in Boston's South Station railway terminal would work like this: A responsive sub-flooring...

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| Thu Aug. 2, 2007 6:04 PM PDT

Atlantic Hurricanes Doubled Over Last Century

About twice as many Atlantic hurricanes form each year on average than a century ago. This according to a new analysis by researchers at the National Center for Atmospheric Research and the Georgia Institute of Technology. Warmer sea surface temperatures (SSTs) and altered wind patterns associated with global climate change are fueling much of the increase. The analysis identifies three periods since 1900, separated...

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| Mon Jul. 30, 2007 2:57 PM PDT

Tibet Warming At Twice Global Average

The Tibetan plateau is heating up by 0.3°C each decade. At more than twice the worldwide average, according to a new study from the Tibet Meteorological Bureau, as reported by New Scientist. The research reinforces a growing realization that high altitudes in tropical regions are experiencing dramatic temperature increases similar to those at the poles. Over the last 50 years, temperatures in the Arctic...

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| Tue Jul. 24, 2007 4:23 PM PDT

Rainfall Changes Linked To Human Activity

Greenhouse-gas emissions have made the Northern Hemisphere wetter &mdash and climate models appear to have underestimated the changes. Research from the Canadian Centre for Climate Modelling and Analysis, published in Nature, finds that human activity has made the weather wetter in a large slice of the Northern Hemisphere, while making the regions just south of the Equator wetter, and those just north of...

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| Tue Jul. 24, 2007 2:56 PM PDT