For years, scientists have warned that climate change is taking its toll on Earth's ice, thawing not just the massive ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica but mountain glaciers and ice caps from the Andes to the Alps.
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Feed SubscriptionPopular Opinion on Climate Change Traced to Political Elites
It seems the general public just can't make up its mind about the existence of man-made climate change. Rather than steadily increasing or decreasing over the last decade, the U.S. public's concern over our warming planet has jumped up and down, according to Gallup polls.
Read More »Would President Romney Be Good For Tech, Science, And Space Innovation In The U.S.?
What would President Mitt do for science, technology, and startups in America? And would he use his missionary zeal to drive policy in these directions
Read More »Gravitational Pol: What President Gingrich And His Moon Base Would Mean For U.S. Innovation
Newt Gingrich's bold plans for a moon base dominated last night's GOP debate.
Read More »Flooding Is Biggest Climate Risk to UK
By Nina Chestney LONDON, Jan 26 (Reuters) - Flooding will be Britain's biggest climate risk this century, with damage set to cost as much as 12 billion pounds ($18 billion) a year by the 2080s if nothing is done to adapt to extreme weather, a report said on Thursday. British summers are forecast to get hotter, while winters will get milder and wetter. New government-funded research has identified the top 100 effects of climate change and their expected impact on Britain and magnitude over this century.
Read More »How the Dutch Make "Room for the River" by Redesigning Cities
For centuries, the Dutch have built higher and higher dikes to keep waters at bay in a country where 55 percent of housing is located in areas prone to flooding. But climate change has convinced them this approach will no longer work, so the country is embarking on a mammoth task of moving dozens of dikes back to make room for swelling rivers
Read More »NCSE Picks Fight Against Climate Science Deniers
The National Center for Science Education is a wonderful institution dedicated to fighting junk science from entering our Nation’s schools and media. This is a tireless and often thankless job, yet there are so few “think tank” type organizations to promote science standards out there that they really stand out. I had the fortune 2 years ago to visit their offices and was impressed by how passionate the staff were and what they could accomplish out of a tiny office and a garage to store their immense archives
Read More »Bee Hunt!
A scientific study to understand the impact of climate change and other factors on plant-pollinator interactions, geographic distributions and seasonal abundances [More]
Read More »A real sea change
International diplomats met two weeks ago at the UN Durban Climate Change Conference in South Africa to discuss a greenhouse gas reduction plan displaying no urgency to reach any meaningful agreement. Meanwhile, researchers at the American Geophysical Union annual meeting in San Francisco are reporting what many scientists have suspected for a long time but have been thus far not been able to prove convincingly that the world s sea level is likely to rise by at least 3 feet in the next 100 years
Read More »Melting Glaciers Muck Up Earth’s Gravitational Field
Photographs never quite capture the sparkling blue tint of glacial ice, so when I visited the Perito Moreno glacier in Patagonia on a backpacking trip through South America some years ago, I was happy to get this camera angle: the blue of the Argentine flag gives you a sense of what the blue of the ice looks like in person.
Read More »Scrubbing Carbon Dioxide from Air May Prove Too Costly
One of the seemingly ideal and direct solutions to climate change is to efficiently vacuum up greenhouse gases straight from the atmosphere. But a new study finds that such a proposal is very far-fetched and tremendously expensive.
Read More »Good and Possible: Climate Talks, Carbon Capture
In the words of Maite Nkoana-Mashabane * , President of the Durban UN Climate Change Conference, “ we should not let the perfect become the enemy of the good and the possible .” Given the thousands of fossil fuel-fired power plants around the world (including about 3,000 in North American alone), this good and possible likely means a future that includes coal, natural gas, and oil as primary energy resources. So, how can we use these fossil fuels in a more environmentally responsible way within practical constraints? One option could be found in the flexible operation of carbon capture and sequestration technology on the world s coal-fired power plants
Read More »Climate Talks Consensus: All Countries Should Cut Greenhouse Gas Emissions–In Future
DURBAN, South Africa--For the first time, all major nations--developed and developing--have agreed to a roadmap that would combat climate change by reducing greenhouse gas emissions via an "outcome with legal force" that would not come into effect before 2020.
Read More »Federal Agency Encourages Its Scientists to Speak Out
SAN FRANCISCO The public at times questions scientific results produced by government agencies, thinking that the findings may be meant to support particular political policies or positions or to deflect criticism of those policies. Jane Lubchenco, the administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) released a formal scientific integrity policy yesterday that is intended to combat that cynicism
Read More »Fast Climate Change Moves Slow Species
It’s hard to feel a sense of urgency about climate change--it feels so slow. Well, try telling that to the critters dealing with it. Because new data suggest that the climate will change more than 100 times faster than the rate at which species can adapt
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