1–6 of 971 entries categorized:

The environment

In the wake of recent scandals in climate science, many people seem to have forgotten that unambiguous evidence for climate change is everywhere: including in the changing locations of species. The locations of thousands of species have been tracked, including plants, animals, and insects. Since 1950, they have been moving northward at a rate of [...]

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When energy is used to heat something up, the temperature does not increase smoothly as the energy is put in. Most significantly, this is because causing matter to change states takes energy in itself, above and beyond the energy that goes into warming. Imagine a big block of ice at 0°C. A lot of energy [...]

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Writer Robert Pool has defined a ‘witness’ as “someone who believes he has information so important that he cannot keep silent.” In the preface to his book, Storms of My Grandchildren, climatologist James Hansen identifies himself using the term. It is truly worrisome to be living in an age when such a prominent climate scientist [...]

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Speaking of taking action against climate change, a strong case can be made that the single most important thing we can do to reduce the chances of catastrophic climate change is to phase out coal. Coal is the one fossil fuel that is definitely abundant enough to cause catastrophic climate change. As such, we need [...]

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Back in 2008, I wrote about whether ‘runaway’ climate change might be possible on Earth. At one point, Venus had liquid water on its surface. Then, the sun grew brighter and Venus warmed. Its oceans evaporated and huge amounts of carbon dioxide (CO2) got baked out of the crust. The heat made the water break [...]

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There are some who assert that the global warming that has been observed on all continents is caused by changes in the output of the sun. This hypothesis does not stand up to scrutiny in either the short or the long-term, as made clear in James Hansen’s Storms of My Grandchildren as well as published [...]

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