By Alison Hawkes Remember the ozone hole? Well, it’s not gone yet but as of a 2005 IPCC report, the problem has stabilized, thanks to the worldwide ban on CFCs. That’s good because no one wants to get fried by ultraviolet radiation, but bad because it may be leading to greater warming, especially in the Antarctic. Geo-engineering enthusiasts say we should just shoot up sulfur aerosols, finely suspended sulfur particles that reflect sunlight, into the atmosphere. Never mind that we’d... [Read more]

By Alison Hawkes Ahh spring. Just three more days and it’s officially started. We know to expect the usual delights: warmer weather, rain, and with that a giant bloom of flowers, leaves, and fresh growth. So giant, in fact, that all that photosynthesis will draw down atmospheric CO2 levels by several ppms. Check it out. This graph provided by the Mauna Loa research station in Hawaii shows the continuous climb in CO2 levels. The red line shows monthly mean values measured from the top of the... [Read more]

By Alison Hawkes Remember the old idea that we could escape climate change by dumping a bunch of iron into the ocean? Iron “seeding” or “fertilization” rests on the notion that iron could be added to the nutrient-deprived deep sea to cause massive phytoplankton blooms, which would capture carbon and, as they died, sink it to the ocean floor. Sounds good, except many people have gotten cold feet over human-induced iron seeding – after all, it seems like too much tampering with ocean ecosystems.... [Read more]

By Alison Hawkes In 2007, the journal Science published a study that concluded that the severe drought in the Amazon in 2005 actually prompted forests to thrive because more sunshine led to a flourishing of plant growth. On the other hand was a IPCC-published claim (from the World Wildlife Fund) that only a small drop in rainfall could cause some 40 percent of the Amazonian forests to die off and switch to savanna. Both of these studies can’t be true. Extreme die-off and plant growth during... [Read more]

By Alison Hawkes Everyone points the finger these days to China, which has emerged as the largest emitter of greenhouse gases in the world. But come to think of it, that’s a little odd, isn’t it? The Chinese people, themselves, for the most part, live way below Western standards. They just produce many of the goods that we consume in the U.S., Europe, and Japan. So what if we looked at greenhouse gas emissions in a way that shifts the responsibility not on the producer of goods, but... [Read more]

By Alison Hawkes This just in from NASA’s Aqua satellite: a giant phytoplankton bloom in the Arabian Sea off the coast of Pakistan. Phytoplankton bloom in Arabian Sea The green swirls are, of course, the phytoplankton, which are individually microscopic but combine in huge numbers to form algae blooms like this one. Blooms are common during monsoon season, when strong winds blow across the ocean towards land causing the upwelling of cold seabed water that’s chalk full of nutrients. The... [Read more]

By Alison Hawkes Methane first came to the world’s attention in relation to global warming in the form of a snicker. Flatulating cattle were what we were supposed to fearful of? Vegetarians cited it as proof that a meat obsessed diet was ruining the planet, while almost everyone else with a sense of humor paused and then returned to worrying about seemingly more serious sources of greenhouse gas emissions. But this week attention was turned back to methane in a study published in the journal... [Read more]

By Alison Hawkes We all know that the poor, especially in developing countries, will be hardest hit by climate change and yet they are the ones who contribute least to it. Who are the world’s poor? Well, 70 percent of them are women. A UK group, Women’s Environmental Network, released a report this week that takes a closer look at the gender inequalities that climate change is exacerbating. Gender and the Climate Change Agenda finds that women are more likely to die or suffer from climate... [Read more]

By Alison Hawkes I’ve always wondered how mountaintop coal mining – in which an entire peak of a mountain is blasted away to reveal the underlying coal – could possibly pass U.S. environmental muster. You can’t even dump a soda can into a stream legally, so how does a company completely change the contour of a mountain, fill the excess pilings into stream beds, and call it a day? Yet there it is, and despite a series of thorny legal challenges the practice has actually been increasing... [Read more]

By Alison Hawkes There’s been a lot of speculation about how fast climate change can happen. Are we talking a Day After Tomorrow scenario or something that slowly builds over time? Can you predict the warning signs of a tipping point? A couple of papers caught my interest recently from leading science journals that show just how dramatically change can occur – and within a human lifetime – surprising since many natural processes seem to pass at, well, geologic time. One study published... [Read more]