Pacific Standard July-August 2013 Cover

The City of the Future: Can Los Angeles Reinvent Itself All Over Again?

June 18, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
downtown-la

This post originally appeared on OnEarth, a Pacific Standard partner site. In the summer of 1998, my wife and I left Brooklyn and gamely headed west to Los Angeles, as disaffected New Yorkers are wont to do, in search of the proverbial greener grass. We found it right away in front of the quintessentially L.A.–style rental house we had been dreaming of: a cozy 1920s Spanish Colonial Revival, complete with a yard and a bounteous garden. One day shortly after we moved in, I found myself standing in this garden with a flowing water hose in my hand. I happily made my way from the brilliant ... Read More

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Study: Consensus on Climate Still Means Consensus

May 15, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
climate-viz

An article of faith in the climate warming community is that a “scientific consensus” exists on humanity’s role in raising the planet’s temperature. An equal and opposite article of faith among global warming skeptics (to check their temperature scroll down the comments section on any mainstream media article about climate change), or at least skeptics of anthropogenic climate change, is that this consensus is at best less than sweeping and at worst illusory. A new study published online today in the journal Environmental Research Letters puts a figure on how real this (genuine) ... Read More

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‘Let’s Work Together’ Message Can Be Counterproductive

April 4, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
(PHOTO: LEXAARTS/SHUTTERSTOCK)

When it comes to climate change, we’re all in this dilemma together, and forcefully addressing it will require collaboration and cooperation. A stirring sentiment, but if you’re looking to spur white Americans to action, it’s actually counterproductive. That’s the conclusion of a Stanford University research team, which found invoking the idea of interdependence undermined the motivation of European-American students to take a course in environmental sustainability. The researchers, led by MarYam Hamedani of Stanford’s Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, argue ... Read More

More like this: Environment, Findings
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Guide to a Sizzling Planet

March 8, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
The Casino Pier Star Jet roller coaster submerged in the sea on January 13, 2013 in Seaside Heights, NJ. (PHOTO: GLYNNIS JONES/SHUTTERSTOCK)

Overheated: The Human Cost of Climate Change By Andrew T. Guzman (Oxford University Press, 249 pages) A Newer World: Politics, Money, Technology, and What’s Really Being Done to Solve the Climate Crisis By William F. Hewitt (University of New Hampshire Press, 304 pages) I'M WRITING THIS a few blocks from Brooklyn’s Red Hook neighborhood, where business owners are still cleaning up after the catastrophic floods of Hurricane Sandy in October. Walking down Van Brunt Street a few weekends ago, I stepped over mildewed Sheetrock and around piles of corroded electrical equipment: ... Read More

More like this: March-April 2013
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Junk in the Air Even Worse than We Realized

January 18, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment

Part of my youth was spent in the less fashionable western end of the Los Angeles metro area in a city called Pomona, named after the Roman goddess of fruit (which predicted the orange groves that would, for a time, mark this portion of the so-called Inland Empire). But the most common commodities at my time in the middle 1960s, as Dr. Demento would remind us, came from the smogberry trees; the fruit of factories and tailpipes was thick upon the horizon. I still recall constantly wondering how the ancients could possibly dream up any identity for the stellar constellations that to me were ... Read More

More like this: The 101
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¿Quién Es Más Verde? Canada or Mexico?

January 14, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment

What country’s legislature made the greatest stride in attacking climate change last year? Perhaps Australia, where bills to put the Clean Energy Act of 2011 – with its goal to reduce greenhouse gas emissions for 80 percent  by 2015 – into practice were introduced. Or maybe Japan, which introduced a carbon tax in October, even as it struggles with ways reduce in climate-friendly nuclear infrastructure. Possibly even China, which despite its addiction to coal, is chugging along on its latest five-year plan with legislation for a national climate change law. Let’s try ... Read More

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Climate Change: Harbinger of ‘End Times’?

December 18, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

Somewhere, James Hansen is weeping. Last week, we reported on American attitudes toward climate change, a post-Kyoto framework, and the Rocky Mountain pine beetle infestation (apathetic, stalled, and spreading, respectively). To that, we append this finding from the Annals of Exceedingly Unlikely But Worryingly Popular Ideas: while 63 percent of Americans agree that the weather is becoming “more extreme,” 36 percent view this as “evidence that we are in what the Bible calls the end times.” In other words, one-third of us blame the recent spate of deadly hurricanes, ... Read More

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The Fuzzy Face of Climate Change

December 17, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
polarbearcentered

On January 24, 2004, in the frigid moonscape of an Arctic winter, wildlife biologist Steven Amstrup rode in a helicopter flying low over the ice. Using an infrared heat detector, he hoped to find polar bears in their dens. When the gun recorded a hit, Amstrup circled around for a closer look. What confronted him was something he had never seen in 34 years of research. The mouth of the den was open, and a smear of bright-red blood stretched away for more than 200 feet. At the end of a long drag trail in the ice lay the still-warm body of a female polar bear. The air temperature was 20 degrees ... Read More

More like this: Cover Story, Environment, January-February 2013
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SLIDESHOW: Looking for Polar Bears in Churchill, Manitoba

December 17, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
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Read the full story of Zac Unger's research on the plight of polar bears in Manitoba. ... Read More

More like this: January-February 2013, Science & Environment
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The Other “Cliff”

December 11, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
COP18

As Christmas approaches, the mercury here in Washington, D.C., has been flirting with 70 all month. On the day we decorated our Douglas fir, I went for a run in shorts, no shirt. The trees are skeletal, but songbirds still linger in the branches. Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised—after all, November was the 333rd consecutive month of above-average global temperatures. Halfway across the world, in Doha, Qatar, the latest international climate conference, COP18, just wrapped up. Representatives from some 190 countries spent a fortnight trying to lay the groundwork for a post-Kyoto world; ... Read More

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