Pacific Standard July-August 2013 Cover

Accepting a Warming Planet Could Cool Urge To Go To War

November 15, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
Drought land

Climate change has the clear potential to cause conflict, as migrants flee no-longer-habitable areas and nations fight over increasingly scarce natural resources. But newly published research offers a more hopeful scenario. It presents tentative evidence that fears of a warming planet could bring earthlings together in a common cause. “Increased awareness of the shared threat of global climate change can, at least under some circumstances, reduce support for war, and promote efforts at peaceful coexistence and international cooperation,” writes a research team led by psychologist Tom ... Read More

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Could Climate Change be the Epitome of Partisanship?

October 26, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

It’s the issue that dare not speak its name – climate change. As the New York Times, NPR, the Associated Press and a host of pundits, including our Tom Jacobs, have noticed, talk of global warming has been banished from the hustings in this year’s U.S. presidential campaign. While both Barack Obama and Mitt Romney embrace talk about energy – whether from fossil fuels or renewable sources – with various amounts of gusto, the focus is always economic, not environmental. Despite his muted voice this year, in years past Obama has been an ardent believer in anthropogenic climate ... Read More

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Smokin’ Election Campaign Quote of the Week

October 19, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

No doubt assuming Americans are more concerned about high gasoline prices than long-term threats to the environment, neither of the major-party presidential campaigns--nor, for that matter, the reporters covering them--have paid much attention to climate change. A few of our thoughtful commentators are starting to take note, including Eugene Robinson in today's Washington Post. But the most succinct and pithy quote on the subject was offered on MSNBC by articulate and erudite Chris Hayes. His metaphor: "Having an energy conversation without talking about climate is like talking about ... Read More

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New Estimate for Climate Change-Related Casualties Released, Not Pretty.

September 27, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

A European humanitarian aid consultancy, DARA, has released a study that claims to define the various ways that 100 million people, most citizens of developing nations, could die from climate change-related events by 2030. Called "a guide to the cold calculus of a hot planet," the report detailing these bleak trends is available in chart and text form here, and a pdf can be downloaded. It's fascinating and benefits from a very cool graphical interface. Precisely when to click on the above links is somewhat of a challenging question. Diving in to the report is a bit like deciding to ... Read More

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Fox News Misleads Viewers on Climate Change

September 25, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

Is the climate changing, and are humans responsible for this troubling phenomenon? There’s virtually no debate in the scientific world that the answer to both questions is yes, but public opinion is confused and conflicted. There are various reasons for this. It’s difficult to wrap our minds around issues involving gradual, big-picture change, and we’re disinclined to believe anything that would necessitate curbing our cherished lifestyles. But there’s also another explanation: simple misinformation, which continues to spread not only via emails and neighbor-to-neighbor chatter, ... Read More

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A Salty Solution to Global Warming

September 20, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

There is no shortage of ideas bouncing around about what to do with our warming planet--switch to renewables, switch to plastic bags, construct space elevators in order to alter the atmosphere and block out the sun, or plug away as usual until the rapture. Recently, researchers experimented with another: injecting CO2 into highly salty groundwater. They found that, over time, the CO2 will dissolve in the briny water, potentially mitigating global warming. Briny patches of groundwater are found the world over and "are often relics of earlier hydrologic systems [that] have persisted for ... Read More

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The Cheapest Way to Fight Climate Change? Block Out the Sun

September 11, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

This summer, the volume and extent of arctic sea ice fell to the lowest level on record; America experienced one of the hottest seasons in the last century; and the United Nations issued warnings about a coming world food crisis that could be catastrophic for tens of millions of people across the globe. All this, argues Bill McKibben, the patron saint of environmental soothsaying, is the New Normal. So what’s a world to do as we get increasingly hotter, more extreme weather events? Block out the sun, of course. Geoenginnering is the strange, far-from-perfect, science of deliberately ... Read More

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A Hotter World Won’t Automatically be a More Fiery World

August 30, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

With 2012 on track to be the worst year on record for wildfires in the U.S.—although Isaac’s heavy rains may blunt some of the drought-based danger in some locales—a nuanced view of climate change and fire seems almost out of place. It’s a pretty simple equation, after all: a hotter world is certainly got to be a more fiery world. Heck, even the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the folks behind the Doomsday Clock, cited that nexus when they included less thermonuclear concerns in their timekeeping. As they wrote five years ago, “Coral reefs will disappear, forest fires ... Read More

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Polynesian Corals Say No to Diversity

August 28, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
Pocillopora coral and fish off Moorea in French Polynesia, study site for the National Science Foundation’s Moorea Coral Reef Long-Term Ecological Research. HOLLIE PUTNAM/UNIVERSITY OF HAWAII-SOEST

When it comes to the symbiotic relationship between reef-building corals and energy-producing algae, “the more the merrier” has been the rule—that is, the more algae types the corals host within their tissues, the heartier the corals, the better they can withstand environmental stress (say from climate change or ocean acidification). Right? Counterintuitive to the notion that biodiversity is essential for a balanced ecosystem, a University of Hawaii at Manoa study of corals in French Polynesia has revealed just the opposite. In the field for the National Science Foundation’s ... Read More

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Six Degrees of Warmer: IEA Says Boston Could Become Miami Beach

August 9, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

There's curious stuff up on the IEA's website: the head of the International Energy Agency is officially talking about a 6 degree rise in global temperature by the end of the century. This is new: Ambassador Richard H. Jones warned that if energy policies do not adapt, enough carbon dioxide will be being emitted to reach 1,000 parts per million in the atmosphere. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that equates to 6º Celsius increase in temperature by the end of this century. “That’s basically Miami Beach in Boston,” he said. ... Read More

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