Pacific Standard March-April 2013 Cover

Species Disappearing Faster Than We Can Count

July 17, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
Green Bottle Blue Tarantula

In 2012, a sneezing monkey, a spongy mushroom, and a blue tarantula became official earthly inhabitants alongside more than 15,000 other new discoveries. Some of these species are more than just wondrous creatures, their existence could have broad implications. A wild rice species discovered in the 1970s was hybridized, and increased the world's rice production nearly fourfold. To this day, that rice provides food in places where it would otherwise be scarce. Every time we discover a new species, it could be a link to health, food, medicine: something that can help what ails us. Over ... Read More

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Just Planting Trees Won’t Stop March of Deserts

June 16, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
USDA map of world desertification

Attendance was sparse at a press conference following last fall’s first ever U.N. General Assembly devoted to desertification, as the loss of fertile land in dry areas is known. “If this were about climate change, the room would be full,” Luc Gnacadja of Benin, executive secretary of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification, began his remarks to the press. On the 20th anniversary of the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, where the desertification convention was established, it remains a poor cousin to other groundbreaking treaties set up at ... Read More

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Could Slackening Solar Winds Cool the Earth?

May 22, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

If global warming doesn’t scare you enough, consider worrying about a new Ice Age instead. The Times of India’s Dipannita Das reports that an investigation by India’s National Center for Radio Astrophysics (part of the portentously named Institute for Fundamental Research) has detected “a steady weakening of the Sun’s magnetic field.” That in turn is weakening the solar wind – a stream of protons and electrons flowing off the sun at, literally, a million miles an hour. So what? Well, among other things, the report says that a continued ebb of the sun's field could lead to a ... Read More

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Is Natural Gas Just as Polluting as Coal?

May 7, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
Natural gas facility

The recent boom in U.S. natural gas production has been hailed as the cure to all America’s ills. Gas, its boosters say, can reduce household heating expenses, enhance energy security, create jobs, and lower greenhouse gas emissions. That last part is crucial to winning over environmentalists. “Over its full cycle of production, distribution, and use, natural gas emits just over half as many greenhouse gas emissions as coal for equivalent energy output,” the green group Worldwatch Institute reported last August. But all of that may amount to a lot of hot air if researchers from ... Read More

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Adding People to the Climate Change Equation

March 30, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

Research scientist Gail Osherenko is blogging for Miller-McCune from the Planet Under Pressure Conference in London. For other posts from her, click here. Changing how business and government operate can be a slow and difficult process. But altering the way science is done is even stickier and more ponderous. Nonetheless, scientists from a wide range of disciplinary backgrounds at this week’s Planet Under Pressure Conference moved a step closer to creating a new, integrated entity to coordinate and advance research on global environmental change. A key aspect of the integration is ... Read More

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Governing Geoengineering: Hot Topic For a Warming Planet

March 28, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

Research scientist Gail Osherenko is blogging for Miller-McCune from the Planet Under Pressure Conference in London. For other posts from her, click here. As I walked out of a panel on geoengineering governance this morning at the Planet Under Pressure Conference taking place in London, I was handed a flyer calling on governments to “Act Immediately to COOL THE ARCTIC.” I do not take the dire warnings of the Arctic Methane Emergency Group lightly, but a call to use geoengineering among other means to cool the Arctic is both premature and scary. As the panel’s experts explained, ... Read More

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Entering a Dangerous Epoch — The Anthropocene

March 27, 2012 • By •
Entering a Dangerous Epoch — The Antropocene

Research scientist Gail Osherenko is blogging for Miller-McCune from the Planet Under Pressure Conference in London. For other posts from her, click here. According to scientists studying global environmental change, the Earth is moving out of the Holocene — the period of remarkably stable climate that began roughly 12,000 years ago — into the Anthropocene, an era in which a single species, humans, are driving the Earth’s systems. “Can we return to the nice, steady Holocene stage where we know humanity can survive or will we be able to transition to a new, much hotter state?” ... Read More

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Accepting Climate Change an Economic Luxury

March 20, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

Environmentalists, scientists, and pollsters have devoted a lot of ink and energy over the last few years assessing a curious trend in perceptions about climate change. Several years ago, the American public appeared to start rejecting the idea of climate change: poll after poll showed concern over the problem tailing off and suspicion of the science behind it rising. What was going on here? Did opinion on climate reflect the partisan politics of the moment? Were people swayed by the weather outside, perhaps by that rash of crazy snowstorms in the winter of 2009-10? Were the dipping poll ... Read More

More like this: Environment, The Idea Lobby
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New York’s White Roofs Prove They’re Cool

March 8, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

A satellite photograph of New York City reveals a dark blot fronted to the north, west, and east by a sea of light green forest, and to the south by an actual sea: the pastel blue of the Atlantic Ocean. Into this blot, on hot summer days, soaks enough solar radiation to turn its denizens into sweaty, irritable, iced-latte swilling malcontents prone to cranking the air-conditioning full blast 24/7 while daydreaming about a weekend upstate. Those who live in fear of sweltering July subway rides days may soon have a respite, from an unlikely source. A just published study by researchers at ... Read More

More like this: By The Way ..., Environment
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New Dirt on Climate Change

January 13, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
Bighorn Basin

For decades, geologists have been drilling — literally — for clues that would help them understand ancient wholesale changes in Earth’s climate, clues that could shed light on current global warming. Usually, their efforts have been aimed at sea sediments taken from cores extracted hundreds of feet beneath the ocean floor. But in a more terrestrial project this past summer, an international geological team led by the University of New Hampshire began deep-core drilling at three sites in Wyoming’s Bighorn Basin east of Yellowstone National Park. These six new core samples from ... Read More

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