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
The Cheapest Way to Fight Climate Change? Block Out the Sun
September 11, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
Pushing Past the Taboo of Climate Adaptation
November 29, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
In October, a group of investors shepherding $20 trillion in assets signed an appeal for clear, long-term policies as incentives for low-carbon economies. Later that month, a study listed the nations and mega-cities most at risk from climate impacts. Then, a report on refugees found that nations must prepare to help millions re-settle in the coming decades. The link between these headlines is climate adaptation: reconfiguring our world’s economies and policies to work under a more extreme climate. While that might seem like an old conversation, it’s not; mitigation — reducing ... Read More
From Siberia to the Tropics with a Thermometer
June 16, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
We are all connected. A low pressure atmospheric wave moves off the west coast of Africa and, 10 days later, a hurricane batters down the door of Florida. The waters of the eastern Pacific Ocean warm up and, as a result, savage droughts roll through Australia. Finding these global patterns of climate connection is expensive, usually requiring measurement tools like satellites and aircraft. But, sometimes, people find these patterns of planetary connection in the most unexpected of ways, as Dr. Steve Katz discusses in this podcast. A marine biologist with the National Marine Sanctuary ... Read More
Crazy Weather and Climate: Do Dots Connect?
May 23, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
At the end of one of the Northern Hemisphere’s wildest winters in memory, we thought it would be a good time to ask a climatologist what’s up with such extreme weather. Even Australia’s normally calm summer has been anything but: First there was drought, then typhoons and then floods of biblical proportions. Granted, such extreme weather has been exacerbated both by recent El Niños (warmer-than-normal sea surface temperatures) and La Niñas (colder-than-normal sea surface temperatures) in the equatorial Pacific. But it does give pause to wonder: Is this global warming on steroids, or ... Read More
A Compensation for Cold Weather: Higher IQs
November 17, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
With the red state/blue state divide rapidly devolving into a cliché, it’s clearly time to find a new way to splice the nation into subsections. Try this adversarial alignment on for size: Smart states/dumb states. Which is to say, cold states/warm states. It turns out those benumbed residents of Maine, Montana and Minnesota have something to brag about. A paper recently published in the journal Psychological Reports concludes that of the 48 contiguous United States, those with cooler average temperatures tend to have populations with higher IQs. A research team led by psychologist ... Read More
Can Hurricanes Be Predicted Decades in Advance?
May 3, 2010 • By • 1 Comment
In 2007, a reporter for the Post & Courier of Charleston, S.C., was tired of doing straight stories on hurricane forecasts. So he hired a medium to predict the forthcoming storm season. "The sense we got from emergency-management people here," the reporter wrote, "is that the forecasts had been so wrong that they were hearing from the public, 'Why should we pay any attention to this stuff?'" At the end of the hurricane season, it turned out the medium had been more accurate than the scientists who took it upon themselves to make storm predictions. But research seems likely to soon make ... Read More
Forecast: Warm With a Chance of Denial
February 16, 2010 • By • 3 Comments
Do weathermen themselves "know which way the wind blows"? A recent national survey of TV weather forecasters, all of them meteorologists, reveals that nearly 1 in 3 believes "global warming is a scam," 1 in 4 is not sure, and three out of four are not convinced that the warming of the Earth since 1950 is man-made. As reported in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, the admittedly small survey sample of 121 forecasters was dominated by climate change skeptics who questioned the findings of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the world authority on ... Read More
Forecasters Work to Avoid Next New Orleans
April 4, 2008 • By • 1 Comment
Whether contemplating several feet of snow on a ski resort roof or watching a drenching storm pelt a windowpane, you know all that water has to go somewhere. How ironic that, during the week when the scarcity of water in many places around the globe was highlighted with the celebration of World Water Day (March 22), untamed water wreaked havoc on some 250 communities in a dozen states in this country. There goes that pesky weather again. But, as Mark Twain opined, nobody does anything about it. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, however, is doing its part in terms of ... Read More
Weathercasters Change With the Climate
February 12, 2008 • By • Leave a Comment
“The days of television meteorologists doing little more than predicting the weather may be numbered as the forecasts of the future increasingly will include tips for viewers on how to dodge environmental threats and manage their health,” said Kris M. Wilson, a senior lecturer in journalism at Emory University. Wilson’s paper in the journal Public Understanding of Science, “Television Weathercasters as Potentially Prominent Science Communicators,” reveals the results of his survey of television weathercasters. “Most of them say their broadcasts are appropriate venues for ... Read More
