Well, this is a relief: The earth is now on the brink of entering another Ice Age, according to a large and compelling body of evidence from within the field of climate science. Many sources of data which provide our knowledge base of long-term climate change indicate that the warm, twelve thousand year-long Holocene period …
It’s been a hard week. Colleagues who did good journalism around me losing their jobs, and the business I love coming unglued. We call it “the daily miracle,” somewhat sarcastically, because you see the chaos that sometimes sets in, around 6 in the evening, the false starts and confused discussions, the arguments over what are …
Continue reading ‘Elephant Diaries: The Thing That Finally Made Me Cry’ »
From a new paper by David Montgomery et al. on the formation of the outflow channels Mars, a rich metaphor from our own desert Southwest. Stare through the classically turgid scientific prose. This is poetry: The Needles area of Canyonlands National Park, Utah, provides a terrestrial analog for the finer-scale extension parallel to the margins …
Continue reading ‘Geology is Poetry if You Listen Carefully’ »
Worked some Yergin and Hartwick into a piece for this morning’s paper on the regulatory framework (or lack thereof) surrounding deep brackish groundwater in New Mexico: Water is not oil, but there are similarities in the politics and policies that accompany our consumption of the two precious liquids. Using groundwater, which is almost never replaced …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: Brackish Water and “Sustainability”’ »
Interesting bit of work in today’s Science arguing that heat, rather than drought, may be the most significant determinant of declining food production as a result of climate change: It will be extremely difficult to balance food deficits in one part of the world with food surpluses in another, unless major adaptation investments are made …
Continue reading ‘Heat, Not Drought, May Pose Biggest Food Threat Under Climate Change’ »
Writing in this week’s Science (who knew economics was a science?), economists Jomo Kwame Sundaram and Rudiger von Arnim argue that the trade liberalization deck is stacked against the developing world, especially sub-Saharan Africa (sub. req.): Whatever the right assumptions are, all the different models come to essentially the same conclusion: Global gains of a …
I have a twitter feed. There, you can learn about dead birds.
Transaction costs of brackish water regulation
The standard critique at the interface between the dying dinosaurs of print and the whip-smart web is that newspapers simply did not understand and embrace the web, and are doomed as a result. If newspapers would only do “X” – and among Internet cognescenti, “X” has many definitions – newspapers would be able to thrive, …
Via Andy Revkin, we learn about the opening of China’s first coal-to-liquids plant. This is an important development, because of the very real possibility that relatively abundant coal could become a substitute for dwindling petroleum supplies – a happy prospect for cheap global energy, not so much for the climate. Choose the economic and environmental …