OUR TAKE: Unintended Consequences! Bushfire Smoke Prompts Plankton Bloom
Who in Australia would have guessed the 2019-20 bushfires would trigger a huge, continent-sized phytoplankton bloom in the Southern Ocean? Deadly to animals, out of season, unprecedented in two decades of satellite records, this anachronistic event was tracked by biological oceanographers of the University of Tasmania, with results
OUR TAKE: Supergrid — Bring It On
A barrage of news images of downed electrical towers and power lines from recent climate related hurricanes and tornados are a bleak reminder that our power system is careening towards failure. In an opinion piece by Jennifer M. Granholm for CNN Business, the former U.S. Secretary of Energy says
Our Take: A New Pipeline? In East Africa? Are You Kidding?
It’s hard to believe that on the heels of the cataclysmic climate report by the authoritative UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the call by UN Secretary General António Guterres for the abrupt end of any new fossil fuel exploration and production, plans to build the
Our Take: How serious is Biden about climate?
Since ascending to the Presidency with bold and ambitious plans for tackling the climate crisis, Joe Biden has compiled a lengthy and damning list of disappointing decisions accommodating or favoring the fossil fuel industry. These indicate that while Biden “gets” climate, he’s still a politician at heart. He
Our Take: We Need a World Climate Authority
This ClimateYou post is written in reaction to the informative article in Smithsonian Magazine posted on August 4, 2021 titled: “Just 5 Percent of Power Plants Release 73 Percent of Global Electricity Production Emissions”. The study upon which the article is based examined the emissions generated by all
OUR TAKE: A Soil-Science Revolution Upends Plans to Fight Climate Change
This article published in Quanta on July 27, 2021 by Gabriel Popkin says soils don’t sequester carbon long term, contrary to the dominant soil science humus paradigm. The Global Climate Models (GCMs) that the IPCC uses reflect the old, not the new paradigm. This overstates the capacity of
OUR TAKE: Climate Change Affects Everything, Even Fishing
by ClimateYou Senior Editors George Ropes and Abby Luby Climate change has become ubiquitous. It is being felt everywhere. The unprecedented drought in America’s western states, the rampaging wildfires it fosters throughout the West, and the repeated record-breaking heat waves that are affecting people’s health, their
How goes the Crusade to Tame the Feral Climate? Part 2: In Glascow
Part 2: In Glasgow The US played a leadership role at the Paris conference, and was pivotal in encouraging, cajoling, persuading, convincing the 195 national delegations or Parties as they are called, to reach an accord. Of course, the US didn’t do it all by itself, but without
Our Take: How Goes the Crusade to Tame the Feral Climate? Part 1: In Washington
Part I: In Washington Alexander Burns, writing in the July 4, 2021 New York Times, penned a clear-eyed view of where we are politically at the moment. In his view, we’re stuck. However, Burns doesn’t raise his gaze from a Washington-based politics that isn’t quite as usual, but as
Our Take: Persistence of COVID & Trump Threatens Climate
Robert Reich focuses in his latest Guardian column on Monday, Aug. 2, on the resistance of the Covid pandemic and Trump’s malevolent hucksterism to dissipate and disappear from our lives. Yet both persist. Both refuse to slink away and let us be. Both still present clear and present
Our Take: What’ll it take for Americans to get Action on Climate?
Oliver Milman, writing for today’s July 12, 2021 The Guardian, reports on a new study that found President Biden’s climate plan would reap almost twice the monetary benefits of the plan’s cost, while saving thousands of lives. Those findings should be the topper, the deal clincher. Yet will
Lower Births & the Need to Adopt a New Paradigm: Sustainability.
How the demographic transition interacts with the climate crisis is complex and murky. Little research has been done on the topic, and the demographic data are very macro. Most evidence is anecdotal. In Laura Spinney’s article “Why declining birth rates are good news for life on Earth” she
