In the run-up to the UN Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20) in Brazil, much has been written about how to define sustainable development; the balance between environmental sustainability and human development; the kinds of goals and targets that might be adopted; and how these might then relate to goals that follow on from the Millennium Development…
Just over 1,200 years ago, the planet was hit by an extremely intense burst of high-energy radiation of unknown cause, scientists studying tree-ring data have found. The radiation burst, which seems to have hit between AD 774 and AD 775, was detected by looking at the amounts of the radioactive isotope carbon-14 in tree rings…
Some scientists advocate pumping aerosols into the atmosphere to counter global warming by reflecting solar energy away. But according to Carnegie Institution scientists, the price we’d have to pay is the loss of the Earth’s blue skies. Blocking 2% of the sun’s light, they say, would make the sky three to five times brighter, and…
The world’s air has reached what scientists call a troubling new milestone for carbon dioxide, the main global warming pollutant. Monitoring stations across the Arctic this spring are measuring more than 400 parts per million of the heat-trapping gas in the atmosphere. The number isn’t quite a surprise, because it’s been rising at an accelerating…
The mysterious fall of the largest of the world’s earliest urban civilizations nearly 4,000 years ago in what is now India, Pakistan, Nepal and Bangladesh now appears to have a key culprit — ancient climate change, researchers say. Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia may be the best known of the first great urban cultures, but the…
Global warming skeptics are not less educated about science but rather use their knowledge to affirm their predetermined beliefs. The new research says that deniers hold their skeptical views due to “opposing sets of cultural values” that help them make a decision on the hot-button environmental issue. “The aim of the study was to test…
The Earth’s greatest mass extinction, 250 million years ago, was so severe that it took 10 million years for the planet to recover. Life was nearly wiped out, with only 10% of plants and animals surviving. And the sheer intensity of the crisis, and continuing grim conditions on Earth after the first wave of extinction,…
Adapted from The Fate of the Species: Why the Human Race May Cause Its Own Extinction and How We Can Stop It, by Fred Guterl (Bloomsbury USA, 2012) NASA climate scientist James Hanson has warned of a “Venus effect,” in which runaway warming turns Earth into an uninhabitable desert, with a surface temperature high enough to melt…
Less than six months after the world agreed to craft a new climate pact by 2015, negotiations stumbled at a crucial preparatory phase as rich and poor countries butted heads. The concluding session of an already troubled 11-day haggle in Bonn ran into delays as countries clashed over who will chair the long negotiations, which…
Four decades ago, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology computer model called World3 warned of a possible catastrophic course for human civilization in the 21st century – a collapse of socioeconomic order and massive drop in human population. In Limits to Growth, a bitterly disputed 1972 book that explicated these findings, researchers argued that the global…