When we change our landscapes, we change the clouds above and thereby climate – this from new evidence just published by Jingfeng Wang (Wang et al., 2009) and a team of researchers in Rafael Bras’s climate lab at MIT. By observing cloud patterns and other climate parameters in deforested areas of Brazil, their work demonstrates that local and regional patterns […]
While you are driving to work, plume of carbon drifting lazily into the sky, do you ever wonder where all of your carbon will end up? Now, work by Simon Lewis and a large team of collaborators (Lewis et al 2009) have shown that about 1/6th of the carbon emitted annually to the atmosphere by combustion of fossil fuels (total […]
It will not be possible to solve global warming without dealing with the dramatic global and local inequalities in carbon emissions and the wealth created from them. Since the Industrial Revolution began, some people and some nations have been pumping a lot more carbon into the atmosphere than others (and you know which one you are!). Moreover, those burning the […]
Are pristine rainforests the only ones that matter? We know that forests do change as they age, developing some unique characteristics when mature, and that some species cannot live outside of large swaths of ancient tropical forests. But what about the rest of tropical forests- the younger ones, the forests that people live in or have cut in recent decades […]
Even if we manage to slash our carbon emissions, planet earth is going to get a whole lot warmer this century. But maybe we can just chill the planet! For more than a decade, Ken Caldeira and many others have been discussing geoengineering solutions to global warming by cooling the planet using technical means – especially by altering the albedo, […]
Diseases introduced by Europeans after 1492 are now known to have caused massive population declines in the Americas, and the failure of ancient agricultural systems across huge regions, many of which depended on the regular burning of forests. Now, researchers, led by Richard Nevle and Dennis Bird have investigated the climate consequences of this massive decline in agriculture and the […]
The Early Anthropocene Hypothesis holds that human alteration of climate began with forest clearing and rice production more than 6 thousand years ago. Here are my personal impressions of recent work supporting this hypothesis, from last week’s annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) in San Francisco (a conference of 15,000- so big its like Woodstock for Earth scientists). […]
A couple weeks ago, I was invited by UMBC to provide a new year’s message to the world, in 100 words, prefaced with “In 2009, the world should resolve to…” Here is the video version of my new year’s message: And here are the 100 words: “In 2009, the world should resolve to think globally before acting. Poverty, global warming, […]
Biofuels started off with such good intentions – energy self-sufficiency, reversing global warming and being green. Yet biofuels are now being blamed for creating much bigger problems than they ever would have solved. How did we get so far into this mess without seeing these problems? Multiple studies have now shown that producing liquid fuels from food crops and even […]
We live in interesting times. We’ve now realized that our activities are changing global climate and thereby harming both ourselves and the rest of the biosphere. And we are begining to do something about it. International efforts are assessing and attempting to manage our climate-altering greenhouse gas emissions and many institutions and even individuals are taking action to become “carbon […]