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Photos: Climate change is making California look like another planet
Posted by Quartz: None Given on March 31st, 2016
Quartz: When Thomas Heinser showed his pictures of California's parched landscape in a gallery last month, people couldn't tell what they were looking at.
Last year marked the driest summer California has seen in at last 500 years, causing water shortages and resulting in forest fires throughout the state. Shot from the side of a doorless helicopter, Heinser's aerial photographs look more like abstract art than fields and valleys--driving home the transformative effects of climate change in California....
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The countries most vulnerable to climate change know the least about how it will affect them
Posted by Quartz: None Given on November 1st, 2015
Quartz: When world leaders meet in Paris this December to agree on measures to fight climate change, they will be amply armed with information about how rising global temperatures affect the developed world. But they’ll be considerably less informed about the potentially far more devastating effects expected elsewhere. That’s because scientific research on climate change that concerns, or is produced in, the poorest and most vulnerable countries is largely missing. A new analysis of 15,000 papers published...
Native Hawaiians are fighting off invasion of astronomers
Posted by Quartz: None Given on April 15th, 2015
Quartz: If completed, the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT), to be built atop Hawaii's dormant Mauna Kea volcano, will be one of the largest and most powerful telescopes in the world. According to the project's organizers, the TMT "will enable astronomers to study objects in our own solar system and stars throughout our Milky Way and its neighboring galaxies, and forming galaxies at the very edge of the observable universe, near the beginning of time.'
It will be quite the scientific feat, and undoubtedly...
Pope weighs in on climate change, saying man “continuously slaps nature in the face”
Posted by Quartz: None Given on January 19th, 2015
Quartz: Wrapping up his visit to the Philippines this week, Pope Francis stirred up controversy by taking an unequivocal stance on climate change and calling on the international community to step up during United Nations climate talks in November.
"I don`t know if it is all (man`s fault) but the majority is, for the most part, it is man who continuously slaps nature in the face," he told reporters. "We have in a sense taken over nature." Scripted remarks that the Pope did not read out go on to say, "As...
How cities in Asia could drastically slow climate change
Posted by Quartz: None Given on January 15th, 2015
Quartz: Cities--the best of which are bastions of transit networks, bike paths, compact apartments and chirpy baristas--are growing faster than litters of sewer rats, exacerbating their already-high hungers for energy. The trend is so steep that a new analysis projects that urban centers will be burning through three times more energy in the year 2050 than was the case in 2005.
But what sounds like a threat could also be viewed as an opportunity. The new study, by five European and American researchers...
2014 was the year of the melting ice sheet
Posted by Quartz: None Given on December 30th, 2014
Quartz: Just as the planet swivels on the poles, so too does the fate of its coastlines. The disaster movie effects of climate change--drowning coastlines and raging blizzards, for instance--are tied to thawing ice sheets and glaciers in the Arctic and Antarctica. Research published throughout 2014 made this all the clearer--and scarier.
Here's a roundup of what we learned this year about melting ice sheets:
The melt rate in West Antarctica has trebled in the past decade
Though scientists have known...
Russia warms faster than rest of planet and sees disease, drought, and forest fires as a result
Posted by Quartz: None Given on August 27th, 2014
Quartz: When Vladimir Putin declined to support the Kyoto Protocol, a treaty to limit carbon emissions, he famously quipped that higher temperatures might actually benefit Russia since its people would have to spend less on fur coats.
Well, he`s getting his wish. Changes in wind and ocean currents caused by global warming shift heat around unevenly, causing some areas to heat up dramatically even as other regions cool. Russia, it turns out, is in the unusually hot category. Between 1976 and 2012, average...
Rain-fed farms common, but India unique in letting bad rains wreak economic havoc
Posted by Quartz: None Given on July 20th, 2014
Quartz: Last week’s rains helped dispel some of the gathering economic clouds?. Though the storm has yet not passed, there is a collective sigh of relief, because poor rains would have meant higher inflation, lower GDP, commodity price swings and widespread human misery among India’s vast number of farmers and farm hands.
India might nurse delusions of becoming an economic superpower, but monsoons are still the final arbiter of our GDP. With all the progress in technology and weather forecasting in the...