Global warming

The head of an independent, Koch-funded study on climate change says humans are behind global warming, in a recent N.Y. Times op-ed.

Greenland’s Ice Sheet Melting Faster than We’ve Ever Seen

It was just yesterday when we showed you what would happen if you got too close to a melting glacier in Greenland — a disturbing glimpse of what’s becoming a regular fixture in that part of the world. And now, as we find ourselves having to endure yet another scorchingly hot July, new data from…

Analysis of polar bear DNA shows they’re an ancient species with a tangled history

A scan of polar bear DNA has shown that polar bears came into existence far earlier than previously assumed. Working with fossils alone, scientists had thought that polar bears, after intermingling with brown bears, made their first snowy white appearance anywhere between 60,000 to 600,000 years ago. But a genetic analysis now shows that they…

This video shows why you don’t want to be anywhere near a glacier when it collapses

A small group of tourists recently got more than they bargained for, while glacier-watching in Greenland. Jens Møller, along with his uncle and an Australian sightseer, got a little too close to a melting glacier when this happened. And if you think that was cool, you must check out this harrowing video of a glacier…

Earth is about to belch out laughing gas (and why that’s a bad thing)

Nitrous oxide is best known as the mild anesthetic laughing gas, but making people feel a bit loopy during dental surgery is the least of its effects. The gas can warm our planet 300 times faster than carbon dioxide. The good news is that the amount of nitrous oxide in the atmosphere is totally insignificant…

It’s time to bring science to the fore of political discourse by having candidates discuss it publicly

If you want to see Obama and Romney devote time to addressing important questions about science and science policy in a publicly televised debate, you’re going to have to fight for it. Back in 2008, an independent citizens’ initiative, known simply as “ScienceDebate,” pushed to have 14 such questions addressed in a debate that would…

America just endured its hottest 12 month period on record. Again.

It’s deja vu all over again. Sweaty, sweltering deja vu. For the third consecutive month, the mainland United States has experienced its hottest 12-month period on record (that is, the hottest since recordkeeping began in 1895). This is getting to be a bit ridiculous. According to NOAA, which yesterday released its State of the Climate…

Thomas Edison’s car battery is back, and it’s better than ever

In 1901, Thomas Edison developed the recharcheable nickel-iron battery, a technology he hoped to see implemented in electric cars. But a slow rate of energy output and slower charging time saw it superseded by lead-acid and lithium-ion batteries in standard and electric cars alike. Now, more than a century after it was first developed, the…

These remarkable clouds look even more incredible from the ISS

Fifty miles overhead, higher than any other formation in our planet’s atmosphere, is where you’ll find one of the most enigmatic classes of cloud ever observed. They’re called noctilucent clouds, and they’re some of the most poorly understood meteorological phenomena on Earth. Noctilucent clouds (aka polar mesospheric clouds) are notoriously difficult to view from the…

Burying greenhouse gases underground could cause earthquakes

As the Arctic ice continues to fade away, some scientists have come up with radical solutions to the problem of greenhouse gases. One of these ideas is large-scale Carbon Capture and Storage (CSS), burying those troublesome gases underground — but now it looks like that notion could cause more trouble than it’s worth. Mike Orcutt…

This magnificent view of the Arctic could be your last

Earth is changing. It’s changing so fast that images like this one, which show our planet’s Arctic polar ice cap in unprecedented detail, could be impossible to capture, as soon as twenty years from now. If you’re going to use a picture of the Earth to talk about climate change, it might as well be…

10 Climate Change Pictures We Really Don’t Need to See Again

Sad Earth is sad. But what is Earth sad about, exactly? Climate change, of course. At the same time, what does this picture really communicate? It doesn’t tell us anything; it does nothing to convey the subtlety of climate science or the nature of its global impact. It just sort of is. It’s boring, meaningless…

What San Francisco Would Look Like After Climate Change

For coastal cities, rising sea levels due to climate change are questions of when and how high, not if. San Francisco’s Brian Stokle and Burrito Justice created this amazing poster that shows what the city would look like after the waters rose. The map shows what the city would like after a catastrophic disintegration of…

Could we build a weather machine to stop climate change?

It’s starting to get pretty warm outside. And it’s also starting to get increasingly obvious that human-made global warming is not going away anytime soon. As our environment continues to degrade and collapse, we may be headed into some fairly desperate times — and with them, the inevitable call for desperate measures. Such out-of-the-box speculation…

Global warming changes tundras into forests much faster than anyone expected

Well, we knew this was going to happen eventually – but now scientists are actually seeing it with their own eyes. Researchers from Finland and Oxford University have discovered that large swaths of European and Asian arctic tundra are quickly turning into forests. They’re attributing it to climate change, but what’s worse is that the…

The Arctic is farting ancient methane into the atmosphere

OK, OK, “farting” might not be the technical term. But as long frozen ice in Arctic regions starts to melt, trapped pockets of methane gas are escaping after millennia. This could be seriously bad news for our already warming planet. Second only to carbon dioxide when it comes to greenhouse gases, methane levels in the…

The last 12 months were the warmest in US history

Did April seem feel unusually balmy to you this year? It probably had to do with the fact that it was the third warmest April ever recorded. Come to think of it, March was pretty warm, as well — the warmest ever documented, to be exact. In fact, NOAA is reporting that, as of April,…

A Visual Representation of the 15,000 Temperature Records That Were Broken in March

Yes, you read that right. Data collected by NOAA reveal that the month of March saw a total of 7,755 daytime and 7,515 nighttime record-breaking high temperatures, making last month far and away “the warmest March on record.” The video featured up top shows the locations of each daytime and nighttime record (or tied record)…

Ancient raindrop fossils reveal that we can thank greenhouse gases for early life on Earth

A raindrop is temporary, leaving behind a damp blotch and no more. Even if it falls in just the right area to create an imprint, even if that imprint is preserved for billions of years, it’s just the imprint of a raindrop…right? Well, a fossilized footprint can teach archaeologists about the creatures who roamed the…

Are we on the verge of a thermal battery revolution?

Are finally we on the cusp of economically viable thermal batteries — devices to store and transmit heat? A perspective article published in this week’s Science seems to think so, and it could mean a major change for the way we think about heating and cooling. Anyone who’s lived in a climate that suffers from…