Greenhouse gas

How Big Meat Is Funding Climate Denial and Polluting the Planet

Move over, Big Oil, and make some room for Big Meat at the climate shame table. A new study shows agribusiness is a major source climate misinformation as well as carbon emissions. The analysis, published last month in Climatic Change, looks at the PR moves behind some of the world’s largest producers of meat and dairy,…

Shocking Findings Show the Amazon May Already Be a Greenhouse Gas Emitter

Historically, the Amazon rainforest has been one of the planet’s most important sources of carbon sequestration, caching billions of tons of carbon from the atmosphere every year. For decades, scientists have cautioned us not to take this crucial service for granted, warning that in just 15 years, the Amazon could meet the fate of other…

Indoor Weed Farms Are Hotboxing the Planet

As more states legalize weed, commercial production of it is increasing. These growing operations may not just be getting customers high—they may be getting the planet’s temperature higher, too. A new study published in Nature Sustainability on Monday aims to quantify the climate impact of indoor cannabis cultivation across the country. The authors, who are…

Airplane Contrails Have Surprising Effect on the Atmosphere

The white trails that airplanes create influence the temperature of our atmosphere.

Trump’s Latest Talking Points on Climate Change Will Make Your Brain Hurt So Bad

Last week, federal scientists released their damning new National Climate Assessment, which warned that if action is not taken to stop global climate change, the U.S. will suffer greatly from consequences including dwindling water supplies, sea-level rise, epidemics, natural disasters, and billions of dollars in damages. It also noted that storms, wildfires, floods, hurricanes and…

Donald Trump’s Administration Wants to Let Oil and Gas Companies Emit a Lot More Methane

Methane is a potent greenhouse gas, with an estimated pound-for-pound emissions impact 25 times greater than carbon dioxide over a century-long timescale. So it’s hardly a surprise that the climate-change-denying crew in the White House has decided we need plenty more of it in the Earth’s atmosphere. Per a Monday report in the New York…

California Is Way Ahead of Schedule for Cutting Greenhouse Gas Emissions

The Environmental Protection Agency may still be headed up by person hellbent on destroying it despite Scott Pruitt’s ouster, but there’s some good news for the environment out in California. The most populous state in the nation hit its first target for cutting back on emissions four years ahead of schedule. The success story, borne…

Greenhouse gases are increasing at the fastest rate they have in 30 years. That means our atmosphere collected more greenhouse gas in the past year than they have in decades, and ocean acidification is moving faster too. The BBC has a report on this new finding.

Watch NASA’s Predictions About Climate Change for the Next 87 Years

News alert! The world is going to get hotter. NASA combined dozens of climate models from around the world to estimate temperature and precipitation patterns for the next 87 years. That’ll get us right to the year 2100. There are a lot of fascinating changes. NASA describes the climate model: To produce visualizations that show…

So this is where all our greenhouse gases come from

Cow farts: NOT AS CULPABLE AS YOU THINK. This impressive datavisualization comes by way of the folks at Ecofys, and breaks down global manmade greenhouse gas emissions by source and sector. Click here for the (much) bigger version. Over at grist, David Roberts has a good take: Every one of these sources can be dialed…

New environmental project logs pollution, neighborhood by neighborhood, house by house

Want to give yourself a major guilt trip for destroying the environment? A new project will release the street-by-street, building-by-building CO2 emissions for cities to help people identify where the pollution is actually coming from. Dubbed the Hestia Project, so far only Indianapolis has been mapped, but Phoenix and Los Angeles are in the works…

The ocean depths might be hiding the full extent of global climate change

The last decade was the hottest on record, and yet it wasn’t until 2010 that an individual year was hotter than the record-breaking 1998 heatwave. Somehow, global temperatures mysteriously flattened out. The explanation may lie thousands of feet underwater. Scientists have long been searching for the so-called “missing heat” to explain the disparity between expected…

How massive volcanoes and supercharged greenhouse gases almost wiped out life on Earth

About 250 million years ago, the world suffered through an extinction event that makes the death of the dinosaurs look like a minor hiccup by comparison. And now we have our best understanding yet of what caused the Great Dying. We’ve discussed the Great Dying, otherwise known as the Permo-Triassic Extinction, before – check out…

Sony Ericsson Wins Greenest Electronics Company Award

Congratulations, Sony Ericsson, for winning what was ultimately a barely challenging competition to become the greenest electronics company around. Our favorite Swedish-Japanese conglomerate rose to the top of Greenpeace’s Greener Electronics Guide by exceeding Energy Star requirements, making all its models PVC-free and banning the most harmful chemicals from phones launched since January 2008. Unfortunately,…