A new study found extensive chemical pollution in American water supplies that federal, state, and local governments either don’t monitor or report if they do.
Category: Environment
Fluoroform is a potent, long-lasting greenhouse gas which was supposed to be phased out worldwide. Instead, fluoroform emissions are alarmingly high and rising.
The Chinese government has announced pending restrictions on the production, sale, and use of plastic.
The modern lifestyle is defined by freedom of movement via motor vehicle transport. The cultural and societal impacts of autos have been incalculable. The health costs have been enormous. The environmental destruction has been horrendous.
The ‘war on drugs’ is driving deforestation in Central America.
Homo erectus discovering how to control fire would not have happened, and been for naught, had it not been for wood. Historians claim no Wood Age only because no such archaic artifacts remained to show wood’s importance; hence, prehistory begins with the Stone Age.
Industrialization has furnished a wondrous plethora of consumer products. The materials for these conveniences have come from gouging the earth for its metals and minerals. The costs of this environmental desecration include pollution that maims and kills life for miles around. China exemplifies the Faustian bargain of consumerism.
Russia is serious about climate change. Alas, it’s the wrong kind of seriousness.
Climate modelers continue to refine their assumptions about the sensitivity of global warming to greenhouse gases. Cloud cover is the latest refinement.
There have been many mass extinction events on Earth. The one currently underway is somewhat novel.
The oceans have absorbed ~90% of the warming from man-made pollution. Several trend changes in ocean currents have resulted. Among them is that the Gulf Stream is slowing. The mainstream media has reported this slowdown as a source of impending calamity in weather events, including warmer southern American winters and colder European winters. There is no such consensus among climatologists.
Whereas our desires propel us through life, unintended consequences more profoundly shape the world in which we live.
Warm water expands. The rate of sea level rise depends upon both how quickly the oceans warm and how fast polar ice melts. Recent historical research of the Greenland ice sheet discovered that melting has as much to do with how sustained warming is as how quickly it warms.
In 1955, when 2 million tonnes of plastic were produced globally, Life magazine celebrated the dawn of “throw-away living,” thanks to disposable plastics. 60 years later, in 2015, 406 million tonnes of plastic were produced worldwide; a figure that keeps rising at a meteoric rate.
Farming has long had outsized political pull, owing to the disproportionate electoral power of rural areas over cities in ostensible democracies. Farm subsidies and tariffs on agricultural imports are common throughout the world; highlighting the hypocrisy of capitalists, who proclaim free trade as a cardinal virtue.
In his continuing campaign to pull the wool over the flock’s eyes, evil shepherd Trump destroyed the map of the egregious pollution produced by his cohorts. Unchecked pollution has a checkered American history.
The only chance humanity has to save itself from self-extinction this century is to become more humane and better organized. It doesn’t look good.
The daunting difficulty of climate modeling is compounded by their institutionalized production, thereby putting a conservative cast on uncertainty which increasingly looks recklessly optimistic.
European Union fishing quotas illustrate the exploitative urge that assures self-extinction.
Every organism, every atom, is unique – a fantastic diversity internally simplified. The mind habitually categorizes for its convenience. The idea of “species” is exemplary.
To fanfare in the mainstream press, Zeke Hausfather and 3 other climate ‘experts’ recently reported on how well early climate models performed. They found “that models are accurately projecting global warming.” Instead, their own survey showed otherwise.
Mathematical modeling of physical dynamics is the nebulous craft of creating equations which capture complex, often entangled, gyres. Climate models face difficulties in both modeling technique and data acquisition.
Carbon isn’t the only chemical causing climate conniptions. Excess nitrogen is an even more challenging catastrophe in the making.
Reaping the wind has come quite a way from the windmills of yore that provided the power to grind grain. Wind power now consists of spindly propeller-driven turbines that generate electricity from gusts.
In 1956, American geologist Marion King Hubbert presciently predicted that American oil production would peak in 1970, based upon his idea that oil production through time resembled a bell curve. Almost 4 decades later, a technology discovered in the 1940s pummeled Hubbert’s peak oil theory.