King Cnut (Canute) famously ordered the incoming tide to stop. It was an exercise in futility (to be fair, Cnut knew this and staged the event to prove that his royal power was worthless compared to the power of God). Donald Trump is the modern King Cnut, pretending to order away climate change. Trump, however, […]
Back to the future past: “Since Trump took office in January 2025, U.S. emissions have increased 1.9% largely because of the renewed use of coal, the dirtiest of the fossil fuels. The Environmental Protection Agency revoked the scientific finding that has been the basis for regulating emissions from cars and power plants since 2009.” Climate […]
While we were grad students at UNC-Chapel Hill, we visited my wife’s uncle and his family on the Outer Banks. He built fishing boats, and lhey lived in a modest house in Buxton, near Hatteras lighthouse. Hatteras lighthouse is the tallest lighthouse in the US. In 1999, Hatteras lighthouse was moved from its original location […]
Climate change is already doing a lot of harm. One of the harms is the drying of land masses. The people who live on these land masses depend on fresh water not only to drink but to grow crops for food. As surface water disappears, humanity is dipping into the corpus of its geological endowment, […]
You may have heard about the flooding in Texas and North Carolina during the past week. But that’s far from all. There’s a reason it’s called “global” climate change. “The disaster comes during a week in which extreme heat and extreme weather have battered the planet. Parts of northern Spain and southern France are burning […]
While Congress debates just how much to goose the federal deficit, the global climate budget is even further out of balance that previously feared: “But another approach can give us a very clear sense of what’s going on: track how much heat enters Earth’s atmosphere and how much heat leaves. This is Earth’s energy budget, […]
A Facebook friend just posted this: “So wildfires and the threat of wildfires is a part of our lives. Our homeowner’s insurance company, American National Property and Casualty (ANPAC) has notified us they are pulling out of New Mexico because their claims (especially fire claims) are higher than their reserves and they can’t cover the […]
Climate change denialists are fond of pointing out that rising CO2 levels will mean that plant life will flourish, since plants “breathe” carbon dioxide. And it’s true that, up to a point, plants do grow faster with higher CO2 levels. But those plants have less nutritional value for the animals that depend on them for […]
Trump and his minions may not believe in global warming, but people whose livelihoods depend on understanding climate change—bankers, insurance companies and the military—know it’s real. So do non-humans whose livelihoods are compromised by climate change: “Native fish populations will likely continue their decline off of Massachusetts’ coast, while species from further south will move […]
Trump says global warming is a scam and a hoax. He promises to cut federal funding for green programs and to ramp up fracking and drilling. He can certainly do the former, but business controls drilling and fracking, and the price of oil is dictated by international supply and demand, not the whims of the […]