Entries tagged with: Climate Change

25 result(s) displayed (1 - 25 of 26):

Got the Time

I've been mulling something of late, and it hasn't left me in a tremendously good mood. Take a look at these two sets of graphs: The first one is from the US Energy Information Administration, a group within the US...

Posted on February 13, 2012 2:41 PM

Cold War Over Warming Already Underway?

Seems like it. Mark Lynas, who worked with the Maldives group at COP15, was literally in the room when the final negotiations took place, and wrote about it for The Guardian. The key section: To those who would blame Obama...

Posted on December 25, 2009 12:24 PM

Climate Lawsuits Ahoy

The combination of science & liability may end up getting a lot of press in the Carbondämmerung era. The parallel of big tobacco and big carbon has always been compelling to me, but the Guardian reports that Oxford University physicists...

Posted on December 11, 2008 3:02 PM

Singularities Enough, and Time

A few people have asked me what I thought of Karl Schroeder's recent article at Worldchanging, "No Time for the Singularity." Karl argues that we can't count on super-intelligent AIs to save us from environmental disaster, since by the time...

Posted on June 28, 2008 2:56 PM

The Big Picture: Resource Collapse

(The Big Picture is my series on the major driving forces likely to shape the next 20 years. The first post, on Climate Change, went up in early February.) Truism #1: Human society's continued existence depends on the sustained flows...

Posted on April 7, 2008 3:05 PM

The Big Picture: Climate Chaos

Thermal Inertia. Get used to that term, as it drives the relationship between climate disruption and human civilization, now and over the next twenty years. Its meaning is simple: even if we were to stop all greenhouse gas emissions immediately,...

Posted on February 1, 2008 5:47 PM

Solving the Climate Crisis

With Al Gore and the IPCC wining the Nobel Peace Prize yesterday, lots of people are talking about global warming. The remaining holdouts and dead-enders continue to bray about hoaxes and imaginary disputes, but by and large the dominant focus...

Posted on October 13, 2007 9:46 PM

Crimes Against the Future

This week's Newsweek contains an article ("The Truth About Denial") that, on the surface, offers a good look at the politics of global warming pseudo-skepticism. When you read between the lines, however, it becomes increasingly clear that we've hit a...

Posted on August 6, 2007 4:55 PM

Earth Day Essay

I've gone ahead and contributed an essay to WorldChanging's "Earth Day" series, a brief set of scenarios based on the matrix shown above. It's very much a high-level view of potential Earth futures, and is meant more as a...

Posted on April 22, 2007 11:46 AM

Interview for Changesurfer Radio

Trinity College Professor of Healthy Policy James Hughes, founder of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies (of which I am a Fellow), runs a weekly Internet radio show called "Changesurfer Radio," covering a variety of topics related to building...

Posted on April 1, 2007 1:37 PM

Tuesday Topsight, January 30, 2007

Multiple deadlines this week, plus meetings -- but interesting stuff keeps rolling in. • SimCollapse: Green LA Girl Siel gave me a heads-up about "Climate Challenge," a Flash-based simulation game produced by the BBC that gives players a chance to...

Posted on January 30, 2007 1:43 PM

We Win the War; Now the Fight Begins

Bruce Sterling's Viridian Note #00487, sent today, is something of a victory announcement for the Viridian movement. The idea -- the truth -- that the planet is in the midst of an extraordinary climate disaster is no longer a fringe...

Posted on January 27, 2007 4:16 PM

Wednesday Topsight, January 24, 2007

Let's see, lots of apocaphilia lately... • Five Minutes to Midnight: The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has a well-known icon, shown here: the ticking clock, counting down to midnight. Throughout the Cold War, as tensions between the superpowers rose...

Posted on January 24, 2007 9:21 PM

Welcome, Treehuggers

My post on the carbon footprint of cheeseburgers got picked up on Treehugger, so this little site is seeing a new flurry of activity. For new visitors who recognize me as the co-founder of WorldChanging, the topics I cover...

Posted on December 27, 2006 10:26 AM

Terraforming the Earth, Now In the Spotlight

Geoengineering -- aka planetary engineering, aka (re-)terraforming the Earth -- has once again popped up into the public limelight. The latest issue of Wired has an article about Nobel-prize-winner Paul Crutzen's proposal to spray sulfur particles into the high atmosphere...

Posted on November 27, 2006 2:34 PM

RAIDs Against Global Warming

This has "duh... why did we think of this before!" written all over it: a "redundant array of inexpensive disks" to cool the Earth. Everyone with a bit of sense knows that the only way to combat global warming-induced climate...

Posted on November 3, 2006 5:14 PM

Late to the Party

Tom Friedman just left the stage at PopTech, having talked a bit about about his GeoGreens notion. Friedman frustrates me; his work in the 1980s and early 1990s on the Middle East was remarkable and insightful, but he's lost me...

Posted on October 19, 2006 12:28 PM

New Futurismic Column Up

My monthly column at Futurismic is now up: The Geoengineering Option. Those who are familiar with my pieces at WorldChanging on "Terraforming Earth" will find some of the content familiar, but the focus in this piece is on understanding geoengineering/terraforming...

Posted on October 1, 2006 12:44 PM

Thursday Topsight, September 21, 2006

Returning to the multiple links in a post format in an (unsuccessful) effort to curb my verbosity. • What Could Have Been: Al Gore's recent speech at the NYU School of Law has received ample coverage in both the activist...

Posted on September 21, 2006 1:37 PM

UEVs

New Scientist reports on the planned use of the Aerosonde drone to measure the conditions inside a hurricane, including the temperature, pressure, humidity and wind velocity. The Aerosonde will go where no human-crewed aircraft could -- just a few hundred...

Posted on September 20, 2006 2:40 PM

Renewable Energy and Global Stability

An Agence France-Presse article, reprinted at Terradaily.com, got me thinking about some of the unanticipated results of a radical shift to renewable energy systems. In "OPEC Casts A Dark Eye On The Greening Of Energy," writer Peter Capella quotes sources...

Posted on September 18, 2006 4:51 PM

Friday Topsight, September 8, 2006

Just a quick one today, with not as much text -- but good links to hang onto. • Smeed's Law: What happens when you add cars to traffic? The number of accidents goes down. On average, annual increases of traffic...

Posted on September 8, 2006 5:10 PM

Raising a Wind Turbine

St. Olaf College, a small private university in Minnesota, recently decided to add a 1.65 megawatt wind turbine to the campus power grid. Minnesota is well-positioned to play a major role in the wind energy economy, and St. Olaf leapt...

Posted on September 5, 2006 4:00 PM

Monday Topsight, June 26, 2006

Light blogging week (of course, the week when I get a hat tip from BoingBoing). I'm spending the next few days at the Institute for the Future's Health Horizons conference (PDF), including serving as the keynote speaker tomorrow. I'll be...

Posted on June 26, 2006 4:57 PM

Monday Topsight, June 19, 2006

• Turning Greenhouse Gases into Greenhouse Glass: One of my mantras when I was writing at WorldChanging was that "we can't assume that all the tools we'll have for fighting global problems have already been invented." Today brings another example...

Posted on June 19, 2006 5:19 PM

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