Everyone loves to talk about the weather, and this winter Mother Nature has served up a feast to chew on. Few parts of the US have been spared her wrath. Severe drought and abnormally warm conditions continue…
Let’s start with some old news. Earth’s climate is warming, human activities are causing it, and as long as we continue to dump greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere, the impacts on climate and…
Whether man-made sources of mercury are contributing to the mercury levels in open-ocean fish has been the subject of hot debate for many years. My colleagues Carl Lamborg, Marty Horgan and I analyzed…
Photosynthesis – turning the sun’s energy into food for plants – is the biological system that feeds the world. But despite its awesome power, the process is extremely inefficient. We can’t really blame…
Despite the Patriots winning the Super Bowl, January and February were not kind months for the people of Boston and New England. By February 10th, more than 60 inches of snow in 30 days fell on the city…
Falling oil prices threaten to slow the US drilling boom. The downturn has also increased calls to lift the ban on exporting oil and natural gas from the US – an outdated policy that should be changed…
Over the past decade, there have numerous efforts to replace petroleum-based fuels with fuel made from plants, or biofuels. One challenge to commercializing biofuel made from non-food sources — called…
It’s been almost two decades since a new nuclear plant opened for business in the United States. But that’s about to change as construction wraps up on the Tennessee Valley Authority’s Watts Bar Unit 2…
In a few months, we will mark the five-year anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. The accident released millions of barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, causing extensive impacts on the marine…
As first glance, asking whether global warming results in more snow may seem like a silly question because obviously, if it gets warm enough, there is no snow. Consequently, deniers of climate change have…
In the early morning hours of Sunday, December 14th last year, climate negotiators in Lima, Peru concluded the COP-20 talks with an agreement among 195 countries. The Lima Call for Climate Action, or Lima…
Scientists in my native state of California were handed a gift: a trove of detailed information about the state’s forests taken during the 1920s and 1930s and digitized over the past 15 years. When we…
In a surprise decision that led to consternation in the oil and gas industry and elation among fracking opponents, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo in December banned fracking in the state. He attributed…
People are increasingly aware of the link between the trillions of microbes that live within our bodies and human health. Studies have found that a healthy population of bacteria, or a microbiome, in a…
Like many Americans concerned with climate change and energy security, I reacted with high hopes to the President Obama’s proposal to reduce leaks of methane gas from oil and gas drilling. But on closer…
The message from the yearly CES consumer electronics extravaganza was clear: the list of gadgets that can be connected to the “internet of things” is growing rapidly. These smart-home technologies have…
Climate change is as much an economic problem as an environmental one. The effects of climate change, such as damage from more severe weather or health problems from higher temperatures, will impose a…
In an effort to jumpstart adoption of fuel cell electric vehicles, Toyota Motors earlier this month made more than 5,600 patents available to other carmakers. A few days later, General Motors introduced…
When you ask yourself what the biggest unanswered scientific questions are, “how did sea levels change over the past 100 years?” is unlikely to appear at the top of your list. After all, haven’t we already…
Big energy infrastructure projects – power plants, coal mines, long distance transmission lines – take time, resources and, typically, some political muscle. They create highly visible if short-lived construction…
It is well known that the US has a major infrastructure problem with our national highway system. Many of our bridges are in a very poor state of repair and highway maintenance is not keeping up with needs…