Since the Industrial Revolution the global average temperature has increased by nearly one degree, mostly in the last forty years. One degree is barely discernible. Yet it is blamed for widespread destruction! How can it be so? One degree adds the energy of maybe a million big hydrogen bombs to the upper ocean. It’s an […]
Seas are rising. It is no longer a question of whether this will be a problem. It is a matter of: How high and how fast? Recent science has both uncertainty and answers. Together they explain why geopolitics may soon become a much more common word. Science studies evidence of two kinds of steady sea-level […]
The world’s last great ice sheet is in the process of collapsing. This is not about climate change. It is about gravity and unstable foundations. The West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) will raise North America’s sea levels ten feet when it goes. It will shift some shorelines inland many miles. A new study sets out […]
Vaccination matters to all of us. It is the first line of defence against bugs that could kill millions. Vaccination and autism have a fraught relationship. Now there is good news. In 1998 a paper in The Lancet linked autism to vaccination. It was later proved to be a fraud. But now some parents refuse […]
Is Bassar al-Assad causing all those Syrian refugees to flee? Well, yes, in a way — but also no. Science now has something to say of this though few have noticed: Chances are that climate change led to the war the refugees are fleeing. They lived in a region that both climate modeling and weather […]
The number of climate-driven natural disasters per year has more than doubled since the 1980s. Meanwhile average global temperature increased less than one degree. We know how to slow the increase. It’s a win-win. Slowing it will keep us safer and will save all of us lots of money. Step one is to understand the […]
Strategy—as I use the term—is all about survival in a situation. So much of what we know of it relates to war. But the world has many other life-and-death situations. Seeing them through the eyes of those who choose to live can cast new light on complex questions. Recent news gives us an example: Why […]
Limits of survival are set by climate, those long drifts of change which a generation may fail to notice. And it is the extremes of climate which set the pattern. Frank Herbert Can we set a limit on how bad climate change can get? A new paper by ten European geoscientists seems to say so. […]
The message of Dr. Bernard Forscher’s brick allegory is that data can obstruct the search for scientific explanation. Today we check a story about missing heat (recent fodder for climate-change denial). On the way to explanation we’ll see data being tweaked to say more than they should. (Data in my book is plural and datum […]