World leaders converge Tuesday in New York to focus on climate change, with the clock ticking down toward a summit this year in Denmark, where a global climate change pact is to be signed.
Leaders to focus on climate change at summit
Tag Archives: climate
Day 2: More than good intentions at the Clinton Global Initiative
Through all the sessions and workshops at the Clinton Global Initiative, the financial crisis was undeniably the elephant in the room. For most, philanthropy had taken a back seat to the economic situation
Feeding the future: Saving agricultural biodiversity
When the chips are down, the world may one day owe a debt of gratitude to a group of potato farmers high up in the mountains of Peru.
Three Months From a Climate Summit, Agreement Far Off
If you happened on Friday morning to walk into the Temple of Earth in Beijing — the nearly 500-year-old monument where Chinese emperors once prayed for good harvests — you would have noticed a steady drip. The environmental group Greenpeace placed ice sculptures of 100 children — made of the glacial meltwater that feeds China’s great rivers — inside the temple, to symbolize the risk that climate change and disappearing ice poses to the more than 1 billion people in Asia threatened by water shortages.
Study: Global warming sparked by ancient farming methods
Ancient man may have started global warming through massive deforestation and burning that could have permanently altered the Earth’s climate, according to a new study by researchers at the University of Virginia and the University of Maryland-Baltimore County. The study, published in the scientific journal Quaternary Science Reviews and reported on the University of Virginia’s Web site, says over thousands of years, farmers burned down so many forests on such a large scale that huge amounts of carbon dioxide were pumped into the atmosphere. That possibly caused the Earth to warm up and forever changed the climate
Clean Energy: U.S. Still Lags in Research and Development
When Apollo astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon 40 years ago, it was a triumph of American scientific skill. It was also the result of the government’s willingness to spend over $125 billion, in today’s dollars, to take the country to the moon. The need to remake our energy economy and to replace fossil fuels with renewables like wind and solar is often referred to as the new Apollo Project, a challenge to our scientists — and to the federal checkbook — that will be even greater than the moon race
One quarter of giant panda habitat lost in Sichuan quake
The earthquake in Sichuan, southern China last May left around 69,000 people dead and 15 million people displaced. Now ecologists have assessed the earthquake’s impact on biodiversity and the habitat for some of the last existing wild giant pandas
Greening the Internet: How much CO2 does this article produce?
Twenty milligrams; that’s the average amount of carbon emissions generated from the time it took you to read the first two words of this article. Now, depending on how quickly you read, around 80, perhaps even 100 milligrams of C02 have been released.
Why toilet paper belongs to America
Since the dawn of time, people have found nifty ways to clean up after the bathroom act. The most common solution was simply to grab what was at hand: coconuts, shells, snow, moss, hay, leaves, grass, corncobs, sheep’s wool — and, later, thanks to the printing press — newspapers, magazines, and pages of books. The ancient Greeks used clay and stone; the Romans, sponges and salt water.
The Incredible Shrinking Sheep of Scotland
News alert: the sheep of Scotland are shrinking! On Soay Island, off the western coast of Scotland, wild sheep are apparently defying the theory of evolution and progressively getting smaller. Why In short, because of climate change. Generally, the sheep’s life cycle goes like this: they fatten up on grass during the fertile, sunny summer; then the harsh winter comes, the grass disappears and the smallest, scrawniest sheep die off, while their bigger cousins survive