Guest post by Jess Scanlon Today millions of Americans gather for the traditional Thanksgiving harvest festival. At many of these celebrations the centerpiece of the Thanksgiving dinner is a roasted turkey. From an environmental standpoint, the turkey falls somewhere between chicken and eggs. A Cornell study shows it takes 14 units of fossil fuel to produce a…Continue Reading…
All you people indifferent to climate change, listen up: Global warming is accumulating in the Earth’s climate system at a rate equivalent to about 4 Hiroshima atomic bomb detonations, 2 Hurricane Sandys, or 4 magnitude 6.0 earthquakes per second. This, according to a new widget created by the folks at Skeptical Science. Such a handy little…Continue Reading…
When China makes international news these days, it’s often because of its densely polluted air. The public health aspect of this story is usually front and center, while the global warming angle is somewhat muted. Still, there’s no getting around the climate implications of China’s reliance on coal. There are signs that China is trying to…Continue Reading…
In 2012 Scientific American asked: Are Wind Turbines Getting More Bird and Bat-Friendly? In case you weren’t aware, wind energy has an ecological downside that’s hasn’t yet been smoothed out. As AP reporter Dina Cappiello wrote earlier this year, “the green industry is allowed to do not so green things”: It kills protected species with impunity and conceals the…Continue Reading…
By now, the pattern is pretty well established. If there is a famine, drought, catastrophic flood, wildfire, a major hurricane or typhoon, then you can be sure that trailing behind these disasters, like ambulance chasers, is a brigade of climate-concerned activists, scientists and their enablers in the media. And trailing behind them is an Anthony…Continue Reading…
An opinion piece in Al Jazeera repeats many of the tropes one frequently hears about GMOs. The accompanying photo (also displayed in this post) is an apt illustration. At the center is a person holding a sign that connects Monsanto and Agenda 21, which is an innocuous U.N. sustainability initiative that has been turned into a feverish…Continue Reading…
Yesterday, in a Forbes article repurposed at the Chicago Tribune, a Heartland Institute staffer (who was not identified as such by the Tribune) wrote that, we should thank global warming for making hurricanes less frequent and less severe. Indeed, Hurricane Sandy may well have been much more deadly in the absence of global warming. This led…Continue Reading…
As I was plowing through my secret stash of Oreos today, I remembered this news from earlier in the month: Connecticut College students and a professor of psychology have found “America’s favorite cookie” is just as addictive as cocaine – at least for lab rats. And just like most humans, rats go for the middle…Continue Reading…
In the latest issue of Cosmos magazine, I have a piece on Bjørn Lomborg, who, as I write, shot to fame in 2001 with his first book, The Skeptical Environmentalist, a broad critique of the environmental movement that infuriated many ecologists and greens. The notoriety transformed the little-known Danish statistician into a globe-trotting public intellectual. Since then,…Continue Reading…
Earlier this week, ABC News asked: Can wind power be hazardous to your health? Some residents of a Cape Cod town have complained about headaches, nausea and other symptoms that they attribute to noise from wind turbines near their homes. I’ve written about “wind turbine syndrome” a bunch of times, including here at Discover and…Continue Reading…