Conservation
Which was the hottest month on record? Would it surprise you to know that—dating back to January 1880—it was July 2015? September 2015 was the warmest of all previous Septembers on record, and 2015 is likely to beat 2014 as the hottest year we’ve ever documented.
News & More
I think Britain’s Prince Charles may be on to something. A longtime environmentalist, the heir to the British throne stated on November 23, 2015—just a week before the climate change conference in Paris—that the world’s failure to tackle climate change is a root cause of Syria’s civil war.
News & More
Before the terrorist attacks that left more than 125 people dead and hundreds wounded in Paris on Friday, November 13, 2015, the city was set to host the 21st Conference of the Parties (COP21) for the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, starting on November 30, 2015.
Videos
How many trees are there in the world? That’s a question you—or a child in your life—has probably asked many times. Until now, however, there hasn’t been a very precise answer. But according to a new video produced by Nature, there are 3.04 trillion trees in the world; a number that’s hard to mentally grasp.
Alaska
Alaska is on fire. Even where I live in Wisconsin, I can feel it. A NASA photo shows that a plume of smoke from those northern blazes extends all the way down through the Midwest. But that’s not the only reason why I should care about Alaska’s fires.
Videos
Last year, 2014, was the warmest on record since 1880, according to scientists at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York. What is even more telling is that nine of the 10 warmest years since modern records began have now occurred since 2000.
News & More
To help meet our growing energy needs, in recent years we have increasingly turned to wind power. The U.S. Energy Information Administration estimates that in 2014, 4.4 percent of the electricity we generated came from wind. However, the wind industry is set to expand exponentially from the current 60,000 megawatts of capacity to 300,000 by 2030.
Videos
Water has been in the news this week: especially regarding how we’ll deal with insufficient quantities of it where we need it most—water is heavy and costly to transport—in a world that continues to rapidly warm and with a population that keeps growing.
Videos
We know that the world’s forests—boreal, temperate and tropical—play a large role in sequestering carbon dioxide (CO2)—as long as drought, harvesting, insect damage and wildfires don’t overpower them. But we may have another “champion” helping us to combat rising CO2 levels: whales.
Conservation
Wednesday, April 22, is Earth Day 2015, the 45th celebration of what started out as a true grassroots movement—the environmental likes of which we haven’t seen since. Last year, on Earth Day 2014, I wrote about Americans’ declining concerns about natural resource issues and the slackening of our environmental laws.
News & More
Suppose we meet for a cup of coffee, and in the course of our conversation, I tell you that 2014 was officially the hottest year on record.
Conservation
One of my favorite things about writing a regular eco-travel and environmental column is getting to read the comments that come in. Sometimes readers are complimentary, sometimes they are critical and sometimes they challenge me. Such is the case with an article I recently wrote on soil and climate change.
