Group items tagged

"Some bold steps to make your carbon footprint smaller" Articles on Act, Eat, Invent, Learn, Live, Move, and Build

Proving that old misunderstandings are not easily resolved, Politico published an anachronistically bad article about climate science yesterday.

While most districts are still tackling Web-based collaboration tools from pedagogical and security perspectives, a large number of teachers are already out there using these tools to supplement instruction, engage learners, and encourage their students to become producers of information, as well as consumers of it. In other words, they're experimenting. And here are some of the free tools they're using to do it.

"This is a major discovery with enormous implications for the future prosperity of humankind," said Barber, the Ernst Chain Professor of Biochemistry at Imperial College London. "The importance of their discovery cannot be overstated since it opens up the door for developing new technologies for energy production thus reducing our dependence for fossil fuels and addressing the global climate change problem."

The only survivors in the wild of an order of reptiles that scampered with dinosaurs could be wiped out because climate change will turn them all into males.

Amanda Leigh Mascarelli looks at how far our understanding of climate change has come in the past twelve months.

Kirpotin describes an "ecological landslide that is probably irreversible and is undoubtedly connected to climatic warming". He says that the entire western Siberian sub-Arctic region has begun to melt, and this "has all happened in the last three or four years".

The wildfires blazing through North Myrtle Beach, S.C., today are hardly an anomaly in a warming world. According to a landmark report that will be published tomorrow in Science, fires are not just a result of a changing climate, they're also contributing to the overall warming trend much more than imagined, the authors report. As vegetation burns, it releases stored-up carbon into the atmosphere, speeding global warming and thereby exacerbating conditions that may generate a greater incidence of wildfires in the coming years.

Yvo de Boer, the U.N.'s climate chief, called the meeting "very positive and constructive" and said it was "helped tremendously" by the support of Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. "There was a recognition around the table that this is a global crisis that cannot be solved without a global response," de Boer said. "There is a universal recognition that the whole world needs to act on this. .................. "China, he said, is now the largest investor worldwide in clean energy technology. "I think many people are not aware of that," he said. And according to a report by HSBC Global Research in February, almost 40 percent of the spending in China's economic stimulus package is supposed to go toward renewable energy, electric grid improvements, pollution control efforts, and other clean-energy-related projects.

From Colorado to Washington state, an unprecedented, years-long epidemic of mountain pine beetle has killed 2.6 million hectares (6.5 million acres) of forest. The insect has struck even more devastatingly to the north, in British Columbia, where clouds of beetles have laid waste to 14 million hectares (35 million acres) - twice the area of Ireland. It is expected to kill 80 percent of the Canadian province's lodgepole pines before it's finished. Farther north, in the Yukon, the pine beetle isn't endemic - yet. Here it's the spruce bark beetle that has eaten its way through 400,000 hectares (1 million acres) of woodland, and even more in neighboring Alaska, in a 15-year-old epidemic unmatched in its longevity and extent.