Articles tagged with: climate change
Guns, forests and carbon
Not only do humans burn away forests to enhance their food supply, they also do it when they battle each other! Or so says a study published by Zhen Li and his colleagues this week …
Rewriting the history of global climate change
For thousands of years, humans have been changing global climate, maybe even helping us avert the next ice age, all long before the Industrial Revolution. Interested? Then you should read Plows, Plagues, and Petroleum: How …
Our landscapes are reflected in the clouds
When we change our landscapes, we change the clouds above and thereby climate - this from new evidence just published by Jingfeng Wang (Wang et al., 2009) and a team of researchers in Rafael Bras’s …
Ancient trees in Africa are eating your carbon
While you are driving to work, plume of carbon drifting lazily into the sky, do you ever wonder where all of your carbon will end up? Now, work by Simon Lewis and a large team …
A Fair Way to Solve Global Warming
It will not be possible to solve global warming without dealing with the dramatic global and local inequalities in carbon emissions and the wealth created from them. Since the Industrial Revolution began, some people and …
The human jungle
Are pristine rainforests the only ones that matter? We know that forests do change as they age, developing some unique characteristics when mature, and that some species cannot live outside of large swaths of ancient …
How best to chill a hot planet?
Even if we manage to slash our carbon emissions, planet earth is going to get a whole lot warmer this century. But maybe we can just chill the planet! For more than a decade, Ken …
Guns, Germs and Carbon: post-Colombian pandemics drive global cooling
Diseases introduced by Europeans after 1492 are now known to have caused massive population declines in the Americas, and the failure of ancient agricultural systems across huge regions, many of which depended on the regular …
Pushing back the Anthropocene at the AGU
The Early Anthropocene Hypothesis holds that human alteration of climate began with forest clearing and rice production more than 6 thousand years ago. Here are my personal impressions of recent work supporting this hypothesis, from …
Beyond good intentions: let’s think globally!
A couple weeks ago, I was invited by UMBC to provide a new year’s message to the world, in 100 words, prefaced with “In 2009, the world should resolve to…”
Here is the video version of …
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