Articles tagged with: global change
Burning the biosphere before you were born
Millennia before humans discovered coal, indeed, millennia before there was civilization, Homo sapiens had discovered fire and was making extensive use of it. In a study just published by Bill Ruddiman and myself (Ruddiman and …
The Nature within now matters most
Should we conserve nature even if it is not wild? Humans have transformed 40% of earth’s ice-free land into crop fields, pastures and settlements, and have embedded another 37% within used and populated landscapes (anthromes). …
The tortoise and the hummer (and the nano!)
Today, the Tata Nano (Wikipedia entry), the first “people’s car” of the 21st century, rolled out of a dealership in Mumbai, hitting the streets at 56 miles per gallon (and 1300 lbs; its a 4 …
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 …
Save the planet? From who?
Millennia ago, our species reshaped the ecology of this planet and we have continued to reshape it ever more rapidly and intensively ever since. Today, we directly use or alter nearly all of earth’s terrestrial …
Globalization is good for the biosphere
Finally some good news about global change: globalization is making us cooperate! This is no minor discovery. Poverty, global warming, environmental degradation and biodiversity loss- all of these will only be solved when all of …
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 …
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