Most recent 40 articles: Skeptical Science
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New Research for Week #37 2024 - Skeptical Science (Sep 19) |
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Sep 19 · A just world on a safe planet: a Lancet Planetary Health–Earth Commission report on Earth-system boundaries, translations, and transformations, Gupta et al., The Lancet Planetary Health:
The health of the planet and its people are at risk. The deterioration of the global commons—ie, the natural systems that support life on Earth—is exacerbating energy, food, and water insecurity, and increasing the risk of disease, disaster, displacement, and conflict. In this Commission, we quantify safe and just Earth-system boundaries (ESBs) and assess minimum access to natural resources required for human dignity and to enable escape from poverty. Collectively, these ... Read more ...
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2024's unusually persistent warmth - Skeptical Science (Sep 16) |
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Sep 16 · My inaugural post on The Climate Brink 18 months ago looked at the year 2024, and found that it was likely to be the warmest year on record on the back of a (than forecast) El Nino event. I suggested “there is a real chance that the world exceeds 1.5C above preindustrial levels in 2024 in the Berkeley Earth record” but that “it is still more likely than not that 2024 temperatures come in below that level.”
Since that post, I think its safe to say that the intervening year and a half surprised us all. We saw extreme (one might even say gobsmacking) global surface temperatures in the second half of 2023, which pushed the year above 1.5C in the Berkeley ... Read more ...
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2024 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #37 - Skeptical Science (Sep 15) |
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Sep 15 · From time to time we like to make our Story of the Week all about us— and this is one of those moments, except that "us" is more than only Skeptical Science.
This week we published our 16th Fact Brief of the year, Does manmade CO2 have any detectable fingerprint? As with all Fact Briefs it's a slightly different look than our ususal output.
The "fact brief" format is a less typical communications mode for us but the main effort at Gigafact, our partner and precipitating instigator in creating these bite-sized cognitive correctants. In a fine example of finding an importantly needful job vacancy and filling it, Gigafact has zeroed in on a significant vacant ... Read more ...
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Fact brief - Does manmade CO2 have any detectable fingerprint? - Skeptical Science (Sep 14) |
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Sep 14 · A key piece of evidence involves carbon isotope ratios in the atmosphere. Isotopes are different versions of the same element. Carbon comes in three isotopes of different weights and amounts: carbon-12 (98.9% of all carbon), carbon-13 (1.1%) and carbon-14 (trace amounts only).
Photosynthetic plants prefer the lightest isotope, carbon-12, because it is favored in photosynthesis reactions. That means plant tissues have relatively less carbon-13 than carbon-12. Fossil fuels, made of dead plants, also carry that distinct low carbon-13 isotope ratio, as does the CO2 produced by burning them.
Measurements over recent decades show a shift in the isotope ratio of atmospheric ... Read more ...
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New Research for Week #37 2024 - Skeptical Science (Sep 12) |
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Sep 12 · Early knowledge but delays in climate actions: An ecocide case against both transnational oil corporations and national governments, Hauser et al., Environmental Science & Policy:
Cast within the wide context of investigating the collusion at play between powerful political-economic actors and decision-makers as monopolists and debates about ‘the modern corporation and private property’ (Berle and Means, 1932/2017), ‘the new industrial state’ (Galbraith, 1967), and ‘the economic theory of regulation’ (Stigler, 1971), the paper reviews the contentious relationship between states, corporations, and markets. Specifically, the article probes ... Read more ...
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Voters love this climate policy they’ve never heard of - Skeptical Science (Sep 11) |
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Sep 11 · The Inflation Reduction Act is the Biden administration’s signature climate law and the largest U.S. government investment in reducing climate pollution to date. Among climate advocates, the policy is well-known and celebrated, but beyond that, only a minority of Americans have heard much about it.
Once voters learn a bit about this landmark law, however, a large majority support it.
These findings are from a survey of U.S. registered voters, conducted jointly by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication (the publisher of this site) and the Center for Climate Change Communication at George Mason University.
In the nationally representative survey, ... Read more ...
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New Models Show Stronger Atlantic Hurricanes, and More of Them - Skeptical Science (Sep 10) |
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Sep 10 · Here’s an example of some of the best kind of climate reporting, especially in that it relates to impacts that will directly affect the audience.
WFLA in Tampa conducted a study in collaboration with the Department of Energy, analyzing trends in hurricane strength, and projecting hurricane activity in to the future.The results are sobering.
One of the predictions is for hurricanes with 20 percent stronger maximum winds. As Jeff Berardelli explains below, that 20 percent is actually much, much worse than it sounds.
THE ESCALATOR (free to republish) Read more ...
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How mismanagement, not wind and solar energy, causes blackouts - Skeptical Science (Sep 9) |
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Sep 9 · In February 2021, several severe storms swept across the United States, culminating with one that the Weather Channel unofficially named Winter Storm Uri. In Texas, Uri knocked out power to over 4.5 million homes and 10 million people. Hundreds of Texans died as a result, and the storm is estimated to have cost the state $130 billion.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, quickly sought to blame the crisis on renewable energy. While the storm and blackouts were still ongoing, Abbott told Sean Hannity of Fox News, “This shows how the Green New Deal would be a deadly deal for the United States of America … fossil fuel is necessary for the state of Texas as well as ... Read more ...
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2024 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #36 - Skeptical Science (Sep 8) |
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Sep 8 · Our Story of the Week is about how peopele are not born stupid but can be fooled into appearing exactly so.
This week we posted a critique of Australian Queensland state senator Gerard Rennick by journalist and author Peter Hadfield, sailing under his Potholer54 YouTube flag. The title "Could this be the stupidest politician in Australia?" is certainly not a flattering introduction to Rennick, but hearing the senator express his understanding of CO2's role in Earth's atmosphere in his own voice and words is far less flattering. He really does sound stupid— obdurately so.
Is Senator Rennick unusually stupid? Doubtful. Rennick holds two post-graduate degrees, each ... Read more ...
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New Research for Week #36 2024 - Skeptical Science (Sep 5) |
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Sep 5 · Diurnal Temperature Range Trends Differ Below and Above the Melting Point, Pithan & Schatt, Geophysical Research Letters:
The globally averaged diurnal temperature range (DTR) has shrunk since the mid-20th century, and climate models project further shrinking. Observations indicate a slowdown or reversal of this trend in recent decades. Here, we show that DTR has a minimum for average temperatures close to 0°C. Observed DTR shrinks strongly at colder temperature, where warming shifts the average temperature toward the DTR minimum, and expands at warmer temperature, where warming shifts the average temperature away from the DTR minimum. Most, but not all climate models ... Read more ...
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The thermodynamics of electric vs. internal combustion cars - Skeptical Science (Sep 4) |
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Sep 4 · I love thermodynamics. Thermodynamics is like your mom: it may not tell you what you can do, but it damn well tells you what you can’t do. I’ve written a few previous posts that include thermodynamics, like one on air capture of carbon dioxide and one on air conditioning. For whatever reason, they tend to get a lot of traffic. Well, here’s another one.
I was charging my electric vehicle (EV) at a DC fast charger the other day and was pumping electrons into my car at around 200 kilowatts (kW). Man, that’s a lot of power, I thought to myself. For reference, 200 kW is the average power draw of around 60 houses. Just going into my car.
That got me ... Read more ...
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Five ingenious ways people could beat the heat without cranking the AC - Skeptical Science (Sep 3) |
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Sep 3 · Every summer brings a new spate of headlines about record-breaking heat – for good reason: 2023 was the hottest year on record, in keeping with the upward trend scientists have been clocking for decades.
With climate forecasts suggesting that heat waves will only become more frequent and severe in the future, it’s increasingly clear that the world needs new ways to adapt to heat – in addition to eliminating climate-warming pollution.
Heat waves pose a serious (and costly) public health risk, given that extreme heat can prompt heat exhaustion, dehydration, and heat stroke and can also worsen chronic conditions like cardiovascular and respiratory ... Read more ...
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New paper about detecting climate misinformation on Twitter/X - Skeptical Science (Sep 2) |
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Sep 2 · Together with Cristian Rojas, Frank Algra-Maschio, Mark Andrejevic, Travis Coan, and Yuan-Fang Li, I just published a paper in Nature Communications Earth & Environment where we use the Computer Assisted Recognition of Denial and Skepticism (CARDS) machine learning model to detect climate misinformation in 5 million climate tweets. We find over half of climate misinformation tweets involve personal attacks or conspiracy theories. This new paper builds on work published in 2021 which I wrote about in the article How machine learning holds a key to combating misinformation.
Here is the abstract of our open access paper "Hierarchical machine learning models can identify stimuli ... Read more ...
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2024 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #35 - Skeptical Science (Sep 1) |
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Sep 1 · Writing for Jacobin, former Rhode Island state representative Aaron Regenburg delivers a critique and rebuttal of a previous essay in the same publication. Regenburg's target is a sincerely delivered but incorrect argument that climate disinformation is not a matter of priority when talking to the general public about solving our climate mishap, an ill-conceived premise that we should save our words by ignoring climate disinformation and instead forcus on climate solutions.
As Regenburg points out, choosing a single frame in this way is a false choice, a misindentification of mutual exclusivity. Following this advice would only prolong the disastrous outcome we're now living. ... Read more ...
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Is recent global warming part of a natural cycle? - Skeptical Science (Aug 31) |
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Aug 31 · Solar energy reaching the Earth varies regularly over thousands of years with "Milankovitch cycles" in the planet's orbital path, tilt, and wobble. As an example of "external forcing", they affect the total energy present in Earth's climate system.
But those cycles are in a cooling phase and cannot explain recent warming. Man made greenhouse gasses can.
Shorter-term cycles ("internal variability"), like the El Nino Southern Oscillation, merely move energy around within the climate system. In warm El Nino years, heat is released from the oceans to the atmosphere. In cooler La Nina years, the reverse occurs.
However, even La Nina years are getting warmer. 2022 was ... Read more ...
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New Research for Week #35 2024 - Skeptical Science (Aug 29) |
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Aug 29 · Arctic glacier snowline altitudes rise 150 m over the last 4 decades, Larocca et al., The Cryosphere:
We mapped the snowline (SL) on a subset of 269 land-terminating glaciers above 60° N latitude in the latest available summer, clear-sky Landsat satellite image between 1984 and 2022. The mean SLA was extracted using the Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) Global Digital Elevation Model (GDEM). We compared the remotely observed SLA observations with available long-term field-based measurements of ELA and with ERA5-Land reanalysis climate data. Over the last 4 decades, Arctic glacier SLAs have risen an average of ∼152 m ... Read more ...
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Climate Adam: Can Coral Reefs survive Climate Change? - Skeptical Science (Aug 28) |
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Aug 28 · This video includes conclusions of the creator climate scientist Dr. Adam Levy. It is presented to our readers as an informed perspective. Please see video description for references (if any).
Coral reefs are in hot water... literally. Climate change is ramping up temperatures, causing increasing bleaching of reefs across the world. On top of that, these unique, vital ecosystems are facing threats from plastic pollution, ocean acidification, and overfishing. And new research shows just how in danger the Great Barrier Reef is. But there are solutions to protect reefs from global warming - helping them adapt to a warming world and removing the threats they face. But if we don't ... Read more ...
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The bold plan to save coral reefs - Skeptical Science (Aug 27) |
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Aug 27 · For 20 years now, Ken Nedimyer has been strapping on his scuba gear and diving into the waters off the Florida coast in a desperate effort to restore coral reefs that have been decimated by climate change and pollution. In 2019, he founded his latest venture, Reef Renewal USA. The group’s YouTube channel shows Nedimyer and other members underwater, carefully attaching nursery-grown coral to structures designed to build healthy reefs.
“We’re working hard under pressure with innovation, speed, and efficiency to repopulate our coral reefs,” the narrator says.
Diver-conservationists like Nedimyer will lose the race against time, scientists say, unless ... Read more ...
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China and India are so big. Do my country’s climate actions even matter? - Skeptical Science (Aug 26) |
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Aug 26 · At a Republican presidential debate in 2023, several candidates articulated a common sentiment about whose climate policies really matter.
“If you want to go and really change the environment, then we need to start telling China and India that they have to lower their emissions,” said Nikki Haley, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and ultimate runner-up to Donald Trump in the Republican presidential primary race. “We also need to take on the international world and say, ‘OK, India and China, you’ve got to stop polluting.’”
Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina agreed, saying, “The places where they are continuing to ... Read more ...
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2024 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #34 - Skeptical Science (Aug 25) |
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Aug 25 · Our Story of the Week is another stab at "connecting the dots," drawing a line between not one but two different stories sharing common foundations.
First there's Emily Atkin writing for HEATED with a critical commentary on Elon Musk, in Why vilify the oil and gas industry?. As detailed by Atkin, in a recent interview with a US presidential party nominee and candidate Musk made an odd statement, one that with all charity can only be interpreted as remarkably chumpish and naive. Musk asserted in connection with climate change that "I don’t think we should vilify the oil and gas industry." Unsurprisingly this article generated a lot of buzz in social media. Musk's ... Read more ...
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Fact brief - Is decreased cosmic ray activity driving global warming? - Skeptical Science (Aug 24) |
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Aug 24 · While some studies attribute some small contribution to decreased cosmic ray activity, there is a scientific consensus that CO2 is the primary factor driving temperature increases worldwide.
Galactic cosmic rays are high-energy particles released by stars of the Milky Way and other galaxies. These rays hit Earth’s upper atmosphere and produce charged particles called ions.
It is suggested these ions cause an increase in cloud cover, which would shield Earth from radiation and prevent warming; thus, it has been proposed that decreased cosmic ray activity is causing rising temperatures. However, causal links between cosmic rays, clouds, and warming have been debunked ... Read more ...
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New Research for Week #34 2024 - Skeptical Science (Aug 22) |
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Aug 22 · The ocean losing its breath under the heatwaves, Li et al., Nature Communications:
The world’s oceans are under threat from the prevalence of heatwaves caused by climate change. Despite this, there is a lack of understanding regarding their impact on seawater oxygen levels - a crucial element in sustaining biological survival. Here, we find that heatwaves can trigger low-oxygen extreme events, thereby amplifying the signal of deoxygenation. By utilizing in situ observations and state-of-the-art climate model simulations, we provide a global assessment of the relationship between the two types of extreme events in the surface ocean (0–10 m). Our results show ... Read more ...
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What should you do to prepare for the climate change storm? - Skeptical Science (Aug 21) |
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Aug 21 · Like an approaching major hurricane whose outer spiral bands are only just beginning to hit, an approaching climate change storm has begun and will soon grow to ferocious severity — a topic I discussed in detail in my previous post, When will climate change turn life in the U.S. upside down? This immense tempest is already exposing the precarious foundations upon which civilization is built — an inadequate infrastructure designed for the gentler climate of the 20th century. What should you do to prepare?
On a personal level, you should prepare for the intensifying climate change storm like you would for an approaching major hurricane. If you’re going to stay ... Read more ...
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Let’s keep this going - Skeptical Science (Aug 20) |
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Aug 20 · This Sunday marks the 10th anniversary of Climate Connections, our national radio program. Launched during a low point in mainstream media coverage of climate change, when only about 15% of Americans believed human-caused global warming was an urgent threat, the program was designed to get listeners talking about climate change and climate solutions.
From the beginning, we aimed to use our bite-sized, 90-second segments to show that climate action wasn’t just the province of scientists and distant technocrats who lead negotiations in United Nations meetings. Instead, anyone – including someone like you – could be part of the climate story. You can hear the ... Read more ...
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Are climate models overestimating warming? - Skeptical Science (Aug 19) |
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Aug 19 · In the world of climate communications, no claim seems to come up more frequently than “The climate models are wrong!” We recently wrote a post responding to claims that the models are running cold and future warming will be larger than models predict.
Today, it’s the claim that the models are hot and future warming will be much less than they predict. The source is some internet weirdo named Derwood Turnip, who posted this:
First, let’s be clear: climate models have an admirable track record of predicting the global average temperature. Zeke wrote a paper about that and it’s worth bookmarking so you’re ready to respond to anyone who ... Read more ...
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2024 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #33 - Skeptical Science (Aug 18) |
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Aug 18 · While we share a wide variety of climate-related stories each week, we'd be off-piste and ignoring our purpose if we didn't focus on Project 2025. Why? Because Project 2025's climate policy intentions and implications are what can be thought of as the whole point of the entire climate denial apparatus, the ultimate, ideal objective of filling people's heads with fantastic yarns about how Earth's climate functions— and can be made to malfunction. Without this synthetic ignorance and confusion, building the critical mass of support needed for imposing obviously lunatic policies on urgent matters of climate mitigation and adaptation would be impossible.
In the case of ... Read more ...
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Fact brief - Does CO2 correlate with global temperature long-term? - Skeptical Science (Aug 17) |
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Aug 17 · This is because CO2 in the atmosphere impedes the escape of heat back to space. Humans added 50% more CO2 since the Industrial Revolution by burning fossil fuels.
Over multi-decade timespans, CO2 shows close correlation with global temperature. However, on much shorter timescales (years, months, days), other natural variations in temperature (e.g. El Nino, La Nina) create "noise" on the graph — the up-and-down fluctuations we see. That's why climate trends tend to be expressed in blocks of 30 years.
When viewed over 30 or more years of data, the dominant relationship between human CO2 emissions and warming is clear. Man made CO2 and global temperatures have both ... Read more ...
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New Research for Week #33 2024 - Skeptical Science (Aug 15) |
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Aug 15 · The ocean losing its breath under the heatwaves, Li et al., Nature Communications:
Here, we find that heatwaves can trigger low-oxygen extreme events, thereby amplifying the signal of deoxygenation. By utilizing in situ observations and state-of-the-art climate model simulations, we provide a global assessment of the relationship between the two types of extreme events in the surface ocean (0–10 m). Our results show compelling evidence of a remarkable surge in the co-occurrence of marine heatwaves and low-oxygen extreme events. Hotspots of these concurrent stressors are identified in the study, indicating that this intensification is more pronounced in ... Read more ...
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Offshore wind farms connected by an underwater power grid for transmission could revolutionize how the East Coast gets its electricity - Skeptical Science (Aug 14) |
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Aug 14 · This article by Tyler Hansen, Research Associate in Environmental Studies, Dartmouth College; Abraham Silverman, Research Scholar, Ralph O’Connor Sustainable Energy Institute, Johns Hopkins University; Elizabeth J. Wilson, Professor of Environmental Studies, Dartmouth College, and Erin Baker, Professor of Industrial Engineering Applied to Energy Policy, UMass Amherst is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Offshore winds have the potential to supply coastlines with massive, consistent flows of clean electricity. One study estimates wind farms just offshore could meet 11 times the projected global electricity ... Read more ...
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Climate Adam: Kamala Harris and Climate Change - Hope or Hype? - Skeptical Science (Aug 13) |
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Aug 13 · In common with climate scientist Dr. Adam Levy's purpose and in keeping with Skeptical Science's philosophy and role as a US 501(c)(3) non-profit, we present this video to our readers as a perspective informed by verifiable facts, not as an endorsement or recommendation. Please see video description for references.
Before it's even begun, the race for the White House has made headlines - from the attempt on Donald Trump's life, to Joe Biden suddenly quitting the race, and Kamala Harris stepping up to take his place. But what could this race for Presidency mean for our planet? How could the next President of the United States affect climate change? Fortunately we can look at ... Read more ...
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Climate change is making us sick, literally - Skeptical Science (Aug 12) |
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Aug 12 · Although raw sewage and gastrointestinal illnesses are rarely topics broached in polite conversation, they’re having a glaring impact in hundreds of towns and cities in the United States. The risk of acute gastrointestinal illness increases by up to 62% after certain kinds of sewer overflows, according to recent research led by a team at the School of Public Health at Boston University.
And with increasing extreme rainfall events in the forecast, climate change could make the problem worse.
So how does sewage treatment affect digestive health, and what does climate change have to do with it all? The answers start with how your community manages its ... Read more ...
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2024 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #32 - Skeptical Science (Aug 11) |
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Aug 11 · Ordinarily any of a half-dozen stories in this week's listing could have been our focus. Instead, "we interrupt regular programming" to bring you a special bulletin, via ProPublica. This news is connected with Project 2025, a scheme fostered by the conservative (self-described) Heritage Foundation to jump start the next US presidential administration (of the politically Right variety) with a freeze-dried, fully comprehensive policy suite that if implemented will radically alter and many cases severely diminish services provided to the US public by the US government.
Expert analysis suggests that if signficantly executed, Project 2025 would leave the US federal government's ... Read more ...
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Fact brief - Are carbon dioxide emissions from human activities enough to affect the climate? - Skeptical Science (Aug 10) |
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Aug 10 · We have understood since the 1850s that adding more CO2 to our atmosphere will cause global temperatures to rise by making it more difficult for heat to escape the atmosphere.
Earth's carbon cycle naturally exchanges a large amount of CO2 between the atmosphere, oceans and land surface. Normally, our land and oceans keep CO2 levels balanced by emitting or absorbing CO2 accordingly. Now, the system is in a state of imbalance.
For over a million years, atmospheric CO2 swung between 180 and 300 parts per million as glaciations and interglacials came and went. But due to our activities, atmospheric CO2 reached 420 parts per million in March 2024 - a 50% increase from ... Read more ...
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New Research for Week #32 2024 - Skeptical Science (Aug 8) |
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Aug 8 · Absence of causality between seismic activity and global warming, Verbitsky et al., Earth System Dynamics:
There is no more consequential scientific matter today than global warming. The societal and policy implications, however, hinge upon the attribution of that warming to human activity and, specifically, continued societal reliance on the burning of fossil fuels. It was recently suggested that this warming could be explained by the non-anthropogenic factor of seismic activity. If that is the case, it would have profound implications. We have assessed the validity of the claim using a statistical technique (the method of conditional dispersion) that evaluates the existence ... Read more ...
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What Project 2025 would do to climate policy in the US - Skeptical Science (Aug 7) |
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Aug 7 · As delegates arrived at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee in mid-July to officially nominate former president Donald Trump as their 2024 candidate, a right-wing policy think tank held an all-day event nearby. The Heritage Foundation, a key sponsor of the convention and a group that has been influencing Republican presidential policy since the 1980s, gathered its supporters to tout Project 2025, a 900-plus-page policy blueprint that seeks to fundamentally restructure the federal government.
Dozens of conservative groups contributed to Project 2025, which recommends changes that would touch every aspect of American life and transform federal agencies — from ... Read more ...
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Trees don’t like to breathe wildfire smoke, either – and they’ll hold their breath to avoid it - Skeptical Science (Aug 6) |
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Aug 6 · This article by Delphine Farmer, Professor of Chemistry, Colorado State University and Mj Riches, Postdoctoral Researcher in Environmental and Atmospheric Science, Colorado State University is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
When wildfire smoke is in the air, doctors urge people to stay indoors to avoid breathing in harmful particles and gases. But what happens to trees and other plants that can’t escape from the smoke?
They respond a bit like us, it turns out: Some trees essentially shut their windows and doors and hold their breath.
As atmospheric and chemical scientists, we study the air ... Read more ...
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The hottest days in 120,000 years - Skeptical Science (Aug 5) |
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Aug 5 · Last week we set a record: we experienced the hottest day in the observational record. That record stood for 24 hours, when the next day took the record. In fact, these may have been the hottest days in the last 120,000 years.
To understand this latter claim, let’s work backwards. We know that the record breaking days last week are the hottest in the observational record, which goes back about 150 years.
Now, let’s look at the last 10,000 years. We used to think that the period about 7,000 years ago, a period sometimes referred to as the Holocene Optimum, was warmer. However, scientists have revised their estimates of the temperature at that time and it is ... Read more ...
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2024 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #31 - Skeptical Science (Aug 4) |
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Aug 4 · Only last week it was phenomenal to see two days in a row exceeding our pevious experience. A few days later and we're in a thicket of multiple new records, four as of the Washington Post's coverage.
Other news and analysis of our ongoing planetary fever:
Even with current data that is off previous charts and an incomplete explanation for "precisely why now," we'll likely see global temperature simmer down a bit not so long from now. Squinting at any graph of Earth surface temperature for the past 60 years will serve nicely to set expectations.
Stuck in a related groove, we'll point out yet again that global temperature reliably wavers from year to year, but only a ... Read more ...
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New Research for Week #31 2024 - Skeptical Science (Aug 1) |
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Aug 1 · The limits of “resilience”: Relationalities, contradictions, and re-appropriations, Davies & Arrieta, WIREs Climate Change [perspective]:
We define manufactured irresilience as damage incurred by people, places and planet, which undermines the possibility of resilience, and results from causally discernible and remediable human behaviors. Building on the “critical resilience” literature (De Verteuil & Golubchikov, 2016), we propose irresilience as a provocative analytical twist on the pairing of concepts. However, instead of a continuum leading from one condition to another, such as vulnerability-security (Detraz, 2011), we position resilience and ... Read more ...
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The greening of planes, trains, and automobiles - Skeptical Science (Jul 31) |
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Jul 31 · This article by Nicola Jones originally appeared in Knowable Magazine, a nonprofit publication dedicated to making scientific knowledge accessible to all. Sign up for Knowable Magazine’s newsletter.
As the world races to decarbonize everything from the electricity grid to industry, it faces particular problems with transportation — which alone is responsible for about a quarter of our planet’s energy-related greenhouse gas emissions. The fuels for transport need to be not just green, cheap and powerful, but also lightweight and safe enough to be carried around.
Fossil fuels — mainly gasoline and diesel — have been extraordinarily effective ... Read more ...
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