The Cognitive Dissonance of Earth Day
Marching for science in the Anthropocene For what you have tamed, you become responsible forever – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry I ask the same question every year: how do we balance our sense of hope and despair? Another Earth Day rolls around and the question has never been more cogent. Barely three months into Donald Trump’s America decades of policy and …
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Climate Impacts on Forests and Wildfire
In the southwest of North America, record heat has spawned an early an aggressive start to the 2016 fire season. One consequence of a warming world is the increased frequency and intensity of wildfires. With increasing heat, fires burn more intensely over a steadily increasing wildfire season signaling a regime shift in global forests . A 2015 study published in …
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Regime Shift for Permafrost Arctic Permafrost Thawing
Nowhere is the climate changing faster than in the Arctic. The region is warming at about twice the rate of the global average, with atmospheric temperature anomalies as much as 13 degrees Fahrenheit above normal reported in January. Permafrost becomes especially vulnerable to these rapid changes, creating land subsidence, habitat change, and a potentially catastrophic release of carbon and methane as …
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