Letters to the Future—an SN&R-led national project involving 40-plus newspapers and media outlets across the United States—set out to find authors, artists, scientists and others willing to get creative and draft letters to future generations of their own families, predicting the success or failure of the Paris Climate Talks of 2015. And what came after.(Continue reading). Like a Bad Robot mega production from J.J. Abrams, the story of geoengineering—wherein scientists propose using large-scale technologies to manipulate the Earth’s temperature as a way to avert global warming—seems straight out of science fiction’s playbook. (Continue reading).
Floods, droughts, wildfires. Rising sea levels and disappearing coastlines.
The world’s scientists have warned for decades that our planet is warming and—thanks to extreme storms like Hurricane Sandy—we finally seem prepared to believe it. A recent Rasmussen Reports poll found that 68 percent of Americans now agree that global warming is a “serious problem.” (Continue reading)
The News & Review led a national effort, in league with the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies in Washington, D.C., to encourage weeklies across the country to join together this week to mark the 10th anniversary of the Kyoto Protocol. (Continue reading)
The first thing we noticed was the blue ice melting. My husband and I traveled out of Sacramento last month, up the Pacific Northwest, and one day found ourselves standing on top of a huge mountain of frozen cold, the Athabasca Glacier. Underneath our feet was a 1,000-foot-high pile of pressurized crystal, just one of many glaciers stretching out, like solid rivers of white, from the vast Columbia Icefield in Alberta, Canada. (Continue reading)
In the introduction to his scathing new takedown of the state of democracy in America under the rule of President George W. Bush, Al Gore writes: “A large and growing number of Americans are asking out loud: ‘What has happened to our country?’”
The Assault on Reason then proceeds—in a vehemently argued treatise that is equal parts damning indictment and wonky civics lesson—to answer this urgent question. (Continue reading)
Nobody ever accused E.O. Wilson of mincing words.
So the fact that his latest book arrives with a subhead that constitutes a spectacularly bold plea to humankind—The Creation: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth—should come as no surprise. (Continue reading)
If E.O. Wilson has got it right, the Earth is fast approaching a kind of Armageddon where—thanks to human consumption, overpopulation and shortsighted priorities—an alarming half of the planet’s animal and plant species will cease to exist by the end of the century. A two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning author and renowned Harvard biologist, Wilson is our most influential living scientist, the Einstein of our day. (Continue reading)
