The Supermoon is Coming! Do Not Panic!
In once sense, the astronomical event that happens this Saturday, May 5, is unexceptional: it’s the full moon, which happens every 29 days or so. This month, however, is a little bit unusual. We’re being treated to a so-called “Supermoon,” scheduled to make its appearance on Saturday night (exactly when depends on where you live: the U.S. Naval … Read More
Listen to the Skeptics! Except When They Talk Nonsense
I got an email the other day from an occasional visitor to the Climate Central website, asking whether we’d be covering a series of recent challenges to conventional climate science. He was being facetious: he knew we probably wouldn’t, and he was right — clear evidence, he proclaimed triumphantly, that our claim of following the science wherever … Read More
Extreme Weather and Climate Change: The Public Gets It
For years, we who communicate about climate change have been wringing our hands over how to make people understand the problem at a gut level. Endangered polar bears? Too far removed. Island nations like the Maldives sinking beneath the waves? Too far away. Hot temperatures by 2100? Too far in the future. But like the first, outlying squalls from … Read More
Watch 131 Years of Global Warming in 26 Seconds
More than 125,000 people have watched this amazing 26-second video depict how temperatures around the globe have warmed since 1880. That year is what scientists call the beginning of the “modern record.” … Read More
Jim’s Frank TED Talk: Speaking Out on Climate Change
If there’s a grand old man of climate science, it’s got to be Jim Hansen, of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Sciences (it’s located above the restaurant that Jerry, George, Elaine and Kramer frequented in Seinfeld). Way back in 1998, he declared in Senate testimony that he was 99% sure that year’s blistering heat was due in part to … Read More
Wacky Winter Weather May Be Global Weirding
It has been a weird wacky winter across most of the country, with crazy, hot temperatures smashing hundreds of records, and snow droughts in large swaths of the northeast, mid-Atlantic, the California Sierra, Colorado and Utah. Is this climate change? Global warming? Perhaps global weirding? … Read More
Image of the Day: A Mesmerizing Cloud of Interstellar Dust
The astronomer Carl Sagan famously called Earth a “pale blue dot,” but it originally came from a bright blue cloud. This glowing blob of light is what astronomers call a “reflection nebula.” It’s a giant cloud of interstellar dust, lit up by the glow of a nearby star — here, it’s Merope, one of the brightest stars in the Pleiades constellation.… Read More
Natural Gas Our New Savior? Not So Fast . . .
Remember how ethanol was going to save us? Until scientists began calculating the actual climate impact of corn ethanol, and discovered it wasn’t much better than gas. You’d think we’d have learned something from this cautionary tale. Evidently not, as natural presents false hope.… Read More
Twitter Facebook YouTube Vimeo Pinterest RSS