Blogs Section
Thoughts on everything from climate modeling to energy policy.

How Much Will Sea Level Rise? Grab Your Towel

How Much Will Sea Level Rise? Grab Your Towel

As Climate Central's Mike Lemonick shows, explaining sea level rise is as simple as a day at the beach. Grab your towel, put on your shades and some suntan lotion and watch this segment from his "Bowtie Series".… Read More

The Supermoon is Coming! Do Not Panic!

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

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

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

Jim’s Frank TED Talk: Speaking Out on Climate Change

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

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

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 . . .

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