Geologists prefer to call the past two centuries as ‘the anthropocene period, a time when humans have reshaped about half of the Earth’s surface. We have dictated what plants grow and where. We’ve pocked and deformed the Earth’s crust with mines and wells, and we’ve commandeered a huge fraction of its freshwater supply for our [...]

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon warned that ‘the Arctic is warming faster than anywhere else on Earth’ and ‘could be ice-free by 2030.’ Ban recently visited the Polar Ice Rim in the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard where he observed firsthand the impact of climate change on the Arctic.
Ban promptly called on governments to achieve in [...]

Perhaps to make Earth Day 2009 more significant, carbon dioxide (CO2) was officially categorized as a pollutant by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). This overhauls the grand scheme of things through the climate change bill which has already survived the US House of Representatives, and is awaiting an equal approval by the US Senate. The [...]

The world is increasingly close to the atmospheric limit for carbon dioxide. Failure to drastically and urgently reduce CO2 emissions will very soon make it impossible to avoid an average warming of the Earth at the 2ºC threshold which is considered dangerous to life. Moreover, we have already spent half of a hypothetical budget of [...]

Forest fires that cause deforestation and habitat loss are also responsible for 20% of carbon dioxide emissions. It is a phenomenon that feeds global warming. Fire and climate are a tandem that goes back at least 400 million years, since plants began to colonize the Earth.
It used to be that forest fires resulted from natural [...]

The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has taken a historic decision recognizing for the first time that greenhouse gases, particularly carbon dioxide (CO2), cause climate change and are hazardous to public health. The measure marks a turning point in US climate policy. This reverses the old Bush administration doubts on the need to address carbon [...]

Climate change could cause the collapse of the ice shelf in western Antarctica, a large expanse of ice attached to the white continent on the Ross Sea. This would occur, as has happened several times in the last five million years, if rising sea temperature comes up to around 5 º C. This warning was [...]

Looks like the economic crisis hasn’t spared even the superlatives. The ace car manufacturer, Toyota Motor Corp. has suffered its first-ever operating loss in 70 years because of the slashing U.S. market and mounting yen. To make up for the loss, Toyota is reportedly working on a secret solar vehicle to accompany its former hybrid [...]