Today is Earth Day and it seems appropriate to include an article about climate change. Last week a study was published in Nature Geoscience showing that some areas of the Himalayas were gaining ice steadily. The study compared data collected on the Space Shuttle Endeavour in 2000 with the French SPOT5 satellite data collected in
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Malaria, Lyme Disease, West Nile Virus, Dengue Fever, Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, Chagas, Chikungunya and many other diseases infect humans through insect carriers. Ticks and mosquitoes are the primary disease agents. Birds are secondary agents because they get bitten by insects, host the viruses, and then transmit them to uninfected insects who then bite us.
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Does the recent warm spell over the eastern half of North America reflect climate change induced by increased greenhouse gases? When Europe experienced an extreme heat wave in 2003, two scientists at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research began a study to see if that event could be related to global warming. Dim Coumou
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Re-engineering the planet may be tougher than re-engineering humanity argues S. Matthew Liao, of New York University, in an article, Human Engineering and Climate Change published in Ethics, Policy & Environment. With the impact of greenhouse gases and rising atmospheric temperatures, and with the growth in human population expected to exceed 9 billion by mid-century,
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With one island nation, Kiribati, already planning an exit strategy, and climatologists and oceanographers marking the steady rise in ocean surface levels, the 21st century looks like it will witness the first definitive impact of global warming. The government of Kiribati recently revealed its purchase of real estate in Fiji for the bulk of its
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How much of the world’s land surface do we use today for planting crops? If I said 20% would you think that is too low. Well it’s not. There are conflicting numbers on just how much of the planet is under cultivation. Here are interesting numbers from one source: 81.98% of the land surface of our
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The rising cost of fuel and energy impacts agriculture many ways. North American farms use lots of fossil fuel resources to produce incredible yields per acre of land. The same is true of farms in many other industrialized nations. In the developing world energy access is an inhibitor to creating increased crop yields. Fossil fuels
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When I was a younger man I wrote a short story about a girl who lived on Mars. Her father, a scientist, was in the business of changing the Martian atmosphere and his gift to his daughter was to give her a living tree outside the protected air envelope that was home to his family
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Climate change as a result of human activity on Earth is a science that has more and more taken on credibility as we track rising global temperatures, ozone depletion, vanishing polar ice, shrinking alpine glaciers, and extreme weather systems that are a departure from recorded meteorological history. Humanity has several choices. We can stay the
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