Climate change
19 articles-
Is the Psychology of Greta Thunberg’s Climate Activism Effective?
Greta Thunberg may have weighted her U.N. remarks toward care and fairness, but she didn’t omit loyalty. “You are failing us,” she said. “But the young people are starting to understand your betrayal.”Photograph by Liv Oeian / Shutterstock Last month, Greta Thunberg, the Swedish teenage activist, excoriated world leaders for their ongoing failure to address […] -
Why Enceladus’ Ice Is Part of the Climate Change Conversation
To imagine the absence of the Arctic and Antarctica produces something like the opposite of sublime, a pang of emptiness and a longing to appreciate that terrain in person before it passes.Image by NASA / Wikicommons Beneath the icy surface of Saturn’s sixth-largest moon, Enceladus, an ocean dwells. Traces of it get expelled skyward through […] -
Climate Change Is Making Plants Behave Like Costco Shoppers
Plants have their own form of money: carbon dioxide. For decades, our fossil fuel industry has been artificially inflating their currency. What happens to plants during inflation—when CO2 levels in the atmosphere rise?The same thing that happens if you drop money from the sky over Times Square, leaving everyone there with $1,000 in their pockets, […] -
Al Gore Does His Best Ralph Waldo Emerson
The former vice president reads the transcendentalist poet—and reminds us of one. -
How to Get Evangelicals to Care About Climate Change
It’s not that evangelicals don’t care about the environment. It’s that they care about people more.Wikicommons Last year was among the three warmest years ever recorded, 1.51 degrees Fahrenheit above the 20th century average, scientists from NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration recently reported. The two years prior were warmer (2016 the warmest), […]
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7 Surprises That Climate Change Will Throw Us
The interdependence of ecosystems and their inhabitants means climate change may force animals, including us, to adapt in surprising ways—some startling changes are to come.“Leiv Eiriksson discovers North America,” by Christian Krohg (1893) Rising sea levels, lower air quality, and longer and more frequent droughts often top the list of climate change consequences that will […]
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Will the March for Science Matter?
The closer one looks, the more intractable the politics become.Photograph by Mihai Petre / Wikicommons Here’s a hypothesis worth testing: If anybody concerned with science was left on the fence about whether the April 22 March for Science was a worthwhile endeavor, a flurry of news in late March catalyzed them to action. Nautilus Members […]
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The Secret of Buckminister Fuller’s World-Changing Ideas Was Serendipity
In his 2016 book, You Belong to the Universe, Jonathon Keats sets out to release Buckminister Fuller from “the zany sci-fi designs that made him notorious, and rescue him from the groupies who have impounded him as a cultish prophet.”Keats, a writer and artist who whips up his own world-changing ideas through trickster gallery and […]
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How Climate Change Makes Social Learning Among Animals More Important
Put yourself in the mind of a killer whale. Let’s say you’re the little guy in the picture below. So far, you’ve lived off of a diet of only marine mammals: seals, sea lions, porpoises, even otters on occasion. Your family has taught you how to hunt these animals. You spend hours swimming alongside your […]
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Are Museums the Perfect Climate Change Education Tool?
When Hurricane Sandy destroyed much of the New York and New Jersey coastlines, in October 2012, the looming threat of climate change abruptly became personal for a large portion of the East Coast—specifically Miranda Massie, a former public-interest lawyer. Seeing her city wasted, she realized that there was nowhere for the public to assemble and […]
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Wild-Winter Whodunnit—Climate Change Over the U.S. With a Slow Jet Stream?
This map produced by NOAA shows the land-surface temperature anomaly: how the temperature deviated from normal, on average, over the month. The darkest red areas were 12 degrees Celsius (22 degrees Fahrenheit) above average, while the darkest blue areas were 12 degrees Celsius below average.NOAA A question hangs like a cloud over the deeply weird […] -
How to Avoid the Desperate Future of “Interstellar”
In 2011 America’s astrophysicist, Neil deGrasse Tyson, was on Real Time with Bill Maher discussing the proposed termination of NASA’s James Webb Telescope, which the House Appropriations Committee had decried as “billions of dollars over budget and plagued by poor management.” Tyson went on to deliver what is now one of his most famous quotes: Nautilus […] -
Searching for Disappearing Species in the US’ Deepest Wilds
Michael Lucid photographs samples found during the Multispecies Baseline Initiative (MBI).Ben Goldfarb In 2010, Michael Lucid, a biologist with the Idaho Department of Fish & Game, captured a surprise in a beer-baited gastropod trap—a slug that didn’t genetically resemble any of the ones he’d caught before. On a hunch, Lucid sent the mysterious invertebrate to […] -
Born of Meteor Dust, Unusual Clouds Appear in the Night Sky
Martin Koitmäe via Flickr If you look to the darkening sky after the end of a long summer day, you might see tendril-like clouds with a blueish tinge that hang at the edge of space. They appear when conditions are right, generally at latitudes close to the North or South Poles, and only when the […] -
One Weird Trick to Save the World (Using Polar Bears)
This is exactly the kind of photo you would not see in environmentalist literature.BMJ / Shutterstock When environmentalists petitioned to designate the polar bear a threatened animal under the Endangered Species Act in 2005, they were not, in fact, out to save the polar bear. They were out to save the world. Since the polar […]
