In the last 11 years since 2000, 9 of them have been the warmest years ever recorded. NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies has kept temperature records since 1880, and the records show that the first 11 years of the 2000′s were hotter than both the middle and late 20th century, according to James Hansen, [...]
Q: How is it that global warming could negatively impact water supplies in the U.S.? Climate change promises to have a very big impact on water supplies in the United States as well as around the world. A recent study commissioned by the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), a leading environmental group, and carried out [...]
According to a study in the journal Nature Geoscience, it looks like it will be at least 1,500 years before the next ice age occurs. Good news, right? Not exactly. While an ice age may seem like an event only portrayed in history books and Hollywood movies, the fact is that they normally happen every [...]
Many people harbor the misconception that global warming means that our atmosphere is getting hotter. This is not entirely true. The effect that global warming has on the climate is that it creates more extreme weather. So areas that generally enjoy a moderately warm summer may start to see rising temperatures or even a longer [...]
Still don’t believe that we humans are changing our climate for the worse? Maybe a new study by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) will change your mind. According the report, in the coming decades we can expect stronger storms, hotter and longer heat weaves, higher average temperatures, and much more precipitation. Seems we [...]
Dear EarthTalk: Can you explain what desertification is and why it is an important environmental issue? Desertification is the degradation of land in already dry parts of the globe that results from various factors, including natural climate changes as well as human activity. As the name connotes it is the expansion of desert-like conditions which [...]
Dear EarthTalk: I understand that China is about to overtake the U.S. as the world’s largest global warming polluter. What is China doing to address this issue as well as its other environmental impacts as such a populous nation? Actually, China passed the U.S. as the world’s leading greenhouse gas emitter back in 2006 and [...]
