Fireflies are turning on earlier than they used to
François Villon ended each stanza of a particular poem with “Mais où sont les neiges d’antan?” (“But where are the snows of yesteryear?”) The plaintive line has proven so resonant that its fame exceeds...
View ArticleWhy are nonscientists skeptical of climate change?
Hal Lewis is a professor emeritus of physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Upset about how the American Physical Society (APS) has dealt with climate change, he resigned from the...
View ArticleWearing my rowing and physicist hats
Sometimes, when I’m working out at my gym, I wear my Capital Rowing Club baseball cap. The club’s logo identifies me as a rower, which, as I found out last week, isn’t a bad thing. Lifting weights...
View ArticleTo save the planet should scientists refrain from traveling?
Today’s issue of Science includes the results of an online poll that the magazine conducted last December. The poll was prompted by a letter to Science from the University of Wyoming’s Ingrid Burke....
View ArticleClimate change, insurance companies, and criminals
Swiss Re is the world’s second largest company in the reinsurance business, the business of insuring insurance companies. In 1990, when the first report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate...
View ArticleWine and climate change
I’ve just returned from a two-week vacation in England and Wales. The picture shows one of the first places that my wife and I visited: Stokesay Castle, which, according to its official website, “is...
View ArticleGaia in the Amazon
In a 1974 paper in Tellus, chemist James Lovelock and biologist Lynn Margulis proposed a bold hypothesis: Earth’s living organisms act together to ensure that the planet remains hospitable to life....
View ArticleTurn on your computer and simulate the future!
“The imaginative novelist is entitled to remake the existing world or present possible future worlds.” Thus Anthony Burgess, in his illuminating Encyclopaedia Britannica entry on “the novel,” claimed...
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