Climate March well-meaning — but means next to nothing

By Chris Wood, Natural Security columnist This isn’t the Bastille of the Climate Revolution. Not even close. What organizers are billing as “the largest climate march in history this weekend,” hopes to draw as many as 150,000 people to New York City to

Humans have the tools to avoid eco-geddon: Chris Wood

Systems approaching the brink display some common features, and sometimes thresholds give advance warning, writes Chris Wood in his new Natural Security column. They recover more slowly from disruption; “in-state fluctuations” become wilder and less predictable; conditions “flicker” rapidly from one state to another.

Clam Rolls, Ocean Acidification — and Solutions

Oddly, the new column by Natural Security columnist Chris Wood brought to my mind a sign outside a university chemistry lab when, a lifetime ago, I was studying biology. “If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the precipitate,” it quipped. It’s

Global Warming hiatus due – surprise! – to Atlantic Ocean

New research published today in the journal Science suggests, surprisingly, that the answer to the biggest climate change mystery of the past decade or so may be found in the deep Atlantic Ocean, and not as suspected in the Pacific. Noted Science: Why did

Does deep Atlantic heating account for global warming hiatus?

By Richard Allan, University of Reading, The ConversationAugust 21, 2014 There seem to have been a dozen or so explanations for why the Earth’s surface has warmed at a slower rate over the past 15 years compared to earlier decades. This is perhaps not

Environmental Assessments Include Climate

By Chris Wood,  Natural Security columnist How wide to cast the net when examining the environmental damage a proposed industrial development might do, is a contested issue. In Canada, panels weighing the impacts of proposed oil pipelines from Alberta to the Pacific

Canada’s Climate: Last Chance Tourism

By CHRIS WOOD  More or less as yesterday’s blog post (on Risky Business and Climate-Smart Development) was emerging from my keyboard, Canada’s federal government very quietly uploaded to the website of the Department of Natural Resources the closest thing Canadians have seen since 2008

Risky Business vs Smart Development

By CHRIS WOOD If Canada’s Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Australia’s Tony Abbott, the world’s most unabashed national cheerleaders for Big Carbon, were really the ‘frank,’ hard-nosed pair they pretend to be, two reports out in as many days would surely shake

The water is rising

Research showing that the West Antarctic Ice Sheet is breaking up lends an hallucinatory air to our political and business discourses, writes Natural Security columnist Chris Wood. We carry on as though the historical world will last forever, as if our biggest problem

Desmond Tutu on climate change, Keystone, and divestment

Nobel laureate Desmond Tutu has launched a campaign to persuade people to divest themselves of holdings in the fossil fuel industry and, specifically, to stop construction of the Keystone pipeline from Canada’s oil sands through the United States to the Gulf of