Milwaukeeans have been shivering and wet this past week, so it’s easy to believe that our soggy, cold April means that global warming or climate change isn’t a serious threat. But unfortunately it is

There's a big reason climate change differs from so many public policy challenges: unlike other crises, addressing the planet's major environmental crisis truly requires mass consensus. Indeed, because fixing the problem

What Barack Obama tried to tell America in the hour of his remarkable victory is that the nation's future won on Election Day. Seeking to inspire and to heal, the re-elected president offered an open hand to partisan

Dear EarthTalk: Has an alternative to air conditioning to keep rooms cool been invented that...

“Soon it will be too hot” is a great opening line for a novel, especially one about global warming. As Martin Amis writes in his introduction for the anniversary edition of The Drowned World, prescience isn't everything, yet J.G. Ballard's 1962 novel...

After beginning my reporting career under an editor I considered unnaturally obsessed with...

"Welcome to the New Normal." Those words should be displayed at New York's airports as a welcome to bedraggled travelers during the Northeast's latest "snowpocalypse." Why? Because the Big Apple's much-lamented paralysis this week is a critical cautionary tale for everyone. The episode warns us about the kind of thing that's likely coming to the rest of America as we now...

DAR ES SALAAM, Tanzania—What would the wealthy nations of the West (and their rising rivals in the East) do if they actually wanted to prevent catastrophic warming? Here in Africa, the obvious answer is that they would find the ways and means to discourage deforestation—the ruinous practice of clear-cutting for timber, charcoal and arable land that accounts for...

If the right-wing chorus insists that the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is "Obama's Katrina," then let us hope the president will make the most of that slogan. The comparison between the utter failure of the Bush administration and the missteps and errors of the Obama White House is fundamentally false. Yet there is nevertheless a crucial parallel...