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

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

Residents of Galveston Island recently faced this question, and, according to reports I’ve seen, nearly 40% of its population chose the latter.  They decided to ride out Hurricane Ike, which made landfall on Saturday morning around 2:00 a.m. local time.  They made this decision in light of the following: Meteorologists were predicting an upper Texas coast landfall as early as Tuesday. Meteorologists, in light of a near census among computer models, forecast a Galveston Island landfall early Wednesday. Mandatory evacuations for parts of the island were ordered as early as Wednesday evening; the entire island and many parts of south Houston were under mandatory evacuations by noon Thursday. The National Weather Service office in Houston/Galveston issued a very strong statement on Thursday evening, and I quote: "All neighborhoods ... and possibly entire coastal communities ... will be inundated during the peak storm tide.  Persons not heeding evacuation orders in single-family one- or two-story homes will face certain death." Yikes.

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Tropical storm Fay, now sitting between Hispaniola and Cuba, appears an imminent threat to the U.S.  The severity and locality of this threat, however, is uncertain.The 2 p.m. EDT advisory on Fay by the National Hurricane Center (NHC) projects a landfall on the southwest coast of Florida:http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/nhc_storms.shtmlThe various computer models used by the NHC produce a range of forecas...

March Madness is unbelievable.  In my opinion, it's the best time of the year for sports, with college football bowl season a close second.  Unfortunately, my bracket was royally screwed during the first weekend of the tournament when both UConn and Duke laid eggs, but oh well.  As a big Duke fan (I was born and raised in North Carolina and taught to appreciate the right shade of blue), my only...

With the launch of the space shuttle Endeavour on Tuesday morning, NASA began a 16-day mission to the International Space Station (ISS) to install part of a Japanese laboratory and the Canadian Space Agency's two-armed gargantuan robotic system Special Purpose Dexterous Manipulator (SPDM). From this title they somehow got the nickname "Dextre" instead of "Dexter." Have you seen this thing? I...