War in Ukraine and Climate Change Could Combine to Create a Food Crisis

Russia’s war in Ukraine is squeezing food supplies in countries that depend on those two nations for critical grains and cooking oils. The halt in agricultural shipments out of the Black Sea has sent the price of wheat and fertilizer soaring and prompted growing concerns of a global food crisis. In Turkey, people are scrambling … Read more

Endlessly recyclable materials could fix our plastic waste crisis

Untold amounts of plastic waste is polluting our land and seas. Now, we’re using chemical tricks to design infinitely and easily recyclable materials Technology 2 March 2022 By Katharine Sanderson Graham Carter One thing chemists do superbly is make bonds between atoms. We are now wading through the consequences of that success: plastic waste that … Read more

Satellites are critical to fighting the climate crisis, scientists say

Space remains a vital resource in studying climate change on our own planet. On Monday (Feb. 28), the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released the second piece of its latest climate report. (The first piece was published in August 2021August and the third will be released in April). The report details how … Read more

Endlessly recyclable plastics could fix our waste crisis

Untold amounts of plastic waste is polluting our land and seas. Now, we’re using chemical tricks to design infinitely and easily recyclable materials Technology 2 March 2022 By Katharine Sanderson Graham Carter One thing chemists do superbly is make bonds between atoms. We are now wading through the consequences of that success: plastic waste that … Read more

New Nuclear Power Plants Are Unlikely to Stop the Climate Crisis

Last fall my Harvard University class and I went through an exercise to help the students understand how the world might address the climate crisis and keep the average global temperature increase below two degrees Celsius. Guided by John Sterman, a management professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the students pretended to be climate … Read more

We’re No More Serious about the Climate Crisis Than We Were before the Pandemic

Disaster researchers are used to seeing train wrecks coming. We study the worst moments in human history—their warning signs, failures, destruction, pain, corruption and injustice—so that we can lessen the hurt. But the scale of the pandemic, and the response to it, shook even the most practiced among us. In the beginning, I spent hours … Read more

Winter Olympic Sites Are Melting Away because of Climate Crisis

The number of places on Earth with the right combination of natural climate and geography for the Olympic Winter Games is already inherently limited. But as global temperatures rise from the burning of fossil fuels, the list is narrowing further. Factoring in the specific conditions that world-class skiers and snowboarders need to safely land tricks … Read more

Our Environmental Crisis Requires Political Fixes, Not Technological Ones

Whether via West Coast wildfires that shrouded New York City’s skyline in smoke or historic floods in Germany, in 2021, signs of the climate crisis were everywhere. A group of the world’s leading ecologists summarized humanity’s predicament when they recently argued that our main goal now as a species is to “avoid a ghastly future.” … Read more

Crowdfunding Isn’t Enough in a Crisis

Many of us are familiar with crowdfunding: donating money to people and their projects using one of many platforms on the internet. During the pandemic, people have sought help through crowdfunding in record numbers, making the activity seem like a de facto part of the American safety net. Some of these campaigns are truly transformative. … Read more

North America Could Expect Over 1 Million More Opioid Deaths by 2029

A new analysis from researchers at Stanford University and the scientific journal, The Lancet, has revealed a large number of Americans and Canadians are still becoming addicted to prescription opioids each year.   Without “urgent interventions“, the members of the Stanford-Lancet Commission estimate this deepening disaster could claim the lives of up to 1.2 million people … Read more