200930
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Meeting the Climate Challenge: The Columbia Climate Center Launch
This blog’s proud parent, the Columbia Climate Center, is having its public launch on Tuesday, March 31—and you’re invited! We are hosting this event to spread the word about our new center and its mission, so it is a great opportunity for readers of Climate Matters to come and learn more about the climate challenge…
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Ecosystems Push South
Warming Climate Drives Plankton and Penguins Poleward
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Wind Shifts May Stir CO2 From Antarctic Depths
Releases May Have Speeded End of Last Ice Age—And Could Act Again
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Sand Filtration
Via ScienceDaily, Dr. James Amburgey, from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, has developed an inexpensive and low-tech way to treat water using sand. According to Dr. Amburgey, all that is needed to create safe drinking water is PVC pipe, sand and inexpensive treatment chemicals. Previous technologies have used sand filtration, however, this current…
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Aquaduct Bicycle
Note: The following image links to a promotional video from Aquaduct In the most recent Innovate or Die contest sponsored by Google and Specialized, the grand prize winner was the Aquaduct, a pedal-powered concept vehicle that transports, filters, and stores water for the developing world. According to the website, As the rider pedals, a pump…
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LifeStraw®
According to the World Health Organization, 3.575 million people die each year from water-related disease, and 84% of water-related deaths are in children ages 0 – 14. Access to safe and clean water is an option many people in developing countries don’t have. I think the picture above says all that is needed about the LifeStraw®,…
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Jeffrey Sachs on African Aid
Jeffrey Sachs speaks with BBC Africa Slowdown at the IMF conference in Dar es Salaam.
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Snowstorms in a Warming World
On March 2 snowstorms hit the eastern seaboard, coinciding with a widely publicized protest against the coal industry in Washington DC . This garnered some attention, with Time noting the irony of people chanting about global warming while shivering in the cold and snow. One might wonder if a March snowstorm is inconsistent with a…
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Foot Forward
In 1968, 14-year-old Paul Olsen of suburban Livingston, N.J., and his friend Tony Lessa heard that dinosaur tracks had been found in a nearby quarry. They raced over on their bikes. “I went ballistic,” Olsen recalls. Over the next few years, the boys uncovered and studied thousands of tracks and other fossils there, often working into the night. It opened the…
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