General208
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The Military-Climatological Complex
In the movie 2012, the world’s governments must respond to the ultimate global change: overheating of the earth’s core, with attendant giant mega- earthquakes, volcanoes and tsunamis. The effective international cooperation it inspires is proportional to the impacts. As the prospects for anything remotely appears to shrink in Copenhagen , this flight of political fancy…
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We Can’t Solve the Problem–But We Can Make It Less Bad
This week, the spotlight of the 24-7, web-based global media on steroids has shifted some of its attention from Tiger Woods to the climate negotiations in Copenhagen. That is good news for Tiger, and for the rest of the world. The basic science of global climate change is now generally accepted as fact. There is…
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The Collective Action Curse
In the lexicon of sociologists, a social dilemma is when individual rationality leads to collective irrationality. With climate change, we are experiencing a very major and extraordinarily complicated social dilemma. On a social level, the benefit that many human individuals are getting from consuming energy is being pitted against humanity in general, because the impacts…
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Cities Produce the Emissions. Cities Must Deal With Them.
By Elliott Sclar It is always good news when the international community gathers to address an important problem. On the other hand, an international conference on climate change implicitly frames this as a nation-state problem. It is, for all intents and purposes, an urban problem. Nations are supposed to be the ones governing carbon emissions;…
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Farming in Future Climates
Agronomist Pedro Sanchez has helped many regions of the world boost food production through better use of nutrients, and now heads the Earth Institute’s Tropical Agriculture and Rural Environment Program. He is at the Copenhagen summit looking for support to build a global soil map that will help farmers work more efficiently in the future.…
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Real Scientists Are Climate Skeptics
The emails stolen from climate researchers at East Anglia University and released online—“Climategate,” as it has come to be known to some–may say a lot about some of the scientists involved. But they also reveal much about the dangerous political atmosphere into which the messages have emerged, coincidental with the Copenhagen climate summit. Scientists need…
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You Can Ignore Polar Bears, But Not People
As the Copenhagen summit prepared to open, we asked geophysicist and social scientist John Mutter to talk about the prospects. While at sea, Mutter investigates the workings of deep ocean floors; on land, he directs the Earth Institute’s Ph.D. in Sustainable Development and works to focus science on humanitarian causes. Among other things, he pinpointed…
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Can Science Explain Religion?
The concluding seminar of the CSSR’s fall semester will take place Thursday, December 10th from 6:00 – 7:30 pm in the Davis Auditorium on Columbia University’s main campus. Come one, come all, this seminar is free and open to the public. John Horgan, the Director of the Center for Science Writings at The Stevens Institute…
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We Can’t Separate Climate and Biodiversity
In 1940, after Copenhagen was occupied by Nazi Germany, many of its Jews were saved when Danes and Swedes cooperated to spirit them at night across the narrow strait from the Danish town of Helsingør to the Swedish town of Helsinborg. On the Danish side of the strait, there is now a monument, lit at…