What is the first thing that comes to mind when you think of satellites? If you were alive in the 1960s, you might have vivid memories of Russia’s Sputnik — the world’s very first satellite — and the resulting Space Race to be the first country to reach the moon. For younger generations, your association with satellites might be from brief references in pop culture, such as a glimpse in the Disney movie WALL-E or maybe something more Star Wars-esque. Now, picture a rural community in a poverty-stricken part of Africa.
It was a clear and beautiful June morning when I joined a team led by Neil Pederson, Senior Ecologist at Harvard Forest to venture out into a swamp forest in Westminster, Massachusetts. Our mission was to core old-growth Atlantic white cedar that grows in these forests. According to the U.S. Forest Service, the Atlantic white cedar is one of only six species in this genus. Only three of the six are native to the continent, and two of them are West Coast species. This leaves Atlantic white cedar as the only representative in the East, where it occurs in a narrow band along the Atlantic coast from Maine to Florida.
Did you know landfills are essentially evil cupcakes? It’s true. Find out why.
Carbon capture and sequestration, commonly referred to by its acronym CCS, could be an effective way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. But scientific perceptions of it versus the public are two different things.
When most people think of forests, their mind immediately connects to pristine scenes of wilderness with undulating hills and valleys, highly dense tree coverage and wildlife roaming the woods. Street trees, on the other hand, are not quite the same as the ones in national forests, but there’s a growing body of literature espousing their benefits.
Arctic governance is quickly emerging as the geopolitical question of the century. With climate change increasing the potential for new shipping routes, as well as interest growing in the areas of mining and extractive processes, players like the Russian Federation, Canada and Norway, among others, are aiming to develop their northernmost territories.
How did your family or town get rid of trash when you were a kid? I imagine that most couldn’t answer this question beyond the point of, “well, we put it by the side of the road and someone just picked it up.”
In recent years, many weather events either shattered or challenged the record books and the conversation about the cause of these events heated up rooms more than the greenhouse effect could ever hope to. It is these extreme events that inspired me to learn more about climate. Over the past several weeks, another extreme weather event has been underway and with it, the climate connection conversation.
Not all environmental policies are good. Indeed, some are worse than others including some policies aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions that can have undesirable side effects.
Imagine your computer crashing and losing all your data. Sounds painful, right? Now imagine that happening to weather data for an entire country. That’s what happened in Jamaica more than 20 years ago when a fire sent decades of data up in smoke, a loss that researchers are still trying to deal with.
