This post is by Lisa Moore, Ph.D., a scientist in the Climate and Air program at Environmental Defense Fund.
There’s an email making the rounds lately – an invitation to take a Global Warming Test. It starts off reasonably enough (yes, global warming is real), but then quickly devolves into ridiculousness – ridiculousness presented in a way that looks misleadingly "scientific".
For those interested in truth, here are the real answers to the Global Warming Test.
This post is by Sheryl Canter, an online writer and editorial manager at Environmental Defense Fund.
Time magazine’s cover story in their latest issue is "How to Win the War on Global Warming". It starts this way:
Americans don’t like to lose wars – which makes sense, since we have so little practice with it. Of course, a lot depends on how you define just what a war is. There are shooting wars—the kind that test our mettle and our patriotism and our resourcefulness and our courage—and those are the kind at which we excel. But other struggles test those qualities too. What else was the Great Depression or the space race or the construction of the railroads or the eradication of polio but a massive, often frightening challenge that we decided as a culture we ought to rise up and face? If we indulge in a bit of chest-thumping and flag-waving when the job is done, well, we earned it.
We are now faced with a similarly momentous challenge: global warming. The steady deterioration of the very climate of our very planet is becoming a war of the first order, and by any measure, the U.S. is losing. Indeed, if we’re fighting at all—and by most accounts, we’re not—we’re fighting on the wrong side.
Take a look and tell us what you think!
This post is by Sheryl Canter, an online writer and editorial manager at Environmental Defense Fund.
Today’s speech by President Bush acknowledged that federal action is needed to address climate change – a new and welcome shift. But the details of his plan fall far short of what’s needed to halt global warming.
Moreover, Environmental Defense Fund strongly disagrees with elements of the President’s legislative principles, his assertion that the U.S. lacks the technology to make deep near-term cuts in emissions, and his claim that effective climate action would cause economic harm.
This post is by Sheryl Canter, an online writer and editorial manager at Environmental Defense Fund.
A new fact sheet on costs to U.S. transportation and infrastructure surveys the many ways that global warming will cause disruption and damage if we don’t act to stop it.
Published by the Democratic Policy Committee, the fact sheet gives examples of known costs in different areas to give a sense of what the total might be – and it’s big. Here are just a few examples from the transportation sector:
This post is by John Balbus, M.D., M.P.H., Chief Health Scientist at Environmental Defense Fund.
Last week was National Public Health Week, with a focus on how climate change harms health. The week’s activities flowed from the public health community into the Congress.
In the House, Center for Disease Control’s Howard Frumkin detailed the dangers to human health posed by climate change. In the Senate, Senator Kennedy’s Health, Education, Labor and Pension (H.E.L.P.) committee also held hearings on climate change and health.
I was invited to give testimony before the H.E.L.P committee about the gaps in public health preparedness for climate change, based on a survey and upcoming report I wrote on the topic. Here are some of the highlights. My full testimony [PDF] is posted on our Web site.
This post is by Sheryl Canter, an online writer and editorial manager at Environmental Defense Fund.
At a congressional hearing on Wednesday, Howard Frumkin, a senior official at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), said there was strong scientific evidence of major health problems due to climate change in the next few decades, including:
At least he got to say it. Last October, CDC testimony on the health risks from global warming was censored by the White House.
Rep. Hilda Solis (D-Calif), who chaired the hearing, said she suspected that "a layer of screening" continues to limit what CDC officials are allowed to say.
