Smoke injected high into the atmosphere cools the planet. This has been repeatedly demonstrated after many volcanic eruptions. The massive smoke pails generated by huge forest fires in British Columbia in 1982 cooled temperatures in the United States by 4°F to 7°F. In 1983, scientist Richard Turco investigated what the effect would be of massive […]

Scientists have long suspected giant meteorite impacts have had a significant impact on the Earth’s climate and ecology. Currently they have identified about 110 preserved meteor impact craters on our planet’s surface, some of which date back as far as 600 million years. Two very large craters located in Canada and South Africa may trace […]

The Great Barrier Reef, off the coast of Australia, is composed of coral. The marine micro-organisms that accomplished this marvelous feat of engineering are dying. No one is completely sure what the problem is. It may be man-made pollution and the impact of global climate change, or some aspect of unrecognized marine life cycles.

One partial solution to the continued buildup of CO in our atmosphere is nuclear power. In fact, while no new nuclear plants were opened, nuclear power was recently the only major category to show an increase, up 6.2 percent over the previous year, to supply 21.7 percent of the U.S. total electrical power. Of course, […]

In order to grow crops, humans transport vast amounts of water from one place and apply them in another, often greatly affecting the vegetation in a region. Over large irrigated tracts of land, especially in the western United States, local wind patterns and thundershower development may be affected. In the 1970s, climatologists found rain fall […]

Humans have been conserving fresh water supplies for eons using reservoirs. But construction of reservoirs since the 1950s has been so extensive that artificial lakes now cover twice the area of the Laurentian Great Lakes (some 500,000 square kilometers).
Moreover, if the water had been allowed passage to the oceans, global sea level today would be […]

The globally averaged surface temperature of the atmosphere is about 59°F. And if it were not for the natural greenhouse effect of water vapor and carbon dioxide, things would be much chillier. The global mean temperature would plunge to 4°F!

Not all of the vast amounts of CO pumped into the atmosphere by humans each year remain in the atmosphere. About 50 percent is thought to be absorbed by the oceans and vegetation. Yet the details of the fate of CO remains a puzzle to climate change scientists. The oceans were long thought to soak […]

With all the talk of increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide (C0 its relative, carbon monoxide (CO), is not usually considered. Carbon monoxide (a deadly component of auto exhaust) had been steadily increasing in the Earth’s atmosphere, along with gases such as greenhouse culprits carbon dioxide and methane. Then, in the last few years, CO levels have […]

Globally, there are 3.7 billion acres of land that have soil and climate conditions suit able for growing crops. Soil erosion, however, is destroying at least 29 million of these acres per year. Worldwide some 75 billion tons of topsoil are blown away by the wind or eroded by water each year. This is ten […]