Posted on 13 September 2011 by Sustainability Digest
Image: Harvard-Smithsonian
Matthew Bailes just made my day. Not just because he is one of the astrophysicists who discovered the ‘diamond planet’ that recently captured the world’s imagination. For that, he is surely awesome — a whole Planet! made of diamond! wow and how strange! — but in describing the public response to his work, the awesomeness expands:
“Our host institutions were thrilled with the publicity and most of us enjoyed our 15 minutes of fame. The attention we received was 100% positive, but how different that could…Read the full story on TreeHugger
Posted on 02 September 2011 by Sustainability Digest
The two week-long tar sands pipeline protests are entering its final stages, and I’m in Washington D.C covering the action. Today, notable Keystone XL opponents Bill McKibben, Naomi Klein, along with a number of the nation’s religious leaders, accompanied hundreds of Americans to the White House. There, they risked arrest to confront the Obama administration on its tacit approval of the potentially devastating 1,700 tar sands pipeline.
Around midday, the famed consumer advocate Ralph Nader stopped by Lafayette Square to lend his support to the protest. Approving the tar sa…Read the full story on TreeHugger
Since Fox’s fact-checkers accidentally admitted on the air that the facts support global climate change, it’s only natural that they’d overcompensate by careening off in the other direction. In a rece…Read the full story on TreeHugger
Well here’s an interesting little catch, courtesy of Media Matters (whose unenviable job it is, evidently, to watch Fox News 24/7). In this segment on ‘Fox and Friends’, the hosts team up to bash Jon Huntsman. He’s behind in the polls, and has been publicly criticizing his rivals for their extreme views, especially on science. But the interesting part comes around two and a half minutes in — when the hosts say their fact-checkers have looked…Read the full story on TreeHugger
We’ve tried painting a compelling picture of the ongoing drought in East Africa, and accompanying famine in parts of Somalia, but without anyone on the ground there we’ve mostly just used stats and short clips of video. There have been few personal accounts of what’s going on–until now: Head over to The Guardian for their compelling interactive piece on the stories of people who’ve had their lives entirely upended b…Read the full story on TreeHugger
Reports are coming in that a tragic attack has occurred on an Arctic expedition in Svalbard, Norway: A British teenager taking part on the trek was attacked and killed by a polar bear — four others were wounded, and the bear was shot dead. …Read the full story on TreeHugger
Curious about how changing global temperatures will affect your area? The NRDC has released new maps that show how a shift in climate may impact health, from allergies to outbreaks of Dengue fever. …Read the full story on TreeHugger
In this third in a series of six videos TreeHugger has done in collaboration with the good folks (and sometimes guest writers here) from Skeptical Science, John Cook explains how climate change deniers and the polluting industries that they are often linked to use the same sort of tactics the tobacco industry employed in trying to convince people that smoking isn’t bad for your health….Read the full story on TreeHugger
