Hot Mess

We’ve known about the greenhouse effect for nearly 200 years and about global warming for more than a century, but we’ve had a hard time acting because our brains aren’t a good match for a problem this big.

Splitting the atom once promised to be the carbon-free energy source of the future. But today, nuclear power plants are aging and retiring worldwide. What happened?

What do you think of when you hear the words “climate change?” Chances are, you might think of sad nature, somewhere far away. But climate change also affects humans, in every corner of the world, including the corner where you live, and where I live. It impacts the people and places we see everyday, and it will impact some of us more than others.

Weather and climate are very different. But our experience of weather can have a big effect on how we view climate change. Why is that?

The average carbon footprint of a person in the US is 16.5 tons –TONS. So, what can you actually do decrease this number and make a meaningful difference?

Climate change is affecting lots of living things, including the fluffy, cute ones. What can the adorable pika teach humans about adapting to global warming?

Climate change is amplifying extreme weather events like hurricanes, heatwaves and other disasters. What’s the first thing that comes to mind when you think of how best to prepare for this stuff? Moving inland? Buying flood insurance? Stockpiling water? Building stronger relationships might not be high on that list, but maybe it should be.

We don’t hear much about the hole in the ozone layer anymore. That’s because we’ve all but fixed it, thanks to consumer choices and a massive international agreement called the Montreal Protocol. Can we learn anything from this environmental success story that will help us fix climate change?

We have enough fossil fuels to make Earth intolerably hot & wet, so we’ll have to choose to not burn them all.

Beef production emits more greenhouse gases than basically anything else we eat, so let’s look at the scale and impact of our bovine pals - and importantly, what we can actually do to make beef less bad.

Over the past few centuries, a handful of countries reaped the benefits of fossil fuels and developed their economies, emitting a lot of greenhouse gases along the way. We now know these gases have changed the climate. But since the mid-2000s, an interesting shift has occurred. The majority of greenhouse gas emissions are now coming from large developing countries, who are looking for cheap energy sources to drive their own economic growth, just like rich countries before them.

Humans are running a dangerous experiment on our planet. We're putting more and more carbon dioxide and other gases into the atmosphere, which are trapping the sun's energy, and lo and behold, our planet is heating up in response. To fix this, we could cut carbon dioxide emissions, but that’s been hard. What if there were a shortcut? What if we could reflect some of the sun’s energy away before it had a chance to get trapped? Like… maybe with space mirrors?!

It’s impossible to say that climate change is responsible for any individual storm or hurricane, but climate change is making these storms stronger. How much stronger? It turns out, Hurricane Harvey is the ideal test case to measure how a warming planet and warming oceans, amplify our worst storms.

In 2017, storms, floods, and droughts displaced 18 million people from their homes worldwide. And by some estimates, over the next three decades, 200 million people may need to leave their homes to escape the same kind of disasters, made worse by climate change. Where in the world will all these people go?

Earth’s atmosphere naturally contains greenhouse gases. Without them, the world would be way too cold for humans. But we are adding extra greenhouse gases, which are causing Earth to heat up and disrupting weather patterns worldwide. So which of these many gases is heating Earth the most?

Thanks to climate change, disease carrying critters are expanding their ranges, and their seasons are getting longer -- meaning they have more space and more time to take a bite out of you or me.

Imagine that aliens landed and gifted us a clean, limitless energy source. And instead of killing each other over this technology, we decided to immediately transform the world into a carbon-free society. This wonderous source would power our homes, industries, cars and planes, and humanity’s annual rate of carbon pollution would almost instantly fall to zero. So if we kicked our carbon addiction tomorrow, what would that mean for global warming?

As the world figures out how to live with a rapidly changing climate, traditional knowledge from indigenous cultures could help us understand just how things are transforming.

About half the world has internet access. That’s 3.6 billion people surfing the web. How much energy is that using? And what is our online world doing to our planet’s climate?

Deforestation is a big problem for the climate. This kind of land use releases more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than any single country, besides the United States or China. And most of the deforestation in the world today happens because people want to put farms where forests are. So, figuring out how to farm with trees instead of just chopping them down could help us fight climate change.

Energy efficiency standards have quietly been saving people mountains of money and helping avoid planet-warming emissions at the same time.

Coral reefs cover less than one percent of the seafloor, and yet they’re home to a quarter of all marine life, making them some of the most biodiverse places on Earth. But their future looks bleak. Decades of environmental threats like warming waters and ocean acidification have pushed reefs to the brink. Can we use science to bring them back?

By the end of 2016, the US was home to over 1 million household and commercial solar energy operations, with 4 times as many solar panels installed that year compared to just four years earlier. But if you don’t own the roof over your head, or can’t afford this kind of upgrade, are you left out of the solar energy revolution?

Georgetown, TX is a conservative city in the middle of oil and gas country that’s committed to 100% renewable energy, and we could learn a lot from them.

Today, lawsuits are positioning climate change as this generation's smoking: it pollutes the air, it’s caused by burning chemicals we buy from a handful of huge companies, and it’s dangerous to human health. Fossil fuel companies are being taken to court just like tobacco companies were, because of what they knew and when. Should they be forced to pay for damages from climate change? And can you even sue specific companies when we’ve all benefited from the industrialization that oil and coal made possible?

Carbon dioxide gets a lot of grief these days. It’s the main cause of the global warming that’s already damaging coral reefs, ice caps, and coastlines. But for eons, life survived on Earth because natural processes kept CO2 levels within limits, preventing the planet from getting either too cold or too hot. So, if we want to keep earth from warming more than a few degrees, we probably need to supercharge those natural processes, in a hurry. Or maybe even invent some new methods to suck carbon out of the sky at an even bigger scale. The question is, can we capture all that carbon before earth becomes too hot for us?

Without a doubt, 2018 was a big year with Climate Change. So we’re here to catch you up on a few of the stories you might have missed this year.