Below you'll find a list of all posts that have been categorized as “Articles”
PARIS, 9 December, 2015 – Some of the world’s coldest places, on land and sea, may be plunged into an unstoppable transition to a climate system most scientists believe has not existed for 35-50 million years. The almost immediate consequences would include the loss of reliable water resources for millions of people, and the start of a process leading to …
THE MOST IMPORTANT thing about Mark Sutton is his contribution to the world’s efforts to clean up nitrogen pollution, but that is not the most striking thing about him. With the earnest air of an English schoolboy of yesteryear, an ability to get into great detail about his enthusiasms very quickly and, on occasion, socks with his sandals, he is, give …
COP21, like the United Nations climate conferences before it, appears to be floundering over international non-binding showcase “commitments” to reduce carbon emissions — and is emitting effusive illusions of progress. Pleas of island nations fall on deaf ears. The negotiators are ignoring the scientific evidence that the reductions they are talking about fall far short of what is necessary to …
Americans have long lived in a nation made up primarily of middle-class families, neither rich nor poor, but comfortable enough, notes NPR’s Marilyn Geewax, but this year – for the first time in US history, that changed. A new analysis of government data showsthat as of 2015, middle-income households have become the minority, extending a multi-decade decline that confirms the hollowing out of …
A new British report commissioned by David Cameron says the use of antibiotics in agriculture is fueling the spread of drug-resistant bacteria and must be reduced or even banned where they are important to human health. The report comes weeks after scientists said they discovered bacteria resistant to all antibiotics in China, and just days after the same genetically mutated bug showed up …
Despite increasing recognition of its usefulness as a medicine and increasingly state-level legalization, someone in the U.S. is arrested for marijuana possession about once every minute. The “war on drugs” costs Americans a staggering amount of money every year that it persists. Despite the billions they receive, federal, state and local law enforcement have a proven inability to stem the …
Donald Trump, the billionaire businessman and reality TV star who has called Mexicans rapists and proposed barring Muslims from entering the United States, is currently leading every national poll for the Republican Party’s presidential nomination — and he has done more in a matter of months to advance and mainstream the ideas of neo-Nazis than self-proclaimed neo-Nazis have been able …
In a scathing attack on President Barack Obama’s drone war, four former operators of the remote-controlled killing machines declared that this kind of warfare is actually fueling terrorism. Meanwhile, the soldiers who pull the triggers are cast aside when they break down under the incessant stress of long-distance killing. “This administration and its predecessors have built a drone program that …
In Toxic Workers , a new Harvard Business School working paper, Michael Housman and Dylan Minor look at the paradox of “superstar” workers who outperform their colleagues by 2:1 or more, but who are “toxic” — awful to work with and be around. The connection between toxicity and productivity has been validated in several studies, but the question that Housman and Minor …
The Paris agreement, according to Pablo Solón, a veteran of climate negotiations, “will be an agreement that will burn up the planet.” The result of the COP21 (Twenty-first United Nations Climate Change Conference), which began on Monday, Nov. 30 and will end on Dec. 11, “can already be announced, because we already know what it will be,” he said in …
