InvestigateWest

  I’ve always been just a hair skeptical about all those admonitions to consumers to save the world — you know, the “Live simply, that others may simply live”-type instructions. They felt a little too much like guilt-tripping to me, with perhaps not enough corresponding actual environmental good being done. It seems like a way for [...] read

In what its authors admit is almost certainly an underestimate, a new study says the catastrophic climate changes coming to the Arctic will cost at least $2.4 trillion by mid-century. (To put that into perspective, President Obama just proposed a $3.8 trillion federal government budget for next year.) The true cost is likely to be a [...] read

There were two pretty big developments on the autism story today. You’ve no doubt heard that for a while there it looked like a preservative in vaccinations given to children for measles, mumps and rubella was responsible for the increasing incidence of autism in American kids. Not so much, it seems. Today the Lancet medical journal retracted [...] read

I’ve been hearing for some years now about unreasonable environmental activists fighting against resurrecting the use of DDT in Africa to control the malaria scourge, and meaning to check out the story. Michael Crichton, for example, charged that the ban on DDT has killed more people than Hitler. Hard to ignore. My interest was further piqued when I met malaria sufferers [...] read

 Richard Harris’ NPR story this week exploring how global temperatures stayed pretty constant over the last decade even as greenhouse gas concentrations increased reminded me of another important piece of research overlooked during last month’s global climate negotiations in Copenhagen: Yale University researchers studying past warming episodes that didn’t get any help from the Industrial Revolution say [...] read

In the couple of decades I’ve watched environmentalists go to ever-greater lengths to get out their messages, I’ve seen few more wacky stunts than the one planned by two guys from Canada: Running the length of the world’s oldest and deepest lake, Lake Baikal in Siberia, in the wintertime. While pulling along 100 pounds of supplies behind them. [...] read

Well, President Obama certainly did go on at some length tonight in his just-concluded State of the Union address. But he once again failed to elevate the climate issue to urgency. I have to agree with David Roberts over at Grist.org: “Pretty weak tea.” (Hat tip to Roberts for posting the transcript of that part of the speech [...] read

Richard Harris’ NPR piece today on methane’s climate-clobbering effects jolted me to remember a post I planned but that went by the wayside when I got so busy editing our coverage of last month’s big climate conference in Copenhagen. During the big UNFCCC negotiations, an op-ed of huge import came out but didn’t get as much attention as you might [...] read

Now that the U.S. Supreme Court has made the world safe for corporate political speech, it’s worth asking why plainclothes police officers are allowed to arrest an environmental activist for expressing his political views. This outrageous tale comes to Dateline Earth from Jim Dwyer’s About New York column in The New York Times, although it’s apparently been raising hackles in [...] read

I didn’t even get through all my back e-mail left over my jam-packed week of learning at the Knight Digital Media Center, and yet I’m headed for the airport. I’m off to Lubbock, Texas, home of Texas Tech University, where I’m due at a meeting of the board of directors of the Society of Environmental Journalists. Texas Tech [...] read