“Hey, I care about the planet—can I go to Rio?”

My latest Green Chain column for the Lake County Record-Bee.   Last month the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (UNCSD) marked its 20th anniversary of the “Earth Summit,” meeting once again in Rio de Janeiro. In 1992, Earth Summiteers envisioned the future they wanted, which included uplifting the “social and economic development” status of

A warmer and wetter world

I found a link the other day to a government website with global mean precipitation data from 1900 to 2000. Of course, I can’t find the link now (please comment if you have the link, but first see the note at the end of the post). Anyway, I put the numbers into an Excel spreadsheet

Gaming Malthus with “Fate of the World”

I have submitted this to the Record-Bee for my December Green Chain column. “I have observed that not the man who hopes when others despair, but the man who despairs when others hope, is admired by a large class of persons as a sage.” – John Stuart Mill In 1901, while searching for giant clams

The Copenhagen Consensus

On one of my post the other day, Anne asked in a comment, “What, other than cost, is the downside of reducing our carbon footprint [to prevent global warming]?” There are steps that we can take to reduce a footprint, carbon or otherwise: Move to a metropolitan area. Urban areas, due to their compactness, are