Opinion

It’s too easy for floods to bring New York to its knees

When we think of the catastrophes produced by climate change, most of us typically think of supercharged hurricanes, massive wildfires and punishing heatwaves.But climate change can turn even a simple rainstorm into a shocking disaster.Much of the New York metropolitan area was treading water on Fri...

Opinion

The clean energy revolution is moving too slowly

If the fight to avoid catastrophic global warming were a football game, then Team Let’s Maybe Not Have an Apocalypse would be stuck on its own 2-yard line, trailing by a touchdown with less than a minute to go. Also, the starting quarterback has a torn ACL. A victory is still possible, but it ...

Opinion

Maui fires show climate change’s ugly reach

Bloomberg Businessweek and Bloomberg Green published a cool infographic a few weeks ago showing how many billion-dollar climate disasters had struck each US state and territory since 1980. Of the 52 locales in the graphic, only one had avoided any such catastrophe for the past 30 years: Hawaii.It wa...

Opinion

Corals are in peril

This broiling year is turning out to be a window onto a grim possible future in which global warming leaves humanity with a vastly different and less hospitable planet.Nowhere is this more apparent than in the fragile reef ecosystems built by corals, to the benefit of other marine life and humans al...

Opinion

The coming El Nino could be a glimpse of a grim future

Thanks to El Nino, the world is about to experience something like time travel to the year 2050. It won’t be pleasant. But rather than devolve into panic at the grim climate future it portends, we should use it as a warning about the need to do more to slow global warming.Climate scientists wa...