By Ryan Johnson Summer holidays are a great excuse to hit the road and get out of the Phoenix-area heat. This year July 4 falls on a Thursday, which creates lots of extended weekend getaway opportunities if you can also get Friday off. Extreme drought conditions in 2018 caused some Arizona cities to cancel their fireworks. But a relatively […]

By Ryan Johnson Back in 1989, Californians received a sobering warning: The accumulation of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere would likely bring more droughts, floods, fires, and heat waves to the state. In the thirty years since, those projections of what would happen in a warming world have proven to be remarkably prescient. “We’ve already […]

By Ryan Johnson Hollywood has produced quite a few fictionalized depictions of dramatic climate change. Scores of people die after Manhattan freezes in 2004’s “The Day After Tomorrow.” In “Geostorm,” released in 2017, the weather goes haywire after satellites malfunction. Realistic scenarios, though, have been less frequent. Yet Sunday’s episode of “Big Little Lies,” the […]

By Ryan Johnson The big problem with plastics is that though they last for a very long time, most are thrown away after only one use. Since plastics were invented in the 1950s, about 8,300m metric tonnes (Mt) have been made, but over half (4,900 Mt) is already in landfill or has been lost to […]

By Ryan Johnson Climate change is global in nature, and is creeping higher in surveys of voter concerns. In some countries it’s at or near the top, but it’s not regarded with the same urgency the world over. Wildfires in California and Siberia. Floods wiping out grain harvests in Argentina. Droughts forcing water restrictions in Capetown […]

By Ryan Johnson Climate change in the Western U.S. means more intense and frequent wildfires churning out waves of smoke that scientists say will sweep across the continent to affect tens of millions of people and cause a spike in premature deaths. That emerging reality is prompting people in cities and rural areas alike to […]

By Ryan Johnson You can be born with good genes and study hard and still not meet your potential. Your environment has a lot to do with how smart you are. Euthenics refers to the practice of improving humanity’s environment in order to maximize its potential. Throughout history, we’ve tweaked our surroundings in such a […]

By Ryan Johnson From monitoring deforestation to designing low-carbon materials The AI renaissance of recent years has led many to ask how this technology can help with one of the greatest threats facing humanity: climate change. A new research paperauthored by some of the field’s best-known thinkers aims to answer this question, giving a number […]

By Ryan Johnson A group of leading business have launched a global initiative aimed at jumpstarting the plastics circular economy. During the first episode of the BBC’s long-awaited series War on Plastic, television chef Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and presenter Anita Rania shed new light on how vast our plastic problem has become. In one of the starker moments of […]

By Ryan Johnson When I worry about the Amazon Rainforest, I typically worry about deforestation. Maybe I should start worrying about climate change, too. A new study out Monday shows that climate change plus deforestation equals disaster for the Amazon: The average number of tree species present in a given patch of rainforest could decline […]