Left: Daytime aerial photograph of Antwerp. Right: Nighttime aerial thermogram of Antwerp

Streets and badly insulated buildings give off heat at night and appear red; foliage and well-insulated structures look blue or green. Thermal colors also depend on roof shape (flat or slanted), roofing materials, and thermostat settings.

A nighttime flight over Antwerp, Belgium, last winter sought to separate the naughty from the nice. But it wasn’t slumbering children who were being judged; it was the buildings that housed them. That’s because in 2009 Antwerp and 20 other Flemish municipalities hired the geo-information firm Eurosense to create an aerial thermographic image showing how much heat was escaping through city roofs. A poorly insulated one can account for about 30 percent of a building’s total energy loss. In this image (above), the least efficient buildings and the city streets glow a bright red. Newer, more sustainable buildings—often insulated with materials such as spray foam or rock wool—appear as a cooler blue or green. Getting the full picture, however, requires a visit to the website zoominopuwdak.antwerpen.be, which lets residents plug in their addresses to learn how their building fares, as well as which government-sponsored loans and grants are available to those who improve their home’s energy efficiency. Now other cities in Belgium, as well as five in France and one in Germany, are following Antwerp’s lead—a sign that in some parts of Europe, coal deliveries will be down in December. —Aaron Britt

With a three-foot wingspan, an adult Rhinoptera bonasus can weigh 40 pounds.

Rays aren’t invasive newcomers here; in 1608 one stung explorer John Smith. But as predators like coastal sharks have declined, the observed spike in cownoses, though untallied, could be grounds for a carefully monitored fishery—and new revenue streams for watermen, retailers, and localities. Call it the new calamari? —Jeremy Berlin Photo: Henry Horenstein, Getty Images. NGM Maps

The worst flooding in recent memory has hit Queensland, Australia, forcing residents from their homes and closing highways and airports. Other parts of Australia have the opposite problem, a crippling drought. Read a two-part article about drought in the Murray-Darling Basin and the rise of extreme weather, both wet and dry, worldwide. In The Wet Down Under Roff Smith chronicles his experiences waiting out a milder wet season in the Queensland town of Karumba, which he describes as a quirky combination of Mayberry R.F.D. and Cannery Row.

• 2009 April -- National Geographic magazine. Australian Drought. 34-59. A years-long drought has brought farmers in the Murray-Darling Basin to their knees. Robert Draper reports on the possible causes and the grim impact on farmers like Malcolm Adlington, who can only watch as his way of life disappears. Photos by Amy Toensing.
• 2009 April -- National Geographic magazine. Changing Rains. 60-65. Elizabeth Kolbert reports on the predictions of experts that "as the planet warms, look for more floods where it's already wet and deeper drought where water is scarce," and connects the rise of extreme weather to growing water shortages worldwide and their potentially devastating effects.
• 2004 November -- National Geographic magazine. The Wet Down Under. 86-117. Roff Smith jumped at the chance to hunker down in Karumba, Queensland, a small fishing town of about 500, for monsoon season. Find out what "going troppo" means and how unpredictable "the wet" can be. Photos by Randy Olson.

 
By Nigel Holmes/Explanation Graphics, 2009; Published in the National Geographic magazine, December 2009. See the full illustration.

The U.N. Climate Change Summit in Cancun, Mexico just concluded with some agreements about how to cut harmful carbon emissions, although most acknowledge that they fall short of what is necessary to stop global warming. Read a straightforward explanation of how carbon emissions work in "The Carbon Bathtub" and the effect of the global thaw in "The Big Melt." Follow along as Peter Miller goes on a carbon diet and reports on the results. Then take a quiz (one answer can be found below) and find out how much you know about carbon emissions and how to reduce them.

• 2010 April -- National Geographic magazine. The Big Melt. 60-79. The Tibetan Plateau is often called the roof of the world and the glaciers there have long functioned as a storehouse of freshwater which feed Asian rivers. Brook Larmer reports on studies showing the glaciers are shrinking, which one Chinese glaciologist predicts will lead to an ecological catastrophe. Photos by Jonas Bendiksen illustrate the changing landscape and the impact on residents.
• 2009 December -- National Geographic magazine. The Carbon Bathtub. The Big Idea (department). How does global warming occur, and what is the fundamental problem in grasping the concept? Robert Kunzig describes Professor John Sterman's theory and his explanation of carbon production and draining in the atmosphere, using water running into a bathtub as an analogy.
• 2009 March -- National Geographic magazine. Saving Energy: It Starts at Home. 60-81. The average U.S. household produces 150 pounds of CO2 a day. Author Peter Miller enlists his wife and neighbors in a carbon diet to cut their footprint to a level the planet can handle. He reports on the results and considers what impact the efforts of individuals can have. Photos by Tyrone Turner.

Worldwide Water Availability and Use, from National Geographic magazine, April 2010, pages 22-23. (Click on the map to enlarge)

China is facing water shortages with no simple solution in sight. The issues involved include geography, climate change, population increases, dams, pollution, economic development, and other countries who depend on the rivers flowing through China. To mark Geography Awareness Week's Freshwater theme, read up on the many factors contributing to this looming problem. Then take an online water quiz and see what you've learned.

For some content the print issues or Complete National Geographic may be needed; click here for help finding NG content.

• 2010 April -- National Geographic magazine. The Big Melt. 60-79. The Tibetan Plateau is often called the roof of the world, and the glaciers there have long functioned as a storehouse of freshwater which feed Asian rivers. Brook Larmer reports on studies showing the glaciers are shrinking, which one Chinese glaciologist predicts will lead to an ecological catastrophe. Photos by Jonas Bendiksen illustrate the changing landscape and the impact on residents.
• 2010 April -- National Geographic magazine map supplement. World of Rivers/Hidden Waters. Side one of this map supplement shows a new mapping of every river system in the world. Side two, Hidden Waters, includes graphics showing the amount of freshwater needed for manufacturing and agriculture, such as making a pair of blue jeans or raising a cow.
• 2008 May -- National Geographic magazine. Bitter Waters: Yellow River. 146-173. The Yellow River winds its way more than 3,000 miles from the Tibetan Plateau to the sea, and was once thought to have a limitless amount of water for those living on the banks. Now one city on the banks is considered one of the most polluted in the world, and unregulated dumping of factory waste continues, reports Brook Larmer. Greg Girard photographs the demise of what the Chinese call the Mother River.
• 2004 March -- National Geographic magazine. China's Growing Pains. 68-95. Jasper Becker describes the challenge in balancing a great leap forward with stewardship of the environment. Photos by Bob Sacha show the economic development and the resulting impact on the land and water. A map on pages 78-79 illustrates water and air pollution across the country, and a chart on page 91 compares the resource consumption per person in China and the U.S.

Setnet fishermen on Bristol Bay trap salmon when the fish swim close to shore with the incoming tide. Photo: Michael Melford

From my vantage point in the single-engine plane above Bristol Bay, I see an epidemic of salmon fever as big as the state of Alaska. Hundreds of boats are in high gear, chasing the millions of ready-to-spawn sockeye returning to the bay, hauling in nets filled with fish. Many boats are so laden with salmon they ride precariously low in the water, dangerously close to swamping. I had heard about this fishery for years, but nothing prepared me for the enormity of it until I saw it for myself. I was also not prepared for its beauty and remoteness—no dams, development, or human footprint, just endless miles of pristine creeks, lakes, and rivers. This was the wild Alaska I had imagined. A tranquil landscape. Nature at its grandest.

Today, nearly 28 years later, photographer Michael Melford and writer Edwin Dobb see the same breathtaking landscape and find the salmon still running. But the Bristol Bay watershed is no longer tranquil. Instead, it’s filled with tension provoked by the discovery of what may be the world’s largest deposit of gold and one of the largest deposits of copper. The lode, worth hundreds of billions of dollars, has spawned ambitions for an immense mining complex with an open pit possibly two miles wide and a cavernous underground mine. It’s a face-off between salmon and gold; the battle between those who support the mine and those who oppose it has reached a critical point. The risk, the values and priorities, the balancing of potential gains and losses all present uneasy and complicated questions. In this month’s issue Melford and Dobb wade into the fight.

A Sherpa on Mount Everest sorts trash into plastics, metals, and biodegradables. Photo: Cory Richards

For 60 years climbers have dumped gear and trash en route to the top of Mount Everest, often in the low-oxygen “death zone” above 26,000 feet, where shedding a few pounds can preserve precious energy.

In recent years melting ice has begun to reveal the scope of the high-altitude imprint, exposing oxygen tanks and other long-frozen jetsam. Though tons of refuse are removed annually from base camps, last spring two Nepali groups, Extreme Everest Expedition and Eco Everest Expedition, targeted the peak’s upper reaches and hauled down seven tons of waste, including debris from a 1973 helicopter crash.

Nepalis are also concerned about corpses collecting on the mountain they consider holy. Since 1996 some 80 climbers have perished above base camp; most remain near the spot they died. In May two bodies, a Swiss and a Russian, were removed along with a pair of unidentified arms, one wearing a watch. Bringing back corpses was long considered logistically unfeasible, says Linda McMillan of the International Mountaineering and Climbing Federation. But as traffic on Everest has risen, she notes, so too has the desire to clean it. —Peter Gwin

Native to warm climates, soapnut trees produce clusters of cherry-like fruits. After the ripe fruits are harvested and pitted, the skin and pulp are dried in the sun. The resulting hollow, leathery globes make suds when added to water that’s churned by hand or machine.

What if you knew exactly which appliances in your home are the worst energy hogs—that the hot tub pump kicks in overnight when it shouldn't, or that the flat-screen TV is sucking energy even when it isn't "on"? Would that change the way you use—and save—electricity?

Residents of Boulder, Colorado, are finding the answers to such questions, thanks to a new "SmartGridCity” program that allows them to track electricity usage in near-real time. Instead of conventional electricity meters that require a reader to come and take a monthly reading, customers of utility Xcel Energy are outfitted with newfangled digital sensors that send real-time usage information back to Xcel’s computers. That data helps the company better avoid power outages—and also lets customers log on to their utility accounts online, where they can track when their usage spikes, then make adjustments.

Although still in its early stages, Boulder’s SmartGridCity program has already yielded a bevy of ways for residents to cut their bills:

1. Kill Your "Vampire" Loads. Those ‘stand-by’ modes that keep your flat-screen TVs, gaming systems, cordless drills, and the rest at the ready are mighty convenient. But they suck up so much electricity that they can add 10 percent to your monthly bill. To save electricity, Boulder, Colorado, resident Tim Hillman did the same thing with the power strips he plugs his electronic gadgets into that some folks do with their living-room table lamps: He attached the strips to automatic timers that switch off overnight. The resulting tangle of timers, strips and cords might look like deranged cootie toys, but they’ll slice your electricity bill.

2. Swamp Your Air Conditioner. Anyone who's hung out by a cold river on a hot day knows that the cold water creates its own microclimate, cooling the air that surrounds it. Evaporative coolers, commonly called "swamp coolers," operate on the same principle. A cold water line is attached to the cooler's reservoir. A filter then sucks up the cold water while a fan blows air through it. The result: a cool, nicely humidified house along with an air-conditioning bill that's as much as 90 percent lower than what it would cost to use conventional air conditioning— the biggest energy hog in the average home. Even better, most swamp coolers (available at appliance stores) can be had for $100 and up—about two-thirds the cost of equivalent A/C units. One caveat: swamp coolers are great for low-humidity climates like Arizona but are far less useful in muggy places like Washington, D.C.

What if commuters were to cut back on driving for just one day? That’s not the kind of sweeping change environmental advocates urge. But it seems doable. And there is an ongoing effort to encourage one-day vacations from Earth-unfriendly activities. The big question: Would a day of less driving make any significant difference? To find out, National Geographic asked Luke Tonachel, vehicles analyst for the Natural Resources Defense Council, to crunch numbers for a big American city. He picked Pittsburgh, which has good commuting data, and projected modest changes. He filled empty mass-transit seats but added no new buses to the fleet and doubled carpooling from 9 to 18 percent of commuters, with a carpool defined as two people. He also factored in a jump in “eco-driving.” The stats are in. The drop in greenhouse gases for the “what if” day in Pittsburgh would equal taking 370 cars off the world’s roads for a year. And cars would burn 213,700 fewer gallons of gas. At $2.50 a gallon, that’s $534,250 in Pittsburghers’ pockets. —Marc Silver

Graphic: Mindy Nichamin. Sources: Luke Tonachel, Natural Resources Defense Council; Moving Cooler Study, Cambridge Systematics; 2007 American Community Survey, U.S. Census Bureau, Analysis By Southwestern Pennsylvania Commission. Photo: Richard Drdul

Classifying the world’s tallest, thickest, biggest, and oldest trees can be an extreme challenge. For the National Geographic "Extreme Trees" poster, featured in several of the magazine’s international editions, we took a look at what counts when measuring. Trees grow, limbs fall, ways of measuring change, and new trees are discovered, so figuring out which trees to highlight wasn’t easy.

As a chemical compound,  nothing could be simpler than water: two atoms of hydrogen joined to one of oxygen. From a human point of view, simplicity fades. Though water covers our world, more than 97 percent is salty. Two percent is fresh water locked in snow and ice, leaving less than one percent for us. This “precarious molecular edge on which we survive,” as Barbara Kingsolver says in this month’s special issue, will only grow more precarious. By 2025, 1.8 billion people will live where water is scarce.

In the pages to come, we bring to life the drama behind that statistic. And this is only the start of a larger commitment, at the magazine and throughout the National Geographic Society, to explore the world of water. To that end, the Society recently named Sandra Postel its first National Geographic Freshwater Fellow. As a researcher, lecturer, and writer, Sandra has worked in the field of sound water management for 25 years. The initiative she heads will not only educate; it will “reshape how people and communities think about, use, and manage fresh water. It will provide the tools to enable individuals, corporations, and communities to become part of the solution,” Sandra says. 

Southern end of James Ross Island. Photograph by Maria Stenzel 

The helicopter ferried us 30 miles from the Nathaniel B. Palmer on this cold, whitewashed morning. Our destination was a rocky outcrop near the end of the two-mile-wide Boydell Glacier, where it crumbles into the sea on the east edge of the Antarctic Peninsula.

As our helo drifted toward the landing site I spotted a lone seal hefting its way up the jumble of rocks and ice. You have to wonder what exactly the guy had in mind climbing a mountain in that kind of footwear.

Flying over over a seamount named Jun Jaeguy, a submarine volcano that appears to be inactive at the moment. Photograph by Maria Stenzel

64.43 degrees south latitude
57.61 degrees west longitude

Our ship has once again been repelled by sea ice—this time more ominously than before. We now know for certain that we will not reach Larsen B. It's hard to imagine how disappointed these scientists must feel. They've been planning this expedition for three years. Their careers depend on it.

Sea ice and icebergs surround the Nathaniel B. Palmer—which is now trapped. Photograph by Maria Stenzel

64.52 degrees south latitude
57.99 degrees west longitude

Gossip overheard in the food line of the Nathaniel B. Palmer tells you exactly where we are in this cruise. “I hear the lettuce is about to end,” says one diner. “I'm not surprised—it's about that time,” says the other, a salty seafarer and grad student from Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in New York City. 

We knew this was coming. Our cruise, now lumbering into its fifth week, has exceeded the longevity of our fresh food. Cantaloupe and watermelon petered out a few days ago. Tomatoes soon after that. And several days later our last bananas—geriatric and brown—also disappeared. They were replaced by banana bread, which itself quickly vanished. 

As the cruise enters new gastronomic waters, it enters new geographic ones as well. Several days ago our ship rounded the northern tip of the Antarctic Peninsula and crossed to the east side—our third, desperate attempt to penetrate the unusually heavy sea ice, which has kept us from reaching the goal of this expedition: the remnants of the Larsen B Ice Shelf. 

We were awakened at 5:30 a.m. for a helicopter briefing. Brilliant weather this morning in Barilari Bay, on the west side of the Antarctic Peninsula. Blue skies—the first in 14 days. Management was determined to make full use of a rare opportunity.

Photo by Alan Highton

Not only can lightning strike the same place twice, but on Lake Maracaibo, at the mouth of the Catatumbo River in northwestern Venezuela, it flashes almost continuously nearly 200 nights (and days) of the year. The ancient Yukpa people believed the bursts of blue, pink, and white light, known as Catatumbo lightning, were sparked when fireflies met ancestral spirits. For centuries mariners navigated by the brilliant discharges, visible up to a hundred miles out at sea. The phenomenon is “beautiful, like fireworks in the middle of the night,” says Ángel G. Muñoz, a scientist at the University of Zulia in Maracaibo.

Our ship sits in Flandres Bay, a deep fjord on the Antarctic Peninsula ringed by mountains whose sheer granite torsos fade, headless, into a ceiling of mist. The air is still. The water is glass. And rain—Who'da thunk it? Rain in Antarctica!—scatters ripples onto the bay.

Today’s muggy 36 degrees Fahrenheit finds me tossing aside my down jacket as I head outside. I walk into the drizzle wearing blue jeans and a light synthetic pullover. From the top deck of the Nathaniel B. Palmer one can see half a dozen humpback whales feeding on swarms of krill. At times, two of them pause and lazily hover side by side—so close they must be touching—just below the water’s surface.

The Palmer sailed for several days to reach this place on the west side of the peninsula, after turning back twice in the face of impassable sea ice on the east side.

The west is a different place. The low-pressure weather systems that sashay in an endless parade around Antarctica dump their full weight of warmth and precipitation on the western edge of the peninsula. Sea ice that forms during winter doesn’t survive summers here; since arriving three days ago, we haven’t seen a speck of it. The heavy snowfall gluts glaciers beyond their capacity. All around us traffic jams of ice blocks tumble out of the mountains, in freeze-frame, down 45-degree chutes to the water's edge. Without any familiar frames of reference such as cars or trees, the mind can scarcely comprehend the size of the scenery. The nearest glacier seems a couple hundred yards away. In fact, it’s more than a mile. Those blocks of ice are as big as houses.

64.28 degrees South latitude
58.86 degrees West longitude

It's a scorching day by Antarctic standards—47 degrees Fahrenheit and a cloudless sky. Two hours ago a helicopter ferried us from the Nathaniel B. Palmer to this rocky nunatak, or mountain, that juts from an apron of glacial ice on the coast of the Antarctic Peninsula. As we hiked, I quickly peeled off my jacket, hat, and gloves and pushed my sleeves up to the elbow.

Greg Balco, a glacial geologist from the Berkeley Geochronology Center in California, strides up a slope of loose scree, steadying himself with trekking poles. Balco is hunting for the perfect rock—one that will reveal the glacial history of this place—but today his job is almost impossible.

An Asian vine with flowers that smell like grape drink, kudzu enticed Americans at a Philadelphia exhibition in 1876. In the 1930s Southerners started planting it to halt soil erosion. They stopped in the ’50s, when they realized that the hardy perennial, which can spread up to 60 feet a year, was out of control. Since then, the vine has swallowed 150,000 acres a year—eight million U.S. acres total. Eliminating it would require a constant war waged by scythes, grazing cattle, and potent herbicides. That’s not likely to happen.

At 3 p.m. on this dim, socked-in afternoon, the Nathaniel B. Palmer reached its rendezvous point—63.7658 degrees south, 56.8273 degrees west—an unremarkable patch of water littered with scraps of sea ice. Ten months earlier a treasure had been dropped into the sea at this spot and anchored to the muddy bottom, 2,112 feet below, by a lead weight. On this day Craig Smith, a marine ecologist from the University of Hawaii at Manoa, was returning on the Palmer to reclaim his treasure. His prospects looked grim.

Rough weather this morning. We’re just under halfway across the Drake Passage, which separates South America from Antarctica, and the sea is handing us a whipping. Winds up to 55 knots and gusts up to 100 have piled the sea into an endless stampede of rolling swells. 

As I step out of bed, my bare feet slide across the tilting floor—right, then left, then right again. I resort to sitting on the floor as I gather my things. Showering while holding on white-knuckled with one hand, lathering with the other, and bracing both feet evokes a feeling of absurdity—an attempt to maintain normalcy when things are in fact far from normal, like awakening into an episode of Laverne & Shirley or I Love Lucy. Except in this case the hanging on isn’t just funny; it’s all that separates me from serious injury.

 54.17 degrees South latitude
 70.90 degrees West longitude

Welcome to the town of Punta Arenas, Chile, at the southern tip of South America. At the pier sits the Nathaniel B. Palmer, a 308-foot icebreaker and research vessel operated by the United States Antarctic Program. 

We’ll soon head south on this ship across the Drake Passage, and sail along the edge of the Antarctic Peninsula, a finger of land that reaches up from the main part of Antarctica and tickles the dangling nubbin of South America. On board the Palmer are roughly two dozen scientists and several dozen crew—plus a trio of journalists on assignment with National Geographic: Maria Stenzel, photographer; Sarah Park, videographer; and myself, Douglas Fox, the writer.

Our voyage will last 59 days; we plan to return to port on March 2 or so. The purpose of the trip is to study how Antarctica is responding to rising temperatures—and no better place to do it than the Antarctic Peninsula, where average temperatures have risen 4.5 degrees Fahrenheit in the past 50 years—nearly five times as quickly as in most other parts of the planet. The ice in this part of Antarctica has seen some dramatic, in some cases even catastrophic, changes. More on that in a minute.

Why are some loons acting so, well, loony? Mercury. Long-term studies of common loons in the United States and Canada reveal that the toxic stuff is invading birds’ brains and bodies in dangerous concentrations. It’s disrupting behavior and physiology—and could put loon populations in peril.

In the National Arboretum’s parched herbarium, where dried plants date to the 1790s, Alan Whittemore is providing needed acorn perspective. A year after few fell in parts of the U.S., the botanist says hungry squirrels and an anxious press—which breathlessly wondered, Is it climate change?—can relax.

Fungi that pop up in the forest are “like CO2 chimneys,” says researcher Steven Allison. Back in 2005 he measured the carbon dioxide emitted by mushrooms after their rootlike mycelia ate carbon from the soil. He was “shocked” by their output—and concerned, since CO2 traps heat in the atmosphere.

Count your damaged and unwanted CDs and DVDs. Multiply by millions of folks like you. Add in the business world’s used data CDs and music, video game, and movie returns. The total is billions of trashed discs a year. How do you keep them out of the landfill?

Are you a green type? The new Ecofont, from the Dutch marketing firm Spranq, aims to be one. Co-owner Alexander Kraaij says it uses less ink than other typefaces, thus saving money and resources. In fact, he contends, a company with 5,000 workers could trim up to $125,000 a year from its printing costs.

When Los Angeles attorney Sean Farrell plunged into the numbing ocean off the Antarctic Peninsula in 2007 (above), the view was just what he had hoped: a vast white wilderness. But every few days Farrell, who was on a chartered yacht, spied tourist boats in the distance. A spike in visitors to Antarctica— up 250 percent during the past decade to 46,000—has Farrell wondering if the great white continent wouldn’t be better off if he’d stayed home. “Everybody wants to see natural beauty,” he says. “But even the most conscientious traveler will have an impact.” 

If the dark seems a little darker these days—and the world a bit less wonderful—it probably is. Researchers in Asia, Europe, and North America are seeing dramatic declines in fireflies. Thailand is one place that seems to be losing the bioluminescent beetles. For centuries they blinked along Thai rivers with splendid synchronicity. Foreign visitors compared their lights to chandeliers or Christmas candles. Locals were able to fish solely by their flashes.

“You have to get up early if you want to beat Otto” was the saying in Oregon’s Rogue River Valley, where I grew up. Otto was Otto Bohnert, “an awesome farmer—always experimenting,” says Dick Dunn, his nephew, also a farmer. Otto was famous for his 120-bushel-an-acre wheat crop in the late 1960s—in the midst of the green revolution, the movement to increase food yields by using new technology. His yields, thanks to superior wheat varieties, irrigation, and chemical fertilizers, were double the normal in our valley.

Shortly after midnight on March 24, 1989, the Exxon Valdez impaled itself on Bligh Reef in Alaska’s Prince William Sound. The tanker leaked 38,800 metric tons of crude oil, fouling 1,300 miles of coastline and wrecking the local fishing industry. During the next 20 years, Exxon spent more than two billion dollars on cleanup and lawsuits.

We talk a lot about the hardware of environmentally responsible buildings, like double-pane windows, energy-efficient heat pumps, and compact fluorescent bulbs. Those are unarguably important and necessary, but it's difficult to feel uplifted by the sight of a roll of R-38 fiberglass insulation.

That's what makes this month's story on green roofs so engaging. Here is where being responsible and attuned to the environment pairs up with spiritual satisfaction. I defy you to look at the image on page 86-87 of the cottage-like garden atop a Manhattan apartment roof and not smile.

“I love those first little green leaves,” says octogenarian Jean Combes of England’s oaks in spring. Since age 11 she’s jotted down signs of winter’s end. Too bad her girlish script shamed her and she tossed her first decade of notes. Such data are vital to phenology, the study of the timing of nature’s cycles. The science is gaining visibility as climate change blurs seasonal lines.


We are getting closer to the point where we may have to employ emergency engineering solutions to cool the planet, according to panelists at a geoengineering session during last week's Aspen Environment Forum.

The economic climate is right for redefining the automobile industry, Elizabeth Lowery, vice president for environment, energy, and safety policy at General Motors said last week at the Aspen Environment Forum.

Electric cars are the short-term solution to wean the world off of gas and oil and in return reduce the carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions that are driving climate change, according to a panel at the Forum on the future of transportation.

Just six days into the job, Jane Lubchenco, the new head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), tells National Geographic "there is a great urgency in addressing [ocean] acidification by reducing CO2 emissions."

"The decisions that individuals make every day add up to affect our global climate," Lubchenco added. "The changes we are seeing now are influenced by our energy choices and uses over the last couple hundred years."

Oceans serve as a carbon sink, absorbing about a third of human-generated carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. The additional CO2 changes the chemical composition and lowers the pH of the seas. Acidic waters can prevent some marine life from producing calcium carbonate needed for shells and exoskeletons.

Lubchenco, a marine biologist and former Oregon State University professor, was at the Aspen Environment Forum in Colorado yesterday to talk about climate change politics and science.

On a Rocky Mountain day that saw cloudy skies and several inches of powder, solar energy experts gathered at the Aspen Environment Forum encouraged conference participants to turn sunlight, normally abundant in Colorado, into profit. 

Solar power is expected to be a growth market, in both developed and developing countries.

While captured sunlight will never account for the bulk of energy on a global or regional scale, it could provide up to 25 percent of U.S. energy needs and play an important role in delivering energy to poorer countries, said Neville Williams, founder of several solar companies and the author of Chasing the Sun.

According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, in 2007, solar energy accounted for less than one percent of total American energy use.

U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Lisa Jackson outlines her priorities and tells National Geographic that the EPA is back, ready to protect human health and the environment, despite the bumpy road ahead.

Jackson told a crowd of more than two hundred Aspen Environment Forum participants last night that EPA's top strategy for tackling climate change is to work with Congress on legislation, instead of focusing on amendments to the Clean Air Act that would allow regulation of carbon dioxide (CO2) and other greenhouse gases.

The 2009 Aspen Environment Forum—focused on sustainable energy—kicks off today in Colorado.

Wal-Mart executives, green building experts, climate scientists, Economist and Washington Post reporters, and government officials from Mozambique, Panama, and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, among many others, will mingle among the mountains as they discuss climate change, energy extraction and use, innovation and technology, efficiency, and conservation.

Samantha (at left) and Natalie Turner sweep sludge from a trough on their family’s drought-stricken farm in New South Wales, Australia.

The diesel engine clatters to life. My friend Mike is giving me a quick lesson in how to operate his father’s bulldozer. Accompanied by a cacophony of metal on metal, I maneuver pedals and levers. I lower the blade and begin knocking down trees. I’m helping build a logging road near Prospect, Oregon. Despite a lack of finesse, I’m making progress and having fun. I’m on top of the world.

When I read Robert Draper’s “Australia’s Dry Run” and look at Amy Toensing’s photographs in this month’s issue, I’m reminded of that day three decades ago when I was young and didn’t understand the potential consequences of bulldozers.

Photographer Tyrone Turner photographed the March 2009 coverage on energy efficiency and produced a striking set of images using a thermal camera. I had a chance to ask him about the challenges of the assignment.

“There is no feast which does not come to an end,” a Chinese proverb warns, and this month’s story on Canadian oil sands is a cautionary tale about the consequences of large appetites. With the decline of conventional oil reserves and the rising price of oil extraction, sources like oil sands—layers of tarlike bitumen mixed with clay, sand, and water—are increasingly attractive as a way to satisfy the world’s craving for hydrocarbons. The catch: Extracting them is messy and costly to the environment.