Correction Appended: Aug. 20, 2009 Somewhere in Iowa, a pig is being raised in a confined pen, packed in so tightly with other swine that their curly tails have been chopped off so they won't bite one another. To prevent him from getting sick in such close quarters, he is dosed with antibiotics. The waste produced by the pig and his thousands of pen mates on the factory farm where they live goes into manure lagoons that blanket neighboring ...

On a hot August afternoon in 2008, Ted Kennedy took John Kerry sailing on his 50-ft. schooner, the Mya.It was a perfect day on the water, sunny with the occasional cotton-ball cloud riding the strong winds over the family compound in Hyannis Port, Mass. With the Mya's blue hull moving at a good clip, Kennedy turned to his old friend with reminiscences of failed campaigns past: Kennedy's bid for the presidency in 1980 and Kerry's in 2004. What concerned ...

Somewhere in Iowa, a pig is being raised in a confined pen, packed in so tightly with other swine that their curly tails have been chopped off so they won't bite one another. To prevent him from getting sick in such close quarters, he is dosed with antibiotics. The waste produced by the pig and his thousands of pen mates on the factory farm where they live goes into manure lagoons that blanket neighboring communities with air pollution and ...

Ancient man may have started global warming through massive deforestation and burning that could have permanently altered the Earth's climate, according to a new study by researchers at the University of Virginia and the University of Maryland-Baltimore County. The study, published in the scientific journal Quaternary Science Reviews and reported on the University of Virginia's Web site, says over thousands of years, farmers burned down so many forests on such a large scale that huge amounts of carbon dioxide were ...

You're probably not thinking about what you would like for Christmas yet. But ask any environmentalist for their ideal gift and you'll get a version of this answer: a binding agreement at the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen this December that is strong enough to match the science. The talks are the latest in a line of climate conferences that began in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. This year the focus will be on the details of a ...

When Apollo astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon 40 years ago, it was a triumph of American scientific skill. It was also the result of the government's willingness to spend over $125 billion, in today's dollars, to take the country to the moon. The need to remake our energy economy and to replace fossil fuels with renewables like wind and solar is often referred to as the new Apollo Project, a challenge to our scientists ...

Add CO2 to the atmosphere and the climate will get warmer — that much is well established. But climate change and carbon aren't in a one-to-one relationship. If they were, climate modeling would be a cinch. How much the globe will warm if we put a certain amount of CO2 into the air depends on the sensitivity of the climate. How vulnerable is the polar sea ice; how rapidly might the Amazon dry up; how fast could the Greenland ...

At the end of August, a wisp of flame suddenly appeared in the Arctic twilight over the Barents Sea, bathing the low clouds over the Norwegian port of Hammerfest in a spectral orange glow. With a tremendous roar, the flame bloomed over the windswept ocean and craggy gray rocks, competing for an instant with the Arctic summer's never-setting sun. The first flare-off of natural gas from the Snohvit gas field, some 90 miles offshore, was a beacon ...

An eco-friendly French boat is hoping to successfully cross the perilous Arctic sea passage that links the Atlantic Ocean with the Pacific. "Le Mangier" is attempting to navigate the icy, unpredictable Northern Sea Route, a 6,000 mile passage that skims the northern coast of Siberia. It is a trip that only a handful of leisure boats in history have successfully completed. Not only that, the modified tug boat is also attempting to do it ecologically. The boat's crew is ...

Twenty milligrams; that's the average amount of carbon emissions generated from the time it took you to read the first two words of this article. Now, depending on how quickly you read, around 80, perhaps even 100 milligrams of C02 have been released. And in the several minutes it will take you to get to the end of this story, the number of milligrams of greenhouse gas emitted could be several thousand, if not more. This may not ...