climate history

Joe Biden, Hail and Farewell

His climate actions will resonate far into the future.

Joe Biden is about to vanish from the political scene, but not from the history books. The last election casts a pall on his reputation, as does his unpopularity. But history may be kinder, as it has been for Harry Truman and Jimmy Carter.  Beyond all else, he has been our best president yet on climate policy. For our descendants, that will matter a lot more than a couple of years of inflation that impacted their ancestors.

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Renewable Energy: A Timeline

Today’s wind and solar resources didn’t come out of nowhere.

The first efforts to use of wind to generate electricity was 134 years ago, and the photoelectric effect was discovered six decades earlier. So in a sense, these are old technologies — about the same age as the very first internal combustion engines. But the scientific and technological advances that made these technologies competitive with …

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The Great-Great-Grandmother of Climate Science

Herein of the now-forgotten woman who discovered the warming effect of CO2.

The first climate science ever published was in 1856 by Eunice Newton Foote, who discovered that CO2 and water vapor trapped the sun’s heat.   Her paper was read at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. That paper, along with another paper of hers,  were the only physics papers by …

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