Climate Change

The field of climate science is under duress, which is wholly different than saying it's discredited. While recent headlines about the woes of U.N.-led efforts to assemble a comprehensive picture of the science have caused gleeful headlines on The Drudge Report and other skeptical media outlets, the vast weight of the evidence -- from melting glaciers to warming oceans to satellite temperature readings, and much more -- still points to a changing climate caused by human activity.

Every failure presents an opportunity, for someone.

On the heels of the disappointing Copenhagen climate summit, Bolivian President Evo Morales announced on Tuesday that he will convene an alternative climate summit. As he told a press conference in La Paz, "Due to a historical responsibility for the mankind, we decided to summon the First World Conference of the People on Climate Change."

For the Republican Party, Sarah Palin has been a problem with no solution. She is a divisive figure, a culture warrior whose celebrity and command of media attention has allowed her to eclipse or bully party leaders with more appeal to independents. No one within the party has been able to put her in her place.

Until late last week, when Palin got into a media fight with Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

The office of Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson lies halfway between Congress and the White House. The placement is appropriate; the 48-year-old New Orleans native—the first African American to run the agency tasked with protecting the air, water and health of Americans—walks a line between action and negotiation every day. She keeps a copy of Dr. Seuss’s The Lorax—the mythical creature who “speaks for the trees”—in her office, alongside photos of herself grinning with Gen. Colin Powell; her former boss, New Jersey Gov.

It isn’t often that Russians climb in bed with Rwandans. Yet, as the much-hyped United Nations climate summit convenes in Copenhagen this week, 56 world newspapers united against the growing threat of catastrophic climate change. An editorial urging global action to deflect the worst effects of fossil fuel dependence appeared in major news outlets, including ones in Moscow and Kigali—and in 10 other newspapers published from the African continent.

Take a snapshot of our society and you'll find misery and heartbreak. Roughly half a million American children are in the foster care system, and that number is likely to increase as high unemployment punishes more vulnerable families. As David Kaiser and Lovisa Stannow vividly demonstrate in a forceful and disturbing essay in The New York Review of Books, the epidemic of sexual violence in U.S. prisons is nothing less than a stain on our national character.

Three years ago, Rajendra K. Pachauri was accepting the Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the U.N.'s climate science panel.

At a factory in Wuxi, China, workers lift solar panels onto conveyor belts, while others in white lab coats move between machines as they check on a process for etching and engraving silicon wafers to form solar cells.

From the day I took office, I've been told that addressing our larger challenges is too ambitious; such an effort would be too contentious.  I've been told that our political system is too gridlocked, and that we should just put things on hold for a while. 

In the southwest corner of China, a land of towering mountains and deep gorges not far from the border of Vietnam, is Shi Dong, the Rock Cave. It is here, 800 miles west of the Pacific Ocean, in an area so remote that people often settle in villages with no more than a few dozen homes, where the Yang Liu River disappears underground.