Summary: Climate change narratives have predicted the disappearance of low-lying islands like the Maldives due to rising sea levels. But as the New York Times has recently noticed, many of these islands are actually expanding, thanks in large part to…

Energy is life. For the world and its inhabitants to live better lives—freer, richer, safer, nicer, and more comfortable lives—the world needs more energy, not less. There are no rich, low-energy countries and no poor, high-energy countries. “Energy…

“You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics,” wrote economist and Nobel laureate Robert Solow in a 1987 book review. While computing was making massive strides in the 1980s and ’90s—cumulating in the internet mania and…

We were never going to reduce atmospheric carbon by appealing to people’s better judgement. When the kids are hungry and our subsistence and livelihood is on the line, concerns for a changing climate — today or fifty years into the future — go out…

Most people have quite the dire view of finance and markets. Unscrupulous bankers and pompous hedge funds place unsound bets on obscure and risky investments; greedy businessmen jack prices and fire workers at the first sight of recessions caused by…

The United States is doing quite well. You wouldn’t know it if you read the headlines, listened to the bombastic political disputes, or even asked Americans. In a March poll, a majority of Americans had low confidence that life would be better for…

“Take away styles and fashion—and the computer screens,” said mathematician Eric Weinstein in a recent interview, “how do you know you’re not in 1973?” The observation is classic for pointing to the slowing down of inventions that radically improve…

The entry for “space” in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy from Douglas Adams’ classic story goes: Space … is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly hugely mindbogglingly big it is. I mean you may think it’s a long way down the road to…

“Buy land; they’re not making it anymore.” — attributed to Mark Twain A repeated fear—and political football—in the climate change conversation is the plight of small island nations. When the United Nation’s climate summits roll around, these…

In 2009, the BBC ran a reporting piece on the Arctic featuring the esteemed polar scientist Peter Wadhams of Cambridge University. The Catlin Arctic Survey, a project set out to answer vital scientific questions about sea ice in the Arctic, had just…

Many people think that the modern world quantifies too much: everything is measured, reported, analyzed, matched with KPIs, and dressed up to tell a quantitative story. Many people also think that numbers can be deceptive, elaborate hoaxes, or – in…

Dr. Pangloss, a character in Voltaire’s satirical novel Candide, has the famous delusion that we live in the best of all possible worlds. If you have a pessimistic slant, you might consider “Panglossian” an apt descriptor for those of us who…

The rising sea could become a problem for many, but for the Dutch, it is merely an old and well-known enemy. Trapped between some of Europe’s largest rivers and the violent North Sea waves, the people living in the Netherlands prevent floods for a…

Natural disasters and their terrible impact on human societies have almost gone full circle. In the past, slow communication and the technical inability to monitor extreme weather meant that we rarely heard about disasters in far-away lands. Then…

Trees are icons of nature and significant carbon sinks, so anyone interested in climate change is invested in the fate of forests. In recent weeks, Hannah Ritchie of Our World in Data has written several articles on deforestation. She had occasion to…

Rosalie Edge was an astonishing woman, as her biographer Dyana Furmansky recounts in Rosalie Edge, Hawk of Mercy. Edge was a New Yorker of the Gilded Age who married into wealth, and a veteran suffragette who in her 40s and 50s discovered a love for…

Britannia may once have ruled the waves, but it was the Dutch who tamed the sea. In water management and beating back a rowdy ocean, the Dutch are undisputed champions—a title they have proudly held for a long time. Some of the iconic Dutch…

Memory often plays tricks with our understanding of the world. We are absolutely sure that we left the car keys on the counter or that a particularly bad storm happened in the spring of 1983 and not in the autumn the year before. It is a…

For such a small item, plastic bags receive a surprising amount of public attention. In recent years, many countries have introduced penalty taxes on plastic bags’ use and a fair number of nations have banned plastic bags altogether. In America,…

Animals die all the time. Sometimes so much so that entire species go extinct – a terrible loss for biodiversity and our world’s ecologic systems. A National Geographic article last year prefaced a discussion about species going extinct by pointing…