Articles by Kit Stolz

They’re getting nervous

When it comes to global warming, Andrew Revkin of The New York Times is without peer at clarifying the science and Elizabeth Kolbert of The New Yorker is the scariest writer in the land.

But this year, The Washington Post established itself as the newspaper best at showing us how global warming is happening right now, with superb articles on the alarming spread of the mountain pine beetle, on changes in the movements of butterflies, polar bears, and mountain water sources, on energy producers ready for regulation of carbon emissions, and this past weekend a major story on how the insurance industry has changed its attitude about homeowner policies in Florida and along the East Coast, thanks to global warming.

Joel Garreau is not the first reporter to cover the story, but his story -- "A Dream Blown Away" -- brings it home with more clarity and verve than any in memory.

To wit:

Washington Post says so

That's the underlying message from two remarkable stories published this weekend in the Washington Post.

On Saturday, Steven Mufson and Juliet Eilperin reported that "top executives at many of the nation's largest energy companies have accepted the scientific consensus about climate change and see federal regulation to cut greenhouse gas emissions as inevitable."

They include a great quote from Duke Energy executive John Stowell:

Is Western time on the outs?

"The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness," wrote John Muir (in a posthumous collection of his notes called John of the Mountains).

Yes, but why? Why does a wild forest take us into the universe more surely than the open sea? Or a vast metropolis teeming with people?

This month in Orion, critic and novelist John Berger takes a crack at that question in an essay called "Between Forests" (not online, unfortunately). Berger takes the forest photographs of Czech photographer Jitka Hanzlová as a point of departure. A glance at one of Hanzlová's mysterious photographs from her Forest series gets across Berger's essential point -- they have been taken "from the inside" of the forest. He writes:

Oceanographer Tim Barnet reveals the dollar amount, and other fascinating points

Tim Barnett, a leading oceanographer who just retired from Scripps Institution of Oceanography, this Monday gave a talk called Future Climate of Earth: A Sneak Preview [PDF] to a convention of fire ecologists in San Diego.

Barnett began by saying that he had seven grandkids, and he didn't like to think about the world they were going to inherit from us. He then went on to succinctly explain why we know global warming is human-caused.