On hearing of the catastrophe in Lac-Mégantic, our first thoughts were with the city’s residents who had lost loved ones, friends, homes, and businesses. The accident was one of those jaw-dropping events that we all have trouble fully comprehending.
Read the face-off between global governance expert Thomas Homer-Dixon and Globe columnist Konrad Yakabuski
If President Obama blocks the Keystone XL pipeline once and for all, he’ll do Canada a favor.
Any day now, the expanse of sea ice in the Arctic will reach its lowest extent for the year. The round-the-clock summer days have gone, and the weather is turning sharply colder as the sun sinks below the horizon for longer periods each day.
In the mid-1980s, when I was a doctoral student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and beginning to study climate change, I attended a lecture by a specialist in plant physiology at nearby Harvard University. He spoke about global warming’s impact on crop productivity. He was quite optimistic. More carbon dioxide in the air, he explained, causes certain kinds of plants to grow faster. So, on balance, food output should rise in a warmer and CO2-rich world.
Canada desperately needs a broad and vigorous public discussion about why academic freedom is important, what might threaten it and how it should be protected.
Dehumanization is arguably a defining feature of the most brutal acts of human violence, such as saturation bombardment of civilian populations, terrorist attacks on urban centers, intense battlefield combat, and genocide.
Ontario, we’re told, is Canada’s new rust belt. The high dollar is pummelling the province’s exports. Big manufacturers are fleeing. The Liberal government is slashing spending to maintain the province’s credit rating.
Humankind will have to invest staggering resources to find and produce new oil if global output is to grow steadily. We’re likely much closer to the tipping point than optimists think
It seems inevitable that the ongoing and rapid changes in the physical environment of the marine Arctic will push components of the region’s existing social-ecological systems—small and large—beyond tipping points and into new regimes.
