climate change

Why Groundhog Day Now Elevates Science Over Superstition

For a UCLA Biologist, Celebrating the Lowly Marmot Could Shed Light on Global Warming

I am a scientist who loves Groundhog Day, that least scientific of holidays. Every February, as Punxsutawney Phil shakes the dust off his coat, emerges from his burrow, glances at his shadow (or not) and allegedly prognosticates winter’s end, I gather a group of professors, graduate students, and other assorted science geeks at my UCLA lab to nibble, drink, schmooze, and revel in ground-hoggery in all its magnificent splendor.

I study the behavior, ecology, and evolution of groundhogs and the 14 other species of marmots—large, charismatic ground squirrels that …

By Daniel T. Blumstein |

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What Self-Cloning Salamanders Say About Climate Change

An Evolutionary Outlier Could Inherit the Earth (or at Least Rural Maine)

By Lisa Margonelli |

Birds do it, bees do it, and so the song goes, even educated fleas do it. But unisexual salamanders don’t.

These all-female amphibians clone themselves to make eggs—all girls—and they’ve …

The Next Big Shift in California’s Climate Change Movement

An Alliance Between Two State Legislators Represents a Sharper Focus on the Needs of Low-Income, Inland Communities

By Joe Mathews |

She calls him Eduardo. He calls her Mrs. Pavley.

And together they epitomize big changes within the world-renowned California movement to fight climate change.

She is Fran Pavley, 67, a state senator …

Frankenstein Is a Story About Climate Change’s Horrors

How a Massive Volcanic Eruption Spun the World Into Chaos and Helped Inspire the Famous Novel

By Kent Linthicum |

Two hundred years ago this June, during a dreadfully cold and wet summer, Mary Shelley began writing Frankenstein. Since then Frankenstein has become iconic, spawning a legion of adaptations and …

Canada’s Fort McMurray Wildfire Highlights the Trouble with Fighting Fire with Fire

Call It the “Pyrocene,” an Unprecedented Collision of Free-Burning Flames with Our Fossil-Fuel Powered Society

By Stephen Pyne |

“And where two raging fires meet together, they do consume the thing that feeds their fury.” —William Shakespeare

The images are gripping. Horizons glow with satanic reds squishing through black and …

America’s Coasts Can Already Taste the Danger of Rising Sea Levels

High Tides and Record Flooding Are Just the Rehearsal for a Troubling Future

By Lisa Margonelli |

In June 2009, the coming of summer brought beautiful sunny days up and down the eastern seaboard of the U.S. But then something weird, almost creepy, happened in the mid-Atlantic …


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