Featured series 
Tag: ” Global warming
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Nation & World
Ice sheet in peril? Gravity to the rescue
Gravity’s surprising effects when the Earth’s ice sheets melt can help to stabilize ones, such as those found in West Antarctica, that are grounded below sea level.
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Nation & World
Getting genetic leg up on climate change
Harvard botanist Charles Davis is examining evolutionary relationships between species affected by climate change for clues to past and future changes.
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Nation & World
Preserving both planet and profits
Harvard Business School Professor Rebecca Henderson delivered a talk last week in honor of Earth Day that offered a business strategy aimed at saving the planet.
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Nation & World
It’s lights out
For the second consecutive year, Harvard University will join the city of Boston by turning out the lights for “Earth Hour,” a major community awareness event about climate change, taking place in Boston and cities worldwide.
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Nation & World
Earthwatch comes to Allston
Earthwatch Institute, a leading international nonprofit environmental group, announces plans to move its headquarters and staff to a Harvard-owned building in Allston. The group hopes to build partnerships with the community and the University.
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Nation & World
Why things happen
Economist Steven Levitt recalled his undergraduate time at Harvard and explored some of his new research during a discussion at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.
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Nation & World
Reality check
Author-turned-activist Bill McKibben says the fight to arrest global warming requires an international movement to force political change.
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Nation & World
Global warnings
Harvard Kennedy School panelists say that the slippage in mainstream media outlets means more voices argue about environmental issues, prompting the public to have difficulty sorting out the cacophony and even to doubt global warming.
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Nation & World
Study: Polar ice sheets vulnerable to even moderate global warming
A new analysis of the geological record of the Earth’s sea level, carried out by scientists at Harvard and Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, employs…
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Nation & World
Devastation by degrees
The head of the Natural Resources Defense Council examines the implications of climate change and the best ways forward for the passage of congressional legislation to combat it.
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Nation & World
Green report card
For the fourth-straight year, Harvard is at the top of the 2010 College Sustainability Report Card, a report that grades the green credentials of 300 colleges and universities.
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Nation & World
McKibben’s movement: 350.org
Activist and author Bill McKibben ’82 takes to the pulpit in a plea for climate change action.
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Nation & World
Green reunions: Groundwork set
As of June 4, Harvard has celebrated 358 commencements. Add to that the simultaneous celebration of untold thousands of reunions.
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Nation & World
Geology is destiny
As a teenager in Toronto in the 1950s, Paul Hoffman would spend hours in the Royal Ontario Museum studying its collection of rocks and minerals. He became a passionate collector, trading rocks with friends and exploring abandoned mines in search of crystals.
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Nation & World
Chu calls for global warming action
U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu expressed optimism Thursday (June 4) that the world will avoid catastrophic climate change, saying the crisis presents an opportunity to bring about a sustainable energy…
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Nation & World
Class of 1984 takes giant step in reducing carbon footprint
For its fifth reunion, the Class of 1984 added community service to the celebration — a novel feature that other reuniting classes have since copied.
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Nation & World
Jerry Mitrovica named geophysics professor
Theoretical geophysicist Jerry X. Mitrovica, whose studies of the Earth’s structure and evolution have important implications for our understanding of climate and sea-level changes throughout Earth’s history, has been named professor of geophysics in Harvard University’s Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, effective July 1.
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Nation & World
GSD students help Netherlands plan for future
“Arriving this morning we made our way to our home for the next six nights, the floating hotel boat, The Merlijn,” wrote Martin Zogran, assistant professor of urban design in Harvard’s Graduate School of Design (GSD), in his blog that highlighted details of the Harvard-Netherlands Project: Climate Change, Water, Land Development, and Adaptation.
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Nation & World
Cyclones spurt water into the stratosphere, feeding global warming
Scientists at Harvard University have found that tropical cyclones readily inject ice far into the stratosphere, possibly feeding global warming.
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Nation & World
Climate change an ‘opportunity’ as well as a threat
Conservation pioneer Russell A. Mittermeier started this year’s Roger Tory Peterson Memorial Lecture (April 5) with a quiz. In front of several hundred listeners at Harvard’s Science Center he turned on a small recorder.
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Nation & World
Planning to save a changing world
Climate change is not only altering Alaska’s natural world, it’s also affecting how humans interact with it, particularly those whose culture and traditions have pointed the way for generations to survive in the sometimes inhospitable far north. Terry Chapin, a professor of ecology at the University of Alaska’s Institute of Arctic Biology, said that climate…
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Nation & World
Disasters, and how to cope with them
Nine out of 10 disasters in the world are related to climate change — the consequence of “a new normal of extreme weather,” said Sir John Holmes. He talked about an accelerating pace of floods, drought, heat waves, and catastrophic storms.
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Nation & World
Energy Secretary and Nobelist Steven Chu to speak at Commencement
U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu, Nobel laureate in physics and a leader in the pursuit of alternative and renewable sources of energy, will be Harvard’s principal speaker at the Afternoon Exercises of Harvard’s 358th Commencement on June 4.
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Nation & World
Lights will go out as University joins worldwide Earth Hour
For an hour on the evening of March 28, Harvard will turn the lights off on some of its iconic architectural features — part of Earth Hour 2009, a global event promoting individual action to reduce climate change. From 8:30 to 9:30 p.m., the University will shut off non-essential lights atop Memorial Hall and on…
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Nation & World
FAS plan will slash greenhouse gas emissions
Without action to slow the release of greenhouse gases, Harvard biologist and oceanographer James McCarthy said last week, current projections indicate that Massachusetts in 2080 could resemble South Carolina in 2008: The Bay State would experience an average of 24 days over 100 degrees each summer and two solid months of temperatures above 90.
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Nation & World
Humanity may hold key for next Earth evolution
Human degradation of the environment has the potential to stall an ongoing process of planetary evolution, and even rewind the evolutionary clock to leave the planet habitable only by the bacteria that dominated billions of years of Earth’s history, Harvard geochemist Charles Langmuir said Thursday (Nov. 13).
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Nation & World
Global warming predicted to hasten carbon release from peat bogs
Billions of tons of carbon sequestered in the world’s peat bogs could be released into the atmosphere in the coming decades as a result of global warming, according to a new analysis of the interplay between peat bogs, water tables, and climate change.
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Nation & World
Wildlife Conservation Society chief outlines scenarios
From the complex social structure of elephant herds to the understanding that gorillas are susceptible to deadly “human” diseases to the impacts of climate change, conservationists are struggling to balance a suite of challenges unknown in past generations.
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Nation & World
Effects of climate change vary greatly across plant families
Drawing on records dating back to the journals of Henry David Thoreau, scientists at Harvard University have found that different plant families near Walden Pond in Concord, Mass., have borne the effects of climate change in strikingly different ways. Some of the plant families hit hardest by global warming have included beloved species like lilies,…