By Dr. Robert Thorson Halloween makes me nervous, though not for the reason you might expect. Of course I’m concerned about kids being run over in the dark, juvenile sugar overdose, and the license for youthful mayhem. But my biggest issue with Oct. 31 is personal. This is the time of year when I come […]

By Dr. Robert Thorson Climate scientists can sleep a little better at night, thanks to Tim Barnett and his colleagues at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. Their results, Barnett said last month, “should wipe out much of the uncertainty about the reality of global warming.” What his team […]

By Dr. Robert Thorson Columnists are teased for being know-it-alls. I have three responses. First, I don’t know everything. Second, you don’t either. Third, I’m thankful there are things neither of us know. Otherwise, scientists would cease to exist. In honor of my existence, I’ll share a holiday meal with you. I’m not talking about […]

By Dr. Robert Thorson Summer at the lake. What a wonderful image. Blue skies. Reflections on cool water, swirled by the wind. Now imagine the lake disappearing right before your eyes, right in the middle of your vacation. The waters recede. Then it’s gone, down the drain. Imagine your boat foundering on its side. Imagine […]

By Dr. Robert Thorson There’s nothing like an old-fashioned natural disaster to cast a news shadow over the human disasters we inflict on ourselves. Consider the genocide in Darfur, a province in western Sudan. In late 2004, the United Nations was treating the disaster in Darfur as the world’s worst humanitarian crisis. Then along came […]

By Dr. Robert Thorson `You think it’s hot here?” That was the title of an August sermon being advertised on a church-front sign in my town. It went up in response to this summer’s month-long heat wave. Remember the clammy humidity? The parched grass? The lethargy? The preacher’s question, of course, begs another: Where is […]

By Dr. Robert Thorson Practically everyone has heard of the nursery rhyme “Humpty Dumpty,” and knows how it ends: “All the king’s horses and all the king’s men / Couldn’t put Humpty together again.” Indeed, many natural systems, once broken, can never be put back together again. But this hasn’t stopped visionary conservationists from trying […]

By Dr. Robert Thorson The fear and dread caused by Hurricane Katrina has put the entire United States on alert for new storms. The most anxious of us despair that we’ve crossed a climate threshold into a scary new world of permanently stronger storms. The most optimistic of us hope we’re simply in a stormy […]

By Dr. Robert Thorson Imagine you’re on your favorite beach enjoying a good book. Into your lap falls a dead mouse tied to a whirling streamer. What do you do? On a Connecticut beach, you freak out. But if you’re on Guam, you brush it off as business as usual, knowing that federal officials are […]

By Dr. Robert Thorson The “thing” lay there on the deck of the fishing trawler, hissing, fizzing and melting into sludge before the crew’s eyes. Frightened and amazed, they shoveled it back to the sea for fear of being asphyxiated. The place was west of Vancouver Island in Canada. The date was fall 2002. The […]