By Dr. Robert Thorson Tropical rainforest deforestation in Africa: This will be my ticket to proving I’m a conservative columnist. Let’s start the easy part. For over three years, I’ve met weekly deadlines and have provoked enough criticism to fill gigabytes on my hard drive. That makes me a columnist. For 30 years, I’ve been […]

By Robert Thorson NASA just swept up some pretty expensive dust. The broom they used was a spacecraft aptly named Stardust, which returned to Earth on Jan. 15 after a seven-year journey. One side of the scientists’ broom contains interstellar dust streaming in from the emptiness of space. The other side holds dust from the […]

By Dr. Robert Thorson New England is on thin ice getting thinner. Our lakes and ponds are freezing later, thawing earlier and getting more dangerous. This aspect of climate change hasn’t gotten the attention it deserves. Why write about winter ice during back-to-school days? For academics like me, spring cleaning comes in early fall, when […]

By Dr. Robert Thorson Let’s revise the geological time scale and create a new epoch called the Anthropocene. This would help spare us from the self-flagellation and negativity about how bad we humans are for the environment. We’re not ruining the environment. We’re reshaping it so rapidly that we’ve created a new geological epoch, even […]

By Dr. Robert Thorson Curving across America’s Deep South is a “Black Belt” that runs from western Tennessee down to Montgomery, Ala., then back northeast through the Carolinas. During the 2016 presidential election, this swath was an anomaly of Clinton Democrats surrounded by a sea of Trump Republicans. It coincides with a demographic belt dominated […]

By Dr. Robert Thorson “A company based in suburban Elk Grove Village, Ill., has accepted its first deposit for manufactured diamonds made from carbon captured during the cremation process so that loved ones — family members, or even pets — could be mounted into a ring, pendant or other jewelry.” — The Chicago Tribune, Aug. […]

By Dr. Robert Thorson Meet the Pliocene. Getting to know this recent warm geological epoch would be a giant step forward in the politics of climate change because it would decouple the certain reality of a warmer world from the finger-pointing about who is responsible for causing it. The Pliocene contained a protracted interval of […]

By Dr. Robert Thorson Let’s stop using the word development to describe the building of homes and businesses in woodland areas or on farms. This use of the word gives unfair advantage to those who would further change New England’s lovely rural countryside. Equating development with commercial-residential construction elevates the seventh definition of the word […]

By Dr. Robert Thorson Planet Earth just got a blast from the past. Mounting evidence indicates that a bona fide meteoroid created the new crater west of Lake Titicaca in Peru. Most convincing are the seismic shock, the scatter of iron-rich rock fragments and eyewitness reports of a bright fireball accompanied by a thunderous roar. […]

By Dr. Robert Thorson Too much bubbly can be dangerous. So concluded an international team of scientists in explaining what mysteriously killed 1,800 people in 1986 near Lake Nyos in Cameroon, West Africa. Thanks to the work of many investigators with funding from UNESCO (the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization), this unusual natural […]