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 […]

By Dr. Robert Thorson Looking for a stunning example of ludicrous government policy? Consider what the U.S. Bureau of Land Management does with its so-called wild horses, as reported by a Policy Forum in the August Science magazine. It turns out that the bureau boards out more “wild” horses to Midwestern farmers than they allow […]

By Dr. Robert Thorson Does “climategate” (the fuss about e-mails stolen from the desktop of climate researcher Phil Jones at the University of East Anglia) sum up to something significant? Or is the media frenzy little more than a mountain made from a molehill by naysayer scientists, media corporations and blowhard politicians? Based on a […]

By Dr. Robert Thorson Last night, my son and I watched the cult classic “Dumb and Dumber” as part of my research for this column. I wanted to make sure that nothing in the movie was dumber than what I saw in the baking aisle of the grocery store last week. I’m referring to official […]

By Dr. Robert Thorson Last year was the year I became an old fart, in the best sense of the term. I learned that the adage “you’re as young as you feel” is mere gloss on the more important realization that people my age are incorrigibly hard-wired to an earlier era. Yes, some of our […]

By Dr. Robert Thorson Geologists just learned that the greatest extinction of life on Earth was aided and abetted by the burning of coal. Though this material has been a great boon for humans since the 18th century, it was a bane beyond measure for nearly every living thing during the 2,519,410th century B.C. Why […]

By Dr. Robert Thorson Consider the sampling of biodiversity at a Thanksgiving feast. The humans, the turkey, the potatoes, the cranberries and the pumpkin. All came from a physical cradle of life, the Earth. This year, the changing Earth is getting serious respect for being the prime mover of organic evolution. For this I am […]

By Dr. Robert Thorson More than a thousand geologists were swarming the streets of Hartford earlier this week during the 47th annual meeting of the Northeastern Section of the Geological Society of America, held at the Marriott Hotel Downtown. Hardly anyone seems to have noticed. Of course, they weren’t here for the attention. They were […]