By Dr. Robert Thorson Charles Dickens opened his Victorian-era novel “A Tale of Two Cities” with these famous lines: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness . . .” I found Dickens’ contradictions particularly helpful for understanding the […]

By Dr. Robert Thorson Sometimes, it’s comforting to know that none of us is really in charge. There but for the grace of the great roulette wheel in the sky go I. I refer to the planetary stray bullets called asteroids, one of which streaked into the Russian atmosphere last week to produce a meteor […]

By Dr. Robert Thorson I wish the editors of a Rhode Island newspaper I recently was reading had learned about olivine before declaring that quartz is the world’s most common mineral. Ouch! Quartz is definitely not the most common mineral. Not for the whole Earth. Not for the Earth’s crust. Not even for the quartz-rich […]

By Dr. Robert Thorson The world must be getting more stupid. Otherwise, why should a “snowmageddon” hitting Washington, D.C., make global warming a non-problem? But even dumber than that is the conspiracy theory that climate change isn’t an actual phenomenon, but an industry created to feather academic beds with funding. Gimme a break. Rewind to […]

By Robert Thorson “Holy Cow! The sun is disappearing! Now what?” This is what I imagine prescientific people saying during their first solar eclipse experience. We have nothing to fear during the eclipse that will sweep across the United States on Monday because we know exactly how, why and where it will occur. Though science […]

By Dr. Robert Thorson For years, I’ve known how it feels to be completely enveloped in nature. Last week, during a visit to downtown Chicago, I learned how it feels to be completely absent from nature. This epiphany happened in the structural core of the Merchandise Mart, the largest commercial building in the world. Rising […]

By Dr. Robert Thorson Imagine a beautiful stalagmite in your neighborhood. Well, imagine no more! Though the megaicicles clinging to road cuts across the state are technically not stalagmites, they form in much the same way. And to my mind, these frozen ribbons and drips of blue-tinged ice are even more beautiful than the precipitated […]

By Dr. Robert Thorson One of the things I really like about late winter is the burst of litter that precedes the burst of spring. This acute exposure to our own trash focuses attention on the wasteful, synthetic, toxic materialism we’ve come to enjoy, and which is slowly poisoning the world’s oceans. A steady dribble […]

By Dr. Robert Thorson ‘Radon Kills.” That was my “Welcome to Hartford” sign all winter long, a huge lemon-yellow banner stretched across a pedestrian overpass that thousands of commuters saw each day. Should the city have allowed it? Initially, I thought no. Though informative, this deathly fact should not have to compete with the Old […]

By Dr. Robert Thorson Imagine a racetrack one mile around. Two contestants enter the final stretch neck-to-neck. The rookie bears the number 2010. The previous winner wears 1998. These two years are now competing, September-to-September for the highest average temperatures on planet Earth. Thus far, according to the U.S. National Climate Data Center, this year’s […]