Top 84 Quotes & Sayings by Tatiana Schlossberg - Page 2

An inherent tension between the seeming ineffectiveness of immediate and individual action and the long view the government is trying to take here may be common to every society trying to reduce emissions and to encourage participation.

Because Japan has to import most of its energy, and because of the 2011 Fukushima nuclear plant disaster, the country has an almost obsessive interest in tackling energy issues.

Ice cores, which are long cylinders scientists extract from glaciers, ice sheets or ice caps, contain gas bubbles, pollen, dust particles, or chemical isotopes that give scientists clues about what Earth's temperature and atmosphere were like when the ice caps first formed.

Coal ash gets far less attention than toxic and greenhouse gas emissions from power plants, but it has created environmental and health problems - every major river in the Southeast has at least one coal ash pond - and continuing legal troubles and large cleanup costs for the authority and other utilities.

Environmental advocates say that changing how much power computers and monitors use in idle mode can cut greenhouse gas emissions without requiring consumers to change their behavior.

Whales and dolphins have extraordinary hearing and the ability to communicate in widely varying voices.

Unlike the visible and heavily regulated airborne emissions from power plant smokestacks, coal ash is largely unseen unless there is a major spill and, until recently, far less effectively regulated.

Sea mammals, in particular, have evolved to take advantage of how well and far sound can travel under water, and to compensate for poor visibility in the dark deep.

If you live in Minneapolis, there's a 95 percent chance you live within a 10-minute walk to a park.

The ocean is loud: Ship propellers, sonar, oil and gas drilling and other industrial work make sounds, even if, like the proverbial tree falling in the forest, no one can hear it.

The world's oceans are littered with trillions of pieces of plastic - bottles, bags, toys, fishing nets and more, mostly in tiny particles - and now this seaborne junk is making its way into the Arctic.

Environmentalists, members of the Obama administration and government officials in several states see significant potential for offshore wind energy, given that winds over the ocean usually blow stronger and more steadily than those on land.

Climate change, habitat destruction, extinctions - the Earth has seen it all before, thousands of years ago. And humans may have been partly to blame for many of those changes in nature, too.

Air quality is already a problem outside of cars: More than 80 percent of people living in cities where pollution is tracked are exposed to air quality levels below World Health Organization limits.

Extreme precipitation is likely to increase with rising temperatures because of growing atmospheric humidity, leading to a higher risk of flash flooding nationwide.

As a nation, we spent eight billion hours sitting in our cars, waiting for lights to change, for the driver ahead to sneak into that parking spot, for an accident to be cleared.

Coal is used to generate power almost everywhere, but problems associated with coal ash and coal ash slurry disproportionately affect low-income and minority communities, experts say.

In the past, offshore wind farms have faced significant opposition in the United States for a few reasons: high costs, complicated rules about who gets to build on the seafloor and what they build, and complaints from people who do not want their ocean view obstructed.

Plastic debris in the ocean was thought to accumulate in big patches, mostly in subtropical gyres - big currents that converge in the middle of the ocean - but scientists estimate that only about 1 percent of plastic pollution is in these gyres and other surface waters in the open ocean.

Over the vast plains of the open ocean, where wave lines may be the only markers, seabirds, including albatrosses, manage to find food.

About 6,000 years ago, St. Paul Island, a tiny spot of land in the middle of the Bering Sea, must have been a strange place. Hundreds of miles away from the mainland, it was uninhabited except for a few species of small mammals, like arctic foxes, and one big one: woolly mammoths.

Climate refers to the long-term averages and trends in atmospheric conditions over large areas, while weather deals with short-term variations, which is what happens when the polar vortex visits your hometown.

The Japanese people, though largely united in recognizing the threat of global warming and rising sea levels, are likely to face hurdles in reforming their energy policy, including some resistance from young people who say the nation faces more pressing problems, like the economy.

Coal ash, the hazardous byproduct of burning coal to produce power, is a particularly insidious legacy of the nation's dependence on coal.