Mason Inman - science journalist

Gauging how the planet will respond to rising emissions remains one of the biggest questions in climate science. Mason Inman looks at how close we are to answering it.

For decades, climatologists have been engaged in a quest for what some consider to be the field's holy grail: an accurate estimate of climate sensitivity. This number captures how temperature responds to greenhouse gases accumulating in the atmosphere — a vital quantity when emissions are increasing fast.

May-June issue of World Watch Magazine

No, not fleets of warships-this power comes from warm and cold running water

"The current energy crisis is fueling a worldwide search for power. Energy explorers are discovering that the largest reserve of potential energy covers more than 70 percent of the Earth's surface-the oceans." Replace "energy crisis" with "climate crisis," and these words could be pulled from the websites of any of several companies that are now looking to generate clean electricity from the heat stored in the oceans.

17 April 2009, for New Scientist 

As scientists start to fill out the picture of a future globe dramatically changed by catastrophic global warming, the use of climate models is increasingly important when forecasting the risks faced by various regions.

Tim Palmer and researchers at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts say that running simulations on cheap computer chips that produce results tainted with random noise could improve those models.

16 April 2009, for National Geographic News

Gushing from a glacier, rust-stained Blood Falls contains evidence that microbes have survived in prehistoric seawater deep under ice for perhaps millions of years, a new study says.

The colony of microscopic life-forms may have been trapped when Antarctica's then advancing Taylor Glacier reached into the ocean 1.5 to 4 million years ago.

23 March 2009, for Columbia Journalism Review

Coverage of Copenhagen climate summit offers a teaching moment

Climate scientists gathered for a major summit in Copenhagen a bit more than a week ago, but you might not have heard about it—or if you did, it might not have made much of an impression.

12 March 2009, for National Geographic News

Burning trees for power may seem backward, dirty, and environmentally hostile.

But a high-tech new way of wood burning holds great potential to save energy, cut costs, and even fight global warming, a new study says.

5 March 2009, for National Geographic News

People on the steppes of what is now Kazakhstan were the first to achieve both riding and milking horses, new evidence suggests.

This culture had domesticated horses at least 5,500 years ago.

27 February 2009, for Science

Azam Khan Swati became Pakistan’s new Minister of Science and Technology last month.

A U.S.–trained lawyer who built a chain of convenience stores before returning to Pakistan in 2003, Swati belongs to the Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam (Assembly of Islamic Clergy) party, which draws its support from a Taliban stronghold along the northwest border with Afghanistan.

25 February 2008, for Nature News

Saleemul Huq of the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) in London, is a pioneer of adaptation to climate change.

Nature News caught up with Huq in Dhaka, Bangladesh, at the Third International Conference on Community Based Adaptation to Climate Change, which ran from 18–24 February, and asked him about the new centre that he plans to start in the country.

12 February 2009, for National Geographic News

A "first draft" of the Neanderthal genome announced today adds to evidence that the extinct human species was lactose intolerant and could have shared some basic language capabilities with modern humans.

The human and Neanderthal family trees split off from each other around 450,000 years ago, after which there was little or no mixing between the two species.