ENE 112: Earth & Environmental Science

The ocean's meridional overturning circulation (MOC) is a key factor in climate change. The Atlantic MOC, in particular, is believed to play an active role in the regional and global climate variability.

In 2008, three years after Hurricane Katrina cut a deadly path along the northern coast of the Gulf of Mexico, researchers J. Steven Picou and Keith Nicholls conducted a survey of the survivors in Louisiana and Mississippi, receiving more than twenty-five hundred responses, and followed up two years later with their than five hundred of the initial respondents.

From Los Angeles to London, from Slovenia to Taiwan, honeybees are dying. In America alone, one in three hives was left lifeless at the end of 2008; in France, the death rate is closer to 60%. What is behind the catastrophe?

There is a growing crisis in our oceans as rates of infectious disease outbreaks are on the rise. Marine epidemics have the potential to cause a mass die-off of wildlife from the bottom to the top of the food chain, impacting the health of ocean ecosystems as well as lives on land. Ocean outbreaks are a sentinel of an impending global environmental disaster, fueled by sewage dumping, unregulated aquaculture, and drifting plastic in a warming ocean.

While environmental disputes and conflicts over fossil fuel extraction have grown in recent years, few issues have been as contentious in the twenty-first century as those surrounding the impacts of unconventional natural gas and oil development using hydraulic drilling and fracturing techniques--more commonly known as "fracking"--on local communities.

Much of what you've heard about plastic pollution may be wrong. Instead of a great island of trash, the infamous Great Pacific Garbage Patch is made up of manmade debris spread over hundreds of miles of sea--more like a soup than a floating garbage dump. Recycling is more complicated than we were taught: less than nine percent of the plastic we create is reused, and the majority ends up in the ocean. And plastic pollution isn't confined to the open ocean: it's in much of the air we breathe and the food we eat.

A scientist's manifesto addressing a soil loss crisis accelerated by poor conservation practices and climate change This book by celebrated biologist Jo Handelsman lays bare the complex connections among climate change, soil erosion, food and water security, and drug discovery.

Provides an entertaining presentation of the essential issues of energy policy and its impact
Answers pressing questions which everybody is asking her or himself
Detailed facts in in narrative form on what is arguably the most important problem of our time.

Drawing on historic sources as well as present-day interviews, Lead Babies and Poisoned Housing is a story about systemic racism, environmental injustice, and the failure of government.

A riveting, urgent account of the explorers and scientists racing to understand the rapidly melting ice sheet in Greenland, a dramatic harbinger of climate change "Jon Gertner takes readers to spots few journalists or even explorers have visited.