Federal climate policymakers should have a grounding in basic chemistry.

The sea level rise expected in the coming century will swamp the Everglades unless current management is adjusted or climate change is curbed.

“New Orleans, at the end of the century, will be an island” — literally, predicts Bruce Babbitt. Whether or not you believe his assessment, he makes a good case for considering the implications of climate change when planning federal projects.

Fossil-fuel pollution has been offsetting global warming to the tune of about 30 percent per year. Cleaning up that pollution, a must, threatens to accelerate warming unless humanity changes its fuel-use strategy.

An unusual layer of rock found along Britain's northwestern coast formed from the debris thrown out of a crater when a meteorite struck nearby more than 1 billion years ago. (p. 238)

The Tibetan Plateau formed when the Indian and Eurasian plates collided, but scientists may have had the order of events wrong. (p. 222)

Nineteenth-century settlers left a dusty mark on the West. Rocky Mountain lake deposits reveal that America's westward expansion kicked huge amounts of dirt into the air—probably from livestock grazing.A team led by Jason Neff, a biogeochemist at the University of Colorado in Boulder, examined soil cores from the beds of tiny mountain lakes in Colorado's San Juan Mountains. The cores captured soil and dust deposited in the lake over 5,000 years. The chemical makeup of the cores was nothing like the surrounding bedrock, suggesting that the dirt came from hundreds of kilometers away, Neff s... (p. 157)