Ron Meador is a veteran journalist whose last decade in a 25-year stint at the Star Tribune involved writing editorials and columns with environment, energy and science subjects as his major concentration.
The wheat genome has finally been mapped in sufficient detail to enable more rapid and robust genetic tinkering — perhaps on a track that could head off mass starvation in coming decades.
Meanwhile, new research into downwind smoke from western wildfires suggests Minnesota gets more than its share.
Was there really such broad consensus on what had to be done to address climate change? Was the marquee failure all that pivotal?
Japan is beleaguered, too, with more than 300 deaths attributed to extreme heat, floods and landslides in July.
While Minnesota summers and winters are both getting warmer, the most significant temperature change is taking place during the summer.
Within the next 15 years, persistent coastal flooding will submerge more than 4,000 miles of the fiber-optic conduits that carry internet traffic in the United States.
New research suggests that heat waves can slow mental functioning.
‘Cross Flipper with a very shy panda and you’ve bred a vaquita.’
Ask yourself: Would it be OK to revoke a mining company’s rights in the same way that these were restored?
By 2045, homeowners might abandon more than 300,000 oceanfront properties. By the end of the century, 2.4 million.
The incidence of high-tide flooding — also called “sunny day flooding,” “nuisance flooding” or “saltwater flooding” — has increased by 50 percent in just the last eight years, a new report says.
U.S. policy has “minimized, underestimated and politicized” the infection, discouraging swift and cheap treatments.
Just five groups may have escaped extinction by asteroid — and flight had nothing to do with it.
Charles C. Mann sets Minnesota’s sainted Norman Borlaug opposite the less remembered William Vogt as “The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow’s World.”
Atmospheric concentrations fell steadily until 2012; monitoring data suggest new production somewhere in eastern Asia.
Development and disease whittle away at a resource that delivers billions in environmental benefits. Minnesota showed essentially no gain or loss between 2009 and 2014.
Projections indicate 300,000 to 400,000 new Lyme infections this year, with Minnesota and Wisconsin among the most afflicted states.
Many a grade-schooler can state the accepted notion of how plants thrive in CO2 and buffer global warming — but it might be really wrong.
An additional 3-foot rise in sea levels could be just decades, not centuries, into the future.
After a little processing, the blue whale sounds rather like a long, bowed note on a double bass.
