Jennifer Granholm: A clean energy proposal -- race to the top! | Video on TED.com

Kicking off the TED2013 conference, Jennifer Granholm asks a very American question with worldwide implications: How do we make more jobs? Her big idea: Invest in new alternative energy sources. And her big challenge: Can it be done with or without our broken Congress?

Twitter / Revkin

Interesting @BardCollege project organizing synchronized campus screenings of "The @IslandPresident" 4/17 http://blogs.bard.edu/theislandpresident/screening-locations …

Why you should sweat climate change

More American children are getting asthma and allergies, and more seniors are suffering heat strokes.

Food and utility prices are rising. Flooding is overrunning bridges, swamping subways and closing airport runways.

People are losing jobs in drought-related factory closings. Cataclysmic storms are wiping out sprawling neighborhoods. Towns are sinking.
... "It's a mixed bag," says Kerry Emanuel, a climate scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, about the link between extreme weather and climate change. Though Emanuel once doubted the evidence, he now says it's clear the world is warming beyond its natural variability. He notes that there are clearer links to some weather events than others.

Emanuel, author of What We Know About Climate Change, says rainfall may have the clearest climate link. He says it now occurs less often, but when it does rain, we're more likely to experience downpours. So wet regions will be wetter, causing flash flooding. Dry ones will get drier, resulting in drought. Heat, of course, is another consequence.