Combatting Climate Change's Double Whammy

Scientist Katey Walter tells Gelf how the melting Siberian permafrost is releasing tons of greenhouse gases into the air—and why that might be a good thing.

J. Michelangelo Stein

Quaint, anachronistic, perhaps extinct. Is this the state of the so-called "public-intellectual"? It would be easy to launch into a jeremiad lamenting the sad reality that Christopher Hitchens is postmodernity's answer to Ralph Waldo Emerson. Instead, Gelf plans to intermittently drag young academics out from their unendowed folding-chairs to talk to us about how their research is changing the world.