Global Warming News and Articles

Gas could be the cavalry in global warming fight

2010-04-11T04:08:00.000-07:00

An unlikely source of energy has emerged to meet international demands that the United States do more to fight global warming: It's cleaner than coal, cheaper than oil and a 90-year supply is under our feet.

It's natural gas, the same fossil fuel that was in such short supply a decade ago that it was deemed unreliable. It's now being uncovered at such a rapid pace that its price is near a seven-year low. Long used to heat half the nation's homes, it's becoming the fuel of choice when building new power plants. Someday, it may win wider acceptance as a replacement for gasoline in our cars and trucks.

Natural gas' abundance and low price come as governments around the world debate how to curtail carbon dioxide and other pollution that contribute to global warming. The likely outcome is a tax on companies that spew excessive greenhouse gases. Utilities and other companies see natural gas as a way to lower emissions - and their costs. Yet politicians aren't stumping for it.

In June, President Barack Obama lumped natural gas with oil and coal as energy sources the nation must move away from. He touts alternative sources - solar, wind and biofuels derived from corn and other plants. In Congress, the energy debate has focused on finding cleaner coal and saving thousands of mining jobs from West Virginia to Wyoming.

Utilities in the U.S. aren't waiting for Washington to jump on the gas bandwagon. Looming climate legislation has altered the calculus that they use to determine the cheapest way to deliver power. Coal may still be cheaper, but natural gas emits half as much carbon when burned to generate the same amount electricity.

Today, about 27 percent of the nation's carbon dioxide emissions come from coal-fired power plants, which generate 44 percent of the electricity used in the U.S. Just under 25 percent of power comes from burning natural gas, more than double its share a decade ago but still with room to grow.

But the fuel has to be plentiful and its price stable - and that has not always been the case with natural gas. In the 1990s, factories that wanted to burn gas instead of coal had to install equipment that did both because the gas supply was uncertain and wild price swings were common. In some states, because of feared shortages, homebuilders were told new gas hookups were banned.

It's a different story today. Energy experts believe that the huge volume of supply now will ease price swings and supply worries.

Gas now trades on futures markets for about $5.50 per 1,000 cubic feet. While that's up from a recent low of $2.41 in September as the recession reduced demand and storage caverns filled to overflowing, it's less than half what it was in the summer of 2008 when oil prices surged close to $150 a barrel.

Oil and gas prices trends have since diverged, due to the recession and the growing realization of just how much gas has been discovered in the last three years. That's thanks to the introduction of horizontal drilling technology that has unlocked stunning amounts of gas in what were before off-limits shale formations. Estimates of total gas reserves have jumped 58 percent from 2004 to 2008, giving the U.S. a 90-year supply at the current usage rate of about 23 trillion cubic feet of year.

The only question is whether enough gas can be delivered at affordable enough prices for these trends to accelerate.

The world's largest oil company, Exxon Mobil Corp., gave its answer last Monday when it announced a $30 billion deal to acquire XTO Energy Inc. The move will make it the country's No. 1 producer of natural gas.

Exxon expects to be able to dramatically boost natural gas sales to electric utilities. In fact, CEO Rex Tillerson says that's why the deal is such a smart investment.

Tillerson says he sees demand for natural gas growing 50 percent by 2030, much of it for electricity generation and running factories. Decisions being made by executives at power companies lend credence to that forecast.

Consider Progress Energy Inc., which scrapped a $2 billion plan this month to add scrubbers needed to reduce sulfur emmissions at 4 older coal-fired power plants in North Carolina. Instead, it will phase out those plants and redirect a portion of those funds toward cleaner burning gas-fired plants.

Lloyd Yates, CEO of Progess Energy Carolina, says planners were 99 percent certain that retrofitting plants made sense when they began a review late last year. But then gas prices began falling and the recession prompted gas-turbine makers to slash prices just as global warming pressures intesified.

"Everyone saw it pretty quickly," he says. Out went coal, in comes gas. "The environmental component of coal is where we see instability."

Nevada power company NV Energy Inc. canceled plans for a $5 billion coal-fired plant early this year. That came after its homestate senator, Majority Leader Harry Reid, made it clear he would fight to block its approval, and executives' fears mounted about the costs of meeting future environmental rules.

"It was obvious to us that Congress or the EPA or both were going to act to reduce carbon emissions," said CEO Michael Yackira, whose utilty already gets two-thirds of its electricity from gas-fired units. "Without understanding the economic ramifications, it would have been foolish for us to go forward."

Even with an expected jump in demand from utilities, gas prices won't rise much beyond $6.50 per 1,000 cubic feet for years to come, says Ken Medlock, an energy fellow at the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy at Rice University in Houston. That tracks an Energy Department estimate made last week.

Such forecasts are based in part on a belief that the recent spurt in gas discoveries may only be the start of a golden age for gas drillers - one that creates wealth that rivals the so-called Gusher Age of the early 20th century, when strikes in Texas created a new class of oil barons.

XTO, the company that Exxon is buying, was one of the pioneers in developing new drilling technologies that allow a single well to descend 9,000 feet and then bore horizontally through shale formations up to 1 1/2 miles away. Water, sand and chemical additives are pumped through these pipes to unlock trillions of cubic feet of natural gas that until recently had been judged unobtainable.

The wells still only capture only about a quarter of the gas locked in the shale formations. Future improvements could double that recovery rate.

However, expanded drilling has already raised environmental concerns about both the type of chemicals and millions of gallons of water used in the process.

Several lawmakers are trying to close a loophole created when Congress exempted the chemicals used in horizontal drilling from the Safe Drinking Water Act four years ago. Two months ago Chesapeake Energy Corp., one of the nation's largest natural gas producers, said it would not operate in the New York City watershed after opposition from environmental groups and lawmakers seeking to protect the water supply.

Even with the big increases in reserves they were logging, expansion plans by XTO and its rivals have been limited by the debt they took on to finance these projects that can cost as much as $3 million apiece. Under Exxon, which earned $45.2 billion last year, that barrier has been obliterated.

Bottom line: this new source of gas supply in Texas, Louisiana, Pennsylvania, North Dakota, New York and other states holds out the promise of as much as 2,000 trillion cubic feet of supplies. It is estimated that the U.S. sits on 83 percent more recoverable natural gas than was thought in 1990.

"The question now is how does this change the energy discussion in the U.S. and by how much?" says Daniel Yergin, a Pulitzer Prize winning author and chairman of IHS CERA, an energy consultancy. "This is domestic energy ... it's low carbon, it's low cost and it's abundant. When you add it up, it's revolutionary."

By MARK WILLIAMS, AP Energy Writer

Does 'Avatar' Contain Hidden Messages?

2010-04-08T04:06:00.000-07:00

Since it opened last week, James Cameron's much-anticipated film "Avatar" has won praise from movie critics and been a juggernaut at the box office. But some who have seen the film say that it contains hidden messages that are anti-war, pro-environment, and perhaps even racist.

For the benefit of those who haven't seen the film, a little nonspoiler background might be useful. The story is set in the year 2154 when Earth's inhabitants, having used up most of their natural resources through decades of living in excess, plan to use military force to conquer Pandora, a moon roughly the same size as Earth. Pandora, inhabited by a wise, peaceful, and nature-respecting people with blue skin called the Na'vi, is rich in a resource that the people of Earth desperately need.

The earthlings send in a crew of special-forces mercenaries armed with guns, bombs, and other sophisticated weaponry to attack and conquer the Na'vi (who some think resemble American Indians and Africans), despite the fact that they represent no direct threat to the inhabitants of Earth.

Since humans can't breathe in Pandora's atmosphere, the military employs mind-controlled avatars that resemble the Na'vi in every way to venture out from their landing craft and explore the landscape. Sympathizing with the Na'vi after becoming acquainted with them and their customs, one of the human-controlled avatars becomes a turncoat and helps lead the people of Pandora in the defense of their homeland.

Are you beginning to get a sense of why some viewers noticed what they believe are underlying messages in the film?

Some prominent members of the media who screened the film certainly took note. In a glowing review for the Chicago Sun-Times, Roger Ebert noted that "Avatar" "has a flat-out Green and anti-war message" that is "predestined to launch a cult." Meanwhile Ben Hoyle, writing in the Times of London, noted that the film "contains heavy implicit criticism of America's conduct in the War on Terror." Further, Will Heaven of the Daily Telegraph said that the plot line involving people of color who wear "tribal" jewelry while sporting dreadlocked hair, being saved by a noble white man gave the film a "racist subtext" that he found "nauseatingly patronising."

But are these hidden messages really all that hidden? James Cameron himself hasn't been shy in publicly proclaiming the fact that he's an environmental activist who believes that humans and "industrial society" are "causing a global climate change" and "destroying species faster than we can classify them." In a recent interview with PBS' Tavis Smiley, Cameron admitted that he made "obvious" references in the film to Iraq, Vietnam and the American colonial period to emphasize the fact that humans have a "terrible history" of "entitlement" in which we "take what we need" from nature and indigenous peoples "and don't give back."

Further, one of the film's stars Stephen Lang told CNN that he is "not surprised at all" that some people have taken note of the film's political messages, mainly because the central theme of humans "destroying" a "pristine world" out of "blindness and greed" is so "overt."

Despite the obvious political undertones in "Avatar," at least one right-leaning critic doesn't think people who disagree with the film's ideology should totally dismiss it. In his review on the website Hot Air, Ed Morrissey writes, "Conservatives have more or less primed themselves to hate this film because of the presumed anti-war politics of the movie. It's there -- in fact, it's unmistakable -- but it's not as bad as one might presume." He goes on to note that "Avatar" is "entertaining" though "hardly a deep intellectual exercise."

by Brett Michael Dykes

British ads banned over climate change claims

2010-04-05T04:04:00.000-07:00

LONDON (AFP) - Britain's advertising watchdog has banned two government adverts for overstating the threat from climate change, it said.

The adverts used nursery rhymes including "Jack and Jill" to highlight the impact of global warming, but the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) said they exaggerated the risk.

"Jack and Jill went up the hill to fetch a pail of water. There was none as extreme weather due to climate change had caused a drought," read the copyline on one of the ads.

"Extreme weather conditions such as flooding, heat waves and storms will become more frequent and intense," warned the advert, commissioned by the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC).

The second advert read: "Rub-a-dub-dub, three men in a tub -- a necessary course of action due to flash flooding caused by climate change."

"Climate change is happening. Temperature and sea levels are rising. Extreme weather events such as storms, floods and heat waves will become more frequent and intense," it said.

And it warned: "If we carry on at this rate, life in 25 years could be very different."

The adverts were part of a DECC campaign last year which attracted 939 complaints.

Upholding the complaints, the ASA said that forecasts by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) "involved uncertainties" that the adverts failed to reflect.

Energy and Climate Change Secretary Ed Miliband downplayed the problem raised by the ASA.

"The science tells us that it is more than 90 percent likely that there will be more extreme weather events if we don't act. In any future campaign, as requested by the ASA, we will make clear the nature of this prediction.

"We will continue to provide public information about the dangers of climate change," he added.

Your answers surprised us

2010-03-24T19:20:00.000-07:00

Of the hundreds who took our survey, 43% of you said you were looking for a "guaranteed process to identify profitable business opportunities."

This made us wonder... did you know that we actually sell an eBook that provides a detailed step-by-step overview of this exact process?

learn how to identify profitable business opportunities Our EBusiness Startup Handbook is a brand-new guide we created to help you overcome the enormous stumbling blocks that many aspiring entrepreneurs encounter when they're first starting out online.

This comprehensive guide walks you through every step of the initial market research you need to do if you want to ensure the success of your business BEFORE you invest a lot of time and effort in building it.

Your initial market research is the most important step of building your business. If you learn how to accurately identify a profitable business opportunity then 90% of the battle has been won! Compared to this stage, acquiring a product to sell and building your website is child's play.

The #1 Reason People Fail

So many people think they can just skip this step. They think they already have a great idea for a product to sell online, or they figure they can just sell any old product and they will eventually be successful.

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If you're just starting out, we urge you not to let your success be based on random luck.

Discover the proven step-by-step system that will enable you to recognize great money-making opportunities when you come across them. It really is the only way to guarantee your success right out of the gate.

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Avoid the #1 mistake that KILLS new websites

2010-03-22T19:19:00.000-07:00

Hi,

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Update on Haiti Relief Effort - Help for Orphans International

2010-01-28T23:47:00.000-08:00

Dear Friends and New Friends,

This is my personal update that I want to share with you today. If you didn't read my email from 2 days ago it is at the bottom of this one.

Help for Orphans International has a volunteer named Jonathan on the ground in Haiti right now. He is a pilot, personally using his own plane. I hear directly from Jonathan everyday.

He said there is a BIG need for morphine here in the hospitals (or at least oral narcotics). They are doing amputations without it. That might be the single most important item to distribute now. Apparently there are quantities in Port Au Prince but the army has taken over and distribution is very slow. Pass the word.

As I mentioned before, Jonathan has this knowledge because he has the only small aircraft on the ground in Haiti right now, which is shuttling in supplies and help. Due to his tireless efforts he has been able to bring medical personnel, supplies, food, water and medication directly to the people who need it most. It is because of the money we raise that enables him to continue to pay for fuel and supplies.

I want you to think about this for a minute. Can you imagine if your child, your brother, or your grandchild was in severe pain for days on end, with no medical care? Can you imagine your child losing ALL the family they have ever known and left to fend for themselves on the streets, surrounded by decomposing bodies? This is the situation for so many in Haiti.

These children need our help. I realize I may be sounding very dramatic here but this is the honest truth. I need every one of you to understand and pass on how severely help is needed there. Most of us, if not all, take for granted the food and water we have at our disposal. So many lives are being lost in Haiti – today - because they are lacking the simple essentials.

So, please, give whatever you can. A few dollars from everyone reading this will make a huge difference. Give up the Starbucks for just one week.

Text "support orphans" to 20222 to give $5 on your cell bill.

To make a larger contribution go to www.helpfororphans.org and click “Donate now" and most of all PLEASE spread the word to EVERYONE you know!

See our Press release released early this morning: http://www.prweb.com/releases/2010/01/prweb3505184.htm

Thank you again from the bottom of my heart!!

Love,

Josie Dobin

917.704.2131 mobile

Help for Orphans International

YouTube Video

How To Help Haiti

2010-01-25T23:42:00.000-08:00

Hi,

I am urging you to please read this message and respond accordingly and then to please forward this on to all your contacts.

As you may know, I am fortunate to be working for Help for Orphans International, a charity founded by Sarah Ehrlich four years ago. She has done a lot of work helping orphans in Kenya and is now solely focused on helping the orphans affected by the earthquake in Haiti.

I don't like to spread bad news but we have a volunteer from our organization who's been on the ground there since over a week ago. Words cannot describe the devastation that he has described to me. Imagine a little child losing ALL their family, wounded, no place to live and with little food/water. This is TRULY the situation.

Sarah and myself are going to Haiti in the next few days to raise awareness and to strategize HOW we are most effectively going to help. We will also be purchasing food/formula/diapers in the Dominican Republic to bring to the most hard hit areas.

Our volunteer there named Jonathan flew his 4 seater aircraft 2000 miles from Sag Harbor, NY and is shuttling back and forth between neighboring areas bringing supplies and medical personnel to the most desperate areas. Today he texted me that he was enroute to bring saws and morphine to a medical unit there.

The only way we can keep him doing this is to continue to send him funds.

Do NOT think that they have ENOUGH help because they don't. What we are doing IS making a difference! Jonathan says that he has the only small aircraft shuttling that he has seen. Additionally, because his aircraft is so small he has been cleared to land at Port au Prince airport.

We can NOT continue to do what we're doing without more donations! There's just NO way! Sadly, the surrounding areas have taken advantage of this tragedy and the cost of fuel and food etc.. has skyrocketed! All your donations are 100% tax deductible and you can know that we are actually USING your money RIGHT NOW to make a difference! Anything helps!

Here's how to donate:

1. Click this now Help For Orphans, then select "donate now" on the top left navigation.

2. Text 20222 from you cell phone and type "support orphans" and you will be charged $5 on your next cell phone bill.

3. Call me at 917.704.2131.

More about us:

Help For Orphans

Thank you from the bottom of my heart. If you would like to be kept updated PLEASE email me directly and I will add you to our list!

Love,

Josie Dobin

Almost sold out! Watch the webinar recording asap

2010-01-05T06:36:00.000-08:00

The webinar last night with my friend the former money manager was 'sold out'! He gave us more powerful trading content than most paid courses. And, because the webinar was filled to capacity we are posting the recording.

Here's the link to register for the webinar replay.

Exchange Traded Index Funds

One of the things he taught us is called the "Law of Association"; which states that in 5 years you will become like the people you hang out with and the books you read and the courses you study.

The bottom line is that if you want to learn to trade big, or profitably and consistently, you need to be around someone who does. Someone like our webinar instructor who used to trade $50 million at a time.

Here's a short list of only some of the highlights:

- A little known position sizing trick that can double your returns regardless of what market or system you trade.

- Two simple tricks that instantly remove 95% of your emotions in trading. As all traders know the emotions of fear and greed are the number one enemies of traders; beat them and you win.

- How some hedge funds hunt stops and a simple trick to avoid being a victim. Yes hedge funds, brokers and other individuals (not the "market") really do hunt stops.

- Why money managers only risk 1-2% per trade and still make great returns.

- Why trading is not a "zero sum game" and what this really means for the average trader.

- How to make strong profits using the daily charts and trading only 10 minutes per night.

- How Warren Buffett, Jim Rogers and others became great traders and investors.

- What the "gurus" selling hype trading courses are hiding from you and six easy ways to spot a counterfeit "trading teacher" from a mile away.

- One of his profit target strategies. (He has 4 proprietary tactics and gives us one, no charge).

- How to not be vague with your entries and stops like when others who say, "Buy a few cents, ticks, or pips above ___."

- A little known, no cost, scanner tool that can help you trade profitably, right now.

- A complementary excel sheet that does ALL the math for you so you can easily see the optimal position size and risk vs. reward ratio on all trades.

- Why ETFs are the best instrument to trade.

- Much more.

I promise it won't be a waste of your time. My friend really did do trades as large as 50 million before he left the world of money management. He did share a little of his story, but most of the hour is spent on the subjects above. As you know I like to share good content with my subscribers and this is one of them.

Click here to get the webinar replay:

Exchange Traded Funds

See you there,

Cheers,

Ave Ramel

P.S. The $1,997 bonus day trade course might already be gone!

A Scientific Breakthrough

2010-01-01T21:13:00.000-08:00

Hi,

At last, have finished the First VitaPlus Tour that will answer

a lot of your questions about this scientific breakthrough in

Health, Wellness, and Beauty.

You may now proceed to: First VitaPlus

The First VitaPlus Tour answers the ff:

- Five Power Vegetables

- Five Little Things You Should Know About First VitaPlus

- Prevention and Maintenance of Diseases

- Availability and Product Sizes

Cheers,

Ave Ramel

***Trust in the Lord with all your heart***

How The Rich are Debt-Free

2009-12-30T23:57:00.000-08:00

Hi,

===========================================

Crisis ???

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- what kind of income to work hard for,

- how to keep it, and

- how to protect it from loss.

That is the key to great wealth.

Discover this kind of income in:

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===========================================

Cheers,

Board Games | Year 2012 End of the World

NASA climate expert hopes Copenhagen summit fails

2009-12-28T19:52:00.000-08:00

LONDON (AFP) - A leading scientist who helped alert the world to the dangers of global warming said on Thursday that climate talks in Copenhagen next week were based on such flawed proposals that he hoped they failed.

James Hansen, the director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies since 1981, said attempts to forge a global deal on cutting emissions after the Kyoto treaty expires were based on a "fundamentally wrong" approach.

"I would rather it not happen if people accept that as being the right track because it's a disaster track," he told Britain's Guardian newspaper ahead of the December 7-18 summit.

Hansen is highly sceptical about a favoured measure of cutting greenhouse gas emissions, a cap-and-trade system under which a progressively stricter 'right to pollute' is exchanged in a carbon market.

Instead, he has previously argued for a direct tax on fossil fuels as the only realistic way to achieve the necessary cuts.

"The approach that's been talked about is so fundamentally wrong that it is better to reassess the situation," Hansen told the paper.

"I think it's just as well that we not have a substantive treaty, because if it is going to be the Kyoto-type thing, and people agree to that, then they'll spend years trying to determine exactly what that means and what is a commitment, what are the mechanisms.

"The whole idea that you have goals which you're supposed to meet and that you have outs, with offsets (sold through the carbon market), means you know it's an attempt to continue business as usual."

Hansen, who made headlines worldwide in 1988 with his US Congress testimony that climate change was already well under way, compared the current approach to the Catholic Church's use of indulgences in the Middle Ages.

Sinners paid the bishops to give them redemption, a system that was patently absurd but suited both sides.

"We've got the developed countries who want to continue more or less business as usual and then these developing countries who want money and that is what they can get through offsets," Hansen said.

However, he insisted there was still hope, telling the Guardian: "I find it screwy that people say you passed a tipping point so it's too late.

"In that case what are you thinking: that we are going to abandon the planet? You want to minimise the damage."

Seychelles getting 'sinking feeling'

2009-12-27T05:14:00.000-08:00

DENIS ISLAND, Seychelles (AFP) - Camille Hoareau stands on Denis Island's beach of creamy-white sand, exactly where trees used to grow a few years ago and where the fish will soon swim if global warming surges on.

"See those? They all went down recently," he says, pointing to the upturned roots of casuarina trees felled by the ever-advancing beach.

Hoareau believes this small privately-owned coralline island in the north of the Seychelles archipelago has shrunk by a few acres already since he became estate manager seven years ago.

"The highest point of the island is about 2.5 metres (eight feet), so it doesn't take long for an island like this one to be swallowed up," he says.

Scientific analyses factoring in melting glaciers and ice caps, added water from Greenland and Antarctica and thermal expansion of warming ocean water predict that sea levels could rise globally by up to two metres this century.

For many, climate change remains a slightly abstract notion that may one day involve minor sacrifices such as driving electric cars and buying solar panels.

But for the Seychellois and other people living on low-lying islands, climate change is a tangible issue that literally knocks on their front door every morning and poses a very existential question.

"Where will the water be in 10, 15 years? Global warming has changed our point of view on a lot of things," says Paul Horner, the manager of Denis Island resort.

"The waves are already lapping my front yard so now I'm building a home for the children in the mountains" on one of the Indian Ocean archipelago's granitic islands.

A two-metre rise in water levels would easily flood the runways of the international airport -- which brings in the tourists that account for 80 percent of the country's foreign currency earnings -- and put the capital Victoria at risk.

As a global deal to radically curb carbon emissions in Copenhagen looks anything but certain, the Seychelles fears that tourists will soon require diving gear to enter their rooms in the archipelago's many luxury hotels.

"Time has run out... Even if we are given a very large sum of money, how are we going to prevent a world heritage site like Aldabra atoll from going under?," asks Seychelles Environment and Transport Minister Joel Morgan.

Pacific, Caribbean and Indian Ocean islands such as Barbados, Kiribati and the Seychelles feel let down by the world's rich, big-polluting countries whose elites like to spend their holidays on their beaches.

At a summit in New York in September, the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) issued a declaration scathing the planet's powerhouses for sealing their doom by pussyfooting around the issue of carbon emissions.

We are "profoundly disappointed by the lack of apparent ambition within the international climate change negotiations to protect... vulnerable countries, their peoples, culture, land and ecosystems from the impacts of climate change," they said.

At the key UN climate talks involving 190 nations in Copenhagen, small islands were the first to put forward a draft calling for huge global carbon emissions and target a cap of 1.5 or two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit ) in global warming.

Several days into the meeting, island states were doing what their best to make their voices heard.

A teenage resident of the Solomon Islands in the Pacific asked Australia to welcome her nation's future climate refugees. The tiny Pacific archipelago Tuvalu took on giants China and India and called for a suspension of the conference, and the president of the Maldives, the famed Indian Ocean tourist paradise, made another passionate appeal, weeks after holding a cabinet meeting under water.

For his part, Seychelles President James Michel hopes to impress on world powers that they too have a lot to lose from unchecked climate changes, albeit a few decades after small islands have been wiped off the map.

"We will lose big, but we will continue to argue our case before the world's powers. We feel that we are seriously underestimating the potential impacts of climate change, which may end up costing the planet a lot more," he said in a statement to AFP.

Michel's special advisor on climate change Rolph Payet, whose role as lead author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change won him the Nobel Peace Prize along with former US vice president Al Gore in 2007, takes the view that small nations can achieve the most by themselves.

"Even if we do something now, we won't see the impact for another 20-25 years, but we have to act," he says. "We are pushing for everyone to do that, to invest in sustainability, like restoring the coastline."

Looking at the fallen trees rimming his shrinking paradise island, Camille Hoareau is wasting no time and working relentlessly to win his own race against the climate clock.

"Here we have a scheme on Denis island, where conservation is integrated in the way the hotel is run. Tourists contribute to the effort in the price they pay and it's becoming more and more important to them," he explains.

"The best protection against erosion is trees, so we have to plant as many as possible... I don't know what's going to come out of Copenhagen, but right now it's about people taking responsibility."

by Jean-Marc Mojon

US aid offer boosts deal at UN climate talks

2009-12-26T05:19:00.000-08:00

COPENHAGEN - Large pieces of a climate deal fell into place Thursday with new offers from the U.S. and China, but other tough issues remained before President Barack Obama and other leaders can sign off on a political accord to contain the threat of an overheated world.

An announcement by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton that the United States would contribute to a climate change fund amounting to $100 billion a year by 2020 was quickly followed by an offer from China to open its books on carbon emissions to international review.

The U.S. delegation did not immediately react to the offer by Vice Foreign Minister He Yafei. But it went a long way toward the U.S. demand that China report on its actions to limit the growth of Beijing's carbon emissions and allow experts to go over its data.

The sudden concessions on the eve of Friday's final session lifted hopes that the 193-nation conference could reach a framework agreement that could be refined into a legal accord next year on limiting greenhouse gas emissions and fighting climate change.

Obama and Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao were to join more than 110 world leaders for the last scheduled day of the conference, which for most of its two weeks was embroiled in angry exchanges, a partial boycott by African countries and another entire day wasted in procedural wrangling. It's also possible that once the world leaders depart, the talks could continue at the ministerial level and stretch late into the night and early Saturday.

A pair of Greenpeace activists crashed a Thursday night banquet hosted by Denmark's Queen Margrethe for the world leaders already in town. The couple, dressed in formal wear, unfurled two banners reading "Politicians Talk, Leaders Act" as they walked on the red carpet reception line, and were dragged from the hall by security guards.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and more than a dozen other leaders returned to work from the banquet to forge a political declaration, and were expected to meet into the early hours of Friday. They were seeking to include a range of emissions targets for rich and developing nations and outline financial commitments, said several European diplomats who spoke on condition of anonymity. It also may set deadlines for reaching a legal binding climate pact by the next U.N. conference in Mexico City next November, they said.

The conference seems likely to fall short of the goal set by many developing countries for a deal that would be legally binding on all parties and guarantee the kind of dramatic emissions reductions by the industrial world that threatened nations feel are necessary.

Yvo de Boer, the U.N.'s top climate official, said a political deal by the small group could be the key to unlocking the negotiating stalemate on a host of issues.

"Leaders came here to lead, and that's what they're doing. They're trying to reach an understanding on the key political components - and that's good," de Boer told The Associated Press well after midnight. "If they can advance on that, it can help unstick a lot of other things in the process as well."

But he cautioned that "people won't accept ... an endless process."

Clinton's announcement on funding was widely welcomed. Yoshiko Kijima, a senior Japanese negotiator, said it sent a strong signal by Obama "that he will persuade his own people that we need to show something to developing countries. ... I really respect that."

Swedish Environment Minister Andreas Carlgren said Clinton added "political momentum," and India's Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh called it "a good step forward."

Independent agencies also praised the move. "I think we're closer now than we have been in two years," said Tom Brookes, an analyst for the European Climate Foundation.

"It shows that when the U.S. moves, China moves," said Kim Carstensen, the climate director for the World Wildlife Fund.

The White House was lowering expectations ahead of Obama's trip.

"Coming back with an empty agreement would be far worse than coming back empty-handed," presidential spokesman Robert Gibbs said.

Neither the U.S. nor China raised its commitment on emissions. Clinton repeated the U.S. would cut emissions by 17 percent from 2005 levels by 2020, and China said its voluntary emissions target was nonnegotiable. It announced last month it would cut its "carbon intensity," or the amount of emissions in relation to production, by 40 to 45 percent.

An internal calculation by the United Nations, obtained by The Associated Press, said pledges made so far by both industrial and developing countries would mean a 3-degree Celsius (4.8-degree Fahrenheit) temperature rise. A panel of U.N. scientists has said that any rise above 2 degrees C (3.6-degree F) could lead to a catastrophic sea level rise threatening islands and coastal cities, kill off many species of animals and plants, and alter the agricultural economies of many countries.

But the U.S.-China moves could prompt the European Union to raise its emissions commitment to a 30 percent reduction by 2020 from 1990 levels, and similarly inspire Japan and Australia to lock into the upper end of their previously announced targets - 25 percent each.

Clinton said the U.S. agreement to the annual transfer of $100 billion to developing countries was contingent on reaching a broader agreement that covers the "transparency" of China's measures to limit heat-trapping gases.

"We think this agreement has interlocking pieces, all of which must go together," Clinton said, accusing China of backsliding on deals reached in closed meetings earlier this year. "It would be hard to imagine, speaking for the United States, that there could be the level of financial commitment that I have just announced in the absence of transparency from the second-biggest emitter - and now I guess the first-biggest emitter."

He, the Chinese official who spoke in the same press room a few hours later, said Beijing had no legal obligation to verify its emissions actions, but was not afraid of supervision or responsibility.

"We will enhance and improve our national communication" to the U.N. on its emissions, He said. China also was willing to provide explanations and clarification on its reports.

"The purpose is to improve transparency," He said, adding that Beijing was ready to take part in "dialogue and cooperation that is not intrusive and doesn't infringe on China's sovereignty."

Negotiating committees worked through the day and were expected to continue late into the night on an agreement.

Yet to be decided was how the huge sums of money flowing from rich to poor countries would be handled, and whether a new multinational body should be created to distribute the funds. Dessima Williams of Grenada, who chairs an alliance of small island states, said Obama telephoned her prime minister Wednesday to discuss the governance of the bulging climate fund.

The White House officials said the biggest sticking point in the talks was the form of the final accord, and whether it will be legally binding on everyone.

Developing countries insist Kyoto be renewed and extended while a new pact is drawn up to include the U.S. and others. The U.S. does not want its emissions targets to be binding in an international treaty.

By ARTHUR MAX, Associated Press writers Seth Borenstein, John Heilprin, Charles J. Hanley, Michael Casey and Karl Ritter contributed to this report.

Global warming may require higher dams, stilts

2009-12-25T19:47:00.000-08:00

With the world losing the battle against global warming so far, experts are warning that humans need to follow nature's example: Adapt or die.

That means elevating buildings, making taller and stronger dams and seawalls, rerouting water systems, restricting certain developments, changing farming practices and ultimately moving people, plants and animals out of harm's way.

Adapting to rising seas and higher temperatures is expected to be a big topic at the U.N. climate-change talks in Copenhagen next week, along with the projected cost - hundreds of billions of dollars, much of it going to countries that cannot afford it.

That adaptation will be a major focus is remarkable in itself. Until the past couple of years, experts avoided talking about adjusting to global warming for fear of sounding fatalistic or causing countries to back off efforts to reduce emissions.

"It's something that's been neglected, hasn't been talked about and it's something the world will have to do," said Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. "Adaptation is going to be absolutely crucial for some societies."

Some biologists point to how nature has handled the changing climate. The rare Adonis blue butterfly of Britain looked as if it was going to disappear because it couldn't fly far and global warming was making its habitat unbearable. To biologists' surprise, it evolved longer thoraxes and wings, allowing it to fly farther to cooler locales.

"Society needs to be changing as much as wildlife is changing," said Texas A&M biologist Camille Parmesan, an expert on how species change with global warming.

One difficulty is that climate change is happening rapidly.

"Adaptation will be particularly challenging because the rate of change is escalating and is moving outside the range to which society has adapted in the past" when more natural climate changes happened, U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration chief Jane Lubchenco, a marine biologist, told Congress on Wednesday.

Cities, states and countries are scrambling to adapt or are at least talking about it and setting aside money for it. Some examples:

• England is strengthening the Thames River flood control barrier at a cost of around half a billion dollars.

• The Netherlands is making its crucial flood control system stronger.

• California is redesigning the gates that move water around the agriculturally vital Sacramento River Delta so that they can work when the sea level rises dramatically there.

• Boston elevated a sewage treatment plant to keep it from being flooded when sea level rises. New York City is looking at similar maneuvers for water plants.

• Chicago has a program to promote rooftop vegetation and reflective roofs that absorb less heat. That could keep the temperature down and ease heat waves.

• Engineers are installing "thermal siphons" along the oil pipeline in Alaska, which is built on permafrost that is thawing, to draw heat away from the ground.

• Researchers are uprooting moisture-loving trees along British Columbia's coastal rainforests and dropping their seedlings in the dry ponderosa pine forests of Idaho, where they are more likely to survive.

• Singapore plans to cut its flood-prone areas in half by 2011 by widening and deepening drains and canals and completing a $226 million dam at the mouth of the city's main river.

• In Thailand, there are large-scale efforts to protect places from rising sea levels. Monks at one temple outside Bangkok had to raise the floor by more than 3 feet.

• Desperately poor Bangladesh is spending more than $50 million on adaptation. It is trying to fend off the sea with flood control and buildings on stilts.

President Barack Obama and Congress are talking about $1.2 billion a year from the U.S. for international climate aid, which includes adaptation. The U.N. climate chief, Yvo de Boer, said $10 billion to $12 billion a year is needed from developed countries through 2012 to "kick-start" things. Then it will get even more expensive.

The World Bank estimates adaptation costs will total $75 billion to $100 billion a year over the next 40 years. The International Institute for Environment and Development, a London think tank, says that number is too low.

It may even be $200 billion a year or $300 billion a year, said Chris Hope, a business school professor at the University of Cambridge and part of the IIED study.

Nevertheless, Hope said failing to adapt would be even more expensive - perhaps $6 trillion a year on average over the next 200 years. Adaptation could cut that by about $2 trillion a year, he said.

As much as three-quarters of the spending will be needed in the developing world, experts say.

"Those are not the countries that caused the problem," Hope said. "There's a pretty strong moral case for us giving them assistance for the impacts that we've largely caused."

Sending money from rich countries to poor ones raises questions of who will control the spending and whether it will be wasted or stolen.

As for helping plants and animals, British climate scientist Martin Parry said the world will have to create a triage system to figure out which living things can be saved, which can't and are effectively goners, and which don't need immediate help.

"It's a brutal way to go about things," Parry said.

And what about people?

Some islands, such as the Maldives, and some coastal cities will not be able to survive rising seas no matter what protections are put in place, said Saleemel Huq, a senior fellow at IIED who runs an adaptation center in Bangladesh. In those cases, he said, the world will need "planned relocation" of people and cities.

Parmesan said people are going to have to realize that "some areas are not going to be good enough to live in in the next 100 years."

By SETH BORENSTEIN, AP Science Writer, Associated Press writers Michael Casey in Bangkok, Alex Kennedy in Singapore, and Minh Tran in Hanoi, Vietnam, contributed to this report.

Upfront money needed to ease UN climate deal

2009-12-24T19:56:00.000-08:00

NEW YORK - Money on the table - perhaps $10 billion a year or more - could help close a deal in Denmark next month and keep climate talks moving toward a new global treaty in 2010. But if poorer nations see too little offered up front, the U.N. conference could end in discord.

The money would help developing countries cope with ocean flooding, drought and other effects of climate change, while also helping them cut down on emissions of global-warming gases. The funds might eventually come from new sources, such as a tax on airline flights, but negotiators for now are seeking quicker infusions.

"Rich countries must put at least $10 billion a year on the table to kick-start immediate action up to 2012," the U.N. climate chief, Yvo de Boer, told reporters last week in a preview of the two-week conference opening next Monday in Copenhagen.

His goal gathered backing in recent days, including from French President Nicolas Sarkozy and Britain's Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who said his nation would contribute $1.3 billion over three years.

"The rest of Europe will do so," Brown told a Commonwealth summit in Trinidad on Friday. "And I believe America will do so as well."

U.S. President Barack Obama and the Chinese leadership energized lagging climate talks last week by announcing modest targets for controlling their countries' emissions of carbon dioxide and other gases blamed for warming the atmosphere.

Although talks will now be extended, Copenhagen was originally meant to culminate years of negotiation centered on two pillars: emissions reductions and financial aid for developing countries to adapt to climate change.

The proposed emissions targets by industrialized nations for 2020 - and China's plan to slow emissions growth - fall short of what scientists say is needed to head off damaging climate change. But if developing nations accept the quick-start financing, a deal might be reached at Copenhagen on a framework for putting all elements in a binding agreement next year, with an eye toward deeper emissions cuts and heftier financing beyond that.

"Short-term finance would be used as an opportunity to get a political buy-in for the other elements of an agreement," said Athena Ballesteros, a climate-finance expert at the Washington think tank World Resources Institute.

The needs are becoming increasingly clear.

An international scientific update last week said changes are happening faster than anticipated. Global temperatures are rising by 0.19 degrees C (0.34 degrees F) per decade, pushing the world into a time of climate disruption, species die-off and expanding seas. Oceans are rising by 3.4 millimeters (0.13 inches) per year, faster than predicted.

"It threatens to submerge the Maldives. My country would not survive," Mohamed Nasheed, president of that low-lying Indian Ocean island nation, told a conference of vulnerable nations earlier this month.

Offers of assistance thus far have been "so low, it is like arriving at an earthquake zone with a dustpan and brush," Nasheed said.

In scores of nations, money will be needed to build coastal protection, modify or shift crops threatened by drought, build water supply and irrigation systems, preserve forests, improve health care to deal with diseases spread by warming, and move from fossil-fuel to low-carbon energy systems, such as solar and wind power.

The World Bank estimates adaptation costs alone will total $75 billion to $100 billion a year over the next 40 years. The cost of mitigation - reducing carbon emissions in poorer nations - will add tens of billions to that. China and other developing countries say the target should be even higher, in the range of $350 billion.

De Boer's $10 billion a year to 2012 is barely a start. But "kick-start finance is so important because such finance will allow developing countries to plan," he told The Associated Press.

In fact, much of the funding would go to "capacity building" - training, planning, getting a fix on needs, local emissions and related concerns.

Upfront money would also help rebuild trust between the rich north and poor south, eroded by years of relative inaction on climate, particularly by the United States.

Climate conference observers expect the European Union to offer most at Copenhagen, perhaps $5 billion a year or more. Japan might contribute $1 billion or more, as would the United States. Appropriations for 2010 totaling some $1 billion to $1.3 billion related to international climate aid are making their way through Congress.

"Quite simply it's the bottom line for getting a deal," New Zealand's Prime Minister John Key said of the financing package, as he pledged up to $50 million on Sunday at a Commonwealth summit in Trinidad.

Obama might use his Dec. 9 drop-by at the Copenhagen conference - on his way to receive the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, Norway - to announce a U.S. offer on financing. Some 80 other presidents and premiers are expected to attend the final days of the conference Dec. 17-18.

Finance expert Ballesteros expects Copenhagen to narrow the focus of talks next year on sources for longer-term, richer adaptation funding, such as a levy on international air transport, sharing in proceeds from the growing trade in carbon emission allowances, or even a global levy on carbon emissions.

Most important is that such revenue be "stable and predictable," not dependent on vagaries of budget-writing in national capitals, she said.

Emissions reductions, adaptation finance and other elements would be part of a hoped-for treaty or set of internationally binding agreements next year to succeed the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. Its limited emissions reductions expire in 2012. The U.S. was the only industrial nation not to accept Kyoto.

By CHARLES J. HANLEY, AP Special Correspondent

Commonwealth talks boost hopes of climate deal

2009-12-23T19:41:00.000-08:00

PORT OF SPAIN (AFP) - Hopes were rising Saturday that a new global climate pact is within reach after rich nations at a Commonwealth summit offered to help poorer countries bear the costs of implementing any deal.

The 53-nation body embracing major global players like Britain, Australia and India, and smaller island states like Nauru and the Maldives, were expected to issue a joint commitment to tackling climate change.

"Success in Copenhagen is in sight," said UN chief Ban Ki-moon, referring to the climate negotiations in the Danish capital December 7-18.

He and Danish Prime Minister Lars Loekke Rasmussen, who both made a rare address to the Commonwealth even though they are not members, praised a move by Britain and France to launch a 10-billion-dollar fund for developing nations.

By showing willingness to meet "the need for money on the table," it was now "realistic" to expect Copenhagen to result in the framework for a treaty to succeed the Kyoto Protocol which expires in 2012, Rasmussen said.

"We should use the momentum out there and convert this momentum into an ambitious deal in Copenhagen."

But he stressed the deal to be hammered out by some 87 leaders including US President Barack Obama must include "commitments, numbers and precise language."

Ban, who has led the push towards Copenhagen, agreed it must not become just another talking shop, saying: "We will come out with a very concrete foundation for a legally binding treaty."

For the first time Indian Premier Manmohan Singh Saturday said that he was willing to commit his country to ambitious global carbon emission cuts, provided others shared the burden.

Much of the new momentum for a climate deal stemmed from a joint overture by British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and French President Nicolas Sarkozy at the Commonwealth gathering, whose leaders represent two billion people, or a third of the planet's population.

The two European leaders proposed to compensate developing countries for the economic disadvantages they would face in cutting carbon emissions.

Britain said it had already set aside 1.3 billion dollars to be paid into the Copenhagen Launch Fund over the next three years.

"Poorer countries must have an understanding that the richer countries will help them adapt to climate change and make the necessary adjustments in their economies," Brown said on his website.

Sarkozy, who was also specially invited by Brown to address the Commonwealth summit in Trinidad, did not say how much France would contribute.

But he told reporters the fund would operate for the next three years, beyond which an "ambitious mechanism" for continued payments would be established.

Australia's Prime Minister Kevin Rudd also welcomed what he called "a fast-start fund."

"Australia is of the view that such a fast-start fund can assist in bringing about a good outcome at Copenhagen, but most critically, assist those most vulnerable states dealing with adaptation challenges now," he said.

The willingness of developed countries to step up their commitments bolstered other moves that suggested nations are now determined to reach an accord.

Important among those were carbon cut pledges by almost all the nations most responsible for greenhouse gas emissions.

China, the world's biggest polluter, has vowed to reduce "carbon intensity" as measured by unit of gross domestic product by 40-45 percent by 2020, compared to 2005 levels.

The United States, the other major contributor to global warming, is looking at curbing carbon emissions by 17 percent from 2005 levels by 2020.

The European Union is unilaterally cutting emissions by 20 percent by 2020 compared to 1990 levels, and is offering to go to 30 percent if other industrialised parties follow suit.

India, home to nearly 1.2 billion people, is the only major greenhouse gas emitting nation yet to announce figures on reining in its carbon output, with just over a week to go until UN climate talks start in Copenhagen.

"India is willing to sign on to an ambitious global target for emissions reductions or limiting temperature increase but this must be accompanied by an equitable burden sharing paradigm," Singh said in a speech, the text of which was released by his office in New Delhi.

by Marc Burleigh

How a Little Town in Peru Is Becoming a Hotspot

2009-12-22T21:12:00.000-08:00

A sure way to get people riled up in Quince Mil, a sweltering outpost in Peru's southern jungle, is to ask about the origin of the town's uncommon name.

There are at least four versions explaining the name, which means "Fifteen Thousand," each more colorful than the one before it. Mayor Mario Samanez claims to have the official version. He says its rains around 15,000 mm (590 inches) each year in the town, hence the name.

"This is the spot with the world's second highest amount of rainfall annually. That is where the name comes from," Samanez says.

Actually the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration does not list Quince Mil among the wettest places in the world. The title goes to Mawsynram, India, with 467 inches, followed by jungle spots in Colombia and Hawaii.

Local residents in Quince Mil have their own theories about the name. Some say a group of explorers passing through lost 15,000 pesos where the town now stands. The place was called 15,000 because that's what the explorers would ask for every time they came back to search for the cash. The town's name has become a synonym for bad luck.

But malevolence may be at the origin as well. Fernando Farro, a local farmer, says Quince Mil takes its name from the amount of money the Peruvian government gave Russian fortune-seekers at the turn of the 20th century to eliminate Amazonian tribes and open the area for sugar plantations.

And that darker explanation may be more relevant now as more and more attention is being paid to the backwater town.

Quince Mil sits at a strategic point on one of the final legs of a new highway that will link Peru's Pacific coast to Sao Paulo on Brazil's southern Atlantic coast. A few years ago it would take a week to get from Cuzco, in the Andes, to Quince Mil, with the road reaching elevations of 14,000 feet and descending fast into thick, tropical forest. The same route, now being paved by a Brazilian construction company, will take around six hours when the road is finished.

"The road means radical change for the population. It is a great opportunity for people throughout the valley to get their products to markets," says Samanez, who expects the blacktop to finally reach the town in mid-2010. (See pictures of Sao Paulo, the 'Clean City.')

JosÉ Bonifaz, an economist at Peru's University of the Pacific, calculates in a new book that the road will generate close to $2 billion for local communities in the coming two decades. The government forecasts that the highway could add a full percentage point to GDP.

Brazil will be the big beneficiary at the start, sending minerals, meat and soybeans through Peru for export to China, instead of using the Panama Canal. But local authorities expect the Peruvian entreprenerus to slowly catch up with exports headed across the Atlantic.

Quince Mil is doing its part to get ready. The number of boarding houses - mainly rooms crafted of plywood and plastic sheets - has jumped from two to more than 30 and the residents say there has been an explosion in restaurants, bars and small shops as folks get ready for the highway, instead of dirt road, traffic.

The population has more than doubled since the last census in 2007, when there were fewer than 1,000 people in the town.

While pleased with the highway, Samanez is worried that it could spark the destruction of the area's pristine forests because of gold found in rivers. There are already more than 100 requests for mining concessions around Quince Mil (five have been formally granted) and with gold prices above $1,000 an ounce a gold rush is already on in the nearby Madre de Dios state. Samanez is hoping the state creates a protected in nearby forests that would curb mining, logging and cattle farming.

U.S. scientists working in the zone share Samanez's concern and believe that Quince Mil could be put on the map for its environmental potential. "This is a biological hotspot. There is so much out there just waiting to be identified," says John Janovec, a botanist from the Botanical Research Institute of Texas. He sees tourists coming down to gawk at birds, tropical flowers and brilliantly colored butterflies.

Janovec, who looks more like a ZZ Top guitarist than an expert on the nutmeg tree, is constantly darting about as he coordinates the Andes to Amazon Biodiversity Project that has documented new species of bugs, birds and plants. He has a revolving door program that continuously brings in other specialists. In early November he was sharing Quince Mil with Russ Van Horn, a leading expert in bears from the San Diego Zoo, and Eric Christenson, a renowned botanist from Florida specializing in orchids.

Their days begin at 4 a.m. and extend late into the night. Christenson has already identified orchids not known to exist in Peru and Van Horn is setting dozens of camera traps to document nocturnal animal activity. Most of the work is done to the constant sound of rain on the tin roof and with spotty electricity, as the town's small electricity generator is constantly on the fritz.

"The development here has been incredible. Things are moving so quickly it is hard to know if Quince Mil will still be surrounded by forests in a few years," says Van Horn.

By LUCIEN CHAUVIN

"Climate Express" to Copenhagen lowers footprint

2009-12-21T19:38:00.000-08:00

ABOARD THE CLIMATE EXPRESS - A train splashed with a green stripe carried 450 U.N. officials, delegates, climate activists and journalists from Brussels to the climate summit in Copenhagen on Saturday to symbolize efforts to reduce the convention's carbon footprint.

More trains were leaving from other European capitals, and one was concluding a trip from Kyoto, Japan, through China and the Trans-Siberian route across Russia.

But symbols were all the trains could be. Most of the 15,000 people expected at the two-week conference opening Monday will arrive by plane from opposite ends of the globe.

The journey through Belgium, Germany and Denmark was intended to underscore what campaigners say is the need to switch to low-carbon economies and rely more on public transportation to reduce tailpipe emissions.

"Anyone who thinks it's impossible is wrong," said Achim Steiner, director of the U.N. Environment Program, noting Germany's move away from fossil fuels over the past 10 years toward greater use of wind, solar and hydroelectricity.

Railway officials claimed the trip is carbon neutral. They said the German railroad, Deutsche Bahn, bought the equivalent of the electricity needed to run the train from renewable sources and added it to the Germany electrical grid.

Traveling by train along the nearly 500-mile (800-kilometer) route emits 33 kilograms of carbon dioxide per person, compared with 115 kilograms by air, the officials said.

Led by France, high-speed rail is being extended through much of Europe, with trains moving faster than 155 miles per hour (250 kph). Airlines say they plan to link up with railways to provide alternatives to short European flights.

But train travel is still not glitch-free. A power problem in moving from the Belgian to the German grid delayed the Climate Express by a half-hour at the German border town of Aachen, although railway officials said the transfer problem was unusual and the lost time would be made up.

The 14-hour journey passed rolling hills of eastern Belgium and German farmland and industrial centers. That compared with three hours' flight and about nine hours by car - in the unlikely case there are no traffic jams on Europe's crowded highways.

Steiner called for more investment in public transport and green energy, saying that business investors were looking for signals emerging from the summit.

"Hundreds of billions of dollars are in waiting mode," he said. "In this financial crisis right now, Copenhagen should be one of the biggest stimulus packages."

The summit aims to draw up a political accord among 192 countries for controlling global greenhouse gas emissions causing the warming of the earth. Transportation is responsible for about 27 percent of worldwide emissions.

By ARTHUR MAX, Associated Press Writer

Have the greens failed?

2009-12-20T20:49:00.000-08:00

On May 3, 2007, League of Conservation Voters President Gene Karpinski realized that the plan was working.

That morning, Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), then a presidential contender, attached his name to a model piece of climate legislation that sought to bring U.S. carbon emissions down by an ambitious 80 percent by 2050. Not to be outdone, a few hours later, Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) hastily announced she'd support the same bill.

And with that, climate issues seemed - at long last - to have departed the realm of idealism and entered the more fruitful arena of politics, with its results-driven rules of engagement.

Environmentalists would no longer have to appeal to politicians' best instincts by promising they'd be saving future generations and doing the right thing for the globe. Instead, climate activists could draft more-persuasive allies of the electoral variety: fear, ambition and self-preservation.

"It really became a competition. That was the beauty of it," recalled Karpinski. "This became an issue where they were competing to see who was the best."

Yet as green activists converge on the 15th United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, their sense of disappointment is palpable, even with the eleventh-hour decision by President Obama to attend the summit on Dec. 9. What was seen in the heady days of 2007 and 2008 as the likeliest venue for a new international agreement on carbon emissions now caps a year of mixed results.

While the American political system has, in many ways, seen a total transformation in its capacity and willingness to tackle such a transcendent issue, some of the traditional obstacles remain - primarily the age-old laws of partisan politics and the limits on how much ambitious legislation Congress can absorb at one time.

At the apex of the 2008 campaign, with the League and other groups leaning hard on a crowded field of presidential candidates, and congressional Democrats shifting steadily toward the view that action would be required, a Democratic victory seemed likely to mean a treaty in the new president’s first year.

In retrospect, though, what had seemed like a political coup was just a partial victory. The populist organizing, the new rhetoric of green jobs and the long-term goals of the campaign season glossed over the concrete terms that have turned 2009 into a season of diminished expectations, making clear that Copenhagen will be, at best, just another step in a long process.

In interviews, environmental leaders made the case that the movement's successes vastly outweigh the setbacks and that they probably never could have predicted the main obstacle to passing major climate legislation this year.

"When someone asks why aren't we going to get a deal in Copenhagen, the biggest reason comes down to two words: health care," said Karpinski.

If the green community is slightly downcast on the eve of Copenhagen, its members still argue that the 12-day conference should set the stage for a major showdown over climate legislation in Congress next year, with victory there being the precursor to a global accord.

"The president is working closely with Congress to pass energy and climate legislation as soon as possible," the White House said in announcing his trip to the summit. Obama hopes his attendance will "drive progress toward a comprehensive and operational Copenhagen accord" that will "serve as a steppingstone to a legally binding treaty."

At the beginning of Obama's presidency, the House of Representatives chose to tackle climate change first, moving swiftly to pass legislation on carbon emissions last summer. But the White House - and, just as crucially, the Senate - went another way. In April, the Senate moved to reserve the procedural fast track known as reconciliation for health and education policy - but not for climate change.

"The administration looked at that and said, 'We can't get a clean win here. Let's go for a clean win. Health care's a clean win," said Sierra Club Executive Director Carl Pope. Even then, health care legislation "turned out to be a harder win than they thought," he said.

The shift left environmental leaders frustrated and doubting the value of some early commitments.

"I do regret that when Obama made his original short-term commitment, we didn't try to get him to be more ambitious," Pope said, referring to Obama's campaign promise to reduce emissions 17 percent by 2020 - a goal that because of the recession and state initiatives could today conceivably be reached without federal action.

"Hillary never trumped him on the short-term goal, so he never had to move it," said Pope, who called Obama's target "pathetically inadequate."

The White House says Obama will offer the 17 percent cut below 2005 emissions during his trip to Copenhagen if China and other less developed countries offer "robust mitigation contributions" of their own.

A day after the president's announcement, China declared that, by 2020, it would reduce emissions relative to its economic output by 40 percent to 45 percent compared with 2005 - a formula that would allow emissions to grow but slow the rate of increase.

Indeed, in the run-up to Copenhagen, countries from Russia to Brazil committed to more aggressive 2020 targets, and climate activists now are pushing the United States and other industrial countries to reduce their emissions by between 25 percent and 40 percent from 1990 levels.

With that focus on long term over short came a decision to stress the targets over the mechanics, including how to achieve such deep cuts and how much it would cost.

"They weren't sweating the details," said Chris Tucker, a spokesman for oil and gas industry groups that have fought efforts to regulate carbon emissions. "They were worrying about the aspirational and emotional stuff. And it turns out people care about the details."

Advocates for a strong international treaty on carbon emissions continue to wrestle with a deep disconnect between a cultural moment - in which "green" is both a pop phenomenon and a corporate branding gimmick - and deep congressional skepticism toward actual action. Even oil companies pine for the green brand, and it's almost undoubtedly good public relations for the major companies that have stormed out of the Chamber of Commerce because of its opposition to climate legislation.

But the green movement also has been unable to translate the broad popular support for environmental causes into a practical solution that captures the public's imagination and could translate into legislative victory. The mechanism for controlling carbon emissions, known as cap and trade, has turned into an Achilles' heel. And Copenhagen remains, to most Americans, merely the capital of Denmark. At best.

"There are a lot of people in the United States who hear the word 'Copenhagen,' and they think of chewing tobacco," said Tucker, referring to a popular American brand. "There was a disconnect between the folks in Washington and the people on whom this was going to be imposed, and it should have been understood from the start that this was going to be a much heavier lift."

But saving the planet didn't seem too heavy a lift for Democrats campaigning in Iowa in 2007. Throughout the Democratic primary, environmental issues were prominent, and candidates were aggressive. If Clinton and Obama could promise an 80 percent reduction in emissions, New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson would distinguish himself by going to 90 percent.

This was no accident: The League of Conservation Voters and its allies had invested deeply in organizing in the early-primary states, making sure that the candidates would be grilled on climate issues at town halls and kitchen tables and that attention would be drawn to those who strayed from the vision of the man who, at the time, was the party's most prominent leader, former Vice President Al Gore.

In August, the League aired a television ad in Des Moines, Iowa, that tinted the candidates’ faces green and that asked - amid chatter about the first black or first female president - who would be the “first green president.”

And then there were the turbines. Windmills were everywhere - at least, everywhere in the television ads candidates ran with promises to revitalize the economy through new, green jobs, the win-win argument developed by Democrats to sell environmentalism to blue-collar workers. That trend had begun in 2006, when the turbine was the "single most common symbol in a political ad," said Sierra Club’s Pope.

"All over the country, people were running ads of wind turbines - and winning," he said. "Americans really bought - probably even more than is true - the notion that clean energy jobs can't be outsourced."

Obama's campaign seemed to vindicate the claims of environmentalists about a changed political environment on climate change when Clinton and Sen. John McCain, the GOP presidential nominee, responded to high gas prices by calling for a gas tax holiday.

"This isn't an idea designed to get you through the summer; it's an idea designed to get them through an election," Obama said, successfully dismissing the notion as political gimmickry.

Obama's victory in the presidential race underscored the importance of the environmental movement's early organizing. He had once been a friend of the coal industry in his home state, Illinois, lavishing praise on "clean coal" technology that environmentalists considered little more than an excuse to keep polluting.

But he quietly reversed that stance, stressing that clean coal was merely an ambition worth funding. He campaigned hard onglobal warming, made the phrase "planet in peril" part of his stump speech and turned the fight against climate change into one of the three pillars of his domestic platform.

Presidential politics wasn't the only place the environmental groups were active. Led by Greenpeace, many activists focused on Congress, running grass-roots campaigns in local districts to pressure lawmakers to back climate legislation that was coming down the pike. The group persuaded 72 members of the House to more forcefully back action on climate change, said Phil Radford, Greenpeace's executive director.

The Democrats' electoral victories in November 2008 were, for the greens, a moment of triumph. In retrospect, however, the movement already was swimming upstream. The economic meltdown pushed climate change - an issue on which voters typically express concern, but not as a top priority - further down the public’s agenda.

The Pew Research Center found that by last January, global warming "ranked at the bottom of the public's list of policy priorities for the president and Congress this year." Independent voters and Republicans ranked it last on a list of 20 priorities, while Democrats ranked it 16th.

Other polling suggests Americans are growing more skeptical of the science behind climate change, with those who blame human activity for global warming - 36 percent - falling 11 percentage points this year, according to Pew.

That skepticism is likely to increase following the embarrassing leak last month of e-mail exchanges among climate scientists dissing the work of peers who doubt that humans are causing global warming.

Those public opinion numbers put the U.S. out of step with its major industrialized partners, Japan and theEuropean Union, and closer to the lower-emitting countries of the developing world.

"The public is in favor of this so long as it doesn't cost anything," said David Victor, a Stanford Law School professor who has argued that the Copenhagen meeting should focus on concrete, politically plausible goals, not a global treaty. "Support was high until a year and a half ago, and then the collapse in the economy happened and got people focused on other things."

What's more, promised "green jobs" - a poll-tested political winner - failed to materialize with the speed hoped for under Obama's economic stimulus package.

"People wanted jobs right now," said Pope. "The administration actively, eagerly wanted to put more of the stimulus money into short-term, fast-start green infrastructure, and they couldn't, because the states hadn't teed it up."

"The timing was terrible," he said. "And the timing of Copenhagen was terrible."

By November, when the White House formally abandoned efforts to create a binding international treaty in Copenhagen, that outcome had been clear to both sides for months. The Senate now has pushed environmental legislation back behind financial reform, to next spring at best, eating away at American leverage overseas.

"The whole thing reminded me of the situation where you're telling everyone you're going to get married, you announce the wedding date, you choose your venue, pick the menu, invite all your friends - all without getting engaged, even without going on the first date,' said Tucker, the industry spokesman.

Privately, environmentalists are arguing among themselves about whether to publicly turn up the heat on the Obama administration, but they are reluctant to do anything that could weaken the president ahead of the climate debates on Capitol Hill. And Democratic officials have begun to express disappointment with the blown deadline.

"Countries see the United States not moving, and they wonder why they should do anything," Sen. John Kerry(D-Mass.) told POLITICO. "They want to know where we are. Everybody asks, you know, 'Are you going to act? What are you going to do? When are you going to do this?"

Expectations remain low for Copenhagen, but there are signs that the climate issue is inching up on Obama's agenda, including his decision to attend the conference and offer specific cuts in U.S. emissions.

Obama made climate talks a priority in a November visit to China, and there are signals that the United States may commit more aid to developing economies to help them meet their emissions targets. His administration, meanwhile, has moved fast on administrative measures that will make the U.S. targets easier to meet.

"You have to lower expectations [for Copenhagen] a little bit from what we would have liked to have seen happen," said the League's Karpinski. "We'll be disappointed that we won't get the final deal we want in Copenhagen, but we'll make significant progress and put in place key building blocks."

Other groups continue to keep the pressure on the president. Greenpeace recently unfurled a banner with his image from atop Mount Rushmore - a statement, it said, to suggest that he could be a truly great president, but only if he leads on the climate issue.

A political agreement short of a treaty in Copenhagen, Kerry said, could be an assertion of the president's primacy over a recalcitrant Congress.

"It's a restatement of the power of the president to direct the [Environmental Protection Agency] to regulate greenhouse gases. He has the power of the budget to make requests of Congress, he has the power of executive orders to order certain behavior in the transformation of energy in buildings, fleet purchases," said Kerry. "But the main thing is that the president is committing to move in a direction, and, of course, where Congress and parliaments need to be brought into play, they are going to be brought into play."

Greenpeace's Radford said Obama's problem is not his position on the climate issue but, rather, his will.

"The question is how much the president will lead," he said. Americans have "overlearned" the lessons of Kyoto, where President Bill Clinton agreed to a treaty that he never submitted for ratification because it faced near-unanimous rejection in the Senate, Radford said.

"They're using that as a reason to hide behind Congress instead of to lead Congress," he said. "The world is watching to see whether [Obama will] step up."

Ben Smith, Politico.com

Australia's global warming bill defeated

2009-12-19T19:32:00.000-08:00

SYDNEY (AP) - Australia's plan to become one of the first nations with a carbon trading system to cut greenhouse gas emissions was dealt a blow Tuesday when the main opposition party chose a leader who vowed to vote it down.

A tumultuous day in politics also means the country could also be one step closer to early elections, with policy differences over global warming placing it as a central issue of the coming campaign.

Debate in the Senate on the government's plans for an emissions trading system continued Tuesday as the conservative Liberal party ejected one leader from the post and elected another. A final vote could come at almost any time.

The conservatives split bitterly and publicly in the past week over the bill, culminating in Tuesday's leadership challenge. Right-leaning Tony Abbott won the vote, ousting Malcolm Turnbull, who had struck a deal with the government to support the bill.

Abbott said his party would now move to defer the bill until after next week's U.N. global summit on climate change in Copenhagen, and possibly longer. If the bill is not deferred, the opposition would vote against it this week in the Senate, he said. The government lacks a majority in the Senate, and the bill will almost certainly fail if the Liberals vote against it.

If the bill is defeated, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd is handed a trigger to call an election at any time under constitutional rules meant to be the ultimate resolution to any deadlocks between Australia's two houses of Parliament.

Rudd is unlikely to call elections immediately, for reasons including that political campaigning during the Christmas-New Year holiday season is considered out of bounds. In any case, elections are due sometime in 2010, and opinion polls consistently show Rudd is so popular that - barring major stumbles - he would probably win whenever they are held.

Rudd wants the legislation passed before the Copenhagen summit to help portray him as a world leader on tackling climate change.

Australia is a small greenhouse gas polluter in global terms, but one of the worst per capita because it relies heavily for its electricity on its abundant reserves of coal, which also make it the world's largest exporter of the polluting fuel. As the driest continent after Antarctica, it is also considered one of the most vulnerable countries to climate change.

The European Union has a carbon trading system, as do some U.S. states. Canada and New Zealand are among countries considering them.

Under the government's plan, an annual limit would be placed on the amount of greenhouse gases allowed to be pumped into the atmosphere and permits would be issued to regulate that ceiling. The permits could be bought and sold, setting up a market system that makes reducing emissions potentially profitable for polluting companies.

Rudd wants to slash Australia's emissions by up to 25 percent below 2000 levels by 2020 if a tough emissions reduction deal is struck in Copenhagen.

Abbott said the proposed system amounts to a massive new tax that would crimp the economy - shrugging off opinion polls that say most Australians want the government to act against climate change.

"I am really not frightened of an election on this issue," Abbott told reporters.

Rudd, speaking in Washington shortly before Abbott was elected his party's leader, said the conservatives were dragging their heels on the issue and that "further delay equals denial on climate change."

'We have a Deal' in Copenhagen

2009-12-19T03:48:00.000-08:00

COPENHAGEN - U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon says "we have a deal" after a climate conference in Copenhagen decided to recognize a political accord brokered by President Barack Obama with China and other emerging powers.

But Ban says he's "aware that this is just the beginning" of a process to craft a binding pact to rein in greenhouse gas emissions. Still, Ban says the Copenhagen Agreement "will have an immediate operational effect."

Many poor nations had bitterly protested the deal because it lacks specific targets for reducing carbon emissions.

By JOHN HEILPRIN, Associated Press

EU nations commit $3.6 billion to climate fund

2009-12-18T20:44:00.000-08:00

BRUSSELS - EU leaders agreed Friday to commit euro2.4 billion ($3.6 billion) a year until 2012 to help poorer countries combat global warming, as they sought to rescue their image as climate change innovators and bolster the talks in Copenhagen.

All 27 members of the European Union agreed to commit money to a short-term fund for poorer countries, Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt said after two days of difficult talks at a summit in Brussels.

Britain, France and Germany will each contribute about 20 percent of the money. But with many cash-strapped eastern EU states balking, donations by some were thought to be only a token to reach a unanimous agreement.

Critics said the EU was merely repacking aid promised earlier in different forms and sidestepping key climate change issues to produce a favorable headline.

Britain is promising the most at $650 million each year - saying this reflects its links to former members of the British Empire affected by climate change. It is also is pushing to raise that figure and the overall EU figure higher at the Copenhagen talks next week.

"(This) really does make possible an agreement where Africa and the developing countries can see that their needs are being taken seriously," British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said.

France and Germany followed with pledges of $622 million (euro420 million) each a year.

The money goes toward a global $10 billion annual fund for short-term help to poor countries, particularly in Africa, adapt to the effects of global warming before a new climate treaty being negotiated in Copenhagen comes into force in 2012.

The money would help poorer countries protect their coasts, adjust crops threatened by drought, build water supplies and irrigation systems, preserve forests and move from fossil fuel to low-carbon energy systems such as solar and wind power.

Yet the $10 billion-a-year pales in comparison to the huge stimulus packages and bank bailouts paid by many EU governments in the wake of the global financial meltdown. Financier George Soros, speaking Thursday in Copenhagen, dismissed that figure as inadequate for the scope of change facing poor countries.

Greenpeace was also critical of Friday's announcement, saying EU leaders were avoiding more important decisions on longer-term climate financing for poor nations and on greenhouse gas emissions cuts.

"Climate change will not end in three years ... so neither should the flow of cash," said Joris den Blanken, the environmental group's climate expert.

ActionAid, which focuses on development aid, said the EU was failing to pony up "real money" and that many EU states had "a track record of repackaging or re-announcing existing aid."

Reinfeldt conceded that the commitments announced Friday include new money as well as aid promised earlier.

The EU leaders also pledged Friday to reduce their emissions by 30 percent of 1990 levels by 2020 - but only if other leading polluters make comparable commitments first. Reinfeldt said Europe was waiting for deeper emission cuts from U.S. and Canada.

Two years ago, the EU was ahead of the pack when it pledged to cut 20 percent of emissions from 1990 levels by 2020 and to increase that to 30 percent if other big polluters made similar promises. Japan and Russia have now outpaced Europe with 25 percent cuts. The U.S. is promising a 3 percent reduction from 1990 levels.

Not all EU states are behind the drive to cut carbon emissions. Poland's prime minister Donald Tusk said his nation would only start making major emissions cuts after 2020, when new nuclear power stations could allow Poland to wean itself off cheap - and polluting - coal.

On other issues, EU leaders also called for more debate on a global financial transaction levy, saying banks must do more to contribute to "the society they serve." They didn't say whether the money should go toward development or a global bank bailout fund.

Brown said there was "growing support" across the world for such a levy and that EU leaders also backed Britain's plans for a one-time tax of 50 percent for all bonuses over 25,000 pounds ($40,800). But no firm EU-wide action was taken.

On foreign policy, the EU leaders said they would support new sanctions against Iran over its nuclear program and welcomed the injection of new U.S. troops in Afghanistan.

By AOIFE WHITE, Associated Press Writer, AP writers Raf Casert, Mike Corder, Tobias Schmidt and Barbara Schaeder in Brussels and Vanessa Gera in Warsaw contributed to this report.

Arctic threats and challenges from climate change

2009-12-17T19:28:00.000-08:00

OSLO (AFP) - Rising temperatures are causing the Arctic's ice sheets to melt, opening the door for an economic boom in the region but also posing a major threat to the survival of its indigenous peoples.

The mercury is rising twice as fast in the Arctic as elsewhere, offering a frightening preview of what the future holds for the planet and prompting UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon to describe the situation as "a canary in a coalmine."

In what is the most visible effect of global warming, the melting ice cap shrank to a record low of 4.1 million square kilometres (1.58 million square miles) in September 2007. It risks disappearing entirely in the summer months by the end of this century, according to experts.

"That's maybe even a bit optimistic given the latest observations, which suggest that the sea ice is melting even faster than expected," said Paal Prestrud, director of the Centre for International Climate and Environmental Research in Oslo (Cicero).

The melting ice is opening up new shipping routes, such as the Northwest Passage off Canada and the Northern Sea route off Russia, which will dramatically shorten routes for ships sailing between the Atlantic and the Pacific, thus avoiding the Panama or Suez canals.

The distance between Rotterdam and Yokohama will be shortened by as much as 40 percent, for example.

Energy groups are meanwhile eagerly eyeing oil and gas riches under the seabed that have long been inaccessible because of the ice -- to the great dismay of environmental activists who fear oil spills in a fragile area.

The region could be home to 90 billion barrels of oil -- worth a whopping 7.0 trillion dollars at the current oil price -- and 30 percent of the planet's untapped gas reserves, according to the US Geological Survey.

The five countries bordering the Arctic (the United States, Canada, Russia, Norway and Denmark through its territory Greenland) have in recent years ramped up their territorial claims in the region, with Russia going so far as to plant its flag 4,000 metres (13,000 feet) beneath the North Pole.

Their claims have occasionally overlapped, as is the case with Hans Island, a source of dispute between Denmark and Canada.

But according to Frederic Lasserre, a geography professor at Laval University in Quebec, a new Cold War is unlikely.

"There is very little chance that these countries will develop tense relations because of these climate changes," he said, noting that they have shown a willingness to resolve their differences through negotiation.

"Most of the exploitable natural resources ... are located relatively close to their shores, so they are already in the countries' exclusive economic zones" recognised by the neighbouring nations, he added.

Nonetheless, Russia and Canada have already decided to beef up their military presence in the Arctic. Just to be safe.

"The Arctic is a very harsh environment," Canada's chief of defense staff, General Walter Natynczyk, said last month.

"If someone were to invade the Canadian Arctic, my first task would be to rescue them," he said.

While there may not be an armed conflict in sight, global warming has already claimed victims.

It has dramatically changed the lives of the 400,000 indigenous people who live in the region and who depend on fishing and hunting for their livelihood.

Ice that forms later in the year and melts earlier each year shortens the Inuits' hunting season.

Some hunters have drowned, either caught off guard by thin ice or carried away by torrential currents. Others have had to slaughter their sleddogs because they can't hunt enough food to feed them.

"We are people who not only survive, we thrive on the ice and snow," said Inuit activist Sheila Watt-Cloutier.

Global warming is accelerated in the Arctic because of the concept known as reflexivity.

Ice reflects more than 80 percent of the sun's radiation back into the atmosphere. When the sea ice melts, the dark water does not reflect the heat but instead absorbs it, thereby accentuating the effect of global warming.

In Lapland, the alternating freezes and thaws make it harder for reindeer herders to shuttle their herds to winter pastures.

And some species, such as barn owls, robins and mosquitoes, are moving further north into new habitats.

"The native species now find themselves competing with the new arrivals for survival, and they themselves can't flee further north," Prestrud explained.

Even the king of icecap -- and the food chain -- is at threat.

By 2050, two-thirds of the Arctic's 20,000 to 25,000 polar bears could disappear because of the melting ice, where the bears hunt seals, according to experts.

They have also observed a rise in cases of cannibalism, attributed to the polar bears' difficulty finding food.

by Pierre-Henry Deshayes

UN: 2000-2009 likely warmest decade on record

2009-12-16T20:38:00.000-08:00

COPENHAGEN - This decade is on track to become the warmest since records began in 1850, and 2009 could rank among the top-five warmest years, the U.N. weather agency reported Tuesday on the second day of a pivotal 192-nation climate conference.

Only the United States and Canada experienced cooler conditions than average, the World Meteorological Organization said, although Alaska had the second-warmest July on record.

In central Africa and southern Asia, this will probably be the warmest year, but overall, 2009 will "be about the fifth-warmest year on record," said Michel Jarraud, secretary-general of the WMO.

The agency also noted an extreme heat wave in India in May and a heat wave in northern China in June. It said parts of China experienced their warmest year on record, and that Australia so far has had its third-warmest year. Extremely warm weather was also more frequent and intense in southern South America.

The decade 2000-2009 "is very likely to be the warmest on record, warmer than the 1990s, than the 1980s and so on," Jarraud told a news conference, holding a chart with a temperature curve pointing upward.

The decade has been marked by dramatic effects of warming.

In 2007-2009, the summer melt reduced the Arctic Ocean ice cap to its smallest extent ever recorded. In the 2007-2009 International Polar Year, researchers found that Antarctica is warming more than previously believed. Almost all glaciers worldwide are retreating.

Meanwhile, such destructive species as jellyfish and bark-eating beetles are moving northward out of normal ranges, and seas expanding from warmth and glacier melt are encroaching on low-lying island states.

If 2009 ends as the fifth-warmest year, it would replace the year 2003. According to the U.S. space agency NASA, the other warmest years since 1850 have been 2005, 1998, 2007 and 2006. NASA says the differences in readings among these years are so small as to be statistically insignificant.

The U.N. agency reported that the global combined sea surface and land surface temperature for the January-October 2009 period is estimated at 0.44 degrees C (0.79 degrees F) above the 1961-1990 annual average of 14.00 degrees C (57.2 degrees F), with a margin of error of plus or minus 0.11 degrees C. Final data will be released early in 2010.

The data were released as negotiators at the two-week talks in Copenhagen turned Tuesday to "metrics," "gas inventories" and other dense technicalities, as delegates worked to craft a global deal to rein in carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases and stem climate change.

Governments, meanwhile, jockeyed for position leading up to the finale late next week, when more than 100 national leaders, including President Barack Obama, will converge on Copenhagen for the final days of bargaining.

Scientists say without an agreement to wean the world away from fossil fuels and other pollutants to greener sources of energy, the Earth will face the consequences of ever-rising temperatures: The extinction of plant and animals, the flooding of coastal cities, more extreme weather, more drought and the spread of diseases.

On Monday, when the conference opened, the Obama administration gave the talks a boost by announcing steps that could lead to new U.S. emissions controls that don't require the approval of the U.S. Congress.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said scientific evidence clearly shows that greenhouse gases "threaten the public health and welfare of the American people" and that the pollutants - mainly carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels - should be reduced, if not by Congress then by the agency responsible for enforcing air pollution.

As Congress considers the first U.S. legislation to cap carbon emissions, the EPA finding will enable the Obama administration to act on greenhouse gases without congressional action, potentially imposing federal limits on climate-changing pollution from cars, power plants and factories.

The announcement gave Obama a new card in what is expected to be tough bargaining next week at the climate conference. In preparation, Obama met with former Vice President Al Gore, who won a Nobel for his climate change efforts, at the White House on Monday.

European climate change officials welcomed the U.S. move.

"This is meaningful because it is yet a sign that the Americans have more to offer. My evaluation is that the U.S. can offer much more," EU environment spokesman Andreas Carlgren told reporters Tuesday in Stockholm.

Yvo de Boer, U.N. climate chief, said the EPA finding gives Obama "something to fall back on."

"I think that will boost people's confidence" at the Copenhagen talks in the Americans' ability to offer more, he said.

The European Union has pledged to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 20 percent by 2020, compared with 1990, and is considering raising that to 30 percent if other governments also aim high. EU leaders will have an opportunity to make such a move at an EU summit this Thursday and Friday in Brussels.

In Britain, Prime Minister Gordon Brown urged fellow Europeans to raise their bid on reducing greenhouse gas emissions to pressure the U.S. and others to offer more at the Copenhagen negotiations.

"We've got to make countries recognize that they have to be as ambitious as they say they want to be. It's not enough to say 'I may do this, I might do this, possibly I'll do this.' I want to create a situation in which the European Union is persuaded to go to 30 percent," Brown was quoted as saying by Britain's Guardian newspaper.

The European Union had called for a stronger bid by the Americans, who thus far have pledged emissions cuts much less ambitious than Europe's. The U.S. has offered a 17 percent reduction in emissions from their 2005 level - comparable to a 3-4 percent cut from 1990 levels.

Whether the prospect of EPA action will satisfy such demands - and what China may now add to its earlier offer - remains to be seen. And success in the long-running climate talks hinges on more than emissions reductions. Most important, it requires commitments of financial support by rich countries for poor nations to help them cope with the impact of a changing climate.

Swedish negotiator Anders Turesson on Tuesday said the U.S. 17 percent reductions "are insufficient and we hope more would come out of that."

He suggested the U.S. buy more carbon credits on the international market, where emissions reductions by developing countries can be credited and sold to the industrialized world.

By CHARLES J. HANLEY, AP Special Correspondent

Chaos at climate conference

2009-12-16T17:21:00.000-08:00

COPENHAGEN - The Copenhagen climate change conference appeared to be imploding from within and exploding from without on Wednesday.

Police fired tear gas, brandished batons and detained more than 200 protesters who tried to push through the security cordon around the Bella Center, as negotiations inside bogged down, for the second time this week, over differences between China and the West over emissions, funding issues and transparency.

"People around the world [are] actually expecting something to be done from us," red-faced Danish Prime Minister Lars Rasmussen lectured delegates from nearly 200 nations.

Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), the highest-ranking American yet to appear at the talks, urged attendees to put aside their differences and "make Friday our day of success."

Minutes earlier - in a surprise move that captured growing uncertainty over conference - Denmark's climate minister, Connie Hedegaard, stepped aside as president of the conference, handing the gavel to Rasmussen, as head of the host country.

Outside, Danish police - who have been accused of heavy-handedness by human rights groups - clashed with thousands of environmental activists who descended on the complex from a nearby train station and demanded entry to the Bella Center.

BBC video showed truncheon-bearing Danish police shoving the crowd backward as protesters gasped and covered their faces to avoid breathing tear gas.

Inside the building, U.N. officials revoked the credentials of about 100 accredited members of the green group Friends of the Earth for staging a series of small protests on Tuesday.

Despite the gloom, U.S. officials told POLITICO they made incremental progress in a variety of areas during marathon sessions Tuesday night and cautioned that all previous climate conferences have experienced similar turbulence. And late Tuesday, negotiators announced a major breakthrough on a deal to preserve wetlands and forests.

Hedegaard will continue to consult parties as Rasmussen’s special assistant, and it was unclear whether the switch was pro forma, as Hedegaard claimed, or she was forced out by representatives of poor nations who had demanded her removal earlier this week.

"With so many heads of state and government having arrived, it's appropriate that the prime minister of Denmark presides," Hedegaard told the 193-nation meeting.

"However, the prime minister has appointed me as his special representative, and I will thus continue to negotiate the ... outcome with my colleagues," she said.

On Tuesday, Hedegaard made an emotional appeal for countries to put aside their differences to finalize a deal - after the G-77 bloc of developing nations accused her of trying to ram through an agreement amenable to the U.S. and other big industrialized nations.

But no sooner had Rasmussen assumed the presidency than those tensions burst out in the open again, with China, India, Bolivia, South Africa and Sudan saying they would block attempts by the Danish delegation to produce a draft text favored by most Western countries.

Minutes after taking the gavel, Rasmussen angrily denounced developing countries for seeking to delay consideration of the text, accusing them of focusing on "procedure, procedure, procedure."

He was immediately rebuked by a representative of China, a member of the G-77 bloc, who said moving forward too quickly was tantamount to "obstructionism" and a bullying attempt by the West.

"I think the matter isn't 'procedure, procedure, procedure.'... You can't just put forth some text from the sky," the representative said.

Glenn Thrush, POLITICO

Copenhagen: The Crux of the Matter

2009-12-16T17:20:00.001-08:00

Left unresolved are the questions of emissions targets for industrial countries, billions of dollars a year in funding for poor countries to contend with climate change, and verifying the actions of emerging powers like China and India to ensure that promises to reduce emissions are kept.

Putin's rare Siberian tiger goes missing

2009-12-15T09:09:00.000-08:00

VLADIVOSTOK, Russia - A rare Siberian tiger fitted by Vladimir Putin with a radio-tracking collar has vanished, a Russian environmentalist said Wednesday, dramatizing the plight of a species some conservationists fear may be approaching extinction.

Russia's prime minister drew worldwide publicity in 2008 when he shot the five-year-old female tiger with a tranquilizer gun and helped place a transmitter around her neck. That allowed visitors to his Web site to follow the animal's prowlings through Russia's wild Far East. A video of the episode is on YouTube.

But the satellite tracking device has been silent since mid-September, which could be due to battery failure, a broken collar or poachers, Vladimir Krever of the World Wildlife Fund said Wednesday.

Tigers are rapidly disappearing from the far-eastern regions of Russian due to poaching and the loss of habitat, conservationists say.

Their number may have declined by 40 per cent since 1997, the Wildlife Conservation Society said in a report released Tuesday, although another major conservation group, the World Wildlife Fund, disputed the figure.

The New-York based Wildlife Conservation Society said only 56 tigers have been spotted in an area of 9,000 square miles (24,000 square kilometers) - about one-sixth of their known habitat in Russia. Based on that, the group estimates the total number remaining in the wild at 300.

A similar estimate in 2005 put the number left in Siberia at 500, a huge increase over the less than 30 that were thought to remain in the 1940s. But the Wildlife Conservation Society said the latest count still shows the animals could face extinction.

"The sobering results are a wake-up call that current conservation efforts are not going far enough to protect Siberian tigers," Dr. Dale Miquelle of the group's Russian Far East Program said in a statement.

The society recommends a greater effort to preserve the tiger's habitat, stronger legal protections and a crackdown on poachers who hunt the animals for hides and bones prized in traditional Chinese medicine.

Krever, of the World Wildlife Fund, disputed the Wildlife Conservation Society report.

"It is absolutely incorrect," Krever told The Associated Press. "There's possibly been a decrease in the last two years, but definitely not 40 per cent."

Krever said deep snow in the last two years limited the tigers' ability to roam, making it harder to count them. His group agreed, however, that the tigers face a loss of habitat.

Sergei Aramilev, of Russia's World Wildlife Fund, said Chinese poachers have begun attaching explosives covered with animal fat to tree branches. When tigers and endangered Amur leopards swallow the bait, he said, it explodes in their mouths.

The World Wildlife Fund's Russian branch has estimated that 30 to 50 Amur tigers are killed every year.

Illegal deforestation in Russia's Far East and corruption among poorly paid park rangers may also be contributing to the tigers' decline, said Sergei Berezniuk of the Fenix Fund, an environmental group in the Pacific coast city of Vladivostok.

Earlier this month, Russian officials and environmentalists said they would hold a "tiger summit" in Vladivostok next September to coordinate multinational efforts to protect tiger populations.

The goal of the program, which could involve as many as 13 countries, would be to double the number of tigers globally to 6,500 by 2022. The total now is believed to be 3,200, according to the World Wildlife Fund.

Weighing up to 600 pounds (272 kilograms), Siberian tigers - also known as Ussuri, Amur or Manchurian tigers - prey on wild boars, deer and bears.

They once roamed most of Eurasia from the Black Sea to Central Asia, but now are limited to the forests of Russia's Far East and the Chinese province of Manchuria. In China the killing of a Siberian tiger is punishable by death.

By LIYA KHABAROVA, Associated Press Writer

Soros: Finance gap could 'wreck' climate talks

2009-12-14T20:31:00.001-08:00

COPENHAGEN - The $10 billion a year proposed by rich nations to help the poor adapt to climate change is "not sufficient" and the gap between what's offered and what's needed could wreck the Copenhagen climate conference, American billionaire George Soros said Thursday.

The investor-philanthropist, one in a line of international notables visiting the 192-nation meeting, told reporters he had developed a partial solution. Soros suggested shifting some International Monetary Fund resources from providing liquidity to stressed global financial systems to a new mission of financing projects in developing countries for clean energy and adapting to climate change.

About $100 billion in a one-time infusion could be generated, said Soros, a major supporter of causes in the developing world.

But he acknowledged a major roadblock in Washington.

"It is possible to substantially increase the amount available to fight global warming in the developing world," he said. "All that is lacking is the political will. Unfortunately the political will will be difficult to gather because of the mere fact that it requires congressional approval in the United States."

Soros said he had "informal discussions" with Obama administration officials and they recognized the difficulty of getting congressional approval. But he said the issue was too important to sweep aside.

"I think it is already becoming apparent in the negotiations that there's a gap between the developed and developing world on this issue which could actually wreck the conference," he added.

The international financier dropped in on the two-week conference on its fourth day, as rich and poor nations pressed on behind closed doors and in open forums to bridge wide differences and reach agreements on how to combat global warming.

They have just a week to deliver something for President Barack Obama and more than 100 national leaders to sign on Dec. 18, the final day of the climate summit.

"People are really getting down to work. I sense that there is a real seriousness now to negotiate," Yvo de Boer, U.N. climate chief, said Thursday. "Good progress is being made in a number of areas."

He said a growing number of environment ministers will be arriving at Copenhagen this weekend, earlier than planned, to take up higher-level negotiations prior to the arrival of presidents and prime ministers next Wednesday and Thursday.

In one key area, delegates are trying to agree on how much industrialized nations should reduce their emissions of carbon dioxide and other global-warming gases after the 2012 expiration of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which covered 37 richer nations. The U.S. had rejected Kyoto. An agreement is also expected to include targets by such poorer but emerging economic powers as China and India for scaling back emissions growth.

The second key area involves climate change financing, money for poorer nations to build coastal protection, modify or shift crops threatened by drought, build water supplies and irrigation systems, preserve forests, improve health care to deal with diseases spread by warming, and move from fossil-fuel to low-carbon energy systems, such as solar and wind power.

The World Bank and others project that hundreds of billions of dollars a year, in public and private money, will be needed eventually for the climate change shift.

Yet industrialized countries thus far are talking only about a quick package - three years of funding at $10 billion a year. Much of that would go toward training, planning and getting a fix on needs.

Developing nations are pressing the U.S., Europeans, Japanese and others at Copenhagen for more upfront money and for assurances about long-term financing so they can plan on a stable source for many billions more.

"Financing should be the 'crunch issue' here next week, for the heads of state to deal with," said Alden Meyer of the U.S. Union of Concerned Scientists.

Soros said the $10-billion-a-year short-term plan is "more than nothing, but not much, it's not sufficient."

He suggested climate financing be boosted with some $100 billion in Special Drawing Rights, the artificial "currency" of the International Monetary Fund, formulated as a basket of major currency values and held in reserve for lending in financial emergencies.

In response to the recent global financial crisis, the IMF created more than $200 billion in new Special Drawing Rights. But Soros noted that the Obama administration had difficulty getting U.S. approval for that through the U.S. Congress.

He had found "quite widespread support" from other governments, but "other countries are reluctant to do something that is uncomfortable for the United States," Soros said.

On Wednesday, the U.S. and China exchanged barbs at the Copenhagen climate talks, underscoring the abiding suspicion between the world's two largest carbon polluters about the sincerity of their pledges to control emissions.

U.S. chief negotiator Todd Stern urged China - now the world's biggest polluter - to "stand behind" its promise to slow the growth of the country's carbon output and make the declaration part of the Copenhagen agreement.

China rejected that demand, and renewed its criticism of the U.S. for failing to meet its 17-year-old commitment to provide financial aid to developing countries and to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and other gases warming the Earth.

"What they should do is some deep soul-searching," said Yu Qingtai, China's chief climate negotiator.

By CHARLES J. HANLEY, AP Special Correspondent

Over 100 icebergs drifting to N.Zealand

2009-12-13T09:08:00.000-08:00

SYDNEY (AFP) – More than 100, and possibly hundreds, of Antarctic icebergs are floating towards New Zealand in a rare event which has prompted a shipping warning, officials said on Monday.

An Australian Antarctic Division glaciologist said the ice chunks, spotted by satellite photography, had passed the Auckland Islands and were heading towards the main South Island, about 450 kilometres (280 miles) northeast.

Scientist Neal Young said more than 100 icebergs -- some measuring more than 200 metres (650 feet) across -- were seen in just one cluster, indicating there could be hundreds more.

He said they were the remains of a massive ice floe which split from the Antarctic as sea and air temperatures rise due to global warming.

"All of these have come from a larger one that was probably 30 square kilometres (11.6 square miles) in size when it left Antarctica," Young told AFP.

"It's done a long circuit around Antarctica and now the bigger parts of it are breaking up and producing smaller ones."

He said large numbers of icebergs had not floated this close to New Zealand since 2006, when a number came within 25 kilometres of the coastline -- the first such sighting since 1931.

"They're following the same tracks now up towards New Zealand. Whether they make it up to the South Island or not is difficult to tell," Young said.

New Zealand has already issued coastal navigation warnings for the area in the Southern Ocean where the icebergs have been seen.

"It's really just a general warning for shipping in that area to be on the alert for icebergs," said Maritime New Zealand spokesman Ross Henderson.

The icebergs are smaller remnants of the giant chunks seen off Australia's Macquarie Island this month, including one estimated at two kilometres (1.2 miles) and another twice the size of Beijing's "Bird's Nest" Olympic Stadium.

Young earlier told AFP he expected to see more icebergs in the area if the Earth's temperature continues to increase.

"If the current trends in global warming were to continue I would anticipate seeing more icebergs and the large ice shelves breaking up," he said.

When icebergs last neared New Zealand in 2006, a sheep was helicoptered out to be shorn on one of the floes in a publicity stunt by the country's wool industry.

China to dramatically slow emissions growth

2009-12-11T08:56:00.000-08:00

BEIJING - China announced plans Thursday to cut its carbon emissions by up to 45 percent as measured against its economic output - a commitment from the world's largest polluter that builds momentum ahead of a widely anticipated climate conference in Copenhagen next month.

The announcement comes a day after President Barack Obama promised the U.S. would lay out plans to substantially cut its greenhouse gas emissions at the summit.

China announced earlier Thursday that Premier Wen Jiabao will take part in the Copenhagen meeting to show the country's commitment to the global effort to reduce greenhouse emissions.

The State Council announcement proposes to cut carbon intensity - carbon dioxide emissions per unit of gross domestic product - by 40 to 45 percent by 2020, compared with levels in 2005.

The goal does not mean that it will cut its total carbon emissions by 2020. In fact, given the expected huge increases in its economy over the next decade, its global warming emissions should increase - but at a much slower pace than if China had made no changes.

India, the world's fifth-biggest greenhouse gas emitter, has proposed a similar policy to link emissions to growth in gross domestic product, defined as a broad measure of the value of the nation's total output of goods and services.

China's State Council, or Cabinet, said it "is a voluntary action taken by the Chinese government based on its own national conditions and is a major contribution to the global effort in tackling climate change."

It said the improvements would come through better research and development, clean coal technology, advanced nuclear energy and better transportation systems. Tax laws and regulations will also be changed to encourage energy efficiency.

The proposal follows closely on the heels of a White House announcement that Obama will attend the start of the Copenhagen conference to personally commit the U.S. to reducing carbon dioxide emissions by about 17 percent from 2005 levels by 2020.

Yu Jie, head of policy and research programs for The Climate Group China, a non-governmental group, welcomed both announcements. She described China's 45 percent target as "quite aggressive."

"For the climate community, of course we welcome so much this kind of effort. Before Copenhagen, we desperately need this good news. We got two pieces within a day," Yu said.

Still, the Dec. 7-18 conference is unlikely to produce a binding agreement. The original goal of the conference was to produce a new global climate change treaty to replace the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. But in recent weeks it became clear that delegates were likely to produce at best an outline for an agreement to be considered late next year.

Despite setting a target on carbon emissions, it does not mean China will accept an international treaty that sets a binding target for it.

China has said repeatedly it will seek binding pollution targets for developed countries and reject similar requirements for itself at Copenhagen.

"We hope to reach a fair and reasonable arrangement" at Copenhagen, Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang told a news conference Thursday. "Wen's attendance fully demonstrates the importance attached to this."

China has said it was unfair that all countries be required to play a role combating global warming since most of the environmental damage was caused by developed nations during their industrialization over the last 100 to 200 years.

China has already said renewables such as solar and wind power will supply 15 percent of its energy needs by 2020.

Yang Ailun, climate campaign manager for Greenpeace China, said that in order to meet the carbon emissions target, China will have to use more renewable energy sources like solar and wind power and look for new ways to reduce its heavy dependence on coal.

By CARA ANNA, Associated Press Writer

Warming's impacts sped up, worsened since Kyoto

2009-12-09T08:49:00.000-08:00

WASHINGTON - Since the 1997 international accord to fight global warming, climate change has worsened and accelerated - beyond some of the grimmest of warnings made back then.

As the world has talked for a dozen years about what to do next, new ship passages opened through the once frozen summer sea ice of the Arctic. In Greenland and Antarctica, ice sheets have lost trillions of tons of ice. Mountain glaciers in Europe, South America, Asia and Africa are shrinking faster than before.

And it's not just the frozen parts of the world that have felt the heat in the dozen years leading up to next month's climate summit in Copenhagen:

-The world's oceans have risen by about an inch and a half.

-Droughts and wildfires have turned more severe worldwide, from the U.S. West to Australia to the Sahel desert of North Africa.

-Species now in trouble because of changing climate include, not just the lumbering polar bear which has become a symbol of global warming, but also fragile butterflies, colorful frogs and entire stands of North American pine forests.

-Temperatures over the past 12 years are 0.4 of a degree warmer than the dozen years leading up to 1997.

Even the gloomiest climate models back in the 1990s didn't forecast results quite this bad so fast.

"The latest science is telling us we are in more trouble than we thought," said Janos Pasztor, climate adviser to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon.

And here's why: Since an agreement to reduce greenhouse gas pollution was signed in Kyoto, Japan, in December 1997, the level of carbon dioxide in the air has increased 6.5 percent.

Officials from across the world will convene in Copenhagen next month to seek a follow-up pact, one that President Barack Obama says "has immediate operational effect ... an important step forward in the effort to rally the world around a solution."

The last effort didn't quite get the anticipated results.

From 1997 to 2008, world carbon dioxide emissions from the burning of fossil fuels have increased 31 percent; U.S. emissions of this greenhouse gas rose 3.7 percent. Emissions from China, now the biggest producer of this pollution, have more than doubled in that time period.

When the U.S. Senate balked at the accord and President George W. Bush withdrew from it, that meant that the top three carbon polluters - the U.S., China and India - were not part of the pact's emission reductions. Developing countries were not covered by the Kyoto Protocol and that is a major issue in Copenhagen.

And the effects of greenhouse gases are more powerful and happening sooner than predicted, scientists said.

"Back in 1997, the impacts (of climate change) were underestimated; the rate of change has been faster," said Virginia Burkett, chief scientist for global change research at the U.S. Geological Survey.

That last part alarms former Vice President Al Gore, who helped broker a last-minute deal in Kyoto.

"By far the most serious differences that we've had is an acceleration of the crisis itself," Gore said in an interview this month with The Associated Press.

In 1997, global warming was an issue for climate scientists, environmentalists and policy wonks. Now biologists, lawyers, economists, engineers, insurance analysts, risk managers, disaster professionals, commodity traders, nutritionists, ethicists and even psychologists are working on global warming.

"We've come from a time in 1997 where this was some abstract problem working its way around scientific circles to now when the problem is in everyone's face," said Andrew Weaver, a University of Victoria climate scientist.

The changes in the last 12 years that have the scientists most alarmed are happening in the Arctic with melting summer sea ice and around the world with the loss of key land-based ice masses. It's all happening far faster than predicted.

Back in 1997 "nobody in their wildest expectations," would have forecast the dramatic sudden loss of summer sea ice in the Arctic that started about five years ago, Weaver said. From 1993 to 1997, sea ice would shrink on average in the summer to about 2.7 million square miles. The average for the last five years is less than 2 million square miles. What's been lost is the size of Alaska.

Antarctica had a slight increase in sea ice, mostly because of the cooling effect of the ozone hole, according to the British Antarctic Survey. At the same time, large chunks of ice shelves - adding up to the size of Delaware - came off the Antarctic peninsula.

While melting Arctic ocean ice doesn't raise sea levels, the melting of giant land-based ice sheets and glaciers that drain into the seas do. Those are shrinking dramatically at both poles.

Measurements show that since 2000, Greenland has lost more than 1.5 trillion tons of ice, while Antarctica has lost about 1 trillion tons since 2002, according to two scientific studies published this fall. In multiple reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports, scientists didn't anticipate ice sheet loss in Antarctica, Weaver said. And the rate of those losses is accelerating, so that Greenland's ice sheets are melting twice as fast now as they were just seven years ago, increasing sea level rise.

Worldwide glaciers are shrinking three times faster than in the 1970s and the average glacier has lost 25 feet of ice since 1997, said Michael Zemp, a researcher at World Glacier Monitoring Service at the University of Zurich.

"Glaciers are a good climate indicator," Zemp said. "What we see is an accelerated loss of ice."

Also, permafrost - the frozen northern ground that oil pipelines are built upon and which traps the potent greenhouse gas methane - is thawing at an alarming rate, Burkett said.

Another new post-1997 impact of global warming has scientists very concerned. The oceans are getting more acidic because more of the carbon dioxide in the air is being absorbed into the water. That causes acidification, an issue that didn't even merit a name until the past few years.

More acidic water harms coral, oysters and plankton and ultimately threatens the ocean food chain, biologists say.

In 1997, "there was no interest in plants and animals" and how they are hampered by climate change, said Stanford University biologist Terry Root. Now scientists are talking about which species can be saved from extinction and which are goners. The polar bear became the first species put on the federal list of threatened species and the small rabbit-like American pika may be joining it.

More than 37 million acres of Canadian and U.S. pine forests have been damaged by beetles that don't die in warmer winters. And in the U.S. West, the average number of acres burned per fire has more than doubled.

The Colorado River reservoirs, major water suppliers for the U.S. West, were nearly full in 1999, but by 2007 half the water was gone after the region endured the worst multiyear drought in 100 years of record-keeping.

Insurance losses and blackouts have soared and experts say global warming is partly to blame. The number of major U.S. weather-related blackouts from 2004-2008 were more than seven times higher than from 1993-1997, said Evan Mills, a staff scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab.

"The message on the science is that we know a lot more than we did in 1997 and it's all negative," said Eileen Claussen, president of the Pew Center on Global Climate Change. "Things are much worse than the models predicted."

By SETH BORENSTEIN, AP Science Writer

Five keys to Copenhagen

2009-12-08T06:41:00.000-08:00

COPENHAGEN - President Barack Obama's decision to participate in the end - rather than beginning - of the international climate change conference here stems from some newfound hope that negotiators can reach a deal by the time the conference wraps up at the end of next week.

But there's a lot to do between now and then.

As delegates from more than 190 countries arrive in the Danish capital, they'll confront more than just a dizzying schedule of meetings, a sea of protesters and a bicycle-powered Christmas tree in City Hall Square.

They'll have to navigate Pacific Islanders who want protection from rising sea levels; Africans who want billions of dollars in aid to cope with severe droughts, freak storms and spreading tropical diseases; Chinese and Indian delegates who don't want global-warming-prevention measures to slow their development; and leaders from the United States and the European Union who want to cut emissions without hurting already shaky economies back home.

How will you know if they're making progress? Here are five things to watch.

1. Can they cut it?

The centerpiece of any deal will be the various countries' agreement to cut greenhouse gas emissions.

Developing countries argue that richer nations have created most of the global-warming pollution over the past century through their industrialization - and, therefore, they should be the ones that make the deepest reductions.

But U.S. negotiators do not want to make drastic cuts unless emerging countries like China and India agree to their own robust reductions.

So far, the European Union has vowed to slash emissions to 20 percent below 1990 levels - more if other nations agree to do the same. Japan has set a goal of a 25 percent reduction from 1990 levels, an almost 30 percent cut from 2005 levels. And last month, White House officials promised to cut greenhouse gases to 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020.

That amounts to a mere 3 percent or 4 percent cut below 1990 levels, according to experts, and it's unclear whether that's enough to satisfy China, India and other developing nations.

A draft text of the pact circulated by Danish officials would have nations agreeing to cut emissions in half by 2050, but China and India say they oppose that target.

"If the Denmark draft is any indication, then we are heading to a dead end," Jairam Ramesh, India's environmental minister, recently told reporters.

Brazil, South Africa, India, China and Sudan plan to submit their own draft - one that rejects legally binding emissions cuts. And poorer countries have already agreed that they'll walk out of the talks if developed nations try to impose their will on them.

2. Is there any money on the table?

One of the most contentious issues at the summit will be figuring out climate financing - or how much rich nations will pay to help poorer countries develop new, clean technologies and deal with the devastating impact of climate change.

Although they have contributed relatively little to global warming, poor countries in the Southern hemisphere are likely to feel the worst effects of climate change over the next few decades. Rural African farmers already face changing weather patterns that disrupt centuries of traditional farming methods. Small island nations are sinking under rising sea levels. And national security experts predict that a scarcity of water and other resources will exacerbate conflicts in already strapped regions.

Now, they say, it's time for the United States, Europe and other developed countries to pay up. The World Bank estimates developing countries will need $75 billion to $100 billion per year over the next 40 years to adapt to climate change.

But that's more than most rich nations are willing to pay. Developed countries are expected to propose jump-start financing closer to $10 billion per year through 2012.

"I think it will be very difficult, if not impossible, to reach agreement on that exact long-term cost sharing," Yvo de Boer, the top U.N. climate official, said last week.

How the funds are distributed presents another difficult issue. The United States has proposed a new global fund that would operate under the World Bank. But poor nations and environmental activists have long been skeptical of the bank, which they say favors richer nations and focuses too much on the development of fossil-fuel industries.

3. Who's seeing red?

China, the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases, has long resisted adopting binding emissions limits. Its position has made reaching a deal extremely difficult because the United States is reluctant to act unless China takes some serious steps.

But some progress was made last month when Chinese officials promised a "carbon intensity target" that would lower greenhouse gas intensity 40 percent to 45 percent per unit of gross economic output by 2020.

Still, Western officials remain deeply skeptical of China's ability to follow through on its promises. Although Chinese officials promised their targets would be binding, they would not be subject to verification by the world community.

"Although this is a domestic voluntary action, it is binding," Xie Zhenhua, the Chinese climate policy envoy, told reporters. "As we've made this commitment, well, Chinese people stick to their word."

But China's "word" isn’t enough for many developing nations, who want to put in place strict systems to measure, report and validate the Chinese emissions cuts.

In the United States, manufacturing-state lawmakers also want to impose border taxes on Chinese imports if the country fails to take sufficient emissions reductions actions by a certain date - a proposal that sets the two countries on a collision course. China and other emerging economies have threatened to walk out of the talks if they are used to set up trade barriers.

4. What does Congress say?

It's a classic Catch-22: Without congressional action - or at least the promise that a Senate bill will come soon - foreign nations will be unwilling to make their own reductions. But unless international negotiators make movement toward a global agreement, U.S. lawmakers will resist making cuts at home, fearing that new regulations will drive manufacturing jobs to cheaper markets such as China and India.

That interdependency means that everyone in the Danish capital will be keeping a close eye on the congressional reaction to the negotiations. And one thing is certain: They'll be hearing the full range of outrage.

The House has already passed a cap-and-trade bill, and Sens. John Kerry (D-Mass.) and Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) will be in Copenhagen to assure the world that the Senate will follow suit soon. Democratic moderates released a letter last week saying they'll support binding targets - as long as competitors like China and India also make commitments.

But Sens. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.) and John Barrasso (R-Wyo.), longtime global-warming skeptics, are also traveling to Denmark - as a "climate truth squad" focused on informing the world that the U.S. Congress opposes the climate bill.

5. Is there O-mentum?

The Obama administration announced late last week that the president will travel to Copenhagen at the conclusion of the talks rather than this week, as he had originally planned.

But for Obama's in-the-thick-of-things visit to have much of an effect, he will have to make a serious commitment to getting a climate bill passed and signed this spring. International climate experts say such a promise is the only way to give other nations the reassurance they need to make their own emissions cuts.

"They're looking for that assurance from the president himself that this is going to get done," said Keya Chatterjee, climate program director for the World Wildlife Fund.

That pledge is particularly important, says Chatterjee, because the world has been burned by Congress before.

In 1997, lawmakers voted to reject any international deal adapting any climate treaty that exempted developing nations. It was a vote that effectively killed U.S. participation in the Kyoto climate treaty.

At the same time, Obama must be careful not to overpromise. Administration officials know that a repeat of Kyoto would be a major defeat for the White House - and for efforts to slow global warming overall.

Lisa Lerer

Thousands gather worldwide on day of climate protests

2009-12-07T07:28:00.000-08:00

PARIS (AFP) – Kicking off with thousands gathering on the steps of Sydney's iconic Opera House, global warming protests took place around the world Saturday to mark 50 days before the UN climate summit.

From Asia to Europe via the Middle East, activists staged lively events addressing world leaders and to mobilise public opinion around climate issues.

Many waved placards bearing the logo 350, referring to 350 parts per million (ppm) of CO2 in the atmosphere which scientists say must not be exceeded to avoid runaway global warming.

France's politicians received a "wake up" call from several hundred Parisians who chose clocks as their symbol.

Protesters who met in a central square had set their alarm clocks and mobile phones to ring at 12:18 pm (1018 GMT) in reference to the closing date of the summit, which lasts from December 7-18.

The summit is considered crucial as world leaders will try to thrash out a new treaty to curb greenhouse gas emissions in place of the Kyoto Protocol which will expire in 2012.

However, Danish Prime Minister Lars Loekke Rasmussen said Saturday that preliminary discussions are not moving fast enough for an international decision to be concluded in Copenhagen.

"It is time to give full speed to the negotiations," Rasmussen said, adding that he wanted a legally binding international agreement to be in place by January.

There is growing concern that a treaty deal in Copenhagen could be hampered by issues including US domestic politics and the problems of securing agreement between developed and developing countries.

Rasmussen underlined that progress had been made on climate issues but that these "key political questions" still had to be resolved ahead of the December meeting.

In Berlin, some 350 protesters wearing masks with the face of German Chancellor Angela Merkel came together in front of the Brandenburg Gate in the city centre.

In London, more than 600 people gathered beneath the London Eye Ferris wheel by the River Thames to arrange themselves into the shape of the number five, according to organisers Campaign against Climate Change.

An aerial photograph of the event will be added to pictures of a giant "three" and "zero" from around the world.

"Hundreds of thousands of people are taking part (globally) and for us that's so important, to have people out on the streets," campaign activist Abi Edgar told AFP. "We want serious action on climate change and we want it now."

Across the Thames, some 100 musicians playing trumpets, trombones, saxophones and clarinets gathered outside parliament to play the same note -- an F, made by the frequency of 350 Hz -- for 350 seconds, organisers said.

In the Lebanese capital Beirut hundreds of activists, many wearing snorkels, held demonstrations in key archaeological sites.

They gathered around the Roman ruins in central Beirut, in the ancient eastern city of Baalbek and along the coast, carrying placards bearing the logo 350.

"It's not the first time Beirut will have gone under water," Wael Hmaidan of the IndyACT group organising Beirut's protests said to AFP, explaining the goggle-wearing, "but this time it's going down because of climate change, and not earthquakes."

In Jakarta, around 100 students from the London School of Public Relations also gathered to form the symbolic number 350, coordinator Candy Tolosa said on Detik.com news website Saturday.

In central Madrid, the Spanish capital, members of the Platform Against Climate Change, grouping social organisations, ecologists and unions, acted out parodies of the "catastrophic consequences of climate change on the planet", the Platform's press release said.

Environmental activists in the Turkish metropolis of Istanbul staged their protest in a boat, unfurling a banner reading "Sun, wind, right now!" under the main bridge linking Asia and Europe over the Bosphorus Strait, Anatolia news agency reported.

They then sailed to the ancient Maiden's Tower, which sits on a tiny islet in the Bosphorus, and unfurled another banner reading "Jobs, climate, justice," the report said.

UN climate summit puts China, India in spotlight

2009-12-04T06:55:00.000-08:00

UNITED NATIONS - China laid down a significant plan for curbing greenhouse gases on Tuesday, outlining ambitious goals of planting enough forest to cover an area the size of Norway and generating 15 percent of its energy needs from renewable sources within a decade.

Chinese President Hu Jintao also promised at the opening of the United Nations climate summit that the communist nation would take "determined and practical steps" to boost its nuclear energy, improve energy efficiency and reduce "by a notable margin" the growth rate of its carbon pollution as measured against economic growth.

Experts were watching the Chinese closely because it had in the past largely ignored global efforts to diminish emissions. The goals Hu outlined also were held in contrast to the United States, where the Senate has yet to take up climate legislation and likely will not have produced a new law by the time world leaders gather this December in Copenhagen, Denmark, to negotiate a treaty to replace the 1997 Kyoto pact.

"At stake in the fight against climate change are the common interests of the entire world," Hu said. "Out of a sense of responsibility to its own people and people across the world, China fully appreciates the importance and urgency of addressing climate change."

Much attention also was fixed on U.S. President Barack Obama's first U.N. speech, where he said the United States is "determined to act."

"The threat from climate change is serious, it is urgent, and it is growing," Obama said, after receiving loud applause. "And the time we have to reverse this tide is running out."

China's more specific ambitions topped the lofty speechmaking as U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called on presidents, prime ministers and other leaders "to accelerate the pace of negotiations and to strengthen the ambition of what is on offer" for a new global climate pact at Copenhagen, Denmark in December.

"Failure to reach broad agreement in Copenhagen would be morally inexcusable, economically shortsighted and politically unwise," Ban warned. "The science demands it. The world economy needs it."

Actor Djimon Hounsou of Benin helped open the summit by quoting late astronomer Carl Sagan and showing his "Pale Blue Dot" photo of Earth taken in 1990 from Voyager 1 within the larger cosmos.

Tuesday's U.N. summit and the G-20 summit in Pittsburgh later this week seek to add pressure on rich nations to commit to a deal in Copenhagen for mandatory greenhouse gas cuts starting in 2013, and to pay for poorer nations to burn less coal and preserve their forests.

But China and some other major fast-developing economies will not agree to binding greenhouse-gas cuts. Developing nations "should not ... be asked to take on obligations that go beyond their development stage," Hu said.

Leaders said that with only about three weeks left for negotiations the likelihood was fast-growing for something less than a full-blown treaty at Copenhagen.

"We are on the path to failure if we continue to act as we have," French President Nicolas Sarkozy cautioned.

Obama said the U.S. is doubling the generating capacity from wind and other renewable resources in three years, launching offshore wind energy projects and spending billions to capture carbon pollution from coal plants.

Obama has announced a target of returning to 1990 levels of greenhouse emissions by 2020, but action awaits Congress passing legislation to make those goals the law of the land.

The United States, under former President George W. Bush's administration, stayed away from international commitments citing inaction by China and India.

China and the U.S. each account for about 20 percent of all the world's greenhouse gas pollution created when coal, natural gas or oil are burned. The European Union is next, generating 14 percent, followed by Russia and India, which each account for 5 percent.

The EU is urging other rich countries to match its pledge to cut emissions by 20 percent from 1990 levels by 2020, and has said it would cut up to 30 percent if other rich countries follow suit.

But the Paris-based International Energy Agency expects global carbon emissions will drop by 2.6 percent this year, the biggest such decrease in more than 40 years, because of the world's recession that is slowing industrial activity, according to projections first reported Monday by The Financial Times.

Even with the economic slowdown, the dangers of climate-altering heat waves, droughts, melting glaciers, loss of the Greenland ice sheet and other calamities are fast approaching, said Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that shared the Nobel Peace Prize with former vice president Al Gore in 2007.

"The science leaves us with no room for inaction now," he said.

Pachauri said major greenhouse gas cuts must be made by 2015 to avoid many of these dangers.

Japanese's prime minister, whose nation generates more than 4 percent of the world's greenhouse gases, said his nation will seek a 25 percent cut in greenhouse gas emissions from 1990 levels by 2020.

"I will now seek to unite our efforts to address current and future climate change with due consideration of the role of science," said Yukio Hatoyama, six days after taking office. "I am resolved to exercise the political will require to deliver on this promise."

Hatoyama also said Japan is ready to contribute money and technical help for poorer countries to cut emissions. He called for a "fair and effective international framework" that allows all countries to make cuts.

By JOHN HEILPRIN, Associated Press Writer

Warming ocean melts Greenland glaciers

2009-12-02T19:29:00.000-08:00

SERMILIK FJORD, Greenland - With whale fins splashing in the distance, Ruth Curry hauls up her catch from the blustery deck of an icebreaker.

An orange tube fixed to a metal frame breaks the surface as the motorized winch stops groaning. Inside: data on the water temperature deep down in this glacial fjord off southeast Greenland.

"If you were to dip your hand in it, it doesn't seem that warm," says Curry, an American climate scientist. "But it is. It's warm enough to melt ice. And that's the important thing here."

Curry and her colleagues from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts zigzagged between majestic icebergs in the Sermilik fjord last month in search of proof that waters from warmer latitudes, or subtropical waters, are flushing through this remote and frigid region.

They found it - all the way up to the base of the outlet glaciers that spill into the ocean like tongues of ice from Greenland's massive ice sheet.

Coupled with similar findings off western Greenland, the discovery could help to explain why the glaciers have started flowing quicker in the past decade, a phenomenon that raised alarm because it contributes to rising sea levels.

"The measurements alone are not enough to conclude that the glacial melt is to a high degree driven by subtropical water. But I think the story is (starting) to come together," says research leader Fiamma Straneo.

The team found subtropical water with a temperature of about 39 Fahrenheit (4 degrees Celsius) deep inside the Sermilik fjord.

The findings confirm the outcome of an undersea battle below the dark surface of the North Atlantic: Arctic waters that usually dominate this region have yielded to an influx of subtropical water carried north by westward branches of the current commonly called the Gulf Stream.

Scientists say it's a natural process - in one period the cold waters will have the upper hand, and in the next it's the other way round. But the rapidly increasing temperatures of the subtropical oceans suggest that the balance could be tilted beyond natural variability, Curry says.

"We've actually measured the waters at their source and have seen their temperature going up, up, up in a way that can't be explained without taking into account human influences," she says.

The research underscores the complex interaction between the world's oceans and a warming atmosphere.

Oceans help to contain global warming by absorbing about half of the carbon dioxide released by humans into the atmosphere, but the water also expands as it warms, raising sea levels.

It could also have a big impact on climate through feedback mechanisms, such as the melting of seaside glaciers and changes to ocean currents that warm or cool different parts of the globe.

In the June-August period, the world's ocean surface temperature was the warmest on record since 1880, according to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The surface temperature was 62.5 F (17 Celsius), 1 degree F (0.6 degrees C) above the 20th century average. Meteorologists say the reason was El Nino weather patterns combined with manmade global warming.

The North Atlantic has seen especially large changes in recent years.

The temperature of the water that flows into the Arctic has increased by as much as 3.5 degrees F (2 degrees C) since the 1990s, says Helge Drange, professor of oceanography at Norway's University of Bergen. "This can only be understood as a combined effect of natural variability and manmade warming," he says.

That has had a big impact on marine ecosystems, with fish traveling north into waters that were previously too cold for them. For example, more than 20 new species of fish have been found off Iceland, including blue sharks and flounders.

Meanwhile, cod has followed the warm water as it flows around Greenland's southern tip and up the giant island's west coast. "If you talk to local people they say it's fantastic because the Atlantic cod is coming," Drange says.

To many scientists, however, the shifts in ocean currents are no cause for celebration. Even if there's natural variability, there's concern that global warming may make the fluctuations more extreme.

And while some species thrive in warmer water, others that live on the edge of the Arctic, such as polar bears and seals, find their habitat melting away.

"We're heading off to a climate extreme and this is just going to snowball," says Curry, reflecting on the state of the global climate on the Greenpeace icebreaker hosting the Woods Hole research team.

"I think that we've done it, really kicked Earth's climate system. And that says a lot," she says. "It's a beast. It's huge. And to have moved it in as short a period of time as a 100 years, basically, to have done that is enormous."

y KARL RITTER, Associated Press Writer

Seismic surveys disturb blue whales: biologists

2009-11-30T06:58:00.000-08:00

PARIS (AFP) - Seismic surveys used for oil and gas prospecting on the sea floor are a disturbance for blue whales, the world's biggest animal and one of its rarest species, biologists reported on Wednesday.

Lucia Di Iorio of Zurich University, Switzerland, and Christopher Clark, an acoustics specialist at the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology in New York, recorded the calls of blue whales at a feeding ground in Canada's St. Lawrence estuary in August 2004.

The 11-day experiment was conducted during a period when a survey vessel was using a "sparker", a low-to-medium power device that sends an acoustic pulse to the sea floor and picks up the reflected signal to get a picture of the topography.

"On the days when the vessel was operating, the whales called more than two and a half times more frequently than on days when the vessel was not operating," Di Iorio told AFP.

For humans, "it would be the same as if you were next to a roadworks hammer and have to shout or repeat what you say," she said.

Di Iorio said further work would show whether blue whales suffered stress or other problems from the acoustic kerfuffle.

"Blue whales are rather solitary whales which swim all the time, are highly dispersed and always travelling, and feeding areas are places where they have the chance to get together in a small range and with a lot of social activity as well.

"Being disturbed during social interactions that don't occur very often could have an influence, perhaps in mating, but we can't really say for sure, or what kind or if it is short term or long term."

One concern is that oil and gas prospecting is venturing out into ever-deeper water, and little is known about the impact this might have on whales' feeding and migratory patterns.

The paper appears in Biology Letters, a journal of Britain's Royal Society.

In April, an experiment reported in the same journal found that very loud, repeated blasts of sonar caused an Atlantic bottlenose dolphin to temporarily lose its hearing.

Numerous beachings of whales, dolphins and porpoises have occurred over the past decade, prompting a finger of blame to be pointed at warship exercises.

Measuring up to nearly 33 metres (100 feet) and weighing as much as 180 tonnes, the blue whale (Balaenoptera musculus) was hunted almost to extinction until it was given international protection in 1966.

Estimates of this species' population today vary widely. A 2002 Canadian study put the global numbers at between 5,000 and 12,000.

Before large-scale whale hunting, there may have been more than a quarter of a million of the giant mammals.

Jellyfish swarm northward in warming world

2009-11-27T00:40:00.000-08:00

KOKONOGI, Japan - A blood-orange blob the size of a small refrigerator emerged from the dark waters, its venomous tentacles trapped in a fishing net. Within minutes, hundreds more were being hauled up, a pulsating mass crowding out the catch of mackerel and sea bass.

The fishermen leaned into the nets, grunting and grumbling as they tossed the translucent jellyfish back into the bay, giants weighing up to 200 kilograms (450 pounds), marine invaders that are putting the men's livelihoods at risk.

The venom of the Nomura, the world's largest jellyfish, a creature up to 2 meters (6 feet) in diameter, can ruin a whole day's catch by tainting or killing fish stung when ensnared with them in the maze of nets here in northwest Japan's Wakasa Bay.

"Some fishermen have just stopped fishing," said Taiichiro Hamano, 67. "When you pull in the nets and see jellyfish, you get depressed."

This year's jellyfish swarm is one of the worst he has seen, Hamano said. Once considered a rarity occurring every 40 years, they are now an almost annual occurrence along several thousand kilometers (miles) of Japanese coast, and far beyond Japan.

Scientists believe climate change - the warming of oceans - has allowed some of the almost 2,000 jellyfish species to expand their ranges, appear earlier in the year and increase overall numbers, much as warming has helped ticks, bark beetles and other pests to spread to new latitudes.

The gelatinous seaborne creatures are blamed for decimating fishing industries in the Bering and Black seas, forcing the shutdown of seaside power and desalination plants in Japan, the Middle East and Africa, and terrorizing beachgoers worldwide, the U.S. National Science Foundation says.

A 2008 foundation study cited research estimating that people are stung 500,000 times every year - sometimes multiple times - in Chesapeake Bay on the U.S. East Coast, and 20 to 40 die each year in the Philippines from jellyfish stings.

In 2007, a salmon farm in Northern Ireland lost its more than 100,000 fish to an attack by the mauve stinger, a jellyfish normally known for stinging bathers in warm Mediterranean waters. Scientists cite its migration to colder Irish seas as evidence of global warming.

Increasingly polluted waters - off China, for example - boost growth of the microscopic plankton that "jellies" feed upon, while overfishing has eliminated many of the jellyfish's predators and cut down on competitors for plankton feed.

"These increases in jellyfish should be a warning sign that our oceans are stressed and unhealthy," said Lucas Brotz, a University of British Columbia researcher.

Here on the rocky Echizen coast, amid floodlights and the roar of generators, fishermen at Kokonogi's bustling port made quick work of the day's catch - packaging glistening fish and squid in Styrofoam boxes for shipment to market.

In rain jackets and hip waders, they crowded around a visitor to tell how the jellyfish have upended a way of life in which men worked fishing trawlers on the high seas in their younger days and later eased toward retirement by joining one of the cooperatives operating nets set in the bay.

It was a good living, they said, until the jellyfish began inundating the bay in 2002, sometimes numbering 500 million, reducing fish catches by 30 percent and slashing prices by half over concerns about quality.

Two nets in Echizen burst last month during a typhoon because of the sheer weight of the jellyfish, and off the east coast jelly-filled nets capsized a 10-ton trawler as its crew tried to pull them up. The three fishermen were rescued.

"We have been getting rid of jellyfish. But no matter how hard we try, the jellyfish keep coming and coming," said Fumio Oma, whose crew is out of work after their net broke under the weight of thousands of jellyfish. "We need the government's help to get rid of the jellyfish."

The invasions cost the industry up to 30 billion yen ($332 million) a year, and tens of thousands of fishermen have sought government compensation, said scientist Shin-ichi Uye, Japan's leading expert on the problem.

Hearing fishermen's pleas, Uye, who had been studying zooplankton, became obsessed with the little-studied Nomura's jellyfish, scientifically known as Nemopilema nomurai, which at its biggest looks like a giant mushroom trailing dozens of noodle-like tentacles.

"No one knew their life cycle, where they came from, where they reproduced," said Uye, 59. "This jellyfish was like an alien."

He artificially bred Nomura's jellyfish in his Hiroshima University lab, learning about their life cycle, growth rates and feeding habits. He traveled by ferry between China to Japan this year to confirm they were riding currents to Japanese waters.

He concluded China's coastal waters offered a perfect breeding ground: Agricultural and sewage runoff are spurring plankton growth, and fish catches are declining. The waters of the Yellow Sea, meanwhile, have warmed as much as 1.7 degrees C (3 degrees F) over the past quarter-century.

"The jellyfish are becoming more and more dominant," said Uye, as he sliced off samples of dead jellyfish on the deck of an Echizen fishing boat. "Their growth rates are quite amazing."

The slight, bespectacled scientist is unafraid of controversy, having lobbied his government tirelessly to help the fishermen, and angered Chinese colleagues by arguing their government must help solve the problem, comparing it to the effects of acid rain that reaches Japan from China.

"The Chinese people say they will think about this after they get rich, but it might be too late by then," he said.

A U.S. marine scientist, Jennifer Purcell of Western Washington University, has found a correlation between warming and jellyfish on a much larger scale, in at least 11 locations, including the Mediterranean and North seas, and Chesapeake and Narragansett bays.

"It's hard to deny that there is an effect from warming," Purcell said. "There keeps coming up again and again examples of jellyfish populations being high when it's warmer." Some tropical species, on the other hand, appear to decline when water temperatures rise too high.

Even if populations explode, their numbers may be limited in the long term by other factors, including food and currents. In a paper last year, researchers concluded jellyfish numbers in the Bering Sea - which by 2000 were 40 times higher than in 1982 - declined even as temperatures have hit record highs.

"They were still well ahead of their historic averages for that region," said co-author Lorenzo Ciannelli of Oregon State University. "But clearly jellyfish populations are not merely a function of water temperature."

Addressing the surge in jellyfish blooms in most places will require long-term fixes, such as introducing fishing quotas and pollution controls, as well as capping greenhouse gas emissions to control global warming, experts said.

In the short term, governments are left with few options other than warning bathers or bailing out cash-strapped fishermen. In Japan, the government is helping finance the purchase of newly designed nets, a layered system that snares jellyfish with one kind of net, allowing fish through to be caught in another.

Some entrepreneurs, meanwhile, are trying to cash in. One Japanese company is selling giant jellyfish ice cream, and another plans a pickled plum dip with chunks of giant jellyfish. But, though a popular delicacy, jellyfish isn't likely to replace sushi or other fish dishes on Asian menus anytime soon, in view of its time-consuming processing, heavy sodium overload and unappealing image.

By MICHAEL CASEY, AP Environmental Writer – Mon Nov 16, 11:58 am ET

Global economic crisis to slash carbon emissions: IEA

2009-11-25T22:29:00.000-08:00

BANGKOK (AFP) - – The global economic crisis will slash carbon emissions in 2009, opening a narrow opportunity to take decisive action on global warming, the International Energy Agency said Tuesday.

The predicted three-percent fall in energy-related CO2 pollution compared with a year earlier would be the steepest drop in 40 years, chief IEA economist Fatih Birol said at a press conference in Bangkok.

The global carbon output up to now has on average grown three percent annually, he added.

Birol said this silver-lining drop in carbon pollution was a "unique window of opportunity" for the world to put itself on a path to limit the increase in global temperatures to two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), the scientific threshold for dangerous global warming.

The recession-driven fall would lead to CO2 emissions in 2020 being five percent lower than the IEA forecast from just a year ago, even if no further action is taken to curb global warming, he added.

The IEA estimate is part of its World Energy Outlook report, an excerpt of which was released at UN climate talks under way in the Thai capital.

It outlined how steeply countries would have to cut their energy-related carbon emissions over the next 20 years in order fix the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere at a level that would ensure the two-degree threshold is not crossed.

That level, measured in parts per million, is 450 ppm, according to a benchmark scientific report issued in 2007 by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

"This gives us a chance to make real progress toward a clean-energy future, but only if the right policies are put in place promptly," said IEA executive director Nobuo Tanaka in a statement.

"Every year of delay adds an extra 500 billion dollars (340 billion euros) to the investment needed between 2010 and 2030 in the energy sector," he warned.

Energy production accounts for about 65 percent of the world's greenhouse gas emissions, according to the IEA.

The climate talks under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) have been stymied for months, and are running out of time to deliver a new global climate treaty at a December conference in Copenhagen.

Rich and poor nations are divided over how to share the burden of cutting greenhouse gases, and who is going to pay for it.

Developed nations are willing to take the lead, but expect emerging giants such as Brazil, India and China to commit to mitigation measures as well -- pledges these countries have fiercely resisted.

Rich nations created the problem and should bear the brunt of the responsibility to fix it, the developing countries say.

"Continuing the current energy policies would have catastrophic consequences for the climate," said UNFCCC chief Yvo de Boer. "This is a unique opportunity... to transition the global energy system."

Tanaka confirmed that China had overtaken the United States as the world's top carbon polluter in 2007, adding that "it will be the same in the future."

While it has not announced an emission reductions target, if China fulfils its energy efficiency plans it would account for a quarter of the global effort needed by 2020 under the IEA scenario for stabilising CO2 levels, he said.

"It would put China at the forefront of the fight against climate change," Birol told AFP.

Environmentalists Not All Happy About New EPA Guidelines

2009-11-23T21:30:00.000-08:00

New fuel-economy rules proposed by the federal Department of Transportation and the Environmental Protection Agency are the first major move by the U.S. toward cracking down on greenhouse-gas emissions. The proposed program includes miles-per-gallon requirements and national emissions standards under the EPA's greenhouse-gas-emissions guidelines for model years from 2012 to 2016.

You'd think that environmental groups would be overjoyed.

Hardly. What has them worried are all the pro-industry rule tweaks and what they see as slanted calculations. "Automakers lobbied hard to include loopholes in the Administration's proposal," says Dan Becker, director of the Safe Climate Campaign at the Center for Auto Safety.

One such wrinkle: in a key concession to manufacturers, the Department of Transportation offers generous credits to carmakers that build advanced-technology vehicles. Manufacturers of electric vehicles will get credits that apply to the regulation's overall company pollution targets. However, the power-plant carbon emissions from generating the electricity to run an EV are not factored into the greenhouse-gas calculations for such vehicles, says Jim Kliesch, senior engineer with the Union of Concerned Scientists. "In truth, if you include system-wide emissions it's about half of what a conventional vehicle emits," he says.

Critics of the proposal also point to phantom savings. Becker says the new rules perpetuate the flex-fuel credit that allows carmakers to build more gas guzzlers than the regulation might otherwise allow, provided the vehicles can run on E85, a mixture that is 85% ethanol and 15% gasoline. The problem is that only about 1% of the gas stations in the U.S. now sell E85 and the number isn't expected to increase much anytime soon. The flex-fuel credit trims the m.p.g. target for manufacturers selling flex-fuel-capable vehicles by 1.2 m.p.g.

Another perceived soft spot in the White House proposal: carmakers will get carbon credits for selling their most efficient vehicles into California and other states that had adopted separate standards before the Obama Administration moved to harmonize an expanding patchwork of state and federal rules. The proposed solution results in an arrangement whereby carmakers who had been prepared to meet California's tough impending state rules (just to be able to sell in California) will now earn bonus credits for doing just that. "The concern is carmakers will be getting extra credits for what they would have done anyway," says Kliesch.

One exemption that is already drawing fire is the so-called "German loophole," which allows automakers selling fewer than 400,000 vehicles in the U.S. to meet a weaker EPA standard. All the German automakers - Mercedes, BMW and Volkswagen - will qualify for the exemption as well as Mitsubishi, Subaru, Kia and more exotic brands such as Ferrari, Aston Martin, Jaguar and Land Rover.

But don't feel too badly for Detroit. Becker says the company that perhaps does best under the proposed rules is the government's own car company, General Motors. GM benefits from the EV exception and also from the changes in the rules that will allow sales of larger vehicles like pickup trucks through a separate loophole that permits automakers to "borrow" credits from the future. Kliesch says the flexibility is fine but asks where the guarantee is that the companies will make good on promises to repay borrowed credits. "That's why you need some kind of backstop [in the rules] to make sure the companies actually meet the standards," says Kliesch.

By JOSEPH R. SZCZESNY, Time

Antarctic coastal ice thinning surprises experts

2009-11-19T04:49:00.000-08:00

OSLO (Reuters) - Scientists are surprised at how extensively coastal ice in Antarctica and Greenland is thinning, according to a study Wednesday that could help predict rising sea levels linked to climate change.

Analysis of millions of NASA satellite laser images showed the biggest loss of ice was caused by glaciers speeding up when they flowed into the sea, according to scientists at the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) and Bristol University.

"We were surprised to see such a strong pattern of thinning glaciers across such large areas of coastline -- it's widespread and in some cases thinning extends hundreds of kilometers inland," said Hamish Pritchard of BAS who led the study.

"We think that warm ocean currents reaching the coast and melting the glacier front is the most likely cause of faster glacier flow," he said in a statement.

"This kind of ice loss is so poorly understood that it remains the most unpredictable part of future sea level rise," he added. BAS said the study gave the "most comprehensive picture" of the thinning glaciers so far.

Rising seas caused by a thaw of vast stores of ice on Antarctica and Greenland could threaten Pacific islands, coasts from China to the United States and cities from London to Buenos Aires.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said earlier this month global warming, blamed mainly on burning fossil fuels, could raise sea levels by 50 cm to 2 meters (20 inches to 6 ft 6 in) this century -- higher than most experts have predicted.

Among findings, Wednesday's study said 81 of 111 fast-moving glaciers in Greenland were thinning at twice the rate of slow-flowing ice at the same altitude.

"Dynamic thinning of Greenland and Antarctic ice-sheet margins is more sensitive, pervasive, enduring and important than previously realized," they wrote. "Dynamic thinning" means loss of ice due to a faster flow.

They said it was too early to determine whether the thinning was a sign that sea level rise would accelerate from a current rate of about 3 mm (0.12 inches) a year.

"Working that out is the next task," David Vaughan, a BAS glaciologist among the authors, told Reuters. Thinning in some areas could be caused by changes in snowfall, for instance, not the slide of ice toward the ocean, he said.

By Alister Doyle, Environment Correspondent

10 percent of world's major species at threat

2009-10-08T08:46:00.000-07:00

SYDNEY (AFP) - – Almost 10 percent of the world's mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians and fish are in danger of extinction due to climate change and other factors, according to an Australian report released Tuesday.

The "Number of Living Species in Australia and the World" study found 0.9 percent of the world's 1.9 million classified species were at threat, including 9.2 percent of major vertebrate species.

Australia's government-funded Biological Resources Study, the world's only census of animal and plant life, found 20.8 percent of mammals were endangered, as were 12.2 percent of birds and 29.2 percent of amphibians.

Of reptiles, 4.8 percent were considered threatened, along with 4.1 percent of fish species.

"In Australia and around the world, biodiversity is under huge and growing pressure," said environment department secretary Robyn Kruk.

"The pressures are pervasive and chronic in many places; invasive species, habitat loss and climate change in particular."

Australia was found to be home to 7.8 percent of the world's known species. Environment Minister Peter Garrett said the study had shown its wildlife was highly unique, with 87 percent of mammals and 93 percent of reptiles found nowhere else in the world.

However, the study also showed Australian species accounted for 9.1 percent of the world's threatened flora and fauna, and Garrett said vigilance was essential.

"We have a long way to go, we have discovered and named only about a quarter of Australia's estimated number of flora and fauna," said Garrett.

"We need this essential information to do a better job of managing our biodiversity against the threats of invasive species, habitat-loss and climate change."

According to the report there were likely to be some 11 million species on Earth of which only 1.9 million had been discovered, with millions of invertebrates, fungi and other organisms yet to be found and named.

Obama: US 'determined to act' on climate change

2009-09-30T07:54:00.000-07:00

UNITED NATIONS - President Barack Obama on Tuesday declared that the United States is a serious partner in combating global warming, telling world peers "we are determined to act."

"The journey is hard. And we don't have much time left to make it," Obama said in brief remarks at a high-level climate summit convened by U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.

Obama sought to show U.S. resolve ahead of crucial talks in Copenhagen in December, when nations will try to reach a new global treaty to address climate change. He spoke at the start of a busy day of diplomacy at the United Nations that also was to include a three-way meeting with Israeli and Palestinian leaders in an effort to nudge forward the Mideast peace process.

"We understand the gravity of the climate threat. We are determined to act," Obama said. "And we will meet our responsibility to future generations."

He spoke after Ban admonished leaders to put aside differences and move more quickly on global warming.

Obama is under pressure to put political capital behind getting a serious clean-energy law at home and show that the U.S., an economic giant, will do its part to cut heat-trapping emissions. The U.S. House passed a bill this summer that would set the first mandatory limits on greenhouse gases, but a Senate version appears increasingly unlikely this year.

In his first presidential visit to the United Nations, Obama also sought to show a clear break from former President George W. Bush without referring to his predecessor by name. Bush's critics said he didn't take climate change seriously enough.

"It is true that for too many years, mankind has been slow to respond to or even recognize the magnitude of the climate threat. It is true of my own country as well," Obama said. "We recognize that."

Environmental experts warn of catastrophic changes, from rising sea levels to more drought, if industrial and developing nations cannot collectively address a warming planet.

"Our generation's response to this challenge will be judged by history," Obama said.

Obama said his administration has made the "largest-ever" American investment in renewable energy. And he called on other nations - the rich and the developing countries alike - to rise to the challenge. He said undertaking costly environmental clean up work is difficult at a time when the world is trying to recover from a recession, but that it has to be done.

"All of us will face doubts and difficulties in our own capitals as we try to reach a lasting solution to the climate challenge," Obama said. "But difficulty is no excuse for complacency."

Tuesday's U.N. summit and the G-20 summit in Pittsburgh later this week seek to put added pressure on rich nations to commit to greenhouse gas cuts and to pay for poorer nations to burn less coal and preserve their forests.

Obama sought repeatedly to hold everyone accountable. He said developed nations such as the United States have a "responsibility to lead" but rapidly-growing nations must do their part.

As for Obama's Mideast diplomacy efforts, there were no expectations of a breakthrough from Tuesday's three-way meeting. But it was seen as a crucial step for the president nonetheless.

After seeing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas separately, Obama was bringing the two together for the first Israeli-Palestinian meeting since Netanyahu took office in March.

Even if little more than a photo opportunity, it will probably be the most-watched portion of a marathon day of international diplomacy for Obama, a 12-hour sprint through many high-profile global problems and disputes.

The Israeli-Palestinian sit-down wasn't announced until Saturday and comes with the two sides still far apart on what it would take to resume peace talks that broke off in 2008.

U.S. envoy George Mitchell failed last week to bridge the gap between the two sides on the issue of Jewish settlements in Palestinian territory, putting the long hoped-for three-way meeting in doubt. Obama has asked Israel to freeze all settlement construction, a condition for Abbas to resume negotiations. But Israel has only committed to a partial halt.

Still, the sides decided to go ahead, even though Obama is considered unlikely to resolve the settlement showdown and announce a relaunching of peace talks.

"We have no grand expectations out of one meeting," White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said.

One reason to have the meeting is the need to get momentum going.

"The U.S. wants to and the U.S. needs to negotiate in public," said Jon Alterman, a senior fellow in Middle East policy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and a former State Department official in President George W. Bush's first term. "There's a perceived need for the U.S. to visibly be involved in making progress on Arab-Israeli issues."

Obama's agenda on Tuesday also included meeting Chinese President Hu Jintao at a fraught time in the Washington-Beijing relationship; playing luncheon host, as America's first black president, to sub-Saharan African leaders for talks on boosting opportunities for young people in their poverty-stricken nations; delivering key speeches to former President Bill Clinton's Global Initiative and to a U.N. heads-of-state session on the stalled issue of climate change; and ending the day with a U.N.-sponsored leaders dinner.

By JENNIFER LOVEN, AP White House Correspondent

2 German cargo ships pass through 'Arctic Passage'

2009-09-28T07:07:00.000-07:00

FRANKFURT - Two German merchant ships have traversed the fabled Northeast Passage after global warming and melting ice opened a route from South Korea along Russia's Arctic coast to Siberia.

Now the German-owned ships are poised to complete their journey through the cold waters where icebergs abound, heading for Rotterdam in the Netherlands with 3,500 tons of construction parts.

The merchant ships MV Beluga Fraternity and MV Beluga Foresight arrived this week in Yamburg, Siberia, their owner Beluga Shipping GmbH said Friday. They traveled from Ulsan, South Korea, in late July to Siberia by way of the Northeast Passage, a sea lane that, in years past, was avoided because of its heavy ice floes.

Scientists report that the Arctic Ocean ice cap has been shrinking to unprecedented levels in recent summers, because of global warming, opening up many passages that were ice-choked in earlier times.

In July, new NASA satellite measurements showed that sea ice in the Arctic was not just shrinking in area, but thinning dramatically.

Niels Stolberg, the president of Beluga, which is based in the German city of Bremen, called it the first time a Western shipping company successfully transited the Northeast Passage.

"To transit the Northeast Passage so well and professionally without incident on the premiere is the result of our extremely accurate preparation as well as the outstanding team work between our attentive captains, our reliable meteorologists and our engaged crew," Stolberg said.

He said the shipping company was planning more voyages through the area in coming months. Traditionally, shippers traveling from Asia to Europe have to go through the Gulf of Aden and through the Suez Canal into the Mediterranean Sea and, pending their destination, into the Atlantic Ocean.

A journey from South Korean to the Netherlands, for example, is about 11,000 nautical miles (12,658 miles). By going northward and using the Northeast Passage, approximately 3,000 nautical miles (3,452 miles) and 10 days can be shaved off. That means lower fuel costs

Researchers said the ability to navigate the route showed climate change.

"We are seeing an expression of climate change here," said Mark Serreze, director of the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colo. "The Arctic is warming; we're losing the sea ice cover. The more frequent opening of that Northeast Passage is part of the process we're seeing."

"The Arctic is becoming a blue ocean," Serreze told The Associated Press.

For the last few years, including this year, navigator Roald Amundsen's famous Northwest Passage has been navigable. Then in 2007, the more crucial deep water channel called McClure Strait opened up and now the Northeast Passage, Serreze said. The passage "is the traditional choke point," Serreze said.

That northern route "is going to become more and more open on a seasonal basis," Serreze said. But it won't be consistently open because of local weather patterns that could still freeze it up for long time periods.

This year is shaping up to have the third lowest amount of Arctic sea ice on record, just behind the worst year set in 2007 and in 2008. But just because 2009 is slightly up from the past two years, it is not an upward trend or a recovery, Serreze said. It reflects a change in local weather patterns that occurred in August, he said.

"It's certainly part of the overall decline of sea ice that we've been seeing," Serreze said.

Both ships, which carried cargo for a power plant project in Surgut, Siberia, were escorted by a pair of Russian icebreakers during portions of their journey. The Beluga Fraternity left South Korea on July 23, followed by the Beluga Foresight on July 28.

They arrived at the Novy Port, a major Russian shipping one on the west side of the Ob Gulf, an open body of water that stretches from the Ob River delta in the south to the Kara Sea in the north.

Verena Beckhusen, a spokeswoman for Beluga, said the Beluga Fraternity had already hoisted anchor and left Novy Port on Thursday. The Beluga Foresight is scheduled to cast off Saturday after its departure "was postponed due to bad weather."

Russia has long used its northern coast for shipping fuel, supplies and other goods to its remote Arctic settlements, though funding for such shipments dwindled after the Soviet collapse.

AP Science Writer Seth Borenstein reported from Washington, D.C. AP Writer Mike Eckel in Moscow contributed to this report.

This summer may see first ice-free North Pole

2009-09-25T04:02:00.000-07:00

WASHINGTON - There's a 50-50 chance that the North Pole will be ice-free this summer, which would be a first in recorded history, a leading ice scientist says.

The weather and ocean conditions in the next couple of weeks will determine how much of the sea ice will melt, and early signs are not good, said Mark Serreze. He's a senior researcher at the National Snow and Ice Data Center and the University of Colorado in Boulder, Colo.

The chances for a total meltdown at the pole are higher than ever because the layer of ice coating the sea is thinner than ever, he said.

"A large area at the North Pole and surrounding the North Pole is first-year ice," Serreze said. "That's the stuff that tends to melt out in the summer because it's thin."

Preliminary February and March data from a NASA satellite shows that the circle of ice surrounding the North Pole is "considerably thinner" than scientists have seen during the five years the satellite has been taking pictures, NASA ice scientist Jay Zwally said Friday. He thinks there is slightly less than a 50-50 chance the North Pole will be ice-free.

Last year was a record year for ice melt all over the Arctic and the ice band surrounding the North Pole is even thinner now.

There is nothing scientifically significant about the North Pole, Serreze said. But there is a cultural and symbolic importance. It's home to Santa Claus, after all. Last August, the Northwest Passage was open to navigation for the first time in memory.

A more conservative ice scientist, Cecilia Bitz at the University of Washington, put the odds of a North Pole without ice closer to 1 in 4. Even that is far worse than climate models had predicted, which was 1 in 70 sometime in the next decade, she said.

But both she and Serreze agree it's just a matter of time.

"I would guess within the next 10 year it would happen at least once," Bitz said.

Already, figures from the National Snow and Ice Data Center show sea ice in the Arctic as a whole at about the same level now as it was at its low point last year in late June and early July.

The explanation is a warming climate and a weather phenomenon, scientists said.

For the last couple of decades, there has been a steady melt of Arctic sea ice - which covers only the ocean and which thins during summer and refreezes in winter. In recent years, it has gradually become thinner because more of it has been melting as the Earth's temperature rises.

Then, this past winter, there was a natural weather shift called the Arctic Oscillation, sort of a cold weather cousin to El Nino. That oscillation caused a change in winds and ocean that accelerated a normal flushing of sea ice in the Arctic. That pushed the older thicker sea ice that had been over the North Pole south toward Greenland and eventually out of the Arctic, Serreze said. That left just a thin one-year layer of ice that previously covered part of Siberia.

By SETH BORENSTEIN, AP Science Writer

Solar finds it hard to squeeze water from desert

2009-09-23T03:59:00.000-07:00

OAKLAND, Calif. - A westward dash to power electricity-hungry cities by cashing in on the desert's most abundant resource - sunshine - is clashing with efforts to protect the tiny pupfish and desert tortoise and stinginess over the region's rarest resource: water.

Water is the cooling agent for what traditionally has been the most cost-efficient type of large-scale solar plants. To some solar companies answering Washington's push for renewable energy on vast government lands, it's also an environmental thorn. The unusual collision pits natural resources protections against President Barack Obama's plans to produce more environmentally friendly energy.

The solar hopefuls are encountering overtaxed aquifers and a legendary legacy of Western water wars and legal and regulatory scuffles. Some are moving to more costly air-cooled technology - which uses 90 percent less water - for solar plants that will employ miles of sun-reflecting mirrors across the Western deserts. Others see market advantages in solar dish or photovoltaic technologies that don't require steam engines and cooling water and that are becoming more economically competitive.

The National Park Service is worried about environmental consequences of solar proposals on government lands that are administered by the Bureau of Land Management. It says it supports the solar push but is warning against water drawdowns, especially in southern Nevada. In the Amargosa Valley, the endangered, electric-blue pupfish lives in a hot water, aquifer-fed limestone cavern called Devil's Hole.

"It is not in the public interest for BLM to approve plans of development for water-cooled solar energy projects in the arid basins of southern Nevada, some of which are already over-appropriated," Jon Jarvis, director of the Park Service's Pacific West Region, wrote to the BLM director in Nevada.

Jarvis' e-mail from February, obtained by The Associated Press, noted that the rare pupfish's dwindling numbers prompted Nevada to ban new groundwater allocations within 25 miles of the pool.

Jarvis urged the BLM to promote technologies that use less water and hold off on permits until it finishes its assessment of the solar program next year. The BLM tried suspending new applications last year but relented under pressure from industry and advocates of renewable energy.

"Water is a big concern and the desert tortoise is a major concern, and the amount of site preparation is a concern," said Linda Resseguie, a BLM project manager. The government in reviewing each project wants to make careful decisions over what it considers "a potentially irreversible commitment of lands," she said.

Water is among the complications in deserts where more than 150 solar applications have been submitted for hot spots in Nevada, California, and Arizona, plus a few in New Mexico.

Companies are wrestling with routes for long-distance transmission lines and habitat for the threatened desert tortoise. They also are worried about a proposal being developed by Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., for a Mojave national monument, which could put up to 600,000 acres off-limits alongside already protected park and military lands. It could affect at least 14 solar and five wind energy proposals.

The Spanish-owned energy company, Iberdrola, has submitted 12 applications in four states. Its solar managing director, Kim Fiske, said her company is planning to use photovoltaic technology in Amargosa Valley but elsewhere will evaluate each site's feasibility for water. Photovoltaic systems use conducting material to convert sunlight directly to electricity and need only nominal amounts of water to wash their solar panels, compared with the traditional steam-turbine solar that uses much larger volumes of water for cooling towers.

"Water usage is becoming the larger issue. Some companies still want wet cooling and say it's less efficient to do dry cooling, and they need 10 percent more land to get the same output," said Peter Weiner, an attorney representing solar companies. Some are exploring hybrid systems that use water during the hottest part of the day.

The government won't say how much water would be needed by applicants because those proposals are still in flux. But National Park Service hydrologists last fall tallied more than 50,000 acre feet per year — nearly 16.3 billion gallons — proposed by applications in Amargosa Valley alone, or enough to supply more than 50,000 typical American homes. Nevada previously said the basin could support only half that. Since then, some companies have dropped out or switched to photovoltaics, making that estimate of 16.3 billion gallons outdated.

Nevada's policy and legal mandates restrict water in the driest areas. California regulators warn that wet-cooled projects face an uphill climb. The two under review there so far on government land use minimal water. First up is Oakland, Calif.-based BrightSource Energy's five-square mile, air-cooled, mirror complex near the Mojave National Preserve.

In Arizona, most solar proposals are away from populous areas with the most water restrictions.

Water is "a hot button for everybody," said Fiske. "Everyone is concerned about water. It's probably one of the biggest issues."

By RITA BEAMISH, Associated Press

Study: SE Asia will be hit hard by climate change

2009-09-21T03:57:00.000-07:00

BANGKOK - Southeast Asia will be hit particularly hard by climate change, causing the region's agriculture-dependent economies to contract by as much as 6.7 percent annually by the end of the century, according to a study released Monday.

The Asian Development Bank study focused on Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam. Those countries are especially vulnerable because they have large coastal populations facing rising sea levels and rely heavily on rice and other agriculture products which could suffer from water shortages as well as floods. Vietnam was found to be the most vulnerable.

"Climate change seriously threatens Southeast Asia's families, food supplies and financial prosperity," said Ursula Schaefer-Preuss, the ADB's vice president for knowledge management and sustainable development. "If Southeast Asian nations delay action on climate change, their economies and people will ultimately suffer.'

If nothing is done to combat global warming, the report said that by 2100 the four Asian countries would see temperatures rise an average of 8.6 Fahrenheit (4.8 Celsius) from the 1990 level. They would also likely suffer drops in rainfall leading to worsening droughts and more forest fires, more destructive tropical storms and flooding from rising seas that could displace millions of people and lead to the destruction of 965 square miles (2,500 square kilometers) of mangroves.

The economic cost, according to the report, would be 2.2 percent of gross domestic product by 2100 if only the impact on markets is considered, 5.7 percent if health costs and biodiversity losses are factored in and 6.7 percent of gross domestic product if losses from climate-related disasters are also included.

That far exceeds the projected cost globally of climate change, estimated at 2.6 percent of gross domestic product each year by the end of the century.

Currently, governments are working to lay the groundwork ahead of a U.N. conference in December in Copenhagen that will attempt to draft a new agreement on regulating carbon emissions. It would replace the 1998 Kyoto Protocol which expires in 2012.

The ADB said Southeast Asian nations would have to do their part — even though their emissions were minuscule compared to China and the United States. But these countries should get billions of dollars in financial assistance from richer nations to help them address the problem and their efforts at mitigation should not come at the expense of slower development.

"Most politicians are only looking at this from an environment view but this is wrong," said Emil Salim, an environmental adviser to the Indonesian government who also contributed to the report. "You would be forgetting that we have unemployment and poverty."

The key for Southeast Asia would be protecting its remaining tropical forests which have fallen victim in recent years to widespread illegal logging and the expansion of palm oil plantations, the report found. Deforestation represents as much as 75 percent of the four country's emissions.

The report advised investing in tree planting programs, better forest management and programs that pay governments to keep trees in the ground.

It also recommended further measures to mitigate the impact of climate change, such as irrigation networks, flood control systems, early warning systems and protecting coastal mangroves.

It estimated such steps would cost $5 billion per year on average by 2020 but that benefits would exceed the cost after 2050. It said by 2100 that the benefits could be 1.9 percent of GDP compared to cost of taking action which would amount to 0.2 percent of GDP.

The report also found that 40 percent of energy-related carbon emissions could be reduced by 2020 if the countries invested in more energy efficient buildings, fuel efficient cars and public transport. Another 40 percent could be reduced by switching from coal to natural gas and renewable energy like solar and wind for power generation.

By MICHAEL CASEY, AP Environmental Writer

Group seeks emergency protection for 32 species

2009-09-18T03:50:00.000-07:00

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. - Environmentalists are seeking emergency protection for nearly three dozens rare plants, animals and insects under the Endangered Species Act, saying all are at risk due to habitat destruction and other threats.

WildEarth Guardians is asking Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service director Dale Hall to list 32 species from across the West - ranging from flowering plants to snails - to ensure they do not disappear.

In an emergency petition sent to officials on Thursday, the group contends the habitat for some of the species has been reduced to just one location.

"The species we have chosen are all at the knife's edge of extinction," the petition states. "Given the location of these species on either no or only one known site on earth, a single event - whether from drought, flood, habitat destruction, pollution, exotic species, or other factors - could literally erase them from the world."

Valerie Fellows, a spokeswoman for the Fish and Wildlife Service in Washington, D.C., said Monday she was not sure whether the agency's endangered species division had received the petition. She said the agency typically has 90 days to review petitions.

WildEarth Guardians said the species in the petition were selected from a list of 674 the group had sought standard endangered species listing for in a pair of petitions filed last summer. The group followed up with a lawsuit in March, charging that Fish and Wildlife failed to act on the initial petitions.

The emergency petition is an attempt to turn up the pressure on the agency, said John Horning, executive director of WildEarth Guardians.

Horning says the endangered species listing program has nearly ground to a halt. He pointed out that the polar bear was the first U.S. species to be listed in over two years and that all of the listings under the Bush administration have been prompted by either citizen petitions or legal action.

As a result of the lack of action over the past eight years, there's more of a need to invoke the emergency provisions of the Endangered Species Act, Horning said.

He said WildEarth Guardians is looking to the species listed in the emergency petition to help make that case.

"These species deserve immediate, emergency protection under the Endangered Species Act. The Fish and Wildlife Service has the authority to save them from vanishing forever, and we're urging them to use that authority," Horning said.

By SUSAN MONTOYA BRYAN, Associated Press Writer

Scientists: Global warming has already changed oceans

2009-09-16T03:46:00.000-07:00

WASHINGTON - In Washington state , oysters in some areas haven't reproduced for four years, and preliminary evidence suggests that the increasing acidity of the ocean could be the cause. In the Gulf of Mexico , falling oxygen levels in the water have forced shrimp to migrate elsewhere.

Though two marine-derived drugs, one for treating cancer and the other for pain control, are on the market and 25 others are under development, the fungus growing on seaweed, bacteria in deep sea mud and sea fans that could produce life-saving medicines are under assault from changing the ocean conditions.

Researchers, scientists and Jacques Cousteau's granddaughter painted a bleak picture Tuesday of the future of oceans and the "blue economy" of the nation's coastal states.

The hearing before the oceans subcommittee of the Senate Commerce Committee was expected to focus on how the degradation of the oceans was affecting marine businesses and coastal communities. Instead, much of the testimony focused on how the waters that cover 70 percent of the planet are already changing because of global warming.

Ocean acidification or diseases that thrive in acidified, oxygen-depleted seawater could be responsible for oysters not reproducing in Washington state , said Brad Warren , who oversees the ocean health and acidification program of the Sustainable Fisheries Partnership in Seattle . A federal study found that two-thirds of larval blue crabs died when exposed to acidity levels like those currently measured off the West Coast , he said.

Federal studies also found acidity levels in the North Pacific and off Alaska are unusually high compared to other ocean regions. The high acidity is already taking a toll of such tiny species as pteropods, which are an important food for salmon and other fish.

As greenhouse gas emissions increase, billions of tons of carbon dioxide from smokestacks and vehicle tailpipes are absorbed by the oceans. The result is carbonic acid, which dilutes the "rich soup" of calcium carbonate in the seawater that many species, especially on the low end of the food chain, thrive in, Warren said.

"If we lose it, it is gone forever," Warren said of the oceans' delicate chemical balance.

In the Gulf of Mexico , Alexandra Cousteau said, the runoff down the Mississippi River from farms in the Midwest has created a dead zone the size of New Jersey where few species can survive. Wetlands in Louisiana are disappearing at the rate of 33 football fields a day as hurricanes grow in strength and frequency because of climate change, she said.

"We must start to realize that there can be no standalone policies, especially as they relate to our water resources," Cousteau said. "Energy, transportation, climate change, infrastructure, agriculture, urban development: this is where our ocean policy must begin. It is all interconnected."

Others testified that the economic toll eventually could be enormous for fishing and other ocean-related industries and for the nation's coastal communities. Taken together, the ocean and coastal economies, including the Great Lakes , provide more than 50 million jobs and make up nearly 60 percent of the nation's economy.

"Significant environmental changes, such as sea level and sea temperature rise, oxygen depletion and ocean acidification, will dramatically change the landscape, restructuring an array of natural and physical assets as well as cultural and economic," said Judith Kidlow of the National Ocean Economics Program. "Over the next 30 years, the nation will see the most significant changes in the ocean and coastal economies since the arrival of industrialization and urbanization."

The subcommittee's chairman, Sen. Maria Cantwell , D- Wash. , suggested a doubling of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration budget, which is now about $4 billion , and giving the agency additional responsibilities.

Cantwell, however, said the key has to be passing comprehensive climate change legislation to reduce carbon emissions.

"Protecting our oceans is an environmental and economic imperative," Cantwell said.

By Les Blumenthal, McClatchy Newspapers

G8 climate talks seek momentum on emission cuts

2009-09-14T03:42:00.000-07:00

KOBE, Japan (Reuters) - Environment ministers from rich countries and other major greenhouse gas emitters kicked off talks on ways to curb emissions and save species as the United States called for a global fund to develop clean technologies.

Ministers and their representatives said on Saturday that action was urgently needed to tackle climate change, but advanced and developing countries are split on how to cut greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming.

The three-day meeting of the Group of Eight and rapidly growing economies such as China and India comes as poor countries balk at global targets to cut emissions, demanding that rich nations cut their own and pay for costly clean energy projects.

Japan said the G8 needed to show initiative for developing countries to do their part in fighting climate change, blamed for droughts, rising seas and more intense storms.

"We need to send a message that we will make it easier for emerging countries to act, with financial mechanisms and technological cooperation," Japanese Environment Minister Ichiro Kamoshita told reporters.

"At the same time, the G8 must make clear their stance that they will act firmly," he said.

Delegates, meeting in the port city of Kobe, are tasked with building momentum for talks on setting long-term targets to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming, an issue to be taken up at a leaders' summit in July.

G8 leaders agreed last year in Germany to consider seriously a goal to halve greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, a proposal favored by Germany, France, Britain, Italy, Japan and Canada.

But developing countries, keen to put economic growth first, have resisted targets without the United States doing more to cut emissions and have demanded that rich nations help with funds to pay for clean technology.

"Technology and finance should be taken up in discussions," China's Xie Zhenhua, vice chairman of the National Development and Reform Commission, told the meeting.

"China's government will be responsible for its actions and we will have to face up to the challenges."

Earlier, the United States, in talks with Japan, called for a global fund to finance research for clean technologies.

NO JACKETS, NO TIES

Eager to show off its green credentials at the meeting, Japan has sent fuel-cell and hybrid cars from its world-class carmakers to pick up delegates from the airport, and has called on participants to bring their own cups and chopsticks to cut trash.

The dress code will be "cool biz" -- a Japanese campaign every summer for office workers to take off jackets and ties to minimize air conditioning and reduce emissions.

Japan is debating its own long-term reduction target and domestic media have urged the government to also set a mid-term goal to show Tokyo can take the lead on climate change at the G8 and in U.N.-led efforts for a new framework after the Kyoto Protocol expires in 2012.

About 190 nations have agreed to negotiate by the end of 2009 a successor treaty to the Kyoto pact, which binds 37 advanced nations to cut emissions by an average of 5 percent below 1990 levels by 2008-12.

But countries are divided on how to shape the new framework and Japan may see limited support this weekend for its proposal for emissions curbs for particular industries, such as steel or cement, that could be added up to a national target.

Many developing nations worry that sector-based targets will throttle their energy-intensive growth.

The Kobe meeting kicked off with a session on biodiversity, which will review steps being taken for a U.N. goal set in 2002 to slow the rate of extinctions of living species by 2010. Most experts say that target is nowhere near being met.

Those discussions, which coincide with a U.N. conference in Germany, will include ways to combat illegal logging and reduce deforestation and forest degradation in developing countries.

Ministers will also talk about how to reduce, reuse and recycle waste.

By Chisa Fujioka, Additional reporting by Linda Sieg in Kobe and Alister Doyle in Oslo; Editing by Bill Tarrant

Greenland's melt mystery unfolds, at glacial pace

2009-09-10T21:02:00.000-07:00

HELHEIM GLACIER, Greenland - Suddenly and without warning, the gigantic river of ice sped up, causing it to spit icebergs ever faster into the ocean off southeastern Greenland.

Helheim Glacier nearly doubled its speed in just a few years, flowing through a rift in the barren coastal mountains at a stunning 100 feet (30 meters) per day.

Alarm bells rang as the pattern was repeated by glaciers across Greenland: Was the island's vast ice sheet, a frozen water reservoir that could raise the sea level 20 feet if disgorged, in danger of collapse?

Half a decade later, there's a little bit of good news - and a lot of uncertainty.

"It does seem that the very rapid speeds were only sustained for a short period of time although none of these glaciers have returned to the 'normal' flow speeds yet," says Gordon Hamilton, a glaciologist from the University of Maine, who's clocked Helheim's rapid advance using GPS receivers on site since 2005.

Understanding why Greenland's glaciers accelerated so abruptly in the first half of the decade - and whether they are now slowing down - is crucial to the larger question of how fast sea levels will rise as the planet warms.

The issue has gained urgency as scientists rush to supply their latest findings in time for negotiations on a new global climate pact, set for December in Copenhagen.

Scientists say the Greenland ice sheet, which is up to 2 miles (3 kilometers) thick and covers an area almost the size of Mexico, is losing about 7 billion cubic feet (200 million cubic meters) of ice a year - the equivalent of 80,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools.

That means snowfall on top of the ice sheet is not enough to replace what is lost through surface melting and ice chucked out in the fjords by faster-flowing glaciers. In the process, sea levels rise as towering icebergs plunge into the Atlantic Ocean and displace water - much like an ice cube dropped into a drink.

The dynamics of the ice sheet on Greenland - and the much larger ones on Antarctica - were not included in sea level rise projections by the U.N. expert panel on climate change in 2007 because the phenomenon was poorly mapped at the time.

The picture of what happened in Greenland is just starting to come together, and scientists are still in the dark about how the underlying causes were set in motion, how much was owed to natural variances and how much to man's tinkering with the global climate system.

"This is like medical science in the 15th century," says David Holland, director of the Center for Atmosphere Ocean Science at New York University. "It's going to take a while to find out what's going on with the patient here."

The most popular explanation is that the patient - Greenland's ice sheet - contracted its ailment not from warmer air, but a warmer ocean.

Scientists earlier believed that the biggest factor for the faster flow speeds was meltwater seeping down to the base of the glaciers, lubricating the bedrock. They're now shifting attention to ocean currents believed to have sent pulses of warmer water from southern latitudes to Greenland's glacial fjords.

Holland found that such water was reaching the edge of western Greenland's biggest glacier, Sermeq Kujalleq. A team led by Fiamma Stranneo, of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, made a similar discovery last month with probes plunged into the chilly depths of Sermilik fjord, where Helheim Glacier ends.

"We've had a confirmation that the waters are really coming up to the glacier," Stranneo says, her voice nearly drowned by engine noise aboard the Arctic Sunrise, a Greenpeace ship that offered her a chance to test her hypothesis. "This is the first time that we've seen it in these southeast glacial fjords."

In July, the world's oceans were the warmest in almost 130 years of record-keeping. Meteorologists say a combination of factors are at work, including a natural El Nino system, man-made global warming and a dash of random weather.

Coinciding with the shrinking of sea ice on the North Pole and the thawing of the Arctic permafrost, the discovery of Greenland's runaway glaciers earlier this decade raised a sense of urgency among scientists studying the impact of climate change on the frozen north.

It has also been used by advocacy groups like Greenpeace to stress the importance of reaching a deal in Copenhagen to limit global greenhouse emissions.

Fearing that a possible deal is in danger, European foreign ministers announced Thursday they were stepping up efforts to make sure that nations around the world face up to global warming.

Even a partial melt of the ice sheet could have a big impact on sea levels, with dire consequences for low-lying areas from Florida to Bangladesh.

The 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change projects a sea level rise of 7 to 24 inches (20 to 60 centimeters) this century. Adding the potential impact of ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica, many scientists have estimated the rise will be double.

"It doesn't sound like a lot but it's an important difference by the way you sort of deal with that issue," says Hamilton, taking a break from his GPS measurements on a plateau overlooking Helheim's styrofoam-like bed of jagged ice. "How you engineer for a sea level rise of 30 centimeters is quite different as to how you would ... deal with a sea level rise of 1 meter."

His latest measurements indicate that Helheim is flowing at 6.5 miles (10.5 kilometers) per year, slightly down from its peak in 2005 but still 50 percent faster than its normal pace.

Other researchers say some - but not all - of Greenland's glaciers have shown similar slowdowns in recent years, suggesting that a sudden, dramatic increase in flow speeds may not be such a cataclysmic and irregular phenomenon after all.

Still, the flows remain fast enough to yield a net loss of mass from the ice sheet. And if the world continues to warm, sudden spurts of glacial acceleration may become more frequent, draining the inland ice until it, eventually, collapses.

No one can say with certainty whether that will take 100 years, or 1,000.

"It's a little embarrassing to know so little," says Ian Howat, a glaciologist based at Ohio State University. "We won't know it's going until it's gone. It feels like that a little bit."

By KARL RITTER, Associated Press

Mass migrations and war: Dire climate scenario

2009-02-22T03:11:00.000-08:00

CAPE TOWN, South Africa - If we don't deal with climate change decisively, "what we're talking about then is extended world war," the eminent economist said.

His audience Saturday, small and elite, had been stranded here by bad weather and were talking climate. They couldn't do much about the one, but the other was squarely in their hands. And so, Lord Nicholas Stern was telling them, was the potential for mass migrations setting off mass conflict.

"Somehow we have to explain to people just how worrying that is," the British economic thinker said.

Stern, author of a major British government report detailing the cost of climate change, was one of a select group of two dozen - environment ministers, climate negotiators and experts from 16 nations - scheduled to fly to Antarctica to learn firsthand how global warming might melt its ice into the sea, raising ocean levels worldwide.

Their midnight flight was scrubbed on Friday and Saturday because of high winds on the southernmost continent, 3,000 miles from here. While waiting at their Cape Town hotel for the gusts to ease down south, chief sponsor Erik Solheim, Norway's environment minister, improvised with group exchanges over coffee and wine about the future of the planet.

"International diplomacy is all about personal relations," Solheim said. "The more people know each other, the less likely there will be misunderstandings."

Understandings will be vital in this "year of climate," as the world's nations and their negotiators count down toward a U.N. climate conference in Copenhagen in December, target date for concluding a grand new deal to replace the Kyoto Protocol - the 1997 agreement, expiring in 2012, to reduce carbon dioxide and other global-warming emissions by industrial nations.

Solheim drew together key players for the planned brief visit to Norway's Troll Research Station in East Antarctica.

Trying on polar outfits for size on Friday were China's chief climate negotiator Xie Zhenhua, veteran U.S. climate envoy Dan Reifsnyder, and environment ministers Hilary Benn of Britain and Carlos Minc Baumfeld of Brazil.

Later, at dinner, the heavyweights heard from smaller or poorer nations about the trials they face as warming disrupts climate, turns some regions drier, threatens food production in poor African nations.

Jose Endundo, environment minister of Congo, said he recently visited huge Lake Victoria in nearby Uganda, at 80,000 square kilometers (31,000 square miles) a vital source for the Nile River, and learned the lake level had dropped 3 meters (10 feet) in the past six years - a loss blamed in part on warmer temperatures and diminishing rains.

In the face of such threats, "the rich countries have to give us a helping hand," the African minister said.

But it was Stern, former chief World Bank economist, who on Saturday laid out a case to his stranded companions in sobering PowerPoint detail.

If the world's nations act responsibly, Stern said, they will achieve "zero-carbon" electricity production and zero-carbon road transport by 2050 - by replacing coal power plants with wind, solar or other energy sources that emit no carbon dioxide, and fossil fuel-burning vehicles with cars running on electric or other "clean" energy.

Then warming could be contained to a 2-degree-Celsius (3.4-degree-Fahrenheit) rise this century, he said.

But if negotiators falter, if emissions reductions are not made soon and deep, the severe climate shifts and sea-level rises projected by scientists would be "disastrous."

It would "transform where people can live," Stern said. "People would move on a massive scale. Hundreds of millions, probably billions of people would have to move if you talk about 4-, 5-, 6-degree increases" — 7 to 10 degrees Fahrenheit. And that would mean extended global conflict, "because there's no way the world can handle that kind of population move in the time period in which it would take place."

Melting ice, rising seas, dwindling lakes and war - the stranded ministers had a lot to consider.

But many worried, too, that the current global economic crisis will keep governments from transforming carbon-dependent economies just now. For them, Stern offered a vision of working today on energy-efficient economies that would be more "sustainable" in the future.

"The unemployed builders of Europe should be insulating all the houses of Europe," he said.
After he spoke, Norwegian organizers announced that the forecast looked good for Stern and the rest to fly south on Sunday to further ponder the future while meeting with scientists in the forbidding vastness of Antarctica.

By CHARLES J. HANLEY, AP Special Correspondent

13 Percent of Americans Not Heard of Global Warming

2008-02-04T16:59:00.000-08:00

Thirteen percent of U.S. citizens said they had never heard or read anything about global warming, the survey said.

Almost all climate scientists say that temperatures are creeping higher because of heat-trapping greenhouse gases released by burning fossil fuels.

Read more 13 Percent of Americans Not Heard of Global Warming at http://globe.manila.ph/globalwarming-awareness2007-news/200701006.htm

World Scientists Meet on Global Warming

2008-01-28T00:17:00.000-08:00

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is to unveil its latest assessment of the environmental threat posed by global warming on Friday.

As the panel meets, the planet is the warmest it has been in thousands of years - if not more - and international concern over what to do about it is at an all-time high.

Read more World Scientists Meet on Global Warming at http://globe.manila.ph/globalwarming-awareness2007-news/200701007.htm

Waxman Seeks Climate Inquiry Evidence

2008-01-08T18:23:00.000-08:00

Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., said he and the top Republican on his oversight committee, Rep. Tom Davis of Virginia, have sought documents from the administration on climate policy, but repeatedly been rebuffed.

"The committee isn't trying to obtain state secrets or documents that could affect our immediate national security," said Waxman, opening the hearing. "We are simply seeking answers to whether the White House's political staff is inappropriately censoring impartial government scientists."

Read more Waxman Seeks Climate Inquiry Evidence at http://globe.manila.ph/globalwarming-awareness2007-news/200701008.htm

Rising sea levels present China with 'unimaginable challenges'

2007-12-08T08:53:00.000-08:00

Shanghai, Guangzhou and other large coastal cities in China could face "unimaginable challenges" if global warming continues and the oceans keep rising.

The sea level had risen by an average of 2.5 millimeters (one tenth of an inch) annually in recent years.

They'll begin building dykes like the Dutch, to stop the cities from being flooded.

Read more Rising sea levels present China with unimaginable challenges at http://globe.manila.ph/globalwarming-awareness2007-news/200701009.htm

Panel hears climate spin allegations

2007-11-29T07:29:00.000-08:00

Federal scientists have been pressured by the White House to play down global warming, advocacy groups testified Tuesday at the Democrats' first investigative hearing since taking control of Congress.

The hearing focused on allegations that White House officials for years have micromanaged the government's climate programs and has closely controlled what scientists have been allowed to tell the public.

Read more Panel hears climate spin allegations at http://globe.manila.ph/globalwarming-awareness2007-news/200701011.htm

U.N.: Greenhouse gases hit high in 2006

2007-11-23T21:57:00.000-08:00

Two of the most important Greenhouse gases in the Earth's atmosphere reached a record high in 2006, and measurements show that one — carbon dioxide — is playing an increasingly important role in global warming, the U.N. weather agency said Friday.

The global average concentrations of carbon dioxide, or CO2, and nitrous oxide, or N2O, in the atmosphere were higher than ever in measurements coordinated by the World Meteorological Organization, said Geir Braathen, a climate specialist at the Geneva-based agency.

Methane, the third of the three important greenhouse gases, remained stable between 2005 and 2006, he said.

Braathen said measurements show that CO2 is contributing more to global warming than previously.

CO2 contributed 87 percent to the warming effect over the last decade, but in the last five years alone, its contribution was 91 percent, Braathen said. "This shows that CO2 is gaining importance as a greenhouse gas," Braathen said.

The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere rose by about half a percent last year to reach 381.2 parts per million, according to the agency. Nitrous oxide totaled 320.1 parts per billion, which is a quarter percent higher than in 2005.

Braathen said it appears the upward trend will continue at least for a few years.

The World Meteorological Organization's annual Greenhouse Gas Bulletin provides widely accepted worldwide data on the amount of heat-trapping greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

Studies have shown that human-produced carbon dioxide emissions heat the Earth's surface and cause greater water evaporation. That leads to more water vapor in the air, which contributes to higher air temperatures. CO2, methane and N2O are the most common greenhouse gases after water vapor, according to the meteorological organization.

They are produced by natural sources, such as wetlands, and by human activities such as fertilizer use or fuel combustion.

There is 36.1 percent more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere than there was in the late 18th century, primarily because of combustion of fossil fuels, the World Meteorological Organization bulletin said.

A report presented by a U.N. expert panel said last week that average temperatures have risen 1.3 degrees Fahrenheit in the last 100 years, and that 11 of the last 12 years have been among the warmest since 1850. Global Warming also led to a sea level increase by an average seven-hundredths of an inch per year since 1961, according to the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

The panel's report, which said human activity is largely responsible for global warming, noted that the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is far higher than the natural range over the last 650,000 years.

The World Meteorological Organization also concluded that "Greenhouse gases are major drivers of global warming and climate change."

The World Meteorological Organization said it based its findings on readings from 44 countries.

The U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change forecast that by 2020, 75 million to 250 million people in Africa will suffer water shortages, residents of Asia's large cities will be at great risk of river and coastal flooding, Europeans can expect extensive species loss, and North Americans will experience longer and hotter heat waves and greater competition for water.

ELIANE ENGELER, Associated Press Writer

US Think Tank Offering Cash to Dispute UN Climate Panel

2007-11-15T06:51:00.000-08:00

A right-wing American think tank is offering 10,000 dollars (7,700 euros) to scientists and economists to dispute a climate change report set to be released by the UN's top scientific panel.

AEI also reportedly offered additional payments, and to reimburse travel expenses.

Read more US Think Tank Offering Cash to Dispute UN Climate Panel at http://globe.manila.ph/globalwarming-awareness2007-news/200701013.htm

U.N. Chief Asked to Call Urgent Summit

2007-11-12T07:06:00.000-08:00

The impetus for such a summit is the acknowledgment by President Bush in his State of the Union speech that climate change needs to be addressed, as well as the Jan. 10 proposals by the European Union for a new European energy policy that stresses the need to slash carbon emissions blamed for global warming.

Read more at U.N. Chief Asked to Call Urgent Summit at http://globe.manila.ph/globalwarming-awareness2007-news/200701014.htm

Humans very likely making earth warmer

2007-11-08T20:00:00.000-08:00

The last report, in 2001, said global warming was "likely" caused by human activity. There had been speculation that the participants might try to change the wording this time to "virtually certain," which means a 99 percent chance.

A draft of the new report predicts a temperature increase of between 2.5 to 10.4 degrees by the year 2100, although that could be adjusted.

Another contentious issue is predictions of sea level rise. Scientists are trying to incorporate concerns that their early drafts underestimate how much the sea level will rise by 2100 because they cannot predict how much ice will melt from Greenland and Antarctica.

global warming news blogger

Read more Humans very likely making earth warmer at http://globe.manila.ph/globalwarming-awareness2007-news/200701015.htm

Rising Seas Threaten Britain's Best-Loved Beaches

2007-11-07T02:28:00.000-08:00

Some of Britain's best loved beaches and coastline, from Golden Cap in Dorset to Formby Sands in Lancashire, are under threat from erosion and flooding.

Southeast England has been sinking slowly since the Ice Age and sea levels on the east coast have risen 20 cms. since 1900.

Read more Rising seas threaten Britain's best-loved beaches at http://globe.manila.ph/globalwarming-awareness2007-news/200701016.htm

global warming news blogger

Global Warming News Blogger Is Back

2007-04-05T20:19:00.000-07:00

It has been a long time since my last post because I have prepared a lot of global warming-related articles that are now linked to this blog (at least 85 in all).

Click these links now:

Global Warming Articles

Biofuels

Diesel Fuel vs. Gasoline

Environmental Conservation

Conservation Areas in the Philippines

Cheers,

global warming news blogger

It's Not Global Warming, Stupid

2007-02-06T12:53:00.000-08:00

Fossil fuel combustion and other industrial activities raise the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere, that raise the temperature.

On the other hand, aerosols in the atmosphere, also due to industrial releases, cools the earth.

The big Pinatubo volcano eruption, and similar big eruptions, also cooled the earth.

Either way, weather conditions are disastrously altered around the world.

global warming news blogger

Proceed now to Global Warming Articles and Environmental Conservation

The Amazon Is The World's Lung

2007-02-05T13:08:00.000-08:00

The Amazon rainforest is a world "lung" believed to provide 1/4 of all our oxygen.

A tropical rainforest therefore is one of the planet's great biological resource.

If the jungles go, the world suffocates.

To strip a tropical rainforest is to wipe out forever the end-product of millennia of evolution.

Who had benefited from the Amazon? Not the Amazon Indians for sure.

Here's the latest bad news. Gold rush tears up the Amazon

global warming news blogger

Proceed now to Global Warming Articles and Environmental Conservation

Ecology Will Not Save The World

2007-02-03T16:38:00.000-08:00

Not by itself.

In itself, Ecology is only a tool.

To decide how Ecology should be used means choosing between different lifestyles, systems, and types of civilization.

That, my friend, is a political choice that is hard to accept by the Developed Countries (West).

Simply discover what is happening to the World Trade Organization (WTO).

The Developed Countries still want to retain control of the world trade, an old capitalist system using technologies that generate greenhouse gases.

"Free trade" for whom? For the Developed and Rich Countries only.

Who, in his right mind, will give up the American dream (mobility)?

I'll be damned with our present crop of politicians and so-called world leaders.

We're all be damned.

global warming news blogger

Proceed now to Global Warming Articles and Environmental Conservation

The Similarity of USA and Iran

2007-02-01T21:45:00.000-08:00

Iran denied that the Holocaust ever happened despite the preponderance of evidence about it. Iran even sponsored a conference on it.

The USA played down (read: denies) global warming because it is very costly to its economy.

But the scientists all agreed that earth's temperature is rising (global warming). What was left to agree on is how high the sea level will rise.

They are like brothers, if not genetically, perhaps in their delusions.

But the USA is confrontational on Iran because the USA suspects Iran is manufacturing a nuclear bomb.

I say it's a sibling war.

Surely, The End Is Near!

It is written that it will come to pass that brother shall be up against his brother before the Second Coming.

Repent ye brothers. I mean the USA and Iran.

global warming news blogger

Proceed now to Global Warming Articles and Environmental Conservation

How Is Religion Related To Global Warming?

2007-01-30T22:24:00.000-08:00

So-called "pagans" had a widespread belief that every tree, stream, hill or any natural object has its own guardian spirit.

The Church was so successful in Europe during the Middle Ages in stamping out animism that there weren't many trees left at that time.

The Spaniards came to the Philippines in 1521 and, like the Inquisition, thoroughly destroyed this ungodly animism that there also weren't many trees left in this country.

Long Live Spain! The Spaniards saved our souls and brought us closer to the Lord.

We are surely on our way to blissful eternity when sooner than our short duration on earth we will all die for lack of oxygen, a natural cause of death.

It is really merciful than a violent death from war. The Church spared us.

global warming news blogger

Proceed now to Global Warming Articles and Environmental Conservation

On Payne of Death

2007-01-29T10:08:00.000-08:00

Edward I of England decided that execution was the solution to pollution.

"On Payne of Death,
the Burninge of Coal be henceforthe forbidden by law in London Towne that the healthe of the Knights of the Shire may not suffere ... "

-Edward I (1322)

There could be a lot of executions today. Survivors should be executed again.

global warming news blogger

Proceed now to Global Warming Articles and Environmental Conservation

A Message To George Bush on Global Warming

2007-01-27T18:12:00.000-08:00

At the Anti-Iraq War Rally in Washington, Saturday, January 27, 2007

12-year-old Moriah Arnold stood on her toes to reach the microphone and tell the crowd: "Now we know our leaders either lied to us or hid the truth. Because of our actions, the rest of the world sees us as a Bully and a Liar."

I say: "The USA is the Greatest Hypocrite when it comes to global warming."

The country that emits the most greenhouse gases, the United States, did not agree to sign the Kyoto Protocol. In 2001, United States President George W. Bush decided that the US would not participate.

To Mr. Bush, the Kyoto Protocol will not cause enough change to stop global warming caused by increased amounts of greenhouses gases, but it is a good first step.

"There is no perfect treaty and don't wait for one."

The American people should also accept responsibility because of their "way of life."

Are you listening when your President told you last year that The American People is addicted to oil?

Why do you think you are in Iraq?

To protect your vested interest in that region ...

- the oil of the Arabs, who you suspect as mostly terrorists, and the Persians, who you suspect of trying to produce a nuclear bomb and ignite that region against you.

global warming news blogger

Proceed now to Global Warming Articles and Environmental Conservation