By Timothy Gardner
    Reuters

    Monday 19 March 2007

    New York - Joining a rising corporate chorus itching to sink money into clean energy projects, big investors will press the US Congress Monday to pass laws attempting to tackle global warming.

    The dozens of investors include Merrill Lynch, The Capital Group, which manages US$850 billion in mutual funds, and the California Public Employees Retirement System, the largest US pension fund, said a source at Ceres, a Boston-based coalition of investors and environmentalists.

    "Investors are seeking strong legislation with tangible greenhouse gas reduction targets," said the source.

    The United States is the world's top emitter of gases from smokestacks and tailpipes that scientists link to global warming. Mandatory emissions cuts could give investors confidence to put more money in low-carbon alternative energy, like wind and solar power, and other technologies.

    The source said the investors have "specific goals" in mind for carbon-cuts.

    Mandatory cuts could also set the stage for a cap-and-trade market on greenhouse gases like the European Union's, in which companies that cut emissions under a set limit can sell credits to others that have not. Investors could also speculate in that market.

   
    By Steve Connor
    The Independent UK

    Monday 19 March 2007

    Global warming over the past quarter century has led to a fall in the yield of some of the most important food crops in the world, according to one of the first scientific studies of how climate change has affected cereal crops.

    Rising temperatures between 1981 and 2002 caused a loss in production of wheat, corn and barley that amounted in effect to some 40 million tons a year - equivalent to annual losses of some £2.6bn.

    Although these numbers are not large compared to the world-wide production of cereal crops, scientists warned that the findings demonstrated how climate change was already having an impact on the global production of staple foods. "Most people tend to think of climate change as something that will impact the future, but this study shows that warming over the past two decades has already had real effects on global food supply," said Christopher Field of the Carnegie Institution in Stanford, California.

    The study, published in the journal Environmental Research Letters, analysed yields of cereals from around the world during a period when average temperatures rose by about 0.7C between 1980 and 2002 - although the rise was even higher in certain crop-growing regions of the world.

    
    By Shawn Dell Joyce
    The Times Herald-Record

    Sunday 18 March 2007

    What if I told you that we already have everything we need to resolve the crisis of global warming, except action? Would you believe me? How about believing two Princeton University economists?

    Stephen Pacala and Robert Socolow announced in August 2004 that "humanity already possesses the fundamental scientific, technical, and industrial know-how to solve the carbon and climate problems for the next half-century."

    Pacala and Socolow have devised "The Princeton Wedge."

    Imagine a graph going up at a sharp angle. This is the graph of projected U.S. carbon emissions during the next half-century.

    We are now at 1.8 gigatons of carbon emissions per year, and headed toward 2.6 GtC in the next 45 years, if we keep the same energy-use patterns.

    Pacala and Socolow point out that we need to "drive a wedge" into that graph by stabilizing emissions, then reducing them by half (0.9 GtC) in less than 50 years. This will help us avoid some of the worst effects of climate change, like the increasing acidification of the world's oceans, the rising sea levels, and a 5-degree-or-higher rise in average global temperature.

    They pointed out that we need to stabilize our emissions first, and then reduce them over the next 50 years.

    TerraDaily.com

    Monday 19 March 2007

    Kamloops, Canada - Despite the fact that the hundreds of scientists and reviewers on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change announced February 2nd in Paris that global warming is "very likely" caused by human activity, governments and other policy-makers may still justify inaction because of naysayers like Danish weather scientist Henrik Svensmark, who maintains that global climate change can be attributed to the proportion of cosmic rays in our atmosphere.

    Another naysayer is atmospheric physicist S. Fred Singer, who asserts that "The whole question of anthropogenic, or human-caused, global warming is central to setting any policy of climate mitigation and therefore warrants closer examination."

    "These arguments are moot," says Peter Tsigaris, an economist at Thompson Rivers University, in Kamloops, BC, Canada. He continues: "The important question is the cost of these opinions being wrong relative to the cost of the IPCC report being wrong in its assessment."

    In a thought-provoking statistical analysis, Tsigaris has concluded that whether or not climate change can be wholly attributed to human factors, it makes strong economic and environmental sense to take action as though it is human-caused, and mitigate the effects of global warming beyond taking measures to adopt.

    He arrived at this conclusion as a result of creating the solution for a question he posed to his statistics students.

    
    Reuters

    Friday 16 March 2007

    Washington - This has been the world's warmest winter since record-keeping began more than a century ago, the U.S. government agency that tracks weather reported Thursday.

    The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) said the combined global land and ocean surface temperature from December through February was at its highest since records began in 1880.

    A record-warm January was responsible for pushing up the combined winter temperature, according to the agency's Web site, http://www.noaa.gov.

    "Contributing factors were the long-term trend toward warmer temperatures as well as a moderate El Nino in the Pacific," Jay Lawrimore of NOAA's National Climatic Data Center said in a telephone interview from Asheville, North Carolina.

    The next-warmest winter on record was in 2004, and the third warmest winter was in 1998, Lawrimore said.

    The ten warmest years on record have occurred since 1995.

    
    By Steve Connor
    The Independent UK

    Friday 16 March 2007

    A catastrophic collapse of the Arctic sea ice could lead to radical climate changes in the northern hemisphere according to scientists who warn that the rapid melting is at a "tipping point" beyond which it may not recover.

    The scientists attribute the loss of some 38,000 square miles of sea ice - an area the size of Alaska - to rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere as well as to natural variability in Arctic ice.

    Ever since satellite measurements of the Arctic sea ice began in 1979, the surface area covered by summer sea ice has retreated from the long-term average. This has increased the rate of coastal erosion from Alaska to Siberia and caused problems for polar bears, which rely on sea ice for hunting seals.

    However, in recent years the rate of melting has accelerated and the sea ice is showing signs of not recovering even during the cold, dark months of the Arctic winter. This has led to even less sea ice at the start of the summer melting season.

    Mark Serreze, a senior glaciologist at the University of Colorado at Boulder, said the world was heading towards a situation where the Arctic will soon be almost totally ice-free during summer, which could have a dramatic impact on weather patterns across the northern hemisphere.