White House refused to open pollutants e-mail.

    The White House in December refused to accept the Environmental Protection Agency's conclusion that greenhouse gases are pollutants that must be controlled, telling agency officials that an e-mail message containing the document would not be opened, senior E.P.A. officials said last week.

    The document, which ended up in e-mail limbo, without official status, was the E.P.A.'s answer to a 2007 Supreme Court ruling that required it to determine whether greenhouse gases represent a danger to health or the environment, the officials said.

    This week, more than six months later, the E.P.A. is set to respond to that order by releasing a watered-down version of the original proposal that offers no conclusion. Instead, the document reviews the legal and economic issues presented by declaring greenhouse gases a pollutant.

    Over the past five days, the officials said, the White House successfully put pressure on the E.P.A. to eliminate large sections of the original analysis that supported regulation, including a finding that tough regulation of motor vehicle emissions could produce $500 billion to $2 trillion in economic benefits over the next 32 years. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter.

    Both documents, as prepared by the E.P.A., "showed that the Clean Air Act can work for certain sectors of the economy, to reduce greenhouse gases," one of the senior E.P.A. officials said. "That's not what the administration wants to show. They want to show that the Clean Air Act can't work."

    The Bush administration's climate-change policies have been evolving over the past two years. It now accepts the work of government scientists studying global warming, such as last week's review forecasting more drenching rains, parching droughts and intense hurricanes as global temperatures warm (www.climatescience.gov).

    Testimony to US Congress will also criticize lobbyists. "Revolutionary" policies needed to tackle crisis.

    New York - James Hansen, one of the world's leading climate scientists, will today call for the chief executives of large fossil fuel companies to be put on trial for high crimes against humanity and nature, accusing them of actively spreading doubt about global warming in the same way that tobacco companies blurred the links between smoking and cancer.

    Hansen will use the symbolically charged 20th anniversary of his groundbreaking speech to the US Congress - in which he was among the first to sound the alarm over the reality of global warming - to argue that radical steps need to be taken immediately if the "perfect storm" of irreversible climate change is not to become inevitable.

    Speaking before Congress again, he will accuse the chief executive officers of companies such as ExxonMobil and Peabody Energy of being fully aware of the disinformation about climate change they are spreading.

    In an interview with the Guardian he said: "When you are in that kind of position, as the CEO of one the primary players who have been putting out misinformation even via organisations that affect what gets into school textbooks, then I think that's a crime."

    He is also considering personally targeting members of Congress who have a poor track record on climate change in the coming November elections. He will campaign to have several of them unseated. Hansen's speech to Congress on June 23 1988 is seen as a seminal moment in bringing the threat of global warming to the public's attention. At a time when most scientists were still hesitant to speak out, he said the evidence of the greenhouse gas effect was 99% certain, adding "it is time to stop waffling".

    He will tell the House select committee on energy independence and global warming this afternoon that he is now 99% certain that the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere has already risen beyond the safe level.

    On Friday, the Senate set aside a bill to combat climate change after failing to gather the 60 votes necessary to move the legislation forward. The bill, S.3036, was proposed by Senator Joe Lieberman (I-Connecticut) and John Warner (R-Virginia) to fight the country's massive level of carbon emissions. The legislation would instate a cap-and-trade system to gradually decrease US emissions by two percent a year for an ultimate 2050 goal of emissions 66 percent below 2005 levels.

    While certain organizations assert that the legislation is too weak, the overall support for the bill by environmental groups is overwhelming.

    The bill failed on the Senate floor after a variety of partisan maneuvers to stall debate and an eventual vote.

    Senator Barack Obama (D-Illinois), the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, said in a statement, "Every credible scientist and expert believes action is necessary. This is critical and long-overdue legislation that represents a good first step in addressing one of the most serious problems facing our generation."

    Fortuna, Spain - Lush fields of lettuce and hothouses of tomatoes line the roads. Verdant new developments of plush pastel vacation homes beckon buyers from Britain and Germany. Golf courses - 54 of them, all built in the last decade and most in the last three years - give way to the beach. At last, this hardscrabble corner of southeast Spain is thriving.

    There is only one problem with the picture of bounty: this province, Murcia, is running out of water. Spurred on by global warming and poorly planned development, swaths of southeast Spain are steadily turning into desert.

    Murcia, traditionally a poor farming region, has undergone a resort-building boom in recent years, even as many of its farmers have switched to more thirsty crops, encouraged by water transfer schemes, which have become increasingly untenable. The combination has put new pressures on the land and its dwindling supply of water.

    This year farmers are fighting developers over water rights. They are fighting one another over who gets to water their crops. And in a sign of their mounting desperation, they are buying and selling water like gold on a burgeoning black market, mostly from illegal wells.

    Southern Spain has long been plagued by cyclical drought, but the current crisis, scientists say, probably reflects a more permanent climate change brought on by global warming. And it is a harbinger of a new kind of conflict.

    The battles of yesterday were fought over land, they warn. Those of the present center on oil. But those of the future - a future made hotter and dryer by climate change in much of the world - seem likely to focus on water, they say.

    "Water will be the environmental issue this year - the problem is urgent and immediate," said Barbara Helferrich, a spokeswoman for the European Union's Environment Directorate. "If you already have water shortages in spring, you know it's going to be a really bad summer."

Methane would warm the planet.

    Riverside, California - Global warming could release long-dormant stores of methane gas trapped beneath the Arctic permafrost, causing an abrupt and catastrophic climate change like one that occurred 635 million years ago, University of California-Riverside researchers have determined.

    Back then, the sheets of ice that covered Earth started to collapse, releasing methane gas that warmed the planet and caused the ice to retreat over a period of 100 to 1,000 years, said Martin Kennedy, a geology professor in UCR's Department of Earth Sciences. Kennedy led the research team.

    "It was the greatest global-warming event of Earth's history almost certainly," he said.

    The findings are published in the latest issue of Nature. They suggest that methane ice sheets still exist beneath Arctic ice sheets that are being degraded by rising carbon-dioxide levels in Earth's atmosphere.

    Recent research indicates that the ice sheets are melting and methane gas is being released at a much higher rate than previously thought, he said.

    "It doesn't make one feel a lot better about the future," Kennedy said.

    If a similar phenomenon occurred today, the most noticeable change would be a rise in sea level, he said. If the Greenland ice sheet collapsed, the sea level would rise about 20 feet, inundating major coastal cities. Accompanying drought could lead to crop failures and widespread famine, he said.