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Study Blames Climate Change for Rise in Hurricanes |
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By Jim Loney
Reuters
Monday 30 July 2007
Miami
- The number of Atlantic hurricanes in an average season has doubled in
the last century due in part to warmer seas and changing wind patterns
caused by global warming, according to a study released Sunday.
Hurricane
researchers have debated for years whether climate change caused by
greenhouse gases from cars, factories and other human activity is
resulting in more, and more intense, tropical storms and hurricanes.
The
new study, published online in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal
Society of London, said the increased numbers of tropical storms and
hurricanes in the last 100 years is closely related to a 1.3-degree
Fahrenheit rise in sea surface temperatures.
The
influential U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, in a report
this year warning that humans contribute to global warming, said it was
"more likely than not" that people also contribute to a trend of
increasingly intense hurricanes.
In
the new study, conducted by Greg Holland of the National Center for
Atmospheric Research and Peter Webster of Georgia Institute of
Technology, researchers found three periods since 1900 when the average
number of Atlantic tropical storms and hurricanes increased sharply,
and then leveled off and remained steady.
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Lawmakers Grill EPA Chief on California Law |
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By Erica Werner
The Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Thursday 26 July 2007
Washington
- The head of the Environmental Protection Agency refused on Thursday
to say whether he knew the Transportation Department was lobbying
against a California global warming law.
"I
defer to the Transportation Department," EPA Administrator Stephen L.
Johnson repeated three times in a row in response to questions from
Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif.
She
replied: "I say that you are, with that statement, neglecting your
responsibility to protect the health and welfare of the people."
Documents
released last month show that as the EPA was considering giving
California permission to put in place state rules on tailpipe
emissions, Transportation Department officials were contacting members
of Congress and governors and suggesting they weigh in against the
request.
Democrats
say such intervention was inappropriate and possibly illegal. The
Transportation Department says it simply was disseminating information.
Boxer
said the actions indicate that the Bush administration does not intend
to grant the request, which has been pending since December 2005.
Johnson said the EPA would decide by year's end.
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US Offers Way to Atone for Carbon Guilt |
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By Claudia Lauer
The Los Angeles Times
Thursday 26 July 2007
To offset emissions, individuals can buy vouchers that the Forest Service will use to plant CO2-absorbing trees.
Washington
- You take public transportation to work, use energy-saving lightbulbs
and turn off the air conditioner when you're not home - but still you
feel somewhat guilty that your lifestyle isn't totally pollution-free.
The federal government may have an answer for you.
For
years, companies have been allowed to compensate for greenhouse gas
emissions by purchasing "carbon offsets" - vouchers for investment in
alternative energy sources, tree-planting and other projects that can
mitigate global warming.
Now
the idea is spreading to individuals, with the Forest Service's
announcement Wednesday that it will be the first federal agency to
offer personal carbon offsets through an initiative called the Carbon
Capital Fund.
"We
came up with the idea because everyone is looking at what they can do
in terms of climate change," said Bill Possiel, president of the
National Forest Foundation, a nonprofit partner of the Forest Service.
"The money goes to a restricted fund for projects on national forests."
Trees
and forests are "carbon sinks," Possiel said, because they draw carbon
dioxide - the main greenhouse gas blamed for global warming - out of
the atmosphere and store it for long periods of time.
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Smog May Speed Up Global Warming |
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Agence France-Presse
Thursday 26 July 2007
Ozone
in smog will accentuate global warming this century as it will damage
plants and trees that help soak up carbon emissions, a study says.
Its authors fear a major factor in the climate-change equation has been badly overlooked.
They
say ozone at ground level is damaging the ability of plants to absorb
the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide (CO2) and so limiting their ability
to act as carbon sinks.
As
a result, more CO2 will build in the atmosphere instead of being taken
up by the land, which in turn will stoke global warming and thus worsen
climate change, the researchers report today online in the journal Nature.
In
the stratosphere, a thin, naturally-occurring level of ozone is a vital
shield for life on earth, providing a shield against DNA-damaging
ultraviolet.
But at ground level, it is a pollutant, brewed in a reaction between fossil-fuel gases and sunlight.
Ozone
has long been known to be a risk to health by damaging the airways, but
recent research has also highlighted its damaging effect on vegetation.
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Alternative Energy Guru Reflects on Policy, Fuels |
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By David Roberts
Grist.org
Thursday 26 July 2007
A conversation with energy guru Amory Lovins.
If politicians think in sound bites and intellectuals think in sentences, Amory Lovins
thinks in white papers. His speech is studded with pregnant pauses -
you can almost hear the whirs and clicks as an enormous mass of
statistics, analyses, and aphorisms is trimmed and edited into a
manageable length. I've talked to experts who struggle to substantiate
their answers. Lovins struggles to leave things out.
No
one has done more to change the world of energy, both its intellectual
underpinnings and its real-world practice, than Lovins. Beginning with
a seminal Foreign Affairs article in 1976 - "Energy Strategy: The Road Not Taken?"
which introduced the "soft path" to energy - Lovins shifted the focus
from bigger to smarter, from more to more-with-less. He's consulted
with businesses, governments, and militaries on how to achieve
organizational goals using less energy and less money. His books and
articles are legion; the latest is Winning the Oil Endgame, a "roadmap to getting the U.S. completely, attractively, and profitably off oil."
This year marks the 25th anniversary of the Rocky Mountain Institute, the "think and do tank" Lovins founded. The occasion will be celebrated in early August at an event attended by, among others, Bill Clinton and New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman.
READ ON -- THIS IS AN EXCELLENT INTERVIEW!
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A 21st Century Catastrophe |
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By Michael McCarthy
The Independent UK
Tuesday 24 July 2007
Flood-ravaged
Britain is suffering from a wholly new type of civil emergency, it is
clear today: a disaster caused by 21st-century weather.
This
weather is different from anything that has gone before. The floods it
has caused, which have left more than a third of a million people
without drinking water, nearly 50,000 people without power, thousands
more people homeless and caused more than £2bn worth of damage - and
are still not over - have no precedent in modern British history.
Nothing
in the past hundred years, in terms of flooding caused by rainfall, has
been as bad. According to the Environment Agency, even the previous
worst case, the extensive floods of spring 1947, which were aggravated
by the vast snow melt that followed an exceptionally hard winter, has
been surpassed.
"We
have not seen flooding of this magnitude before," said the agency
yesterday. "The benchmark was 1947, and this has already exceeded it."
And the 1947 floods were said to have been the worst for 200 years.
Most
remarkable of all is the fact that the astonishing picture the nation
is now witnessing - whole towns cut off, gigantic areas underwater,
mass evacuations, infrastructure paralysed and grotesquely swollen
rivers, from the Severn and the Thames downwards not even at their
peaks yet - has all been caused by a single day's rainfall. A month's
worth and more in an hour. It is obvious that the Government and the
civil powers, from Gordon Brown down to the emergency services, are
struggling to cope, not only with the sheer physical scale of the
disaster itself, but with the very concept of it. It is entirely
unfamiliar. It is new. Yet it is exactly what has been forecast for the
past decade and more.
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Congress Stymied on Global Warming Bills |
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By Frank Davies
The San Jose Mercury News
Monday 23 July 2007
Inaction on national greenhouse gas proposals makes state's job tougher.
Washington
- The fervor to do something about global warming has reached new
heights this summer, as huge crowds worldwide vowed to reduce carbon
emissions during Live Earth concerts on every continent. These days,
everyone from Wal-Mart to the Vatican is going green.
But
the reality has been very different on the floor of the U.S. Senate.
Last month, supporters of a plan requiring utilities to produce 15
percent of their energy from renewable sources - solar, wind, biomass -
said they had more than 50 votes. But they didn't have 60, the hurdle
an idea must clear in the Senate to remain alive, so that proposal did
not even come up for a vote.
The
Senate did take a significant action by voting to increase fuel
efficiency in new vehicles by 40 percent to average 35 mpg by 2020,
long a legislative goal of Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif. It would be
the first time Congress has imposed standards in 32 years - but so far,
the House has yet to take any action.
Halfway
through the legislative year, the report card for Congress on global
warming initiatives - a priority for the new Democratic majority when
it took over in January - is a big "incomplete." Feinstein and Barbara
Boxer, the state's two senators and both Democrats, have had to
celebrate small victories: mandates for more energy efficiency in
federal buildings, and a $2 million program to better measure
greenhouse gas emissions.
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Warnings Sounded as Mediterranean Melts in Heat |
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The New Zealand Herald
Monday 23 July 2007
Athens
- Greece is now on a war footing against weather phenomena "the likes
of which we haven ever seen", warns the country's Public Order Minister
Byron Polydoras.
Polydoras
was speaking as countries around the Mediterranean roasted, with
temperatures soaring to "furnace levels", as one meteorologist
described it.
Temperatures
are likely to reach 43C in the shade this week, making this the hottest
summer on record for Greece in the past century.
Macedonia
has declared a state of emergency. Spain, Italy and France are
experiencing droughts that are measuring up to become the worst on
record.
According
to the most recent bulletin from the French Government, the situation
remains "preoccupying", with recent rain in the north failing to
replenish subterranean reservoirs.
Many politicians now fear the Mediterranean coast may soon become too hot to sustain a viable tourist industry.
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The We Campaign is a project of The Alliance for Climate Protection
-- a nonprofit, nonpartisan effort founded by Nobel laureate and former
Vice President Al Gore. Our ultimate aim is to halt global warming.
Specifically we are educating people in the US and around the world
that the climate crisis is both urgent and solvable.
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