By Cornelia Dean
    The New York Times

    Wednesday 12 March 2008

    A rise in sea levels and other changes fueled by global warming threaten roads, rail lines, ports, airports and other important infrastructure, and policy makers and planners should be acting now to avoid or mitigate their effects, according to new government reports.

    While increased heat and "intense precipitation events" threaten these structures, the greatest and most immediate potential impact is coastal flooding, according to one of the reports, by an expert panel convened by the National Research Council, the research arm of the National Academy of Sciences.

    Another study, a multiagency effort led by the Environmental Protection Agency, sounds a similar warning on infrastructure but adds that natural features like beaches, wetlands and fresh-water supplies are also threatened by encroaching saltwater.

    The reports are not the first to point out that rising seas, inevitable in a warming world, are a major threat. In a report last September, the Miami-Dade County Climate Change Task Force noted that a two-foot rise by the year 2100, the prediction of the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, "would make life in South Florida very difficult for everyone."

    But the new reports offer detailed assessments of vulnerability in the relatively near term. Both note that coastal areas are thickly populated, economically important and gaining people and investment by the day, even as scientific knowledge of the risks they face increases. Use of this knowledge by policy makers and planners is "inadequate," the academy panel said.

   
    By Juliet Eilperin
    The Washington Post

    Monday 10 March 2008

    The task of cutting greenhouse gas emissions enough to avert a dangerous rise in global temperatures may be far more difficult than previous research suggested, say scientists who have just published studies indicating that it would require the world to cease carbon emissions altogether within a matter of decades.

    Their findings, published in separate journals over the past few weeks, suggest that both industrialized and developing nations must wean themselves off fossil fuels by as early as mid-century in order to prevent warming that could change precipitation patterns and dry up sources of water worldwide.

    Using advanced computer models to factor in deep-sea warming and other aspects of the carbon cycle that naturally creates and removes carbon dioxide (CO2), the scientists, from countries including the United States, Canada and Germany, are delivering a simple message: The world must bring carbon emissions down to near zero to keep temperatures from rising further.

    "The question is, what if we don't want the Earth to warm anymore?" asked Carnegie Institution senior scientist Ken Caldeira, co-author of a paper published last week in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. "The answer implies a much more radical change to our energy system than people are thinking about."

   
    By Stephen Leahy
    Inter Press News

    Wednesday 05 March 2008

    Brooklin, Canada - Colder than usual January temperatures in the United States have brought the climate change deniers out of hibernation, flooding websites, and opinion and letters pages about the "great global warming hoax". They even organised their own conference on denial in New York City this week.

    "Global warming is not a global crisis" declared the Heartland Institute, organiser of the "International Conference on Climate Change". Heartland is a well-known right-wing lobby group which accepted more than half a million dollars from oil giant ExxonMobil between 1999 and 2005, according to Exxon documents disclosed by Greenpeace, and thousands of dollars more from the tobacco industry.

    Not surprisingly, in a statement issued Tuesday, they insisted that all efforts "intended to reduce emissions of CO2 be abandoned forthwith".

    "Manmade global warming is a total hoax. It has no basis in fact," shouted Rush Limbaugh, a U.S. conservative radio host, on his Feb. 27 show, which draws as many as 13 million listeners.

    "Record snows and cold are being reported from all over the northern hemisphere this winter," Limbaugh claimed.

    There is more to the northern hemisphere than the U.S. and Canada. Yes, it has also been cold in China and the Middle East, but it has also been very warm in Britain and most of Europe. In early February, it was balmy 14 degrees C in Edinburgh, Scotland, which is the city's normal average temperature in July. In Moscow, Russia, the most northern capital city in the world, the forecast this week is rainy and about 3 degrees C, instead of the normal snowy and -10 degrees C.

    
    The Associated Press

    Tuesday 04 March 2008

Shifting jet stream eyed in 2005 starvation.

    Grants Pass, Oregon - Scientists examining the sudden and widespread collapse of West Coast salmon returns are pointing to the unusual changes in weather patterns that caused the bottom to fall out of the ocean food web in 2005.

    NOAA Fisheries Service oceanographer Bill Peterson said Monday the juvenile salmon that left their native rivers and entered the Pacific Ocean in 2005 found little food being transported by the California Current, which flows from the northern Pacific south along the West Coast.

    The reason was that the jet stream had shifted to the south, delaying the spring onset of winds out of the north that create a condition known as upwelling, which kickstarts the ocean food web by stirring the water from bottom to top, the agency said.

    "If there is no upwelling, there is no phytoplankton growth, no zooplankton growth, and basically you have no food chain that develops, because it all depends on the upwelling," Peterson said from Newport.

    "We are not dismissing other potential causes for this year's low salmon returns," NOAA Fisheries Service Northwest Science Center Director Usha Varanasi said in a statement. "But the widespread pattern of low returns along the West Coast for (both coho and chinook) salmon indicates an environmental anomaly occurred in the California Current in 2005."

    That was the year that countless seabirds, showing signs of starvation, were washing up dead on beaches and nesting colonies were sparse. Off Oregon, water temperatures near shore, where chinook spend much of their time in the ocean, were 5 to 7 degrees warmer than normal and yielded about one-fourth the usual amount of phytoplankton, the tiny plants that are at the bottom of the food web.

    Tuesday 04 March 2008

    By refusing to sign on to the Kyoto climate treaty, Americans have insulated ourselves from the complexities of the carbon market the European Union has been trading in for the last three years. But that state of ignorance, while not exactly blissful, is about to end.

    On February 26 and 27, the international carbon trading financial community descended on San Francisco to present Carbon Forum America, the first American carbon trading conference to include a full trade show featuring 80 companies that manage carbon credit assets and trades, negotiate contracts, validate projects, and perform various other market services.

    Why California and why now? California is the US leader on climate policy and now is the time the tea leaves are spelling out a coming certainty for investors. The first serious US climate change measure, the Lieberman-Warner bill, has passed out of a Senate committee. All three front-running presidential candidates have acknowledged a cap-and-trade system for carbon emissions is inevitable. US regional programs like the Western Climate Initiative are picking up steam, and 32 states have now adopted hard emissions targets.

    The conference sponsor, the International Emissions Trading Association, is banking on the idea US investors will embrace a worldwide carbon trading market that reached $60 billion in 2007 and could mushroom to $300 billion or more very soon.

    But what exactly is a carbon market? At a press briefing, IETA president and CEO Henry Derwent acknowledged the concept was a difficult one to explain. "Carbon is an externality, not a commodity. People say, 'What on earth do I need that for? It's not a pork belly.'"

   
    By Peter O'Neil
    The Ottawa Citizen

    Friday 29 February 2008

Melting of passageway means countries will vie to control it, former Coast Guard official says.

    Paris - The fast-warming Arctic's vast economic potential makes it increasingly prone to smuggling, perilous polar tourism, environmental catastrophes and even armed conflict unless Canada and the U.S. lead efforts to bring order to the region, according to a new analysis.

    Former U.S. Coast Guard Lt.-Cmdr. Scott Borgerson, in the latest issue of Foreign Policy magazine, argued Washington has to start with a Canada-U.S. agreement on how the Arctic should be regulated as global warming opens northern sea lanes.

    He also called on U.S. leaders to take seriously Canada's sovereignty claims over the Northwest Passage, as well as consider a way to resolve competing claims involving Russia, Denmark and Norway.

    "The United States should not underestimate Canadian passions on this issue," wrote Lt.-Cmdr. Borgerson, a fellow at the influential Council on Foreign Relations.

    He cited ongoing Canadian "sabre-rattling" and noted that Canada is among several countries bulking up their military and surveillance capabilities in the North in anticipation of expanded shipping and energy exploration activity.

    "There are currently no clear rules governing this economically and strategically vital region," stated the magazine's summary of Lt.-Cmdr. Borgerson's analysis, called Arctic Meltdown: The Economic and Security Implications of Global Warming.