By David Usborne
    The Independent UK

    Monday 02 April 2007

Pictures of seal pups drowning in melting polar ice have shocked the world. Yesterday campaigners reported they have seen survivors clinging to life. But in a few days' time, the hunters will come and the pups' brief struggle against so many odds will come to a bloody end.

    These are the wrenching images that will once more ignite worldwide recriminations and protest as the Canadian government prepares to give the green light to its annual culling of baby harp seals in spite of new evidence that the population is doubly at risk this year because of collapsing ice cover.

    The authorities in Ottawa announced last week a sharp reduction in the numbers of pups that hunters will be allowed to kill this spring in a first official acknowledgement of the impact the melting ice is having on the seal population. Conservationists, however, are demanding that the harvest be cancelled.

    Even though public uproar, notably in Britain and Europe, over the seal slaughter is likely to be more intense than ever before, the government is expected in the next several days to announce a start-date for the annual culling. The hunter's vessels are tied up but ready to start the hunt at a moment's notice.

    Fisheries officials in Ottawa have responded to renewed criticism of the massacre by asserting that the melting of the ice is not presenting as dire a threat to the harp seal populations as the conservationist claim. Nor are they willing to accept that the situation this year is necessarily linked to global warming.

    Scientists with the International Fund for Animal Welfare, IFAW, which has its headquarters in Massachusetts, have been issuing increasingly bleak reports from the areas where the hunt traditionally begins each March, notably around the Magdalen Islands at the mouth of the St Lawrence river. The alarm has similarly been sounded by the Human Society of the United States.

   
    By Mark Martin
    The San Francisco Chronicle

    Monday 02 April 2007

Poll-driven politicians see need to tackle global warming.

    Sacramento - Few issues are hotter in the Capitol this year than global warming.

    Lawmakers have introduced more than 60 bills on the topic, and no wonder. Polls show widespread support among California voters for tackling climate change. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Assembly Speaker Fabian Núñez received rock star-like affection worldwide for their work on landmark greenhouse gas legislation last year. And there is a seemingly infinite number of policy directions the state could take to lower carbon emissions.

    "It's become an apple-pie issue," noted Darry Sragow, a longtime Democratic strategist in California. "It's like being for better schools."

    This year, lawmakers are pushing bills to require diesel-powered school buses to run on biodiesel fuel instead of regular diesel; change regulations to make it easier for housing projects to install solar power; require televisions and computers to be more energy efficient; create a new bureaucracy to consolidate the disparate agencies that study climate change issues; and add incentives for gas station owners to install pumps for alternative fuels.

    In a repeat from last year, there is also an effort to require that half of all cars sold in California run on alternative fuels by 2020.

    A check of legislation moving through the Capitol shows more than 60 bills have been introduced to deal with climate change. And Assemblyman Lloyd Levine, the chairman of the Assembly's key energy committee, noted he had discouraged others from drawing up even more plans when they approached him "wanting to do something about alternative fuels, or solar power," he said.

   
    Reuters

    Monday 02 April 2007

    Washington - In a defeat for the Bush administration, the Supreme Court ruled Monday that a U.S. government agency has the power under the clean air law to regulate greenhouse gas emissions that spur global warming.

    The nation's highest court by a 5-4 vote said the Environmental Protection Agency "has offered no reasoned explanation" for its refusal to regulate carbon dioxide and other emissions from new cars and trucks that contribute to climate change.

    The ruling came in one of the most important environmental cases to reach the Supreme Court in decades. It marked the first high court decision in a case involving global warming.

    Greenhouse gases occur naturally and are also emitted by cars, trucks and factories into the atmosphere. They can trap heat close to the earth's surface like the glass walls of a greenhouse.

    Such emissions have risen steeply over the past century and many scientists see a connection between this rise and an increase in global average temperatures and a related increase in extreme weather, wildfires, melting glaciers and other damage to the environment.

    Justice John Paul Stevens, writing for the court majority, rejected the administration's argument that it lacked the power to regulate such emissions. He said the EPA's decision was "arbitrary, capricious or otherwise not in accordance with law."

    
    By Andrew C. Revkin
    The New York Times

    Sunday 01 April 2007

    The world's richest countries, which have contributed by far the most to the atmospheric changes linked to global warming, are already spending billions of dollars to limit their own risks from its worst consequences, like drought and rising seas.

    But despite longstanding treaty commitments to help poor countries deal with warming, these industrial powers are spending just tens of millions of dollars on ways to limit climate and coastal hazards in the world's most vulnerable regions - most of them close to the equator and overwhelmingly poor.

    Next Friday, a new report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations body that since 1990 has been assessing global warming, will underline this growing climate divide, according to scientists involved in writing it - with wealthy nations far from the equator not only experiencing fewer effects but also better able to withstand them.

    Two-thirds of the atmospheric buildup of carbon dioxide, a heat-trapping greenhouse gas that can persist in the air for centuries, has come in nearly equal proportions from the United States and Western European countries. Those and other wealthy nations are investing in windmill-powered plants that turn seawater to drinking water, in flood barriers and floatable homes, and in grains and soybeans genetically altered to flourish even in a drought.

    In contrast, Africa accounts for less than 3 percent of the global emissions of carbon dioxide from fuel burning since 1900, yet its 840 million people face some of the biggest risks from drought and disrupted water supplies, according to new scientific assessments. As the oceans swell with water from melting ice sheets, it is the crowded river deltas in southern Asia and Egypt, along with small island nations, that are most at risk.

    
    By David Strahan
    BBC News

    Thursday 29 March 2007

Many people think that running out of oil, or "peak oil," would be good for the climate. In his new book The Last Oil Shock, David Strahan begs to differ; he suggests it may bring catastrophe.

    It is becoming increasingly clear that global oil production will soon go into terminal decline, with potentially devastating economic consequences.

    Although the idea of peak oil has traditionally been ridiculed by the industry, now even some of the world's most senior oilmen concede the case.

    Last year Thierry Desmarest, chairman of Total, the world's fourth largest oil company, declared that production would peak by around 2020.

    He urged governments to find ways to suppress oil demand growth and put off the witching hour.

    Other forecasters are convinced the peak date is even closer.

    But many environmentalists continue to resist the idea.

    Some seem to suspect that anybody who argues that oil production is set to fall must be a closet climate change denier with a secret agenda.

    Others, like Stephen Tindale of Greenpeace, instinctively distrust forecasts of an imminent peak, but wish fervently that it would come soon.

    "Let's hope that the oil does run out", he told me, "and that the world has to develop alternatives to oil seriously quickly, and from a climate point of view that would be an excellent outcome."

    Neither position could be more wrong.

    
    MSNBC News

    Thursday 29 March 2007

Amundsen Sea ice shelves thinning, raising fears of sea level rise.

    Houston - A Texas-sized area of Antarctica is thinning and could cause the world's oceans to rise significantly in the long-term, polar ice experts said in wrapping up a three-day conference.

    "Surprisingly rapid changes" are occurring in Antarctica's Amundsen Sea Embayment, an ice drainage system that faces the southern Pacific Ocean, the experts said in a statement, adding that more study was needed to determine how fast it was melting and how much it could cause sea levels to rise.

    The warning came Wednesday at the end of a conference of U.S. and European polar ice experts at the University of Texas in Austin.

    The scientists blamed the melting ice on changing winds around Antarctica that are causing warmer waters to flow beneath the ice shelves in the Amundsen Sea. The shelves hold back ice that is grounded on the continent and known as the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. Should the shelves collapse, grounded ice would start flowing into the sea much more rapidly, raising sea levels.

    The wind change, they said, appeared to be the result of several factors, including global warming, ozone depletion in the atmosphere and natural variability.

    The thinning in the two-mile-thick West Antarctic Ice Sheet is being observed mostly from satellites, but it is not known how much ice has been lost because data is difficult to obtain in the remote region, they said.

    "The place where the biggest change is occurring is the Amundsen Sea Embayment," said Donald Blankenship of the University of Texas Institute for Geophysics.

    "One, it's changing, and two, it can have a big impact," he said in a Webcast with a number of conference participants.

    The West Antarctic Ice Sheet contains enough grounded ice to raise world sea levels close to 20 feet, the scientists said.