By Richard Glover
    The Sydney Morning Herald AU

    Sunday 21 October 2007

    I used to feel bad about mindless consumerism but not any more. The green movement has come to my rescue. With every purchase, I can now enjoy the warm glow of helping develop environmentally sound practices.

    There's my new briefcase, for example. It is shiny and luxurious and its purchase has allowed me to throw my old one into the bin. But there's no eco-guilt for me.

    According to the manufacturer, the leather in my briefcase was stained using "extracts of bark and seeds collected from renewable sources in the forests of Africa and India". The work was all done by "traditional artisans", all of them using "sustainable practices" in the "old saddler tradition". There's not a lot of detail on the leather but, based on the tone of the pamphlet, I'm pretty sure the cows would have been volunteers.

    I feel I now deserve some sort of medal just for handing over my credit card.

    I'm not alone in falling for this sort of sales pitch. People are always looking for an excuse to consume more and the latest excuse - bizarrely - is environmentalism.

    Let's call it "greensumerism". Forget the simple mantra of "less is more"; with the help of the green movement you can now indulge in a frenzy of consumerism, with each luxury purchase excused by the idea that you are helping the development of the "green" sector.

    
    By Scott Pelley
    CBS News

    Sunday 21 October 2007

Scott Pelley reports from the American West's fire lines on the rising number of mega-fires.

EDITORS NOTE: The intro of this article was cut to skip to the part about climate change.

    The severity of the burning and size of the fires caught the eye of Tom Swetnam, one of the world's leading fire ecologists. He wanted to know what's touched off this annual inferno and whether it's truly a historic change.

    At the University of Arizona, Swetnam keeps a remarkable woodpile, comprised of the largest collection of tree rings in the world. His rings go back 9,000 years, and each one of those rings captures one year of climate history.

    Swetnam found recent decades have been the hottest in 1,000 years. And recently, he and a team of top climate scientists discovered something else: a dramatic increase in fires high in the mountains, where fires were rare.

    "As the spring is arriving earlier because of warming conditions, the snow on these high mountain areas is melting and running off. So the logs and the branches and the tree needles all can dry out more quickly and have a longer time period to be dry. And so there's a longer time period and opportunity for fires to start," Swetnam says

    "The spring comes earlier, so the fire season is just longer," Pelley remarks.

    "That's right. The fire season in the last 15 years or so has increased more than two months over the whole Western U.S. So actually 78 days of average longer fire season in the last 15 years compared to the previous 15 or 20 years," Swetnam says.

    
    By Seth Borenstein
    The Associated Press

    Monday 22 Oct 2007

Several scientists agree one meter rise will happen as soon as 50 years from now.

    Ultimately, rising seas will likely swamp the first American settlement in Jamestown, Va., as well as the Florida launch pad that sent the first American into orbit, many climate scientists are predicting.

    In about a century, some of the places that make America what it is may be slowly erased.

    Global warming - through a combination of melting glaciers, disappearing ice sheets and warmer waters expanding - is expected to cause oceans to rise by 1 meter, or about 39 inches.

    It will happen regardless of any future actions to curb greenhouse gases, several leading scientists say. And it will reshape the nation.

    Rising waters will lap at the foundations of old money Wall Street and the new money towers of Silicon Valley. They will swamp the locations of big-city airports and major interstate highways.

    Storm surges worsened by sea level rise will flood the waterfront getaways of rich politicians - the Bushes' Kennebunkport and John Edwards' place on the Outer Banks. And gone will be many of the beaches in Texas and Florida favored by budget-conscious students on spring break.

    That's the troubling outlook projected by coastal maps reviewed recently by the Associated Press. The maps, created by scientists at the University of Arizona, are based on data from the U.S. Geological Survey.

    
    By Jon Gertner
    The New York Times Magazine

    Sunday 21 October 2007

    Scientists sometimes refer to the effect a hotter world will have on this country's fresh water as the other water problem, because global warming more commonly evokes the specter of rising oceans submerging our great coastal cities. By comparison, the steady decrease in mountain snowpack - the loss of the deep accumulation of high-altitude winter snow that melts each spring to provide the American West with most of its water - seems to be a more modest worry. But not all researchers agree with this ranking of dangers. Last May, for instance, Steven Chu, a Nobel laureate and the director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, one of the United States government's pre-eminent research facilities, remarked that diminished supplies of fresh water might prove a far more serious problem than slowly rising seas. When I met with Chu last summer in Berkeley, the snowpack in the Sierra Nevada, which provides most of the water for Northern California, was at its lowest level in 20 years. Chu noted that even the most optimistic climate models for the second half of this century suggest that 30 to 70 percent of the snowpack will disappear. "There's a two-thirds chance there will be a disaster," Chu said, "and that's in the best scenario."

    In the Southwest this past summer, the outlook was equally sobering. A catastrophic reduction in the flow of the Colorado River - which mostly consists of snowmelt from the Rocky Mountains - has always served as a kind of thought experiment for water engineers, a risk situation from the outer edge of their practical imaginations. Some 30 million people depend on that water. A greatly reduced river would wreak chaos in seven states: Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada and California. An almost unfathomable legal morass might well result, with farmers suing the federal government; cities suing cities; states suing states; Indian nations suing state officials; and foreign nations (by treaty, Mexico has a small claim on the river) bringing international law to bear on the United States government. In addition, a lesser Colorado River would almost certainly lead to a considerable amount of economic havoc, as the future water supplies for the West's industries, agriculture and growing municipalities are threatened. As one prominent Western water official described the possible future to me, if some of the Southwest's largest reservoirs empty out, the region would experience an apocalypse, "an Armageddon."

    
    By Bob Egelko
    The San Francisco Chronicle

    Saturday 20 October 2007

    California will sue the Bush administration next week to demand action on a long-stalled request to let the state limit auto emissions of gases linked to global warming, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's office said Friday.

    "We've just waited too long" for a decision from the Environmental Protection Agency, said Schwarzenegger's press secretary, Aaron McLear.

    The state asked the EPA in December 2005 for permission to enforce the California law, the model for statutes passed later in 11 other states. The EPA's approval is needed for California to implement a law more stringent than federal clean-air standards, and the agency has granted every such request California has made over the past 30 years.

    The EPA held a public hearing in May and has promised a decision by the end of the year. But McLear said the state has run out of patience and will go to court Wednesday, the deadline that Schwarzenegger set in April.

    "There's really no excuse at this point why we shouldn't be granted a waiver," McLear said. He said the state's case was strengthened in April when the U.S. Supreme Court, in a suit filed by California and other states against the EPA, "agreed with the rest of the world that greenhouse gas emissions are bad for the air."

    The suit will be filed in a Washington, D.C., federal court, said state Attorney General Jerry Brown.

   
    By Juliet Eilperin
    The Washington Post

    Friday 19 October 2007

Science adviser's stance at odds with panel on warming.

    The president's top science adviser said yesterday there is no solid scientific evidence that the widely cited goal of limiting future global temperature rises to two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels is necessary to avert dangerous climate change, an assertion that runs counter to that of many scientists as well as the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

    John H. Marburger III, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, said at a news conference that the target of preventing Earth from warming more than two degrees Celsius, or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, "is going to be a very difficult one to achieve and is not actually linked to regional events that affect people's lives."

    A wide number of scientists, as well as European leaders and many U.S. lawmakers, have endorsed the goal of limiting global temperature rise to that level. That roughly translates to holding the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere to 450 parts per million of carbon dioxide or equivalents, compared with the current level of roughly 385 parts per million.

    The atmosphere has already warmed by 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit compared with pre-industrial levels. In its April report, the IPCC outlined a range of environmental impacts that could transpire if temperatures rise 1.8 to 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit above 1980 levels. These include placing between 20 and 30 percent of all species "at increasing risk of extinction" damaging most coral reefs; and "increased morbidity and mortality from heat waves, floods and droughts."