The Associated Press

    Friday 28 April 2006

    Washington - Ten states fired a new legal salvo at the federal government Thursday in a long-running court battle over global warming and pollution from power plants.

    The states, joined by environmental groups, sued the Environmental Protection Agency over its decision not to regulate carbon dioxide pollution as a contributor to global warming.

    New York, California, Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Mexico, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Wisconsin filed the lawsuit in the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

    By Juliet Eilperin
    The Washington Post

    Thursday 06 April 2006

    Scientists doing climate research for the federal government say the Bush administration has made it hard for them to speak forthrightly to the public about global warming. The result, the researchers say, is a danger that Americans are not getting the full story on how the climate is changing.

    Employees and contractors working for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, along with a US Geological Survey scientist working at an NOAA lab, said in interviews that over the past year administration officials have chastised them for speaking on policy questions; removed references to global warming from their reports, news releases and conference Web sites; investigated news leaks; and sometimes urged them to stop speaking to the media altogether. Their accounts indicate that the ideological battle over climate-change research, which first came to light at NASA, is being fought in other federal science agencies as well.

    These scientists - working nationwide in research centers in such places as Princeton, NJ, and Boulder, Colorado - say they are required to clear all media requests with administration officials, something they did not have to do until the summer of 2004. Before then, point climate researchers - unlike staff members in the Justice or State departments, which have long-standing policies restricting access to reporters - were relatively free to discuss their findings without strict agency oversight.

    "There has been a change in how we're expected to interact with the press," said Pieter Tans, who measures greenhouse gases linked to global warming and has worked at NOAA's Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder for two decades. He added that although he often "ignores the rules" the administration has instituted, when it comes to his colleagues, "some people feel intimidated - I see that."

    By Stephen Leahy
    Inter Press Service

    Monday 10 March 2006

    Brooklyn, Canada - Vast swaths of coral reefs in the Caribbean Sea and South Pacific Ocean are dying, while the recently-discovered cold-water corals in northern waters will not survive the century - all due to climate change.

    The loss of reefs will have a catastrophic impact on all marine life.

    One-third of the coral at official monitoring sites in the area of Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands have recently perished in what scientists call an "unprecedented" die-off.

    Extremely high sea temperatures in the summer and fall of 2005 that spawned a record hurricane season have also caused extensive coral bleaching extending from the Florida Keys to Tobago and Barbados in the south and Panama and Costa Rica, according to the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Coral Reef Watch.

    By Sara Goudarzi
    LiveScience.com

    Tuesday 11 April 2006

"Global warming will result in catastrophic species loss," scientist says.

    Using several models that project habitat changes, migration capabilities of various species, and related extinctions in 25 "hotspots," scientists predict that a quarter of the world's plant and vertebrate animal species would face extinction by 2050.

    A report detailing the projections was released today.

    Biodiversity hotspots are some of the richest and most threatened biological pools on Earth. They contain 44 percent of plant and 35 percent of the Earth's vertebrate species on only 1.4 percent of the Earth's land. Each hotspot contains its own set of unique species.

    "Climate change is rapidly becoming the most serious threats to the planet's biodiversity," said Jay Malcolm, an assistant forestry professor at the University of Toronto. "This study provides even stronger scientific evidence that global warming will result in catastrophic species loss across the planet."

    By Richard Cohen
    The Washington Post

    Tuesday 18 April 2006

    Boring Al Gore has made a movie. It is on the most boring of all subjects - global warming. It is more than 80 minutes long, and the first two or three go by slowly enough that you can notice that Gore has gained weight and that his speech still seems oddly out of sync. But a moment later, I promise, you will be captivated, and then riveted and then scared out of your wits. Our Earth is going to hell in a handbasket.

    You will see the Arctic and Antarctic ice caps melting. You will see Greenland oozing into the sea. You will see the atmosphere polluted with greenhouse gases that block heat from escaping. You will see photos from space of what the ice caps looked like once and what they look like now and, in animation, you will see how high the oceans might rise. Shanghai and Calcutta swamped. Much of Florida, too. The water takes a hunk of New York. The fuss about what to do with Ground Zero will turn to naught. It will be underwater.

    "An Inconvenient Truth" is a cinematic version of the lecture that Gore has given for years warning of the dangers of global warming. Davis Guggenheim, the director, opened it up a bit. For instance, he added some shots of Gore mulling the fate of the Earth as he is driven here or there in some city, sometimes talking about personal matters such as the death of his beloved older sister from lung cancer and the close call his son had after being hit by a car. These are all traumas that Gore had mentioned in his presidential campaign and that seemed cloying at the time. Here they seem appropriate.

    By Mark Hertsgaard
    Vanity Fair

    Monday 17 April 2006

The Queen of England is afraid. International C.E.O.'s are nervous. And the scientific establishment is loud and clear. If global warming isn't halted, rising sea levels could submerge coastal cities by 2100. So how did this virtual certainty get labeled a "liberal hoax?"

    Ten months before Hurricane Katrina left much of New Orleans underwater, Queen Elizabeth II had a private conversation with Prime Minister Tony Blair about George W. Bush. The Queen's tradition of meeting once a week with Britain's elected head of government to discuss matters of state - usually on Tuesday evenings in Buckingham Palace and always alone, to ensure maximum confidentiality - goes back to 1952, the year she ascended the throne. In all that time, the contents of those chats rarely if ever leaked.

    So it was extraordinary when London's Observer reported, on October 31, 2004, that the Queen had "made a rare intervention in world politics" by telling Blair of "her grave concerns over the White House's stance on global warming." The Observer did not name its sources, but one of them subsequently spoke to Vanity Fair.

    "The Queen first of all made it clear that Buckingham Palace would be happy to help raise awareness about the climate problem," says the source, a high-level environmental expert who was briefed about the conversation. "[She was] definitely concerned about the American position and hoped the prime minister could help change [it]."