By Andrew C. Revkin and Matthew L. Wald
    The New York Times

    Tuesday 20 March 2007

    Washington - A House committee released documents Monday that showed hundreds of instances in which a White House official who was previously an oil industry lobbyist edited government climate reports to play up uncertainty of a human role in global warming or play down evidence of such a role.

    In a hearing of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, the official, Philip A. Cooney, who left government in 2005, defended the changes he had made in government reports over several years. Mr. Cooney said the editing was part of the normal White House review process and reflected findings in a climate report written for President Bush by the National Academy of Sciences in 2001.

    They were the first public statements on the issue by Mr. Cooney, the former chief of staff of the White House Council on Environmental Quality. Before joining the White House, he was the "climate team leader" for the American Petroleum Institute, the main industry lobby in Washington.

    He was hired by Exxon Mobil after resigning in 2005 following reports on the editing in The New York Times. The White House said his resignation was not related to the disclosures.

    Mr. Cooney said his past work opposing restrictions on heat-trapping gases for the oil industry had had no bearing on his actions once he joined the White House. "When I came to the White House," he testified, "my sole loyalties were to the president and his administration."

    Mr. Cooney, who has no scientific background, said he had based his editing and recommendations on what he had seen in good faith as the "most authoritative and current views of the state of scientific knowledge."

    
    By Shawn Dell Joyce
    The Times Herald-Record

    Sunday 18 March 2007

    What if I told you that we already have everything we need to resolve the crisis of global warming, except action? Would you believe me? How about believing two Princeton University economists?

    Stephen Pacala and Robert Socolow announced in August 2004 that "humanity already possesses the fundamental scientific, technical, and industrial know-how to solve the carbon and climate problems for the next half-century."

    Pacala and Socolow have devised "The Princeton Wedge."

    Imagine a graph going up at a sharp angle. This is the graph of projected U.S. carbon emissions during the next half-century.

    We are now at 1.8 gigatons of carbon emissions per year, and headed toward 2.6 GtC in the next 45 years, if we keep the same energy-use patterns.

    Pacala and Socolow point out that we need to "drive a wedge" into that graph by stabilizing emissions, then reducing them by half (0.9 GtC) in less than 50 years. This will help us avoid some of the worst effects of climate change, like the increasing acidification of the world's oceans, the rising sea levels, and a 5-degree-or-higher rise in average global temperature.

    They pointed out that we need to stabilize our emissions first, and then reduce them over the next 50 years.

    
    By Seth Borenstein
    The Associated Press

    Saturday 10 March 2007

    Washington - The harmful effects of global warming on daily life are already showing up, and within a couple of decades hundreds of millions of people won't have enough water, top scientists will say next month at a meeting in Belgium.

    At the same time, tens of millions of others will be flooded out of their homes each year as the Earth reels from rising temperatures and sea levels, according to portions of a draft of an international scientific report obtained by The Associated Press.

    Tropical diseases like malaria will spread. By 2050, polar bears will mostly be found in zoos, their habitats gone. Pests like fire ants will thrive.

    For a time, food will be plentiful because of the longer growing season in northern regions. But by 2080, hundreds of millions of people could face starvation, according to the report, which is still being revised.

    The draft document by the authoritative Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change focuses on global warming's effects and is the second in a series of four being issued this year. Written and reviewed by more than 1,000 scientists from dozens of countries, it still must be edited by government officials.

    But some scientists said the overall message is not likely to change when it's issued in early April in Brussels, the same city where European Union leaders agreed this past week to drastically cut greenhouse gas emissions by 2020. Their plan will be presented to President Bush and other world leaders at a summit in June.

    The report offers some hope if nations slow and then reduce their greenhouse gas emissions, but it notes that what's happening now isn't encouraging.

   
    By Ed Pilkington
    The Guardian UK

    Monday 05 March 2007

Publication delayed for more than a year. Authors argue president's efforts "are working."

    New York - A draft report prepared by the Bush administration admits that emissions of greenhouse gases by the United States will rise by 2020 to 20% above 2000 levels, flying in the face of warnings from scientists that drastic action to cut emissions is needed if environmental catastrophe is to be averted.

    The internal administration report, which has been obtained by the Associated Press, should have been handed to the United Nations more than a year ago as part of the world body's monitoring of climate change, but its publication has been delayed. The draft estimates that US emissions of so-called greenhouse gases, largely from the burning of oil, coil and natural gas, will rise from 7.7bn tons in 2000 to 9.2bn tons in 2020 - an increase of 19.5%.

    The growth is in line with expectations, but underlines how out of kilter the US government is with world opinion and efforts to tackle climate change. The Kyoto protocol, which the Bush administration has refused to ratify partly on the grounds that it would damage the US economy, demands of most developed countries that they reduce their 1990 emissions levels by 5% by 2012.

    The US produces about a quarter of the world's carbon dioxide and other gases believed responsible for warming the world's atmosphere. Environmentalists and green groups say that if irreversible global warming is to be avoided far more stringent targets should be set than even those proposed under the Kyoto protocol, which came into force two years ago. On April 14 campaigners will be demonstrating in cities across the US to call for 80% cuts by 2050.