Climate News and Resources

By MARK HERTSGAARD of TIME
With his curly, salt-and-pepper hair and thoughtful demeanor, Chris West looks like just another mid-career professor as he crosses the streets of Oxford University. But West, trained as a zoologist, is more an activist than an academic these days. From his cramped office around the corner from Balliol College, he directs the government's UK Climate Impacts Program, which educates individuals and businesses in Britain about the risks they face from climate change and the ways to cope with it.

YouTube 37 minute video

By Alister Doyle, Environment Correspondent

OSLO, March 29 (Reuters) - Better architecture and energy savings in buildings could do more to fight global warming than all curbs on greenhouse gases agreed under the U.N.'s Kyoto Protocol, a U.N. study showed on Thursday.

By TIMOTHY EGAN
The so-called sky islands of southern Arizona, once green havens above the desert, have experienced near collapse.

By David A. Fahrenthold
Environmental activist (and former vice president) Al Gore descended on Capitol Hill yesterday, telling two congressional panels that global climate change represents the most dangerous crisis in American history and that the measures needed to fix the problem -- such as an immediate freeze on new emissions from cars and power plants -- are far more drastic than anything currently on the table....

By Steven Mufson
The Sierra Club and Kansas City Power & Light Co. have signed an unusual accord in which the utility agreed to offset all the greenhouse gas emissions from a new coal-fired plant by adding wind power and taking steps to conserve energy on a large scale.

While the U.S. government and some corporations are finally acknowledging global climate change, some critics say partnering with such forces may "tame" the movement's goals and strategies.

The National Renewable Energy Laboratory will receive more than $100 million in additional money from Washington this year.

WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) -- U.S. auto executives on Wednesday downplayed calls for tougher vehicle mileage standards, telling a House panel that increased use of bio-fuels and a range of incentives would be the best way to lower dependence on foreign oil.

Hundreds of millions of people will not have enough water within a couple of decades as the harmful effects of global warming already start to appear, top scientists will say next month at a meeting in Belgium.

As the snow melts from the towering peaks in the distance, Culebra Creek runs fast and the trout are biting. But Van Beecham, a fourth generation fishing guide, is uneasy.

This has been the world's warmest winter since record-keeping began more than a century ago, the U.S. government agency that tracks weather reported Thursday.

By MATT RICHTEL
Some technology investors that portray themselves as green-friendly are inconsistent with their marketing message.

By FELICITY BARRINGER
Bill McKibben, who was one of the first laymen to warn of global warming, is now the philosopher-impresario of the program of climate-change rallies called Step It Up.

Former Opponents Clinton, McCain Tout Its Benefits, but Its Campaign Value May Be Dropping

By Shailagh Murray
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, March 13, 2007; Page A06

What's the closest thing in politics to a religious experience? The ethanol conversion.

By WILLIAM J. BROAD
Some scientists argue that a number of central points in Al Gore’s film, “An Inconvenient Truth,” are exaggerated and erroneous.

By Alan Cooperman
The National Association of Evangelicals said yesterday that it has been unable to reach a consensus on global climate change and will not take a stand on the issue, disappointing environmentalists who had hoped that evangelical Christians would prod the Bush administration to soften its position...

Ken Cohen, vice-president for public affairs and Sherri Stuewer, vice-president for safety, health and environment explain Exxon's position on climate change and lay down basic principles for a future US policy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

By Steven Mufson
COUNCIL BLUFFS, Iowa -- From the top of a new coal-fired power plant with its 550-foot exhaust stack poking up from the flat western Iowa landscape, MidAmerican Energy Holdings chief executive David L. Sokol peered down at a train looping around a sizable mound of coal.

BRUSSELS, Belgium, March 8, 2007 (ENS) - Late today, the 27 European Union member governments approved a new target to cut their collective greenhouse gas emissions by 20 percent from the 1990 level in 2020. The agreement was reached at the Spring Council meeting of EU heads of government.

By Peter Baker
SAO PAULO, Brazil, March 9 -- President Bush sealed a deal with Brazil on Friday morning intended to promote international production of ethanol, opening a six-day tour of Latin America dedicated to renewing U.S. commitment to a region that has become estranged from Washington in recent years.

By Warren Brown
GENEVA, March 6 The Opel Corsa OPC is a little sports coupe that looks sharp, runs fast and gets 30 miles per gallon. It can be parked in the tightest of parking spots. It proves beyond any reasonable doubt that fuel-efficient cars don't have to be boring. And even at the stiff price of 34,664 Swiss francs -- about 22,000 euros in most of Europe -- Opel, the European subsidiary of General Motors, expects the Corsa OPC to be a big and profitable seller....

The Associated Press
Tuesday, February 27, 2007

UNITED NATIONS, New York: To head off the worst of climate change, governments must pour tens of billions of dollars more than they are into clean- energy research and enforce sharp rollbacks in fossil-fuel emissions, a scientific panel reported to the United Nations on Tuesday.

The United Nations itself must better prepare to help tens of millions of "environmental refugees," the panel said, and the authorities everywhere should discourage new building on land less than one meter, or 39 inches, above sea level.
The 166-page report, two years in the making, forecasts a turbulent 21st century of rising seas, spreading drought and disease, weather extremes, and damage to farming, forests, fisheries and other economic areas.

"The challenge of halting climate change is one to which civilization must rise," said the panel of 18 scientists from 11 nations, whose work was conducted at the United Nations' request and sponsored by the private United Nations Foundation and the Sigma Xi Scientific Research Society.

Their dozens of recommendations about what to do to mitigate and adapt to global warming came three weeks after the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, an authoritative UN network of 2,000 scientists, made headlines with its latest assessment of climate science.
The IPCC expressed its greatest confidence yet that global warming was being caused largely by the accumulation of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases in Earth's atmosphere, mostly from the burning of coal, oil and other fossil fuels. If nothing is done, the panel said, global temperatures could rise by as much as 11 degrees by 2100.

Temperatures rose an average 1.3 degrees in the past 100 years. The scientists who produced the report released Tuesday said further increases this century should be limited to about 3.6 degrees or the world risked crossing a climate "tipping point" that could produce "intolerable impacts on human well-being."

They said global carbon dioxide emissions should be leveled off by 2015- 2020 and then cut back to less than one- third that level by 2100 — via a vast transformation of global energy systems, toward greater efficiency, away from fossil fuels and toward biofuels, solar and wind energy and other renewable sources of energy.

That changeover would be spurred by heavy "carbon taxes" or "cap-and-trade" systems, whereby industries' emissions are capped by governments and more efficient companies can sell unused allowances to less efficient ones.

Such programs — already in use in Europe under the Kyoto Protocol climate pact — have been proposed in Congress but are opposed by the Bush administration, which also rejected the Kyoto treaty.

The White House says that it is spending almost $3 billion a year on energy-technology research and that that is its major contribution to combating climate change. But the UN panel said such research worldwide was badly underfunded and required a tripling or quadrupling of spending, to $45 billion or $60 billion a year.

Specialists say governments particularly should step up research into carbon capture and sequestration — technology to capture carbon dioxide in power-plant emissions and store it underground or underwater. In fact, the experts panel urged governments to immediately ban all new coal-fired power plants except those designed for retrofitting with sequestration technology.

Among its list of recommendations, the report Tuesday also called on UN agencies to study the need for an internationally accepted definition of "environmental refugee," since treaties recognize only political refugees as eligible for aid from the UN refugee agency.
The report expresses "special concern" that international capacity could be overwhelmed by coastal refugees fleeing seas rising as they expand from heat and melted land ice. Scientists estimate that a rise in sea levels of one meter by 2100 — conceivable in IPCC projections — would displace roughly 130 million people worldwide.

Policymakers have settled on 'emissions trading' as their favorite global-warming fix. But it isn't working.

A New York Times Editorial

Climatologists have found a surprisingly detailed record of weather patterns that raises questions about how water is being used in the Southwest.

By EDMUND L. ANDREWS
The lawsuit could allow energy companies to avoid as much as $60 billion in royalties to the government over the next two decades.

By ANDREW C. REVKIN
According to a new report, the Bush administration’s climate policy will result in emissions growing 11 percent in 2012 from 2002.

By Jose Antonio Vargas
YouTube doesn't want to be just a goof-off destination anymore.
It just went a little C-SPAN.

By CAROLYN THOMPSON
Associated Press Writer

TONAWANDA, N.Y. -- Taking time out from her cross-country presidential campaign schedule, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton flew back to New York Monday and suggested the country approach energy independence the way it approached space exploration.