Time for change

Climate change threatens French truffle

PARIS (Reuters) - The black truffle, one of the most exclusive and expensive delicacies on the planet, is under threat from climate change.
Read more [Reuters]

Ocean nitrogen only limited help for climate: study

OSLO (Reuters) - Rising amounts of nitrogen entering the oceans from human activities are less beneficial than previously thought as a fertiliser for tiny fertilizermarine plants that help slow global warming, scientists said on Thursday.
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Seed giants see gold in climate change

Asia Times: First the biotech industry promised that its genetically engineered seeds would clean up the environment. Then they told us biotech crops would feed the world. Neither came to pass. Soon we'll hear that genetically engineered climate-hardy seeds are the essential adaptation strategy for crops to withstand drought, heat, cold, saline soils and more. After failing to convince an unwilling public to accept genetically engineered foods, biotech companies see a silver lining in climate ...
Read more [EcoEarth.info]

Global warming has changed behaviour of plants and animals over last 40 years, says NASA

Daily Mail: Global warming has altered the behaviour of thousands of species of plants and animals in the last 40 years, the biggest study of its kind suggsts. Scientists from the American space agency Nasa say there are now more than 27,000 examples of how nature has responded to warmer temperatures around the world since the early 1970s. They range from earlier springs in Britain and the movement north of insects and birds in Europe to avoid warmer weather, to changes in the hunting ...
Read more [EcoEarth.info]

Fungal gene to help wheat and rice cope with climate change

Australian Broadcasting Corporation: Researchers at the Australian National University have identified a gene in algae that could help wheat and rice cope with climate change. Carbon dioxide levels are rising, and Australia's grain growing regions are getting drier. Professor Murray Badger says his research could improve the photosynthesis of wheat and rice, in an atmosphere of higher carbon dioxide concentrations. "If you can take simple genes such as algae and put it into a plant like wheat, you ...
Read more [EcoEarth.info]

US lists polar bear as threatened

BBC: The United States has listed the polar bear as a threatened species, because its Arctic sea ice habitat is melting due to climate change. US government scientists predict that two-thirds of the polar bear population of 25,000 could disappear by 2050. However, the government stressed the listing would not lead to measures to prevent global warming. Environmentalists have expressed disappointment that more will not be done to protect the bear's habitat. US ...
Read more [EcoEarth.info]

US enacts law to protect polar bears, but only from hunting

Independent: The United States declared the polar bear a threatened species yesterday; saying the dramatic reduction in sea ice caused by global warming has put it in imminent danger of extinction. Yesterday marked the first time the US Endangered Species Act was used to protect a species threatened by climate change. The US Geological Survey says that two-thirds of the world's polar bears could be gone by 2050. The bears will only be protected from the direct effects of hunting, and some ...
Read more [EcoEarth.info]

Change is accelerating in the greenhouse

Sydney Morning Herald: CLIMATE change enhanced by humans is taking its toll on the world's plants and animals and physical environment much more quickly than previously thought, scientists have warned. The message from a study was that climate change required an urgent response, said one of the scientists, David Karoly, from the University of Melbourne's school of earth sciences. The international research team found that many accounts of plants flowering early, birds changing migration habits, and ...
Read more [EcoEarth.info]

World's wildlife and environment already hit by climate change, major study shows

Guardian: Global warming is disrupting wildlife and the environment on every continent, according to an unprecedented study that reveals the extent to which climate change is already affecting the world's ecosystems. Scientists examined published reports dating back to 1970 and found that at least 90% of environmental damage and disruption around the world could be explained by rising temperatures driven by human activity. Big falls in Antarctic penguin populations, fewer fish in African ...
Read more [EcoEarth.info]

Polar Bears Listed As US Threatened Species

Reuters: Polar bears were listed on Wednesday as threatened under the US Endangered Species Act because their sea ice habitat is melting away. However, this new protection does not aim to reduce climate change -- which environmentalists see as the cause of the bears' disappearing habitat -- or Arctic drilling for the fossil fuels that spur the climate-warming greenhouse effect. In announcing the government's decision one day ahead of a court-ordered deadline, Interior Secretary Dirk ...
Read more [EcoEarth.info]

Giant Study Pinpoints Changes From Climate Warming

Reuters: Human-generated climate change made flowers bloom sooner and autumn leaves fall later, turned some polar bears into cannibals and some birds into early breeders, a vast global study reported on Wednesday. Hundreds of previous studies have noted these specific changes and most suggested a link to so-called anthropogenic global warming, but a new analysis published in the journal Nature correlated these earlier studies with changes in temperature, the study's lead author said. ...
Read more [EcoEarth.info]

Endangered Species Act threatens Polar Bears

For the last three years, the US Department of Interior has been dragging its feet when it comes to protecting the polar bear. It has now finally listed the polar bear as threatened under the Endangered Species Act. This might seem like a victory but there are enough exemptions in this listing to leave the polar bear unprotected against its biggest threat, global warming.
Read more [Greenpeace international]

WRI Joins North America’s Largest Greenhouse Gas Reporting Partnership

The Climate Registry, which uses accounting methodologies created by the World Resources Institute, will name WRI one of its founding reporters next month.

To date, WRI and more than 100 businesses and organizations have committed to report to The Climate Registry, which bills itself as “North America’s largest climate change organization.” It is, according to the Denver Post, “a nationwide program in which participants quantify and publicize their greenhouse gas emissions as a first step in reducing them.” The Registry was founded by 39 U.S. states, seven Canadian provinces, six Mexican states, three Native American tribes, and the District of Columbia.

“WRI has demonstrated exemplary environmental leadership by courageously stepping forward to support The Climate Registry in its preliminary stages,” said Gina McCarthy, chair of The Climate Registry.

“We have reported our annual emissions publicly on our Web site since 2001,” added Jonathan Lash, WRI president. “Registries like this are tremendously important as tools to allow companies, organizations, and civil society to track our progress in managing and reducing emissions.”

The Climate Registry is a non-profit organization established to measure and publicly report greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in a common, accurate and transparent manner consistent across industry sectors and borders. All emissions reported require third-party verification. The Registry represents a linking of several state-sponsored GHG emissions reporting efforts, including the California Climate Action Registry and the Eastern Climate Registry. It is anticipated that mandatory state-level GHG reporting programs will be linked with the Registry.

The Climate Registry’s protocols are based on the internationally recognized Greenhouse Gas Protocol, which was created by WRI and the World Business Council for Sustainable Development and is the most widely used international accounting tool for governments, companies, and organizations to measure and report their GHG emissions. WRI also played an active role in the development of the Climate Registry.

Giant study pinpoints changes from climate warming

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Human-generated climate change made flowers bloom sooner and autumn leaves fall later, turned some polar bears into cannibals and some birds into early breeders, a vast global study reported on Wednesday.
Read more [Reuters]

Stumping on Climate, McCain Faults Bush

New York Times: Senator John McCain intensified his criticism of President Bush and the administration's environmental polices on Tuesday, taking a walk in the cold, rain-drenched foothills of the Cascade Mountains and asserting that in the effort to stem climate change, "America can lead and not obstruct." At an outdoor news conference in the Cedar River Watershed east of Seattle, Mr. McCain, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, declared that "the president and I have disagreed on this ...
Read more [EcoEarth.info]

Burying trees might solve global CO2 problem

Indo-Asian News Service: Scientists have suggested that burying trees might solve the global carbon dioxide (CO2) problem. Of the current global environmental problems, the excessive release of carbon dioxide from the combustion of fossil fuels and the related global warming is one of the most pressing. Whereas other environmental problems can, at least in principle, be solved by the appropriate modern technology, there are no realistic solutions for the CO2 problem, said Fritz Scholz from the ...
Read more [EcoEarth.info]

Australia: Greens want more focus on renewables

AAP:  Australian Greens leader Bob Brown has renewed his attack on Labor's first budget, saying it prioritises "clean coal" technology over renewable energies. The Rudd government has missed an opportunity to take the country forward on a sustainable footing, he said. "This budget does flunk on climate change," Senator Brown told ABC Radio on Wednesday morning. "It puts a lot of money into clean coal which doesn't exist yet, puts very little ...
Read more [EcoEarth.info]

Indian Ocean coral shows partial recovery

Reuters: Coral reefs in the Indian Ocean have partly recovered from the 1998 spike in sea temperatures, but climate change will probably hamper future conservation, a coral expert said on Wednesday. An unusual spike in sea temperatures a decade ago killed coral throughout the Indian Ocean, dropping the average healthy, hard coral cover to 15 percent of reefs from 40 percent before. Tim McClanahan, a coral expert with the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) said hard coral cover had ...
Read more [EcoEarth.info]

McCain warns India, China over warming

Times of India: Any expectations that a John McCain presidency will mean a seamless transition in US-India ties with a revival of the Bush-driven civilian nuclear deal will have to be tempered by a tough warning he issued on Monday that India and China will be held to "international standards" on emissions with a possible risk of sanctions if they did not meet them. In a speech that marked a significant departure from the Bush line on global warming and also contained the seeds of a ...
Read more [EcoEarth.info]

Global warming under way 'earlier'

Australian: PLANTS, animals, ice and waters worldwide have all been significantly affected by global warming triggered by human activity, says the first research to link the phenomenon to changes in biological and natural systems. Among the effects are earlier leafing of trees, movements of species to cooler climes, changes to bird migrations, melting glaciers and snow fields and shifts in fresh and marine ecosystems. Even agriculture and forestry are feeling the heat, claim scientists at ...
Read more [EcoEarth.info]

Canada: Carbon tax minefield awaiting Dion

Toronto Star: Under the lush green grass of a promising election harvest on climate change is a carbon tax minefield that could cost Stéphane Dion the next federal campaign if it is not navigated carefully. Two recent Harris/Decima polls confirm that if the Liberal leader proceeds with a tentative plan to place a carbon tax at the centre of his platform, he will be taking a promising but unforgiving election path with little room for missteps. Taken together, the findings validate both the ...
Read more [EcoEarth.info]

Cash tap turned on for water in Murray-Darling

Australian: MORE than $900 million will be spent to upgrade water infrastructure in the Murray-Darling over the next two years ahead of the Government's 10-year plan to buy back water allocations from irrigators. The accelerated investment in improving water efficiency is part of the Rudd Government's $12.9billion Water for the Future package announced last month by Climate Change and Water Minister Penny Wong. The Government's initial $50million foray into buying allocations in the water ...
Read more [EcoEarth.info]

United Nations Has A Tree-mendous Goal

Washington Post: The United Nations is leading an effort to plant 7 billion trees worldwide -- to help protect the environment and slow climate change -- by the end of next year. The U.N. Environment Programme (UNEP), an organizer of the planting drive, had an initial goal of 1 billion trees by the end of 2007. "In 2006 we wondered if a billion-tree target was too ambitious; it was not," said Achim Steiner, head of UNEP. "The goal of planting 7 billion trees, equivalent to just ...
Read more [EcoEarth.info]

United States: How Schwarzenegger Is Trying to Finagle More Big Dam Construction

CounterPunch: California Governor Schwarzenegger wants to build two new dams -- Sites and Temperance Flat. They are being sold as necessary to cope with the reduction in Sierra Nevada, Cascade and Klamath Mountains snowpack expected as a result of climate change. New and "enhanced" storage are being marketed by Lester Snow, director of California's Department of Water Resources (DWR) as part of a "portfolio approach" which, in addition to "enhanced" storage, calls for urban ...
Read more [EcoEarth.info]

Peruvian 'Switzerland' melting under climate change

Agence France-Presse: Peru's Cordillera Blanca, a snow-topped northern mountain range sometimes called the "Peruvian Switzerland," is slowly disappearing because of climate change, a key issue on the table of a Latin America-EU summit being held in Lima this week. The glaciers making up the range -- declared a natural world heritage site by UNESCO -- have steadily been shrinking, said Marco Zapata, the head of the glaciology unit of Peru's National Institute for Natural Resources. He ...
Read more [EcoEarth.info]

United States: Polar Bear Gets Threatened Status Because of Warming

Bloomberg: The U.S. declared the polar bear a threatened species, giving protected status for the first time to an animal because of global warming while also including provisions to ensure continued oil and gas development. The carnivore, which hunts on ice sheets that are shrinking because of higher Arctic temperatures, joins more than 1,200 species in the U.S. classified as threatened or endangered with extinction. The ruling, announced by Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne at a Washington ...
Read more [EcoEarth.info]

Peru creates environment ministry as glaciers melt

LIMA (Reuters) - President Alan Garcia on Tuesday created the first environment ministry in Peru, where scientists say climate change is hitting hard because of the Andean country's rich biodiversity.
Read more [Reuters]

Extinction fear for butterfly

A UK mountain-dwelling butterfly could be wiped out in Scotland because of climate change, experts say.
Read more [EarthWire]

Natural changes pinned to warming

A survey concludes that shifts in the Earth's physical and biological systems are driven by global warming.
Read more [EarthWire]

Committee studies Ireland's climate change

Members of the Joint Oireachtas Committee on Climate Change and Energy Security have visited Galway to find out the key drivers of climate change in Ireland.
Read more [EarthWire]

McCain's Gift to the Green Movement

The GOP candidate's global warming plan has its flaws. But he has engaged the issue, and that bodes well for the '08 campaign
Read more [EarthWire]

Australia Budget - Great Barrier Reef In Frame In Climate Fight

CANBERRA - Australia will spend A$3.8 billion ($3.5 billion) to fight climate change, including A$200 million to rescue the Great Barrier Reef, as part of a four-year plan outlined in the government's budget on Tuesday.
Read more [EarthWire]

Bird migration at mercy of weather patterns

Severe weather conditions as a result of climate change could make it impossible for migratory birds to complete their long-distance flights
Read more [EarthWire]

Life feels the effects of a changing climate

Climate change is already altering our planet's biology, with only life in Antarctica so far spared its influence, suggests an analysis of thousands of studies (full text available to subscribers)
Read more [EarthWire]

Peru sets up environment ministry

Peru sets up its first environment ministry, ahead of a Latin American-EU summit focusing on climate change.
Read more [EarthWire]

Official Urges US Climate Service

With concerns about global warming rising along with the planet's temperature, the head of the federal agency in change of weather research and forecasting is proposing creation of a new National Climate Service
Read more [EarthWire]

New study amplifies warning on climate change

A wide-scale study published Wednesday has strengthened warnings, spelt out last year by UN scientists, that climate change is already on the march.
Read more [EarthWire]

World Tree Planting Drive Sets Goal Of 7 Billion

OSLO - A campaign to plant trees worldwide set a goal on Tuesday of seven billion by late 2009, just over one for each person on the planet, to help protect the environment and slow climate change.
Read more [EarthWire]

Polar bear listed as threatened species because of global warming

The U.S. Interior Department declared the polar bear a threatened species Wednesday, saying it must be protected because of the decline in Arctic sea ice from global warming.
Read more [EarthWire]

World tree planting drive sets goal of 7 billion

OSLO (Reuters) - A campaign to plant trees worldwide set a goal on Tuesday of seven billion by late 2009, just over one for each person on the planet, to help protect the environment and slow climate change.
Read more [Reuters]

World CO2 Levels At Record High, Scientists Warn

http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/05/12/8897/

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World Carbon Dioxide Levels Highest for 650,000 Years, Says US Report

David Adam, of The Guardian UK, reports: "The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has reached a record high, according to the latest figures, renewing fears that climate change could begin to slide out of control. Scientists at the Mauna Loa observatory in Hawaii say that CO2 levels in the atmosphere now stand at 387 parts per million (ppm), up almost 40% since the industrial revolution and the highest for at least the last 650,000 years."

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/051308F.shtml



http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=CO2
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=carbon+dioxide
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=David+Adam
Read more [twoday.net]

McCain Differs With Bush on Climate Change

New York Times: Senator John McCain sought to distance himself from President Bush on Monday as he called for a mandatory limit on greenhouse gas emissions in the United States. Mr. McCain, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, also pledged to work with the European Union to diplomatically engage China and India, two of the world's biggest polluters, if those nations refused to participate in an international agreement to slow global warming. In what his campaign promoted as a major ...
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World tree planting drive sets goal of 7 billion

Reuters: A campaign to plant trees worldwide set a goal on Tuesday of seven billion by late 2009, just over one for each person on the planet, to help protect the environment and slow climate change. The U.N. Environment Programme (UNEP), an organizer of the tree planting drive begun in late 2006 with an initial goal of a billion by the end of 2007, said governments, companies and individuals had already pushed the total above 2 billion. It set a target on Tuesday of an extra five ...
Read more [EcoEarth.info]

Australia: $2.3bn suite of climate change measures

News.com.au: HALF a million Australian homes will be able to reduce their impact on the environment and the little standby light on your TV will have a power limit as a result of a $2.3 billion suite of climate change measures planned by the Federal Government. Precise levels of emissions that should be reduced through the raft of measures in the 2008 Budget are not outlined, but the changes will affect everyone from home owners and renters to farmers and even forestry workers in Papua New ...
Read more [EcoEarth.info]

Australia Spends Millions to Rescue Reef

Reuters: Australia will spend A$3.8 billion ($3.5 billion) to fight climate change, including A$200 million to rescue the Great Barrier Reef, as part of a four-year plan outlined in the government's budget on Tuesday. More than A$1 billion would be spent to improve renewable technologies like solar, wind and geothermal energy over six years, as well as clean-up heavy-polluting coal power, centre-left Labor said in its first budget since it last held power in 1995. "The government ...
Read more [EcoEarth.info]

China: Govt fast-tracks clean coal spending

Age: The federal government has ramped up its spending on climate change to an unprecedented $2.3 billion - but its decision to fast-track clean coal over renewable energy could provoke environmentalists. The four years of spending plans makes good on the government's election promise to overhaul the climate change budget. The fund includes $500 million for clean coal and $500 million for renewable energy, both to be spent over seven years. But the clean coal funds will be ...
Read more [EcoEarth.info]

McCain Backs Limits on Greenhouse Gas Emissions

National Public Radio: Republican presidential candidate John McCain is touting his plan to combat global warming as he stumps for votes this week in the Pacific Northwest. McCain travels to Washington state Tuesday for an environmental forum outside Seattle. On Monday, he was in Portland, Ore., where he visited the offices of a windmill company. McCain hopes his conservative approach to global warming will appeal to moderate Democrats as well as Republicans. It relies on the same market forces ...
Read more [EcoEarth.info]

McCain rips Bush record on warming

Chicago Tribune: John McCain launched a green-tinted courtship of West Coast swing voters on Monday, with a call to action on global warming and an indictment of the Bush administration's "failed" policies to combat it. The presumptive Republican presidential nominee visited the wind-power technology firm Vestas, near Portland International Airport, to decry melting polar ice, vanishing glaciers, changes in animal migration and "rising temperatures and waters," all products, he ...
Read more [EcoEarth.info]

McCain's Climate 'Market'

Wall Street Journal: The latest stop on John McCain's policy tour came at an Oregon wind-turbine manufacturer, where the topic was – what else? – the Senator's plan to address climate change. This is one of those issues where Mr. McCain indulges his "maverick" tendencies, which usually means taking the liberal line. That was the case yesterday, no matter how frequently he claimed his approach was "market based." In fact, if "the market" is your favored mechanism, Mr. McCain's ...
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Australia: Rudd has flunked it on climate change: Bob Brown

AAP: The Australian Greens view the Rudd government's first budget as a big letdown. Greens leader Bob Brown said Prime Minister Kevin Rudd had "flunked" the test of climate change. "What a disappointment," Senator Brown told reporters. "This is, whatever else, not a green budget." "There's 40 times as much expenditure on defence as there is on arguably the biggest future threat to our country, which is climate change." Mr ...
Read more [EcoEarth.info]