Do the green thing

Andy Hobsbawm shares a fresh ad campaign about going green -- and some of the fringe benefits.

Global Warming Changing Walden Pond

As per this news I don't know what to say about this Global Warming.
It's changing Walden Pond in Massachusetts please click here to read the news.


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NASA Climate Report on Global Warming

global warming and sun spots

Global Warming - open your eyes, this is a wake up call

Global Warming Video

Global warming issue needs to be addressed

Global warming is a serious issue that needs to be addressed with huge investments and latest technology, said Gerald Doucet, secretary-general of the World Energy Council, while addressing the Global Energy Forum here yesterday.


Nearly 200 decision-makers and major players of oil and gas companies from all over the globe explored technology solutions in oil and gas industry at the first Microsoft Middle East and Africa Global Energy Forum 2008.

The forum explored technology solutions in the oil and gas and discussed how to address the environmental issues.

Speaking at the forum, Doucet said, “A lot of progress is being made in fighting global warming. But the big issue is the carbon capture storage and that calls for much more rapid progress through investment.

“We need to create more efficient employees for software handling. We need clear rules in the UN organisations to deal with the environmental issues and the issues of the investments,” Doucet said.

Ali Faramawy, vice-president of Microsoft International, said, “Meeting the challenges of global energy supply and demand depends on integrated business processes, breakthrough innovations and rock-solid business relationships.”

He added: “The UAE is a very special country we are trying to bring here our best in terms of education and technology.”

Global Warming, the carbon tax and the coming carbon tariff

British Columbia has been a leader in establishing climate-change policy, particularly with the creation of the carbon tax. It's a revenue neutral model to try and redistribute a tax on carbon to other parts of the economy and taxpayer, so that there's no net revenue game to government.

But B.C. is having a tougher time implementing the tough, greenhouse gas targets for the economy, as this column shows. Premier Gordon Campbell says that the targets won't likely get put in place until late 2009.

Meanwhile, however, the United States is getting ready for some major moves on the file. A made-in-the-USA carbon-trading system is likely coming and there's probably going to be the creation of what many are calling a carbon tariff. Here's my take on it. It's a likely scenario because Hilary Clinton, John McCain and Barack Obama have all signaled support for a move to carbon controls in the next administration

Curing global warming requires sacrifice

recent article in the Christian Science Monitor said that President Bush wants to end the growth of U.S. carbon emissions by 2025. This will happen if developing nations commit to lowering emissions and the U.S. economy is unharmed.

Waiting 17 years to fix the problem of global warming is not going to help our economy, which is far from healthy.

We are more than $9 trillion in debt, according to the U.S. Department of Treasury. A good chunk of that debt is the result of global warming - in fact, approximately a $138 billion chunk, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association and Whitehouse.gov.

Global warming is expensive. Drought, warmer oceans and severe storms affect 33 percent of the nation's gross domestic product. Industries - including agriculture and fishing - contributed $4 trillion to the American economy in 2006 after a $6 billion to $8 billion loss due to drought.

Preliminary estimates for 2007 show that drought in the Great Plains and the eastern U.S. cost $5 billion in crop yields. That same year, millions of dollars were lost due to drought and high winds when wildfires consumed the California landscape.

But drought isn't our only concern. The oceans are getting warmer and our fragile fishing industry is at risk.

Fishing is a multi-billion dollar industry in the U.S. It's so important that the proposed 2009 budget includes $69.9 billion for ocean and fisheries conservation.

It's counterproductive to put all of that money into preserving the ocean's ecosystem if we are going to ignore the threat of global warming.

One of the most catastrophic and expensive events in U.S. history spawned from warmer oceans. Hurricane Katrina has cost the federal government $127 billion and she's still not done. The reconstruction phase is a work in progress.

The money can be replaced, but the loss of more than 1,000 lives is irreversible.

Putting the economy ahead of our well-being is unacceptable. If we don't act now, disasters like Katrina are not the only threats to our health. Greenhouse gases have been linked to asthma, heart disease and cancer.

A recent MIT study concluded that a modest cap-and-trade system will cost $20 per household annually. We will pay more in hospital bills if we don't change current emissions soon.

Events like the droughts and Katrina will continue to rack up tabs on our bill. Working through the initial costs of mandatory caps is the only way to achieve a healthy economy. If we start now - not 17 years from now - we may have a chance to minimize global warming's tab.

Developing countries probably have more to lose from global warming than we do. The severe weather, drought, rising sea levels and increases in disease could ravage these countries before they can adapt.

Bush needs to start worrying at global levels, rather than being U.S.-centric. The most important issues are future financial, environmental and societal impacts. The health of our economy and our biological well-being depends on it.

We can be a green economy and thrive. We will all need to make sacrifices, but in terms of what it has already cost, and what it will cost in the future, sacrifice is worth it.

Hotel investment sector can reduce global warming

The fourth Arabian Hotel Investment Conference (AHIC 2008) takes place at the Madinat Jumeirah Convention Centre in Dubai from May 3 to 5. This year’s theme is Ever Increasing Circles – the Ripple Effect of Hotel Investment in the Middle East. TTN has highlights of the programme and comments from industry leaders.
Long distance swimmer Lewis Gordon Pugh will deliver a keynote address to tourism professionals about global warming at this year’s Arabian Hotel Investment Conference (AHIC 2008).

Pugh, also known as ‘Aqua Al Gore’, is the first person to complete a long distance swim in every ocean of the world. He will speak on the devastating affects of global climate change at the conference on May 5.


This comes in the wake of news that Dubai hoteliers in particular are being asked to implement energy saving measures as many properties clock up 225 per cent more energy usage than their European counterparts.


Says Pugh, “We stand at a critical point in the history of the planet. Climate change is the greatest threat to life as we know it. It is serious and it's been caused by man. Luckily, the end has yet to be written and this is where we come in. The hotel investment sector can help.


“The steps which we take over the next few years will determine the future of the natural world and the sustainability of mankind.”


Conference co-organiser, MEED’s Edmund O’Sullivan said that the conference will feature a session on “green development” which will look at how to develop a hotel in an eco friendly way.


“If we start outlining simple steps now, it will not be long before industry leaders implement measures en masse. This is what we need to ensure strict environmental standards are met.”


He said AHIC was committed to ‘doing it’s bit’ to help reduce global warming and had teamed up with NativeEnergy, one of the world’s leading providers of quality carbon offsets. He added that although IPCC (United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) estimates that the region’s contribution towards global emissions to be less than six percent, the UAE alone is on the top 50 countries list for carbon emissions.


“Pugh is on a journey to fight against climate change and as a recognised international ambassador we believe that AHIC 2008 provides a great platform to communicate this crisis to the 1,000 plus hotel, travel and tourism industry,” O’Sullivan said.

Global Warming May Take Ten Year Break

Climate change projections, as published in the last Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, only consider changes in future atmospheric composition. This strategy is appropriate for long-term changes in climate such as predictions for the end of the century. However, in order to predict short-term developments over the next decade, models need additional information on natural climate variations, in particular associated with ocean currents.


The lack of sufficient data has hampered such predictions in the past.


Scientists at The Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences at the University of Kiel (IFM-GEOMAR) and from the MPI for Meteorology have developed a method to derive ocean currents from measurements of sea surface temperature (SST). The latter are available in good quality and global coverage at least for the past 50 years.


The press release says that with this additional information, natural decadal climate variations, which are superimposed on the long-term anthropogenic warming trend, can be predicted. The improved predictions suggest that global warming will weaken slightly during the next decade.


“Just to make things clear: we are not stating that anthropogenic climate change won’t be as bad as previously thought”, explains Prof. Mojib Latif from IFM-GEOMAR.

“What we are saying is that on top of the warming trend there is a long-periodic oscillation that will probably lead to a to a lower temperature increase than we would expect from the current trend during the next years”, adds Latif.

“That is like driving from the coast to a mountainous area and crossing some hills and valleys before you reach the top”, explains Dr. Johann Jungclaus from the MPI for Meteorology. “In some years trends of phenomena, the anthropogenic climate change and the natural decadal variation will add leading to a much stronger temperature rise.”

Emmy-Noether1 fellow and lead author Dr. Noel Keenlyside from IFM-GEOMAR continues: “In addition to the greenhouse gas concentrations we are using observed SST’s of the past decades in our climate model simulations, a method which has already successfully been applied for seasonal predictions and El Niño forecasting. The SST’s influence the winds and the heat exchange between ocean and atmosphere, and both factors impact ocean currents. The results are very encouraging and show that at least for some regions around the world, it is possible to predict natural climate oscillations on decadal time scale. Europe and North America are two such regions because they are influenced by the North Atlantic and Tropical Pacific, respectively.”

Prof. Latif expands “Such forecasts will not enable us to tell you whether or not we will have a white Christmas in 2012 in northern Germany, but we will be able to provide a tendency as to whether or not some decades will be warmer or cooler than average. Of course, always with the assumption that no other unforeseen effects such as volcanic eruptions occur, which can have a substantial effect on our climate as well”.

Could felling and burying trees help fight global warming?

Could cutting down trees and burying them help fight global warming? An article in this week's issue of New Scientist suggests so.

Ning Zeng, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Maryland in College Park, tells New Scientist that thinning forests and burying "excess wood" in a manner in which its didn't decay could sequester enough carbon to offset all of our fossil-fuel emissions.

"Zeng gives an example of a plot of 1 square kilometre (100 hectares), with the excess wood from 1 hectare of woodland buried deeper than 5 metres and down to 20 metres," writes Richard Lovett of New Scientist, referring to Zeng's research published in Carbon Balance and Management. "He calculates that this could sequester 1 tonne of carbon per hectare — using that land to grow trees would sequester 1 to 5 tonnes, depending on the age of the forest and the type of tree."



"He estimates that offsetting all of the world's current emissions would be achievable with a workforce of one million people — substantially fewer than those already employed in the forestry industry in the US alone," Lovett continues. "Even so, to offset all our emissions, most of the world's forests would have to run a wood burial scheme."

New Scientist notes that Zeng's idea is not a new one — ancient indigenous groups used a similar approach known as biochar to enrich the nutrient-poor soils of the Amazon rainforest.

"More than 500 years ago Amazonian people were creating almost pure carbon by smouldering their domestic waste and letting it work its way into the soil. This earth, known as terra preta ('black earth') remains to this day," Lovett writes. "Ancient farmers had no idea that they were sequestering carbon, of course, but they did know that adding biochar to the soil hugely increased its quality."

Lovett cites a modern example in hydrothermal carbonization, a process which chars organic material under pressure. He says the technique could eventually be used on an industrial scale and may qualify for carbon credits, assuming it could avoid generating methane, another potent greenhouse gas.

Global warming? Scientist says Earth is cooling

Climate change is again in the spotlight, with a leading Australian scientist challenging dire predictions of global warming.

That follows the biggest single year temperature change on record - a drop of point seven degrees in the year to January.

Geophysicist Philip Chapman says he's not convinced by the current arguments on global warming - and says the drop is due to a slowdown in sun spot activity.

“If the sun spot cycle is delay, as it has been then the chances are excellent that the period of several decades of cooling.

Earth hour first step in 'global warming war'

From the Sydney Opera House to San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge went dark as people switched off lights in their homes and skylines dimmed around the world yesterday to show concern with global warming.

Up to 30 million people were expected to have turned off their lights for 60 minutes by the time "Earth Hour" -- which started in Suva in Fiji and Christchurch in New Zealand -- completed its cycle westward.

More than 380 towns and cities and 3,500 businesses in 35 countries signed up for the campaign that is in its second year after it began in 2007 in Sydney, Australia's largest city.

"Earth Hour shows that everyday people are prepared to pull together to find a solution to climate change. It can be done," said James Leape of WWF International, which was running the campaign.

Lights at Sydney's Opera House and Harbour Bridge were lowered as Australians held candle-lit beach parties, played poker by candlelight and floated candles down rivers.

"In the central square a lot of people were standing looking at the stars," said Ida Thuesen, spokeswoman for WWF Denmark.

"It's not often you can see the stars in a city."

In a tip of its virtual hat to the event, the background of Google's home page turned to black from white on more than a dozen country sites including Google.com.

A message on the site read: "We've turned the lights out. Now it's your turn." and directed visitors to conserve energy when using computers.

Buildings account for about one-third of the carbon emissions that scientists say will boost global average temperatures by between 1.4 and 4.0 degrees Celsius this century, bringing floods and famines and putting millions of lives at risk.

Organisers of Earth Hour said that while switching off a light for one hour would have little impact on carbon emissions, the fact that so many people were taking part showed how much interest and concern at the climate crisis had taken hold.

World's largest lake warming rapidly: Scientists

Siberia's Lake Baikal has warmed faster than global air temperatures over the past 60 years, which could put animals unique to the world's largest lake in jeopardy, US and Russian scientists said.

The lake has warmed 1.21 degrees Celsius since 1946 due to climate change, almost three times faster than global air temperatures, according to a paper by the scientists to be published next month in the journal Global Change Biology.

"The whole food web could shift," Marianne Moore, a biology professor at Wellesley College in Massachusetts and one of the authors of the paper, said in an interview. The frigid lake, which holds 20 per cent of the world's freshwater, boasts 2,500 species with most of them, such as the world's only freshwater seal, found nowhere else.

In potentially bad news for that animal, the paper found that the lake's annual days of ice cover had fallen an average of 18 days over the last 100 years and could drop a further two weeks to two months by the end of the century.

The findings could foreshadow the vulnerability of smaller lakes to global warming because Baikal's great volume of water had been thought to protect it from rising temperatures, the paper said.

Moore said Baikal's seal, which raises its pups on the ice, could suffer because the animal has several onshore predators. If ice caves the pups are raised in melt, Asian crows could also eat the pups, she said.

Changes in the food cycle have already been seen. Numbers of multicellular zooplankton, which normally live in warmer waters, have increased 335 per cent since 1946, while numbers of chlorophyll have risen 300 per cent since 1979, it said.

In addition, the number of diatoms, which live under the ice and later die and become food for tiny organisms living in the lake's depths, could fall, Moore said. "Ice recession may have a greater effect than the rising temperatures," she said.

Storm over global-warming sceptic hurricane man

Earlier this month we noted the controversy that greeted this year’s hurricane predictions from Colorado State University academic William Gray. Now it seems Gray’s future is in jeopardy.

According to a story in the Houston Chronicle, CSU feels all the media curfuffle around the annual predictions is taking too much staff time. Gray thinks otherwise.

“This is obviously a flimsy excuse and seems to me to be a cover for the Department’s capitulation to the desires of some (in their own interest) who want to reign [sic] in my global warming and global warming-hurricane criticisms,” said Gray in a memo written when he was informed of the decision last year (read the memo).

Wikipedia has a whole section on his climate change position, which he’s also outlined in a BBC opinion piece. And as the Chronicle’s science blog notes, CSU’s excuse is slightly strange:

I contacted a handful of public relations professionals who found that excuse to be, at best, questionable. University media offices exist to get press for their schools. Gray delivered that in spades with his hurricane forecasts.

CSU denies that Gray’s views on global warming have anything to do with it. Most of the forecasting work is currently done by Gray’s former student Phil Klotzbach and CSU says it will continue to support the forecasts as long as is involved.

Still, by the time the story had reached FoxNews, it had become “a pioneering expert on hurricane forecasting may be out of a job due to the debate over global warming”.

Gray has been semi-retired for some time now anyway. Still, here comes the outrage:
Kaos Radio sees parallels with Expelled:

Ben Stein is a genius. Not only that, but liberals can’t help themselves proving him right.

‘Enviro-Nuts attack Hurricane Pioneer’, says the Mark’s Soap Box blog:

They hate people who speak out against their Dogma, and they attack when you don’t bow down at the alter [sic] of “global warming”. Their target now is the founder of Hurricane prediction, Dr William Gray.

The Secondhand Smoke blog also sees it in terms of stifling scientific orthodoxy:

All around the country and the world, scientists who don't fall in line on human cloning, global warming, neo-Darwinism, and other issues in which the Science Establishment demands lockstep thinking, find themselves being pushed aside--ironically, by the very types who vociferously criticize the Catholic Church for its treatment of Galileo.

Global warming may 'stop', scientists predict

Researchers studying long-term changes in sea temperatures said they now expect a "lull" for up to a decade while natural variations in climate cancel out the increases caused by man-made greenhouse gas emissions.


Melting icebergs: The study predicts the IPCC's 0.3ºC temperature rise for the next decade may not happen
The average temperature of the sea around Europe and North America is expected to cool slightly over the decade while the tropical Pacific remains unchanged.

This would mean that the 0.3°C global average temperature rise which has been predicted for the next decade by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change may not happen, according to the paper published in the scientific journal Nature.

However, the effect of rising fossil fuel emissions will mean that warming will accelerate again after 2015 when natural trends in the oceans veer back towards warming, according to the computer model.

Noel Keenlyside of the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences, Kiel, Germany, said: "The IPCC would predict a 0.3°C warming over the next decade. Our prediction is that there will be no warming until 2015 but it will pick up after that."

advertisementHe stressed that the results were just the initial findings from a new computer model of how the oceans behave over decades and it would be wholly misleading to infer that global warming, in the sense of the enhanced greenhouse effect from increased carbon emissions, had gone away.

The IPCC currently does not include in its models actual records of such events as the strength of the Gulf Stream and the El Nino cyclical warming event in the Pacific, which are known to have been behind the warmest year ever recorded in 1998.

Today's paper in Nature tries to simulate the variability of these events and longer cycles, such as the giant ocean "conveyor belt" known as the meridional overturning circulation (MOC), which brings warm water north into the North East Atlantic.

This has a 70 to 80-year cycle and when the circulation is strong, it creates warmer temperatures in Europe. When it is weak, as it will be over the next decade, temperatures fall. Scientists think that variations of this kind could partly explain the cooling of global average temperatures between the 1940s and 1970s after which temperatures rose again.

Warming felt more in Western U.S

An analysis of 50 studies finds that the region's temperatures are increasing faster than in the rest of the country and the planet as a whole.
By Margot Roosevelt, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
March 28, 2008
The American West is heating up faster than any other region of the United States, and more than the Earth as a whole, according to a new analysis of 50 scientific studies.

For the last five years, from 2003 through 2007, the global climate averaged 1 degree Fahrenheit warmer than its 20th century average.


During the same period, 11 Western states averaged 1.7 degrees warmer, the analysis reported.

The 54-page study, "Hotter and Drier: The West's Changed Climate," was released Thursday by the Rocky Mountain Climate Organization -- a coalition of local governments, businesses and nonprofits. It was based largely on calculations by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The report reveals "the growing consensus among scientists who study the West that climate change is no longer an abstraction," said Bradley H. Udall of the University of Colorado, whose work was cited in the study. "The signs are everywhere."

Carbon dioxide pollution from vehicles, power plants and other industrial sources is a major contributor to global warming. The Environmental Protection Agency is under court order to address cutting greenhouse gases, and Congress is considering legislation to curb them.

The consequences of Western temperature increases, the report said, are evident in a rash of heat waves. Montana, Idaho and Wyoming had their hottest Julys on record last summer, while Phoenix suffered 31 days above 110degrees.

Likely to accelerate

The Colorado River basin, which stretches from Wyoming to Mexico, is in the throes of a record drought. About 30 million people in fast-growing cities such as Los Angeles, San Diego, Phoenix and Las Vegas depend on water from the Colorado and its tributaries, which also drive the region's agricultural economy and hydroelectric industry. The river's two main reservoirs, Lake Powell and Lake Mead, are only 45% and 50% full, respectively.

Globally, warming varies according to region -- with more heating over land than over oceans. In California, with its coastal location, the study showed an increase of 1.1 degrees above the global average over the last five years. Arid interior states, including Utah, Wyoming, Arizona and Montana, experienced rises more than 2 degrees higher than in the world overall.

"Temperature rises have been much larger and more noticeable in the Western states," said Kelly T. Redmond, regional climatologist at Nevada's Desert Research Institute. "The past 10 years have been particularly warm, unlike any similar 10-year period we have seen over the past 115 years."

According to Udall, the data suggest that the trend will accelerate -- with the West warming about 1 1/2 times faster than the global average. Martin Hoerling, a NOAA meteorologist, has predicted that the West could heat up as much as 5 degrees by mid-century. In Alaska, the annual mean air temperature has risen 4 to 5 degrees Fahrenheit over the last three decades.

"If we don't want this problem to get really bad, we need to pass a climate bill with teeth," said Theo Spencer, a project manager at the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental advocacy group that funded the Rocky Mountain Climate analysis. "Western senators need to take the lead, considering what's at stake in their states."

Legislation in the works

A bill to slash greenhouse gases nationwide, sponsored by Sens. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) and John W. Warner (R-Va.), is expected to reach the Senate floor by June. A recent tally by the newsletter Environment & Energy Daily counted 44 votes for the bill so far.

As many as 10 Republican senators from Western states are leaning against the bill, according to the newsletter, which based its research on interviews with lawmakers, staff, industry and environmental groups.

California's two senators, Democrats Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein, favor the bill.

In the absence of federal action, states are moving ahead. California is drafting rules to slash its greenhouse gas emissions by 80% by mid-century. And six other Western states -- Arizona, Montana, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah and Washington -- have joined it in a regional compact to curb the pollution blamed for global warming.

U.S. to Issue CO2 Emissions Regulations This Spring

The Bush administration will reportedly recommend new carbon dioxide emissions rules, a U.S. environmental official told Congress on Thursday.

The rules will have a direct impact on everything from cars and trucks to power plants and oil refineries.

Stephen Johnson, administrator for the Environmental Protection Agency, said the agency plans to issue new rules related to the effects of the climate change as well as potential regulation of greenhouse gas emissions from stationary and mobile sources.

In the letter he sent to congressional leaders, the EPA administrator responded to a Supreme Court ruling that the agency should reconsider its 2003 refusal to regulate carbon-dioxide emissions from new vehicles under the Clean Air Act.

Through his letter, Johnson tries to seek comment from industry and the public in an attempt to change course before the final regulations are issued.

The White House was accused of stalling so President Bush could end his mandate before the rules are implemented. Bush ends his second and last term at the White House in January 2009 and it’s very probable that the rules won’t take effect by then.

Although knowing the fact that the United States is the world's biggest greenhouse gas emitter, the Bush administration wouldn’t allow emission limits arguing that China and India, the other world’s big greenhouse gas emitters, have done nothing of the sort.

EPA Signals Caution on Global Warming

The government made clear on Thursday it will not be rushed into deciding whether to regulate emissions linked to global warming, as the Supreme Court directed nearly a year ago.

Such action "could affect many (emission) sources beyond just cars and trucks" and needs to be examined broadly as to other impacts, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency wrote lawmakers.

Stephen Johnson said he has decided to begin the process by seeking public comment on the implications of regulating carbon dioxide, a leading greenhouse gas, on other agency rules that cover everything from power plants and factories to schools and small businesses.

That process could take months and led some of his critics to suggest he was shunting the sensitive issue to the next administration.

"This is the latest quack from a lame-duck EPA intent on running out the clock ... without doing a thing to combat global warming," said Rep. Edward Markey, D-Mass. He is chairman of the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming.

The Supreme Court said in April 2007 that carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels is a pollutant subject to the Clean Air Act. The court directed the EPA to determine if CO2 emissions, linked to global warming, endanger public health and welfare.

If that is the case, the court said, the EPA must regulate the emissions.

The ruling, in a lawsuit by Massachusetts against the EPA, dealt only with pollution from cars and trucks.

Johnson said Thursday that if CO2 is found to endangered public health and welfare, the agency probably would have to curtail such emissions from other sources as well. That could affect a range of air pollution, from cement factories, refineries and power plants to cars, aircraft, schools and off-road vehicles.

"Rather than rushing to judgment on a single issue, this approach allows us to examine all the potential effects of a decision with the benefit of the public insight," Johnson wrote the leaders of the House and Senate environment committees.

Sen. Barbara Boxer, who heads the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, noted that Johnson has had nearly a year to respond to the court but "now, instead of action, we get more foot-dragging."

"Time is not on our side when it comes to avoiding dangerous climate change. This letter makes it clear that Mr. Johnson and the Bush administration are not on our side, either," Boxer, D-Calif., said in a statement.

Senior EPA employees have told congressional investigators in the House about a tentative finding from early December that CO2 posed a danger because of its climate impact. They said a draft regulation was distributed to the Transportation Department and the White House.

The EPA officials, in interviews with the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, said those findings were put on hold abruptly. Johnson has said that enacting tougher automobile mileage requirements in December meant that the issue had to be re-examined.

Johnson said a requirement for greater use of renewable fuels such as ethanol changed the landscape when it comes to CO2 regulation.

"It does not change EPA's obligation to provide a response to the Supreme Court decision," Johnson wrote Congress.

Environmentalists said Johnson's approach seemed to signal no meaningful action on climate change.

"EPA has offered a laundry list of reasons not to regulate," said Vickie Patton, a lawyer for Environmental Defense.

Frank O'Donnell, president of Clean Air Watch, an advocacy group, added, "This means any real action is going to come in the next administration."

But lawyer Chet Thompson, a former EPA deputy general counsel, said Johnson's approach was "very responsible given the numerous issues raised" and ramifications of regulating carbon dioxide.

Warming felt more in Western US

U.S. West Warming Faster Than Rest of World -Study

The U.S. West is heating up at nearly twice the rate of the rest of the world and is likely to face more drought conditions in many of its fast-growing cities, an environmental group said on Thursday.
By analyzing federal government temperature data, the Natural Resources Defense Council concluded that the average temperature in the 11-state Western region from 2003-07 was 1.7 degrees Fahrenheit (0.94 degrees Celsius) higher than the historical average of the 20th century.

The global average increase for the same period was 1.0 degrees Fahrenheit (0.55 degrees Celsius).

In the Colorado River Basin, which supplies water to big and fast-growing cities like Los Angeles, San Diego, Las Vegas and Denver, the average temperature rose 2.2 degrees Fahrenheit (1.21 degrees Celsius), the U.S. group said.

Most of the river's water comes from melting snow in the mountains, and climate scientists predict hotter temperatures will reduce the snowpack and increase evaporation, the NRDC said in a statement.

"Global warming is hitting the West hard," said Theo Spencer of the NRDC. "It is already taking an economic toll on the region's tourism, recreation, skiing, hunting and fishing activities."

Study author Stephen Saunders of the Rocky Mountain Climate Organization said there were signs of the economic impacts throughout the West.

"Since 2000 we have seen $2.7 billion in crop loss claims due to drought. Global warming is harming valuable commercial salmon fisheries, reducing hunting activity and revenues, and threatening shorter and less profitable seasons for ski resorts," he said.

Ice shelf collapse: What does it mean?

the collapse of a 160-square-mile portion of the Wilkins Ice Shelf in Antarctica could mean many changes for wildlife at the bottom of the world.


Krill may not be the most exotic of creatures, but climate change could affect them like any other animal.

1 of 2 Most inhabitants of our planet will never get a firsthand look at a polar bear at the North Pole or a penguin at the South. But polar scientists already see changes in plants and animals from rapidly warming temperatures.

"Because of their extreme environments, they tend to be highly sensitive to temperature changes," said marine biologist James McClintock of the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

"Therefore, what we see happening in the poles should be taken as warning of what may be coming elsewhere," said McClintock, who studies the physiology and ecology of aquatic and marine invertebrates in Antarctica.

According to the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center, in the past 50 years, the western Antarctic peninsula has undergone the biggest temperature increase on Earth: up .9 degree Fahrenheit, or .5 degree Celsius, in each of the past five decades.
Although krill may never be as majestic as whales or as adorable as penguins, these small shrimp-like crustaceans in the waters of the Antarctic are crucial to the region's ecology.

And they might be among the first in the animal kingdom to have to adapt to warming temperatures. Scientists already are observing declines in polar krill populations that could be tied to a decrease in "As babies, krill live under the sea ice and graze on microalgae. With a decline in sea ice, there is less habitat for young krill," McClintock said.

But there may be a non-global-warming explanation for the decrease. Once heavily hunted, humpback whales that feed on krill have made a comeback in Antarctic waters.

So it is also possible that more whales are simply eating more of these tiny crustaceans.

Another warming ocean event that scientists are studying closely is the migration of king crabs. Marine remotely operated vehicles have captured photos of these giant crabs on the Antarctic Slope, where underwater land starts to rise up to the southernmost continent.

It's the first time in tens of millions of years that these predators have appeared that close to Antarctica.

Crabs and other marine invertebrates die when the water is too cold, because they cannot flush magnesium out of their systems. But even slightly warmer seawater allows the animal to regulate that element.

McClintock says that if these new predators keep moving, they could wipe out other Antarctic species. Snails, brittle stars, sea spiders and some marine worms have evolved without armor and other protections they would need to survive alongside the king crab.

Scientists studying Adelie penguins on Antarctica's western peninsula see that species suffering major declines. Ironically, an increase in snowfall could be among the most dangerous "warming" effects for this animal.

"In Antarctica, as the air temperature warms up, the humidity rises and the ability of snowfall to occur increases," McClintock said.

That snowfall can affect the mortality of penguin eggs.

Another possible impact of climate change in the Antarctic is acidification. Seawater has long been known to be good at absorbing carbon dioxide. But one effect of that absorption is that it turns the ocean water more acidic.

Organisms that make shells or have skeletons that are exposed to seawater, such as clams, snails and sea butterflies, could see their shells dissolve in water that is too acidic.

Plants and animals that have survived and thrived in the brutal conditions of Antarctica for millions of years have had to make plenty of adjustments.

"Wildlife will be impacted, but they are pretty adept at dealing with a topsy-turvy world," said Ted Scambos, lead scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center.

Scambos first spotted the disintegration of the Wilkins Ice Shelf in February. He cautions that the poles will be the leading edge of what's happening in the rest of the world as global warming continues.

"Even though they seem far away, changes in the polar regions could have an impact on both hemispheres with sea level rise and changes in climate patterns," he said.

CEI Launches National Ad Campaign on the Impact of Al Gore’s Global Warming Policies

The Competitive Enterprise Institute has launched a national advertising campaign, focusing on the threat to affordable energy posed by Al Gore’s global warming agenda. The ads contrast Gore’s energy-consuming lifestyle with the life-and-death need for energy in developing countries.




CEI’s new campaign comes in the face of Gore’s March 1st announcement of a major new set of ads from his Alliance for Climate Protection to promote the global warming issue. CEI’s response includes both a broadcast television ad and related online video.

“Global warming activists warn us about the alleged threats from global warming, but are usually silent about the much more immediate threats from global warming policies,” said CEI General Counsel Sam Kazman, also the ad co-creator. “Restricting access to affordable energy is a sure recipe for increasing poverty, disease and human misery around the world.”

The broadcast ad premiered this morning at a press conference at the National Press Club, and will run in markets around the country over the next two weeks, including Boston, Phoenix, Orlando and Pittsburgh. The ad will also be running in the Washington, D.C. market on cable news programs on CNN, CNBC and Fox News Channel.

CEI previously stirred international controversy in 2006 with a pair of CEI ads on global warming alarmism, which carried the tagline “CO2: They Call It Pollution; We Call It Life.”

Massive ice shelf on verge of breakup

(CNN) -- Some 220 square miles of ice has collapsed in Antarctica and an ice shelf about the size of Connecticut is "hanging by a thread," the British Antarctic Survey said Tuesday, blaming global warming.


Scientists say the size of the threatened shelf is about 5,282 square miles.

1 of 2 "We are in for a lot more events like this," said professor Ted Scambos, a glaciologist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Scambos alerted the British Antarctic Survey after he noticed part of the Wilkins ice shelf disintegrating on February 28, when he was looking at NASA satellite images.

Late February marks the end of summer at the South Pole and is the time when such events are most likely, he said.

"The amazing thing was, we saw it within hours of it beginning, in between the morning and the afternoon pictures of that day," Scambos said of the large chunk that broke away on February 28.

The Wilkins ice shelf lost about 6 percent of its surface a decade ago, the British Antarctic Survey said in a statement on its Web site

Another 220 square miles -- including the chunk that Scambos spotted -- had splintered from the ice shelf as of March 8, the group said.

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"As of mid-March, only a narrow strip of shelf ice was protecting several thousand kilometers of potential further breakup," the group said.

Scambos' center put the size of the threatened shelf at about 5,282 square miles, comparable to the state of Connecticut, or about half the area of Scotland. See a photos as the collapse progressed




Once Scambos called the British Antarctic Survey, the group sent an aircraft on a reconnaissance mission to examine the extent of the breakout.

"We flew along the main crack and observed the sheer scale of movement from the breakage," said Jim Elliott, according to the group's Web site.

"Big hefty chunks of ice, the size of small houses, look as though they've been thrown around like rubble -- it's like an explosion," he said.

"Wilkins is the largest ice shelf on the Antarctic Peninsula yet to be threatened," David Vaughan of the British Antarctic Survey said, according to the Web site.

"I didn't expect to see things happen this quickly. The ice shelf is hanging by a thread -- we'll know in the next few days or weeks what its fate will be."

But with Antarctica's summer ending, Scambos said the "unusual show is over for this season."

Ice shelves are floating ice sheets attached to the coast. Because they are already floating, their collapse does not have any effect on sea levels, according to the Cambridge-based British Antarctic Survey.

Scambos said the ice shelf is not currently on the path of the increasingly popular tourist ships that travel from South America to Antarctica. But some plants and animals may have to adapt to the collapse.

"Wildlife will be impacted, but they are pretty adept at dealing with a topsy-turvy world," he said. "The ecosystem is pretty resilient."

Several ice shelves -- Prince Gustav Channel, Larsen Inlet, Larsen A, Larsen B, Wordie, Muller and Jones -- have collapsed in the past three decades, the British Antarctic Survey said.

Larsen B, a 1,254-square-mile ice shelf, comparable in size to the U.S. state of Rhode Island, collapsed in 2002, the group said.

Scientists say the western Antarctic peninsula -- the piece of the continent that stretches toward South America -- has warmed more than any other place on Earth over the past 50 years, rising by 0.9 degrees Fahrenheit each decade.

Scambos said the poles will be the leading edge of what's happening in the rest of the world as global warming continues.

"Even though they seem far away, changes in the polar regions could have an impact on both hemispheres, with sea level rise and changes in climate patterns," he said.

News of the Wilkins ice shelf's impending breakup came less than two weeks after the United Nations Environment Program reported that the world's glaciers are melting away and that they show "record" losses.


"Data from close to 30 reference glaciers in nine mountain ranges indicate that between the years 2004-2005 and 2005-2006 the average rate of melting and thinning more than doubled," the UNEP said March 16.

The most severe glacial shrinking occurred in Europe, with Norway's Breidalblikkbrea glacier, UNEP said. That glacier thinned by about 10 feet in 2006, compared with less than a foot the year before, it said

Soot almost as bad as CO 2 for global warming

Aharply reducing the amount of "black carbon" - commonly known as soot - in the atmosphere could help slow global warming and buy precious time in the fight against climate change, new research says.

Soot produced by burning coal, diesel, wood and dung causes significantly more damage to the environment than previously thought, two US researchers have found. Black carbon could cause up to 60 per cent of the current warming effect of carbon dioxide, making it an important target for efforts to slow global warming.

Around 400,000 people are estimated to die each year due to inhaling soot particles, particularly because of indoor cooking on wood and dung stoves in developing countries. These deaths are mainly among women and children.

Greg Carmichael, of the University of Iowa, one of the authors of the study, published in Nature Geoscience, said: "Trying to develop strategies that really go after black carbon is a very good short-term strategy and a win-win strategy [from] both climate and air pollution perspectives."

Professor Carmichael and Veerabhadran Ramanathan, at Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego, put together data from satellites, aircraft and surface instruments on the warming effect from black carbon.

They conclude that its effect in the atmosphere is around 0.9 watts per square metre, higher than the estimate of 0.2 to 0.4 watts in last year's report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

The 8 million tonnes of soot released into the atmosphere every year have also created a number of "hot spots" around the world, contributing to rising temperatures.

The plains of south Asia along the Ganges River and continental east Asia are both such hot spots, in part because up to 35 per cent of global black carbon output comes from China and India.

Fine black soot settling on snow and ice - and thus trapping more of the sun's radiative force - have also accelerated the melting of glaciers in the Himalayas and ice cover in the Arctic, two regions that have been hit especially hard by climate change in recent decades.

"A major focus on decreasing black carbon emissions offers an opportunity to mitigate the effects of global warming trends in the short term," the authors conclude.

Most particulates in the atmosphere reduce the warming effect from greenhouse gases by bouncing radiation back into space - so-called global dimming. But black carbon has the opposite effect and professors Ramanathan and Carmichael argue that its contribution to global warming has been underestimated.

The researchers say programs to replace wood-burning stoves with clean technology in developing countries should be pursued to reduce the number of deaths caused by inhaling the smoke.

The authors stress that these measures are not a magic bullet for climate change.

"It is important to emphasise that black carbon reduction can only help delay and not prevent unprecedented climate changes due to CO2 emissions,"