Climate in the news

Christian Science Monitor: Think of it as a modern-day Victory Garden. With gasoline prices soaring and food costs not far behind, the number of Americans planning to grow their own backyard vegetables this year is up sharply. Gardening organizations, seed wholesalers, and local nurseries are all reporting hikes in the number of people buying vegetable seeds and starter plants. It's a trend that started slowly several years ago, spurred by concerns about food safety, food quality, and global ...

Associated Press: TOYOTA'S Prius started out a decade ago as a risky experiment in green technology. Today it is the world's first mass-produced petrol-electric hybrid car to hit 1 million in sales. The Prius went on sale in Japan in 1997 and is now sold in 40 countries and regions. Its popularity is increasing because of surging petrol prices and concerns about the environment. Toyota Motor Corp said yesterday 1.028 million Prius models had been sold to the end of April. Toyota sells ...

Polar bears were listed yesterday as threatened under the United States Endangered Species Act because their sea ice habitat is melting away. But the new protection was not accompanied by proposals to address either climate change,...

Fortune:  climate-change bill that has widespread support as it heads to the Senate floor will create an estimated $150 billion of new assets in the first year it takes effect. Between now and 2050, regulating greenhouse gases could easily generate $3 trillion worth in value in the United States. Should that value go to utility companies, electricity customers who will face rising rates, government investments in new technology or tax cuts? Or should it be returned to all ...

Guardian: Climate change will lead to a "fortress world" in which the rich lock themselves away in gated communities and the poor must fend for themselves in shattered environments, unless governments act quickly to curb greenhouse gas emissions, according to the vice-president of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Prof Mohan Munasinghe was giving a lecture at Cambridge university in which he presented a dystopic possible future world in which social problems are ...

Environmental Finance: Half of the world's energy companies believe that there is a "real risk" of a bubble in the renewable technology sector, according to a KPMG report released this week. Turning up the Heat, a global survey of more than 200 senior executives in the energy sector, reveals that these fears are even more prominent in Europe, where nearly two-thirds of those questioned fear a bubble. Of respondents who had considered but not completed a renewable energy acquisition, 44% cited the seller's ...

Associated Press: Maverick oilman T. Boone Pickens has placed a $2 billion bet on wind power in just the first of a four-phase project to build the world's largest wind farm in Texas. Pickens said the total cost of the deal will grow considerably after the initial investment in General Electric Co. turbine technology. Pickens' Mesa Power said the Pampa Wind Project in the Texas Panhandle will eventually cover 400,000 acres and generate enough power for more than 1.3 million ...

BBC: Seen from a small boat emerging from Puraquequara lagoon into the full flow of the Amazon River, this is a world reduced to water, trees and sky. It's a full three kilometres to the other side and at that distance even the forest giants that tower over the canopy seem reduced in size. Amazonas state - a territory three times the size of France but with a telephone book just a centimetre thick - is 98% pristine rainforest. But it is an environment threatened by ...

Bloomberg: Royal Dutch Shell said the failure of crude suppliers to keep pace with accelerating demand may prompt the expansion of renewable energy. There's "plenty of oil in the world," Shell's Scenario Team said today on a Webcast led by Global Business Environment Vice President Jeremy Bentham. "The important moment is actually not a possible peak of oil production;" it's when demand exceeds supply, which may "come well before a peak" in output. Under two ...

Westender: The water that comes out of most city taps in Canada is pretty clean. Yet many people prefer to spend money on bottled water, believing that it is somehow safer. Now we're learning that the stuff in plastic water bottles may be more harmful than anything in our tap water. Bisphenol A is just one chemical that's been in the news – and in many plastic bottles – recently. This compound mimics estrogens (human female hormones) and has been linked to breast and ovarian cancers and childhood ...

Bloomberg: Royal Dutch Shell Plc, Europe's largest oil company, joined the International Energy Agency's carbon capture and storage research project in Canada. Shell agreed to co-sponsor the research along with Chevron Corp, OMV AG, Saudi Arabian Oil Co., Apache Corp. and EnCana Corp., The Hague-based company said today in an e-mailed statement. The $80 million IEA Greenhouse Gas Weyburn-Midale CO2 is one of the world's three largest in-field carbon storage research projects. The ...

Economist: FOR the system that is supposed to make it easier for people in the rich world to cut the greenhouse emissions of the poor, a "binary moment" has come. That, at the least, is the prediction of a banker with an interest in the future of the clean development mechanism (CDM). Like many others in the business, he foresees either buoyant growth or terminal decline for the arrangement designed to encourage financial transfers from long-established carbon emitters to emerging ones. On the ...

Telegraph: Researchers who analysed 30,000 academic studies dating back to 1970 said man was responsible for changes that ranged from the loss of ice sheets to the collapse in numbers of many species of wildlife. "Humans are influencing climate through increasing greenhouse gas emissions, and the warming world is causing impacts on physical and biological systems," said Cynthia Rosenzweig, at the Nasa Goddard Institute for Space Studies. The effects on living things include ...

Mongabay: Nitrogen pollution of the world's oceans is harming marine ecosystems and contributing to global warming, report two reviews published in the journal Science. The research, which involved dozens of scientists from around the world, shows that human activity is dramatically altering nitrogen cycles in Earth's oceans, soils, and atmosphere. The papers report that agricultural runoff and the burning of fossil fuels have boosted the supply of reactive nitrogen in the open oceans 50 ...

Mongabay: Ending the destruction of tropical rainforests is the simplest step to helping address climate change, said Prince Charles in an interview with the BBC. Speaking on the BBC's Today program, Charles said he supported the establishment a mechanism that would compensate tropical countries for preserving their forests. He noted that forests provide critical services for humanity. "When you think [rainforests] release 20 billion tonnes of water vapor into the air every day, ...

EurekAlert: A large quantity of nitrogen compounds emitted into the atmosphere by humans through the burning of fossil fuels and the use of nitrogen fertilizers enters the oceans and may lead to the removal of some carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, concluded a team of international scientists led by Texas A&M University Distinguished Professor of Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences Robert Duce. The team of 30 experts from institutions around the world presented its conclusions in the ...

Economic Times: Like President George Bush, the presumptive Republican Presidential candidate John McCain too has said a new global pact on climate change must include India and China, the "greatest contributors" to global warming. But the US will still have to act if efforts to negotiate an international pact to deal with the problem does not succeed, he said at a campaign rally in Portland, Oregon in what many analysts have seen as a major departure from the Bush administration's policy ...

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. "As much as a third of the nitrogen entering the world's oceans from the atmosphere is man-made," according to a team of 30 scientists writing in the journal Science. "It's not as good a thing as some people would like it to be," said Peter ...

Associated Press: While carbon dioxide has been getting lots of publicity in climate change, reactive forms of nitrogen are also building up in the environment, scientists warn. "The public does not yet know much about nitrogen, but in many ways it is as big an issue as carbon, and due to the interactions of nitrogen and carbon, makes the challenge of providing food and energy to the world's peoples without harming the global environment a tremendous challenge," University of Virginia ...

Anchorage Daily News: Alaska industry and political leaders reacted with disappointment, even vehemence, to the decision yesterday to protect the polar bear as "threatened," despite assurances from the Bush administration that the listing would mean no new regulation in Alaska. Industry officials worried that the listing decision would give environmentalists a new tool for opposing development in the Arctic, especially new offshore oil exploration and development. Politicians attacked the science ...