Did the North Atlantic's 'birth' warm the world?

The volcanic eruptions that created Iceland might also have triggered one of the most catastrophic episodes of global warming ever seen on Earth, a new study suggests.

Michael Storey at Roskilde University in Denmark and colleagues have found evidence that a huge volcanic eruption, 55 million years ago, unleashed so much greenhouse gas into the atmosphere that world temperatures rose by as much as 8°C – with the Arctic ocean reaching a toasty 25°C.

"It was already a warm Earth, and it got a lot warmer," says Storey. The climatic turmoil that ensued was disastrous for most life, he says, killing off many deep-sea species.

Ancient ocean sediments that record this episode, called the Palaeocene-Eocene Temperature Maximum (PETM), also contain an unusually small amount of the heavier isotope of carbon, carbon-13. The sediments point to a sudden influx of available carbon dioxide or methane – which would explain the sudden warming – from some source with reduced carbon-13 levels.

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Lost world warning from North Sea

Archaeologists are uncovering a huge prehistoric "lost country" hidden below the North Sea.

This lost landscape, where hunter-gatherer communities once lived, was swallowed by rising water levels at the end of the last ice age. University of Birmingham researchers are heralding "stunning" findings as they map the "best-preserved prehistoric landscape in Europe". The large plain disappeared below the water more than 8,000 years ago.

The Birmingham researchers have been using oil exploration technology to build a map of the once-inhabited area that now lies below the North Sea - stretching from the east coast of Britain up to the Shetland Islands and across to Scandinavia. "It's like finding another country," says Professor Vince Gaffney, chair in Landscape Archaeology and Geomatics.

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Nation feels effects of global climate shift

As global warming causes changes in the world’s wind and water patterns, Viet Nam is beginning to feel the effects. Former President Tran Duc Luong urges awareness and action to head off the destruction of natural disasters.

Earlier this year, the World Bank released the report "The Impacts of Sea Level Rise on Developing Countries: A Comparative Analysis" written by a group of economic and developmental experts, headed by Sushmita Dasgupta.

The analysis showed the oceans would only have to rise 1m to endanger the lives of millions living in lowland or coastal areas around the world.

Japan's Ministry of Environment announced it would spend US$64.5 billion to respond to rising sea levels, partly due to the earth's melting ice caps. The Japanese believe if the seas rise, 90 per cent of the country's beaches will eventually be swallowed up and rice production will shrink by 50 per cent. The country advised China to consider building a "new Great Wall" of dikes along its entire coastline.

And though it hasn't happened yet, there is no doubt that sea levels are continuously rising, a trend our very own scientists can attest to.

Higher Ground

A yearlong topographic and demographic study of New Orleans arrives this month like the latest installment of the television series "MythBusters" -- and may forever change the notion of the Big Easy as a below-sea-level city.

"Contrary to popular perceptions, half of New Orleans is at or above sea level," according to the study by Tulane and Xavier universities' Center for Bioenvironmental Research.

Yep, half.

And if you want to cling to other myths, such as Monkey Hill at Audubon Zoo being the highest spot in New Orleans, avoid the study's author, a celebrated research professor who years ago went house-hunting in Bywater with his wife, Marina, toting topographic maps.

"No, Monkey Hill is not the highest," said Richard Campanella, leaning over to review elevation data captured by LIDAR, a precise light imaging detection technology, to support his point. "It's 25.4 feet high; a hill in the Couturie Forest in City Park is 27.5 feet."

In the study, data captured with LIDAR from 1999 through 2001 were used to identify the heavily populated areas in the New Orleans area that are at and above sea level, replacing impressions with facts. In calculating the proportion of the city above sea level, sparsely inhabited areas such as Bayou Sauvage were not accounted for.

"Innumerable media reports following Hurricane Katrina described the topography of New Orleans as unconditionally below sea level," the study notes. "This oversimplification is inaccurate by half, and its frequent repetition does a great disservice to the city."

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Holy Cross homes tour helps mark Earth Day

People squinted up at flat black panels, using hands to shade their eyes from the intense midday sun. That same sun powered the house they stood beside, through solar electric systems installed last month on the house's roof.

Relatively unexciting topics -- solar electricity and energy efficiency -- drew a crowd of nearly 100 people to the Holy Cross neighborhood in the Lower 9th Ward on Sunday. The "Clean Energy Homes Tour" went from the solar-powered house on Tricou Street near the river levee and to an energy-efficient house on Dauphine Street.

The tour was one of several local events honoring Earth Day, the environmental-awareness day that's been celebrated in the United States since 1970.

In the Broadmoor area, 100 Jewish teenagers participated in J-Serve, a national day of volunteerism for Jewish youths, toting shovels and rakes, cleaning up three of the neighborhood's neutral grounds and planting azalea bushes and flowers there. In Central City, hundreds of students and young adults planted three "edible gardens" as part of a national event called Global Youth Service Day, which emphasizes the contributions that youth volunteers make to their communities year-round.

The Lower 9th Ward tour started at the corner of Chartres and Lizardi streets, at the Center for Sustainable Engagement and Development, where returning residents can learn about rebuilding their homes with Earth-friendly technologies and materials.

Sunday's group included several environmentalists but mostly was made up of Holy Cross residents, ranging in age from the toddlers in strollers pushed by their parents to the older folks who had lived more than a half-century in the neighborhood. By and large, their motivations were less about the green earth and more about green currency.

"For me, it's simple: economics," an older woman said. Others said high Entergy electricity bills have pushed them to think "green."

"When you hit people in the pocketbook, you hit a nerve," said Charles Allen III, vice president of the Holy Cross Neighborhood Association, which he said is aiming to become a "truly energy-efficient, carbon-neutral community."

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Bloomberg Draws a Blueprint for a Greener City

In a quarter-century plan to create what he called “the first environmentally sustainable 21st-century city,” Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg proposed a sweeping and politically contentious vision yesterday of 127 projects, regulations and innovations for New York and the region.

The plan is intended to foster steady population growth, with the city expected to gain about 1 million residents by 2030, and to put in place a host of environmentally sensitive measures that would reduce the greenhouse gases it generates.

Mr. Bloomberg also set the parameters for what could be a large piece of his legacy as mayor. In an address outlining the plan yesterday at the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan, Mr. Bloomberg likened it to the first blueprints for Central Park more than 100 years ago and the construction of Rockefeller Center in the Great Depression.

Many elements of the plan will face political hurdles in Albany and will depend on huge financial commitments from the state and federal governments, not to mention future mayors. To start, Mr. Bloomberg intends to add hundreds of millions of dollars to his proposed $57 billion budget for the next fiscal year, his aides said yesterday.

“Our economy is humming, our fiscal house is in order and our near-term horizon looks bright,” Mr. Bloomberg said. “If we don’t act now, when?”

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Where we live may be to blame for rising obesity

That's precisely the theory posited by a growing body of researchers in public health, urban planning, epidemiology and economics. Ever since two studies linked sprawl and obesity in 2003, study upon study has been published suggesting that our environment -- marked by car-oriented, isolated, unwalkable neighborhoods -- is having a deleterious influence on our health. In other words, sprawl is making us unhealthy, unhappy and fat.

One early study of 200,000 people, led by urban planner Reid Ewing, found that residents of sprawling communities tended to weigh more, walk less and have higher blood pressure than those living in more densely populated areas. Another study, by health psychologist James Sallis of San Diego State University, concluded that people living in "high-walkability" neighborhoods walk more and were less likely to be obese than residents of low-walkability neighborhoods.

A 2004 study in Atlanta, led by Lawrence Frank, reported that the number of minutes spent in a car could be linked to a risk of obesity. Among the oft-cited conclusions of the study: A typical white male living in an isolated residential-only neighborhood weighs about 10 pounds more than one living in a walkable, mixed-use community.

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Climate clock is ticking in South Florida

Pine trees, coral reefs, tourism and our drinking water supply are under the gun of climate change.

The warming of the planet means Florida, with 1,200 miles of heavily populated and vulnerable coastline, is feeling real-time effects that are foreshadowing bigger consequences:

• Sea levels are rising twice as fast as once predicted, eroding shorelines.

• Higher temperatures are shifting tropical conditions farther north.

• Oceans are more acidic.

• Seas are hotter.

• Droughts may be increasing, while periods of intense rainfall are farther apart.

While the long-range effects are likely to affect our grandchildren, the near-term effects are whittling away at our environment with the power of spring tides.

As evidence mounts that the earth is warming faster than once predicted, Florida is finally starting to focus on the issue. A conference May 9-11 in Tampa will look at the latest research and make recommendations to policymakers.

more from the Miami Herald

Twenty-First Century New York Forecast: Floods, Heat, Bugs

Even Noah would have been impressed.

For two days this week, New York City endured the lashings of one of the worst storms in recent history, a northeaster that flooded streets, downed power lines and dumped nearly eight inches of rain on Central Park. With its olive-sized raindrops, it had the feel of some Biblical melodrama, re-enacted for our environmental, if not spiritual, edification.

In Brooklyn, the Gowanus Canal topped its banks, sending cold, dark water pouring into apartments. In Queens, some residents were forced to paddle the streets in boats. Every borough had its stories, and with them came the nagging suspicion that some god of global warming had finally spoken.

Michael Oppenheimer, a geosciences professor at Princeton University and a leading thinker on climate change, saw the storm as a clear portent.

“You can really never tie one particular event directly to global warming in a cause-and-effect sense,” he said. “On the other hand, this is exactly the type of event that we’d expect to see more of in the future—this kind of gully-washing, incredibly intense downpour.”

“The storm was kind of a preview of things to come,” he concluded.

more from the NY Observer

It’s a Dry Heat

There is, evidently, a small section of rural land in the northeast corner of the state of California where temperatures have actually cooled over the last five decades. For the rest of us, the news is not so good.

“Cities in California have been warming at a rate two to three times faster than the rural parts of the state,” says Steve LaDochy, a professor of geography at California State University, Los Angeles. “Global warming is usually stated as one degree Celsius over the last century. In places like San Francisco and Los Angeles, the temperature has risen two degrees.” For the most part, climate change models have been assuming that global warming’s influence will be uniform. We should be so lucky. “[Southern Californians] will feel the effects sooner,” he says.

That’s because we’ve got a confluence of factors on our hands, a spiraling dance of urban planning, greenhouse gas emissions, and cyclical drought patterns. Humans in general are cooking the upper atmosphere with CO2, but a new report LaDochy co-authored with two other scientists – including Southern California’s favorite weatherman Bill Patzert at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena – shows that we, in particular, are adding insult to injury in the form of the mushrooming heat island we’ve constructed.

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The consequences are not just more intense sunburn and higher air conditioning bills. The heat, say ecologists and water experts, is sucking up our water supply.

Coastal mapping helps guide policy

A new scientific project to map the sea floor off the California coast has yielded some intriguing insights — such as the location of critical underwater habitat and the reason why the waves at Mavericks in Half Moon Bay are among the biggest in the country.

The California Coast State Waters Mapping Project, a collaborative effort between state and federal scientific and conservation agencies, used sophisticated sonar and aerial light detection instruments to create, for the first time, detailed 3-D imagery of every fault, crevice and reef in a portion of state waters, according to the study's authors.

The new technology will prove useful in many ways, from charting areas that must be protected in order for certain fish species to survive, to where a tsunami is likely to strike next, according to Rikk Kvitek, a professor at California State University, Monterey Bay, and lead researcher of the study. It even offered a few little surprises, such as the location of a long-forgotten shipwreck.

"The sort of mapping that we're doing has never been done before," explained Kvitek. "The best information we have on the sea floor is based on nautical charts that date from the 1940s."

more from the Oakland (CA) Tribune

Natural selection

Do you know where your food comes from? How it was produced? How far it traveled before ending up on your plate? It's getting easier to find answers to those questions. Restaurant menus and supermarket food labels now tout the origins of ingredients and make eco-conscious claims such as "pasture-raised" and "certified humane."

Food is a key part of a growing movement in Chicago and across the nation to go "green." In a three-part series starting today, the Sun-Times will also examine the growing interest and investment in eco-friendly homes and transportation.

Sales of organic foods are booming, and not just at specialty stores. Even giant retailers Wal-Mart and Target are offering organic items.

Schools, hospitals and food-service companies increasingly are choosing locally grown and organic foods.

And farmers markets and community-supported agriculture programs, or CSAs, are multiplying: Between 1994 and 2006, there was a 149 percent increase in the number of farmers markets nationwide, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Agricultural Marketing Service.

Green is growing more popular, but it hasn't been totally embraced by mainstream America. Consider hybrid cars, for instance. These eco-friendlier means of transportation get a lot of attention, but they amounted to just 2 percent of all cars sold in the United States in 2005.

Some people are going green to save the planet, others to save money; some are trying to stay ahead of the trend, others are making a statement.

Eating green -- with a heightened emphasis on knowing more about our food and who's producing it -- "has become more trendy. It's really gone beyond just going to farmers markets," said Paul McRandle, deputy editor of National Geographic's The Green Guide, an online resource for green living.

more from the Chicago Sun-Times

Model of urban future: Jersey City?

Once, this was a city of browns and grays. Railroads owned a third of the land, and trains rumbled night and day to the cacophonous riverfront. Factories belched fumes and leaked chemicals. "Nobody cared," says Bob Leach, born here in 1937. "Smoke meant jobs."

And those were the good years. Then, in the 1960s, the railroads went broke. Rail yards were abandoned, piers rotted, factories closed. In the 1970s alone, the city lost 14% of its population and about 9% of its jobs.

Now Jersey City has come back as its own antithesis: clean, green and growing — an example, urban planners say, of how the nation can accommodate some of the additional 100 million Americans expected by 2040 without paving over every farm, forest and meadow.

Jersey City, a model of smart growth? Even Robert Cotter, the city's planning director, says he was surprised by the notion. But because so many people here live in apartments or attached houses located near shops, offices and mass transit, they require less land, gasoline, heating oil, water, sewer pipe and other finite resources.

Smart Growth America, an advocacy group that ranks the largest metro areas by sprawl, says Jersey City is the second "least sprawling," trailing only New York City.

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How (and how not to) battle flu: a tale of 23 cities

When the Spanish flu reached the United States in the summer of 1918, it seemed to confine itself to military camps. But when it arrived in Philadelphia in September, it struck with a vengeance.

By the time officials there grasped the threat of the virus, it was too late. The disease was rampaging through the population, partly because the city had allowed large public gatherings, including a citywide parade in support of a World War I loan drive, to go on as planned. In four months, more than 12,000 Philadelphians died, an excess death rate of 719 people for every 100,000 inhabitants.

The story was quite different in St. Louis. Two weeks before Philadelphia officials began to react, doctors in St. Louis persuaded the city to require that influenza cases be registered with the health department. And two days after the first civilian cases, police officers helped the department enforce a shutdown of schools, churches and other gathering places. Infected people were quarantined in their homes.

Excess deaths in St. Louis were 347 per 100,000 people, less than half the rate in Philadelphia. Early action appeared to have saved thousands of lives.

more from the NY Times

Climate Change Scenarios Scare, and Motivate, Kids

The boy has drawn, in his third-grade class, a global warming timeline that is his equivalent of the mushroom cloud.

"That's the Earth now," the 9-year-old says, pointing to a dark shape at the bottom. "And then," he says, tracing the progressively lighter stripes across the page, "it's just starting to fade away."

Alex Hendel of Arlington County is talking about the end of life on our beleaguered planet. Looking up to make sure his mother is following along, he taps the final stripe, which is so sparsely dotted it is almost invisible. "In 20 years," he pronounces, "there's no oxygen." Then, to dramatize the point, he collapses, "dead," to the floor.

For many children and young adults, global warming is the atomic bomb of today. Fears of an environmental crisis are defining their generation in ways that the Depression, World War II, Vietnam and the Cold War's lingering "War Games" etched souls in the 20th century.

Parents say they're searching for "productive" outlets for their 8-year-olds' obsessions with dying polar bears. Teachers say enrollment in high school and college environmental studies classes is doubling year after year. And psychologists say they're seeing an increasing number of young patients preoccupied by a climactic Armageddon.

more from the Washington Post

Planning panel approves Pitt's 'green' project

The official name of the applicant, Douglas and Andry Sustainable Building LLC, was scarcely as attention-grabbing as, say, Brad Pitt's name would have been.

The official language of the application -- "a request for a mixed-use planned community district overlay including residential and commercial uses in new structures in an LI light industrial district" -- was no more exciting.

But the prosaic terminology of government bureaucracy could not hide the unusual nature of the project that won approval last week from the New Orleans City Planning Commission: a 23-unit "environmentally friendly" low-income residential development in the Lower 9th Ward being built by Global Green USA with backing from actor Pitt.

The complex is being designed, thanks to the use of solar panels and other "green" technology, to require 75 percent less energy than typical New Orleans buildings, said Beth Galante, director of Global Green's New Orleans office. It will include an 18-unit apartment building, five single-family homes and a community center containing offices, an auditorium, a visitor center, a community kitchen and retail space.

Global Green hopes to break ground in May and complete the first home by Aug. 29, the second anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, Galante said. The rest of the complex should be finished by next summer, she said.

more from the Times Picayune

RENEW, REBUILD . . . RECYCLE?

For years, Donna Gibson, Carol Bradford and Bernard Walsh diligently sorted the trash from their Mid-City homes: cans, newspapers and glass bottles deposited into brightly colored bins that would line the curbs early in the morning once a week.

The 7 feet of water that swallowed their homes along Banks Street 19 months ago also swallowed the plastic bins. But even the storm of a generation has a hard time wiping out old habits.

After Hurricane Katrina, the neighbors' newspapers became cage liners at the local animal shelter. Canvas bags became rolled-up window insulators. Styrofoam peanuts helped aerate the soil below potted plants. Discarded wrought iron and empty glass bottles went to local artists.

"There's a lot of creativity going on," Gibson said. "A lot of it is: Reuse it until it falls apart."

That creativity has become the only outlet for conscientious residents after Hurricane Katrina drowned nearly all government recycling programs in the greater New Orleans area.

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Tracing global warming’s toll to Tuvalu

Global warming is invisible. Just as a frog in a slowly warming frying pan cannot sense his impending doom, so, too, are humans unaware of the global disaster that is descending upon them. Yet the island nation of Tuvalu offers an all too palpable example of global warming’s consequences. As the northern ice caps thaw and the oceans swell with additional water, the sea level slowly rises. Low-lying Pacific coral atolls such as Tuvalu are particularly vulnerable to the waves. Is it inevitable that they will one day share the same fate as the legendary island of Atlantis, disappearing below the waves for eternity. In order to better grasp the nature of global warming and the threat that it harbors, Hankyoreh 21 launched an expedition to the equatorial island nation of Tuvalu.

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Living Through The Storm

With his 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.

Not long ago, West says, a DuPont executive boasted to him about how well his company was now treating the environment. Jolly good, West replied, but was DuPont also prepared for how the environment might treat DuPont? “I asked how many of his company’s 300-odd facilities around the world were located in floodplains,” West says. Global warming will bring increased risks to anyone located in a floodplain. “He didn’t know,” West recalls. “I said, ‘Don’t you think you should?’”

For years, global warming was discussed in the hypothetical—a threat in the distant future. Now it is increasingly regarded as a clear, observable fact today. This sudden shift puts all of us in the same boat as that Dupont executive. We must start thinking about the many ways global warming will affect us, our loved ones, our property and our economic prospects in the years ahead. We must think—and then we must adapt to this new reality as best we can.

more from Mark Hertsgaard's article in Time

Buildings Called Key Source of City’s Greenhouse Gases

Laying the groundwork for a plan to reduce the production of greenhouse gases in the city, the Bloomberg administration released a study yesterday showing that New York’s roughly 950,000 buildings are responsible for a vast majority of the city’s carbon dioxide emissions.

In sharp contrast to the national average of about 32 percent, the city’s buildings are responsible for 79 percent of the greenhouse gases produced by the city and are being cut each year, according to the study, conducted by the city’s Office of Long-Term Planning and Sustainability. Transportation systems, including mass transit, cars and trucks, are responsible for most of the remaining 21 percent of the emissions, which are considered a major factor in global warming.

The release of the inventory marked the first concrete step in Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s ambitious effort to set the city on a greener path as it plans for the addition of one million residents by 2030. In December, Mr. Bloomberg outlined goals to help guide the city’s growth in a more environmentally sound way, including reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 30 percent.

“Even though New Yorkers already generate less than a third of the carbon emissions that the average American does, we can and we must do more,” Mr. Bloomberg said in announcing the results of the study at a news conference in Lower Manhattan.

Officials said that the inventory was a critical tool in understanding the sources of the city’s emissions so that they could better devise strategies to reduce them. Still, they declined to provide details on how they would accomplish their goals, saying that the mayor would reveal his proposals on Earth Day, April 22.

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1918 flu showed it's vital to act early

One of the enduring riddles of the 1918 pandemic — the worst flu season in the history of humankind — was why some cities were spared the high death toll that ravaged other municipalities.

Researchers reporting in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in two analyses have found that in cities where health officials imposed stringent containment measures, the population fared better than in cities where plans were helter-skelter or were cobbled together too late to make a difference.

An estimated 600,000 people in the United States and as many as 50 million worldwide died in the pandemic. The fierce wave of illnesses struck at the close of World War I just when people thought they could breathe a sigh of relief. More U.S. troops died of influenza — sometimes called the Spanish flu — than in the war.

In an era when even the best medical minds had no idea that the globe-circling pandemic was caused by a virus, some cities were able to limit infections through common-sense methods, scientists now say. They also theorize that lessons from the past can have relevance today should another pandemic strike.

Schools, theaters, churches and dance halls in cities across the country were closed. Kansas City, Mo., instituted a ban on weddings and funerals if more than 20 people were to gather. The mayor of Seattle ordered people to wear face masks.

In cities with stringent enforcement of such plans, fewer people died.
more from the Seattle Times

More new construction adopting ‘green’ design

A new color is catching on in construction: green.

Some new projects, like the massive HealthNow New York office complex opening downtown, are aiming to be environmentally sensitive in everything from the building materials they use to the lighting systems in their offices.

Proponents say the payoff from “going green” comes in the form of lower utility bills, a healthier workplace for employees, reduced impact on the environment, and community goodwill.

Just a few years ago, using greenfriendly ideas to meticulously guide the design of a building was uncommon, a nice idea for some other project to try. But the trend is showing up in a growing number of places; many cities are embracing the objectives for public projects.

“Everyone wants to go green nowadays,” said Ryan Hughes, project manager for AEC, a Colorado architectural firm that has served as a consultant on the HealthNow New York complex.

The U.S. Green Building Council has helped steer green construction from an “alternative” concept toward the mainstream, with its widely used project checklist. The scoring system, known as Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design, or LEED for short, rates whether a building hits a range of targets beneficial to the environment.

from the Buffalo (NY) News

Digging to root of diet problem

First the gopher problem must be solved. Then holes must be dug. Seeds must be planted.

After that, members of the West Fresno Boys & Girls Club can start growing, weeding and harvesting in their new fruit and vegetable garden.

The club hopes to battle diabetes and other obesity-related diseases that plague the neighborhood by growing and selling fruits and vegetables in a garden next to its playground.

The Consumer Empowerment Forum for Change -- a group of local residents, elected officials, businesses and community leaders -- has unveiled plans for the garden in hopes of improving the health of residents in low-income Fresno neighborhoods by giving them easier access to fruits and vegetables.

Fresno County has more than five times as many fast-food restaurants and convenience stores as supermarkets and produce vendors, according to the California Center for Public Health Advocacy. The center, based in Davis, is a nonpartisan nonprofit organization that raises awareness about critical public health issues.

In a recent study, the center found that counties with high numbers of fast-food restaurants also have high occurrences of diabetes, heart disease and cancer because residents are more likely to eat burgers and fries than fruits and vegetables.

more from the Fresno Bee (CA)

In Success of ‘Smart Growth,’ New Jersey Town Feels Strain

The neighborhoods here seem plucked from an urban planner’s catalog: trimmed lawns, picket fences and freshly minted homes. Shopping is an easy stroll away on the wide sidewalks. A greenbelt wraps the town like a bow.

But there is growing frustration with the very thing that attracted thousands of families here in the first place: a high-density “smart-growth” development in the middle of town.

That project, the 400-acre Washington Town Center — designed according to state planning goals as a remedy to suburban sprawl — has become a victim of its own success, town officials and residents said. So many families have flocked to Washington Township, eight miles east of Trenton in Mercer County, in the nine years since construction began that the schools are overflowing, property taxes are skyrocketing and the main streets are clogged.

more from tne NY Times

A warning on warming for Southeast

Increased flooding, more smog, fewer species and the threat of tropical diseases are all possible results of global warming in metro Atlanta and throughout the Southeast, a panel of scientists said Wednesday.

And as winters continue to warm, cockroaches and fleas will thrive, becoming an even greater nuisance.

But not even the best research can provide specifics on exactly when and how global climate change will be felt in the region.

"The most important thing to recognize is that we're going to be surprised a lot," said Robert Harriss, president and chief executive officer of the Houston Advanced Research Center, an environmentally friendly nonprofit group offering technological and policy expertise.

Harriss and three other scientists, including Judith Curry, chairwoman of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Georgia Tech, talked to reporters Wednesday to draw attention to the plight of the South as the climate warms. The next report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is due Friday and will assess worldwide consequences and project changes to come.

Harriss and the other scientists said evidence of warming will vary from place to place. The Southwest, for example, is expected to experience more severe droughts, while parts of the Southeast, including Georgia, should get more rainfall, although concentrated in more severe storms.

Stronger hurricanes

In February, the IPCC released the first of three reports this year assessing the science of climate change. In it, more than 2,000 climate scientists from 130 countries agreed there is indisputable evidence that global warming is occurring, and human activity that creates heat-trapping pollution from cars, planes, industries and power plants is the leading cause.

Georgia Tech's Curry said rising sea temperatures will lead to more intense hurricanes within a decade — "the most devastating short-term impacts of global warming for the southeastern United States."

more from the Atlanta Journal Constitution

U.N. Study Shows Likely Impact of Global Warming

The latest United Nations assessment of the role of humans in global warming has found with “high confidence” that greenhouse gas emissions are at least partly responsible for a host of changes already under way, including longer growing seasons and shrinking glaciers.

A summary of the working draft of the report, to be released Friday in Brussels, was provided to The New York Times today by several people involved in reviewing it.

It is a detailed follow-up to a February report by the United Nations group, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which was the fourth assessment since 1990 of the basic science that points to a human hand on the planet’s thermostat.

That report said there was at least a 90 percent chance that most warming since 1950 had resulted from a continuing buildup of heat-trapping emissions in the atmosphere. The new report describes the specific effects of climate changes on people and ecology; identifies those species and regions at greatest risk; and describes options for limiting risks.

more from the NY Times

Surviving a warmer world: Global forecast is 'mostly dry'

It's a late March morning, and a light breeze tousles the tops of aspens and Ponderosa pines at Elk Cabin, one of the oldest spots in New Mexico for recording the depth of winter snow. Richard Armijo, a measuring stick in hand, is there to gauge this spring's snowpack.

The site, in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, sits just upstream from two reservoirs that serve the city of Santa Fe. In late March, Elk Cabin should have a foot of snow on the ground, but it's nearly bare.

Like much of the West, New Mexico has endured a long drought.

According to the latest scientific evidence, such dry spells are likely to grow more severe – as they will around the world. Global warming, climate scientists say, is changing climates from the Himalayan Mountains to the Euphrates-Tigris River Basin. Patterns of rain and snowfall are shifting significantly.

The question now becomes: How will nations and individuals adapt as Earth's climate warms? Glaciers from the Andes to the Alps are shrinking at an accelerating pace. Countries are already haggling over river rights. From 400 million to as many as 3.2 billion people face serious water shortages over the next 20 to 50 years. New Mexico, an already dry region that is getting drier, is on the front lines.

Mr. Armijo, a snow surveyor for the US Department of Agriculture, knows something is going on. Like much of the American West, the state has been in the grip of drought for years.

"We've set record lows for snowpack a couple of times in the last five or six years," he says. "For the most part, the snowpack's gone. In the last three to four weeks, we've experienced some really warm temperatures."

In early February, the UN released a report on the science behind global warming. In it, researchers expressed "very high confidence" that greenhouse-gas emissions – mostly carbon dioxide from burning coal, oil, and natural gas – have been warming the climate.

If these emissions continue to grow at their current rates, the report estimates, global average temperatures could top their 1980-2000 average by 2.3 to 4.1 degrees C. (4.1 to 7.4 degrees F.) by the end of the century. Among the warming's effects: Arid regions will dry out further. And some of the water that they do receive will come in the wrong form (rain instead of snow) or at the wrong time.

more from the Christian Science Monitor

Viewpoint: Urban planning can save the earth

Unlike the cure for the common cold, solutions to a significant cause of global warming are commonly known. In fact, more than a few middle-schoolers understand that reducing the number of personal automobiles on the road, reducing the length of time such cars are driven, will in-turn reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

The challenge is persuading millions of American commuters to abandon a cherished member of the family, a combination mobile office, breakfast nook and makeup vanity hand-washed and waxed with love.

The solutions to global warming are found in modern urban planning and zoning and three little words: Transit Oriented Development. Build well-designed, affordable housing within walking distance of efficient mass transit, and the air-fouling traffic jams will unclog themselves. Better yet, build well-designed, affordable housing within walking distance of jobs, schools and retail, and car use will plummet.

A decade ago, Mountain View redeveloped 18 acres of auto dealerships and outdated shops into “The Crossings,” built between 1994 and 1998. Residents of the 128 condominiums, 129 townhouses and 102 detached, single-family homes are a few minutes walk from major retail, including a Safeway, plus a Caltrain station. In 2002, the American Planning Association recognized Mountain View with an Outstanding Planning Award.

more from Examiner Online

Billions at risk from wheat super-blight

"This thing has immense potential for social and human destruction." Startling words - but spoken by the father of the Green Revolution, Nobel laureate Norman Borlaug, they are not easily dismissed.

An infection is coming, and almost no one has heard about it. This infection isn't going to give you flu, or TB. In fact, it isn't interested in you at all. It is after the wheat plants that feed more people than any other single food source on the planet. And because of cutbacks in international research, we aren't prepared. The famines that were banished by the advent of disease-resistant crops in the Green Revolution of the 1960s could return, Borlaug told New Scientist.

The disease is Ug99, a virulent strain of black stem rust fungus (Puccinia graminis), discovered in Uganda in 1999. Since the Green Revolution, farmers everywhere have grown wheat varieties that resist stem rust, but Ug99 has evolved to take advantage of those varieties, and almost no wheat crops anywhere are resistant to it.

The strain has spread slowly across east Africa, but in January this year spores blew across to Yemen, and north into Sudan (see Map). Scientists who have tracked similar airborne spores in this part of the world say it will now blow into Egypt, Turkey and the Middle East, and on to India, lands where a billion people depend on wheat.

more from New Scientist

Tropical forecast is fierce — again

This year's first predictions for the hurricane season, issued Tuesday by a research team in Colorado, are identical to the "very active" outlook for 2006 that most forecasters got very wrong.

This time, however, tropical storm prognosticators say the El Niño climate pattern that blunted last season is gone. In its place, says veteran hurricane scientist William Gray, are conditions much more conducive to a busy 2007 for tropical storms in the Atlantic, Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico.

more from USA Today

Hurricane shield is stronger, corps says

As the National Hurricane Conference here picks up steam, officials from the Army Corps of Engineers said Tuesday that the area's hurricane protection system is stronger than it was a year ago, and corrective work on pumps at the end of three drainage canals in New Orleans will be completed by June 1.

"As of today, we're on track to have those 40 pumps installed, tested and ready by June 1," which is the beginning of hurricane season, said Karen Durham-Aguilera, civilian director of the corps' Task Force Hope, during a news conference at the site of the hurricane conference.

The conference, which began Monday with a series of emergency planning training programs and lasts through Friday, provides an opportunity for emergency managers, meteorologists and public officials to discuss strategies for dealing with hurricanes and their aftermath.

more from the Times Picayune

Is Earth near its 'tipping points' from global warming?

Earth is spinning toward many points of no return from the damage of global warming, after which disease, desolation and famine are inevitable, say scientists involved in an international report due Friday on the effects of climate change.

Opinions vary about how long it will take to reach those "tipping points" and whether attempts to cut planet-warming gases churned out by power plants, vehicles and other human industry can slow, halt or reverse the harmful effects in coming decades. Some suggest it might be cheaper for society to adapt to the changing climate than to roll back the pace of warming.

But in the report, the second of three this year by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, thousands of climate scientists and representatives of more than 100 nations, including the USA, present in the most stark terms the "key global risks" — serious environmental consequences from the changing climate — that threaten humanity.

"It's time (a report) puts people on the planet into the picture" of global warming, says economist Gary Yohe of Wesleyan University, a lead author of the report.

more from USA Today

'Ten-metre-high' tsunami strikes Solomon Islands

At least 12 people died and many more are missing after a tsunami struck the tiny Solomon Islands following a powerful undersea earthquake in the South Pacific on Monday morning.

The quake measured 8.1 on the Richter scale and occurred in shallow waters 350 kilometres (220 miles) north-west of the Solomons' capital, Honiara. It struck at 0740 local time on Monday 2 April (2040 GMT on Sunday), levelling buildings in the south-western islands. The initial tremor was followed about 7 minutes later by a second one, centred further west, of magnitude 6.7.

The quakes created a tsunami several metres high that swamped buildings, swept away entire villages and dragged people out to sea. There are fears that the numbers of dead could rise with emerging news of more villages being destroyed.

from New Scientist

Reports From Four Fronts in the War on Warming

Over the last few decades, as scientists have intensified their study of the human effects on climate and of the effects of climate change on humans, a common theme has emerged: in both respects, the world is a very unequal place.

In almost every instance, the people most at risk from climate change live in countries that have contributed the least to the atmospheric buildup of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases linked to the recent warming of the planet.

Those most vulnerable countries also tend to be the poorest. And the countries that face the least harm — and that are best equipped to deal with the harm they do face — tend to be the richest.

To advocates of unified action to curb greenhouse gases, this growing realization is not welcome news.

“The original idea was that we were all in this together, and that was an easier idea to sell,” said Robert O. Mendelsohn, an economist at Yale. “But the research is not supporting that. We’re not in it together.”

The large, industrialized countries are more resilient partly because of geography; they are mostly in midlatitude regions with Goldilocks climates — neither too hot nor too cold.

from the NY Times

Report: Global warming will melt Himalayas

For people in their 30s, climate change has already reshaped the world into which they were born.

By the time they reach retirement, the changes will be far more dramatic and perhaps life-threatening on a massive scale, an authoritative UN study will say this week.

Today, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a network of more than 2,000 scientists, will open a five-day meeting in Brussels, Belgium, to finalize a report on how warming will affect the globe and whether humans can do anything about it.

The panel will paint a bleak picture of increasing poverty, paucity of drinking water, melting glaciers and polar ice caps, and a host of vanishing species by mid-century unless action is taken to curb emissions of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases.

Among the gloomy forecasts, the report predicts that glaciers in the Himalayas, the world's highest mountain range, will melt away, affecting hundreds of millions of people.

"If current warming rates are maintained, Himalayan glaciers could decay at very rapid rates, shrinking from the present 500,000 square kilometers to 100,000 square kilometers by 2030s," according to a draft technical summary.

from The People's Daily (CN)

Tracking the 'Brain Gain'

When Richard Campanella, a research professor with the Center for Bioenvironmental Research at Tulane and Xavier Universities, commented on the New Orleans "brain gain" in an article in the March 3 issue of The Times-Picayune, he apparently got the attention of a lot of people.

"I've received eight or nine calls about it," says Campanella, who went on record in the article estimating that 2,000 to 3,000 professionals have come to New Orleans since Hurricane Katrina.

While the article, "The Brain Gain," reported on the trend of young professionals coming to New Orleans to help the rebuilding effort, Campanella notes that his estimate includes all professionals, not solely young ones and/or those involved in planning and rebuilding.

Campanella, a geographer who has written three books on the city's cultural geography both before and after the storm, says that he based his estimate of post-Katrina professional newcomers on a finding by the 2006 Louisiana Health and Population Survey. In that survey, 7,042 respondents living in Orleans Parish during June-October 2006 said they had "changed their residence due to job opportunities" within the previous year.

from the Tulane Daily News

Poor Nations to Bear Brunt as World Warms

The world’s richest countries, which have contributed by far the most to the atmospheric changes linked to global warming, are already spending billions of dollars to limit their own risks from its worst consequences, like drought and rising seas.

But despite longstanding treaty commitments to help poor countries deal with warming, these industrial powers are spending just tens of millions of dollars on ways to limit climate and coastal hazards in the world’s most vulnerable regions — most of them close to the equator and overwhelmingly poor.

Next Friday, a new report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations body that since 1990 has been assessing global warming, will underline this growing climate divide, according to scientists involved in writing it — with wealthy nations far from the equator not only experiencing fewer effects but also better able to withstand them.

Two-thirds of the atmospheric buildup of carbon dioxide, a heat-trapping greenhouse gas that can persist in the air for centuries, has come in nearly equal proportions from the United States and Western European countries. Those and other wealthy nations are investing in windmill-powered plants that turn seawater to drinking water, in flood barriers and floatable homes, and in grains and soybeans genetically altered to flourish even in a drought.

from the NY Times