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Last update: 5 May 2008

These recent articles concern climate and climate change issues of interest to California Applications Program (CAP) and/or California Climate Change Center (CCCC) participants.

• Sinking without trace: Australia's climate change victims
  Like Kiribati and Tuvalu, the islands of the Torres Strait are slowly being submerged. But unlike their Pacific neighbours, the plight of their inhabitants is being overlooked. Ron and Maria Passi, who operate Murray Island's only taxi, were out driving the night the king tide struck. Neighbours flagged them down, asking for help, and so it was not until some time later that they saw their own grandchildren standing in the road. "They were shouting 'Granddad, stop the car, the water is coming in the house'," says Ron. "I just slammed on the brakes."
  (The Independent, May 2008)
• Forecast for big sea level rise
  Sea levels could rise by up to one-and-a-half metres by the end of this century, according to a new scientific analysis. This is substantially more than the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) forecast in last year's landmark assessment of climate science. Sea level rise of this magnitude would have major impacts on low-lying countries such as Bangladesh.
  (BBC News, April 2008)
• Eat: Sere Grapes
  Though ultraripe wines have been fashionable in the Napa Valley for more than a decade, climate change appears to be forcing the issue. While recent summers were cool, most Napa winemakers agree that 10-year averages are the hottest in memory. Too often, a result has been overripe grapes, and the cooked flavors and throat-searing alcohol that accompany them. If temperatures continue to rise even slightly, Napa could be in trouble.
  (New York Times, April 2008)
• California utility customers to fund think tank on climate
  California utility customers will foot the bill for a $600-million global-warming think tank under a Public Utilities Commission program that critics say is a costly and questionable departure from the agency's mission to make sure ratepayers get affordable and reliable power. The California Institute for Climate Solutions, approved Thursday, was pushed by commission President Michael Peevey, and the concept behind it -- accelerating research into ways to quickly cut harmful greenhouse gas emissions -- enjoyed broad support.
  (Los Angeles Times, April 2008)
• Researchers perform multi-century high-resolution climate simulations
  Using state-of-the-art supercomputers, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory climate scientists have performed a 400-year high-resolution global ocean-atmosphere simulation with results that are more similar to actual observations of surface winds and sea surface temperatures.
  (Science Blog, April 2008)
• California's water fortune is told at Gin Flat
  In deep winter, water scientist Frank Gehrke straps on his cross-country skis and trudges uphill in the thin, cold air to one of the most closely monitored frozen meadows on the continent, 7,200 feet above sea level in the Sierra Nevada. To understand why his arduous, breath-sucking hike is important, stand still and listen to the snow. In the pale morning sun, the forest of pine and cedar comes alive with sound. Clumps of fresh powder fall with a thud or drip-drop from tree tops, quickening with the staccato of popping corn. This place is like a Rosetta Stone for California's water supply. It's where the convergence of snow, sun and temperature enables scientists to predict floods or drought. It's where they have installed sophisticated equipment to help understand how climate change is altering snow melt in the Sierra, a source of water for millions of Californians.
  (Los Angeles Times, March 2008)
• Skeptics on Human Climate Impact Seize on Cold Spell
  The world has seen some extraordinary winter conditions in both hemispheres over the past year: snow in Johannesburg last June and in Baghdad in January, Arctic sea ice returning with a vengeance after a record retreat last summer, paralyzing blizzards in China, and a sharp drop in the globe's average temperature. It is no wonder that some scientists, opinion writers, political operatives and other people who challenge warnings about dangerous human-caused global warming have jumped on this as a teachable moment. So what is happening? According to a host of climate experts, including some who question the extent and risks of global warming, it is mostly good old-fashioned weather, along with a cold kick from the tropical Pacific Ocean, which is in its La Nina phase for a few more months, a year after it was in the opposite warm El Nino pattern.
  (New York Times, March 2008)
• West Antarctic Glaciers Melting At 20 Times Former Rate, Rock Analysis Shows
  Boulders the size footballs could help scientists predict the West Antarctic Ice Sheet's (WAIS) contribution to sea-level rise according to new research. Scientists from British Antarctic Survey (BAS), Durham University and Germany's Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research (AWI) collected boulders deposited by three glaciers in the Amundsen Sea Embayment -- a region currently the focus of intense international scientific attention because it is changing faster than anywhere else on the WAIS and it has the potential to raise sea-level by around 1.5 metres.
  (Science Daily, March 2008)
• Past Greenhouse Warming Provides Clues To What The Future May Hold
  If carbon dioxide emissions from the burning of fossil fuels continue on a "business-as-usual" trajectory, humans will have added about 5 trillion metric tons of carbon to the atmosphere by the year 2400. A similarly massive release of carbon accompanied an extreme period of global warming 55 million years ago known as the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM). Scientists studying the PETM are piecing together an increasingly detailed picture of its causes and consequences. Their findings describe what may be the best analog in the geologic record for the global changes likely to result from continued carbon dioxide emissions from human activities, according to James Zachos, professor of Earth and planetary sciences at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
  (Science Daily, February 2008)
• Eco-homes: There will be floods
  A floodplain on the edge of the North Sea may not be the ideal place to build your new home, especially with predictions of sea-level rises being ratcheted up with each new report. The latest global analysis, published earlier this month by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), predicted a rise in sea levels by the end of the century of up to 58cm - higher than all previous predictions, which put the rises between 14cm and 43cm. The Association of British Insurers (ABI) warned last week that many new homes could be "unsaleable, uninsurable and uninhabitable" if they're built on floodplains. And the Environment Agency has also issued strong warnings that we must "avoid inappropriate development in areas at risk of flooding and to direct development away from those areas at highest risk."
  (The Independent, February 2008)
• Climate Change Poses A Huge Threat To Human Health
  Climate change will have a huge impact on human health and bold environmental policy decisions are needed now to protect the world's population, according to the author of an article published in the British Medical Journal. The threat to human health is of a more fundamental kind than is the threat to the world's economic system, says Professor McMichael, a Professor of public health from the Australian National University. "Climate change is beginning to damage our natural life-support system," he says.
  (Science Daily, January 2008)
• Our Trial By Fire
  Beset by heat and drought, the West burns up
  This was a record fire year in the West, but most are these days. Wildfire began on schedule in the Southwest, but by July the heavy action was in the northern Rockies. Forest fires roared across more than 600,000 acres of Montana, where I live, close to 30 major fires, some lasting from mid-June until first snowfall in October. Idaho had it worse, with roughly the same number of fires as Montana but more than two million acres burned. The two states took the brunt of the action but were not far out of line with the rest of the West. All told, as much as eight million acres of western wildlands burned (the same as in each of the past three years); the climax came in Southern California with brushfires that claimed almost 2,000 homes and at least seven lives, engulfing close to half a million acres in less than a week.
  (OnEarth Magazine from NRDC, Winter 2008)
• The Ocean's Biological Deserts Are Expanding
  The Sahara, the Gobi, the Chihuahuan -- all are great deserts. But what about the South Pacific's subtropical gyre? This "biological desert" within a swirling expanse of nutrient-starved saltwater is the largest, and least productive, ecosystem of the South Pacific. Together with the subtropical gyres in other oceans, biological deserts cover 40% of Earth's surface. But their relative obscurity may be about to change. Researchers are reporting that the ocean's biological deserts have been expanding, and they are growing much faster than global warming models predict.
  (Science Now, January 2008)
• Why Natomas levees flunked
  U.S. agency used a new type of flood-risk analysis; critics fear faulty premises could distort the results.
  When the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers two weeks ago revealed that Natomas levees are not tall enough to contain even a modest storm, it wasn't because the levees had shrunk overnight or because someone misread the yardstick. Instead, the corps applied a new yardstick. But the new method is so complex that many flood-control experts are struggling to understand it - even some within the corps itself, said Joe Countryman, former chief of civil works design in the corps' Sacramento District and now president of MBK Engineers, a flood-control consultancy.
  (Sacramento Bee, January 2008)
• Brazil Amazon deforestation soars
  The Brazilian government has announced a huge rise in the rate of Amazon deforestation, months after celebrating its success in achieving a reduction. In the last five months of 2007, 3,235 sq km (1,250 sq miles) were lost. Gilberto Camara, of INPE, an institute that provides satellite imaging of the area, said the rate of loss was unprecedented for the time of year.
  (BBC News, January 2008)
• Climate Change Entices Birds To Stay Home
  Amateur ornithologists in the UK are gearing up for this weekend's annual Big Garden Birdwatch. The results could be worrying: Due to warm weather, many feathered friends are foregoing their winter trips to the Mediterranean -- a process which climate change will exacerbate.
  (Spiegel Online, January 2008)
• Profiteering from the Arctic Thaw
  Global warming isn't necessarily the catastrophe it's made out to be -- at least not for multinational oil companies. Shrinking ice caps would reveal the Arctic's massive energy sources and shorten tanker routes by thousands of miles. Ice-cap melting may be bad news for the polar bears in Manitoba, Canada, but it is great news for Pat Broe of Denver. When the ice melts in the Arctic, the polar predators have to search for new hunting grounds or starve -- but but Broe doesn't mind. He figures global warming will make him around $100 million a year.
  (Spiegel Online, January 2008)
• Google to Host Terabytes of Open-Source Science Data
  Sources at Google have disclosed that the humble domain, http://research.google.com, will soon provide a home for terabytes of open-source scientific datasets. The storage will be free to scientists and access to the data will be free for all. The project, known as Palimpsest and first previewed to the scientific community at the Science Foo camp at the Googleplex last August, missed its original launch date this week, but will debut soon.
  (Wired, January 2008)
• North American Birds Moving North As A Result Of Climate Change
  A new study led by an Auburn University researcher shows that the breeding ranges of North American birds have shifted northward coinciding with a period of increasing global temperatures. Alan Hitch, a doctoral student with AU's School of Forestry and Wildlife Sciences, along with his master's degree advisor, Paul Leberg, studied the breeding ranges of 56 bird species using data collected by the North American Breeding Bird Survey, a long-term, large-scale, international avian monitoring program initiated in 1966 to track the status and trends of North American bird populations.
  (Terradaily, January 2008)
• Warming forces Iditarod changes
  The modern challenges of global warming and population growth are catching up with the world's most famous sled dog race. Citing a warming climate and sprawling development, officials with the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race said Wednesday they were implementing permanent logistical changes that in recent years have become the norm for the March event.
  (Yahoo News, January 2008)
• Scientists Find Good News About Methane Bubbling Up From the Ocean Floor Near Santa Barbara
  Methane, a potent greenhouse gas, is emitted in great quantities as bubbles from seeps on the ocean floor near Santa Barbara. About half of these bubbles dissolve into the ocean, but the fate of this dissolved methane remains uncertain. Researchers at the University of California, Santa Barbara have discovered that only one percent of this dissolved methane escapes into the air -- good news for the Earth's atmosphere.
  (UCSB News, December 2007)
• Climate sanctions sought against US
  The Social Democrats are calling for sanctions on energy-intensive US export products if the Bush administration continues to obstruct international agreements on climate protection, the party's leading environmental specialist said yesterday. The move, after the United Nations climate conference last week in Bali, Indonesia, has won strong support from the Greens and other leftist groupings in the European Parliament. Those factions will renew their bid to impose such levies when the Parliament reconvenes next month.
  (The Boston Globe, December 2007)
• Global warming is pushing edges of tropics towards poles: study
  The greenhouse effect is causing Earth's zone of tropical climate to creep towards the poles, according to a study whose release on Sunday coincided with the eve of a major UN conference on climate change. The poleward expansion of the tropics will have far-reaching impacts, notably in intensifying water scarcity in the Mediterranean and the US "Sun belt" as well as southern Africa and southern Australia, it warns.
  (TerraDaily, December 2007)
• European Union Forests Expanding, Absorbing Carbon At Surprisingly High Rate
  European Union countries likely require an old ally -- Mother Nature and her forests -- to meet an ambitious post-Kyoto goal for cutting greenhouse gas emissions 20% by 2020, according to new research. The University of Helsinki study says that despite rising population and affluence, the EU can meet its obligations post-Kyoto (2012-2020). However, it will likely require more than energy savings, new technologies and mitigating non-CO2 gasses such as methane; partial credit for expansion of the region's forests could be decisive, say researchers Pekka E. Kauppi, Laura Saikku and Aapo Rautiainen, whose report, The Sustainability Challenge of Meeting Carbon Dioxide Targets in Europe by 2020, is published today in the peer-reviewed UK journal Energy Policy.
  (Science Daily, November 2007)
• Fever Outbreak Linked to Climate Change
  An outbreak in Europe of an obscure disease from Africa is raising concerns that globalization and climate change are combining to pose a health threat to the West. Nearly 300 cases of chikungunya fever, a virus that previously has been common only in Africa and Asia, were reported in Italy -- where only isolated cases of the disease had been seen in the past. "We were quite surprised," said Stefania Salmaso, director of Italy's Center for Epidemiology at the National Health Institute. "Nobody was expecting that such an unusual event was going to happen."
  (The New York Times, November 2007)
• 2007 Rainfall Patterns in United States
  The rainfall pattern across the United States during the first eight months of 2007 is a study in contrasts. Drought dominated both coasts, while the Great Plains states saw far more rain than average. The pattern is illustrated in this rainfall anomaly image, made from data from the near-real-time, Multi-satellite Precipitation Analysis at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.
  (NASA Earth Observatory Newsroom, November 2007)
• Tim Flannery broadcast on Climate Change (mp3 file)
  Leading Australian Scientist Tim Flannery on Global Warming and the Worsening Dangers of Climate Change Denial
  The above mp3 broadcast and interview transcript are with Tim Flannery, leading Australian scientist and climate change campaigner. He was named 2007 Australian of the Year. He is author of several books including "The Weather Makers: The History and Future Impact of Climate Change."
  (Radio program 'Democracy Now!', November 2007)
• Chinese coal plants cause health problems around the world
  It takes five to 10 days for the pollution from China's coal-fired plants to make its way to the United States, like a slow-moving storm. It shows up as mercury in the bass and trout caught in Oregon's Willamette River. It increases cloud cover and raises ozone levels. And along the way, it contributes to acid rain in Japan and South Korea and health problems everywhere from Taiyuan to the United States. This is the dark side of the world's growing use of coal.
  (CNN, November 2007)
• European Union moves to reduce aircraft emissions
  One of the boldest attempts by the European Union to impose its climate policy on other parts of the world received a boost Tuesday when legislators voted to strengthen a plan to cap carbon emissions from aircraft flying to and from Europe. The proposal mirrors an existing carbon credit trading system that the EU uses to combat global warming and meet its emissions targets under the Kyoto Protocol. Under the current system - which exempted airlines - governments set carbon dioxide limits for producers of power, cement, fuels, pulp and paper. Companies must then purchase credits if they exceed those targets.
  (International Herald Tribune, November 2007)
• The deceit behind global warming
  No one can deny that in recent years the need to "save the planet" from global warming has become one of the most pervasive issues of our time. As Tony Blair's chief scientific adviser, Sir David King, claimed in 2004, it poses "a far greater threat to the world than international terrorism", warning that by the end of this century the only habitable continent left will be Antarctica.
  (Telegraph, November 2007)
• German City Turns All its Power Green
  While the government announces more targets for saving energy and reducing CO2 emissions, the central German city of Kassel is the first German city to go completely green when it comes to power. The juice coming out of electrical sockets in the central German city of Kassel in the state of Hesse couldn't get any greener. As of Tuesday, Oct. 30, only electricity generated from renewable sources is surging through the power lines.
  (DW, November 2007)
• As temperatures rise, a greening of Greenland
  A strange thing is happening at the edge of Poul Bjerge's forest, a place so minute and unexpected that it brings to mind the teeny piece of land that Woody Allen's father carries around in the film "Love and Death." Its four oldest trees - in fact, the four oldest pine trees in Greenland, named Rosenvinge's trees after the Dutch botanist who planted them in a mad experiment in 1893 - are waking up. After lapsing into stately, sleepy old age, they are exhibiting new sprinklings of green at their tops, as if someone had glued on fresh needles.
  (International Herald Tribune, October 2007)
• Tower to gauge climate success
  Sensors will help show if Valley is reducing emissions quickly enough
  Scientists charged with determining if progress is being made under California's new anti-global warming law on Monday unveiled one way they will gather crucial independent information. Government and university scientists will rely on sensors along a 2,000-foot television tower rising from the tomato fields near Walnut Grove. The recently placed sensors will analyze the amount of carbon dioxide, methane and other greenhouse gases in the air. The data will help determine whether the state - or the Sacramento Valley at least - is reducing emissions fast enough. The new landmark state law requires that greenhouse gas emissions be reduced by 25 percent over the next dozen years.
  (Sacramento Bee, October 2007)
• Tiny Pacific islands say climate change threatens survival
  Some of the world's most vulnerable island nations appealed Monday for action to halt climate change that could cause them to disappear beneath the Pacific Ocean. Meeting in the Tongan capital, Nuku'alofa, the leaders of tiny nations including Kiribati, Tuvalu, Nauru, Niue, the Cook Islands and the Marshall Islands said countries responsible for greenhouse gas emissions must act. "It is very, very serious because if we don't do something now, we are gone. That's for sure," said the Premier of Niue, Young Vivian. "There's no two ways about it and we are scared."
  (TerraDaily, October 2007)
• Award Underlines Danger of Climate Change
  The Nobel Peace Prize committee made a powerful statement today that the consequences of increasing carbon emissions could be as dangerous as the ravages of war. The award to Al Gore and the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reflects a growing conviction on the part of scientists, politicians and economists that emissions and the global warming they produce will lead not only to more pollution but could also create economic mayhem, social upheaval and conflicts between nations or groups trying to survive in an increasingly hostile natural environment.
  (The New York Times, October 2007)
• All eyes on California climate-change fight
  Make big-rig trucks more aerodynamic. Allow docked ships to shut off engines and plug into electrical outlets. Require oil-change technicians to check tire pressure. Those measures and six more that California regulators will consider this month are among early actions in what will be a long, fiercely debated and politically perilous battle against global warming.
  (USA Today, October 2007)
• Greenhouse Gas Emissions Hit Danger Mark
  The global economic boom has accelerated greenhouse gas emissions to a dangerous threshold not expected for a decade and could potentially cause irreversible climate change, said one of Australia's leading scientists. Tim Flannery, a world recognized climate change scientist and Australian of the Year in 2007, said a U.N. international climate change report due in November will show that greenhouse gases have already reached a dangerous level.
  (The New York Times, October 2007)
• Arctic Melt Unnerves the Experts
  The Arctic ice cap shrank so much this summer that waves briefly lapped along two long-imagined Arctic shipping routes, the Northwest Passage over Canada and the Northern Sea Route over Russia. Over all, the floating ice dwindled to an extent unparalleled in a century or more, by several estimates. Now the six-month dark season has returned to the North Pole. In the deepening chill, new ice is already spreading over vast stretches of the Arctic Ocean. Astonished by the summer's changes, scientists are studying the forces that exposed one million square miles of open water - six Californias - beyond the average since satellites started measurements in 1979.
  (The New York Times, October 2007)
• China offers surprise hope in climate change fight
  Teenager Zhu Xiaotong's home a few hours' drive outside Beijing is a world away from the acrid air and snarling traffic jams that have come to dominate China's energy-hungry capital. Cherry tomatoes, capsicum and spring onions rise up from a little garden patch that forms the centrepiece of her family's brick courtyard home, while a solar panel heater ensures the Zhu's have warm water even in winter.
  (TerraDaily, October 2007)
• Vanishing ice worries West
  Accelerating Arctic melting could change weather patterns in region, bring less rain
  The Arctic Ocean is more than 3,000 miles from Southern California, but the rapid disappearance of sea ice at the top of the world could be altering weather patterns down here. Three years ago, computer forecast models predicted that in 2050, the reduced ice mass would cause climate shifts that would result in a drought in the western United States. But the ice is melting far faster than climatologists thought it would.
  (The San Diego Union Tribune, September 2007)
• Fight for the Top of the World
  At the end of august, a wisp of flame suddenly appeared in the Arctic twilight over the Barents Sea, bathing the low clouds over the Norwegian port of Hammerfest in a spectral orange glow. With a tremendous roar, the flame bloomed over the windswept ocean and craggy gray rocks, competing for an instant with the Arctic summer's never-setting sun. The first flare-off of natural gas from the Snohvit (Snow White in Norwegian) gas field, some 90 miles (145 km) offshore, was a beacon of promise: after 25 years of false starts, planning and construction, the first Arctic industrial oil-and-gas operation outside of Alaska was up and running. Norway's state-owned petroleum firm Statoil could finally exploit once unreachable reserves, expected to deliver an estimated $1.4 billion worth of liquefied natural gas each year for the next 25 years.
  (Time, September 2007)
• Greenhouse Earth: Methane powered runaway global warming
  Methane released from wetlands turned the Earth into a hothouse 55 million years ago, according to research released Wednesday that could shed light on a worrying aspect of today's climate-change crisis. Scientists have long sought to understand the triggers for an extraordinary warming episode called the Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), which occurred about 10 million years after the twilight of the dinosaurs.
  (Terra Daily, September 2007)
• Greenland' Jakobshavn glacier sounds climate change alarm
  The chaotic cavalcade of blueish ice tumbling into the sea from the world's fastest-moving glacier is sounding a daily climate change alarm, say scientists ahead of International Polar Day on Friday. The Jakobshavn Glacier, on Greenland's west coast, is melting twice as fast as 10 years ago and advancing toward the sea at 12 kilometres (seven miles) per year, compared with six kilometres (three and a half miles) before.
  (Terra Daily, September 2007)
• Labor Day heat wave may test Calif. power grid
  Utilities warn customers to keep conserving energy as demand soars
  Utilities urged customers to ease up on electricity use and officials opened cool shelters as California continued to swelter under a heat wave at the start of Labor Day weekend. Meanwhile, cloudbursts laced with lightning unleashed downpours in the mountains and deserts, leading to flash flood watches and warnings. Firefighters also watched for lightning-sparked wildfires.
  (MSNBC, September 2007)
• Frequency of Atlantic Hurricanes Doubled Over Last Century; Climate Change Suspected
  About twice as many Atlantic hurricanes form each year on average than a century ago, according to a new statistical analysis of hurricanes and tropical storms in the north Atlantic. The study concludes that warmer sea surface temperatures (SSTs) and altered wind patterns associated with global climate change are fueling much of the increase.
  (UCAR News Release, July 2007)
• A New Global Warming Video...From 1958
  Posted by Adam Howard
  This video contains scenes from the 1958 Frank Capra produced documentary "The Unchained Goddess", which had some startling predictions for the future.
  (AlterNet, July 2007)
• Hot and dry -- for decades
  By Glen M. MacDonald, professor of geography and ecology and evolutionary biology at UCLA
  If you like it hot and dry and live in Southern California, you could be in luck. Our combination of an arid winter, scorching summer and host of wildfires may not be a short-term aberration. Consider the possibility of decades of dry, hot weather, stretching from Southern California to the headwaters of the Sacramento and Colorado river systems - the lifelines that allow us to flourish in our arid to semi-arid landscape. That is the nature of a "perfect drought," and new research regarding a past episode of climate warming tells us we could be on the brink of a new one.
  (Los Angeles Times, July 2007)
• Scenarios of Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Atmospheric Concentrations; and Review of Integrated Scenario Development and Application
  The final reports for the scenarios of greenhouse gas emissions and atmospheric concentrations (part A) and global-change scenarios - their development and use (part B) have been released. These reports are part of 21 synthesis and assessment products called for in the Strategic Plan for the U.S. Climate Change Science Program. A scenario is a description of potential future conditions produced to inform decision-making under uncertainty. The scenarios in the reports explore the implications of alternative stabilization levels of anthropogenic greenhoues gases in the atmosphere, and they explicity consider the economic and technological foundations of such response options.
  (U.S. Climate Change Science Program, July 2007)
• Climate change brings early spring in the Arctic
  The Arctic spring is coming two weeks ahead of time compared to a decade ago, with birds, butterflies, flowers and small animals all appearing earlier in the year as a result of climate change.
  (The Independent, June 2007)
• Climate Change Adds Twist to Debate Over Dams
  The power company that owns four hydroelectric dams on the Klamath River says the dams provide a crucial source of so-called clean energy at a time when carbon emissions have become one of the world's foremost environmental concerns.
  (The New York Times, April 2007)
• An Arid West No Longer Waits for Rain
  A Western drought that began in 1999 has continued after the respite of a couple of wet years that now feel like a cruel tease. But this time people in the driest states are not just scanning the skies and hoping for rescue. Some $2.5 billion in water projects are planned or under way in four states, the biggest expansion in the West’s quest for water in decades. Among them is a proposed 280-mile pipeline that would direct water to Las Vegas from northern Nevada. A proposed reservoir just north of the California-Mexico border would correct an inefficient water delivery system that allows excess water to pass to Mexico.
  (The New York Times, April 2007)
• Legislature flooded with bills about climate crisis
  Poll-driven politicians see need to tackle global warming
  Few issues are hotter in the Capitol this year than global warming. Lawmakers have introduced more than 60 bills on the topic, and no wonder. Polls show widespread support among California voters for tackling climate change. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez received rock star-like affection worldwide for their work on landmark greenhouse gas legislation last year. And there is a seemingly infinite number of policy directions the state could take to lower carbon emissions.
  (San Francisco Chronicle, April 2007)
• Justices: EPA Can Control Car Emissions The Supreme Court ordered the federal government on Monday to take a fresh look at regulating carbon dioxide emissions from cars, a rebuke to Bush administration policy on global warming. In a 5-4 decision, the court said the Clean Air Act gives the Environmental Protection Agency the authority to regulate the emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases from cars.
  (San Francisco Chronicle, April 2007)
• NOAA Studies Causes of Catastrophic Urban Floods: Improve Forecasts and Better Understand 'Atmospheric Rivers' Researchers from the NOAA Earth System Research Lab are intensively monitoring air, water and soil in the American River basin between Reno, Nev., and Sacramento, Calif., through the end of March. Working closely with NOAA National Weather Service forecasters and hydrologists, scientists are improving predictions of California's heavy winter rains to help water resource managers prevent catastrophic flooding in the Sacramento region.
  (NOAA News Online, March 2007)
• Warm Winters Upset Rhythms of Maple Sugar
  One might expect Burr Morse to have maple sugaring down to a science. Vermont's maple sugaring industry goes back centuries. Samples of different grades of maple syrup rest on shelves at Burr Morse's farm in Montpelier. Tree sap is boiled down to make the syrup. For more than 200 years, Mr. Morse's family has been culling sweet sap from maple trees, a passion that has manifested itself not only in jug upon jug of maple syrup, but also in maple-cured bacon, maple cream and maple soap, not to mention the display of a suggestively curved tree trunk Mr. Morse calls the Venus de Maple. But lately nature seems to be playing havoc with Mr. Morse and other maple mavens. Warmer-than-usual winters are throwing things out of kilter, causing confusion among maple syrup producers, called sugar makers, and stoking fears for the survival of New England's maple forests.
  (The New York Times, March 2007)
• Dueling studies fuel global warming controversy
  One study says irrigation cools the San Joaquin Valley and may hide the effects of global warming. Another says irrigation warms things up, at least at night, and that a lack of such heating in other areas suggests widespread climate change has not arrived here. What's a nonscientist to believe? Outside observers say it may only be getting harder to determine the truth about global warming, one of the world's most controversial topics.
  (Recordnet, March 2007)
• Antarctic ice melt reveals exotic creatures
  Spindly orange sea stars, fan-finned ice fish and herds of roving sea cucumbers are among the exotic creatures spied off the Antarctic coast in an area formerly covered by ice, scientists reported Sunday. This is the first time explorers have been able to catalog wildlife where two mammoth ice shelves used to extend for some 3,900 square miles over the Weddell Sea.
  (CNN, February 2007)
• Paul Krugman: Colorless Green Ideas
  The factual debate about whether global warming is real is, or at least should be, over. The question now is what to do about it. There's nothing heroic about California's energy policy - but that's precisely the point. Over the years the state has adopted a series of conservation measures that are anything but splashy. They're the kind of drab, colorless stuff that excites only real policy wonks. Yet the cumulative effect has been impressive, if still well short of what we really need to do.
  (Welcome to Pottersville, February 2007)
• 46 Nations Back Body to Protect Planet
  Forty-five nations answered France's call for a new environmental body to slow inevitable global warming and protect the planet, perhaps with policing powers to punish violators. Absent were the world's heavyweight polluter, the United States, and booming nations on the same path as the U.S. China and India. The charge led by French President Jacques Chirac came a day after the release of an authoritative and disturbingly grim scientific report in Paris that said global warming is "very likely" caused by mankind and that climate change will continue for centuries even if heat-trapping gases are reduced. It was the strongest language ever used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, whose last report was issued in 2001.
  (ABC News, February 2007)
• Scientists offered cash to dispute climate study
  Scientists and economists have been offered $10,000 each by a lobby group funded by one of the world's largest oil companies to undermine a major climate change report due to be published today. Letters sent by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), an ExxonMobil-funded thinktank with close links to the Bush administration, offered the payments for articles that emphasise the shortcomings of a report from the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
  (Guardian Unlimited, February 2007)
• Ban traditional light bulbs? California eyes idea
  How many people does it take to change a light bulb? In California, the answer could be a majority of the Legislature as part of the state's groundbreaking initiatives to reduce energy use and greenhouse gases blamed for global warming. The "How Many Legislators Does it Take to Change a Light Bulb Act" would ban incandescent light bulbs by 2012 in favor of energy-saving compact fluorescent light bulbs.
  (MSNBC, January 2007)
• Mountain Views
  The Newsletter of the Consortium for Integrated Climate Research in Western Mountains (CIRMOUNT)
  The January 2007 edition of the CIRMOUNT newsletter has been released. This edition highlights several articles about climate research in the western mountains including:
  
  • Water Year 2006 -- Another 'Compressed' Spring in the Western United States?
  • Monitoring Alpine Plants for Climate Change: The North American GLORIA Project
  
  (January 2007)
• Bush administration in hot seat over warming
  The Democratic-controlled Congress on Tuesday stepped up its pressure on President Bush's global warming strategy, hearing allegations of new political pressure on government scientists to downplay the threat of global warming. Lawmakers received survey results of federal scientists that showed 46 percent felt pressure to eliminate the words "climate change", "global warming" or similar terms from communications about their work.
  (MSNBC, January 2007)
• Indonesia may lose 2,000 islands to warming
  Indonesia could lose about 2,000 islands by 2030 due to climate change, the country's environment minister said on Monday. "It is very, very serious," Rachmat Witoelar said at a media conference attended by Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the U.N. climate treaty secretariat.
  (MSNBC, January 2007)
• Pelosi seeks global warming committee
  House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (news, bio, voting record) sought to create a special committee Thursday in an effort to jump-start long-delayed government efforts to deal with global warming and produce a bill by Independence Day. Pelosi, D-Calif., said the committee would hold hearings and recommend legislation on how to reduce greenhouse gases, primarily carbon dioxide generated by fossil fuels, that most scientists blame for a gradual warming of the earth's climate.
  (Yahoo News, January 2007)
• A Century Later, Los Angeles Atones for Water Sins
  It may fall short of a feel-good sequel to 'Chinatown', the movie based on the notorious, somewhat shady water grab by Los Angeles that allowed the city to bloom from a semi-arid desert. But in one of the largest river restoration efforts in the West, water is again flowing along a 62-mile stretch of the Owens River after a dry spell of nearly a century.
  (The New York Times, January 2007)
• Middle Stance Emerges in Debate Over Climate
  Amid the shouting lately about whether global warming is a human-caused catastrophe or a hoax, some usually staid climate scientists in the usually invisible middle are speaking up.
  (The New York Times, January 2007)
• Schwarzenegger Remakes Himself as Environmentalist
  Governor Challenges GOP on Global Warming
  Arnold Schwarzenegger is not the type of guy you would necessarily associate with tree hugging. When he bought a Hummer in the early 1990s, it kicked off a nationwide craze for the gas-guzzling behemoths. His lighter-fluid-dowsed action flicks and protein-packed chest bespoke more of American excess than environmentalism, more violence than vegan. But as governor of California, Schwarzenegger has engaged in a savvy makeover, befitting a Hollywood star. He retooled one of his four Hummers to run on alternative fuels and is quickly fashioning himself into one of the most aggressively pro-environment governors in a state known for leading the nation on that issue.
  (The Washington Post, December 2006)
• U.S. wants polar bears listed as threatened
  The Bush administration has decided to propose listing the polar bear as threatened under the Endangered Species Act, putting the U.S. government on record as saying that global warming could drive one of the world's most recognizable animals out of existence.
  (The Washington Post, December 2006)
• Climate change: So where has all the snow gone?
  With trees bursting into bud and ski runs looking like spring meadows, the Alpine winter appears to have been cancelled. Midwinter's day may not fall until later this week, but spring already seems to have come to the roof of Europe.
  (The Independent, December 2006)