2009 to be one of warmest years on record: researchers

LONDON (Reuters) - Next year is set to be one of the top-five warmest on record, British climate scientists said on Tuesday.

The average global temperature for 2009 is expected to be more than 0.4 degrees celsius above the long-term average, despite the continued cooling of huge areas of the Pacific Ocean, a phenomenon known as La Nina.

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Navy, environmentalists settle sonar lawsuit

HONOLULU - The Navy has settled a lawsuit filed by environmentalists challenging its use of sonar in hundreds of submarine-hunting exercises around the world.

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Responses to plastic pollution

After seeing through the dreadful negative effects, movements have already been launched against plastic pollution. For instance, a United States law, implementing an international agreement called MARPOL Annex V, became effective on December 31, 1988. It prohibits the disposal of plastics into the marine environment and requires ports to provide reception facilities for ship-generated plastic wastes.

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A Japanese Town That Kicked the Oil Habit

Shin Abe doesn't find it odd that the picturesque little Japanese town of Kuzumaki, where he has lived all his life, generates some of its electricity with cow dung. Nor is the 15-year-old middle school student blown away by the vista of a dozen wind turbines spinning atop the forested peak of nearby Mt. Kamisodegawa. And it's old news to Abe that his school gets 25% of its power from an array of 420 solar panels located near the campus. "That's the way it's been," he shrugs. "It's natural."

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Warmer oceans would fuel more thunderstorms

SAN FRANCISCO -- Inhabitants of the tropics can expect to see more severe storms if sea-surface temperatures in the region continue to rise as Earth’s climate changes.

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Eco-Friendly Wood for the Greater Good

If you are planning a home improvement project, chances are you’ve spent some time thinking about how to make that project a green one. You’ve probably starting thinking about countertops or tile made from recycled material, no-VOC paints, and Energy Star lighting, appliances and windows. But have you thought much about one of most basic but critical parts of your project, the wood you use?

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The big melt: 2 trillion tons of ice gone since '03

WASHINGTON - More than 2 trillion tons of land ice in Greenland, Antarctica and Alaska have melted since 2003, according to new NASA satellite data that show the latest signs of what scientists say is global warming.

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Obama focuses on alternative energy, environment

CHICAGO (Reuters) - Insisting on the need to develop new forms of energy, U.S. President-elect Barack Obama on Monday chose as his energy secretary a Nobel physics laureate who is a major promoter of alternative fuels.

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Calif. adopts sweeping global warming plan

SACRAMENTO, Calif. - California air regulators on Thursday approved a climate plan that would require the state's utilities, refineries and large factories to transform their operations to cut greenhouse gas emissions.

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Climate change may cause more coral extinction: study

POZNAN, Poland (Reuters) - The world has lost about a fifth of its corals and many of the remaining reefs could die in the next 20 to 40 years unless humans reduce greenhouse gas emissions, a report said on Wednesday.

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Newest Source of Biofuel: Fungus

It was recently discovered that a fungus found in the Patagonian Rain Forest in South America could potentially be used to fuel vehicles in the future. Yes, you heard right - Patagonian fungus, the next biofuel.

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Obama Embraces 'Green Path' in Stimulus Plan to Aid Environment

Dec. 2 (Bloomberg) -- President-electBarack Obama is considering a stimulus package that will include a heavy dose of spending on environmentally friendly projects aimed at creating “green-collar jobs”? and saving energy.

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Honey bee crisis threatens English fruit farmers

LONDON (Reuters) - Where in the United States, fruit farmers pay to have bees trucked thousands of miles to pollinate their crops and in parts of China, humans with feather dusters have taken on the task, in Britain most bees go nature's way.

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Experts warn of severe water shortages by 2080

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia - Half the world's population could face a shortage of clean water by 2080 because of climate change, experts warned Tuesday.

Wong Poh Poh, a professor at the National University of Singapore, told a regional conference that global warming was disrupting water flow patterns and increasing the severity of floods, droughts and storms — all of which reduce the availability of drinking water.

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Reasons to save the forests

A Vancouver-based company that repairs broken ecosystems sees a bright future in carbon offsets.

Robert Falls, CEO of Ecosystem Restoration Associates Inc., says he believes that his firm will get a major boost from a September meeting in New York -- Protecting Rainforest Communities and Our Climate, which focused on the impact of deforestation on global warming.

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Himalayan glaciers may disappear by 2035

The glaciers in the Himalayas are receding faster than in any other part of the world and, if the present rate continues, a large number of them may disappear by 2035 because of climate change, warn Indian and foreign environmentalists and geologists.

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Electric car owners use creativity to plug in

SEATTLE - Owning an electric vehicle requires more than global-cooling ambitions. It takes guile, planning, sharp vision, a silver tongue — and a 50-foot extension cord.

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A Lesson In Changing Light Bulbs

In recent days the news poured in from all corners of the earth; many, many countries are going to force their citizens to change their light bulbs. No joke - 27 countries in Europe, Australia, Canada, Cuba and the Philippines are all eliminating incandescent light bulbs as early as 2010 and replacing them by fluorescent bulbs. And the US 2008 energy bill phases out filament light bulbs for traditional use starting 2012 with an official ban effective in 2014.

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Environment will wither whoever wins US election

Eager anticipation of the next American president offering a dramatically different policy on climate change is being tempered by the chill winds of the financial crisis.

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Argentina makes environmental insurance a must

BUENOS AIRES (Reuters) - Argentine officials said on Thursday theirs is the first government worldwide to require that companies engaged in potentially hazardous activities buy insurance to cover environmental damage.

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Global warming getting political cold shoulder in U.S. amid economic woes

WASHINGTON - The global economic crisis has thrown a political chill over one of the main initiatives under consideration in the United States to combat global warming: the so-called cap-and-trade plan.

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Global Warming Triggers an International Race for the Arctic

A new epoch is beginning at the top of the Earth, where the historic melting of the vast Arctic ice cap is opening a forbidding, beautiful, and neglected swath of the planet. Already, there is talk that potentially huge oil and natural gas deposits lie under the Arctic waters, rendered more accessible by the shrinking of ice cover. Valuable minerals, too. Sea lanes over the top of the world will dramatically cut shipping times and costs. Fisheries and tourism will shift northward. In short, the frozen, fragile north will never be the same.

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Starbucks Wastes Millions of Litres of Water a Day

Environmental campaigners have attacked Starbucks after the discovery that millions of litres of water are wasted in its coffee shops every day, contradicting its much-boasted green credentials.

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Expert: 99 percent of Alaska glaciers in decline

Most of Alaska's glaciers are retreating or thinning or both, a new book by the U.S. Geological Survey reports.

About 5 percent of Alaska's area is covered by more than 100,000 glaciers — that's about 29,000 square miles (75,000 square kilometers), or more than the entire state of West Virginia.

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A cleaner way to get drinking water from seas?

David Kreamer's vision is to return old ships to the seas where they belong. But he'd like to see them fulfill a new purpose: turning seawater into drinking water through desalination facilities installed aboard.

According to Kreamer, a geoscientist at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, hundreds of mothballed military and private ships could be well adapted as mobile desalination plants.

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Ike leaves debris on miles of Texas beaches

PADRE ISLAND NATIONAL SEASHORE, Texas - The world's longest undeveloped barrier island now looks as if people have been living — and dumping — on it for decades.

Tons of debris swept up by Hurricane Ike last month were carried by Gulf of Mexico currents hundreds of miles from the upper Texas coast to this ordinarily pristine landscape just north of the Mexican border.

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Houston joins L.A. in severe-smog club

HOUSTON - Houston has joined Los Angeles to become the second place in the U.S. classified as having a severe smog problem, the Environmental Protection Agency said Thursday.

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Weather History Offers Insight Into Global Warming

NEW PALTZ, N.Y. — It is probably a good thing that the Mohonk Mountain House, the 19th-century resort, was built on Shawangunk conglomerate, a concrete-hard quartz rock. Otherwise, the path to the National Weather Service’s cooperative station here surely would have turned to dust by now.

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Beetles can bug our weather, experts find

The current scourge of the Rocky Mountain region — the mountain pine beetle — has been decimating lodgepole pine populations, leaving millions of acres of dead trees in its wake throughout western North America.

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Firms warned about climate change

Companies that fail to tackle climate change could lower the value of their businesses, a report by the UK's Carbon Trust suggests.
The report said firms, together are worth £3.8 trillion ($7 trillion) globally, could boost market value by taking steps to tackle emissions.

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Old-growth forests important carbon sinks, says study

The Commission has rejected the notion that farmers should implement river basin management schemes in exchange for agricultural subsidies, despite increasing fears over water shortages and droughts.

The international group of scientists' findings indicate that old-growth forests in the northern hemisphere account for at least 10% of global net uptake of carbon dioxide. This contrasts with the commonly accepted view that these forests are carbon neutral, a hypothesis based mainly on a single study from the 1960s.

The new research builds on 519 plot studies and shows that carbon accumulation continues in forests that are centuries old. Nevertheless, the Kyoto Protocol does not call for forests to be left intact, instead demanding changes to the carbon stock by afforestation, reforestation and deforestation.

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Rare rhinos endangered by loss of habitat

South Asia's endangered Great One-horned Rhinoceros is being driven out of its natural habitat in search of food into the hands of illegal poachers, experts said on Thursday.

A meeting of the Asian Rhino Specialist Group in Nepal said that the massive animal's feeding grounds were being invaded by "exotic species" of weeds and wild plants and the rhino could soon run out of natural fodder.

"Grassland is being invaded by weeds and other unwanted plants that are not suitable for rhinos," Bibhab Kumar Talukdar, co-chairman of the group said from the Chitwan National Park, home to 408 rhinos.

"We have to concentrate on how best to control the weeds and for this we have to intensify research."

The endangered animal, whose numbers have been rising in Nepal and India, is found mostly in the northeastern Indian state of Assam, and in southwestern Nepal.

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