Monthly Archives: February 2007
Climate Expert Urges China, US to Talk on Warming
Reuters: China and the United States, key to tackling the climate crisis, are both acting on global warming and must start giving each other credit for it, former World Bank chief economist Nicholas Stern said on Tuesday. Stern, who produced a seminal report last October on the economics of climate change, said the [...]
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China Parliament to Focus on Missed Environment Aims
Reuters: Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao is likely to give priority to meeting energy saving targets at the annual session of parliament which opens next week, after the country failed to meet last year’s goals. China cut its energy per unit of gross domestic product, or energy intensity, by 1.23 percent last year, the [...]
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Six Million Chinese Face Water Shortages
Reuters: A severe drought in southwestern China is threatening the water supplies of six million people in the crowded metropolis of Chongqing, Xinhua news agency said on Wednesday. The city faces an acute water shortage in early March due to a continuing drought along the Yangtze River, the agency said citing a local [...]
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Britain Accepts Binding EU Renewables Target – Aide
Reuters: Britain has dropped resistance to a mandatory European Union target of drawing 20 percent of power from renewable sources by 2020 and expects EU leaders to set that goal next week, a British official said on Wednesday. Britain was one of several countries, including prominently France, which opposed making legally binding the [...]
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U.N. Conservation Body Says Africans Split over Ivory Trade
Associated Press: African countries are divided over banning or controlling international ivory trading, but need to reach a common position if they are to ensure the survival of the continent’s elephants, a U.N. panel said Wednesday. David Morgan, chief scientific officer at CITES, said African countries have filed three ivory proposals before the [...]
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Moscow Tells Residents to Change Their Light Bulbs
Reuters: Russia has launched its first major energy awareness campaign since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, bringing an unfamiliar sight to Moscow’s streets: billboards urging people to switch to energy-saving light bulbs. But Muscovites are not being encouraged to go green to save the planet. Moscow’s government has [...]
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Merkel Grabs Climate Change Baton from Blair
Reuters: Angela Merkel has pushed global warming to the top of her international agenda in a bet that rising public awareness and her close ties to Washington can help deliver results that have proved elusive in past years. The German chancellor has put aggressive action to curb greenhouse gases, which scientists say are [...]
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Scientists Offer Plan to U.N. for Civilization to Rise to Climate Challenge
Associated Press: To head off the worst of climate change, governments must pour tens of billions of dollars more than they are into clean-energy research and enforce sharp rollbacks in fossil-fuel emissions, an expert scientific panel reported to the United Nations on Tuesday. The U.N. itself must better prepare to help tens of [...]
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United Kingdom: Winter’s warmer again this year
Sun: THIS winter has been the second warmest since records began 350 years ago, figures have shown. Temperatures averaged 6.5°C (43.7°F) in England and Wales from December to February. The only warmer winter was 1868/69 when temperatures averaged 6.8°C (44.2°F). The main reason has been winds from the south bringing in [...]
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Warming, sea level rise threaten 42 million Brazilians: study
Xinhua: The average temperature in Brazil can rise by four degrees Celsius by the year 2100 and is expected to prompt a sea level rise of half a meter and threaten 42 million Brazilians who live in coastal areas, according to a report released by the Environment Ministry on Tuesday. The report was [...]
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Study: ‘Tipping point’ for climate is near
USA Today: Declaring there is "no more time for delay," an international panel of scientists urged the world’s nations Tuesday to stave off climate-change "catastrophe" by boosting clean-energy research and sharply cutting industrial emissions that fuel global warming. Otherwise, Earth this century could cross a climate threshold or "tipping point that could lead to [...]
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States make pact to cut greenhouse gases
Telegraph (UK): Exasperated by what they see as federal inaction over global warming, governors of five western American states have come together to pledge a significant reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. Arizona, California, New Mexico, Oregon and Washington will develop a regional pact to cut greenhouse gases and create a market-based programme to help [...]
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Malaysia: Sabah palm oil industrial projects: ‘Minimal effect on mangrove swamps’
New Straits Times: The development of two palm oil industrial cluster zones in the east coast of Sabah will overflow into some 1,000ha of protected mangrove swamps. The majority of the palm oil industrial clusters (POIC) in Lahad Datu and Sandakan, however, will be outside the boundaries of some 40,000ha of mangrove swamps that [...]
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Climate pact is “no post-Kyoto answer”
Reuters: A six-nation alliance of big polluters drawing in China, Japan, the U.S. and India was not the answer to the search for a wider post-Kyoto pact to combat global warming, Britain’s top climate diplomat said on Tuesday. The American-led Asia-Pacific Partnership for Clean Development and Climate, which also includes Australia and South Korea, [...]
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Developing Nations Hit Back on Climate Change