Industry Ignored Its Scientists on Climate

For more than a decade the Global Climate Coalition, a group representing industries with profits tied to fossil fuels, led an aggressive lobbying and public relations campaign against the idea that emissions of heat-trapping gases could lead to global warming.
“The role of greenhouse gases in climate change is not well understood,” the coalition said in a scientific “backgrounder” provided to lawmakers and journalists through the early 1990s, adding that “scientists differ” on the issue.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/24/science/earth/24deny.html?_r=1&em

Clean coal is future for energy supplies

Any new coal-fired power stations built in Britain will have to be fitted with cutting-edge technology to capture their carbon emissions, the Government announced yesterday in a revolution in energy policy.
The announcement, by the Energy and Climate Change Secretary Ed Miliband, outlined the first practical programme in the world to deploy carbon capture and storage, or CCS – the technological "fix" on which the world's chances of fighting climate change may come to depend.

http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/green-living/clean-coal-is-future-for-energy-supplies-1673412.html

SOUTHERN AFRICA: Climate Change to Shrink Agricultural Production by Half

Environmental researchers predict Southern Africa will be hit heavily by climate change over the next 70 years. Agricultural production is projected to be halved - a development that will threaten the livelihoods of farmers in a region where 70 percent of the population are smallholder farmers."We will be seriously affected by climate change in Southern Africa. Agriculture and biodiversity will experience a particularly negative impact," Dr Constansia Musvoto, researcher at South Africa’s Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), told members of the Southern African Confederation of Agricultural Unions (SACAU) at the organisation’s policy conference in Durban on Apr. 15 and 16.
http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=46582

SENEGAL: Can "green charcoal" help save the trees?

An environmental NGO in northern Senegal is about to go to market with "green charcoal" – a household fuel produced from agricultural waste materials to replace wood and charcoal in cooking stoves.
Given that Senegal's trees are disappearing, finding viable alternatives is a must, a Ministry of Energy official says. At least half of Senegal's 13 million people rely on wood and charcoal for household fuel, while 40 percent relying on petrol products like butane gas, the ministry says.
http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/IRIN/f7f65f55ddbf83ae5c5f151e122fe86a.htm

Climate change will overload humanitarian system, warns Oxfam

Emergency organisations could be overwhelmed within seven years by the rising number of people in poor countries affected by floods, droughts, heatwaves, wild fires, storms, landslides and other climate hazards.
Analysis by Oxfam International of the 6,500 climate-related disasters recorded since 1980 show that the numbers of people affected by extreme weather events, many of which are linked to climate change, has doubled in just 30 years and is expected to increase a further 54% to more than 375 million people a year on average by 2015. The figure does not include people hit by other disasters such as wars, earthquakes and volcanoes.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/apr/21/climate-change-natural-disasters

A movable border

ONCE frontiers were changed by armies. Now the job is done by global warming. Italy and Switzerland are preparing to make—or rather to recognise—alterations to the border that runs through the Monte Rosa massif of the Alps. Despite what romantically minded locals may say, the name of the massif has nothing to with the pink blush its peaks acquire at sunset. It comes from a dialect word meaning glacier.
http://www.economist.com/world/europe/displaystory.cfm?story_id=13496212

Going green: Algae viewed seen promising input for alternative fuels

As director of the National Algae Association, he is a leading advocate of curbing U.S. dependence on oil by harnessing the power of tiny, green waterborne plants known to most as pond scum.Though it may sound far-fetched, the idea has gained momentum in recent years.After decades of research, algae now is viewed as one of the most promising inputs for alternative fuels like biodiesel, as well as a potential way to capture carbon emissions from polluting factories.“No one has really looked at algae as a business opportunity until recently,” said Cohen, who runs the association from a home office in The Woodlands.
http://bioenergy.checkbiotech.org/news/going_green_algae_viewed_seen_promising_input_alternative_fuels

West Africa faces 'megadroughts'

Severe droughts lasting centuries have happened often in West Africa's recent history, and another one is almost inevitable, researchers say.
Analysis of sediments in a Ghanaian lake shows the last of these "megadroughts" ended 250 years ago.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8003060.stm

The World's Cleanest Countries

The declining health of Mother Earth has drawn growing attention over the last two decades, with countries coming together to fight a range of environmental threats, from declining fishing stocks to global warming.
Witness the Kyoto Protocol, the first widely adopted set of environmental protection guidelines, which emerged during the 1990s and took effect in 2005. Kyoto led to the development of the first large-scale emissions trading market, Europe's Greenhouse Gas Emission Trading Scheme, which puts caps on carbon dioxide pollution. A similar carbon market, the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, began operating at the start of this year in 10 Eastern U.S. states.

http://www.newsweek.com/id/194082

WEST AFRICA: Parliamentarians take on climate change

Some of the 50 parliamentarians from across West Africa attending a conference on climate change, and food and water security held in Dakar on 25 and 26 March, looked uncomfortable when presented with a picture of a banana with a watermelon-coloured peel and an elephant with a cabbage head. “This is what you think genetically modified organisms (GMO) look like, right?” asked the plant breeding expert, Marcel Galiba. “I want you to reconsider,” he challenged the lawmakers.
http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=83659

Study Finds a Pattern of Severe Droughts in Africa

For at least 3,000 years, a regular drumbeat of potent droughts, far longer and more severe than any experienced recently, have seared a belt of sub-Saharan Africa that is now home to tens of millions of the world’s poorest people, climate researchers reported in a new study.
That sobering finding, published in the April 17th issue of Science, emerged from the first study of year-by-year climate conditions in the region over the millenniums, based on layered mud and dead trees in a crater lake in Ghana. Although the evidence was drawn from a single water body, Lake Bosumtwi, the researchers said there was evidence that the drought patterns etched in the lakebed extended across a broad swath of West Africa.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/17/science/earth/17drought.html?ref=science

‘‘Climate Change Does Not Wait For Recessions’’

Lack of money and technical know-how makes it difficult for poor farmers to participate in the Kyoto Protocol’s carbon trading mechanism aimed at reversing global warming. Meanwhile, the global economic crisis may further undermine investment in carbon trade in African countries.The Kyoto Protocol, signed in 1997, allows for carbon trade which involves industrialised countries lowering their greenhouse gas emissions by financing emission reduction projects in developing countries where investment is cheaper. This is called the clean development mechanism (CDM).
http://www.ipsnews.net/africa/nota.asp?idnews=45957

Third-World Stove Soot Is Target in Climate Fight

“It’s hard to believe that this is what’s melting the glaciers,” said Dr. Veerabhadran Ramanathan, one of the world’s leading climate scientists, as he weaved through a warren of mud brick huts, each containing a mud cookstove pouring soot into the atmosphere.
As women in ragged saris of a thousand hues bake bread and stew lentils in the early evening over fires fueled by twigs and dung, children cough from the dense smoke that fills their homes. Black grime coats the undersides of thatched roofs. At dawn, a brown cloud stretches over the landscape like a diaphanous dirty blanket.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/16/science/earth/16degrees.html?_r=2&ref=world

Carbon trading won't stop climate change

ONE day renewable energy looks like a sunrise industry, the next, tumbleweeds are blowing around a setting solar panel. What has changed? The price of emitting carbon dioxide.
In 2005 the European Union created the world's first proper carbon market, the EU Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS), which compels highly polluting industries to buy permits to emit CO2. The number of permits is limited, so the idea is that supply and demand set a price that encourages the development of a low-carbon economy. A rising price with no wild fluctuations sends an economic signal to invest in clean energy. But it's not working.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20227046.200-carbon-trading-wont-stop-climate-change.html

CLIMATE CHANGE: Going Beyond the Carbon Market

With an incisive report in hand about what awaits Latin America and the Caribbean in the future if action is not taken to fight climate change, economist John Nash defends the role of the World Bank and underscores the need to expand the so-called "clean development mechanism".Nash, the World Bank's lead economist for the region, sets out a dramatic scenario for what lies ahead if no agreement is reached to replace the Kyoto Protocol on climate change - a treaty that has been in force since 2005 and expires in 2012. A new treaty is the goal of the Conference of Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, a 10-day event to take place in December in Copenhagen.
http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=46363