News Blog

Reporters on the front lines of climate change ate locally grown food from biodegradable tableware at the annual Society of Environmental Journalists conference held at Stanford University last week .

Yet, they also boarded gas-guzzling, air-conditioned buses to tour Google's solar headquarters, green buildings in San Francisco and area ecosystems. The nonprofit Environmental Defense handed out folders about safeguarding the oceans. These came inside vinyl shoulder bags that stank of the same toxic chemicals that poison waterways. Most of some 900 attendees flew to the event in petroleum-powered planes to discuss how to report about imperiled ecosystems, from the big picture to the local level.

But don't be too hard on the journalists. Like anyone else, they (or we) are merely living on Earth in its current, carbon-gobbling state. The impracticality of being as green as green can get is just another inconvenient truth of postmodern life. And most other conventions fail even to serve up the corn-plastic forks.

To atone for air travel and other ungreen habits, you can buy endless carbon offsets. Even Burning Man partiers can pay for credits through the Cooling Man project. But rather than spewing carbon one day and planting trees and solar panels the next, why not stop polluting in the first place? Perhaps none of us should cast a stone in a glass greenhouse unless we plan to hold every professional rendezvous via videoconferencing, with all our Web sites and computers plugged into some green grid.

Instead, a flurry of eco-events this fall will invite participants from various far-flung locales to rack up their airline miles and meet in person. AlwaysOn Going Green is being held in Davis, Calif., this week, and at least three conventions related to green building happen around the country before Thanksgiving. Dwell on Design is this weekend, followed by West Coast Green. Al Gore will speak at the meeting of the American Society of Landscape Architects in October, near CNET's San Francisco headquarters. Bill Clinton will keynote Greenbuild in Chicago in November. (Absent from such rosters are politicians running for office, whose environmental platforms remain largely showy and shallow. If we truly must mend our wicked ways within a mere decade or two, then where's the green New Deal to match their rhetoric?)

There is sure to be a common message at all of these get-togethers: that the planet is in peril--but green goods and businesses can save the day! More products and services, such as hybrid taxis, are getting greener, although it takes time for them to become widespread. But the overwhelming message at the SEJ conference was clear that in these arctic ice cap-melting days, we possibly can't afford the time for glacial change--and the meaning of that phrase itself has quickened.

PALO ALTO, Calif.--Republican presidential candidate John McCain asked the technology sector for help fighting "Islamic extremism" and global warming at a conference here on Wednesday.

McCain said extremists are "taking advantage of cyberspace" in new ways that will require U.S. technologists to help find better tools to thwart their efforts.

The senator from Arizona also said he's convinced global warming is real. He thanked the gathering at the AlwaysOn Stanford Summit for their efforts in developing green technologies.

"We can have debate about how serious (climate change) is," McCain said, "but what will help us prevent further damage to the planet is people like you."

McCain is winging around the country as he tries to quell a recent firestorm of bad press. Reports that McCain's campaign coffers are running out of money and the exodus of several senior campaign leaders has apparently hurt his poll numbers.

The American Research Group released July presidential poll figures this week and they indicate that during the past month the senator has lost half his support in New Hampshire, the first primary state.

But in Silicon Valley, McCain was greeted warmly and was applauded several times.

There were a few murmurs when the senator said that if elected president, he would support greater adoption of nuclear energy--even if it was "in my backyard."

"Nuclear power is safe," McCain declared. "The French generate 80 percent of their energy from nuclear. We know how we all try to imitate the French."

McCain was partly kidding, but he was gravely serious when he said that reducing the country's reliance on foreign oil wasn't just good for the environment but that it also helped stop terrorism.

To prove his point, McCain spoke of a foiled plot to blow up a refinery in the Middle East, that had the plan succeeded, would have sent gas prices skyrocketing and would have certainly hurt the country's economy.

He was asked several times to provide details about how he would tackle global warming. His answer was to start by keeping the government out of the equation as much as possible.

"I would simply let 1,000 flowers bloom," he said. "I'd like 1,000 of the best and smartest people to compete and I'd fund their efforts."

Nobody's going to like this one. Liberals will feel attacked. Libertarians will nod glumly. Conservatives will feel they're being blamed for something that hasn't happened. And those who intend to ignore climate change will continue to accuse others of a conspiracy.

Peter Wells, a researcher in Cardiff, England, has published an article warning that climate change could lead to a global, militaristic totalitarian state. Here's where you can find the article, but it will cost money to see it all. So, a brief summary: Climate change will create severe challenges to numerous nations. It may prove impossible to get enough agreement among conflicting interests and countries to cope with the effects. Eventually, this may lead to more centralized, international government. That, the professor argues, is an open invitation to the military-environmental elite to gradually expand control.

Wells goes on to say, "A modern green junta is unlikely to arrive with tanks on the streets and the overnight capturing of control. Rather, it creeps upon us through multiple small steps--each one justified by 'necessity'." And Wells questions whether the slow-moving methods of democracy can cope with a global catastrophe.

Here's what his Web site says about the author: "Peter Wells has a degree in Geography from Leeds University, and an MSc in Town Planning from Cardiff University, while his PhD (also from Cardiff University) was on the subject of the socio-economic consequences of military R&D in the U.K. He joined the Centre for Automotive Industry Research at its inception in 1990 and has since specialised on economic, strategic and environmental aspects of the world automotive industry. He is particularly interested in small scale, decentralised economic organisation as a means to achieve sustainable consumption and production."

Of course, that's British spelling.

China is now No. 1. Not just in population. Nor just in economic growth among major nations. Not just in construction cranes or the building of coal-burning power plants. It's now the reigning champ of CO2 emissions. Despite the best efforts of numerous American utility companies and widespread use of air conditioning, SUVs and our own splurge in coal-burning, the United States has sunk to No. 2 in the CO2 derby.

The first to declare China the CO2 champ is the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency. Its estimates today show China put out 6,200 million tons of CO2 last year. The U.S. could only manage 5,800 tons. China's huge population gives it the CO2 lead because it still only produces 25 percent as much CO2 per capita as the U.S. This means continued economic growth for China will bring even more CO2.

The build-up of pollution from China has been foreseen, but topping the U.S. was expected to take a few more years. Back in 2005 air pollution over Beijing reached maximum measured levels. People were told to stay inside. NASA also reports China has high rates of respiratory disease and acid rain.

American efforts to produce more electricity and thus burn more coal remain prodigious. More than 100 new coal-burning plants are being proposed in the U.S. Even that'll not be enough to regain our CO2 emission lead.

The reason we care is not just daily health, or acid rain. CO2 is the leading greenhouse gas and worsens the global warming of the atmosphere.

We have 10 years, folks. And then it's man the lifeboats, or head for the hills. That's the conclusion of James Hansen and five other scientists. They've just published a paper with the Royal Society in England. It says melting ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctic could soon reach a point of no return. The team even says the recent reports from the United Nations' global warming conferences are too conservative in their projections of what could happen.

The paper urges quick and decisive action, including attempts to scrub greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. Hansen is outspoken and a favorite target of global warming disbelievers. In all fairness, Hansen's been at this climate change thing a long time. Back in 1999 he co-wrote an article on changing temperature patterns around the world. At that time his map showed the U.S. seemed to be cooling temporarily. He didn't try to jiggle the data.

Believe Hansen and his cohort, or diss them, we will soon see who's right. Scientists are actively tracking the ice sheets in Antarctic and those on Greenland where changes will be closely measured.

Time to re-write one little section in my Webster's Dictionary. That's an old-time thing, ink on paper, you remember? It gives the fifth definition of "glacial" as "as slow as the movement of a glacier." Need to change that to read "fast" in the future.

British researchers have found the movement of Antarctic's glaciers is speeding up. During the decade ending in 2003, these southern glaciers speed up by 12 percent. That means these huge rivers of ice are speeding toward the ocean. There three things can happen: the ice melts, it merges into an ice shelf or sloughs off to become a free-floating iceberg.

Antarctic is an enormous storehouse of water. This data on glacial speed not only redefines a word, it'll bring adjustments in the projections about global warming and the rise of sea levels.

We're not going to be the first generation of humans to cope with severe climate change. We may simply be the first to know just what's happening.

An international research team traced the growth of farming in Mexico's Iguala Valley. Their new report charts the rise of agriculture as the climate became warmer and wetter. Farming began after the last Ice Age. New lakes formed. Corn and squash were being regularly farmed 8,000 years ago. Then farming spread. Agricultural burning was used. Sixty-three hundred years ago domestic crops were plentiful. Forest clearing increased.

Then, around 1,800 years ago, the climate began to change. Iguala Valley became drier. That lasted until 900 years ago and matched the time of the decline of the classic Mayan civilization in that region. The research concludes that climate change could have led to social change. Are we paying attention?

U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) on Friday called for Congress to enact mandatory restrictions on carbon dioxide emissions by year's end.

At a news conference in Washington D.C. alongside Rep. Edward Markey (D-Mass.), the chairman of the Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming, Pelosi said that as part of a "Fourth of July energy independence package" of legislation, she said it is "absolutely essential" for the House to pass a European-style "cap-and-trade" proposal related to carbon dioxide. The compound, a greenhouse gas released into the atmosphere when fossil fuels like coal and petroleum are burned, is considered a major contributor to global warming.

In a cap-and-trade system, which Europe began adopting in January 2005 as part of the Kyoto Protocol on Climate Change, potential polluters must purchase credits on carbon-trading markets if their operations emit more than an allocated limit. The United States has already employed such an approach to combat sulfur dioxide emissions, which contribute to the phenomenon known as "acid rain."

Pelosi said she hopes a new bill will be introduced in June, although it was unclear what it would look like. Markey said politicians are still mulling the target percentage and timeframe by which the emissions must be reduced. (Europe, for instance, is aiming for a 20 percent carbon reduction by the year 2020.)

The politicians were fresh off a trip with a congressional delegation to England, Germany and Belgium to meet with foreign leaders about climate change issues and to learn from Greenland natives about the toll global warming has taken on their livelihood.

They also criticized President Bush for failing to endorse a mandatory cap in his announcement one day earlier about U.S. climate change policy. The G8 is scheduled to discuss mandatory caps as part of its summit in Germany next week.

In a speech Thursday, the president pledged that the United States would play a major role in global environmental policy and come up with a plan to reduce emissions by the end of 2008. He said the nation needs to focus on continued investments in alternative energy technologies, such as hydrogen-powered and electric vehicles.

"Yes, he says now he believes that global warming is happening and he accepts the science that it is," Pelosi said. "But if that were so, if he truly understood that, he could not have come up with a proposal that is aspirational."

Markey went a step further, calling the plan not just aspirational but "procrastinational."

A new scientific study funded by NASA shows that there will be even more rain and snowfall due to global warming. This latest data indicates that rain could increase as much as 13 percent over the next century. The recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicted a maximum rainfall increase of 8 percent. So this new satellite-based data may lead to rejiggering currently used climate change models.

The whole report is now available online. You have to pay, or be a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) to access the complete PDF.

Don't expect this new data to mean Phoenix will become a rainforest. Previous predictions still hold: wet places will get wetter, and more intense storms. Dry areas like the southwestern United States will likely get even dryer. Even though global warming is expected to put more moisture into the atmosphere, it won't be evenly distributed.