Bay Area Ecosystems Climate Change Consortium (BAECCC)

Climate Ark Climate Change & Global Warming RSS Newsfeed

02/22/2012 11:00 PM
India: Sacred natural sites and climate change threat
Hindustan Times: Sacred natural sites are areas of land or water having special spiritual significance. And the Eastern Himalayas is home to many such sites like Mount Kailash (Tibet), Lumbini (Nepal), Taksang (Bhutan), Gosaikunda (Nepal), Gurudongmar Lake (Sikkim). These sites besides having spiritual and religious significance also have biodiversity conservation value due to restrictions on cutting of trees and desecration of environment around them. Surveys have found high level of biodiversity in these areas....

02/22/2012 07:00 AM
Sea level rise poses flood risk
Delta Optimist: Planning needs to be done now to address the future sea level rise in South Delta, say researchers that provided ominous visuals of what could unfold. Current estimates have the sea level rise for South Delta at approximately 1.2 metres by 2100. However, at a science symposium in Vancouver on the weekend, a pair of researchers made a more dire prediction, contending the original estimates might be too conservative. David Flanders of the University of B.C and Simon Fraser University professor...

02/22/2012 06:29 AM
GOP Politicians Not Listening To Even Conservative Scientists On Climate Change
Think Progress: A number of prominent U.S. climate scientists who identify themselves as Republican say their attempts in recent years to educate the GOP leadership on the scientific evidence of man-made climate change have been futile. Now, many have given up trying and the few who continue notice very little change after speaking with politicians and their aides. "No GOP candidates or policymakers want to touch the issue, and those of us trying to educate them are left frustrated," Kerry Emanuel, an atmospheric...

02/20/2012 11:00 PM
Rick Santorum slams Obama’s “phoney climate theology”
Business Green: The prospect of US climate change policy and environmental regulations being completely dismantled if Republican presidential hopeful Rick Santorum wins this autumn's election was again underlined this week, when he launched a fresh attack on President Obama's efforts to tackle rising global temperatures. Santorum was this week asked to clarify a claim he made on Saturday that President Obama was following "some phony ideal, some phoney theology... not a theology based on the Bible". The right-wing...

02/22/2012 03:59 AM
Gleick hurt by ethics lapse over climate papers
San Francisco Chronicle: The latest national uproar over climate change science has damaged, if not ruined, the reputation of one of the Bay Area's most prominent scholars and raised serious questions about ethics during what has become a roiling political and ideological debate. Peter Gleick, a MacArthur Foundation fellow and co-founder and president of Oakland's Pacific Institute, admitted Monday that he had posed as someone else and obtained confidential internal papers from the Heartland Institute, a libertarian group...

02/22/2012 05:09 AM
Russian Heatwave Made More Likely by Climate Change
Guardian: The extreme Russian heatwave of 2010 was made three times more likely because of man-made climate change, according to a study led by climate scientists and number-crunched by home PC users. But the size of the event was mostly within natural limits, said the scientists, laying to rest a controversy last year over whether the extreme weather was natural or human-induced. A woman digs out potatoes from her former garden, ravaged by one of the hundreds of wildfires sparked during the 2010 Russian...

02/22/2012 06:00 AM
Climate sceptics may find fertile ground in US schools
New Scientist: THE political battle over whether human activity is changing Earth's climate is heading for US schools. A conservative organisation is working to develop teaching materials that sow doubt on the scientific consensus over climate change, according to documents leaked last week from the Heartland Institute, a libertarian think tank based in Chicago. What's more, a separate informal poll of nearly 2000 Earth science teachers suggests that a significant proportion may prove receptive to contrarian...

02/21/2012 11:51 PM
United Kingdom: Farmers warn food prices could go up because of drought
Telegraph: Peter Kendall, President of the National Farmers Union, said ongoing drought in the South East and Anglia, the "bread basket of Britain', will cut yields and force up prices. "As sure as night follows day if it doesn't rain, food prices will go up. I can guarantee you that,' he said. "If there is less water across bigger areas of northern Europe food will cost more money.' Drought-afflicted areas need 120 per cent of normal rainfall between now and March to avoid drought but the Met Office...

02/22/2012 12:54 AM
Cut all fossil-fuel use: scientists
Montreal Gazette: Two Canadian climate-change scientists from the University of Victoria say the public reaction to their recently published commentary has missed their key message: that all forms of fossil fuels, including the oilsands and coal, must be regulated for the world to avoid dangerous global warming. "Much of the way this has been reported is (through) a type of view that oilsands are good and coal is bad," said climate scientist Neil Swart, who co-wrote the study with fellow climatologist Andrew Weaver....

02/22/2012 02:00 AM
Inter-ministerial groups to fine-tune India's climate change stance
Times of India: In a consolidation of the Durban results, the environment and forests ministry has notified inter-ministerial groups that will advise on key elements of India's stance on climate negotiations for future. The groups, with officials from various ministries including power and renewable energy, will advise and guide the negotiating team through issues which are to be taken up through the year and at the full meeting of all countries in Qatar. The groups have been formed on three critical areas...

02/22/2012 02:55 AM
The Heartland Affair: A Climate Champion Cheats — and We All Lose
Time: Late last year, Peter Gleick -- the president of the Pacific Institute for Studies in Development, Environment and Security; and a respected expert on water-and-climate issues -- co-authored a paper on the American Geophysical Union's (AGU) task force on scientific ethics and integrity. Gleick and his co-author Randy Townsend of the AGU wrote that advancing scientific work to create a sustainable future would only be possible if scientists had the trust of the public and policymakers. And that trust,...

02/22/2012 02:58 AM
5 Years on, Heart of Borneo Faces Big Conservation Challenges
Jakarta Globe: In February 2007, the three countries that share Borneo, the world’s third-largest island, signed on to a conservation and sustainable forest development program initiated by the World Wildlife Fund to protect a vast swath of forest. Fives years on, officials concede that the Heart of Borneo program faces daunting challenges. In its latest status report on the area, the environmental organization notes that lowland forest in the 220,000-square-kilometer zone stretching across the island is under...

02/22/2012 04:22 AM
Russia fires first shot in EU aviation emissions trade war
Business Green: Simmering tensions between the EU and the group of countries opposed to the bloc's expansion of its emissions trading scheme (ETS) to include aviation increased further today, after officials signalled that the so-called "coalition of the unwilling" had agreed a package of retaliatory measures. Speaking following a meeting in Moscow of the group of 26 countries opposed to the new EU carbon pricing mechanism, Russia's deputy transport minister Valery Okulov told reporters diplomats had agreed a...

02/22/2012 05:02 AM
Forest clearing blamed on local govt
Jakarta Post: Local government officials may have accepted bribes from logging, mining and plantation companies in exchange for permission to clear forests, a top official has said. The Forestry Ministry’s director general of forestry business development, Iman Santoso, said bad governance had undermined efforts to halt Indonesia’s deforestation. “It’s possible it happens with bribery and permits, because as we know, if there is mismanagement in our natural forest it must be from be bad governance,” said Iman....

02/22/2012 05:35 AM
Tanzania: Norway suspends funding to WWF
Daily News: Norwegian Embassy Advisor, Mr Simon Milledge told the 'Daily News' on Tuesday that reports of fund mismanagement were revealed by the WWF last December. At the centre of the matter are two projects, one of which is Strengthening Capacity of Environmental civil society Organizations, worth over 25 million Norwegian Kroners (approx. 7bn/-) signed in April 2008. The second project to support implementation of REDD project (enhancing Tanzanian Capacity to Deliver short and Long term data on Forest...

02/21/2012 04:59 PM
From Rocky Flats to Fukushima: this nuclear folly
Guardian: In March 2011, novelist Kristen Iversen's memoir, Full Body Burden: Growing Up in the Nuclear Shadow of Rocky Flats, was waiting sedately among piles of other manuscripts at various publishing houses. Then, Japan was hit by a tsunami, and the cooling systems of the Fukushima nuclear reactor were overwhelmed, giving the world apocalyptic images of toxic floods and floating cars, of whole provinces made uninhabitable. Immediately, Iversen's book was auctioned, and the timing of its publication,...

02/21/2012 02:55 PM
All fossil fuels must be cut to avoid global warming, scientists say
Montreal Gazette: Two Canadian climate change scientists from the University of Victoria say the public reaction to their recently published commentary has missed their key message: that all forms of fossil fuels, including the oilsands and coal, must be regulated for the world to avoid dangerous global warming. "Much of the way this has been reported is (through) a type of view that oilsands are good and coal is bad," said climate scientist Neil Swart, who co-authored the study with fellow climatologist Andrew...

02/21/2012 03:42 PM
Iowa Scientists Call For State To Address Climate Change
KCRG: Forty-four scientists from 28 Iowa colleges and universities have issued a joint call for Iowa legislators to acknowledge and address climate change. The letter was sent to all Iowa legislators on Tuesday. It calls for candidates for public office at the national, state and local levels to acknowledge the overwhelming balance of evidence for the underpinning causes of climate change, to develop appropriate policy responses, and to develop local and statewide strategies to adapt to near-term changes...

02/21/2012 08:22 AM
GleickGate: Climate change activism takes a big step backward
Houston Chronicle: It`s been a few days since the controversial leak of internal Heartland Institute documents, which revealed what we already knew: This is a partisan organization keen on sowing dissent about the prevailing scientific view of climate change. However this story has taken an explosive turn as Peter Gleick has revealed himself as the originator of the documents. Writing on his blog, he says: At the beginning of 2012, I received an anonymous document in the mail describing what appeared to be details...

02/21/2012 11:10 AM
Prominent Climate Scientist Admits to Leaking Heartland Documents
LiveScience: A water and climate scientist with decades of research in his field has admitted to deceiving the free-market conservative Heartland Institute into leaking confidential documents about their donors, fundraising efforts and plans to spread doubt about climate change. Peter Gleick, the president of the Pacific Institute for Studies in Development, Environment, and Security in Oakland, Calif., issued a statement on the Huffington Post on Monday admitting to using a false name to trick Heartland into...