Al Gore has sought to inject fresh momentum into the Copenhagen build-up, saying he is certain Barack Obama will attend and predicting a rise in civil disobedience against fossil-fuel polluters unless drastic action is taken over global warming.
The world's carbon trading markets growing complexity threatens another "sub-prime" style financial crisis that could again destabilise the global economy, campaigners warn today.
In a new report, Friends of the Earth says that to date "cap and trade" carbon markets have done almost nothing to reduce emissions but have been plagued by inefficiency and corruption that render them unfit for purpose.
A giant mechanical digger gouges out a chunk of topsoil, grass and
tree stumps, extending a neat furrow that stretches into the distance.
Dozens of similar furrows run parallel with the regularity of a
ploughed field.
Yet no crop could grow in the pitch-black surface exposed by the
machine working 1,000ft below our helicopter. This is the edge of a
fast-expanding open-cast mine in the Canadian tar sands, one of the
world's most polluting sources of oil.
Lobbying groups for the energy companies and environmentalists have boosted their spending by double digits in a year because they knew that the US Senate would debate environmental legislation ahead of global climate change talks next month.
But science and specifics are hard to find in the barrage of ads and messages about green jobs, alternative energy and the dangers of pollution.
There is no point in denying it:
we're losing. Climate change denial is spreading like a contagious
disease. It exists in a sphere that cannot be reached by evidence or
reasoned argument; any attempt to draw attention to scientific findings
is greeted with furious invective. This sphere is expanding with
astonishing speed.
The snows of Mount Kilimanjaro will be gone within two decades, according to scientists who say that the rapid melting of its glacier cap over the past century provides dramatic physical evidence of global climate change.
If the forecast - based on 95 years of data tracking the retreat of the Kilimanjaro ice - proves correct it will be the first time in about 12,000 years that the slopes of Africa's highest mountain have been ice-free.
One of the world's leading climate change gurus urged people to become
vegetarian today, to help beat global warming.
Nicholas Stern, the author of an influential 2006 review of climate change,
said methane emissions from cows and pigs were putting "enormous pressure"
on the world and people needed to think about what they ate.
In 1992, I attended an event that filled me with hope.
Canada and the rest of the world had just signed a climate change treaty at the United Nations Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro.
I remember being optimistic that the world could come together to fight the greatest threat to our planet and our own survival. We had done it before in overcoming other threats, like defeating Nazism in Europe and beating back horrific diseases like polio.
It's an interesting phenomenon to live in a town where the level of
public vitriol over nearly every political question runs incredibly
high. Here in "high Sonoran" Arizona, we enjoy an amazingly diverse and
oftentimes starkly polarized topography -- you can go from snow-capped
peaks to wind-blown deserts in very short order -- and the cultural
landscape seems to follow suit when issues such as immigration, health
care, education, or warfare are raised in the public dialogue.
