BUENOS AIRES - Drought could parch close to 70 percent of the planet's soil by 2025 unless countries implement policies to slow desertification, a senior United Nations official has warned.
"If we cannot find a solution to this problem... in 2025, close to 70 percent could be affected," Luc Gnacadja, executive secretary of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification, said Friday.
Carbon-dioxide emissions are turning the waters of the Arctic Ocean into acid at an unprecedented rate, scientists have discovered. Research carried out in the archipelago of Svalbard has shown in many regions around the north pole seawater is likely to reach corrosive levels within 10 years. The water will then start to dissolve the shells of mussels and other shellfish and cause major disruption to the food chain. By the end of the century, the entire Arctic Ocean will be corrosively acidic.
Great Lakes water levels could drop by up to two feet by the turn of the century as temperatures rise, according to a recent series of reports released by the Union of Concerned Scientists.
The water decline is a response to global climate change, according to the report by the group of scientists and citizens that advocates for science-based solutions to environmental problems. Warming temperatures reduce ice cover and increase evaporation. Lake Huron and Lake Michigan are projected to have the greatest changes.
This week, Sens. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) and John Kerry (D-Mass.) introduced a new piece of climate legislation, and agriculture once again is expected to be at the center of debate as the bill moves forward. The new legislation is a complement to the Waxman-Markey climate bill the House passed last June, a bill that placed agriculture in a potentially perilous position. The Boxer-Kerry legislation now threatens to do the same, a move that could be bad for farmers, eaters, and the planet.
The
global discussion on climate change has quickly degenerated into a north-south confrontation, for perhaps obvious reasons. On average, carbon emissions per capita in the developed world are about five times those in developing countries.
WASHINGTON - President Barack Obama's
drive to fight global warming got a boost on Wednesday as Democrats in
the U.S. Senate unveiled a bill aimed at slashing greenhouse gas
emissions in the next four decades.
The plan aims to cut carbon dioxide and other pollutants by
encouraging broader use of solar, wind and other renewable fuels in
place of dirtier ones such as oil.
Twenty-five million more children will go hungry by the middle of this century as climate change leads to food shortages and soaring prices for staples such as rice, wheat, maize and soya beans, a report says today.
If global warming goes unchecked, all regions of the world will be affected, but the most vulnerable - south Asia and sub-Saharan Africa - will be hit hardest by failing crop yields, according to the report, prepared by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) for the World Bank and Asian Development Bank.
SYDNEY - The "Number of Living Species in Australia and the World" study found 0.9 percent of the world's 1.9 million classified species were at threat, including 9.2 percent of major vertebrate species.
Australia's government-funded Biological Resources Study, the world's only census of animal and plant life, found 20.8 percent of mammals were endangered, as were 12.2 percent of birds and 29.2 percent of amphibians.
Of reptiles, 4.8 percent were considered threatened, along with 4.1 percent of fish species.
Exelon, one of the country's largest utilities, said Monday that it would quit the United States Chamber of Commerce because of that group's stance on climate change. It was the latest in a string of companies to do so, perhaps a harbinger of how intense the fight over global warming legislation could become.
"The carbon-based free lunch is over," said John W. Rowe, Exelon's chief executive. "Breakthroughs on climate change and improving our society's energy efficiency are within reach."
BANGKOK - Delegates at the start of marathon climate talks in Thailand on Monday were told to speed up "painfully slow" negotiations as they struggle to settle on the outline of a tougher pact to fight global warming.
The Bangkok talks, which run until October 9, is the last major negotiating round before a gathering in Copenhagen in December that the United Nations has set as a deadline to seal a broad agreement on a pact to expand and replace the Kyoto Protocol.
