UN climate talks kick off in Bonn

The latest round of international climate change talks commenced today with the now perennial warning about the need for greater urgency from governments as they battle to curb global greenhouse gas emissions.

Speaking at the opening of the annual week of talks, which are intended to lay the ground work for the UN's next major climate summit in Poland later this year, the head of

Everest Ice Shrinking Fast, Scientists and Climbers Say

Everest isn't the same mountain it was when Jim Whittaker became the first U.S. climber to summit the peak in 1963. The world's highest peak has been shedding snow and ice for the past 50 years, possibly due in part to global warming, new research says. (Take an Everest quiz.)

New analyses show Mount Everest has lost significant snow and ice cover over the past half century. In nearby Sagarmatha National Park,

Wind Energy’s Shadow: Turbines Drag Down Power Potential

As seemingly limitless as the air that swirls around us, wind has proven to be the world's fastest-growing source of renewable energy. Backers suggest wind power can continue growing as quickly as companies can raise turbines to capture it.


But some scientists are challenging that assumption, arguing that the laws of physics will limit wind's potential for meeting the world's energy needs. The controversy arises from the turbines themselves. "As soon as you start to put turbines into the wind, you start to change the resource," said Amanda Adams, a meteorologist who conducts atmospheric modeling at the University of North Carolina Charlotte. (See related quiz: "What You Don't Know About Wind Energy.")

Safe drinking water disappearing fast in Bangladesh

The availability of safe drinking water, particularly in Bangladesh's hard to reach areas, is expected to worsen as the country experiences the effects of climate change, experts say.

According to a study by the World Bank's water and sanitation programme (pdf), about 28 million Bangladeshis, or just over 20% of the population, are living in harsh conditions in the "hard-to-reach areas" that make up a quarter of the country's landmass. The study found that char – land that emerges from riverbeds as a result of the deposit of

Grand Canyon uranium mining set to go ahead despite ban from Obama

Uranium mining on the doorstep of the Grand Canyon national park is set to go ahead in 2015 despite a ban imposed last year by Barack Obama.
Energy Fuels Resources has been given federal approval to reopen its old Canyon Mine, located six miles south of the canyon's popular South Rim entrance, that attracts nearly 5 million visitors a year.

Climate change experts head to “adaptation capital of the world”

Bangladesh may be among the countries most vulnerable to climate change but it is also to one that has done most to adapt to the impacts ahead, according to the organisers of an international conference that takes place there next week.

 

Bangladesh's Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina will open the conference and Mary Robinson, the former President of Ireland, will give the keynote speech in the closing session.

The 7th International Conference on Community Based Adaptation to Climate Change takes place in Dhaka on 22-25 April, and will be managed by the International Institute for Environment and

Four actions to reduce the ‘forest footprint’ of commodities

Consumer demand for palm oil is growing fast. It ends up in food products, cosmetics and biodiesel, with demand set to double by 2030. With this expansion leading to large-scale deforestation, how do we reduce the forest footprint of commodities like palm oil, and increase demand for ‘deforestation-free’ ones?

Palm oil on sale in a market in west Africa. Demand for palm oil, which ends up in food products, cosmetics and biodiesel, is set to double by 2030. Photo: IITA Image Library.  
There are a number of measures available to reduce deforestation and limit the forest footprint of commodities. Some of these include: legislation to restrict illegally-sourced imports, improving

Ethiopia: Can it adapt to climate change and build a green economy?

Despite the challenges, Ethiopia hopes to capitalise on its current economic growth by becoming more resilient to the impacts of climate change while developing its economy in a carbon neutral way.

A house in Rema, Ethiopia gets fitted with solar panels. The Ethiopian government wants the country to achieve middle-income status by 2025 in a carbon neutral way. Photo: Stiftung Solarengie 
Climate change poses a huge challenge to Ethiopia’s government and people. The country is faced with increasingly unpredictable rains, and sometimes the complete failure of seasonal rains –

In Sign of Warming, 1,600 Years of Ice in Andes Melted in 25 Years

Glacial ice in the Peruvian Andes that took at least 1,600 years to form has melted in just 25 years, scientists reported Thursday, the latest indication that the recent spike in global temperatures has thrown the natural world out of balance.

The evidence comes from a remarkable find at the margins of the Quelccaya ice cap in Peru, the world’s largest tropical ice sheet. Rapid melting there in the modern era is uncovering plants that were locked in a deep freeze when the glacier advanced many thousands of years ago.

Dating of those plants, using a radioactive form of carbon in the plant tissues that decays at a known rate, has given scientists an unusually precise method of determining the history of the ice sheet’s margins. 

Lonnie G. Thompson, the Ohio State University glaciologist whose team has worked intermittently on the Quelccaya ice cap for decades, reported the findings in a paper released online Thursday by the journal Science. 

The paper includes a long-awaited analysis of chemical tracers in ice cylinders the team recovered by drilling deep into Quelccaya, a record that will aid scientists worldwide in reconstructing past climatic variations. 

Such analyses will take time, but Dr. Thompson said preliminary evidence shows, for example, that the earth probably went through a period of anomalous weather at around the time of the French Revolution, which began in 1789. The weather presumably contributed to the food shortages that exacerbated that upheaval. 

“When there’s a disruption of food, this is bad news for any government,” Dr. Thompson said in an interview. 

Of greater immediate interest, Dr. Thompson and his team have expanded on previous research involving long-dead plants emerging from the melting ice at the edge of Quelccaya, a huge, flat ice cap sitting on a volcanic plain 18,000 feet above sea level. 

Several years ago, the team reported on plants that had been exposed near a meltwater lake. Chemical analysis showed them to be about 4,700 years old, proving that the ice cap had reached its smallest extent in nearly five millenniums. 

In the new research, a thousand feet of additional melting has exposed plants that laboratory analysis shows to be about 6,300 years old. The simplest interpretation, Dr. Thompson said, is that ice that accumulated over approximately 1,600 years melted back in no more than 25 years. 

“If any time in the last 6,000 years these plants had been exposed for any five-year period, they would have decayed,” Dr. Thompson said. “That tells us the ice cap had to be there 6,000 years ago.”

Meredith A. Kelly, a glacial geomorphologist at Dartmouth College who trained under Dr. Thompson but was not involved in the new paper, said his interpretation of the plant remains was reasonable.

Her own research on Quelccaya suggests that the margins of the glacier have melted quite rapidly at times in the past. But the melting now under way appears to be at least as fast, if not faster, than anything in the geological record since the end of the last ice age, she said. 

Global warming, which scientists say is being caused primarily by the human release of greenhouse gases, is having its largest effects at high latitudes and high altitudes. Sitting at high elevation in the tropics, the Quelccaya ice cap appears to be extremely sensitive to the temperature changes, several scientists said. 

“It may not go very quickly because there’s so much ice, but we might have already locked into a situation where we are committed to losing that ice,” said Mathias Vuille, a climate scientist at the State University at Albany in New York. 

Throughout the Andes, glaciers are now melting so rapidly that scientists have grown deeply concerned about water supplies for the people living there. Glacial meltwater is essential for helping Andean communities get through the dry season. 

In the short run, the melting is producing an increase of water supplies and feeding population growth in major cities of the Andes, the experts said. But as the glaciers continue shrinking, trouble almost certainly looms. 

Douglas R. Hardy, a University of Massachusetts researcher who works in the region, said, “How much time do we have before 50 percent of Lima’s or La Paz’s water resources are gone?”

Asia forges ahead on climate change adaptation

THE 3rd Asia Pacific Adaptation Forum was held in Incheon, Korea from March 18 to 20 with over 700 participants from across the region, including government officials, NGOs, researchers and regional and international organisations. It was hosted by the Ministry of Environment of Korea and the Korea Environment Institute.

Tata Power registers another wind project under UNFCC

NEW DELHI: Tata Power today said its 50.4 MW wind energy plant in Gujarat has been registered under the United Nations Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), making it the company's third project to be part of this framework.

Located in Samana, the project will come under Clean Development Mechanism of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

"Samana wind plant is Tata Power's third CDM registered project, with the 50.4 MW wind project at Khandke, Maharashtra & 25 MW solar project at

Mary Robinson: Climate Change’s Gender Gap

When she was still a small and bookish girl, holed up in the library of a Sacred Heart nuns’ school in Dublin, Mary Robinson read about towering human-rights figures—Eleanor Roosevelt, Mahatma Gandhi—and dreamed of doing something worthwhile with her life. Before long, and famously, she did: first, as one of Ireland’s youngest senators and a barrister taking up cases with the European Court of Human Rights; then, as Ireland’s first female president, promoting peace in Northern Ireland and reaching out to the country’s marginalized communities; and, from 1997 to 2002, as the United Nations’ high commissioner for human rights, bearing witness to, and calling for international action on, vicious conflicts and widespread suffering in places such as Kosovo, Sierra Leone, East Timor, and Chechnya.

Former president of Ireland Mary Robinson speaks during a press conference in April 2011. (Chung Sung-Jun/Getty, file)

Climate change adaptation as a new academic discipline

The world of higher education is beginning to recognize adaptation to climate change as a major research topic and an academic discipline, according to one of the world’s leading adaptation specialists, Saleemul Huq.

“Adaptation is no longer about analytical framing: it’s a learning-by-doing process,” said Huq, a senior fellow at the International Institute for Environment and Development in London and a member of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

As U.S. Cleans Its Energy Mix, It Ships Coal Problems Abroad

The port of Norfolk, Virginia, seen here in 1970, is the largest U.S. facility for exporting coal. It saw a surge of activity last year as U.S. coal exports increased 17 percent to set a new record.

Photograph by Charles Rotkin, Corbis

Thomas K. Grose

For National Geographic News

Published March 15, 2013

Ready for some good news about the environment? Emissions of carbon dioxide in the United States are declining. But don't celebrate just yet. A major side effect of that cleaner air in the U.S. has been the further darkening of skies over Europe and Asia.

The United States essentially is exporting a share of its greenhouse gas emissions in the form of coal, data show. If the trend continues, the dramatic changes in energy use in the United States—in particular, the switch from coal to newly abundant natural gas for generating electricity—will have only a modest impact on global warming, observers warn. The Earth's atmosphere will continue to absorb heat-trapping CO2, with a similar contribution from U.S. coal. It will simply be burned overseas instead of at home. 

Environmental threats could push billions into extreme poverty, warns UN

A Filipino boy washes his face in murky waters in Manila. Inaction on the environment will accelerate global poverty, warns the UN. Photograph: Francis R Malasig/EPAAdd caption

The number of people living in extreme poverty could increase by up to 3 billion by 2050 unless urgent action is taken to tackle environmental challenges, a major UN report warned on Thursday.

The 2013 Human Development Report hails better than expected progress on health, wealth and education in dozens of developing countries but says inaction on climate change, deforestation, and air and water pollution could end gains in the world's poorest countries and communities.

Climate Change Infographics

Climate Change is Real!

Thanks to extensive research and noticeable changes in weather and storm prevalence, it’s getting harder to turn a blind eye to the reality of climate change. Since the Industrial Age spurred the increasing usage of fossil fuels for energy production, the weather has been warming slowly. In fact, since 1880, the temperature of the earth has increased by 1 degree Celsius.

Although 72% of media outlets report on global warming with a skeptical air, the overwhelming majority of scientists believe that the extreme weather of the last decade is at least partially caused by global warming. Some examples of climate calamities caused partly by global warming include:

• Hurricane Katrina
• Drought in desert countries
• Hurricane Sandy
• Tornadoes in the Midwest