Climate Change News Digest

Space station sunsets, desert lakes in Mongolia and cloud formations over the Canaries were among the images captured by European Space Agency and Nasa satellites during June

Helium- powered ships could be carrying freight " and even passengers " in as little as a decade''s time. Fresh fruit, vegetables, flowers and other foreign luxuries could be part of a global revolution by carrying cargo around the world in airships instead of planes, one of the UK''s leading scientists has predicted. The government''s former chief scientific adviser, Professor Sir David King, now director of the Smith School of Enterprise and Environment at the University of Oxford, told a conference that massive helium balloons " or blimps " would replace aircraft as a key part of the global trade network as a way of cutting global warming emissions. Despite languishing in sci- fi B- movies for most of the last 70 years, King said several major air and defence companies, including Boeing and Lockheed Martin, were working on designs, and the US defence department had recently made a large grant ...

Government will cut nine existing green business quangos to fund the Green Investment Bank. Swapping nine existing quangos and funds for a shiny new Green Investment Bank would fit snugly into the government''s desire to cut back on public spending and boost low- carbon investment flows, and now the chancellor, George Osborne, has some cover for doing so. The independent Wigley report (pdf) published yesterday recommends exactly that and was commissioned by the Tories themselves while in opposition to add weight to what otherwise was a great- sounding but nebulous manifesto commitment. A review of existing quangos is well overdue. All governments like to announce new things and the number of bodies established under Labour to try to speed up the transition to a low- carbon economy was quite staggering.

Standoff suggests Senate would give up on climate change law that would result in far more limited proposals Barack Obama''s hopes of leveraging public anger at the Gulf oil spill into political support for his clean energy agenda fell flat today after he failed to rally a group of Democratic and Republican senators around broad energy and climate change law. The standoff suggests the Senate would formally give up on climate change law, and recast energy reform as a Gulf oil spill response, that would roll in far more limited proposals such as a green investment bank, or a measure to limit greenhouse gas emissions that would apply only to electricity companies. Such a move would come as a personal rebuff to Obama who has put energy and climate change at the top of his agenda, and who called on the 23 senators at the White House meeting to establish ...

Cost of the low- carbon infrastructure is estimated at £550bn Venture capital sector prepared to invest in ecological projects. Scores of government- backed organisations face being swallowed by a new UK Green Investment Bank, under radical proposals announced today. Billions of pounds that are being spent by disparate quangoes and officials funds should instead be ploughed into an eco- bank, a group of leading financial and environmental experts recommended. The Green Investment Bank Commission argued that cutting the number of state- funded green bodies would "radically improve" the task of cutting the nation''s carbon output " an area where Britain continues to lag behind official targets. The Commission was led by former Merrill Lynch chairman Bob Wigley.

Committee on Climate Change says policies required within next year to reform electricity market and home efficiency. The new coalition government must introduce a string of climate policies over the next twelve months or risk Britain missing its legally binding targets to cut carbon emissions, ministers were warned yesterday. David Kennedy, the chief executive of the Committee on Climate Change, said action was needed in four key areas. He said policies should be brought forward to reform the electricity market, and to make homes more energy efficient. Ministers need to protect efforts to encourage the development of electric cars and introduce measures to bring down the carbon footprint of UK farmers, he added."We' ve had a light- touch approach in the UK, we' ve talked a good game but what we' ve seen is emissions haven' t fallen," Kennedy said.

The BP oil spill may make people reconsider their dependency on cars " but budget cuts are limiting public transport options. Just at the moment when the Deepwater Horizon BP oil spill has generated two months of non- stop headlines about the dangers of oil dependency and the federal government in America finally has something of a platform to call for Americans to wean themselves off oil dependency, cities, counties and states across the US are decimating their public transit systems and forcing people, willy- nilly, to return to their cars. In most countries, one might expect fiscal collapse to lead to more people taking public transport.

A pending new rule change from a key environmental standards organization has set off a heated controversy between competing eco- certifiers of wood.

By now, you probably think your opinion of Goldman Sachs and its swarm of Wall Street allies has rock- bottomed at raw loathing. You' re wrong. There''s more. It turns out the most destructive of all their recent acts has barely been discussed at all. Here''s the rest. This is the story of how some of the richest people in the world - Goldman, Deutsche Bank, the traders at Merrill Lynch, and more - have caused the starvation of some of the poorest people in the world, just so they could make a fatter profit. It starts with an apparent mystery. At the end of 2006, food prices across the world started to rise, suddenly and stratospherically.

It''s getting warmer - and something needs to be done. Staffordshire Newsletter (blog) Where are the crisis measures to change our lifestyles and stop burning fossil fuels in order to prevent heatwaves and wildfires becoming more frequent and ...

It turns out El Niño may not have had such a large effect on recent climate change as a controversial paper published last year suggested

Ice sheets melt away as CO2 rises: that''s how it''s supposed to work. So why does the opposite sometimes seem to have happened?

Seen at a meeting yesterday: Grant us The ability to reduce the uncertainties we can; The willingness to work with the uncertainties we cannot; And the scientific knowledge to know the difference. (Drawn from a white paper on the use of climate models for water managers). Discuss.

The last part of the Penn State inquiry has now reported unanimously that Mike Mann did not engage in any activity that violated scientific norms. Quoting from the report conclusions, Conclusion of the Investigatory Committee as to whether research misconduct occurred: The Investigatory Committee, after careful review of all available evidence, determined that there is no substance to the allegation against Dr. Michael E. Mann, Professor, Department of Meteorology, The Pennsylvania State University. More specifically, the Investigatory Committee determined that Dr. Michael E. Mann did not engage in, nor did he participate in, directly or indirectly, any actions that seriously deviated from accepted practices within the academic community for proposing, conducting, or reporting research, or other scholarly activities.

The only glacier in the western Pacific could disappear in less than five years, taking with it vital clues about the earth''s changing climate, a US scientist said Friday.

With carbon dioxide in the atmosphere approaching alarming levels, even halting emissions altogether may not be enough to avert catastrophic climate change. Could scrubbing carbon dioxide from the air be a viable solution? A new study by scientists at the Carnegie Institution suggests that while removing excess carbon dioxide would cool the planet, complexities of the carbon cycle would limit the effectiveness of a one- time effort. To keep carbon dioxide at low levels would require a long- term commitment spanning decades or even centuries.

As global warming threatens many animal species with extinction, the cane toad is set to flourish with increasing temperature. This is a major cause for concern as the cane toad, once introduced to Australia as agricultural pest- control of the cane beetle, is an already highly invasive species and considered a pest in Australia. The researchers present their new findings at the Society for Experimental Biology Annual Conference in Prague on Friday, July 2, 2010.

(AP) -- Climate change talks among some of the world''s most polluting nations are continuing for a second day in Rome.

(AP) -- Lonnie Thompson spent years preparing for his expedition to the remote, mist- shrouded mountains of eastern Indonesia, hoping to chronicle the affect of global warming on the last remaining glacier in the Pacific. He''s worried he got there too late.

(Phys. Org. com) -- Research by scientists at Queen Mary, University of London has found that a predicted rise in global temperature of 4°C by 2100 could lead to a 13% reduction in ecosystems' ability to absorb carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere.