Climate Change News Digest

A Dutch inquiry into the UN climate science panel backs its main findings, but calls for more transparency.

The unanswered questions from 'climategate'

The oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico has cost BP a total of $3.12bn to date, the company says, up $500m from last week.

Transocean, the company that owns the failed Deepwater Horizon rig that caused the Gulf oil spill, used well- known tax havens in the Cayman Islands and Switzerland to lower its U. S. corporate tax rate by almost 15 points. And, as TP reports, due to a break in the U. S. tax code, BP was also allowed to write off the rent it paid to Transocean on its own tax bill, saving it hundreds of thousands of dollars per day: The owner, Transocean, moved its corporate headquarters from Houston to the Cayman Islands in 1999 and then to Switzerland in 2008, maneuvers that also helped it avoid taxes.

When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bonds which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of Nature and of Nature''s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation. We hold these truths to be self- evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

A carbon- pricing plan will decrease our dependence on foreign oil, create American jobs, lower energy bills, and protect our environment. This will be the measure of a real bill, and I' m prepared to fight to get this done, following the strategy Winston Churchill laid out at the outbreak of World War II: 'Never give in, never give in - never, never, never, never.' That''s the rousing final paragraph of a column by the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in Foreign Policy, titled, 'Whatever it takes.' Here''s more: Climate instability and our oil addiction present immediate, direct threats to America''s national security.

In his weekly radio, the President announced he was putting $2 billion into two solar energy projects, including Concentrated solar thermal with storage (aka solar baseload). CSP remains 'The technology that will save humanity.' And we are seeing more and more plants in various phases of construction (see 'Total of 8500 MW of CSP planned for 2014 in U. S. alone'). The easiest way to deal with the intermittency of the sun is cheap storage - and thermal storage is much cheaper and has a much higher round- trip efficiency than electric storage.

contribution by Leo New polling sheds some light both on where the public stand in terms of different power options, and on the impact of arguments that make nuclear seem more attractive. The polls are useful for understanding public attitudes towards nuclear power in two ways: they indicate how people regard nuclear at the moment, and they also help show the impact of arguments for nuclear power. At a basic level, nuclear power is currently pretty much the least popular form of power generation in the UK. 1. When asked favourability towards different sources, it comes in at the bottom of the pile " around the same place as both coal and gas.

The left should be in the ascendancy following a crisis of capitalism, but it is not. The right is leading for a number of reasons but just one of the problems for the left is that the narratives and explanations it offers tend to be more complicated than those offered by the right. When David Cameron describes the UK''s debt as an overdraft it doesn' t matter that he''s wrong, it is easy to understand. When a Government''s finances are compared to a households it is intelligible to all whereas thinking about the public sector deficit as a mirror image of a private sector surplus seems counter- intuitive.

A sobering new report warns that the oceans face a "fundamental and irreversible ecological transformation" not seen in millions of years as greenhouse gases and climate change already have affected temperature, acidity, sea and oxygen levels, the food chain and possibly major currents that could alter global weather. The report, in Science magazine, brings together dozens of studies that collectively paint a dismal picture of deteriorating ocean health.

Human societies have long relied on specialists to help in complex matters involving the natural and human- built worlds. Ptolemaic astronomers used what would seem to us moderns as a needlessly complex Earth- centered system to explain the heavens and predict celestial events. And yet, they were amazingly accurate. Complex societies of the past have employed specialists in war, statecraft, engineering, agriculture, shipbuilding, and a variety of other tasks that would be difficult to accomplish without in- depth knowledge. And, yet these specialists typically lived not within societies that were managed along completely rational principles. Instead, the role of religion was far more prominent that it is today and tightly interwoven with the workings of the state.

BEIJING (Reuters) - China will host an extra round of international negotiations in October aimed at fostering agreement over a new climate treaty, the United Nations' top environment official said in remarks published on Monday.

The past 12 months have been the hottest since measurements began, in keeping with trends that have, for the past 35 years, shown global warming unfolding as predicted by science.

Scientists at the Carnegie Institution have said that while scrubbing carbon dioxide from the air could reduce green house effect, the carbon cycle would limit the effectiveness of a

With carbon dioxide (CO2) in the air 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?

DRC/ Barron Ludlum Dead trees line Interstate 35W near Pilot Knob in Denton, on land owned by Fort Worth- based development company Hillwood. The landowner said mesquite trees are being killed off to make way for cattle. Usually, not even a scorching, bone- dry Texas summer can kill a mesquite. The native tree is known for its skill at surviving drought and 100-degree heat. So when groves of them ...

The messages are tense angry cajoling.

Experts worry that as Chinas 1.3 billion people clamor for more cars and creature comforts, international efforts to limit global warming could be doomed.

Forget auto emissions and power plants. Humans may have contributed to climate change more than 10,000 years ago, according to a new study. Climate change - Environment - 8th millennium BC - Activism - Organizations

Scientists find excess nitrogen favors plants that respond poorly to rising CO2As atmospheric carbon dioxide levels rise, so does the pressure on the plant kingdom. The hope among policymakers, scientists and concerned citizens is that plants will absorb some of the extra CO2 and mitigate the impacts of climate change. For a few decades now, researchers have hypothesized about one major ...