Climate Change

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger on Tuesday launched an international organization to tackle climate change with leaders from regional governments in Europe, South America, Africa, Asia and the United States. The failure to achieve an international climate pact in Copenhagen last year left many people discouraged, Schwarzenegger said, addressing several hundred delegates to a "climate summit" at UC Davis. But now, he added, "The sub-nationals should do their work.... The green revolution is moving forward full speed ahead without the international agreement.

With a simple statement on Tuesday, State Farm Insurance became the latest company to withdraw its support from the Heartland Institute, a Chicago-based think-tank which claims a “realist” position questioning that humans are responsible for climate change. “State Farm is ending its association with the Heartland Institute. This is because of a recent billboard campaign launched by the Institute,” said the entirety of the statement, which ran on the State Farm Facebook page.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, seeking to make monkeys of the legions of scientists who have suggested that climate change is a significant problem, wants to put them on trial. Specifically, it wants the Environmental Protection Agency to stage a "Scopes monkey trial" for the 21st century, appointing a judge to hear evidence on the question of whether global warming endangers Americans' health. It's an intriguing idea. Congress is considering legislation aimed at fighting climate change that would force the country to reinvent its entire energy infrastructure.

Many growers proudly advertise their local origins, but when David Rosenstein of Evo Farm sells his produce on Sunday for the first time at the Mar Vista farmers market, he says he will be talking "not about food miles, but food feet. " Rosenstein has built an innovative prototype aquaponics farm, combining aquaculture and hydroponic (soilless) vegetable cultivation, in a neighbor's backyard. Each of these systems by itself generates copious waste, but when they are synergized, the fish provide the fertilizer for the plants and the plants filter the water for the fish.

India remains flexible and its national climate-change plans are not the window dressing some critics charge, the nation's lead negotiator said Friday. But any agreement that might emerge from future global negotiations must give the South Asian powerhouse with the world's second-largest population ample room to grow and develop economically, said Shyam Saran, the prime minister's special envoy on climate change. "Climate change shouldn't become a mechanism for the perpetuation of poverty," Saran said in a meeting with reporters.

Climate-change researchers at a British university failed to respond to critics in an open manner but hewed to high standards in their science and did not manipulate their data, according to findings released Wednesday of an independent review of hundreds of hacked e-mails. The e-mails were taken from the server of the University of East Anglia late last year and caused an international stir just before a global environment summit in Copenhagen. Skeptics of human-caused climate change alleged that the e-mails showed scientists deliberately trying to suppress certain data about global warming or slanting it to support their conclusions.

Something is rotting in the state of Denmark. Lots of things, actually, and it's a bit of an embarrassment for this Scandinavian nation as it prepares to host a widely anticipated global environmental summit this week. Denmark is proud of its image as one of the greenest countries in the world; it's probably why it was chosen as the site of the 15th United Nations Conference on Climate Change. But beneath the gloss lurk some inconvenient truths, including the fact that, pound for pound, Denmark produces more trash per capita than any other country in the 27-member European Union.

California's farms and vineyards could vanish by the end of the century, and its major cities could be in jeopardy, if Americans do not act to slow the advance of global warming, Secretary of Energy Steven Chu said Tuesday.

An oxygen-depleted "dead zone" the size of New Jersey is starving sea life off the coast of Oregon and Washington and likely will appear there each summer as a result of climate change, an Oregon State University researcher said Thursday. The huge area is one of 400 dead zones around the world, most of them caused by fertilizer and sewage dumped into the oceans in river runoff. But the dead zone off the Northwest is one of the few in the world -- and possibly the only one in North America -- that could be impossible to reverse.

With so many scientific issues becoming battlefields in the culture wars - from climate change to stem-cell research to evolution (see above) - we hardly needed a new study to tell us that scientists have become a favorite target of the right. Yet a paper written by University of North Carolina doctoral fellow Gordon Gauchat and published last week in the American Sociological Review also contains a highly counterintuitive finding. Common sense, as well as past research, suggests that distrust of science correlates with lack of education; the less education a person has, the more likely he or she will favor traditional beliefs or religious dogma over scientific evidence.

Forecast the Facts, the activist group that first confronted GM about its support of climate change doubters the Heartland Institute, now plans to muster a public campaign targeting the Discovery Channel. The purpose: to get Discovery to acknowledge the scientific consensus on man-made climate change in its programming. The flap follows the recent airing of the final episode of Discovery's lush exploration of the polar regions, “ Frozen Planet .” The last of the seven-hour series, “On Thin Ice,” was devoted specifically to presenting evidence of climate change - including discussion of the challenges facing polar bears, collapsing ice shelves, diminishing habitat, and naturalist David Attenborough (Alec Baldwin is the narrator and host of the series)

You might expect Earth Day to be trumpeted with pictures of melting ice packs, disappearing glaciers and sad-looking polar bears. But that's so 47 seconds ago. Instead, we bring you a stunning photo gallery documenting the ways in which the world's explosive population growth has aggressively changed the landscape. The aerial photos above are just one example. They illustrate deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon between 1992 and 2006; the clearing in the Mato Grosso state in southwest Brazil is occurring at a rate of about 22,000 square kilometers per year.

This year's late winter heat wave over much of the United States, dubbed "March Madness," has been cited as evidence that human-induced global warming is causing the climate system to stray far outside its normal range of variability. The thousands of all-time high temperature records shattered during last month's climate rampage have been likened to home-run records shattered by a baseball player on steroids. It is true that the signature of human-induced global warming is clearly apparent in the increasing number of new high temperature records, which are currently outnumbering low temperature records by a factor of about 3 to 1. Just as a rising tide lifts all ships, a rise in global mean temperature is bound to raise the levels of the highest temperatures.

Tennessee enacted a law Tuesday that critics contend allows public school teachers to challenge climate change and evolution in their classrooms without fear of sanction. Republican Gov. Bill Haslam allowed the controversial measure to become law without his signature and, in a statement, expressed misgivings about it. Nevertheless, he ignored pleas from educators, parents and civil libertarians to veto the bill. The law does not require the teaching of alternatives to scientific theories of evolution, climate change and "the chemical origins of life.

The price of power Re "Activists feeling burned," April 6 Southern California has many large, empty rooftops that could easily support a sea of solar panels. Exploitation of this vast resource, which is already connected to the grid, should be a top regional priority. Unfortunately, the decision-makers at our utilities prefer to stick with an outmoded business model that relies on corporate point-source energy production, in which solar power plants are substituted for coal-fired ones.

WASHINGTON - Tennessee is poised to adopt a law that would allow public schoolteachers to challenge climate change and evolution in their classrooms without fear of sanction, according to educators and civil libertarians in the state. Passed by the state Legislature and awaiting Republican Gov. Bill Haslam's signature, the measure is likely to stoke growing concerns among science teachers around the country that teaching climate science is becoming the same kind of classroom and community flash point as evolution.

A cottage industry has sprouted in the environmental movement, but it has nothing to do with wind turbines or carbon offsets. The green scene has been flooded with conferences, conventions, trade shows and other events trying to capitalize on the popularity of sustainability and concerns about climate change. Most of the meetings deal directly with environmental issues such as carbon emissions, conservation or alternative energy. Even some industry trade shows, such as electronics and textiles, have green elements, including special pavilions and panel discussions.

"The Island President"is heartening and unsettling by turns. The heartening segments of this powerful new documentary are intentional, the unsettling elements illustrate what happens when your protagonist gets caught in the cogs of history. "Island President's" leading character is 44-year-old Mohamed Nasheed, at the time the film was made the democratically elected president of the Maldives, a nation of some 1,200 coral islands scattered jewel-like in the Indian Ocean. A cross, as the president himself says, "between raradise and paradise," the Maldives are a prime vacation destination for those privileged enough to afford it. But all those gorgeous beaches (stunningly photographed by director-cinematographer Jon Shenk)

Coca-Cola Co. and Kraft Foods Inc. bowed to consumer pressure this week and cut ties with the American Legislative Exchange Council, a conservative lobbying group that has recently backed controversial voter ID and so-called “stand your ground” laws. Within hours of advocacy group Color of Change launching a boycott against Coca-Cola for its participation on ALEC's Private Enterprise Board, the soft drink giant issued a statement saying that it had “elected to discontinue its membership.” But the company blamed ALEC's support of “discriminatory food and beverage taxes” instead of “issues that have no direct bearing on our business.” “We have a long-standing policy of only taking positions on issues that impact our company and industry,”Coca-Colasaid.