Global Warming

The Environmental Protection Agency on Friday declared that industrial greenhouse gases are a danger to human health and well-being, opening the way to broad new regulations to reduce carbon dioxide and other planet-heating gases. The finding could lead to far-reaching rules that are likely to heavily affect cars and trucks, which account for nearly a quarter of the nation's greenhouse gas emissions, and utilities, which are responsible for more than a third.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is set tonight to announce a groundbreaking agreement by California's biggest timber firm to begin marketing its vast forests as a weapon in the fight against global warming. The announcement comes less than a week after the Schwarzenegger administration pushed through new rules that allow Sierra Pacific Industries to sell its trees' ability to absorb harmful carbon dioxide from the air. Environmental groups immediately raised questions about the timing, so soon after the administration pressed the California Air Resources Board to approve the new protocols.

When Greg Nickels became Seattle's mayor in 2002, global warming was hardly at the top of the municipal agenda. New York's World Trade Center had been attacked, and officials had to figure out how to protect their own city from terrorism. Boeing was laying off 30,000 machinists, so there was the declining regional economy to deal with. Surely the federal government would worry about climate change. Then came the winter of 2004, when the Cascade Mountains snowpack was so disastrously low that ski resorts -- facing their worst year on record -- laid off most of their employees.

Manoel Silva de Cunha, leader of a group of 200,000 Brazilian forest-dwellers, was blunt about why he traveled this week from the Amazon to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's Global Climate Summit. The rubber tappers, nut gatherers and fishermen who live off tropical forests want money from American corporations to help them preserve the trees that cool the planet. "These companies have polluted a lot," he said. "They have to make up for it." Many of the 1,200 delegates who crowded into Century City's Hyatt Regency this week came with similar hopes: to cash in on California's expertise, its technology and the multimillion-dollar carbon trading market it plans to launch in 2012.

Sprawling across about 9,000 acres of rolling farmland in southwestern Indiana is one of the world's biggest aluminum smelters, operated by Alcoa Inc. The maze of rectangular buildings and giant smokestacks consumes enough electricity to supply a city of 200,000 -- power generated by burning more than 2 million tons of coal a year. So it may be surprising that company executives are pushing Congress to pass a version of President Obama's plan for combating global warming.

Climate change is increasing the risk of U.S. crop failures, depleting the nation's water resources and contributing to outbreaks of invasive species and insects, the Department of Agriculture said in a report released Tuesday. Those and other problems for the U.S. livestock and forestry industries will persist for at least the next 25 to 50 years, said the report compiled by 38 scientists for use by water and land managers. "I think what's really eye-opening is the depth and breadth of the impacts and consequences going on right now," said Anthony C. Janetos, a study author and director of the Joint Global Change Research Institute at the University of Maryland.

All around the world, national governments are trying to hammer out their global warming policies, preparing for the United Nations' climate-change conclave in Copenhagen at the end of the year. And in too many places, the effort seems to be going nowhere. Here in Australia, for instance, the government last week decided to postpone any real action for another year, citing the recession.

The seasons begin two days earlier than they did 50 years ago, a shift that may be related to human activity, according to researchers at UC Berkeley and Harvard University. The season skewing means that the hottest and coldest days of the year come about two days sooner than they did 50 years ago, according to a study published in the Jan. 22 edition of the journal Nature.

More than a third of native California bird species could vanish from a wide swath of their current range by the end of the 21st century because of global warming, according to a new study by Audubon California.

Along with California's vigorous efforts to crack down on its own greenhouse gas emissions, state officials have begun preparing for the worst: heat waves, a rising sea level, flooding, wildlife die-offs and other expected consequences from what scientists predict will be a dramatic temperature increase by the end of this century. California's Natural Resources Agency on Monday issued the nation's first statewide plan to "adapt" to climate change.