AFP - Police in Spain detained 30 Greenpeace activists Thursday who had blocked the entrance to the country's oldest nuclear power station which the environmental group is urging the government to close, the group said.

AFP - Russia on Thursday signed an agreement to give 500,000 dollars to an Asia-Pacific fund to combat climate change and disasters.

AFP - Top Senate Democrats on Thursday said they would introduce major global warming legislation early next year, saying Barack Obama's election meant a "sea change" in the battle against climate change.

AFP - Global warming may have contributed to a recent spate of outbreaks of deadly diseases in the Philippines, a senior minister said Thursday.

As President-elect Obama and a new Congress prepare to assume office in January, expectations for climate and energy legislation in the U.S. are arguably the highest in recent memory. And within the confines of the current economic climate, careful crafting of these policies has never been more important. 

read more

See what the Pew Center is saying about the Obama transition.
Statement of Eileen Claussen, President, Pew Center on Global Climate Change
on President-Elect Barack Obama's Remarks to the Bi-Partisan Governors' Global Climate Summit
November 18, 2008

read more

The latest Pew Center e-newsletter includes a presidential voter guide, an updated comparison chart of all cap-and-trade proposals in the 110th Congress, and more.

View the full Newsletter here.

October 22, 2008

The Pew Center on Global Climate Change announced today that The Dow Chemical Company and Johnson Controls, Inc. have joined the Pew Center’s Business Environmental Leadership Council (BELC) and its efforts to address global climate change.

read more

Polar bears and penguins get all the attention but there's more than large, fuzzy and feathered animals thriving at the frozen antipodes of our planet. Both of Earth's polar environments host rich webs of plants and animals--and all of these inhabitants face a changing clime. [More]

It is said that the Inuit have many words for snow, but when it comes to the Northwest Passage only one type of frozen water matters: multiyear ice. It can slice through the hull of a ship like a knife through butter and it persists in the passage's waters despite unprecedented warming in the Arctic Ocean, thwarting shippers in search of a shortcut between Europe and Asia.

The fabled Northwest Passage has made headlines ever since it thawed last year for the first time. For three centuries the quest for an expedited route between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans rivaled today's space race, with European superpowers vying for the prize. Hundreds of sailors and countless expeditions ventured into Canada's Arctic waters, including such naval luminaries as Sir Francis Drake, Captain James Cook and the ill-fated Henry Hudson, who left his name--and lost his life--on the Canadian bay that marks its entrance.

In the late ninth century a disastrous harvest precipitated by drought brought famine to China under the rule of the Tang dynasty. By A.D. 907--after nearly three centuries of rule--the dynasty fell when its emperor, Ai, was deposed, and the empire was divided. According to the atmospheric record contained in a stalagmite, one of the causes of that downfall may have been climate change. [More]

Emissions of a greenhouse gas that has 17,000 times the planet-warming capacity of carbon dioxide are at least four times higher than had been previously estimated. Nitrogen trifluoride (NF3) is used mainly by the semiconductor industry to clean the chambers in which silicon chips are made. The industry had in the past estimated that most of the gas was expended during the cleaning process and only about 2 percent escaped into the air. But the first-ever measurements of nitrogen trifluoride levels in the atmosphere, published recently in the journal Geophysical Research Letters show that emissions could be as high as 16 percent. [More]

Humanity's impact on climate has been detected on every continent except Antarctica, or so said the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in February 2007. No longer: scientists, comparing decades of records from 17 Antarctic weather stations with computer simulations of Earth's climate, found that human-induced global warming has been heating up the continent that is home to the South Pole, as well. [More]

The northern leopard frogs that inhabit the boreal U.S. have never recovered from some catastrophic population declines in the 1970s. Some blame it on the acidifying lakes and streams caused by coal-burning, others point to the ongoing loss of wetlands to development, and now new evidence shows that the herbicide atrazine--widely sprayed on crop fields throughout the region--is killing the frogs by helping parasitic worms that feast on them. [More]

Dear EarthTalk: What are these “ocean deserts” I’ve been hearing about? Also, didn’t I read that there was a huge mass of plastic bottles floating around somewhere on the ocean surface?-- Wally Mattson, Eugene, OR [More]

Humanity has enjoyed an unusual streak of food surplus since the green revolution began in the mid-1960s. These trends sustained economic development and a significant reduction in global hunger and poverty. A sharp reversal is now possible, however, given strong economic growth in the world’s most populous countries and loss of suitable cropland.

People with rising incomes consume more meat and livestock products, which in turn requires more grain per unit of food produced. The rapid expansion of biofuel production only complicates the competition between food and fuel.

Scientific American magazine editor in chief, John Rennie, talks about the November issue's contents, including computer-brain interfaces, DNA computing, the ongoing attempts to find an HIV vaccine and getting closer to the Star Trek tricorder with portable NMR. Plus, we'll test your knowledge of some recent science in the news. Web sites mentioned on this episode include snipurl.com/4LJ71; SciAm.com/sciammag

> Related In-Depth Report: Today's Alternative Energy [More]

When David W. Keith, a physicist and energy expert at the University of Calgary in Alberta, gives lectures these days on geoengineering, he likes to point out how old the idea is. People have been talking about deliberately altering climate to counter global warming, he says, for as long as they have been worrying about global warming itself. As early as 1965, when Al Gore was a freshman in college, a panel of distinguished environmental scientists warned President Lyndon B. Johnson that carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from fossil fuels might cause “marked changes in climate” that “could be deleterious.” Yet the scientists did not so much as mention the possibility of reducing emissions. Instead they considered one idea: “spreading very small reflective particles” over about five million square miles of ocean, so as to bounce about 1 percent more sunlight back to space--“a wacky geoengineering solution,” Keith says, “that doesn’t even work.”

In the decades since, geoengineering ideas never died, but they did get pushed to the fringe--they were widely perceived by scientists and environmentalists alike as silly and even immoral attempts to avoid addressing the root of the problem of global warming. Three recent developments have brought them back into the mainstream.

Researchers analyzing the May 2008 Wenchuan earthquake in China’s Sichuan province have found that geological stress has significantly increased on three major fault systems in the region. The magnitude 7.9 quake on May 12 has brought several nearby faults closer to failure and could trigger another major earthquake in the region.

Scientists and engineers from WHOI and the University of Washington have successfully completed the first scientific mission with Sentry, a newly developed robot capable of diving as deep as 5,000 meters into the ocean. The vehicle surveyed and helped pinpoint several proposed deep-water sites for seafloor instruments that will be deployed in the Ocean Observatories Initiative.