Now researchers at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, and elsewhere say this change is under way in a little-studied area under the sea, the East Siberian Arctic Shelf, west of the Bering Strait.

Natalia Shakhova, a scientist at the university and a leader of the study, said it was too soon to say whether the findings suggest that a dangerous release of methane looms. In a telephone news conference, she said researchers were only beginning to track the movement of this methane into the atmosphere as the undersea permafrost that traps it degrades.

But climate experts familiar with the new research reported in Friday’s issue of the journal Science that even though it does not suggest imminent climate catastrophe, it is important because of methane’s role as a greenhouse gas. Although carbon dioxide is far more abundant and persistent in the atmosphere, ton for ton atmospheric methane traps at least 25 times as much heat.

Until recently, undersea permafrost has been little studied, but work so far shows it is already sending surprising amounts of methane into the atmosphere, Dr. Shakhova and other researchers are finding.

Last year, scientists from Britain and Germany reported that they had detected plumes of methane rising from the Arctic seabed in the West Spitsbergen area, north of Scandinavia. At the time, they said they had begun their work hoping to gain data to predict future emissions and had not expected to find evidence that the process was under way.

It is “indispensable” to keep track of methane in the region, Martin Heimann of the Max Planck Institute in Germany said…

1 – Selling Our Future

2 – Population Pressure: Land and Water

3 – Climate Change and the Energy Transition

4 & 5 – Stabilizing Climate: An Energy Efficiency Revolution & Shifting to Renewable Energy

6 – Designing Cities for People

7 – Eradicating Poverty and Stabilizing Population

8 – Restoring the Earth

9 – Feeding Eight Billion People Well

10 – Can We Mobilize Fast Enough?

Satellite image showing 97km (60 mile) long iceberg, right, about to crash into the Mertz glacier tongue, left, in the Australian Antarctic Territory. The collision created a new 78km-long iceberg. (Photograph: AP)

An iceberg the size of Luxembourg that contains enough fresh water to supply a third of the world’s population for a year has broken off in the Antarctic continent, with possible implications for global ocean circulation, scientists said today.

The iceberg, measuring about 50 miles by 25, broke away from the Mertz glacier around 2,000 miles south of Australia after being rammed by another giant iceberg known as B-9B three weeks ago, satellite images reveal. The two icebergs, which both weigh more than 700m tons, are now drifting close together about 100 miles north of Antarctica.

Rob Massom, a senior scientist at the Australian Antarctic Division and the Antarctic Climate and Ecosystems Cooperative Research Centre in Hobart, Tasmania, said the location of the icebergs could affect global ocean circulation and had important implications for marine biology in the region.

Mass migration northwards to new towns in Scotland, Wales and northeast England may be needed to cope with climate change and water shortages in the South East, according to an apocalyptic vision set out by the Government Office for Science.

Scientists are studying coastal and glacier change along the entire Antarctic coastline. This map identifies the southern portion of the Antarctic Peninsula, which was the area studied as part of the project.

(U.S. Geological Survey)

The ice shelves in the southern part of the Antarctic Peninsula appear to be disappearing because of climate change, according to a new report from the U.S. Geological Survey and the British Antarctic Survey.

“The loss of ice shelves is evidence of the effects of global warming,” says USGS scientist and lead author Jane Ferrigno.

Melting of the West Antarctic part alone of the Antarctic ice sheet would cause a worldwide sea-level rise of approximately 18 feet. According to the report, “the resulting rise in sea level could severely impact the densely populated coastal regions on Earth.”

In the worst-case scenario, the potential sea-level rise if the entire Antarctic ice sheet melts is estimated to be 213 to 240 feet.

“The changes exhibited in the region are widely regarded as among the most profound and unambiguous examples of the effects of global warming yet seen on the planet,” the authors write in the report.

Since 1998, the ice lost from just one of the five ice shelves in the study totals more than 1,500 square miles, an area larger than the state of Rhode Island.

Scientists used satellite and aerial photographs and maps dating back to the 1940s as sources for the report.  The ice shelves are attached to the continent and already floating, holding in place the Antarctic ice sheet that covers about 98 percent of Antarctica.

The report acknowledges that while parts of the Antarctic ice sheet are thickening, on balance, it is probably becoming thinner overall.

The full report, “Coastal-Change and Glaciological Map of the Palmer Land Area, Antarctica: 1947—2009″ is available online.

By Doyle Rice

With today’s release of a global solar map and dataset, the company has completed its unprecedented goal of identifying and mapping the world’s wind and solar resources using a globally consistent methodology.

At a resolution 3 to 30 times higher than any other publicly available data source, 3TIER’s global solar map and dataset leverage several in-house improvements to provide the following features:

• Global coverage between 50° S and 60° N
• Spatial resolution of 2 arc-minutes (approximately 3 km)
• Hourly values of GHI, DNI, and DIF extending back 10 to 13 years

“This dataset provides the in-depth solar irradiance information essential to developers, financiers, and governments for targeting the best regions in the world for development”

Migrant workers in Guiyu, China, scavenge used electronic equipment, which often contains highly toxic material. (Photograph: Jim Puckett/AP)

The world must do more to cope with the drastic rise in electronic waste, according to a UN study published today.

The report suggests that in some countries, the amount of e-waste being produced – including mobile phones and computers – could rise by as much as 500% over the next decade. Such rapid growth, it argues, will create intractable problems for people’s health and the environment as the waste, much of it containing toxic material, decays.

“The issue is exploding,” said Ruediger Kuehr, who oversees zero-emission initiatives at the United Nations University. “We see the hunger for mobile phones, computers and also any other kind of electronic and electrical equipment in some developing countries.”

The findings are being unveiled at a meeting of the UN Environment Programme (Unep) in Bali today, along with a call for greater efforts to fix the problem.

“This is a global question,” said Guido Sonnemann, programme officer for Unep. “This problem is not going away, it’s growing.”

PUTNEY, VERMONT — With the continuing failure of governments to reach agreements on combating climate change, the outlook for both humans and nature remains bleak.

And nowhere is the failure more conspicuous than in the avoidance of the subject of population growth. Population is a double-barreled environmental problem — not only is population increasing; so are emissions per capita.

In 1970, when worldwide greenhouse gas emissions had just begun to transgress the sustainable capacity of the atmosphere, the world population was about 3.7 billion; today it’s about 6.9 billion — an increase of 86 percent.

In that same period, worldwide emissions from fossil fuels rose from about 14 billion tons to an estimated 29 billion tons — an increase of 107 percent.

In other words, in 1970, such emissions were about 3.8 tons per capita; today, despite the growing awareness of climate change, they have actually risen to about 4.2 tons per capita.

The growing fraction of energy produced by low-emission means (solar, nuclear, wind, etc.) seems merely to be slowing down the rapidly growing dependence on fossil fuels in response to ever increasing energy demand.

Yet inexplicably and inexcusably, recommendations by the United States, the United Nations and independent research groups essentially never include — and certainly never stress — population as a contribution to global warming.

No rapid solution to the population problem is in sight, so we must continue to promote emission-control measures ever more vigorously. And nothing is more important than persistent education and publicity. In the matter of global warming, no idea is more critical than the notion that the atmosphere must come to be regarded as a global commons, a common heritage of mankind.

… The time has come to…

Reaching 4.6 billion at the end of 2009, the number of cell phone subscriptions across the globe will hit 5 billion sometime in 2010, according to the International Telecommunication Union (ITU). The explosion in cell phone use has been driven not only by developed countries, but by developing nations hungry for services like mobile banking and health care.

“Even during an economic crisis, we have seen no drop in the demand for communications services,” said ITU Secretary-General Dr. Hamadoun Toure at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this week, “and I am confident that we will continue to see a rapid uptake in mobile cellular services in particular in 2010, with many more people using their phones to access the Internet.”

Along with the surge in cell phones, demand for mobile access to the Internet has skyrocketed. The ITU expects the number of mobile broadband subscriptions to surpass 1 billion around the world this year, a leap from 600 million at the end of 2009. The organization predicts that within the next five years, more people will hop onto the Web from laptops and mobile gadgets than from desktop computers.

People in developing countries are increasingly using their cell phones for mobile banking, even those who have no bank accounts. But it’s in the area of health care that cell phones have made a difference…

The devel­op­ment and release of 3D GIS is a major step for­ward into the future. It will undoubt­edly cause a stir, sev­eral peo­ple to scratch their heads and unleash a wave of new think­ing that we have not expe­ri­enced in the geo­com­mu­nity for quite some time. It will cross dis­ci­plines, open doors and stir the pot of con­tented indi­vid­u­als who thought we had gone as far as we could go.

Visu­al­iza­tion is poised to skyrocket in terms of activ­ity due to new ways for inter­pret­ing prob­lems, under­stand­ing their nature and rep­re­sent­ing their inter­ac­tions. Is 3D GIS about to rev­o­lu­tion­ize visualization?

Sometime around 2050, there are going to be nine billion people roaming this planet—two billion more than there are today. It’s a safe bet that all those folks will want to eat. And that’s… an incredibly daunting prospect. Right now, an estimated one billion people go hungry each day.

So add two billion more people, a limited supply of arable land, plus the fact that rising incomes will boost demand for meat and dairy products, plus the fact that many key natural resources (fisheries, say) are already being overexploited… and it’s hard to see the situation getting better. And that’s before we get into the fact that the planet’s heating up, which is expected to wreak havoc on…

This web site is the result of that search. The site (and the accompanying wall chart) are here to show you – in as clear, objective, and accessible a format as possible – the condition of the world — both its natural and human elements.

A new ranking of the world’s nations by environmental performance puts some of the globe’s largest economies far down the list, with the United States sinking to 61st and China to 121st.

In the previous version of the Environmental Performance Index, compiled every two years by Yale and Columbia University researchers, the United States ranked 39th, and China 105th.

The top performer this year is Iceland…

The lack of reliable environmental data is a major challenge, the researchers said. “There are so many countries that are not collecting even minimal data sets,” said Christine Kim, a researcher at Yale who is program manager of the project. “The state of the data hasn’t gotten much better in the last 10 years. We have better data on…

By Christoph Seidler

The West wants to direct billions toward protecting forest lands, but the lack of any standardized rules and enforcement methods could lead to disaster. Experts warn that the wrong people might benefit from the money and argue indigenous peoples, not bureaucrats, should watch over the rainforests.

It would seem like fairly simple logic: If you want to help protect the environment, help save the forests. Huge amounts of carbon dioxide are stored in plants and the soil beneath them. So, clearing forests using slash-and-burn techniques only succeeds in releasing harmful CO2 and methane gas into the atmosphere.

Even if it is still difficult to precisely quantify the carbon footprint of deforestation, it would still only seem logical that there would be some sort of financial reward for protecting the forests. One mechanism, known as “Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation,” or REDD — envisions a system that would allow industrialized countries to pay developing and newly industrializing countries to preserve large tracts of forest land. But a newly published report suggests that the REDD program might also give rise to…

The United States looms large in the world food economy: it is far and away the world’s leading grain exporter, exporting more than Argentina, Australia, Canada, and Russia combined. In a globalized food economy, increased demand for food to fuel American vehicles puts additional pressure on world food supplies.

From an agricultural vantage point, the automotive hunger for crop-based fuels is insatiable. The Earth Policy Institute has noted that even if the entire U.S. grain crop were converted to ethanol (leaving no domestic crop to make bread, rice, pasta, or feed the animals from which we get meat, milk, and eggs), it would satisfy at most 18 percent of U.S. automotive fuel needs.

When the growing demand for corn for ethanol helped to push world grain prices to record highs between late 2006 and 2008, people in low-income grain-importing countries were hit the hardest. The unprecedented spike in food prices drove up the number of hungry people in the world to over 1 billion for the first time in 2009. Though the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression has recently brought food prices down from their peak, they still remain well above their long-term average levels.

The amount of grain needed to fill the tank of an SUV with ethanol just once can feed one person for an entire year. The average income of the owners of the world’s 940 million automobiles is at least ten times larger than that of the world’s 2 billion hungriest people. In the competition between cars and hungry people for the world’s harvest, the car is destined to win.

Continuing to divert more food to fuel, as is now mandated by the U.S. federal government in its Renewable Fuel Standard, will likely only reinforce the disturbing rise in hunger. By subsidizing the production of ethanol, now to the tune of some $6 billion each year, U.S. taxpayers are in effect subsidizing rising food bills at home and around the world.

* 5.4 million Congo death rate figure “far too high”

By Patrick Worsnip

UNITED NATIONS, (Reuters) – Wars are less deadly than they once were and national mortality rates have continued to decline even during conflicts due to smaller scale fighting and better healthcare, a report said on Wednesday.

The report by a Canada-based project sponsored by four European governments also dismissed a widely cited figure of 5.4 million people killed in wars in the Democratic Republic of Congo as “far too high.”

It offered no exact alternative figure but suggested the true toll could be…

http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/N20590508.htm

The United States looms large in the world food economy: it is far and away the world’s leading grain exporter, exporting more than Argentina, Australia, Canada, and Russia combined. In a globalized food economy, increased demand for food to fuel American vehicles puts additional pressure on world food supplies.

From an agricultural vantage point, the automotive hunger for crop-based fuels is insatiable. The Earth Policy Institute has noted that even if the entire U.S. grain crop were converted to ethanol (leaving no domestic crop to make bread, rice, pasta, or feed the animals from which we get meat, milk, and eggs), it would satisfy at most 18 percent of U.S. automotive fuel needs.

When the growing demand for corn for ethanol helped to push world grain prices to record highs between late 2006 and 2008, people in low-income grain-importing countries were hit the hardest. The unprecedented spike in food prices drove up the number of hungry people in the world to over 1 billion for the first time in 2009. Though the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression has recently brought food prices down from their peak, they still remain well above their long-term average levels.

The amount of grain needed to fill the tank of an SUV with ethanol just once can feed one person for an entire year. The average income of the owners of the world’s 940 million automobiles is at least ten times larger than that of the world’s 2 billion hungriest people. In the competition between cars and hungry people for the world’s harvest, the car is destined to win.

Continuing to divert more food to fuel, as is now mandated by the U.S. federal government in its Renewable Fuel Standard, will likely only reinforce the disturbing rise in hunger. By subsidizing the production of ethanol, now to the tune of some $6 billion each year, U.S. taxpayers are in effect subsidizing rising food bills at home and around the world.

http://www.earthpolicy.org/index.php?/press_room/C68/2010_datarelease6

#   #   #

For more information on the competition between cars and people for grain, see Chapter 2 in Plan B 4.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2009), on-line for free downloading with supporting datasets.

* 5.4 million Congo death rate figure “far too high”

By Patrick Worsnip

UNITED NATIONS, (Reuters) – Wars are less deadly than they once were and national mortality rates have continued to decline even during conflicts due to smaller scale fighting and better healthcare, a report said on Wednesday.

The report by a Canada-based project sponsored by four European governments also dismissed a widely cited figure of 5.4 million people killed in wars in the Democratic Republic of Congo as “far too high.”

It offered no exact alternative figure but suggested the true toll could be…

OpenEarth is the open source initiative to archive, host and disseminate Data, Models and Tools for marine & coastal scientist and engineers. It aims to remedy the above-described inefficiencies by providing a project-superseding approach.

It seems like the usage of Google Earth goes way beyond checking for your neighbours garden and with the possibilities fo KML complex data visualizations in a 3D environment are at your fingertips. OpenEarth even provides some tutorials on how to get startet with these types of visualizations.

Do you have any other examples of data visualization in Google Earth? Or are most of the data mash-ups done with Google Maps?

Nearly all the infrastructure in Dubai could be underwater by 2100.

Up to 85% of the population and 90% of the infrastructure of coastal zones throughout the UAE is at risk from climate change, a new study by researchers from the Stockholm Environment Institute finds in: “Climate Change – Impacts, Vulnerability and Adaptation in UAE.”

• » See also: Who Wants a Climate & Energy Bill? 83 Leading US Companies

Despite uncertainty about to what extent, some degree of global warming is already happening and will only continue, resulting in an unavoidable increase in sea levels. How much that will be is uncertain. The uncertainty comes from not being able to predict whether and how fast and how effectively political actions will be taken to reduce greenhouse gases. There is no uncertainty about the science of climate change itself.

The very best case scenario had originally seen a one or two foot rise, which it is almost impossible to achieve now. Now, higher rises and worse case scenarios are more likely. We can now only control how much worse those scenarios are.

The speed of implementing renewable energy to replace fossil energy depends on legislation at the global level and national level, especially in China, India and the US where the climate bill is due to be voted on in the US Senate. But time is running out, with most scientists seeing a tipping point by 2017.

Even a rise of ten feet (three metres) would see Abu Dhabi lose more than 800 sq km under water, and Dubai would lose important infrastructure as well, the report said.

But once sea levels rise thirty feet (nine metres), all of the UAE capital of Abu Dhabi and the city of Dubai would be entirely submerged. That could happen as soon as 2100, (and almost certainly by 2200 or 2300), making the city’s elaborate infrastructure probably the shortest-lived in human history.

Unlike Venice, which was built in the middle ages, modern cities have key electrical infrastructure at ground level and below, making it almost impossible to inhabit a modern city with skyscrapers submerged up to the first or second floor.

Source: UAE Khaleej Times

The Map contains a wealth of information on renewable energy, including support policies, expansion targets, current shares, installed capacity, current production, future scenarios, and policy pledges.

The Map can be found on the REN21 website, at http://www.ren21.net/map

The REN21 Secretariat collects the information from various reports, databases, news announcements, specific enquiries, and other sources.

Designed as a central access-point to renewable energy information, the Map is dependent on the knowledge contributions of many organisations and individuals in the renewable energy community. REN21 strives to cite the sources for all the information presented, so that users can access further information directly.

As the network of the renewable energy policy community, REN21 has provided authoritative information for several years, in particular through its Renewables Global Status Report. As a new tool for REN21’s knowledge management, the Renewables Interactive Map is designed to track more closely the dynamic development of renewable energy policy-making and market development, and to provide disaggregated information for specific countries and technologies.

The REN21 Secretariat wishes to thank the network partners for their support in producing the Map, and invites all experts to provide data contributions and comments for the Map, which is still a beta-version.

About REN21

 REN21 is a global policy network that provides a forum for international leadership on renewable energy. Its goal is to bolster policy development for the rapid expansion of renewable energies in developing and industrialised economies.  

Contact

 REN21 Secretariat at secretariat@ren21.org

REN21 Secretariat
15, Rue de Milan, 75441 Paris Cedex 9, France
T: (+33) 144 375094
F: (+33) 144 375095
I: www.ren21.net

The average American consumes more than his or her weight in products each day, fuelling a global culture of excess that is emerging as the biggest threat to the planet, according to a report published today. In its annual report, Worldwatch Institute says the cult of consumption and greed could wipe out any gains from government action on climate change or a shift to a clean energy economy.

Erik Assadourian, the project director who led a team of 35 behind the report, said: “Until we recognise that our environmental problems, from climate change to deforestation to species loss, are driven by unsustainable habits, we will not be able to solve the ecological crises that threaten to wash over civilisation.”

The consumer culture is no longer a mostly American habit but is spreading across the planet. Over the last 50 years, excess has been adopted as a symbol of success in developing countries from Brazil to India to China, the report said. China this week overtook the US as the world’s top car market. It is already the biggest producer of greenhouse gas emissions.

Such trends were not a natural consequence of economic growth, the report said, but the result of deliberate efforts by …

The baby’s name and nationality are not known. The child will grow up innocent of having a place in history. But somewhere, this year, that child became the billionth person in Africa, the continent with the fastest growing population in the world.

Climbing from 110 million in 1850, Africa’s headcount reached this threshold in 2009, according to the United Nations, although patchy census data in many countries means that no one can say where or when.

By 2050, the population is projected to almost double, to 1.9 billion. Pessimists predict a human tide that will put an unbearable burden on food, jobs, schools, housing and healthcare. Yet optimists sense an opportunity to follow billion-strong China and India in pursuing economic growth.

“It’s not a problem,” said Mo Ibrahim, a Sudanese-born British entrepreneur. “Africa is underpopulated. We have 20% of the world’s landmass and 13% of its population. We have a bulge of young people and that brings to the marketplace a huge workforce, whereas Europe’s population is ageing. We need to focus on education and training.”

Africans born today are likely to live not in a village but in a “mega-city” since the continent’s rate of urbanisation is the fastest the world has yet seen. Deaths from smoking or car crashes will be a factor as much as the more familiar health issues of malnutrition, malaria and Aids. These citizens will also be vulnerable to…

The most notable ice loss in recent years has been the shrinking of sea ice in the Arctic Ocean. From the beginning of the satellite record in 1979 through 1996, ice area decreased at a steady rate of 3 percent per decade in response to rising temperature. In the following decade, ice area decreased by 11 percent, reaching a dramatic minimum in 2007. In September of that year, sea ice occupied only 3.6 million square kilometers, an area 27 percent smaller than the previous record low (in 2005) and 38 percent smaller than the 1979–2007 average. Summer sea ice coverage has increased slightly in the last two years, but it is still far below the long-term average.

Declines in ice thickness and volume are just as dramatic. The combination of these trends has led to a decrease in the amount of ice that persists in the Arctic through multiple seasons. Multiyear ice is more stable and less susceptible to break-up than the thin, short-lived seasonal ice that forms each winter. Between 1987 and 2007, the amount of ice at least five years old has plummeted from 57 to just 7 percent. Drastic changes in sea ice cover have led scientists from the University of Washington and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to predict that the summer of … could see the first ice-free Arctic in a million years.

But when the IPCC meets in 2014, tipping points — or tipping elements, in academic vernacular — will get much more attention. Scientists still disagree about which planetary systems are extra-sensitive to climate shifts, but the possibility can’t be ignored.

“The problem with tipping elements is that if any of them tips, it will be a real catastrophe.

The colored circles show each region’s population and their electricity consumption and carbon emissions.

Use the slider at the top to see annual emissions generated from 1980 to 2007.

Click on the name of the regions at the top for a closer view of the relevant figures.

The UK environment secretary said that acidification provided a “powerful incentive” to cut carbon emissions.

Ocean chemistry is changing because water absorbs extra CO2 from the air.

Some believe this impact of rising CO2 levels could be as significant as climatic change, though it is rarely discussed at the UN climate convention.

The UN summit in Copenhagen, which started a week ago, is scheduled to conclude on Friday, when more than 100 world leaders will attend in an effort to agree a new global treaty on climate change.

According to the agency, the major goal of negotiations at COP15 is for nations to agree on allowing the global temperatures to rise no more than 2°C compared to 18th century levels. In order to achieve this, emissions must be reduced by 44 billion tons by 2020.

Up until now, following all the reduction pledges released by different nations and understanding where they fit into the overall goal of making some difference was quite difficult–but no longer. The Web site includes a bar-graph which clearly shows where the negotiations stand today and what the world can expect from COP15 if all the pledges made are lived-up to.

Accountability and transparency in deciding policy stem from an educated public demanding it. And, when it comes to decisions of global consequence like those being hashed out in Copenhagen, Web sites like the one created by UNEP are invaluable for allowing everyone do to their duty of staying informed.

Conducted by the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research (SCAR), it says that warming seas are accelerating melting in the west of the continent.

Ozone loss has cooled the region, it says, shielding it from global warming.

Rising temperatures in the Antarctic Peninsula are making life suitable for invasive species on land and sea.

The report – Antarctic Climate Change and the Environment – was written using contributions from 100 leading scientists in various disciplines, and reviewed by a further 200.

SCAR’s executive director Dr Colin Summerhayes said it painted a picture of “the creeping global catastrophe that…

At the international climate meetings in Copenhagen next month, Mr. Obama will tell the delegates that the United States intends to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions “in the range of” 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020 and 83 percent by 2050, officials said.

WASHINGTON — Since the 1997 Kyoto international accord to fight global warming, climate change has worsened and accelerated — beyond some of the grimmest warnings made back then.

As the world has talked for a dozen years about what to do next, new ship passages opened through the Arctic’s once-frozen summer sea ice. In Greenland and Antarctica, ice sheets have lost trillions of tons. Mountain glaciers in Europe, South America, Asia and Africa are shrinking faster than before.

And it’s not just the frozen parts of the world that have felt the heat…

As it is, humanity each year uses resources equivalent to nearly one-and-a-half Earths to meet its needs, said the report by Global Footprint Network, an international think tank.

“We are demanding nature’s services — using resources and creating CO2 emissions — at a rate…

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon laid out this sobering statistic as he kicked off a three-day summit on world food security Monday in Rome.

“Today, more than 1 billion people are hungry,” he told the assembled leaders. Six million children die of hunger every year — 17,000 every day, he said.

The summit opened with the leaders adopting a declaration to renew their commitment to eradicating hunger. They promised to do so by promoting investment, reversing the decline in funding for agriculture and tackling the effect of global warming on food security.

Urgent action is critical, Ban said. In 2050, the world will need to feed…

Gathering and analysing statistics is one of the important IEA functions. But the Agency – an autonomous body within the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development – also…

Leading scientific experts believe that it’s possible to cut back on global warming pollution, improve the overall health and durability of our oceans, and prevent serious harm to our world—but only if action is taken quickly and decisively.

Which is why researchers at the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre in Ispra, Italy, and the World Bank, created this gorgeous map. They first created a model, which calculated how long it would take to travel from a given point, to the nearest city of 50,000 people or more; the model includes rail, road, and river networks.

Then they plotted these results on a color coded map: The brighter an area, the closer it is to a big city; the darker it is, the further out it is.

http://www.newscientist.com/gallery/small-world/2

Although the global economic crisis has caused a temporary slump in demand, the longterm trend is clear: fossil fuel consumption in developing countries has surpassed that in industrialized countries. With four times the population and a vast demand for economic development to raise standards of living, developing countries will see energy use rise further.

For six years running, coal has led the growth in fossil fuel production…

Despite marginal improvements in utilization efficiency, coal continues to be the most polluting fossil fuel…

Speaking to an invitation-only conference at New Mexico’s Santa Fe Institute, Hans Joachim Schellnhuber divulged the findings of a study so new he had not yet briefed German Chancellor Angela Merkel about it. The study has now been published. If its conclusions are correct –and Schellnhuber ranks among the world’s half-dozen most eminent climate scientists– it has monumental implications… it goes a giant step beyond the findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change… the world as a whole must be carbon-emission-free by…

Reduced petroleum demand in developed nations could make their economic growth less vulnerable to oil price shocks, the report states.

Nonetheless, global oil demand is still expected to grow, overall, driven by China and other developing nations as the world economy recovers.

The Food and Agricultural Organisation says if more land is not used for food production now, 370 million people could be facing famine by 2050.

The world population is expected to increase from the current 6.7 billion to 9.1 billion by mid-century.

Climate change, involving floods and droughts, will affect food production.

The FAO said net investments of $83bn (£52.5bn) a year – an increase of 50% – had to be made in agriculture in developing countries if…

As losses accelerate, missed target is “certain”...

Growing water needs, mismanagement leading to “catastrophic decline” in freshwater biodiversity...

Biodiversity science evolving from sounding alarms to finding solutions...

New systems being created to monitor biodiversity, inform policy...

As sea temperatures have risen in recent decades, enormous sheets of a mucus-like material have begun forming more often, oozing into new regions, and lasting longer, a new Mediterranean Sea study says (sea “mucus” blob pictures).

And the blobs may be more than just unpleasant.

Up to 124 miles (200 kilometers) long, the mucilages appear naturally, usually near Mediterranean coasts in summer. The season’s warm weather makes seawater more stable, which facilitates the bonding of the organic matter that makes up the blobs (Mediterranean map).

Now, due to warmer temperatures, the mucilages are forming in winter too—and lasting for months.

Until now, the light-brown “mucus” was seen as mostly a nuisance, clogging fishing nets and covering swimmers with a sticky gel…

Those facilities include Shaheen, the region’s fastest supercomputer, as well as what is being billed as the world’s most advanced facilities for scientific visualization.

The display systems for the Visualization Laboratory Showcase were developed and fully prototyped earlier this year in the KAUST-funded VirtuLab at the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2) at the University of California, San Diego and the Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) at the University of Illinois at Chicago .

“In response, officials said they would reduce their wheat harvest by one eighth each year until production would cease entirely in 2016. The Saudis then plan to use their oil wealth to import virtually all the grain consumed by their Canada-sized population of nearly 30 million people,” notes Brown, President and Founder of the Earth Policy Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based independent environmental research organization.

“The Saudis are unique in being so wholly dependent on irrigation,” says Brown in Plan B 4.0. But other, far larger, grain producers such as India and China are facing…

“The crux of the sea level issue is that it starts very slowly but once it gets going it is practically unstoppable,” said Stefan Rahmstorf, a scientist at Germany’s Potsdam Institute and a widely recognized sea level expert.

“There is no way I can see to stop this rise, even if we have gone to zero emissions.”

Rahmstorf said the best outcome was that after temperatures stabilized, sea levels would only rise at a steady rate “for centuries to come,” and not accelerate.

Most scientists expect…

The new overview of global warming research, aimed at marshaling political support for a new international climate pact by the end of the year, highlights the extent to which recent scientific assessments have outstripped the predictions issued by the Nobel Prize-winning U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2007.

What does this mean for renewable energy start-ups? Start more companies and faster, would be the logical implication for the sector. This grim piece of science news also argues for serious coastal planning in communities which have not begun the process.

The research found that 81 of the 111 Greenland glaciers surveyed are thinning at an accelerating, self-feeding pace…

The King has gambled billions of dollars on raising a university out of the desert that he hopes will compete against other top-notch institutions worldwide.

Intellectual freedom isn’t exactly the first thing that jumps to mind when one thinks of Saudi Arabia, and for a country whose technological contributions basically begin and end with oil, the hurdle is significant.

From the moment life began on the planet billions of years ago, the climate has swung drastically and often abruptly from one state to another — from tropical swamp to frozen ice age. Over the past 10,000 years, however, the climate has remained remarkably stable by historical standards: not too warm and not too cold, or Goldilocks weather.

That stability has allowed Homo sapiens, numbering perhaps just a few million at the dawn of the Holocene, to thrive; farming has taken hold and civilizations have arisen. Without the Long Summer, …

But how much of that runoff makes it into people’s drinking water closer to home? In agricultural areas, it can be enough to cause persistent health problems, including diarrhea and other infections, according to a report today in The New York Times.

“Sometimes it smells like a barn coming out of the faucet,” Lisa Barnard, a Wisconsin resident told the Times. Barnard’s well water tested positive for various contaminants and bacteria, including E. coli—which point not just to any runoff, but that coming from excess manure, according to…

Given the urgency of the drought crisis, ...

"The need to understand the highly complex workings of the water cycle, and the need to project its changes, has never been greater."
Jay Famiglietti, director, Center for Hydrologic Modeling.

Click on the link below to listen to the individual segments, which are now airing on public radio stations across the United States, and check this page frequently to see if and when a show will air on a public radio station in your area. After listening, join the discussion about the Global Water Challenge.

The report, "Climate Change in the United States: The Prohibitive Costs of Inaction," is an overview of more than 60 studies analyzing the potential financial toll of global warming if we fail to dramatically curb emissions.

The costs are largely due to rising sea levels, more intense hurricanes, flooding, declining public health, strained energy and water resources, and impaired transportation infrastructure.

The survey by Circle of Blue, an American multi-media news and science organization, and GlobeScan, a global public opinion polling firm, also found that people are hungry for more information.

The MDG Monitor is designed as a tool for policymakers, development practitioners, journalists, students and others to:

TRACK progress through interactive maps and country-specific profiles

LEARN about countries' challenges and achievements and get the latest news

SUPPORT organizations working on the MDGs around the world

As Table 1, on page 22, shows, in just one year, the capacity of utility-scale solar photovoltaic (PV) plants (larger than 200 kW) tripled to 3 GW.

All forms of grid-tied solar PV grew by 70%. Wind power grew by 29% and solar hot water increased by 15%. Annual ethanol and biodiesel production both expanded by 34%. Heat and power from biomass and geothermal sources continued to grow, and small hydro increased by 8%.

According to Land Art Generator, 496,905 square kilometers are needed to power the world with solar energy. That's less than the surface area of Spain. And just a piece of the Sahara Desert could power all of Europe and North Africa.

The real costs are likely to be 2-3 times greater than estimates set out by the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, according to a new report published by the International Institute for Environment and Development and the Grantham Institute for Climate Change at Imperial College London.

The report notes that costs will be even higher once the full range of climate impacts on human activities is taken into account.

Now, at the peak of World Water Week, more than a handful of surveys, reports and news items are bearing that idea out, as an ever-increasing number of people and companies are taking a hard look at the world's water supply.

First up is a survey from CircleOfBlue, which found the vast majority of the world's citizens concerned about water issues. Among the results:

NASA and Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, known as METI, developed the data set. It is available online to users everywhere at no cost.

"This is the most complete, consistent global digital elevation data yet made available to the world."

The WRSC is based on an idea by R. Buckminster Fuller decades ago. This site and RSS feed will document the development of this idea and conversation in the world as it progresses towards realization.

The WRSC can be placed in several thought categories, including:

• world issues
• geographic information systems or GIS
• current global issues
• current regional issues
• land use - projected
• current events in the world
• world issues articles
• multilateral organizations
• r buckminster fuller
• world peace
• relationships between issues
• implications
• state-of-the-art visualization technologies