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/ 17 October 2007
Former United States vice-president Al Gore said that he has no plan to join the US presidential race even after winning the Nobel Peace Prize for urging global action to fight climate change. Gore, narrowly beaten by US President George Bush in the 2000 race, said that it was a ”great honour” to win the prestigious award.
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/ 25 September 2007
Climate change is spurring a ”worldwide economic and industrial restructuring” as more and more of the world’s largest companies seek to confront global warming, an investor survey said on Monday. Even so, some big firms were still doing far too little to identify risks and opportunities from climate change.
Mankind is to blame for climate change but governments still have time to slow accelerating damage at moderate cost if they act quickly, a draft United Nations report shows. Underlining the need for speed, it says a European Union goal of holding temperature rises to a maximum two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial times is almost out of reach.
Climate negotiators from more than 150 nations assembled in Vienna on Monday with calls for a global deal beyond 2012 to replace the United Nations’s Kyoto Protocol and include outsiders such as the United States and China. ”Climate change is already a harsh reality, a massive obstacle to development,” Austrian Environment Minister Josef Proell said.
The United Nations urged far tougher action to fight climate change at a 166-nation climate conference on Monday, the first after reports warning of growing damage from droughts, floods or rising seas. More than 1Â 000 government delegates at the May 7 to 18 meeting will try to find ways to break gridlock in international negotiations.
Northern nations such as Russia or Canada may be celebrating better harvests and less icy winters in coming decades even as rising seas, also caused by global warming, are washing away Pacific island states. A draft United Nations report to be issued in Brussels foresees unequal impacts from warming: tropical nations from Africa to the Pacific, are likely to bear the brunt but those nearer the poles.
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/ 2 February 2007
The United Nations climate panel issued its strongest warning yet on Friday that human activities are heating the planet, adding pressure on governments to do more to combat accelerating global warming. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicted more severe rains, melting glaciers, droughts, heatwaves and rising sea levels.
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/ 1 November 2006
More than a decade after world leaders pledged to avert ”dangerous” climate change, a report card on their efforts so far might read: ”Must try harder”. Rising industrial emissions of greenhouse gases, acrimony between Washington and many of its allies over policy and a report this week that the world economy risks a 1930s-style Depression by failing to act are among reasons for gloom.
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/ 24 October 2006
Humans are stripping nature at an unprecedented rate and will need two planets’ worth of natural resources every year by 2050 on current trends, the WWF conservation group said on Tuesday. It also said in a two-yearly report that populations of many species, from fish to mammals, had fallen by about a third from 1970 to 2003.
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/ 18 September 2006
With a steady stream of bleak predictions that ”water wars” will be fought over dwindling supplies in the 21st century, battles between two Sumerian city-states 4 500 years ago seem to set a worrying precedent. But the good news, many experts say, is that the conflict between Lagash and Umma over irrigation rights in what is now Iraq was the last time two states went to war over water.