Global Warming News

The Bush administration released a climate change assessment on Thursday -- four years late and pushed forward by a court order -- that said human-induced global warming will likely lead to problems like droughts in the U.S. West and stronger hurricanes.

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Global warming could release long-dormant stores of methane gas trapped beneath the Arctic permafrost, causing an abrupt and catastrophic climate change like one that occurred 635 million years ago, University of California-Riverside researchers have determined.

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Since 1994, a trident of flares burned methane from Brevard County's Central Disposal Facility, minimizing its pollution, but squandering its energy.

With energy prices and global warming concern at historic highs, companies and governments are finding profit in an underutilized and renewable energy source: our trash.

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While cities are hot spots for global warming, people living in them turn out to be greener than their country cousins.

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The state of Alaska will sue to challenge the recent listing of polar bears as a threatened species, the governor announced.

Gov. Sarah Palin and other Alaska elected officials fear a listing will cripple oil and gas development in prime polar bear habitat off the state's northern and northwestern coasts.

Palin argued Wednesday that there is not enough evidence to support a listing. Polar bears are well-managed and their population has dramatically increased over 30 years as a result of conservation, she said.

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The global warming debate arrives in the Senate next week, and it's about time. Finally, the Members will have to vote on something real, as opposed to their buck-passing to courts and regulators, and their easy trashing of President Bush.

The vehicle is a bill that principal sponsors Joe Lieberman and John Warner are calling "landmark legislation." They're too modest. Warner-Lieberman would impose the most extensive government reorganization of the American economy since the 1930s.

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Senators begin to ponder an ethanol exit plan

Think back to 2005 and the energy policy debates in Congress. Democrats and Republicans both claimed the slogan of energy independence as the mantra for a national energy policy.

Energy independence quickly became synonymous with homegrown biofuels, specifically corn-based ethanol. The vote was easy: Iowa farmers versus Saudi oil ministers. Congress mandated that 7.5 billion gallons of ethanol to be blended into the nation's fuel stocks by 2012. Last year, Congress increased the mandate to 15 billion gallons by 2015.

Fast forward less than one year later. Proponents and opponents of ethanol are waging a rough and rowdy war in Washington over whether biofuel has a future.

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Proponents of CCS — also known as carbon capture and sequestration — claim it will allow us to keep making energy the way we always have, by burning oil and coal. But instead of releasing billions of tons of carbon dioxide emissions into the atmosphere every year, we can remove the carbon before or after we burn the fuel and bury it deep underground.

Of course no one in their right mind is thinking of this as a permanent solution to carbon emissions — except oil and coal companies, and the Bush administration.

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The next American administration should be prepared for a China that is getting serious about the climate change issue for its own domestic reasons.

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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, according to a federal report released Tuesday.

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