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For those who have endured this winter's frigid temperatures and today's heavy snowstorm in the Northeast, the concept of global warming may seem, well, almost wishful. But climate is known to be variable -- a cold winter, or a few strung together doesn't mean the planet is cooling. Still, according to a new study, global warming may have hit a speed bump and could go into hiding for decades. Earth's climate continues to confound scientists. Following a 30-year trend of warming, global temperatures have flatlined since 2001 despite rising greenhouse gas concentrations, and a heat surplus that should have cranked...

As key international talks on climate change drew to a close in Poland with little progress on a global deal and anger against the EU for failing to lead the way on targets, the Nobel Prize winner attempted to get efforts to stop global warming back on track. In a rousing speech to hundreds of delegates at the UN Climate Change Conference in Poznan, the former US Presidential candidate echoed President-elect Barack Obama in calling for change. "It is wrong for this generation to destroy the habitability of the planet and ruin the prospects of every future generation. That realisation...

When Bill Clinton took office in 1993, global warming was a slow-moving environmental problem that was easy to ignore. Now it is a ticking time bomb that President-elect Barack Obama can't avoid. Since Clinton's inauguration, summer Arctic sea ice has lost the equivalent of Alaska, California and Texas. The 10 hottest years on record have occurred since Clinton's second inauguration. Global warming is accelerating. Time is close to running out, and Obama knows it. "The time for delay is over; the time for denial is over," he said Tuesday after meeting with former Vice President Al Gore, who won a...

Collapsing antarctic ice sheets, which have become potent symbols of global warming, may actually turn out to help in the battle against climate change and soaring carbon emissions. Professor Rob Raiswell, a geologist at the University of Leeds, says that as the sheets break off the ice covering the continent, floating icebergs are produced that gouge minerals from the bedrock as they make their way to the sea. Raiswell believes that the accumulated frozen mud could breathe life into the icy waters around Antarctica, triggering a large, natural removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. And as rising temperatures cause...

Chief Bill Erasmus of the Dene nation in northern Canada brought a stark warning about the climate crisis: The once abundant herds of caribou are dwindling, rivers are running lower and the ice is too thin to hunt on. Erasmus raised his concerns in recent days on the sidelines of a U.N. climate conference, seeking to ensure that North America's indigenous peoples are not left out in the cold when it comes to any global warming negotiations. Erasmus, the 54-year-old elected leader of 30,000 native Americans in Canada, and representatives of other indigenous peoples met with the U.N.'s top climate...

The economic free fall gripping the nation may bring down one of the main environmental objectives: capping the greenhouse gases that are blamed for global warming. Democratic leaders in the House and the Senate, and both presidential candidates, continue to rank tackling global warming as a chief goal next year. But the focus on stabilizing the economy probably will make it more difficult to pass a law to reduce carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. At the very least, it will push back when the reductions would have to start. As one Republican senator put it, the green bubble has...

Climate change could have global security implications on a par with nuclear war unless urgent action is taken, a report said on Wednesday. The International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) security think-tank said global warming would hit crop yields and water availability everywhere, causing great human suffering and leading to regional strife. While everyone had now started to recognize the threat posed by climate change, no one was taking effective leadership to tackle it and no one could tell precisely when and where it would hit hardest, it added. "The most recent international moves towards combating global warming represent a...

April 10, 2007 — Planting new trees in snow-covered northern regions may actually contribute to global warming as they have the counter-effect of tropical forests, according to a study out Monday. While rainforests help cool the planet by absorbing carbon dioxide and producing clouds that reflect sunlight, the dark canopy of Canadian, Scandinavian and Siberian forests catches sunrays that would be reflected back to space by the snow, the study said. The study, published Monday in the online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that reforestation projects in the tropics would help mitigate global warming,...

The melting of Greenland's glaciers can slow as rapidly as it can accelerate, making the ice's effect on rising sea levels tough to forecast, a study says.

Later this week in Paris, climate scientists will issue a dire forecast for the planet that warns of slowly rising sea levels and higher temperatures. But that may be the sugarcoated version. Early and changeable drafts of their upcoming authoritative report on climate change foresee smaller sea level rises than were projected in 2001 in the last report. Many top U.S. scientists reject these rosier numbers. Those calculations don't include the recent, and dramatic, melt-off of big ice sheets in two crucial locations: They "don't take into account the gorillas — Greenland and Antarctica," said Ohio State University earth sciences...

Foreshadowing potential climate chaos to come, early global warming caused unexpectedly severe and erratic temperature swings as rising levels of greenhouse gases helped transform Earth, a team led by researchers at UC Davis said Thursday. The global transition from ice age to greenhouse 300 million years ago was marked by repeated dips and rises in the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and wild swings in temperature, with drastic effects on forests and vegetation, the researchers reported in the journal Science. "It was a real yo-yo," said UC Davis geochemist Isabel Montanez, who led researchers from five universities and...

A rise in the Earth’s temperature could lead to an increase in the number of insects worldwide, with potentially dire consequences for humans, a new study suggests. New research shows that insect species living in warmer areas are more likely to undergo rapid population growth because they have higher metabolic rates and reproduce more frequently. The finding has scientists concerned that global warming could give rise to more fast-growing insect populations and that we could see a spike in the number of six-legged critters. The consequences could be more serious than just a few extra bug bites each summer. “If...

Global warming could be causing some glaciers to grow, a new study claims. Researchers at Newcastle University looked at temperature trends in the western Himalaya over the past century. They found warmer winters and cooler summers, combined with more snow and rainfall, could be causing some mountain glaciers to increase in size. The findings are significant, because temperature and rain and snow trends in the area impact on water availability for more than 50 million Pakistanis. Researchers focussed on the Upper Indus Basin, which is the mainstay of the national economy of Pakistan and has 170,000 sq km of irrigated...

The world has seven years to take vital decisions and implement measures to curb greenhouse gas emissions or it could be too late, British Prime Minister Tony Blair said on Tuesday. Blair said the battle against global warming would only be won if the United States, India and China were part of a framework that included targets and that succeeded the 1992 Kyoto Protocol climate pact. "If we don't get the right agreement internationally for the period after which the Kyoto protocol will expire -- that's in 2012 -- if we don't do that then I think we are in...

As used by the media, "global warming" refers to the theory not only that the earth is warming, but doing so because of human industrial activity. -snip- All we have is hypothesis. -snip- So how else might an intelligent layperson judge the matter? -snip- Well, he could begin by evaluating the claim that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has increased from 0.028% to 0.036% without necessarily taking the measurements himself. This finding is so straightforward, it's reasonable to assume it would have been widely debunked if unreliable. Next, the claim that this should lead to higher temperatures because of the...

Scientists have developed a serum to reduce methane gas in burping sheep, cows and other ruminants to combat global warming, a German magazine reported on Monday. The Hanover-based monthly Technology Review will report in its July issue that Andre-Denis Wright, a molecular biologist at Australia's CSIRO Institute, has found a vaccine that reduced the methane emissions of sheep by eight percent. The magazine said that scientists believe the amounts can be reduced even further and more testing is planned. Sheep produce 20 grams of methane each day, or seven kg per year, the magazine with 80,000 subscribers reported. Cows produce...

A vast belch of gas from beneath the North Atlantic 55 million years ago may have warmed the planet and hold clues to threats from an even faster modern surge in greenhouse gases, scientists said on Wednesday. The apparent release of hydrocarbons from subsea rocks in the Eocene epoch might also bolster theories that spasms of volcanic activity could have triggered extinctions like the demise of the dinosaurs 10 million years before the Eocene. In an article in the science journal Nature, Norwegian researchers said they had found traces of thousands of hydrothermal vents in lava off Norway that could...

For years, a discrepancy in global climate data has fuelled debate over global warming. Temperatures in the troposphere, the first 11km of the atmosphere, have been rising slower than models predict given the rate of increase in temperature on the Earth's surface. But polar orbiting satellites show that cooling in the stratosphere - the next layer of the atmosphere - explains the inconsistency, according to research published in Nature. Once the effects of this stratospheric cooling have been taken into account, the scientists found that statistical analyses produced temperature trends consistent with observed surface warming and the predictions of climate...

A super storm envelops the globe, sending tornadoes skittering through Los Angeles, pounding Tokyo with hail the size of grapefruit and burying New Delhi in snow. Brace yourself. After decades spent tackling volcanoes, aliens, earthquakes, asteroids and every other disaster imaginable, Hollywood has turned its attention to one of the hottest scientific and political issues of the day: climate change. No one is pretending the forthcoming film "The Day After Tomorrow" is anything but implausible: In the $125 million movie, global warming triggers a cascade of events that practically flash freeze the planet. It's an abruptness no one believes possible,...

The health of millions of children worldwide is threatened by global warming and air pollution. The world's poorest kids are at highest risk, experts say, of getting caught in a growing asthma epidemic. In a report released Thursday, researchers at the Harvard Medical School's Center for Health and the Global Environment said the warming global climate is releasing more allergens into the air. Once floating in the sky, the allergens combine with pollutants such as ozone and soot, resulting in a recipe for a health crisis. "The combination of air pollutants, aeroallergens, heat waves and unhealthy air masses -- increasingly...