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Water troubles in the West may worsen
Alan Zarembo, Los Angeles Times
A study finds that man-made global warming has been steadily reducing snowpack along mountain ranges. States must make plans now to adapt, scientists say.
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Human-caused global warming has been shrinking the snowpack across the mountain ranges of the West for five decades, suggesting that the region's long battle for water will only get worse, according to a computer analysis released Thursday.

As temperatures have increased, more winter precipitation has fallen as rain instead of snow, and the snow is melting sooner, according to the study published in the journal Science.

The result is that rivers are flowing faster in the spring, raising the risk of flooding, and slower in the summer, raising the risk of drought.

"These trends will only intensify over the next few decades," said Richard Seager, a research scientist at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University, who was not part of the study.

The changes will be felt differently throughout the West, scientists said.
(1 February 2008)
Related at Washington Post: Decline in Snowpack Is Blamed On Warming

Peat bogs pelted with heather to slow CO2 emissions
John Vidal, Guardian
Bales of heather fell from the sky onto a peat plateau in the Peak District yesterday, in the latest attempt to halt what scientists believe is a dangerous emitter of carbon dioxide.

Instead of acting as a natural store, or sink, for CO2, peat bogs such as the district's Bleaklow are leaking the gas, a process which experts put down to exposure to 200 years of pollution, overgrazing and fire. The gas is thought to be a big contributor to climate change.

Helicopters interrupted the January tranquillity of a few sheep and muddy walkers to drop billions of heather seeds embedded in bales of brash, or cut heather, which should start sprouting in the spring. The seeds will also be spread across the moorland by volunteers in the coming weeks.

The rate of CO2 emission from eroded peat bogs is a matter growing concern for scientists: along with neighbouring Peak District hills such as Kinder Scout, it is thought the 700 sq km of the southern Pennine hills could be leaking as much CO2 as a town of almost 50,000 people. Britain's peat bogs store the equivalent of 10 times the country's total CO2 emissions.
(31 January 2008)

Carbon embodied in international trade
Rhitu, Chatterjee, Environmental Science & Technology
A new study shows that 20% of the earth's carbon is emitted from production activities in developing nations that are aimed at meeting the consumption needs of developed countries.
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Since adopting the Kyoto Protocol in 1997, developed countries that ratified the treaty have managed to reduce their carbon emissions. And yet global CO2 emissions have risen by nearly 35%. The failure of developing nations to enforce environmental regulations is often blamed for the increasing emissions. But, as a new study in ES&T (DOI: 10.1021/es072023k) shows, 5.3 gigatons (Gt) of the planet's carbon emissions are embodied in international trade. Most of that trade is driven by consumption in developed countries, which have become net importers of carbon emissions.

Some developed countries have reduced their CO2 emissions, but unabated consumption in these countries has led to high carbon-intensive production in developing nations.

Lax enforcement of environmental regulations and lower production costs (because of abundant natural resources and cheap labor) in developing countries have prompted industrial nations to relocate or shift parts of their production to poorer countries, leading to "carbon leakage".

This trend has been documented previously. In a paper (DOI: 10.1021/es0629110) published last year in ES&T, Scott Matthews and Christopher Weber of Carnegie Mellon University's departments of civil and environmental engineering and engineering and public policy showed that the U.S. has increasingly outsourced its emissions to its trading partners, especially China. "It's a bit obvious" that China is producing more to meet consumption in the U.S. and in the EU, says Glen Peters of the Industrial Ecology Programme at the Norwegian University of Science and author of the new ES&T study. "Otherwise, China wouldn't be growing so rapidly."

However, international trade and emissions exported by a developing country-the leaking carbon-have been largely ignored by existing climate change mitigation policies, which rely solely on production-based emission inventories of individual countries.
(30 January 2008)