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In Spain, Water Is a New Battleground
Elisabeth Rosenthal, New York Times
ush fields of lettuce and hothouses of tomatoes line the roads. Verdant new developments of plush pastel vacation homes beckon buyers from Britain and Germany. Golf courses — dozens of them, all recently built — give way to the beach. At last, this hardscrabble corner of southeast Spain is thriving.

There is only one problem with the picture of bounty: this province, Murcia, is running out of water. Swaths of southeast Spain are steadily turning into desert, a process spurred on by global warming and poorly planned development.

Murcia, traditionally a poor farming region, has undergone a resort-building boom in recent years, even as many of its farmers have switched to more thirsty crops, encouraged by water transfer plans, which have become increasingly untenable. The combination has put new pressures on the land and its dwindling supply of water.
(3 June 2008)

A chilling global warming forecast
Editorial, Los Angeles Times
There's always a new report about global warming, but the one released by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, with its charts on optimal temperatures for soybeans and peanuts, is downright creepy in its detail. This isn't your usual futuristic fodder, with vague but dire predictions. The USDA report is more frightening because it states matter-of-factly the practical changes in farming, forestry and water that are transforming the landscape now and will do so again over the next few decades.

The Senate is scheduled to vote this week on a sweeping bill that would require carbon emissions to be slashed 70% by mid-century. Its chances for passage are slim; President Bush opposes it, as he has opposed all meaningful attempts to curb global warming, on the grounds that it would harm the economy. He ought to read the USDA study, along with a similar but more comprehensive report released last week by his science advisors, which specifies the effects of global warming and its very real costs.
(2 June 2008)

Climate Findings Were Distorted, Probe Finds
Appointees in NASA Press Office Blamed
Juliet Eilperin, Washington Post
An investigation by the NASA inspector general found that political appointees in the space agency's public affairs office worked to control and distort public accounts of its researchers' findings about climate change for at least two years, the inspector general's office said yesterday.

The probe came at the request of 14 senators after The Washington Post and other news outlets reported in 2006 that Bush administration officials had monitored and impeded communications between NASA climate scientists and reporters.
(3 June 2008)

Harper Says Next Climate Treaty Must Be `Realistic'
Theophilos Argitis, Bloomberg
Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper said negotiations for a new climate change treaty will fail unless ``realistic'' targets are set to allow all of the world's biggest polluters to sign on.

The next treaty ``must include binding targets for all the world's major emitters, including China and the United States,'' Harper, 49, said in a speech today to the Canada-U.K. Chamber of Commerce in London. ``We will never see the United States ratify a protocol that does not require genuinely global action.''

... Countries will be forced over time to shift to forms of energy that are cleaner than oil because all of the ``easily exploitable'' sources have probably been found already, he said.
(29 May 2008)
Contributor Scott Chisholm Lamont writes:
So, at long last Harper alludes to peak oil as a factor in the need to move away from fossil fuels, but continues to drag his feet on climate change issues. It may fast become a race to see which reason is going to "force" the change more urgently. In the meantime, Harper's feckless coalition government is making some positive domestic policy decisions in relation to energy use for the near future, but not nearly enough to either protect the Canadian public from coming impacts or to provide anything resembling global leadership.

Half of Papua New Guinea's forests gone by 2021: study
AFP
Half of Papua New Guinea's forests will be lost or damaged in just over a decade, speeding up local climate change, unless logging is dramatically reduced, a study released Monday found.

The University of Papua New Guinea report, which used satellite images to show the loss in forest cover between 1972 and 2002, found that at current rates, 53 percent of forest was at risk of being destroyed by 2021.
(2 June 2008)