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Calif. Fights Extreme Heat (audio)
Sarah Varney, All Things Considered, National Public Radio (NPR)
Climate scientists say extreme heat in California will worsen in the coming decades as a result of climate change.

Heat waves that once lasted days could instead last for months. That adds up to dangerous conditions, especially for the elderly.

In Stanislaus County, emergency responders are already working on how to help safeguard residents against temperatures that could make life not just uncomfortable, but downright dangerous.
(2 July 2008)

Environment: Climate risk from flat-screen TVs
Ian Sample, Guardian
The rising demand for flat-screen televisions could have a greater impact on global warming than the world's largest coal-fired power stations, a leading environmental scientist warned yesterday.

Manufacturers use a greenhouse gas called nitrogen trifluoride to make the televisions, and as the sets have become more popular, annual production of the gas has risen to about 4,000 tonnes.

As a driver of global warming, nitrogen trifluoride is 17,000 times more potent than carbon dioxide, yet no one knows how much of it is being released into the atmosphere by the industry, said Michael Prather, director of the environment institute at the University of California, Irvine.
(3 July 2008)

Biodiversity: Some species could be wiped out 100 times faster than feared, say researchers
Ian Sample, Guardian
Endangered species could become extinct 100 times faster than previously thought, scientists warned yesterday in a bleak reassessment of the threats to global biodiversity. They say methods used to predict when species will die out are seriously flawed and dramatically underestimate the speed at which some will disappear.

The findings, presented in the journal Nature, suggest that animals such as the western gorilla, the Sumatran tiger and Malayan sun bear, the smallest of the bear family, may become extinct much sooner than conservationists had feared.

Ecologists Brett Melbourne, at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and Alan Hastings at the University of California, Davis said conservation organisations should use updated extinction models to urgently re-evaluate the risks to wildlife. "Some species could have months instead of years left, while other species that haven't even been identified as under threat yet should be listed as endangered," said Melbourne.
(3 July 2008)