Lawyers for the Alaska Native coastal village of Kivalina, which is being forced to relocate because of flooding caused by the changing Arctic climate, filed suit in federal court here arguing that five oil companies, 14 electric utilities and the country's largest coal company were responsible for the village's woes.

The suit filed Tuesday is the latest effort to hold companies like BP America, Chevron, Peabody Energy, Duke Energy and the Southern Co. responsible for the effects of global warming because they emit millions of tons of greenhouse gases, or, in the case of Peabody, mine and market carbon-laden coal that is burned by others. It accused the companies of creating a public nuisance.

In an unusual move, those five companies and three other defendants - ExxonMobil, American Electric Power and ConocoPhillips - are also accused of conspiracy.

There has been a long campaign by power, coal and oil companies to mislead the public about the science of global warming," the suit says. The campaign, it says, contributed "to the public nuisance of global warming by convincing the public at large and the victims of global warming that the process is not man-made when in fact it is."

Kivalina, an Inupiat village of 400 people on a barrier reef between the Chukchi Sea and two rivers, is being buffeted by waves that, in colder times, were blocked by sea ice, the suit says. "The result of the increased storm damage is a massive erosion problem," it says. "Houses and buildings are in imminent danger of falling into the sea."

The estimated cost of relocating the village is up to $400,000, the suit says.

http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/02/27/america/alaska.php

JAKARTA, Indonesia - Soon after scientists landed by helicopter in the mist-shrouded mountains of one of Indonesia's most remote provinces, they stumbled on a primitive egg-laying mammal that simply allowed itself to be picked up and brought to their field camp.

Describing a "Lost World" _ apparently never visited by humans _ members of the team said Tuesday they also saw large mammals that have been hunted to near-extinction elsewhere and discovered dozens of exotic new species of frogs, butterflies and palms.

"We've only scratched the surface," said Bruce Beehler, a co-leader of the monthlong trip to the Foja Mountains, an area in the eastern province of Papua with roughly 2 million acres of pristine tropical forest.

"There was not a single trail, no sign of civilization, no sign of even local communities ever having been there," he told The Associated Press in a telephone interview from Washington, D.C.

Two headmen from the Kwerba and Papasena tribes, the customary landowners of the mountain range, accompanied the expedition, and "they were as astounded as we were at how isolated it was," Beehler said.

"As far as they knew, neither of their clans had ever been to the area."

The December expedition was organized by U.S.-based Conservation International and the Indonesian Institute of Sciences, and funded by the National Geographic Society and several other organizations.

Minutes after the small team of American, Indonesian and Australian scientists were dropped into a boggy lake bed and set up camp near the mountain range's western summit, they said they encountered a new species of bird _ a red-faced and wattled honeyeater.

The next day they saw Berlepsch's Six-wired Bird of Paradise, described by hunters in the 19th century and named for the wires that extend from its head in place of a crest.

They watched in amazement as a male bird performed a courtship dance for a female, shaking the long feathers on his head, and later took the first known photograph of the bird.

The scientists said they discovered 20 frog species _ including a microhylid frog less than a half-inch long _ four new butterfly species, and at least five new types of palms.

Among their most memorable experiences were their encounters with the Long-beaked Echidna, members of the primitive egg-laying group of mammals called the Monotremes, which twice allowed themselves to be picked up and brought to the scientists' camp for observation.

Beehler attributed the lack of fear displayed by the long-snouted spine-covered Echidnas (pronounced eh-KID-na) to the fact that they probably had never come into contact with humans.

But other animals, like the Golden-mantled Tree Kangaroo, an arboreal jungle-dweller previously thought to have been hunted to near-extinction, were much more shy, he said, and quickly disappeared into the dense forest after being spotted.

Though the scientists' findings will have to be published in scientific journals and reviewed by peers before being officially classified as new species, other environmentalists said the discoveries were hardly surprising in a country renowned for its rich biodiversity.

"There are many species that have not been identified" in Indonesia, said Chairul Saleh of the World Wildlife Fund, which has made hundreds of its own discoveries in the sprawling archipelago in the last 10 years.

Papua, the scene of a decades-long separatist rebellion that has killed an estimated 100,000 people, is one of Indonesia's most remote regions geographically and politically, and access by foreigners is tightly restricted.

The scientists said they needed six permits before they could legally visit the mountains located on the western side of New Guinea island.

Stephen Richards of the South Australia Museum in Adelaide said he and other team members got a glimpse of what the island "was like 50,000 years ago, because there's been no hunting, no impact of transport or anything like that."

Because of the rich diversity in the forest, the group rarely had time to stray more than a few miles from their base camp.

Beehler, vice president of Conservation International's Melanesia Center for Biodiversity Conservation, said he hopes to return this year with other scientists.

One of the reasons for the rain forest's isolation, he said, was that only a few hundred people live in the region and game in the mountain's foothills is so abundant they have no reason to venture into the jungle's interior.

There did not appear to be any immediate conservation threat to the area, which has the status of a wildlife sanctuary, he said.

"No logging permits are given to this area, there is no transport system _ not a single road," Beehler said.

"But clearly, with time, everything is a threat. In the next few decades there will be strong demands, especially if you think of the timber needs of nearby countries like China and Japan. They will be very hungry for logs."

http://www.conservation.org

Biologists of the Austin-based Zara Environmental assisted by the staff of two California national parks stumbled upon 27 new species of animals living in the caves in Sequoia and Kings Canyon national parks.

They include centipedes, creatures looking like scorpions and spiders, which are probably native to caves in these parks. Both these southern Sierra Nevada parks have 238 explored caves.

Joel Despain, a cave specialist who helped explore 30 caves in the adjoining national parks said: “Not only are these animals new to science, but they're adapted to very specific environments -- some of them, to a single room in one cave.”

Darrell Ubick, a cave biologist with the California Academy of Sciences says that though it is rarer now to find any new animal or bird species on the surface, caves might still hold a lot of surprises since they are not explored frequently.

He added: “It's not necessarily unusual to find something new, but that doesn't make this less spectacular. Many people will be looking at these trying to find where they fit in the tree of life.”

As these species have evolved in complete darkness, these species have characteristics that make them appear like dreadful versions of their own species who live on the surface of the planet.

A pill bug's relative's organs found in a cave were clearly visible as it was translucent. A Daddy long legs had jaws which were bigger than its body, and a teeny-weeny spider that looked fluorescent orange instead of brown.

http://www.earthtimes.org/articles/show/5063.html

LONDON: Depleting amphibian population has been linked to global warming by an international team of researchers. The team's report, published in the latest issue of the British journal Nature, warns that climate change which is found to have wiped out many animal species may one day affect humans.

The scientists explain that rising air temperatures make atmospheric conditions conducive for the survival, growth and reproduction of a pathogenic fungus called Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis. The fungus infects amphibians and has wiped out many frog species in the Americas. The golden toad and Harlequin frogs of Central America, one of the areas where the study was conducted, are among those identified as rapidly depleting in numbers because of the disease.

Hundreds of species around the world are consequently on the brink of extinction or have already disappeared. Of the 5,743 species of amphibians including frogs and toads known so far, about one third are classified as threatened

HEIDELBERG: Scientists here did a double take when they found plants emitting methane – one of the gases blamed for global warming.

A chance finding can turn a long held belief system upside down as was proved by Frank Keppler and his colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics. Keppler, an environmental engineer first noticed signs of methane emissions by plants in normal air.

The incredulous scientist and his colleagues then placed grass and leaves from tropical plants in methane-free chambers. To make sure bacteria did not contribute to the methane reading, they sterilized the plants using gamma radiation. Another sample of leaves was left unsterilised to enable a comparison.

They were surprised to find that both the set of leaves emitted similar levels of methane. The tests were repeated with living plants and the results are enough to make the community of environmentalists to do a rethink on the role of forests in controlling global warming.

At a rough calculation, the plant population around the world could be contributing between 10 percent and 30 percent to the world's total methane emission, i.e. about 600 million tones a year, they said. In the last 150 years, methane content in the atmosphere has almost tripled and large concentrations of the gas have been seen above tropical forest areas when observed from space.

Methane is considered second only to carbon dioxide for causing the greenhouse effect i.e. trapping the sun's energy in the atmosphere. Until now it was believed that forests serve as the lungs of our planet generating oxygen for living organisms and maintaining the atmospheric balance and temperature.

The scientific community was less inclined to believe that plants could emit methane and had classified very few natural sources of methane, such as swamps, rice paddies and environments with low oxygen levels where a combination of plant and bacteria activity produced methane. Other examples of methane contributing environments include coal mines, farting or belching animals, city rubbish dumps.

The results have also nudged the community of environmentalists to reconsider their stand on environmental issues.

http://www.earthtimes.org/articles/show/4989.html

Kangerdlugssuaq Glacier on the east coast of Greenland has been clocked using GPS equipment and satellites to be flowing at a rate of 14km per year.

It is also losing mass extremely fast, with its front end retreating 5km back up its fjord this year alone.

The glacier "drains" about 4% of the ice sheet, dumping tens of cubic km of fresh water in the North Atlantic.

This gives it significant influence not just on global sea level rise but on the system of ocean circulation which drives through the Arctic.

"We've seen a 5km retreat of the terminus, we've see an almost 300% acceleration in the flow speed and we've seen about a 100m thinning of the glacier - all occurring in the last one or so years," said Dr Gordon Hamilton, of the Climate Change Institute at the University of Maine.

"These are very dramatic changes." And they are not confined to Kangerdlugssuaq.

He was speaking here at the American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting.

Model problem

Helheim Glacier, just to the south of Kangerdlugssuaq, is exhibiting similar changed behaviour. It is flowing only slightly slower at 12km per year - the equivalent of half a football field a day.

Hamilton thinks a couple of factors may be triggering the quick melt.

GPS is used to measure the flow rate

And if that same warming is bringing higher-temperature sea waters into contact with the front of Kangerdlugssuaq and Helheim, this could explain their rapid retreat.

If other large glaciers in the region are seen to go the same way, it could begin to "pull the plug" on Greenland, said Dr Hamilton.

"The model predictions for sea level rise do not include the effects of rapid changes in ice dynamics," he added.

"We're seeing now that this component might be extremely important. And what it suggests is that the predictions for both the rate and the timing for sea level rise in the next few decades will be largely underestimated."

Alaskan lessons

Tad Pfeffer, from the University of Colorado at Boulder, also gave the latest details here of his study of Alaska's Columbia Glacier.

This has shrunk in length by more than 14km since 1980 and is moving at a speed just shy of Kangerdlugssuaq.

The Columbia Glacier is now the single largest glacial contributor in North America to sea level rise, producing about 10% of the water volume entering the sea from all Alaskan glaciers each year.

Dr Pfeffer said its current retreat, which started in 1980, appears to be linked to a combination of complex physical processes which cannot be explained simply by recent climate warming.

"Tidewater glaciers advance and retreat in a fairly well documented cycle in Alaska. They advance slowly over millennia and they retreat rapidly over a few decades," Dr Pfeffer said.

The longer and more detailed records of Columbia could be used as a model to better understand the current behaviour of glaciers in Greenland, Dr Pfeffer added.

"If we are going to put things into a numerical model and try to figure out contributions to global sea levels from these processes, we have to have a pretty good way of looking at the physics and Columbia is an excellent place to do that," he told the meeting.

This is a very interesting thread, Runningfox and Waya. 

I particularly enjoyed the info. about climate changes in Europe because I'm noticing them myself.  They have started already in most parts of the Continent. 

As far as Italy is concerned, for instance, forest fires are increasing each year, water shortage hasn't occurred yet, but there are frequent, more violent thunderstorms (especially in the North), which cause heavy flooding and landslides.  Temperatures are rising, as a whole, with glaciers melting in the Alps and longer summers in the South. 

As you know, I live in Naples, which has a lovely climate, so I don't have much to compalin about...  However, we're having a light rain today, and the temperature is 74 Fhr., which is rather high for this time of the year... It feels "strange"... 

Pollution is getting worse and worse everywhere.  To decrease it, most major cities have established  weekly driving bans.

Yes, life IS changing, and we'll have to adapt, whether we like it or not!

Giuliana aka Princess Little Rock 

That is the conclusion of a Europe-wide assessment that highlights the threat posed by climate change.

The Mediterranean will be at increased risk of forest fires, water shortages, loss of agricultural land and from its tree species shifting northward.

The study, by an international team, appears in the journal Science.

The assessment set out to forecast the impact of climate change, shifting land use and socio-economic factors on Europe during the 21st Century.

It simulated the effects of changes in soil fertility and water availability as the climate changes and humans respond, for example, by modifying land use patterns or moving to new areas.

Water shortages

Of all European regions, the Mediterranean was most vulnerable to the global-scale changes projected to occur during the course of this century.

Many of the effects on this region are related to increased temperatures and reduced rainfall.

Water will also be an issue in mountain regions

Mountain regions also appear vulnerable because of a rise in the elevation of snow cover and changes in river run-off.

"In winter, precipitation will fall as rain instead of snow. The whole regime of peak flow times changes and you get an increased probability of flooding in winter and spring," Dr Schroeter told the BBC News website.

"You will get less water in summer because the water which was stored in the snow cover is no longer there."

Such changes would significantly impact both the skiing and hydroelectric industries, Dr Schroeter said.

Time to adapt

The report did identify some positive effects. These include forest expansion due to a reduced demand on land from agriculture. Farmers in northern Europe could also begin to exploit crops usually grown in the Mediterranean.

Forests act as a "carbon sink" absorbing the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. But by the latter half of the century, rising temperatures due to climate change will balance this positive effect.

"By mid-century, it will probably become so hot that the soils will, instead of absorbing carbon dioxide, start releasing carbon dioxide - they will become an additional source of greenhouse gas emissions," explained Dr Schroeter.

The Harvard researcher says other parts of the world will fare much worse than Europe in the face of climate change and other global trends.

"If you live in Europe you are a lucky toad, but maybe not as lucky as I would have thought before doing this assessment. I was surprised by some of the very negative impacts of climate change," she said.

The researchers conclude that the involvement of policy-makers is required if European states are to develop effective strategies to cope with the changes.

Global Warming Puts Half of All Reefs at Risk

GEELONG, Australia, October 25, 2005 (EN - Half of the world’s coral reefs may die within the next 40 years unless urgent measures are taken to protect them from climate change, the World Conservation Union (IUCN) warns in a new report released today. Warming ocean temperatures are causing reefs to bleach and die, but Marine Protected Areas can help.

The report, “Coral Reef Resilience and Resistance to Bleaching” was presented at the First International Marine Protected Areas Congress (IMPAC1) taking place in Geelong through Friday.

Some 520 delegates from 64 countries are attending the global conference organized by the IUCN and its World Commission on Protected Areas together with Australian governmental and institutional partners.

“Twenty percent of the Earth’s coral reefs, arguably the richest of all marine ecosystems, have been effectively destroyed today," says Carl Gustaf Lundin, head of IUCN's Marine Programme. "Another 30 percent will become seriously depleted if no action is taken within the next 20-40 years, with climate change being a major factor for their loss.”

Marine protected areas are key to preventing further degradation of these “underwater rainforests” by making corals more robust and helping them resist bleaching, advise the report's authors, Rod Salm and Gabriel Grimsditch.

“Destructive fishing practices such as blast or poison fishing can make coral reef more vulnerable to bleaching - it can decrease coral cover or deplete fish populations that are important for the coral reef ecosystem,” says Salm, who serves as cirector of the Nature Conservancy's Coastal Marine Program.

Corals are animals that are usually coloured tan, green or blue due to the presence of millions of microscopic plant cells within their tissues. These tiny plants use sunlight and the coral animal's respired CO2 to produce energy rich compounds that feed the coral host and release oxygen.

When seas get too warm, the relationship collapses, the brown plant cells are ejected, the white coral skeleton becomes visible through the now transparent animal tissues, and the coral slowly starves.

"Current predictions are that massive coral bleaching will become a regular event over the next 50 years," warns Lundin.

He calls Marine Protected Areas a key tool, relieving coral reef ecosystems from other stress factors that also cause bleaching – sediment run-off, pollution, overfishing and invasive species.

Australia’s Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority has received international acclaim for efforts to extend protection to cover one-third of the world’s largest coral reef, which the IUCN says should help the area better cope with water pollution and sudden outbreaks of the invasive and voracious crown-of-thorn starfish.

The Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority says that under zero-stress conditions, reefs affected by the crown-of-thorns starfish can recover within seven to 15 years. But recovery can take much longer if the resilience of the ecosystem has been eroded by other stresses such as water pollution or bleaching.

The report recommends a strategy for the establishment of a global Marine Protected Areas network in the face of climate change, covering all important marine ecosystems including coral reefs.

"For a global MPA network, we need to take climate change into consideration. Some marine ecosystems become more valuable, others less so, which influences our decisions on which site should be included in the global network," says Lundin.

Sustainable fisheries management and integrated coastal management are seen as additional valuable strategies that enable coral reefs to be more resilient to bleaching.

IMPAC1 aims to advance Marine Protected Areas as a key tool for marine conservation, carrying forward the implementation of resolutions on these areas from the 2003 IUCN World Parks Congress. This gathering was the first to recognize that Marine Protected Areas are under-represented at the global level.

Only one percent of the world’s oceans are under protection today.

In addressing marine issues, the conference is designed to embrace the entire global range of marine protected areas in-shore, reef, deep water, high seas and remote locations.

The delegates will aim to develop a blueprint for partnerships between Marine Protected Area managers, fisheries managers, management agencies, indigenous peoples, local communities and industries reliant on marine resources.

Presenters will provide examples or models of best practice approaches for biodiversity and ecological processes through the management of Marine Protected Areas, address emerging issues, and explore innovative approaches and possible solutions to enable effective management of these issues.

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. - Researchers from the National Nuclear Security Administration's Sandia National Laboratories, together with fellow members of the Joint Water Reuse & Desalination Task Force, in coming months will be studying the best ways to desalinize - and make potable - ocean water, subsurface brines, and wastewater.

The California Department of Water Resources recently granted Sandia and its Task Force partners $1 million for the study. The Task Force - which comprises Sandia, the WaterReuse Foundation, the Bureau of Reclamation, and the American Water Works Association Research Foundation - matched the award for a total of $2 million. Each member has to contribute $250,000 to the project.

"Over the next six months we will decide on the type of research we will do in the California effort," says Pat Brady, who heads the project for Sandia.

Among possibilities to be studied will be alternatives to disposing of waste - extremely salty water - after the desalination process. The waste could be dumped into the ocean, put in ponds for evaporation, or injected into the subsurface.

Brady notes that California is growing rapidly and may have limited choices about where to obtain future water supplies.

"They may have to come from the ocean or municipal wastewater," he says.

Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., who secured more than $4 million for desalination efforts for Sandia as chairman of the Senate Energy and Water Development Appropriation Subcommittee, says this type of research could be the "long term solution to our nation's and New Mexico's water problems."

"This award for research is an excellent step in the right direction," he says. "California shares many of our state's water problems, so technology developed under this award will be of benefit to everyone."

Sandia is a multiprogram laboratory operated by Sandia Corporation, a Lockheed Martin company, for the U.S. Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration. With main facilities in Albuquerque, N.M., and Livermore, Calif., Sandia has major R&D responsibilities in national security, energy and environmental technologies, and economic competitiveness.

Human evolution, University of Chicago researchers report, is still under way in what has become our most important organ: the brain. In two related papers, published in the September 9, 2005, issue of Science, they show that two genes linked to brain size are rapidly evolving in humans.

"Our studies indicate that the trend that is the defining characteristic of human evolution--the growth of brain size and complexity--is likely still going on," said lead researcher for both papers Bruce Lahn, PhD, assistant professor of human genetics at the University of Chicago and an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. "Meanwhile, our environment and the skills we need to survive in it are changing faster then we ever imagined. I would expect the human brain, which has done well by us so far, will continue to adapt to those changes."

Evolution, Lahn said, doesn't occur at the species level. Rather, some individuals first acquire a specific genetic mutation; and because that variant confers on those who bear it a greater likelihood of survival, it then spreads in the population. "We're seeing two examples of such a spread in progress," he said. "In each case, it's a spread of a new genetic variant in a gene that controls brain size. This variant is clearly favored by natural selection."

Lahn previously showed that there was accelerated evolution in humans among numerous genes, including microcephalin and abnormal spindle-like microcephaly-associated (ASPM). Both of these genes regulate brain size, and therefore "were good candidates to look for signatures of selection. We indeed found such signatures when we compared humans to other species," he said. "As a natural extension of that, we asked, could it be that selection on these genes is still ongoing in humans?"

In the two Science papers, the researchers looked at variations of microcephalin and ASPM within modern humans. They found evidence that the two genes have continued to evolve. For each gene, one class of variants has arisen recently and has been spreading rapidly because it is favored by selection. For microcephalin, the new variant class emerged about 37,000 years ago and now shows up in about 70 percent of present-day humans. For ASPM, the new variant class arose about 5,800 years ago and now shows up in approximately 30 percent of today's humans. These time windows are extraordinarily short in evolutionary terms, indicating that the new variants were subject to very intense selection pressure that drove up their frequencies in a very brief period of time--both well after the emergence of modern humans about 200,000 years ago.

Each variant emerged around the same time as the advent of "cultural" behaviors. The microcephalin variant appears along with the emergence of such traits as art and music, religious practices, and sophisticated tool-making techniques--which date back to about 50,000 years ago. The ASPM variant coincides with the oldest-known civilization, Mesopotamia, which dates back to 7000 BC. "Microcephalin," the authors wrote in one of the papers, "has continued its trend of adaptive evolution beyond the emergence of anatomically modern humans. If selection indeed acted on a brain-related phenotype, there could be several possibilities, including brain size, cognition, personality, motor control or susceptibility to neurological/psychiatric diseases."

"The next step is to find out what biological difference imparted by this genetic difference causes selection to favor that variation over the others," Lahn said.
Both microcephalin and ASPM have numerous genetic variations. The authors show that certain variants are subject to very strong positive selection over others.

To determine the variation frequency of the two genes, the researchers surveyed more than 1,000 individuals representing 59 ethnic populations worldwide. For each gene, the scientists identified a large number of haplotypes, or variant copies. They found that one class of haplotypes, called haplogroup D, shows two distinct characteristics. First, they are very young. Because not enough evolutionary time has passed since the first copy of these variants appeared for them to diversify, all the haplogroup D variants are nearly identical. Second, despite recent emergence they have spread rapidly. "In a very short period of time, this class of variants arose from a single copy to many copies. That implies that this must have happened because of positive selection," Lahn said, pointing out that it's statistically unlikely for a haplogroup this young to have such high frequency due merely to random genetic drift.

The team also observed geographic differences. For haplogroup D of ASPM, they found that it occurs more frequently in Europeans and surrounding populations including, North Africans, Middle Easterners, and South Asians, and at a lower incidence in East Asians, New World Indians and sub-Saharan Africans. For microcephalin, the researchers found that haplogroup D is more abundant in populations outside of sub-Saharan Africa.
The biochemical functions of these two genes are not fully understood. There is, however, some information as to what they do. Mutations that render either gene completely nonfunctional in humans cause microcephaly, a medical condition in which the brain is much smaller than normal. In many cases there are often no other abnormalities, which indicates that these two genes play an important role in brain size.

A series of studies suggest that there is some correlation between brain size and intelligence, but with some exceptions. Although, on average, a man's brain is 3 to 4 percent larger than a woman's, both sexes score similarly on IQ tests. Lahn also points out that "brain size is very heritable. Bad nutrition is typically not a factor; the brain is very privileged within the body." The researchers emphasize that very little is known about the impact of these variants. They may not have anything to do with cognition or intelligence. "Just because these genes are still evolving, doesn't necessarily mean they make you any smarter," Lahn said. "We've evolved genes for selfishness, violence, cruelty--all of which are in place because they may make survival easier. But in today's society, they're certainly not condoned."

Lahn and colleagues stress these studies only examine two genes, and that the genetic variations within a population are often almost as great as the differences between groups. "If we look at multiple genes, the ethnic variations--such as the ones we found--are likely to be counterbalanced by other differences," Lahn said. "It just happens that we looked at two genes for which the variants favored by selection have a higher frequency in some populations, such as Europeans. It might be that for the next two brain size genes we find, the variants favored by selection will have a higher frequency in Asians or Africans." Scientists know of about a half dozen other genes that are primarily linked to brain size and several others that may also play a role in regulating brain size. According to Lahn, these are all primary candidates for learning more about human evolution.
HHMI funded both of these studies. First author for the ASPM paper is Nitzan Mekel-Bobrov, and first author for the microcephalin paper is Patrick Evans, both of whom are graduate students in Lahn's lab.

Researchers have long considered tuberculosis, a bacterial respiratory disease that kills 3 million people each year, a relatively recent human affliction. But a new study in PLoS Pathogens suggests that the disease and the pathogens responsible are much older than previously thought.

"Our results change the current paradigm of the recent origin of tuberculosis," says Veronique Vincent, senior author of the study and researcher at Institut Pasteur, Paris, France. These results may have important future implications for improving diagnosis and treatment of the disease.

Most tuberculosis cases are caused by Mycobacterium tuberculosis and its close relatives. However, some tuberculosis patients from East Africa are infected with unusual bacterial strains that form colonies that appear physically different from M. tuberculosis. Using genetic data from the different strains, Vincent and her colleagues discovered that the ancestors of these bacterial strains were also the progenitors of M. tuberculosis.

These results suggest that M. tuberculosis and related strains recently emerged from a much more ancient bacterial species than previously thought, possibly as old as 3 million years, Vincent says. "Tuberculosis could thus be much older than the plague, typhoid fever, or malaria, and might have affected early hominids," and its expansion to the rest of the world may have coincided with the waves of human migration out of Africa.

BERKELEY -- One in a new generation of computer climate models that include the effects of Earth's carbon cycle indicates there are limits to the planet's ability to absorb increased emissions of carbon dioxide.

If current production of carbon from fossil fuels continues unabated, by the end of the century the land and oceans will be less able to take up carbon than they are today, the model indicates.

"If we maintain our current course of fossil fuel emissions or accelerate our emissions, the land and oceans will not be able to slow the rise of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere the way they're doing now," said Inez Y. Fung at the University of California, Berkeley, who is director of the Berkeley Atmospheric Sciences Center, co-director of the new Berkeley Institute of the Environment, and professor of earth and planetary science and of environmental science, policy and management. "It's all about rates. If the rate of fossil fuel emissions is too high, the carbon storage capacity of the land and oceans decreases and climate warming accelerates."

Fung is lead author of a paper describing the climate model results that appears this week in the Early Online Edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). Fung was a member of the National Academy of Sciences panel on global climate change that issued a major report for President Bush in 2001 claiming, for the first time, that global warming exists and that humans are contributing to it.

Currently, the land and oceans absorb about half of the carbon dioxide produced by human activity, most of it resulting from the burning of fossil fuels, Fung said. Some scientists have suggested that the land and oceans will continue to absorb more and more CO2 as fossil fuel emissions increase, making plants flourish and the oceans bloom.

Fung's computer model, however, indicates that the "breathing biosphere" can absorb carbon only so fast. Beyond a certain point, the planet will not be able to keep up with carbon dioxide emissions.

"The reason is very simple," Fung said. "Plants are happy growing at a certain rate, and though they can accelerate to a certain extent with more CO2, the rate is limited by metabolic reactions in the plant, by water and nutrient availability, et cetera."

In addition, increasing temperatures and drought frequencies lower plant uptake of CO2 as plants breathe in less to conserve water. A second study she and colleagues published last week in PNAS report evidence for this temperature and drought effect. Since 1982, a greening of the Northern Hemisphere has occurred each spring and summer (except for 1992 and 1993, after Mt. Pinatubo erupted) as the climate has steadily warmed. As a result, there is a small but steady decline in atmospheric CO2 each growing season due to increasing photosynthesis at temperate latitudes in the northern hemisphere. When Fung and a team of her former and current post-doctoral fellows took a detailed look at this phenomenon, however, they discovered that since 1994, enhanced uptake of CO2 as photosynthesis revved up in the warm wet springs was offset by decreasing CO2 uptake during summers, which became increasingly hot and dry - an unsuspected browning in the past 10 years.

"This negative effect of hot, dry summers completely wiped out the benefits of warm, wet springs," Fung said. "A warming climate does not necessarily lead to higher CO2 growing-season uptake, even in temperate areas such as North America."

In the climate modeling study published this week in PNAS, she and colleagues found that similar water stress could slow the uptake of CO2 by terrestrial vegetation, and at some point, the rate of fossil fuel CO2 emissions will outstrip the ability of the vegetation to keep up, leading to a rise in atmospheric CO2, increased greenhouse temperatures and increased frequency of droughts. An amplifying loop leads to ever higher temperatures, more droughts and higher CO2 levels.

The oceans exhibit a similar trend, Fung said, though less pronounced. There, mixing by turbulence in the ocean is essential for moving CO2 down into the deep ocean, away from the top 100 meters of the ocean, where carbon absorption from the atmosphere takes place. With increased temperatures, the ocean stratifies more, mixing becomes harder, and CO2 accumulates in the surface ocean instead of in the deep ocean. This accumulation creates a back pressure, lowering CO2 absorption.

In all, business as usual would lead to a 1.4 degree Celsius, or 2.5 degrees Fahrenheit, rise in global temperatures by the year 2050. This estimate is at the low range of projected increases for the 21st century, Fung said, though overall, the model is in line with others predicting large ecosystem changes, especially in the tropics.

With voluntary controls that flatten fossil fuel CO2 emission rates by the end of the century, the land and oceans could keep up with CO2 levels and continue to absorb at their current rate, the model indicates.

"This is not a prediction, but a guideline or indication of what could happen," Fung said. "Climate prediction is a work in progress, but this model tells us that, given the increases in greenhouse gases, the Earth will warm up; and given warming, hot places are likely to be drier, and the land and oceans are going to take in carbon at a slower rate; and therefore, we will see an amplification or acceleration of global warming."

"The Earth is entering a climate space we've never seen before, so we can't predict exactly what will happen," she added. "We don't know where the threshold is. A two degree increase in global temperatures may not sound like much, but if we're on the threshold, it could make a big difference."

Fung and colleagues have worked for several decades to produce a model of the Earth's carbon cycle that includes not only details of how vegetation takes up and releases carbon, but also details of decomposition by microbes in the soil, the carbon chemistry of oceans and lakes, the influence of rain and clouds, and many other sources and sinks for carbon. The model takes into account thousands of details, ranging from carbon uptake by leaves, stems and roots to the different ways that forest litter decomposes, day-night shifts in plant respiration, the salinity of oceans and seas, and effects of temperature, rainfall, cloud cover and wind speed on all these interactions.

"This is a very rough schematic of the life cycle of the ecosystem," she said.

Five years ago, she set out with colleagues Scott C. Doney of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, Keith Lindsay of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colo., and Jasmin John of UC Berkeley to integrate the carbon cycle model into one of the standard climate models in use today - NCAR's Community Climate System Model (CCSM). All of today's climate models are able to incorporate the climate effects of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, but only with concentrations of CO2 specified by the modelers. Fung's model does not specify atmospheric CO2 levels, but rather predicts the levels, given fossil fuel emissions. The researchers used observations of the past two centuries to make sure that their model is "reasonable," and then used the model to project what will happen in the next 100 years, with the help of supercomputers at NCAR and the National Energy Research Scientific Computer Center at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL).

The climate model coupled with the carbon cycle has been her goal for decades, as she tried to convince climate modelers that "whether plants are happy or not happy has an influence on climate projections. To include interactive biogeochemistry in climate models, which up to now embrace primarily physics and dynamics, is new."

She admits, however, that much work remains to be done to improve modeling. Methane and sulfate cycles must be included, plus effects like changes in plant distribution with rising temperatures, the possible increase in fires, disease or insect pests, and even the effects of dust in the oceans.

"We have created a blueprint, in terms of a climate modeling framework, that will allow us to go beyond the physical climate models to more sophisticated models," she said. "Then, hopefully, we can understand what is going on now and what could happen. This understanding could guide our choices for the future."

The studies were supported by the National Science Foundation, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, LBNL and the Ocean and Climate Change Institute of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

Race Affects How We Learn to Fear Others, Study Says

People have more difficulty getting over fear toward members of other races than toward those of their own race, a new study shows.

In the study, blacks and whites were shown images of both black and white men and given a mildly uncomfortable electric shock.

The participants were later shown the same images, this time without the shock. Researchers found that the participants dropped the fear they associated with people of their own race but continued to show fear of members of the other race.

The results suggest that how we learn fear is influenced by what social group we belong to.

"We'll more readily associate somebody of a group that's not our own with something negative, and that fear isn't changed by new information as readily as [it is] with somebody in our own social group," said Liz Phelps, a professor of psychology and neural science at New York University and a co-author of the study.

Phelps and colleagues say that the persistence of fear toward members of another race is a product of both evolutionary factors and cultural learning.

The study also showed that people with interracial dating experience let go more readily of their fears of someone of another race than people who had not had such experiences.

"This, to me, is quite stunning," said Mahzarin Banaji, a professor of psychology at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. "It suggests that the one or two romantic experiences one has had with another group are successful in modulating this otherwise strong negative reaction."

Phelps and Banaji are co-authors of the study, which appears in tomorrow's issue of the journal Science.

Extinction of Fear

Prior research has shown that humans have a harder time getting over fears of snakes and spiders than fears of, say, birds and butterflies.

To see if this kind of fear-learning extends to social groups, the researchers showed young black and white Americans living in New York City images of black and white men.

Here at Mother Earth News we sometimes hear from people who say, “Now, I’m not an environmentalist, but I love your magazine.” At first this was surprising. After all, we’re called Mother Earth News, and we’ve helped people protect the environment in thousands of ways for 35 years.

Many folks may be generally opposed to labels, or don’t want to be associated with a movement. Some people may think environmentalists have to be activists — perhaps they only regard environmentalists as those who chain themselves to trees or take other controversial actions. Then it dawned on us — the word “environmentalist” no longer simply means someone who cares about the environment. Sadly, the label now comes with assumptions — the baggage of unrelated partisan issues: blue state, red state, blah, blah, blah.

“The Death of Environmentalism,” an essay that has been widely circulated within the conservation community, arrived in the thick of that political mood. Its title is self-explanatory, and it has sparked lively debate since its release last year. Call it what you will, but environmentalism isn’t dead.

We believe humanity’s profound and personal concern for the planet transcends politics and other dividing lines — the environment should never be a partisan issue. Any person who wants to breathe clean air, drink clean water or know that future generations will be able to visit forests cares about nature. Any person who feels uplifted by the sight of a monarch butterfly, bald eagle, grizzly bear cub or whitetail doe with twin fawns cares about our stewardship of the planet. That feeling you get when you encounter a majestic mountain range, a group of regal oak trees, or even just a quaint brook in a city park — that feeling is awe, and it’s the basis for what is sometimes called environmentalism.

The fact is, everyone cares. We may argue about the approach or priorities, but we agree on the fundamental need to preserve this beautiful planet.

So when politicians accuse their opponents of a lack of concern for the planet, the charge is more insulting than a simple disagreement over allocations to the highway fund. At some level, every leader recognizes that a healthy planet is necessary to our quality of life.

And when politicians or pundits lambaste environmentalists for exaggeration or stupidity, they run the most serious risk of all. Those working to protect endangered species and preserve wilderness are safeguarding our planet’s wonderful characteristics for the future. Those working to curb global warming and clean up toxic waste are taking care of our most essential housework. The threats are real. If our leaders take too long to recognize those threats, the planet’s health — and the health of billions of people — will be in danger. Should that come to pass, hindsight won’t be enough.

However our leaders approach issues such as pollution and conservation, it’s up to us to advocate action, and to do what we can in simple and profound ways to live wisely on this planet. So try talking to friends, family and neighbors — even those you normally don’t agree with — about these topics. Leave the “E” word out of the discussion if need be, but you’ll probably be surprised at how much common ground we all share.

— MOTHER

For a child with leukemia or lymphoma, a donation of umbilical cord blood can be a lifesaver. But cords contain only a small amount of blood and may have so few hematopoietic stem cells--the cells that continuously produce red and white cells and platelets in our bloodstreams--that multiple donations are often needed for older children and adults. Now, University of Minnesota researchers have identified a group of genes that guide the functioning of hematopoietic stem cells, a finding that may help researchers grow enough of the cells in the laboratory to give doctors more options in treating patients.

"The goal is to develop the ability to grow stem cell populations from cord blood," says Stephen Ekker, associate professor of genetics, cell biology and development. "Even to double or triple the number of stem cells available would expand doctors' ability to treat children with one donor instead of two. Or to treat adults, if we can expand the populations enough." Ekker and Catherine Verfaillie, director of the university's Stem Cell Institute, led the study, which will be published in the July issue of Public Library of Science--Biology.

Working with zebrafish--a common laboratory model organism--the researchers inactivated over 60 genes, one by one, in fish embryos. Observing the effects of each gene "knockout," they identified 14 genes that play a role in the development of blood cells from hematopoietic stem cells and determined which step along the road to blood cell production each gene is necessary for.

An example is a gene dubbed "Sprouty." When it was inactivated, embryos showed a lack of blood cell development. But when the researchers added either the human or the fish version of the gene to embryos lacking Sprouty, blood cell development was restored. If they added back multiple copies of the gene, even more blood cells were made, indicating Sprouty is likely important at an early step in blood development.

The next step, says Ekker, is to repeat this experiment with each gene. If incorporating extra copies of a gene into fish embryos boosts blood cell production, the gene will become a candidate for addition to human hematopoietic stem cells. Using this procedure, the researchers hope eventually to enhance blood cell production in the laboratory, not only by coaxing each hematopoietic stem cell to produce lots of mature blood cells but by encouraging the stem cells to replenish their own stocks.

The research fits in perfectly with the mission of the University's new McGuire Translational Research Facility, which opened officially in June. Work in the facility, which will house the Stem Cell Institute, the College of Pharmacy's Orphan Drug Center, and the new Center for Infectious Diseases and Microbiology Translational Research, aims to "translate" discoveries about basic biology into treatments for such diseases and conditions as tuberculosis, HIV, malaria, heart disease, Parkinson's disease, and spinal cord injury. The ability to turn research into recovery will further establish the University of Minnesota as a powerhouse of research on stem cells and other topics.

This story has been adapted from a news release issued by University Of Minnesota.

ROCHESTER, Minn. -- Mayo Clinic researchers have discovered an inherited structural mechanism that can make drugs for some diseases toxic for some patients. The mechanism decreases a protein and in turn causes certain individuals to metabolize thiopurine drugs differently. Thiopurine therapies are used to treat patients with childhood leukemia, autoimmune diseases and organ transplants. The Mayo researchers say their finding advances the field of pharmacogenomics, which tailors medicine to a patient's personal genetic makeup.

In the current issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, (http:/​/​www.pnas.org/​cgi/​content/​abstract/​102/​26/​9394) Mayo researchers report that under certain genetic conditions, key proteins are not formed properly -- they are "misfolded." When misfolding happens, the quality-control process in the cell detects the misfolded proteins and tags them for immediate destruction or quarantines them in a "cellular trash can" known as an aggresome (last syllable rhymes with "foam"). Whether destroyed or aggregated into the aggresome, the effect is the same: the patient's body suffers a protein deficit that disrupts the enzyme that metabolizes thiopurine.

"Our finding is surprising because the aggresome is a new kind of mechanism to study to explain this. It's quite different from what we were thinking even a few years ago," says Liewei Wang, M.D., Ph.D., lead Mayo researcher in the study. "People are still debating what its function really is, but it appears to play a role here by receiving misfolded proteins."

Significance of the Research

"Nobody has shown before that the aggresome plays a role in thiopurine metabolism, and it's a significant contribution," says Richard Weinshilboum, M.D., the Mayo Clinic researcher who first described the genetically variable response to thiopurine drugs over 20 years ago. "From a clinical point of view, the genetic test we developed at Mayo to predict response to thiopurine drugs has been invaluable to pharmacogenomic medicine -- and now this finding is taking us in promising new directions because we believe our findings can be generalized to apply to many instances in the field."

The finding helps explain what goes wrong under certain genetic conditions -- and suggests mechanisms which might help predict which genetic changes could alter the effect of drugs. Prior efforts to explain the mystery of thiopurine metabolism had focused on biochemical mechanisms -- not changes in protein levels.

Background

Researchers have known for decades that 1 in 300 patients of Caucasian European genetic background has two copies of the variant gene -- specifically, a switch in 2 out of 245 amino acids -- that results in the absence of the protein needed to properly metabolize thiopurine drugs. In patients with the genetic defect, instead of helping heal, a standard dose of thiopurine drugs can cause fatal bone marrow destruction. Though Mayo Clinic researchers described this genetically variable response and the danger it presents over 20 years ago, no one had been able to explain the cellular mechanism behind it.

This story has been adapted from a news release issued by Mayo Clinic.

New Haven, Conn. -- Cigarette smoking may improve attention and short--term memory in persons with schizophrenia by stimulating nicotine receptors in the brain, according to a study by Yale School of Medicine researchers in the June issue of The Archives of General Psychiatry.

Persons with schizophrenia smoke two to three times more than smokers without mental illness, said the researchers. They found that when study subjects with schizophrenia stopped smoking, attention and short--term memory were more impaired, but, when they started smoking again, their cognitive function improved. No effects from stopping or resuming smoking were observed in smokers without mental illness.

Participants with and without schizophrenia were then asked to smoke while taking a drug called mecamylamine, which blocks nicotinic acetylcholine receptors in the brain, preventing the nicotine from acting on those receptors. Mecamylamine blocked the ability of smoking to improve cognitive deficits in schizophrenia, but not in persons without mental illness. The findings suggest that when people with schizophrenia smoke, they may in part be self--medicating with nicotine to remedy cognitive deficits.

"Our findings have significant implications for developing treatments for cognitive deficits and nicotine addiction in schizophrenia," said Kristi Sacco, associate research scientist in the Department of Psychiatry and first author of the study. She said the results may also help explain the high rates of smoking in people with schizophrenia. She added that this study does not suggest that people with schizophrenia who do not smoke should start smoking.

Tony George, M.D., associate professor in the Department of Psychiatry, is senior author of the study.

The study was funded by grants from The National Institute on Drug Abuse and the National Alliance for Research on Schizophrenia and Depression. The researchers are members of the Transdisciplinary Tobacco Use Research Center at Yale and the Program for Research in Smokers with Mental Illness. For more information about both projects please see www.quitwithyale.org and www.prism.yale.edu.

This story has been adapted from a news release issued by Yale University.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass., July 7, 2005 -- Researchers at Harvard University have found evidence that the retina actively seeks novel features in the visual environment, dynamically adjusting its processing in order to seek the unusual while ignoring the commonplace. The scientists report in this week's issue of the journal Nature on their finding that this principle of novelty-detection operates in many visual environments.

"Apparently our thirst for novelty begins in the eye itself," says Markus Meister, the Jeff C. Tarr Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology in Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences. "Our eyes report the visual world to the brain, but not very faithfully. Instead, the retina creates a cartoonist's sketch of the visual scene, highlighting key features while suppressing the less interesting regions."

These findings provide evidence that the ultimate goal of the visual system is not simply to construct internally an exact reproduction of the external world, Meister and his colleagues write in Nature. Rather, the system seeks to extract from the onslaught of raw visual information the few bits of data that are relevant to behavior. This entails the discarding of signals that are less useful, and dynamic retinal adaptation provides a means of stripping from the visual stream predictable and therefore less newsworthy signals.

For example, Meister says, in visual environments such as forests or fields of grass with many vertical elements but only rare horizontal features, the retina adjusts to suppress the routine vertical features while highlighting the singular horizontal elements.

Meister and his co-authors examined neural signals in retinal ganglion cells, which convey visual images from the eye to the brain. These cells generally record local spatial differences and changes over time rather than faithful renditions of momentary scenes. Scientists had interpreted this as a form of predictive coding, a strategy shaped by the forces of evolution in adaptation to the average image structure of natural environments.

"Yet animals encounter many environments with visual statistics different from this hypothetical 'average' scene," Meister says. "We have found that when this happens, the retina adjusts its processing dynamically: The spatio-temporal receptive fields of retinal ganglion cells change after a few seconds in a new environment. These changes are adaptive, improving predictive coding by enhancing the ability of these receptive fields to pick out unusual features."

While manipulating the visual scenes faced by salamanders and rabbits, Meister and colleagues recorded neural signals from the animals' retinal ganglion cells, testing whether adaptation to a different environment altered the encoding of retinal signals. From the neural responses to novel stimuli, the researchers computed the sensitivity of individual ganglion cells to various scenes.

For most cells, sensitivity to a novel scene was greater than sensitivity to control scenes to which the animals had already been exposed, a gap that grew gradually in the seconds after introduction to a new environment. Because this adaptation occurred in both salamanders and rabbits, Meister concluded that it typifies retinal function in both amphibians and mammals, animals that differ greatly in ecology and physiology but share the challenge of adjusting to a variable visual environment.

This story has been adapted from a news release issued by Harvard University.

LOS ANGELES — The gold walls and chrome balconies of Santee High School gleam against a backdrop of warehouses and aging homes.

When it opens Tuesday, the campus in tough South Los Angeles will become the first completely new high school built in 35 years in the city. It's part of the biggest ongoing school construction project in the United States and stands as a symbol of revival for the nation's second-largest district.

More than 3,000 district students are now packed into high schools designed for less than half that number. Laboratories are relics from the 1960s, and teachers roam campuses without having a desk of their own.

"You go out in the hallways, and they're full, you can barely walk," said David Estrada, 16. "You have to wait for everything, for food, for talking to counselors. Sometimes kids just leave because no one even notices if they're there."

Yet Santee, built upon the contaminated site of an old dairy, also symbolizes the challenges the Los Angeles Unified School District faces in building environmentally safe schools in an area where contamination and earthquake faults cut through the earth.

Last month, the state Department of Toxic Substances Control said the school's developer used tainted rubble as backfill beneath the school. The material contained varying levels of PCBs, lead and other potentially toxic chemicals.

Tests later determined the rubble posed no threat, but the situation has stirred bitter memories of past environmental fiascos. The most notorious occurred at Belmont High School five years ago, when the district spent $270 million on what became the nation's most expensive public school campus.

Its doors, however, remain closed because it was built atop explosive pockets of methane gas and an earthquake fault just west of downtown.

In the Los Angeles district, where enrollment has reached 746,000, families in heavily minority communities have pushed for decades for new classrooms to help eliminate year-round classes and ease violence attributed to overcrowding. But after construction began in the mid-1990s, several highly touted projects became environmental albatrosses.

Some parents remain suspicious.

"It's not a question of science. Now it's a question of distrust, of public opinion," said Margarita Jackson, whose son will attend the new school.

School officials noted Santee is just one of more than 160 new campuses in the works as part of a $14.6 billion school construction and renovation project funded through bonds.

Superintendent Roy Romer acknowledged that each of the sites has the potential to be a toxic land mine but added the district has opened 17 new schools in less than five years and will complete nearly 40 more by year's end. All have been cleared by state environmental officials.

The district's building boom is one of several large school construction projects underway nationwide. Las Vegas is building 90 schools to accommodate enrollment growth, while New York has 51 schools planned to help house its nearly 1.2 million students.

"If you're going to develop in Los Angeles, especially in the inner city... you find toxic materials because usually it was land that was used for industrial purposes," said Roger Carrick, who oversaw an investigation into Belmont.

"The issue is how well you characterize the potential problems and whether you correct it," he said. "The question was whether it was handled properly."

Cecilia Nunez, a founder of Neighbors for an Improved Community, added: "It begs the question. What other dirty little environmental secrets are there?"

Romer has tried to turn things around by replacing project administrators with a team of retired Navy engineers. He also vowed to finish the building initiative by 2012 and insisted that Belmont can be opened by 2007.

He also conceded that the district "made a mistake" at Santee by giving the builder too much independence and by waiting for the company to alert state officials about the contamination.

Steve Spillman, vice president of Emerald Development, which built the campus, said he did not know why the tainted soil was used, and he blamed an independent contractor for the problem.

But, sitting in Santee's auditorium, Marta Renteria smiled at the thought of sending her daughter to the new school.

"I've lived here for 28 years, and not one of my kids has ever gone to a new school, a school as nice as this one," she said. "It's about time they build them."

Source: Associated Press

NEW DELHI — Rescuers saved all 354 passengers who were trapped for days in a train that had slowly filled with flood water to neck height, officials said Saturday as raging monsoons continued to submerge vast swaths of Indian countryside and forced the evacuation of half a million people.

"The situation is serious. There is water everywhere. Villages, roads and railway lines are all submerged," federal Home Minister Shivraj Patil told reporters after an aerial tour of flooded areas in western Gujarat state.

At least 500,000 people, mostly poor villagers who lost their homes and belongings, have been evacuated to safer ground and at least 100 people have died this week, news reports said.

The Indore-Gandhinagar Shanti Express and its passengers had been trapped in the flooded railroad cars since Thursday morning. Passengers were communicating with officials through a single cell phone that still had its batteries charged, The Times of India reported.

"All the passengers have been saved by army soldiers and local police," said A.K. Bhargava, Gujarat police chief. "All of them have been moved to safer places." The rescue was carried out late Friday and there were no casualties, he said.

In the town of Nadiad, authorities were trying to shift more than 300 prisoners out of the local prison because the premises were flooded, Press Trust of India reported. But roads in the areas have been washed out and vehicles carrying the prisoners could not leave the prison, it said.

Soldiers were assisting police and civilian rescue workers in the area, while air force helicopters took part in rescue missions and food drops.

Experts from the Water Resources Ministry rushed to Vadodara on Saturday to examine and plug a 30-feet (nine-meter) breach in the Pratap Pura dam.

India's monsoon season begins in June and continues until the end of September. Downpours have lashed the state since last weekend, submerging vast areas.

A heat wave that preceded the monsoon season claimed nearly 400 lives in India, Bangladesh and Pakistan with temperatures soaring to 50 degrees Celsius (122 Fahrenheit).

"Once the rain fury subsides, we have to help the kin of the dead and carry on the relief work for the affected," Patil said.

Chief Minister Narendra Modi, the top Gujarat official who accompanied Patil on the survey, said the rains are so heavy that even the state's drought-prone Ranapur village had received eight inches (20 centimeters) of rainfall in four hours, inundating 30 villages, PTI reported.

Patil could not go to the worst-affected Vadodara district because of bad weather. The airport in the district's main town of the same name is swamped and no flights are operating, Press Trust of India reported.

Source: Associated Press

LONDON — The cost of driving in central London is going up.

Hoping to drive even more cars off the road, the capital is raising its "congestion charge" to eight pounds (US$14.16, euro11.80) on Monday, up from the previous five pounds (US$8.85, euro7.32). Drivers who pay for a month or more in advance get a 15 percent discount.

Transport for London, the body responsible for the capital's transportation system, says the five pound charge has reduced the number of vehicles on the road by 15 percent, cut accidents and curbed pollution.

For many drivers, its a case of no gain without pain.

"Obviously traffic has eased," said self-employed parcel delivery man Gary Rickwood. "But it's a lot of money just to come into the city and do nothing. It's not like I'm socializing; I'm trying to work."

Rickwood said he works about 49 weeks each year, paying about 1,225 pounds (US$2,168, euro1,800) for a van that he doesn't even own.

"I know why they're doing it, but I'm just trying to earn a living," he said.

Mayor Ken Livingstone, who introduced the congestion charge in February 2002, backed the increase in a continued effort to relieve the crowded roads and encourage commuters toward public transportation.

He has promised there will be no further increases during his remaining three years in office.

The higher charge is expected to boost revenue by more than 35 million pounds (US$62 million, euro51.5 million) per year.

Transport for London is to devote most of the extra money to improving the bus system, which currently carries about 2 million passengers a day.

Livingstone's office says the congestion charge has made London the only city in Britain to achieve a major shift from cars to public transport. He expects the higher charge to reduce road congestion by a further 35 percent.

The 15 percent discount is being introduced "mainly to reduce the hassle of paying the charge," said Alun Shurmer, spokesman for Transport for London. He cited a survey that showed that drivers' biggest frustrations with the fee was that they often forget to pay.

Commuters can pay online, through the mail, by phone or text message and at selected gas stations and garages.

Those who don't pay and are caught by one of the 700 or so cameras enforcing the congestion zone are fined 50 pounds (US$89, euro74) -- or double that if they don't pay within 14 days.

The congestion charge for fleets, or companies who operate at least 25 vehicles in the busy area, will be 7 pounds (US$12.40, euro10.30), 1.50 pounds (US$2.66 euro2.21) more than the previous rate.

London's government is considering expanding the current 22-square-kilometer (8.5-square-mile) congestion area by 75 percent in September.

The charge would remain the same, although annual revenues are forecast to increase by more than 140 million pounds (US$250 million euro206 million).

"If it happens, it will all operate on the same system," Shurmer said. "It will be one big zone, with one payment method."

Source: Associated Press

MOSCOW — Greenpeace activists blockaded the main entrance to government headquarters in Moscow Thursday to protest a new law the environmental group says will devastate Russian forests through uncontrolled logging.

Activists attached to harnesses hung from a nearby bridge to unfurl a huge yellow banner, reading "Recall this worthless forest code from the Duma (lower house of parliament)." Other Greenpeace volunteers dressed as trees and flanked by colleagues in orange boiler suits blocked the gates of the main entrance to the Russian White House.

"We call on the government, before it is too late, to remove this forest bill from the Duma," Greenpeace representative Alexei Yaroshenko said. "If it is adopted, a large part of our forests will disappear."

Police later detained the activists, the private NTV television reported.

The head of Russia's Federal Forest Agency, Valery Roshchupkin, has criticized insufficient forest exploitation, which he said accounts for the inefficiency of Russia's lumber industry. The new law would potentially enable private ownership of forests, giving logging companies unfettered access.

According to Greenpeace, Russia's forests cover more than one thousand million hectares, or 22 percent of the world's total woodlands, an area larger than the continental USA

WASHINGTON — A new report, the result of a collaboration between a mainstream U.S. investment bank and a environmentalist nonprofit, has broken new ground by issuing stock recommendations.

A report connecting the dots between climate change and investment opportunities coming from the World Resources Institute (WRI), an environmental nongovernmental organization (NGO) with market expertise, is not surprising. What is surprising is such a report being jointly produced with mainstream investment bank Merrill Lynch. This is the case in a report titled Energy Security & Climate Change: Investing in the Clean Car Revolution, which was released late last week.

"The report is novel in two main respects: first off, to our knowledge, this is the first time a US investment bank has partnered with an environmental NGO on research," said Fred Wellington, a senior financial analyst leading WRI's capital markets research team, who contributed to the report. Interestingly, Merrill Lynch proposed the collaboration to WRI, not vice-versa, as one might expect. "They are familiar with our work, and we've had an ongoing dialogue for about a year-and-a-half, but this report is not a result of us pressuring them to put it out."

"The second way it is interesting is that other investment banks, mostly out of their European offices, have put out very good research on climate change, but the Merrill Lynch report makes actionable stock recommendations on the back of a global analysis of climate change policies," Wellington told SocialFunds.com.

The first part of the report examines how energy security and climate change are driving governmental responses in the form of regulation, outlining the Kyoto Protocol as well as regulations in the European Union, U.S., Canada, Japan, China, and Australia.

"Clearly, there is a discernable trend towards regulating emissions of carbon dioxide and other tailpipe emissions from the burning of fossil fuels," state the report authors, led by John Casesa, Merrill Lynch global auto team coordinator. "As the causes of human-induced climate change become more generally accepted, policies to reduce GHG emissions will continue to proliferate."

Another factor driving the auto sector to address energy security and climate change is demand from consumers, who want more environmentally friendly cars but do not necessarily want to give up on performance and features. This poses a technological challenge to the sector.

"This is what we mean by the Clean Car Revolution: in a world of finite resources, higher consumer expectations are stimulating a technology race to meet them," the report states. "For investors, solutions to these challenges present a compelling investment opportunity."

The report provides analysis of the seven companies the Merrill Lynch global auto team believes are best positioned to capitalize on what it calls the clean car revolution, including BorgWarner, Hyundai, Magna International, and Toyota.

"Perhaps the company in our global universe most leveraged to the trends outlined in this report is Detroit-based BorgWarner Automotive," states the report, referring to the car components manufacturer. "(A)lmost all of BorgWarner's key products offer the benefit of higher fuel efficiency and/or lower emissions."

"We rate BorgWarner Neutral, as the stock's current valuation appears to reflect the company's attractive growth prospects," the report continues.

After outlining Hyundai's research and development efforts to proactively deal with environmental regulations, such as focusing on hybrid electric and fuel cell vehicles, diesel engines, and fuel efficiency enhancements, the analysts give Hyundai a neutral rating.

Buy ratings go to Magna, primarily on the strength of its metal hydroforming technology allowing for the production of lighter, stronger, more fuel-efficient vehicles, and Toyota, the global leader in hybrid technology according to the analysts.

The report exemplifies the very type of climate change research by mainstream financial institutions called for by the Investor Network on Climate Risk (INCR) in its ten-point "Call for Action" issued at the United Nations summit last month.

"I think this report is the first to come out since the recommendation was made," said Wellington, who co-authored a report on climate risk investment strategies sponsored by INCR, a consortium of two dozen US and European institutional investors with over $3 trillion in assets. "However, it is not at all a result of the INCR conference -- we at WRI have been working on this with Merrill Lynch since well before the summit."

The report sets a high water mark for other mainstream investment firms to best in answering INCR's call.

Source: Greenbiz.com, Socialfunds.com

BONN, Germany — A waste of more than $1,300 a year for every American, undermining economic growth and jobs? Or a lifeline for the planet costing just an annual $20 for each European?

The U.N.'s Kyoto protocol on curbing global warming looks utterly different when viewed from Washington, which opposes the 150-nation pact, or from its main backers in the European Union, Japan or Canada.

So who is right?

Experts say there is no sign that investors are shifting to favor the United States out of worry that Kyoto's supporters are shackling their economies with vast costs to curb emissions of heat-trapping gases from power plants, factories and cars.

"I think the United States was wrong" to say that Kyoto was too expensive, said Artur Runge-Metzger, head of the European Commission's Climate, Ozone and Energy unit. "This is a huge opportunity to get on a path towards clean energy."

U.S. President George W. Bush will meet the main backers of Kyoto at a July 6-8 Group of Eight summit in Scotland, where British Prime Minister Tony Blair hopes radical action will be agreed to combat global warming.

But given Washington's reaction to Kyoto, hopes that further concrete measures can be agreed upon look slim.

The United States says the EU got off lightly in its targets for cutting use of fossil fuels and shifting to cleaner energies such as solar and wind power under Kyoto.

"The reductions (in greenhouse gases) the EU have to make were modest compared to what might be required by the United States," said U.S. Senior Climate Negotiator Harlan Watson.

Supporters of Kyoto, which entered into force on Feb. 16, see it as a tiny first step to avert what could be far higher costs of more storms, droughts, heat waves and rising sea levels that could drive thousands of species to extinction by 2100.

THREAT TO GROWTH

The EU Commission reckons Kyoto will cut the EU's annual gross domestic product (GDP) by 0.06 percent by 2010 when it has full effect, Runge-Metzger said. That would work out roughly at $20 for each EU citizen in 2010 alone.

"We think this is affordable, in fact it disappears in the noise of the statistics," Runge-Metzger said. Japan and Canada also see costs as manageable.

In the past, U.S. officials have estimated Kyoto could mean a brake in U.S. economic output of up to $400 billion by 2010 in the worst case, or 4.2 percent of GDP. That would mean more than $1,300 for each American that year.

Bush pulled the United States, the world's biggest polluter, out of Kyoto in 2001, branding it too costly and unfair because it omits developing nations from a first round of cuts until 2012.

Kyoto obliges participants to cut emissions of carbon dioxide -- the main greenhouse gas -- by 5.2 percent below 1990 levels by 2008-12.

"The costs for the EU probably work out at the cost of a light lunch for each citizen," said Alexander Ochs of the German Institute for International and Security Affairs. "Views about Kyoto's effects are more at the level of belief than fact."

Some investors might be attracted to companies that stress environmentalism by promising to respect Kyoto, he said. Others may prefer to invest in firms that stress profit over what might turn out to be unreliable climate science.

Watson said the United States would have faced a bigger burden under Kyoto than its main allies, partly because of U.S. heavy reliance on domestic coal for generating electricity. Coal emits more carbon dioxide than gas or oil when burned.

"Europe's overall reduction from business as usual is 4 to 5 percent," he said. For the United States "we would estimate in the order of 30 to 35 percent reduction versus business as usual."

And east European EU members are far below target because of a collapse of Soviet-era smokestack industries, he said.

Regulations governing diesel exhaust emissions have reduced air pollution in Tokyo significantly, according to a Tokyo metropolitan government survey.

The level of suspended particulate matter cleared the national environmental standard at 97 percent of checkpoints in fiscal 2004.

This is a drastic improvement from the previous fiscal year, when SPM levels made the standard at only 12 percent of checkpoints. The figure also surpassed the national average of 77 percent in fiscal 2003.

The latest results show Tokyo's air attained the level considered clean for the first time since fiscal 1984, when the metropolitan government began measuring SPM.

SPM is emitted by diesel-powered vehicles and is thought to be a cause of asthma, lung cancer and hay fever.

The metropolitan government measures particulate levels at 34 checkpoints located along national highways and crossings and announces at how many of these sites the figure clears the national standard, which is a maximum of 0.1 milligram per cubic meter of air.

To see more of The Yomiuri Shimbun, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.yomiuri.co.jp and www.yomiuri.co.jp/index-e.htm.

Source: Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News

MOSCOW — A six-party consortium chose France as the site for an experimental nuclear fusion reactor, a spokeswoman for the European Union said Tuesday, opening the way for development of a potential source of clean, inexhaustible energy.

Antonia Mochan, spokeswoman for the European Commission's science and research committee, said the decision was made in Moscow at a closed-door meeting of the consortium.

The International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor is intended to show that nuclear fusion, which harnesses the same energy that heats the sun to generate electricity, can wean the world off pollution-producing fossil fuels. Nuclear fusion produces no greenhouse gas emissions and only low levels of radioactive waste.

"As a project of unprecedented complexity spanning more than a generation, ITER marks a major step forward international science cooperation," EU Research Commissioner Janez Potocnik said.

"Now that we have reached consensus on the site for ITER, we will make all efforts to finalize the agreement on the project, so that construction can begin as soon as possible," Potocnik said.

The project is funded by a consortium comprised of Japan, the United States, South Korea, Russia, China and the European Union, but the six parties had been divided over where to put the test reactor.

Competition was intense. At stake are billions of dollars (euros) worth of research funding, construction and engineering contracts, and the creation of up to 100,000 new jobs, according to estimates cited by Dow Jones NewsWires.

Japan, the United States and South Korea wanted the facility built at Rokkasho in northern Japan. Russia, China and the European Union wanted it at Cadarache, in southern France.

"This is a great success for France, for Europe and for all of the partners in the ITER," French President Jacques Chirac said in a statement issued by his office minutes after the announcement in Moscow.

"The international community will now be able to take on an unprecedented scientific and technological challenge, which opens great hopes for providing humanity with an energy that has no impact on the environment and is practically inexhaustible," he said.

Japanese newspaper reports had said Tokyo was prepared to give up hosting the US$13 billion (euro10.8 billion) ITER project in return for a bigger research and operations role in the project. The deal concluded Tuesday assured Tokyo of that role.

"Japan is happy and sad at the same time. We decided to overcome the sorrow and turn the sorrow into joy. Japan in the future will be ready to make contribution to the development of fusion energy," said Nariaki Nakayama, Japan's minister for science and culture.

Some scientists have warned that both sites are in seismically active zones and could be prone to earth tremors.

Source: Associated Press

CALANG, Indonesia — Mike Gray spends most days as Rolls-Royce's regional director selling jet engines to the Indonesian military or compression systems to oil companies across the country's vast archipelago.

But since the tsunami, the 54-year-old Briton with a boyish face has assumed a new role: spurring corporate relief efforts.

Gray isn't alone. The Dec. 26 tsunami inspired unprecedented corporate involvement in humanitarian relief after a natural disaster. Eager to respond to the crisis -- and bolster their credentials as good corporate citizens -- dozens of Fortune 500 companies joined aid groups on the ground within weeks of the disaster that killed about 180,000 people in 11 countries.

Days after the tsunami, Gray chartered a 800-ton ferry to deliver masks, body bags and gloves to the Indonesian military along the west coast of Sumatra -- all at the company's expense.

He then approached the London-based bank HSBC Holdings with a proposal to build a $500,000 clinic in the coastal town of Calang.

"When he said half a million dollars, I almost gasped," said Richard McHowat, the bank's chief in Indonesia. "I said, 'Mike, we're going to struggle to put that kind of money together.'"

The state-of-the-art primary care clinic was completed nine weeks later.

Today, the compound with bright, white walls stands out against the tent camps and wood shacks that dot Celang, which lost nearly 90 percent of its 7,000 residents in the Dec. 26 disaster. HSBC funded the clinic's construction, Jakarta-based Global Assistance and Healthcare designed it, and Rolls-Royce has agreed to pay operation costs for a year.

Examples of corporate relief work abound.

General Electric Co. shipped a water treatment plant to Aceh, while Intel Corp. and several other companies are planning to wire the battered city of Banda Aceh. Even an online casino got into the act by donating fishing boats in Sri Lanka.

Those efforts, say corporations and their boosters, prove the private sector can play a greater role in areas traditionally dominated by governments and relief groups.

Businesses in the tsunami zones have demonstrated speed and efficiency as well as technical expertise that aid groups sometimes lack in situations like Aceh where villages, roads and bridges were destroyed.

"The ability to react quickly in any disaster situation, but particularly in this one which is spread out over such a large geographical area, is exceptionally important," said Erskine Bowles, former President Clinton's deputy in his role as special U.N. envoy for tsunami recovery.

"It shouldn't be viewed as competition, but as another resource that has to be coordinated to be effectively used," Bowles said.

The aid community appears divided about the corporations' role. The United Nations has embraced the private sector as a partner in the tsunami relief, but some aid groups say the job should be left to experts.

The critics say too many companies are inexperienced and rush to finish a job, leaving behind projects that are inappropriate or of little use to villagers.

In the Indonesian village of Lamreh, for example, a German cigar company donated a water filtration system. But a dispute among the villagers over the cost of drinking water has left it sitting idle.

"It's all very well to come in quickly and build hard infrastructure," said Kim Tan, a spokesman for the British charity Oxfam. "But it's not just about building schools and clinic. You have to pay the teachers, the doctors. The history of aid is littered with projects that didn't have long-term sustainability."

More than 400 U.S. companies gave $528 million for tsunami relief, according to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's Center for Corporate Citizenship, and many of them were first-time givers to disaster relief.

The numbers fall short of the more than $721 million given by American companies after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, but surpass the previous record for a corporate response to a natural disaster -- $70 million for Hurricane Mitch in 1998.

The outpouring was driven both by the disaster's scope and its occurrence over the Christmas holidays. But it also provided companies an opportunity to burnish their image and build employee morale.

"We think this is good for business," said McHowat at HSBC, whose bank also donated money for six boats in Aceh and sent 30 employees to help rebuild a school.

"People will make a decision where they buy their engines, where they choose to bank and what shampoo they buy based on ethics and how this company behaves," he said. "I've never heard a shareholder say all this activity is damaging profits and the share price."

Most companies gave cash to aid agencies or governments, giving them flexibility on spending and the companies a tax write-off. Others donated goods -- everything from powdered milk to backhoes to computers.

But some companies took relief a step further, wanting in part to account for donations especially in historically corrupt countries like Indonesia. They sent employees to the disaster zone, teamed up with the United Nations and local governments on training projects and started "Adopt a Village" initiatives.

"This is the first time you are really seeing a surge in manpower," said Alesa

WASHINGTON — For the third time in four years, the Senate is certain to produce an energy bill embraced by Republicans and Democrats. But its chance of becoming law depends on hard bargaining with House GOP leaders more favorable to industry.

After finishing most work on the Senate bill late last week, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist scheduled a final vote on the measure Tuesday. Both Republicans and Democrats predicted approval.

But the Senate bill deliberately skirts some of the most contentious energy issues facing Congress. The legislation says nothing about drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska, although that's a top priority of the Bush administration and House GOP leaders.

And unlike the House bill, it is silent on giving aid to larger oil companies and refiners who want protection against environmental lawsuits because one of their products, the gasoline additive MTBE, has contaminated drinking water in hundreds of communities. House leaders have insisted an MTBE waiver be part of energy legislation.

More environmentally friendly than the energy bill passed by the House in April, the Senate measure would funnel 40 percent of some $18 billion in tax breaks over 10 years to boost renewable energy sources such as wind and biomass. The Senate bill also would try to reduce energy consumption through tax incentives for efficient appliances and homes and for gas-electric hybrid cars.


Legislation Highlights

Major provisions in the Senate energy bill, compared with a bill the House passed in April.

SENATE BILL:

--Cost: $16 billion.
--Tax incentives: $18 billion, offset by $4.3 billion in new energy taxes, tilted toward conservation, alternative fuels and renewable energy sources.
--Ethanol: Requires use of 8 billion gallons annually in gasoline by 2012.
--Arctic refuge: Not included.
--Loan guarantees: For developing clean coal, new reactors, carbon capturing technologies.
--Offshore energy: Calls for inventory of Outer Continental Shelf oil and gas resources.
--Liquefied natural gas terminals: Establishes clear federal authority over siting LNG import terminals.
--Oil savings: Calls on president to find ways to reduce oil use by 1 million barrels a day by 2025.
--Daylight-saving time: Not included.
--Energy efficiency: Tax breaks for purchase of energy efficiency appliances, hybrid automobiles, building energy efficient homes.
--Electricity grids: Mandatory reliability standards and tax incentives for grid improvements.

HOUSE BILL:

--Cost: $8 billion (assumes $2.6 billion expected revenue from ANWR oil leases).
--Tax breaks: $8.1 billion over 10 years, almost all for traditional fossil fuels and electric utilities.
--Ethanol: Requires use of 5 billion gallons annually in gasoline by 2012
--Arctic Refuge: Approves oil drilling in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR).
--Loan guarantees: Not included.
--Offshore energy: $2 billion in government support for research into ultra-deep water drilling.
--Liquefied natural gas terminals: Same.
--Oil saving: Not included.
--Daylight-saving time: Extends it by two months.
--Energy efficiency: Tax breaks for homeowners making energy-improvements
--Electricity grids: Same.

Source: Associated Press

WASHINGTON — A U.S. biotech company said on Thursday it expected the Food and Drug Administration to soon approve the industry's request to market meat and milk products from cloned cattle and other animals.

The FDA in October 2003 declared food from cloned animals and their offspring was as safe as conventional food. But an FDA panel urged more research be conducted on the new technology, delaying a final decision for more than a year.

Scott Davis, president of Texas-based Start Licensing and co-founder of ViaGen Inc., said scientific data supported an FDA finding that the food did not pose a risk to consumers.

Start Licensing owns the genetic information from Dolly teh sheep, the world's first cloned mammal. Viagen is working with cloned cattle, pigs and horses.

"I would assume it's going to be coming out soon ... and that there has been no change in the direction of FDA's thinking," Davis told Reuters.

The FDA declined to say when its risk assessment would be completed. "It's very premature to make any indication as to what the findings will be as the risk assessment is still ongoing," said spokeswoman Suzanne Trevino.

The nascent industry has voluntarily agreed not to sell any products from cloned animals until the FDA completes its review. After the FDA publishes its risk assessment, the agency said it would take at least another two months before it made a final decision.

Davis said further delays could devastate the industry, which is still four to five years away from selling cloned animal food. There are currently about 300 cloned animals in the United States.

"There were a number of companies that were in this business and now we are only two or three left," he said. "If a decision isn't forthcoming, it's going to put people in a very difficult financial situation.

Consumer advocates have urged the government to consider the moral and ethical concerns of cloned animals when making its decision. "Some people are revolted by the notion of cloned animals," said Carol Tucker Foreman, food policy director for the Consumer Federation of America.

Biotech companies clone animals by taking the nuclei of cells from adults and fusing them into other egg cells from which the nuclei have been extracted. Livestock have already been cloned for sale to producers.

Source: Reuters

With the president leading the cheers, the nuclear industry is poised to receive a bounty of incentives from Congress that could subsidize construction of new nuclear reactors in central Illinois and several other locations.

President George W. Bush on Wednesday became the first president in 26 years to visit a nuclear plant, declaring near Washington that the nation needs nuclear power.

Speaking as the Senate neared a vote on legislation spelling out a new energy policy, Bush referred to nuclear power as "the one energy source that is completely domestic, plentiful in quantity, environmentally friendly and able to generate massive amounts of electricity."

The president offered his endorsement while touring the Calvert Cliffs nuclear plant in Maryland, 50 miles southeast of Washington, one of the plants that could receive incentives to expand from the new energy bill.

A vote was expected in the Senate today on an amendment to remove loan guarantees for nuclear power and other energy sources, but it's not expected to pass.

The Senate bill would place taxpayers squarely behind resuming new construction of nuclear plants for the first time in 30 years with tax credits that could reach $6 billion if fully used by the industry.

The legislation would authorize $2.7 billion for research and development over the next five years, similar to provisions in a bill already passed by the House. An additional $1.25 billion would be allocated for a nuclear reactor in Idaho that would try to generate hydrogen fuel.

The nuclear industry could have received even more subsidies under an amendment Wednesday to curb global warming. But after several hours of debate, the amendment, sponsored by Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn., was defeated.

Meanwhile, the Senate legislation -- as well as the House bill -- would renew the half-century-old Price-Anderson Act limiting the liability of nuclear power plants in the event of an accident.

The provisions have generated a debate that the nuclear industry appears set to win in the Republican-controlled Congress.

Steve Kerekes, spokesman for the Nuclear Energy Institute in Washington, said the provisions amount to "kick-starting the first of the new orders of new nuclear power plants that we would be starting later this decade. We're talking about limited incentives for a limited period of time for a limited number of plants."

But Keith Ashdown, an energy analyst with the nonprofit Taxpayers for Common Sense in Washington, argued that the government should not be risking a bounty of tax dollars on an industry "that cannot exist in the private market without huge handouts from Uncle Sam."

"We pay for nuclear research and development," he said. "We're starting to pay for siting plants. We're backing loans to build the facilities. We're paying for the production of energy. Then we pay for the decommissioning of plants. There's no other industry that's completely subsidized from cradle to grave."

In his speech at the plant, Bush argued that government help for nuclear power is essential. "It makes sense for the long-term economic security of our country to expand nuclear power, and on the other hand, say to those who are risking capital, 'Here's some help, here's some ways we can provide incentive for you to move for with the construction of plants.'"

Not since Jimmy Carter visited Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania after a near meltdown in 1979 had a president toured a nuclear plant. Clad in a white hard hat, Bush looked at a plan by Baltimore-based Constellation Energy to build a new reactor along Chesapeake Bay.

The Maryland plant is one of several being examined by the nuclear industry in a two-track effort to resume building at nuclear plants.

Last month, NuStart Energy Development, a consortium of nuclear companies that includes Illinois-based Exelon Corp., put the Calvert Cliffs site on a list of six existing plants from which it intends to choose two for nuclear expansion.

Meanwhile, three nuclear companies are proceeding on their own under a streamlined permitting process:

--Exelon is seeking a so-called early site permit for construction at its Clinton, Ill., nuclear plant, 22 miles south of Bloomington.

--Richmond, Va.-based Dominion Corp. has asked for a siting permit for new construction at its plant at Mineral, Va.

--Entergy Corp. is seeking early approval for expanding generation at its Grand Gulf Nuclear Station in Port Gibson, Miss.

To see more of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.stltoday.com.

Source: Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News

WASHINGTON — The Senate neared completion of a sweeping national energy agenda late Thursday that would promote conservation and environmentally friendly fuels. But senators rejected a last-minute bid to substantially raise automobile fuel economy over the next decade.

The massive energy bill, which was essentially completed but awaits a final vote next Tuesday, contrasts with a bill more favorable to oil and gas producers and approved by the House in April.

If the Senate, as expected, passes the bill next week, it will set the stage for difficult, possibly lengthy negotiations with the House later this summer.

"It's going to be a tough conference (with the House)," said Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., who will lead the Senate negotiations with the other chamber.

Late Thursday, Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., tried to put into the bill a provision that would require a nearly 50 percent increase in automobile fuel economy to a fleet average of 40 miles per gallon over the next decade. He said, "Instead of moving forward, we have been going backwards" as automobiles become less fuel efficient.

Transportation accounts for two-thirds of the nation's oil use and most of that is consumed by motor vehicles. Durbin argued there's no way to reduce U.S. reliance on foreign oil without more fuel efficient automobiles.

But Sen. Christopher Bond, R-Mo., called Durbin's proposal "politically inspired" and said it would force motorists into smaller cars , "result in more fatalities" and lead to lost auto industry jobs. Durbin said the technology is available to increase fuel economy without making vehicles smaller and cited as an example the popular gas-electric hybrid vehicles now showing up in showrooms.

But Durbin's proposal failed 67-28. Instead, the Senate passed an industry-friendly fuel economy amendment that does not call for any new federal standards. It imposes a dozen considerations -- including safety and economic impact -- that the Transportation Department must consider before it boosts auto fuel economy rules. Environmentalists have maintained this may make it harder for future administrations to boost auto fuel economy.

The Senate bill, cobbled together during months of behind-the-scenes discussions and then two weeks of floor debate, includes $18 billion in energy tax incentives, more than twice the amount approved by the House. About 40 percent of the tax breaks would go for conservation, renewable energy and programs promoting alternative motor fuels.

The Senate on Thursday added to the largess approving $1 billion over four years to help states that have offshore oil and gas production pay for environmental restoration of coastal estuaries. Most of the money which had been sought by Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., would go to four Gulf coast oil producing states.

The legislation also calls for doubling ethanol use in gasoline, a far more ambitious expansion of ethanol production than the House approved, but an idea that enjoys wide bipartisan support.

The bill's total cost, taking into account new revenue and non-tax-related spending, would be about $16 billion, nearly three times what the White House said it would like to see. The House measure would cost $8 billion.

The legislation avoids some of the most divisive energy issues, including President Bush's call for oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska and a provision to give the makers of the gasoline additive MTBE liability protection from environmental lawsuits.

Both issues were sure to attract a filibuster which Domenici, the bill's Republican floor leader, said would be tantamount to torpedoing any chance of the legislation passing the Senate. The MTBE liability provision, included in the bill the House passed in April, was blamed for scuttling energy legislation two years ago.

Senators have acknowledged that the bill, expected to run to 1,000 pages when completed, would do nothing in the short term to drive down high gasoline and other energy prices or significantly reduce America's growing reliance on foreign oil.

But the legislation's supporters said that through loan guarantees, tax incentives and other programs, it will spur the growth of non-fossil energy industries. They include production of ethanol, wind power and the use of biofuels made from garbage, plants and wood remnants -- all initiatives that eventually would reduce the demand for foreign crude oil.

Source: Associated Press

WASHINGTON — The Senate soundly defeated a proposal Wednesday for mandatory reductions in heat-trapping pollution that may be warming the Earth. Supporters managed to get five fewer votes than they did two years ago.

The proposal to cap greenhouse gases at 2000 levels, within five years, lost by a 60-38 vote. It was a victory for President Bush's policies that focus on voluntary actions by industry to address the problem.

Separately, the Senate agreed to give Washington clear authority to override states' objections to the location of liquefied natural gas terminals.

Senators rejected, by 52-45, an amendment to a broad energy bill that would have allowed governors to veto a federal permit for such a terminal because of state concerns about safety or environmental harm.

Proponents said deciding where to put these facilities was a federal matter because imports will help meet a growing demand for natural gas and perhaps lower prices. But opponents of the idea said states should have a greater say because of concerns about possible tanker spills and terrorism.

"We're not talking about the siting of a neighborhood ballpark or a Wal-Mart," said GOP Sen. Olympia Snowe of Maine, which has rejected several LNG projects. "It's a states' rights issue, plain and simple."

The debate about the climate was seen by some as a barometer of congressional support for Bush's strategy. His approach has come under criticism from environmentalists and some European leaders who say it does not adequately address one of the most pressing environmental issues.

Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., urged his colleagues to support the measure he sponsored with Sen. Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., though he realized the long odds.

"I can take the temperature" of the Senate, McCain said.

On Tuesday, senators had approved modest proposals that would require no cuts in emissions but would increase support for new, clean-energy and carbon-capturing technologies.

"The evidence is now compelling, overwhelming. The world knows that climate change is real," McCain said. "Those who have debunked this and continue to debunk it will have somebody to answer to in not too many years from now."

The approach approved on Tuesday was "meaningless" and "a fig leaf," he said, to hide the fact that the U.S. is doing little to reduce this kind of pollution. Many scientists believe it is trapping heat in the atmosphere and causing the Earth to warm.

Two years ago, the McCain-Lieberman proposal got 43 votes when it was offered as part of an energy bill two years ago.

Opponents said mandatory caps on greenhouse emissions would hurt the economy while driving the coal and other industries out of business. They also said such caps would do little to solve the climate problem because emissions are continuing to grow in China and elsewhere.

"The reason this bill can't pass is because it can't be implemented," said Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M.

He said Bush is pressing for voluntary measures to rein in the growth in emissions "and I don't argue with him."

Sen. James Inhofe, one of the leading skeptics of climate change science, said, "Energy prices and the economy is what we're talking about." Inhofe, R-Okla., said the mandatory caps would be "devastating" to industry because of their cost.

When it came to imports of liquefied natural gas, many senators from coastal states objected to a part of the energy bill that says federal regulators have "exclusive" authority in the final say about where a facility is built.

"States must have a role in siting LNG facilities to protect the welfare of their citizens," said Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif.

She failed in an attempt to add proposals that would have given governors the right to veto a federal siting decision.

Energy experts predict a soaring growth of LNG imports over the next 20 years to make up for a shortfall of domestic natural gas. Currently, there are only four import terminals. But some 40 new facilities have been proposed; perhaps one-third of them are expected to be built.

"Our biggest challenge is the price of natural gas. More needs to be imported," said Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., a former governor.

Domenici said a project still would need various zoning, environmental and other permits, and that governors would have input in any siting decision.

"There is no intention in our legislation that local authorities be usurped," he insisted.

A report last year by the Sandia National Laboratory concluded that a terrorist attack on a tanker carrying liquefied natural gas would create an intense fire at a terminal. The fire would cause significant property damage and seriously burn people who were as far as a mile away from the facility.

LNG now accounts for only about 3 percent of U.S. natural gas use. The Energy Department estimates the market share will grow to more than 20 percent by 2025 because of a decline in domestic natural gas supplies.

Source: Associated Press

NEW YORK — Victor Wouk, an electrical engineer and entrepreneur who developed the first full-size version of the modern hybrid car, has died. He was 86.

Wouk died of cancer at his New York City home on May 19, his son Jordan told the Los Angeles Times for a story in Sunday's editions.

Described as the father of modern hybrid automobile programs, Wouk held more than 10 patents, most of them related to hybrid and electric vehicles. In the early 1970s, he formed his own company, Petro-Electric Motors, to develop a hybrid vehicle for the federal government.

Would said his work was spurred by the Clean Air Act, passed by Congress in 1970, which called for the development of a car engine that could eliminate 90 percent of the pollutants then being emitted by engines.

Wouk and friends invested about $300,000 into the project and he and a partner, Charles Rosen, modified a 1972 Buick Skylark with a rotary engine and an electric motor that supplied peak power when needed.

"We built the first full-powered, full sized hybrid vehicle," Wouk said in a 2004 interview. "Nobody had taken a full-sized passenger car and made a hybrid out of it."

The car proved effective in independent lab tests. It met the strictest emission standards, got 30 miles to a gallon of gas and its top speed was 85 mph. Nevertheless, it failed the Environmental Protection Agency's tests.

Petro-Electric folded in the 1970s and Wouk became a consultant and remained a booster for hybrid cars. He believed Toyota's 1997 introduction of a gasoline-electric car was affirmation of his life's work, said son Jordan.

Besides Jordan, Wouk is survived his wife of 63 years, Joy; his brother, the novelist Herman Wouk; another son, Jonathan, and a grandson.

Source: Associated Press

COLUMBIA, S.C. — The University of South Carolina has a new partner in its effort to develop a technology that some researchers say could become an alternate power source.

USC President Andrew Sorensen said Friday the university has signed an agreement with a South Korean energy laboratory to collaborate research on fuel cell technology. The agreement allows the university and the Korea Institute of Energy Research to exchange scientists and share research findings.

"All of us suffer from the diminution of fossil fuels, and we need to look for other forms of energy," Sorensen said.

Sorensen said the partnership will draw on the strengths of each institution in fuel cell research and could give the university an edge in attracting grants and private investors to its research center planned in downtown Columbia, where fuel cell researchers will work.

The university plans to complete construction on the first two buildings of the center by fall 2006. The $58 million project received approval this week by the Budget and Control Board.

The center has partnerships with 15 private companies, government laboratories and other organizations to study fuel cells -- a technology that some scientists hope could become a clean energy source for cars and commercial power plants.

Other scientists say the fuel cells could hurt Earth's atmosphere and are too expensive to be an alternative to more common sources of energy.

The government-funded Korea Institute is the only one in the country specializing in energy research, said Ik-Soo Choi, president of the institute. Its research helps guide South Korea's energy policies.

"There are many brilliant scientists in Korea already working in this area," Choi said through an interpreter. "This collaboration will strengthen the fuel cell research under way at each institution and provide additional opportunities for our top scientists to conduct research that will benefit our nations' energy needs."

Two years ago, the University of South Carolina became the only institution in the nation to house a fuel cell research center funded by the National Science Foundation. The center has about 30 researchers.

Source: Associated Press

GROTON, Conn. — The proposed closing of America's oldest submarine base could not only rob the area of a vital economic engine but leave the land too contaminated by toxic waste for quick redevelopment, Connecticut authorities say.

Worried residents of Groton, Connecticut, where the New London Naval Submarine Base is slated to be shut, can look to the Alameda Naval Air Station in California, where locals said cleanup and redevelopment were slow, expensive and frustrating.

Groton, the largest single base marked for closure, is among 33 major military installations Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld recommended for closure in May. A final decision is due later this year.

The base at the mouth of the picturesque Thames River has 29 contaminated spots in need of environmental cleanup, officials say. Pollutants like acids, metals, pesticides and medical waste have poured into the base's land and groundwater over the course of its century-long history.

"That's our major concern," Gina McCarthy, commissioner of Connecticut's Department of Environmental Protection, said of the proposed closing. "We don't think that decision really looks realistically at the contamination of the property from the redevelopment standpoint."

Cleaning up Groton, the self-proclaimed "Submarine Capital of the World," for redevelopment will cost far more than the government estimates, local officials say. The Navy already has spent about $57 million, and the Pentagon has proposed another $23.9 million for Groton's cleanup.

"The big question is who is going to pay for everything that has to be done? That has actually not been resolved," said Paulann Sheets, a member of the Groton town council.

Spokesmen at the Pentagon and the New London Naval Submarine Base could not be reached for comment.

NOT CLEAN ENOUGH

Some contaminated spots on the submarine base have been closed and capped, but they are not clean enough for commercial or residential use, McCarthy said.

"We have a number of sites where their (idea of a) final cleanup is 'We've paved it over, don't go near it,"' she said. "That is not exactly in a condition to be redeveloped."

In California, the Alameda base, located on a scenic island across the bay from San Francisco, shut down in 1997.

Since then, additional contaminants were found on the base, according to Ron Plaseied, the Navy's base closure manager for Alameda. So, like many military bases closed in recent years, Alameda is stuck in a tangle of environmental cleanup.

Many of its buildings, from aircraft hangers to apartments, remain boarded up. Since leaving, the Navy has relinquished a fraction of the territory, putting on hold redevelopment of prime land in one of the hottest U.S. property markets.

"The Navy's required to do the environmental cleanup before they can convey the property, but they need to have the funding," Alameda Mayor Beverly Johnson said. "The problem is that they depend on Congress to get the money."

Plaseied estimates the cleanup bill will be $128 million, in addition to the $200 million already spent. Others say the real costs will be much higher.

Some commercial tenants use Alameda's military buildings, and local officials and the Navy say they are close to a deal to transfer the land and allow fuller redevelopment to begin.

"It takes a long time to make these projects, to really start seeing the positive effects from base closures. We still haven't seen that from Alameda," Johnson said. "It's a little frustrating."

ECONOMIC COST

At Groton, local officials still hope to keep the base open. The federal government estimates about 8,460 military and civilian jobs are at stake with the proposed closing; state officials say it could be as many as 31,500 jobs.

Another of Groton's large employers, General Dynamics' Electric Boat, has said it would remain in business if the base closed. But such a closing could affect the number of jobs at Electric Boat, which now has some 11,300 employees.

While the base's waterfront location is breathtaking, the land may be too dirty to join neighboring Mystic, a popular resort, in attracting tourists, officials say.

But new industrial uses might be welcome in a town so dependent on the base that some 40 percent of its school children come from Navy families. Many other residents are military retirees who opted to stay near a base for its health care facilities and discounted shopping.

Sheets said small businesses in particular depend on the base. "They will shrivel up and blow away within six months if we don't have something moving in," he said.

Joseph Quaratella, whose Nautilus Barber Shop is filled with photographs of submarines, has been giving crew cuts to Groton's military staff for 46 years.

"This place is going to be disasterland" if the base closes, he said. "I know I'll lose business. Will it be enough to survive? Who knows?"

(Adam Tanner reported from Alameda, California)

Source: Reuters

PORTSMOUTH, N.H. — Environmental Power Corporation (AMEX:EPG), in collaboration with Dairyland Power Cooperative, is formally commissioning the first of its electricity generating anaerobic digester systems. A ribbon cutting ceremony will be held on June 22, at the Five Star Dairy in Elk Mound, WI, to commemorate this. The ceremony will feature a facility tour and brief remarks by William Berg, president and chief executive officer of Dairyland Power Cooperative, Frank Frassetto, Wisconsin state director for USDA Rural Development, Joseph Cresci, chairman of Environmental Power Corporation, and Agricultural Minister Counselor Steen Thorsted of the Royal Danish Embassy in Washington, DC.

This facility has been designed and constructed by Microgy, Inc., Environmental Power's principal operating subsidiary. The facility is believed by Microgy to produce substantially more electricity from a given quantity of animal and organic wastes than any other anaerobic digester system built for commercial purposes in the United States. The facility is the first installed in the United States utilizing a proven Danish technology licensed exclusively to Microgy for deployment in North America. The system is projected to generate approximately 6.5 million kilowatt hours annually from the waste of about 800 milk cows, an output that is sufficient to supply approximately 600 homes.

Joseph Cresci stated "The commissioning of this system is the first step toward what we believe will be an important role for this superior technology in helping our country cost-effectively meet its growing energy demands while protecting the environment."

In addition to producing renewable energy, anaerobic digesters are recognized as a solution to environmental and regulatory compliance issues related to animal waste disposal. Microgy's system can help farmers reduce ground and surface water pollution and minimize odors while freeing land for increased herd sizes, which is expected to help lower farm operation and maintenance costs. Anaerobic digesters also produce residual byproducts, including compost, bedding materials and pollution management credits that can serve as additional sources of revenue.

"Environmental Power Corporation is committed to developing renewable and alternative energy facilities. With our first-mover advantage in producing biofuels from agricultural waste management processes, we hope to continue leading the way in the growing market for 'green' energy," said Kam Tejwani, president and chief executive officer, Environmental Power Corporation. "This event showcases Microgy's unique technology and celebrates our collaboration with Lee Jensen of Five Star Dairy, Dairyland Power Cooperative and Dunn Energy. We look forward to the construction and installation of additional anaerobic digesters with Dairyland Power Cooperative."

"This alliance with Microgy enables Dairyland to expand our renewable energy portfolio as part of our long-term plan to use clean, cost-effective sources of electricity. Increased demand on our system will be eased by this waste-to-energy generation, which is good for our cooperative members and the environment," said William Berg, president and chief executive officer, Dairyland Power Cooperative.

ABOUT Environmental Power Corporation: Environmental Power Corporation is a developer, owner and operator of renewable energy production facilities. Its principal operating subsidiary, Microgy, Inc., holds an exclusive license in North America for the development and deployment of a proprietary anaerobic digestion technology, which transforms manure and food industry waste into methane-rich biogas that can be used to generate electricity or thermal energy, or refined to pipeline-grade methane for sale as a commodity. This technology also represents a potentially profitable solution for the nation's estimated 3,500 large animal feeding operations as they seek to comply with a growing number of proposed and adopted mandates developed by federal, state and local officials aimed at regulating the management of farm waste. For more information visit the Company's web site at www.environmentalpower.com.

About Dairyland Power Cooperative: With headquarters in La Crosse, Wis., Dairyland provides wholesale electricity to 25 member distribution cooperatives and 20 municipal utilities. Dairyland's service area encompasses 62 counties in four states (Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa and Illinois). Dairyland has provided low-cost, reliable electrical energy and related services to its customers in the upper Midwest for over 63 years.

Source: Businesswire, Environmental Power Corporation

WASHINGTON — Visitors to hazy national parks and wilderness areas once again might see a clear day -- even if not forever -- under new rules that will require power plants, steel mills and other facilities to cut pollution by a million tons a year.

The Environmental Protection Agency rules issued Wednesday direct state officials to specify what plants will have to make the cuts and by how much.

"States are now required to go out and identify these facilities and then determine what the best available retrofit technology is," said Jeff Holmstead, head of air quality for EPA. "We don't expect that any states will fail to do this."

As part of a 2003 court settlement with an environmental group, New York-based Environmental Defense, the EPA agreed to have states impose limits on air pollution, often from sources hundreds of miles away, to reduce haze and visibility problems in 156 national parks and wilderness areas. States will now have to submit new plans by December 2007 on how to do that.

But the group, which sued to enforce the Clean Air Act, says the Bush administration weakened the final rule by allowing states to discount some data on the worst haze.

"Protective state action enforcing EPA's pollution-control guidelines will be essential to lift the veil of haze from the nation's crown jewels," said Vickie Patton, a senior attorney for the group. "Unfortunately, EPA has made it harder for the states to restore clean air to our national parks by exempting some high-polluting industrial sources from cleanup requirements."

The biggest impact will be in the Great Smoky Mountains and other parks in the Southeast and in Western parks such as the Grand Canyon. Haze is produced mainly by nitrates and sulfates that scatter and absorb light in the atmosphere.

Holmstead said that beginning in 2014, industrial facilities will have to cut 1 million tons of pollution a year -- 600,000 tons of nitrogen oxides and 400,000 tons of sulfur dioxide.

The EPA estimates it will cost about $1.5 billion a year to achieve the reduction but puts the annual benefits at $8.5 billion to $10 billion through fewer premature deaths, nonfatal heart attacks, hospital admissions and lost school and workdays.

The EPA expects an additional $240 million a year in benefits from increased tourism.

"Some areas will benefit more, because they're more polluted than other areas," Holmstead said. "We are predicting improvements in all of them."

SYDNEY, Australia — Taking up a tactic long used by Australian environmentalists, the country's largest timber company has gone to court to try to block prominent environmental campaigners from carrying out what it claims are violent protests and to demand millions of dollars in damages from anti-logging demonstrations.

Hearings will be held next month on the suit filed by Gunns Ltd. accusing the Australia-based Wilderness Society, federal Sen. Bob Brown of the Green Party and 18 other environmental activists of engaging in "guerrilla tactics" at four logging sites in the southern state of Tasmania.

The 216-page suit filed late last year in the Victoria Supreme Court accuses the defendants of sabotaging logging machines, destroying private property, trespassing, blocking access to land and obstructing police. It also claims the defendants organized smear campaigns targeting Gunns' overseas customers -- particularly in Japan and Belgium -- and vilifying Gunns investors and shareholders.

Gunns is seeking an injunction against such tactics and Australian $6.36 million (US$4.8 million; euro3.91 million) in damages.

Environmentalists, who frequently have gone to court to battle logging companies, argue the Gunns' lawsuit undermines their right to free speech.

"We see this whole court case as being very dangerous for the right of ordinary people to get out there and play their part in protecting the environment," said Alexander Marr, a forest campaigner for the Wilderness Society and the lead defendant in the case. "The logging industry does not accept that it's acceptable for anybody to protest against the logging industry in any form."

Lawyers for the defendants have filed a motion seeking to force Gunns to produce evidence backing their claims. Preliminary hearings in the case are scheduled to begin on July 4 in the Victoria Supreme Court.

"At the moment we have 200 pages of accusations and no worthwhile documentation backing up those accusations," Marr said.

Gunns has refused to comment on the case while the trial is pending. But in a statement issued last year, the company said it was forced to act to protect the interests of shareholders, employees and contractors.

Timber industry groups support the move, saying the protesters have gone too far. They accuse environmental activists of harassing workers, damaging logging equipment, defecating on private property and putting lives at risk by placing metal spikes in trees.

"We've put up with 20 years of disruption to our workplace. There's loss of wages, in some instances loss of jobs," forestry union spokesman Scott McLean said in a telephone interview. "These things are not fair. This is guerrilla warfare these people are carrying out."

Terry Edwards, chief executive of the Forest Industries Association of Tasmania, also supports the lawsuit.

"We don't object to people wishing to express themselves by way of protest, but they've got to do it within the law of the land," he said. "Where they don't, that gives rise to damages claims within the courts."

But Sen. Brown says the allegations are false and that it is the timber industry supporters -- not the environmentalists -- who have resorted to violence.

"I've never crossed that line and I believe totally in peaceful protests," Brown told The Associated Press.

"I've had death threats in my time as an activist, I've had shots fired at me. ... The logging industry has a record which should be held up and answered for," he added.

Timber groups also claim environmentalists have distorted the view of logging in Tasmania, claiming a disproportionately large area of the state's ancient forests are razed.

"The state has a very, very high level of preservation," said Edwards of the Forest Industries Association. He cited statistics from Forestry Tasmania, the state body that manages forests, showing that around 46 percent of Tasmania is preserved in World Heritage areas, national parks or other reserves that cannot be logged.

Of the state's 3.2 million hectares (7.9 million acres) of unprotected forest, roughly 38,000 hectares (93,860 acres) -- not much more than 1 percent -- is logged each year, he said.

But Brown calls those figures "a total cheat," saying many of the reserve areas do not include the largest stands of old growth forest, have already been logged, or are open to mining and other forms of industry.

Lawyers have said the case could last up to two years. In the meantime, Brown says the logging company's suit won't deter him from environmental activism.

"They can take every penny I've got, they can take every home convenience and they can take every good night's sleep I've got left in my life but I won't back off," he said.

Source: Associated Press

WASHINGTON — The Senate was set to take up a broad, $11 billion energy bill on Tuesday, with lawmakers racing the clock to get a final version to the White House this summer.

The legislation aims to boost long-term domestic oil, natural gas and gasoline production, make the U.S. electric grid more reliable and build more nuclear power plants.

The bill also seeks to reduce U.S. addiction to foreign oil, which now accounts for close to 60 percent of domestic petroleum demand.

Senate Democrats plan to offer an amendment to the bill that would require the government to find ways to cut U.S. import dependence by 40 percent in 20 years. That goes beyond the bill's current call to reduce U.S. oil demand of about 20 million barrels per day by 1 million bpd by 2015.

U.S. companies can use existing technologies like hybrid cars, biodiesel and other farm-derived fuels to make the cut, Senate Democrats said.

"When you have a dangerous addiction, it's time for an intervention," Sen. Byron Dorgan of North Dakota said. He has pushed for Congress to require U.S. refiners to double the use of corn-blended ethanol, a boon to his state's farm economy.

President Bush asked Congress to send him an energy bill before lawmakers adjourn for their summer recess around Aug. 1.

However, senior staff at the Senate Energy Committee said they won't commit to wrapping up work on a final energy bill by that date, because it may difficult, if not impossible, to work out major differences in the Senate and House energy bills.

The House of Representatives approved an $8 billion energy package in April with several contentious provisions that could be filibustered in the Senate.

Those differences will have to be worked out in a Senate-House conference committee.

Unlike the Senate's bill, the House legislation would allow oil drilling in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Senate Republicans prefer to include ANWR drilling language in the government's massive annual budget bill, which can't be filibustered.

A much bigger problem for the Senate is the House bill's measure to protect oil companies from certain lawsuits for making the water-polluting MTBE gasoline additive. House Republican leader Tom DeLay of Texas insists that U.S. refiners must be shielded from defective-product lawsuits.

MTBE liability measures doomed a previous energy bill in the Senate last year and could do so again, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid said.

"If there is no liability (for MTBE makers), there won't be a bill," Reid said. "We feel very strongly about that."

U.S. refiners began adding MTBE to gasoline in 1979 as an anti-knock agent that replaced lead, but MTBE has seeped into water supplies in all 50 states through leaky storage tanks, rendering the water undrinkable.

Amendments are expected on requiring more electricity to be generated by renewable energy sources; allowing states to open closed offshore waters for oil and gas drilling; and fighting global warming.

The Senate Finance Committee will also tack on to the bill a multibillion-dollar package of energy tax breaks and financial incentives, which could be more than the double the $6.7 billion cap the White House wants in the bill.

STOCKHOLM, Sweden — More than 300 scientists, experts and government representatives gathered in Stockholm on Monday to discuss the environmental issues facing the South Pole, and the effects global warming and increased tourism may have on the icy continent.

The two-week meeting brings together the 45 countries who have signed the 1959 Antarctic Treaty, which governs the continent, to negotiate how best to handle international cooperation concerning research, environmental protection and tourism on Antarctica.

One of the key issues to be discussed will be a proposal to hold corporations responsible for oil spills and other accidents near the South Pole, and make them liable to pay damages.

Other items on the agenda include so-called "bio-prospecting" by biotech companies searching for organisms to use in medicines or other applications.

"Our common and challenging task is to manage this extraordinary continent for the benefit of our common environment, and for future generations," Swedish Foreign Minister Laila Freivalds said in her opening speech. "The Antarctic Continent is our largest joint nature reserve."

The meeting in Stockholm, the 28th international conference on the Antarctic, lasts until June 17. Sweden's King Carl XVI Gustaf is set to attend a scientific lecture on June 8.

Under the Antarctic Treaty, the continent is designated as a natural reserve, devoted to peace and science. Originally signed by 12 nations in 1959, the treaty established the continent as a rare model of cooperation.

Signatories, which included the Soviet Union, Britain and the United States, agreed to demilitarize the continent, share scientific information from studies there and set aside territorial claims.

When it comes to the world laid before us, our mind's eye has a bias. For reasons that are not entirely clear, during some tasks humans have a tendency to devote more visual attention to the left side of the visual world than the right side, a phenomenon known as pseudoneglect. Researchers now report that pseudoneglect is not restricted to humans but is shared by birds, suggesting not only that brain structures thought to play a requisite role in pseudoneglect may not actually be essential for this phenomenon, but also that pseudoneglect may reflect evolutionary adaptations that allow animals to devote attention to multiple aspects of their environment.

The findings are reported in the May 24 issue of Current Biology by Bettina Diekamp (now at Johns Hopkins University) and colleagues at Ruhr University, Bochum, Germany; the University of Padova, Italy; and The University of Trieste, Italy.

It has been known for some time that human patients who have suffered injury to the brain's right hemisphere can experience a much more severe bias in their spatial attention--spatial hemineglect--in which the entire left side of the visual world seems nonexistent as the brain performs spatial tasks. In a classic example, a patient asked to draw a daisy can only manage to put petals on the right side of her drawing.

The more subtle leftward bias in attention present in healthy humans likely has to do with asymmetries in the wiring of the brain's attention in the two hemispheres; the new finding in birds offers some insight into how and why this might be.

In the new work, researchers tested two bird species, the domestic chick and the pigeon, for their performance on a task in which they were allowed to freely peck at grains of food that were spread evenly in an area before them. Though the birds' bodies were positioned at the midline of the search area, both chicks and pigeons showed a considerable leftward bias in pecking. The experiment is similar in concept to those that reveal pseudoneglect in humans--so-called cancellation tasks in which subjects are asked to "cancel-out" evenly distributed visual targets on a sheet of paper placed before them.

The finding that birds also exhibit spatial pseudoneglect is somewhat surprising, given that birds lack a corpus collosum, the structure in human brains that is thought to facilitate rapid communication between the two hemispheres. In the past, such communication via the corpus collosum has been thought to form the basis for asymmetries in human spatial attention, but the new observations suggest that this view warrants reconsideration.

It isn't clear why humans or birds should benefit from biased spatial attention, but past work has suggested that brain organization underlying attention asymmetries may offer benefits in spatial learning and in performing simultaneous spatial tasks, such as looking for food while being vigilant for predators.

###

The researchers include Bettina Diekamp and Onur Gόntόrkόn of the Ruhr-Universitδt Bochum, Germany; Lucia Regolin of University of Padova, Italy; and Giorgio Vallortigara of the University of Trieste, Italy.

Bettina Diekamp, Lucia Regolin, Onur Gόntόrkόn and Giorgio Vallortigara: "A left-sided visuospatial bias in birds." Current Biology, Vol. 15, R372–R373, May 24, 2005. http://www.current-biology.com

This story has been adapted from a news release issued by Cell Press.

Five Evidentiary Exhibits
Expose Today’s Middle East "Merchants of Extinction"

Enclosed are the five Evidentiary Exhibits submitted to the F.B.I. in May, 2001. These represent 14 years of investigatory work in Central Asia and the Middle East, considerable expenditure of resources, and difficult sacrifices by dedicated supporters embedded across ex-Soviet Asia and the Middle East.

This material and the website reference prominent leaders of Kazakhstan, Mongolia, and ex-Soviet Asia – as well as important Middle East leaders – financing and directing illicit trade in rare falcons and other wildlife, often under cover of Diplomatic Immunity and contrived biological “field research” and captive breeding programs. Each year, Gulf-financed implementing agents smuggle with impunity, thousands of specimens of this priceless wildlife resource.

OPERATION FALCON successfully documented “person-to-person” smuggling, with over 300 arrests and favorable, U.S. Congressional Hearings. These Exhibits uncover “Government-to-Government” smuggling, and therein lies the challenge: how to reform a black market that is promoted by Asian and Middle East political leaders, Sheikhs, Princes, Ministry and C.I.T.E.S. Officials, and field biologists. Today’s “Keepers of the Gate” have pillaged the resource they are mandated to protect.

These Exhibits were withheld from the public domain, under Agreement with the F.B.I. that prevented F.O.I.A. disclosures. However, when Middle East smugglers stole these Exhibits on August 26, 2002 in Marbella, Spain – the element of confidentiality was lost. The Middle East / Central Asian Mafia now possess information-gathering protocols and names of informants.

Under this threat, U.C.R. has no choice but to appeal to a larger community to support aggressive, proactive measures to eviscerate today’s black market trade. Our first step is to make these materials available for public review, and to appeal to the U.S. Administration and Capitol Hill, to seek regulatory change, policy reform, and “Pelly Amendment” trade sanctions, selectively applied against smuggling States.

This is not about birds. This is about “Official Misconduct” and “High-Level Corruption” – beginning with Arab Royals in their desert Palaces in Riyadh, Kuwait, and the U.A.E. – reaching clear across the Atlantic. Several Middle East leaders abuse political power and the wealth of their Nations to control conservation agencies, including the United Nations C.I.T.E.S. Secretariat. The ultimatums emanating from Royal smugglers importune cover from the U.S. State Department – without which today’s black market would be impossible.

The U.S. Pelly Amendment advocated here, has the potential to reverse this trend

http://www.savethefalcons.org/exhibits.aspx

Alaska scientist warns of impact of permafrost thaw

   ANCHORAGE (Reuters) - A warming climate has heated much of Alaska's permafrost to temperatures

just below freezing and drastic changes are expected in the coming decades as that layer of frozen

soil thaws, a prominent scientist said on Wednesday.
  
  Vladimir Romanovsky, an associate professor at the University of Alaska Fairbanks' Geophysical

Institute said the impact is already apparent. In Fairbanks a path has buckled into undulating waves,

houses are slumping into thawed ground and stands of birch trees are toppling as dying forested

areas melt into swamps.

   Melting permafrost has even opened up a gaping hole in the earth near his office at the university.

"It's a great place to study permafrost, right behind the building," Romanovsky said.

  He presented a summary of his research into changes in the permafrost at an energy symposium in

Anchorage.

  Over the past 30 years, soil temperatures have risen 1 degree to 3 degrees Celsius, according to

Romanovsky's study. Along the trans-Alaska pipeline, the permafrost temperatures rose by 0.6 degrees

to 1.5 degrees Celsius in 20 years.

   Because permafrost holds methane, the thaw will also accelerate the climate-warming greenhouse

effect created by gases in the atmosphere "This methane will be released into the atmosphere,

adding directly to the greenhouse gases," Romanovsky said.

Marshes Tell Story Of Medieval Drought, Little Ice Age, And European Settlers Near NYC

Aside from views of cattails and blackbirds, the marshes in the lower Hudson Valley near New York City offer an amazingly detailed history of the area's climate. Sediment layers from a tidal marsh in the Hudson River Estuary have preserved pollen from plants, seeds, and other materials. These past remnants allowed researchers from Columbia University, New York, N.Y. and NASA to see evidence of a 500 year drought from 800 A.D. to 1300 A.D., the passing of the Little Ice Age and the impacts of European settlers.

Plants provide an indicator of climate because the well-being of a species is controlled by the temperature and moisture of a region, and whether those conditions suit a type of plant. That's why if you draw latitudinal or horizontal lines around the world you'll find very similar species growing along those lines, like tropical plants around the equator, or tundra and northern or boreal forest species in a circumference south of the North Pole.

From the pollen record found in sediments in Piermont Marsh of the lower Hudson Valley, a Medieval Warm period was evident from 800 to 1300 A.D. Researchers know this from the striking increases in both charcoal, a sign of dry vegetation and fires, and pollen from pine and hickory trees. Prior to this warming spell, there were more oaks, which prefer a wetter climate.

The study which appeared in a recent issue of the journal Quaternary Research is important for showing how climate in this region has changed due to natural causes prior to human interventions in the area. Dee Pederson, a researcher at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory (LDEO), Palisades, N.Y., and Dorothy Peteet, a researcher at NASA's Goddard Institute of Space Studies, New York, N. Y., and LDEO, wrote the study.

During this drought period, a core drilled into the marsh bed showed large influxes of inorganic soil particles, a sign of erosion. Plant roots hold soil in place, but with drought and plant deaths, more erosion occurs.

Droughts like this also make the bay saltier, and evidence of this was found by an increase in salty marsh plants, like saltmarsh cordgrass. The changing salinity of the marshes and estuaries could present future water quality issues in the event of a drought. For example, heading north up the Hudson River, the city of Poughkeepsie draws its municipal water directly from the river. Because the salinity of the river changes with drought, causing saltier water to move further north, salinity changes have the potential to affect the water supply of the city.

During the Little Ice Age from the early 1400s to late 1800s, the vegetation changed again to plants that favored cooler and wetter climates. The core records revealed increases in spruce and hemlock that prefer cooler and wetter climates.

Similarly, when Europeans settled the area they cleared the forests for agriculture. The pollen record reflects this with a vast decline in tree pollen and an increase in pollen from weedy plants like ragweed, plantain, sorrel and dock. Inorganic soil particles also went up following European settlement.

Peteet points out that researchers could use these methods to similarly learn about climate in other parts of the world.

The study was funded by the Hudson River Foundation, the LDEO Investment Fund and NASA.

WASHINGTON — A House spending panel is directing the Energy Department to start sending nuclear waste to an interim storage site next year, a shift from the Bush administration's focus on the troubled Yucca Mountain dump in Nevada.

Rep. David Hobson, chairman of the House Appropriations subcommittee on energy and water, included $10 million for the effort in a spending bill the subcommittee passed on Thursday.

The legislation, approved by voice vote, directs the department to select one or more aboveground sites that will be ready in 2006 to accept some of the thousands of tons of commercial reactor fuel and defense waste now accumulating in 39 states.

Hobson said he remains committed to Yucca Mountain, the planned underground dump for the nation's nuclear waste, but that delays to the project have made interim storage necessary. The bill does not specify a storage site.

Yucca Mountain has endured a string of problems. The most recent concerned allegations that government workers on the project falsified data. Also, the department recently abandoned a 2010 completion date and did not set a new one.

The government is facing billions of dollars in potential liability from nuclear utilities because it promised to start accepting their waste in 1998, but failed to make good.

"I'm trying to bridge that gap between the time that Yucca Mountain opens," Hobson, R-Ohio, told reporters after the subcommittee vote.

"We're incurring a lot of litigation when we don't get the spent fuel rods out from these power plants like we said we were going to do," he said. "This way we could eliminate that, cut down on the security problems they have, and put them into some aboveground sites."

Hobson's bill still grants President Bush's 2006 spending request for Yucca Mountain. Bush proposed $651 million in his budget plan released in February; Hobson's subcommittee would fund the project at $661 million, with the additional money going for the interim storage plan.

An Energy Department spokeswoman said the department remains focused on Yucca Mountain, which was approved by Congress in 2002 to store 77,000 tons of nuclear waste beneath the desert 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

"We are reviewing the legislation, but obviously we are continuing to work toward a permanent geologic repository at Yucca Mountain," Anne Womack Kolton said.

In the Senate, Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., favors legislation to permanently leave nuclear waste at the reactor sites where it now sits.

Source: Associated Press

INTERVIEW - White House Wants Oil Price at $25 a Barrel

USA: May 13, 2005

WASHINGTON - The White House wants to see oil prices fall by about half to around $25 a barrel although reaching that goal may take time, President George W. Bush's top economic adviser said on Wednesday.

"We would like to see the price get back to around $25 a barrel, somewhere around there," Allan Hubbard, director of the White House National Economic Council, said in an interview with Reuters as crude oil prices hovered around $50, down from the record-high above $58.

Hubbard acknowledged: "It's going to take a while for the world energy supply to expand so prices can drop."

The administration has shied away in the past from giving a preferred target for oil prices.

An administration official said later that Hubbard was speaking "theoretically about a goal, but the White House is well aware that markets set the price for oil."

With oil prices soaring, energy policy has vaulted to the top of Bush's economic agenda but Hubbard said Bush is not backing off his goal of passing Social Security legislation this year despite opposition. He suggested, however, that Bush would continue the fight if the legislation hits a snag.

"He's totally patient," Hubbard said. "He's not going to give up."

Hubbard was noncommittal on proposals by House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Bill Thomas, who favors a package that would include incentives to boost retirement savings.

While praising Thomas, Hubbard said that in his talks with California Republican "we have not gotten into those details."

But he cautioned that there were fiscal constraints. "We're always worried about costs."

Some of Bush's fellow Republicans, including Sen. Trent Lott of Mississippi, have publicly distanced themselves from his proposal to reduce promised Social Security retirement benefits to all but low-income workers.

Hubbard disputed that Capitol Hill Republicans were cool to the plan. "My contact up there is exactly the opposite."

Hubbard said Bush would discuss proposals for add-on retirement accounts, but preferred the carved-out approach.

The so-called add-on accounts would not divert Social Security taxes away from the program, while Bush's proposal would direct a portion of those taxes into private accounts.

He said low-income workers are spending all their disposable income on basics like food, housing and transportation and "there's really no extra money to put into an add-on account."

PRESSING SAUDIS ON OIL PRICES

Bush campaigned in 2000 with a promise to "jawbone" OPEC countries and Hubbard said Bush has been pressing Saudi Arabia "and I'm sure others" to try to get prices down.

Asked what can be done now to push oil toward $25 a barrel, Hubbard gave few specifics other than conservation, encouraging Americans to buy hybrid vehicles and the long-standing proposal to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling.

Bush, who is due to give the latest in a series of energy speeches on Monday, has acknowledged that his broad energy plan will not yield short-term relief for motorists.

In a Reuters survey, experts forecast US oil prices would average $48.38 a barrel in 2005 and 2005 and $44.01 in 2006.

The Energy Information Administration has said it expects crude prices to stay above $50 a barrel with gasoline over $2 a gallon through 2006.

Washington is also under pressure from US manufacturers who claim China's currency policy gives Chinese goods an unfair price advantage. China's currency currently trades in a narrow band pegged to the value of the dollar.

Hubbard said China is now in a position to move to a more flexible exchange rate, but deferred on timing to Beijing.

"The Chinese have been reforming their financial system so they are in a position to move to a more flexible exchange rate whenever they decide to do it," Hubbard said.

"Obviously we're concerned about our bilateral trade deficit with them and the fact that their currency is pegged. And the president and the secretary of treasury have made it clear that they think there should be more flexibility," Hubbard added.

REUTERS NEWS SERVICE

CHARLOTTE AMALIE, U.S. Virgin Islands — U.S. Virgin Islands residents ought to switch to solar power because of skyrocketing oil prices, an official said Thursday.

The average electricity bill shot up 3.7 percent this month because of the rising cost of oil, which the U.S. Virgin Islands Water and Power Authority burns to generate power. Fuel comes from the Hovensa oil refinery in St. Croix, the second-largest oil refinery in the Western Hemisphere.

Home owners and businesses could save millions by drawing on the U.S. Caribbean territory's sunny skies to make their own electricity, said Alberto Bruno-Vega, who heads the power authority. Consumers could buy and install solar panels with help from government loans and grants and sell excess energy to the government, he said.

"It may sound crazy to tell customers to shop somewhere else, but we need to switch away from fuel oil," Bruno-Vega said.

The call for a switch came after a government audit in December detailed widespread abuses within the state-owned utility company, resulting in millions of lost dollars passed on to consumers in the form of higher bills.

Employees allegedly allowed unlicensed electricians to bypass water and electricity meters to benefit certain customers. They also stole government property and failed to report meter tampering to police, the audit revealed.

University of the Virgin Islands officials said installing solar water heaters and energy efficient equipment on the university's two campuses has saved millions in electricity and water costs.

"We've virtually eliminated conventional water heating on the campus," said Patrick O'Donnell, the school's capital projects director.

The school is seeking US$3 million to build a 200-foot (61-meter) tall wind-driven generator that could produce more than 2 million kilowatt hours, spokeswoman Patrice Johnson said.

In March, the utility company warned it would not supply power or water for new schools or health clinics unless the government starts paying its $16 million debt to the company.

Two public hospitals and the Department of Education are among the indebted government institutions.

Source: Associated Press

WASHINGTON — Despite increases in levels of mercury, PCBs and dioxin, overall chemical pollution released into the environment fell more than 6 percent in the latest report issued by the Environmental Protection Agency.

The decline was led by reductions among mining companies and chemical makers.

Some 4.44 billion pounds of toxic chemicals were released in 2003, the latest year for which figures are available, the EPA said. About 4.74 billion pounds were released in 2002, a year that had marked the first increase reported by EPA since 1997.

Metal mining and chemical makers reported the sharpest decreases, the EPA said. Metal mining's 1.52 billion pounds, the largest single sector, dropped 18 percent from 2002. Manufacturers of chemicals reported 564 million pounds, a 3 percent decrease.

About 23,000 facilities provided information on 650 chemicals, but that represented a decline in participation. In 2002, 24,379 facilities were included; in 2001, 25,388 facilities reported findings.

Meghan Purvis, an environmental health advocate for the U.S. Public Interest Research Group, expressed alarm at increases in three chemicals that persist in the environment, working their way up the food chain.

"Although it is good news that overall releases are back on track, it is a major concern that some of the most hazardous chemicals have increased so dramatically," she said.

Up by 1,000 percent were the 22 million pounds of polychlorinated biphenyls released. PCBs were once widely used to insulate electrical equipment but the government banned their production in 1979 because of studies linking them to cancer and other health problems.

Mercury releases rose 41 percent, to 7.4 million pounds, from metal mining and coal-fired electric utilities. The toxic metal can cause nerve damage, particularly in pregnant women, women of childbearing ages and young children.

Releases of dioxin, a chemical that can be hazardous even in small amounts, rose to 593 pounds, a 93 percent increase from 2002.

Lead releases were 432 million pounds, a 7 percent increase. This was the third consecutive year that the EPA required facilities to tell state and federal authorities about lead releases of more than 100 pounds. Only much larger releases were reported previously.

The EPA's annual Toxics Release Inventory began under a 1986 community right-to-know law. The biggest polluters in recent years have been hard-rock mining companies and utilities.

Purvis said the EPA, which has been considering proposals to change the public information program, should resist anything that might reduce what gets reported.

"When facilities have to report their toxic releases to the public, they reduce them," she said. "The Bush administration should not weaken the public's right to know."

Source: Associated Press

Source: Copyright 2005, Independent
Date: April 27, 2005
Byline:  Michael McCarthy

Originally posted at: http://news.independent.co.uk/world/environment/story.jsp?story=633349

More Information on "climate change food" - ClimateArk web page search results | Eco-Portal site link search results

Worldwide production of essential crops such as wheat, rice, maize and soya beans is likely to be hit much harder by global warming than previously predicted, an international conference in London has heard.

The benefits of higher levels of the main greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide, will in fact be outweighed by the downsides of climate change, a Royal Society discussion meeting was told yesterday. It had been thought that the gas might act as a fertiliser to increase plant growth. Rising atmospheric temperatures, longer droughts and side-effects of both, such as higher levels of ground-level ozone gas, are likely to bring about a substantial reduction in crop yields in the coming decades, large-scale experiments have shown.

The two-day meeting, entitled Food Crops in a Changing Climate, is focusing largely on tropical countries where most of the world's food is grown, and where people are most vulnerable to climate change.

It is bringing together leading scientists in the fields of meteorology, climate science and agriculture to report on the latest research, including growing crops in experimental conditions in the open air that simulate advanced global warming. Previously, such experiments had taken place in closed chambers, and these had suggested that the "fertilisation" effect of rising CO2 would offset the detrimental effects of rising temperatures and drought incidence on crop production.

But, a new technology known as Face (Free-Air Concentration Enrichment) is allowing treatment of large areas of crop with elevated levels of CO2 and ozone, and these experiments have painted a very different picture.

"Growing crops much closer to real conditions has shown that increased levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will have roughly half the beneficial effects previously hoped for in the event of climate change," said Steve Long, from Illinois University.

"In addition, ground-level ozone, which is also predicted to rise but has not been extensively studied before, has been shown to result in a loss of photosynthesis and 20 per cent yield loss. Both these results show that we need to seriously re-examine our predictions for future global food production, as they are likely to be far lower than previously estimated," Professor Long said.

Additionally, studies in the UK and Denmark show that just a few days of hot temperatures can severely reduce the yield of major food crops such as wheat, soya beans, rice and groundnuts, if they coincide with the flowering of these crops.

These results suggest that there are particular thresholds above which crops become very vulnerable to climate change.

On a more positive note, the meeting also highlighted new developments in forecasting techniques, the basis of which can act as early warning systems of famine.

The techniques incorporate a climate prediction model with a model that simulates crop growth under varying environmental conditions.

Politicians say one in eight swimmers is falling ill after a trip to the seaside.

The new standards will overhaul current criteria set nearly 30 years ago and reduce the risk of swimmers catching stomach bugs and respiratory illnesses.

"Sewage and swimmers should not have to share the same space but too often that used to be the case," said Chris Davies, a Liberal Democrat in the European Parliament.

"This new law will raise standards still further while giving swimmers, surfers and canoeists up-to-date information about the water they use," he said in a statement.

The assembly voted for tougher water cleanliness rules to apply from 2011, bringing forward an earlier deadline set for 2015.

EU lawmakers also want to promote a system of smiling face signs at beaches, like the "smileys" used in e-mails, to inform bathers of the level of water cleanliness in the sea, lakes and rivers.

They are also urging the EU to devise an emergency plan to clean up after major pollution accidents

Budget Conference report still threatens Arctic Refuge

We have just received word that the Budget conference report could begin moving quickly, resulting in a full congressional vote before week's end. As we've reported in the past, the Budget Conference report represents an enormous threat to the Arctic Refuge, because it cannot be blocked with a filibuster by those who believe the Arctic Refuge should be off-limits to drilling.

Whether you've taken action once or even a dozen times before, we urgently need you to call your Representative and Senators today urging them to vote against any budget conference report that includes reconciliation instructions that could lead to Arctic Refuge oil drilling.

Please call your Representative and Senators today.

1. First, call and urge your Representative, Ric Keller, to vote against any budget conference report that includes reconciliation instructions that could lead to Arctic Refuge oil drilling. Your Representative's direct phone number is:
(202) 225-2176

2. Then, do the same thing for Senators. Call and urge them to vote against any budget conference report that includes reconciliation instructions that could lead to Arctic Refuge oil drilling. Your Senators' names and phone numbers are:

Sen. Bill Nelson
Phone: (202) 224-5274

Sen. Mel Martinez
Phone: (202) 224-3041

Please note: Some Members of Congress have been strong supporters of Arctic Refuge protection and are poised to do the right thing on this vote. We encourage you to see how they have voted on recent Arctic Refuge votes. Thank them if they voted recently to oppose Arctic Refuge oil drilling. Click here for the latest vote in the U.S. House of Representatives: http://clerk.house.gov/evs/2005/roll122.xml

Click here for the latest Senate vote:
http://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_lists
/roll_call_vote_cfm.cfm?congress=109&session=1&vote=00052

When You Call
You'll either be forwarded to a staff member or an answering machine to leave your message. Be sure to state your name and hometown, then your message.

Background

The budget conference report need not say the words "Arctic National Wildlife Refuge" to result in Arctic Refuge drilling. In fact, it is likely that the report will not mention the Refuge by name but will instead contain "reconciliation instructions" to the House Resources and Senate Energy Committees, requiring them to cut their budgets by a specific amount.

Although these open-ended instructions sound harmless, the Committees would be allowed to fulfill the instructions by changing laws to generate new revenue, instead of making actual cuts. Reconciliation instructions would therefore give pro-drilling chairmen of these committees, Sen. Pete Domenici (R-NM) and Rep. Richard Pombo (R-CA), everything they need to avoid a Senate filibuster over drilling the Arctic Refuge.

A vote for a budget resolution with these open-ended instructions is a vote to drill America's Arctic Refuge, whether or not it mentions the Refuge by name. Unlike the energy bill, the budget resolution cannot be filibustered.

Please call your Senators and Representatives today. Thank you.