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Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak set off an explosion Thursday, launching an ambitious and controversial plan to make the Western Desert bloom with water channeled from the Nile River. When the canal is done, if all goes according to plan, water will wind its way 190 miles (310 kilometers) across the Western Desert to irrigate 500,000 acres (200,000 hectares) of virgin land. And, if all goes according to plan, the newly irrigated land will be populated by hundreds of thousands of people. The explosion Thursday was the first step in the construction on a pumping station that Egypt claims will be...

Why melting is not a threat While today's balance between the icecaps and global sea level has been relatively steady since about 1000 B.C., it would be careless to assume that this is the Earth's natural state and that it should always be this way. What could happen to climate naturally in the next few thousand years? If the Earth continued to warm and break from ice age conditions, some of the remaining ice caps could melt. On the other hand, climate might swing back into another ice age. (In fact, some of the environmentalists now worried about global warming...

Scientists have discovered a huge crater in the Saharan desert, the largest one ever found there. The crater is about 19 miles (31 kilometers) wide, more than twice as big as the next largest Saharan crater known. It utterly dwarfs Meteor Crater in Arizona, which is about three-fourths of a mile (1.2 kilometers) in diameter. In fact, the newfound crater, in Egypt, was likely carved by a space rock that was itself roughly 0.75 miles wide in an event that would have been quite a shock, destroying everything for hundreds of miles. For comparison, the Chicxulub crater left by a...

Al Gore, who has reversed his political fortunes to become a potential contender in the 2008 presidential race, made an emotional return to Congress Wednesday in an appeal for an even more dramatic rescue—saving the planet. Gore—who is one of voters' top choices for the Democratic presidential nomination even though he says he's not running—implored lawmakers to adopt a list of policy prescriptions to stop global warming. Fresh off a triumphant Academy Awards appearance in which his climate change documentary "An Inconvenient Truth" won two Oscars, Gore drew overflow crowds as he testified before House and Senate panels about a...

Ten senators -- seven Democrats, two Republicans, and one independent -- have just returned with differing views from a tour of Greenland. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) talked about the risk of Greenland's ice sheet "being lost." Barbara Mikulski (D-MD) said "melting Greenland ice would cause a 23-foot rise in sea levels worldwide." Bob Corker (R-TN) was more circumspect, saying only that "we're digging in to understand this issue." Sanders' and Mikulski's statements are reminiscent of Al Gore's movie, An Inconvenient Truth, which contains a montage showing much of Florida disappearing as Greenland melts away. This wacko scenario has never enjoyed much...

...Egypt already uses all the Nile water it is allocated by international treaty, mostly for irrigating crops. Yet it still imports more than half of its food, including about 10 million tons of grain annually. Since it takes 1,000 tons of water to grow a single ton of grain, that means Egypt already brings in about 10 billion tons of "virtual water" per year, according to Prof. Tony Allan, a water expert at the University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies. Seen as a whole, the Middle East is the world's largest exporter of oil--no surprise there--but also...

<p>The Petermann Glacier seen in August, 2009. The cliffs on the left are about 3,000 feet high, about the same height as three Eiffel Towers or more than two Willis Towers.</p> <p>Taken nearly two years after the picture above, this photo shows the extent of the ice loss. The channel is about ten miles wide.</p>

Glaciologist Jason Box has been testing a Moulin, a shaft that allows water to travel from the glacier's surface to its bottom, in a glacier on the Greenland ice cap to find out how fast it is melting. Dr Box said: “The Moulin is the epicentre of our concern because all the water is running down at this one point. “It’s just bottomless, no light escapes.” Balanced on the edge of an ice sheet the team used a flow meter to measure the water speed. He said: “There’s no escape from a Moulin. It’s just got danger written all over...

JERUSALEM (AP) - The Dead Sea is dying, and only a major engineering effort can save it, Israel's Minister of the Environment said Monday. The Dead Sea gets its name from its heavy salt content, because no aquatic creatures can live in it. Now there's a new ``death threat'' - the Dead Sea is drying up and disappearing. An Israeli TV reporter, illustrating the government report, stood on a spot where, just 20 years ago, water met land. Now that point is 2,000 feet of parched ground away, he said, as the sea gradually recedes. Because it is landlocked in...

Reconstructing the climate of the past is an important tool for scientists to better understand and predict future climate changes that are the result of the present-day global warming. Although there is still little known about the Earth's tropical and subtropical regions, these regions are thought to play an important role in both the evolution of prehistoric man and global climate changes. New North African climate reconstructions reveal three 'green Sahara' episodes during which the present-day Sahara Desert was almost completely covered with extensive grasslands, lakes and ponds over the course of the last 120.000 years. The findings of Dr....

A breakthrough study of fluctuations in sea levels the last time Earth was between ice ages, as it is now, shows that oceans rose some three meters in only decades due to collapsing ice sheets. The findings suggest that such an scenario -- which would redraw coastlines worldwide and unleash colossal human misery -- is "now a distinct possibility within the next 100 years," said lead researcher Paul Blanchon, a geoscientist at Mexico's National University. The study, published by the science journal Nature, will appear in print Thursday. Rising ocean water marks are seen by many scientists as the most...

A new island has been discovered in the Arctic after rising temperatures melted the giant ice sheet which covered it. The rocky mass - dubbed Warming Island - lies 400 miles north of the Arctic Circle in eastern Greenland, reports The Sun. It was found by US explorer Dennis Schmitt 60 and is seen as further proof of global warming. Danish mapping expert Hans Jepsen said: "It was clearly detached from the mainland when the connecting glacier-bridge retreated southward." Explorer Schmitt said: "There is a dark side to this. We were all aware of the dire consequences."

One of the tricks in the global warming alarmist playbook over the years has been to show how global warming will cause sea levels to rise and flood the low-lying coastal areas where population centers happen to be, specifically lower Manhattan in New York City. However, the imagery used by Al Gore in his "An Inconvenient Truth" and by various other global warming made-for-television specials isn't scientifically accurate according to Bjørn Lomborg, author of "Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist's Guide to Global Warming." Lomborg was asked by Gene Epstein in the May 18 issue of Barron's if it would be...

OSLO (Reuters) - Global warming this century could trigger a runaway thaw of Greenland's ice sheet and other abrupt shifts such as a dieback of the Amazon rainforest, scientists said on Monday. They urged governments to be more aware of "tipping points" in nature, tiny shifts that can bring big and almost always damaging changes such as a melt of Arctic summer sea ice or a collapse of the Indian monsoon. "Society may be lulled into a false sense of security by smooth projections of global change," the scientists at British, German and U.S. institutes wrote in a report saying...

Environmentalists concerned about the threat to its unique eco-system. Water levels in the lowest and saltiest body of water on the planet are falling by more than four feet a year, giving rise to quips that the Dead Sea is dying. The government in Amman has said it is planning to extract more than 10 billion cubic feet a year from the Red Sea 110 miles to the south, feed most of it into a desalination plant to create drinking water, and send the salty waste-water left over to the Dead Sea by tunnel. Similar plans are already the subject...