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KAKTOVIK, Alaska - Skeptics of global warming should come to this Eskimo village on the Arctic Ocean, roughly 250 miles north of the Arctic Circle. It's hard to be complacent about climate change when you're in an area that normally is home to animals like polar bears and wolverines, but is now attracting robins. A robin even built its nest in town this year (there is no word in the local Inupiat Eskimo language for robins). And last year a (presumably shivering) porcupine arrived. The Okpilak River valley was historically too cold and dry for willows, and in the...

<p>Hey, get this ... I want to talk about environmentalists. You know, the full-timers. The ones who make their living off it.</p> <p>You get the feeling this isn't about preservation for them, it's about self-preservation. Some of their stances have now rocketed right past obstinate and into arbitrary.</p>

Severe floods in central Europe are not becoming more common, say scientists in Germany who have compiled a historical record that stretches back almost 1000 years. Even the devastating floods that left cities from Prague to Dresden awash with water in 2002 do not suggest an upward trend, Manfred Mudelsee at the University of Leipzig and his colleagues found. Many reports at the time suggested that the floods were the kind of extreme weather event expected to become more frequent as a result of global warming. But "if they can't find trends, then there is no reason to attribute the...

Researchers say the electricity generated by mud-dwelling bacteria from a lump of sugar could power a mobile phone for four days. According to a report in October's Nature Biotechnology Magazine, searchers at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst have persuaded mud-dwelling bacteria to generate electricity from sugar. Fuelled by this unfashionable high-carb diet, the recently identified bacterium, Rhodoferax ferrireducens, releases the energy in sugar molecules by removing electrons. In their natural habitat of Vancouver bay sediment, the bacteria pass on the electrons to iron compounds, but in the lab the bacteria have been persuaded to donate them to an electrode as...

LOS ALAMOS, N.M. - Hydrogen fuel cells may not be the most environmentally friendly answer to America's dependence on foreign oil, according to a study led by a Los Alamos National Laboratory scientist.   Los Alamos researcher Thom Rahn headed a team of scientists from California universities and the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo. Their study of the natural cycle of atmospheric hydrogen was published in a recent edition of the British science journal Nature. While there are certain benefits to hydrogen power, Rahn said there may also be unforeseen consequences that need to be examined before...

WASHINGTON - The Bush administration on Wednesday exempted thousands of older power plants, refineries and factories from having to install costly clean air controls when they modernize with new equipment that improves efficiency but increases pollution. In a major new revision to its air pollution rules, the Environmental Protection Agency (news - web sites) will allow up to 20 percent of the costs of replacing each plant's production system to be considered "routine maintenance" that doesn't require costly antipollution controls, according to agency documents obtained by The Associated Press. A typical power plant has more than one "process unit"...

John Kleppe likes having the moon in his back yard. His astronaut is a small remote control vehicle equipped to explore the floor of Fallen Leaf Lake. In the four years he's been studying the lake, Kleppe said he has found trees that could challenge traditional thinking regarding global warming. "This is stuff no humans have seen," said Kleppe of the video images of the deep lake produced by the rover. "That to me is like having the moon in your back yard ... every time we go out, it seems we find another mystery." Kleppe, chairman of the...

Rockville, Md. (CNSNews.com) - A coalition of environmental and faith-based groups announced on Friday that it would be issuing 15,000 "tickets" to Washington, D.C./Baltimore area SUV owners as part of its campaign to "save our planet from the catastrophe of rapid global warming." Fred Scherlinder Dobb, a Maryland rabbi and co-chair of the interfaith group, Religious Witness for the Earth, told CNSNews.com that SUVs "are hurting the climate, hurting endangered species, hurting children, and we are out here trying to change that." Dobb held a sign that read: "Dirty SUVs = Global Warming." The Chesapeake Climate Action Network, at a...

Green-spirited individuals hoping to do their part to save the environment by buying hydrogen-fuelled cars next year are in for expensive and rude surprises, a study by a Canadian and a U.S. scientist says. Establishing an infrastructure to fuel hydrogen cars, touted by their proponents as a wonder solution to global warming and smog, would cost $5,000 per vehicle, says the study by David Keith, a Canadian atmospheric physicist teaching at Carnegie Mellon University and Alex Farrell of the California Institute of Technology. Although cars operating on hydrogen fuel cells emit only water vapor, switching to hydrogen would be...

Reference Paulsen, D.E., Li, H.-C. and Ku, T.-L. 2003. Climate variability in central China over the last 1270 years revealed by high-resolution stalagmite records. Quaternary Science Reviews 22: 691-701. What was done In the words of the authors, "high-resolution records of ð13C and ð18O in stalagmite SF-1 from Buddha Cave [33°40'N, 109°05'E] are used to infer changes in climate in central China for the last 1270 years in terms of warmer, colder, wetter and drier conditions." What was learned Among the climatic episodes evident in the authors' data were "those corresponding to the Medieval Warm Period, Little Ice Age and...

Imagine being in Las Vegas on a Saturday night and wanting to drive from the MGM Grand on the south end of the Strip up to Treasure Island to see the new sexy-themed pirate-ship battle. You can see the TI in the distance. But with cars lined up bumper to bumper and thick pedestrian traffic, it could take 30 minutes to an hour to get there. Now fast-forward to early 2004, when the much-anticipated Las Vegas Strip monorail system is set to start. For just a couple of dollars, you can make that trip in a few short minutes. This...

Controversial climate claim exonerates carbon dioxide. The impact of cosmic rays on our climate might outweigh that of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide, a controversial new report suggests1. "It's no excuse to ignore sensible resource use," says one of the report's authors, physicist Nir Shaviv of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel. "But the bottom line is that carbon dioxide is not the bad boy that people claim it is." The suggestion has met with scepticism, however: "I don't buy it," says climate-change expert Wallace Broecker of Columbia University in New York. Shaviv and climatologist Ján Veizer of...

From atomic-scale "carbon nanotubes," Motorola Inc. has sprouted a new technology that will make it possible for the first time for manufacturers to easily grow and inexpensively produce the material to make large-scale TV and computer display tubes, the Schaumburg technology company announced Tuesday. In addition to its use in producing 60-inch and larger displays at a retail price potentially below $1,000--a fraction of the current cost for plasma displays--the new Motorola process will have a variety of other applications, researchers said. It could be used in devices to detect and eradicate infectious microbes, such as that causing the...

Camarillo, California - Shell Solar will introduce two new lines of monocrystalline photovoltaic (PV) modules in Europe starting this Autumn. According to the company, each new offering will have a power output capacity six percent higher than its predecessors despite the surface areas remaining unchanged. The greater power output is the result of a change in design. Whereas the solar cells in the lines being replaced have rounded corners, those in the new modules are almost square. The unoccupied spaces between the cells are smaller so that the end-user obtains more power for the area covered. The new modules...

During the 2000 elections, I was enrolled at the University Of Georgia. A large university campus is a fascinating place to be during a presidential election; it is a microcosm of political views ranging from the mainstream to the absurd. I was involved with both Republican and Libertarian club events, but the colorful activities of other political ideologies did not escape my attention. The daily panorama of politics ranged from the banality one would expect to be a reflection of the Gore/Lieberman ticket, to the playfully politically incorrect witticisms that have come to be expected from College Republicans. But...

Sunnyvale, California - Solar Cell manufacturer SunPower Corporation has produced photovoltaic (PV) cells with an efficiency of more than 20 percent, the company announced Monday. The cells were produced on a pilot line located in Round Rock, Texas in a facility adjacent to a manufacturing plant operated by Cypress Semiconductor Corporation, a major investor in SunPower. The company intends to increase production on the line to its 2 MW capacity this summer. The new, 125 mm, single-crystal cell, dubbed the A-300, owes its increased efficiency in part to its rear-contact design, which maximizes the working cell area, hides wires...

<p>Danny Locke drinks a glass of water beside the largest solar-powered irrigation pump in the world, unveiled last week on his Mendota farm west of Fresno. The AquaMax pump uses a 108-foot-long solar array to power a 36-kilowatt, 50-horsepower pump.</p>

The Group of Eight gave a verbal push here Sunday for tougher measures against decrepit oil tankers and reaffirmed their vows to help poorer countries but skirted tougher environmental issues that have divided the United States and Europe. A statement issued by the G8's environment ministers after a three-day meeting said that the catastrophic sinking of an oil tanker off Europe's Atlantic coast last November, in the second such disaster in just three years, "demonstrated that the existing rules on tanker safety and pollution prevention need to be further improved." They backed calls for the International Maritime Organisation (IMO)...

  Several California legislators are contemplating a measure to take over a federal clean air program that was recently abandoned by the Bush administration. Legislators and a coalition of environmental and public health groups say the state must act to protect the air from industrial pollution. If enacted, it would be the second time in a year that the state has passed a law in response to what critics consider the administration's hostile stance toward the environment. Last year, Democratic Governor Gray Davis signed a law making California the first state to regulate global warming pollution from cars. At...

Since the very first Earth Day, scare stories have been exaggerated WASHINGTON -"Between 1980 and 1989, some 4 billion people, including 65 million Americans, will perish from starvation ... civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind." These are actual predictions by environmentalists celebrating the first Earth Day -- April 22, 1970. They were wrong. Sixty-five million Americans haven't starved to death. Food production has handily outpaced population growth. And food today is cheaper and more abundant than ever before. Civilization has not ended. Undaunted, the environmental left continues to sound...