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Former Vice President Al Gore is urging Congress not to be sidetracked by the current financial crisis and to take "decisive action" this year to reduce the heat-trapping gases responsible for global warming. Gore, scheduled to appear before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Wednesday, planned to tell lawmakers that a bill capping greenhouse gas emissions is needed if the U.S. is to play a leading role in negotiations for a new international climate treaty. He also was pressing Congress to pass President Barack Obama's economic stimulus plan, saying investments in clean energy and green jobs will help dig the...

The purpose of my letter today is to express my view on global warming, a view that is in opposition to contemporary thought and one many readers will find disagreeable. However, before rendering a judgment on my view, I'd like the reader to stay with me to the end because you may be pleasantly surprised where I land. I don't believe that the human use of carbons to fuel our energy needs is the cause of global warming, if global warming even exists. That's my opinion, straight and simple. The context of this letter makes it unnecessary to explain how...

An US dietician says that has branded Americans food habits an "SUV eating style", which contributes to global warming more than the cars they drive, in her book. Kate Geagan, registered dietitian in Park City, Utah, refers to a University of Iowa study that has found that food on average travels about 1,500 miles to reach people's tables. "When we choose highly processed packaged foods, we contribute to global warming, so food is a new part of the dialogue about the environment. And this is something that everyone can do now and not wait for politicians to enact changes. An...

Global warming is serious problem, not a "hoax," and requires more than a state response, Gov. Mike Beebe said Friday. "I think it's a threat, and I think global warming is occurring," Beebe said in response to a caller to his statewide radio program who said he believed the climate change crisis was a "hoax." Another caller asked if Arkansas was going to promote a national carbon tax, which is being discussed in Washington, D.C., as a way to get companies to reduce carbon emissions into the atmosphere, a major cause of global warming. Any initiative designed to tackle the...

As key international talks on climate change drew to a close in Poland with little progress on a global deal and anger against the EU for failing to lead the way on targets, the Nobel Prize winner attempted to get efforts to stop global warming back on track. In a rousing speech to hundreds of delegates at the UN Climate Change Conference in Poznan, the former US Presidential candidate echoed President-elect Barack Obama in calling for change. "It is wrong for this generation to destroy the habitability of the planet and ruin the prospects of every future generation. That realisation...

When Bill Clinton took office in 1993, global warming was a slow-moving environmental problem that was easy to ignore. Now it is a ticking time bomb that President-elect Barack Obama can't avoid. Since Clinton's inauguration, summer Arctic sea ice has lost the equivalent of Alaska, California and Texas. The 10 hottest years on record have occurred since Clinton's second inauguration. Global warming is accelerating. Time is close to running out, and Obama knows it. "The time for delay is over; the time for denial is over," he said Tuesday after meeting with former Vice President Al Gore, who won a...

Collapsing antarctic ice sheets, which have become potent symbols of global warming, may actually turn out to help in the battle against climate change and soaring carbon emissions. Professor Rob Raiswell, a geologist at the University of Leeds, says that as the sheets break off the ice covering the continent, floating icebergs are produced that gouge minerals from the bedrock as they make their way to the sea. Raiswell believes that the accumulated frozen mud could breathe life into the icy waters around Antarctica, triggering a large, natural removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. And as rising temperatures cause...

A conservation group is going to court to force the federal government to consider adding the Pacific walrus to the list of threatened species. The Center for Biological Diversity sued the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne on Wednesday for failing to act on a petition seeking protection for walruses under the Endangered Species Act. Walruses are threatened by global warming that melts Arctic sea ice, according to the group, one of the parties that successfully petitioned to list polar bears as threatened. The group also has filed petitions to protect Arctic seals. The walrus petition...

At least 200 narwhal whales in Canada's Arctic, trapped by winter ice that is setting in around them and facing starvation or suffocation, must be culled, officials said Friday. Hunters from the village of Pond Inlet on Baffin Island discovered the animals trapped near Bylot Island, about 17 kilometers (10.5 miles) from Pond Inlet, on November 15, and checked on them periodically. The local hunters are allowed to harvest only 130 whales each year for food, according to standards set by the federal department of Fisheries and Oceans. But department spokesman Keith Pelley told AFP: "It's unlikely the animals are...

It's Nature's way of healing itself. The findings help determine how much carbon that big storms have historically taken from the atmosphere and buried for thousands of years beneath the sea. More carbon could be buried by these storms if global warming increases their intensity and frequency, as some scientists have predicted. Scientists have been looking at ways to store carbon to lower the levels of carbon dioxide building up in Earth's atmosphere. Scientists have long suspected that hurricanes and typhoons (along with cyclones and tropical depressions, these are all versions of storm systems called tropical cyclones) can cleanse the...

Just a sliver of voters say global warming is the most important issue they are weighing in deciding whom to support for president. Nonetheless, the issue appears to be playing a role in how voters make up their minds and could be key for undecided voters, according to a new poll out Monday. The survey, conducted by researchers at Yale and George Mason universities, also found Sen. Barack Obama leading Sen. John McCain among registered voters by a margin of 9 percentage points, a result consistent with other recent polls. With the economy in turmoil, that global warming even registered...

Arctic ice has shrunk to the lowest level on record, new satellite images show, raising the possibility that the Northwest Passage that eluded famous explorers will become an open shipping lane. ADVERTISEMENT The European Space Agency said nearly 200 satellite photos this month taken together showed an ice-free passage along northern Canada, Alaska and Greenland, and ice retreating to its lowest level since such images were first taken in 1978. The waters are exposing unexplored resources, and vessels could trim thousands of miles from Europe to Asia by bypassing the Panama Canal. The seasonal ebb and flow of ice levels...

Without exactly being like Mike, Sen. John McCain yesterday join-ed Mayor Bloomberg in calling global warming a reality to be dealt with by weaning the U.S. off Mideast oil. "The world is already feeling the powerful effects of global warming," McCain said in calling for caps on carbon emissions, and "the problem isn't some Hollywood invention." The Arizona Republican did not directly address Bloomberg's environmental plan, which includes $8 tolls on cars south of 86th St. But a McCain spokesman said the mayor and the senator were in sync on facing up to a greenhouse gas effect that many in...

April 10, 2007 — Planting new trees in snow-covered northern regions may actually contribute to global warming as they have the counter-effect of tropical forests, according to a study out Monday. While rainforests help cool the planet by absorbing carbon dioxide and producing clouds that reflect sunlight, the dark canopy of Canadian, Scandinavian and Siberian forests catches sunrays that would be reflected back to space by the snow, the study said. The study, published Monday in the online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that reforestation projects in the tropics would help mitigate global warming,...

A top hurricane forecaster called Al Gore "a gross alarmist" Friday for making an Oscar-winning documentary about global warming. "He's one of these guys that preaches the end of the world type of things. I think he's doing a great disservice and he doesn't know what he's talking about," Dr. William Gray said in an interview with The Associated Press at the National Hurricane Conference in New Orleans, where he delivered the closing speech. A spokeswoman said Gore was on a flight from Washington, D.C., to Nashville Friday; he did not immediately respond to Gray's comments. Gray, an emeritus professor...

More than two-thirds of the world's large cities are in areas vulnerable to global warming and rising sea levels, and millions of people are at risk of being swamped by flooding and intense storms, according to a new study released Wednesday. In all, 634 million people live in the threatened coastal areas worldwide ? defined as those lying at less than 33 feet above sea level ? and the number is growing, said the study published in the journal Environment and Urbanization. More than 180 countries have populations in low-elevation coastal zones, and about 70 percent of those have urban...

The first stage of Canada's controversial annual harp seal hunt is likely to be scrapped because the ice floes where pups are born have broken up and many animals have drowned, officials and animal rights activists said on Tuesday. ADVERTISEMENT The first part of the hunt, which had been due to start on Wednesday, occurs in the Gulf of St Lawrence to the south of the Magdalen Islands on Canada's East Coast. Hunters move across the ice floes, shooting and clubbing to death young seals. Canada's federal fisheries ministry, which oversees the hunt, said the pups had been born as...

Democrat John Edwards was back on the presidential campaign trail in San Francisco Monday, but while the announced subject was global warming, his wife's newest battle with cancer was never far from his mind. In a news conference Thursday, Edwards and his wife, Elizabeth, announced that breast cancer discovered in the final weeks of the 2004 presidential campaign had returned, spread to her bones and is now considered incurable. They both agreed his campaign for president should continue. "I miss her,'' Edwards, a former North Carolina senator and 2004 Democratic vice presidential candidate, told reporters Monday at the Palace Hotel....

We are extremely well informed by our news media of nationally important events such as the latest on Britney Spears and Anna Nicole Smith, but it would be nice to see educational information on the apparently more trivial issue of global warming. E. Thomas McClanahan, who admits to not being a scientist, authored an article in the Feb. 28 The Herald Bulletin ridiculing the idea of global warming. He points out that 60 Canadian “scientists” (a relatively small number) wrote to the Prime Minister to question the credibility of global warming. We hear of other “scientists” who also are doubtful,...

AMONG ITS other negatives, Valentine's Day has now been shown by thoughtful scientific research to cause global warming. I knew it. Environmentalists in Britain are mad that the flowers British women get for Valentine's Day are usually flown in to the country, typically as far as 33,800 miles, before reaching their destination. I have no idea where they got that number, which I admit sounds far-fetched. But I read it on the Drudge Report, which got the story from London's Telegraph newspaper, which proves it's true. The problem is, apparently, that Britain is cold in the winter, which makes it...