Rising Tide Australia

Daily Comet: The conveyances room of the Terrebonne Parish Courthouse used to bustle with abstractors researching potential lease properties for oil-and-gas companies. Today, the room is much quieter, and veteran abstractor David Toups spends less time there. Instead, he`s providing the same service from his office, looking at similar records electronically from north Louisiana parishes like Caddo and Red River. He estimates that 20 to 30 percent of his business is researching natural gas ...

Sydney Morning Herald: AUSTRALIA's two leading scientific agencies will release a report today showing Australia has warmed significantly over the past 50 years, and stating categorically that ''climate change is real''. The State of the Climate snapshot, drawn together by CSIRO and the Bureau of Meteorology partly in response to recent attacks on the science underpinning climate change, shows that Australia's mean temperature has increased 0.7 degrees since 1960. The statement also finds average daily ...

Independent (UK): Imagine U2 clambering on to a train to take them to a sold-out stadium; Keith Richards swigging from a bottle of organic, Fairtrade booze while Bon Jovi recycle their post-gig waste. Unlikely as it sounds, it may yet come to pass as rock'n'roll's tradition of painting the town red fades to an ethical shade of green. Polluting private jets, excessive dressing room demands and arena-busting tours are no long sustainable, according to the biggest study so far on the effect of the live ...

Record-Eagle: A local environmental group is increasingly worried that Traverse City Light & Power is on an unstoppable fast track to building a local wood-burning power plant, but the public utility insists a decision hasn't been made. Light & Power officials are expected to decide next month whether to construct a biomass plant in Traverse City. The facility would be fired on wood, but could accept designated fuel crops or other items. Officials recently released a consulting firm's ...

Journal Star: The neighborhood where Tyrone Hayes grew up was developed by draining a swamp. He spent his youth fascinated with frogs, turtles, snakes and lizards that shared his stomping ground. Hayes graduated from Harvard University with a major in evolutionary biology, earned a Ph.D. at 24 and became the youngest tenured professor at the University of California-Berkeley. He became a world expert on frog development. Then he met atrazine, an herbicide used on more than 70 percent of ...

Associated Press: Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao said he was snubbed at last year's Copenhagen climate change conference and fired back Sunday at critics who accuse China of arrogance. China was blamed by some for undermining efforts to reach a binding agreement at the December conference and Wen was himself criticized for skipping a meeting of top leaders attended by President Barack Obama. However, Wen says he was never formally notified of the late-night Dec. 17 event and sent Vice Foreign ...

Mongabay: As the President of France, Nicholas Sarkozy, argues in Paris that more funding is needed to stop deforestation and mitigate climate change, a shipment of illegal rosewood is being readied for export in Madagascar by a French company with the tacit approval of the French government. The shipment of some 4,000-5,000 tons of rosewood will be shipped under the auspices of the French company, Delmas, according to Derek Schuurman, who has published papers on the illegal logging crisis for ...

Telegraph: A new study, funded by Nasa, has found that the most serious drought in the Amazon for more than a century had little impact on the rainforest's vegetation. The findings appear to disprove claims by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that up to 40% of the Amazon rainforest could react drastically to even a small reduction in rainfall and could see the trees replaced by tropical grassland. The IPCC has already faced intense criticism for using a report by ...

Telegraph: At least one in six of the 255 wind farms in Britain have received noise complaints according to figures obtained by the Daily Telegraph. But local authorities have never managed to prosecute on the grounds of noise nuisance because it is so difficult to prove. The main problem is the intermittent nature of noise from wind farms that makes it difficult to measure. Inspectors have to be on the site when the noise is worst, even though that could be in the middle of the night. ...

Associated Press: A new report says birds that live in and visit Louisiana's badly damaged and eroding coast are threatened by climate change. On Louisiana's coast, sea level rise and the loss of habitat will threaten migratory songbirds, ocean bird species and waterfowl, according to Melanie Driscoll, director of bird conservation at the Louisiana Audubon Society. The report, "The State of the Birds: 2010 Report on Climate Change," was released Thursday. A 2009 report on bird populations ...

Agence France-Presse: Around 60 countries pushed ahead on Thursday with a multi-billion-dollar scheme to reduce climate-changing emissions from deforestation, to which Germany added its support, British minister Joan Ruddock said on Thursday. "There was a tremendous mood of determination to get things done. I regard this as quite a breakthrough, actually," Ruddock, who is secretary of state for energy and climate change, told AFP in a phone interview. Around 60 countries, gathering donor economies ...

San Francisco Chronicle: Emperor penguins and chicks in Antarctica are the most severely threatened by impending climate changes, the report says. The birds need solid sea ice to lay eggs and raise chicks on. Shifting sea ice around Antarctica is already disrupting penguin colonies as the world's climate warms, according to a new report by a team of polar scientists. The researchers looked at the complex relationship between emperor and Adelie penguins and their changing habitats and studied how a ...

Press Democrat: To a long list of predators and threats, the western snowy plover, a sparrow-sized bird that nests in sandy beaches on the Sonoma coast, has a new nemesis: climate change. The little brown, black and white shorebird is among the feathered species at risk from rising seas due to climate change, bird experts said. "They are already in trouble," Gary Langham, director of bird conservation for Audubon California, said of the plovers, a threatened species since 1993. "Climate change ...

Monroe News: Lake Erie was shrouded in fog Friday, but its future waters might be a muddier brown or an eerier bright green due to persistent pollution and climate change, experts suggest. The lake, especially its shallowest western basin bordering Monroe County and northwest Ohio, is suffering from farm-related and other runoff that threatens to return its health to that of the 1970s when it was written off as dead. "We don't want to be responsible for writing Lake Erie's obituary again," said ...

Herald: Government has called on farmers to adjust to changing weather patterns and become more scientific in their approach to agriculture. In a speech read on his behalf by Mr Collins Mungate, a senior official in the Ministry of Media, Information and Publicity, Minister Webster Shamu said Zimbabwe -- like all other countries in the region -- was affected by the effects of global warming and climate change. "Our rainfall pattern, amount and distribution of rain have changed ...

Associated Press: Sen. John Kerry, hoping to win over wavering senators, said he is pushing environmental reforms to create jobs and spark energy independence, with climate benefits along "for the ride." In an interview with The Associated Press, the Massachusetts Democrat said legislation he's crafting with Sens. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., and Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., will differ from a House-passed bill that embraces a so-called "cap and trade" approach to reduce pollution blamed for global ...

News Journal: Young people in evangelical churches have likely never heard a sermon linking scripture with a love of creation and caring for the earth. That explains the slowness of mainline evangelicals in signing onto the movement to lower carbon emissions and avert climate change, said the Rev. Richard Cizik, president of the New Evangelical Partnership for the Common Good. He's reached that opinion from hundreds of talks he's given on campuses, and it's sad news for Americans who believe ...

Daily Comet: The combined forces of climate change and land loss pose a major threat to Louisiana bird species, especially those that depend on the disappearing coast, according to a report released Thursday by a partnership of university bird researchers, federal agencies and environmental groups. The State of the Birds: 2010 Report on Climate Change," released Thursday by U.S. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, was prepared by a partnership of university bird researchers, federal agencies and ...

Guardian: Watch one of the contentious climate change adverts The advertising watchdog has mildly rebuked the government over the phrasing of a claim in two advertisements on the danger of climate change, while dismissing the rest of the complaints against the controversial television and newspaper campaign. The campaign, run by the Department of Environment and Climate Change last winter, brought in 939 complaints. Various groups said the adverts were political, too scary, and factually ...

redOrbit: Using green algae to produce hydrocarbon oil for biofuel production is nothing new; nature has been doing so for hundreds of millions of years, according a Texas AgriLife Research scientist. "Oils from the green algae Botryococcus braunii can be readily detected in petroleum deposits and coal deposits suggesting that B. braunii has been a contributor to developing these deposits and may be the major contributor," said Dr. Timothy Devarenne, AgriLife Research scientist with the Texas ...