The government’s broken promises on climate change
Right wing economist Frances Cairncross shocked climate campaigners last week by calling for the government to make adapting to the “inevitable consequences” of climate change a priority - not attempting to stop it. In a speech to the science festival in Norwich, she said, “It’s extremely improbable that, whatever the rich countries do, we will be able to reduce concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. It looks as though the technology doesn’t exist at this stage to produce a reduction.”

Lowered Global Warming Forecasts? Not So Fast
hen science news reporters take their cues from other news reporters rather than from the scientific literature itself, problems often result. Those problems are only compounded by the brevity of most wire reports. Witness this Reuters story that appeared over the weekend here at SciAm.com: Climate panel lowers global warming forecast: report. SYDNEY (Reuters) - The world's top climate scientists are slightly less pessimistic in their latest forecasts for global warming over the next 100 years, the Australian newspaper reported on Saturday. A draft report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change obtained by the newspaper says the temperature increase could be contained to two degrees Celsius by 2100, if greenhouse gas emissions were held at current levels.

Gore: We have to solve global warming
Former Vice President Al Gore said on Tuesday that reducing drastically the amount of greenhouse gas emissions was vital for the future of the planet. "Unless we stop dumping 70 million tons of global warming pollution into the atmosphere every 24 hours, which we are doing right now ... the continued acceleration of this pollution would destroy the future of human civilization," Gore said in a news conference in Finland's capital Helsinki. It is possible to reverse global warming, he said, adding that politics can seem to change very slowly, but it can also cross a tipping point and adapt a new pattern and change rapidly.

Canadians more worried about climate change
Climate change has jumped dramatically on the scale of Canadians' worries over the last year and most people want the government to meet Kyoto targets, according to an environmental poll. Global warming is second place as a top-of-mind environmental issue, next only to air quality, says McAllister Opinion Research, an international firm known for its research on environmental issues. That means it was cited with the second-greatest frequency when people were asked, without prompting, to name the most important environmental issue in a poll conducted in July.