Time Magazine: It could be a sign of just how traumatic 2005's Hurricane Katrina was that when Hurricane Gustav failed last week to fully pulverize New Orleans, it was news. The fallout from Gustav was relatively limited, but it was still a major storm, with maximum sustained winds of 110 m.p.h. when it made landfall in Louisiana -- strong enough to cause an estimated $20 billion in damages. And Gustav won't be the last this season. Hurricane Hanna gathered strength in the Atlantic last week, and Ike is ...

Associated Press: President Bush says if Congress doesn't permit offshore drilling to increase U.S. oil supplies and possibly ease gasoline prices, lawmakers should not expect voters to support them in November. In his Saturday radio address, Bush said experts claim the Outer Continental Shelf could eventually produce nearly 10 years' worth of U.S. oil production. Yet while record fuel prices have focused more attention on increasing domestic energy production, experts also note that lifting the ...

Florida Times-Union: The recent visit by Tropical Storm Fay reminds us that the First Coast is subject to change at any time. Nature doesn't care where we place property boundaries or homes and may change the landscape without notice. What we view as permanent is just one frame in the story of the coastal environment. Beaches erode and rebuild in predictable ways, never when or where we wish. In this era of global climate change and rising sea levels, we should expect that natural beaches will erode. We ...

Asian News International: A new research has indicated that climate change is depriving coral reefs across the globe of the building materials used to make their shells. The daily life of corals is a constant battle against erosion. The reef builders patch up holes in their shells, left by nibbling sea creatures, using a mineral called calcium carbonate. To keep up with repairs, corals in the wild usually require three times as much of the mineral as sheltered corals grown in laboratories. Before ...

LA Times: A massive 19-square-mile ice shelf in Canada's northern Arctic has broken away and is floating in the Arctic Ocean, the latest sign of rapid climate change in the remote region, a team of scientists said Tuesday. They said the Markham Ice Shelf -- one of just five remaining ice shelves in the Arctic -- split away from Ellesmere Island in early August. They also said two large chunks totaling 47 square miles had broken off the nearby Serson Ice Shelf, reducing it in size by ...

Reuters: America's pain at the gasoline pump has been years in the making, but there will be a big push in Congress next week, when lawmakers return from summer break, to fix the problem by expanding offshore oil drilling. Gasoline prices, down sharply since July, remain high by historical standards, a major issue in the presidential election. Allowing more offshore drilling is seen as the solution by many Americans and politicians. "Drill, baby, drill!" was the chant from the crowd at ...

Inter Press Service: Soaring temperatures have led to the collapse of several huge ice shelves in the Canadian Arctic over the past few weeks. One 50 sq km ice shelf on the northern coast of Canada's Ellesmere Island simply "vanished" over three days, exposing a coast that lay buried under ice for at least 4,000 years. At the same time, the Arctic's thick, year-round sea ice cover has declined to near the 2007 record of 2.6 million square kilometres less ice than the summer average minimum. This ...

Reuters: Worldwide sea levels may rise by 80 centimetres to two metres by 2100 thanks to global warming, but dire predictions of larger increases seem unrealistic, U.S. scientists said this week. They examined scenarios for loss of ice from Greenland, Antarctica and the world's smaller glaciers and ice caps into the world's oceans, as well as ocean expansion simply because of rising water temperatures. Their calculations yielded estimates for global sea level increases by the end of the ...

Agence France-Presse: British explorer Lewis Gordon Pugh declared Friday he had kayaked further to the top of the world than anyone else ever has, as his bid to reach the North Pole failed -- much to his delight. But the renowned extreme swimmer, dubbed the human polar bear, nonetheless warned the Arctic ice pack was thinning and urged world leaders to take immediate action to halt it. Pugh, 38, made it to 81 degrees north latitude before hitting solid pack ice. He temporarily planted the flags of ...

Australian Broadcasting Corporation: More attention should be given to a potential environmental disaster in Papua New Guinea near one of the world's largest copper mines, warn some scientists. Melbourne-based river scientist Dr Ian Campbell is concerned about large areas downstream from Papua New Guinea's Ok Tedi mine being affected by acid mine drainage. He presented his concerns at this week's River Symposium in Brisbane. "It's a nightmare waiting to happen, I think," says Campbell, who recently advised ...

Scientific American: Greenland, the world's largest island, holds enough ice to raise global sea levels by 23 feet (seven meters). Add the ice sheets of Antarctica and the oceans would deepen more than 200 feet (60 meters). Satellite measurements from space and speed measurements on land confirm that Greenland's glaciers are melting and on the move. And although the picture is less clear in Antarctica, the global warming seems to be having an impact there, too. So the question is: How much--and how ...

New Scientist: What is the maximum amount that sea levels could rise by 2100? Much attention has been given to the numbers issued by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2007, and the fact that they are absolute minimums. Now, a team of researchers has said that there may be a way of nailing the fixed upper limit – a rate of sea-level rise which physically could not be surpassed by the end of the century. That level, they say, is 2 metres: sea levels are unlikely to rise more than 2 ...

ScienceNOW: Hot on the heels of findings that tropical cyclones have been intensifying over the past few decades (ScienceNOW, 3 September), researchers report tomorrow in Science that global warming will cause sea levels to rise much faster by the end of the century than officially projected. The rising temperatures will cause the oceans to swell with melted glacial ice, the study finds, likely flooding substantial portions of Florida and Bangladesh, as well as many other low-lying, densely populated ...

Reuters: The British government has approved construction of a 500-megawatt offshore wind farm in Cumbria, northwest England, the government said on Thursday. It said the Duddon Sands farm, planned near Walney Island off the coast of Barrow-in-Furness, was one of the country's three largest offshore wind farms approved so far. It would comprise up to 139 turbines. Morecambe Wind Ltd, a consortium of Scottish Power, Eurus Energy from Japan and Denmark's state-controlled DONG Energy, is ...

Reuters: Hurricane Ike strengthened rapidly into an fiercely dangerous Category 4 hurricane in the open Atlantic on Wednesday and Tropical Storm Hanna intensified to a lesser degree as it swirled over the Bahamas toward the southeast US Coast. Ike posed no immediate threat to land but strengthened explosively, growing in the space of a few hours from a tropical storm to an intense Category 4 hurricane on the five-step Saffir-Simpson intensity scale. Ike had top sustained winds near 145 ...

AlterNet: There is no landmass on Earth quite like California. Here one finds the world's most ancient trees, bristlecone pines, more than 4,700 years old, in the White Mountains; the tallest and largest trees, the coast redwood and giant sequoia, respectively; the highest point in the lower 48 states, Mount Whitney; the lowest and hottest place in the Western Hemisphere, Death Valley; the largest western hemisphere estuary, the Bay Delta; an 800-mile coastline; the most irrigated acres; the most ...

BBC: Sea levels globally are very unlikely to rise by more than 2m (7ft) this century, scientists conclude. Major increases would have to be fuelled by a faster flow of glaciers on the Greenland or Antarctic ice sheets. But writing in the journal Science, a US team concludes that a rise of 2m would need glaciers to reach speeds that are "physically untenable". However, even increases substantially less than 2m would cause major issues for many societies, they ...

International Herald Tribune: A new study finds that the strongest of hurricanes and typhoons have become even stronger over the past two and a half decades, adding grist to the contentious debate over whether global warming has already made storms more destructive. "I think we do see a climate signal here," said James Elsner, a professor of geography at Florida State University who is the lead author of the paper, published Thursday in the journal Nature. The study, which also found that more typical, less ...

Christian Science Monitor: Look at a satellite map, and you`ll see them lined up like Rockettes, stretching from Texas to the Canary Islands: Former Hurricane Gustav, Tropical Storm Hanna, Hurricane Ike, Tropical Storm Josephine. What gives? Four simultaneous named storms is unusual, but it`s not unprecedented. As the AP`s Seth Borenstein points out, 1998 saw four hurricanes – not just tropical storms – at the same time. And in 1995 we had five coinciding tropical storms. Still, it`s not every year that ...

Rocky Mountain News: Predictions that sea levels will rise 20 feet in the next century are wildly exaggerated, but a more realistic 4- to 6-foot rise still could put homes under water for hundreds of millions of people. That's the conclusion of Colorado scientist Tad Pfeffer, whose work on the subject appears in Friday's edition of the magazine Science. Pfeffer, a fellow of the University of Colorado's Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research, found that a 20-foot rise is well-nigh impossible, a ...