Original News

George M. on why we shouldn't ask others to "save the planet" -
"One psychological response to climate change is to find language and images that create distance - to suggest that it will affect someone else in the future. So the talk and images are of ‘climate’ not ‘weather’, polar bears not hedgehogs, African children not our own.
‘The Planet’ is about as distant as one can get - I am not being called on to save my family, my community, my country, my world or even my Earth. It is The Planet - a lump of cold rock seen from space. I’ll be honest - I don’t give a damn about ‘The Planet’ - it means nothing to me."

It has been labelled the Wind Rush by certain parts of the press, and like it or not, it seems to be headed to the UK.

The implementation of wind farms is the government’s latest environmental pet project and recent news coming from Brussels has highlighted the increasing need for wind power in the UK.

For an alternative take on the Bali climate talks, check out Alter Eco – Offsetting Emissions, which you can download from http://www.tni.org/detail_page.phtml?act_id=17652 

A major new campaign has been launched this week in New Zealand aiming to get tens of thousands of New Zealanders active in tackling climate change.

Spearheaded by Greenpeace, Oxfam and Forest & Bird, Be The Change will provide advice and encouragement to community groups and individuals from Bluff to Kaitaia, and from the cowshed to the boardroom, on reducing their personal impact on the climate.

Fifty Australian marine scientists have issued a consensus statement warning of the impact of climate change on coral reefs and calling for immediate and substantive reduction targets in human produced greenhouse emissions. The unprecedented call for action is the outcome of a National Forum on Coral Reef Futures, held at the Australian Academy of Science, in Canberra. The scientists have already warned that ocean acidification due to increased atmospheric CO2 is accelerating.

This article describes how the car has come to dictate land use planning, and how getting back to our roots - where the street is about community, not speed, we can solve some other social problems too.
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Rediscovering our roots can solve 21st Century traffic woes

Gary Toth, the new Director of Transportation Initiatives at PPS and a veteran of 34
years with the New Jersey Department of Transportation, reflects on how we lost our
way in traffic planning and what we can do to get back on track.

I started at the New Jersey Department of Transportation in 1973 right out of

Ocean acidity is increasing at a much faster pace according to marine scientists meeting in Canberra at the Coral Reef Futures 07 Forum, October 18-19, 2007. "It appears this acidification is now taking place over decades, rather than centuries as originally predicted. It is happening even faster in the cooler waters of the Southern Ocean than in the tropics. It is starting to look like a very serious issue." said Professor Malcolm McCulloch of the Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies (CoECRS) and the Australian National University.

Arctic summer sea ice is headed towards rapid disintegration as early as 2013, a century ahead of the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) projections, according to 'the Big Melt' (PDF), a new review of recent scientific literature on climate change produced by www.carbonequity.info. We have gone past the tipping point for Arctic sea ice and now we watch the disintegration of the Greenland and the West Antarctic ice sheets which will result in catastrophic changes in sea level of 5 metres or more in the next 100 years.