nuclear-news

Climate change gathers steam, say scientists 1 Dec 08  PARIS (AFP) — Earth’s climate appears to be changing more quickly and deeply than a benchmark UN report for policymakers predicted, top scientists said ahead of international climate talks starting Monday in Poland………………..

Even without additional drivers, the IPCC has warned that current rates of greenhouse gas emissions, if unchecked, would unleash devastating droughts, floods and huge increases in human misery by century’s end.

But the new studies, they say, indicate that human activity may be triggering powerful natural forces that would be nearly impossible to reverse and that could push temperatures up even further.

At the top of the list for virtually all of the scientists canvassed was the rapid melting of the Arctic ice cap.

“In the last couple of years, Arctic Sea ice is at an all-time low in summer, which has got a lot of people very, very concerned,” commented Robert Watson, Chief Scientific Advisor for Britain’s department for environmental affairs and chairman of the IPCC’s previous assessment in 2001.

“This has implication’s for Earth’s climate because it can clearly lead to a positive feedback effect,” he said in an interview………………………..The present concentration [of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere] is the highest during the last 650,000 years and probably during the last 20 million years,” said the Global Carbon Project’s Pep Canadell, a researcher at Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation……………….

The December 1-12 forum of 192-member UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) comes midway through a two-year process launched in Bali for braking the juggernaut of global warming.

Scheduled to run until December 12, the talks are a stepping stone towards a new pact — due to be sealed in Copenhagen in December 2009 — for reducing emissions and boosting adaptation funds beyond 2012, when the current provisions of the UN’s Kyoto Protocol expire.

Hard times: directors feel the pinch
THE AUSTRALIAN Business Robin Bromby | December 01, 2008 TOUGH times mean tough decisions, and in the next few months we will see which companies are prepared to make them………………..At uranium explorer Monaro Mining (MRO), ambitious projects in Bulgaria, Estonia and Niger have been put on hold. Spending is being slashed.