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Washington Business Journal: A new president and, ironically, a lingering recession may be all that is needed to provide a boost to the clean-energy business in 2009. Many in the industry believe that President-elect Barack Obama's administration, with a to-do list heavy on curbing climate change and creating green jobs, could move the country and region to the next economic frontier. Several local governments -- including Arlington, Loudoun, Prince George's and Montgomery counties -- are pitching the new ...

Huliq News: The United States could suffer the effects of abrupt climate changes within decades--sooner than some previously thought--says a new government report. It contends that seas could rise rapidly if melting of polar ice continues to outrun recent projections, and that an ongoing drought in the U.S. west could be the start of permanent drying for the region. Commissioned by the U.S. Climate Change Science Program, the report was authored by experts from the U.S. Geological Survey, ...

Indo-Asian News Service: Ocean acidification and rising temperatures are gradually killing off the biggest and most robust corals on the Great Barrier Reef since 1990, the "tipping point" year, says a new study. The study, authored by Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS) scientists Glenn De'ath, Janice Lough and Katharina Fabricius, is the most comprehensive one to date on calcification rates of Great Barrier Reef (GBR) corals. Calcification is how much skeleton the coral puts down each year. ...

Asia Times: For anyone interested in the weather, the good news is that 2008 was cooler than the previous year. The bad news is that the world is still getting hotter and that greater variability in weather brought on by climate change resulted in or contributed to extreme weather that killed hundreds of people in Southeast Asia in 2008 and affected the lives of millions across the region. At least so says the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), the United Nation's Geneva-based climate ...

Asian News International: Ecologists have suggested that as a result of global warming, species will shrink in size, as bigger creatures will have more problems losing heat. Though the effects of the climate change are likely not to be seen for many more years, it is important to consider how to preserve larger species right now. 'Our collective actions are negatively affecting body sizes of many living species,' Kaustuv Roy, a biologist at the University of California in San Diego, told New ...

Age: IT SEEMS every generation has its own version of the apocalypse. Climate change may be the Armageddon of the new millennium, yet somehow it lacks the menace of, say, an atom bomb. It is destruction by increments. It is hidden in the cracks of a drought. Or a "water crisis", as we city-dwellers call it. Farmland turned to salt pans. Water levels so low that if they were exam results they'd be an "F" for fail. When I think about it, I breathe faster. And since I had children, ...

Australian: THE pace of global warming remains as much a topic of discussion as does the weather itself. Many climate scientists warn of potentially devastating social, economic and environmental costs because of continuing global warming they blame on human-caused greenhouse emissions. They have advanced their argument to the extent that most Australians accept the world is getting warmer. But we were reminded yesterday when the Australian Bureau of Meteorology released its climate report for last year ...

Australian: CATTLE farmer Neil Graham can see the landscape changing around him as his neighbours sell their properties for plantations, unable to compete against the Rudd Government's generous tax concessions for forestry companies. The passing of legislation by the Government last year to provide tax concessions to spur the planting of carbon-sink forests has created disquiet in many farming communities, including around Mr Graham's picturesque cattle property at Dairy Plains in the Meander ...

Ledger: For years, environmentalists have called for safer disposal of coal ash, a by-product of coal-fired electrical generation. Late last month, a massive spill of the substance demonstrated - in hideous, gray detail - what happens when warnings go ignored too long. The scope of the disaster near Kingston, Tenn. - a city that "overflows with nature's beauty," as its Web site proclaims - is still being assessed, but serious trouble has been documented already. Reports indicated that ...

Bloomberg: Growth of coral along the 2,000- kilometer (1,200-mile) Great Barrier Reef is declining more than at any time in four centuries as the climate warms globally and ocean waters become more acidic, Australian scientists found. Coral skeletal growth slowed by 14.2 percent since 1990, the steepest decline in at least 400 years, Glenn De'ath, who led a team of researchers at the Australian Institute of Marine Science in Townsville, Queensland, wrote in the journal Science. "This ...