"The multiyear ice covering the Arctic Ocean has effectively vanished, a startling development that will make it easier to open up polar shipping routes, an Arctic expert said on Thursday."
"An international team of environmental scientists led by the University of Pennsylvania has shown that sea-level rise, at least in North Carolina, is accelerating. Researchers found 20th-century sea-level rise to be three times higher than the rate of sea-level rise during the last 500 years."
"Leaders at companies that develop low-carbon energy told a Senate panel that climate legislation would create millions of new jobs, but lawmakers from fossil-fuel dependent states said the bill would hit employment in the traditional energy economy."
"Even as the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee took up its climate bill for the first time Tuesday, the Environment Protection Agency proposed requiring thousands of greenhouse gas emitters to install stricter pollution control technology."
"President Obama's envoy for climate change has dashed hopes of a bilateral climate-change deal during next month's presidential trip to China. Todd Stern says a wide gap remains between Chinese and U.S. officials. China and the U.S. account for 40 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions."
"The Obama administration and some Senate Democrats expressed fresh urgency on Tuesday about the need to address climate change and refashion the nation's energy economy."
As debate over climate legislation rages, reporters will encounter many confusing and seemingly contradictory statements about the costs of changing US energy practices. You may help your audience with an understanding of how incomplete the cost figures cited by companies and politicians often are.
"COPENHAGEN -- Legislators from 16 of the world's major economies and most major political parties have agreed on key guiding principles to enact climate change legislation in their home countries that will drive the move to a global low carbon economy. Meeting this weekend, the lawmakers agreed to act right now in their own legislative bodies, even before the key UN climate deal in Copenhagen, now just six weeks away."
A popular theory, put forth by anti-regulatory groups and non-scientists, that the earth is cooling rather than warming is just bunk, the AP has found. Independent statisticians, given global temperature data without knowing what it was, said there was no such cooling.
"A Senate committee on Tuesday launches three long days of hearings on a Democratic climate bill in a bid to further convince an international summit in December that Washington is serious about tackling global warming."
