Arriving at work on 5 March, Stanford University ecologist Paul Ehrlich found a rambling and highly profane voice message from someone identifying himself as John Q Public. In one of his more lucid moments, the caller labelled Ehrlich and his colleagues in the climate-science community as "progressive communists attempting to destroy America".
The grey, sulphur-laden skies overlying parts of Asia have a bright side — they reflect sunlight back into space, moderating temperatures on the ground. Scientists are now exploring how and where pollution from power plants could offset, for a time, the greenhouse warming of the carbon dioxide they emit.
Two lines of evidence nearly brought down the last-minute climate agreement brokered in Copenhagen by US President Barack
Obama: studies indicating that the impacts of global warming could be more severe than previously thought, and that rich countries could do more to counter the problem without breaking the bank.
Building on an existing pledge to slash deforestation rates in the Amazon, Brazil is considering a commitment to substantially
reduce cumulative greenhouse-gas emissions over the next decade.
If the next climate treaty tackles deforestation, tropical nations will need to monitor the biomass of their forests. One ecologist has worked out a way to do that from the sky, finds Jeff Tollefson.
