Rich countries must commit to cutting carbon emissions by 80 percent by 2050 and developing nations must agree that by 2020 they too will set their own targets, leading economist Nicholas Stern said on Wednesday. He said the only way the world could defeat the climate crisis was by ensuring that global carbon emissions peaked within 15 years, were then halved from 1990 levels to 20 billion tonnes a year by 2050, and cut to 10 billion thereafter.

The Rudd Government is buying into the flawed plans to alleviate the water crisis. IT IS possible to have life without oil, but life without water is impossible for more than a few days. Given the impending water crisis you would think that, at the very least, the Rudd Government would have looked at all the alternatives before Water Minister Penny Wong announced a $13 billion investment program in "strategic water priorities" in a speech to the Annual Water Summit on Tuesday.

The Earth's climate is changing because the composition of our atmosphere is being altered, primarily as a consequence of human activity. We are now also experiencing a non-cyclical rise in the global temperature caused by the accumulation of the so-called "greenhouse gases"--carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide and others.

Any serious attempt to deal with climate change must involve transport. Transport accounts for 13% of all world greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, though this figure takes into account CO2 sources other than fuel combustion, such as forestry, land-use and biomass burning. A look at CO2 emissions from fuel combustion only shows the transport sector accounts for about 23% worldwide and about 30% in the OECD area.

This paper provides a detailed description and assessment of CARMA (Carbon Monitoring for Action), a database that reports CO2 emissions from the power sector. CARMA also lays the groundwork for the global monitoring system that will be necessary to ensure the credibility of any post-Kyoto carbon emissions limitation agreement. CARMA focuses on the power sector because it is
the largest carbon dioxide emitter, and because power plants are much better-documented than many sources of carbon emissions.

Climate change is one of the key challenges of this century. Specifically, balancing climate change mitigation and increased energy needs in developing countries poses a serious dilemma that can only be reconciled with new and improved clean energy technologies.

The dramatic projected rise in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from Asian [and wider] cities poses a major challenge for the world. Population growth, increased urbanisation, the rise of
megacities, increased average incomes and consumption mean that travel demand is rising rapidly. The supply of transport funding and infrastructure to meet these challenges lags behind

The global carbon market grew to a whopping US$64 billion (

Transport volumes and structures in China change drastically as a result of economic and social development in the country. These changes are associated with increasing energy consumption and negative impacts on the environment, e.g. emissions of greenhouse gases and toxic air pollutants affecting not only the micro and macro climate but also health.

On geological timescales, carbon dioxide enters the atmosphere through volcanism and organic matter oxidation and is removed through mineral weathering and carbonate burial. An analysis of ice-core CO2 records and marine carbonate chemistry indicates a tight coupling between these processes during the past 610,000 years, which suggests that a weathering feedback driven by atmospheric CO2 leads to a mass balance between CO2 sources and sinks on long timescales.

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