Issues relating to protection of the planet continue to capture media headlines and provoke public and political debate. The United Nationsʼ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has referred to global warming as a ʻweapon of mass destructionʼ (IPCC, 2007). However, global warming is not the only earth-threatening issue – there is also an increasing amount of environmental crime. The term ʻenvironmental crimeʼ is relatively new to the UK government lexicon but does not capture or harness the actions of the powerful towards acts of global environmental harm.

An overview is provided of the observed and potential future responses of zooplankton communities to global warming. The researcher begins by describing the importance of zooplankton in ocean ecosystems and the attributes that make them sensitive beacons of climate change. Global warming may have even greater repercussions for marine ecosystems than for terrestrial ecosystems, because temperature influences water column stability, nutrient enrichment, and the degree of new production, and thus the abundance, size composition, diversity, and trophic efficiency of zooplankton.

Global warming is already taking its toll. In Darfur, where several hundred thousand people have died in recent years from the internal conflict, climate change has exacerbated water and land shortages (because of growing desertification), undermined agriculture, and fueled conflict over these scarce resources among the poor. March 2008

John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath provides a verbal mural depicting America's experience in the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, with its migration of "Okies" from ruined farmlands in Oklahoma and Texas to a not-so-promised land in California. This historical experience and perhaps the present-day drought of biblical proportions in Australia should alert international policymakers to the risks to world agriculture of a hotter and drier world by late this century as a consequence of unarrested global warming. March 2008

In Little League dugouts, community parks, professional athletic organizations, and international soccer leagues, on college campuses and neighborhood playgrounds, even in residential yards, the question being asked is "grass or plastic?' The debate is over synthetic turf, used to blanket lawns, park spaces, and athletic fields where children and adults relax and play; the questions are whether synthetic turf is safe for human and environmental health, and whether its advantages outweigh those of natural grass.

Observations have shown that the hydrological cycle of the western United States changed significantly over the last half of the 20th century. We present a regional, multivariable climate change detection and attribution study, using a high-resolution hydrologic model forced by global climate models, focusing on the changes that have already affected this primarily arid region with a large and growing population.