Just who is in charge of climate change?

"Politicians seem to think that the science is a done deal," says Tim Palmer. "I don't want to undermine the IPCC, but the forecasts, especially for regional climate change, are immensely uncertain." Palmer is a leading climate modeller at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts in Reading, UK, and he does not doubt that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has done a good job alerting the world to the problem of global climate change.

OECD environment ministers on Tuesday stood by efforts to tackle climate change, despite arguments in some quarters that at a time of economic uncertainty, spending on green issues could damage competitiveness. In an

There may be more to global warming than we thought. On top of the effect of human-made carbon emissions, natural changes in the warm ocean currents travelling to the icy north may be helping to heat up the entire northern hemisphere.

The rule of unintended consequences threatens to strike again. Some researchers have suggested that injecting sulfur compounds into the atmosphere might help ease global warming by increasing clouds and haze that would reflect sunlight. After all, they reason, when volcanoes spew lots of sulfur, months or more of cooling often follows. But a new study warns that injecting enough sulfur to reduce warming would wipe out the Arctic ozone layer and delay recovery of the Antarctic ozone hole by as much as 70 years.

RECENTLY, an advertisement showed how super-models are trying to promote an eco-friendly lifestyle through their outfits made with materials that are less polluting, less harmful to the environment and the earth, which, in other words, is called a green method of living. Comparing black, a trendy colour for evening parties, with this green way of resource utilisation is not only interesting but also reflects the fact that global environmental issues -- climate change to be precise -- have caught the attention of everyone. The problem

Arctic ice may be melting faster than most climate change science has concluded, the conservation group WWF said in a report published on Thursday. It found that ice in Greenland and across the Arctic region was retreating "at rates significantly faster than predicted in previous expert assessments". The Greenland Ice Sheet -- with an ice volume of about 2.9 million cubic kilometres -- is shrinking at a fast pace and "could contribute much more than previously estimated to global sea-level rise during the 21st century," the WWF said.

Speakers at a roundtable on Thursday stressed incorporation of the impacts of climate change into the new health policy. The daily Prothom Alo and ICDDR,B organised the roundtable on climate changes: emerging health problem and strategies to combat it at the ICDDR,B auditorium to mark World Health Day. The day was observed on April 7 with the theme

Much has been made of the role of airlines and oil companies in the fight against climate change, but few think of the built environment. Yet property is thought to account for nearly half of all carbon emissions and about half of those come from commercial buildings. Last year's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report highlighted the construction sector as that with the most potential to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and in the most cost effective way.

The international team of climate change scientists that produced an influential series of reports last year will be doing things a little differently in the future. Government delegates to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), meeting in Budapest, Hungary, approved a plan for the 20-year, 100-nation enterprise that would generate more precise and relevant information on climate change-without taking any longer than the current 6-year gap between reports.

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