This report presents a study of policies and measures that could dramatically reduce US greenhouse gas emissions over the next two decades. It examines a broad set of national policies to increase energy efficiency, accelerate the adoption of renewable energy technologies, and shift energy use to less carbon-intensive fuels. The policies address major areas of energy use in residential and commercial buildings, industrial facilities, transportation, and power generation.

This study analyzes the employment, macroeconomic, energy and environmental impacts of implementing the Climate Protection Scenario.

The strong altitudinal gradients in mountain regions provide unique and sometimes the best opportunities to detect and analyse global change processes and phenomena. Meteorological, hydrological, cryospheric and ecological conditions change strongly over relatively short distances; thus biodiversity tends to be high, and characteristic sequences of ecosystems and cryospheric systems are found along mountain slopes. The boundaries between these systems experience shifts due to environmental change and thus may be used as indicators of such changes. The higher parts of many mountain ranges are not affected by direct human activities. These areas include many national parks and other protected environments. They may serve as locations where the environmental impacts of climate change alone, including changes in atmospheric chemistry, can be studied directly. Mountain regions are distributed all over the globe, from the Equator almost to the poles and from oceanic to highly continental climates. This global distribution allows us to perform comparative regional studies and to analyse the regional differentiation of environmental change processes as characterised above. Therefore, within the IGBP an Initiative for Collaborative Research on Global Change and Mountain Regions was developed, which strives to achieve an integrated approach for observing, modelling and investigating global change phenomena and processes …

This book is a series of reports summarizing discussions and recommendations from a series of forums about strategies to deal with natural disaster. The focus is on changing human behavior and development in order to coexist with natural phenomena rather than trying to control natural phenomena.

This brief news article provides preliminary evidence that global warming may have sped up the pace at which grasslands are being overtaken by mesquite, creosote and other shrubs at desert sites around the world.

This paper takes as its initial premise the assumption that there are important and significant populations in the world's drylands who, given the right conditions and incentives, can achieve good livelihoods, accumulate assets to reduce vulnerability and escape from poverty. However, to make a convincing case it is necessary to challenge current wisdom on the distribution and condition of drylands populations, and build more realistic scenarios that decision makers can take seriously. This is a major task, and this paper will only set the challenge and introduce some of the new evidence that is required.

Researchers at NASA and the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC), studying changes in tropical precipitation patterns, have noted a higher frequency of El Niños and La Niñas over the last 21 years. In addition, when either of those events occur, the world can expect more months with unusually high or low precipitation with droughts more common than floods over land areas.

The PAGES research community works toward improving our understanding of the Earth's changing environment. By placing current and future global changes in a long term perspective, they can be assessed relative to natural variability. Since the industrial revolution, the Earth System has become increasingly affected by human activities. Natural and human processes are woven into a complex tapestry of forcings, responses, feedbacks and consequences. Deciphering this complexity is essential as we plan for the future. Paleoenvironmental research is the only way to investigate Earth System processes that operate on timescales longer than the period of instrumental records.

The degree to which carbon flows balance each other - human activities leading to carbon emissions into the atmosphere, vegetation and oceans soaking it up - is the subject of vigorous debate. It is not yet possible to define quantitatively the global effects of human activities such as forestry and agriculture, and may never be so. However, studies to determine these effects have emerged as critical for understanding how the earth's climate will evolve in the future. Global concern about the potential implications of the behaviour of the carbon cycle under anthropogenic stress includes concepts of system instability and large scale change. To contribute to understanding this behaviour, and our potential responses to it, requires a thorough investigation of both biophysical and social systems. Until recently, most scientific assessments of such risks focused on the anatomy of conceivable environmental changes themselves, devoting little attention to either the human driving forces or the ecosystems and societies that might be endangered by the changes. Recently, however, questions about the linkage and interaction of social, ecological, and biogeochemical systems are emerging as a central focus of policy-driven assessments of global environmental risks. The approach used here is to accept humans as an integral …

This report presents two series of studies performed before COP-6 and COP-6bis, in order to provide DG Environment with economic analysis of the issues at stake in international climate negotiations. These analysis used the background information provided by the large scale world energy partial equilibrium model POLES. They were also based on an extensive use of the Marginal Abatement Cost Curves produced by the POLES model through the ASPEN-sd software, specifically designed to produce assessment.

Different speakers addressed the Panel. Among other issues, the Eighteenth Session of the IPCC decided that its work must continue to maintain its high scientific and technical standards, independence, transparency and geographic balance, to ensure a balanced reporting of viewpoints and to be policy relevant but not policy prescriptive or policy driven.

Different speakers addressed the Panel, and some highlighted the importance of sound data for monitoring and predicting the climate system and noted with concern the decline in observational networks. Others emphasized the value of the scientific information provided by the IPCC for the Convention process and highlighted the need to integrate scientific assessments in sustainable development consideration and to communicate with a wider audience.

Scientific news article about Snowball Earth eras. These are times when ice periodically covered the globe, and the era called the Cambrian Explosion, which produced the first fossils of almost all major categories of animals living today.

This press release summarizes the findings of a new study. Saharan dust clouds travel thousands of miles and fertilize the water off the West Florida coast with iron, which kicks off blooms of toxic algae. The research was partially funded by a NASA grant as part of ECOHAB: Florida (Ecology and Oceanography of Harmful Algal Blooms), a multi-disciplinary research project designed to study harmful algae.

New data from tree rings from 500 sites around the world are now available from NOAA. These data are important because they provide climate scientists and resource managers with records of past climatic variability extending back thousands of years.

El Niño is an abnormal warming of the ocean temperatures across the eastern tropical Pacific that affects weather around the globe. El Niño episodes usually occur approximately every four-five years. NOAA researchers and scientists are presently monitoring the formation of a possible weak El Niño and predict that the United States could experience very weak-to-marginal impacts late winter to early spring 2002.

Normal temperatures and precipitation levels for your area may have changed as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's National Climatic Data Center recently released new 'normal' data for about 8,000 weather stations. The data defines the normal temperature at locations across the United States, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands and U.S. Pacific Islands. These data are used as a benchmark for weather forecasters to calculate day-to-day temperature and rainfall departures from typical levels and are also used by business, government and industry for planning, design and operations.

This Law was formulated in order to prevent desertification, to improve and reclaim desertified land, to protect the environment, and to promote a sustainable economy and society.

New findings suggest that the deep ocean is teeming with organisms that produce essential natural fertilizers. A National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded research team led by Jonathan Zehr, a marine scientist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, has discovered a previously unknown type of photosynthetic bacteria that fixes nitrogen, converting nitrogen from the atmosphere into a form other organisms can use.

This report provides a brief overview of the state of science of air quality forecasting. The report was composed to guide future federal research in air quality forecasting.

This government report describes pollutants which are carried between continents by air currents. The report also addresses current and future research to better understand how these pollutants are transported.

This report is an update on progress of federal plant genome research. The focus in this report is on plants that are economically important to agribusiness.

The PAGES research community works toward improving our understanding of the Earth's changing environment. By placing current and future global changes in a long term perspective, they can be assessed relative to natural variability. Since the industrial revolution, the Earth System has become increasingly affected by human activities. Natural and human processes are woven into a complex tapestry of forcings, responses, feedbacks and consequences. Deciphering this complexity is essential as we plan for the future. Paleoenvironmental research is the only way to investigate Earth System processes that operate on timescales longer than the period of instrumental records.

What is the overall state of the Arctic environment? The aim of this report is to answer the many aspects of this seemingly straightforward question. Although several national and international efforts have looked at parts of the Arctic, this is the first attempt to assess the state of Arctic flora and fauna as a whole.