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After a year of watching adults engage in devastating recklessness in the financial markets and depressing fecklessness in the global climate talks, it's refreshing to know that the world keeps minting idealistic young people who are not waiting for governments to act, but are starting their own projects and driving innovation. "Why did this tour happen?" asked Ringwald. "Why this mad, insane plan to travel across India in a caravan of solar electric cars and jatropha trucks with solar music, art, dance and a potent message for climate solutions? Well ... the world needs crazy ideas to change things, because the conventional way of thinking is not working anymore."

The report, which U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu co-chaired before his selection, outlines several bold, sweeping changes to reduce both countries' emissions.

Scientists are to hold an emergency summit to warn the world's politicians they are being too timid in their response to global warming.

US environment warning: 'An apocalypse for agriculture in California'

EX Many extremes and their associated impacts are now changing. For example, in recent decades most of North America has been experiencing more unusually hot days and nights, fewer unusually cold days and nights, and fewer frost days. Heavy downpours have become more frequent and intense. Droughts are becoming more severe in some regions, though there are no clear trends for North America as a whole. The power and frequency of Atlantic hurricanes have increased substantially in recent decades, though North American mainland land-falling hurricanes do not appear to have increased over the past century. Outside the tropics, storm tracks are shifting northward and the strongest storms are becoming even stronger.

Eight crazy experiments bold enough to change the world.

The only survivors in the wild of an order of reptiles that scampered with dinosaurs could be wiped out because climate change will turn them all into males.

How can cities reduce the role they may play in global warming? Could fire departments, garbage collection services, residential building codes, and industrial regulations be greener? Attempting to help address those questions, 21 U.S. cities, including New York, Las Vegas, and New Orleans will describe their major sources of greenhouse gas emissions to the Carbon Disclosure Project, one of the world's largest repositories linking such data to climate change.

Up to 75 percent of major Antarctic penguin colonies may disappear if climate change continues to heat up the continent, according to a recent report.

Energy/Environment: Of all the challenges we face as a nation and as a planet, none is as pressing as the three-pronged challenge of climate change, sustainable development and the need to foster new and cleaner sources of energy. The Obama administration and the Office of Science and Technology Policy are committed to addressing this looming issue aggressively, intelligently and in a way that will not only minimize the negative impacts of past policy failings but also strengthen our economy and enhance our national security.

At a scientific conference on climate change held this week in Copenhagen, four environmental experts announced that sea levels appear to be rising almost twice as rapidly as had been forecast by the United Nations just two years ago. The warning is aimed at politicians who will meet in the same city in December to discuss the same subject and, perhaps, to thrash out an international agreement to counter it.

The Discovery Channel has developed a series of tools to help visualize the impact of global climate changes around the world.

Climate is the average pattern of weather over the long term. The earth's climate has warmed and cooled for millions of years, since long before we appeared on the scene. There's no doubt that the climate is growing warmer currently; indications of that change are all around us.

It is most appropriate for Alaska to be hosting this week's Indigenous People's Global Summit on Climate Change here in Anchorage. Alaska's indigenous people know well a cruel irony of global warming: Those who are suffering the most from a warming climate are those who contribute least to the problem -- and they generally have the fewest resources to cope with the damage. Warming trends in the world's Arctic are undeniable. Sea ice is shrinking, giving storms more chance to pound unprotected shorelines and eat away at low-lying communities. Melting permafrost causes homes and other buildings to heave and twist.

Holdren said temperatures should be kept from rising more than 3.6 degrees. To get there, he said the U.S. and other industrial nations have to begin permanent dramatic cuts in carbon dioxide pollution by 2015, with developing countries following suit within a decade. Those efforts are racing against three tipping points he cited: Earth could be as close as six years away from the loss of Arctic summer sea ice, he said, and that has the potential of altering the climate in unforeseen ways. Other elements that could dramatically speed up climate change include the release of frozen methane from thawing permafrost in Siberia, and more and bigger wildfires worldwide.

At the moment, global emissions are thought to be rising at nearly 3 per cent a year - so turning that into a 3 per cent annual cut would be a gigantic slashing of what the earth's factories and motor vehicles are pumping into the atmosphere. There is as yet nothing remotely like that on the table for potential agreement in Copenhagen, and if a deal of this ambition were to be done, it would be regarded as a triumph. Yet even with that, the Hadley Centre research suggests, the chances of keeping the rise down to about 2C by 2100 would be only 50-50. Furthermore, the simulations suggest that there is a worst-case scenario - about a 10 per cent chance - of the rise by the end of the current century reaching, even with these drastic cuts, a level of 2.8C above the pre-industrial, which is well into disaster territory.

Unlike the Kyoto Protocol, the BAP affirms the importance of reducing deforestation, which accounts for 17 to 20 percent of the world's annual greenhouse gas emissions, as a strategy for mitigating climate change. It specifies "policy approaches and positive incentives on issues relating to reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation in developing countries" (REDD) to be included in the NAMAs that countries can undertake (UNFCCC 2007, 3; FCCC/ CP/2007/6/Add.1 Decision 1). For many experts, the term REDD has become synonymous with a carbon-financing approach, in which the developing countries' reduction of emissions from forests is supported by the developed countries' purchase of carbon credits, which they can use to meet their own emissions reduction or other obligations.

Though the team is not yet ready to definitively pin the cause of the increased erosion rate on any one factor, changing conditions such as declining sea ice extent, increasing summertime sea-surface temperature, rising sea level, and increases in storm power may have all contributed to the coastal decline.

Yvo de Boer, the U.N.'s climate chief, called the meeting "very positive and constructive" and said it was "helped tremendously" by the support of Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. "There was a recognition around the table that this is a global crisis that cannot be solved without a global response," de Boer said. "There is a universal recognition that the whole world needs to act on this. .................. "China, he said, is now the largest investor worldwide in clean energy technology. "I think many people are not aware of that," he said. And according to a report by HSBC Global Research in February, almost 40 percent of the spending in China's economic stimulus package is supposed to go toward renewable energy, electric grid improvements, pollution control efforts, and other clean-energy-related projects.