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Without decisive action, global warming in the 21st century is likely to accelerate at a much faster pace and cause more environmental damage than predicted, according to a leading member of the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Barack Obama is to invite China to join the United States in an effort by the world's two biggest polluters to stop global warming running out of control.

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

WILKINS ICE SHELF - A huge Antarctic ice shelf is on the brink of collapse with just a sliver of ice holding it in place, the latest victim of global warming that is altering maps of the frozen continent. "We've come to the Wilkins Ice Shelf to see its final death throes," David Vaughan, a glaciologist at the British Antarctic Survey (BAS), told Reuters after the first - and probably last - plane landed near the narrowest part of the ice.

Kirpotin describes an "ecological landslide that is probably irreversible and is undoubtedly connected to climatic warming". He says that the entire western Siberian sub-Arctic region has begun to melt, and this "has all happened in the last three or four years".

Despite the political rhetoric, the scientific warnings, the media headlines and the corporate promises, he would say, carbon emissions were soaring way out of control - far above even the bleak scenarios considered by last year's report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the Stern review. The battle against dangerous climate change had been lost, and the world needed to prepare for things to get very, very bad.

Half the world's population could face a shortage of clean water by 2080 because of climate change, experts warned Tuesday. Wong Poh Poh, a professor at the National University of Singapore, told a regional conference that global warming was disrupting water flow patterns and increasing the severity of floods, droughts and storms - all of which reduce the availability of drinking water. Wong said the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found that as many as 2 billion people won't have sufficient access to clean water by 2050. That figure is expected to rise to 3.2 billion by 2080 - nearly tripling the number who now do without it.

This Canadian oil is stable and reliable. It promises to substantially reduce America's future dependence on volatile Middle Eastern sources of oil. And much of it is profitable to produce even with oil prices hovering around $50 per barrel, which explains why some of the world's largest oil conglomerates have invested tens of billions of dollars here despite wild short-term swings in international oil prices. Free White Papers! But what few American consumers know as they routinely fill up their tanks is that this new petroleum bonanza, drawn from dense, tarry deposits known as oil sands, ranks as what environmentalists call the dirtiest oil on the planet. Extracting it causes widespread ecological damage - and could accelerate global warming.

Global warming is one of the most serious challenges facing us today. To protect the health and economic well-being of current and future generations, we must reduce our emissions of heat-trapping gases by using the technology, know-how, and practical solutions already at our disposal.

The prospect that human-driven warming is poised to push Earth past dangerous tipping points is now a cornerstone of many environmental campaigns. But what tipping points are well established and which ones remain what Stephen W. Pacala of Princeton University has called "the monsters behind the door"? I have a piece in the Week in Review section exploring these concerns. Given the limits on space in print, I thought it worthwhile to add some additional voices here and encourage further discussion. The bottom line? A growing effort to clarify such risks has yielded what amounts to the same message climate experts have been conveying for more than two decades: More emissions of greenhouse gases raise the odds of trouble.

Some of the mightiest rivers on the planet, including the Ganges, the Niger, and the Yellow river in China, are drying up because of climate change, a study of global waterways warned yesterday. The study by the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado found that global warming has had a far more damaging impact on rivers than had been realised and that, overwhelmingly, those rivers in highly populated areas were the most severely affected. That could threaten food and water supply to millions of people living in some of the world's poorest regions, the study warned.

AN ICE bridge which had apparently held a vast Antarctic ice shelf in place during recorded history shattered on Saturday and could herald a wider collapse linked to global warming, a leading scientist said.

The new projections, published this month in the American Meteorological Society's Journal of Climate, indicate a median probability of surface warming of 5.2 degrees Celsius by 2100, with a 90% probability range of 3.5 to 7.4 degrees. This can be compared to a median projected increase in the 2003 study of just 2.4 degrees.

New evidence has emerged that a large plate of floating ice shelf attached to Antarctica is breaking up, in a troubling sign of global warming, the European Space Agency (ESA) said on Thursday 10 July 2007. Images taken by its Envisat remote-sensing satellite show that Wilkins Ice Shelf is "hanging by its last thread" to Charcot Island, one of the plate's key anchors to the Antarctic peninsula, ESA said in a press release.

A leading energy body is calling for a $45 trillion (£23 trillion) green revolution to tackle global warming. The International Energy Agency (IEA) said nations must spend 1% of annual economic output on new technology to halve carbon dioxide emissions by 2050.

Climate change inescapable fact Story by NGOVI KITAU Publication Date: 6/9/2008 CLIMATE CHANGE LEADING to global warming is the biggest environmental challenge facing the world. The World Environment Day was marked last week, and it is necessary to examine the state of our environment. Our moderate weather and tropical climate encourage a range of outdoor activities. We have been fortunate to live in a country that has marvellous mountains to climb, fabulous beaches to bask in, magnificent vegetation and animals in our famous national parks. We have great lakes and rivers to explore, fertile highlands to grow cash crops and rear exotic dairy animals in, extraordinary lowlands to grow food crops in, the magnificent Rift Valley, beautiful plateaus and hills covered by dense tropical forests and giant trees, and great savannas for grazing our animals in. And what do we observe today? Long and recurrent droughts, flooding whenever it rains, melting of ice on Mt Kenya, destruction of the Mau and other forests, continuing and alarming soil erosion, silting of dams, degradation of the eco-system, accelerated desert march, loss of biodiversity, and persistent human conflict over scarce resources.

Dr. John P. Holdren The President of the Woods Hole Research Center discusses global warming with Dave Letterman.