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June 6, 2008-Satellite images show Papua New Guinea's Gulf Province rain forest intact in 1988 (left) and laid bare by logging in 2002. The images were released this week as part of a new study.

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.

Evidence of serious flaws in the multi-billion dollar global market for carbon credits has been uncovered by a BBC World Service investigation. The credits are generated by a United Nations-run scheme called the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM).

Geographers have projected temperature increases due to greenhouse gas emissions to reach a not-so-chilling conclusion: climate zones will shift and some climates will disappear completely by 2100.

The Climate Change Collection is a suite of science education web-based resources covering natural climate dynamics as well as human impacts on the climate system.

To be effective, such tools must be refined so that they can be shared and applied across borders and cultures. To be strategic, they should be versatile, that is, offer solutions to more than just one global problem. They should also be affordable, simple, and easy to use in many contexts.

From Spain to New York, to Australia, Japan and Hawaii, jellyfish are becoming more numerous and more widespread, and they are showing up in places where they have rarely been seen before, scientists say. The faceless marauders are stinging children blithely bathing on summer vacations, forcing beaches to close and clogging fishing nets. But while jellyfish invasions are a nuisance to tourists and a hardship to fishermen, for scientists they are a source of more profound alarm, a signal of the declining health of the world's oceans.

Overarching and Enduring Understandings Addressed in Climate Change Unit: Natural Cycles of Planetary Change Change is Detection through Pattern recognition Interlocking relationship between the Earth's Systems Overarching Questions Addressed in Greenland Melting unit: What are the results of global warming? Can the triggers of the Little Ice Age happen again? What are the methods that scientists use to study Earth processes? What are the harbingers and fingerprints of global processes? What are the drivers of climate? How are glaciers and ocean currents related?

Jakobshavn Glacier

"This is a major discovery with enormous implications for the future prosperity of humankind," said Barber, the Ernst Chain Professor of Biochemistry at Imperial College London. "The importance of their discovery cannot be overstated since it opens up the door for developing new technologies for energy production thus reducing our dependence for fossil fuels and addressing the global climate change problem."

A funny thing happened just before a ceremony was to be held last week to commemorate a $3 million sea wall around the village of Kivalina way up on Alaska's Arctic coastline. The village, home to Inupiat natives for 4,000 years, is about to be washed into the sea, and the 1,800-foot wall is supposed to stop that. Alaska There's growing evidence that villages in the far North like Kivalina, Alaska, are being eaten up by the ocean due, at least in part, to global warming. (Northwest Arctic Borough,The Anchorage Daily News/AP Photo) But along came a modest storm, with winds of up to 40 miles per hour, and 160 feet of the wall washed out. The ceremony was canceled.

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 chunk of ice spreading across 18 square kilometers (7 square miles) has broken off a Canadian ice shelf in the Arctic, scientists said Tuesday. He hasn't seen any ice in weeks. Plans to set up an ice camp in February had to be abandoned when usually dependable ice didn't form for the second year in a row. "Nobody on the ship is surprised anymore," Stern said. "We've been trying to get the word out for the longest time now that things are happening fast and they're going to continue to happen fast."

The Environment Secretary Edward Yau stated that people can do the audits to figure out how much GHG emissions are being generated by the buildings.

"This guide is the product of a three-day workshop, Climate and Weather Literacy: Using the AAAS Project 2061 Science Literacy Research to Develop Weather and Climate Literacy Framework, in April 2007."