KidsGCCI

We need to do two things, broadly. We need first to slow the rate of climate change. The second thing is that we need to start adapting to the climate changes we can't avoid. And the best way to say it is that we need to avoid the unmanageable and manage the unavoidable.

The Clock Is Ticking The Planet Forward conversation starts online and becomes a whole new type of television show. Web to television and back again. You set the agenda.

However much the oceans rise by the end of the century, add an extra 8 inches or so for New York, Boston and other spots along the coast from the mid-Atlantic to New England. That's because of predicted changes in ocean currents, according to a study based on computer models published online Sunday in the journal Nature Geoscience.

United States Senate confirms John P. Holdren, Former Director of the Woods Hole Research Center

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.

Scientists have long established that the Antarctic Peninsula is one of the most rapidly warming spots on Earth. Now, new research using detailed satellite data indicates that the changing climate is affecting not just the penguins at the apex of the food chain, but simultaneously the microscopic life that is the base of the ecosystem.

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.

We are on the brink of a major revolution - the demise of the fossil-fuel economy. Now is the time to think through the implications.

From 1998 to 2006, Exxon Mobil, for example, contributed more than $600,000 to Heartland, according to annual reports of charitable contributions from the company and company foundations. Alan T. Jeffers, a spokesman for Exxon Mobil, said by e-mail that the company had ended support "to several public policy research groups whose position on climate change could divert attention from the important discussion about how the world will secure the energy required for economic growth in an environmentally responsible manner."

Over a billion people today suffer from water scarcity; deforestation in the tropics destroys an area the size of Greece every year - more than 25 million acres; more than half of the world's fisheries are over-fished or fished at their limit. "Just as a few lonely economists warned us we were living beyond our financial means and overdrawing our financial assets, scientists are warning us that we're living beyond our ecological means and overdrawing our natural assets," argues Glenn Prickett, senior vice president at Conservation International. But, he cautioned, as environmentalists have pointed out: "Mother Nature doesn't do bailouts."

"We know from scientific evidence that climate change is a reality and that climate change will have damaging effects on the economy all over the world," said Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen, one of the politicians attending the scientific conference. "Therefore we need an agreement and we need an agreement this year."

More than 150 scientists from 26 countries are calling for immediate action by policymakers to reduce CO2 emissions sharply to avoid possible widespread and severe damage to marine ecosystems from ocean acidification. This warning comes in The Monaco Declaration and the Research Priorities Report developed at the 2nd international symposium on The Ocean in a High-CO2 World, to be released during a press conference on Friday, 30 January, at the ASLO Aquatic Sciences Conference in Nice.

Australia Battles Floods in North as Crocodiles Enter Towns