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By Louise Gray, Environment Correspondent Published: 7:00AM GMT 01 Mar 2010 Ed Miliband, Britain's climate change secretary, has spoken of his frustration at the chaotic end to the Copenhagen summit and admitted he had wanted Ed Miliband said agreement was 'not an easy task' Photo: REUTERS A United Nations meeting in Copenhagen at the end of last year broke down in chaos because rich and poor countries could not agree the best way to cut greenhouse gas emissions. The main problem was that developing countries wanted an extension of the Kyoto Protocol, that imposes targets on rich nations, while developed countries wanted a whole new treaty.

"World Health Organization Director-General Margaret Chan says she is disappointed a deal on climate change was not struck in Copenhagen. But she says important steps were taken that, she believes, will ultimately result in an agreement to stop or retard climate change. She says the relationship between climate change and health is obvious. For example, she says millions of people will suffer from either too much water or too little water under climate change. Chan says extensive flooding may lead to loss of life from drowning and disease. She says contaminated floodwaters can cause fatal illnesses, such as diarrhea and cholera. On the other hand, she says some areas will have too little water and prolonged drought will affect the kind of crops people normally grow. "The prediction is that in the next 20 years to 30 years, if the situation continues to get worse, the productivity from the agricultural sector and from subsistence farming in Africa, the production would reduce by as much as 50 percent," she said. "If there is any truth to that, can you imagine the impact on hunger, on acute and chronic malnutrition?" Scientists say the warming of the planet will be gradual, but that extreme weather events will increase in frequency and intensity. They say the effects of more storms, floods, droughts and heat waves will be abrupt and profound. The World Health Organization says the effects of so-called climate-sensitive diseases already are killing millions of people. WHO reports more than three-and-a-half million people die every year from malnutrition-related causes. It says diarrhea-related diseases kill nearly two million people and almost one million die from malaria."

"Vatican City, Jan 11 (AP) Pope Benedict XVI denounced the failure of world leaders to agree to a new climate change treaty in Copenhagen last month, saying today that world peace depends on safeguarding God's creation. He issued the admonition in a speech to ambassadors accredited to the Vatican, an annual appointment during which the pontiff reflects on issues the Vatican wants to highlight to the diplomatic corps. Benedict has been dubbed the "green pope" for his increasingly vocal concern about the need to protect the environment. Under his watch, the Vatican has installed photovoltaic cells on its main auditorium to convert sunlight into electricity and has joined a reforestation project aimed at offsetting its CO2 emissions. For the pontiff, it's a moral issue: Church teaching holds that man must respect creation because it's destined for the benefit of humanity's future."

"Call it the mystery of the missing thermometers. Two months after "climategate" cast doubt on some of the science behind global warming, new questions are being raised about the reliability of a key temperature database, used by the United Nations and climate change scientists as proof of recent planetary warming. Two American researchers allege that U.S. government scientists have skewed global temperature trends by ignoring readings from thousands of local weather stations around the world, particularly those in colder altitudes and more northerly latitudes, such as Canada. In the 1970s, nearly 600 Canadian weather stations fed surface temperature readings into a global database assembled by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Today, NOAA only collects data from 35 stations across Canada. Worse, only one station -- at Eureka on Ellesmere Island -- is now used by NOAA as a temperature gauge for all Canadian territory above the Arctic Circle. The Canadian government, meanwhile, operates 1,400 surface weather stations across the country, and more than 100 above the Arctic Circle, according to Environment Canada. Yet as American researchers Joseph D'Aleo, a meteorologist, and E. Michael Smith, a computer programmer, point out in a study published on the website of the Science and Public Policy Institute, NOAA uses "just one thermometer [for measuring] everything north of latitude 65 degrees." Both the authors, and the institute, are well-known in climate-change circles for their skepticism about the threat of global warming. Mr. D'Aleo and Mr. Smith say NOAA and another U.S. agency, the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) have not only reduced the total number of Canadian weather stations in the database, but have "cherry picked" the ones that remain by choosing sites in relatively warmer places, including more southerly locations, or sites closer to airports, cities or the sea -- which has a warming ef

"Saturday's 6.5 temblor off California's remote North Coast was the strongest to hit the state in six years, but it caused few injuries and little major damage aside from downed chimneys, broken windows and rattled nerves. But experts say it could have been far worse. Because the epicenter was located in solid rock about 25 miles offshore - and the rural region's population is scattered and resides primarily in wood-frame housing - damage was minimal for a quake of that size. The quake was also a powerful reminder that the area is the seismic capital of our state, yet its turbulence receives far less attention than quakes in the Bay Area and Los Angeles Basin. Every year at least 80 temblors with magnitudes over 3 are recorded off the Cape Mendocino coast, according to the University of California-Berkeley Seismology Laboratory. Humboldt County officials reported that more than two dozen residents sought emergency medical care, with only one serious injury - a broken hip. The picturesque city of Eureka, the hardest-hit community in the region, reported $12.5 million in structural damage, with 14 residents displaced. "On the whole, I think we dodged a bullet," said state Assemblyman Wesley Chesbro, D-Eureka. Most Californians are anxious about the San Andreas Fault, yet the so-called Cascadia subduction zone - which created Mount Lassen - is twice the length of the San Andreas and is believed capable Advertisement Quantcast of generating larger quakes than our notorious fault."

"It took years for liberalism's redistributive itch to create an income tax so steeply progressive that it prompts the flight from the state of wealth-creators: "Between 1990 and 2007," Voegeli writes, "some 3.4 million more Americans moved from California to one of the other 49 states than moved to California from another state." And the state's income tax - liberalism codified - intensifies the effects of business cycles on the state's revenue stream: During booms, the stream surges and stimulates government spending; during contractions, revenues dwindle but the new government spending continues. Voegeli says that if California's spending had grown no faster than population growth and inflation from 1992 to 2006, it would have been $65 billion less in 2006, and per capita government outlays then would have equaled not those of Somalia or Mississippi but of Oregon, which is hardly "a hellish paradigm of Social Darwinism." It took years for liberalism's mania for micromanaging life with entangling regulations to make California's once-creative economy resemble Gulliver immobilized by the Lilliputians' many threads. The state, which between 1990 and 2007 lost 26 percent of its factory jobs and 35 percent of its high-tech manufacturing jobs, ranks behind only New York, another of liberalism's laboratories, in the number of outward-bound moving vans. (emphasis added)"

"Living in tree houses and eating from skips, for 4 years activists have occupied Bilston Wood near Edinburgh to stop it being destroyed by a new road."

"The world could be in for a spell of cooler temperatures, rather than hotter conditions, as a result of cyclical changes in ocean currents for the next 20 or 30 years, it is predicted. Research by Professor Mojib Latif, one of the world's leading climate modellers, questions the widely held view that global temperatures will rise rapidly over the coming years. Pen Hadow climate change trek makes it less than half way to North Pole But Prof Latif, of the Leibniz Institute at Germany's Kiel University and an author for the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), believes that the cool spell will only be a temporary interruption to climate change. He told a UN conference in September that changes in ocean currents known as North Atlantic Oscillation could dominate over man-made global warming for the next few decades. Controversially, he also said that the fluctuations could also be responsible for much of the rise in global temperatures seen over the past 30 years. Prof Latif told one newspaper at the weekend: "A significant share of the warming we saw from 1980 to 2000 and at earlier periods in the 20th Century was due to these cycles - perhaps as much as 50 per cent. "

"A WARNING that climate change will melt most of the Himalayan glaciers by 2035 is likely to be retracted after a series of scientific blunders by the United Nations body that issued it. Two years ago the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued a benchmark report that was claimed to incorporate the latest and most detailed research into the impact of global warming. A central claim was the world's glaciers were melting so fast that those in the Himalayas could vanish by 2035. In the past few days the scientists behind the warning have admitted that it was based on a news story in the New Scientist, a popular science journal, published eight years before the IPCC's 2007 report. It has also emerged that the New Scientist report was itself based on a short telephone interview with Syed Hasnain, a little-known Indian scientist then based at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi. Related Internet Links * Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report on Himalayan glaciers * How New Scientist reported the row Related Links * Global warming blamed for rise in malaria * Experts clash over sea-rise 'apocalypse' Hasnain has since admitted that the claim was "speculation" and was not supported by any formal research. If confirmed it would be one of the most serious failures yet seen in climate research. The IPCC was set up precisely to ensure that world leaders had the best possible scientific advice on climate change. "