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[News] from [guardian.co.uk]

[Environment > Flooding]
Policeman dies as devastating deluge strikes Britain
Four bridges collapse, main roads are blocked and hundreds are evacuated as 12 inches of rain falls in Cumbria in 24 hours
Helen Carter
guardian.co.uk, Friday 20 November 2009 20.10 GMT Article history

A policeman swept away and killed during the devastating flooding that hit north-west England was trying to save lives by directing motorists off a bridge across a swollen river.

PC Bill Barker, who would have been 45tomorrow , was praised by the prime minister, Gordon Brown, as a "very heroic, very brave man" who had given his life saving others after Cumbria was struck by what the Environment Agency described as "unprecedented" rainfall.

Severe flooding in the county was driven by a combination of heavy rain, saturated ground and swollen rivers.

Hundreds were evacuated from their homes, four bridges collapsed and main roads were blocked after 314mm (12.4in) of rain fell in 24 hours – a record for England.

Flooding was also reported in north-west Wales and Dumfries and Galloway in Scotland, but Cumbria was hardest hit.

Workington MP Tony Cunningham said the flood was "of biblical proportions" and he was astonished by the destruction of the Northside bridge, which led to PC Barker's death.

"The force of the river was absolutely incredible. This is a stone bridge. To wash away a bridge of that size and dimension is incredible."

Fifty people were evacuated by RAF helicopters from Cockermouth, where the river Cocker joins the Derwent, after flooding cut off the town centre.

Police said PC Barker, a father of four, had gone out on foot to direct motorists off the Northside bridge, which crosses the Derwent in Workington, when it gave way and swept him into the water at 4.40am .

Jerry Graham, the assistant chief constable of the Cumbria constabulary said: "Members of the public were trying to cross the bridge, it was obvious they were going to put themselves in danger.

"So PC Barker went out on to the bridge on foot to try and protect them. Unfortunately when they were on the bridge, it gave way just due to the volume of water and PC Barker went into the water and was swept away."

One local claimed PC Barker had gone to the aid of a driver who had got stuck on the stone bridge as it collapsed, but this was not confirmed by police.

Robin Taylor, 50, a maintenance engineer from Workington, said: "I was told the police officer had responded to an emergency call and gone to the bridge to help a car that had become stuck and, as he was leading them away, the pavement side of the bridge collapsed first and he was gone. It is really sad, I thought it was absolutely shocking.

His body, still in uniform, was found washed up on a beach .

His widow, Hazel, described him as her best friend and an "amazing dad". She said: "I have the comfort of knowing that Bill died doing the job he loved, and the fact that he was helping others is just typical Bill."

Evacuated residents spent last night in emergency reception centres across Cumbria. Red Cross worker Ian Rideout said many of those rescued in Cockermouth were suffering from shock.

He said: "The centre of Cockermouth looks like it has been completely destroyed – I've never seen anything like it. The water has caused so much damage that many of the homes here are completely ruined.

"We've been working non-stop and between the Red Cross and RNLI we've rescued in the region of 200 people from their homes. Last night, I went up in one of the helicopters to get an idea of the full scale of the disaster and where we should focus rescue efforts. Almost straight away we found four people on the roof of their home who needed to be winched to safety.

"Most of the people we've rescued have been in shock. One minute it's raining heavily, then the next their home is filling with water and they're being evacuated by the Red Cross."

Water was feared to have seeped into the cellar at Wordsworth House in Cockermouth, the poet's birthplace, potentially damaging valuable archives.

The death of PC Barker highlighted the dangers for rescue workers. RNLI lifeboat operations manager, Brian Ashbridge, said a "massive current" sweeping down the Derwent made conditions challenging for crews searching the river basin.

"It's absolutely horrendous. There is a huge amount of debris around in the water at the moment as well, which adds to the difficulties."

The environment secretary, Hilary Benn, who was in Cockermouth to assess the flooding, said defences built after the 2005 floods that were designed to withstand a "one-in-100-years flood" were unable to cope with the volume of water.

Benn said: "What we dealt with last night was probably more like one-in-1,000 so even the very best defences, if you have such quantities of rain in such a short space of time, can be overtopped."

The heavy rainfall was caused by a slow-moving front of air which rolled in from the Atlantic, according to the Met Office.

A spokesman said: "It was warm air coming from the Azores, so being warm it had the potential to hold a lot of water. When it hit land it was forced to rise and then cool, to produce the heavy rain."

Experts warned of a funding shortfall that could thwart official plans to prevent future floods. Nick Reeves, executive director of the Chartered Institution of Water and Environmental Management, said he welcomed the flood and water management bill, announced in the Queen's speech on Wednesday, which gives local authorities responsibility for surface water flooding for the first time and puts the Environment Agency in overall charge of flooding.

But he said: "Our concern at the moment is that most local authorities don't have the additional resources needed to tackle this at local level. The bill doesn't guarantee any additional cash. In six months we are going to have a general election and this government hasn't committed to additional funding.

"Lessons should be learned from the 1997 floods. We know that climate change will bring warmer and wetter winters so we need to plan now."

The flood bill is the government's response to Sir Michael Pitt's report into the 1997 floods.

Stormy outlook

Cumbria was due a brief respite from the heavy rain last night and early this morning, but experts predicted further rain and unsettled weather into the start of next week. A Met Office spokesman said: "There will be more rain from mid to late morning, clearing in the late afternoon. We are expecting about 15-40mm, which is normal for Cumbria. The outlook is unsettled and the rain won't help the clear-up but I would expect river levels to subside over the next two to three days."

It will be very windy on Sunday, with gales or severe gales in west Cumbria, which could cause structural damage, he said. "There will be blustery showers and we could see that for the next week but no prolonged period of rain like we saw on Wednesday and Thursday." Wet and windy conditions were expected over most of the UK today, starting in the south and moving east and west to cover all areas.

Karen McVeigh

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[News] from [guardian.co.uk]

[News > UK news > Weather]
Torrential rains and flooding rivers turn Cockermouth into an island
Martin Wainwright
guardian.co.uk, Friday 20 November 2009 19.35 GMT Article history

The twin rivers that bring thousands of tourists to Cockermouth turned on the town after the heaviest rainfall ever recorded in Britain, driving 250 people out of their homes.

Torrents flung cars across the picturesque centre, sweeping through Wordsworth's birthplace and ransacking one of the largest concentrations of small, independent shops in the north.

"See that oven," said Keith Fair, who opened an upmarket kitchen shop in Market Square two years ago. "That was in the window last night. Now it's on its side, halfway out of the back door."

"We were lucky – sort of," says his fitter Jim Woodford, a burly six-footer who had to cling to railings before flinging himself on the rescue boat. He points at the broken roof of a four-storey Georgian building. "The RAF's Sea King was up there this morning, winching out a group of people in their 70s and 80s."

Like many in Cockermouth, the pensioners had refused to believe that their cosy homes, painted in seaside pastel and newly strung with Christmas lights, might be death traps if water inundated the ground floors. The town has had three floods in the last 10 years and hosted an Environment Agency forum on six defence options only last month.

"But there's been nothing remotely like this," said Jeremy Petman, head brewer at Jennings, whose riverside malt store was awash with two waterlogged skips of spent hops. "This was a different scale. There'll be no brewing now for a long time."

Evacuee Lilian Lister agreed, adding in her wartime experiences in Cumbria's blitz for good measure. Now 91, she said that residents in her sheltered housing gradually realised that dry floors upstairs weren't enough. "We'd no power, no heat and no way of getting out for food," she said.

Like the rooftop group in Market Square, she and her neighbours were evacuated as Land Rovers from 42nd Brigade drove into the town to help four inshore lifeboats and a civilian army of volunteers. The jeeps added to the clatter of the Sea King and chainsaws deployed to deal with a small forest of uprooted trees; the most spectacular being stuck like a spear through the iron railings of Main Street bridge, rearing up almost vertically with its roots in the water and the trunk jammed against the 19th-century stone. Another was impaled in a circle of seats in Market Place and the town's Christmas tree, put up only last week, leaned against the statue of Richard, sixth Earl of Mayo.

"If the statue had gone, we'd really have felt that was it for Cockermouth," said June Priestley, drying out in the Bitter End, Cockermouth's other brewery, a micro attached to a pub on high ground. The landlady, Susan Askey, said: "We're safe here but that doesn't spare us from what's happened. I've spent the morning trying to track down what's happened to an elderly relative. Thank goodness I've just discovered where they've taken him, and he's safe."

Other families took hundreds of phone calls from anxious friends and family further away, with all roads cut at one stage except the narrow Whinlatter Pass from Keswick. The main A66 route was blocked by a new, third lake between Derwentwater and Bassenthwaite, whose temporary shores were lined with abandoned cars.

At the high school, on Cockermouth's highest ground, nurse Gill Aitchison was among scores of volunteers looking after other elderly victims, some of them groggy after a night on mattresses in the commandeered hall. A man sat in tears after returning briefly to collect clothes from his mud-plastered flat.

As the rivers slowly withdrew to their debris-littered courses, other volunteers started a huge clean-up with everything from mops to a farm slurry spreader. Hauled in by a tractor, the machine's heavy-duty pump sucked a swimming pool's worth of water from the cellars of Jan Mansergh's lingerie shop.

"My family are farmers," she said, "and as soon as they saw what was happening, they were on the phone offering help." The alley off Main Street filled with the stink of sewage.

"That's the river water," Mansergh said. "Don't ask what's in it, but everything in Cockermouth is going to need cleaning again and again."


[Environment > Climate change scepticism]
Climate change denial MEP attacks churchRoger Helmer says Anglican hierarchy has dropped the gospel in favour of 'the new religion of climate alarmism'
Allegra Stratton, political correspondent
guardian.co.uk, Friday 20 November 2009 15.11 GMT Article history

A Tory MEP has accused the Church of England of having "abandoned religious faith entirely and taken up the new religion of climate alarmism instead".

Roger Helmer, who resigned from the Tory frontbench in Europe when the Westminster leadership dumped its promised referendum on the Lisbon treaty, used a magazine article to urge the Church to "get back to the gospel".

Referring approvingly to the work of another writer who said bishops were spending more time "preaching climate change than the gospel of salvation", Helmer wrote: "The recent multi-faith conference at Windsor suggests that other world religions are taking the same line on climate change. This is particularly ironic at a time when the world is cooling and when more and more scientists around the world are breaking cover to challenge the theory of man-made global warming. Perhaps world religions should have more faith in God, and less in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change."

The Bishop of Leicester, Tim Stevens, said Helmer had not aired these views when he debated climate change in Leicester cathedral and asked whether "this was merely courtesy, or was it because the opportunity for a platform meant more to him than exposing his views to scrutiny or challenge from a live audience".

Helmer is one of a growing band of European politicians threatening to cause trouble for the Tory frontbench in the first few months of any government it may form. He and his eurosceptic colleagues insist they will not drop their campaign for a referendum on Lisbon.

Analysis by the leftwing website Next Left has shown that the top 10 Tory bloggers are climate change sceptics. This week Helmer convened a conference of climate change deniers at the European parliament. Speakers included Ross McKitrick, a Canadian professor who has said data indicating global warming has been fiddled; Tom Segalstad, a Norwegian geologist who says human-released CO2 would not have a large effect on the climate; Fred Goldberg, co-author of the polemic The Global Warming Scam; Hans Labohm, a Dutch professor who challenges the existence of global warming; and Professor Fred Singer, who wrote the documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle.

news20091121gdn3

[News] from [guardian.co.uk]

[Environment > Climate change scepticism]
This climate email-hacking episode is generating more heat than light
Another skirmish has broken out in the long-running battle between climate scientists and so-called sceptics, and this one is likely to lead to more public confusion
Bob Ward
guardian.co.uk, Friday 20 November 2009 20.40 GMT Article history

Another skirmish has broken out in the long-running battle between climate scientists and so-called sceptics, with the hacking of email messages between some of the world's leading researchers on global temperature trends. But as usually happens in the blogosphere, this episode is generating more heat than light and is likely to lead to more public confusion over the causes of climate change.

For the past few years, a small group of climate change 'sceptics' have been poring over scientific journal papers that report historical trends in temperatures from around the world, as recorded by directly by thermometers and other instruments, and by 'proxies', such as tree rings. Their primary objective has been to seek out evidence that global warming has been invented by climate researchers who fake their data.

Among their main targets have been papers published by research teams led by Michael Mann at Pennsylvania State University and Phil Jones at the University of East Anglia, and particularly those featuring the famous 'hockey stick' graph, showing that average temperature in the northern hemisphere was relatively stable and constant for most of the last couple of millennia, but rose dramatically upwards in the last 100 years. This graph appeared prominently in the landmark Third Assessment Report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2001, which concluded that "most of the observed warming over the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations".

The attacks on the hockey stick graph led the United States National Academy of Sciences to carry out an investigation, concluding in 2006 that although there had been no improper conduct by the researchers, they may have expressed higher levels of confidence in their main conclusions than was warranted by the evidence.

The 'sceptics' believe they have been vindicated and have presented the hockey stick graph as proof that global warming is not occurring. In doing so, they have ignored the academy's other conclusion that "surface temperature reconstructions for periods prior to the industrial era are only one of multiple lines of evidence supporting the conclusion that climatic warming is occurring in response to human activities, and they are not the primary evidence".

More importantly, these skeptics have not overturned the well-established basic physics of the greenhouse effect, namely that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas and increasing its concentration in the atmosphere causes the earth to warm. They also have not managed to make melting glaciers and rising sea levels, or any other evidence of warming, disappear into thin air. But they have managed to confuse some of the public about the causes of climate change.

Over the past five years, Mann and Jones in particular have been subjected not only to legitimate scrutiny by other researchers, but also to a co-ordinated campaign of personal attacks on their reputation by 'sceptics'. If the hacked e-mails are genuine, they only show that climate researchers are human, and that they speak badly in private about 'sceptics' who accuse them of fraud.

It is inevitable as we approach the crucial meeting in conference in Copenhagen in December that the sceptics would try some stunt to try to undermine a global agreement on climate change. There is no smoking gun, but just a lot of smoke without fire.

> Bob Ward is Policy and Communications Director at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics and Political Science


[Environment > Conservation]
Biodiversity loss is Earth's 'immense and hidden' tragedy, Darwin's 'natural heir' warns
Problem of biodiversity loss has been 'eased off centre stage' by focus on climate change, according to Prof Edward Wilson, the ecologist described as 'Darwin's natural heir'
James Randerson
guardian.co.uk, Friday 20 November 2009 16.36 GMT Article history

The diversity of life on Earth is undergoing an "immense and hidden" tragedy that requires the scale of global response now being deployed to tackle climate change, according to one of the world's most eminent biologists.

Prof Edward Wilson, an ecologist who has been described as "Darwin's natural heir" and hailed by novelist Ian McEwan as an "intellectual hero" and "inspirational" writer, told the Guardian that the threat was so grave he is pushing for the creation of an international body of experts modelled on the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

The IPCC, which is credited with convincing world leaders that the threat from climate change is real, includes about 2,500 scientific expert reviewers from more than 130 countries and was awarded the Nobel peace prize in 2007 along with Al Gore. Wilson's proposed organisation – which he names the Barometer of Life – would report to governments on the threats posed to species around the world.

Wilson said the problem of biodiversity loss had been "eased off centre stage" because of the focus on climate change.

"We don't hear as much public concern, protestation and plans by political leaders to save the living environment. It doesn't get anything like the attention the physical environment has," he said.

Since the beginning of the last century, 183 species are known to have become extinct, including the Tasmanian tiger, the Caribbean monk seal and the toolache wallaby. But this number is a gross underestimate of the true number of extinctions, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature species programme.

Wilson was speaking ahead of the 150th anniversary of the publication of the Origin of Species on Tuesday. The 80-year-old scientist will deliver a lecture via video link to an audience at London's Royal Institution on Darwin's legacy and "the future of biology".

The extent of scientific ignorance about the diversity of life on Earth is vast. Scientists have catalogued about 1.9 m species, but estimate there are about 20m-30m in total (excluding microbes).

Wilson said the scale of the mass extinction now under way was even harder to comprehend.

At the start of the Neolithic period – about 9500BC – scientists estimate that species were becoming extinct at a rate of 20-30 per year. Since the population explosion of modern humans, that is estimated to have increased to 20,000-30,000. Most have never been documented by scientists. And in a couple of decades, Wilson reckons this will have increased to 200,000-300,000. Wilson's proposed international initiative, which he has developed with Simon Stuart, the chairman of the Species Survival Commission, would document this species loss and work out how to tackle it.

"Darwin would be simply appalled by what humanity had done to the richness and diversity of natural life," said Randal Keynes, one of Darwin's great-great-grandsons, who is helping to coordinate the 150th anniversary with the British Council. "He would be in the lead of campaigning on the preservation of biodiversity."

Some of the species that played a central role in the formulation of Darwin's theoryof evolution by natural selection are now either extinct or severely threatened. The Floreana mockingbird, that lives on the island of the same name in the Galapagos, was one of a handful of related species that first gave Darwin the idea that species could change (it is a myth that finches were the crucial group).

Reflecting on the similarities and differences between mockingbirds on different islands and on the mainland, Darwin gave the first vague hint of his later theory in his notes on the Beagle voyage that "such facts would undermine the stability of species".

Today, the Floreana mockingbird is classed as "critically endangered" and exists in two populations numbering 200 and 49. The giant tortoise that Darwin encountered on the same island – Geochelone elephantopus – was driven extinct by hungry whalers who enjoyed eating its meat in soup.

Wilson said conservation efforts around the world were far from adequate. "Right now we are just piddling around with efforts here and there, some of them strong and dedicated, the aggregate of which is not even close to what we need.""The benefits for humanity [of a concerted international effort on biodiversity] would be enormous ... the discovery of the rest of life on Earth and fuller evaluation of it is going to result in all sorts of very valuable knowledge," said Wilson, pointing at new crops, products and biotechnology advances.

A year of celebration of Darwin's achievements (and his 200th birthday) is drawing to a close and will segue neatly into the International Year of Biodiversity in 2010.

"The public recognition of the importance of biodiversity as an issue is very poor, very low," said Kenyes, "I think Darwin would want everyone to pick up that agenda and give it all the support they can."

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[News] from [guardian.co.uk]

[Environment > Climate change scepticism]
Climate sceptics claim leaked emails are evidence of collusion among scientists
Hundreds of emails and documents exchanged between world's leading climate scientists stolen by hackers and leaked online
Leo Hickman and James Randerson
guardian.co.uk, Friday 20 November 2009 18.15 GMT Article history

Hundreds of private emails and documents allegedly exchanged between some of the world's leading climate scientists during the past 13 years have been stolen by hackers and leaked online, it emerged today.

The computer files were apparently accessed earlier this week from servers at the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit, a world-renowned centre focused on the study of natural and anthropogenic climate change.

Climate change sceptics who have studied the emails allege they provide "smoking gun" evidence that some of the climatologists colluded in manipulating data to support the widely held view that climate change is real, and is being largely caused by the actions of mankind.

The veracity of the emails has not been confirmed and the scientists involved have declined to comment on the story, which broke on a blog called The Air Vent.

The files, which in total amount to 160MbB of data, were first uploaded on to a Russian server, before being widely mirrored across the internet. The emails were accompanied by the anonymous statement: "We feel that climate science is, in the current situation, too important to be kept under wraps. We hereby release a random selection of correspondence, code and documents. Hopefully it will give some insight into the science and the people behind it."

A spokesperson for the University of East Anglia said: "We are aware that information from a server used for research information in one area of the university has been made available on public websites. Because of the volume of this information we cannot currently confirm that all this material is genuine. This information has been obtained and published without our permission and we took immediate action to remove the server in question from operation. We are undertaking a thorough internal investigation and have involved the police in this inquiry."

In one email, dated November 1999, one scientist wrote: "I've just completed Mike's Nature [the science journal] trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie, from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith's to hide the decline."

This sentence, in particular, has been leapt upon by sceptics as evidence of manipulating data, but the credibility of the email has not been verified. The scientists who allegedly sent it declined to comment on the email.

"It does look incriminating on the surface, but there are lots of single sentences that taken out of context can appear incriminating," said Bob Ward, director of policy and communications at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics. "You can't tell what they are talking about. Scientists say 'trick' not just to mean deception. They mean it as a clever way of doing something - a short cut can be a trick."

In another alleged email, one of the scientists apparently refers to the death of a prominent climate change sceptic by saying "in an odd way this is cheering news".

Ward said that if the emails are correct, they "might highlight behaviour that those individuals might not like to have made public." But he added, "Let's separate out [the climate scientists] reacting badly to the personal attacks [from sceptics] to the idea that their work has been carried out in an inappropriate way."

The revelations did not alter the huge body of evidence from a variety of scientific fields that supports the conclusion that modern climate change is caused largely by human activity, Ward said. The emails refer largely to work on so-called paleoclimate data - reconstructing past climate scenarios using data such as ice cores and tree rings. "Climate change is based on several lines of evidence, not just paleoclimate data," he said. "At the heart of this is basic physics."

Ward pointed out that the individuals named in the alleged emails had numerous publications in peer-reviewed scientific journals. "It would be very surprising if after all this time, suddenly they were found out doing something as wrong as that."

Professor Michael Mann, director of Pennsylvania State University's Earth System Science Centre and a regular contributor to the popular climate science blog Real Climate, features in many of the email exchanges. He said: "I'm not going to comment on the content of illegally obtained emails. However, I will say this: both their theft and, I believe, any reproduction of the emails that were obtained on public websites, etc, constitutes serious criminal activity. I'm hoping the perpetrators and their facilitators will be tracked down and prosecuted to the fullest extent the law allows."

When the Guardian asked Prof Phil Jones at UEA, who features in the correspondence, to verify whether the emails were genuine, he refused to comment.

The alleged emails illustrate the persistent pressure some climatologists have been under from sceptics in recent years. There have been repeated calls, including Freedom of Information requests, for the Climate Research Unit to make public a confidential dataset of land and sea temperature recordings that is "value added" by the unit before being used by the Met Office. The emails show the frustration some climatologists have had at having to operate under such intense, often politically motivated, scrutiny.

Prof Bob Watson, the chief scientific advisor at the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs said, "Evidence for climate change is irrefutable. The world's leading scientists overwhelmingly agree what we're experiencing is not down to natural variation."

"With this overwhelming scientific body of evidence failing to take action to tackle climate change would be the wrong thing to do – the impacts here in Britain and across the world will worsen and the economic consequences will be catastrophic."

A spokesman for Greenpeace said: "If you looked through any organisation's emails from the last 10 years you'd find something that would raise a few eyebrows. Contrary to what the sceptics claim, the Royal Society, the US National Academy of Sciences, Nasa and the world's leading atmospheric scientists are not the agents of a clandestine global movement against the truth. This stuff might drive some web traffic, but so does David Icke."

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[naturenews] from [nature.com]

[naturenews]
Published online 20 November 2009 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news.2009.1101
News
Leading British climate centre hacked
E-mails and documents have been taken from the University of East Anglia.
Quirin Schiermeier

One of Britain's leading climate-research centres has had more than 1,000 files stolen from its computers and republished on the Internet. The cyber-attack is apparently aimed at damaging the reputations of prominent climate scientists.

The University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit (CRU) in Norwich confirmed today that e-mails and documents dating from 1991 to 2009 were illegally copied and subsequently published on an anonymous Russian server.

A link to the Russian server first appeared on 19 November on a relatively obscure climate-sceptic blog. The server was shut down just hours later, but the stolen material had already been distributed elsewhere on the Internet.

"We are aware that information from a server used for research information in one area of the university has been made available on public websites," says Simon Dunford, a spokesman for the University of East Anglia. "This information has been obtained and published without our permission and we took immediate action to remove the server in question from operation."

The volume of the information is too large to "currently confirm that all of this material is genuine", Dunford says, adding that the university will undertake an internal investigation and has already involved the police in the enquiry.

Some climate-sceptic bloggers are already poring over the posted material, which includes e-mails allegedly sent by the CRU's director Phil Jones to fellow climate researchers, including Michael Mann at Pennsylvania State University in University Park. Mann is the author of a widely cited assessment of past climate records, known as the hockey-stick graph, which shows a pronounced global-warming trend during the latter part of the twentieth century¹.

"I'm not going to comment on the content of illegally obtained e-mails," says Mann. "However, their theft constitutes serious criminal activity. I'm hoping that the perpetrators will be tracked down and prosecuted to the fullest extent the law allows." Jones declined to comment on the matter.

With less than three weeks to go until the start of the United Nations' climate negotiations in Copenhagen, Mann doubts that the timing of the attack is a coincidence. "The deniers will probably do anything they can to distract the public from the reality of the problem [of climate change], and the threat that it poses," he says. "Cherry-picked, out-of-context quotes, stolen from private e-mails, is the best they've got."

References
1. Mann, M. E. , Bradley, R. S. & Hughes, M. K. Nature 392, 779−787 (1998).


[naturenews]
Published online 20 November 2009 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news.2009.1100
News
Model predicts future deforestation
Projections could help Central African nations in Copenhagen climate talks.
Anjali Nayar

A computer model that predicts future changes in the world's forests could strengthen the case of Central African nations that are calling for compensation in exchange for protecting their natural resources.

Forest management is expected to be a key point of discussion at the United Nations climate summit in Copenhagen in December. Countries will negotiate on how to reward rainforest nations for protecting their forests, a mechanism dubbed REDD for 'reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation'.

Deforestation rates in the Congo Basin rainforest — the second-largest rainforest on Earth — have hovered at around 0.15% per year for the past 15 years. But preliminary results from the model, unveiled this week, predict that forest cutting in the region will increase to 0.3–0.5% per year by 2020–30.

Major rainforest countries that have historically had high deforestation rates — such as Indonesia (2.0%) and Brazil (0.6%) — are pushing for compensation that is based on historical trends. With a relatively high business-as-usual scenario, they are expected to reap above-average rewards for any decreases in deforestation.

But using historical trends will short-change the countries of the Congo Basin, some argue. Although in the past this region has had low deforestation rates, recent improvements in the road network as well as planned mining and timber projects are likely to increase deforestation rates considerably in coming years. "There are strong indications that Central African forests are at a critical turning point for the future," says Carlos de Wasseige, the coordinator of an EU-funded project called Forests of Central Africa, whuch hopes to set up a regional forest monitoring centre.

"Most proposals for [REDD] suggest that history is the best predictor of tomorrow," says Michael Obersteiner, who is leading the development of the forestry model at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, based in Laxenburg, Austria. "But for [Central African] countries, the forward-looking projections will be more reliable."

Model forest

The model, which has a resolution of 10–50 km2, is a combination of three global land-use models called GLOBIOM, G4M and EPIC. Its predictions are based on key global drivers of deforestation, including population growth and gross-domestic-product growth, as well as global demand and production of biofuel, timber and agricultural crops. The model works by calculating the profitability of forest clearance in certain areas on the basis of topography, soil composition and climate.

Obersteiner recognizes, however, that the model is only as good as the data going into it — and those data can often be difficult to obtain, either through lack of resources to collect them or because the information is held by private companies.

"The idea of publicly available reliable statistics escapes our country," says André Kondjo-Shoko, head of forest inventory at the Democratic Republic of the Congo's environment ministry. "The statistics don't represent reality."

Another problem is that the model does not account for a major driver of deforestation: illegal tree cutting for charcoal and timber.

The conservation group WWF now hopes to fill this data gap using a 'geo-wiki', also unveiled this week, which provides a repository for forestry information. Modelled on the open-source principles of the online encyclopaedia Wikipedia, "it combines the principals of social networking with the craft of spatial mapping", says Leo Bottrill, who heads the geo-wiki project at the WWF's office in Washington DC.

Bottrill started the geo-wiki after struggling to collate information about the Congo Basin region. For the past two years, he has been collecting baseline information on mineral deposits, forest concessions and planned infrastructure such as roads, railways and transmission lines. He hopes that the site's users will be able to contribute data and maps, either through the Internet or by text message, as well as commenting on and editing the content.

The WWF will launch a pilot of its geo-wiki for the Democratic Republic of the Congo in March 2010, and hopes the system will be fully functional by mid-2010. "We hope people will run with the idea," says Bottrill.

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[Top News] from [REUTERS]

[Green Business]
Consolidation to hit solar in 2010: BP Solar
Fri Nov 20, 2009 10:07am EST
By Laura Isensee

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - More consolidation could hit the solar power industry in 2010, as tough competition and falling prices whittle away companies that are sitting on high cost assets and loaded with debt, the chief executive of BP Solar told Reuters on Thursday.

BP Solar, a unit of BP Plc, and other solar companies are seeing demand for the renewable energy systems pick up after a dismal year of difficult financing and a tumble in panel prices, but panel prices will continue to drop.

"For some people there will be momentum. For others, they will struggle to meet the cost reductions and the price reductions," BP Solar CEO Reyad Fezzani told Reuters in an interview.

Fezzani said BP Solar did its own version of consolidation, shuttering more expensive factories, such as phasing out module assembly at its plant in Frederick, Maryland.

BP Solar has been in the industry for nearly 40 years and has about 1 gigawatt of installed or sold capacity for solar power systems.

"My expectation is that we will see more of the expensive end of the cost curve be whittled down and cut back," Fezzani said.

The executive said that BP Solar is not looking to acquire any companies that may be for sale as "we think they're the ones that should shut."

DEMAND GROWING

Next year looks bright for BP Solar, with "very robust sales" for the first quarter of 2010, said Fezzani, who expects Italy to be the company's top growth market next year.

Overall, BP Solar is gearing up to grow 40 to 50 percent next year, Fezzani said.

Fezzani said that government incentives in Italy, China and India are expected to spur growth. Depending on how fast China and India ramp up, supply shortages could return.

"We still have a very immature supply chain in this industry. There are going to be stresses and strains particularly as we're up to levels of growth and capacity that we have not seen before," Fezzani said.

The executive expects panel prices, which have plummeted as much as 50 percent over the last year, to return to a more normal rate of decline.

BP Solar could cut solar power panel costs faster than previously estimated.

The company has targeted a 25 percent cut in panel costs by the end of 2010, and it could make those reductions a quarter or two earlier than its target date, Fezzani said.

"I think we're progressing very well on that path," he said.

The company set that goal to make the renewable energy systems more competitive with traditional electricity.

CUSTOMER BASE

BP Solar sees the bulk of its business -- about 60 percent -- in Germany, the world's largest market.

The U.S. market makes up less than 10 percent of BP Solar's sales, but the company would like to grow that to 30 or 40 percent.

BP Solar, which sells in the residential, commercial and utility markets, has landed deals in the United States with major retailer Wal-Mart and package delivery company FedEx Corp.

Fezzani said that the company is working to arrange financing for its 37-megawatt project with the Long Island Power Authority and plans to start construction in the second half of 2010.

It is working with the U.S. Department of Energy's loan program, but Fezzani did not say how much it was seeking.

(Reporting by Laura Isensee; editing by Carol Bishopric)


[Green Business]
Kyoto carbon scheme needs Americans: Sindicatum CEO
Fri Nov 20, 2009 10:24am EST
By Michael Szabo

LONDON (Reuters) - An injection of U.S. talent into the $6.5 billion market in carbon offsets would help clear bureaucratic bottlenecks, making way for increased investment in clean energy, the CEO of a $310 million environmental fund said.

Under the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), an emissions trading scheme governed by the Kyoto Protocol climate change pact, companies can invest in low-carbon projects in emerging countries. In return they receive offsets that can be used toward greenhouse gas targets or sold for profit.

But long delays in approving projects and issuing offsets have forced many investors to the sidelines in the past year.

The U.S. decided not to ratify Kyoto in 2001 so its participation in the CDM has been minimal, even though the first emissions trading schemes were engineered by Americans.

"You basically have a global regulatory system staffed without the world's most talented human resource pool, and it's a big problem," Assaad Razzouk, head of Sindicatum Carbon Capital, said this week.

"What the CDM needs is 20,000 products of the U.S. education system ... You've got Europeans regulating a cap-and-trade system which was essentially invented by Americans."

Razzouk said the United States, the largest emitter of greenhouse gases behind China, is not represented according to its size as an emitter and as a global economic and regulatory force.

"The transfer of knowledge capital did not occur, and as a result the U.S. is not represented in this market according to their weight," Razzouk added. "We will have a system that works much better when they are involved."

Through a fund of $310 million, London-based Sindicatum has developed an investment portfolio of 20 projects, 80 percent of which are in Asia and the remainder in the United States.

The projects, some of which are CDM registered, capture greenhouse gases emitted by coal mines, landfills and livestock.

The fund profits both through offset sales as well as by selling power generated by the projects. It is now 85-90 percent committed, prompting Razzouk to consider Sindicatum's next step.

He told Reuters it is considering four options: start a second fund, raise private equity capital, publicly list in the U.S. and/or Singapore, or simply continue reinvesting revenues.

Razzouk said a decision will be made in the new year, at which point the company will relocate its headquarters to Singapore and move its European office to Cyprus.

"We've got to take a long-term view. We have no footprint in Europe, most of our projects are in Asia and more than 80 percent of our investors are U.S. institutions," he added.

COPENHAGEN

A U.N.-sponsored climate summit in Copenhagen next month is expected to address CDM reform by attempting to streamline processes, which could result in shorter delays.

It was hoped that the talks would agree a successor to Kyoto, which expires in 2012, but there is a growing consensus that only a political agreement will be reached in the Danish capital, postponing a full treaty until 2010 at the earliest.

Razzouk said expectations of a deal at the Copenhagen meeting had always been unrealistic.

"I don't know what people were smoking. I think expectations were wrongly raised for politicians to save us, and I think people should know better," Razzouk said.

"There are 190 governments trying to negotiate a single treaty. My bet is they'll agree at midnight on December 31, 2012."

Razzouk said Copenhagen was irrelevant to his company, and that it would benefit from a number of possible outcomes.

"Unlike many other companies, we're not sitting being anxious about what happens in Copenhagen. I don't care what happens and we can't afford to build a business that cares." To read the full interview transcript or for more news and analysis on the global carbon markets, login to here

(Editing by Anthony Barker)


[Green Business]
Trony Solar raises IPO target to $241.5 million
Fri Nov 20, 2009 6:19pm EST

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Chinese thin film solar company Trony Solar Holdings Company Limited raised the amount of its initial public offering on Friday, adding to the buzz around the many U.S.-based publicly traded solar companies.

The firm said in a regulatory filing that it would raise as much as $241.5 million in its IPO, up from the $200 million it filed for last month.

The Shenzhen-based company said it plans to sell 15 million American depositary shares while shareholders sell an additional 4.5 million shares. It said in a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission it expects the shares to price between $9 and $11.

JPMorgan Special Situations (Mauritius) Limited and Intel Capital Corp, which currently own a combined 5.69 percent of the company, are selling all of their shares.

The firm reported revenue of 254.6 million yuan ($37.1 million) in the three months ended September 30, up 44.8 percent from a year ago, and net profit of 72.5 million yuan, up 61.5 percent from a year ago.

Trony Solar plans to debut on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker "TRO."

Lead underwriters for the deal are J.P. Morgan and Credit Suisse. The underwriters may purchase an additional 2.925 million shares.

(Reporting by Clare Baldwin, editing by Matthew Lewis)

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[Top News] from [REUTERS]

[Green Business]
Shoppers going green despite struggling economy
Fri Nov 20, 2009 11:31am EST
By Basil Katz

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Despite the worst U.S. recession in decades, sales of organic and sustainable products have continued to grow, experts say, with shoppers willing to spend a few more dollars in a bid to become more green.

U.S. supermarket sales of environmentally sustainable or "ethical" products -- from energy-efficient light bulbs to organic produce -- will rise about 8.7 percent in 2009 to nearly $38 billion, according to a recent study by Packaged Facts, a market research provider.

President Barack Obama's commitment to tackle climate change, a string of scandals over tainted food and effective marketing of sustainable products have helped convince more Americans, whose environmental credentials lag behind Europeans, to buy green.

"I've been reading about carbon footprints," said Lindsey Hoffman, 24, as she selected organic lettuce at a Whole Foods Market in Manhattan, "and though I'd prefer to go to a farmer's market, this is better than anything else."

"When I walked in I saw gorgeous asparagus, but as it's $4 a bunch and flown in from Peru, I stayed away," she said.

While sustainable and organic goods have traditionally occupied the premium shelves of supermarkets, an increasing number of retailers such as Wal-Mart Stores Inc and Safeway Inc have expanded their offerings and some prices now rival conventional products.

Some experts say the global economic crisis and the battle against global warming have prompted consumers to think more about purchases -- both financially and environmentally.

"The financial crisis reminded people of the unintended consequences of collective behavior," said Scott Bearse of Deloitte Consulting, who added that once people go green, they generally stay green.

Shelly Balanko at the Hartman Group, a marketing consulting firm that specializes in sustainable goods, said shoppers were realizing that green products offered better quality, along with causing less harm to the environment.

She said buyers now thought, "'If I buy this, it will be less wasteful and I'm going to get good value for my dollar.'"

Some companies are appealing to these lifestyle changes, such as Kimberly Clark, one of the largest manufacturers of paper towels and diapers, which launched Scott Naturals, a paper products line using recycled fibers.

"There is much more of an interest in this in the last couple of years," said Kimberly Clark spokeswoman Kay Jackson.

Americans spent a total of $511.9 billion on groceries at drugstores, supermarkets and mass retailers in 2008. So far this year shoppers have spent 1.9 percent more than the same period a year ago.

Sales of goods specifically labeled organic rose 17 percent to $24.6 billion in 2008, according to the Organic Trade Association.

"The more I read and hear about it, the more I'd like to go completely organic, 100 percent," said Richard Drew, 35, a television producer, as he shopped at a natural body care shop in Manhattan.

(Editing by Michelle Nichols and Vicki Allen)


[Green Business]
Finance is key to Copenhagen talks: Norway PM
Fri Nov 20, 2009 1:33pm EST
By Robin Pomeroy

LONDON (Reuters) - The key to successful climate talks in Copenhagen next month will be making sure rich countries fund greener technologies in the developing world, Norway's prime minister said Friday.

Politicians have talked down expectations for the talks which are supposed to find a successor to the Kyoto treaty that expires in 2012, and Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg said it now seemed clear a full legal deal could not be reached.

But Copenhagen will be at least partly successful if a funding mechanism is established -- an element of the talks which is even more important than setting new greenhouse gas emissions targets for 2020, Stoltenberg said.

"I believe that the most important issue is the issue of financing," he told Reuters after addressing students at the London School of Economics.

"Norway has proposed a system of financing where we auction part of the global emission allowances and earmark those to developing countries. Also Mexico has launched a financing mechanism called the Green Fund and now we are working closely with Mexico to make those two proposals compatible."

Thursday, the head of the U.N. Climate Change Secretariat called on rich nations at Copenhagen to pledge $10 billion a year for three years.

Yvo de De Boer said that was one of his three goals for the summit, along with emission targets for 2020 by rich countries and planned actions by developing countries.

Stoltenberg declined to say if Copenhagen could be judged a success if it achieved a funding deal but failed to set 2020 targets for developed nations to cut their greenhouse gas emissions.

"I don't know if I am able to answer that now," he said. "But I believe we should mobilize whatever we have now to get a strong agreement in Copenhagen and then we should evaluate it afterwards.

Norway, one of the richest nations in the world as the number 5 oil exporter, has promised about $530 million a year to protect tropical forests.


[Green Business]
Climate goal needs "more than technology": Shell
Fri Nov 20, 2009 1:35pm
By Gerard Wynn

LONDON (Reuters) - Action to limit global warming to 2 degrees Celsius is beyond simply inventing new, low-carbon technologies and depends on wider changes to behavior and the way communities are built, said a Royal Dutch Shell executive.

Oil major Shell was among nine firms which signed on Friday a letter addressed to head of the European Union's executive Commission, Jose Manuel Barroso, calling for a "strong deal" on climate at a global U.N. meeting next month in Copenhagen.

Climate scientists say that the world must limit average global warming to 2 degrees Celsius to avoid dangerous climate change. "I think that (it) is extremely demanding," said Graeme Sweeney, Shell's executive vice-president of future fuels and CO2, of that target.

"It is more than the (energy) supply-side, more than the technology, it will require a clear approach to the demand-side including behavior," he told Reuters on Friday.

"What we understand is that the 2 degrees rise is associated with a 450 parts per million of CO2 equivalent ... and that should guide the global agreements as they are set in place," he said referring to the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere which would result in about 2 degrees warming.

"It will require behavioral change to be achieved, change as individuals and collectively. That doesn't mean we don't have to do all the supply-side things as well."

Behavior change could include individuals retro-fitting their own homes with efficiency upgrades and installation of low-carbon appliances, and the re-design of communities to allow more thrifty use of energy -- for example to encourage cycling, public transport or provide local generation of energy from waste.

The world will have to limit greenhouse gas emissions from deforestation as well as from burning fossil fuels, he added.

Shell is working on producing a new generation of low-carbon transport fuels from non-food crops such as wood waste. One criticism of biofuels now, for example when produced from corn, is that they compete with food crops and so stoke food prices and perhaps spur deforestation.

Sweeney said he disagreed with recent research which suggested that second generation biofuels would also compete with cropland and so spur deforestation.

Shell is also funding technologies which might be able to suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, in particular an approach which involves quarrying minerals that when exposed to the air can absorb CO2 and then be used as a building material.

"We're working on mineralization, that's the conversion of the captured CO2 into what would then effectively become building materials. We think that there's a considerable scope in that and we continue to work on it."

(Reporting by Gerard Wynn, Editing by Keiron Henderson)

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[Top News] from [REUTERS]

[Green Business]
EU carbon drops below 13 eur/t to 7-week low
Fri Nov 20, 2009 2:34pm EST

LONDON (Reuters) - European carbon emissions futures fell below 13 euros on Friday to a seven-week low as industrial selling broke a key technical level and weak energy prices failed to support, traders said.

The benchmark contract for EU Allowances (EUAs) were down 35 cents or 2.54 percent to 13.05 euros ($19.41) a tonne by 1607 GMT, after dropping to 12.98 euros earlier.

EUAs last traded below 13 euros on October 5, when prices sank to 12.92 euros.

"We saw more industrials selling this morning, which was amplified by financials through stop loss selling triggered this afternoon," said Emmanuel Fages, carbon analyst at Societe Generale.

"We could finish the day down at around 12.80 euros."

Traders said prices were free to fall sharply when they broke a technical support level of 13.30-13.40 euros this morning.

British gas prices were lower on Friday as mild weather looked to keep heating demand down, while there was plenty of supply, including LNG cargoes heading for the country.

U.S. crude oil fell toward $76 a barrel on Friday, pressured by a stronger U.S. dollar and as falling equities raised concerns about the economy and outlook for energy demand.

German Calendar 2010 baseload power on the EEX was down 25 cents or 0.54 percent at 45.85 euros per megawatt hour.

Certified emissions reductions (CERs) under the U.N.'s Clean Development Mechanism were down 17 cents or 1.38 percent to 12.18 euros a tonne.

The paper and pulp industry looks set to have quite a surplus of EUAs to 2012 as its emissions in the EU fell by almost 6.5 percent in 2008, according to data released by the Confederation of European Paper Industries.

The industry's emissions fell to 37.26 million tonnes in 2008 from 39.83 million in 2007, due to reduced output because of the economic slowdown and energy-saving measures.

(Reporting by Nina Chestney; Additional reporting by Michael Szabo; Editing by Angus MacSwan)


[Green Business]
Pennsylvania residents sue over gas drilling
Fri Nov 20, 2009 2:56pm EST
By Jon Hurdle

DIMOCK, Pennsylvania (Reuters) - Residents of a small rural Pennsylvania town sued Cabot Oil & Gas Corp on Friday, claiming the company's natural-gas drilling has contaminated their water wells with toxic chemicals, caused sickness and reduced their property values.

The lawsuit accuses the company of violating state environmental laws by allowing drilling chemicals to escape from gas wells, where they are used in a technique called hydraulic fracturing.

A Cabot spokesman said the company had not had time to study the lawsuit in detail but said Cabot was in full compliance with Pennsylvania's environmental laws and "disappointed" by the lawsuit.

"We don't see merit in these claims," Cabot spokesman Ken Komoroski said.

The company, like others in the industry, has argued that its drilling processes are safe because chemicals are heavily diluted and are injected into the ground through layers of steel and concrete thousands of feet below the aquifers that are used for drinking water.

The industry says there has never been a documented case of ground water contamination because of hydraulic fracturing.

The case is one of the first to confront the industry over the technique, which critics claim pollutes aquifers with chemicals that can cause cancer and other serious illnesses.

Cabot's drilling allowed methane to escape into private water wells and in two cases caused wellhead explosions due to a gas build-up, the 15 families in the lawsuit claim.

Pat Farnelli, 46, a plaintiff in the lawsuit, told reporters on Friday that some of her eight children suffered stomach cramps after drinking water from the family's well, which is a few hundred yards from a gas well. She ruled out water-borne bacteria because boiling the water didn't help.

'WE WANT JUSTICE'

The suit is the culmination of complaints by residents of the northeastern Pennsylvania community where Cabot has drilled dozens of gas wells in its efforts to develop the Marcellus Shale, a massive gas formation that underlies about two-thirds of Pennsylvania and parts of surrounding states.

"These releases, spills and discharges caused the plaintiffs and their property to be exposed to such hazardous gases, chemicals and industrial wastes," said the complaint.

The complaint says residents have suffered neurological, gastrointestinal and dermatological symptoms from exposure to tainted water. They also say they have had blood test results consistent with exposure to heavy metals.

Victoria Switzer, a plaintiff who lives about a mile from Carter's home, said she had joined the lawsuit because she had failed to get satisfaction from the state Department of Environmental Protection or her elected representatives.

"Lawyers were the last thing I wanted," she said. "We are not greedy people, we just want some justice."

The lawsuit accuses Cabot of negligence and says it has failed to restore residential water supplies disrupted by gas drilling. It seeks a permanent injunction to stop the drilling processes that are blamed for the contamination, as well as unspecified compensatory damages.

Residents of many gas-drilling areas in the United States say the chemicals used in hydraulic fracturing are contaminating ground water. However, they have been unable to prove that, in part because energy companies are not required to disclose the composition of their drilling fluids.

Gas deposits such as the Marcellus Shale offer the United States an opportunity to reduce dependence on overseas oil imports and reduce carbon emissions, advocates say. But development could slow if fracturing is shown to be environmentally damaging.

(Editing by Ellen Wulfhorst, Michelle Nichols, Richard Chang and Steve Orlofsky)


[Green Business]
Electric carmaker Tesla preparing IPO: sources
Fri Nov 20, 2009 4:38pm EST
By Poornima Gupta

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - U.S. electric sports car maker Tesla Motors plans to go public soon, two sources familiar with the matter said, amid growing interest in green technology and battery-powered vehicles.

An IPO filing from the six-year-old start-up, best known for its $109,000 all-electric Roadster, is expected any day, said one of the sources. The person did not give a specific time frame, although IPOs typically take several months.

Tesla spokesman Ricardo Reyes declined to comment on what he called "rumor or speculation."

Tesla would mark the first public offering from a U.S. automaker since Henry Ford's Ford Motor Co debuted its shares in 1956. The IPO represents a landmark in the resurgence of electric car technology that most carmakers had dismissed as impractical until recently.

The company's chairman Elon Musk said early last year that an IPO was a possibility in either late 2008 or 2009.

But the financial market turmoil following the collapse of Lehman Bros. in the latter half of 2008 virtually shut down the IPO market. The appetite for IPOs has picked up since mid-September this year with a robust pace of new filings.

Tesla's IPO would follow the successful debut of lithium-ion battery maker A123 Systems, whose shares rallied 50 percent on their first day of trading on Sept 25.

Analysts have said that the success of A123, the first green technology IPO this year, would encourage more venture capital-backed green companies to go public.

Tesla will compete with established automakers like Ford, General Motors and Nissan Motor Co, all of which are racing to launch electric or plug-in hybrid vehicles. Tesla, by contrast, is a small player with a high-end market and limited production.

A combination of factors has driven the recent interest in developing electric, or partially electric vehicles, including the Obama administration's push to have one million rechargeable vehicles on US roads by 2015 and low-cost Department of Energy loans for manufacturers.

VENTURE FUNDS BACK GREEN CARS

The carmaker is developing a second, lower-cost model, an electric sedan known as the Model S, which will have a base price of $49,900.

Tesla said in September it delivered 700 Roadsters since February 2008. The Roadster, which is built on a Lotus frame, can go from zero to sixty miles an hour in less than four seconds, making it faster than a Porsche 911 or a Ferrari Spider.

The electric car start-up was offered $465 million in low-cost loans by the U.S. Department of Energy to help build the new Model S. Tesla said it will build the new car in California.

Tesla's investors include Google Inc founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page.

Other investors include Daimler AG; Abu Dhabi-based Aabar Investments, which owns a stake in Daimler; and venture capital funds Valor Equity Partners, Technology Partners, The Westly Group and Compass Venture Partners.

Tesla said it had achieved overall corporate profitability in July with about $1 million of earnings on revenue of $20 million.

But like established automakers, survival in the hyper-competitive U.S. automotive market has not been easy for Tesla. The company had to face cost overruns and production delays for the Roadster.

(Reporting by Poornima Gupta; Editing by Derek Caney)

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[Top News] from [REUTERS]

[Green Business]
U.N. climate chief says deal hinges on more ambition from rich
Fri Nov 20, 2009 3:44pm EST
By Stacy Feldman, SolveClimatehere

(SolveClimate) - The U.S. remains the only industrialized nation that has not committed itself to a greenhouse gas reduction target with Copenhagen climate talks just weeks away. Pressure is increasing on the U.S. to commit to a target, but the UN climate chief warned that the lack of ambition from rich nations as a whole could still foil hopes of any kind of agreement by the end of 2009.

"Unfortunately, it is not a single country that holds the key to success," said UN climate chief Yvo de Boer (pictured here), during a press conference wrapping up the final two days of pre-negotiations in Copenhagen this week.

An American number "is critical," de Boer explained. "But we are also still in the situation that the targets offered by the group of industrialized countries as a whole are not in line with what science is telling us is necessary," he said.

In short, progress will largely boil down to "more ambition from industrialized countries," said de Boer.

So far, the rich have pledged emissions cuts in the range of 11 to 15 percent from 1990 levels by 2020. The climate bills in play in Congress propose reductions of 17 percent and 20 percent below 2005 levels by 2020—equivalent to cuts of 4 percent to 7 percent below 1990 levels by 2020.

Dig deeper into those numbers, said Jonathan Pershing, U.S. deputy special envoy for climate change, and this detail jumps out: The cuts in Congress are actually "more aggressive" than the 20 percent reduction promised by Europe. It is an argument that leaves many unpersuaded. EU nations have been gradually decreasing emissions, while the US, after years of inaction, is faced with making up for lost time.

But this much is clear: The range of proposed reductions emerging from lawmakers in America would not be enough to appease poor nations. Developing nations are demanding an aggregate cut from the rich of at least 40 percent from 1990 levels by 2020. Without that, there will be no deal in Copenhagen at all, they have warned.

The science, at least, is with the poor.

In 2007, the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said that cuts of 25 to 40 percent would be needed to stave off the worst effects of global climate change. Two years later, global warming is even worse than scientists feared.

New research released this week supports this.

Some 30 scientists from seven countries involved in the Global Carbon Project said the world could warm 6 degrees Celsius by the end of the century. That's four degrees more than previously predicted—and a worst-case scenario for the planet.

Whether the world will raise political ambition in time to avert a crisis remains to be seen.

The Copenhagen summit (Dec 7-18) was long seen as the last chance to set rigorous greenhouse cuts before the first commitment period of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol expires in 2012.

It's a chicken and egg problem, and it comes back to the U.S, David Turnbull, director of the international Climate Action Network, told SolveClimate.

"Developed countries have not put forward proposals that meet the urgency of the problem," he said. "But if the US comes to the table with a strong offer, other countries may be willing to increase their ambition as well."

The EU has pledged a 20 percent cut, with the caveat of ratcheting that up to 30 percent if other rich nations sign on. They "should" make that jump in Copenhagen, especially if the U.S. commits to a concrete figure, Turnbull said.

"Australia, Canada, and Japan might also consider increasing their reduction targets as well, in the face of a new proposal from the U.S. and mounting pressure from their citizens at home," he added.

Tougher targets are "not out of the question," according to Turnbull.

In fact, science-based commitments from the wealthy are already on the table. Norway and Scotland have both pledged to reduce their emissions by at least 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2020.

They may be small nations in the grand scheme of global climate stabilization, but they show how "rich countries can indeed take on such strong commitments," he said.

Obama's Poodle

On Sunday, Denmark Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen sounded the death knell for a legally binding deal to come out Copenhagen.

At a breakfast meeting of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC), he said that a deferral "plan" has been agreed on by the APEC nations, which would look to Copenhagen to set a deadline for binding legal text sometime in future.

News of the so-called "deal" for a Copenhagen non-agreement spread through the media like wildfire. Advocates on the ground in Denmark said it was greatly overblown.

The Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF) responded in a statement:

"Rumors about the death of the Copenhagen deal have been greatly exaggerated," said Kim Carstensen, leader of the WWF global climate initiative. "There is still enough time to agree on every single detail of a climate deal. A declaration that a deal is binding would take only a few seconds. There is no lack of time, there is lack of political will," he said.

Greenpeace International said:

"Danish Prime Minister Rasmussen has become complicit in a US so-called 'deal' which would put Obama''s political difficulties ahead of the survival of the world's most vulnerable countries," said Kaisa Kosonen, climate policy adviser for the organization.

The problem lies with the Danish host, Tove Ryding, climate change advisor for Greenpeace, told SolveClimate.

"They are focusing only on the U.S. and completely ignoring all the developing countries, despite the fact that the poorest and most vulnerable countries are the ones that will be worst hit by climate change," Ryding said.

"As one delegate said in the corridors, 'Rasmussen is behaving like Obama's poodle,'" she added.

Poorer Nations Must Step Up

De Boer made it clear this week that the world's industrializing nations must also increase their commitments to curb their exploding emissions growth.

"It is essential that we also have clear indication from major developing countries on what they are willing to do to lower the growth of their emissions," said de Boer. Without their action, "the long term response to climate change is meaningless," he added.

The UN climate chief has previously suggested that poor nations could limit their emissions 15 percent below business as usual by 2020, to help seal an agreement.

On Sunday, Brazil announced a target of 36 percent below predicted levels by 2020. Similarly, South Korea said it would strive for a 30 percent cut below business as usual over the next decade.

While not binding, de Boer called the offers "encouraging." With just a few weeks to go until Copenhagen, "we need more offers of that kind," he said.

Meanwhile, in a surprise turnaround, Russia announced this week it is revising its proposed CO2 cut to 20 to 25 percent by 2020 from 1990 levels, up from its previous stated target of 15 percent.

In response to Russia's announcement, de Boer said all industrialized countries have now given targets for their greenhouse gas emission reductions, apart from the U.S.

See also:

Poor Nations Issue 'Save Kyoto Protocol' Plea in Lead-Up to Copenhagen

US Envoy Says CO2 Cuts Proposed by Congress 'More Aggressive' Than EU's

Poor Demand Binding Treaty in Copenhagen, as Rich Scuttle Hope

UN Climate Chief Praises China, Says US Must Deliver Concrete 2020 Target

Road to Copenhagen: Doing the Climate Shuffle

Road to Copenhagen: Re-Tooling Industry

Road to Copenhagen: A New Social Contract

Road to Copenhagen: Managing Risk


[Green Business]
PSEG to keep emissions low at New Haven plant
Fri Nov 20, 2009 3:53pm EST

NEW YORK (Reuters) - PSEG Power said Friday the proposed $135 million, 130 megawatt peaking plant to be built at its New Haven, Connecticut, power plant would not cause a net increase in emissions.

In an agreement with the city of New Haven and environmental groups, PSEG said in a release it expected the three new natural gas-fired peaking units to enter service in 2012. Peaking units run during times of peak power demand.

To avoid increasing emissions, PSEG planned to alter the operating permit of the existing 448 MW oil/gas-fired Unit 1 to reduce its maximum output while the peaking units were in service and burn more gas on unhealthy summer air days.

The city of New Haven agreed to support Connecticut Siting Council and state Department of Environmental Protection approval for the project, while the environmental groups agreed not to oppose the project.

PSEG is a unit of Public Service Enterprise Group Inc, of Newark, New Jersey.

(Reporting by Scott DiSavino)