Economist: IF THIS week's report into the workings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) by a council of national academies of science were the sort of report children take home from school, its main themes would be expressed as "could do better" and "needs to show workings". Stern parents might read it as calling for a Gradgrind-like clampdown; more indulgent ones as an inducement for the little darlings to try a little harder. At a meeting in Busan, South Korea, this October, ...

AP: An offshore oil rig has exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, west of the site of the April blast that caused the massive oil spill. Coast Guard Petty Officer Casey Ranel says the blast was reported by a commercial helicopter company about 9:30 a.m. CDT Thursday. Seven helicopters, two airplanes and four boats are en route to the site, about 80 miles south of Vermilion Bay along the central Louisiana coast. Ranel says it hasn't been determined whether the structure is a production ...

AFP: Two Greenpeace activists will face possible jail terms in Japan on Monday for stealing a box of whale meat in a trial the environmental group says will test the country's limits on political activism. Prosecutors have demanded 18-month prison sentences for each defendant, Junichi Sato and Toru Suzuki, on charges of trespass and theft, in a case that started more than two years ago with their arrests in dramatic Tokyo police raids. The two activists admit taking the box of ...

AFP: Scottish oil exploration group Cairn Energy said Thursday it had resumed operations on a rig off the coast of Greenland after Greenpeace ended a protest. "Cairn can confirm that operations have started again on the Stena Don (oil rig), where safety remains Cairn's priority in this drilling exploration activity," the group said in a statement. "The actions taken by Greenpeace remain a matter for the Greenlandic authorities." Four Greenpeace activists had climbed onto the ...

Guardian: Four Greenpeace activists who halted drilling by a British-owned oil exploration rig off Greenland have been arrested after they abandoned their occupation because of severe weather. Greenlandic police arrested the four after high winds buffeted the Stena Don drilling rig overnight, forcing them to abandon mountaineering-style platforms they had suspended by ropes underneath the platform less than 48 hours earlier. Morten Nielsen, deputy head of Greenland police, said the four ...

Reuters: BP Plc said it had begun removing a cap from equipment atop its ruptured Gulf of Mexico oil well on Thursday, the first of several steps in advance of plugging the leak for good. "We expect that to happen this afternoon," spokesman Scott Dean said. The cap has shut off all oil flow from the leak since July 15. Once it is gone, BP can remove a failed blowout preventer and replace it with another before plugging the leak through a relief well. (Reporting by Kristen Hays; ...

Reuters: The U.S. Coast Guard was flying helicopters to a possible offshore drilling rig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico, a Coast Guard spokesman said. Helicopters were an hour away from the site of the possible explosion, said Coast Guard Petty Officer Prentice Danner.

AP: An offshore petroleum platform exploded and was burning Thursday in the Gulf of Mexico about 80 miles off the Louisiana coast, west of the site where BP's undersea well spilled after a rig explosion. The Coast Guard says no one was killed in the blast, which was reported by a commercial helicopter flying over the area Thursday morning. All 13 people aboard the rig have been accounted for, with one injury. The extent of the injury was not known. Coast Guard Cmdr. Cheri Ben-Iesau ...

New Era: The decline in Namibia's fish resources is a result of environmental conditions and failed recovery of the resources despite conservative management strategies, says Beau Tjizoo of the Ministry of Fisheries and Marine Resources. "Warm events" that have occurred since 1995 have increased along the coast in recent years. This has led to the displacement and mortality of fish species. Reporting to the ongoing meeting of the Food, Agriculture and Natural Resources Policy Analysis ...

AP: The image of thick crude gushing from a blown-out oil well a mile beneath the Gulf of Mexico was turned off when a tightly fitting cap was secured on top a month-and-a-half ago. Engineers weren't expecting that sight again Thursday when they planned to delicately remove the cap as a prelude to raising the massive piece of equipment underneath that failed to prevent the worst offshore oil spill in U.S. history. But the government wasn't offering a guarantee no more oil would ...

Business Green: By 2015 the auto industry will have put 3.2 million electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles on the world's roads, according to research released this week. The study from analyst Pike Research, entitled Plug-in electric vehicles, predicts a 106 per cent compound annual growth rate for the vehicles over the next five years, initially driven by demand in the small consumer vehicle category. Dave Hurst, senior analyst at the organisation, predicted that small electric cars will act ...

Daily Trust: Nigeria is susceptible to climate change-induced disasters, Minister of Environment, Mr. John Odey has warned. Odey said yesterday in Minna that climate induced disasters may soon affect the country as he maintained that research had revealed that Nigeria would succumb to the adverse effects of climate change. The minister's representative, Mrs. Olabisi Jaji, who was speaking at the commencement of the visit of Task Force members of the West African Science Service Centre on Climate ...

Washington Times: Climate change in Latin America – and the accompanying drought, flooding and desertification – is likely to drive increased illegal migration across the Mexico-U.S. border in coming years, according to a report. Worsening economic conditions, spiraling social tensions and growing political instability will drive greater numbers to make the dangerous journey to the United States in the long term, according to the American Security Project, a bipartisan nonprofit research group focused ...

Independent: The humble hardworking elephant is not an animal that usually likes to complain. But over the years, while higher-profile, more urgently threatened species have been the subject of widescale conservation efforts, elephant numbers have been allowed to dwindle. Perhaps worse, the gender ratio -- since only males have tusks, it is they who are sought by poachers -- has become perilously skewed. In an attempt to address these concerns, the Indian authorities have now decided to declare ...

Reuters: Visitors and some residents were evacuated from low-lying holiday islands off the North Carolina coast yesterday as Hurricane Earl bore down on the US eastern seaboard, churning up dangerous swells. Earl, still a major (Category 3) hurricane, weakened slightly overnight as it swept across the Atlantic east of the Bahamas. It was on track to approach North Carolina's coast early tomorrow, the US National Hurricane Centre (NHC) said. The second major hurricane of the season was ...

Business Green: Reforms to the UN's Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) currently being considered by the offset scheme's Executive Board could lead to a spike in the price of carbon credits issued under the scheme. That is the conclusion of a new analysis from research firm Point Carbon, which predicts that proposed reforms governing the liabilities faced by the Designated Operation Entities (DOEs) that check the validity of emission reduction projects would simultaneously constrict the supply of ...

Business Green: Smart meters capable of measuring and managing a building's electricity use in real time are becoming increasingly common, but to date there has been little progress in the development of smart devices for managing the use of heat. That looks set to change after smart meter developer Onzo and energy giant Scottish & Southern Energy (SSE) yesterday revealed they are working on a project to apply smart meter functionality to domestic hot water and heating systems. The ...

Christian Science Monitor: A bit of a propaganda war is heating up in California over Proposition 23, a citizen's initiative which could suspend the state's landmark greenhouse gas reduction law. Backed by manufacturers and Texas oil companies Valero and Tesoro, the ballot initiative would halt enforcement of the 2006 emissions law, AB32, until California unemployment, now over 12 percent, sinks to 5.5 percent for at least a year. Backers of the "California Jobs Initiative" say it is necessary to protect ...

AP: Enbridge Energy Partners, the company whose pipeline caused a major oil spill in the Kalamazoo River five weeks ago, said Wednesday its plan to reinforce its oil pipelines under Lake Michigan is part of a routine maintenance program. Enbridge has filed for a state permit that would allow the company to add more anchoring braces to two pipelines along the lake bottom in the Straits of Mackinac between Mackinac County in the Upper Peninsula and Emmet County in the Lower Peninsula. The ...

ABC: MARK COLVIN: Two of the world's most influential climate sceptics appear to have had a change of heart. The Danish academic Bjorn Lomborg wrote a book in 2001 called The Skeptical Environmentalist which said climate change wasn't that serious and we couldn't and shouldn't do much about it. But now he says it's undoubtedly one of the chief concerns facing the world today. Michael Hanlon the formerly ultra-sceptic science editor of Britain's two-million-copies-a-day Daily Mail has also ...