2008

Miklós Zágoni isn't just a physicist and environmental researcher.  He is also a global warming activist and Hungary's most outspoken supporter of the Kyoto Protocol. Or was.

That was until he learned the details of a new theory of the greenhouse effect, one that not only gave far more accurate climate predictions here on Earth, but Mars too.

Frederick Seitz, 96, the former president of the National Academy of Sciences who was an outspoken skeptic of global warming, died March 2 at the Mary Manning Walsh nursing home in New York City. No cause of death was reported.

Only about one in three Alberta earth scientists and engineers believe the culprit behind climate change has been identified, a new poll reported today.

The expert jury is divided, with 26 per cent attributing global warming to human activity like burning fossil fuels and 27 per cent blaming other causes such as volcanoes, sunspots, earth crust movements and natural evolution of the planet.

A 99-per-cent majority believes the climate is changing. But 45 per cent blame both human and natural influences, and 68 per cent disagree with the popular statement that "the debate on the scientific causes of recent climate change is settled."

Gordon Brown warned yesterday that energy companies could still face a windfall tax unless they offered a much bigger rebate for the poor and pensioners facing big rises in fuel bills.

The prime minister was being questioned in the Commons by David Marshall, Labour MP for Glasgow East, a week before the budget as pressure grows from MPs for action against energy firms. The companies have hit back by warning that a windfall tax could affect their commitment to investment in renewable energy.

NEW YORK — "It is inexcusable for scientists to torture animals," the playwright Henrik Ibsen once remarked. "Let them make their experiments on journalists and politicians."

After years of being labeled everything from devotees of a neo-Flat Earth Society to the equivalent of Holocaust deniers by an opposition that refuses to seriously engage them — i.e. declaring unsettled science settled, refusing to publicly debate spurious claims made in one's Academy Award winning documentaries, repeatedly using scorn as a crutch to steady lack of reason — the global warming skeptics gathered at the Heartland Institute's 2008 International Conference on Climate Change held at the Times Square Marriott certainly appeared fully on board with Ibsen's proposition.

With the ink barely dry on plans by the European Commission for fighting climate change, members of the EU have already started a game of tug-of-war to pull the legal proposals in their favor.

"It's most important that the national targets … take into account solidarity and [economic] convergence," said Arturas Paulauskas, Environment Minister for Lithuania, one of the EU's newest and least developed members.

The EU's climate-change plans "are not the place to deal with cohesion and solidarity — that is what cohesion funds and the [EU] budget are for," retorted Hilary Benn, environment minister for Britain — one of the EU's richest and most developed economies.

EU industry commissioner Guenter Verheugen is pushing for EU leaders at their summit next week to agree that energy intensive industries should have a special status when it comes to the bloc's pollution-reducing emissions trading scheme (ETS).

German daily Handelsblatt reports that Mr Verheugen next week, during the 13-14 March summit, will argue that industries due to be heaviest hit by the emissions scheme – a system that was tightened up at the beginning of the year – should be exempted.