Radical environmentalist pleads guilty

An informant who helped convict many of the 10 radical environmentalists known as "The Family" pleaded guilty in federal court to arson and attempted arson.

Jacob Ferguson admitted Friday that he set fire to the U.S Forest Service Ranger Station in Detroit, Ore., and a government pickup in 1996.

Ferguson, 35, turned informant three years ago as investigators closed in on the group that had set 20 fires across the West from 1996 to 2001, causing more than $40 million in damage.

All 10 were sentenced this year after pleading guilty to arson and other charges.

Sentencing for Ferguson was set for Jan. 10.

Climate change seen hurting poor regions

Latin America and other poor regions of the world will bear the brunt of climate change, a top official from the organization that shared this year's Nobel Peace Prize said Thursday.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a U.N. network of scientists, was awarded the prize along with former U.S. Vice President Al Gore for their work alerting the public of the perils of global warming.

"The results of the IPCC show very clearly the impacts of climate change will be ... much more severe for the poorest groups and Latin America is included in that," said IPCC vice chairman Mohan Munasinghe of Sri Lanka. Munasinghe headed a two-day meeting in Rio of the organization, its first since winning the Nobel prize.

He said water management issues were likely to be the most pressing problem caused by global warming in Latin America. Dry areas will become much drier and other areas will face increased floods and associated waterborne diseases like malaria and dengue fever.

Results from the Rio meeting, the group's fourth since 1990, will be presented at the U.N. climate conference in Bali, Indonesia, in December.

Munasinghe said he felt the Noble prize gave greater recognition and credibility to the scientific panel, which has explained the details of global warming in thousands of pages of footnoted reports issued every six years or so.

He said despite the problems facing Latin America, the region is very proactive in addressing the issue.

"My sense is that (Latin American) countries ... have been much more responsive to the issue of climate change because they feel much more vulnerable," Munasinghe said. "For North America, particularly the United States, the reaction is more defensive."

Brazilian Environment Minister Marina Silva said global warming was a burden shared by both developing and developed nations.

"If we were to reduce our gas emission by 100 percent, without richer nations reducing theirs by at least 80 percent, we would still be affected," Silva said, warning that global warming could turn the Amazon rain forest into dry savanna land in the decades to come.

Many scientists believe that the extensive Amazon rainforest absorbs carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas. About 70 percent of the basin lies in Brazilian territory.

But agricultural burning in the Amazon is also responsible for about 75 percent of Brazil's greenhouse gas emissions, making it the world's fourth largest emitter nation.

Carbon dioxide in atmosphere increasing

Just days after the Nobel prize was awarded for global warming work, an alarming new study finds that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is increasing faster than expected.

Carbon dioxide emissions were 35 percent higher in 2006 than in 1990, a much faster growth rate than anticipated, researchers led by Josep G. Canadell, of Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization, report in Tuesday's edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Increased industrial use of fossil fuels coupled with a decline in the gas absorbed by the oceans and land were listed as causes of the increase.

"In addition to the growth of global population and wealth, we now know that significant contributions to the growth of atmospheric CO2 arise from the slowdown" of nature's ability to take the chemical out of the air, said Canadell, director of the Global Carbon Project at the research organization.

The changes "characterize a carbon cycle that is generating stronger-than-expected and sooner-than-expected climate forcing," the researchers report.

Kevin Trenberth of the climate analysis section of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo. said the "paper raises some very important issues that the public should be aware of: Namely that concentrations of CO2 are increasing at much higher rates than previously expected and this is in spite of the Kyoto Protocol that is designed to hold them down in western countries,"

Alan Robock, associate director of the Center for Environmental Prediction at Rutgers University, added: "What is really shocking is the reduction of the oceanic CO2 sink," meaning the ability of the ocean to absorb carbon dioxide, removing it from the atmosphere.

The researchers blamed that reduction on changes in wind circulation, but Robock said he also thinks rising ocean temperatures reduce the ability to take in the gas.

"Think that a warm Coke has less fizz than a cold Coke," he said.

Neither Robock nor Trenberth was part of Canadell's research team.

Carbon dioxide is the leading "greenhouse gas," so named because their accumulation in the atmosphere can help trap heat from the sun, causing potentially dangerous warming of the planet.

While most atmospheric scientists accept the idea, finding ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions has been a political problem because of potential effects on the economy. Earlier this month, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and former Vice President Al Gore for their work in calling attention to global warming.

"It turns out that global warming critics were right when they said that global climate models did not do a good job at predicting climate change," Robock commented. "But what has been wrong recently is that the climate is changing even faster than the models said. In fact, Arctic sea ice is melting much faster than any models predicted, and sea level is rising much faster than IPCC previously predicted."

According to the new study, carbon released from burning fossil fuel and making cement rose from 7.0 billion metric tons per year in 2000 to 8.4 billion metric tons in 2006. A metric tons is 2,205 pounds.

The growth rate increased from 1.3 percent per year in 1990-1999 to 3.3 percent per year in 2000-2006, the researchers added.

Trenberth noted that carbon dioxide is not the whole story — methane emissions have declined, so total greenhouse gases are not increasing as much as carbon dioxide alone. Also, he added, other pollution plays a role by cooling.

There are changes from year to year in the fraction of the atmosphere made up of carbon dioxide and the question is whether this increase is transient or will be sustained, he said.

"The theory suggests increases in (the atmospheric fraction), as is claimed here, but the evidence is not strong," Trenberth said.

The paper looks at a rather short time to measure a trend, Robock added, "but the results they get certainly look reasonable, and much of the paper is looking at much longer trends."

The research was supported by Australian, European and other international agencies.

Climate change blamed for fading foliage

Every fall, Marilyn Krom tries to make a trip to Vermont to see its famously beautiful fall foliage. This year, she noticed something different about the autumn leaves.

"They're duller, not as sparkly, if you know what I mean," Krom, 62, a registered nurse from Eastford, Conn., said during a recent visit. "They're less vivid."

Other "leaf peepers" are noticing, too, and some believe climate change could be the reason.

Forested hillsides usually riotous with reds, oranges and yellows have shown their colors only grudgingly in recent years, with many trees going straight from the dull green of late summer to the rust-brown of late fall with barely a stop at a brighter hue.

"It's nothing like it used to be," said University of Vermont plant biologist Tom Vogelmann, a Vermont native.

He says autumn has become too warm to elicit New England's richest colors.

According to the National Weather Service, temperatures in Burlington have run above the 30-year averages in every September and October for the past four years, save for October 2004, when they were 0.2 degrees below average.

Warming climate affects trees in several ways.

Colors emerge on leaves in the fall, when the green chlorophyll that has dominated all spring and summer breaks down.

The process begins when shorter days signal leaves to form a layer at the base of their stems that cuts off the flow of water and nutrients. But in order to hasten the decline of chlorophyll, cold nights are needed.

In addition, warmer autumns and winters have been friendly to fungi that attack some trees, particularly the red and sugar maples that provide the most dazzling colors.

"The leaves fall off without ever becoming orange or yellow or red. They just go from green to brown," said Barry Rock, a forestry professor at the University of New Hampshire.

He says 2004 was "mediocre, 2005 was terrible, 2006 was pretty bad although it was spotty. This year, we're seeing that same spottiness."

"Leaf peeping" is big business in Vermont, with some 3.4 million visitors spending nearly $364 million in the fall of 2005, according to state estimates.

State tourism officials reject the notion that nature's palette is getting blander. Erica Housekeeper, spokeswoman for the state Department of Tourism and Marketing, said she had heard nothing but positive reports from foresters and visitors alike this year.

The problem is perception, Housekeeper says: Recollections of autumns past become tinged by nostalgia.

"Sometimes, we become our own worst critics," Housekeeper said.

People who rely on autumn tourism in New England are worried.

"I don't have a sense that the colors are off, but the timing is definitely off," said Scott Cowger, owner and innkeeper at the Maple Hill Farm Bed & Breakfast Inn at Hallowell, Maine.

"Some trees are just starting to change now," Cowger said Thursday. "It used to be, religiously, it was the second week of October when they were at their peak. I would tell my guests to come the second week if you want to see the peak colors. But it's definitely the third or fourth week at this point."

People in Northampton, Mass., are still waiting on fall color. If foliage-viewing is the goal, "I wouldn't send anybody down this way yet," Autumn Inn desk clerk Mary Pelis said this past week.

"The way things are going, the foliage season is the one sure thing for us," said Amie Emmons, innkeeper at the West Mountain Inn, in Arlington, Vt. "We book out two years in advance. It's very concerning if you think the business could start to be affected."

Experts help Gore address climate change

Oak Ridge National Laboratory researcher Virginia Dale likes to say the scientific process is all about studying vast amounts of evidence over time. In the case of global climate change, the Department of Energy lab has crunched 100 trillion bytes of information in its high-performance computers. The results went into the international studies credited by Al Gore for his Nobel Peace Prize.

"Basically one third of all the (computer) runs that were done were done at the Oak Ridge lab," said David Erickson, a climate modeling expert who helped brief the former vice president during a multimedia show-and-tell at the lab two years ago.

Colleague John Drake said Oak Ridge also helped develop models used at the two other participating computer centers at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California.

"From where we sit, it was very satisfying to know that we communicated a good chunk of the actual work that was done," Erickson said. "Obviously, Al Gore is an effective communicator."

Gore's documentary, "An Inconvenient Truth," won two Academy Awards last year and has been credited with changing the debate in America about global warming. The Nobel announced last week may do the same internationally.

The former Tennessee senator shared the Nobel with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations network of scientists. The panel has explained the dry details of global warming in thousands of pages of footnoted reports every six years since 1990.

Several Oak Ridge scientists contributed their own research to that effort — with studies tracking the rise in greenhouse gases in the atmosphere to measuring the impact of deforestation and transportation on the planet. Some also reviewed the work of others.

"The scientific world has been slowly, carefully documenting the evidence for over 20 years about climate change, the forces that cause it and the impact that it has," said Dale, an ecologist who has studied deforestation trends around the globe.

"The scientific process is to build upon small pieces of evidence, and the papers build and build on that. So the validation in the scientific world that this is out there is pretty strong," she said.

"But what this prize does is really move that into the arena where it has public validation."

Transportation specialist David Green said the Nobel recognition accomplishes two things.

"I think it makes it that much more difficult for people who don't want to address this problem to say it is not necessary to do so," he said. "It also gives an impetus to all countries around the world to work on the problem more seriously."

Green said the Nobel committee recognized that climate change is much more than an environmental issue. It could lead to disputes over water, rising sea levels and changing habitats. It could lead to war.

"Climate change is likely to be a destabilizing influence on world," he said. "It is likely to lead to conflicts between nations, which is one more reason to address the problem."

Austria to host global warming meeting

Innsbruck — home to two Winter Olympics — is hosting a conference on how to cope with the warm winters and lackluster snowfall caused by global warming.

Some 400 people from 20 countries are in the Austrian winter sports mecca for three days of discussions on the future of the Alps. Discussions will focus on eight core themes related to mountains, including ecology, natural hazards, health and spatial planning and development.

A much-anticipated session Tuesday focuses on the impact of climate change on tourism.

The conference takes place just days after former Vice President Al Gore and the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for their efforts to spread awareness of man-made climate change and lay the foundations for counteracting it.

"We have to do something ... we're in the midst of climate change," said Eric Veulliet, head of the alpS-Centre for Natural Hazard Management GmbH, which is organizing the conference along with the University of Innsbruck and the Austrian Academy of Sciences.

He said officials in the Alps — and in other mountain communities around the world — must recognize climate change, take action and come up with strategies for adapting to the future.

"It is too late for prevention," Veulliet said Monday at an opening news conference.

Securing a sustainable future for the Alps is of particular interest to countries such as Austria that have much to lose if winter sports enthusiasts take their business elsewhere because of snow-free slopes.

Christian Schoenwiese, a professor at the University of Frankfurt's Institute for Atmospherics and the Environment, predicted that, in years to come, the Alps would likely see either colder winters with less precipitation or warmer winters with more rain instead of snow.

"Tourism venues have to rethink. ... It will get more difficult for those who like to go skiing," Schoenwiese said in an interview with The Associated Press Monday evening.

Schoenwiese also said he expected weather to become more extreme and marked by greater variability.

Last season's unseasonably warm weather and lackluster snowfall caused concern not only among hotel owners and ski resort managers but also politicians. An annual tourism report recently revised by Austria's parliament contained a special section devoted to climate change.

Climate change already has had a huge impact on the economy, tourism industry and environment of the Austrian province of Tyrol, said Elisabeth Zanon, Tyrol's deputy governor.

She said "prevention" is the wrong word to use because climate change is already in full swing.

"That there's a change in the climate — that's a fact, we don't need a question mark there," she said.