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Reports on the plan of Eskimos to seek a ruling from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights that the U.S. is threatening their existence. Contribution of the U.S. to global warming; Argument that global warming is not only an environmental problem but an assault to basic human rights.

Reports on the number of tornadoes in the United States in August and September 2004.

Explores the damage done by the hurricane in Pensacola, Florida. Efforts of some residents in incorporating the prospect of such catastrophe into their lives; Description of the damage caused by Hurricane Ivan on the road, U.S. 90.

Reports that the aftermath of the Hurricanes Charley and Frances is causing everyone along the United States southern and eastern coasts to start building with the worst in mind. Evidence that better building codes made a difference to houses and buildings in the strike zone; Some builders are changing the way they design and assemble structures.

Reports on how U.S. meteorologists grade the destructive potential of hurricanes. Decision of the National Hurricane Center to upgrade Hurricane Charley to a Category 4 storm within a span of five hours; Failure of weather forecasters to predict the intensity of storms due to the absence of measurable factors.

Reports that blue whales, the world's largest animals and among its rarest whales, have been spotted and photographed in Alaskan waters in July 2004, the first time in three decades.

Reports that the administration of United States President George W. Bush plans to announce an agreement with seven countries to slow global warming and harvest wasted fuel by capturing emissions of methane, a heat-trapping gas, from landfills, coal mines and oil and gas fields and pipelines.

Reports on a study showing that the temporary pollution increase caused by the collapse of the World Trade Center in New York City on September 11, 2001, was unlikely to increase cancer risks in nearby communities. Discovery of chemicals called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons; Finding that samples contained declining amounts of the varieties associated with diesel exhaust.

Reports that New York City officials joined a federal lawsuit brought on July 21, 2004, by New York and seven other states against five of the United States' largest power companies in an effort to curb global warming. City lawyer Michael A. Cardozo's statements on the impact that global warming could one day have on New York; Companies named in the lawsuit; Reaction of the companies to the lawsuit; Reaction of environmental groups.

The article reports that delegates from 187 nations reached an agreement to negotiate a new accord limiting practices that contribute to global warming in 2008-2009. The agreement means that such a treaty would be finalized under a different U.S. President than George W. Bush. Bush has been an adamant opponent of any mandatory cuts in greenhouse gas emissions.

The article discusses the findings of a United Nations panel on climate change, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, that describe the threat of global warming in plain terms. These findings come before the meeting in Bali, Indonesia that will create new climate change protocols to replace the Kyoto protocol. According to global change expert Hans Verolme, people realize how important this document will be to the climate issue.

The article reports that scientific concerns about melting arctic ice caps have been realized. The Arctic sea ice met its summer minimum on September 16, 2007 and there was one million fewer square miles of ice than average. Additionally, the sea ice is being shifted towards Greenland by winds and ocean currents, according to a study by Son Nghiem at the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

The article reports that U.S. President George W. Bush has proposed setting a long-term goal to cut worldwide greenhouse gas emissions, and wants other high-polluting nations to create an agreement by the end of 2007 on how to do so. The proposal reverses prior administration policy on greenhouse gases, which was to resist calls for action to limit them. Bush will present his proposal to the Group of 8 industrial nations summit conference in June 2007.

The article discusses the United States Climate Action Report, which indicates that over the next decade U.S. greenhouse gas emissions will increase as much as in the previous decade. White House spokeswoman on environmental matters, Kristen A. Hellmer, said that U.S. President George W. Bush's climate change initiatives are working. David W. Cooper, counsel to the National Commission on Energy Policy, said a mandatory program needed to be established to set a price on emissions.

The article discusses a report issued February 2, 2007, by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that concluded global warming was "unequivocal." Achim Steiner, executive director of the United Nations Environment Program, said the evidence for climate change was on the table. U.S. Secretary of Energy Samuel Bodman stated that the U.S. was a small contributor to the overall problem.

The article discusses bills before the U.S. Congress to address global warming. The legislative initiatives purportedly were spurred by former U.S. Vice President Al Gore's film "An Inconvenient Truth," polar bears' losing habitat, and premature plant flowerings. One measure is sponsored by U.S. Senators John McCain, Joseph I. Lieberman, and Barack Obama. Senators Diane Feinstein and Thomas R. Carper offered bills capping carbon dioxide emissions.

This article discusses the change in the language of the mission statement for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) by deletion of wording that pertains to understanding and protecting our planet. David E. Steitz of NASA said that the change was made to square the mission statement with President George W. Bush's goal of pursuing spaceflight to the Moon and Mars. Many NASA scientists believe the new wording will produce less incentive to pursue such projects as climate changes caused by greenhouse gases.

This article reports on Michael D. Griffin, NASA's top administrator, who issued a statement calling for scientific openness throughout the agency. James E. Hansen, NASA's top climate scientist, complained that the space agency's public-affairs office was trying to silence his statements on global warming.

Reports that potential problems with fuel tank foam in the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (NASA) shuttles were played down in years of study. Decision by NASA managers that the chances that debris from the fuel tank would strike the shuttle Discovery, in the kind of accident that doomed the Columbia and its astronauts in 2003, had been reduced to acceptable levels; Observation that a piece of foam fell from the protuberance air load ramp on Discovery's liftoff; Suspension of future shuttle flights until the problem can be resolved; Suggestion that the effort to resolve the problems was a chain of missed opportunities and questionable judgments over the life of the shuttle program; Background on problems at the program; Options under consideration.

Reports that a White House official who once led the oil industry's fight against limits on greenhouse gases has repeatedly edited government climate reports to play down links between such emissions and global warming, according to internal documents. Role of Philip A. Cooney in removing or adjusting descriptions of climate research that government scientists and their supervisors had already approved; Examples of the dozens of revisions, which tend to produce an air of doubt about findings that most climate experts say are robust; Background on Cooney, who is chief of staff for the White House Council on Environmental Quality; Method by which the documents were obtained by "The New York Times"; Response of White House officials to the changes made by Cooney; Views of climate experts and representatives of environmental groups; Influence of Cooney and other White House officials with ties to energy industries. INSET: An Editor in the White House.

Reports on a small camera-studded robotic submarine that is travelling the length of the aqueduct that carries water from upstate New York to New York city. Marine engineers at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, led by Ben G. Allen who worked with the ASI Group of Ontario, Canada to make the device; Mission to photograph every foot of the 45 mile stretch of aqueduct which is leaking water to help determine the condition of the structure; Leakage of up 36 million gallons a day which was found in 1991.

FACING a public focused on economic revival, a hostile House and the lowest level of voter concern in a long while on human-driven climate change, President Obama could easily punt on energy this Tuesday. But this would actually be the ideal time for him to introduce an energy quest as a keystone 21st-century American imperative. Only by expanding our menu of nonpolluting energy choices can we hope to ameliorate a variety of social, geopolitical, climatic and economic risks facing the country and the world. Mr. Obama's first step should not be to announce a predetermined list of policies to transform our energy system, but to use his State of the Union address to commence a yearlong American conversation on the merits and shape of such an effort. Modeled on the president's health care summit meeting last February, this conversation would play out in public televised events attended by the president or his cabinet, along with politicians, experts, scientists and American workers, in places ranging from the White House to coal country, from the grounds of a potential site for a new nuclear reactor to the boiler room of a primary school looking to cut emissions and energy bills. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

With the swift bang of a gavel on Saturday morning, a prolonged fight between nations small and large over an international pact to limit climate risks that was forged the night before by the United States and four partners came to a somewhat murky end. The chairman of the climate treaty talks declared that the parties would ''take note'' of the document, named the Copenhagen Accord, leaving open the question of whether this effort to curb greenhouse gases from the world's major emitters would gain the full support of the 193 countries bound by the original, and largely failed, 1992 Framework Convention on Climate Change. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

President Obama announced here on Friday night that five major nations, including the United States, had together forged a climate deal. He called it ''an unprecedented breakthrough'' but acknowledged that it still fell short of what was required to combat global warming. The agreement addresses many of the issues that leaders came here to settle. But it has left many of the participants in the climate talks unhappy, from the Europeans, who now have the only binding carbon control regime in the world, to the delegates from the poorest nations, who objected to being left out of the critical negotiations. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The top American envoy to climate talks here flatly rejected arguments Wednesday by diplomats from poor lands that the United States owes a debt to developing nations for decades of American emissions that contributed to global warming. It was not the first time that the American negotiator, Todd D. Stern, had dismissed the notion. But his words highlighted the divide that persists between the poor and the wealthy as nearly 200 nations try to sketch the outlines of a new pact on climate change here. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Environmental Protection Agency, resolving a lawsuit aimed at cutting the flow of mercury and other toxic substances from coal- or oil-burning power plants, has agreed to develop standards by late 2011 for limiting such emissions. Environmental and public health groups that had sued the agency in pursuit of a deadline for issuing the standards said the agreement set the stage for closing longstanding gaps, which persisted through the Clinton and Bush administrations, in clean-air rules for power plants. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

President Obama's top climate and energy official said Friday that there was virtually no chance Congress would have a climate and energy bill ready for him to sign before negotiations on a global climate treaty begin in December in Copenhagen. The remarks by the official, Carol M. Browner, during an onstage interview in Washington, were the first definitive statement by the administration that it saw little chance of Congressional passage this fall. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Twenty-five years after the federal government declared a long stretch of the Hudson River to be a contaminated Superfund site, the cleanup of its chief remaining source of pollution began here Friday with a single scoop of mud extracted by a computer-guided dredge. Twelve dredges are to work round the clock, six days a week, into October, removing sediment laced with the chemicals known as PCBs. Mile-long freight trains running every several days will carry the dried mud to a hazardous-waste landfill in Texas. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In a speech on Monday at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, President Obama presented a vision of a new era in research financing comparable to the Sputnik-period space race, in which intensified scientific inquiry, and development of the intellectual capacity to pursue it, are a top national priority. The president laid out an ambitious plan to invigorate the country's pipeline for innovation, from grade-school classrooms to corporate, government and academic research laboratories. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

As ministers from 189 countries gather here in the coal mining regions of Poland to hammer out a new climate treaty, progress is being sorely hampered by the transition under way in American politics, delegates and experts here said. No one expected a team representing President-elect Barack Obama to attend these meetings -- he has said there is but one president at a time, and the United States is still represented here by the Bush administration. But the anticipation of his presidency has left this critical meeting in a bit of limbo. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

SENATOR MCCAIN co-authored legislation in 2003 to cap greenhouse gases and said at a hearing: ''It is time for the United States government to do its part to address this global problem, and a discussion of mandatory reductions is the form of leadership that is required.'' But this year, he has sometimes appeared to soften his stance. At a news conference in June, he said: ''I believe in the cap-and-trade system, as you know. I would not at this time make those -- impose a mandatory cap at this time. But I do believe that we have to establish targets for reductions of greenhouse gas emissions over time.'' [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A growing array of military leaders, Arctic experts and lawmakers say the United States is losing its ability to patrol and safeguard Arctic waters even as climate change and high energy prices have triggered a burst of shipping and oil and gas exploration in the thawing region. The National Academy of Sciences, the Coast Guard and others have warned over the past several years that the United States' two 30-year-old heavy icebreakers, the Polar Sea and Polar Star, and one smaller ice-breaking ship devoted mainly to science, the Healy, are grossly inadequate. Also, the Polar Star is out of service. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The National Center for Atmospheric Research, an important hub for work on the causes and consequences of climate change, has shut down a program focused on strengthening poor countries' ability to forecast and withstand droughts, floods and other climate-related hazards. The move, which center officials say resulted from the shrinking of federal science budgets, is being denounced by many experts on environmental risk, who say such research is more crucial than ever in a world with rising populations exposed to climate threats. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

For the first time since the 1930s, federal biologists confirmed that a leatherback sea turtle has nested on a Texas beach, at the Padre Island National Seashore near Corpus Christi. Last Friday, staff members conducting a beach patrol found turtle tracks and a few exposed eggs. They were thought at first to be those of a green turtle. But the eggs and the width of the tracks, more than six feet across, were later determined to be from a leatherback. The giant turtles, endangered around the world, have until now only been known to nest in three spots in the United States -- with about three dozen females a year laying eggs on beaches along the east coast of Florida and slightly larger nesting populations in Puerto Rico and the United States Virgin Islands. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Two years after James E. Hansen, the leading climate scientist at NASA, and other agency employees described a pattern of distortion and suppression of climate science by political appointees, the agency's inspector general has concluded that such activities occurred and were ''inconsistent'' with the law that established the space program 50 years ago. In a 48-page report issued on Monday as a result of a request in 2006 by 14 senators, the internal investigative office said the activities appeared limited to the headquarters press office. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Bush administration, bowing to a court order, has released a fresh summary of federal and independent research pointing to large, and mainly harmful, impact of human-caused global warming in the United States. The report, released Thursday, is online at climatescience.gov, along with a new report updating the administration's priorities for climate research. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Diplomats from the five countries bordering the Arctic Ocean adopted a declaration on Wednesday aimed at defusing tensions over the likelihood that global warming will open northern waters to shipping, energy extraction and other activities. The agreement, reached after a daylong meeting in Ilulissat, Greenland, said the United States, Canada, Russia, Norway and Denmark saw no need for new accords on Arctic matters and would use existing international laws like the Law of the Sea Treaty to resolve disputes. Greenland belongs to Denmark. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The rise in concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from human activities is influencing climate patterns and vegetation across the United States and will significantly disrupt water supplies, agriculture, forestry and ecosystems for decades, a new federal report says. The changes are unfolding in ways that are likely to produce an uneven national map of harms and benefits, according to the report, released Tuesday and posted online at climatescience.gov. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

President Bush called Wednesday for the United States to stop the growth of greenhouse gas emissions by 2025 and challenged other countries, including major polluters like China and India, to abandon trade barriers on energy-related technology and commit to goals of their own. The White House cast Mr. Bush's announcement in the Rose Garden as an ambitious effort by a president determined to lead on the climate change issue, even with just nine months left in office. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article reports about the delay in Japan's humpback whale harvesting plan, under the pressure from Australia and the U.S., head of International Whaling Commission, the international body that governs whaling. It states that opposition for Japan intensified when it included, for the first time, the humpback whale on it's planned, harvest list. It mentions that, humpback whales belongs to a marquee species in the billion-dollar-a-year whale watching industry.

The article states about the dispute over the location of the U.S. coal-fired electric plant, an environmental-friendly plant that will capture and store its carbon emissions. It states that the builder of the plant, FutureGen Alliance announced a location, which seemed "inadvisable," to the U.S. Dept. of Energy. The energy department, who is supposed to pay 74 percent of the costs also questioned the commitment of FutureGen Alliance towards the project.

The article discusses the increasing level of carbon dioxide concentrations by industrialized and industrializing countries, leading to global warming. It is stated that even as talks on climatic changes continue, the concentration of carbon dioxide due to increased use of fossil fuels, is rising. China is stated to follow suit of the U.S. on the way of fossil-fueled prosperity. Scientists say that the emissions from developing countries like China and India may swamp other natural resources.

The article reports on the efforts of various countries to arrive at a final agreement on climatic treaty. The U.S. had previously rejected negotiations on forming new steps to avoid climatic changes. Now it has agreed for a deadline to the original treaty, which was signed by former U.S. President George Bush. The agreement focuses on the importance of addressing global emissions. However, it is also stated that the deal does not bind any country to reduce greenhouse pollution.

The article reports on the significance of the two-week climate talks to be held in Bali, Indonesia from December 3, 2007. In light of a climate report by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the Bali meeting is said to have become very important. It is likely that the focus of the talks would be on renewal of 15-year-old global climate treaty. The U.S. has declined to agree on a new treaty with binding limits on greenhouse gas emissions.

The article offers information regarding the protests of environmental groups against Whale hunting in Japan. It states that various environmental groups, marine biologists and officials from the U.S. are protesting the humpback whale hunting in the name of scientific research. Reacting on the complaints the Japan Whaling Association has termed them as cultural imperialism.

The article reports that United Nations (UN) Secretary General, Ban Ki-moon has asked the U.S. and China to play a more constructive role in protecting global environment. Releasing the report on climatic changes prepared by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), he said that the meeting of world's energy ministers to be held in Bali, Indonesia, should agree on a comprehensive climate change policy. The meeting will discuss to replace Kyoto Protocol.