Telegraph: Homeowners could be forced to improve the insulation and energy efficiency of their properties when carrying out renovation work as part of a landmark strategy on energy to be unveiled by the Government this week. Ministers are considering introducing new laws which would compel Britons to increase the energy efficiency of their properties over the next decade. Inefficient appliances such as oil-fired boilers may also be outlawed. One of the major concerns of the …

Independent: For the eighth successive year, the resorts of the north Mediterranean coast are threatened by a monstrous-looking primeval creature from the depths, the jellyfish. Although injuries to bathers have been rare, marine biologists have spotted vast shoals of "mauve stingers" or Pelagia noctiluca in the waters between Corsica and the French mainland. From next week, the town of Cannes will erect booms and nets around its most popular beaches to try to protect bathers from the …

Scientific American: Roughly 14,700 years ago the weather patterns that bring snow to Greenland shifted from one year to the next–a pattern of abrupt change that was repeated 12,900 years ago and 11,700 years ago when the earth’s climate became the one enjoyed today–according to records preserved in an ice core taken from the northern island. These speedy changes–transitions from warming to cooling and back again–in the absence of changes in greenhouse gas could presage abrupt, catastrophic climate change in our …

Reuters: The world should cut the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to below that of 20 years ago, more deeply than most government plans, to avoid the worst of climate change, a group of 150 advocates said on Monday. "We’ve gone too far — in a dangerous direction," scientists, politicians, business leaders and others said in full-page advertisements in the Financial Times, the New York Times, the International Herald Tribune and two Swedish dailies. They said that …

New York Times: Twenty years ago Monday, James E. Hansen, a climate scientist at NASA, shook Washington and the world by telling a sweating crowd at a Senate hearing during a stifling heat wave that he was "99 percent" certain that humans were already warming the climate. "The greenhouse effect has been detected, and it is changing our climate now," Dr. Hansen said then, referring to a recent string of warm years and the accumulating blanket of heat-trapping carbon dioxide and other gases emitted …

Washington Post: Here’s something to ponder as you park your Prius: What if gas guzzling isn’t the problem? That rather counterintuitive theme emerged yesterday from a visit to Washington by James E. Hansen, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute and one of the first to sound the alarm about global warming in a congressional hearing 20 years ago yesterday. As he undertook a commemorative, I-told-you-so tour, from Diane Rehm’s radio show to ABC News to the National Press Club to the House of …

Reuters: On the eastern tip of Chongming, the world’s largest alluvial island in the mouth of the Yangtze River, birdwatchers wait patiently to glimpse an occasional crane or plover rising from the wetlands’ reeds. A few kilometers to the southwest, in an area of fishponds, marshes and farmland, developers are plotting out a city for up to 400,000 people that they hope will be a model of ecological harmony, powered entirely by renewable energy. Shanghai’s Dongtan Eco-city has a lofty …

Guardian: James Hansen, one of the world’s leading climate scientists, will today call for the chief executives of large fossil fuel companies to be put on trial for high crimes against humanity and nature, accusing them of actively spreading doubt about global warming in the same way that tobacco companies blurred the links between smoking and cancer. Hansen will use the symbolically charged 20th anniversary of his groundbreaking speech to the US Congress - in which he was among the first to …

Age: GLOBALLY, it’s hardly surprising that the emphasis on water supply these days is on how to get more. Water consumption is doubling every 20 years as the world’s population balloons towards 10 billion and growth in China drives a switch to higher-protein, more water-intensive diets. In Europe, climate change and affluence are proving an equally menacing combination: 200 million sun-lovers are flocking into coastal areas of the Mediterranean every year. As resort tourists they use four …

Washington Post: There have been hotter days on Capitol Hill, but few where the heat itself became a kind of congressional exhibit. It was 98 degrees on June 23, 1988, and the warmth leaked in through the three big windows in Dirksen 366, overpowered the air conditioner, and left the crowd sweating and in shirt sleeves. James E. Hansen, a NASA scientist, was testifying before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. He was planning to say something radical: Global warming was real, it was a …