Chicago Tribune: Thousands of climate change experts from throughout the world are gathering in Bali to start the politically tortuous process of turning new scientific evidence about the perils of climate change into policy to act on the problem. To see the potential perils of inaction, they need not look far. Indonesia’s low-lying capital, Jakarta, has long suffered seasonal flooding. But climate change, combined with a failure by politicians to address factors contributing to flooding, means …

CNN-IBN: Who should pay the price? It’s a question at the heart of the UN Climate Change Conference in Bali. India says the West should shoulder the burden of capping carbon emissions, since its per capita emissions are up to 20 times higher than in India. But leaders of the US delegation to Bali insist that expanding economies like India and China must act quickly as well. "We could bring our emissions to zero in the developed world and not have a significant impact on the …

Age: BRAZIL has announced a sharp drop in the rate of Amazon deforestation, but environmentalists warn it could be a short-term trend masking a broader threat against the rainforest. Brazil’s environment ministry reported that the rate of Amazon destruction dropped 20 per cent between August last year and July this year. The report came the same day an environmental group warned that climate change, together with deforestation, could wipe out or severely damage nearly 60 per cent of …

BBC: There could be more than two offshore wind turbines per mile of UK coastline under plans being set out by ministers. Business Secretary John Hutton says he wants to open up British seas to allow enough new turbines - up to 7,000 - to power all UK homes by the year 2020. He acknowledged "it is going to change our coastline", but said the issue of climate change was "not going away". The thrust of the idea was backed by Tory Alan Duncan: "We’re …

Aftenposten: "This is fantastic," said an enthusiastic Lars Haltbrekken of Norway’s chapter of Friends of the Earth (Naturvernforbund). He has earlier criticized the government for failing to come up with sufficient concrete measures to halt global warming. Rainforest preservation is viewed as an important means of reducing carbon emissions, because it can halt the burning that often comes with deforestation. Some experts claim that stopping the destruction of the world’s rainforests is …

Washington Post: As 12,000 people gathered in Bali this week to begin framing a global response to Earth’s warming climate, efforts to close a deal that would slow destruction of tropical forests appear to be the best prospect for a concrete achievement from the historic assemblage. But the deforestation issue is also Exhibit A for the disputes that have made climate negotiations lengthy and divisive despite widening agreement that global warming is real and largely man-made. While scientific dispute …

Agence France-Presse: Climate change campaigners called Sunday for greater effort in the fight against global warming, saying the world was waiting for a crunch UN conference in Bali to produce a breakthrough. Prominent figures including Nobel-winning former US vice president Al Gore and UN chief Ban Ki-moon are due to arrive on the Indonesian resport island in the coming days as the climate change summit enters its crucial final week. "The whole year has been pointing at the Bali …

Associated Press: Canada was accused of undermining negotiations at the Bali climate change conference by insisting on targets for poor nations yesterday while developing countries led by China again squabbled with the West over mandatory emission cuts. The U.S. negotiator to the conference said bluntly that the U.S. will come up with its own plan to cut global-warming gases by mid-2008, and won’t commit to mandatory caps at this UN conference. "We’re not ready to do that here," said …

Reuters: The science on climate change is indisputable so the world must now act to limit greenhouse gas emissions or face "abrupt and irreversible" change, the head of the Nobel prize-winning U.N. climate panel said on Sunday. But Rajendra Pachauri, head of the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), said the industrialized world did not have a moral right to force poorer nations to slash emissions that may stunt their growth. "The science is …

San Francisco Chronicle: As international diplomats gather in Bali to try to begin negotiating a successor treaty to the Kyoto Protocol, their toughest challenge is how to deal with China’s fast rise as the world’s leading source of greenhouse gases. At the talks, which began Dec. 3 and continue until Dec. 14, no binding agreement is likely to be reached on cutting emissions. The Bush administration refuses to consider such a pact unless China also does so and China says wealthy nations must go first. Not …