Climate Change

With 20,000 delegates, advocates and journalists jetting to Copenhagen for planet Earth's last chance, the carbon footprint of the global warming summit will be the only impressive consequence of the climate-change meeting. Its organizers had hoped that it would produce binding caps on emissions, global taxation to redistribute trillions of dollars, and micromanagement of everyone's choices. China, nimble at the politics of pretending that is characteristic of climate-change theater, promises only to reduce its "carbon intensity" --...

___ Median CEO pay rises to $9.7 million in 2012 NEW YORK — CEO pay has been going in one direction for the past three years: up. The head of a typical large public company made $9.7 million in 2012, a 6.5 percent increase from a year earlier that was aided by a rising stock market, according to an analysis by The Associated Press using data from Equilar, an executive pay research firm. CEO pay, which fell two years straight during the Great Recession but rose 24 percent in 2010 and 6 percent in 2011, has never been higher.

As you may have noticed, the end of the year was all about the end of the world. Mayan doomsday prophesies. Rogue planets on a collision course with Earth. Fear-mongering about an artificial "fiscal cliff. " House Republicans doing, well, what they usually do. Fortunately, for now, life as we know it continues. And scary as all of this sounds, the real horror show, the true existential threat, is yet another crisis of our own making: the catastrophic effects of climate change.

Regarding the May 20 op-ed by Rep. Lamar Smith, " Let's cool our rhetoric on climate change ": Apparently, Mr. Smith (R-Tex.), the chairman of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, has little use for the conclusions of the overwhelming majority of climate scientists, at least insofar as they conflict with the short-term interests of the petroleum and coal industries. This comes as no surprise to anyone who has been frustrated by the dithering of Congress on this issue for a generation.

Leslie Holland-Bartels, regional executive, U.S. Geological Survey, Interior Department Best known for : Leading the team that demonstrated the link between climate change and probable significant decline of the polar bear within 45 to 75 years. This is the first time that any species has been labeled "threatened" before the endangering conditions came about. Government service : Holland-Bartels spent summers with her mother's family, among relatives who were commercial fishermen on the Great Lakes, and grew up during...

LONDON -- Several dozen environmental activists scaled Britain's Parliament building Sunday to draw attention to climate change. Greenpeace said 55 of its members were atop the building, where they could be seen holding yellow banners reading "Change the politics, save the climate. " One flew a giant flag from a turret in the shadow of the Big Ben clock tower. The group said the protesters scaled the neo-Gothic, 19th-century landmark using ladders and ropes. The Metropolitan Police said officers were speaking to the...

I disagree with Martin Feldstein ["Cap and Trade: All Cost, No Benefit," op-ed , June 1] that "the U.S. should wait until there is a global agreement on CO2 that includes China and India before committing to costly reductions in the United States. " While the Waxman-Markey bill's goals for curbing greenhouse gases are not as ambitious as many environmentalists would like, domestic action on climate change by the United States would have tremendous political benefits, such as garnering broader international support for a new global climate...

"Global warming" and "climate change" succinctly describe a complicated phenomenon, and in just a few decades they have become common descriptors. But while global warming would be bad for the Earth as a whole, the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere would affect different areas in different ways, and local climate change is what matters to many people. So let's look at the relative winners and losers. Two factors will likely determine whether a particular region will prosper or...

Earlier this month, a writer in the Guardian lamented the scarcity of novels about "the most pressing and complex problem of our time": climate change. "We don't want to have this conversation," complained Daniel Kramb, "and neither do most characters in most novels being published. " As Paul Ryan would say, the dangers of this so-called crisis are debatable. Imagine if "most characters in most novels" lectured each other about climate change. I'd push the last polar bear off...

The Nov. 19 news article "Wildlife refuges among areas dealt a blow by Sandy" highlighted the high cost of repairing the damage done by Hurricane Sandy. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is struggling to manage its refuges on a limited budget in the face of a serious and long-term threat: climate change. It is vital that our national wildlife refuges are sufficiently funded. But preparing for storms and other climate-change impacts and making these special places more resilient is just as important.

SWARTHMORE, Pa. — Student activists at more than 200 colleges are trying a new tactic in hopes of slowing the pace of climate change: They are asking their schools to stop investing in fossil fuel companies. The Fossil Free campaign argues that if it's wrong to pour pollution into the air and contribute to climate change, it's also wrong to profit from it. The strategy, modeled after anti-apartheid campaigns of the 1980s, aims to limit the flow of capital to fossil fuel companies by...

This hadn't been a bad tornado year until Monday . In fact, it had been remarkably quiet, with 274 tornadoes reported around the United States as of Monday, much lower than the average, which would be 491 through May 20. It had been a welcome break from a string of years in which violent thunderstorms — spawning tornadoes, hail and powerful straight-line winds, and possibly ramped up by climate change — caused record amounts of insurance losses...

The alarming May 16 front-page article " World's fish on move to cooler waters, study finds " blamed climate change for the migration of commercial fisheries since 1970 and included a statement that Atlantic surf clams have declined in the Mid-Atlantic while now thriving off New England. For this to be true, the mean annual temperature of coastal Maine would have to resemble that of tidewater Virginia in the early 1970s. That is not the case. According to data from the National Climatic Data Center , the Tidewater Virginia...

Correction: Correction: An earlier version of this commentary incorrectly represented 12 one-thousandths of 1 percent (0.012 percent) as 0.0012. This version has been updated. Lamar Smith, a Republican, represents Texas's 21st District in the U.S. House and is chairman of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology. Climate change is an issue that needs to be discussed thoughtfully and objectively. Unfortunately, claims that distort the facts hinder the legitimate...

TRAVERSE CITY, Mich. — A decades-old effort to nurse the battered Great Lakes to health has made progress toward reducing toxic pollution and slamming the door on invasive species, but the freshwater seas continue to face serious threats, a U.S.-Canadian agency said Tuesday. The International Joint Commission, which advises both nations on issues affecting shared waterways, said their governments had compiled a mixed record in restoring the Great Lakes, which for much...

Last week, as news circulated of New Jersey Governor Chris Christie's weight-loss surgery, so did a video in which Christie parodied his own brand — and the fleece he wore day and night during the Hurricane Sandy crisis. In the video, he asks everybody from Morning Joe to Jon Bon Jovi if they've seen his now-missing fleece, without which he is powerless, like Iron Man without his suit. The governor may be able to poke fun at the absurdity of, among other things, his rising star, rumored ambitions and "relentless" ...

It began with an anonymous Internet posting, and a link to a wonky set of e-mails and files. Stolen, apparently, from a research center in Britain, the files showed the leaders of climate-change science discussing flaws in their own data, and seemingly scheming to muzzle their critics. Now it has mushroomed into what is being called "Climate-gate," a scandal that has done what many slide shows and public-service ads could not: focus public attention on the science of a warming planet.

A ll right, now can we talk about climate change? After a year when the lower 48 states suffered the warmest temperatures, and the second-craziest weather, since record-keeping began? Apparently not. The climate-change denialists — especially those who manipulate the data in transparently bogus ways to claim that warming has halted or even reversed course — have been silent, as one might expect. Sensible people accept the fact of warming, but many doubt that our dysfunctional political system can...

The World Bank is making a major push to develop large-scale hydropower projects around the globe, something it had all but abandoned a decade ago but now sees as crucial to resolving the tension between economic development and the drive to tame carbon use. Major hydropower projects in Congo, Zambia, Nepal and elsewhere — all of a scale dubbed "transformational" to the regions involved — are a focus of the bank's fundraising drive among wealthy...

Hurricane Sandy sent 11 billion gallons of sewage from East Coast treatment plants into streams, canals and roadways, according to a report released last week, six months after the storm hit. That total is equal to New York's Central Park stacked 41 feet high with sewage. More than 90 percent of the spills occurred in New York and New Jersey. Of the total, 3.45 billion gallons was raw, untreated and unfiltered, said the report, which was based on state and federal data and on estimates in...