Wallace Baine: The Plague of Punditry - Santa Cruz Sentinel

Picture, if you can, what cable TV would look like in a healthy democracy. Sure, there'd be a lot of trashy entertainment. But there'd also be niche programming designed to solve problems that threaten our way of life. Imagine a global-warming channel that focuses only on monitoring climate change and giving voice to both true believers and skeptics.

Global warming is going to shrink the world's species

"Global warming may reinforce this trend towards smaller sizes through the temperature-size rule," said Roy.

The temperature-size rule, also known as Bergmann's rule, says that species size increases with latitude: they tend to be smaller in the tropics, and larger closer to the poles.

Bergmann's rule is debated, but one explanation for it is that larger animals have a lower surface-area-to-volume ratio, allowing them to retain more heat and fare better in cooler climes.

Meteorologist Al Kaprielian weighs in

Q. What do you think of the controversy over global warming?

A. That’s more of a research issue. We don’t have enough data right now. We’ll have to wait and see what future weather brings.

UN Carbon Credit Project Backlog Jumps Sevenfold (Update1)

Sept. 12 (Bloomberg) -- The backlog of United Nations greenhouse gas-reduction projects seeking emission credits surged more than sevenfold since the beginning of August, undermining efforts to curb climate change.

The number of projects awaiting completeness checks before they can be registered by regulators jumped by 253 since Aug. 2, said David Abbass, the Clean Development Mechanism spokesman at the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, or UNFCCC. That compares with 37 before, Abbass said yesterday by e-mail.

The CDM ``is in danger of suffocating before our eyes,'' said Henry Derwent, chief executive officer of the International Emissions Trading Association. ``It is essential that the UNFCCC grips this problem.''

The backlog suggests supplies of emission credits from UN- approved projects may rise. The allowances can be used by factories and power stations in the European Union carbon dioxide program, the world's biggest greenhouse gas trading market. About 391 projects have received credits so far, as of Sept. 1, UN data shows.

``The secretariat has acted to increase, on a temporary basis, the number of staff working in this area, and therefore it is expected that in the final four months of 2008 more than 50 requests will be processed per month,'' Abbass said.