Carbon scandal linked to nephew of Papua New Guinea's PM | PNG

A nephew of Papua New Guinea's Prime Minister Michael Somare has been accused of pressuring remote villagers to sign away their land for carbon deals despite there being no carbon trade laws in place.
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Pacific Carbon's Eric Komang, the prime minister's nephew, has been promoting a five-page Memorandum of Agreement that includes a breakdown of revenue where landowners receive 48 per cent royalties.

A councillor from the area said Pacific Carbon operators last week were urging landowners to sign the contracts.

``They approach the councillors and tell them to tell their people to sign,'' he told AAP.

``Basically the forms are to sign land rights away to do carbon trading,'' he said.

``But the thing is you speak to landowners and they think they're setting up a deal to suck oxygen from the trees to create a big tank in the west,'' he said.

Playing with Jello and deducing climate change

The warmest era — when oak forests covered the lowland of Sweden — was what we geologists call "the Optimum," the balmy times of about 6,000 to 8,000 years ago. That era was much warmer than today.

Some of the great shifts in climate were global in scope, some were only regional. And just to give us all nightmares, some of the biggest shifts in temperature occurred in just 20 years or so — well within a single human lifetime.

Studying past climates demands strength in the field, patience in the lab, strong eyes for microscope work — and plenty of courage, too. The simple but brutal fact is that major and minor climate change is woven into the fabric of the Earth itself.