from Reuters:

Humans are stripping nature at an unprecedented rate and will need two planets' worth of natural resources every year by 2050 on current trends, the WWF conservation group said on Tuesday. For more than 20 years we have exceeded the earth's ability to support a consumptive lifestyle that is unsustainable and we cannot afford to continue down this path," WWF Director-General James Leape said, launching the WWF's 2006 Living Planet Report.

From Environmental Economics:

Failing to fight global warming now will cost trillions of dollars by the end of the century even without counting biodiversity loss or unpredictable events like the Gulf Stream shutting down, a study said on Friday. But acting now will avoid some of the massive damage and cost relatively little, said the study commissioned by Friends of the Earth from the Global Development and Environment Institute of Tufts University in the United States. ... The study said the cost of inaction by governments and individuals could hit 11 trillion pounds a year by 2100, or six to eight percent of global economic output then. ... By contrast, spending just 1.6 trillion pounds a year now to limit temperature rises to two degrees could avoid annual economic damage of around 6.4 trillion pounds, the Tufts report said.

Like everyone, we love Google and use it everyday. Now we have even more reason to love Google: Via RenewableEnergyAccess

"When the project is completed this spring, Google employees, shareholders and the community around us will begin to enjoy the environmental as well as economic benefits of clean, renewable energy generated onsite," said David Radcliffe, vice president of real estate at Google. Most of the panels will be placed on the rooftops of some of the buildings in the Googleplex and others will provide shaded parking as part of newly constructed solar panel support structures on existing Google parking lots.

It's nice to hear some (relatively) good news about seafood. From CBS:

Eating seafood twice a week is good for your heart and generally outweighs the risk of exposure to mercury and other dangerous contaminants, the Institute of Medicine said Tuesday. Even so, the government needs to help consumers figure out which seafood is safer, an Institute report said. 'The confusion may have scared people out of eating something that is beneficial for them and maybe for their offspring,' said Jose Ordovas, a Tufts University researcher and member of the report committee. 'Our goal was to put both things in perspective and see where is the balance.'

Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth shows footage of the collapse of the Larson B ice shelf which scientists now definitively say was caused by the accumulation of greenhouse gases, compounded by the hole in the ozone layer. Reuters reports:

....British and Belgian scientists, writing in the Journal of Climate, said there was evidence that global warming and a thinning of the ozone layer over Antarctica, caused by human chemicals, had strengthened winds blowing clockwise around Antarctica. The Antarctic peninsula's chain of mountains, about 2,000 meters (6,500 ft) high, used to shield the Larsen ice shelf on its eastern side from the warmer winds. "If the westerlies strengthen the number of times that the warm air gets over the mountain barrier increases quite dramatically," John King, a co-author of the study at the British Antarctic Survey, told Reuters.

Two food supply stories have been reported in the past couple of days that deserve a closer look. In both cases, extreme weather is the cause, and the implications are frightening when viewed in terms of climate change. The Financial Times of London reports that worldwide grain stockpiles are at a 25 year low. The major hit was seen in Australia where drought has reduced the crop yield by more than 50%. Ukraine has instituted quotas on grain and the USDA has revised, lower, the grain output of China, Brazil, and the EU.

The concern now is what happens next year. If we have poor conditions for growing wheat again, supplies could get very tight and we might see some demand rationing,” said Dan Cekander, grains analyst at Fimat.

The second food alarm is found in Florida, where the orange yield this year will be at its lowest point in 16 years, mostly attributed to recent severe storms. See the Providence Journal for that story.

Cost of climate change action manageable:

A UK-commissioned study on the economics of climate change will advocate taking action to combat global warming as soon as possible, seeing the costs of such action as manageable, Britain's Treasury said on Tuesday.

The bottom line is that action now is economically manageable, while waiting until disaster strikes would prove economically catastrophic.

From Commondreams.org:

Drought threatening the lives of millions will spread across half the land surface of the Earth in the coming century because of global warming, according to new predictions from Britain's leading climate scientists. Extreme drought, in which agriculture is in effect impossible, will affect about a third of the planet, according to the study from the Met Office's Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research.

The science coming out of the U.K. of late is truly breathtaking. This backs up dire warnings from the Pentagon, published in 2003: An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario and Its Implications for United States National Security