Warming atmosphere is expanding the tropics, study finds The globe's tropics are expanding -- and if you're thinking coconuts and palm trees, don't. Think deserts and drought. According to a new study in Science, satellite measurements show that the lowest level of the atmosphere in torrid subtropical regions on either side of the equator is heating up, and has pushed the northern and southern jet streams each some 70 miles closer to the poles since 1979. A continuation of the trend could deprive southern Europe of winter precipitation, expand deserts of the American Southwest, and nudge the Sahara Desert north, …

Bush's voluntary emissions-reduction programs not amounting to much Are you sitting down? We've got some earth-shattering news: the Bush administration's voluntary programs to reduce industrial greenhouse-gas emissions aren't working. A report issued yesterday by the Government Accountability Office stated that many industry participants in the U.S. EPA's voluntary "Climate Leaders" program and the Department of Energy's voluntary "Climate VISION" program were not setting specific emissions-reduction goals or inventorying or reporting on their emissions. According to the report, as of November 2005, only 38 of the 74 participants in the EPA program had set reduction goals; an EPA spokesflack responded that …

Dear Umbra, I recently saw "organic canola oil" on a salad dressing bottle. I looked up the origin of canola oil, and it looks like it is a genetic modification of rapeseed. I thought organic certification disallowed genetically modified foods. What's the scoop? Tom Grundy Nevada City, Calif. Dearest Tom, Have you noticed yet that May is food month here on floor 2B? Food and plants, in honor of spring -- and to counter last month's depressing climate-change bonanza. (Although it's been yet another weird, hot spring in purportedly rainy Seattle, and all the gardeners are irrigating already -- maybe …

It's something of a miracle that An Inconvenient Truth, the chronicle of Al Gore's quest to raise alarm about "climate chaos," exists at all. A movie with a scantily clad Jessica Alba presenting a computer slideshow on climate science is implausible enough. Al Gore doing it, well ... even C-SPAN could be forgiven for having second thoughts. Albert Arnold Gore Jr. may be many things, but he's no penguin. And this is no Murderballian story of triumph over tragedy. It's a story of tragedy over tragedy. His sister's death of lung cancer. The near-death of his 6-year-old son. The 2000 …

Hey, NBC's Today is focusing on -- wait for it -- climate change! Check out Katie Couric's interview with Al Gore. (Sigh, requires IE.)

Another wind-power project proposed for Massachusetts waters Wind-power developers can't get enough of Massachusetts, it seems. Nantucket Sound has the contentious Cape Wind project; now a new wind farm is being proposed for nearby Buzzards Bay. The South Coast Offshore Wind project would consist of three clusters of 30 to 40 turbines each, up to 450 feet high, from two to four miles offshore. It could generate half of Cape Cod's electricity, according to project contractor Jay M. Cashman. The project, which would not be complete for at least five years, will have to overcome a variety of safety and …

National parks' air and land under threat from energy development Thousands of miles of new pipelines and power lines could soon snake through national parks, national forests, and other public lands in the West. The energy bill signed into law last year called on federal agencies to speed up approval of new energy corridors by putting them under a single, overarching environmental review instead of doing project-by-project analyses. People who like their national parks and forests unmarred by pylons and trenches, and not at risk of pipeline explosions, are unimpressed. "We're talking about millennia, if ever, for recovery of an …

Globe will warm faster than predicted, new studies say Global warming won't be as bad as we thought, says new research -- it'll be worse. Two separate climate-change studies factored in increased carbon dioxide released from warming soil, forests, and oceans, and came up with similar results: current climate models may underestimate warming by 15 to 78 percent. Yippee! The two groups, one from the U.S. and one from Europe, used different methods and focused on different time periods, yet produced concurrent data. Both groups admit that ecosystems in the current era of deforestation and rampant fertilizer use may act …

Al Gore wants you to understand climate change. Photo: © 2006 Paramount Classics.  Think you've been hearing a lot about global warming lately? If a new climate-focused group hatched by Al Gore has its way, you ain't seen nothin' yet. After nine months of behind-the-scenes planning and wrangling, the Alliance for Climate Protection is now nearly ready for prime time. Gore spoke about the alliance in an exclusive interview with Muckraker. He said the group aims to raise big bucks for a single goal: "To move the United States past a tipping point on climate change, beyond which the majority …

Climate Change Action has unearthed a video of Al Gore's complete climate-change slideshow -- the one An Inconvenient Truth is based on. It's a huge file, but if you're curious, there it is. Update [2006-5-19 10:42:12 by David Roberts]: Speaking of Gore (do we speak of anything else?), Matthew Nisbet has an interesting post discussing why Gore didn't campaign more heavily on climate change in 2000. It's based on a passage from Joe Klein's new book Politics Lost. Klein's a tool, but I suspect he's more or less right on this subject.