Just metres from the water’s edge, under palm trees, tropical drink in hand, perfect weather. Of course it is North Queensland where holiday-makers like me blissfully nudge the shoreline alongside resorts and housing and business complexes. But scientists warn the shoreline is about to push back, catastrophically. Think of the Maldives, that Indian Ocean idyll [...]

This city of 20 million rose from the sea and grew into a modern showcase, with skyscrapers piercing the clouds, atop tidal flats fed by the mighty Yangtze River. Now Shanghai’s future depends on finding ways to prevent the same waters from reclaiming it. Global warming and melting glaciers and polar ice sheets are raising [...]

Scientists look seriously at the possibility of warming beyond the 2 °C target. Concerned by escalating greenhouse gas emissions, scientists are now looking in earnest at the possibility of global temperatures rising by 4 °C or more. Gathering this month at the University of Oxford, they sketched out a world affected by severe climate change, [...]

SHOULD owning a great dane make you as much of an eco-outcast as an SUV driver? Yes it should, say Robert and Brenda Vale, two architects who specialise in sustainable living at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand. In their new book, Time to Eat the Dog: The real guide to sustainable living, they [...]

Conservationists say the decision by the Obama administration to allow drilling in the Beaufort Sea repeats Bush era mistakes Conservation groups based in Alaska have accused the Obama administration of repeating the mistakes of George Bush after it gave the conditional go-ahead for Shell to begin drilling offshore for oil and natural gas in the [...]

SEEKING to alleviate poverty, reduce world hunger and protect biodiversity sounds, to your correspondent’s ears, like something a Miss World hopeful might have pledged in the 1980s. In fact, it was what a professor of soil quality at a lesser-known university in the Netherlands promised to a scientific conference that concluded on October 16th. Addressing [...]

Gordon Brown warned today of a catastrophe for the planet if action to tackle climate change is not agreed at forthcoming UN talks and said that global warming could be more costly than two world wars and the Great Depression. The Prime Minister delivered the analysis in a speech to representatives from 17 countries at [...]

There is a little quotation that I have printed out and have attached to my desk pad cover; it reads Press On Nothing in the world can take the place of perseverance. Talent will not. Nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not. Unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will [...]