The UK government has approved 10 sites in England and Wales for new nuclear power stations, most of them in locations where there are already plants. It has rejected only one proposed site – in Dungeness, Kent – as being unsuitable on environmental grounds. A new planning commission will make decisions on the proposals “within [...]

“A BELIEF in man-made climate change and the alleged resulting moral imperatives is capable, if genuinely held, of being a philosophical belief for the purpose of the 2003 Religion and Belief Regulations.” Those were the words of an English High Court judge, Mr Justice Burton, on November 3rd as he ruled that green beliefs deserve [...]

A climate change deal at the end of the year could end up being two treaties because the Americans refuse to sign up to existing global agreements. The UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in December has been billed as the last chance for the world to stop catastrophic global warming. But the latest round [...]

Intelligent people agree that, absent immediate radical action regarding global warming, the human race is sunk. That is a tautology because those who do not agree are, definitionally, unintelligent. Britain’s intelligent prime minister, Gordon Brown, gives scary precision to the word “immediate.” By his reckoning humanity now has about 30 days to save itself. He [...]

UN climate talks in Barcelona last week ended with little progress, prompting speculation that a legally binding treaty will need another year to negotiate. “I don’t think we can get a legally binding agreement by Copenhagen. I think that we can get that within a year after Copenhagen,” UN climate chief Yvo de Boer said [...]

November 8, 2009 The multiyear ice covering the Arctic Ocean has effectively vanished…. “I would argue that, from a practical perspective, we almost have a seasonally ice-free Arctic now, because multiyear sea ice is the barrier to the use and development of the Arctic,” said Barber [Canada's Research Chair in Arctic System Science at the [...]