Climate

BEIJING/LONDON (Reuters) - China is on course to overtake the United States this year as the world's biggest carbon emitter, estimates based on Chinese energy data show, potentially pressuring Beijing to take more action on climate change.

EL ESCORIAL, Spain (Reuters) - With climate change set to bring ever more frequent storms, floods and natural disasters, 21 European countries have created a unified weather alert system, its creators said on Friday.

HOBART (Reuters) - Rising sea levels and melting polar ice-sheets are at upper limits of projections, leaving some human population centers already unable to cope, top world scientists say as they analyze latest satellite data.

MADRID (Reuters) - Some of the world's leading meteorologists said on Wednesday they had no doubt that humans were responsible for global warming.

OSLO (Reuters) - Cuts in emissions of greenhouse gases can mute the worst impacts of global warming, such as water shortages for billions of people or extinction of almost half of Amazonian tree species, a draft U.N. report shows.

GENEVA (Reuters) - Many major rivers in the world are at risk of drying out because of climate change and dam construction, which could affect fresh water supplies and marine life, the global nature protection body WWF said on Tuesday.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Joining a rising corporate chorus itching to sink money into clean energy projects, big investors will press the U.S. Congress on Monday to pass laws attempting to tackle global warming.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - This has been the world's warmest winter since record-keeping began more than a century ago, the U.S. government agency that tracks weather reported on Thursday.

CANBERRA (Reuters) - Floodwaters flowed into the world's largest ephemeral lake in outback Australia on Monday, triggering a once-in-a-decade explosion of bird and fish life in place of arid salt flats.

The European Commission has agreed to reduce carbon emissions by 20 per cent below 1990 levels by 2020. The agreement was announced at a climate change summit in Brussels.

The European Science Foundation has warned that climate change is already having a significant impact on marine life. Warmer seas and changing salinity levels are leading to unprecedented movements of species, threatening the stability of the marine ecosystem as a whole.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The Bush administration estimates in a report being completed for the United Nations that U.S. emissions of gases that contribute to global warming will grow in the next decade at a rate nearly equal to that of the past 10 years, The New York Times reported in Saturday editions.

OSLO (Reuters) - More than 60 nations launch the broadest scientific investigation yet of the Arctic and Antarctic on Thursday to chart polar regions on the front lines of global warming.