Climate Witnesses in the news

Drought forcing children to quit school

Palin's Big Oil infatuation

Peru's potato farmers adapt to climate change

Sink or swim for Philippines village in four-year flood

Two women fight to save world's deepest lake

Can Israel find the water it needs?

Sustainable approach to tackle coastal erosion

Climate change in the land of frozen ground, fish and hardy trees

Living on the edge: The owners whose homes are going over a cliff

Climate witnesses move delegates

Sahel: Voices from the frontline of climate change

MALI: 9 June 2008
People living in the Sahelian band of West Africa are among those worst affected by shifting patterns of rainfall and desertification in the world, the UN says. Integrated Regional Information Networks (IRIN) asked five people near Timbuktu in northern Mali what climate change means for them, and these are their replies.

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Spain's drought: a glimpse of our future?

SPAIN: 24 May 2008
Barcelona is a dry city. It is dry in a way that two days of showers can do nothing to alleviate. The Catalan capital's weather can change from one day to the next, but its climate, like that of the whole Mediterranean region, is inexorably warming up and drying out. And in the process this most modern of cities is living through a crisis that offers a disturbing glimpse of metropolitan futures everywhere.

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Of Rats, Stars And Climate Change

SUDAN: 06 May 2008
The days are hot and long in Sudan's arid Northern Kordofan State, between North Darfur and Khartoum, where the farmers say droughts have become more intense and frequent in the past few decades as they sip hot chai in Gereigikh village, about 100km northeast of the state capital, El Obied.

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Sinking without trace: Australia's climate change victims

AUSTRALIA: 05 May 2008
Ron and Maria Passi, who operate Murray Island's only taxi, were out driving the night the king tide struck. Neighbours flagged them down, asking for help, and so it was not until some time later that they saw their own grandchildren standing in the road. "They were shouting 'Granddad, stop the car, the water is coming in the house'," says Ron. "I just slammed on the brakes."

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A Drought in Australia, a Global Shortage of Rice

AUSTRALIA: 17 April 2008
Lindsay Renwick, the mayor of this dusty southern Australian town, remembers the constant whir of the rice mill. “It was our little heartbeat out there, tickety-tick-tickety,” he said, imitating the giant fans that dried the rice, “and now it has stopped.” The Deniliquin mill, the largest rice mill in the Southern Hemisphere, once processed enough grain to meet the needs of 20 million people around the world. But six long years of drought have taken a toll, reducing Australia’s rice crop by 98 percent and leading to the mothballing of the mill last December.

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Bangladesh faces climate change refugee nightmare

BANGLADESH: 14 April 2008
Abdul Majid has been forced to move 22 times in as many years, a victim of the annual floods that ravage Bangladesh. There are millions like Majid, 65, in Bangladesh and in the future there could be many millions more if scientists' predictions of rising seas and more intense droughts and storms come true.

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Iceland: life on global warming's front line

ICELAND: 06 April 2008
If any country can claim to be pitched on the global warming front line, it may be the North Atlantic island nation of Iceland. On a purely physical level, this land of icecaps and volcanoes and home to 300,000 people is undergoing a rapid transformation as its glaciers melt and weather patterns change dramatically.

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Islanders to become climate refugees

PAPUA NEW GUINEA: 31 March 2008
PAPUA New Guinea’s almost 3000 Carteret Islanders in Bougainville are already preparing to be among the world’s first “climate refugees’’. This news is from United Nations rights body, the Human Rights Council, which has been instituted to study climate change in affected countries in the world. The Carterets will be on the list after the UN human rights body appointed the organisation to do a study in the Maldives and the atolls of Carterets islands.

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Time runs out for islanders on global warming's front line

INDIA & BANGLADESH: 30 March 2008
Rising sea levels threaten to flood many of the islands in the fertile Ganges delta, leading to an environmental disaster and a refugee crisis for India and Bangladesh. Dependra Das stretches out his arms to show his flaky skin, covered in raw saltwater sores. His fingers submerged in soft black clay for up to six hours a day, he spends his time frantically shoring up a crude sea dyke surrounding his remote island home in the Sundarbans, the world's largest delta.

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Australian wine industry feels heat from climate change

AUSTRALIA: 25 March 2008
Australian grape growers reckon they are the canary in the coalmine of global warming, as a long drought forces winemakers to rethink the styles of wine they can produce and the regions they can grow in. The three largest grape-growing regions in Australia, the driest inhabited continent on earth, all depend on irrigation to survive. The high cost of water has made life tough for growers.

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Minority and indigenous groups - silent victims of climate change says new global report

INTERNATIONAL: 11 March 2008
Minority and indigenous groups across the world are among the hardest hit by climate change and often disproportionately affected by climate-related disasters but their plight has yet to be recognised by the international community, a new report says. A study of several recent environmental disasters across the world shows that it is minority and indigenous groups that have been worst affected by changing weather patterns but in most cases when a disaster strikes help and relief reach them last.

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When the elements threaten a little piece of paradise

FIJI: 02 March 2008
Battered by the elements, the skeletal remains of coconut trees are all that remain to remind William McGoon of a by-gone era. He's lived at Togoru for the better part of his life and pushing on 61, still has some fight left in him. Togoru sits a few miles south-east of the township of Navua, and hugs the coastline with a commanding view of the hazy blue island of Beqa to the south.

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Hunters, anglers join global-warming outcry

US: 21 February 2008
Anglers say trout and salmon are moving upstream looking for colder water. Duck hunters say the prairie potholes where ducklings hatch are drying up. And game hunters say moose populations are migrating north. Many of these outdoor enthusiasts blame it on global warming. Now, they are lobbying Congress to protect their favorite pastimes.

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Climate change driving Mongolians from steppe to cities

MONGOLIA: 21 February 2008
Lifelong herder Namdag lives in a traditional felt tent home—or "ger"—among some half dozen cars in various states of disrepair, an informal junkyard against the towering, snow-capped mountains that surround the Mongolian capital of Ulaanbaatar (Ulan Bator). "I miss my old life," said the 71-year-old, now a world removed from the sweeping steppes he once called home. "But life out there is too difficult."

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Uganda's lucrative coffee threatened by climate change

UGANDA: 9 February 2008
The temperature is rising a little too quickly in Uganda -- and coffee farmers are getting worried. Growers say that global warming is damaging production of coffee, Uganda's biggest export. Ask coffee farmer Emmanuel Kawesi, who has a "feeling" about the impending danger. "It's hotter now -- this is not usual," he says standing under a wide mango tree to escape the intense sun.

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Chinese ice festival feels heat from climate change

CHINA: 8 January 2008
Chinese scientists have warned that climate change is hurting the most famous draw in the northern city of Harbin - its annual ice sculpture contest. Average annual temperatures in the city perched on the edge of Siberia hit 6.6 degrees Celsius last year, the highest average since records began, and the ice sculptures are feeling the heat.

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Climate change in Senegal ruins homes, lives

SENEGAL: 7 January 2008
MBAYE DIENG awoke to find water rising in his bedroom. He ordered the small children to be placed on the roof for safety, tried to retrieve as many belongings as possible and then waited for help. For some, Diengs ordeal is reminiscent of Hurricane Katrina. Instead, it was a torrential rainstorm with strong winds that sent waves crashing over a levee July 4 in Thiawlene (pronounced chow-LIN), a coastal neighborhood of 5,000 residents that lies 3 feet above sea level in the town of Rufisque, about 20 miles east of Dakar, Senegal.

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Drip, drip, drip sounds the slow death knell of Santa’s Lapland hideaway, as climate change threatens to turn childhood dreams to slush

FINLAND: 22 December 2007
Plop. Splash! Drip. Every year, like some extraordinary migratory species, many tens of thousands of British tourists trek to this remote northern outpost in search of the authentic Father Christmas. Kitted out with thermal underwear and Arctic explorer jumpsuits, they are treated not only to the unofficial anthem of Finnish Lapland – Wham’s Last Christmas – but also, even more ominously, to the sound of melting snow.

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Kenya: Climate Change Threatens Future of Local Tourism

KENYA: 13 November 2007
Last year, flash floods hit the Maasai Mara Game Reserve turning roads into streams and damaging the infrastructure. Months later, there is growing fear that we have not seen the last of the flash floods and that climate change will affect the way Kenya runs its tourism sector.

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Malaria moves in behind the loggers

PERU: 30 October 2007
Deforestation and climate change are returning the mosquito-borne disease to parts of Peru after 40 years.

The afternoon is hot and sticky on the banks of the Napo river, an arm of the Amazon, but Claudio, a logger, is shivering in his creaky wooden bed. "I feel bad, very bad, pain all over my body, fever, high fever, shudders," he says. "I have malaria; this is the 17th time so far. I don't know what to do any more."

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New England losing fall colors due to warming?

US: 22 October 2007
Every fall, Marilyn Krom tries to make a trip to Vermont to see its famously beautiful fall foliage. This year, she noticed something different about the autumn leaves.

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South struggles to cope with drought

US: 22 October 2007
Kids in Jefferson, Ga., are shutting the tap off as they brush their teeth. Adults are doing bigger, but fewer, laundry loads. And just about everybody is glancing nervously at the puddle passing for the town's reservoir. Like many in the South, the people of this farm town turned Atlanta suburb have not given much thought to water consumption in the past. But with their well literally running dry, residents have curtailed water consumption by 25 percent. Now they just hope it's enough.

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Tuvalu about to disappear into the ocean

TUVALU: 13 September 2007
The tiny Pacific island state of Tuvalu on Thursday urged the rest of the world to do more to combat global warming before it sinks beneath the ocean. The group of atolls and reefs, home to some 10,000 people, is barely two meters on average above sea-level and one study predicted at the current rate the ocean is rising could disappear in the next 30 to 50 years. "We keep thinking that the time will never come. The alternative is to turn ourselves into fish and live under water," Tuvalu Deputy Prime Tavau Teii told Reuters in the South Korean capital where he was attending a conference on the environment.

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Learning to live with it

INDIA/UK: 11 September 2007
The dusty roads and swelteringly heat of India's north-eastern state of Assam now make it hard to believe that it, like England, was hit by the worst floods in years just over a month ago. But Assam's floods claimed the life of at least one child: 12-year-old Atikur Rahman, who drowned trying to bathe in floodwater with friends. His village, Raimadha, in the Nalbari district of Assam, had been heavily flooded for five days.

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Australia's Dry Threatens Wine Drought

AUSTRALIA: 6 September 2007
The winding lines of shipping containers outside Casella Wines may mark the high-point of Australia's A$3 billion wine export market as drought and possible climate shift bite. John Casella heads the country's biggest family winery, based 600 km from the coast in the farming town of Yenda, the "enda the earth" jokes Viticultural Manager Kelly Drysdale.

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In Northern France, Warming Presses Fall Grape Harvest Into Summertime

FRANCE: 2 September 2007
On a cobweb-encrusted rafter above his giant steel grape pressers, René Muré is charting one of the world's most tangible barometers of global warming. The evidence, scrawled in black ink, is the first day of the annual grape harvest for the past three decades. In 1978, it was Oct. 16. In 1998, the date was Sept. 14. This year, harvesting started Aug. 24 -- the earliest ever recorded, not only in Muré's vineyards, but also in the entire Alsace wine district of northeastern France.

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Global swarming: Is climate change bringing the state more bugs?

US: 26 August 2007
As state entomologist, Jon Turmel speaks with authority about bugs: "They're just so cool." But ask him about the new insects arriving with the onset of global warming and he admits they're not so hot.

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Consequences On Agriculture

NEPAL: 24 August 2007
Top Narayan Shrestha, 31, a resident of Kabilash village of Chitwan district, 140 kilometers south west of capital, has seen many ups and downs in recent years in annual food productions, particularly in traditional crops like rice, maize and wheat. As there is less rainfall and warmer temperature, the production has become unpredictable.

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The human face of climate change

SOUTH AFRICA: 23 August 2007
The 2007 Ruth First fellowship was jointly awarded to journalist Leonie Joubert and photographer Santu Mofokeng. Joubert has had a long-standing interest in the environment, previously she researched South African flora and fauna endangered by climate change. The results of this research was Scorched, published by Wits University Press in 2006. Now Joubert is turning her attention to human communities. There is “a need to humanise the discussion surrounding climate change,” she said.

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After the Deluge, the Reality of Deprivation

INDIA: 22 August 2007
Losing everything he owns has become a routine disaster for Shankar, a landless laborer in the northeastern state of Bihar who saw his home and belongings destroyed in some of the worst floods to hit the north of India in decades. “This is the third time I’ve lost my house in the rains,” he said, standing in the water and peering into the shell of his home, hopeful of salvaging something from the ruins. “This year the rains were worse, and the waters are deeper. But in the end it’s the same. I have nothing left.”

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Inuit life threatened by climate change

CANADA: 18 August 2007
Even in July, conditions near the top of the world can be harsh and unforgiving. When most of the snow and ice melt, a desert-like landscape remains. Of the 229 or so people who live on Cornwallis Island, most are Inuit, native people transported from northern Quebec in the 1940s and 50s as part of a sovereign claim to the northern region. They’ve remained ever since. CBS News correspondent Daniel Sieberg reports from the town of Resolute in the Arctic.

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Twitchers spread wings as Scots bird species increase

SCOTLAND: 19 August 2007
TWITCHERS are having a field day. New figures reveal that the number of bird species being recorded in Scotland has increased dramatically. A new volume of Birds Of Scotland - to be published later this year - will contain 513 species, up from 452 in 1986 when the book was last brought out. Four new species have been recorded in the past three years, providing evidence that habitat ranges are expanding due to climate change.

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Wainwright sees the effects of warming now

ALASKA, US: 17 August 2007
The Arctic sea ice in Northwest Alaska is usually within 30 miles of Wainwright in August. Today it's more than 300 miles away, much farther than it's ever been. Wainwright hunters have usually bagged more than 100 walruses by this time in the season. They've bagged fewer than 20 this year.

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Wine before its time alarms Italy

ITALY: 16 August 2007
Patrizia Filippi has no degree in meteorology or any idea how to calculate what scientists call extreme weather change. But the 43-year-old grape picker has been working this area's silky, volcanic soil for nearly three decades, and she knows what she sees: This is an early harvest unlike anything that Italy, or any generation in her family, has experienced in memory.

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A river ran through it

AUSTRALIA: 5 August 2007
The Murray is the lifeblood of Australia's farming country, a legendary river that thundered 1,500 miles from the Snowy Mountains to the Indian Ocean. Now, it's choking to death in the worst drought for a thousand years, sparking water rationing and suicides on devastated farms. But is the 'big dry' a national emergency, or a warning that the earth is running out of water?

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Rising seas threat to Torres Strait islands

AUSTRALIA: 2 August 2007
Global warming isn't just a theory in Torres Strait – it's lapping at people's doorsteps. The phenomenon is a visible reality as rising sea levels threaten to erase centuries-old island communities. Roads have been swallowed whole, buildings washed out, graveyards swamped and houses flooded in six of the most vulnerable low-lying island communities. Authorities have ordered evacuation and relocation plans for more than 2000 people who face losing their land and livelihood from the invading sea.

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South Asia struggles with floods

SOUTH ASIA: 2 August 2007
Almost 250 people have died and over 17 million people have been displaced or marooned in severe flooding across India, Bangladesh and Nepal. The floods are being described as the worst in living memory, according to BBC correspondents in the region.

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Warming of glaciers threatens millions in China

CHINA: 1 August 2007
More than 3 miles above sea level in these jagged, wind-scoured mountains, there's little doubt that global warming is endangering China's future. The glaciers that ripple off the peaks of Anyemaqen, a mountain range in the western China province of Qinghai, are shrinking rapidly, endangering hundreds of millions of people who depend on the waters flowing eastward through the Yellow River.

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Climate change escalates Darfur crisis

SUDAN: 27 July 2007
Less rainfall on the fringes of the Sahara Desert is putting more of a strain on resources than ever before. With Darfur refugee women waiting up to two days for their chance to fill buckets at a communal water point, it's only a matter of time before bickering turns into a full-fledged fight.

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A dark, gloomy summer in England turns menacing

UK: 25 July 2007
The first sign of the flood for John Burrow came in a trickle, like sand through an hourglass, when water began to spill incongruously from the mail slots of the houses across Bridge Street. Then it started to cascade, powered by the force of the swollen Windrush River, which finally burst its banks after weeks of relentless rain.

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Swaziland: Facing Climate Change

SWAZILAND: 20 July 2007
Felix Matsebula, a subsistence farmer in Swaziland's eastern Lubombo region, near the Mozambique border, always suspected that the columns of smoke rising from the surrounding sugarcane plantations and blackening the sky were harmful to his crops, and a reason his harvests have been declining for years. "You hear about global warming and greenhouse gases. You can see for yourself how the sun is almost hidden by the smoke here," he said.

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Zero water cuts deep into citrus orchards.

AUSTRALIA: 11 July 2007
The citrus industry along the Murray River in southern Australia is facing catastrophe if zero water allocations remain for the next 12 months due to the long term drought. This region of Australia produces 52 per cent of Australia's fruit.

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Crisis looms for Bolivia as glaciers melt

BOLIVIA: 10 July 2007
The glaciers in the Andes Mountains of Bolivia provide about half the drinking water for two million people down the mountain. But the glaciers are now melting at an unprecedented rate and will be completely gone within 20 years.

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Warming waters drive fish south

AUSTRALIA: 9 July 2007
A study of waters off the south-east coast of Australia reveals that they are warming up faster than anywhere else in the southern hemisphere. Warmer waters could devastate local fisheries.

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Wealthy Stake $25 Million in War with the Sea

AMERICA: 8 July 2007
Erosion has become a serious threat to bluff-top homes in the village of Siansconet on Nantucket Island. On this island money is no object and it is a place where carpenters rountinely commute to work by plane.

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African Farmers Hit by Climate Change

ZAMBIA: 6 July 2007
Corn farmers in southern Zambia used to be able to predict the year's first rainfall, almost to the day. Now, October often stretches into November, and November into December, before the rain comes. The rainy season in this largely poor southern African nation, a study shows, has been getting shorter, more intense and more erratic, especially over the last 20 years - symptoms of longer-term climatic changes occurring across Africa.

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Drought Forces Desert Nomads to Settle Down

AFRICA: 2 July 2007
Climate change threatens human cultures. For centuries the Tuareg people have lived as nomads, herding their animals from field to field just south of the Sahara Desert in Mali, near Timbuktu. But this way of life has become impossible due to changes in the climate.

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India Rains Strand Pilgrims; Three Die in Mumbai

INDIA: 2 July 2007
Heavy rains across India left thousands of Hindu Pilgrams stranded in Kashmir and killed three people in Mumbai while at least 8 fisherman where feared drowned of the stormy southern coast.

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Greenland's ice meltdown quickens.

GREENLAND: 1 July 2007
The glaciers are disappearing and a lot of people want to see Greenland ice sheet before its gone explained a Danish glacier tour guide who has watched the Russell Glacier melt over the past 22 years.

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Penguins' struggle is a warning to the world

ANTARCTICA: 1 July 2007
Adelies Penguins are beginning to die off by the tens of thousands as a result of global warming. Today floating ice formations that are crucial to the Adelies' survival are melting and thinning.

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Crisis looms as rivers around Mt Kenya dry up.

KENYA: 1 July 2007
Mt Kenya's glaciers have melted and the rivers have dried. Now residents of Kirua, Mbari, Nari and Rurii areas walk for kilometres in search of water, which they buy in 20 litre jerrycans.

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Climate Commission looks at changes in states of ice, tundra

ALASKA, US: 1 July 2007
Global warming is changing ice conditions off Alaskas coast so much that elders and hunters cannot rely on their expertise to keep them safe. Ice conditions are completely changing and people are more cautious when traveling across the ice.

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Rains hit West Europe wheat, drought devastates east

UK: 27 June 2007
Europe's wheat crop has rain in all the wrong places this year, with already sodden France, Germany and Britain getting a further soaking this week, while drought has devastated countries further east.

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Farmers are reporting nothing but dust

AMERICA: 19 June 2007
More than a third of the United States is in the grip of a menacing drought that threatens to make its way into Illinois and other Midwestern states before the summer ends. While much of the West has experienced drought conditions for close to a decade, severe drought conditions are moving north causing level D4 drought, the most extreme level charted and the worst in the nation.

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Ukraine farmers suffer in worst drought for century

UKRAINE: 19 June 2007
Southern Ukraine is in the grip of a drought which has affected 60 percent of grainfields. With a snap parliamentary election due in September, the drought and the prospect of further, hugely unpopular rises in bread prices are high on the political agenda. As a result of the drought, the government has reduced its crop forecast to 30 million tonnes from 38 million.

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Indians speak forcefully on climate

AMERICA: 17 June 2007
US tribes join discourse on global warming. In recent months, some Native American leaders have spoken out more forcefully about the danger of climate change from greenhouse gases, joining a growing national discourse on what to do about the warming planet. Scientists have documented climate change, but Native Americans speak of it in spiritual terms and remind others that their elders prophesized environmental tragedy many generations ago.

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Death toll from Bangladesh mudslides, lightning reaches 105

BANGLADESH: 12 June 2007
A torrent of mudslides, flooding and lightning killed at least 105 people and left scores more missing as the annual monsoon rains hit Bangladesh. The heavy rains (the highest recorded levels in seven years) washing away shanties and inundating cities. The worst-hit area was the hilly port city of Chittagong, where large chunks of earth slid off the soaked hillsides, burying dozens of crudely built shacks.

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Heatwave cooks North India, dozens killed

INDIA: 12 June 2007
Hot and dusty desert winds have caused a heatwave across the plains of northern India, killing 74 people over the last week, officials and local media reports said on Monday. Most of the dead were beggars, homeless and people working in the open hit by sunstrokes and dehydration. Temperatures peaked on Saturday, reaching 48.9 degrees Celsius (120 Fahrenheit) in Ganganagar in the desert state of Rajasthan.

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'No doubt' about effect of drought on trout

AUSTRALIA: 11 June 2007
The effects of climate change and the lack of water in NSW dams could threaten the multi-million dollar fishing industry, which contributes almost 700 jobs to the region and $70 million to the NSW economy. Inflows and water levels in lakes Eucumbene and Jindabyne are the lowest on record and there is some concern if the situation does not improve that trout stocks could become depleted.

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The village that was swallowed by the sea

THAILAND: 25 May 2007
Just an hour's drive south of the Thai capital Bangkok , the small coastal village of Khun Samutchine is facing a daily battle with the sea. The village is suffering from the effects of severe coastal erosion: the sea comes in at a rate of approximately 25 metres a year. Environmentalists say the erosion experienced in the area is probably some of the worst in the world.

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Global warming melts Andean Glaciers toward oblivion

BOLIVIA: 8 June 2007
Global warming will melt most Andean glaciers in the next 30 years, scientists say, threatening the livelihood of millions of people who depend on them for drinking water, farming and power generation. The glacier on Bolivia's Chacaltaya mountain used to be the world's highest ski resort at 18,000 feet (5,500 metres) above sea level. But the glacier is now only 10 feet (3 metres) thick on average and will disappear this year or next.

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Expanding deserts hurts farmers in China

CHINA: 19 June 2007
Half a century after Mao Zedong‘s "Great Leap Forward" brought irrigation to the arid grasslands in this remote corner of northwest China, the government is giving up on its attempt to make a breadbasket out of what has increasingly become a stretch of scrub and sand dunes.

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The cruelties of global warming

PERU, KENYA, BANGLADESH, NICARAGUA, TAJIKISTAN: 29 May 2007
High in the Andes, freak hailstorms and cold snaps are freezing llamas to death. In the north of Kenya, unprecedented droughts have driven herdsmen into deadly battles for the few water holes. In the mountains of Tajikistan, near the border with Afghanistan, flooding and landslides are washing away the crops.

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Victim of climate change, a town seeks a lifeline

ALASKA, US: 27 May 2007
The sturdy little Cessnas land whenever the fog lifts, delivering children’s bicycles, boxes of bullets, outboard motors and cans of dried oats. And then, with a rumble down a gravel strip, the planes are gone, the outside world recedes and this subarctic outpost steels itself once again to face the frontier of climate change. “I don’t want to live in permafrost no more,” said Frank Tommy, 47, standing beside gutted geese and seal meat drying on a wooden rack outside his mother’s house. “It’s too muddy. Everything is crooked around here.”

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The village that was swallowed by the sea

THAILAND: 25 May 2007
Just an hour's drive south of the Thai capital Bangkok , the small coastal village of Khun Samutchine is facing a daily battle with the sea. The village is suffering from the effects of severe coastal erosion: the sea comes in at a rate of approximately 25 metres a year. Environmentalists say the erosion experienced in the area is probably some of the worst in the world.

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Climbers face more risks as alps crumble

SWITZERLAND: 22 May 2007
Climbing sheer rock faces has never been the safest of sports, but global warming is increasing the risk factor. The ice that glues Alpine peaks together is slowly melting, loosening rocks and making classic European climbs like the Eiger and Matterhorn even riskier than in the past.

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Mountaineers' fear of global warming

NEPAL: 21 May 2007
Climbers and officials in Nepal are worried that global warming is making the glacial environment unsafe for humans in the Himalayas. They say human settlements and activities such as mountaineering are threatened by glaciers retreating and glacial lakes growing both in number and size.

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Island sees coastal changes as ice cap melts faster than expected

GREENLAND: 14 May 2007
Greenland's ice cap is melting, and faster than scientists had thought possible. If its ice cap melted entirely, oceans would rise by 20 feet, flooding New York and London, and drowning island nations like the Maldives.

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As the climate changes, bits of England's coast crumble

ENGLAND: 4 May 2007
An English farm in Beccles, on the cliff above, is losing land to the encroaching sea. The government will no longer try to save all threatened land. Coastal erosion has been a fact of life here for a century, because the land under East Anglia is slowly sinking. But the erosion has never been as quick and cataclysmic as it has been in recent years, an effect of climate change and global warming, many scientists say.

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American indigenous peoples share stories of climate change

US: 2 May 2007
Arctic leaders touring the United States with their eyewitness messages of climate change shared their stories Sarah James Drummingwith local Indigenous Peoples yesterday. The exchange came during a tour stop in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The audience at a public meeting in a Presbyterian church included local Anishabe people, and also some descendants of Saami people who had come to hear Saami Council Vice President Olav Mathis Eira.

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Warming for Arctic wolves, suicide

ARCTIC: 4 May 2007
GLOBAL warming has sent marauding wolves into an Alaskan hamlet, killed Norwegian reindeer with unlikely parasites and may even spur suicide among Inuit youth, Arctic leaders said today. As scientists and government officials in Bangkok put the finishing touches on a report by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change on what to do about global warming, the three Arctic emissaries came to Washington to tell how the phenomenon was making their lives more difficult now.

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Feeling Warmth, Subtropical Plants Move North

US: 3 May 2007
ATLANTA - Like a true belle, this city flounces into bloom when the weather turns, its redbuds, azaleas and forsythia emerging like so much lace on a bodice. But in recent years, plants that thrive in even warmer weather have begun crashing the ball. At the Habersham Gardens nursery, where well-heeled homeowners choose their spring seedlings, a spiky-leafed, sultry coastal oleander has been thriving in a giant urn.

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Global warming blamed for Swedish beetle-infestation

SWEDEN: 2 May 2007
VRETA KLOSTER, Sweden - For Goran Samuelsson, the proud owner of 70 hectares of majestic spruce trees here in southeastern Sweden, the forest is no place for fairy tales or fauns. It is his economic security - "a bank where you don't have to bow to get what you need," as he puts it. But recently, due to a set of events that many experts see as caused by global warming, Samuelsson has started seeing a part of his prized forest in a much darker light. He now calls it "hell."

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The first refugees of global warming

BANGLADESH: 2 May 2007
ANTARPARA, Bangladesh - Muhammad Ali, a wiry 65-year-old, has never driven a car, run an air conditioner or done much of anything that produces greenhouse gases. But on a warming planet, he is on the verge of becoming a climate refugee. In the past 10 years the farmer has had to tear down and move his tin-and-bamboo house five times to escape the encroaching waters of the huge Jamuna River, swollen by severe monsoons that scientists believe are caused by global warming and greater glacier melt in the Himalayas.

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Brisbane dies for a thirst quencher

AUSTRALIA: 29 April 2007
When the timer pings, Emma Kendall-Marsden knows that her four minutes in the shower are up. This is Brisbane, and the water is running out. Emma and her husband Sam emigrated to Australia from the UK in 2003. The lifestyle and warm climate were the main attractions. They bought a house in a leafy Brisbane suburb. Their spacious lawn was irrigated by 24-hour sprinklers.

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Climate change bites

GLOBAL: 25 April 2007
When a 59-year-old man developed a fever and stomach ache on the French Mediterranean island of Corsica last August, his diagnosis surprised local doctors and sent a warning signal to the wider medical world. He had contracted malaria.

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Alien Invasion: The Fungus That Came to Canada

CANADA: 8 April 2007
Sally Lester, an animal pathologist at a British Columbia laboratory, slipped a slide under her microscope -- a tissue from a dog on Vancouver Island. Her lens focused on a tiny cell that looked like a boiled egg. It was late 1999. She had started seeing a lot of those.

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