"Political pressure is mounting to make businesses pay for the damage they cause to the environment, and the latest UN study assessing the impact of the world's biggest companies is almost certainly the first stage in a concerted campaign to calculate how much damage is caused, what it is worth and ultimately how it can be stopped. Another report due later this year, The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity, led by the economist and UN special adviser Pavan Sukhdev, will be another significant step towards th..."

"We are in danger of passing an extremely dangerous tipping point, with the frightening discovery of massive deposits of sub-sea methane in the Arctic. Hey, ho, where's the cash flow? Wasn't the bailout supposed to get those streams of credit flowing again? But while the titans of trickle-down and the free-reign rainmakers pray for new rivers of revenue to float their boats, some venerable bodies of water beyond the canyons of Wall Street are in danger of literally evaporating -- and all the money in the world won'..."

"Earth is heating up lately, but so are Mars, Pluto and other worlds in our solar system, leading some scientists to speculate that a change in the sun’s activity is the common thread linking all these baking events. Others argue that such claims are misleading and create the false impression that rapid global warming, as Earth is experiencing, is a natural phenomenon. While evidence suggests fluctuations in solar activity can affect climate on Earth, and that it has done so in the past, the majority of climat..."

"For example, scientists at the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences at the University of Kiel in Germany recently discovered that plankton consumes more carbon at higher atmospheric concentrations of CO2. "The plankton were carbon-enriched," says marine biologist Ulf Riebesell, who conducted the study. "There weren't more of them, but each cell had more carbon." This could mean that microscopic ocean plants may potentially absorb more of the carbon emitted into the atmosphere. Unfortunately, other research (from..."

"Sea Level Rise—The level of the world's oceans will rise, likely inundating low-lying land, turning freshwater brackish and potentially triggering widespread migration of human populations from affected areas. "As temperatures rise, thermal expansion will lead to sea-level rise, independent of melting ice," says chemical engineer Lenny Bernstein, another lead author of the recent IPCC report. "The indications are that this factor alone could cause serious problems [and] ice-sheet melting would greatly accelerate..."

"Climate change is "unequivocal" and it is 90 percent certain that the "net effect of human activities since 1750 has been one of warming," the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) —a panel of more than 2,500 scientists and other experts—wrote in its first report on the physical science of global warming earlier this year. In its second assessment, the IPCC stated that human-induced warming is having a discernible influence on the planet, from species migration to thawing permafrost. Despite these findin..."

"Abortion. Same-sex marriage. Stem-cell research. U.S. legislators backed by the Christian right vote against these issues with near-perfect consistency. That probably doesn't surprise you, but this might: Those same legislators are equally united and unswerving in their opposition to environmental protection...."