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Featured stories in this issue...

Toxic Chemicals Blamed for the Disappearance of Arctic Boys
  Twice as many girls as boys are being born in remote communities
  north of the Arctic Circle. And across much of the northern
  hemisphere, particularly in the US and Japan, the gender ratio has
  skewed towards girls for the first time.
Study Suggests Fewer Gray Whales Means Ocean Itself Is Failing
  Now the remaining gray whale population faces a new threat,
  scientists say: The changing seabed of the Pacific Ocean can barely
  support a small fraction of their original numbers as the climate
  warms.
Antarctic Penguin Colony Nears Extinction
  The Adelies penguin population has shrunk by 80 percent since 1974,
  and scientists expect the knee-high birds to be extinct in eight
  years. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is considering listing 10
  other species of penguins as possibly facing extinction.
Threatened Species List Shows Escalating 'Global Extinction Crisis'
  More than 180 species have been added since 2006 to the ranks of
  those classified as endangered, critically endangered or vulnerable.
  "We're at code red," said Dr. Mark Wright. "The plight of the world's
  species is a mirror on the state of the planet."
Global Warming Imperils France's Vineyards
  Throughout the wine-producing world, from France to South Africa to
  California, vintners are in the vanguard of confronting the impact of
  climate change. Rising temperatures are forcing unprecedented early
  harvests, changing the tastes of the best-known varieties of wine and
  threatening the survival of centuries-old wine-growing regions.
Climate Change Brings Grim Forecast
  As the climate turns warmer, food production may decline 30 to 40%
  in India and across many parts of Africa.
Global Warming Impact Like 'Nuclear War': Report
  Climate change could have global security implications on a par
  with nuclear war unless urgent action is taken, according to a new
  study of global security.

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From: The Independent (London, England), Sept. 12, 2007
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TOXIC CHEMICALS BLAMED FOR THE DISAPPEARANCE OF ARCTIC BOYS

By Daniel Howden in Nuuk, Greenland

Twice as many girls as boys are being born in remote communities north
of the Arctic Circle. Across much of the northern hemisphere,
particularly in the US and Japan, the gender ratio has skewed towards
girls for the first time.

Now scientists working with Inuit villages in Arctic Russia and
Greenland have found the first direct evidence that this trend is
linked to widespread chemical pollutants. Despite the Arctic's
pristine environment, the area functions as a pollution sink for much
of the industrialised world. Winds and rivers deliver a toxic tide
from the northern hemisphere into the polar food chain.

Scientists have traced flame-retardant chemicals used in everything
from industrial products to furniture, phones and laptops to the food
chain, finding high levels of these pollutants in seabirds, seals and
polar bears. The Inuit have traditionally relied on a hunter-
gatherer's diet almost exclusively made up of marine animals, making
them especially vulnerable to toxic pollutants.

Historically in large populations, it is considered normal for the
number of baby boys slightly to outnumber girls in a trend believed
to compensate naturally for greater male mortality rates.

But a peer-reviewed US study found an unexpected drop in the
proportion of boys born in much of the northern hemisphere. The
missing boys would number more than 250,000 in the US and Japan, using
the gender ratio at the levels recorded up until 1970.

The researchers suspected that this linked widespread exposure among
pregnant women to hormone-mimicking pollutants. But Danish scientists
examined 480 families in the Russian Arctic and found high levels of
the hormone-mimicking pollutants in the blood of pregnant women, and
twice as many girls being born as boys.

They are now studying similar communities in Greenland and Canada and
although full results will be published next year, their initial
findings exactly match those in Russia.

Lars Otto Riersen, a marine biologist, pollution expert and an
executive with the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme (Amap),
says: "When you see such things happening in the Arctic, it may happen
here first, in the same way as climate change did."

Although the nature of the Inuit diet is believed to have triggered
the disturbing ratios in the Arctic, a similar pattern may be emerging
further south. Until now, the only evidence of the impact of these
toxins was circumstantial. The most skewed ratio had been in Canada,
where a First Nation community in Sarnia lives amid Ontario's
petrochemical industry, and the number of boys born has plunged since
the 1990s. The fallout from the toxic cloud in Seveso in Italy in 1976
allowed scientists to monitor dramatic impacts on both the gender
ratios and numbers of babies born.

Every year in the industrialised world, household fires cause billions
of pounds worth of damage, and chemical flame retardants designed to
curb this are big business. They contain a host of chemicals some of
which mimic human hormones. These chemicals became notorious in the
1960s and a worldwide ban on one category, PCBs, was introduced after
tests showed they had entered the food chain with potentially lethal
consequences for humans and animals. But the chemicals industry
continues to produce variations of the retardants, which scientists
claim are not subject to the long-range testing required.

Dr Jens Hansen, leader of Amap research, said they were finding
incredibly high levels of banned PCBs among a cocktail of other
hormone-mimicking chemicals in pre-natal mothers. Pregnant mothers, he
said were ingesting these hormone-mimicking chemicals in their diet
and passing them through the placenta where they influenced the gender
of the foetus or killed male foetuses.

Aleqa Hammond, Greenland's Foreign Minister, says: "We heard from
scientists four years ago that our heavy metal consumption is
dangerous." She adds wryly: "If you ate me, you would die."

Aqqaluk Lynge, head of the Inuit Circumpolar Council, said they were
trying to raise the alarm internationally but nobody was listening.
"People don't want to talk about such a critical question. We are
talking about our people's survival which is very alarming."

Greenland, the world's largest island and still a dependency of
Denmark, now has the highest proportion of women in the world.

Copyright 2007 Independent News and Media Limited

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From: San Francisco Chronicle (pg. A18), Sept. 11, 2007
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STUDY SUGGESTS FEWER GRAY WHALES MEANS OCEAN ITSELF IS FAILING

By David Perlman, Chronicle Science Editor

Gray whales, the massive mammals that migrate each year offshore along
the California coast, once flourished in the tens of thousands before
commercial whaling drove them nearly to extinction.

Now what remains of the whale population faces another threat,
scientists say: The changing seabed of the Pacific Ocean can barely
support a small fraction of their original numbers as the climate
warms.

Recent gray whale counts indicate that about 22,000 of the gentle
creatures now migrate along the coast. Until recently, scientists had
assumed that the whales had fully recovered from their near
extinction, and that the current number represented the entire
population of Pacific gray whales that existed before the whale
hunting era.

Not at all, according to a tricky DNA study by S. Elizabeth Alter
and Stephen Palumbi of Stanford University's Hopkins Marine Station --
and there's a take-home lesson here, they say: Alter and Palumbi
calculate there must have been about 100,000 gray whales along the
Pacific coast before the whalers came. So if the ocean could once
provide ample food for that many whales, but can't nourish the 22,000
or so that remain, then the changing ocean itself must be in trouble,
too, they reason.

"Our chain of evidence tells us that if the ocean could once support
100,000 whales, then we need to ask ourselves why it can't support
20,000 now -- that's our worry for the state of the ocean," Palumbi
said.

Climate change caused by global warming is most likely responsible,
but other influences, such as pollution that degrades the sediments on
the ocean bottom where the whales feed, or overfishing that alters the
entire ocean ecology, could also play a role, the scientists say.

But as Alter said Monday in a telephone interview from New York, where
she is working temporarily at the American Museum of Natural History,
"It means we really must pay more attention to everything that impacts
the ocean -- whether it's climate or shipping or fishing practices."

A report by Alter and Palumbi on the new evidence for population
changes in the Pacific gray whales is being published today in the
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Other scientists have long been aware that the world's oceans have
grown warmer in recent decades. They have documented the northward
movement of organisms like crabs, shrimp and mollusks as they seek the
colder water temperatures they need to thrive. Meanwhile, organisms
that require warm environments are also spreading up from farther
south to find new habitats that suit them.

"As we're watching the slow creep northward of the organisms on which
the whales feed," Alter said, "it seems likely that the whales' lives
are changing, too."

According to Palumbi, calving rates in the lagoons of Baja California
have diminished in recent years, while adults are showing up thinner
and even malnourished -- evidence that they are not getting enough
nourishment from the sediments of the northern ocean.

"This is evidence that the whole ecosystem of the Bering Sea is
changing," he said, "and that's reason for real concern."

The population estimates by Alter and Palumbi are based on their study
of genetic diversity in 42 gray whales whose DNA provided a record of
their original numbers. In small populations of animals, there's more
inbreeding and less genetic variation, Palumbi explained, while larger
populations mean greater genetic diversity -- "so the record of their
numbers in the past is written in their DNA today," Palumbi said in an
interview.

"This is a brilliant application of a powerful technique that tells us
the estimates of pre-whaling gray whale populations were quite likely
a serious underestimate," said Jane Lubchenco, a noted marine
biologist at Oregon State University who was not involved in the
Hopkins research but is an expert on ocean ecology.

"These findings challenge the current assessment that gray whales have
more or less recovered from the (earlier) impacts of whaling."

Whale watchers along California's coast are delighted every autumn
when they spot the huge animals heading south, and just as delighted
again in the spring, when the whales -- including mothers with their
newborn calves swimming alongside -- head for the far north, a round-
trip journey of at least 12,000 miles.

The toothless gray whales are bottom feeders -- they scoop up sediment
from the ocean floor and strain out crustaceans, mollusks and other
organisms through the baleen plates that act like combs of thick hair
attached to their upper jaws while the sediment returns to the seabed
- "they're like marine bulldozers," as Palumbi said.

E-mail David Perlman at dperlman@sfchronicle.com.

Copyright 2007 Hearst Communications Inc.

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From: MSNBC, Sept. 12, 2007
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ANTARCTIC PENGUIN COLONY NEARS EXTINCTION

By Daniel Grossman

PALMER STATION, Antarctica -- William Fraser remembers when the ice
floes and rocky outcrops near this U.S. outpost were thick with Adelie
penguins and the constant, almost deafening roar of their calls made
it impossible to hold a conversation.

"You could not go anywhere without seeing hundreds to thousands of
Adelies," says the ecologist.

Today, the Adelies outnumber people in this icy patch of the world by
100 to 1. The ratio sounds impressive until Fraser notes that the
penguin population has shrunk by 80 percent since he began studying it
in 1974, and that he expects the knee-high birds to be extinct in
eight years.

What's to blame? Fraser, president of the Polar Ocean Research Group,
says global warming is part of the problem because it has made it
harder for the penguins to forage and breed.

When he first arrived at Palmer Station, Fraser says, the climate was
cold and relatively dry. Now it is warmer and wet, "a bit like
southeast Alaska," he says. "That environment did not exist at Palmer
30 years ago."

Peninsula problem

Palmer Station, the smallest of three permanent U.S. research bases on
the continent, is near the northern tip of the Antarctic Peninsula, a
finger-like piece of land that points at South America.

The region is warming faster than anywhere else on Earth. Winter
temperatures have risen by between 9 and 11 degrees Fahrenheit since
recordkeeping began about 50 years ago, and the annual sea ice that
covers the ocean near Palmer Station lasts 25 percent to 30 percent
fewer days than it did in the 1970s.

Adelie penguins spend 90 percent of their lives at sea, swimming or
huddled on ice floes in one of the world's harshest climates.

In 1974, about 15,200 breeding pairs nested each summer on a handful
of windswept islands near Palmer Station.

In 2003, there were 5,635 breeding pairs. "Right now, you can walk on
some of these islands and it is completely silent," Fraser said at the
time. "It's sad."

During the 2005 breeding season, Fraser could find no breeding pairs
on a rocky outcrop called Litchfield Island. It marked the first time
in at least 700 years that, according to paleontological evidence from
an excavation, Adelie penguins hadn't nested there.

The latest breeding season ended early this year. Speaking from his
home in Montana, Fraser said his team counted only 3,393 pairs of
Adelies.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said in July that it is considering
listing 10 species of penguins as possibly facing extinction, also
citing global warming as part of the problem. Adelie penguins are not
on the agency's list, however, because large colonies in other parts
of Antarctica are thriving.

Fraser says the birds near Palmer Station are struggling to have
families.

Adelies arrive at the islands in the area each October, soon after the
snow melts during the southern hemisphere's spring. They build pebble
nests big enough to cradle a basketball in colonies with up to several
thousand adults.

But there is evidence that snowfall is increasing on the Antarctic
Peninsula, which in the past was almost desert-like. The cause is
believed to be warmer air, which is able to hold more moisture, and
reduced sea ice, which permits more ocean water to evaporate.

More winter precipitation means the islands around Palmer Station
don't become snow-free until later in the spring. But Adelies can't
build nests and lay viable eggs until their gravel breeding ground is
bare.

Time pressure to feed

If the penguins wait too long to lay eggs, there won't be enough time
to raise chicks before the area's krill season ends and the penguins
are forced to move for the winter.

When they do depart, the Adelies rely on ice floes, which act like
moving sidewalks, helping to carry the birds to their winter feeding
grounds hundreds of miles south of Palmer Station. But sea ice is
shrinking, Fraser says, and the penguins don't always make it to the
best places to feast on the shrimp-like krill that sustain them.

As a human being, Fraser says it is troubling to see the birds he's
studied his whole professional life disappear. But as a scientist, he
watches the rapid-fire changes taking place at Palmer Station with
fascination.

"At one time we were getting glimpses of these changes," he says.
"Right now they're so obvious it's quite remarkable."

Copyright 2007 by MSNBC.com

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From: The Guardian (Manchester, UK), Sept. 12, 2007
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THREATENED SPECIES LIST SHOWS ESCALATING 'GLOBAL EXTINCTION CRISIS'

By Alison Benjamin

Corals and seaweed have joined the ranks of threatened species, and
more apes and reptiles are now facing extinction according to the
World Conservation Union, which warns of a "global extinction
crisis".

The conservation group's annual Red List of threatened species,
published today, found that the extinction crisis had escalated in the
last year with 16,306 species now at the highest levels of extinction
threat, equivalent to almost 40% of all species in the survey.

A quarter of all mammals, a third of all amphibians and one in eight
birds on the 2007 IUCN Red List are in jeopardy.

More than 180 species have been added since 2006 to the ranks of those
classified as endangered, critically endangered or vulnerable.

IUCN director general Julia Marton-Lefevre warned that this year's
list showed how efforts to protect species were inadequate and that a
concerted effort by all levels of society was needed to prevent their
widespread extinction.

"The rate of biodiversity loss is increasing and we need to act now to
significantly reduce it and stave off this global extinction crisis,"
she said.

Despite reports of its demise, the Yangtze river dolphin is classified
as critically endangered (possibly extinct). Although the last
documented sighting of the dolphin was in 2002, further surveys are
needed before it can be definitively classified as extinct, said the
IUCN. A possible sighting last month is being investigated by Chinese
scientists.

The IUCN report had just one success story. Mauritius Echo Parakeets
have been downlisted from the "critically endangered" category to
"endangered" after conservation measures led to 139 birds bred in
captivity being successfully released into the wild.

Deputy head of IUCN's species programme, Jean-Christophe Vie, said an
improvement for only one species was "really worrying" in the light of
government commitments such as the 2010 target to slow down the rate
of biodiversity loss.

Corals were assessed and added to the Red List for the first time, and
two corals found in the Galapagos have entered the list in the
"critically endangered" category and one in the "vulnerable" category.
The rise in sea temperature caused by the effects of El Nino and
climate change are identified as the main threats.

Ocean warming also threatens seaweeds around the islands, with 10
classified as critically endangered, six of which are highlighted as
"possibly extinct".

The seaweeds are also affected by overfishing which removes predators
from the food chain, resulting in an increase in sea urchins, which
overgraze the algae.

Gorillas and orangutans face a particularly grim future after the
discovery that more than 60% of Western Lowland Gorillas in Africa
have been wiped out by the Ebola virus and the commercial bushmeat
trade, and forest clearance for oil palm plantations, along with
illegal logging, continue to seriously threaten the survival of
orangutans in Sumatra and Borneo.

The Gharial crocodile has been uplisted from "endangered" to
"critically endangered" following the discovery that there are less
than 200 breeding adults left in the wild. The report said that
excessive irreversible habitat loss in Nepal and India following the
construction of dams and irrigation canals had wiped out more than
half the crocodile's population in the last decade.

Other particularly threatened animals include the Eastern Chimpanzee,
found in central and east Africa, which faces habitat loss, poaching
and disease, and Speke's Gazelle whose numbers have been decimated by
hunting, drought and overgrazing across the grasslands of Somalia and
Ethiopia.

Two Mexican freshwater turtle species and a rattlesnake species are
among the 700 reptiles added to the list this year after a major
assessment in Mexico and North America. The Santa Catalina Island
Rattlesnake, caught by illegal collectors and eaten by feral cats, is
the most endangered new entry.

The brightly-coloured Banggai Cardinalfish, collected for the
international aquarium trade, is one of 1,200 endangered fish on the
list.

Vultures in Africa and Asia are among the most endangered birds with
five s pecies, including the Red-headed Vulture and the Egyptian
Vulture, reclassified this year. Lack of food, due to habitat loss, a
reduction in grazing mammals and the increasing use of drugs to treat
livestock are to blame for the vultures' rapid decline.

The Red List examines just over 40,000 species, around 12% of the 15m
species in the world.

Around 70% of the world's assessed plants are on the 2007 Red List.

The Woolly-stalked Begonia, a Malaysian herb, was the only species
declared extinct this year bringing the total number of extinct
species to 785. A further 65 species now exist only in captivity.

Chair of the IUCN's species survival commission, Holly Dublin, said it
showed how environmentalists alone could not save endangered animals
and plants.

"The challenge of the extinction crisis also requires attention and
action from the general public, the private sector, governments and
policy makers to ensure that global biodiversity remains intact for
generations to come," she said.

The IUCN report stressed how the rapid disappearance of species had a
direct impact on people's lives. Declining freshwater fish, for
example, deprived rural poor communities of their major source of food
and their livelihoods.

Jane Smart, head of the IUCN's species programme, said: "Our lives are
inextricably linked with biodiversity and ultimately its protection is
essential for our very survival." Conservation charity, WWF, said the
increasing number of threatened species on the IUCN Red List
demonstrated how the planet was being pushed to its limits.

"We're at code red," said Dr Mark Wright, chief scientist at WWF-UK.

"The plight of the world's species is a mirror on the state of the
planet.

Species are under enormous pressure as we systematically destroy their
habitat or overexploit them for our increasingly demanding lifestyles.

"We urgently need to reverse this trend and start living within the
planet's natural resources -- not just for the wellbeing of these
threatened species but also for our own."

Copyright 2007 The Guardian

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From: Minneapolis Star Tribune, Sept. 8, 2007
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GLOBAL WARMING IMPERILS FRANCE'S VINEYARDS

Grapes and winemakers are used to a cool climate, and they're having
difficulty adapting to hot weather.

By Molly Moore, Washington Post

ROUFFACH, France -- On a cobweb-encrusted rafter above his giant steel
grape pressers, Rene Mure 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 Mure's vineyards, but also in
the entire Alsace wine district of northeastern France.

"I noticed the harvest was getting earlier before anybody had a name
for it," said Mure, 59, the 11th generation of his family to produce
wine from the clay and limestone slopes of the Vosges Mountains near
the German border. "When I was young, we were harvesting in October
with snow on the mountaintops. Today, we're harvesting in August."

Throughout the wine-producing world, from France to South Africa to
California, vintners are in the vanguard of confronting the impact of
climate change. Rising temperatures are forcing unprecedented early
harvests, changing the tastes of the best-known varieties of wine and
threatening the survival of centuries-old wine-growing regions.

In the hot Mediterranean vineyards -- the first to feel the effects of
longer, drier summers -- vintners are harvesting grapes at night to
protect the fragile fruit at the critical picking stage. Growers in
Spain, Italy and southern France are buying land at higher terrains
for future vineyards.

Wine comes back in England

Some champagne producers in northern France -- whose grapes were ready
for harvest in August, earlier than in any year on record -- are
eyeing properties in southern England, the current beneficiary of
planet warming. The British wine industry is reemerging for the first
time in the 500 years since a mini-ice age cooled Europe.

While Provence and other southern regions of France have suffered
through debilitating droughts and high temperatures for several
seasons, scientists and growers have been stunned by the dramatic
evolutions in the northernmost regions of Alsace and Champagne, long
considered less susceptible to global warming.

"Usually Alsace is one of the last regions to harvest in France, and
this year we were the first ones," said Gerard Boesch, president of
the Alsace Wine Association. "That's astonishing. Vintners wonder how
all this will turn out in a few years."

In a chain reaction of nature, climate change is also sending new
insects and diseases north. The leafhopper is migrating north with
warmer weather, spreading yellow-leaf disease in Alsace vineyards for
the first time, according to a regional research institute.

Scientists and vintners say wine grapes are the best agricultural
measure of climate change because of their extraordinary sensitivity
to weather and the meticulous data that have been kept concerning the
long-lived vines.

"The link of wine to global warming is unique because the quality of
wine is very dependent on the climate," said Bernard Seguin, an
authority on the impact of global warming and viniculture at the
French National Agronomy Institute. "For me, it is the ultimate
expression of the consequences of climate change."

Nowhere is the impact more acute or better documented than in France.
Here, the $13 billion wine industry is not only crucial to the economy
but also more inextricably entwined in the culture and heritage of the
people than in any other wine-producing country on earth.

For centuries, the "vendange," or annual grape harvest, has been
treated as a near-religious ritual, with parish churches maintaining
meticulous records in dusty, crumbling ledgers.

French regulations are strict

In France, winegrowers are subject to the world's most rigid
cultivation restrictions: Vintners can grow only varieties authorized
for their region, harvests are tightly regulated and, until this year,
no irrigation was allowed. Year after year, the climate is the single
greatest variable in France's wine production, making its vineyards
the perfect climate-change laboratory for scientists.

Rene Mure's family has been growing grapes and producing wine in the
hills surrounding the picturesque village of Rouffach since 1648. The
family tree, with its 12 generations of wine growers -- Rene's
children, Veronique, 31, and Thomas, 27, are the newest Mure vintners
-- is tacked to a wall in his cellars, which produce 350,000 bottles
of wine a year.

In 1932, his grandfather bought the 37.5-acre Domaine du Clos St
Landelin, named for the abbey whose monks tilled the vineyards in the
8th century. Its sunny, southern exposure on the steep mountain flanks
made it one of the choicest vineyards in the area, and it produced the
Mure family's finest wines.

Mure and other French vintners have detected global warming's
influence in their wines for the past three decades. Their red pinot
noirs have become more aromatic, and their white Gewurztraminers are
sweeter with fragrances of litchi and roses.

Adding sugar isn't needed

All over France, vintners have abandoned their forefathers' practice
of adding sugar to the wine vats to improve flavors and increase
alcohol content. The sun and warmer summers are doing the job for
them. Through the 1980s and 1990s, French wines won higher and higher
ratings from domestic and international wine critics, many of whom
tend to give high ratings to wines from grapes that have fully
ripened.

But the climate warming has accelerated faster than vintners or French
scientists anticipated. Higher temperatures throughout the growing
season have pushed up sugar levels, and consequently alcohol levels,
in the wines. Some producers in Provence are adding acidic compounds
to their wines in an effort to keep them from becoming too sweet and
undrinkable.

Vintners in Alsace are now facing similar problems. The average
temperature in Alsace, which is bordered by the Rhine River and
Germany, has risen 3.5 degrees in the past 30 years -- a dramatic
increase for sensitive grapevines.

"For 10 years, our problem has been to preserve the acidity," keeping
it from being overpowered by alcohol and sugar, Mure said. "Wines need
to be balanced to have fresh, crisp flavor."

Mure already has started changing the way he cultivates his grapes,
growing some vines closer to the ground with fewer leaves in the style
of southern grape growers, giving his vines less exposure to the sun.

He wants to experiment with growing warm-climate Syrah grapes in
Alsace. The way Mure sees it, if the southern climate is moving north,
he should be prepared to grow grapes that can take the heat.

"We have to stay in contact with the climate and the 'terroir,' " said
Mure, referring to the soil, slope, climate and locality that give
wine from each vineyard its unique flavor and aroma. "We have to
adapt. It's a question of survival."

But Mure is discovering that the regimentation of the French wine-
production system, which has allowed climate change to be documented
so accurately, is now threatening to undermine the very industry it
was designed to protect.

Before he can experiment with plantings of Syrah grapes, Mure must
obtain the permission of the Alsace Wine Association, watchdog of the
region's viniculture reputation and tradition. Without its approval,
said his daughter, Veronique, planting different grapes would be "as
illegal as planting marijuana."

'We have to adapt'

"Of course, we have to adapt to climate changes," said Boesch, the
association president and a winegrower. But, he added, "We have to
preserve our identity. Our identity is not Syrah, it's Riesling," the
grape that produces Alsase's white wines.

Scientists warn that climate change is advancing so rapidly that it
threatens to overwhelm the cumbersome French wine bureaucracy.

"Some vintners, like the Mures, are ahead of others," said Philippe
Kuntzmann, a grapevine specialist at Interprofessional Technical
Center for Vines and Wine in the Alsace regional capital of Colmar.
"Others are more traditional; they want to wait and see. If you wait
too long, it will be too late."

Rene Mure's daughter, who studied agronomy and biology in college,
said she sees change as the only way to pass the family heritage on to
her 2½-year-old daughter, Margaux, and the son she is expecting to
deliver in November.

"Yes, it's a radical idea," she said. "We don't say that tomorrow
we'll get rid of pinot noir [for the family's red wines] and replace
it with Syrah. It takes years and years to see the results in
winemaking. We think it will be investing in the future to have this
experiment."

Copyright 2007 Star Tribune.

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From: The New York Times (pg. A6), Sept. 13, 2007
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CLIMATE CHANGE BRINGS GRIM FORECAST

By Celia W. Dugger

A new study by the economist William Cline quantifies sharp
reductions in agricultural productivity in many of Africa's poorest
countries by the 2080s if greenhouse gas emissions continue to
increase.

Such declines are particularly grave in Africa, where most people
still depend on farming.

Mr. Cline, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development and
the Peterson Institute for International Economics, projects that
Sudan and Senegal could see agricultural production fall by more than
half, while it would decline by 30 to 40 percent in other parts of
Africa. South Asia would also suffer, with declines of 38 percent in
India and 22 percent in Bangladesh.

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From: Washington Post, Sept. 12, 2007
[Printer-friendly version]

GLOBAL WARMING IMPACT LIKE 'NUCLEAR WAR': REPORT

By Jeremy Lovell, Reuters

LONDON (Reuters) -- Climate change could have global security
implications on a par with nuclear war unless urgent action is taken,
a report said on Wednesday.

The International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) security
think-tank said global warming would hit crop yields and water
availability everywhere, causing great human suffering and leading to
regional strife.

While everyone had now started to recognize the threat posed by
climate change, no one was taking effective leadership to tackle it
and no one could tell precisely when and where it would hit hardest,
it added.

"The most recent international moves towards combating global warming
represent a recognition... that if the emission of greenhouse gases
... is allowed to continue unchecked, the effects will be catastrophic
-- on the level of nuclear war," the IISS report said.

"Even if the international community succeeds in adopting
comprehensive and effective measures to mitigate climate change, there
will still be unavoidable impacts from global warming on the
environment, economies and human security," it added.

Scientists say global average temperatures will rise by between 1.8
and 4.0 degrees Celsius this century due to burning fossil fuels for
power and transport.

The IISS report said the effects would cause a host of problems
including rising sea levels, forced migration, freak storms, droughts,
floods, extinctions, wildfires, disease epidemics, crop failures and
famines.

The impact was already being felt -- particularly in conflicts in
Kenya and Sudan -- and more was expected in places from Asia to Latin
America as dwindling resources led to competition between haves and
have nots.

"We can all see that climate change is a threat to global security,
and you can judge some of the more obvious causes and areas," said
IISS transnational threat specialist Nigel Inkster. "What is much
harder to do is see how to cope with them."

The report, an annual survey of the impact of world events on global
security, said conflicts and state collapses due to climate change
would reduce the world's ability to tackle the causes and to reduce
the effects of global warming.

State failures would increase the gap between rich and poor and
heighten racial and ethnic tensions which in turn would produce
fertile breeding grounds for more conflict.

Urban areas would not be exempt from the fallout as falling crop
yields due to reduced water and rising temperatures would push food
prices higher, IISS said.

Overall, it said 65 countries were likely to lose over 15 percent of
their agricultural output by 2100 at a time when the world's
population was expected to head from six billion now to nine billion
people.

"Fundamental environmental issues of food, water and energy security
ultimately lie behind many present security concerns, and climate
change will magnify all three," it added.

Copyright 2007 Reuters

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