Happy bird day — forest reveals a new species

A COLOURFUL bird new to science has been discovered in an unexplored forest, spurring efforts to protect the area.

The bright yellow and red-crowned Yariguies brush-finch was named after the indigenous tribe that once inhabited the mountainous area where it was discovered. The Yariguies committed mass suicide instead of submitting to Spanish colonial rule. For conservationists the discovery of the species came at a crucial time.

Thanks in part to the discovery, the Government has decided to set aside 200 hectares of the pristine cloud forest where it lives to create a national park.

"There are about two new birds found in the world every year," said Thomas Donegan, one of the two who discovered the bird. It's a very rare event."

Climate change seen pushing plants to the brink

Thousands of plant species are being pushed to the brink of extinction by global warming, and those already at the extremes are in the greatest danger, a leading botanist said on Tuesday.

Paul Smith, head of Britain's Millennium Seed Bank, said the drylands of the world which cover 40 percent of the earth's surface and are home to more than one-third of the population faced the bleakest future.

"In the southern hemisphere the plants can either go up or south. But in South Africa's Cape they can't do either, so the 8,000 unique species of fijnbos (indigenous vegetation) there are a real worry," he told Reuters on a visit to London's Kew Gardens.

Canada rain forest town tackles drought crisis

A drought-hit resort town in Canada's Pacific rain forest is trucking in water to avert a total shutdown, but hotels and other businesses will have to severely limit consumption, the mayor said on Friday.

Tofino, on the west coast of Vancouver Island, usually receives about 10 feet of rain a year. It has had no serious rainfall since June and last month was the driest August on record.

Mayor John Fraser -- who earlier this week ordered all businesses to close by Friday -- said some water was being shipped in from nearby towns.

"We've set a record for the driest August ever ... we've always had rain in Tofino. It is a rain forest but the weather patterns are changing," he told a televised news conference,

"It's certainly something that I think we're going to have to look at in the future in terms of global warming ... this was definitely the biggest wake-up call."

Climate change a threat to development: World bank

Climate change may be one of the biggest threats to slashing poverty in the world's poorest nations and has forced the World Bank to reassess its development projects, the bank said on Tuesday.

Studies have shown that climate change and global warming linked to greenhouse gas emissions will slash economic growth, development and investment in some of the world's most vulnerable and poor nations.

"We are already seeing the consequences of climate change ... we need to see how we can help countries develop in a climate friendly way," Steen Jorgensen, World Bank acting vice president for sustainable development, told reporters in Cape Town at the release of a new report on climate change.

Ozone-friendly chemicals lead to warming

Cool your home, warm the planet. When more than two dozen countries undertook in 1989 to fix the ozone hole over Antarctica, they began replacing chloroflourocarbons in refrigerators, air conditioners and hair spray.

But they had little idea that using other gases that contain chlorine or fluorine instead also would contribute greatly to global warming.

CFCs destroy ozone, the atmospheric layer that helps protect against the sun's most harmful rays, and trap the earth's heat, contributing to a rise in average surface temperatures.

In theory, the ban should have helped both problems. But the countries that first signed the Montreal Protocol 17 years ago failed to recognize that CFC users would seek out the cheapest available alternative.

The chemicals that replaced CFCs are better for the ozone layer, but do little to help global warming. These chemicals, too, act as a reflective layer in the atmosphere that traps heat like a greenhouse.

Increasing Forest Fires Pump Mercury into the Air

As wildfires grow in number and strength worldwide, they are unleashing mercury that has polluted wetlands in the north since at least the dawn of the Industrial Revolution.

These infernos in the north of North America are releasing mercury at levels up to 15 times greater than fires elsewhere in the continent. The key, researchers note, is that climate change is making northern wetlands more vulnerable to burning.

Mercury can damage the brain and lead to birth defects. Normally, atmospheric circulation carries mercury spewed from industry northward, where it settles down, for instance, in cold wet soils in Alaska and Canada.

"Peat lands have done us a real service by locking up mercury before and during the entire Industrial Age," researcher Merritt Turetsky, an ecologist at Michigan State University in East Lansing, told LiveScience.

Over the past few decades, forest fires are burning more frequently and intensely. In 2004 and 2005, Alaska and western Canada saw the largest wildfire seasons in recorded history. Increasingly, northern forests and wetlands also are growing drier due to climate change, Turetsky said, leaving them more vulnerable to fires.

Protective ozone layer to remain thin for longer: UN

The recovery of the earth's protective ozone layer, which was ravaged by chemicals in the 20th century, will take five to 15 years longer than predicted.

"The delayed recovery is a warning that we cannot take the ozone layer for granted and must maintain and accelerate our efforts to phase out harmful chemicals," said Achim Steiner, executive director of the UN Environment Programme Friday.

Some 250 scientists concluded in a report that there were more amounts of damaging chemicals -- some of them contained in refrigerators -- still available or being produced than previously estimated, UNEP and the World Meteorological Organisation said.

Most but not all ozone-depleting substances are banned or being eliminated under the 1989 Montreal Protocol, one of the world's few successful environmental treaties.

"We have an unfinished job which bears directly on human health and wider environmental concerns," Marco Gonzalez, executive secretary of the Montreal Protocol, told journalists.

The layer in the upper atmosphere, which protects life on earth from excessive solar radiation, should start to recover over inhabitated northern and southern mid-latitude areas of the world by 2049, instead of 2044, according to the report.

The ozone layer over the Antarctic will only be completely replenished 15 years later than predicted, by 2065.

Man-made Climate Change Causing Stronger Hurricanes

The increase in the intensity and duration of Atlantic hurricanes in recent decades is due to temperature increases in the atmosphere caused by global warming, and not by natural variations in ocean temperature, according to a new study.

Recent studies have linked rising sea surface temperatures, or SSTs, in the Atlantic Ocean to climate change caused by human activities. Warmer SST's means the ocean is capable of storing more energy--energy that is converted into wind power during tropical storms.

However, other scientists blame a decades-long natural variation in ocean temperature, called the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, or AMO, for the rising SST trend.

Both camps agree that rising SSTs are contributing to increasing hurricane strength, but until now, the connection between air temperature and SST was unclear. Do rising atmospheric temperatures cause sea surface temperatures to rise? Or is it the other way around?

Now, James Elsner, director of the Hurricane Center at Florida State University, says he has broken the deadlock using a statistical test that determines causality. His conclusion: that a warming atmosphere is raising sea surface temperatures, causing hurricanes to become stronger.

Elsner's finding is detailed in the current issue of the journal Geophysical Letters.