Climate change update

Lakes Around the World Are Warming:

The world’s largest lakes are warming along with the air — and sometimes at faster rates — but the intensity of the warming trend differs strikingly around the globe, a new study by two scientists from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory says.

The study, published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, shows that the warming trend is most intense in northeastern Europe, where Lake Vanern in Sweden and two lakes in Russia, Ladoga and Onega, are. There, temperature data drawn from satellite measurements taken from 1985 to 2009 show a rate of warming as high as 1.72 degrees Fahrenheit per decade.

On the North American continent, warming that met the test of statistical significance was found in three Western lakes, Lake Tahoe in California, Pyramid Lake in Nevada and the Great Salt Lake in Utah, which were warming at a rate of more than one degree Fahrenheit per decade. The Great Lakes also showed a statistically significant warming trend, although the rates of warming were slightly lower than those of the Southwestern lakes.

New front opens in war against global warming:

Many policymakers and business leaders have come to see the most basic method of slowing global warming - cutting carbon dioxide emissions through a binding treaty - as elusive for now. They are turning their attention instead toward a more achievable goal: curbing other greenhouse gases that are warming the planet.

As the annual meeting of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change kicked off Monday in Cancun, Mexico, with the aim of laying the groundwork for a future pact, many experts focused on more immediate cuts in industrial chemicals, soot and methane, all of which contribute to short-term warming.

Rafe Pomerance, a senior fellow at Clean Air-Cool Planet, said a campaign to reduce these non-carbon dioxide emissions "can provide momentum that the world needs on significant greenhouse gas cuts."

The United States, Canada and Mexico will launch as early as this week a North American initiative to curb hydrofluorocarbons, which are used as industrial refrigerants, along with methane and the black carbon that comes from some diesel engines and wood-fired stoves. And U.N. negotiators in Cancun will press for the adoption of language next week that would ease the way for phasing out HFCs under a separate climate treaty.

In another sign of movement in this direction, 400 major companies including Coca-Cola, Pepsico, Unilever and WalMart announced Monday that they would stop using HFCs in new equipment by 2015.

An excellent graphic that shows greenhouse gas emissions by country over time