With U.N. security letting in only those cleared last week, hundreds of accredited delegates, journalists and NGO representatives were left to stand for hours in near-freezing temperatures before being let through. "It was crazy," AP's Seth Borenstein said. "You couldn't leave the line. You couldn't go to the bathroom, you couldn't eat. Then snowflakes started falling. One woman even said, 'if lightning strikes me, would they take me out of line?'"

People started handing out food -- one gave out tangerines, another croissants. A man screamed "I don't need food. I need socks! I'm freezing my ass off out here." At one point, a U.N. official announced the wait would be longer, prompting the crowd to boo and chant "Let Us In!"

An Indian TV crew member interviewing actor Rahul Bose quipped "we'll just do our interviews out here!" to which Bose mused "when bad things happen in a first-world country, it's really a disaster!"

Seth himself stepped into the line at 7:55 a.m. and was through at 3:15 p.m., but only after another AP reporter, John Heilprin, "saved my bacon" by persuading a U.N. security guard to go out and fetch him.

"John was afraid to go out himself in case they wouldn't let him back in ... the first thing I did when I saw him was give him a big hug. I have never been so grateful to be indoors." Seth's neighbors in line? "Oh they're still out there."

And it looks like they might stay there. With 40,000 people registered and Bella Center's capacity only 15,000, the U.N. introduced a new quota system and ordered NGOs to cut down their numbers. Police shut down the Bella Center's subway stop in a bid to ease the congestion. The situation can only get worse as more than 100 heads of state and government, including President Obama, show up this week with their entourages.

Many among the 3,500 accredited journalists worry they may be "locked down" in the press area and kept away from the conference center's central atrium where delegates, presidents and premiers would circulate.

UPDATE: At 5 p.m., U.N. officials told everyone still in line that accreditation would close at 6 p.m. and so they should leave until Tuesday morning. Police started pulling people out of the crowd, which shouted back "Shame on the U.N.!" The U.N. then apologized for the inconvenience -- a gesture met with more booing and chanting.

Katy Daigle is based in London and covers international news for the AP

Follow AP's climate coverage on Twitter by going to @AP_ClimatePool

COPENHAGEN – As police cracked down on climate protesters, church bells tolled 350 times Sunday to impress on the U.N. global warming conference a number that is gaining a following, but is also awash in contradictions.

Conference negotiators went behind closed doors in talks to pin down an elusive new pact on climate, talks in which the figure 350 looms as a goal for true believers, but one that appears impossible based on progress so far.

It refers to 350 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the highest concentration that some leading scientists say the world can handle without sparking dangerous climate effects.

"It's the most important number in the world," said Bill McKibben, founder of the environmental activist group 350.org. "It's the line between habitability on this planet and a really, really desolate future."

Not everyone buys into that. But an entire environmental group has sprung up around the number, pushing 350 as a goal, sporting it on T-shirts and flags waved by throngs of protesters that marched to the conference center over the weekend. About 100 nations at the U.N. climate summit have signed on to the idea of heading for 350.

Actually, the world has lived with more than 350 for a while.

The last time the Earth had 350 ppm of carbon dioxide in the air was a generation ago, in the fall of 1989. This year CO2 pushed over the 390 level. When scientists started measuring carbon dioxide in 1958 it was 315.

Since the atmosphere passed the 350 level, ice sheets have been melting and other dramatic changes have been happening. Prominent scientists — notably NASA's James Hansen, one of the earliest to warn about global warming, and Rajendra Pachauri, head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — have said 350 is the only safe level of carbon dioxide in the air.

Still, many economists, political leaders, and even some scientists believe that the worst effects of global warming can be avoided even with less stringent actions.

But there is general agreement among negotiators and climate scientists that continued global warming will lead to dramatic changes that mean more widespread drought in some regions, greater flooding along coastlines, stronger storms and the loss of species.

On Sunday, hundreds of churches around the world had signed up to ring bells at 3:50 p.m. in their respective time zones.

"It was an incredibly powerful moment and to know that there are bells ringing all over Europe, up to Greenland, down into the south Pacific and every corner of the planet," McKibben said moments after the bells stopped ringing in Copenhagen.

As they tolled, more than 40 government environment chiefs and other high-level negotiators were meeting at the Danish Foreign Ministry. They were trying to bridge the gap between their positions in informal talks before the second and last week of negotiations gets under way. The week will end with the arrival of President Barack Obama and more than 100 other national leaders for the final hours of negotiation.

Sharp divisions remain between rich and poor countries on greenhouse emissions cuts and financing for developing nations to deal with climate change and shift to cleaner energy.

"I think there was recognition around the table of the urgency of what we need to achieve in the coming days," Britain's Climate Change Secretary Ed Miliband said after Sunday's talks. "I think there needs to be more movement from everyone, more imagination, and I think we will all be striving for that."

Australia's Climate Change Minister Penny Wong also said a lot of work remains to be done.

"It's going to be tough to get an agreement by Friday but that's what we have to do," she told a news conference.

According to participants, the closed-door consultations focused on about a half-dozen plans on financing for poor countries to deal with climate change. One joint proposal by Mexico and Norway calls for a "Green Fund" for climate financing, starting with $10 billion a year in 2013, and increasing to $30 billion to $40 billion a year by 2020

Separately, a proposal aimed at saving the world's tropical forests suffered a setback Sunday, when negotiators ditched plans for faster action on the problem because of concerns that rich countries aren't willing to finance the plan. A deal on deforestation — a sizable global warming factor — is considered a key component of the larger pact.

For a second day in a row, police cracked down on climate activists marching through the Danish capital. More than 200 were detained as police stopped an unauthorized demonstration headed toward the city's harbor and carried out a security check of some of the participants.

Meanwhile, nearly all of the 1,000 detained on Saturday — from Europe, Africa, Asia, and the U.S — were released without charges. Thirteen of them were arraigned in court and faced preliminary charges of assaulting police or were let off with a warning for wearing masks, which are outlawed during demonstrations in Denmark, or carrying box-cutters or other sharp objects.

Reducing carbon dioxide levels to 350 would mean reversing the trend of the past couple of centuries. Carbon dioxide stays in the atmosphere for as long as 100 years. And the emissions cuts currently being pledged by developed countries, including the United States and European nations, are aimed at having CO2 levels peak at around 450, not 350, in coming decades.

And even that may not be possible. Some economists say the world should plan to stop at 550.

Economist Henry Jacoby, co-director of MIT's Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change, has said that even 450 is "totally impossible, there's no way we can do that."

To get down to 350, civilization has to remove massive amounts of carbon dioxide from the skies, something talked about but not yet achieved. Trees and oceans suck CO2 from the atmosphere, but that process is overwhelmed by emissions from burning coal and oil. McKibben said it would probably take 40 years to get down to 350 even if emissions stopped today.

"It may be on the edge of impossible," he said Sunday. "We could do it. At the moment, there's no sign that we are going to do it."
 
MIT management professor John Sterman said scientifically 350 makes sense, even if economically it seem unreachable.

"We ought to have a goal of 350 and realize we're already above that," Sterman said.
___
Link:  http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/climate

Climate change speeds up since 1997 Kyoto accord

by SETH BORENSTEIN, The Associated Press, Seattle Times, November 23, 2009

WASHINGTON — Since the 1997 Kyoto international accord to fight global warming, climate change has worsened and accelerated — beyond some of the grimmest warnings made back then.

As the world has talked for a dozen years about what to do next, new ship passages opened through the Arctic's once-frozen summer sea ice. In Greenland and Antarctica, ice sheets have lost trillions of tons.

Mountain glaciers in Europe, South America, Asia and Africa are shrinking faster than before.

And it's not just the frozen parts of the world that have felt the heat in the years leading up to next month's climate summit in Copenhagen:

• The world's oceans have risen about an inch and a half.
•  Droughts and wildfires have turned more severe, from the U.S. West to Australia to the Sahel desert of North Africa.
• Species now in trouble because of changing climate include not just the polar bear, which has become a symbol of global warming, but also fragile butterflies, colorful frogs and entire stands of North American pine forests.
• Temperatures over the past 12 years are 0.4 degree warmer than in the dozen years leading up to 1997.

"The latest science is telling us we are in more trouble than we thought," said Janos Pasztor, climate adviser to U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon.

Here's why: Since an agreement to reduce greenhouse-gas pollution was signed in Kyoto, Japan, in December 1997, the level of carbon dioxide in the air has increased 6.5%.

From 1997 to 2008:

• World carbon-dioxide emissions from the burning of fossil fuels have increased 31%.
• U.S. emissions of this greenhouse gas rose 3.7%.
• Emissions from China, now the biggest producer of this pollution, have more than doubled in 12 years.

Key countries out
When the U.S. Senate balked at the accord and President George W. Bush withdrew from it, that meant the top three carbon polluters — the U.S., China and India — were not part of the pact's emission reductions.

Developing countries were not covered by the Kyoto Protocol, and that is a major issue in Copenhagen.
And the effects of greenhouse gases are stronger and happening sooner than predicted, scientists said.

"Back in 1997, the impacts (of climate change) were underestimated; the rate of change has been faster," said Virginia Burkett, chief scientist for global-change research at the U.S. Geological Survey.

That last part alarms former Vice President Al Gore, who helped broker a last-minute deal in Kyoto.

"By far the most serious differences that we've had is an acceleration of the crisis itself," Gore said this month.
In 1997, global warming was an issue for climate scientists, environmentalists and policy wonks.

Now biologists, lawyers, economists, engineers, insurance analysts, risk managers, disaster professionals, commodity traders, nutritionists, ethicists and even psychologists are working on climate change.

"We've come from a time in 1997 where this was some abstract problem working its way around scientific circles to now, when the problem is in everyone's face," said Andrew Weaver, a climate scientist at the University of Victoria in British Columbia.

Melting planet
Back in 1997, "nobody in their wildest expectations" would have forecast the dramatic sudden loss of summer sea ice in the Arctic that started about five years ago, Weaver said.

From 1993 to 1997, sea ice would shrink on average in the summer to about 2.7 million square miles.

The average for the last five years is less than 2 million square miles. What's been lost is the size of Alaska.
Antarctica had a slight increase in sea ice, mostly because of the cooling effect of the ozone hole, according to the British Antarctic Survey.

At the same time, large chunks of Antarctic ice shelves — adding up to the size of Delaware — have calved off.

Ice sheets shrink
While melting Arctic Ocean ice doesn't raise sea levels, the melting of giant land-based ice sheets and glaciers that drain into the seas do. Those are shrinking dramatically at both poles.

Measurements show that since 2000, Greenland has lost more than 1.5 trillion tons of ice, while Antarctica has lost about 1 trillion tons since 2002, according to two scientific studies published this fall.

In multiple reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, scientists didn't anticipate ice-sheet loss in Antarctica, Weaver said.

And the rate of those losses is accelerating, so that Greenland's ice sheets are melting twice as fast now as they were just seven years ago, raising the sea level.

Worldwide glaciers are shrinking three times faster than in the 1970s and the average glacier has lost 25 feet of ice since 1997, said Michael Zemp, a researcher at World Glacier Monitoring Service at the University of Zurich in Switzerland.

"Glaciers are a good climate indicator," Zemp said. "What we see is an accelerated loss of ice."

Also, permafrost — the frozen northern ground that oil pipelines are built upon and which traps the potent greenhouse gas methane — is thawing at an alarming rate, Burkett said.

Another new post-1997 impact has scientists very concerned. The oceans are getting more acidic because more of the carbon dioxide in the air is being absorbed into the water.

More acidic water harms coral, oysters and plankton and ultimately threatens the ocean food chain, biologists say.

In 1997, "there was no interest in plants and animals" and how they are hampered by climate change, said Stanford University biologist Terry Root.

Now scientists are talking about which species can be saved from extinction and which are goners.

The polar bear became the first species put on the federal list of threatened species, and the small rabbitlike American pika may be joining it.

More than 37 million acres of Canadian and U.S. pine forests have been damaged by beetles that don't die in warmer winters. And in the U.S. West, the average number of acres burned per fire has more than doubled.

The Colorado River reservoirs, major water suppliers for the U.S. West, were nearly full in 1999. But by 2007, half the water was gone after the region endured the worst multi-year drought in 100 years of record-keeping.

Insurance losses have soared, and experts say climate change is partly to blame.

The number of major U.S. weather-related electricity blackouts from 2004 to 2008 were more than seven times higher than from 1993 to 1997, said Evan Mills, a staff scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab.

"The message on the science is that we know a lot more than we did in 1997, and it's all negative," said Eileen Claussen, president of the Pew Center on Global Climate Change. "Things are much worse than the models predicted."

Link to article by Seth Borenstein:  http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2010334012_climatechange23.html

Statisticians reject global cooling

Some skeptics claim Earth is cooling despite contrary data

by Seth Borenstein, AP Science Writer, October 26, 2009

WASHINGTON - An analysis of global temperatures by independent statisticians shows the Earth is still warming and not cooling as some global warming skeptics are claiming.


The statisticians, reviewing two sets of temperature data, found no trend of falling temperatures over time.

Real Climate: Winds of Change

Spring keeps coming earlier for birds, bees, trees

3/21/2008

Enlarge Visitors take a stroll under the cherry blossoms along the Tidal Basin in Washington in this March 30, 2007 file photo. The National Park Service announced its prediction on March 6, 2008, that most of the cherry trees circling the Tidal Basin will be in peak bloom when the National Cherry Blossom Festival begins on March 29. Thirty years ago, the trees usually waited to bloom until around April 5. By Pablo Martinez Monsivais, AP WARMING WORLD

In central California, the first of the field skipper sachem, a drab little butterfly, was fluttering about on March 12. Just 25 years ago, that creature predictably emerged there anywhere from mid-April to mid-May.

And sneezes are coming earlier in Philadelphia. On March 9, when allergist Dr. Donald Dvorin set up his monitor, maple pollen was already heavy in the air. Less than two decades ago, that pollen couldn't be measured until late April.

Pollen is bursting. Critters are stirring. Buds are swelling. Biologists are worrying.

"The alarm clock that all the plants and animals are listening to is running too fast," Stanford University biologist Terry Root said.

Blame global warming.

The fingerprints of man-made climate change are evident in seasonal timing changes for thousands of species on Earth, according to dozens of studies and last year's authoritative report by the Nobel Prize-winning international climate scientists. More than 30 scientists told The Associated Press how global warming is affecting plants and animals at springtime across the country, in nearly every state.

What's happening is so noticeable that scientists can track it from space. Satellites measuring when land turns green found that spring "green-up" is arriving eight hours earlier every year on average since 1982 north of the Mason-Dixon line. In much of Florida and southern Texas and Louisiana, the satellites show spring coming a tad later, and bizarrely, in a complicated way, global warming can explain that too, the scientists said.

Biological timing is called phenology. Biological spring, which this year begins at 1:48 a.m. ET Thursday, is based on the tilt of the Earth as it circles the sun. The federal government and some university scientists are so alarmed by the changes that last fall they created a National Phenology Network at the U.S. Geological Survey to monitor these changes.

The idea, said biologist and network director Jake Weltzin, is "to better understand the changes, and more important what do they mean? How does it affect humankind?"

There are winners, losers and lots of unknowns when global warming messes with natural timing. People may appreciate the smaller heating bills from shorter winters, the longer growing season and maybe even better tasting wines from some early grape harvests. But biologists also foresee big problems.

The changes could push some species to extinction. That's because certain plants and animals are dependent on each other for food and shelter. If the plants bloom or bear fruit before animals return or surface from hibernation, the critters could starve. Also, plants that bud too early can still be whacked by a late freeze.

The young of tree swallows — which in upstate New York are laying eggs nine days earlier than in the 1960s — often starve in those last gasp cold snaps because insects stop flying in the cold, ornithologists said. University of Maryland biology professor David Inouye noticed an unusually early February robin in his neighborhood this year and noted, "Sometimes the early bird is the one that's killed by the winter storm."

The checkerspot butterfly disappeared from Stanford's Jasper Ridge preserve because shifts in rainfall patterns changed the timing of plants on which it develops. When the plant dries out too early, the caterpillars die, said Notre Dame biology professor Jessica Hellmann.

"It's an early warning sign in that it's an additional onslaught that a lot of our threatened species can't handle," Hellmann said.

It's not easy on some people either. A controlled federal field study shows that warmer temperatures and increased carbon dioxide cause earlier, longer and stronger allergy seasons.

"For wind-pollinated plants, it's probably the strongest signal we have yet of climate change," said University of Massachusetts professor of aerobiology Christine Rogers. "It's a huge health impact. Seventeen percent of the American population is allergic to pollen."

While some plants and animals use the amount of sunlight to figure out when it is spring, others base it on heat building in their tissues, much like a roasting turkey with a pop-up thermometer. Around the world, those internal thermometers are going to "pop" earlier than they once did.

This past winter's weather could send a mixed message. Globally, it was the coolest December through February since 2001 and a year of heavy snowfall. Despite that, it was still warmer than average for the 20th century.

Phenology data go back to the 14th century for harvest of wine grapes in France. There is a change in the timing of fall, but the change is biggest in spring. In the 1980s there was a sudden, big leap forward in spring blooming, scientists noticed. And spring keeps coming earlier at an accelerating rate.

Unlike sea ice in the Arctic, the way climate change is tinkering with the natural timing of day-to-day life is concrete and local. People can experience it with all five senses:

• You can see the trees and bushes blooming earlier. A photo of Lowell Cemetery, in Lowell, Mass., taken May 30, 1868, shows bare limbs. But the same scene photographed May 30, 2005, by Boston University biology professor Richard Primack shows them in full spring greenery.

• You can smell the lilacs and honeysuckle. In the West they are coming out two to four days earlier each decade over more than half a century, according to a 2001 study.

• You can hear it in the birds. Scientists in Gothic, Colo., have watched the first robin of spring arrive earlier each year in that mountain ghost town, marching forward from April 9 in 1981 to March 14 last year. This year, heavy snows may keep the birds away until April.

• You can feel it in your nose from increased allergies. Spring airborne pollen is being released about 20 hours earlier every year, according to a Swiss study that looked at common allergies since 1979.

• You can even taste it in the honey. Bees, which sample many plants, are producing their peak amount of honey weeks earlier. The nectar is coming from different plants now, which means noticeably different honey — at least in Highland, Md., where Wayne Esaias has been monitoring honey production since 1992. Instead of the rich, red, earthy tulip poplar honey that used to be prevalent, bees are producing lighter, fruitier black locust honey. Esaias, a NASA oceanographer as well as beekeeper, says global warming is a factor.

In Washington, seven of the last 20 Cherry Blossom Festivals have started after peak bloom. This year will be close, the National Park Service predicts. Last year, Knoxville's dogwood blooms came and went before the city's dogwood festival started. Boston's Arnold Arboretum permanently rescheduled Lilac Sunday to a May date eight days earlier than it once was.

Even western wildfires have a timing connection to global warming and are coming earlier. An early spring generally means the plants that fuel fires are drier, producing nastier fire seasons, said University of Arizona geology professor Steve Yool. It's such a good correlation that Weltzin, the phenology network director, is talking about using real-time lilac data to predict upcoming fire seasons. Lilacs, which are found in most parts of the country, offer some of the broadest climate overview data going back to the 1950s.

This year, though, it's the early red maple that's creating buzz, as well as sniffles. A New Jersey conservationist posted an urgent message on a biology listserv on Feb. 1 about the early blooming. A 2001 study found that since 1970, that tree is blossoming on average at least 19 days earlier in Washington, D.C.

Such changes have "implications for the animals that are dependent on this plant," Weltzin said, as he stood beneath a blooming red maple in late February. By the time the animals arrive, "the flowers may already be done for the year." The animals may have to find a new food source.

"It's all a part of life," Weltzin said. "Timing is everything."

Link to article: http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science/environment/2008-03-19-warming-spring_N.htm