Scientists seek a more sustainable model for growth.

The graphs climbing across these pages are a stark reminder of the crisis facing our planet.

NEW YORK — The next administration will have to undertake massive public works spending projects, including funding for renewable energy,

Human activities are driving temperature shifts at both of Earth’s poles, according to a new study.

“We’re able, for the first time, to directly attribute warming in the Arctic and Antarctica to human influences on climate,” said lead author Nathan Gillett of Environment Canada.

Scientists had documented rising temperatures at both poles in recent decades, but until now, no study had attempted to formally determine the human role in those changes.

LAUSANNE, Switzerland — A trip around the world is no big deal for the frostbitten and sunburned adventurers of this Alpine nation.

Doing it without a drop of fuel is.

Swiss physics professor, Auguste Piccard, set a pace for adventure travel 77 years ago when he took a balloon into the stratosphere and became the first human to see the Earth’s curvature. A quarter-century later, his son, Jacques, took a bathyscaphe to the deepest part of the ocean.

Not everyone is thrilled with how some Middle Eastern countries are handling climate change, and the dissenters aren’t being quiet.

In a recent interview, a Jordan-based environmentalist said that Masdar, a planned “carbon-neutral” city in the United Arab Emirates, is more about publicity than about helping the environment. The proposed car-free enclave in Abu Dhabi, slated for completion in 2016, envisions electric vehicles ferrying 40,000 commuters and providing homes for another 50,000 residents in a 2.5-square-mile space, with wind, solar and geothermal energy turning on the lights.

“It’s too much money for too few people. We could spend the same billions to build large solar factories,” said Munqeth Mehyar,

The rise in temperatures at Earth’s poles has for the first time been attributed directly to human activities, according to a study.

The work, by an international team, is published in Nature Geoscience journal.

In 2007, the UN’s climate change body presented strong scientific evidence the rise in average global temperature is mostly due to human activities.

This contradicted ideas that it was not a result of natural processes such as an increase in the Sun’s intensity.

29 October 2008 – While global attention is focused on crises ranging from energy to food security to climate change, a senior United Nations environmental expert today highlighted the “silent” crisis of desertification or land degradation, which, if tackled properly, can actually help address these other issues. “The land can be… an opportunity to solve most of the ongoing global crises,” Luc Gnacadja, Executive Secretary of the UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), told a news conference in New York.

The 2005 Convention aims to promote effective action through innovative local programmes and supportive international partnerships to combat desertification, which is the degradation of land in arid, semi-arid and dry sub-humid areas.

NEW YORK — The next administration will have to undertake massive public works spending projects, including funding for renewable energy, new electric transmission, environmental cleanup and rebuilding the United States’ crumbling infrastructure in order to stave off a devastating recession next year, three leading economists agreed yesterday.

Still, the United States can expect to see rising unemployment, weak consumer and corporate confidence, and an economy that shrinks by about 2 to 3 percent in 2009, regardless of what course the country takes, they said.

The situation could become even worse if problems spread throughout the world, especially in emerging markets in Asia, Africa and Latin America.

China’s use of coal power in 2007 cost the country $248 billion in health care costs, environmental damages and government subsidies, according to a report released Monday by Greenpeace.

The $248 billion figure — equivalent to 7.1 percent of China’s gross domestic product — represents additional social costs imposed by coal but does not include purchases of coal or spending on infrastructure. It also does not include the future costs of climate change caused by the carbon dioxide emissions from coal use, Greenpeace said.