Since 1990, Great Britain’s carbon dioxide emissions have dropped 15%, while its GDP has risen 45%.

–Cited by Barbara Boxer in Thursday’s Senate Environment and Public Works Committee hearing on “Examining Global Warming Issues in the Power Plant Sector” (at 1:51:00).

So you can have both climate protection and economic growth. It has been done. The time to act is now!

UN: Floods, heatwaves send signal about global warming – M&G Online. “Heavy rainfalls in Pakistan, India and northern England and heatwaves in Greece, Italy and Romania are indications of what might happen more frequently and more severely across the globe as a consequence of global warming,” said Salvano Briceno, director of the UN International Strategy for Disaster Reduction. Heatwaves and deluges, Hell and High Water. Sound familiar?

A milestone on the road to green fuel – The Independent. Factoid: Biofuels from straw, timber, manure, rice husks, and agriwaste could achieve a 91% reduction in CO2 emissions.

Averting water wars in Asia – International Herald Tribune. Factoid: “Asia has less fresh water – 3,920 cubic meters per person – than any continent other than the Antarctica.” Global warming and population growth will inevitably shrink that number coming decades.

Ford, Chrysler Join U.S. Climate Action Partnership (USCAP) – GreenBiz News. USCAP has expanded to 29 organizations and plans to step up its push to enact federal climate change legislation.

Everybody loves trees. They are so popular as offsets they even make Wikipedia’s definition:

When one is unable or unwilling to reduce one’s own emissions, Carbon offset is the act of reducing (“offsetting”) greenhouse gas emissions elsewhere. A well-known example is the planting of trees to compensate for the greenhouse gas emissions from personal air travel.

But does planting trees reduce global warming? Not in most places on the Earth. The Carnegie Institution’s Ken Caldeira summarized the result of a major 2005 study (detailed below) this way:

To plant forests to mitigate climate change outside of the tropics is a waste of time.

Why? Because forest canopies are relatively dark, compared to what they replace outside the tropics–grass, croplands, or snowfields–and so they absorb more of the sun’s heating rays that fall on them. That negates the “carbon sink” benefit trees have soaking up carbon dioxide. Worse, the study found that planting a large number of trees in high latitudes would “probably have a net warming effect on the Earth’s climate.” Ouch!

So what about an offset project involving tree planting in the tropics where water evaporating from trees increases cloudiness, which keeps the planet cool, according to models? Tropical-tree-planting offset projects suffer from a different problem:

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Alabama is in the midst of a brutal, Biblical drought. Click on the map on right, which shows that more than 40% of the state is suffering exceptional drought (brown) and nearly 90% of the state is suffering severe drought (orange or darker).

So what is the strategy of Governor Bob Riley? As the Birmingham News reports today: “The governor issued a proclamation calling for a week of prayer for rain, beginning Saturday.”

Given that global warming is going to make these brutal droughts more common and more severe in the coming decades, perhaps the governor should be joining California and other states in reducing greenhouse gas emissions.