''Chacaltaya has disappeared. It no longer exists.''

–Edson Ramirez, head of a team of international scientists that has studied the glacier since 1991

At some unknown moment early this year, Bolivia's 18,000-year-old Chacaltaya Glacier – once the highest ski resort on Earth – officially vanished.

Its meltdown began in the mid-1980s. In 1998, Dr. Ramirez predicted its complete disappearance in 2015. His models were too optimistic. The rate of thaw tripled in the last 10 years due to accelerated climate change and quickened the death of the Andean glacier.

Ramirez, a leading glaciologist, proclaimed it a warning sign for the region:

"It's very probable that other glaciers are disappearing faster than we thought.''

This is consistent with recent research. In 2007, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded that climate changes could melt away "most" of Latin America's tropical glaciers between 2020 and 2030. 

Africa has been responsible for less than 3 percent of global emissions due to fossil fuel burning, and preliminary research suggests it may even be a net carbon absorber.

Yet Africa’s future if climate change continues apace looks grim: the devastation of its farms and fisheries, flooding of its river deltas, and the ruin of its mangrove swamps and coral reefs. Such damage will be worsened by Africa’s awesome poverty, because the continent has far less money to spend on adaptation and mitigation than the industrialized West.

So far, too little attention has been paid to global warming’s impact on African agriculture. Its vulnerability to breakdown has been put into sharp relief by recent droughts and the global food crisis. As the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 2007 report notes,

By 2020, in some countries, yields from rain-fed agriculture could be reduced by up to 50 percent. Agricultural production, including access to food, in many African countries is projected to be severely compromised. This would further adversely affect food security and exacerbate malnutrition.

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• Max Ajl's blog
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In my opinion, it is still feasible to solve the global warming problem before we pass tipping points that would guarantee disastrous irreversible climate change. But urgent strong actions are needed.

It is clear that the required course is technically feasible, and it would have great benefits to the public in developing and developed countries. The geophysical facts practically dictate the way.

Unfortunately, knowledge and understanding of the situation are not widespread. In addition, there is a minority of people, termed “fossil interests,” who benefit from business-as-usual. These fossil interests have enormous influence on governments worldwide, far outside their fair role in democracies.

It’s been weeks since the Copenhagen climate talks ended, and the blame game hasn’t dulled but become more shrill. In all the finger pointing, one thing that has been lacking is consideration that achievement of a binding legal deal on climate change may be better served under the skies of a gritty, dynamic urban center in an emerging market country than a pristine old world capital.

In Mexico City, where the Conference of Parties to the UNFCCC meets again in late November with hopes of this time reaching a legally binding climate accord, developed countries will not so easily be able to ignore the pressure climate change will place on a majority of the world’s population — a population that is more cramped for space and has less wealth per capita than the people of major cities in developed countries around the world.

Ask Americans if something should be done to stop global warming and close to three-quarters will say yes. Getting them to act on that belief is something else.

Only 8 percent say they’ve taken the step to contact their political representatives, according to a poll by Yale and George Mason University’s Center for Climate Change Communication.

That paradoxical state of America’s consciousness has drawn the interest of social scientists and psychologists who are captivated by the challenge of how to engage the public and policymakers on climate change.

Earlier this month, the American Psychological Association issued a report based on an examination of decades of psychological research on climate, conservation and environmental beliefs and actions. Its conclusion: Psychologists should take a greater role in helping communicate and break down the psychological barriers that are keeping people from accepting the science behind climate change and taking action to stop it.

"What is unique about current global climate change is the role of human behavior," said task force chair Janet Swim of Pennsylvania State University. "We must look at the reasons people are not acting in order to understand how to get people to act."

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• Renee Cho's blog
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There are dates that will live in infamy. June 5, 2009, has become one for the people of the Amazon.

That morning, a group of about 2,500 indigenous Peruvians from the Awajún and Wambis tribes stood at Curva del Diablo on the Fernando Belaunde Terry highway outside Bagua, near Petroperu’s oil pipeline pumping station No. 6.

They were peacefully protesting, as they had been since April 9, against the opening of vast tracts of the Peruvian Amazon to oil drilling, logging and other forms of exploitation in order to fulfill a free trade agreement with America.

Some of it was land to which they held title under the Peruvian constitution, and they didn’t want it despoiled. At the very least, they wanted to be consulted before foreign firms ripped up the trees and the earth and poisoned the waters.

Nevertheless, Bagua’s police chief had been ordered on June 4 to open the road, so when morning came and the protesters were still there, 500 police, Special Forces and paramilitary opened fire with tear gas and live ammunition.

The government's violent response and the widespread international protests that it sparked forced the resignation last week of Peruvian Prime Minister Yehude Simon, and on Saturday, President Alan Garcia dismissed seven more Cabinet ministers. The government repealed two of the land laws that had fueled the protests, but indigenous groups are demanding the repeal of seven more, plus the safe return of their leader, who fled the country.

A new burst of coal-fired power plant construction now underway – the largest in decades – will put 43 new coal plants on American soil in the next five years, and all of them will escape the performance standards written into the climate bill now moving through Congress.

The 43 plants are either already under construction, near construction or permitted. They fall under a designation called “progressing projects” in a report (attached below) published by the National Energy Technology Laboratory, and under provisions in the American Clean Energy and Security (ACES) bill now awaiting Senate action, they would all be grandfathered in without direct restriction on their CO2 emissions.

“I’d definitely call it a bubble,” said Erik Shuster, the author of the report, who works in NETL’s Office of Systems Analysis and Planning.

Between 2000 and 2008, less than 5,600 MW of new coal-fired electric generation capacity came online, according to Shuster’s analysis. The 43 progressing plants are projected to add four times that generating capacity – 22,236 MW – in the coming five years. Collectively, they will produce more than 150 million tons of new CO2 emissions every year for many decades.

The ACES bill contains tough performance standards that would essentially require new coal plants to capture and store at least 50 percent of their CO2 emissions no later than 2025, but these 43 progressing projects – and potentially others – would escape those standards, thanks to a change in a single word in the legislation now more than 1,600 pages long.

Sustainability seems to be the buzz word of 2009: sustainable homes, sustainable living, sustainable products, sustainable companies.

But when it comes to corporations, what does it mean to be sustainable?

Do companies have a responsibility to minimize environmental impacts and help solve the climate crisis? And how do you separate those companies that are truly sustainable from those that simply claim to be?

B Corporation, a project of the 501(c) 3 non-profit B Labs, hopes to answer those questions.

China-based solar producer Suntech Power announced plans this week to build a manufacturing facility in the United States to serve the growing U.S. market for large-scale utility projects and to take advantage of government incentives.

“We believe in the outstanding long-term prospects of the solar energy market in the United States” Suntech Chairman and CEO Zhengrong Shi said.

The Suntech announcement reflects the value of federal and state incentives for renewable energy. It also counters a favorite argument of climate action opponents on Capitol Hill that shifting the United States to a clean energy future will send U.S. jobs overseas.

New projects to harness thermal power from America's sun-soaked deserts keep rolling in – thanks in part to Spain.

The latest was announced this week, when Madrid-based Albiasa Solar disclosed plans for a 200 MW, $1 billion concentrating solar plant (CSP) that will spread a sea of parabolic mirrors over a 1,400-acre stretch of Arizona desert near Kingman.

When completed in 2013, the billion-dollar plant will power 50,000 homes.

It's the first solar deal on U.S. soil for Albiasa – and the latest move by a Spanish firm to cash in on the country's concentrated sunlight.