UC Berkeley researchers report that environmental damage caused by rich nations affects poor nations so much, it costs them more than their combined foreign debt.

The study examined the impacts of the expansion of agriculture, deforestation, overfishing, loss of swamps and ozone completion from 1961 to 2000.

When all these impacts are added up, the portion of the footprint of high-income nations falling on low-income countries is greater than their entire financial debt, or about $1.8 trillion, according to lead researcher Thara Srinivasan.

The news of environmental traumas assails us from every side – unseasonal storms, floods, fires, drought, melting ice caps, lost species of river dolphins and giant turtles, rising sea levels potentially displacing inhabitants of Arctic and Pacific islands and hundreds of thousands of people dying every year from air pollution. Last week brought more – new reports that Greenland’s glaciers may be melting away at an alarming rate.

What’s going on? Are we experiencing one of those major shocks to life on Earth that rocked the planet in the past?

If you think $100 per barrel oil is costly, consider $180 per barrel oil.

The former is here, while the latter may be in our not-too-distant future, according to two well-known oil industry analysts.

While energy prices retreated during the second week of January amid continued signs of a slowing economy and forecasts for mild weather in the Northeast, crude oil prices are still hovering about 70 percent higher than year-ago levels.

Global warming is partly to blame for the increasing intensity and frequency of massive wildfires in the American West, according to one expert, who says more than half of the region’s forests could be claimed by fire in the next century.

Tom Swetnam, a leading fire ecologist at the University of Arizona, told CBS’s 60 Minutes that a temperature increase in the West of just one degree had contributed to a four-fold increase in fires in the area.

In an “unforeseen and unprecedented” shift, the world food supply is dwindling rapidly and food prices are soaring to historic levels, the top food and agriculture official of the United Nations warned Monday.

The changes created “a very serious risk that fewer people will be able to get food,” particularly in the developing world, said Jacques Diouf, head of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization.

The agency’s food price index rose by more than 40 percent this year, compared with 9 percent the year before - a rate that was already unacceptable, he said. New figures show that the total cost of foodstuffs imported by the neediest countries rose 25 percent, to $107 million, in the last year.