Is it not time to recognise that climate change is yet another symptom of our unsustainable lifestyles, which must now become the focus our efforts?

Yet governments, and those organisations who have now assumed the role of combating climate change, subscribe to the notion that climate change is our central problem and carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions is the cause of this problem.

See Sex sells, but at what cost? also.

Climate scientists have blamed global warming for a dramatic rise in the number of storms in the Atlantic over the past century. Their study showed the average number of storms that develop every year has doubled since 1905.

They suggest the trend is due to the rise in sea surface temperatures in the Atlantic, a phenomenon with a well-established link to climate change.

Tropical storms are powered by the energy in the oceans they pass over, with warmer sea surfaces leading to more intense storms. In the past century, the surface temperature of the Atlantic has risen by 0.7C.

The Bush administration’s environment chief drew fire on Thursday from Democratic senators for delaying a decision on whether to let California regulate global warming emissions from cars and light trucks.

Stephen Johnson, head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, has said the government will decide this question by year’s end, two years after California’s first request to set state air quality standards stricter than national rules.

Sen. Barbara Boxer, a California Democrat who heads the Environment and Public Works Committee, told Johnson at a hearing she found the delay incomprehensible.

Oil supplies may fall short of demand by 13 million barrels a day by 2030, according to a study led by former Exxon Mobil Corp. chairman Lee Raymond and based on forecasts from the world’s largest oil companies

Data collected from as many as 12 international oil companies showed global production may reach 105 million to 110 million barrels a day by 2030. That’s as much as 11 percent below US government forecasts for 118 million barrels a day of demand. The report was approved yesterday by the National Petroleum Council, an advisory group that conducted the study in response to a request from US Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman.

“We need energy efficiency, we need to moderate the rate of growth of demand,” Bodman said after the report was released. “We need diversity of suppliers and of supplies.”

Proponents of “peak oil” – the theory that global crude oil production has hit its zenith and is headed for a steep decline – are steamed with a U.S. oil industry group’s findings that the world has plenty of oil.

Next week the U.S. National Petroleum Council – a board of high-level U.S. oil industry executives – releases its study titled “Facing the Hard Truths about Energy,” conducted at the behest of Energy Secretary Sam Bodman.

According to the report’s executive summary obtained by Reuters, the world is not running out of oil but there are “accumulating risks” to securing supply through 2030.