‘Unprecedented rate’ cited on International Day for Biological Diversity

Human activities are wiping out three animal or plant species every hour and the world must do more to slow the worst spate of extinctions since the dinosaurs by 2010, the United Nations said on Tuesday.

Scientists and environmentalists issued reports about threats to creatures and plants including right whales, Iberian lynxes, wild potatoes and even wild peanuts on May 22, the International Day for Biological Diversity.

Worldwide CO2 emissions rose at a faster rate in 2000-2004 than the worst-case scenario imagined in this year’s UN reports on climate, according to new research.

The rise over the first four years of this century is also greater than in the 1990s - 3.1% a year between 2000-2004, up from an average of 1.1% a year during the 1990s.

This is faster than scenarios developed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), suggesting even its most alarming predictions of the effects of climate change may not tell the whole story.

The earth’s ability to soak up the gases causing global warming is beginning to fail because of rising temperatures, in a long-feared sign of “positive feedback,” new research reveals today.

Climate change itself is weakening one of the principal “sinks” absorbing carbon dioxide - the Southern Ocean around Antarctica - a new study has found.

As a result, atmospheric CO2 levels may rise faster and bring about rising temperatures more quickly than previously anticipated. Stabilising the CO2 level, which must be done to bring the warming under control, is likely to become much more difficult, even if the world community agrees to do it.

An area as large as the US state of California melted due to warmer temperatures in western Antarctica a satellite from the US space agency showed, according to a NASA analysis of the largest melt in recent decades. The data collected by the NASA satellite, QuickScat, between July 1999 and July 2005 captured the largest melting in 30 years during January 2005, scientists said late Tuesday.

Sen. Hillary Clinton announced today that, along with a New York Congressman, she will chair a probe looking into the federal government’s response and environmental clean-up efforts in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

“We need to examine what went wrong and assess whether the federal government is better prepared to respond to environmental hazards in future disasters,” Clinton said in a news release.