A European Union agreement last week was short on specifics. US commitments on reductions may not be forthcoming, making Chinese commitments also unlikely.

The Christian Science Monitor, By David Francis, November 5

Berlin - The world is moving toward December climate change talks that have been described in some quarters as "pivotal." But a European Union agreement, signed last week, sheds light on how tenuous the prospects are for a comprehensive deal any time soon.

UN-sponsored talks are scheduled in Copenhagen, and it was initially hoped they would extend the emissions-cutting targets of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. But Artur Runge-Metzger, head of the European delegation at a preliminary meeting in Barcelona for the Copenhagen negotiations, said Thursday that a deal was unlikely on schedule. "There is a lot of work still to be done," he told reporters.

Last week, European Union officials lauded their internal agreement – which determined that $150 billion would be needed over the next decade to combat climate change – as evidence of a united front heading toward Copenhagen.

These officials claim the agreement will give them leverage in negotiations with China and the United States, both of which have been reluctant to name specific targets for emission reduction. House Democrats – over a threatened Republican boycott – are currently pushing a bill through committee that would cap US emissions.

BBC, By Richard Black, November 12

The Greenland ice sheet is losing its mass faster than in previous years and making an increasing contribution to sea level rise, a study has confirmed.

Published in the journal Science, it has also given scientists a clearer view of why the sheet is shrinking.

The team used weather data, satellite readings and models of ice sheet behaviour to analyse the annual loss of 273 thousand million tonnes of ice.

The Guardian, By Tom Phillips, November 13

Rio - The Brazilian government yesterday announced a "historic" drop in the deforestation of the Amazon, weeks before world leaders meet in Copenhagen for climate change talks.

Brazilian authorities said that between August 2008 and July this year, deforestation in the world's largest tropical rainforest fell by the largest amount in more than 20 years, dropping by 45% from nearly 13,000 square kilometres to around 7,000 square kilometres (5,000 square miles to 2,700 square miles).

"It is an excellent figure – a historic result," the environment minister, Carlos Minc, said in the capital, Brasilia.

"It is a substantial drop," said the head of Brazil's Space Institute, Gilberto Câmara, according to the government news provider Agência Brasil. He claimed it was the most significant cut in deforestation since his institute started monitoring rainforest destruction with satellite technology in 1988.

New York Times, By Elisabeth Rosenthal, November 13

PLAYA GRANDE, Costa Rica — This resort town was long known for Leatherback Sea Turtle National Park, nightly turtle beach tours and even a sea turtle museum. So Kaja Michelson, a Swedish tourist, arrived with high expectations. “Of course we’re hoping to see turtles — that is part of the appeal,” she said.

But haphazard development, in tandem with warmer temperatures and rising seas that many scientists link to global warming, have vastly diminished the Pacific turtle population.

On a beach where dozens of turtles used to nest on a given night, scientists spied only 32 leatherbacks all of last year. With leatherbacks threatened with extinction, Playa Grande’s expansive turtle museum was abandoned three years ago and now sits amid a sea of weeds. And the beachside ticket booth for turtle tours was washed away by a high tide in September.

“We do not promote this as a turtle tourism destination anymore because we realize there are far too few turtles to please,” said Álvaro Fonseca, a park ranger.

[...]

More uniquely, their gender is determined not by genes but by the egg’s temperature during development. Small rises in beach temperatures can result in all-female populations, obviously problematic for survival.

[...]

If the sand around the eggs hits 30 degrees Celsius (86 degrees Fahrenheit), the gender balance shifts to females, Mr. Drews said, and at about 32 degrees (89.6 Fahrenheit) they are all female. Above 34 (93), “you get boiled eggs,” he said.

Copenhagen climate talks: No deal, we're out of time, Obama warns

Brown still hopes to salvage climate talks as US rules out binding targets

The Guardian, By David Adam, Jonathan Watts & Patrick Wintour, November 15

Barack Obama acknowledged today that time had run out to secure a legally binding climate deal at the Copenhagen summit in December and threw his support behind plans to delay a formal pact until next year at the earliest.

During a hastily convened meeting in Singapore, the US president supported a Danish plan to salvage something from next month's meeting by aiming to make it a first-stage series of commitments rather than an all-encompassing protocol.

Postponing many contentious decisions on emissions targets, financing and technology transfer until the second-stage, leaders will instead try to reach a political agreement in Copenhagen that sends a strong message of intent.

While this falls short of hopes that the meeting would lock in place a global action plan to replace the Kyoto protocol, it recognises the lack of progress in recent preparatory talks and the hold-ups of climate legislation in the US Senate.

New York Times, By Sindya N. Bahnoo, November 18

The Earth’s oceans, which have absorbed carbon dioxide from fuel emissions since the dawn of the industrial era, have recently grown less efficient at sopping it up, new research suggests.

Emissions from the burning of fossil fuels began soaring in the 1950s, and oceans largely kept up, scientists say. But the growth in the intake rate has slowed since the 1980s, and markedly so since 2000, the authors of a study write in a report in Thursday’s issue of Nature.

The research suggests that the seas cannot indefinitely be considered a reliable “carbon sink” as humans generate heat-trapping gases linked to global warming.

The slowdown in the rise of the absorption rate resulted from a gradual change in the oceans’ chemistry, the study found. “The more carbon dioxide the ocean absorbs, the more acidic it becomes and the less carbon dioxide it can absorb,” said the study’s lead author, Samar Khatiwala, a research scientist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University and a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

[...]

Even as human-generated emissions of carbon dioxide increase, the oceans’ uptake rate growth appears to have dropped by 10 percent from 2000 to 2007, Dr. Khatiwala said.