Greenhouse Gases

Maryland is largely on track to meet its goal of reducing climate-warming pollution 25 percent by the end of the decade, according to O'Malley administration officials, but still needs legislation being debated in Annapolis to put wind turbines off Ocean City , limit sprawl and increase funding for mass transit. A draft plan developed by the Maryland Department of the Environment and to be released Wednesday says the state has nearly all the measures in place to comply with a 2009 law requiring curbs on the state's emissions of carbon dioxide and other "greenhouse gases.

Maryland environmental officials are staging a series of public meetings, beginning today, to get public input on the state's plan to reduce climate-altering pollution. The General Assembly passed in 2009 an O'Malley-sponsored bill committing Maryland to reducing the state's greenhouse gas emissions 25 percent by 2020.  Maryland is among the states most vulnerable to climate change, with the nation's fourth longest tidal coastline exposed to rising sea level. The state Department of the Environment recently unveiled a plan for curtailing greenhouse gas emissions, which projects reaching the goal largely with regulations and programs already on the books.  For details, go here . MDE is holding five public meetings around the state over the next month, with the first today.

Global warming. The words themselves conjure up beads of sweat. Is Mother Nature getting a fever? Can she survive it? Can we afford the cure?Leaders from 160 nations are flying to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, this week to take the planet's temperature at the United Nations Conference on the Environment and Development, better known as the Earth Summit.Top on the agenda of the 12-day session is a treaty that would pledge world leaders to avert a global warm-up by curbing emissions of so-called "greenhouse gases," chiefly carbon dioxide.

Maryland is largely on track to meet its goal of reducing climate-warming pollution 25 percent by the end of the decade, according to O'Malley administration officials, but still needs legislation being debated in Annapolis to put wind turbines off Ocean City , limit sprawl and increase funding for mass transit. A draft plan developed by the Maryland Department of the Environment and to be released Wednesday says the state has nearly all the measures in place to comply with a 2009 law requiring curbs on the state's emissions of carbon dioxide and other "greenhouse gases.

DELEGATES from more than 150 nations are gathered in Kyoto, Japan, to cap two years of technical work with a ringing and binding call for reductions in greenhouse gases -- notably carbon dioxide from fossil fuels -- to reverse global warming. They may not make it.Broadly speaking, the nations are grouped in two camps. The United States is in neither. If the conference fails to produce agreement, the U.S. is likely to be cast as villain. If a compromise is brokered that produces a treaty that would bring results and pass Senate ratification, the U.S. would emerge as unlikely hero.

KYOTO, Japan -- A conference that is supposed to cap more than two years of negotiations on what to do about global warming opened yesterday amid widespread concern that too many hard issues remained to allow the completion of an effective agreement.Melinda Kimble, a senior State Department official who is leading the U.S. delegation in Kyoto, hinted at some flexibility in the American position on setting targets for reducing gases that trap heat in the atmosphere.Scientists advising the negotiators say that if emissions are not reduced, the average global surface temperature will rise by 2 to 6 degrees Fahrenheit over the next century.

THE INTERNATIONAL agreement on global warming represents an environmental milestone, with the first legal obligations of the industrialized world to reduce heat-trapping fossil fuel emissions.While troublesome details remain to be resolved, and ultimate ratification of the treaty by the more than 150 participating nations is uncertain, the accord gets the world moving in the right direction to address potentially serious climatic change.The United States finally committed itself to a target of 7 percent reduction of greenhouse gases from 1990 levels; other industrialized countries have similar targets under the agreement that was two years in the making.

THE BALTIMORE ORIOLE evicted from Maryland's woodlands by the ravages of global warming? Sounds like a story from the supermarket tabloids, but it is the latest warning from the World Wildlife Fund about the catastrophic climatic and habitat changes in store for the planet if man-made greenhouse gases go unchecked.The immediate cause for such alarm is an effort to persuade the U.S. and other nations to agree to binding international limits on the burning of fossil fuels that produce carbon dioxide, which accumulates in the upper atmosphere and traps heat that warms the Earth.

WASHINGTON -- In sharp debate yesterday before the U.S. Supreme Court, states and environmental groups urged the justices to require that the Bush administration regulate greenhouse gases from new vehicles in an effort to slow global warming. The case, in which Baltimore joined Massachusetts and 11 other states to sue the Environmental Protection Agency, is the first on global warming to reach the high court. Lawyers argued yesterday that the consequences of inaction, resulting in melting Arctic ice and swelling sea levels, are tangible and significant.

HEILIGENDAMM, Germany -- Leaders of the world's richest industrialized nations agreed here yesterday to a compromise on efforts to combat global warming that had been sought by President Bush. Participants in the Group of Eight summit, led by German Chancellor Angela Merkel, yielded to Bush's insistence that while new talks were necessary to deal with climate change, the summit must not order specific steps and targets to reduce the greenhouse gases widely blamed for rising temperatures.

I've read several accounts of the proposed artificial turf fields for the county high schools. None has addressed the possible adverse environmental impact of the product, especially when spread across several county high school fields. It isn't necessarily something we should automatically promote. From what I've read about artificial turf, it not only poses a higher risk of injury to the kids who play on it than natural turf, it can leach carcinogens into the local ground water, and long-term, even costs more to maintain.

It seems that the man-made global warming scare, long promoted by those opposed to the burning of fossil fuel, is now behind us. It turns out that there is no unanimity of scientists supporting man-made global warming theory and never has been. It's also now becoming widely recognized that there is no incontrovertible evidence that global warming is caused by human activity, and that there is quite a bit of evidence that human activity is not a primary cause of such warming. It's becoming better known that for at least 240,000 years, a rise in CO2 has followed rather than preceded global warming.

It's less than two months into the school year, and Gov. Martin O'Malley's grades have already slipped a little. He was marked down last week to a B+ from his usual glowing environmental marks by the Maryland League of Conservation Voters, largely on one issue: his failure to slow the proliferation of waste-to-energy incinerators in the state. That may seem a relatively minor matter, but a new report by the Environmental Integrity Project, a nonprofit advocacy group, provides ample evidence to the contrary.

Organizers could scarcely have chosen a more appropriate day to call attention to the threat Maryland faces from climate change. It is of course impossible to prove that the heat wave we're currently experiencing is the result of global warming, but late-May temperatures in the upper-90s are the kind of thing we can expect more of if we don't address society's continued dependence on fossils fuels and the build-up of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere....

The best news to be found on the climate change front this month was a report that the polar bear, a threatened species that has come to symbolize the dangers of global warming, may yet be saved — if greenhouse emissions are reduced over the next two decades. Unfortunately, that's a big "if. " International climate talks that ended early this month in Cancun produced no legally binding agreement. They weren't expected to — nor is the stalemate expected to break in the near future.

In an old "Saturday Night Live" sketch, Steve Martin plays a medieval barber who has just bled an ailing patient to death. Distraught, Mr. Martin begins a monologue exploring the possibilities of scientific testing, of abandoning practices that fail, and of an enlightened era of modern medical science. As a professor of constitutional law, my "medieval barbershop moments" arise when I contemplate Senate confirmation hearings after a member of the Supreme Court resigns. Just imagine: Instead of Judiciary Committee members reading worn-out scripts aimed at placating the party base and nominees giving well-rehearsed yet vacuous responses aimed at avoiding controversy, the committee members asked thoughtful, probing (and yes, short)

For those who want to see the planet but fret about the harmful environmental effects of driving and flying, a growing list of companies are offering a chance to "offset" the journey. They're called carbon offset programs, and they aim to reduce the threat of global warming that scientists say are caused by greenhouse gases emitted when burning fossil fuels. Using the offset programs, most available online, travelers can calculate how much carbon dioxide their trip produces and pay to generate an equal share of renewable energy such as wind or solar power.

If the U.S. has learned anything from the environmental movement, it's that the sooner tough choices are made to curb pollutants, the easier it is on all involved. Regulate waste disposal at Hooker Chemical three decades ago and you wouldn't have Love Canal. Pregnant women might still be able to eat freshwater fish in this country today if the nation had kept mercury, much of it coming from coal-fired power, out of the food chain decades ago. With the climate change threat, inaction could be the greatest danger the nation faces.