SYDNEY (Reuters) - Tens of thousands of Australians took part in mass protests around the country Saturday to call for tough government action on climate change, organizers said. The demonstrations were held as Australia prepares to set national greenhouse gas emissions targets, expected around the end of this month. Environmentalists accuse industry of pushing for targets that are likely to compromise the environment.

Global warming will have a broad and devastating impact on California's economy over the next century, according to a report released Thursday. Roads and bridges, the water supply, agriculture, public health and even winter skiing all will be affected by global climate change, said the report by University of California-Berkeley agricultural and resource economics professors David Roland-Holst and Fredrich Kahrl.

BOSTON, Nov 12 (Tierramérica) - The Antarctic holds the world’s largest amount of fresh water in its icy grip, and it is most certainly warming as a result of greenhouse gases, say new scientific studies. "We're able for the first time to directly attribute warming in both the Arctic and the Antarctic to human influences," said Nathan Gillett of the University of East Anglia, in Britain, who led the study.

OSLO (Reuters) - This year is on track to be about the 10th warmest globally since records began in 1850 but gaps in Arctic data mean the world may be slightly underestimating global warming, a leading scientist said on Tuesday.

LONDON (Reuters) - The world will have to bet on extreme measures to avoid serious global warming, the International Energy Agency said on Wednesday, adding to growing worries that governments have under-estimated the problem.

Hill farmers to be given financial incentive to conserve peatlands, Britain's biggest carbon store Hill farmers should be rewarded for protecting wildlife, landscapes, water and carbon stores as well as livestock, the National Trust said today.

Former Vice President Al Gore and Paul and Anne Ehrlich, the prize-winning ecologists and authors at Stanford University, have weighed in with suggestions for President-elect Barack Obama. Mr. Gore gave his updated prescription for climate and energy policy in an op-ed article in The Times on Sunday

Speaking yesterday at Harvard University, former vice president Al Gore renewed his call for an end to dependence on oil and other carbon-based fuels, blaming it for global warming and the United States' problems in the Middle East.

SAN FRANCISCO—The presidential candidates certainly paid lip service to tackling the problem of climate change during their debate last night. But what would it actually take to slow down—or even reverse—global warming?

Climate change is happening faster and its extent is wider than the world's leading scientists had predicted, according to a new report by pro-green group the WWF released on Monday (20 October), urging the EU to take ambitious action. "It is clear that climate change is already having a greater impact than most scientists had anticipated, so it's vital that international mitigation and adaptation responses become swifter and more ambitious," Jean-Pascal van Ypersele - a professor of climatology at the Louvain university in Belgium and newly elected vice chair of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) - said, unveiling the study.

A new study has found that an increase in average temperature of only two degrees Celsius could have a devastating effect on populations of Australias iconic kangaroos. Our study provides evidence that climate change has the capacity to cause large-scale range contractions, and the possible extinction of one macropodid (kangaroo) species in northern Australia, said study authors Euan G. Ritchie and Elizabeth E. Bolitho of James Cook University in Australia.

China is likely to face inadequate food supply by 2030 if the current climate change trend continues, warns a new Greenpeace report released Wednesday.

Scientists will visit a vulnerable part of an Antarctic ice shelf this year to work out if it will crack off in coming decades and perhaps trigger a rise in sea levels, they said Thursday.

Environment ministers and officials from more than 30 countries held an informal meeting in the Polish capital this week to prepare for a major UN climate conference.

WARSAW (Reuters) - Tackling climate change will help, not hinder, governments' efforts to overcome the global financial crisis, the EU's environment chief said on Tuesday. The 27-nation European Union has set ambitious goals to curb carbon dioxide emissions by a fifth by 2020, compared to 1990 levels, partly by making power generators and heavy industry pay for permits to pollute in its emissions trading scheme.

The global economic crisis has thrown a political chill over one of the main initiatives under consideration in the United States to combat global warming: the so-called cap-and-trade plan.

Cleaning air in Beijing and in other large cities suffering from pollution problems by limiting car and power-plant emissions may raise global temperatures instead of lowering them, a German scientist warns.

Climate taxes, not cap and trade markets alone, will lead to the vast technological changes the world's energy system needs to fight global warming, a top U.S. economist said on Thursday. Cap and trade has emerged as the dominant attempt to slow global warming. Global deals in permits to emit greenhouse gas emissions have hit nearly $65 billion a year.

France, Germany and Austria called on Friday for an easing of EU climate ambitions to help industries facing an economic downturn, causing green groups to warn that the battle against climate change was in jeopardy.

A new epoch is beginning at the top of the Earth, where the historic melting of the vast Arctic ice cap is opening a forbidding, beautiful, and neglected swath of the planet. Already, there is talk that potentially huge oil and natural gas deposits lie under the Arctic waters, rendered more accessible by the shrinking of ice cover. Valuable minerals, too.