The Coming Hunger: Record Food Prices Put World 'in Danger', Says UN

Food riots, geopolitical tensions, global inflation and increasing hunger among the planet's poorest people are the likely effects of a new surge in world food prices, which have hit an all-time high according to the United Nations. The UN's index of food prices - an international basket comprising wheat, corn, dairy produce, meat and sugar - stands at its highest since the index started in 1990, surpassing even the peaks seen during the 2008 food crisis, which prompted civil disturbances from Mexico to Indonesia.

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Biting Winters Driven by Global Warming: Scientists

PARIS - Counter-intuitive but true, say scientists: a string of freezing European winters scattered over the last decade has been driven in large part by global warming. The culprit, according to a new study, is the Arctic's receding surface ice, which at current rates of decline could to disappear entirely during summer months by century's end.

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Everything Is Negotiable, Except with Nature

The UN’s big climate conference ended Saturday in Cancún, with claims of modest victory. "The UN climate talks are off the life-support machine," said Tim Gore of Oxfam. “Not as rancorous as last year’s train wreck in Copenhagen,” wrote the Guardian. Patricia Espinosa, the Mexican foreign minister who brokered the final compromise, described it as "the best we could achieve at this point in a long process."

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Climate change can cause cancer

Scientists have warned that melting glaciers and ice sheets are releasing cancer-causing pollutants into the air and oceans. The long-lasting chemicals get into the food chain and build up in people's bodies - triggering tumours, heart disease and infertility.

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'Greener' Climate Prediction Shows Plants Slow Warming

A new NASA modeling effort found that in a doubled-carbon dioxide world plant growth could lessen global warming by about 0.3 degrees C globally. The same model found that the world would warm by 1.94 degrees C without this cooling feedback factored in. Image: Great Smoky Mountains National Park. (Credit: National Park Service)

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Chris Arsenault: A Scramble for the Arctic

With one fifth of the world's oil and gas at stake, countries are struggling to control the once-frozen arctic.

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World could heat up 4 degrees C in 50 years: Immediate action needed to hold warming to half that, scientists calculate

There’s not much time to reach binding international agreements for limiting greenhouse gas emissions if climate negotiators are going to meet the goal of keeping global average temperatures from climbing no more than 2 degrees Celsius above those typical of pre-industrial times. Continuing with a business-as-usual approach to energy use into the foreseeable future could foster a 4 degree C warming, perhaps as early as the 2060s, a package of new papers concludes.

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Cancun climate change summit: scientists call for rationing in developed world

In a series of papers published by the Royal Society, physicists and chemists from some of world’s most respected scientific institutions, including Oxford University and the Met Office, agreed that current plans to tackle global warming are not enough.

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Climate Change Could Cause Half the World to Lose Access to Clean Water

Almost half of humanity could lose clean water access due to climate change, according to a British report to be released tomorrow ahead of an international climate change conference in Mexico.

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Johann Hari: There Won't Be a Bailout for the Earth

Why are the world's governments bothering? Why are they jetting to Cancun next week to discuss what to do now about global warming? The vogue has passed. The fad has faded. Global warming is yesterday's apocalypse. Didn't somebody leak an email that showed it was all made up? Doesn't it sometimes snow in the winter? Didn't Al Gore get fat, or something?

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