Flying in a helicopter over the crevasses of a receding glacier in the Arctic is a dramatic way of seeing what scientists say are the risks of climate change…but getting there may be badly stoking the problem.
Last week I went to the Arctic island of Spitsbergen to report on a meeting arranged by Norwegian Environment Minister Helen Bjoernoy: she invited 40 politicians and leading [...]

The carbon market has been attracting headlines recently on Reuters for the massive profits some speculators and polluters are making from these emerging schemes.
These markets are meant to help fight climate change by putting a price on greenhouse gas emissions. But are these profits helping drive cuts in those gases? I would argue that often the [...]

Indian scientists have travelled to the Arctic to study everything from air pollution to how plants might yield cures for disease.
Boxes of scientific equipment in Ny Alesund, on a Norwegian island 1,200 km (750 miles) from the North Pole, are marked “First Indian Arctic Expedition 2007″, a [...]

“Passengers are reminded they are not allowed to carry reindeer antlers or fossils in their hand baggage because they are viewed as possible weapons,” a woman’s voice booms from the loudspeaker at Longyearbyen airport, about 1,300 km from the North Pole.
You already know you are getting to an exotic part of the world when there [...]

Rains that have washed out much of the summer in northern Europe are good news at least for one remote ski resort in Norway.
Like most people, I don’t much like thinking about  winter sports after weeks of rains and floods but 30,000 people a season make their way to the summer slope on a glacier at [...]

Steve Sillett smiled as he told a recent after-hours gathering at New York’s American Museum of Natural History about the slice of the Mark Twain redwood tree.
Loggers cut down the tree in 1891. A slice was sent from California to the U.S. East Coast and wound up in the museum to teach the rest of the country [...]

Some people reckon that the United Nations produces lots of hot air but the good news is that some of it will end up helping farmers in Kenya to cut their reliance of fossil fuels.

I don’t know how they did it but U.N. experts have worked out that the first U.N. special [...]

Solar-powered trash bins sound an improbable invention and one is even crunching rubbish in rainy England.
On a recent (wet) holiday to southwest England, I gawped on hearing that the council in Torbay has started testing a U.S. “Big Belly” bin that uses a solar-driven motor to compact rubbish. The idea is that garbage trucks then [...]