Across the Western Hemisphere, the study also found, nearly 10 percent of mammals will be unable to move fast enough to keep up with changes in climate. In some areas, such as the Amazon, that number will be as high as 40 percent.

And while some animals will do just fine or even better than before, certain animals in certain places face catastrophic losses of survivable habitat. Most at risk are primates, which will likely lose 75 percent of their range because of both inhospitable climate and the inability to get to livable places.

“We could be underestimating the vulnerability of some species to climate change,” said Carrie Schloss, an ecologist at the University of Washington.

“There have been a lot of projections done on species’ ranges and where they are projected to be in the future based on where the climate will be suitable,” she added. “But most don’t tell you whether species can get from where they are today to where the climate will be suitable.”

To make more accurate predictions of how mammals might be expected to fare in the coming decades, Schloss and colleagues collected information on 493 species of mammals whose future ranges had already been predicted through about the year 2100. Then, the researchers used known relationships between how big an animal is and what it eats to estimate how far a given species could be expected to move from generation to generation.

Previous studies have shown that climate change will expand the ranges where some species will be able to live. But when Schloss’ team factored in whether animals could actually get to these newly suitable habitats, they found that true ranges will actually shrink in nearly 60 percent of those cases. Range size will shrink by an average of nearly 40 percent.

Animals in tropical regions face the biggest risks, the researchers report today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, possibly because species there are extra-sensitive to even small changes in climate.

Across the moist subtropical regions of the western hemisphere, for example, nearly 15 percent of mammals will likely be left behind by climate change. That number jumps to nearly 40 percent in some areas of the Amazon. In those places, species that can only migrate about one kilometer (0.6 miles) each year would need to move eight times faster to keep up with climate-induced shifts in their ideal rangelands.

Other areas that are likely to experience climate changes that are more extreme than many species will be able to handle include the Yucatan Peninsula, the Appalachian Mountains and the southeastern United States. Primates are in particularly trouble, as are moles and shrews.

Animals expected to be able to keep up with climate change include carnivores, armadillos, sloths, coyotes, elk and moose. Many of these animals can move large enough distances to get them to where they’ll need to go.

The new study should help researchers focus conservation efforts by, for example, figuring out where to create corridors for animals that will need to migrate in the face of climate change, said David Ackerly, an ecologist at the University of California, Berkeley.

“Unfortunately, there is not a lot of good news in analyses of climate impacts,” he said. “Rapid change will be disruptive. The question is: Where will impacts be worse and what can we do?”

If Canada proceeds, and we do nothing, it will be game over for the climate.

Canada’s tar sands, deposits of sand saturated with bitumen, contain twice the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by global oil use in our entire history. If we were to fully exploit this new oil source, and continue to burn our conventional oil, gas and coal supplies, concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere eventually would reach levels higher than in the Pliocene era, more than 2.5 million years ago, when sea level was at least 50 feet higher than it is now. That level of heat-trapping gases would assure that the disintegration of the ice sheets would accelerate out of control. Sea levels would rise and destroy coastal cities. Global temperatures would become intolerable. Twenty to 50 percent of the planet’s species would be driven to extinction. Civilization would be at risk.

That is the long-term outlook. But near-term, things will be bad enough. Over the next several decades, the Western United States and the semi-arid region from North Dakota to Texas will develop semi-permanent drought, with rain, when it does come, occurring in extreme events with heavy flooding. Economic losses would be incalculable. More and more of the Midwest would be a dust bowl. California’s Central Valley could no longer be irrigated. Food prices would rise to unprecedented levels.

If this sounds apocalyptic, it is. This is why we need to reduce emissions dramatically. President Obama has the power not only to deny tar sands oil additional access to Gulf Coast refining, which Canada desires in part for export markets, but also to encourage economic incentives to leave tar sands and other dirty fuels in the ground.

The global warming signal is now louder than the noise of random weather, as I predicted would happen by now in the journal Science in 1981. Extremely hot summers have increased noticeably. We can say with high confidence that the recent heat waves in Texas and Russia, and the one in Europe in 2003, which killed tens of thousands, were not natural events — they were caused by human-induced climate change.

We have known since the 1800s that carbon dioxide traps heat in the atmosphere. The right amount keeps the climate conducive to human life. But add too much, as we are doing now, and temperatures will inevitably rise too high. This is not the result of natural variability, as some argue. The earth is currently in the part of its long-term orbit cycle where temperatures would normally be cooling. But they are rising — and it’s because we are forcing them higher with fossil fuel emissions.

The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has risen from 280 parts per million to 393 p.p.m. over the last 150 years. The tar sands contain enough carbon — 240 gigatons — to add 120 p.p.m. Tar shale, a close cousin of tar sands found mainly in the United States, contains at least an additional 300 gigatons of carbon. If we turn to these dirtiest of fuels, instead of finding ways to phase out our addiction to fossil fuels, there is no hope of keeping carbon concentrations below 500 p.p.m. — a level that would, as earth’s history shows, leave our children a climate system that is out of their control.

We need to start reducing emissions significantly, not create new ways to increase them. We should impose a gradually rising carbon fee, collected from fossil fuel companies, then distribute 100 percent of the collections to all Americans on a per-capita basis every month. The government would not get a penny. This market-based approach would stimulate innovation, jobs and economic growth, avoid enlarging government or having it pick winners or losers. Most Americans, except the heaviest energy users, would get more back than they paid in increased prices. Not only that, the reduction in oil use resulting from the carbon price would be nearly six times as great as the oil supply from the proposed pipeline from Canada, rendering the pipeline superfluous, according to economic models driven by a slowly rising carbon price.

But instead of placing a rising fee on carbon emissions to make fossil fuels pay their true costs, leveling the energy playing field, the world’s governments are forcing the public to subsidize fossil fuels with hundreds of billions of dollars per year. This encourages a frantic stampede to extract every fossil fuel through mountaintop removal, longwall mining, hydraulic fracturing, tar sands and tar shale extraction, and deep ocean and Arctic drilling.

President Obama speaks of a “planet in peril,” but he does not provide the leadership needed to change the world’s course. Our leaders must speak candidly to the public — which yearns for open, honest discussion — explaining that our continued technological leadership and economic well-being demand a reasoned change of our energy course. History has shown that the American public can rise to the challenge, but leadership is essential.

The science of the situation is clear — it’s time for the politics to follow. This is a plan that can unify conservatives and liberals, environmentalists and business. Every major national science academy in the world has reported that global warming is real, caused mostly by humans, and requires urgent action. The cost of acting goes far higher the longer we wait — we can’t wait any longer to avoid the worst and be judged immoral by coming generations.

James Hansen directs the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and is the author of “Storms of My Grandchildren.”

The Filchner-Ronne Ice Shelf fringing the Weddell Sea on the eastern side of Antarctica has so far not seen ice loss from global warming and much of the observation of melting has focused on the western side of the continent around the Amundsen Sea. But new research from the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in Germany says the 450,000-sq-km ice shelf is under threat.

“According to our calculations, this protective barrier will disintegrate by the end of this century,” said Dr Harmut Hellmer, lead author of the study, published in the journal Nature this week.

The huge ice shelves that float on the seas fringing Antarctica provide a buffer against warming waters eating away at the base of the much larger glaciers behind them that sit on the land.

“Ice shelves are like corks in the bottles for the ice streams behind them,” said Hellmer. “They reduce the ice flow.

“If, however, the ice shelves melt from below, they become so thin that the dragging surfaces become smaller and the ice behind them starts to move.”

Hellmer and his team predict the melting of the Filchner-Ronne shelf could add up to 4.4 mm per year to rising global sea levels.

According to the latest estimates based on remote sensing data, global sea levels rose 1.5 mm a year between 2003 and 2010 due to melting glaciers and ice shelves, the scientists say. This is on top of an estimated 1.7 mm annual rise due to the expansion of the oceans as the water warms.

COSTLY SEA DEFENCES

The research was funded by the European Union’s ‘Ice2sea’ program, set up in the wake of the 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that highlighted ice-sheets as the most significant remaining uncertainty in projections of rising sea levels. Projections from the Ice2sea project will feed into the fifth IPCC report due in 2013/2014.

It will also inform plans for major capital spending on sea defenses to protect Europe’s coastlines, particularly areas of economic importance like London, with its tidal barrier on the River Thames, and the port of Rotterdam. A large part of the Netherlands is below sea level and protected by an elaborate system of dykes.

Professor David Vaughan of the British Antarctic Survey, who heads the Ice2sea program, told Reuters the Alfred Wegener Institute’s findings add to evidence that warming oceans are having the greatest impact on the ice sheets, as opposed to atmospheric changes or the legacy of some long-term change decades or even hundreds of years ago.

“What people need to know with a sense of urgency is what is going to happen to sea levels over the next few decades,” said Vaughan. “In those terms, these results are very big news indeed.”

Vaughan is cautious about precise projections of the impact on sea levels. “For me, those numbers are about what might be plausible,” he said. “I think we need to do some more work with the ice sheet models to determine exactly what sea level rises we might expect, but those are plausible numbers.”

All other things being equal, the polar ice sheets reach a balance where the amount of snow going in each year is broadly matched by the number of icebergs coming out, but subtle changes like those associated with global warming, can affect that balance quite rapidly.

Vaughan said there was clear evidence that the widely-reported disintegration of the Larsen A and Larsen B ice shelves in 1995 and 2002 respectively, had led to the ice sheets that fed them moving faster into the sea, some of them many times the rate seen before collapse.

The scientific focus on the melting ice in the Amundsen sea is down to the fact that this is where it is happening now, but Vaughan said although the Weddell Sea is not seeing ice loss at the moment, the German research supports the view that it will spread to other areas.

If there is a lesson for climate scientists, it’s “don’t behave like the infant school football team and follow the ball,” he said.

Alec Loorz turns 18 at the end of this month. While finishing high school and playing Ultimate Frisbee on weekends, he’s also suing the federal government in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C.

The Ventura, California, teen and four other juvenile plaintiffs want government officials to do more to prevent the risks of climate change — the dangerous storms, heat waves, rising sea levels, and food-supply disruptions that scientists warn will threaten their generation absent a major turnabout in global energy policy. Specifically, the students are demanding that the U.S. government start reducing national emissions of carbon dioxide by at least six percent per year beginning in 2013.

“I think a lot of young people realize that this is an urgent time, and that we’re not going to solve this problem just by riding our bikes more,” Loorz said in an interview.

The youth — represented, pro bono, by the Burlingame, California, law firm of former U.S. Republican congressman Paul “Pete” McCloskey, a co-founder of Earth Day — filed the suit, Alec L. et. al vs. Lisa P. Jackson, et. al, in May of last year. Defendants include not only Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson but the heads of the Commerce, Interior, Commerce, Defense, Energy, and Agriculture departments. This Friday, U.S. District Court Judge Robert L. Wilkins, an Obama appointee, will hear arguments on the defendants’ motion to dismiss the complaint.

While skeptics may view the case as little more than a publicity stunt, its implications have been serious enough to attract the time and resources of major industry leaders. Last month, Judge. Wilkins granted a motion to intervene in the case by the National Association of Manufacturers, joined by Delta Construction Company, Dalton Trucking Inc., Southern California Contractors Association, and the California Dump Truck Owners Association.

“At issue is whether a small group of individuals and environmental organizations can dictate through private tort litigation the economic, energy, and environmental policies of the entire nation,” wrote National Association of Manufacturers spokesman Jeff Ostermeyer in an email. Granting the plaintiffs’ demands, he added, “would carry serious and immediate consequences for industrial and economic productivity — increasing manufacturing and transportation costs and decreasing global competitiveness.” The manufacturers’ legal brief says the restrictions being sought “could substantially eliminate the use of conventional energy in this country.” It also argues that the plaintiffs haven’t proved they have a legal right to sue.

The plaintiffs contend that they have standing to sue under the “public trust doctrine,” a legal theory that in past years has helped protect waterways and wildlife. It’s the reason, for example, that some state government agencies issue licenses to catch fish or shoot deer, particularly when populations are declining. The doctrine has never before been applied to the atmosphere, and it’s a trickier prospect, not least because the sources of atmospheric pollution are so diffuse and wide-ranging, extending to other countries whose actions the United States may not be able to influence.

Defense attorneys have, in fact, have argued that the plaintiffs are essentially seeking for a court to make foreign policy decisions. To this, the plaintiff’s attorneys counter that other nations’ supposed inaction on climate change shouldn’t be used as an excuse for the United States to do nothing. “That is like saying poverty exists everywhere, other countries have poverty, so it is ok for us to permit poverty,” attorney Phil Gregory wrote in an email.

While teenagers serve as the public face of the lawsuit, the idea itself came from Julia Olson, an attorney based in Eugene, Oregon. Olson founded an organization called Our Children’s Trust after watching the Al Gore documentary An Inconvenient Truth while she was seven months pregnant. Her idea to invite kids to become plaintiffs in a suit against the government was partly inspired by her colleague Mary Christina Wood, director of the Environmental and Natural Resources Law Program at the University of Oregon. Wood has spent her career studying the public trust doctrine, most recently devising a strategy she has dubbed Atmospheric Trust Litigation to apply that theory to the climate.

Wood told Olson about a case from the Philippines, where in the early 1990s a combative environmental attorney named Antonio Oposa represented 43 children, including some of his relatives, in a class action suit to defend the archipelago’s small vestige of old-growth forest from logging firms. The children’s case against the country’s head of Environment & National Resources was ultimately upheld by the Philippines’ Supreme Court, inspiring similar suits throughout the world.

Olson and other supporters of the suit believe that having kids as plaintiffs makes a particularly visceral appeal to adults to take action. Indeed, many of the adults involved said that their own children and grandchildren had inspired them. “Becoming a grandfather motivated me to speak out,” said climate scientist James Hansen, the director of the U.S. NASA Goddard Space Institute and the man who first brought Loorz and Olson together. Hansen, in his free time, is a conscientious objector to U.S. energy policy who has been arrested three times at peaceful protests.

In support of the children’s suit, Hansen has drawn up recommendations as to how the U.S. government can meet the greenhouse-gas reduction goals, through cuts in fossil-fuel-powered electricity and reforestation. “My talents are mainly in the sciences,” he said, “but it just became so clear that no one is doing anything to prevent what is becoming scientifically a very clear picture. I didn’t want my grandchildren to say that “Opa” (Dutch for “grandpa”) knew what was happening but didn’t do anything about it.”

The tall, lanky Loorz is an especially compelling spokesman for the U.S. children’s lawsuit. He became a climate activist at age 12, when, like Olson, spurred to action after watching An Inconvenient Truth — in his case, twice in one evening. He went on to found an organization called Kids vs. Global Warming, and traveled the world, giving more than 200 speeches at schools and other venues to more than 100,000 people altogether.

The federal suit, which was first filed in California and then relocated to Washington, D.C., was initially coordinated with a dozen similar lawsuits against individual states. Four of those suits have been dismissed, while eight are still active, according to organization spokeswoman Meg Ward. With both the executive and legislative branches having been stymied on any major climate-change progress for more than two decades, the federal lawsuit represents a kind of Hail Mary pass, trusting that courts might bring about a speedier solution.

“The judicial branch is much less influenced by special interests such as the fossil fuel industry,” said Hansen, who recalled that U.S. courts have succeeded in breaking such policy logjams in the past, including in the successful cases against tobacco firms and the enforcement of racial integration during the Civil Rights battles.

When it comes to climate change, however, it’s unclear how far U.S. judges may be willing to proceed. In 2009, six states, New York City, and several land trusts sued utilities operating fossil fuel-powered electricity plants, in a somewhat similar effort to cut greenhouse gas emissions. The plaintiffs argued that the emissions’ contribution to climate change constituted a “public nuisance,” under common law. But last June, the U.S. Supreme Court blocked their effort. Writing for the court, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said the U.S. Clean Air Act passed by Congress didn’t allow for what she called a “parallel track” of enabling federal judges to control emissions.

While the adults continue their argument, Loorz says kids his age are much more worried about climate change than many of their parents might imagine. Indeed, one British survey found that children between the ages of 11 and 14 worry more about climate change (74 percent) than about their homework (64 percent). “I used to play a lot of video games, and goof off, and get sent to the office at school,” he said. “But once I realized it was my generation that was going to be the first to really be affected by climate change, I made up my mind to do something about it.”

It may seem ironic that the hyper-focused Loorz is one of the more than five million youth diagnosed with Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder. In this case, however, Loorz contends that it’s the grownups who are suffering from disabling distraction. He argues that U.S. politicians are so preoccupied by the lingering economic crisis and this year’s presidential campaign that they’re ignoring an environmental threat that could ultimately bring about devastating consequences.

“Sometimes I do ask myself, like is there really any chance to solve this problem?” Loorz acknowledged. “I feel a lot of despair sometimes, but when I talk to Dr. Hansen, he says there is still hope, so I have to trust that he knows more than I do about this.”

British researchers reported in Tuesday’s edition of the journal Current Biology that the methane emissions from sauropods far outstripped those of today’s cattle, goats and other cud-chewing mammals.

Sauropods were a diverse bunch of plant-eating dinosaurs, known for their small heads and giant bodies with long necks and tails. An average-sized sauropod _ such as Apatosaurus louisae, once popularly known as brontosaurus _ could weigh 44,000 pounds, making it several times bigger than an elephant.

Like many modern herbivores, scientists think, sauropods probably hosted a diverse community of microbes in their guts to help break down and digest their food, producing methane in the process. In cattle and other ruminants, that gas is released in the form of burps and flatulence.

Such emissions from modern-day cattle are considered a major source of the greenhouse gas, adding up to roughly 55 million to 110 million tons per year. Though carbon dioxide is more abundant in the atmosphere, methane is more than 20 times as effective at trapping heat, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.

The problem of cattle emissions prompted ecologist David Wilkinson of Liverpool John Moores University in England to consider the climate-changing effects of sauropods.

He and two other researchers used a formula from a study last year that linked body mass to methane emissions from guinea pigs and rabbits. The relationship is straightforward: The more body mass there is, the more methane is produced.

For their investigation, Wilkinson and his colleagues had to make some assumptions _ for example, that the ratio of body size to gas produced is the same for small and extremely large animals. “That’s a slightly dodgy thing to do,” Wilkinson acknowledged, “but in this case there’s not any other option.”

The researchers also used published population estimates from the late Jurassic (about 161 to 145 million years ago) to gauge how many sauropods had been roaming the Earth back then.

Altogether, the team concluded, sauropods were likely producing on the order of 572 million tons of methane per year _ more than five times as much methane as modern-day cattle and other ruminants. Today, worldwide emissions from animals and from such human activities as burning natural gas and collecting trash in landfills is estimated to produce 550 million to 660 million tons of methane per year, the researchers said.

Wilkinson said he expected to find that the dinosaurs were perhaps only a little more productive than today’s animals. The results, he said, “surprised me.”

It would take more study of the ancient climate to find out whether, and how, sauropods warmed Earth’s atmosphere during the Mesozoic era, said Marcus Clauss, a digestive physiologist at the University of Zurich who helped develop the formula for determining methane emissions from body mass.

Wilkinson’s team was not the first to suspect that Earth’s ancient behemoths were responsible for some climate change: A 2010 study in the journal Nature Geoscience found that atmospheric methane levels dropped in the Americas once native megafauna such as mammoths and giant ground sloths went extinct _ around the same time that humans arrived on the continents.

Called Fragile Earth, the app for iPhone and iPad shows how our planet is impacted by global warming by featuring more than 70 sites such the receding Muir Glacier in Alaska, the impact of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans and the draining of the Mesopotamia Marshes in Iraq.

“We don’t necessarily put an opinion on it,” said Jethro Lennox, head of publishing at Collins Geo, a division of Harper Collins UK which created the app. “We’re just trying to visually portray some of the geographical features and changes around the world.”

The app also shows the impact of natural disasters including the devastating earthquakes in Haiti and Pakistan and the tsunami in Japan, and how mining, deforestation and dam building have changed areas of the planet.

Users of the app slide birds-eye photographs depicting before and after states of environmental changes.

“When you’re looking at the earth changing, it’s almost surprising and it shows how amazing the place is,” said Lennox. “For years glaciers have been retreating and advancing, and we don’t really know exactly why this is taking place. But the rate of some of these changes is amazing.”

Lennox said that some of the most astounding images are of the Aral Sea, which was once the world’s fourth-largest lake but has drastically reduced in size over the past 40 years.

“We even have to change our world maps quite regularly because it changes so fast,” he said.

The app explains what is happening in the images, which Lennox thinks is part of its appeal because a user doesn’t need to be a scientist to understand what is happening.

It is an extension of the book “Fragile Earth,” which was published in 2006 and is now out of print. A second edition of the book will be published later this year.

Collins Geo plans to continue to develop the app, adding more image sets and other features.

Lennox said the company views apps as an important channel, especially for visual content.

“Some of the more reference and illustrative books are starting to really come alive in the app environment,” he said.

Images within the app come from a variety of sources including NASA and GeoEye, a satellite imagery company. They date from 1914 up to the present day.

The app is available worldwide and costs $2.99.

The western chunk of Antarctica is losing 23 feet of its floating ice sheet each year. Until now, scientists weren’t exactly sure how it was happening and whether or how man-made global warming might be a factor. The answer, according to a study published Wednesday in the journal Nature, is that climate change plays an indirect role — but one that has larger repercussions than if Antarctic ice were merely melting from warmer air.

Hamish Pritchard, a glaciologist at the British Antarctic Survey, said research using an ice-gazing NASA satellite showed that warmer air alone couldn’t explain what was happening to Antarctica. A more detailed examination found a chain of events that explained the shrinking ice shelves.

Twenty ice shelves showed signs that they were melting from warm water below. Changes in wind currents pushed that relatively warmer water closer to and beneath the floating ice shelves. The wind change is likely caused by a combination of factors, including natural weather variation, the ozone hole and man-made greenhouse gases, Pritchard said in a phone interview.

As the floating ice shelves melt and thin, that in turn triggers snow and ice on land glaciers to slide down to the floating shelves and eventually into the sea, causing sea level rise, Pritchard said. Thicker floating ice shelves usually keep much of the land snow and ice from shedding to sea, but that’s not happening now.

That whole process causes larger and faster sea level rise than simply warmer air melting snow on land-locked glaciers, Pritchard said.

“It means the ice sheets are highly sensitive to relatively subtle changes in climate through the effects of the wind,” he said.

What’s happening in Antarctica “may have already triggered a period of unstable glacier retreat,” the study concludes. If the entire Western Antarctic Ice Sheet were to melt — something that would take many decades if not centuries — scientists have estimated it would lift global sea levels by about 16 feet.

NASA chief scientist Waleed Abdalati, an expert in Earth’s ice systems who wasn’t involved in the research, said Pritchard’s study “makes an important advance” and provides key information about how Antarctica will contribute to global sea level rise.

Another outside expert, Ted Scambos of the National Snow and Ice Data Center, said the paper will change the way scientists think about melt in Antarctica. Seeing more warm water encircling the continent, he worries that with “a further push from the wind” newer areas could start shrinking.

Climate-policy experts say that the move sets an encouraging precedent. As a developing country with rapidly increasing emissions, “Mexico taking the lead is probably more important” than Britain doing so, says Mark Maslin of University College London, who studies climate change and its implications.

“It’s at the domestic level that the rubber hits the road,” says Elliot Diringer, vice-president of the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions in Arlington, Virginia. “The actions we need to see at this stage are more in the nation’s capitals than in the UN negotiations.”

The Mexican government has pushed for climate measures in the past, supporting efforts to develop a successor to the Kyoto Protocol, which would lock countries into an international programme of emissions reductions. And Mexico City, where transport accounts for almost half of greenhouse-gas emissions, has developed bus and subway facilities through its 2008 Green Plan to cut carbon dioxide emissions by 7 million tonnes by the end of this year.

The biggest spur to action, however, has been Mexico’s current drought — the worst since records began some 70 years ago — which has ramped up public pressure on the government to take the initiative on climate change. The new law, which passed 128 to 10 in the lower house and unanimously in the Senate, mandates that CO2 emissions be reduced by 30% from business-as-usual levels by 2020, and by 50% from 2000 levels by 2050.

To achieve this, it demands that by 2024, 35% of the country’s electricity supply come from renewable sources, up from its current level of about 20% (see ‘A mighty wind?’). Mandatory emissions reporting by the country’s largest greenhouse-gas producers will be overseen by a new commission, and a carbon-trading scheme also looks likely.
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It will be no easy task to monitor greenhouse-gas-intensive businesses that are thriving in the rapidly developing country. The cement industry, for example, had put up vigorous opposition to the legislation. Juan Bezaury, an expert in Mexican policy with the Nature Conservancy in Arlington, says that Mexico is “very good at making laws. The problem is enforcing them.”

As with other countries that are developing national climate plans, including South Korea, Australia and South Africa, Mexico hopes to cash in on green technologies. Almost 14% of the country’s electricity comes from hydropower, but output has been hampered by the drought. Its solar-power capacity is still limited, so Mexico, much like many emerging economies, is focusing on wind power.

Mexico’s government estimates that the country has the potential to generate 71 gigawatts of wind power — 40% more than its generating capacity from all energy sources, including coal and hydropower. One promising site is the Isthmus of Tehuantepec in southern Oaxaca, which is ideally placed to tap the trade winds from the Gulf of Mexico. The conditions have attracted companies to install about 2,500 megawatts of wind-power capacity in the area. But this ‘wind rush’ has sparked outrage from indigenous groups, who fear that their communal lands are being taken over.

“The money will always disappear, but the land will not. If we rent our land then we will lose it,” says Beatriz Gutierrez Luis, a local teacher and activist in San Mateo, which last year rejected entreaties from a company to develop a wind-power station there. Protests in the area have already led to some activists being arrested, and at least one death.

“Our organization generally supports sustainable development and green energy,” says Gustavo Esteva, a campaigner for indigenous peoples’ rights at the Center for Intercultural Dialogues and Encounters, Oaxaca. “But it’s always with the question of ‘At the expense of what?’”

Though it can still be difficult to tease out how much climate change plays in any given weather event, changes are occurring.

In the spirit of Earth day, here’s a look at our marvelous blue marble and the ways people and other living things are responding to global warming. [50 Amazing Facts About Earth]

1. Moving the military northward
As the Arctic ice opens up, the world turns its attention to the resources below. According to the U.S. Geological Survey, 30 percent of the world’s undiscovered natural gas and 13 percent of its undiscovered oil are under this region. As a result, military action in the Arctic is heating up, with the United States, Russia, Denmark, Finland, Norway, Iceland, Sweden and Canada holding talks about regional security and border issues. Several nations, including the U.S., are also drilling troops in the far north, preparing for increased border patrol and disaster response efforts in a busier Arctic.

2. Altering breeding seasons
As temperatures shift, penguins are shifting their breeding seasons, too. A March 2012 study found that gentoo penguins are adapting more quickly to warmer weather, because they aren’t as dependent on sea ice for breeding as other species.

It’s not just penguins that seem to be responding to climate change. Animal shelters in the U.S. have reported increasing numbers of stray cats and kittens attributed to a longer breeding season for the felines.

3. High-country changes
Decreased winter snowfall on mountaintops is allowing elk in northern Arizona to forage at higher elevations all winter, contributing to a decline in seasonal plants. Elk have ravaged trees such as maples and aspens, which in turn has led to a decline in songbirds that rely on these trees for habitat.

4. Altered Thoreau’s stomping grounds
The writer Henry David Thoreau once lovingly documented nature in and around Concord, Mass. Reading those diaries today has shown researchers just how much spring has changed in the last century or so.

Compared to the late 1800s, the first flowering dates for 43 of the most common plant species in the area have moved forward an average of 10 days. Other plants have simply disappeared, including 15 species of orchids.

5. Changed “high season” at national parks
When’s the busiest time to see the Grand Canyon? The answer has changed over the decades as spring has started earlier. Peak national park attendance has shifted forward more than four days, on average, since 1979. Today, the highest number of visitors now swarm the Grand Canyon on June 24, compared with July 4 in 1979.

6. Genetic changes
Even fruit flies are feeling the heat. According to a 2006 study, fruit fly genetic patterns normally seen at hot latitudes are showing up more frequently at higher latitudes. According to the research, the gene patterns of Drosophila subobscura, a common fruit fly, are changing so that populations look about one degree closer in latitude to the equator than they actually are. In other words, genotypes are shifting so that a fly in the Northern Hemisphere has a genome that looks more like a fly 75 to 100 miles (120 to 161 kilometers) south.

7. Hurting polar bears
Polar bear cubs are struggling to swim increasingly long distances in search of stable sea ice, according to a 2011 study. The rapid loss of sea ice in the Arctic is forcing bears to sometimes swim up to more than 12 days at a time, the research found. Cubs of adult bears that had to swim more than 30 miles (48 kilometers) had a 45 percent mortality rate, compared with 18 percent for cubs that had to swim shorter distances.

8. More mobile animals
Species are straying from their native habitats at an unprecedented rate: 11 miles (17.6 km) toward the poles per decade. Areas where temperature is increasing the most show the most straying by native organisms. The Cetti’s warbler, for example, has moved north over the last two decades by more than 90 miles (150 km).

That’s according to a new nationally representative survey that also found a majority of Americans say U.S. weather is getting worse. Furthermore, a large majority of Americans think global warming made several high-profile weather events even worse.

The results, which are part of a long-term project at Yale, suggest global warming is becoming less of a “down the road” and “out of sight” issue and more of a “here and now” problem in the minds of Americans.

The researchers found early on in this project, a decade ago, that for many Americans climate change was a problem distant in time and space, “a problem about polar bears and Bangladesh, but not in my state, not in my community, not for the people and places I care about,” said study researcher Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication, referring to the public.

“What’s interesting about these results is that it suggests Americans are beginning to internalize climate change, to bring it into the here and now,” Leiserowitz told LiveScience. “The past two years have been filled with a seemingly endless succession of extreme weather events.”

On the American mind

He and his colleagues were interested to find out what people had experienced in terms of this extreme weather, what kinds of related harm they had experienced and how they had interpreted their experiences regarding climate change.

So they conducted a survey of more than 1,000 Americans ages 18 and older between March 12 and March 30, 2012.

Their results showed that 72 percent of Americans believe global warming worsened the unusually warm winter of December 2011 and January 2012; 70 percent said it worsened the record high summer temperatures in the U.S. in 2011; the drought in Texas and Oklahoma in 2011 (69 percent); record U.S. snowfall in 2010 and 2011 (61 percent); the Mississippi River floods in the spring of 2011 (63 percent); and Hurricane Irene (59 percent).

(While scientists can’t tie climate change to any one weather event, they do have evidence that with global warming extreme events will become more common.)

Overall, 82 percent of Americans said they experienced one or more types of extreme weather or natural disaster in the past year, with those in the Northeast more likely to have experienced extreme high winds, rainstorms, cold temperatures, snowstorms, floods and hurricanes.

Midwesterners were more likely than others to have experienced extreme high winds, rainstorms, snowstorms and tornadoes. People in the South were more likely to report having experienced an extreme heat wave or drought, while Westerners were more likely to report experiencing wildfires. Not only that, but 35 percent said they were personally harmed either a great deal or a moderate amount by one or more of these extreme weather events.

Who supports global warming?

So are more Americans now accepting scientifically backed man-made global warming? That depends on which Americans we are referring to. Leiserowitz has found that with regard to climate, there are six American publics, each with varying views, knowledge and interest in this issue. While the extreme views — the dismissive group who link conspiracy with climate change and the solid backers of the phenomenon — are staying put regardless of extreme weather, he said.

The groups in the middle are the people who pay attention to global warming but don’t know much about it, using their personal experiences and what they see on national news to form an opinion. These personal and vicarious experiences of extreme weather start to accumulate in their minds. “That’s what we think is starting to happen for people,” Leiserowitz said. One natural disaster they might see as random; two, that’s a coincidence; but three, and you’re starting to see a pattern.

And these Americans aren’t expecting the weather to get any better, it seems. Fifty-one percent believe the extreme weather will cause a natural disaster in their own community in the next year.