WOOOOOOO! Congrats!
AP – Former Vice President Al Gore and the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize Friday for their efforts to spread awareness of man-made climate change and lay the foundations for counteracting it.
Gore, U.N. body win Nobel Peace Prize
SimCity Societies — the forthcoming installment in the classic urban simulation franchise — will include a global warming variable. If your SimSocieties aren’t carefully balanced, they’ll swamp their environments with greenhouse gasses and die off. The module is produced with BP, who, I guess, are trying to figure out what a giant oil company does next.
The game does not force players to power their cities any specific way, but allows them to make choices, each of which come with advantages and disadvantages. Similar to real-life, the least expensive and most readily-available buildings in SimCity Societies are also the biggest producers of carbon dioxide, an invisible gas that contributes to global warming. Should players choose to build cities dependent on these types of sources for power to conserve their in-game money, their carbon ratings will rise and, at reaching critical levels, the game will issue alerts about the threat of the various natural disasters like droughts, heat waves and others that may strike their cities.
Read the rest of the story at: SimCity adds global warming to the mix (via Boing Boing)
AP – The world isn’t just getting hotter from man-made global warming, it’s getting stickier. It really is the humidity. The amount of moisture in the air near the surface — the stuff that makes hot weather unbearable — increased 2.2 percent in just under three decades. And computer models show that the only explanation is man-made global warming, according to a study published in Thursday’s journal Nature.
Global warming may make humidity worse
AFP – Europe needs to take drastic action to reverse complex environmental issues that have shortened the life expectancy of its people by almost a year, the European Environmental Agency said Wednesday.
Climate change deadlier than car accidents: European agency
Reuters – The global economic boom has accelerated greenhouse gas emissions to a dangerous threshold not expected for a decade and could potentially cause irreversible climate change, said one of Australia’s leading scientists.
Greenhouse gas emissions hit danger mark
Apparently more and more, the government is putting a price tag on our environment.
AP – A big power company accused of spreading smog and acid rain across a dozen states agreed Tuesday to pay at least $4.6 billion to cut chemical emissions in what the government called the nation’s largest environmental settlement.
Acid rain case settled for $4.6 billion (AP)
Reuters – The number of heat-related deaths in and around New York City will nearly double by 2050 – and could rise as high as 95 percent — due to global warming if no efforts are made to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, a new study shows.
Heat may kill hundreds of New Yorkers (Reuters)
