A report from Environmental Research Letters shows that crops yields worldwide have dropped by 40 millions tonnes a year as a result of rising temperatures. Though this is a small percentage of total harvests, it’s not a promising trend.

People sometimes wonder why things like globalization, GMOs, or maltreated seals provoke outrage and protest, while the prospect of immanent planetary disaster do not, really. Well, protesters have finally arrived in Ottawa.

Most Canadian adults believe climate change is a reality, according to a poll by Angus Reid Strategies. 77 per cent of respondents are convinced that global warming is happening, 21 per cent think it may be occurring, and only two per cent flatly reject it.

Fighting global warming will be inexpensive but governments have little time left to avert big, damaging temperature rises, a draft United Nations report shows.

The draft, due for release in Bangkok on May 4, indicates warming is on track to exceed a 2 Celsius (3.6 F) rise over pre-industrial times, regarded by the European Union as a threshold for “dangerous” change to nature.

Ma Kai, the chairman of China’s National Development and Reform Commission speaks of concerns over a heating economy. He states that “China’s per capita greenhouse gas emissions are rising quickly.”

Analysis of scientific data on solar variations over the last 25 years shows no evidence of it causing global warming, a report states.

“The temperature record is simply not consistent with any of the solar forcings that people are talking about,” said lead author Mike Lockwood at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Oxfordshire.

A Xinhua news agency believes that Tibet will see the fastest rise in temperature than anywhere else in the world – a rise of 0.3C every 10 years.

“Chinese scientists have long warned that rising temperatures on the Qinghai-Tibet plateau will melt glaciers, dry up major Chinese rivers and trigger more droughts, sandstorms and desertification.”

Differences in everything from sea ice to permafrost show the Arctic climate is changing even more rapidly than scientists had predicted, says a new summary of the most recent research.

The report, produced for the World Wildlife Fund and presented this week to the Arctic Council, adds that there could be factors contributing to climate change that were not even considered until recently.