[JAKARTA] Indonesia has launched its Tsunami Early Warning System (InaTEWS) and hopes to become the Indian Ocean tsunami warning provider by 2011. The new system can warn of an impending tsunami within five minutes of an earthquake and uses new technologies that differ from previous systems, according to its developers.

Sometimes deferring pain simply makes matters worse. We can only hope this point is not lost on the government delegates currently gathered at the United Nations climate change conference in Poznan, Poland. There to continue negotiations for a new treaty to replace the Kyoto protocol, the representatives of some 190 countries are finding that progress, even on this burning concern, can be tortuously slow.

POZNAN, Poland (Reuters) - President-elect Barack Obama's goals for curbing greenhouse gases to 2020 are inadequate to fight global warming, Chinese and Indian delegates told Reuters at U.N. climate talks on Wednesday. Developing nations welcomed Obama's plan for tougher goals than President George W. Bush but said Obama's target of cutting U.S. greenhouse gas emissions back to 1990 levels by 2020 was not enough to avoid dangerous global warming.

POZNAN, Poland (Reuters) - A group of 43 small island states called on Wednesday for tougher goals for fighting global warming than those being considered at U.N. climate talks, saying that rising seas could wipe them off the map. "We are not prepared to sign a suicide agreement that causes small island states to disappear," Selwin Hart of Barbados, a coordinator of the alliance of small island states, told Reuters at the 187-nation meeting.

In the summer of 1968, Dave Kavanaugh set off on a hike that would change the course of his life. As a second-year medical student at the University of Colorado, he had joined a climbing club with a few members of the biophysics department, and the group had set their sights on Gray's Peak—the ninth highest mountain in Colorado. Kavanaugh, who has never been able to do anything slowly, scampered up to the top of the peak in record time and sat down to wait for the rest of the group.

POZNAN, Poland (Reuters) - The world must avoid a "cheap and dirty" fix for the economy that could undermine the fight against global warming, the U.N.'s top climate official said on Sunday. Yvo de Boer said the world risked a second financial crisis if governments reacted to economic slowdown by building cheap, high-polluting coal-fired power plants that might then have to be scrapped as climate impacts hit.

A year-long push to devise a new global climate-change treaty — one that picks up where the Kyoto Protocol leaves off — gets under way Monday in Poland, with delegates from more than 190 nations set to resume grappling with the thorny issues of how much more to cut greenhouse-gas emissions and who will pay.

This year's round of UN climate talks are opening in Poland with nations attempting to set the terms of a new deal on all aspects of climate change. The talks, in the city of Poznan, mark the halfway point in a two-year process agreed at last year's UN conference.

Skeptics believed that the fiscal crisis would force Obama to put his plans to address global warming on the back burner. But in a videotaped speech to a climate summit co-hosted by California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger this month, Obama said, "Now is the time to confront this challenge once and for all. Delay is no longer an option."

Delegates from nearly 200 countries meet in Poland Monday to work on a new global climate-saving pact, finding ways to help poorer regions

GENEVA (Reuters) - Gases blamed for global warming reached record levels in the atmosphere last year, the United Nations weather agency said on Tuesday. Concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO2) and nitrous oxide (N2O) touched new highs after more steady rises in 2007, and methane had its largest annual increase in a decade, the World Meteorological Organization said.

Enormous cave bears, Ursus spelaeus, that once inhabited a large swathe of Europe, from Spain to the Urals, died out 27,800 years ago, around 13 millennia earlier than was previously believed, scientists have reported. The new date coincides with a period of significant climate change, known as the Last Glacial Maximum, when a marked cooling in temperature resulted in the reduction or loss of vegetation forming the main component of the cave bears' diet.

OTTAWA - Global warming is melting Arctic ice faster than the military projected, posing greater challenges for Canadian Forces already facing a deteriorating security situation half a world away in Afghanistan, says Canada's top soldier. "Global warming is happening very quickly. I think any projection we have has been underestimated. Flying over Ellesmere Island and not seeing very much snow up there and seeing the Arctic Ocean as a blue water ocean was quite revealing to me," Gen. Walt Natynczyk, the chief of the defence staff, said Monday in a candid and sweeping assessment of the challenges faced by the military from the sun-baked deserts of Afghanistan to the not-so-frozen Far North.

Glaciers high in the Himalayas are dwindling faster than anyone thought, putting nearly a billion people living in South Asia in peril of losing their water supply. Throughout India, China, and Nepal, some 15,000 glaciers speckle the Tibetan Plateau. There, perched in thin, frigid air up to 7200 metres above sea level, the ice might seem secluded from the effects of global warming.

OSLO (Reuters) - The economic downturn will test the world's resolve to do more to fight global warming at 190-nation talks in Poland next week, but the election ofBarack Obama as U.S. president should temper the gloom. The December 1-12 meeting of 8,000 delegates in Poznan, Poland, will review progress in a two-year push to work out a sweeping new U.N. climate treaty by the end of 2009.

SINGAPORE (Reuters) - The Southern Ocean has proved more resilient to global warming than previously thought and remains a major store of mankind's planet-warming carbon dioxide, a study has found. Oceans absorb a large portion of the extra CO2 released by mankind through burning fossil fuels or deforestation, acting as a brake on climate change, and the Southern Ocean is the largest of these "carbon sinks."

EU countries may agree before the end of the year on the basic principles and structure of an agreement on the European Commission's energy and climate package, but it is unlikely that a deal will be finalised, an ambassador of one of the bloc's 27 member states told EurActiv.

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - The Arctic offers new energy and fishing resources as a result of global warming and new technology, the European Union said on Thursday.

ALGIERS (Reuters) - Barack Obama's pledge to work to reduce emissions sharply by 2020 is a "huge signal" of encouragement to countries negotiating a new climate pact, the head of the U.N. Climate Change Secretariat said on Wednesday.

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia - Half the world's population could face a shortage of clean water by 2080 because of climate change, experts warned Tuesday. Wong Poh Poh, a professor at the National University of Singapore, told a regional conference that global warming was disrupting water flow patterns and increasing the severity of floods, droughts and storms — all of which reduce the availability of drinking water.

Will the world's economic meltdown stall initiatives to curb global warming? World leaders in the campaign to address climate change will confront that question as they gather in Beverly Hills tomorrow and Wednesday to shape policies aimed at responding to the mounting threats to food production, public health and the environment.

Despite new leadership in the United States promising to cap the country's greenhouse gas emissions, some environmental leaders say it is unlikely that an international climate treaty will pass in the next year. During his campaign, U.S. president-elect Barack Obama supported a global cap-and-trade agreement for regulating his nation's carbon emissions. As a result, many international observers are hoping the United States will agree to binding emissions-reduction targets at thehigh-profile climate change negotiations scheduled for December 2009 in Copenhagen, Denmark.

SYDNEY (Reuters) - Tens of thousands of Australians took part in mass protests around the country Saturday to call for tough government action on climate change, organizers said. The demonstrations were held as Australia prepares to set national greenhouse gas emissions targets, expected around the end of this month. Environmentalists accuse industry of pushing for targets that are likely to compromise the environment.

Global warming will have a broad and devastating impact on California's economy over the next century, according to a report released Thursday. Roads and bridges, the water supply, agriculture, public health and even winter skiing all will be affected by global climate change, said the report by University of California-Berkeley agricultural and resource economics professors David Roland-Holst and Fredrich Kahrl.

BOSTON, Nov 12 (Tierramérica) - The Antarctic holds the world’s largest amount of fresh water in its icy grip, and it is most certainly warming as a result of greenhouse gases, say new scientific studies. "We're able for the first time to directly attribute warming in both the Arctic and the Antarctic to human influences," said Nathan Gillett of the University of East Anglia, in Britain, who led the study.