"Rising sea levels due to global warming in the next few decades could put trillions of dollars in U.S. assets at risk, according to a report released Tuesday."

"A team of climate scientists, seeking to remind the negotiators who will hammer out a new climate treaty of what is at stake, has produced  The Copenhagen Diagnosis, a summary of the latest peer-reviewed science on the anticipated impacts of human-driven global warming."

"Ice volume around the Arctic region hit the lowest level ever recorded this year as climate extremes brought death and devastation to many parts of the world, the U.N. weather agency WMO said on Tuesday."
 

"A Senate bill's target for emission cuts is akin to level US is likely to offer in Copenhagen. Ahead of the global warming talks, other nations have been waiting to see US target."

"Since the 1997 international accord to fight global warming, climate change has worsened and accelerated -- beyond some of the grimmest of warnings made back then. As the world has talked for a dozen years about what to do next, new ship passages opened through the once frozen summer sea ice of the Arctic. In Greenland and Antarctica, ice sheets have lost trillions of tons of ice. Mountain glaciers in Europe, South America, Asia and Africa are shrinking faster than before."

"The Earth’s oceans, which have absorbed carbon dioxide from fuel emissions since the dawn of the industrial era, have recently grown less efficient at sopping it up, new research suggests."

"The United States and China have agreed to cooperate on developing an inventory of China's greenhouse gas emissions, the Environmental Protection Agency announced Wednesday, an initiative that appears be a response to criticism of Beijing's data collection."

"Appearing with President Hu Jintao, President Obama on Tuesday told reporters that the United States was determined to work with China and other countries to help produce a substantive agreement in Copenhagen climate talks next month."

The peatlands of Indonesia, formed over thousands of years, used to be a vast reservoir of carbon. But now deforestation has dried them out, and they are burning, releasing back into the atmosphere as much carbon dioxide as all the cars and trucks in the U.S. The question is how economic incentives to save the peatlands can outweigh the incentives for destroying them.

"COPENHAGEN -- Environment ministers made progress on Tuesday toward a scaled-down climate deal in Copenhagen next month, with Washington facing pressure to promise deep cuts by 2020 in greenhouse gas emissions."