The global ecotourism movement is acutely sensitive to the dangers of global warming. Natural areas in all climate zones are being impacted by the effects of climate change. The Global Ecotourism Conference 2007, in Oslo , Norway ( May 14-16, 2007 ) will address this issue head on during the course of the three-day event.

"Most ecotourism properties work very hard to minimize their use of carbon fuels," said Wolfgang Strasdas, PhD., a professor of Ecotourism at Uniersity of Eberswalde in Hamburg, Germany, and a member of the Board of The International Ecotourism Society (TIES), the main organizer of the Global Ecotourism Conference 2007 along with Ecotourism Norway and UNEP. Dr. Strasdas is also the author of Global Warming, Ecotourism and Sustainable Transportation.

One way ecotourism properties and their partners are addressing global warming is through carbon offsets, taking active steps to ameliorate carbon output caused by transportation. Carbon offsets can be accomplished through one airline that will be present at the conference - Nature Air, a Costa Rican airline that is the first to totally offset carbon emissions generated by its operations.

"We are an ecotourism airline," said Alexi Huntley of Nature Air. "We operate in an area very sensitive to ecological impacts, so we are very sensitive to our impact on the environment. Carbon offsets are just one of the things we do to help minimize our impact on the environment of our beautiful region." Nature Air is a sponsor of the Global Ecotourism Conference 2007.

Dr. Strasdas, along with Robert Muller of Atmosfair, will be presenting at the Global Ecotourism Conference 2007 and hosting a workshop outlining the alternatives and options for truly "carbon neutral" travel. Atmosfair provides carbon offset programs for individual travelers as well as companies interested in offsetting carbon emissions from their activities.

The debate over future sea level rise from melting ice in a changing climate has raged for years. It is widely believed that the expression of climate change is amplified across the polar regions of Earth, and there exists some supportive evidence in historical climate records. However, much of the worry about rapid polar climate change stems from model predictions of inordinate warming in the high latitudes during the 21st century. The chain of events, then, is warming, glacial melt, and sea level rise, which is a logical sequence that makes doomsday scenarios of sea level rise easy to sell.

We found gloomy news about our agricultural future. Of course, within the first two sites visited, we learned that “the region likely to be worst affected is Africa , both because its geography makes it particularly vulnerable, and because seventy percent of the population rely on rain-fed agriculture for their livelihoods.”

Literally thousands of experiments have been conducted showing that agricultural plants benefit enormously in environments of higher concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide – they increase their rate of photosynthesis, increase water use efficiency, and increase yields. Furthermore, hundreds of experiments have shown that many agricultural plants benefit from higher temperatures, particularly higher temperatures at night. Believe it or not, most agricultural plants benefit from less frost! With all the gloom and doom about increased drought in the future, we note that all climate models predict increased precipitation on a global scale with little ability to predict changes in precipitation at local or even regional scales. Finally, can you name any important agricultural crop that has seen a reduction in yield per unit area over the past century? You cannot, because years of agricultural research have improved both the plants and the farming practices. Our guess is that the research in the future will produce even greater increases in yields, despite any changes that occur to the climate.

What is odd is that literally thousands of professional journal articles show that virtually all plants benefit from elevated atmospheric carbon dioxide levels with or without any increase in temperature. With all the goodness in the world of flora, why do the fauna of the planetary ecosystem seem so vulnerable? The dirty secret is that the literature is full of articles showing the animal kingdom benefiting from changes that are underway.

Among the usual claims, we learn that many humans will die as the temperature of the Earth increases, and that the elderly, the children, and the poorest among us are most at risk. Throw in a few pictures of Paris during the 2003 European heat wave, claim tens of thousands died in that event, and the icing is on the cake. A Google search of “Global Warming and Mortality”

We all know the story – humans are burning fossil fuels, greenhouse gases are increasing in atmospheric concentration at an alarming rate, the temperature of the earth is soaring upward, the ecosystems are struggling to cope with all the related changes, and if we don't act now, we will soon push the entire system past the dreaded tipping point. We at World Climate Report have presented evidence from a growing number of scientific papers that challenge this simple but highly popularized and publicized global warming story. Now another recent paper calls into question one of the most basic assumption – the article questions whether the second most important greenhouse gas, namely methane, is continuing to increase in atmospheric concentration.

No popular presentation of global warming is complete without images of people suffering from the effects of a heat wave. It seems so simple – the world is getting hotter, temperatures are rising everywhere, and therefore, heat waves will be longer, more frequent, and more severe. There are heat waves somewhere on the planet at any moment, so one would never run out of fresh material for such a story. Add in giant killer heat waves in Chicago and/or Europe, claim tens of thousands of deaths on those ever-increasing heat waves, and another scary global warming story emerges. Heat waves put a human face on suffering thanks to global warming, and if you include sweltering pets and animals at the zoo, the story is further embellished. Add in the familiar lines about the heat waves differentially impacting the elderly, the poor, and children, and the story is nearly complete. Obviously, blame the industrial nations (particularly the United States ) for all the misery just for some icing on the cake.

We have covered heat waves many times in the past at World Climate Report, but another article has appeared in a recent issue of Theoretical and Applied Climatology that we must call to your attention. A team of scientists from various institutions in Quebec decided to examine trends in the number of summer-season heat spells and the number of summer-season hot days in southern Quebec over the past 60 years. Canada is in the mid-to-high latitudes where climate models predict enhanced warming compared to the rest of the planet, so one might logically expect to see an increase in the heat spells. The title of the article reveals that the focus is on observed changes in heat spells in southern Quebec , but the results may surprise the global warming advocates of that country.

A recent example of such shunning is that of Dr. Christopher Landsea, hurricane expert from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Landsea is perhaps the world's foremost expert in hurricane climatology. As such, he has served the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) by providing, for the past several Assessment Reports, a summary of the current state of knowledge about hurricane history, especially as it relates to global warming. Landsea notes that there are large natural variations in the patterns of the strength and frequency of hurricanes, and that these natural cycles make it very difficult to detect an influence of global warming on tropical cyclones