WASHINGTON – Methane is leaking into the atmosphere from unstable permafrost in the Arctic Ocean faster than scientists had thought and could worsen global warming, a study said Thursday.

From 2003 to 2008, an international research team led by University of Alaska-Fairbanks scientists Natalia Shakhova and Igor Semiletov surveyed the waters of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf, which covers more than 772,200 square miles (two million square kilometers) of seafloor in the Arctic Ocean.

“This discovery reveals a large but overlooked source of methane gas escaping from permafrost underwater, rather than on land,” the study said.

“More widespread emissions could have dramatic effects on global warming in the future.”

Earlier studies in Siberia had focused on methane escaping from thawing permafrost on land.

Scientists learn red grouper operate as underwater architects

Coleman didn’t suspect initially that red grouper were capable of such engineering feats. Years ago, she was on a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration vessel in the Gulf of Mexico looking at images from a remotely operated camera and noticed the large holes on the sea floor.

“I was just sitting there, thinking, ‘Why are there holes?’ It came like a flash: The only thing it could be is red grouper,” she said.

Coleman and a few colleagues, including her husband, Christopher Koenig, a fellow FSU professor, and Margaret Miller, an ecologist at the NOAA’s Southeast Fisheries Science Center, tested her hypothesis. They trapped red grouper in a cage without a bottom; the fish dug out of it. The scientists placed black charcoal the size of sand grains on the sea floor to see whether the fish would move it; they scattered it everywhere.

“They started digging almost right away,” Coleman said of the fish, adding that it was almost as if the scientists had offended the grouper’s aesthetic sensibilities. “It was like, ‘I just cleaned this place.’ ”

By building complex, three-dimensional structures that expose the hard rock beneath the sand, Miller said, red grouper create an environment in which seaweed, coral and sponges can thrive. These communities then attract everything from cleaner fish to female grouper seeking a mate.

“It’s just a very cool ecological story,” Miller said. “They really have this tremendous ability in getting these diverse communities of organisms to exist in a place that otherwise wouldn’t be there.”

The Obama administration stepped up its criticism Thursday of health insurers’ efforts to raise their rates, an attempt to harness public aggravation with the industry and rebuild momentum for broad changes to the nation’s health-care system.

Separately, Washington area residents holding individual health insurance policies said they have received notices that their premiums are increasing by as much as 40 percent.

At a news conference, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius cited half a dozen examples, from Maine to Washington state, in which insurers have sought large premium increases on people who buy coverage individually. In every case but one, state insurance regulators rejected all or part of the requested increases.

Cruise ships still find a Haitian berth

Luxury liners are still docking at private beaches near Haiti’s devastated earthquake zone for holidaymakers to enjoy the water

Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines faced a difficult decision over whether to dock as per itinerary at Labadee Beach, Haiti after last week’s tragic quake. Photograph: Daniel Morel/AP

The Florida cruise company leases a picturesque wooded peninsula and its five pristine beaches from the government for passengers to “cut loose” with watersports, barbecues, and shopping for trinkets at a craft market before returning on board before dusk. Safety is guaranteed by armed guards at the gate.

To their credit, some of the cruise ships passengers were uncomfortable with their situation.  Read on:

The decision to go ahead with the visit has divided passengers. The ships carry some food aid, and the cruise line has pledged to donate all proceeds from the visit to help stricken Haitians. But many passengers will stay aboard when they dock; one said he was “sickened”.

“I just can’t see myself sunning on the beach, playing in the water, eating a barbecue, and enjoying a cocktail while [in Port-au-Prince] there are tens of thousands of dead people being piled up on the streets, with the survivors stunned and looking for food and water,” one passenger wrote on the Cruise Critic internet forum.

“It was hard enough to sit and eat a picnic lunch at Labadee before the quake, knowing how many Haitians were starving,” said another. “I can’t imagine having to choke down a burger there now.”

For more than a decade, a fierce debate about peak oil has been raging between those who think a peak in global oil production is at hand and those who think the world is not close to running out of oil. The debate is moot for two reasons. First, the growing threat of global warming requires deep reductions in national and global oil consumption starting now, peak or no peak. Second, relying on unconventional oil like tar sands and liquid coal to make up a supply shortage, as the oilmen say we must, would be climate catastrophe. More supply is not the answer to either our oil or our climate problem — reducing consumption of oil is. And right now we have two feasible solutions: greatly increase our vehicle fuel economy and find alternative fuel sources that are abundant, low-carbon and affordable.

Sea levels will rise by twice as much as previously predicted as a result of
global warming, an
important international study has concluded.

The Scientific Committee on
Antarctic Research (SCAR) calculated that if temperatures continued to
increase at the present rate, by 2100 the sea level would rise by up to 1.4
metres — twice that predicted two years ago.

Even if the average global temperature increases by only 2C — the target set
for next week’s Copenhagen summit — sea levels could still rise by 50cm,
double previous forecasts, according to the report.

The IPCC report predicted that the melting of ice sheets would contribute
about 20 per cent of the total rise in sea levels, with the majority coming
from the melting of glaciers and the expansion of the water as it warms. It
said that it was not able to predict the impact of melting ice sheets, but
suggested this could add 10-20cm.

In the race to reduce greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, scientists have been looking to forests and oceans to absorb the pollution people generate.

World’s oceans, forests becoming less able to absorb CO2

Relying on nature to compensate for human excesses sounds like a win-win situation — except that these resources are under stress from the very emissions we are asking them to absorb, making them less able partners in the pact.

“What our ocean study and other recent land studies suggest is that we cannot count on these sinks operating in the future as they have in the past and keep on subsidizing our ever-growing appetite for fossil fuels,” Khatiwala said.

TARUNA JAYA, INDONESIA — Across a patch of pineapples shrouded in smoke, Idris Hadrianyani battled a menace that has left his family sleepless and sick — and has wrought as much damage on the planet as has exhaust from all the cars and trucks in the United States. Against the advancing flames, he waved a hose with a handmade nozzle confected from a plastic soda bottle.

Amid often-acrimonious debate over how to curb global warming ahead of a critical U.N. conference next month in Copenhagen, “peat is the big elephant in the room,” said Agus Purnomo, head of Indonesia’s National Council on Climate Change. Dealing with it, he said, requires that the world answer a vexing question: How can protection of the environment be made as economically rewarding as its often lucrative destruction?

In 354 days, the dead will rise. Or so believe Republicans.

They believe that their suffering and forbearance in the face of an overzealous, hyperliberal left will culminate in a 2010 resurrection of the battered Republican brand.

Case in point: After G.O.P. victories in Virginia last week, Representative Eric Cantor, the House Republican whip, exclaimed that voters are “looking for change. … The Republican resurgence begins again tonight!”

Cantor is also right that the people want change — still. They trusted Democrats to deliver. The Democrats haven’t, not yet at least, and pleas for patience come at a price. If voters’ thirst remains unsated, they will change politicians until politicians change policies.