What the world is reading

A hotter planet is already baked in. So no matter what the climate wonks say or what the leaders of the world decideor dont decidein Copenhagen,it may just be too late to hit a carbon undo button. But Spencer Reiss says we can still come out OK,simply by adapting to climate change. Coastal communities,for example,will survive not because the world will somehow unite to stop sea levels from rising it wont. Theyll survive because theyll learn to adapt, says Reiss.

NEW SCIENTIST

Great and good share hopes and fears for Copenhagen

Ahead of Copenhagen,the weekly science magazine goes around the table,asking leading scientists,politicians and entrepreneurs to talk about the climate change talks. Among the experts are R.K. Pachauri of IPCC and Richard Lindzen,Professor of Atmospheric Sciences at MIT. There are the standard positionsmy best hope is that developed countries agree on commitments to reduce emissions by 2020,says R.K. Pachauri. And some candid onesI fervently hope that Copenhagen will avoid canonising the absurd notion that climate is determined by any single parameter like CO2, says Lindzen.

GLOBALPOST

Special report: Oceans

The answer to a rapidly warming globe lies in the depths of the ocean; if only someone bothered to look deep enough,writes C.M. Sennott. The author writes about a study that GlobalPosts team of student correspondents conducted on the health of the worlds oceans. The stories have been put up on an interactive graphic with links to each of the reports. Ashley Herendeen and Patrick Winn write about sex slaves,a centuries old phenomenon in which the owners of large fishing boats capture their crews,and Elizabeth Tuttle writes about drowning islands such as I-Kiribati.

SCIENCE DAILY

Greening of the Sahara Desert Triggered Early Human Migrations out of Africa

Its climate change again. Early human migrations out of Africa,it turns out,were triggered by climate change. A report in the Science Daily says the Sahara desert and the Sahel region of north Africa were wetter around 9,000,50,000 and 120,000 years ago than at present. At these times,the wetter conditions in central North Africa likely enabled humans to cross this normally inhospitable region,allowing them to migrate into other continents, the report says.

Desmogblog.com

Climategate is the hottest topic on the blogosphere. For those who came in late,this is about a series of emails hacked from the Clunare Research Unit at the University of Anglia in which scientists admit to having tampered with climate stats. In his post that takes on the denial industry,Richard Littlemore says the hacked emails are trouble,serious trouble,but not BIG trouble. He quotes a Washington Post editorial that says,Climate scientists should not let themselves be goaded by the irresponsibility of the deniers into overstating the certainties of complex science or,worse,censoring discussion of them.