"The fossilised remains of prehistoric forests have been fought over, pumped and mined throughout the twentieth century. Fossil fuels have powered the industrial revolution across the globe. But the burning of coal, oil and gas to provide electricity for our homes and factories and fuel for our cars, trains and aeroplanes has fuelled another fire. It has led to an increased greenhouse effect, a suspected global rise in the earths temperature, and changed the climate of many parts of the world.

"Over More than 80% of the primary greenhouse gas CO2, released into the atmosphere due to human activity, comes from burning fossil fuels.

"Today, just one country releases almost a quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions.

"The United States releases more than four times the global average of greenhouse gas emissions per head of the population, more than 20 tons per person per year, compared to under less than 10 in the UK and just 2.7 in China, that's 22% of the worlds greenhouses gasses from a country with little more than 4% of the worlds population."

EARTH REPORT TITLE: "Change in the Air"

VOX POP 1: "Sea levels are rising, beaches are eroding, we're on a classic collision course."

VOX POP 2: "Everything we've had is ruined, baby pictures, married pictures, everything is gone."

VOX POP 3: "We originally won a Nobel peace prize with concern for nuclear weapons, this is like nuclear war in slow motion."

COMM: "The United States is not immune from the effects of greenhouse gas emissions, climate change has affected every state.

"The Kyoto protocol aims to reduce emissions but the American government has failed to comply in the face of powerful opposition from the coal and oil lobby. Unless the US signs up to Kyoto it is an all but worthless document. Unlike congress, public opinion in the US now seems to be moving in favour of accepting limits to greenhouse gas emissions. One reason is this - the US National Assessment Report. Sober, thorough, undramatic, it dishes the tobacco scientists .in the pay of the fossil fuel interests - it shows that North America is already in the grip of potentially catastrophic climate change.

This week we report on just a few of the national assesement findings."

SUB-TITLE: ALASKA

COMM: "With an area of over 580 thousand square milesmore than 1.5 million square kilometres, Alaska is bigger than the next three of the largest US states combined. It has 3 million lakes, 5,000 glaciers and 17 of the highest 20 mountains in the US. Yet its scale does not protect it from global forces. 1.23 million acres hectares of spruce spine forest are diseased and dying, in some areas over more than 90% are dead.

"Ed Holsten is as forest entimologist. He has been working in Alaska for over more than 22 years.

"The spruce pine tree is the most predominant of only three species of tree that flourish in this northern region where cold harsh winters tend to discourage both plant and animal species not adapted to these latitudes."

ED HOLSTEN: "Every year we fly around forested areas in Alaska, mapping in insect and disease damage. A lot of the times you fly over a mixed forest and you look down you'll see maybe five or ten trees per acre killed and a lot of hardwood trees. Then all of a sudden you get into another area where you have pure spruce come over a little knoll and as far as you can see for 20 miles there will be a sea of red brown trees and maybe one percent will be green trees. Without being in an aeroplane and seeing this it's hard to describe you can fly for mile after mile after mile and not see a green tree."

COMM: "Ecologists studying the causes of this widespread destruction have pointed the finger at the bark beetle. A beetle normally associated with killing spruce pine trees in warmer southerly latitudes, but where greater tree diversity has tended to limit its impact."

ED HOLSTEN: "This area here, this tree was killed a couple of years ago by beetles but by removing the bark we can see a couple of things that is very indicative of Spruce Beetle. Number one all that live flome tissue is gone and all we're left with is this boring dust and this is just the remains of where the beetles have been feeding. They've consumed all the flome tissue. But this gallery right here which is about 3-4 inches long is called the egg gallery and it's about this long and then they lay up to 80 eggs on each side of this gallery, will hatch out perpendicular to the egg gallery and will feed out in this direction and this direction. And so you'll have thousands of galleries all up and down a tree to a height of 20ft tall and there is only one insect up here that makes an egg gallery like that and thats the Spruce Beetle. So it's fairly easy to determine that this was a beetle killed tree."

COMM: "At the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, Climatologists have been charting a changing climate in the region, most clearly portrayed by a steady trend of rising winter temperatures."

GUNTER WELLER: "There is a fairly consistent trend in the temperatures. An upward trend that makes the temperature warmer from year to year to year and associated with that is the decrease in ice cover, melting of glaciers, thawing of permafrost, and all these signal very clearly that we have a trend that continues to get worse from year to year and if you believe the computer models that have been set up to predict what is going to happen in 100 years time if they are correct and they seem to be born out by present observations, then it's going to get considerably worse."

ED HOSTEN: "In the last ten years we have lost more trees than we have in the previous 60 years, a factor of 10 times more, and if you relate that tree mortality then you plot out temperature, you can see in the last 10 years where we had a real significant increase in mean annual temperature that corresponded to this explosive epidemic of Bark Beetle occurring in Alaska. We have not seen such a long length of favourable weather like this for hundreds if not thousands of years and the Bark Beetle that normally has a two year life cycle many years now goes through it's life cycle in one year which means we double the population every year and this has been occurring more and more and more in recent years and is one of the main factors for creating these extensive Bark Beetle outbreaks that as far as we've known the intensity of the outbreak is probably unprecedented."

COMM: "The forest destruction has also impacted the human population. Robert Purcell is the local fire chief in Homer, a town on the northern tip of the Kenai peninsular."

ROBERT PURCELL: "The Bark Beetle poses a threat from the trees to homes and people here often chose to keep the trees as close to their homes as possible. There was a very real concerted effort to preserve the forest as people built in this forest and to suddenly find that the forest is a threat either by the trees falling on the homes in a windstorm as they die or potentially catching fire if we have a major fire, and we have had fire events here that have threatened homes, has changed the perspective into a degree where the forest was seen as sort of warm and embracing or sheltering, there's a component of threat now.

"I see a similarity between the Spruce Bark Beetle infestation and the impacts that came from the Exxon Valdez oil spill. It's challenged the economies of communities, it's challenged peoples values, it's made people deal with an issue that they probably hadn't anticipated they would need to or have to deal with. I think there's a very important human dimension to something of this scale that isn't really acknowledged as maybe as much as it should, and thats something that has surprised me that there hasn't been more study and thought associated with that. The interaction of the human experience and this kind of disturbance in the forest."

ED HOLSTEN: "Many areas that have been impacted by beetles there is no Spruce regeneration coming back and we are seeing a conversion of a Spruce forest to grass and brush and hardwood. We are changing the eco system, the structure and the composition of the forest in many parts of Alaska are changing due to a beetle that has changed its behaviour due to increase in temperature."

COMM: "A warming climate may benefit many varieties of insect and other pests, it does not help preserve the worlds ice sheets. These frozen wastes have a far greater significance to our oceans, our climate, to fish and animal life, than there remote location might suggest."

SUB-TITLE: MONTANA

COMM: "In the North Mid-West of the United States lies the state of Montana. Outside Alaska it contains one of the largest areas of undisturbed wilderness in the United States and some of the most southrly glaciers to be found on the continent. Glacier National Park makes up the majority of this area."

DAN FAGRE: "Big natural parks like this are extremely unique. We have 5,000 sq kms or 1600 sq miles here and it's relatively pristine. Very few effects of people are here so in this way we are able to use a very unique situation in this grand national park to be able to learn about how systems really operate."

COMM: "Dr Fagre is using the park to study glaciers. Across the globe at extreme latitudes and elevations there has been a consistent and measurable amount of ice melt and glacial retreat in recent years. It has been estimated that half the worlds glaciers have already been lost. In Montana, Glacier National Park has not escaped these losses."

DAN FAGRE: "Glaciers used to be much more dominant here and in 1850 there were about 150 glaciers here and now there are less than 37 of them that are named and we suspect that there is probably some of them that don't even qualify as glaciers anymore because they've become so small."

COMM: "The apparent speed of the retreat of the normally slow moving glaciers has spurred Dr. Fagre into mapping just how fast and how serious the glacial loss is, and to find the extent this could be related to climate."

DAN FAGRE: "One of the activities that we've had here at the glacier field station with the US Geological Survey is to look at how this eco system has already responded to climate change. As part of that effort we've been looking at many of the glaciers and they way they have receded over the past 150 years. To demonstrate some of this we've been looking at repeat photography in this case we go to the historic archives and we take a photo like this one from 1932 of the Boulder Glacier, note the small figures here, these are people standing next to this huge ice cave, and then you go to the exact same photo point and 56 years later you see there is absolutely no ice left whatsoever in the landscape. The entire glacier has disappeared and that was quite a large one. And by repeating this for many of the glaciers in the park we've been able to show that most of the glaciers have disappeared and even the ones that remain are a mere fraction of their previous size. And this is a graphic and dramatic example of the kinds of ecological changes that are going on here at Glacier National Park in Montana. You can see historically here from this graph too that the area of the glaciers from 1850 into the early part of this century and you can that they go down dramatically as this lower line which is the average summer temperature goes up. And so this clearly demonstrates that the glaciers are responding to warming temperatures in this particular area this century.

"One of the tools we've been using to try to see what the future would be like for Glacier National Park is Eco System Modelling. So in this particular sequence we've actually used data from the past, from 1850 up to the present and then extrapolated that into the future and in this particular scenario you can see that all of our glaciers disappear by the year 2030. If you look closely here you will see that the vegetation is also changing behind the glacial recession so one of the significant features is that grasses move into some of the areas that were previously forested. So the mix of vegetation and the disappearance of glaciers in Glacier National Park will give us a very different look into the future.

"We can be assured that climate is the main driver because we have no other kinds of influences regionally or locally that would affect the kinds of eco system responses that we're seeing. That's one of the beauties of using a National Park to try to figure out what's making these ecosystems tick. Most of the other influences are greatly diminished or gone all together so we can attribute things like glacier recession and vegetation change primarily to climatic change and external things of this sort. So we feel fairly confident that these glaciers have retreated because the climate has shifted over the last 150 years."

COMM: "Scientists predict the impact of ice melt and glacier loss will not be restricted to the colder regions, but will be felt across the globe."

GUNTER WELLER: "As glaciers continue to melt, this will have a major impact on the global sea level rise and sea level rise is a problem in many parts of the world - low lying areas, that is why the Pacific island nations are so concerned.

"You know various studies have shown that the sea level rise which is estimated to be about 20cm over the last century - 2mm per year has been mostly due to, half of it has been due to melting of mountain glaciers. Also as you have more open water instead of ice, climate patterns begin to change, storm tracks which are affected by the presence or absence of ice will change and therefore the weather as well as the climate in certain parts will be affected, the ocean is extremely important in all of this and any changes that occur in the oceans system will affect everything else."

COMM: "In part two we see how changing climate is impacting the temperate and tropical areas of the US."

SUB-TITLE: "THE EASTERN SEABOARD

COMM: "The impact of global warming on the worlds oceans is already having a significant effect on the coastal areas of the United States. Court Stevenson, a professor of environmental science at Maryland University and has been monitoring sea level rise on the Chesapeake Bay area. He plans to visit James' Island off the western shore."

PROF. COURT STEVENSON, MARYLAND UNIVERSITY: "I don't think myself I expected the kind of rise in the 1990's that we're seeing on the gauges at all. I would have expected to see a change from 3mm to 6mm but now we have 1.6 cm which is considerably more than I would have ever predicted in the 1980's, so we've got much more than 10 times the original sea level rate."

WE SEE COURT ON A BOAT IN THE BAY: "See the surf out there eating away at that?

"I used to navigate in here 10 years ago, using that as a forest stand, it was a big clump of forest, now you can hardly make it out.

"In the 1940's it was split into two islands, each about 200 acres but now its less than 60 acres."

COURT STEVENSON: "If the trees are lost and the island disappears and it turns into a shoal the waves will be dissipated onto a number of homeowners beaches and we'll start to see the erosion of the mainland itself."

COMM: "Homeowners are finding that as the barrier islands disappear, land on the mainland is being lost at an ever increasing rate."

JOE COIN Resident Homeowner: "Many many homes have been lost many many homes have been moved from islands that are sinking into the Chesapeake bay onto firmer ground on the mainland and now even some of those homes are now in jeopardy, having been moved once they find themselves in jeopardy once again."

COMM (beaches Florida): "Further south, the state of Florida is also suffering from severe and increasing rates of coastal erosion."

Dr. LEATHERMAN: "Well at high tide I'd be under water and the waves would be bashing into me, this area is a critically eroding area, like much of the coastline of Florida that's eroding, in fact in the United States 80% to 90% of beaches are presently eroding, it's a national problem."

COMM (beaches): "It's a problem exacerbated by a long term trend towards shore ward migration of the population. Some xx% of all Americans now live on the coast compared to just xx% of the population xx years ago."

Dr. Leatherman: "Americans have a love affair with beaches, there is a shore ward migration of the population, and at the same time sea level is rising, beaches are eroding, we're on a classic collision course."

COMM (wind hotels, offices): "A collision that is surely felt most directly during the many storms and hurricanes that lash this coastline, putting at risk not only lives but the whole infrastructure that has been put in place to serve the rising population."

Dr. Leatherman: "Some of our most valuable real estate is packed along the coastline, in fact along the US eastern gulf coast it's estimated that there are 3.1 trillion, with a T, trillion dollars in real estate vulnerable to beach erosion and hurricane impacts."

COMM (flood footage, Hurricane Centre): "While coastal erosion from sea level rise is a relatively slow albeit unstoppable force, damage from flood and storm is far more immediate but no less related to the influence of global warming. During Hurricane Irene, a relatively minor force 1 hurricane, much of downtown Miami was under water Climate models predict that as the earth warms hurricane winds may not become any more frequent, but they will increase in intensity and appear over a wider area, even as far north as Chesapeake Bay."

Court Stevenson: "If we have a little bit more warming and the isotherms, the levels of temperature are shifted northwards in the ocean before the hurricane comes in if its getting much warmer water the wind forces stay very high. If we have a 4 or 5 category hurricane as Camille hit in 1969 down in the gulf coast we would have a tragedy beyond anything we've experienced in Chesapeake bay."

COMM: "Hurricane Andrew that hit xxx Florida and Louisiana in 19xx 1992 was a force 4/5 (?) hurricaneCategory 4 storm with wind speeds of more than 250 km an hour."

Dr. Leatherman: "Andrew was the worst natural disaster economically in the world, at 30 billion dollars, I don't think there's anything that comes close to that."

COMM (flood aftermath damage in South Carolina): "Tracked by the National Hurricane Centre in Miami, the largest hurricane in the 1999 season was Floyd. At one time it was predicted it would hit Florida, in the panic to escape major freeways were blocked solid for 24 hours trapping some 6 (?) million people. At the eleventh hour it veered northwards dissipated somewhat as it hit cooler water and made landfall in North Carolina.

"The greater percentage of damage that stems from Hurricane winds is not usually from the wind itself but from the accompanying surge in tides and excessive rainfall.."

LADY WITH CONDEMNED HOUSE: "You can see the line here where it got into my house, and this is not a pretty sight, everything we had on the porch washed, and this is where I did most of my living because it's cool out here, every things gone. I had an old player piano over there and its washed away.

"Here I had five dead cows floating, the water was all the way up and they were floating right out here and the stench is better, but it's still bad. And every time I come I look for my kitty cat and I can't find my cat so...(cries)"

MAN HOMEOWNER: "We've been married for 42 years, everything we've had is ruined, baby pictures, family pictures, everything is gone."

ANOTHER MAN HOMEOWNER: "When I opened the door, pulled the door open, the refrigerator floated right to me, the refrigerator, everything, table, stove, it just floated right to you, and floated right on down the street with you, that's how high it was."

COMM (Fema HQ): "Although hurricane Floyd caused far less damage than it would had it hit Florida the week before, it was never the less highly destructive."

FEMA SPOKESPERSON: "Fema has 600 people working 7 days a week on this disaster, we have 57,000 requests for assistance FEMA will end up reimbursing the state of North Carolina for all this in the high single billions of dollars."

COMM: "The combination of increased storms and floods with sea level rise could well make disasters like Floyd a regular occurrence for people living in coastal zones."

ENDING: "There are solutions, - increasing the efficiency with which we use energy, wasting less, travelling less, using renewable energy sources from the wind, the sun and waves which do not release global warming gasses such as CO2 into the atmosphere. In many cases they There are many real economic alternatives to that would make us less dependent on fossil fuel power stations."

WWF PERSON: "We can see now that the effects of global warming and climate change will affect us all, the climate respects no boundaries. But it's not too late to do something about our climate. The US has to implement measures that will reduce CO2 emissions into our atmosphere, but it must act now."

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