....Many studies have looked at how global warming may cause shifts in where plants...Climate shift. The warming of the Walden Pond area ( above...species are threatened most by global warming and which are likely to adapt...

"Oil companies once viewed drilling in the deep waters off Florida as cost prohibitive. Politicians feared even the slightest sign of support would be career suicide.".."The early activity here stems from a 2006 Congressional compromise that allows drilling on 8.3 million acres more than 125 miles off the Panhandle -- an area that had been covered by the moratorium, which was enacted out of environmental concerns. In exchange, the state got a no-drilling buffer along the rest of its beaches. Florida may turn out to be a prelude for other coastal states. If oil or natural gas deposits are found in the newly opened region, experts say it could further the push to explore other once-protected areas everywhere. It also could be a rallying point for critics, who say the new exploration isn't a license to expand exploration.With gas topping $4 a gallon, recent polls show Americans, Floridians included, more supportive of drilling in protected areas. Some politicians -- including Gov. Charlie Crist -- have switched sides. "..."Drilling activity off the Florida Panhandle has started and sputtered for decades. Some companies had leases to drill off the Panhandle before the 1981 moratorium. They were grandfathered in when the moratorium passed because they were already actively exploring in their lease areas. They continued their activity off and on into the early 1990s. In March, four companies -- Australia-based BHP Billiton Petroleum Deepwater Inc., Houston-based Anadarko E&P Co., Shell Offshore Inc. and Italian oil and natural gas company Eni SpA -- purchased leases on 36 Gulf of Mexico tracts under the 2006 compromise. Jeb Bachmann, an analyst with New Orleans energy consultant Howard Wiel, said the four understand the shifting political and financial realities. "..."And it will take years before the company begins producing anything at the site -- and there is no guarantee of success. A company can have as much as $4 billion invested and a wait of up to five years before seeing any return on the investment, Strive said. "We typically will have $100 to $200 million invested in a project before we know if it is an economic venture or not," he said. "Then, if you know you have made an economic discovery, you spend a billion dollars or more on a facility." The 1981 moratorium -- enacted out of environmental concerns in response to a massive oil spill off the Santa Barbara coast a decade earlier -- has prevented the Interior Department from spending money on offshore oil or gas leases in virtually all coastal waters outside the western Gulf of Mexico and in some areas off Alaska. But politicians who once supported the ban are changing their minds. U.S. Sen. John McCain supports lifting the ban and allowing states to decide whether to approve drilling of their shores. Crist, Florida's Republican governor and a possible vice presidential candidate, reversed his long-standing opposition to lifting the ban last month. The ban won't be lifted without a fight. U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson, who has led opposition to offshore drilling among the state's Congressional delegation, criticized the governor for reversing his position, accusing Crist and McCain of putting oil company profits before protecting the state's $65 billion annual tourism industry. "..."Oil companies and their allies are using the shockingly high price of oil and gasoline, which largely is the result not of a supply problem but speculative fever, to scare the public into thinking coastal drilling offers a real solution to our dependency on oil," he said in an e-mailed statement."....

..."In Transport Revolutions: Moving People and Freight Without Oil http://www.richardgilbert.ca/transportrevolutions/index.htm , Gilbert and co-author Anthony Perl, an urban studies professor at Simon Fraser University, make a persuasive argument that global oil depletion is more imminent, and for that reason more important, than climate change. One way or another, they say, there is a revolution coming."..."In case you've missed the vigorous and contentious debate about peak oil, think of it as the time when half of all the oil that ever could be produced has been produced, whether that is from one particular field or from the planet's total supply. More importantly, think of it as the end of easy oil. "..."Predicting the date of peak oil is tricky. It involves many variables, such as the projected rates of consumption, how much oil is actually still in the ground and whether new technology could allow reserves that are currently unreachable to be tapped in the future."..."But whether one concludes, as Perl and Gilbert have, that the peak in global oil production is likely to occur in 2012 or far in the future, oil is inarguably a finite resource. More importantly, oil post-gusher will be more expensive, dangerous and politically risky than previously. If peak oil theorists are right, countries such as the U.S. and the U.K., which have managed to increase consumption by importing oil, may eventually find there won't be oil to import. "..."Well, 95 per cent of all motorized transportation is fueled by oil. Almost half of that is freight. And freight has shaped what our economies, and hence our societies, have become."..."There is no way for society to continue with these price increases without either an economic collapse or some kind of military crisis, or both." "...."They write that in a worst-case scenario, "car-dependent suburban residents … will have to abandon their homes or live at a subsistence level on what they can produce from their land." "..."By 2025, the authors believe, 30 per cent of transportation in the U.S. can, and must, complete the shift away from oil. The cost, not surprisingly: trillions of dollars. On the other hand, they say, some of that money would be redeployed from airport and highway construction and maintenance. Against the rising cost of oil and the risk of societal collapse, those trillions are a bargain, they say"..."They call it the Great Pause. In 1941, before Pearl Harbour yanked the U.S. into the Second World War, American auto companies manufactured 3.8 million cars. Priorities changed on Dec. 7. ...By 1943, just 143 vehicles were produced. A "golden age" for public transit lasted through the war years. "Individual sacrifice was justified in the name of national security, a recipe for legitimizing sudden and dramatic behavioural change," write Gilbert and Perl. "....