Midtown resident Linda Rinard just returned from vacation.

"I just flew in at 9 a.m. from Las Vegas; two weeks and sunny Las Vegas," she said.

Sherri Stein picked up Rinard from Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport and brought her to Stein's driveway. Rinard and Stein are among the army of folks with shovels and snow blowers digging out, but only making room for more snow to take its place. The constantly falling snow and fog make it difficult for drivers to see the road.

Some ended up stuck in a snow bank like Jennifer Alger.

"I was just driving down the road and everything all looked the same, just all white. And my tires caught the snow bank, just went right through it, so my car's completely stuck," she said.

The worst of the snow-related accidents happened on the Glenn Highway this morning. Five cars were involved in an early-morning accident that resulted in two people being taken to the hospital. Traffic was forced to reroute on the Hiland Road exit.

Some of those in the ditch say they dove for it as they tried to avoid other cars.

"I just decided to get in the ditch rather than hit them in the middle of the road," said Shannon Overstreet, who was stuck in a ditch.

Four cars mixed it up on Lake Otis Parkway, near Tudor Road. Anchorage police closed the southbound lanes for about an hour.

The only ones smiling through all of this mess were wrecker drivers, who consider all of the weather-related wrecks like these as payday.

"Unfortunate, yes, but yeah, got to pay the bills you know," said Alaska Towing and Wrecking wrecker driver Greg Head.

At Stein's driveway, the ladies make progress. But they realize once the driveway is done, it's time to contemplate the roof.

"It's kind of nice to have some on the top because it does help to insulate. But then it gets to the point where you need to take it off, and I think it's at that point," Stein said.

It's how you get through these tough weather days: one step at a time.

State workers in Anchorage went home early today and the city closed libraries and several parks and recreational facilities early at 6 p.m.

Today was a record snowfall day for the Anchorage area. The National Weather Service has recorded 9.6 inches at its forecast offices as of 5:15 p.m. However, a lot more snow has fallen in other parts of town.

The following amounts have been recorded around Anchorage over the last 24 hours, as of 5:15 p.m. today:

O'Malley and Hillside - 22.0 inches
Mid-Hillside - 17.0 inches
Upper DeArmoun - 17.0 inches
Abbott Loop Road - 15.0 inches
Glen Alps - 12.0 inches
Eagle River - 4.5 inches
So far, Anchorage has accumulated 57.60 inches of snow this winter, a new record for snowfall as of Jan. 3.

Snow advisories are in effect until 9 p.m., but the Southcentral region should be seeing an end to the snow later tonight.

PREDICTION: El Niño, greenhouse gases making '07 hot

"There's been weird weather all across the United States," says Kevin Trenberth, a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado, which was walloped by two major snowstorms last month. He blames an El Niño warming pattern in the Pacific for dry and warm conditions elsewhere.

"Another big player is what we call the 'long-term trend,' " said Heidi Cullen of The Weather Channel. "That's a euphemism for global warming."

The combination of El Niño and global warming prompted Britain's Meteorological Office to say Thursday that 2007 could become the hottest year ever recorded. It said there is a 60% chance to break the record set in 1998, when global temperatures were 1.2 degrees warmer than the long-term average.

The balmy temperatures have smashed records. International Falls, Minn., which averages a high of 13 degrees this time of year, hit record highs of 41 degrees Wednesday and 37 Thursday. Buffalo has had more than three weeks of above-average temperatures, and all-time highs are likely Saturday in New York City and Richmond, Va.

The warm wave has had a silver lining for consumers and taxpayers. Electric heating bills were down 7.35% for Pepco customers in Washington and its Maryland suburbs. In Syracuse, N.Y., acting Public Works Commissioner Jeff Wright says the city could shave as much as $1 million off the annual $3.2 million snow-removal budget.

The picture is more mixed for sportsmen. Golfers in some areas are enjoying more time on the links.

In Michigan, two dozen people took advantage of late Octoberlike temperatures at the Traverse City Golf & Country Club on Thursday. "Normally we're closed," says Roger Bliss, the club's golf pro. "It's the first time anyone can remember playing golf in January."

Thin ice in Minnesota's lakes, however, has canceled ice fishing tournaments and put organizers of the annual St. Paul Winter Carnival, which starts Jan. 26, in a bind. Carnival spokeswoman Mary Huss says officials will decide next week whether to haul 56 flatbed truckloads of 300-pound ice blocks from northern Minnesota lakes or use plastic blocks to build a giant ice maze.

The tepid temperatures have been more than a nuisance, though. In Maine, it proved deadly Sunday when a college professor drowned after falling through thin ice on usually frozen Rangeley Lake.

Contributing: The Associated Press

A woman and six-year-old girl were killed in their home as the storm hit, the Iberia Parish Coroner's Office said. At least 15 other people were injured, and several mobiles homes were blown over, Sheriff Sid Hebert said.

"We were just sitting and watching a movie, and then all of a sudden the wind started blowing and it got really bad," said Joyce Firmin of Iberia Parish. "It just sounded like a bunch of trucks or an airplane or something was coming toward the house."

Firmin's daughter Jaci, 14, said she could hear branches snapping and power lines popping during the storm. "My ears were popping a lot," she said. "Then we came out, everything was down."

Steven Bruno described from a hospital how he was flipped over twice while furniture and glass flew around his mobile home. His girlfriend, who is six months pregnant, was hospitalized for fetal monitoring.

Whether it was a tornado won't be determined until storm surveys are conducted.

Damage was less serious as the storm continued through the state, although the heavy rain flooded roads, and windows were blown out and roofs ripped off homes in the New Roads area, National Weather Service meteorologist Jim Vasilj said.

In Mississippi, at least nine people were hurt in Kemper County and eight homes damaged when the storm hit there late Thursday and early Friday, according to the Mississippi Emergency Management Agency. Five more homes and business were damaged in Stone County.

City workers in New Orleans had been dispatched early to clean drains and prepare for possible flooding ahead of the heavy rain.

The area has been pounded by major storms that bumped its December rainfall total to more than 25 centimetres, nearly twice the normal average.

Forecasters on Friday warned that more rain was coming.

"More showers and thunderstorms are on the way Saturday afternoon and evening as we get another cold front coming through. We're in a progressive pattern - almost like clockwork, every three days we'll get a front through," said weather service forecaster Kent Kuyper.

The reason for the forecast is mostly due to El Nino, a cyclical warming trend now under way in the Pacific Ocean. The event occurs irregularly - the last one happened in 2002 - and typically leads to increased temperatures worldwide.

While this year's El Nino is not as strong as it was in 1997 and 1998, its combination with the steady increase of temperatures due to global warming from human activity may be enough to break the Earth's temperature record, said Phil Jones, the director of the Climatic Research unit at the University of East Anglia.

"Because of the warming due to greenhouse gases, even a moderate warming event is enough to push the global temperatures over the top," he said.

"El Nino is an independent variable," he said. "But the underlying trends in the warming of the Earth is almost certainly due to the release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere."

El Nino can sometimes lead to milder weather, such as in the in the northeastern United States or the Atlantic Ocean, which is likely to see fewer hurricanes this year. However, it can also increase the severity of weather-related disasters, such as typhoons in the Philippines or drought in southern Africa and Australia, a country that is already suffering through its longest dry spell on record.

Environmental groups said the report added weight to the movement to control greenhouse gases.

"The evidence that we're doing something very dangerous with the climate is now amassing," said Campaign against Climate Change coordinator Philip Thornhill.

"We need to put the energy and priority (into climate change) that is being put into a war effort. It's a political struggle to get action done - and these reports help," Thornhill said.

Yesterday, British scientists announced that there's a 60 per cent chance globally that 2007 will be the same or hotter than 1998, the warmest year on record, due to the effect of El Niño in the Pacific Ocean and greenhouse gases.

"It's another important addition to the ever-increasing body of evidence that climate change is real, it's happening now, and it's getting worse," said, Keith Allott, head of the climate change program at World Wildlife Federation (UK).

The past few weeks have been warmer than normal, said David Phillips, senior climatologist for Environment Canada. Nationally, December was the warmest month on record.

While it's easier to predict global weather patterns, said Phillips, he believes it will probably be another warm year for Canada and the GTA.

"I wouldn't bet the family farm or the fishing fleet on it. I'd maybe bet a couple loonies on it," said Phillips, who noted forecasters have been wrong on their hurricane predictions in the past two years, underestimating in 2005 when Katrina killed more than 1,300 people in the Gulf Coast and overestimating last year.

The effect of this balminess is most evident on ski hills, where the ground is making unwanted appearances.

"Conditions are starting to deteriorate. It's getting warmer and warmer, and brown patches are starting to come out," said Caroline Yli-Luoma, co-owner of Dagmar Ski Resort, who added that business has dropped 30 per cent. "It can be frightening. These are huge operations that we run. They're very expensive."

She said the resort hasn't been able to regularly employ its 200 seasonal staff. But it's surviving, making snow whenever temperatures dip low enough, which is infrequent. Ice wine producers in the Niagara region are also hoping for just a few days of frigid temperatures for their ice wine production. Barry Katzman, president of the Creekside Estate Winery, said they need just a few days of minus 8C weather for the crop.

On the other hand, the weather has been great for table wines, he said. "Severe winter conditions damage and hurt the grapes that we harvest for our regular wines - that's 80 to 90 per cent of all grapes out there."

Gardeners would also like to see a cold snap. Sara Katz, a landscape designer who owns Wild at Heart Design, said warm weather could have damaging effects on the garden. The lack of snow robs the ground of insulation and moisture. A lack of cold means garden pests and diseases won't be killed off.

"A lot more spores and fungus will survive in the ground," Katz said.

Elsewhere, the Toronto Stock Exchange had its second day of triple-digit declines yesterday, largely because of balmy North American temperatures.

The biggest drag on the TSX yesterday was energy and "that is clearly a weather-related story, with oil prices falling," said Mark Levesque, a fixed income strategist at TD Securities.

Warmer weather means less demand for oil for heating purposes. Home-heating demand in the northeast United States will be 40 per cent lower than normal in the coming week, Bloomberg News reported.

In the last two days, the price of crude oil has had its biggest drop in two years.

with files from Tara Perkins and Star Wires

He pointed to southern Florida's 7 million coastal residents.

"We're eventually going to get a strong enough storm in a densely populated area to have a major disaster," he said. "I know people don't want to hear this, and I'm generally a very positive person, but we're setting ourselves up for this major disaster."

More than 1,300 deaths across the Gulf Coast were attributed to Hurricane Katrina, the worst human toll from a weather event in the United States since the 1920s.

But Mayfield warns that 10 times as many fatalities could occur in what he sees as an inevitable strike by a huge storm during the current highly active hurricane cycle, which is expected to last another 10 to 20 years.

His apocalyptic vision of thousands dead and millions homeless is a different side of the persona he established as head of the hurricane center.

Mayfield attained national celebrity status during the tempestuous 2004 and 2005 seasons, appearing on network television with hourly updates as hurricanes Charley, Ivan, Frances and Wilma bore down on the Caribbean and the Southeast. His calm demeanor and avuncular sincerity endeared him to millions of TV viewers seeking survival guidance.

And he argues that his dire predictions don't have to become reality.

The technology exists to build high-rise buildings capable of withstanding hurricane-force winds and tropical storm surge more powerful than those experienced in the last few years. Much of Hong Kong's architecture has been built to survive typhoons, and hotels and apartments built in Kobe, Japan, after a 1995 earthquake devastated the city are touted as indestructible, he said.

What is lacking in the United States is the political will to make and impose hard decisions on building codes and land use in the face of resistance from the influential building industry and a public still willing to gamble that the big one will never hit, he said.

"It's good for the tax base" to allow developers to put up buildings on the coastline, Mayfield said in explaining politicians' reluctance to deter housing projects that expose residents to storm risks.

"I don't want the builders to get mad at me," he said, "but the building industry strongly opposes improvement in building codes."

Consumers also have yet to demand sturdier construction, Mayfield added. A builder gets a better return on investment in upgraded carpet and appliances than for safety features above and beyond most states' minimal requirements, he said.

As a senior civil servant, Mayfield was prohibited from making job inquiries in the private sector while still in the government's employ. But he said on Tuesday, his last day in office, that he hoped to launch a second career as a consultant in emergency planning and disaster response. He has particular interest in a potential public-private initiative to mine natural disaster scenes for their educational value.

He envisions a natural disaster assessment service like the National Transportation Safety Board, which probes the causes and consequences of aviation and other transport accidents.

"If the NTSB finds some structural problem is the cause of an air crash, you would never see that plane continue to be built with the same problems," he said.

With natural disasters, though, the same mistakes that put lives at risk are repeated year after year in unsafe construction and inadequate planning, he said.

Mayfield said he also was pondering collaboration with advocates of tougher building standards and land use rules.

"It's not just about the forecasting. Whatever I do, I want to help change the outcome," he said, conceding frustration with persistent public disregard of federal and local government campaigns to boost hurricane awareness and preparation.

Even after the devastating hurricane seasons of 2004 and 2005, he said, fewer than 50% of those living in storm-prone areas have a hurricane evacuation plan.

While he has been critical of the Federal Emergency Management Agency's response to Katrina's devastation of New Orleans, he warns against depending on the federal government after natural disasters. He was dismayed to see federal agencies handing out water and ice in South Florida after Hurricane Wilma hit in October 2005, when stores were open and tap water was usable.

"You don't want the federal government to be your first-responders," he said. "The government can't do everything for people and it shouldn't, or else you create a culture of dependence."

Mayfield praises the Florida state government for its well-oiled disaster-response program and steps toward improving building safety, in contrast with other states along the Gulf of Mexico that he says still have no statewide building standards.

Though Mayfield's name and face recognition are the envy of some presidential hopefuls, he laughs out loud at the notion of running for office.

"Oh, good gosh, no! That is just not my thing," he says.

At the hurricane center on the Florida International University campus, Mayfield will be succeeded by Bill Proenza, the National Weather Service's director for the Southern region. Home to 77 million, the region has "the most active and severe weather in the world," according to the weather service's parent agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Proenza, 62, began his meteorological career at the Miami office as an intern in 1963. As director of 50 regional offices and 1,000 employees in the Southern region for the last eight years, he has long experience collaborating with the hurricane center staff on forecasts and tracking.

"That's why I don't have any problem walking out the door," said Mayfield, declaring himself fearful that the mild 2006 hurricane season left those in the storm zone ever more complacent.

It's soon enough that the majority of people alive today can still expect to be breathing then. That makes it real. Despite professions of concern for future generations, it's difficult to stir passions or action about something that will happen a century or two or three from now.

As well, most of the things we build, including generating stations, roads and major industries, last 40 or 50 years. So what we do now will play a large part in determining what the Earth is like in 2050.

"It's a useful year to focus on," Matthew Bramley, director of climate change at the Pembina Institute, which does environmental policy research, said in an interview from Ottawa. "It's far enough away to be a year when real change is both necessary and possible."

Anyway, longer-term forecasts are likely irrelevant.

If we make the wrong decisions now, scientists warn, by 2050 the planet will either be a mess or irretrievably on course to become one. Viewed from the opposite direction, it's when major changes must be completed if we're to avoid disaster.

So, what will the Earth be like 43 years from now?

While most general predictions are consistent, details remain a bit of a guess. Much depends on whether we make a concerted effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and other pollution between now and then, and on what steps we take to adjust to the new environment.

It's certain the world will be warmer. With all of the carbon dioxide already in the atmosphere, the planet is, on average, 0.6C warmer than at the start of the Industrial Revolution - when we began burning fossil fuels in vast quantities - and there's no way to keep it from climbing another half a degree. The stuff stays intact for about a century, and we're stuck with it.

Even with very stringent emissions cuts, scientists say the average temperature by the end of the century will be at least 2C above pre-industrial levels. In fact, they say, that's the best we can hope for.

It's a small number but a substantial increase, and it will cause hardship for many people. Still, with effort, we could adapt to the changes in temperature, precipitation and water supply that would likely result.

To stay within that limit would require major changes in technology. Current crystal balls show lines of giant wind turbines and machines that generate electricity from wave power a few kilometres off ocean coasts; massive centralized power stations fuelled by coal that capture all their greenhouse gas emissions and pump them deep into the ground; well-insulated homes heated or cooled by underground geothermal energy; solar panels everywhere; zero-emission cars.

Of course, technology changes rapidly and often in surprising ways, so we might go off in totally unexpected directions to meet our inevitably soaring energy demand and be much better off than anyone now hopes.

But we're also resisting change, which makes it more difficult to curb the warming trend. Bare land and open water absorb much more heat than earth covered in trees or snow, or frozen seas. Melting permafrost could release immense amounts of methane, a very potent greenhouse gas.

So most predictions for 2050 assume we'll zip past the two-degree target. As now, we'll gradually use energy more efficiently. But those gains will be far outstripped by population and economic growth.

These attempts at future gazing, too, contain considerable guesswork. Experts plug numbers into sophisticated and massive computer programs that often take months to spit out results. Others look at history and trends, and make assumptions.

Forecasts for the entire planet are considered the most accurate. Precision decreases along with the size of the area being studied.

With all of this in mind, what follows is a picture of the world in 2050, a picture compiled from a wide variety of reports and interviews.

Up to one-third of the global population - about 9 billion in 2050 - lacks water. The shortages are worst in the areas of Asia and South America that get their supply from melting glaciers in the Himalayas and Andes mountain systems. Those rivers of ice have melted away.

Some parts of Earth, including much of Canada and Europe, get more rain, but others - notably southern Africa, Australia and the Mediterranean Basin - are parched by drought.

Mediterranean tourism has withered away; the beaches are blistering hot. But people flock to toasty warm northern Europe and Britain, where they can sit under palm trees and munch on locally grown olives.

And if it's business as usual?

It's warmer in most places, particularly in winter. In the first couple of decades after 2007, a few areas here and there cooled down from time to time, as natural cycles asserted themselves over human-caused climate change. By 2050, though, that kind of impact is history: Climate change rules.

The biggest temperature increases are in the Arctic and over Africa and the Middle East.

The poles get more precipitation, the mid-latitudes less. Drought threatens southern Africa, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, northern South America, and the central and southeast United States.

We've just seen the first summer with no ice at the North Pole. Canada's High Arctic is, on average, a huge 5C or 6C hotter than in the past. Ships can now ply the Arctic with relative ease.

Inuit have many more weeks in which to zip across the waves in boats, but they no longer see polar bears or walruses, and seals are rare. With Arctic winter temperatures 5C to 8C higher than in recent history, ice conditions are treacherous and travel dangerous.

Most of British Columbia and the Prairies have the least warming, winter and summer, but even they are two or three degrees above the late-20th-century average. They'll also get less precipitation.

In Toronto, winters are mild and drier. Outdoor ice rinks are distant memories. Summers are hot and sticky - three or four degrees above the turn-of-the-century average. Smog blankets the city almost every day, although the cruddy haze is often shredded by violent thunderstorms, which overwhelm the sewer system, causing floods and erosion and flushing vast amounts of human and toxic wastes into Lake Ontario.

The Humber, Don and Rouge rivers are increasingly erratic, and with the intense bursts of rainfall, it's no longer news when they overflow their banks.

With increased evaporation and slightly reduced precipitation, the levels of Lake Ontario and the other Great Lakes have dropped a metre or two. Storm-whipped water and occasional flash floods make living near the shore a dicey proposition.

Farmers are frustrated. Their crops should be thriving on the feast of carbon dioxide in the air and the longer growing season. But the heat is often too scorching: Even worse, precipitation comes in violent, damaging storms that punctuate prolonged droughts.

In the tropics, the growing season has actually been shortened by heat, and crops are parched.

Around the world, about 1 million land-based plant and animal species have gone extinct. More than 90 per cent of the oceans' coral reefs, including Australia's Great Barrier, have died off. The sea species we eat have virtually disappeared from the oceans, and farmed fish can't fill the void.

The "bread basket" of the United States - the Great Plains of the Midwest - is now too hot for wheat and other cereal crops. The prime growing area has shifted. It begins in the northern U.S., covers almost all of Canada's prairie provinces and stretches up to the southern Northwest Territories. Unfortunately, much of the land is the Canadian Shield, with thin soil that can't support grains. But there are pockets of good growing land.

Much of the vast boreal forest that once covered the rocky shield has disappeared; it simply couldn't survive the hot, dry climate. Forest fires are larger and more frequent. The decline of the boreal has been the death knell for the woodland caribou, wolverine, Canada Jay and many other species.

Other forests have been decimated by disease and insects that are no longer killed off by cold winters. Pests have a longer growing season in which to attack trees and produce offspring. That produces yet another feedback, since dying and dead trees stop storing carbon.

On average, everyone on Earth is 20 per cent poorer. But the economic burden isn't spread equally. Places like sub-Saharan Africa that are already impoverished fare even worse.

Rising sea levels and the spread of deserts have forced as many as 200 million people to seek new homes as environmental refugees. They're flooding into Europe, North America and Australia.

Malaria is spreading because mosquitoes that carry it can survive in more areas, but the disease hasn't yet reached Canada.

International tourism will have shrivelled because of restrictions on air travel - which by now is one of the major sources of greenhouse gases.

Warm winters long ago wiped out Europe's ski industry. Now, Rocky Mountain resorts in Canada and the U.S. are going under.

The Netherlands, after centuries of wresting land from the sea, has had to give much of it back. Thousands of people are living in floating communities.

"Climate change will increase the instability of agricultural production," the report said, according to the official Xinhua News Agency on Wednesday. "If no measures are taken, in the latter half of the century production of wheat, corn and rice in China will drop by as much as 37 percent."

It said that average temperatures in China would rise by 2 or 3 degrees Celsius in the next 50 to 80 years, and that this would cause "the speed of change to accelerate."

The report did not say what measures should be taken to combat climate change. It added that evaporation rates for some inland rivers would increase by 15 percent. China already faces a severe water shortage, especially in the northern part of the country.

On Sunday, the state Xinhua News Agency reported that temperatures in 2006 were on average 1 degree higher than in normal years. Meteorological officials were quoted as saying there was less rain than normal, down 16 millimeters (half an inch) from an average year.

Dong Wenjie, director of the Beijing Climate Center, said the high temperatures were caused by global warming, while the annual meteorological report released by the China Meteorological Administration said 2006 had been a disastrous year for loss of life and property damage.

Typhoons, floods and droughts killed 2,704 people and caused economic losses of 212 billion yuan (US$27.2 billion; euro20.65 billion) in 2006, second only to 1998 when an extremely severe flood swept the country, the report said.

China's size and geography make it prone to natural disasters. Every year, natural disaster affect 400 million people and 50 million hectares (123.6 million acres) of farmland, with economic losses equal to 1 percent to 3 percent of gross domestic product, Xinhua said.

Scientists at the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in Germany studied the relationship between sea temperature and eelpouts counts in the Southern North Sea, combining data from the field with lab investigations of eelpout physiology.

The researchers not only found the oxygen levels in the waters of the North and Baltic seas have dropped because of increasing temperatures over the past 50 years -- a factor that reduces fish populations -- they also discovered eelpouts need more oxygen in warmer waters, a second factor that is reducing their numbers.

A key factor in the diminishing size of fish stock is increased difficulty in absorbing oxygen via respiration and blood circulation caused by the warming waters.

The study, published in the Jan. 5 issue of the journal Science, also noted the population of eelpouts dropped as average summer temperatures increased. The impact was also observed in the short term such that eelpout numbers decreased the year immediately after a warm summer.

Animals tolerate a limited range of environmental conditions. Anything out of their tolerance window can cause damage. Fish in the North Sea have evolved to tolerate a wider range of temperatures than fish elsewhere because of the large seasonal fluctuations there.

However, warming waters and their impact on oxygen supply can stress fish to the point their thermal tolerance range is thrown off and they perish, the scientists said.

In the future, eelpouts could prove to be important bioindicators that would help experts assess what might happen to other marine species in the region, the scientists explained.

Worldwide, warming waters can be expected to strain species that require lots of oxygen, forcing them to either relocate to cooler waters or face extinction, the authors write.

Is it really necessary to rehearse what ought to be the obvious? There's an alarm going off here, adding to the many already clanging and wailing.

Genesis had God giving humankind dominion over the Earth. This was not a favor. It was a task. Dominion must suppose stewardship.

There is a bitter irony in our failures at the job. Bitter because, if we were paying attention, we would notice that when we knuckle down and, crucially, if it's not too late, we can stop and sometimes reverse the damage from our neglect and despoliation. Environmentalism works.

Thirty-five years of reasonably serious attention to air and water quality in the United States has improved both. And timely alertness to imminent species extinctions has led to rescues.

The bald eagle is to be taken off the endangered species list in February; its population has increased 15-fold since 1963. The whooping crane, down to 15 in 1941, now number 518. The loss and degradation of migration habitat remains a challenge, but this is the first time in more than a century that the population exceeds 500.

It is the overwhelming, international judgment of scientists in the relevant disciplines that the Earth is warming and that the warming is man-made, not part of a natural cycle. There are a million arguments over details but that's the big picture and it is not in serious question among serious people.

The Bush White House, which shrugs energy conservation off as perhaps nice for personal virtue but useless as policy, first denied global warming is occurring, then grudgingly admitted it is but swore the administration couldn't for the life of it figure out why, so what's a poor body to do?

To act would inconvenience automotive, fossil-fuel and other industries and abrade the political right, which holds, as doctrine, that global warming is lefty hoax created to smash free markets and spit on Adam Smith's grave.

Yet word has slipped out from the administration that the polar bear may soon be listed as endangered, the first species designated as a potential victim of the global warming that the White House says we shouldn't try to do anything about.

Dolphins are mammals, like us, a thought that often charms us. Maybe we should pay more notice to the fact that we're mammals. Like dolphins.

Tom Teepen writes for Cox Newspapers. His e-mail address is teepencolumn@earthlink.net

Extinction is as old as life on Earth - about 3.5 billion years - but scientists calculate that we are losing species at a rate of somewhere between 1,000 and 10,000 times higher than the natural "background" rate of extinction. This means that technically we are going through a period of "mass extinction", the sixth that we know about over the hundreds of millions of years of the fossil record. But unlike the previous five mass extinctions, this one is largely caused by the actions of a single species - Homo sapiens.

How many species have gone extinct in the past 100 years?

This is a notoriously difficult question to answer, due in part to the difficulty in recording the declining populations of a particular animal or plant, and in part to the technical definition of an extinction. Experts estimate there are 15,589 species threatened with extinction. But a species is only accepted to have become extinct if exhaustive surveys in its known habitat range have failed to find any record of the individual.

So even if scientists strongly suspect that an animal has gone extinct it cannot be defined as extinct until some time has elapsed since an individual was last observed - which can mean 30 or 50 years for some species.

The decline and eventual extinction of an animal or plant may take many decades or even centuries and the final stages are seldom observed. This make it difficult to decide when something has completely died out.

Conservationists calculate that since 1500 there have been more than 800 recorded extinctions. However, the true number of extinctions is likely to be much larger because of what is known about the rate at which habitats are being lost or broken up.

What groups of animals or plants are at the highest risk?

In general, the more we know about a particular group of species, the more we realise that they are at risk. One in four mammals and one in every eight birds is threatened. Half of all tortoises and freshwater turtles are similarly endangered.

Amphibians - frogs, toads, newts and salamanders - are perhaps the largest group of animals at serious risk.

About one in three species of amphibians are seriously endangered in some way or other and more than 120 species are thought to have died out over the past 25 years.

Amphibian specialists believe that a combination of factors may be involved, such as habitat loss and the spread of a deadly fungus, aided by the human trade in an African toad, a known carrier of the disease.

Up to 2,000 species of amphibians - the first vertebrates to conquer the land - are classified as endangered. The group is thought to be particularly vulnerable because their life cycles generally depend on two habitats, terrestrial and aquatic, for survival.

How many species are still alive?

Again, this is another notoriously difficult question. About 1.5 million animals and plants have been identified and formally or informally named. However, the true number of species alive today is likely to fall within the range of between five million and 15 million, although some scientists suggest even higher numbers - perhaps 30 million species in total.

According to studies of the fossil record, which gives a good indication of the diversity of life on Earth over the past 600 million years, only between about 2 and 4 per cent of the species that have ever lived are believed to survive today - the disappearances of the earlier species occurred long before the arrival of the first humans some two million years ago.

Do species have a natural 'lifetime'?

Some species are better than others at surviving for long periods of time. Some adapt to changing environmental conditions and evolve into new species.

Most species eventually become extinct. Animals without backbones, the invertebrates, have an average evolutionary "lifetime" of five to 10 million years. Mammals, on the other hand, are thought to have a lifetime of one or two million years.

However, scientists say that the current lifetimes of some birds and mammals are much shorter than natural lifetimes based on the fossil record. One scientist calculated that the lifetime of a typical bird or mammal species is now about 10,000 years - significantly shorter than the natural average lifetime.

What caused the previous mass extinctions?

We know about the previous five mass extinctions from the fossil record. Studies of the number of marine families over the past 600 million years show five points in time when large numbers of species disappeared abruptly.

The last was 65 million years ago, in which the dinosaurs became extinct, and is thought to have resulted from an asteroid hitting the Earth and causing a dramatic change in the climate. In fact all previous mass extinctions are thought to have been caused by some large-scale geo-physical process, such as supervolcanic eruptions or the sudden release of vast quantities of greenhouse gases from the seabed.

The biggest mass extinction of all occurred some 251 million year ago, when about 90 per cent of marine life and 70 per cent of land species vanished. One theory is that something happened to the Earth's atmosphere at the end of the Permian period, robbing it of vital oxygen.

It has happened before, so why worry?

There are several reasons we should be concerned. The first is that in the past it has taken life on Earth between 10 million and 100 million years to recover from a mass extinction. The second is that for all our technology, we still rely on the delicate ecological balance of the natural world for our survival. The Earth's biodiversity provides us with clean air, drinking water, food and even new drugs - upsetting it too much could cause the collapse of this vital life-support system.

The third reason is philosophical. If we conserve works of art, why should we not also conserve nature? The extinction of a humble beetle is no less important than the wilful destruction of a Rembrandt or a Picasso?

Should we be concerned about the rapid extinction of the Earth's species?

Yes...

* Life is a delicate web of inter-related species: destroy too many and the entire fabric can come apart

* The natural world is the planet's only life-support system, and if we lose that we lose our own lives as well

* Protecting biodiversity is the moral equivalent to preserving human culture for future generations - it is not ours to destroy

No...

* There are millions of species on Earth and the loss of a few won't matter too much

* Life has bounced back in the past when there have been similar mass extinctions

* We can live in a world of fewer species, provided we keep the ones that matter to us

It was a reference to past differences between Bush and European allies on the Kyoto accords, an international agreement to reduce pollution that causes global warming. It has not been ratified by the United States.

He also praised her for her efforts to put the so-called quartet- the United States, the EU, Russia and the United Nations - at the center of a revived Israeli-Palestinian peace effort.

"Madame Chancellor had a good idea to convene the quarter," Bush said. He said that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice would soon be going to the region to try to revive the process.

"We're strongly committed to a two-state solution. Two democracies supporting each other's rights to exist," Bush said. He said, however, that he was unwilling to expand the quartet.

The two leaders conferred on issues ranging from war and energy problems to the economy and global warming.

Merkel's visit came just days after Germany assumed the presidencies of the 27-nation European Union and the Group of Eight major industrialized democracies.

While Bush and Merkel are strong allies on many issues, there also are differences, including steps to combat global warming.

"We talked about climate change, and I assured the chancellor I'm committed to promoting new technologies that will promote energy efficiency and do a better job protecting the environment," Bush said.

For her part, Merkel said she believed there was "wide scope for further talks about this." She said that while "on the one hand we obviously need economic growth," it was also important to protect the environment from so-called greenhouse gases.