Within just four years, most Australians will be able to drive an electric car and recharge it at special plug-in points at home, the office or shopping centres.

The mass use of electric cars moved a giant step closer to reality today, with power company AGL and finance group Macquarie Capital signing an agreement with international group Better Place to provide infrastructure to support the environmentally-friendly vehicles.

Under the agreement, Macquarie will raise $1 billion to build an electric-vehicle network in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane, and AGL will power it with renewable energy.

Better Place, established by American entrepreneur Shai Agassi, has designed the infrastructure model, which is already being rolled out in Israel and Denmark.

Mr Agassi said under the agreement, by 2012 the three major Australian cities will each have a network of between 200,000 and 250,000 charge stations where drivers can recharge their electric cars.
These are likely to be at home, in businesses, car parks and shopping centres, he said.
In addition, there will be some 150 switch stations in each city and on major freeways, where electric batteries can be automatically replaced in drive-in stations similar to a car wash.

"We call it a ubiquitous charging network across the cities," Mr Agassi said in Melbourne today.
"It's a massive infrastructure project ... and that means new jobs for Australians."
Drivers will pay to recharge their cars through various power supply agreements, similar to mobile phone contracts, where consumers choose the rate that best reflects their car use.

The Arctic is losing its old, thick ice faster than in previous years, according to satellite data. The loss has continued since the end of the Arctic summer, despite cold weather across the northern hemisphere. Ice more than two years old now makes up about 30% of all the ice in the Arctic, down from 60% two decades ago.

The shrinking of Arctic ice has global implications, as its white surface reflects solar energy back into space whereas the open ocean absorbs it.

The winter ice loss is thought to be driven mainly by the transport of old floes from Arctic waters out into the Atlantic Ocean. The currents driving this are stronger than usual as a consequence of another natural cycle, the Arctic Oscillation. The net result is that most of the cover consists of ice that has formed since last summer.

The scientists behind these findings believe this year's cooling should not obscure the long term warming trend, with temperatures across the Arctic rising about twice as fast as the global average.

"Weather comes and goes, and it's the long term average that really matters," observed Josefino Comiso from Nasa's Goddard Space Flight Center. Dr Comiso said he believed that the change of albedo - the change from a white, reflective surface of ice to a dark, absorbing surface of sea - was already happening.

With the ice pack containing such a high proportion of thin, salty ice, the scientists believe another major melt is likely in the summer.

"It's becoming thinner and thinner and much more susceptible to melting during the summer - much more likely to melt away," commented Walt Meier from the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) in Boulder. "It may look OK on the surface, but it's like looking at a Hollywood movie set - you see the facade of a building and it looks OK, but if you look behind it, there's no building there."

Last summer, the sharp melt meant that the Northwest Passage, the fabled navigation route linking the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans across the top of North America, was easily navigable. The disappearance of ice cover has countries around the Arctic eagerly eyeing the mineral reserves that may become accessible.

Most projections of climate change in the Arctic suggest the ocean may become ice-free by the middle of the century, but one forecast released late last year said it could happen by 2013.

In a formal survey the researchers said that a number of systems that influence the Earth's weather patterns could begin to collapse suddenly if there's even a slight increase in global temperatures.

At greatest risk is arctic sea ice, the Greenland ice sheet and the west Antarctic ice sheet.

The researchers have listed and ranked nine ecological systems that they say could be lost this century as a result of global warming. The nine tipping elements and the time it will take them to undergo a major transition are:

• Melting of Arctic sea-ice (about 10 years)
• Decay of the Greenland ice sheet (about 300 years)
• Collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet (about 300 years)
• Collapse of the Atlantic thermohaline circulation (about 100 years)
• Increase in the El Nino Southern Oscillation (about 100 years)
• Collapse of the Indian summer monsoon (about 1 year)
• Greening of the Sahara/Sahel and disruption of the West African monsoon (about 10 years)
• Dieback of the Amazon rainforest (about 50 years)
• Dieback of the Boreal Forest (about 50 years)

Many of Earth's climate systems will undergo a series of sudden shifts this century as a result of human-induced climate change, a study suggests. A number of these shifts could occur this century, say the report's authors.

They argue that society should not be lulled into a false sense of security by the idea that climate change will be a gradual process.

The global demand for energy is set to grow inexorably through to 2030 if governments do not change their policies, warns a top energy official.

Nobuo Tanaka, executive director of the International Energy Agency (IEA), said such a rise would threaten energy security and accelerate climate change. He said energy needs in 2030 could be more than 50% above current levels, with fossil fuels still dominant. Mr Tanaka was speaking at the launch of the IEA's World Energy Outlook report.

Rapid economic growth in China and India would be the main drivers behind the rise, he said as he unveiled the agency's annual flagship publication. "The emergence of new major players in global energy markets means that all countries must take vigorous, immediate and collective action to curb runaway energy demand," he warned.

"Rapid economic development will undoubtedly continue to drive up energy demand in China and India, and will contribute to a real improvement in the quality of life for more than two billion people. "This is a legitimate aspiration that needs to be accommodated and supported by the rest of the world."

The World Energy Outlook 2007 report warned that much of the increased demand for energy would be met by coal. As a result, energy-related carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions could rise by 57% - from 27 giga-tonnes in 2005 to 42 giga-tonnes in 2030.

Even in the report's "alternative policy scenario", which takes into account the governments' proposed action to save energy and cut emissions, CO2 levels are set to rise by 25%.

But it offered a glimmer of hope within its "450 Stabilisation" case study. It described a notional strategy for governments to stabilise CO2 levels in the atmosphere at about 450 parts per million (ppm), which some scientists and policy makers suggest is an acceptable concentration.

"Emissions savings come from improved efficiency in industry, buildings and transport, switching to nuclear power and renewables, and the widespread deployment of carbon capture and storage," the report said. This approach would see global emissions peak in 2012 then fall sharply below 2005 levels by 2030, it suggested. But it added: "Exceptionally quick and vigourous policy action by all countries, and unprecedented technological advances, entailing substantial costs, would be needed to make this case a reality."

Mr Tanaka stressed the need for urgency in the battle against climate change: "We need to act now to bring about a radical shift in investment in favour of cleaner, more efficient and more secure energy technologies."

The UK's Energy Secretary, John Hutton, endorsed the IEA's findings and agreed that urgent action by politicians was needed. As the IEA states, it is a lack of international political will, not technological innovation, that is preventing us from reducing emissions while securing energy supplies to power our homes and businesses for the years ahead.

It is time for the industrialised world to wake up and change its behaviour before the Arctic, its people and its wildlife are lost forever, argues explorer Glenn Morris. In this week's Green Room, he shares his experiences of travelling by kayak along part of the Northwest Passage in the Canadian Arctic.

 "It's so hot," an Inuit elder said, fanning herself while sitting on a bench outside the Northern Stores in Paulatuk. Her face, etched with lines, hinted at a past life that would be alien to the young people of the hamlet today. Her complaints about the heat were said in a way that might have been comical if it were not for the sinister underlying reasons. I later learned that she had been born in a snow house.

Change for the people of the north is both fast and relentless. Colin Adjun, an Inuit hunter, told us that he remembered winter temperatures in Kugluktuk often dropping to between -50 and -60C; now they are more likely to be between -25 to -30C.

The summers, too, seem much warmer. Before our journey, we had consulted the Admiralty Arctic Pilot manual, which gave the upper summer temperature for the part of the Canadian Arctic we were traversing as 21C. Yet we experienced temperatures of 34C, and it was almost impossible to sleep.

Rising temperatures are having an effect on every aspect of life in the Arctic. As the permafrost melts, homes and roads are affected. Inuit hunters and other residents told us that new insects and flowers are appearing and animals that previously lived in the lower environs are now moving north. During our journey we had often stared into the clear waters below the kayaks and remarked to each other on the complete absence of life below us.

The amount of carbon dioxide being absorbed by the world's oceans has reduced, scientists have said. University of East Anglia researchers gauged CO2 absorption through more than 90,000 measurements from merchant ships equipped with automatic instruments.

Results of their 10-year study in the North Atlantic show CO2 uptake halved between the mid-90s and 2000 to 2005. Scientists believe global warming might get worse if the oceans soak up less of the greenhouse gas.

Researchers said the findings, published in a paper for the Journal of Geophysical Research, were surprising and worrying because there were grounds for believing that, in time, the ocean might become saturated with our emissions.

BBC environment analyst Roger Harrabin said: "The researchers don't know if the change is due to climate change or to natural variations.

"But they say it is a tremendous surprise and very worrying because there were grounds for believing that in time the ocean might become 'saturated' with our emissions - unable to soak up any more."

He said that would "leave all our emissions to warm the atmosphere". Of all the CO2 emitted into the atmosphere, only half of it stays there; the rest goes into carbon sinks.

There are two major carbon sinks in the biological cycle: the oceans and the land "biosphere", which includes plants and the soil.

Carbon dioxide (CO2) levels in the atmosphere have risen 35% faster than expected since 2000, says a study.

International scientists found that inefficiency in the use of fossil fuels increased levels of CO2 by 17%. The other 18% came from a decline in the natural ability of land and oceans to soak up CO2 from the atmosphere. About half of emissions from human activity are absorbed by natural "sinks" but the efficiency of these sinks has fallen.

The research, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), was carried out by the Global Carbon Project, the University of East Anglia, UK, and the British Antarctic Survey.

It found that improvements in the carbon intensity of the global economy have stalled since 2000, leading to an unexpected jump in atmospheric CO2.

"In addition to the growth of global population and wealth, we now know that significant contributions to the growth of atmospheric CO2 arise from the slow-down of natural sinks and the halt to improvements in the carbon intensity of wealth production," said the study's lead author, Dr Pep Canadell, executive director of the Global Carbon Project.

The weakening of the Earth's ability to cope with greenhouse gases is thought to be a result of changing wind patterns over seas and droughts on land.

"The decline in global sink efficiency suggests that stabilisation of atmospheric CO2 is even more difficult to achieve than previously thought," said report co-author Dr Corinne Le Quere of the British Antarctic Survey.

"We found that nearly half of the decline in the efficiency of the ocean CO2 sink is due to the intensification of the winds in the Southern Ocean." The declining power of the seas to soak up industrial pollution is not only being recorded in the southern hemisphere, however.

According to a separate 10-year study published recently, the effect is also being seen in the North Atlantic.

The Arctic is being hit by melting ice, hotter air and dying wildlife, according to a US government report on the impact of global warming there.

A new wind circulation pattern is blowing more warm air towards the North Pole than in the 20th Century, scientists found. Shrubs are now growing in tundra areas while caribou herds are dwindling in Canada and parts of Alaska. The report stresses that the fate of the Arctic affects the entire planet.

The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) report found that in 2007 winter and spring temperatures were "all above average throughout the whole Arctic and all at the same time" unlike in previous years.

"This is an unusual feature and it looks like the beginning of a signal from global warming," the Noaa's James Overland told reporters. Scientists have expected polar regions to feel the first impacts of global warming, and the 2006 US State of the Arctic report provided a benchmark for tracking changes.

A Korean firm, Kyosemi Corporation, has developed a highly efficient spherical solar cell. It's called the Sphelar and represents a huge leap forward in solar development.

Instead of conventional solar cells which lay flat and only have one surface to collect the sun's energy, these spheres, measuring between 1-1.5mm in diameter, will be able to harness the energy from most of their whole surface. This gives their panels flexibility as their structures do not need to be rigid, allowing them to be used in more applications than conventional PV.

As an added bonus these cells do not block light and can therefore be embedded in clear objects without fully compromising clarity, giving energy-producing windows a chance.

Physorg reports that "the Sphelar is made by a process of melted silicon that is subjected to free fall, whereby spheres are created naturally by the microgravity conditions. The result creates little or no waste of raw materials. This feature is cost effective and provides efficient use of the rare component silicon."

No word yet on their electrical production potential, but we'll certainly keep our eyes out for this one and report back to you. World Changing has a fantastic interview with Kyosemi's lead engineer. Check it out for a great read.