Mexican floods strand 300,000; more rain ahead

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An estimated 900,000 people had their homes flooded, damaged or cut off, and as of Thursday 300,000 still had not been rescued, Tabasco Gov. Andres Granier said. Police, soldiers and military workers were still trying to reach them.

It was becoming difficult to find a safe place to put refugees. Officials improvised, turning parking garages and any other dry structure into temporary shelters. Dozens of Mexico's hospitals and medical centers were also flooded, complicating treatment of the sick. Watch residents swim through flooded streets »

Health officials warned that flooding could trigger epidemics of cholera, although none were yet reported.

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Half a million flee Southern California fires, 1,300 homes burn

Loss of Arctic ice: Satellite imagery shows the melting is happening much faster than climate models had predicted.

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At this rate, a complete melting of Arctic sea ice could happen by 2030 - far sooner than expected.

"We've been seeing this loss of ice. What has greatly surprised us is how quickly we are losing it," said Mark Serreze, senior research scientist at the center, who led a team of six analyzing new satellite imagery received Friday.

"This is telling us the Arctic is on a fast-track of change. It may well be unstoppable ...," Serreze said. "The numbers that come to us day-to-day leave us agog, ... somewhat blue, yes. This is disturbing stuff we are seeing."

Arctic sea ice keeps polar regions cool and helps control the global climate, reflecting sunlight back into space. As the ice melts in summer, oceans heat up. Scientists at the center here in Colorado measure the amount of sea ice using imagery from U.S. Department of Defense satellites delivered by NASA. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and National Science Foundation support the monitoring.

Five years ago, 2070 was thought to be the soonest a total summer meltdown was possible, based on the computer modeling scientists worldwide use to try to anticipate global climate change.

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108 Die in Bangladesh Mudslides, Floods

The heaviest recorded rainfall levels in seven years have also inundated parts of the capital, Dhaka, and other regions.

Bangladesh, a low-lying delta nation of 150 million people, is buffeted by cyclones and floods that kill hundreds each year. A powerful cyclone in 1991 killed 139,000 people.

Densely populated and grindingly poor, the country is filled with slums that are particularly vulnerable -- the one hit in Chittagong was home to 700 people, most of them migrant workers and their families who lived in clusters of straw-and-bamboo or mud-and-tin shanties built on the slope of hill, survivors said.

Dulu Mia Munshi, a rickshaw puller, said he lost five family members, including his wife and two young sons.

"There was a sudden rush of mud and water, and our home was swept away," Munshi told The Associated Press by telephone from his hospital bed. Five other neighboring shanties on a slope were also washed away.

Thunder? It's the sound of Greenland melting

Swiss-born Steffen is one of dozens of scientists who have peppered the Greenland ice cap with instruments to measure temperature, snowfall and the movement, thickness and melting of the ice.

Since 1990, Steffen has spent two months a year at Swiss Camp, a wind-swept outpost of tents on the ice cap, where he and other researchers brave temperatures of minus 30 Celsius (minus 22 Fahrenheit) to scrutinize Greenland's climate change clues.

The more the surface melts, the faster the ice sheet moves towards the ocean. The glacier Swiss Camp rests on has doubled its speed to about 15 km (9 miles) a year in the last 12 years, just as its tongue retreated 10 km into the fjord.

"It is scary," said Steffen. "This is only Greenland. But Antarctica and glaciers around the world are responding as well."

Hundreds of millions of livelihoods will be affected by declining snow and ice cover as a result of global warming, a UN report has warned.

The study warns of a range of threats that could destabilise ecosystems around the world, with potentially devastating consequences for hundreds of millions of people.

Melting glaciers in Asia's mountains could affect an estimated 40% of the world's population, who rely on ice melt for crop irrigation and drinking water.

It added that rising temperatures were already resulting in the thawing of permafrost in places such as Siberia. This was leading to the release into the atmosphere of methane, a potent greenhouse gas.

The fate of the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets, which hold almost all of the planet's freshwater ice, needed to be better understood, the UN publication urged.
It said that if emissions of greenhouse gases continued unabated, the massive ice sheets were likely to become unstable as the world continued to warm.

Without taking measures to mitigate sea level rise, an estimated 145 million people, primarily in Asia, would be exposed to the risk of flooding.