Sitting on a restaurant terrace overlooking the Baltic Sea on a warm June evening in Sweden, what better drink than a green summer cocktail?

Perhaps followed by a delicious-looking Baltic farmer’s soup?

And you don’t even have to pay — you can scoop up such liquids for free from the most polluted parts of the Baltic Sea – also bordered by countries including Finland, Latvia, Russia, and Germany.

The images are part of a new campaign by the WWF environmental group to show off the problems of the Baltic – an almost enclosed sea that has suffered badly from pollution, including run-off from fertilisers that provoke big brief blooms of greenish algae that then die and sink to the bottom.

The WWF says that large areas of the Baltic seabed are “dead zones” starved of oxygen — and it says one study shows that 7 of the 10 largest such known zones in the world are in the Baltic Sea.

For years Baltic Sea countries managed to blame each other for pollution — the former Soviet Union spewed large amounts of toxic waste into the sea. But the end of the Cold War should be making cooperation easier.

The Baltic countries agreed a plan in late 2007 to clean up by 2021, including an innovative benchmark for “maximum allowable nutrient input” from nitrogen and phosphorus fertiliser polllutants.

Is there hope for a clean-up?

Or will Baltic soup still be green and unappetising in 2021?

We hear a lot of grim news about how sea ice has been melting more than usual in recent summers in the Arctic, how glaciers from the Himalayas to the Andes are melting or how winter sports such as ice hockey in Canada may be under threat from global warming.

So here’s a bit of light relief (assuming it’s not for real):

Among suggestions for slowing global warming it may be the most radical — countries failing to keep promises to curb emissions should not be allowed to send a soccer team to the World Cup.

June 2-13 talks in Bonn on a new deal to widen the Kyoto Protocol after  a first period ends in 2012 are ending on Friday with few agreements and many criticisms about a lack of progress.

But how do you focus delegations’ minds and get countries to do more to curb greenhouse gas emissions? U.N. reports last year warning the world of rising temperatures, droughts, rising seas and other risks in coming decades have not fully done the trick.

Sanctions under the Kyoto Protocol, the main existing plan for fighting climate change running to 2012, involve imposing stiffer greenhoues cuts in a next period. But does that do the job?

Rarely for a U.N. climate meeting, the Bonn sessions have often ended promptly at about 6 p.m. – and some delegates have been more agitated talking about the Euro 2008 soccer than about the threats to the planet.

  So Alden Meyer, of the Union of Concerned Scientists, has a joking proposal:  ”if countries don’t comply their teams shouldn’t be allowed to go to the World Cup.”

   What do you think?

Indiana Jones and the World Bank sound like an odd couple to get anything done (”Quick, shoot that robber!” “Wait, we have to do a two-year feasibility study first!”) but are part of a new alliance trying to save the world’s tigers. (Read my colleague Leslie Wroughton’s fine story here)

Will it work? Tigers are under threat from loss of prey and habitats and a black market in tiger skins and bones.

And tiger numbers have plunged to about 4,000 today from more than 100,000 a century ago, according to the new International Tiger Coalition, led by the World Bank with backing from celebrities such as “Indiana Jones” star Harrison Ford, Bo Derek and Robert Duvall. Ford is a board member of Conservation International. 

A World Bank report warned that “if current trends persist, tigers are likely to be the first species of large predator to vanish in historic times.”

So far the ideas for saving tigers have obviously failed and tigers raised in farms (there are more tigers in captivity around the world, in countries including the United States and China, than in the wild) often get too flabby and lazy to be introduced into the wild.

And conservationists say fast economic growth in China may raise demand for traditional tiger parts, used as cures for everything from colds to rheumatism.

 Trying to make people aware of the threats to wildlife, the Humane Society, for instance, urges you to take a pledge not to buy items made from wild animal parts or to buy them as pets.

Do you have any good ideas to halt the slide? Please tell us.

What do you serve world leaders for lunch at a U.N. summit trying to solve a crisis caused by soaring food prices?

You clearly want to impress dozens of heads of state but without laying on opulent meals when up to 1 billion people are threatened by hunger.

U.N. organisers of the June 3-5 food summit in Rome are treading a fine line, putting typically Italian ingredients on the menus, such as mozzarella cheese, pasta, spinach, beans, risotto and parmesan. No pizzas, though.

The main exception to traditional Italian ingredients are pineapples, requiring more energy to transport from the tropics. Veal is on the menu twice and beef once — environmentalists say vegetarianism is best for the climate because cows need to eat about 16 kilos of grain or grass to put on a kilo of meat.

So here is Tuesday’s menu:

Vol au vent with maize and mozzarella

Pasta with a cream of pumpkin and prawns

Braised veal slices with cherry tomatoes and basil

Spinach a la romaine

Fruit salad with ice cream

 They have even gone easy on the wine: today it is the Orvieto Classico Poggio Calvelli 2005; not among Italy’s most expensive.

Any better advice? Maybe they should all go vegetarian?

Delegates from almost 200 countries are meeting in Bonn, Germany,  to discuss ways to protect animals and plants from threats ranging from climate change to pollution. 

Sigmar Gabriel, Germany’s environment minister, said it would be a ”Herculean task” to safeguard animal and plant life. Try my colleague Madeline Chambers’ fine story about the opening.

But what can they do at the May 19-30 meeting?

An Earth Summit in Johannesburg in 2002 set a goal of slowing the rate of biodiversity loss by 2010, but U.N. studies say that climate change, rising human populations and loss of habitats are causing the worst spate of extinctions since the dinosaurs were wiped out 65 million years ago. That means that most experts say the 2010 goal is out of reach.

The conference will discuss ideas like expanding protected areas for wildlife, giving local peoples a bigger share of the cash if pharmaceutical companies develop a new drug with a plant on their land. Are these enough?

Any ideas to help, especially if Hercules doesn’t show up?

The story of Noah’s Ark in The Bible is widely read as an allegory and discoveries of a stunning range of species of wildlife raise questions, for those who believe in the account as literal truth, about how they all crammed aboard.

The total number of species of animals and plants on the planet, according to biologists, may well range up to the tens of millions. About 1.8 million have been identified so far – many of them are plants and fish that Noah did not take along to escape the flood, according to the Book of Genesis.

Even the Ark, with its three decks, would have quickly filled if Noah took at least two of all living creatures as God instructed Noah in the Book of Genesis. 

Modern maritime standards are that cows, for instance, need about 2 square metres each on ocean voyages in pens of about half a dozen. The Ark was about 140 metres (460 feet) long — the world’s biggest container ships are now almost 400 metres long.

One 2004 poll showed that 60 percent of Americans read the story of Noah’s Ark as literally true.

Some creationists  say that the instructions to Noah to take along all ”kinds” of animals might indicate a broader grouping than “species” — perhaps just one pair to represent cows, buffaloes or yak. And maybe insects, of which there are many thousands of species, managed to survive on floating uprooted trees? Noah might have taken along juveniles, or God might have induced a type of hibernation.

What do you think?

A worldwide tree planting campaign is aiming to reach a total of 7 billion by the end of 2009 – that means just over one for everyone on the planet.

The United Nations says the campaign has exceeded expectations since it began in late 2006 with a goal of planting one billion within a year: two billion have been planted already. That means another 5 billion by late 2009.

A lot of the plantings so far have been by carried out governments —  including 700 million by Ethiopia, 400 million by Turkey and 250 million by Mexico. That still leaves a lot still to be planted by companies and people like you and me.

Of course it leaves questions about how many survive — there are no checks to see if the saplings — like the one in the photo being planted by Kenyan Nobel Peace Prize winner Wangaari Maathai (right) in 2006, grow to maturity. 

Trees absorn carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, as they grow and release it when they rot or are burned. So planting trees can take a chunk out of global warming — a U.N. official says that 7 billion trees would, if they reach maturity, soak up as much greenhouse gases as Russia emits in a year.

Have you noticed more trees in your neighbourhood? Or have you planted any?

It’s hard to imagine how big some of the cracks are on this link to satellite images of the Arctic ice during winter – dark lines hundreds of miles (km) long abruptly appear off the Canadian islands at the bottom right of the picture as the ice swirls through the winter.

At the top right, vast amounts of ice are flowing out of the Arctic basin southwards along the coast of Greenland.

“As of the middle of March, most of the basin, including the pole itself, appears to be covered only by seasonal ice,” it says. The image comes from Koji Shimada of the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology, via a link supplied by Thomas Homer Dixon, an environmental expert at the Trudeau Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Toronto.

The summer sea ice in the Arctic shrank to a record low extent in September 2007, outstripping the previous 2005 record, according to satellite observations since the 1970s. Dark water, once exposed, soaks up ever more heat than reflective ice and snow, accelerating the process. A less chill Arctic in turn would tend to heat the rest of the globe.

And some researchers say that the Arctic ice may have reached a “tipping point” because of global warming and that it is destined to vanish in summers within decades — earlier than projected by the U.N. Climate Panel.

What do you think?

It’s almost creepy watching this video of a colossal squid slowly thawing out in a giant tub at the Museum of New Zealand. If this were a horror movie, after all, it would suddenly start flailing around with its monstrous tentacles.

Researchers say that the squid, weighing 495 kg (1,090 lb) and caught off Antarctica in 2007, will be unfolded for study on Wednesday after it is defrosted. It is expected to be 6-8 metres long.

That could tell scientists more about colossal squid, rare creatures that are the world’s biggest invertebrates. Sometimes someone wanders into the video frame and you get a sense of how enormous the squid is.

So the video above is not just a curiosity that looks like a poorly stocked fish section in a supermarket with a broken freezer full of water.

“This squid is a really nasty agressive sort of squid…a gelatinous blob with seriously evil arms on it,” the New Zealand Press Association quoted Steve O’Shea, a squid expert at the University of Auckland, as saying of a previous colossal squid in 2003.

“Without any doubt if you fell in the water, you could be shredded to bits by a colossal squid. It is the T-Rex of the oceans,” he said.

So if you thought Jaws was bad….