Dozens of vultures landed on the grass the other day outside the building where U.N. climate talks are taking place in Ghana – and more were circling overhead.

“They’ve been attracted by all the delegates falling asleep inside,” one official joked.

(I missed those vultures, but when I tried to get a picture of a group on the grass to try to illustrate this blog they flapped off before I was close enough … The picture on the left is of a vulture in Spain).

The Aug. 21-27 talks among 160 countries working on a new treaty to fight climate change moved at a glacial pace even though the United Nations said they were making progress, for instance, in defining how to give tropical countries incentives to slow deforestation. Burning trees is a big source of greenhouse gas emissions.

Getting countries from Albania to Zimbabwe to agree to a new treaty to fight climate change by the end of 2009 as planned is clearly going to be a gigantic jigsaw, but some things could be simplified.

Many governments say fighting climate change is one of the biggest challenges facing the world, so why not design talks with a bit more built-in urgency?

– How about starting meetings on time? Sessions now start like clockwork — between 15 and 25 minutes after the appointed time.

– Speakers often feel obliged to spend half a minute or more praising the chairman, the host country, donors etc for arranging the talks before they get to the point. Why not streamline the formalities?

Any other ideas?

Morality needs a bigger role as a spur to a talks on a new U.N. treaty to slow global warming, according to a group of Christians I spoke to today in Accra, Ghana.

 They were lobbying delegates at 160-nation talks to do more to combat climate change. For the story, click here

Around a table with me in a crowded conference hall in Ghana, they argued that economic and political arguments for action are simply not enough to solve an issue that is already affecting people’s livelihoods, especially in Africa, the poorest continent.

So should ethics and morality have a bigger role in working out international treaties? Or are there risks, for instance of opening the door to differing religious views of how far humans should be stewards of creation?

Is a global ”green revolution” unstoppable, even with an economic slowdown?

That’s what Danish Climate and Energy Minister Connie Hedegaard (left) predicts, saying that a huge shift to renewable energies, such as solar and wind power, from fossil fuels will survive flagging economic growth.

She has to puzzle over the outlook since she is set to be host of a U.N. meeting in late 2009 in Copenhagen at which the world is meant to agree a new climate deal to succeed the Kyoto Protocol.

Many nations have been reluctant so far to spell out what they are willing to do to slow global warming. It’s a bit of the “you first”, “no, you first” trap.

“The green revolution is going to come anyway,” she told me for a story about how far a gloomier economic outlook may dampen action to fight climate change, and how far high oil prices will help.

Is she right? (Many Danes have bet on the revolution – Vestas is the world’s number one wind turbine maker).

In the 1970s the oil crisis spurred huge interest in renewable energies — U.S. President Jimmy Carter even had solar panels installed on the roof of the White House. His successor, Ronald Reagan, took them down, and that ‘revolution’ ran out of steam as oil prices fell (below $10 a barrel in 1986).

Since then, of course, almost all climate scientists have concluded that fossil fuels cause global warming. So a shift to renewables is not just about current high oil prices ($111 a barrel), or worries about smog pollution.

Is the revolution coming?

The humpback and some other big whales are recovering from the threat of extinction.

But will the celebrations turn sour, for many people, if whaling nations use the news to justify sharpening their harpoons?

The International Union for Conservation of Nature put out a report today showing that the humpback was off the main endangered list, along with some other species including the southern right whale and the minke whale — it said that stocks were recovering, helped by a 1986 moratorium on all hunts. Many other types of whale, porpoise and dolphin were still in trouble.

But is the report bad news in disguise for whales?

Greenland, for instance, lobbied in vain June to add 10 humpbacks — a whale famed for its spectacular leaps (see the picture above) — to its annual quota of other species caught in an aboriginal hunt. Anti-whaling nations voted “No” at a meeting of the International Whaling Commission, arguing stocks were too small.

Can anti-whalers make that same argument next year?

And Japan this year dropped a plan to hunt 50 humpback whales after international criticism. Will that criticism still be fair if Japan targets humpbacks (perhaps even the famed white whale ”Migaloo” off Australia) next year?  

Whaling nations, mainly Japan, Norway and Iceland, argue they should be allowed to hunt whales when there are enough in the seas. Norway targets about 1,000 minke whales a year, and says there are at least 100,000 in the north-east Atlantic.

So should there be hunts or a ban?

A scientist who claims the world record for spotting the most types of primates wants more challengers — via a new brand of eco-tourism that might stave off extinction for many apes, monkeys and lemurs.

Russell Mittermeier, president of Conservation International and head of the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s (IUCN) primate specialist group, reckons he has seen 350 out of 634 known species and sub-species of primate in the wild.

“There are another couple of people in the running but I think that’s the highest,” Mittermeier, born in 1949, told me of his list compiled over about four decades of work often in the world’s tropical forests.

He said that he was planning to launch a website with the lists of the top experts’ sightings.

“Then people can try to catch us,” he said.

Eco-tourism to remote jungles could be a way of easing deforestation and human hunting for primate meat, a delicacy in some countries. Almost half the world’s primate species are under threat of extinction because of human activity, according to a report by the IUCN on Tuesday.

Personal tallies of species work with birdwatchers, some of whom zealously record how many of the 10,000 or so species worldwide they have seen. The late American Phoebe Snetsinger is the record holder with more than 8,000; a tally of several thousand is enough to inspire awe (…at least among fellow enthusiasts).

A drawback for primate spotting is that birds are obviously easier to see — a glance out of my office here over a square in central Oslo reveals several pigeons, a gull swooping past and a couple of sparrows. There’s not a single chimpanzee, gibbon, orang-utan or gorilla (…though I wonder about that big guy in the heavy coat over in the corner).

So my species scorecard so far today — Birds: 3, Primates: 1 (he’s human).

Trips to remote tropical region to spot primates could be one way of putting a price tag on primates and their habitats: local people would have a stake in conservation if their income from tourism were higher than from hunting or logging.

Of course there would be a host of environmental problems in bringing more visitors to the jungles. But maybe they could do more good than harm?

So would you pay for a trip to a tropical forest in the Congo basin, or along the Amazon? Perhaps to the Ivory Coast to try to track down a Miss Waldron’s red colobus? — a type of monkey not seen by a primatologist since 1978.

What do you think? Please tell us your views.

Are European sports cars the latest ’endangered species’ because of climate change?

Read my colleague Pete Harrison’s fascinating feature about how automakers fear tougher restrictions intended to slow global warming could mean the end of the road for supercars such as the Aston Martin DB9, Ferrari F430 or Porsche 911.

They argue that the motoring icons need protection from European Union rules that will limit carbon dioxide emissions from new models from 2012.

Would you buy a car that looked like a Maserati but roared as loud as the family hatchback? Would sitting in a Lamborghini make your heart race if it had the tyre-shredding acceleration of a Fiat Uno? Would a Porsche engine purr if it had to match the emissions of a Mini?

“As a high luxury brand we are representing Europe to the world,” Lamborghini Chief Executive Stephan Winkelman said. “We are a species to protect”.

Environmentalists say that the sports cars should cut their emissions and that their makers find new ways to create thrills – new lighter materials, better engines, even a zip of electric power?

Who’s right?

Please tell us what you think.

Could cow manure curb global warming?

A study by scientists in Texas reckons that cows, sheep, pigs, chickens and other farm animals excrete enough waste to generate electricity for millions of homes, helping reduce reliance on coal-fired power plants and so cut greenhouse gas emissions released by burning fossil fuels.

Left to decompose naturally, manure emits the powerful greenhouse gases methane and nitrous oxide. If trapped by a devoted workforce (people with an impaired sense of smell encouraged to apply) the gases could used to drive microturbines to generate electricity. That works by the manure being “anaerobically digested” — a process a bit like making compost — to release energy-rich biogas which would be burnt to drive the microturbines.

The calculations, the scientists say they are the first to outline a procedure for quantifying amounts of energy and greenhouse gases linked to national herds, suggest that farm animals in the United States alone could generate about 2.4 percent of U.S. electricity and avert about 3.9 percent of greenhouse gas emissions.

Dung is widely burnt in the Third World as a fuel; why not exploit it elsewhere?

The study doesn’t look into the uncertainties about the economics of sucking up manure, transport, building specialised power plants, etc (with oil at almost $130 a barrel, what would you pay for a barrel of manure?) 

So, if you live in the countryside and your eco-minded neighbour tells you sometime in future: “We switched our electricity supplier from coal to get it from the local wind farm” you can go one better and say:

“See Daisy the cow over there in the field? We get ours from her”.

Is there a future for manure?

So “Lonesome George” might become a Dad?

In lists of endangered creatures such as black rhinos, orang utans, tigers or blue whales, ”Lonesome George” has long had the saddest status as the only one known survivor of the Pinta island species of Galapagos giant tortoise.

That has made him the “rarest living creature” for the Guinness Book of Records.

But now my colleague Alonso Soto in Quito reports that he’s mated with one of his two female companions of a similar species and keepers have found several eggs in his pen. If they hatch, they would at least preserve half of his genes.

Good on you, George! It would be an amazing turnaround after he has kept the species a heartbeat away from oblivion, showing little interest in sex in 36 years in captivity.

The Darwin Foundation has explained his problems by saying “he probably grew up alone and did not learn proper social and mating behaviour” even though he is in his sexual prime for a tortoise, aged about 60 to 90.

I visited the Galapagos Islands on a holiday in the late 1980s and went to Lonesome George’s enclosure –I can imagine that he was put off thinking of anything but survival because tourists were allowed to wander right up to him. The constant disturbances by people trampling around him can hardly have put him in a romantic mood. And maybe he’d been holding out in vain to meet an ideal Pinta mate?

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):