Actor Edward Norton will appear alongside Alanis Morissette on Larry King Live tonight to promote Earth Hour. Norton is a long-time environmental activist while Morissette recently filmed a PSA promoting Earth Hour.

Earth Hour goes down on March 28th, when for one hour, 2,712 cities, towns and municipalities in 83 countries will switch off in observation of Earth Hour 2009, the world’s first global election between Earth and global warming. The concept is simple: turn your lights off to vote Earth and leave your lights on if you’re rooting for global warming.

Check out King’s interview with Norton and Morissette tonight at 9 p.m. on CNN.

For those of us who take the time to track our carbon footprints concern over how far a product has been shipped is nothing new. But a recent study shows that the total environmental impact from commercial shipping is greater than had been previously thought.

The American Geophysical Union recently found that cargo ships, tankers and cruise ships produce as much particle pollution as half of the world’s automobiles.

The research examined the exhaust of over 200 ships in the Gulf of Mexico in the summer of 2006 with a specific focus on the amount of sulfates emitted in the exhaust.

The results were an estimate that cargo ships emit approximately 2.2 million pounds of particulate pollution each year.

This was the first such study of its kind and the results are pretty staggering.

Since over 70 percent of all shipping happens near coastlines (within 250 miles), it’s the coastal areas that are most affected. One of the researchers of this study had done previous research that linked levels of particle pollution with premature death in coastal areas.

President Barack Obama multi-trillion-dollar budget is heavy on the spending and looks to boost taxes of the wealthy while paving the way for universal health care.

The Obama budget looks to spend $3.55 trillion for 2010 in an effort to stave off a severe recession and the worst financial crisis the U.S. has seen in seven decades.

Among the ways that the Obama budget seeks to mitigate the massive spending is a proposal to raise hundreds of billions of dollars by selling permits that allow companies to exceed carbon emissions caps. Obama intends to impose the carbon emissions caps on companies relying on fossil fuels in an effort to reduce American impact on global warming.

The Obama budget would see part of the money raised through these pollution permits used to extend the “Making Work Pay” tax credit of $400 beyond 2010, as described in the recently passed economic stimulus bill.

The Obama administration said this was to was to help compensate people for the expected higher cost of electricity that will come as a result of the stiffer pollution controls.

To better calculate the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere NASA is launching a new satellite tomorrow. The precise measurements of the Orbital Carbon Observatory will help scientists better understand the natural processes as well as the human impact of carbon dioxide levels. This should provide more reliable predictions of how green house gases are distributed through the atmosphere as well as their effect on global warming

Current data on carbon dioxide levels in the Earth’s atmosphere has become much easier for anyone to check now since last week Purdue University released a carbon dioxide map for Google Earth. It reveals pollution from factories, highways, buildings, etc. for the U.S. by state, county or population.

This is all part of Purdue’s Project Vulcan which is intending to expand the details of the map and expanding it to Canada and Mexico.

Actress Susan Sarandon is appealing to the American public to help her in her efforts to stop global warming, asking citizens to participate in Capitol Climate Action, a peaceful protest at the Capitol Power Plant in Washington D.C. on March 2, 2009.

In the video, Sarandon says: “Civil disobedience can overcome great challenges and global warming is the greatest challenge of our time. On March 2nd, thousands will come together in Washington D.C for a historic protest on the climate crisis. Many will continue our tradition of peaceful, civil disobedience.”

Despite the growing concern and heightened awareness of the dangers of global warming researchers have found that the amounts of human-produced carbon being added to the atmosphere has increased faster than it did in the 1990s.

The research, which was released last Saturday, shows that levels of carbon emissions have risen by 3.5 percent each year since 2000. This marks a drastic increase from the previous decade which saw an increase of 0.9 percent annually.

Christopher Field of the Carnegie Institution for Science spoke at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science saying that the main cause for the sharp increase in carbon emissions is the widespread use of coal power and that “without aggressive attention societies will continue to focus on the energy sources that are cheapest and that means coal.”

He went on to say that previous projections on reducing carbon emissions was too optimistic with no where in the world seeing a decline so far this decade.

Things continued to get bleaker with France’s National Center for Space Studies’ Anny Cazenave saying that their satellite readings of sea levels showed them to be rising faster than predicted.

Next up was evidence that showed that the recent adoption of biofuels may prove more dangerous that helpful in efforts to slow global warming. Demand for biofuels lead a great deal of American crop growers to grow corn instead of soy. This left a vacuum in the market for soy which was filled by Brazil. Brazil created the additional soy fields by destroying more of their rainforest which is crucial to the absorption of carbon dioxide.

Stanford University’s Holly Gibbs stated, “If we run our cars on biofuels produced in the tropics, chances will be good that we are effectively burning rainforests in our gas tanks.”

An international team of researchers that included Christopher Carcaillet from the Center for Bio-Archaeology and Ecology, has recently analyzed wildfire patters from thousands of years ago revealing that they were intimately linked with drastic changes in climate.

The study examined a period between 15,000 to 10,000 years ago. The time period was chosen because it exhibited a large scale, drastic climate change similar to our current situation. By examining sedimentary charcoal records and studying fossil pollen they were able to determine that wildfires are far more prolific when the climate is warming.

The result of this study is that as global warming continues we can expect to see a consistent increase in the number of wildfires; an obviously dangerous prospect considering the recent wildfire disaster that devastated Australia.

Who’s ready for panic time? I know, I know, I’ve officially become part of the fear-mongering media but this one doesn’t sound like the type of story you’d want to ignore.

As we reported earlier the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado at Boulder has satellite imagery showing a 5,282 square mile Antarctic ice shelf has started collapsing.

Now, geophysicists out of the University of Toronto have done research that indicates that the collapse of this Antarctic ice shelf could result in an actual shift in the Earth’s axis. Holy shift!

Their research, which will be published today in the journal Science, shows that when sea levels rise after the ice shelf collapse the Earth’s rotation could be affected.

A press release from the University of Toronto’s physics department goes on to state that, “The melting of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet will actually cause the Earth´s rotation axis to shift rather dramatically — approximately 500 metres from its present position if the entire ice sheet melts.”

Geophysicist Jerry Mitrovica continues, saying previous analysis was likely too conservative and that many coastal regions will see water levels rise by 25 percent more than expected, for a total of six to seven meters.

“That’s a lot of additional water, particularly around such highly populated areas as Washington, D.C., New York City, and the California coastline,” Mitrovica stated.

The beautiful old growth trees of the western United States and Canada are disappearing twice as fast as they were dying thirty years ago, and climate change is most likely to blame, say scientists.

Philip van Mantgem of the US Geological Survey collected data from 76 plots on the west coast without any direct human management, so that any tree loss was not due to logging. They looked at old forests, where many of the trees were at least 200 years old, and sometimes as old as 1000 years. In 87% of the plots, the trees were disappearing faster than new trees that are growing. Death rates varied, but the trend held whether the trees were old or young, and regardless of their location geographically.

The Pacific Northwest, including the pine trees of British Columbia, were the worst affected and death rates there are doubling every seventeen years. The team believes the rise in average temperatures across the region is the main cause of elements that are killing off the trees at this new alarming rate. “Warming can cause a lot of changes,” says van Mantgem. “It could [increase evaporation] in these stands and effectively dry them out, and it could make things that chew on trees much happier,things like bark beetles and fungi. The ultimate implications for our forests and environment are huge.”

Researchers at the University of Toronto have published findings in the science journal, Nature Geoscience, that show global warming actually changes the molecular structure of organic matter in soil.

“Soil contains more than twice the amount of carbon than does the atmosphere, yet, until now, scientists haven’t examined this significant carbon pool closely,” says M J. Simpson, Ass. Professor of Environmental Chemistry at UTSC. “Through our research, we’ve sought to determine what soils are made up of at the molecular level and whether this composition will change in a warmer world.”

Organic matter is what makes soil fertile and able to support plant life, an essential for agriculture. Organic matter holds water in the soil and prevents erosion and the processes of decomposition of soil organic matter provide plants and microbes with the energy source and water they need to grow, and carbon is released into the atmosphere as a by-product of this process. Warming temperatures are expected to speed up this process which will increase the amount of CO2 that is transferred to the atmosphere.

“From the perspective of agriculture, we can’t afford to lose carbon from the soil because it will change soil fertility and enhance erosion” says Simpson. “Alternatively, consider all the carbon locked up in permafrost in the Arctic. We also need to understand what will happen to the stored carbon when microbes become more active under warmer temperatures.”