New Orleans levee system still vulnerable, officials say. Three years after Katrina, an Army Corps of Engineer official acknowledges 'there are gaps in the system.' The city may not be safe from Hurricane Gustav. [News Source]

Incomplete levee system leaves West Bank vulnerable to flooding. Flood-control experts said Hurricane Gustav's surge may deliver the worst-case scenario for the West Bank because the area's hurricane-protection system remains incomplete and severely vulnerable in some spots, despite accelerated levee work in the past three years. [News Source]

Global warming’s local threat. Representatives of the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy came to town to show a video of images that reflect the stunning level of flooding threatening the Charleston area if the sea level rises by a mere four or five feet. [News Source]

Surging B.C. glacier threatens to block river. A mammoth-sized glacier is dangerously on the move in remote northwestern B.C., threatening to seal off the Alsek River and create a lake that would ultimately burst and pose a flood hazard to rafters and anyone else downstream. [News Source]

Climate change threat to Japanese Zen gardens. Kyoto, the old capital of Japan, is famous for two things: its Buddhist temples and the 1997 treaty that set out to tackle global warming. Now the failure of the second is threatening the first as accelerating climate change eats away at Kyoto's ancient heritage. [News Source]

Worries over stability of Greenland icesheet. Scientists say they can no longer rule out a fast-track melting of the Greenland icesheet, a prospect once merely the preserve of doomsayers. [News Source]

Greenland ice sheet melting faster than predicted, report says. One of the world's largest masses of ice could melt much faster than predicted, says a new study that warns the steady loss of the Greenland ice sheet could raise sea levels three times higher than estimated. [News Source]

Climate change refugees look to Australia, N.Z. With the apparent effects of global warming already being felt among Pacific island nations, Australia and New Zealand are being urged to do more to prepare for ‘climate change refugees’. [News Source]

Whales shedding blubber: Japanese study. Japan, under fire overseas for whaling it justifies as research, has released its findings - whales are losing blubber because ocean resources are growing scarce. [News Source]

Hurricane Gustav: Fuzzy science confounds predictions. Meteorologists are predicting a more active hurricane season than usual this year, but there is no way to know whether global warming has caused an individual event such as a hurricane, or whether it has made such storms worse. [News Source]

A savage force of nature — and mounting evidence they are becoming more violent. It is virtually impossible to link any one weather event with climate change, yet there is mounting evidence that global warming could be causing hurricanes to increase in both frequency and intensity. [News Source]