Global Warming News
An inhabited island has disappeared:

Rising seas, caused by global warming, have for the first time washed an inhabited island off the face of the Earth. The obliteration of Lohachara island, in India's part of the Sundarbans where the Ganges and the Brahmaputra rivers empty into the Bay of Bengal, marks the moment when one of the most apocalyptic predictions of environmentalists and climate scientists has started coming true.

Gardening maps have changed:

Fifteen years of warm winter weather is beginning to change the Washington area's landscape — with Southern species like crape myrtles having an easier time and northern types feeling less welcome, according to findings by the National Arbor Day Foundation.

The foundation has revised its map of "hardiness zones" — with each of the nine zones showing a range of average annual low temperatures that help serve as a guide for gardeners and others.
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"You could say D.C. is the new North Carolina," said Bill McLaughlin, a curator at the U.S. Botanic Garden on the Mall.

And retail is feeling it:

Retailers are calling it the Coat Crisis of 2006, a fashion fiasco measured in racks of unsold fur-lined shearlings at Saks Fifth Avenue in New York and hooded wool peacoats at the Galeries Lafayette department store in Paris.

Balmy temperatures on the East Coast of the United States and in Western Europe have been disastrous for sales of all kinds of cold-weather clothing, from cashmere caps to wool scarves.