The columnist George Will recently wrote about the new movie Up in the Air.

While breezily discoursing on the emotional pain of the worst unemployment record in decades,  Will happened to mention that the “opening soundtrack” to the movie, featuring a new version of Woody Guthrie’s classic This Land is Your Land, was (and I quote) “weird.”

Check out the song for yourself, via the interesting free music site LaLa:

Will, the bow-tied baseball-ed embodiment of white-bread conservatism, is about as stuffy as a man can be, so it’s no surprise that he completely misses the point of this funkified classic by Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings.

Jones sounds like a young Aretha unleashed. She and the Dap-Kings turn out to be a fascinating story in their own right, a collective devoted to the classic funk of the James Brown style.

Their sound is brassy and tight, but without synthesizers or digital gear, giving their songs an analog funkiness that’s timeless, sexy, and in your face. They even turn out to be the secret weapon behind the huge success of Amy Winehouse and her hits “Back to Black” and “You Know I’m No Good.”

But the truth is, of course, that George Will could never in a million years say anything good about this greatest of all American folk songs, funkified or not, because the lyrics challenge the unbounded faith in private property espoused by him and other American conservatives.

In the glossy, funny, but not phony movie, we only hear the first of Guthrie’s words. and then an up-dated fade-out of the song from the band, mentioning locales such as Houston and L.A.

Is it possible that after all these decades, the lyrics are still too radical for most movie-going Americans? Take a look or a listen, and decide for yourself …

As I went walking, I saw a sign there
And on that sign it said "Private Property"
But on the other side it didn't say nothin'
That side was made for you and me !

It’s important because this fact seems to challenge the cause and effect linkage between CO2 and global temperatures. To explain why this matters, Alley opened his talk by quoting from an angry letter about Alley to the university for which he works, Penn State. The alum said that for his work on global warming, Alley “should be dealt with severely,” and pointed to the lag between changes in the levels of CO2 and changes in global atmosphere as the “shameful” part of Alley’s argument.  

Here’s Alley’s counter-example. If he was to overspend on his credit card, his credit card company would delightedly raise the interest rate he is charged on the debt he owes. This would in not too long a time raise the amount of total debt he owes the company. But nonetheless, the overspending would come first, and so one could argue that the raise in the rate of interest lags the change in the level of debt. By this way of thinking, a rise in interest does not lead to a rise in total debt. 

But as anyone who has ever dealt with debt knows, the interest rate is in fact “the big control knob” on the amount of debt an individual owes, in another of Alley’s wonderfully simple metaphors.

Similarly, changes in C02 track changes in global temperatures extremely well, but don’t necessarily precede changes in temperature. They lag, slightly, as a rise in interest payments slightly lags overspending. This doesn’t change the fact that interest on debt, more than any other factor, controls the amount of total debt, and CO2, more than any other factor, controls global temps…

Well, here’s another one. Yesterday Palin published an op-ed in the Washington Post, in which she claimed that global warming is real, but “a natural, cyclical environmental trend.”

This year that has changed. First we had veteran science reporter Robert Lee Hotz’s story on New York City’s sloshy, scary future, which appeared to have barely survived a cleaver-wielding editor.

Then about a week and a half ago, Andrew Revkin, dean of climate reporters for the New York Times, pointed on the blog Dot Earth to a long video interview the Wall Street Journal ran with the famously successful entrepreneur Sir Richard Branson. Branson has invested a great deal of his wealth into an all-out effort to reduce the risks of climate change, including backing a $25 million prize for inventors, but this went completely unmentioned in the lengthy interview, which Revkin called “puzzling.”

And this weekend the WSJ ran a story about global warming that makes a huge issue of a slight decrease in the rate of warming. The story features the best known climate change denier, and implicitly argues that the short-term trend puts the long-term outcome in doubt. To wit:

Scientists who have long questioned man-made global warming cite the temperature drop that began in 2006 as more evidence the models are wrong. “They were predicting warming,” says Richard Lindzen, a climate scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Mr. Lindzen’s work, regarded as leading the research challenging man-made warming, suggests that natural factors such as clouds generally inhibit, rather than intensify, greenhouse-gas warming. He wrote in a recent article that the study from the U.K. admits that the kind of climate model cited in the U.N.’s IPCC report “did not appropriately deal with natural internal variability, thus demolishing the basis for the IPCC’s iconic attribution” linking greenhouse-gas emissions to climate change. He added that “even when all models agree, they can all be wrong.”

The researchers behind those studies strenuously reject that description. But they disagree among themselves on how long the cooling will last. The British paper says warming will resume as early as this year. The German paper says warming won’t resume for perhaps a decade.

Yet if you look at the graph published with the story, the warming trend is unmistakable. Meaning that the text has been massaged beyond factuality.

Sad to see this happen to news coverage at a once-great paper.

Inhofe concedes that the globe did warm after the Industrial Revolution, but doubts whether this warming was caused by “man-made gases, anthropogenic gases, CO2, methane.”

Stoll turns the question around, asking: What would happen to carbon dioxide and methane if humans were to disappear? As is it happens, we have a reputable (if not indisputable) answer to that question from a scientist named William Ruddiman, at the University of Virginia, who in 2003 published a paper in the journal Climate called How the Anthropogenic Era Began Thousands of Years Ago [PDF].

Ruddiman argues that the so-called Little Ice Age, which took hold from approximately 1315 to 1850, was the result of various horrific plagues and pandemics in the Middle Ages. As people died by the tens of millions, agriculture in much of Europe, Asia, and Central America all but collapsed, forests and jungles regrew, the levels of CO2 and methane in the atmosphere fell, winters lengthened, pack ice spread southward, and global temperatures dropped dramatically. 

Though some climate change deniers have pointed to this as evidence that greenhouse gases are good, Stoll argues that’s a shallow interpretation:

In fact, however, this medieval tale reveals the enormous capacity of human beings to shape their environment, whether unwittingly or deliberately. If our crop-planting, animal-herding, forest-and-savannah-burning ancestors could trigger the rapid cooling of the atmosphere through their sudden absence, then we can achieve the same effect by abandoning other practices. The cold we caused does more damage to Inhofe’s position than any finding by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Stoll sees the positive side of this argument. As the responsibility of wealthy, developed nations for “a just climate” becomes undeniable, “the litany of rationalizations” holding the global poor to blame for their suffering may finally become untenable, giving them a chance to rebalance the scales of justice.

Stoll’s faith in the power of rationality might seem a little naive, except that he foresees a time when “the very poor are filing class-action suits against wealthy nations for reckless carbon output.”

And just this week, according to the Wall Street Journal‘s Law Blog, the conservative Fifth Circuit [Federal] Court based in New Orleans has just allowed lawyers for landowners in Mississippi to file suit against coal companies and oil companies for damage suffered during Hurricane Katrina. The court noted that the Supreme Court has already upheld the right of the EPA to regulate carbon dioxide emissions under the Clean Air Act, and affirmed the causal link between emissions and global warming, and, possibly, ocean temperatures and more powerful hurricanes.

Though no one expects the this ruling on “standing” to lead to quick decisions against coal companies, an expert in class-action suits did predict it would lead to many other claims against emitters being filed. Legal observers recall that the tobacco industry defended itself against damage suits successfully for years, but eventually was forced to stop denying that cigarette smoking is harmful to health.

So Stoll’s argument seems not so far-fetched after all. As they say in courthouses around the world, the mills of the gods grind slow, but they grind exceedingly small.

In one of her first interviews with the national press since being named to office, Lisa Jackson, the new head of the Environmental Protection Agency, started well in her defense of the need for government action to regulate the emission of greenhouse gases. She pointed out to National Public Radio that corporate lobbyists have a long history of melodramatizing the costs of government action to reduce air pollution, water pollution, acid rain, and CFC emissions. 

If you look at the history of environmental laws in this country, big ones — because climate-change law, energy law would be big new legislation — every time that’s ever been attempted, the lobbyists out there say, “Oh, that will shut down the American economy, every last one of you will lose your job.” It’s always these hugely overblown doomsday scenarios that overlook the important missing ingredient, which is American ingenuity, American innovation, and the fact that you can indeed build an economy around a move to green energy.Michele Norris

But as the interview progressed, and NPR’s Michele Norris pressed Jackson about the potential cost of regulating greenhouse gas emissions, Jackson moved to issuing a weak call for legislation from Congress. She claimed, improbably, that “resistance” to such new laws in Congress was “too strong” a word, despite admitting that opposition was regionally based. She lauded “the great environmental laws we have in this country,” and wistfully said that “it would be lovely to have Congress add one more to the list.”

Her idealism is admirable, but misplaced. She failed to make the common sense argument most likely to move ordinary folks, which is simply that climate change is coming, whether we like it or not, and if we fail to prepare, we will end up spending far more than if we act now.

In the words of The Stern Review:

The evidence shows that ignoring climate change will eventually damage economic growth.  Our actions over the coming few decades could create risks of major disruption to economic and social activity, later in this century and in the next, on a scale similar to those associated with the great wars and the economic depression of the first half of the 20th century.  And it will be difficult or impossible to reverse these changes.  Tackling climate change is the pro-growth strategy for the longer term, and it can be done in a way that does not cap the aspirations for growth of rich or poor countries. The earlier effective action is taken, the less costly it will be.

Or, as your grandmother might say, a stitch in time saves nine.

Yet in the book Thoreau didn’t mention the fact that a year earlier, he had accidentally set the woods near his home town of Concord on fire, causing a 300-acre blaze, a near disaster, and costing the town  $2,000, at the time a considerable sum.

In Walden he famously scorned those who would live “lives of quiet desperation,” but he didn’t mention after the fire that he himself was scorned in Concord as a “woodsburner.”

Is it possible he went to the woods to redeem himself? To become something besides a town pariah?

That’s the suggestion of a first novel coming out next week by John Pipkin, called — yes — Woodsburner. In a column for the Boston Globe, Pipkin writes: 

That the father of American environmentalism could have been the scourge of the Concord Woods may seem too ironic to be true. Yet, not only did this unlikely event actually occur, but it seems quite possible that, given Thoreau’s general lack of direction at the time, as well as his growing interest in pursuing a career as a civil engineer, America’s first great naturalist might not have undertaken his Walden experiment at all, had it not been for the forest fire he sparked a year earlier.

In Walden, Thoreau wrote that “To regret deeply is to life afresh.” Could regret over an inadvertent act of destruction have led to a new life for Thoreau, and the first great work of environmentalism? 

(h/t: Jacket Copy)

Despite its economic woes, The Los Angeles Times still employs some of the best environmental reporters in the business, including a personal favorite, Julie Cart, who always brings compassion (and great quotes) to her work. Her story about how climate change is devastating Australia ran this week on the front page and it’s absolutely first rate.

“What Will Global Warming Look Like? Scientists Point to Australia” is the headline in the online edition, but although the story references the science, it hits home with quotes from ordinary folk — farmers, suburbanites, shocked patriarchs — talking about non-climactic matters such as depression, despair, and suicide. One stout farmer named Frank Eddy told her:

“Suicide is high. Depression is huge. Families are breaking up. It’s devastation,” he said, shaking his head. “I’ve got a neighbor in terrible trouble. Found him in the paddock, sitting in his [truck], crying his eyes out. Grown men — big, strong grown men. We’re holding on by the skin of our teeth. It’s desperate times.”

A result of climate change?

“You’d have to have your head in the bloody sand to think otherwise,” Eddy said.

Without being heavy-handed about it, the story also brings up an irony about global warming still unknown to most Americans, and quite beyond the mental capacity of deniers. As Kevin Trenberth, a leading scientist for the National Center for Atmospheric Research puts it: “The wets will get wetter, and the dries will get drier.” The story also mentions that Australia, a big coal user and exporter, and the highest per capita producer of greenhouse gases in the world, happens to be one of the first industrialized nations to be devastated by climate change.

But the U.S. has no right to be complacent. Although it has not reduced its coal consumption or exports, Australia is making changes … as Keith Schneider pointed out recently for Yale’s Environment 360 site.

Concerned that steadily rising temperatures in south Australia and the recent drought signal a permanent climate shift, a majority of the country’s states have taken the unprecedented step of agreeing to let the central government play the dominant role in managing local water resources. Growing fears of a lasting change in climate patterns has helped generate support for major public works projects to deal with water scarcity. Australia’s 2007 national election, which saw the Progressive Party come to power, was the first national election in the country’s history in which a scientific issue — climate change — played a decisive role.

“It’s testing our people,” said John Williams, the former chief of Land and Water for the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), the country’s premier scientific agency. “These new conditions are forcing people to move out of industries. There are many people making decisions to change radically the nature of their business. There are some industries — rice growing, cotton production — that are just failing and falling away.”

The American Southwest has yet to face these same climatic facts.

In California, for example, no substantial changes have been made in state-wide water distribution in recent years. An excellent report at the end of 2008 put out by a blue ribbon task force commissioned by the Governor has been ignored, even though nearly everyone agrees the system is in crisis, and even though the state is facing a third year of drought.

Medical researchers in the United Kingdom have found evidence that “friendly” bacteria found in soil may activate the immune system, produce the brain compound serotonin, and help ward off depression.

According to a study published last week in Neuroscience, researchers from Bristol University and University College London found that mice treated with the soil agent Mycobacterium vaccae behaved much like mice treated with anti-depressants. Further research showed that a specific part of the mice brain that produces serotonin — the dorsal raphe nucleus, or DRI — had been energized, and was producing serotonin, which helps govern mood.

Popular anti-depressants such as Prozac and Zoloft work by inhibiting the re-uptake of serotonin in the brain: this bacterium appears to work by indirectly increasing the actual amount produced in the brain.

Medical News Today reported last week that Dr. Chris Lowry of Bristol University became interested in the subject after he heard that cancer patients treated with the soil bacterium reported a better quality of life. Lowry speculated that it might be because the bacteria was activating their “serotonergic system,” as the study appears to confirm.

“These studies leave us wondering if we shouldn’t all be spending more time playing in the dirt,” Lowry said.

For environmentalists, this is a reminder that dirt itself has gotten something of a bum rap in the last hundred years. Many immunologists now suspect that a little dirt at a young age may help “educate” the immune system and reduce the chance of childhood asthma.

Another earthy compound considered “dirty” in conventional morality is semen, which — interestingly — also has been shown to have an anti-depressant effect. (The study is controversial, but has not been disproven.)

They say cleaniness is next to Godliness; they don’t mention that it’s also a little depressing.

The more we discuss the economic crisis in terms of the physical world, the less we discuss the climate crisis itself, even though restoring balance in the atmosphere will be far more difficult than reviving the faltering economy. It’s an alarming irony. As we worry about our melting savings and our vanishing jobs, we forget about melting icecaps and vanishing species.

If you like to double-check sources, check out a linked version of the op-ed.