Every column Bill McKibben writes on climate change becomes more dread-laden and portentous, but I never stop enjoying them. His latest is "Year One" in Sierra Magazine. The money clip: We will soon learn, for example, that what we've been calling "global warming" is better thought of as excess energy trapped in the atmosphere, which will express itself in every possible way. Like the Bush administration's energy bill, these manifestations will also be about "more": more evaporation in arid lands and then more flooding when it eventually rains; more wind as air pressure rises from warmer areas; more extreme heat …

Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) has spent the last week or so -- nay, the last 25 years -- attempting to circumvent the clearly and repeatedly expressed preferences of a majority of U.S. citizens by allowing oil drilling to take place in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The latest attempt involved attaching drilling to the defense appropriations bill, in effect holding military funding hostage in the middle of an armed conflict. We have perhaps become numbed by the sheer repetition and persistence of these efforts, but it's worth pausing, stepping back, and noting just how utterly venal and anti-democratic they are. …

Bush administration officials tried their darnedest to derail the international climate-change negotiations that wrapped up in Montreal last week. But in the midst of their bombastic no-no-no-ing, they did offer up one constructive idea -- a $950 million partnership between the U.S. Department of Energy and industry leaders to build FutureGen, a "prototype of the fossil-fueled power plant of the future" -- perhaps hoping it would help redeem their negative image. Could I interest you in this lump of coal? Photo: Siemens. It didn't work. "It was an inappropriate attempt at distraction," said Greenpeace energy-policy specialist John Coequyt, who attended …

2005 to be one of the hottest years recorded This year will go down as one of the hottest on record. NASA's Goddard Institute says 2005 will beat 1998, the current record-holder, while the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the U.K. Meteorological Office -- using the same land and ocean data as NASA, but crunching it in slightly different ways -- say 1998 will still be the champ by fractions of a degree. The three agencies stress that although they reached minutely different conclusions, it's definitely getting warmer on planet Earth, and human activity is part of what's rapidly …

Polar bears drowning as Alaska sea ice disappears OK, we're trying to keep a positive outlook here, but ... drowning polar bears? Seriously? And just when therapy was starting to work. In September 2004 (the year the polar ice cap receded a record 160 miles from Alaska's north coast), federal researchers doing routine aerial surveys counted 10 bears swimming in the open ocean as far as 60 miles off Alaska's shore -- where they'd spotted perhaps one bear every two years in the past. They later found four dead bears floating in the vicinity, a few days after a big …

I thought this new Greenpeace commercial was kind of a cutesy joke. But no: Turns out polar bears really are drowning. (Yeah, it's subscription only, so there's an excerpt below the fold.) Scientists for the first time have documented multiple deaths of polar bears off Alaska, where they likely drowned after swimming long distances in the ocean amid the melting of the Arctic ice shelf. ... In a quarter-century of aerial surveys of the Alaskan coastline before 2004, researchers from the U.S. Minerals Management Service said they typically spotted a lone polar bear swimming in the ocean far from ice …

California utility commission recharges Governator's solar energy plan California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's (R) Million Solar Roofs initiative -- a casualty of partisan squabbling in the California legislature's last session -- has been partially resurrected. On Tuesday, the California Public Utilities Commission responded to a groundswell of public support with a $3.2 billion plan to increase the state's total solar output from about 100 megawatts now to 3,000 megawatts by 2017, eliminating the need for six natural-gas-fired power plants. State officials say it would be the largest solar initiative in the country, possibly the world. Residential energy bills would go up …

It's an open question how much gasoline prices affect gasoline consumption. But apparently gas prices are pretty tightly correlated with something else. Click to find out what. (Via Tapped)

Climate change is messing with the seasons in a Rocky Mountain forest Since 1968, researchers have gathered air samples from near the summit of Colorado's Niwot Ridge in the Rocky Mountains, and tracked carbon dioxide levels in the conifer forest below. They've amassed the world's third-longest record of atmospheric carbon dioxide, and that record provides a troubling glimpse of how forests respond to a warming world. The biological start of spring in the Niwot forest was about 10.5 days earlier in 2002 than it was in 1980, and cool fall temperatures are coming later. "It's shocking," said researcher Pieter Tans. …

I've been to climate meetings in locales that stretch from Kyoto to The Hague, Mexico City to the Maldives. It would have been awfully easy to get in the old hybrid and drive two hours north to Montreal for the big climate-change confab that wrapped up this weekend -- if nothing else, it's a city I love deeply. But I couldn't bring myself to do it in the end. I knew it was going to be too painful to watch. Do U.S. see what I see? Photo: iStockphoto. Too painful because, as it has since the issue first emerged, the …