If you've so far scoffed at all evidence of impending sea-level rise, this may finally change your mind: Apparently, baby animals are now learning how to surf. There is literally no explanation for this that doesn't involve some kind of instinctual understanding that the world is about to get a lot wetter.

Zorro, the piglet, is maybe not great at it, but at least he's a strong swimmer, so he won't be totally washed up (get it?):

These baby seals actually don't even need a surfboard in order to avoid the worst consequences of rising oceans, but they do look like they're having fun:

Insurance companies have been paying out big bucks of late, funding cleanup in the wake of wildfires, hurricanes, and other extreme weather events likely made worse by global warming. Superstorm Sandy caused an estimated $50 billion in economic losses, and it was just one of 11 American catastrophes in 2012 that wrought more than $1 billion worth of destruction.

So one would logically think that insurance companies would be among the most clued-in businesses when it comes to understanding and bracing for humanity’s horrendous effects on the weather.

Not so, according to the results of an industry-wide survey of 184 insurance companies that operate in California, New York, and Washington state.

Human beings are pretty damn clever. We have adapted and invented our way out of some extremely grim situations. And we can do the same in the face of climate change! The ideas and innovations necessary to ensure our security, and the security of future generations, are within our power. What's needed is a smooth, effective conveyor belt to carry those ideas and innovations from our heads, into the world, and up to sufficient scale.

Unfortunately, as things now stand, that conveyor belt is rusty and full of gaps. Clever ideas get stuck in our heads, or fail to make it across the "valley of death" between labs and markets, or fail to take hold and grow in those markets. We call these gaps "market failures," but that is a misleadingly passive construction. The conveyor belt is not something that exists in Platonic market space, a priori, that we merely need to uncover. It is something we must build, consciously, using markets among other tools.

Tastes great vs. less filling

For many years, climate hawks have been engaged in misguided and self-defeating debates about which end of the conveyor belt to fix. On one side are those who want to fix the early end, where ideas move from imagination to lab to early market. These folks talk a lot about innovation and are criticized (somewhat unfairly) as denying the need for deployment.

On the other side are those who want to fix the later end, where ideas move from early market to large, world-changing scale. These folks talk a lot about deployment and are criticized (somewhat unfairly) as denying the need for innovation.

Both sides accuse the other of failing to grasp the threat of climate change.

The innovation side accuses the deployment side of misunderstanding the scale of the problem. There is so much energy poverty remaining in the world, so many people in the developing world rising toward the middle class, such massive demand, that we can't hope to satisfy this century's energy (or agricultural, water, transportation ...) needs with today's technologies.

The deployment side accuses the innovation side of misunderstanding the urgency of the problem. If we are to stay within our carbon budget for the century, global emissions must peak and begin falling (quickly) within five years or so. To have a real chance at preventing catastrophe, we ideally ought to drive carbon emissions to zero, or even negative, well before the end of the century. There is simply no way to do that unless we rapidly deploy the technology we have today. Even if a technology breakthrough appeared in a lab tomorrow, there simply isn't enough time to drive it past all the market barriers to wide adoption fast enough to forestall disaster.

So, who is right? Well, they are both right, about everything except the fact that the other is wrong.

So why fight at all? Here it's worth briefly pondering the history of the debate.

Good news, soda lovers and Bloomberg haters!

Reuters reports that New York State Supreme Court Justice Milton Tingling threw out New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg's pet ban, calling it "arbitrary and capricious," in response to lawsuits brought by the American Beverage Association and other unapologetic sugar peddlers business groups.

Mathieu Goussin and Hortense Le Calvez's photographs look like jellyfish, kelp, and anemones. But these lovely-looking aquatic lifeforms are actually just piles of debris.

London may be the world's newest best cycling city. Mayor Boris Johnson has announced that the city will be spending a whopping $1.51 billion on better bike infrastructure -- including a 15-mile bicycle highway that will connect the west and east sections of the city.

There are, oh, a gabillion reasons why this is a great idea. But here are the reasons Johnson gave for spending all this money on cycling:

The reason I am spending almost £1 billion on this is my belief that helping cycling will not just help cyclists. It will create better places for everyone. It means less traffic, more trees, more places to sit and eat a sandwich. It means more seats on the Tube, less competition for a parking place and fewer cars in front of yours at the lights. Above all, it will fulfill my aim of making London’s air cleaner.

The New York Times editorial board and Times columnist Thomas Friedman have both come out swinging against the Keystone XL pipeline.

A strong editorial today calls on Obama to kill the project. The headline: "When to Say No."

[Obama] should say no, and for one overriding reason: A president who has repeatedly identified climate change as one of humanity’s most pressing dangers cannot in good conscience approve a project that — even by the State Department’s most cautious calculations — can only add to the problem. ...

Supporters of the pipeline have argued that this is oil from a friendly country and that Canada will sell it anyway. We hope Mr. Obama will see the flaw in this argument. Saying no to the pipeline will not stop Canada from developing the tar sands, but it will force the construction of new pipelines through Canada itself. And that will require Canadians to play a larger role in deciding whether a massive expansion of tar sands development is prudent. At the very least, saying no to the Keystone XL will slow down plans to triple tar sands production from just under two million barrels a day now to six million barrels a day by 2030. ...

In itself, the Keystone pipeline will not push the world into a climate apocalypse. But it will continue to fuel our appetite for oil and add to the carbon load in the atmosphere. There is no need to accept it.

In an op-ed published on Sunday, Friedman also calls for rejecting Keystone, but with a different spin. He thinks Obama will end up approving the pipeline, so he wants activists to make such a stink about it that Obama feels compelled to take other big steps to forestall climate change in exchange.

A mouse at a zoo in eastern China was supposed to be a snake's dinner, but was freed by zoo officials after he informed the snake that he had no plans to go quietly. While the snake was eating another mouse -- let's call that mouse Dinner Mouse --  that had been unceremoniously dropped into its cage for its evening meal, this guy -- who we'll call Brave Alive Mouse -- jumped on the snake's head and started to bite him. This was undoubtedly a combination of survival instinct, having a tiny mouse brain, and maybe rabies, but we're choosing to interpret it as a desperate, heroic attempt to save his friend.

Twelve-year-old Sicily Kolbeck is a girl after our own hearts. She's building a tiny house. It's based on the Gypsy Junker, which we have a particular fondness for. She raised more than $1,500 on Indiegogo to support the project. And she's really concerned about poo. In fact, like us, she writes about it on the internet:

This week I will be working on my composting toilet for the tiny house; I decided to go with a sawdust composting toilet because it's cheap, but just in case I am installing plumbing for an RV hookup because I want to be #1 in the business of #2. Like a boss.

Kolbeck has an advantage over most 12-year-olds who might want to build their own tiny spot to hang out in: She goes to a private school that emphasizes project-based learning. So building this house is what she does at school. (Yes, we are jealous.)

Where not so long ago there was nothing but ice, now there are miles of forests.

As frigid Arctic tundras have melted during the past 30 years, swaths of the northern lands have grown over with lush stands of trees, bushes, and other plants. That's the conclusion of NASA-funded scientists who studied 30 years of satellite data. They published their results Sunday in the journal Nature Climate Change.

"In the north's Arctic and boreal areas, the characteristics of the seasons are changing, leading to great disruptions for plants and related ecosystems," said one of the researchers, Ranga Myneni. From NASA:

As a result of enhanced warming and a longer growing season, large patches of vigorously productive vegetation now span a third of the northern landscape, or more than 3.5 million square miles (9 million square kilometers). That is an area about equal to the contiguous United States. This landscape resembles what was found 250 to 430 miles (400 to 700 kilometers) to the south in 1982.

"It's like Winnipeg, Manitoba, moving to Minneapolis-Saint Paul in only 30 years," said co-author Compton Tucker of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.