Nowadays, in an age of rising population and scarcities of food and water in some regions, it's a wonder that humanitarians aren't clamoring for more atmospheric carbon dioxide.

No, it's not The Onion. It's the Wall Street Journal editorial page, which nowadays is much the same thing.

Once again, the country’s leading financial newspaper is recycling long-debunked myths from disinformers with PhDs posing as climate scientists -- in this case, Harrison H. Schmitt and William Happer, "In Defense of Carbon Dioxide: The demonized chemical compound is a boon to plant life and has little correlation with global temperature."

But what nefarious forces have been demonizing CO2? Let’s see:

Yes, sure, fine, it is possible to get a somewhat healthy sandwich at Subway. It will have watery, shredded lettuce on it, and peppers, and maybe avocado. It will taste like nothing. And let's be real: That is not what people are ordering at Subway. They are ordering the foot-long Italian sub, with its layers of (relatively) delicious, fatty meat. Or they are ordering the Big Philly Cheesesteak.

The result of these choices is that, despite Subway's enormously successful advertising campaign pitching it as a healthy fast-food alternative, the chain is feeding just as much crappy food to people as McDonald's is. Or, as the New York Daily News reports:

"We found that there was no statistically significant difference between the two restaurants, and that participants ate too many calories at both," public health scholar Dr. Lenard Lesser, who led the study, said in a statement.

UPDATE: Call off the snail-hunting committee! The giant snail in question is not a giant African snail but a rosy wolfsnail, which is considerably more benign and also sounds more like a Doctor Who reference.

Houston, Texas, is the latest place to find itself the unlucky host to a rather large African snail, which, sadly, does not have any plans to benefit its newly acquired habitat. A woman working in a Houston garden stumbled on a single snail, but officials fear this was only one snail among more, and possibly many.

In case you were under the misapprehension that being a giant African snail involves a minimum of nefarious activity, well, sorry. These snails are pretty evil, even if they don't mean to be.

The Obama administration has been procrastinating on its decision on the Keystone XL pipeline for years -- and now comes word that it may kick the can even further down the road. From Reuters:

The Obama administration is unlikely to make a decision on the Canada-to-Nebraska Keystone XL pipeline until late this year as it painstakingly weighs the project's impact on the environment and on energy security, a U.S. official and analysts said on Friday.

TV isn't exactly an environmentally friendly form of entertainment. Ever-improving screens and all their associated gadgets need, according to the law of conspicuous consumption, to be replaced as soon as financially possible once a better model comes along, and they're energy-vampires.

But no matter how much energy they suck up, TVs are still more environmentally friendly than those energy-intensive creations known as children.

And, as Brad Plumer writes at the Washington Post, as a country's TV ownership grows and more women are exposed to media, the fertility rate begins to decline. He explains:

This isn’t as bizarre as it seems. A 2009 paper (pdf) by Robert Jensen and Emily Oster found that the introduction of cable television “is associated with significant decreases in the reported acceptability of domestic violence towards women and son preference, as well as increases in women’s autonomy and decreases in fertility.” It’s far from certain that television alone is driving these changes, but the evidence is suggestive.

Look how this plays out in India, for instance:

Melting glaciers might have been the farthest thing from some lakeshore-dwelling Minnesotans' and Manitobans' minds these past few days.

Fast-growing sheets of ice, marching steadily forward as if out of a horror film, destroyed homes near Dauphin Lake in Manitoba, Canada, and caused damage along the southeastern shores of Lake Mille Lacs in Minnesota. They rose from melting lakes and were blown by powerful winds up foreshores into yards and homes.

Amateur video of the advancing ice was captured Saturday by anxious residents in Minnesota and posted to YouTube:

A few weeks ago, Noluck Tafuruka was arrested by police in Zimbabwe for possessing a rifle without a license. But he's doing better than his partner, Solomon Manjoro. The two men allegedly snuck into Zimbabwe's Charara National Park with the intention of bagging some valuable wild animals.

But one elephant that they tried to take down had had it up to here with poachers -- and when you’re an elephant, “up to here” is pretty high. The elephant charged Manjoro and trampled him.

Treehugger points out:

In recent years, poaching of elephants and rhinos in wildlife reserves in Africa has spiked dramatically, fueled largely by demand for their prized tusks and horns.

When people camp, they often turn into even bigger slobs than they are in real life. Between the beers, flashlight batteries, water bottles, and marshmallow packaging, they generate and leave behind a lot of crap. So, the people at Glad, who make trash bags, thought to themselves, "How might we enhance the camping experience, encourage people to pick up after themselves, and also, let's be honest, promote our brand?" The result: a tent that can be turned into a garbage bag.

It's springtime at the Point Reyes National Seashore, about an hour outside of San Francisco, and the cold wind whips off the sea and through the tall grass along the cliffs. Cows wander and graze along the fingers of land that reach out into the estuary’s tiny bays, an area altogether encompassing just over three square miles. Beyond the estuary, at the outer edges of the seashore, seals sun themselves on the beaches, packed in tightly and squirming along the shoreline. From March through June, the estuary is quiet. The seashore boasts more than 28,000 acres of agricultural land, most of …

The National Journal has a long piece out, "The Coming GOP Civil War Over Climate Change: Science, storms, and demographics are starting to change minds among the rank and file."

Back in October 2010, NJ ran an article explaining, "The GOP is stampeding toward an absolutist rejection of climate science that appears unmatched among major political parties around the globe, even conservative ones."

Now reality is biting back, or, perhaps more accurately, nibbling back. The new piece begins with MIT climatologist Kerry Emanuel, a registered Republican since 1973. He switched his registration to "independent" shortly after a not-so-successful meeting with Republican presidential candidates in the run up to South Carolina’s GOP presidential primary, a meeting arranged by the influential Charleston-based Christian Coalition of America: