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Landmark report says humans cause warming, and more

Read the articles mentioned at the end of the podcast: Now We’ve Done It The Airspeed Velocity of an Uneaten Swallow The Triple Threat Eh, You’ll Be Fine Grandchildren, Schmandchildren The Illumi-nicey Read the articles mentioned at the end of the podcast: You’re Getting Warmer The Short-Term Solution That Stuck ESR Said Than Done Re: […]

Wow, that’s a truly terrible pun.

Sick and tired of hearing from me about lead-up to the Olympics in London and Beijing? (I know Patrick is.) Well, exciting news, sports fans — we can look ahead to environmental devastation in preparation for Olympics 2014! Leading environmental groups said on Friday Russia’s bid to host the 2014 Winter Olympics would involve tearing […]

Environment is top concern for Canadians. Americans, not so much.

Cascadians on both sides of the U.S.-Canadian border share a deep connection to our temperate corner of the world. But if national polling data is any indication of regional opinion, we may not necessarily share the same views when it comes to the fate of our piece of the planet -- or even of the planet itself. Public opinion polling in the two countries shows a boundary between perceptions almost as stark as the national border drawn on a political map.

In recent polling by Gallup and Pew, Americans display little concern about the environment and global warming -- far less, as it turns out, than their Canadian counterparts.

A nice interview with the folks behind Ethicurian.com

There is a nice interview on Culinate.com with the people who created and write for Ethicurian.com.

Kevin Bacon launches SixDegrees.org

Kevin Bacon has gone über-meta. The once-ubiquitous film actor has taken the “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” trivia game — itself based on the already-meta concept that everyone (and everything?) is somehow connected — to a whole new level with a new charity-based website: www.SixDegrees.org is about using this idea to accomplish something good. It’s […]

Characteristically grim

Lordy, the news and commentary on green matters is coming so fast and heavy that I can barely link to it all, much less contribute. (For the love of God, people, stop emailing me interesting stuff!) Here’s something to chew on: James Kunstler, sick and tired of being accused of doom-mongering without offering solutions, offers […]

So says the Wall Street Journal

Speaking of good work by the MSM, the Wall Street Journal on Saturday ran an interesting little news story by John Fialka on why the long-term outlook for global warming may be "more dire than suggested" by the IPCC's just-released Fourth Assessment on Climate Change.

Two reasons: first, as Joe Romm mentioned in a post below, the report doesn't fully take into account the melting of inland glaciers. That's according to Tom Delmore, a climate modeler with the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Association.

Second, because of the limits of computing power, the report probably underestimates the amount of warming that will be caused by increasing amounts of water vapor in the atmosphere. That's according to Jim Butler, also with NOAA.

The story ran under an oddly inane headline, but it's well-reported, and very much worth reading.

If You Blog It, They Will Come

A 21st-century gold rush hits the Brazilian Amazon Our fair city of Seattle was once a gold rush town, a way station for loading up on supplies and sex before heading to the Yukon. So we feel an affinity for the mud-caked prospectors combing a remote stretch of Brazilian rainforest in hopes of finding nuggets […]

The Triple Threat

New plan would nearly triple Yellowstone daily snowmobile limit Gentlemen, stroke your engines: The National Park Service has issued a draft plan that would nearly triple the number of snowmobiles allowed into Yellowstone National Park each day, from 250 to 720. While the limit is lower than the average number entering the park daily before […]

Unite to condemn right-wing attacks on science

Alan Sokal is is a professor of physics famous for perpetrating the Sokal Hoax, wherein he submitted a parody article to a postmodernist journal of semiotics called Social Text. The editors and peer reviewers [correction: it’s not peer-reviewed] there saw nothing amiss with a "transformative hermeneutics of gravity," so the piece got published. While the […]