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Reflections on protecting your offspring without losing your sanity

Kidhuggers. It’s a gag-me kind of word, too precious to be catchy. And it certainly won’t ever replace the slur-cum-badge-of-honor for enviros — treehuggers. But maybe it should. Illustration: Keri Rosebraugh The green movement has never been about people with an overfondness for bark and flora. Instead, it’s based on a natural protectiveness, an urge […]

Talking to Bill Scher

I was on Bill Scher’s radio program on Saturday for about 20 minutes. It was broadcast on WHMP-AM in western Mass.; you can listen to the podcast here. Or if you like, you can watch Bill talking to me: One amendment, for those who actually listen to the whole thing: I praised renewable portfolio standards […]

Discover Brilliant: The business of climate change

The final session of the day (hooray) is about "the business of climate change." On the panel: Climate Change Journal, Grant Ferrier, Editor (Moderator) Climate Solutions, K.C. Golden, Policy Director Sterling Planet, Alden Hathaway II, Senior VP, Business Development Environmental Resources Trust, Gordon Smith, EcoLands Director We start with Smith, who begins by, of all […]

Lomborg’s a real Nowhere Man

In Cool It, Lomborg writes about global warming -- but the globe he is writing about certainly isn't Earth. We've already seen in Parts I and II that on Planet Lomborg, polar bears can evolve backwards and the ice sheets can't suffer rapid ice loss (as they are already doing on Earth).

On Planet Lomborg, the carbon cycle has no amplifying feedbacks -- even though these are central to why warming on Earth will be worse than the IPCC projects. I couldn't even find the word "feedback" or "permafrost" in the book [if anyone finds them, please let me know].

On Planet Lomborg, free from the restrictions of science, global warming is kind of delightful (p.12):

The reality of climate change isn't necessarily an unusually fierce summer heat wave. More likely, we may just notice people wearing fewer layers of clothes on a winter's evening.

On planet Earth, a major study in Nature found that if we fail to take strong action to reduce emissions soon, the brutal European heat wave that killed 35,000 people will become the typical summer within the next four decades. By the end of the century, "2003 would be classed as an anomalously cold summer relative to the new climate."

Lomborg's entire book takes place in a kind of fantasy land or Bizarro world. Aptly, on the last page is "A Note on the Type" that begins:

This book was set in Utopia ...

Irony can be so ironic. Utopia is from the Greek for "no place," or "place that does not exist." Lomborg is the nowhere man!

Pope lauds Montreal Protocol, Vatican aims for carbon neutrality

The Montreal Protocol turned 20 this weekend — and you forgot to get it a gift, didn’t you. As nearly 200 nations convene this week to discuss the protocol, which has been successful in spurring an international phaseout of ozone-depleting chemicals, it has been lauded by no less a person than Pope Benedict XVI, who […]

Residents in over 100 Chinese cities urged to walk, bike, or use public transit this Saturday

China, once famed as a bicycling nation, tries to put the genie back in the bottle.

Hey …

… did you hear that Al Gore won an Emmy? After the Nobel Peace Prize, what’s left for the guy to win?

Discover Brilliant: Business something something

Next up, a full panel of folks discussing sustainable business opportunities. On the stage: Mossadiq Umeday, chair of Xantrex Technology Inc., Andrew Mangan, executive director of the US Business Council for Sustainable Development, and John Kaestle, president and CEO of Halosource. … Oh screw it. This one was so boring I could barely focus.

Second-warmest U.S. August ever

Let's look at some of the records for the month:, according to the National Climatic Data Center, a division of NOAA:

• For the contiguous U.S., the average temperature for August was 75.4°F (24.1°C), which was 2.7°F (1.5°C) above the 20th century mean and the second warmest August on record.
• More than 30 all-time high temperature records were tied or broken, and more than 2000 new daily high temperature records were established.
• Raleigh-Durham, N.C., equaled its all-time high of 105°F on August 21, and Columbia, S.C., had 14 days in August with temperatures over 100°F, which broke the 1900 record of 12 days. Cincinnati, OH, reached 100°F five days during August, a new record for the city.
• The warmest August in the 113-year record occurred in eight eastern states (West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, the Carolinas, Georgia, Alabama, and Florida) along with Utah.
• Texas had its wettest summer on record.
• This was the driest summer since records began in 1895 for North Carolina, and the second driest for Tennessee.
• At the end of August, drought affected approximately 83 percent of the Southeast and 46 percent of the contiguous U.S.

Coincidence? I think not!

This post was created for ClimateProgress.org, a project of the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Army Corps must halt work on destructive Missouri river project

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers was ordered this weekend to cease work on a Mississippi River flood-control project in Missouri that would have cut the river off from its last remaining floodplain, devastated tens of thousands of acres of wetlands, and, um, not controlled flooding. Ordering the Corps to remove any part of the […]