Tracey has a plan to get people to see an Inconvenient Truth. It's a good'un.

While on the subject of the G-Ps, Jamie is running a zombie haiku contest. I think it's time to start a revenant renga, too. We can use the summer form, since most zombie movies come out for the blockbuster season.

To start:

Blogger couples rule. I gotta find a way to get Kelc bloggin', because she's already a prolific writer (of psych papers.)

There is no official Category 6 designation for hurricanes, but there may be soon. If hurricane categories seem to be divided into roughly 20 mph increases in wind speed, we've already had Cat 6 'canes--in fact, we've arguably seen a Cat 7.

Before you think about this as fairly academic argument about strong breezes, keep in mind that, though the increase in wind speed is linear, the increases in damage and financial loss are exponential, by factors of 10 and 20, respectively. A Cat 6 is ten times more physically devastating than a Cat 5--and a Cat 7 would be one hundred times worse. And if a Cat 5 did $100 million worth of destruction, a Cat 7 would be $40 billion--with a "B". And, of course, a Cat 5 does way more than $100 million in damage--Katrina was only a Cat 3.

Really. Check out his SNL bit if you missed it. If only he'd been this guy six years ago. Who knows, maybe he'll run again. If he does, I think I'd support him. I think he's got his priorities straight now.

Also, "An Inconvenient Truth" has a blog, so check that out. Scientists like the movie. Good RSS feed, too.

How many pounds of carbon do you generate every year? Take Wired's quiz to find out. I scored 14,283. Being vegetarian helped--nyah, nyah!

Looks like the co-founder of Greenpeace is up to his old tricks. See, while he's gone to dinner numerous times on that title, he's more recently known as a shill for lumber, mining, oil and biotech industries.

And now it looks like the Washington Post got suckered by him with his op-ed "Going Nuclear: A Green Makes the Case." Which "Green" is that, Pat? Oh, you? Hmm, no, not so much.

...for a three-pack-a-day smoker. That's the comparison Dan Becker, director of the Sierra Club's global-warming program, made when commenting on the new "improved" fuel-efficiency standards for SUVs. They amount to less than two miles per gallon greater efficiency, by 2011, than the 2007 standards. Oh, and heavy pickups are completely exempt from this.

Why is it that every time Bush looks like he's giving Mother Earth a hug, he's actually just trying to feel her up?

My new most favoritist reference site is SourceWatch, a wiki that specializes in keeping track of "expert" sources. It was particularly handy last night, read from a laptop, while watching Penn & Teller's Bullshit (which, though often quite good, can be bullshit itself, particularly on environmental issues.) I was able to spot a corporate shill working for Cato, a disgraced Danish scientist who hasn't had much at all submitted for peer review knocking the environmental movement, and Patrick Moore (a P&T favorite), who once was in charge of Greenpeace International until he went to the dark side as a PR consultant for logging and hazardous waste companies, among others. Hardly impartial experts, them.

In fairness, there were a lot of dumb, New-Age hippie kids on the show spouting off a lot of crap or just being generally uninformed about the issues for which they were advocates. They got busted, fair and square. But this is really the fault of their organizations and, quite frankly, it's endemic to lefty activist groups. So many times, these kids are pulled right from college, given the barest possible training, paid for shit, overworked, and put out in the field to advocate. No wonder they come off as idiots.

This has got to change. The Right coddles their young, treating them to all manner of scholarships, fellowships, paid internships, training, and other employment. We burn through ours, exhausting the vast majority of them (and I speak from personal experience) before they ever have the chance to do much good. Of course, the Right has scads more funding and always will. But we're not entirely broke. There really needs to be a renewed emphasis not just on recruiting activists, but maintaining, educating and developing them. Otherwise, we get dumb hippies set up in hit pieces for national television. That's self-defeating and needs to stop really fucking soon.

Another home run from the free book shelf here at work. The New Yorker's Elizabeth Kolbert wrote Field Notes From A Catastrophe, a sober, well-researched and yet truly frightening account of what global warming is already doing and how little we have done to stop it, particularly in the US. It hits the shelves in March, so, if I haven't personally handed you my copy by then, pick it up.

A lot of warming deniers, such as fuckwit Dennis Miller, like to poke fun at the fact that global warming will "only" raise the average global temperature by a few degrees centigrade. By "only," they refer to a figure somewhere between 4 and 9 degrees. But, as Kolbert notes in her conclusion and as I never tire of saying at cocktail parties, the instability of that kind of climate change is the real killer. We're approaching a climate that the Earth hasn't seen in 400,000 years. That's bad. We're also pushing the limits on the bubble of stability that has kept our current climate steady, from season to season, for the past 10,000 years---the same amount of time, not coincidentally, that humans have been able to use agriculture. That's really bad.

When deniers talk about "alarmist" scenarios, they seem to think that our picture of global warming's effects includes lakes of fire, palm trees atop Mount Everest, and the return of dinosaurs. They miss the point completely. The danger is not that we'll all be baked alive. The danger is that even moderate amounts of change in the climate system will cause calamitous change in our social system. Can our current society absorb one billion starving refugees, driven to the temperate zones after losing the arable land around the equator? Will our technology be able to provide the water for irrigation and drinking and will it be able to shift our choice of crops from year to year as the regional weather becomes increasingly unpredictable? Can our economy deal with the loss, through storm or flood, of our most essential port cities? How many Katrinas can we take in one decade? In one year?

To the point about hurricanes, definitely check out DarkSyde's post on DailyKos today about global warming's effects on hurricane intensity. While the consequences of global warming on hurricane frequency are still not fuilly understood, hurricane intensity will definitely increase as the oceans warm up. That means that the there will be more tropical storms that kick up to hurricanes and more hurricanes that reach the Category 5 level--city killers, as we saw this summer.

We nearly lost New Orleans completely. We may soon lose Miami, New York, Savannah, Baltimore, Boston, or Houston. Global warming is real. It is happening right now. It has already killed people, and it will kill many more. Wake up.