Boiled Frog

Little Man Big Foot (print)

While looking for a link to a discussion of our American storage locker fetish to back up a little discussion on my new blog called Green RFD, I came across an all-too-true screed about the apparently proportionate connection between male "compensation" and carbon footprints -- and the flaunting that often accompanies it. Check it out: its all about Dick-Boats, Harleys and Viagra. Hilarious!

Politics or Science or Both or Neither?

As we head down the slippery slope to climatic disaster society lurches from turn to turn like a school bus full of drunks fighting over the steering wheel and nobody thinking to put on the brakes. On the one hand we have the naysayers -- their karma is simple and the lower circles of Hell will bulge with the the ones who did so for a dollar soon enough -- but there are well-meaning souls on both sides of the question as well, and a moral sort of those is more difficult.

Take, for example, this piece off the BBC website about a new report out of the London School of Economics. If we are to take the reporter's analysis at face value (I, for one, will want to read the original) the authors seem to be saying that since climate change mitigation policy since Kyoto has not lived up to our hopes -- and its own goals -- that we should just dump it and start over. That is equivalent to saying that since the Waxman-Markey bill has been compromised to oblivion we should simply give up trying to pass decent legislation. God knows I feel that way, but we really do have no choice but to move forward as much as we can, as fast as we can. (Sorry, my bias is showing....<G>)

The house is burning. The source and type of the fire is unknown. There are three fire extinguishers sitting nearby and five of in the room. Argue, or start spraying? Du-uh! All three if necessary. We had a chimney fire last winter, and only immediate action saved the house. There are times to talk and times to act. Guess which I think this is? (And guess whether or not I care if our chances of success are slim?)

Core principle:   the likelihood of failure does not relieve one of the responsiblity to act. How we act can certainly be constrained by available options, but not-acting should not be one of those options.

Earth Day!

Here's a link to a database of Earth Day activities so that you can find an event near you.

How To Make Money Trashing Local Food Production

A friend sent me a link to an Op-Ed piece in the NY Times that questions whether free range animal agriculture is inherently superior to CAFO meat manufacturing operations. Free Range Trichinosis is the clever title, and it was penned by a history professor at Texas State - San Marcos who conveniently has a book coming out about "how locavores are endangering the future of food."

The guy does know how to turn a phrase, and I am sure that the loyal employees of the industrial food companies will buy enough copies (with company money?) to keep it up in the Bestseller Beauty Shows and Amazon Rankings for a goodly while. But the piece in the paper is riddled with logical fallacies, non-sequitors and dirty rhetoric. If I get the time, I'd like to do a little background research that it seems The Times did not (at least not before the piece ran -- there is an addendum on the web now, pointing out that the research which forms the heart of his critique was funded by the National Pork Board). I'm not sure they could have, given the way things are written, and of course Op-Eds are held to a different standard than news, and unless the book is self-published, simply enticing a publisher with a juicy, topical title makes the writer a hot property -- and, in the case of The Times, a small proof of "balance," sort of like the Washington Post printing the vacuous stupidity of Charles Krauthammer.

There is the core conflation of "locavore" and "free range," and later, "slow food." These are hot terms of the moment that are bound to sell books, but while often used near each other in the Googlish sense (as is the phraser "the future of food" for that matter), they are not inherently connected in the real world of food production -- I doubt that "local" veal or fois gras is free range, and so the terms are mere straw men for the author to bat down.

One example: right in the first paragraph there is a quote from a "purveyor" as to how the benefits of free range are indisputable and then immediately the author notes that this is "another reminder that culinary wisdom is never conventional." Now apparently the professor has been outside the city limits of San Marcos, because he correctly understands that chefs (I assume this is what he means by culinary) haven't always had the best grasp of how food is actually produced.

Twenty five years ago I hosted a vegetable tasting at a prestigious local resort (this was in Vermont, where such things were just getting going...California was years ahead of us) and the executive chef was astounded that we had twelve kinds of carrots to taste.

"When I was in culinary school, there were only three kinds of carrots," he told me.

Intrigued, and having some experience of fifty or so different varieties, I asked him, "Which three?"

"Five pound bags, ten pound bags and twenty five pound bags." We became instant friends and he has gone on to become a staunch advocate of local food.

But our author slyly conflates "purveyor" and "culinary" in this case. Quotations are usually from a specific person, who is identified, so we can assess the credibility of that person (disclosure: my quotation in the first paragraph above is part of the overly long title of the forthcoming book). Some "purveyors" I have know over my thirty years on the production side of the food business buy and sell damaged crates of iceberg from the trunk of a too-old Cadillac, while others not only run top notch operations, but are as familiar with trade press and scientific journals as any professor of history.

Did you notice the subtle diss? I called him a professor of history (which he claims to be) and thus planted the meme that he doesn't necessarily know anything about food -- he might, and I would like to read this "forthcoming" book to see -- and that is another of his unexamined tactics in the piece, which can only help sales of the book: the use of terms for people he purports to disagree with to essentially play off their mind share. A Swift Beef bogosity attack; Colbert X Coulter -- now there is a hybrid (or chimera) that outdoes even Carville X Matalin.

So the second paragraph includes a salting of "data" from the scientific journal; I am definitely going to have to look up the original article, as I used to analyze journal articles for a PhD candidate, and found it is amazingly easy it is to honestly or dishonestly, misunderstand or mis-represent the findings (again, the research was funded by the National Pork Board, which promotes CAFOs).

Next we hear that "just a little time outdoors increases pigs' interaction with rats and other wildlife" (etc., I don't want to violate the Times copyright <G>) but it also involves domesticated cats, and -- OmiGod: moist soil, where he says, "pathogens find an environment conducive to growth." (I find it odd not to mention the 24 / 7 heated barns where animals are jammed cheek to jowl, or the "processing" plants where now-dead meat and parts are held in similarly petri-like conditions. Moist soil...Omigod!) In the next paragraph we learn that this will be especially troubling to "connoisseurs of fine pork...supporters of sustainable meat and slow food advocates" who claim that free range meat tastes better.

The oversights, elisions, conflations and (at the end of the paragraph) mindlesss conclusions of this paragraph are almost too numerous to list...the presentation, is, in the end, flakier than a pie crust. The Union of Concerned Scientists has a good report from last September called "Uncovering CAFOs."

The first of those two paragraphs is about the potential for infection of the animals, not about their taste, but the author seems to think that taste and infection are connected in the same sort of way "tasting" a toke at a rock concert (inevitably, OmiGod!) leads to hepatitis C, or oral herpes. I'm sorry...it was a bad example, but no more far out than the one offered. It just doesn't follow, it is not a valid syllogism, no matter how fancy the verbal footwork; he makes no connection between the infection part of the argument and the taste part, but implies it anyway.

There is a hidden connection behind both paragraphs and does honestly join them that the author does not mention -- and if in the book he even considers this aspect, I think I can safely predict he will have something negative to say about it -- and that is the breed of pig in the study he cites. I should be able to check this when I check the journal article. If it is not identified, the study is flawed, and if it is, I think it is likely to be illustrative.

I am going to speak from my prejudice for a moment (no I have not been doing so up till now!). My kids were raised on a vegetable farm, running wild outside and coming home dirty on a regular basis. They were free range kids. Sure they had the usual ear infections and such, but those were picked up a school, an environment more like a confined animal operation than their home. They are now two healthy, robust adults, and my daughter lives in Africa, but even there, with a little appropriate attention to hygiene, has not gotten seriously ill, though surrounded by pathogens. These days, however, kids -- especially suburban kids -- are raised in a near sterile environment and never have a chance to develop the kinds of antibodies and resistances that our kids did.

With modern domestic animals, the situation is even more extreme, especially with chickens, and with pigs, both of which have been bred for confinement production for generations. And that breeding has occured within sterile environments, with the breeder concentrating -- a breeders must -- on a few traits. I would make a guess (which it will be easy enought to check later, since I know where to look) that weight gain, and litter size are two of those. Disease resistance, foraging ability, taste; those were likely no more important than they were in the case of the cardboard tomato that is harvested green, gassed with ethylene and shipped 2000 miles to sit in a supermarket bin for three weeks before being eaten with a notable lack of relish. Myself, as a vegetable gardener, I confer equal Buddha nature on plants and animals; to see the noble pig -- I raised them, small scale, free range, for local sale, for about ten years -- reduced to a commodity is hurtful.

So there are at least two, maybe three, maybe many more distortions even in this small segment of the article. This post is likely going to be two, three, maybe many time longer than the original article simply because of the layers of ignorance and distortion the article displays. To name a few: the taste the author pooh-pahs is due as much to the breed of pig -- say a Hungarian Mangalitsa -- as it is to the free ranging -- though many of the best tasting pig breeds would not thrive in modern confinement any more than a modern industrial pig would thrive in the "wild" of a pasture; the choice of free range is not only one of taste but of ethics, and of environmental responsibility; I see neither of these mentioned, and so will be interested to read the book and find out about the part of its title refered to by "...and how we can truly eat responsibly." But we'll leave that there, or for our other blog, Hand To Mouth.

That conclusion is foreshadowed at the end of the the piece, and I am losing interest in wasting my time to critique this loosely reasoned and tightly written little screed. One last point that I had highlighted from my first read-through, but will never get to if I am going to have a Friday night; after all I am just a blogger, not a media or dot.org professional. That point is shortly before the conclusion and leads directly to it (at least in the authors twisted universe). "Free range is ultimately an arbitrary point between the wild and the domesticated." Du-uh. All agriculture (and horticulture) is by nature un-natural, as it is a controlled environment (a point he makes while trying to prove the opposite) and it is only a matter of where on the continuum your preferences, premises and practices fall. All points on that sort of space-control continuum are arbitray, as dates and times are arbitrary in the phenological world of seasonal time. And not to seem obscure, a phenological world is what both agriculture and horticulture are all about. Methinks our professor should employ a bit less sophistry, and spend a little more time with the people -- farmers, not factorymen -- he so disdains.

Pandemics and Punctuated Equilibrium

Is the slippery slope some sort of smooth progression, or a series of dips and drops on the descent to eco-hell? If you've follwed this blog you've read about ocean currents, ice shelfs, and Al Gore evaporating my beer.

I don't remember why I ended up on this blog entry, but it caught my attention for a few reasons. Its premise, or assertion, is that as Greenland glaciers melt due to global warming, bacteria held in their ice will be released and may well cause global pandemics on the scale of the Black Death or the Spanish Flu.

I have written elsewhere about the "organism out of place" syndrome that is both the rationale for being wary of exotics in the landscape (if we care about invasive species), and a great argument for caution in terms of genetically engineered plants and animals. The realization that glacial melt could release long-dormant bacterial (or fungal) species makes me very concerned, too.

One of the "new" bacteria discovered, named Chryseobacterium Greenlandensis is a gram negative bacteria, and other members of its genus have been implicated in such wonderful diseases as hepatitis, sepsis, osteomyelitis, cholera and meningitis in newborns. But we have not been exposed to this bacteria since we were hobbling around practically on all fours.

As I have said (often to small minded derision) there is no such thing as evolution; there is only co-evolution. All species evolve within the context of their ecosystem. And our bodies (and immediate environment) are an ecosystem. What this means is that we have evolved at the same time as the bacteria that inhabit our bodies and our homes and the world outside in which we eat, drink and breathe.

There may be -- will likely be -- many more microbial species long dormant, held within glacial ice that, given the conditions of a warmer world -- and given the opportunity for spread by global, nearly instantaneous travel -- that will infect whomever does not have a genetic immunity. And who will, given that those bacteria have not been around in the environment for what, 1,000, 10,000, 100,000 years? A large portion of the aboriginal American population was thought to be wiped out by diseases brought to America by Europeans, diseases they had never been exposed to and had no resistance to. Take that and put it on steriods.

Regime Change We Can Believe In

One of the most encouraging articles I have read in a long time appeared in the Washington Post today. Called Winds of Change Evident in US Environment Policy, it details the quick start that the new administration has gotten on a range of environmental issues. And why.

I am no great fan of the Bush administration (especially the second) or the Bush family, coming as I do from an old East Coast family with liberal Republican roots (remember them? remember the concept of "noblesse oblige"?) but there is one thing that W was right about: the government is full of do-good idealists.

Now I, for one, think that is actually a good thing. I vaguely remember something about service, and society and whatever....so I was thrilled to read that what I had suspected was indeed true: that a large cadre of dedicated public servants kept working during the W-Dick Dark Ages, keeping their heads down until the time returned when they could do the jobs openly again.

I discovered this stealth bureaucracy, called by the flak for the National Manufacturers Association "these bureaucrats and activist groups," when I was executive director of a small non-profit trying to green the way the parks and monuments of the capital were maintained. What I found was that the mid-level, career people in the government were very supportive, but were being constrained by policies from the political appointee apparatchiks at the top. That is what has changed.

Now that the top political positions are held by people from a greener group, long closeted studies and policies and programs are hitting the fast track.

One example cited in the article:

"On Feb 18, less than a month after Obama was sworn in, the United States filed a complaint agains the Big Cajun 2 Power Plant charging that for more than a decade it has operated without required pollution controls; the case was based in part on about 2,000 boxes of documents from the EPA's enforcement office.

The Justice official said the fact that EPA employees continued to research these sorts of complaints kept a 1999 federal initiative aimed at coal fired ulitities 'alive, and that's what gives us the ability now to file a couple of these cases.'"

These, my friends, are public servants, who continued to serve the public even when the government had been stolen, first in Florida and then in Ohio. I am lucky to count some of them among my friends, and I am glad for them that they are finally in a position to do the jobs that inspired them to public service in the first place.

Garden & Gun

Despite being a web geek, I have always loved magazines, having both studied them and written for them over the years. In fact the best grade I got during my less than illustrious college career was in JS 291, Media Criticism. In that project, which was about segmentation in the magazine market, I did a comparison of the centerfolds of three magazines: Playboy, High Times and Soldier of Fortune (had it existed at the time, I might have included Iron Horse, another of my perpetual favorites). To get the links above I had to visit the home page of each, and I have to say -- to my amazement -- that the Playboy site is by far the most in synch with its original "brand." The others have all turned into some kind of weird, all news, all the time kind of thing. Only Playboy is staying with its core appeal....um, need I say more? I am especially disappointed in Iron Horse (which used to have a great feature called "Ask Spider" which was a sort of Dear Abby column not unlike Savage Love, but with a biker twist, and clearly created out of whole cloth in the way that only Day Of The Locust could protray.

The idea behind the project was that each magazine provided "Walter Mitty" fantasies for a specific group of readers (and audience segment), of which the centerfold was simply the most graphic. the Playboy centerfold was predictable for the time, and served as the "control." (In those days all the critical tissue was airbrushed, so it was a pretty tame fantasy by today's standards. The High Times centerfold was a close-up still life of a mirror laid flat, with a crystal decanter (purportedly half-full of burgundy colored hash-oil, which looked like a port wine) and a hand blown glass pipe atop, shot from just above. (Given my weakness for reflections -- see Music of the Spheres -- I found this one rather tasteful -- I guess they were trying raise their demographic upscale.) The third was the one that the professor liked most, as I guess it was out of his everyday experience (being a college teacher I am sure he was exposed to sex and drugs regularly), but SOF was the Rock-N-Roll!

The Soldier of Fortune centerfold was a landscape shot at night on the shore of a lake -- Lake Managua in Nicaragua as it turns out -- with the lights of city in the distance across the water. In the foreground was an open US military Jeep of the 50's vintage, camo, with four black faced and bereted Somocistas (soldiers in the Army of General Anastasio Somoza Debayle brandishing AK-47s lounging and leering. The right front wheel of the Jeep, however, was up on the chest of a similarly clad American Special Ops type -- actually a retired Green Beret Colonel who was now freelancing as Somosa's personal military attache -- who had a knife in his teeth and a Korean fighting star in each hand. Now that is a fantasy!

Now Garden & Gun is a magazine I see periodically at the local coffee shop, usually a few months late (judging by the dates). Whoever leaves it also leaves Utne Reader, and Technology Review, some Civil War History magazine I forget the name of (being just across the Potomac River from Antietam MD, the Civil War -- or War of Yankee Agression, "that unfortunate unpleasantness" -- is a big cultural meme here) though of course it may be more than one person (if it isn't they have a pretty damn wide range of interest). Its slugline is "Soul of the New South."

Basically it is a Robb Report for rednecks or a slightly over the top regional Martha Stewart Living. And no doubt it appeals to a certain kind of nouveau housewife in a McMansion outside such places as Atlanta who needs some help masquerading as established money. Think the rise of the New South, think yuppie preppie New England, think Bush senior and junior, relocated to Texas, Jeb to Florida). The houses are big, the living is good, and the guns expensive.

And the guns...well, of course they are in the name, and they are also in the photo spreads -- though without the cold, dead fingers. The fingers holding these signature shotguns are young and beautiful, the ad for the scope on the back cover is somewhere between the Jackal, James Bond, and a young Hemingway got gold (no prying of fingers, and no prying eyes, when you get right down to it...)

One of the things we learned in J-School was the symbiosis between content and advertising, in both the phsyical and conceptual sense. In the physical sense, the size of any publication is determined by ad sales in the current issue (even truer of newspapers, and the source of the most famous first year lesson for journalism students, which is the "pyramid structure" of news accounts...and if there is a reader amongst you who happens not to know what this, just post a comment and I'll fill you in). In the conceptual sense, certain types of content draw certain types of readers, which will attract certain types of advertisers; so, you writer-wannabes, pay attention to the ads as much as the articles and you'll improve your chances.

The Dec/Jan issue of Garden & Gun (that it is a bimonthly issue is a meme) has features on expensive vacations in the Caribbean, Elvis Costello's love of the South, heirloom camellias, some "damn good duck gumbo," a story about riding the Natchez Trace (on a Harley...what else?) and a very MSL photo spread of a "farm" B&B that probably paid good money for the coverage (that is the real MSL piece, complete with ID and price for all the clothes on the models).

I have stop with this now though, because there is a "service piece" (as it is known) called "How to Love a Woman's Dog" which is something I really need to read. Does that give you any hints about who this mag is for?

Your Nitrogen Footprint

The Chesapeake Bay Foundation (CBF) has added a nitrogen footprint calculator to their website, and it is pretty cool. I have worked on these kinds of projects in the past, and they are impossible to get completely right, both for technical reasons, and because there really isn't enough hard data out there to nail down all the variables. This one does a good job, though.

Carbon footprint caluclators are all over the web these days (see for example the one I helped out with at The Earth Partners) and they all share some of the same weaknesses. For example, there is no way to calculate the "actual" emissions per passenger on a plane trip unless you know the plane model and the number of passengers...all you can do is use averages. The same is true with emissions related to housing. I live alone in a three bedroom stone house over a hundred years old which is part of a sixty acre compound. I keep the thermostat at 48F and use a space heater in the room I use for my office. If I was not living here, the only difference would be the space heater, because the house has to be kept above freezing. There are a nearly infinite number of variables. In the end, none of that really matters -- what matters is giving the average person an opportunity to play around with the numbers and see how their lifestyle choices interact, and affect the environmen.t

Back in 2004-5 I worked on a Crop Conversion Calculator for the Rodale Institute that compared the economics of conventional and organic commodity grain crops. Great project, but full of uncloseable gaps because there simply wasn't consistent reliable data nationwide for most crops, nor any established market prices for organic crops. So we did the best we could. And I think we did a good job. It got people thinking.

I am thinking we now need a calculator that can help the average citizen understand the unfunded costs of climate change that are accumulating due to years of dilly-dallying about the lifestyle changes we need to make. I am posting that early stage rumination here on Boiled Frog as well.

The folks at CBF have done a very nice job with theirs, which estimates the nitrogen load your lifestyle places on the Chesapeake estuary. It is relatively quick, cleanly designed, and the assumptions are stated, even if not in great detail, which is an essential aspect of a calculator's credibility. The summary at the end is especially nice in that it simultaneously shows the user's footprint, the average footprint, and the footprint that a "restored" Chesapeake can support.

As a teaching aid this is brilliant (though I would offer one graphic design tip: make the size of the pies relative to the size of the footprint instead of having the 14 lb pie and the 8 lb pie the same size so the user gets the idea non-verbally as well; many carbon calculators do this and it is not that difficult to code). Nonetheless, all the classic problems are here: electricity contribution is calculated by dollars spent, not kilowatt hours, the vehicle choices don't have the opportunity to simply enter miles driven and MPG (my car gets 45 mpg and is a diesel, which has a different emissions profile). Also it appears I am being "charged" for having a large lot ( I "appropriated" an acre of the compound to myself) when actually, the "penalty" is generated because most of the problems are coming from developments, and developments with larger lot sizes use a lot more resources...but not this one!

As I mentioned, there is no way around these problems (and others not mentioned) and success with these calculators comes from stimulating thought, discussion and change...and provides, linked out from the background, the knowledge and resources to actually accomplish that change. On that basis the CBF Nitrogen Footprint Calculator is a very nice piece of work! Now what about Phosphorus?

Don't Forget The Beer

The lead editorial in the Washington Post this morning is about a bill working its way through Congress that would put tobacco under FDA regulation (finally) and force disclosure of cigarette ingredients. Given how little cigarettes these days resemble those of yesteryear that is a great idea. While we are at it, why not do the same to beer makers? That Budweiser can legally be called beer is a travesty possible here only in the CSA (not Confederate States of America, not Community Supported Agriculture or even Creeping Socialist Agriculture, but the Corporate State of America).

Personally my complaint is more with cigarettes than with tobacco. Like a lot of other "vices" tobacco was once a sacred substance, and like a lot of the other things that were once sacred, it has been commodified, and what was once meaningful has become meaningless, and an addiction. Given my outlook, I am tempted to say that modern industrial life is an addiction (though it is more properly called addictive by twelve step writers -- I have two blogs on this topic and process (MT & SGF), but they are still private at the moment).

And of course this is happening at the same time that there are other bills working their way through Congress (I think first of H-875 and H-759) that would completely restructure the kind of food and drug safety regulation currently done by the FDA...so (as usual?) we have a recipe for confusion here. Oh, yes, the article link.

The Sky is Falling! The Sky...No Wait...The Sea Is Rising

The whole point of a blog like this is to keep track of those little, barely noticeable changes that insidiously over time, add up to something that in hindsight we will see all too clearly, and feel foolish to have missed, like the snowmobiler who slowly starts sinking into the slush as he zooms across the ever thinning ice of some wilderness lake in March.

I want to come up with a new term...I've always enjoyed doing that anyway...so here ya go! A lot of our most intractable environmental problem are triggered on the blind side by a bean counter's trick known as Net Present Value, or NPV. It is one of those soul-less but economically necessary calculations like the VHL, or Value of a Human Life (that one has been going on a long time!) 

Back when I was in college pursuing and independent studies degree I called Environmental Journalism, one of my work study jobs was to read and summarize journal articles for a grad student who was preparing a dissertation on what he called Environmental Psychology. There were a number of threads to this (I was given a stack of greenbar printouts with 10,000 references -- this was decades before the internet -- and told to go at it. Of interest here is the large number of studies that had been done on agression and human contact. We all know the meme of the bomber pilot who feels less guilty about the effect of his bombs because he never sees the people he is killing, but it turns out this relation exists on the individual level as well. It turns out that if you take two subjects, put them in different rooms and instruct one to punish the other, they will do so more brutally than if they are in the same room and can see each other. (This was done with a tester in one room, testee in another, and no right answers to the test questions. The testee has an electrode hooked up to them, and the tester has a calibrated dial. Get the picture?)

Both NPV and VHL Operate that way, one with a future we can't see, and the other with an abstract person who doesn't exist. With both, making the calculation blindly destroys both humanity and wisdom, and replaces them with mere social engineering and rationality. But solved eyes open,what they do is expose the assumptions that undergird the pseudo-science of economics. It is like when there is a minor error in a computer program (or spreadsheet formula) and the answer that comes out clearly doesn't make sense -- only a fool trusts the calculation rather than their common sense. Abstract mathematics and quantum physics aside, I'll take wisdom over knowledge almost every time.

So I want to think a minute about the economics of climate change, and do in terms of what I'd like to call Net Present Cost, or NPC. I noticed a little AP piece on the 16th about rising sea levels and us eastern seaboard urban infrastructure. This is something we've been following on our other blog, Sinks or Swim but more of on a sort of scoreboard, current events or, if you will, blow-by-blow level. that's not what we do here...BTW, if you prefer a more rural example, check out a piece in the Washington Post a few days later (also linked from there) about the cost of beach erosion on the beach towns of the Delmarva Peninsula.

So to choose the first, what is the Net Present Cost to New York City of a 3-4 foot rise in sea levels by the year 2100 (which is the current estimate, given the way things are going)? Think of those little retirement calculators all over the web -- the ones where you put in your age and the income you want to have when you retire, and when that is going to be. Click -- the little PHP gremlins do their thing and suddenly you realize you need to be saving twice as much as you are or spend you waning years huddled under a blanket sucking thiin broth out of a tin spoon. (And that is without any Wall Street meltdowns!)

We don't do anything about the rise in greenhouse gases because we don't want to spend the money and hold out the delusional hope that the problem will just go away. Sort of the opposite of youth, which we hope won't go away, but which inevitably does. Of course there are those who don't trust the science, and who remind us that twenty years ago there were worries about the global climate cooling down disastrously. Cry Wolf -- Sell Papers!

Hey, there is no doubt a little of that happens -- just like is happening with Wall Street and the economy right now -- but what is missed from that is that it doesn't really matter whether the global climate warms drastically or cools drastically...either one would be catastrophic for human civilization , not to mention all those other unfortunate species who had no hand in throwiing the biosphere out of whack. That is precisely why Climate Change is the proper term, not Global Warming -- which is statistically variable in different regions of the globe anyway. This is one sense in which change is bad: the biosphere on which we depend is presently exquisitely balanced, and stable within a range that has permitted the currently existent plants and animals to survive, and thrive. Throw it out of whack and all bets are off.