Weather, Water, Energy 8-23-06

Derrick Jackson in the Boston Globe alerts us to a Weather Channel series this fall, "The Climate Code," that will stop hemhawing about global warming and start focusing on what we need to do, particularly inner-city areas whose residents will be unusually susceptible to heat, floods, and other predictables. It's good news and hopefully the start of reality in our media. . . . An Edmunds.com study shows that hybrid cars and their fuel efficiency will pay for themselves over time. So it's time to end the tax breaks that help them do so, right, DC? God, I hope future historians don't choke themselves laughing at our stupidity right now. . . . Meanwhile, a Christian Science Monitor editorial documents the dangerous effects of our pollution on our oceans and how the oceans may get us back if we don't get our acts together. It's not pretty, on so many levels. . . . And just when you think you know all the possible problems, here comes the release of mercury into that stuff we breathe by the drying of wetlands and peat that have absorbed it and burning them up. "Hundreds of years of mercury accumulation," we're told, will be released. Yum.