Weather, Water, Energy 7-03-07

Okay, now Natalie Portman is off in Rwanda naming baby mountain gorillas and drawing attention to their possible extinction. Does she ever sleep? . . . Thousands of years of providing fresh water in summer to Arctic water species, poof! Global warming. . . . As we gear up our tear ducts to feel badly that China doesn’t get to be a planetary hog like we’ve been, see which story impresses you more—the one in which Chinese leaders say they’ll do their part against greenhouse emissions but those emissions are other people’s responsibilities or the one in which they successfully pressured the World Bank to omit from a report that pollution in China was killing 750,000 citizens a year. Yeah, I feel for that nation and really trust that it will “do its part.” . . . Michael Tobis notes a forceful argument for how US leadership in fighting global warming would have big economic payoffs as well as, you know, helping us survive reasonably well. Some companies do get that this can be seen as an opportunity for a new and stronger economy, but it will sacrifice many economic dinosaurs who will fight to their last breath, which includes the corporatist Busheviks. . . . Some Yale types are using fed money to make some interesting progress on solar energy development, which is nice to hear with all this hype about biofuels and nukes. . . . There’s talk and there’s walk, and it’s not clear how many steps back Schwarzenegger is going to take for every step he goes forward, deliberately slowing down efforts to go after greenhouse emissions in CA. This guy in MD and this guy in FL, OTOH, seem to be doing actual walking. . . . Finally, proof that prayer works. AL (Alabama, not Alaska) prayed at its governor’s command and it rained. Science is wonderful, isn’t it?