Informed Comment Is More Useful Than Spin and Fingerpointing

Hey, guess what? Science is hard, but it's easy to take a few sentences out of context to make people look bad.

Canada's Elizabeth May actually read the stolen/hacked East Anglia climate emails - all 3,000 of them. And what she found was, in her words "We've been had."

"Starting from 1996, these good and decent scientists write to each other... Tough stuff using proxy records to figure out what the temperature was... They wrote each other sharing ideas for handling the records from tree rings. They struggled with how to re-calibrate surface sea temperature records. This was a neat thread. Turns out those navies around the world kept records of the temperature of the sea water before using it in the steam room engines. The temperature records shifted when they stopped using wooden buckets and moved to canvas buckets. Tough work evening out the temperatures so they are comparable."

Not very glamorous or exciting, but important work. And very easy for ignorant people to point the finger and say: "You're changing the data!"

US (=Bush) Pressured IEA to Inflate Oil Reserve Numbers

Did the International Energy Agency inflate oil reserve figures to make it look like we're not facing peak oil?

That's what the Guardian is reporting, based on statements by a whistleblower:

The senior official claims the US has played an influential role in encouraging the watchdog to underplay the rate of decline from existing oil fields while overplaying the chances of finding new reserves.

The allegations raise serious questions about the accuracy of the organisation's latest World Energy Outlook on oil demand and supply to be published tomorrow – which is used by the British and many other governments to help guide their wider energy and climate change policies.

...Now the "peak oil" theory is gaining support at the heart of the global energy establishment. "The IEA in 2005 was predicting oil supplies could rise as high as 120m barrels a day by 2030 although it was forced to reduce this gradually to 116m and then 105m last year," said the IEA source, who was unwilling to be identified for fear of reprisals inside the industry. "The 120m figure always was nonsense but even today's number is much higher than can be justified and the IEA knows this....

Read the whole thing...

Fixing the Climate Crisis Isn't Just The Right Thing To Do... It's Sexy!

Glen Hansard and Damien Rice Busking for Oxfam!

This is fun... and important. It's so great when folks use their star power to bring more people into the green movement...

Do it for the Planet.

Coming up on October 15.... sign up and do your part, too!

Coal Is Too Dirty... :)

I didn't realize that some college campuses have their own coal-fired power plants. Time for a change....

John Stewart Skewers Glenn Beck for Health Care Flip-Flop

Is it "a nightmare"? Or "The best health care system in the world?"
We report, you decide....

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
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Good point - health insurance is different

Great analysis of the fundamental problem with our current health insurance system:

Insurance only works at all because of pooled risk - you pay into a general pool and insurance companies are able to calculate the statistical likelihood that they'll have to pay out in case of accident. "Accident" is the key word - it's an event that has some probability of occurring given someone's history and lifestyle. But it's a finite, time-limited occurrence that incurs a certain amount of cost. Car insurance, therefore, works. Yes, you pay more if you're a poor driver or a 16 year-old, but there's still some statistical probability that these people won't get into accidents. Health care isn't like that. If health care insurance companies were only hedging against the likelihood that someone will slip and fall and break an arm, or fall off the ski lift, then the private solution would work fine. Now imagine the following case. To continue with the car insurance analogy, pretend that everyone has one car that cannot be sold. Some people have lemon cars whose brakes fail every week, or have continuous oil leaks, etc. In other words, the insurance company knows that it will have to pay out on the people with lemon cars, not just occasionally, but continuously. There's absolutely no incentive to insure these people at all. We could, as a society, say well, that's tough. Only, eventually, we all end up with lemon cars - we're all going to die one day, and the large majority of us will be sick for some time before that. The only way to insure people with lemon cars is stick them in a large group of average people and calculate the risk for that pool as a whole.

Wanna print some green money?

Okay, you and I can't crank out the billions the way the big boys do in Washington.

But if you're a fan of Seventh Generation cleaning products, you'll be pleased to know they now have $1-off coupons on their website.

In these times, every little bit helps....