You've probably seen those phone-message forms with check boxes in ascending order of urgency from "FYI—no need to return call" all the way up to "the future of civilization hangs in the balance." We might see that last category as light-hearted exaggeration, but it's no laughing matter to McKibben. In his jeremiad in today's LA Times literally entitled "Civilization's last chance," McKibben solemnly declares that "the world looks a little terminal right now" and "it isn't morning in America, it's dusk on planet Earth." OK. Just so long as it's nothing serious.

Never mind that in 2006 it was reported that levels of the second most important greenhouse gas, methane, have stabilized.

Scientists are now working to create a new “tootless” grass for bovine enjoyment which will help cut methane emissions from the bovine tailpipes. What next? A moratorium on baked beans at BBQs?

According to the Scientific American article: “During the two decades of measurements, methane underwent double-digit growth as a constituent of our atmosphere, rising from 1,520 parts per billion by volume (ppbv) in 1978 to 1,767 ppbv in 1998. But the most recent measurements have revealed that methane levels are barely rising anymore — and it is unclear why.”

From NewScientist: “Although this is good news, it does not mean that methane levels will not rise again, and that carbon dioxide remains the 800-pound gorilla of climate change.”

It must be nice to be on Old Media's "free pass" list.

For years, Apple Computer has been on that list (disclosure: yours truly is a 23-year Mac user). Apple has been the cool, innovative tech darling, the noble foil of big, bad monopolist Microsoft.

Another free-pass beneficiary is Al Gore, who sits on Apple's Board of Directors.

Wait until you see what ClimateCounts.org thinks of Apple's record on "fighting global warming," especially in comparison to its industry peers (HT InfoWorld via Kevin at Pundit Review):

(h/t to Sharon) B.C. [British Columbia] is about to be hit with new taxes to achieve the government’s greenhouse gas (GHG) reduction goal of 33% below current levels by 2020. But the BC Liberals were elected to reduce taxes and burdensome regulations, not increase them.

So just how did the premier come up with this goal and what is the outlook for B.C.?

While in Hawaii for his Christmas 2006 vacation, the premier is said to have read a couple of books on catastrophic climate change, including Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. Tellingly, the British High Court ruled showing the movie version of that book, and misleading students into believing it accurately represented climate science, was in violation of the political indoctrination section of the country’s Education Act. The experience in Europe goes beyond propaganda, however. The experience in Europe is one of job losses with little, if any, GHG reduction.

The Real Climate guys have offered odds on future temperature changes, which is great because it gives us a sense of their confidence in predictions of future global average temperatures. Unfortunately, RCs foray into laying odds is not as useful as it might be.

The motivation for this bet is the recent Keenlyside et al. paper that has caused a set of mixed reactions among the commenters in the blogosphere. Some commenters here have stridently argued that the predictions in the Keelyside et al. paper are perfectly consistent with predictions of climate models in the IPCC. However, when one such commenter here was asked to show a single IPCC climate model run showing no temperature increase for the 2 decades following the late 1990s he submitted an irrelevant link and disappeared. Others have argued that the Keenlyside et al. projections (and this includes Keenlyside) are inconsistent with the IPCC predictions. Real Climate apparently falls into this latter camp.

Students at a California public school have written a series of letters to Chicago's Heartland Institute, which works to discover and develop free-market solutions to society's problems, attacking its members for "destroying our planet" by refusing to endorse the politics of Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" film.

According to students in the sixth-grade class of teacher Michael Steria at David A. Brown Middle School, the institute consists of "fools" and "horrible people."

"I think your (sic) fools for denying G.W. you know it could kill us all & you're just adding to it. I want you to help stop G.W. not increase it," said one letter.

"We are going to tell you about global warming. I don't care if you don't want to read, but I'm making you read it you horrible people," said another.

A TOP Indian advocacy group that monitors climate change in south Asia warned last night that the Nargis cyclone that devastated Burma was "a sign of things to come", as climate change caused extreme weather to increase in intensity.

"Nargis is a sign of things to come. Last year, Bangladesh was devastated by the tropical cyclone Sidr," CSE director Sunita Narain said in a statement.

"The victims of these cyclones are climate change victims and their plight should remind the rich world that it is doing too little to contain its greenhouse gas emissions."

The Australian: Cyclone 'is a sign of things to come'

(h/t to Jacob) Great Britain is a decade ahead of Canada in the global warming debate and what's happening there today is instructive for us.

Former British prime minister Tony Blair was a major booster of the Kyoto Accord.

A 2006 report his Labour government commissioned from British economist Sir Nicholas Stern, predicting world-wide environmental and financial disaster if immediate steps weren't taken to combat global warming, is the Holy Grail of the international green movement.

Initially, Great Britain thought it would have a relatively easy time implementing Kyoto because of its "dash for gas" starting in the 1980s, during which coal-fired energy plants were replaced by natural gas facilities.

(h/t to Stefanie) An anti-nuclear, Toronto-based, urban-loving, 1970s peace activist who opposes subsidies to the oil industry might be the last person expected to detail cracks in the science of global warming.

But Lawrence Solomon has done just that in a short book with a long subtitle: The Deniers: The world-renowned scientists who stood up against global warming hysteria, political persecution, and fraud (and those who are too fearful to do so).

The spark for the book came after an American TV reporter compared those who question the Kyoto Protocol to Holocaust deniers. But Solomon wondered about that so he sought out the experts in specific fields to garner their views.

Consider Dr. Edward Wegman, asked by the U.S. Congress to assess the famous "hockey stick" graph from Michael Mann, published by the UN's International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which purported to show temperatures as mostly constant over the past 1,000 years -- except for a spike in the last century.

An American organisation is defending its decision to publish names of scientists in association with an article supporting the theory that most of the recent global warming is natural and not manmade.

Joseph Bast, president of the Heartland Institute, said today that a list of 500 scientists on its website had published work which contradicted some of the tenets of "global warming alarmism".

Many of the scientists, including five in New Zealand, have reacted angrily to being included on the list as they say their research does not support that argument.