Fake Steve:

So I'm getting loads of mail in response to my post about Al Gore. People are telling me I've got the facts all wrong: the world temperature hasn't gone up 1.5 degrees Celsius in six months, it's .05 degrees Fahrenheit in sixty years; it's not true that a piece of ice the size of Greenland broke off from Iceland, and it couldn't possibly be true, since Greenland is roughly 100 times the size of Iceland. So fair enough. Maybe it was a piece of ice the size of Iceland that broke off from Greenland. Whatever. Listen. You can quibble all you want over tiny mistakes. You can keep calling for more studies, and you can sit around with your thumbs up your butts while the planet keeps getting hotter. Or you can put aside the details and keep your eyes on the big picture. Don't you see what the skeptics are doing? The tiny details are what the oil companies and Republicans want people to focus on. They'll just keep throwing these nitpicky things at us, trying to wear us out. Like Al told everyone this weekend at Barbra's house, these guys are just going to keep looking for tiny mistakes and then trying to extrapolate from those tiny mistakes that the whole theory is wrong. But it's not wrong. It's right. Everyone with half a brain knows that it's right. Anyway. To those of you who wrote in, I appreciate your criticism. But you're wrong and Al is right.

From the "if you don't believe something, you'll believe anything files", the "Gore Challenge" (via Greenie Watch):

As a believer:

• that human-caused global warming is a moral, ethical, and spiritual issue affecting our survival;
• that home energy use is a key component of overall energy use;
• that reducing my fossil fuel-based home energy usage will lead to lower greenhouse gas emissions; and
• that leaders on moral issues should lead by example;
• I pledge to consume no more energy for use in my residence than the average American household by one year from today

Note by selecting the "household" as the target, the energy profligate lifestyles -- first class seating, private planes, entourage, limos, SUVs, powertoys, cottages, etc. -- of the privileged are exempt from examination; whereas almost 100% of Joe Everyman's life is up for grabs.

If you were to make a list of inventions that changed the twentieth century, the elevator and air conditioning would probably appear somewhere. But the mythical past is always better than the brutal now (story via Greenie Watch):

THE LATEST CRAZE in architecture, after fizzled experiments in Modernism, Post Modernism, Brutalism, Deconstructionism, and Post-Brutal-Deconstructed-Neo-Modernism, is a genuflection to environmentalism called "Green Building" or "Sustainable Architecture." For the most part, building "Green" means cloaking an intrinsically inefficient high rise building in an ecological hair shirt that makes owners feel good and tenants feel miserable. The latest example of Green Building has risen in San Francisco, where the city by the Bay has ripped apart one of the grittier parts of its foggy utopia to construct what is surely the most ridiculous building of our still young century: the poetically-named Federal Building. A unique combination of crackpot environmentalism and elaborate ugliness, the Federal Building will finally opens its doors (or flaps, or airlocks, or orifices, or something) later this month and it will boast a number of odd design "features." For instance, the Federal Building is an office tower tall enough to disrupt the city's skyline, yet its elevators only stop on every third floor--the better to conserve energy. And after trudging up and down the stairs on a blazing summer afternoon the unfortunate tenants soak in their own sweat because the building has no air conditioning . . . again to save energy. [...] With any luck, the Mayne event in San Francisco will be so notoriously bad that it will do for enviro-fundamentalism what the Tweed Courthouse did for corrupt government . . . that is, give it unmistakable form that provokes corrective action. Until then, federal employees by the Bay will have plenty of time to contemplate the consequences of global climate change while working in their very own greenhouse

Iain Murray on the IPCC report (I've had this one in my to-blog pile for a while):

Yet the IPCC still admits we know very little about the role of aerosols, land use changes, contrails, water vapor and solar irradiance on global temperature, so they admit they make that assertion without full knowledge of the facts.Also, gone from the Summary is the icon of the Third Assessment Report – the “hockey stick” graph.  The fact that it took two amateurs to get the scientists to realize the hole in their argument there is indicative of the state of climate science today.  The IPCC has been wrong in the past.  The fact that there’s nothing really new in this document suggests that as we learn more about the science, yes we may well find more evidence of human involvement in the climate, but when all’s said and done it won’t amount to anything to worry about.  If we go down the road of emissions suppression, however, that will be something to worry about.  We could stabilize emissions at a cost to the world of 5 percent of GDP (bear in mind that the Iraq War is costing America 0.8 percent of GDP and the world as a whole a lot less) and still have warming or we can all get richer and more resilient.  That’s really the choice on the table.

Try it yourself (via London Fog)! President Hitler's plans of subsidize airplanes, burning coal, cutting takes, building nukes and telling the foreign-types to go to hell didn't work out so well in the simulation (see end comments though)

And that's where the simulation falls of the rails -- Europe never voted against any Hitlers.

You've been warned Alberta. Pay the price for Canada to make it's Kyoto commitments or there'll be consequences:

by Charles Adler

As I apply my ink stained fingers to the trusty keyboard, it's been more than 72 hours since Mark Holland, the Liberal Natural Resources critic, belched out the most threatening words I have heard in a political conversation in years.

[...] When I asked Holland whether a Liberal government under Stephane Dion would shut down or limit oil sands production if necessary to meet Kyoto targets, his response was, "Exactly." He then went on to say "I think what you are going to see is we're going to say you cannot exploit that resource, basically go in there and pump it out as fast as you can to give it to the Americans and sell out our national interests and blow apart our emissions targets."

I also heard that Dion is going to ban the use of small jet planes by individuals such as Al Gore, you know, since we're facing the end of the world and everyone -- great and small -- have to make sacrifices. Ha ha, just kidding: that would hurt Quebec, which isn't the point of the exercise.

Canadians generously willing to sacrifice Alberta - "put a little water in my economic wine" - to the Climate Gods:

The dramatic rise in production from Alberta's oil sands has played a key role in Canada's economic strength in recent years, but the survey suggests a willingness to give up some of that growth.

When asked if Canadians would support slowing or reducing the development of the tar sands in Northern Alberta, 48 per cent said there would be support and 32 per cent predicted opposition to the idea.