With only a few minor adjustments to account for dates and sports utility vehicles, this NY Times article on recent car buying trends could have been written thirty years ago. Start with the headline:

As Gas Costs Soar, Buyers Flock to Small Cars

I have childhood memories of such headlines. Change the price-a-gallon and replace "sport utility vehicles" with "gas-guzzling boat-sized sedans" and the following paragraph would have been relevant back then, too:

The switch to smaller, more fuel-efficient vehicles has been building in recent years, but has accelerated recently with the advent of $3.50-a-gallon gas. At the same time, sales of pickup trucks and large sport utility vehicles have dropped sharply.

Finally, here is where history repeats itself in perhaps the most moronic way:

The trend toward smaller and lighter vehicles with better mileage is a blow to Detroit automakers, which offer fewer such models than Asian carmakers like Toyota and Honda.

Yet as a testament to how the entire auto industry, regardless of country of origin (which means little in a globalized production line), is completely behind the times, consider the gas mileage of the fuel-efficient vehicles the Times lists in a sidebar:



The city mileage does not even reach 30 M.P.G.! We should be getting 100 M.P.G. now. We should have taken care of this thirty years ago. But no-o-o-o-o. We got frightened by the Iranian Revolution and elected an ex-B movie actor who stroked our precious imperialist egos ("It's okay, my fellow Americans, we're still a great big superpower"), and, once in office, undid the energy policies of the Carter Admin that would have saved us time, money, war, lives, and at least a part of the global warming crisis we face. Thanks, Reagan Democrats! I hope you guys learn your lesson this time!

But, like Detroit, you probably won't.

According to a recent scientific study, as reported in Science Daily, the water crisis in the Western United States is the result of human-induced climate change and will continue to get worse at current levels of global warming.

The team scaled down global climate models to the regional scale and compared the results to observations over the last 50 years. The results were solid, giving the team confidence that they could use the same models to predict the effects of the global scale increase in greenhouse gases on the Western United States in the future.
The projected consequences are bleak.
By 2040, most of the snowpack in the Sierras and Colorado Rockies would melt by April 1 of each year because of rising air temperatures. The earlier snow melt would lead to a shift in river flows.
The shift could lead to flooding in California’s Central Valley. Currently, state reservoirs are filled during the rainy season. As the water is drawn down, the reservoirs are replenished with snow melt from the Sierras.
If that snow melts earlier, as predicted in the climate models, the reservoirs could overflow.
“We are headed for a water crisis in the Western United States that has already started,” Barnett said. “A couple of decades ahead, we might not have that snowpack, making us more susceptible to flooding.”

The illustration accompanying the article juxtaposes aerial photos of South Cascade Glacier, Washington, making the case with stark visual contrast.

From the Associated Press:

More than 3,000 flying foxes dropped dead, falling from trees in Australia. Giant squid migrated north to commercial fishing grounds off California, gobbling anchovy and hake. Butterflies have gone extinct in the Alps.

While humans debate at U.N. climate change talks in Bali, global warming is already wreaking havoc with nature. Most plants and animals are affected, and the change is occurring too quickly for them to evolve.

The Willamette Week reports how much has "time has been wasted" since the signing of the Kyoto Protocol ten years ago. In the spirit of "moving beyond Kyoto", the Center for American Progress urges citizens to pressure their congresspeople to support legislation introduced in the Senate and the House - and to generate enough support to override a threatened veto by the BushAdmin. On that note, the Daily Green reports on this aspect of the UN summit in Bali:

The United States, Canada and Japan are throwing up repeated roadblocks to even small steps on global warming, like setting up a working group to discuss the transfer of technology from rich to poor nations, Friends of Earth has said, according to Deutsche Presse-Agentur.

From a Der Spiegel article on global warming currently being slashdotted:

It was not until the rise of the environmental movement in the 1980s that everything suddenly changed. From then on it was almost a foregone conclusion that global warming could only be perceived as a disaster for the earth's climate. Environmentalists, adopting a strategy typical of the Catholic Church, have been warning us about the horrors of greenhouse gas hell ever since -- painting it as a punishment for the sin of meddling with creation. What was conveniently ignored, however, is that humanity has been reshaping the planet for a very long time, first by clearing forests and plowing fields, and later by building roads, cities and factories.

So moving on to rising sea levels, increasing desert and drought, melting ice caps and displacing hundreds of millions of poor people will be a logical progression of human ingenuity?

The article goes on to make a few good points: 1) it is too late to prevent climate change altogether, so our response to these changes need to be smart, careful and "levelheaded" (I'll leave it to the reader to guage what that means.) 2) "The end of the world isn't coming anytime soon." 3) Carbon emission reductions, though necessary, will have limited impact.

But the author is pretty blasé regarding the fate of the "losers" of climate zone "reshuffling" while practically rhapsodic about the brave new world awaiting the "winners." Illustrating the article is a slide show featuring thin, young German women in bikinis enjoying the beach, apparently representatives of Germany's future status as the "new Italy." Indeed, citing new computer-generated models from the Max Planck Institute of Meteorology, the author argues that sea levels will rise more slowly than previously anticipated, allowing poor coastal cities like Bangladesh time to prepare.

Also, more detailed simulations have allowed climate researchers to paint a considerably less dire picture than in the past -- gone is the talk of giant storms, the melting of the Antarctic ice shield and flooding of major cities.

Improved regionalized models also show that climate change can bring not only drawbacks, but also significant benefits, especially in northern regions of the world where it has been too cold and uncomfortable for human activity to flourish in the past. However it is still a taboo to express this idea in public.

Eileen Clausen, president of the Pew Center on Global Climate Change addressed these and other points of the article five years ago. See also the Center's more recent critique of Bjørn Lomborg's The Skeptical Environmentalist, for which much of the Der Spiegel article functions as a "Cliff's Notes version."

Edited to correct embarrassing spelling errors. Argh.