Wednesday, September 20, 2006

Blooperstan

George Monbiot lets loose on a most cloying British columnist:
In January this year, for example, the Daily Mail's columnist Melanie Philips asserted that most of the atmosphere "consists of water vapour"(1). She now admits that this was a mistake, but she still maintains that the planet was two degrees warmer 1000 years ago, that there has been no overall rise in global sea levels and that as many glaciers are expanding as shrinking(2) -- all of which are just as wrong.
Now realizing just what kind of hard hitting research backs up her claims, I kind of doubt that we will see a Londonistan any time in the future.

In keeping with tradition, Bush's polling unpopularity tracks very well with the average price of gasoline, which means he has managed a bit of an uptick recently. No luck for Londoner Blair though, as his former trustworthy MP's have left in disgust, draining away political support almost as fast as the North Sea loses its own stockpile of black treasure.



I have had mixed feelings with the reshuffling of the Air America Radio lineup. First off, it disappointed me that the creativity, comedy, spark, and ranting of version 1.0 (Winstead, Maron, Seder, Malloy) have essentially gotten replaced with safer and less spontaneous NPR-lite-style programming. However from my own biased energy perspective, the lineup looks fairly solid. AAR has EcoTalk on 5 nights a week, and my local outlet decided to syndicate Thom Hartmann every evening.

Lots of good targets out there ripe for mockery; just from the tiny emirate of Dubai alone, we have ecologic/economic disasters in the making (via comments at TOD):