A lot of things get blamed on “global warming”/”climate change”, but this quote from Ted Turner is the first time I’ve heard cannibalism blamed on it. Can I have a side of tiki with that?

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Looking for good property values in the post-apocalyptic world? Florida beaches will probably be gone, so you’ll need to head further north - way north, according to Dan Bloom, whose concept is to build “Polar Cities”.

Look for the first to open in Norway in 2012 - yes, that should be a ding for all you 2012 enthusiasts, because that makes as much sense as any other 2012-doomsaying.

But… will they have Starbucks?
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Besides “The Day After Tomorrow” and “An Inconvenient Truth”, there haven’t been a lot of films about climate change, and even then “An Inconvenient Truth” is meant to be a documentary. Am I missing any? I feel like I must be missing some.

“The Last Winter” is a new horror film set against a background of global warming. Starring James LeGros and Ron Perlman, it takes place in the arctic region of Alaska, and of course as the environment warms and the permafrost clears, something horrible rises out of the formerly-frozen ground.

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Congratulations to Al Gore for winning the Nobel Peace Prize for his work on climate change. I suppose that Gore didn’t personally win the Academy Award for “An Inconvenient Truth”; the film won it, but close enough.

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Naegleria fowleri - sounds a little like some kind of scam where someone emails you telling you they want to wire you lots of money if you will send them your bank account number. It’s actually a brain-eating amoeba, and when you see a big graphic proclaiming “Brain! Eating! Amoeba!” on a new service web page, it tends to catch your attention.

While not strictly apocalyptic (except to the person whose brain is being eaten), it qualifies as “Plague” and is therefore blog-worthy. As an added benefit, it even has a global warming tie-in!

The news article describes amoeba infections as attacks, as if the amoeba are sitting around dark corners of lakes waiting to mug you. In reality they live on the bottoms of lakes and go up your noise when water is stirred up such that it goes… up your nose. So don’t get water up your nose and you’ll probably be okay.
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You’re not the only one. Attitudes about it seem to shift like the wind, with both sides in the politically charged disagreement about it coming in with new “facts” all the time, and disputes about the factuality of old “facts”.

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Sufferers of celiac disease may cheer (you know who you are!), but the rest of us will be sad… predictions are that climate change will reduce wheat harvests. While a certain amount of warming helps crops, too much kills them, and the side effects of climate change - extreme precipitation (or the lack thereof), flooding - are also bad for crops.

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I’ve been looking forward to the film “Sunshine” since I first heard about it. It had a great pedigree - Danny Boyle directed it, and I’ve loved some of Boyle’s previous films (“Shallow Grave”, “A Life Less Ordinary”, “Trainspotting”, “Millions”, “28 Days Later”). Its writer, Alex Garland, wrote “28 Days Later” and the slightly less successful (in my opinion) “The Beach”. And the cast was appealing - Cillian Murphy, Michelle Yeoh, Chris Evans, Rose Byrne (who seems to be in every other thing I’ve watched this summer).

There have been so many disappointing science fiction films over the years - “Event Horizon” being the one the generally comes to mind first (“Supernova” usually comes second) - and it’s so easy to become excited about a new film before it runs - that I was worried about expecting to much from “Sunshine”. And in fact, I’m also worried about overselling it here - it’s a really good film, and it’s a really good science fiction film in particular - but it doesn’t make up for the past sins of other films, nor should it have to.
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The future’s so bright…

It’s summer, everyone could benefit from wearing some sunshades… except possibly our globally warmed Earth.

One researched solution to the problem of climate change is to mimic the effects of massive volcanic eruptions. Eruptions have, in recently recorded history, been the cause of rapid global cooling. The eruption of Tambora Volcano in Indonesia in 1815 clouded the Earth so much that Europe and North America barely had a summer in 1816. I remember reading a couple of years ago about the climate history of the town I live in, and being surprised that in 1816 it was so cold that people found ice in their water buckets in July and August.

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The topic of how climate change may affect New England is near and dear to my heart, not the least because I live there.

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