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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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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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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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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Researchers in the British Royal Society have concluded that neither the sun nor cosmic rays can be blamed for current warming trends around the planet. Given it’s nature one would think we’d point the finger at the sun first, but a recent paper published in “Proceedings A” shows that the sun’s energy output has actually dropped over the last 20 years, while global temperatures have risen.

The cosmic ray hypothesis holds that cosmic rays create clouds as they’re absorbed by the earth’s atmosphere. Some clouds lock heat in; others bounce solar radiation off the planet. Research shows that levels of cosmic rays seem to be completely statistically irrelevant to global temperature trends.

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The word is that “organic” farming techniques leave soil able to fix about 30% more carbon than large-scale industrial farming techniques. When you’re “organic” farming, you plant winter cover crops and you don’t till the soil (turning it in order to mix in fertilizers, uproot weeds, aerate it).

I guess my organic garden isn’t organic, because I do use a roto-tiller to till it.
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The Boston Globe reports on the “Boston-Area Climate Experiment” at UMass Boston, an attempt to predict how New England’s climate will change as temperatures rise over the next century. Unlike some climate modeling experiments, this one isn’t running on supercomputers - it’s running on an old farm in Waltham, and is being conducted by controlling the actual environmental conditions of small plots of land.
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