This week the excellent TED conference posted a video segment with Al Gore regarding an update to his famous climate crisis slide show. The piece is just about 1/2 hour long and provides updates to several key points made famous in his Academy Award winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth. Gore gives the latest info regarding warming at the north and south poles, increases in carbon emissions from developing nations and the grassroots campaign to change the hearts and minds of Australians toward Kyoto.

He also focuses on the need to do more than just change light bulbs, and makes a plea to get laws changed. Some parts are a bit overly dramatic for my taste, but I agree with his core tenet. The climate crisis is going to continue to worsen unless people start demanding change, particularly of the presidential candidates. Seeing how much the U.S. depends on gasoline, and how little attention the main stream media has devoted to the topic, it’s easy to see why Al’s upset.

Take time on your lunch break or after work and watch this video. After all, knowledge is power.

At some point (hopefully in the very near future) politicians, skeptics and blowhards who deny that human beings are altering the Earth’s climate will have to snap out of their right-wing fantasy lands and face facts. For Rep. Bob Inglis of South Carolina, that day finally came, thanks in part to his children:

Once a skeptic of global warming, Inglis got a hint that the political winds might be shifting when a longtime supporter warned that he might vote against Inglis if he “didn’t clean up his act on the environment.”

The warning came from Inglis’ eldest son, Robert Jr., now 22.

His daughter was no less blunt about the congressman’s refusal to embrace the view that global warming was being caused by human actions and that a serious response is needed. “I have three more kids coming up — and they seem to share the same view,” Inglis said.

Family pressure worked. Inglis traveled to Antarctica and, most recently, to Greenland to witness the effects of rising CO2 levels and temperatures. He now believes the science behind global warming. And he believes the politics are equally conclusive: Republicans will “get hammered” if they do not reckon with the issue soon.

Imagine that. A representative does a little research, takes a trip to see the effects of climate change first hand, and realizes that the bullshit climate critics have been force-feeding him for years was wrong. Perhaps there’s hope for us yet. In the meantime, Al Gore continues to fight the good fight and come to the aid of whales everywhere.

You really have to hand it to Al Gore. First he wins an Academy Award for his groundbreaking work on An Inconvenient Truth with Davis Guggenheim. Next he stages the largest entertainment event in the history of the planet, and now he wins the Nobel Peace Prize along side the IPCC. All of this was done in the name of raising awareness to the growing problem of man-made climate change, and his efforts seem to be paying off. People everywhere are starting to list climate change as one of the most important problems facing our nation and the world. With record temperatures being set, hurricanes that strengthen in record times and ever shrinking glaciers, the general public is starting to feel global warming’s effects directly.

Of course, this doesn’t stop the climate deniers from insisting that there really isn’t a problem. It seems that even when faced with overwhelming scientific evidence, from thousands of leading scientists across the planet, it’s just not enough. Well, today we learned that one man’s hard work and perseverance, along with the dedicated research of thousands of climate professionals, may just help to save us all. Bravo Al, from all of us who happen to think our pale blue dot matters.

As if massive privacy concerns and identity theft were not enough reasons to worry about the wide spread use of radio frequency identification technology, now comes word that it it may also cause cancer. It seems that a series of veterinary and toxicology studies from the mid-1990s, found that RFID chip implants had “induced” malignant tumors in some lab mice and rats. Although the FDA has officially approved the chips for implanting in pets and limited use in humans, these studies found that lab mice and rats injected with microchips sometimes developed subcutaneous “sarcomas”, or malignant tumors, most of them encasing the implants.

Although the research is ongoing, I’m seriously thinking about having the RFID chips in our pets removed. Some people think all this FUD is hogwash, and that RFID is perfectly safe and secure. To them I say, have you ever had chemotherapy? I have, and let me just say it’s no day at the beach. If you’d like to gamble with an aggressive form of cancer that can kill you in as little as 3-6 months just to prove your pet theories, be my guest! The chips are even mentioned by bible enthusiasts as one of the signs of the end times for Pete’s sake! Do you really want to portend the apocalypse AND go through localized radiation therapy? No, I didn’t think so.

Earlier this month, California passed a law forbidding companies from forcing their employees to have RFID chips implanted in them. I plan on writing our representatives and asking them to support the very same measure here in NC. The chips pose serious threats to security, personal liberty and now, health. As far as I’m concerned, they can’t be banned fast enough. Now excuse me while I finish that Book of Revelations.

I love how this ad takes Bush’s “either you are with us or you are with the terrorists” rhetoric and turns it on its head. The climate deniers seem to respond to black and white vs. levels of gray, so maybe spots like this will penetrate their thick, thick skulls. We can only hope and pray. There isn’t much time left.

Global warming is a hoax. Just remember that simple “fact” as you watch the news this week. Temperatures in parts of the United States have hit triple digits for the second straight week, California is suffering rolling blackouts due to the extreme heat and Felix grew from a tropical storm to a category 5 hurricane in just 27 hours. None of this matters you see, because evidently there is no empirical evidence to suggest that man is causing climate change.

I know what you’re thinking. You thought the argument was that the climate wasn’t changing AT ALL, not that man was causing it. Well, those skeptics seem to have given up on that lame defense and are now admitting that climate change is real, it’s just not humans who are causing it. It has to do with the wobble of the earth, or sun spots, or water vapor or cycles or… or… whatever! Just not increasing levels of CO2 in the atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels. No, there is no evidence of that what-so-ever.

So as you bake in your blacked out or windswept home in the days and weeks ahead, just keep repeating to yourself that man isn’t to blame and there is nothing we can or even should do about it. If you say it enough times, it will be true. At least in your own head.

Interesting, if distressing story today from the New York Times about China and its rush toward industrialization. It seems that China’s pollution levels are reaching staggeringly bad proportions thanks to a heavy increase in coal fired power plants. China has lots of coal, maybe more than any other nation on Earth and they intend to use it. The problem of course, is that coal is dirty, both for the environment and human health. The increase in China’s pollution output has created an environmental disaster and has made cancer their leading cause of death. This bit is especially distressing:

“China’s problem has become the world’s problem. Sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides spewed by China’s coal-fired power plants fall as acid rain on Seoul, South Korea, and Tokyo. Much of the particulate pollution over Los Angeles originates in China, according to the Journal of Geophysical Research.

More pressing still, China has entered the most robust stage of its industrial revolution, even as much of the outside world has become preoccupied with global warming.

Experts once thought China might overtake the United States as the world’s leading producer of greenhouse gases by 2010, possibly later. Now, the International Energy Agency has said China could become the emissions leader by the end of this year, and the Netherlands Environment Assessment Agency said China had already passed that level.”

Back in 2005, Al Gore touched on the challenges facing China and its increasing number of coal fired plants in his award winning documentary, An Inconvenient Truth. I’ve captured the segment dealing with China and posted it on YouTube as an interesting tangent to the NYT piece. It seems that China’s pollution problems have only grown worse since the movie was made which doesn’t bode well for China or the U.S.

Given the problems the United States has had dealing with greenhouse gasses and our lack of global responsibility in regard to the climate crisis, it seems unlikely that the Chinese will fare better any time soon. It most likely will be decades before the communist government there decides to do something about their nation’s contribution to global warming. Given the rate at which things are changing around the world, I don’t think any of us can afford to wait that long.

Here are some scientific facts that I bet you were never taught in school:

• The Earth is only 6000 years old

• The Grand Canyon was carved by Noah’s flood

• Dinosaurs and man roamed the Earth together

These are just some of the amazing “scientific facts” that are presented to children and adults alike at the new Creation Museum opening today in Petersburg Kentucky. The center is the brainchild of Ken Ham who founded the nonprofit ministry Answers in Genesis, originally in Australia. Ham wanted to give believers a rallying point to help support “Creation Theory” as an alternative to Darwin’s Theory of Evolution and raised a staggering $27 million dollars in donations from like-minded Christians to help him do it.

After learning more about the center (I refuse to call it a museum), I can fully understand why many nations around the globe have come to think on the United States as one big joke. No other place in the world allows such assaults on scientific consensus and reason as we do. Long established facts, like the 4.5 billion year old age of the Earth, are allowed to be tossed aside in favor of religious doctrine. Children are encouraged to roam the exhibits of this place and learn that fossils are not the remains of animals dead for many millennia, but were all created by the massive flood detailed in the book of Genesis.

What year is this again, 1492 or 2007? I forget.

The so-called “Creation Museum” is just one symptom of something dangerous that has taken hold in this country. It’s called the assault on science. There are a wave of fundamentalists that see it as their duty to fight the growing tide of secularism in the United States. People in local, state and federal government have begun pushing their agendas and they will use any platform to do it. It takes many forms including the school board battles for Intelligent Design in Kansas, the so-called “attack on Christmas” and the fight against scientific consensus regarding global warming. The slow maturing of the nation and our growing intellectual understanding of the world is evidently too much for these fundamentalists to take. So we get this:

• The Bible must be taken literally.

• Christmas must never become just another “holiday”.

• Humans can’t possibly effect Earth’s climate.

I was born and raised a Catholic. I was baptized a Christian, attended Catholic school, had my first Communion and became an alter boy at a young age. I love God, Jesus and Mary, and when I pray it isn’t to the Flying Spaghetti Monster. However, I don’t believe in the story of Adam and Eve, and I don’t take the story of Noah and the Flood as a historical account. Does this make me a bad Christian? To me, being a Christian is more about how you treat your fellow man than about how old the Earth is. It means you have a special place in your heart for Christ’s teachings, and as such I try to make “Do unto others…” the guiding principal in my life.

“I believe in a God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fates and actions of human beings.” – Albert Einstein

Does the scientific belief in the “Big Bang” mean that God could not have caused it? Of course not, all things are possible in God. Couldn’t Evolution be just another one of God’s intricate and wondrous plans for how the natural universe works? And why must the Bible be taught as a literal account rather than a guiding collection of parables? Science and religion can co-exist, as long as they play on their own, separate turfs. I think I speak for a great many people who have had their faith hijacked, when I say I don’t want Noah in my museum any more than Ken Ham would want Darwin in his church.

UPDATE: This has all been said before, and brilliantly I might add, by none other than that uniquely American creation – The Simpsons. Perhaps there is hope for us yet.

UPDATE II: Seems like something of a minor sex scandal has hit the center. Could be a tempest in a tea cup, but I always find it interesting how those who claim the moral high ground are often found wallowing in the mud.

UPDATE III: A blog called BlueGrassRoots posted a walk-through of the center and the images and experiences shown are nothing less than startling. This place is full on, 100% religious propaganda pure and simple. After checking out this post, I actually felt sick to my stomach for all the parents who think substituting religion for science is acceptable behavior. Disturbing to say the least.