Caught Remnick the first time, thank you, & tried not to stare. It's hard to watch a grown man slobber in public, puarticularly a grown man who wrote one of the best grown-up books of the last decade, Remnick's book about Ali nee Clay.

Yes, it's getting warmer, just what you'd expect from an ice-age rebound: the Little Ice Age ended about 150 years ago, and ice has been melting as a result. Yes, science & Science (the journal) are starting to coalesce around the greenhouse-gas model. Solid research & data are finally supplanting or supplementing the computer models that Weird Al Gore gouged & gored in '92. Alas, we're far from consensus on the Goriest Gas: Gregg Easterbrook et al. cite naturally emitted methane as a greater threat than CO2, so it may be premature to dismantle the modern world to attack a gas that may or may not be causing problems that may or may not be irremedial or worthy of remedy.

This much now seems clear: Gore's Kyoto was & is a crock. Maybe ECB should research & report the piles of dirty green dollars that Big Eekology & the green lobby dumped into a bad-news treaty that even progressive Canadians can't live with or comply with. To say almost nothing of the exemptions bestowed on crypto-capitalist gassers in China & India.

Re the New Yorker: Check the 17 April article about Gene Robinson & the north-south Anglican divide. Sort of gets at ECB's pretty good reporting on Seattle's neo-evangelical emergents. Of course ECB gave the last word to reactionary radical Church Council of Greater Seattle types. And she gave them many of the first words & most words in between (sort of like letting the ACLU explicate the NRA), but other than that it was, uh, fair & balanced. Or at least a good intro to Jesusland and underclass populism.

While effete elites like American Episcopalians & Stranger writers simper over $16-scallops & designer drugs, the real world is trying to get a grip on the real world.

I'll have to check out the New Yorker article above. But I don't possibly see how it could be better than this article from Wired magazine.

Global warming aside, I think Gore's actually on to something with his new venture.

Ohh Erica, now you're all foaming at the mouth about global warming. Your attention deficit would be amusing if the world were not in such a mess right now and needing incisive writing. First it's boycott the Mexican on immigration day, then it's boycott Seattle Weekly for being racist.

What the white males do about global warming is at this point is irrelevant girlfriend. China is rapidly industrializing, if it continues at the current rate in fifteen years the majority of the air pollution in Bellingham will come from China after floating across the pacific. Compared to the impact of China, The United States is now a non issue.

China is building a huge dam at the moment that will displace millions of poor and create an environmental catastrophy the likes of which this world has never known.

While privledged little shits like you and your Stranger collegues are dining on "Sustainable local goat cheese" Chinese farmers that have grown food for themselves on the same plot for a thousand years are being driven off their land to go work in urban factories making your cellphones, I-Pods, and hand painted chotchkes you give each other at office birthday parties.

But by all means keep preaching to us dumb working class crackers in Tacoma and Auburn about how we should trade in our decade old Toyotas for new Hybrid cars and get organic hemp cellphone holders.

Oh yeah and how much jet fuel did your collegues waste flying to promotional events for your porn anthologies, your vanity films, and lecture tours?

Stranger - please keep writing about global warming and boyband racism. I used to have to pay money to go to horror movies, now all I have to do is read what addled brained trust funders are thinking while they eat their $15 spinach salads at Daliah lounge and it's terrifying.

Dear ERICA LUV,

a) you pay money for anything? you're known about these parts as the cheapest mother fucker on earth!

b) give us the proof, who on the stranger staff is a trust fund kid? if you know something spill the beans, otherwise shut the fuck up about this already.

c) i assume you are mentioning dahlia and the money it costs, because of comments about savage being their with so-called "media elites" last week and blowing tons of money. but can you tell us if he paid? if he didn't pay, and was treated to a nice dinner by someone else does that still make him elitest? or just seizing the oppurtunity to have a nice meal on someone else's dime?

you're so full of fucking conspiracy, stick to the point or give up the info you know biatch!

god you and that MEDIA WATCHDOG person are so petulant! are you WEAKLY STAFFERS? it's like having whiney little children in the comments all the time.

PROOF, that's what i want WITH your accusations! until then SHUT THE FUCK UP ALREADY.

Thanks for mentioning the article about Gore.

I think it's foolish to believe that all the garbage the world's civilizations have been pumping into the air, since the Industrial revolution, hasn't had a profound negative effect on our atmosphere. I wonder if the opponents to environmental protections have stopped to consider how quickly our environmental changes have occurred.

I'm so glad I don't have children and I feel bad for the kids that are going to have to deal with the environmental mess we've made.

I wish America could have lived up to it's potential as an innovator, encouraged new clean technologies and aided the world in a positive way. But no, it's about quick money and power, using up our precious resources, denying the warning signs and then admitting that we should probably have some fuel efficient cars.

America does not matter any more if China continues to grow at it's current rate. That's the tough issue. Chinese pollution will dwarf whatever damage the United States has done.

Pointing fingers at the Republicans while you continue to talk on your Chinese made cell phone and waste jet fuel flying around to promote your porn anthology is no longer just hypocritical, it's endangering the future of our whole planet.

"America does not matter any more if China continues to grow at it's current rate. That's the tough issue. Chinese pollution will dwarf whatever damage the United States has done".

I don't believe that is a valid reason for the U.S. to ignore our contribution (you seem to acknowledge) to the world wide air pollution problem. We do matter. Much of China is a developing country, eager to trade with the rest of the world, and the U.S. could be in a unique position to spear head sustainable and environmentally friendly means of energy that could benefit everyone. I hope we do that...If only our current administration would acknowledge there is a growing problem, admit the causes and actively promote the development of some solutions.

China already has an enormous population (well over one billion) that dwarfs that of the U.S. (298, 764,562 a couple seconds ago). If I'm not mistaken, we are still a bigger polluter and consumer of the worlds resources. The U.S. needs to step up to the plate and do the right thing.

Thanks for the New Yorker link, I'd missed it.

Inconvenient truths: Elizabeth Kolbert in the New Yorker (January 2001?) broke down data from Greenland ice cores, data that give us a 100,000-year baseline re global climate change. Bottom line: climate changes. Radically, relentlessly. Again & again during about 99,900 years in which Earth was not afflicted with internal combustion, world climate has flipped almost overnight by 5-10 F, then flipped back, usually settling into a norm that was too cold for comfort or subsistence or civilization.

Contrast that with Jared Diamond's Collapse, in which the great man posits devastating industry-induced climate change on the basis of his own observations (since the 1950s) of Montana snow fields. Diamond is afflicted with the heartbreak of Progressive Disease: His baseline for what's normal & abnormal is his own narrow experience. 100,000 years of Greenland ice tell an inconvenient story for neo-Luddites like Diamond, Gore, & ericacbarnett.

Also check Scientific American, summer 2004, regarding atmospheric CO2. Seems the peak happened about 7000 years ago, inconveniently pre-industry. On the basis of no evidence, SA attributed the CO2 concentration to human activity: stone-age agriculture.

If I'm not mistaken, we are still a bigger polluter and consumer of the worlds resources

Drury-

You're not mistaken. The United States has five percent of the world's population, but we consume 25 percent of the world's resources. We also produce about the same percentage of the world's pollution.

Free Mumia, drive a hybrid car, see Al Gore's movie! Worry about global warming! I really wish you activist hippies would move to Portland and stop trying to make Seattle wear your hair shirts.

There's a big difference between being concerned about issues that matter (and taking steps to deal with them) and refusing to enjoy life because there are serious problems in the world.