Thomas Friedman of the New York Times has been rolling in green editorials.

Mid-April he wrote a major piece called “The Power of Green” in which he made the case for his generation to follow the footsteps of the Greatest Generation to become the Greenest Generation in the eyes of the future. He writes:

We in America talk like we’re already “the greenest generation,” as the business writer Dan Pink once called it. But here’s the really inconvenient truth: We have not even begun to be serious about the costs, the effort and the scale of change that will be required to shift our country, and eventually the world, to a largely emissions-free energy infrastructure over the next 50 years.

More recently, Friedman has weighed in on how to begin to change the environmental decisions our political leaders make, and it starts with the upcoming election. In “Turning the Election Green” Friedman proposes a presidential debate on the environment and energy. According to a poll Friedman cites done for the Center for American Progress, a substantial percentage of Americans want policies to address global warming and redirect our energy policy.

Today, Friedman has another piece, “Our Green Bubble.” He writes:

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Speaking in terms of Earth’s history, our records are miniscule, meaning that data from hundreds of thousands of years ago, paleoclimatic records, are all the more important.

Global average temperatures have been measured since the mid-19th century and comprehensive data on snow and glaciers has only been acquired since the 1960s. Overall, the evidence leads to the assertion in the fourth IPPC assessment that “warming of the climate system is unequivocal” and that “eleven of the last twelve years (1995 -2006) rank among the 12 warmest years in the instrumental record of global surface temperature (since 1850).”

However we also benefit from analyzing conditions as far back as we can possibly “see”. Enter ice cores, tree rings, coral and other proxy fossil data from which moisture levels and chemical composition can be read. As long as the ice isn’t melting and the trees aren’t burning, the IPCC report can conclude that “atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide in 2005 exceeds by far the natural range over the last 650,000 years(180 to 300 ppm) as determined from ice cores.”

Really, it’s a shame Michael Crichton has put his creative paleontological skills to work spreading disinformation on climate change. He seems to be stuck in the Jurassic Park era, climate and creatures included.