One comment on my already infamous “Global Warming Imperils 4th of July” post reads:

What Joe also likes to do is select areas of the US that are most likely to be in drought and portray drought events in these areas as unusual or lay blame on rep. politicians from those states.

No. I do occasionally point about droughts where conservative global warming denyers come from, just for irony’s sake. But we’ve been seeing severe droughts in quite unusual places, which is suggestive of — though not proof of — the hand of climate change.

Consider today’s New York Times article, “Drought Saps the Southeast, and Its Farmers,” which notes:

The region’s most severe drought in over a century has farmers here averting their gaze from a future that looks as bleak as their fields.

They run an amazing graphic of the unusual drought:

The commenter (hippie with a pistol) thoughtfully provided a link to a U.S. map of the “percent of time in severe and extreme drought, 1895 to 1995,” which makes clear that most of this region rarely gets anywhere near this dry:

Read more

Then check out www.socialfunds.com.

The site bills itself as “the largest personal finance site devoted to socially responsible investing.” I can’t attest to that, but it does seem like a comprehensive resource with up-to-date news I haven’t seen elsewhere, such as the article on sustainable biofuels.