Since my first post dissing PG&E’s offset program, I’ve had phone calls with PG&E, NRDC, 2 calls with members of PG&E’s ClimateSmart External Advisory Group, plus a call with a forestry expert who consults with those who oversee the van Eck forest, which is featured on the “Our Projects” page of the ClimateSmart website. I have four basic conclusions:

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The story of Australia’s worst dry spell in a thousand years continues to astound. Last year we learned, “One farmer takes his life every four days.” This year over half of Australia’s agricultural land is in a declared drought.

How bad is it? One Australian newspaper is reporting:

DROUGHT will become a redundant term as Australia plans for a permanently drier future, according to the nation’s urban water industries chief….

“The urban water industry has decided the inflows of the past will never return,” Water Services Association of Australia executive director Ross Young said. “We are trying to avoid the term ‘drought’ and saying this is the new reality.”

Unless we take start leading on climate action soon, America faces the same fate: In April, Science (subs. req’d) published research that “predicted a permanent drought by 2050 throughout the Southwest” — levels of aridity comparable to the 1930s Dust Bowl would stretch from Kansas to California. What causes this climatic disaster?

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Climate Progress wants your comments! How else am I ever going to get it right? So I have tried to adopt a liberal progressive comment policy.

I don’t edit comments, even ones that are factually inaccurate–I say, bring it on, Doubters and Deniers! I do delete comments spam that include swearing, vulgarity and gratuitous insults — this discussion is too important to be uncivil, even among those who strongly disagree. That’s one reason I started using the term “Doubters” — Denier is a “strong term and should be reserved for professional misinformers and disinformers.”

I have noticed some people posting comments and leaving a fake email address. I don’t think anonymous posters are a good idea. So I may delete such comments.

The Deniers always talk about the need for more climate research before we can act. But much of that turns out to be just empty rhetoric — as DeSmogBlog reveals:

Somewhere in Maryland is a metal box containing a fully completed climate spacecraft that could save the world.

NASA’s Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) cost over $100 million and was designed to measure the energy budget of our warming planet. Yet the spacecraft has remained in its box for the last five years and it looks like it is not going anywhere anytime soon.

NASA quietly cancelled the project altogether in January 2006 citing “competing priorities”.

Why? DeSmogBlog is going to spend the next few months “digging into the history of DSCOVR, the reasons why it was cancelled, and why NASA refuses to release any internal documents on the decision to kill the mission.”

This is precisely the kind of online climate journalism need to see more. Kudos to DeSmogBlog!

That’s the question posed by the industry’s trade newspaper, Variety, to help explain why this summer did such boffo box-office biz:

Extreme heat and heavy rain across large swaths of the U.S. sent more people to theaters, looking for relief. The onset of the extreme weather — record-breaking temperatures in the western U.S., rain up and down the Eastern seaboard, the Midwest and Texas — started at the end of June, just as the box office was starting to see a bump. “You went from dreadful heat to downpours,” [Bruce] Snyder [Fox's president of distribution] says. “Historically, we’ve seen a bounce in grosses when the weather is bad. Also, when kids can’t go outside, and make their parents nuts, they send them to the movies.”

Extreme weather = extreme profits. If Variety says it’s true, who can disagree? And global warming causes extreme weather, as many studies have shown

Hmm, if we fail to take action on global warming, are we doomed to an endless stream of sequels: “Spiderman 15,” “Pirates of the Caribbean: At Climate’s End,” and “The Bourne Truth”?

I guess this means all those Hollywood stars promoting climate action are actually working against their own best interest — who knew they were so altruistic!