"She Smoked Like a Coal-Fired Power Plant..."

For the last couple of weeks, I've been mentioning the newly-released report on global warming in our country from the US Global Change Research Program. I've been reading reports from various scientific agencies, including the IPCC, for some time now, and I have never read one this dire.

But even among my tough-minded readers, this raises hackles. How can we talk casually about a future climate so much worse than today's?

On the other hand, how can we not talk about it?

If this future were a human being, we would want to lock him up and try him -- or worse.

So let's give some credit to the imagination of Miriam Goldstein, who turns the science into a film noir -- and a few other genres. Anything to get folks to pay attention. Way to go, Miriam!

Climate change prediction: The U.S. will be seven degrees hotter.

The moment she walked into my office, the temperature got two degrees hotter. She smoked like a coal-fired power plant and had a carbon footprint that went all the way to 850 molecules of CO2 for every million molecules of atmosphere. That was more than double the carbon in the atmosphere now, and more carbon than I really wanted to handle. This dame was hot—and I mean seven degrees of global temperature increase hot. And she wasn’t even the worse-case scenario. Even her smart cousin, who stabilized climate change at a mere four degrees of global temperature rise, looked like she could kill some penguins before breakfast and wash them down with torrential flooding. I poured myself a shot of ice water. I was going to need it.