Some 20,000 polar bears are left on Earth, their only planet, and most of them live in the Canadian Arctic. While the bears have been distracted by the melting away of polar ice and their entire habitat, humans at a meeting in Thailand have decided that's it's okay to continue killing the endangered animals to sell their parts on the international market for bits of endangered animals—bearskin rugs and claws and "other body parts."

The United States delegation proposed not hunting the polar bear to extinction. Although the ban had the backing of Russia, which also has a declining polar bear population in its arctic zone, the Convention [...]

Did you forget to stay up late waiting for results from the U.N. climate talks in Doha? Well, you'll be happy to know global warming is solved thanks to a bold consensus decision to take aggressive international action on carbon emissions and sustainability. No, wait, that is not what happened. Here's a typically sunny reaction: "It’s very, very depressing. There is nothing [in the text] at all on finance, nothing about emissions reduction, it's all about workshops and talk shops. There is no commitment by [by rich countries] on anything."

Then again, "low expectations" were the only expectation at all. Sorry, polar bears and etc.

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"It is a greater change than we could even imagine 20 years ago, even 10 years ago. And it has taken us by surprise and we must adjust our understanding of the system and we must adjust our science and we must adjust our feelings for the nature around us." —The urgency apparent in Norwegian Polar Institute's Dr. Kim Holman's assessment of recent data about the melting arctic ice cap is truly terrifying. But the fact that the Institute named its icebreaker ship "Lance" makes me smile.

One of the cool things about the West and the Southwest is that lots of species get pooled and segregated into little genetic pools—at the top of isolated mountains, squirrels that once roamed and mingled now have been separated for ages, like the nine sub-species of Abert's squirrel. Now at Yosemite, the Alpine chipmunk is being forced to ascend uphill as well, into isolated genetic pods. Radical lesbian elitist climate change atheist publication Nature Climate Change reported the details on how "global warming" is forcing the squirrels ever upwards. Climb, chipmunks! Climb for your lives! (Picture: a detail from a photo by Miss Pudding.)

"There is a little bit of elitist-versus-populist tensions. There are meteorologists who feel, 'Just because I have a bachelor's degree doesn't mean I don't know what's going on.'" -Science writer Bob Henson suggests one of the reasons meteorologists, who wear make-up and say wacky things about the weather, are more prone to dismiss global warming than climatologists, who are actually scientists.

Great. Now even the trees are going to destroy the planet. A major bummer of an article in Nature explains that, due to global warming, trees are growing farther north than they have before. And how, because tree-tops are darker than barren land, they have less "albedo" (that's a cool word!) or "reflectiveness," and so the earth with absorb more heat from the sun. "When the vegetation moves in, there will be an amplification of the warming," says Inez Fung, an atmospheric physicist at the University of California, Berkeley.

Our Kennedy-dog-having fascist-socialist tea-hating President Barack Obama is going to force the EPA to assert that "greenhouse gas emissions like carbon dioxide endanger human health and welfare," according to Reuters. Do you not think we should take some time to study this crazy idea? Particularly in relation to God's plan. I don't see no seas rising, unless you look at the lies on the Wikipedia.

Good news, maybe, about our challenging situation here on the only available habitable planet: Today's climate change study (from Norway) says maybe the 1990s were worse for global warming than the 2000s, which means …. we can go back to five steaks a day, and McMansions, and Hummers?

New estimates from a Norwegian research project show meeting targets for minimizing global warming may be more achievable than previously thought. After the planet’s average surface temperature rose through the 1990s, the increase has almost leveled off at the level of 2000, while ocean water temperature has also stabilized, the Research Council of Norway said in a statement on its website.

Carrie: So Ken, I understand that you recently purchased a Prius and are pleased with your purchase! And I bought one several years ago, and am likewise very happy with it. So my first question would be: What do you think the plural of Prius is: Prius-us? Pri-i?

Ken: Well, did you know that Toyota asked Prius owners to vote for the plural form of Prius, because the actual Latin plural (priora) was already taken by a crappy Lada? I just read this on Wikipedia, so I am pretty much an "automotive journalist" now. Anyway, the plural is officially and legally prii.

Carrie: I did not know that! Very [...]

You know that thing about how if a butterfly flaps its wings in Brazil, it can cause a tornado in Texas? Well, something like that is happening right now. Except in this case, it's more like, if a butterfly hatches out of its cocoon in Montreal, it means that everyone south of there is going to die in fire. Because this particular butterfly is a Giant swallowtail butterfly called a Papilio cresphontes Cramer, indigenous to tropical areas in Central and South America, and the fact that it is now able to live in northern Nordic zones is attributable to climate change. There are plenty of other videos I [...]

Huh.Thanks to global warming, and the resultant increase in oceanic wind speeds, seabirds are flying faster than they've ever flown before. They're healthier—gaining weight and wingspan and everything—because of it. Man, if this had happened 40 years ago, Jonathan Livingston Seagull would never even have had to be written! But it was. And they made a movie, and Neil Diamond made the soundtrack. Lots of other songs have been written about seabirds, though. There's something about them that makes us feel lonely and wistful, I think, the way they soar for so long on the wind over the empty expanse of the sea. So out of reach. Oh, [...]

This is a very nice story about a fun renegade weatherman who is free to oppose global warming! This weatherman is in good company with other weatherpeople, it turns out. "Twenty-nine percent of the 121 meteorologists who replied [to an Emory University study] agreed with [KUSI's John] Coleman-not that global warming was unproven, or unlikely, but that it was a scam. Just 24 percent of them believed that humans were responsible for most of the change in climate over the past half century-half were sure this wasn't true, and another quarter were 'neutral" on the issue. "

"Nitrous oxide (N2O) has become the greatest threat to the ozone layer, a new analysis suggests. The ozone-destroying abilities of the gas have been largely ignored by policy-makers and atmospheric scientists alike, who have focused on the more potent chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs)-historically the dominant ozone-depleting substances in the atmosphere." So says Nature magazine, reporting on the work of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Boulder, Colorado (figures.)