Well, it's not so much that it is a common prediction as that it is a pedestrian response, and that is common.

Jim Hansen, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, has suggested that within ten years climate change could reach a point of no return. Yet outside of scientific circles, very few public figures have dared to imagine, much less advocate, policies adequate to this challenge. A glaring exception is Ross Gelbspan, a 66-year-old retired newspaper journalist turned lonely missionary, whom former Vice President Al Gore has compared to Upton Sinclair, Lincoln Steffens, and the other great muckraking reformists of the early twentieth century.

With his two landmark books on climate change, his high-level contacts among scientists and politicians, and his unflagging conviction, Gelbspan has been shuttling around the country and abroad, giving lectures and interviews and writing articles to promote a drastic project called the World Energy Modernization Plan. The plan dwarfs the Kyoto protocol and leaves the most far-reaching U.S. effort, the McCain-Lieberman Climate Stewardship and Innovation Act of 2005, in the dust.

At first glance, Gelbspan’s ideas seem romantic, extreme, and certainly unrealistic. Yet the more you learn about climate change, the more you may wonder whether in fact everyone else is being unrealistic in accepting timid measures to cope with such an overwhelming threat.

You've heard all about the possible consequences so I won't repeat them now. You may also have heard that emissions would have to be reduced by 70%, and soon, to avoid consequences. That won't happen, can't happen, and any plan - such as Gelbspan's - that would achieve that goal would have worse consequences than climate change. It's like hanging yourself to relieve pain. It works, but, but . . .

When he learned that some of the climate skeptics would be testifying—and be compelled under oath to reveal their funding sources—in St. Paul, Minnesota, where administrative judge Allan Klein was reviewing the environmental costs of coal-burning by the state’s power plants, Gelbspan resolved to use his own savings to fly out to cover the hearings. Their testimony forms some of the most shocking passages in The Heat Is On. “Expert” after “expert” revealed on the stand that their work had been paid for by big oil and coal concerns. Under questioning, many of their assertions about climate change were revealed as eccentric at best.

This is dirty pool, though that's just how the game is played. The error is in assuming that the work of these scientists is for sale, that they would deliver the conclusions desired for a price. If this is this case then all scientists, no matter what their positions, are paid flacks who conveniently deliver the desired results depending on the funding source. The proponents of climate change are even more guilty, since they get more money, than the opponents. This is nonsense. There may well be scientists whose views are for sale, but it takes more than a glance at funding sources to expose them. You have to actually, you know, have some empirical evidence and reason well from it.

What we really have here is an ordinary journalist hustling for bucks, hyping some cause to sell articles and books. And the author of the article in the normally reliable Conservation in Practice, Katherine Ellison, is a simple minded exploiter of popular junk science. CiP should be ashamed of itself.

European nations have moved far ahead of the United States in recognizing and reacting to the climate-change threat. Oil and gas interests aren’t as dominant a part of Europe’s economy, and there was no skewed debate there over the science. Instead, aggressive media coverage has helped build consensus for action and even for economic sacrifice. Not only have European nations signed on to Kyoto, but several have already adopted energy or carbon taxes. Still, even Europe’s most ambitious climate change goals, such as the U.K.’s target of cutting emissions by 60 percent over 1990 levels by 2050, aim well below the level of reductions that would actually make a difference, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). And of course, Europe’s efforts mean little in the absence of similar dramatic steps in the United States and major developing countries.

Europe has done nothing but talk. This is merely a PR campaign by venal politicians gulling the public. There are no reductions to speak of and never will be with the silly methods they advocate. Anyone who takes even the most cursory glance at their ideas bursts out laughing that anyone could be so stupid as to fall for that crap. This is just political posturing by Ellison, an opportunity for a little brain-dead America bashing for the oikophobes in her small and diminishing circle.

Gelbspan is still fishing for donations, but won't reveal funding sources.

. . . he’s told me he’s on the verge of giving up his crusade, due to financial pressures and sheer burnout. But through a turn of good fortune last year, a Canadian software entrepreneur stepped forward to fund Gelbspan “just to be me . . . no strings attach-ed,” he says, for another two years. (The funder wishes to remain anonymous.) So for now, Gelbspan is maintaining his website (www. heatisonline.org) and has teamed up with a New York-based group called the Climate Crisis Coalition.

Perhaps it's really an energy company, or Karl Rove, secretly funding a nutter who discredits that which he advocates by being so silly and extreme? Once you go down the path of imputing secret motives to people there's no end to the possibilities.

. . . this spring, he has a third book in mind, one exploring the question of the proper existential response to a period of real collapse.

He acknowledges the irony of writing yet another book—an investment in a civilized future—with the theme of questioning whether there will be a civilized future. Yet the idea is in keeping with his determination to continue being intellectually honest. “I know lots of other people who privately share my perception, but who escape emotionally into unlikely “rosy” scenarios, who find consolation in the positive potential of . . . various schemes which simply will not do the trick,” he says. “I think there are not enough people who have the courage to look reality in the face and not flinch, no matter how horrible the consequences.”

It should make a few bucks, and in future it may be a useful period piece providing a glimpse of the convoluted mind of a twen-cen enviro-whacko.

Update:

Another Rovian PsyOp?

But what if something wierd is going on? After contemplating all of the above, and recent news on the blogs, etc., one must consider all of the rumors going around that The Daily Kos blog is a Bush-CIA-RNC Nixonian construct designed to discredit the Democratic Party. Since all of the Rovian hallmarks are there, I suspect that it is likely, but I can't prove it.

Just think about it: you set up a couple of websites to get a million angry amateurs and mentally unstable kooks (many of them probably CIA junior staff guys and RNC junior staff folks having great fun posting and cheerleading, plus thousands of Christian right-wing extremist volunteers) to dig into the core of your opposition, and weaken it from within. What could be more Rovian? More devilishly ingenious and convoluted? And to hire a haute-nurdy ex-Army guy for cover... too clever to be an accident. Don't ya think?

And, just consider - how many blogs could rent a place in Vegas for a meeting of their readers? Could your blog do that? Hmmmm. I suspect half of the attendees were plants, collecting personal info, and half looked like homeless brought in for free food and tee-shirts to set the stage for the sting. This Frisch story - definitely suspicious effort to discredit the Dems: she provokes, takes a fake fall, and gets her checks and reappears in a few weeks with another alias and a fresh outrage in a few weeks.

And the selection of Lieberman as a target - highly suspicious to pick the one guy the Repubs would like to keep on board - it's perfect cover, while it turns the netroots against the Dems, and distracts them from the Repubs - and Lieberman will win anyway. Ned Lamont? A useful idiot in the game - a pawn, utterly unaware of his role, selected for the money of his own he could spend to complete the charade....after all, if half of the netroots are agent-provocateur posters with CIA-generated aliases and locations, where else would the money for a campaign come from?

Think about it. And this is happening shortly after Rove left his White House berth for "other operations." Could all of this be pure coincidence? Didn't Rove openly say "We have a plan, and we will win."?