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Al Gore, Nobel winner?

Al Gore has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Two out of three is pretty darn good

It's a banner day in celebrity "journalism," y'all. Two out of the three items in TMZ's Party Favors section were environment-related:

"Monster Garage" host Jesse James was slapped with a $271,250 fine by California air regulators, claiming his custom bikes didn't comply with the state's clean-air laws. The bikes were spewing 10 times the legal limits of hydrocarbons ... While traveling to the U.S. to receive an environmental award, Prince Charles opted to take a commercial plane instead of his private jet because he didn't want his visit to cause unnecessary pollution ... An escaped prisoner who stole singer Crystal Gayle's tour bus was arrested in Daytona Beach after a five-day manhunt.

OK, OK, the banner day was actually Sunday -- can I help it if I've been too busy going to class to keep up with my gossip blog reading? (And yes, that is the stale stench of martyrdom in the air.)

The report may pass over some of the worst dangers

The report hasn't even been released yet, but one of the big stories around this Friday's release by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is the conservative edge to the final product, which does not fully account for the melting of the Greenland and/or Antarctic ice sheets.

New study scares the ess out of us

A new "semi-empirical" method of estimating sea level rise shows that earlier techniques underestimated the likely rise, according to research published in Science online.

And also: ew

After the Washington Post published a long (and I would say incomplete) thumb-sucker on whether cloned livestock could be organic, the USDA shut the door on that possibility.

Arch Coal gets the go ahead for record-size strip mining permit

Eight years after a federal judge prevented Arch Coal Inc., one of the biggest and most active players on the West Virginia coal mining scene, from obtaining a permit to mine 3,113 acres near Blair, WV in Logan County, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers issued the permit instead. Though slightly smaller in size at 2,278 acres, the "dredge-and-fill" permit nevertheless allows Arch's Spruce No. 1 Mine to bury nearly seven miles of streams and is the largest permit ever issued in the history of mountaintop-removal mining in West Virginia.

Two notes

A couple of things to note. One, don’t miss Amanda’s interview with famed Republican language massager Frank Luntz today. I’ll be very interested to hear people’s reactions. Also, scroll down […]

Hey, We Made a Boo-Boo

Yellowstone grizzlies may lose protections, while also losing food source What do beetles, pine trees, grizzly bears, and global warming have in common? Check it: the U.S. plans to lift […]

One if By Land, Zilch if By Air

New U.S. nuclear-security policy draws fire from critics The safe, clean Nuclear Regulatory Commission has revised its security policy, drawing criticism from members of Congress and others. The new policy […]

The myth of ‘both sides do it’ emerges yet again

Several people last week linked to a piece by leading climate researcher Kerry Emanuel in the Boston Review. I finally got around to reading it, and sure enough, the first […]