Despite an unusually cool summer in southern California there has been a drastic upturn in the average number of very hot days during the past few years with more to come.

Microwaves can be used to turn bio waste like wood chips into charcoal, effectively sequestering their carbon. The charcoal can be used as fertilizer and for filtering. Burning it would just release all the carbon- yes, those of us who prefer charcoal grilling are dumping carbon straight into the atmosphere!

Sarah Palin apparently believes dinosaurs and men co-existed on earth at the same time: She has seen pictures of man’s footprints in dinosaur fossils. Sarah, there’s this thing called Photoshop…

NASA has a devastating look at the drought being experienced this year in parts of America. It is rated at the worst level that NASA tracks. Be sure to check out the images and maps- they are frightening. If this isn’t a repeat of the Dust Bowl experienced during the Depression in the 1930s I don’t know what is.

Worldchanging has a great post on new terms coming out of the climate energy crisis. One of them, Super-spikes, refers to circumstances where change occurs very rapidly due to a cascading effect. In a previous post I talked about how rising gas prices were adding to indebtedness as large car and SUV owners see the value of their vehicles plummet. This an example of how a super-spike works, in this case rapid rise of energy costs doing a serious number on the economy. Another example is the implosion of financial markets as liquidity dried up due to fears about the viability of banks and mortgage lenders.

The problem with super-spikes is that they are often unpredictable in the speed and range of their effect. Given that we’ve been living with our heads in the sand, we’ve missed the window of slowing things gradually and easing into a new worldview. Instead we’re in the super-spike model where change will be catastrophic with no amount of wealth making any difference in our ability to change. We cannot throw dollars, technology or science at the problem and expect a neat solution. Instead we will be fighting trench warfare for the foreseeable future.

Another example of a super-spike is the current fire season in California. Already the worst season on record even though it is really just starting, there are hundreds of fires burning thousands of square miles of forest. This shows another characteristic of super-spikes: They are exponential- which means the effects multiply at very rapid rates once a critical mass is reached. It is literally a wildfire effect.

A big part of the problem is that politicians are very poorly equipped to deal with super-spikes as we saw with Katrina and 9/11. They stall, hoping to pass responsibility onto the next Congress, President or City Council. Unfortunately super-spikes require immediate, decisive action.

Finally, super-spikes force us into a reactive position where we are so busy responding to immediate threats that we have no breathing room to build a strategic response. The politicians currently in office and previous Republican Presidents back to Nixon, with their caving in to energy and automotive lobbies, have made it impossible to develop a strategic, long term response to climate change. Instead we are literally putting out fires.

“Al Gore came out with a movie called ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ in 2006, when Hummer sales were still good,” said Robert Barbera, the chief economist of ITG. “The inconvenient truth, in fact, is that prices are what matter. With gas prices soaring, Gore is going to get his collapse in Hummer sales, not because people went green, but because they wouldn’t spend the extra green to buy the gas.”

from It’s Easier to Be Green if It Also Saves Money 

It’s going to be driven by economics not politics. 3 out of 5 Times editorials this morning are about climate issues.