Check out Paul Krugman’s chart created to quell global warming deniers like George Will who use inaccurate and carefully selected datasets to make their case that warming is not taking place.

You might want to check out this image too.

temperatures 1880-2006

We went to the market this morning because Saturdays are getting incredibly crowded. We were surprised by how many people were there including the full range of vendors, though our favorite egg people weren’t there- we’ll see them on Saturday.

Shopping this way not only saves money and provides entertainment, it alerts you to what’s available locally and when. It’s still early but local asparagus is nearly over. There’s still plenty from New Jersey (The Garden State) which seems pretty local to me but Boo disagrees- she thinks there is a difference. 300 hundred miles of trucking I guess.

This past year we went almost every week, even in the dead of winter. The stalls morph into tents with propane heaters blasting and everyone has a chill somewhere. The local produce is things like cabbage, potatoes, apples-things that store well. You can still get nearly anything else from far off places. At least we’re thinking about the carbon cost when we pick up fruit from South America.

The food business in America amazes me. For low artificially low prices we can get virtually anything, anytime. When I was in Paris a few years ago we arrived early on a Saturday at the apartment we rented in Marais. Though lagged we wanted to wander and the first place we found was a weekly street market. I’d always heard about the quality of French fresh food but this was totally amazing. Perfect rows of glistening shrimp lovingly packed in ice, table after table of beautiful fruit and vegetables with literally dozens of varieties of each type. It was a cook’s paradise though I certainly was not planning on spending time cooking in the food capital of the Western world!

That night we had our first French meal in a restaurant in Place de Vosges, the amazing medieval plaza that fills an entire block. The highlight was incredible asparagus served with a lemony hollandaise. They were very thick and a pale green and melted in your mouth like no vegetable I’d eaten before. When Carol (my ex and still friend) bit into her order the expression on her face was priceless. Perhaps we’ll achieve that degree of subtlety and appreciation for our food in a few hundred years- though it may have taken a planetary crisis to force us down that path.

Due to warming and deforestation, a new study finds that mass extinctions are taking place with up to 25% of land mammals and 33% of sea mammals disappearing during this century. Biodiversity is essential to maintaining a healthy bio-system and a genetic pool that can support continued evolution. The loss of these species will have incalculable effects on humanity.

We’re destroying this planet as fast as we can and we have a vice-presidential candidate who does not believe in science.

Newsflash: God is not going to bail us out.

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…