Yoffe to Gore: You’re scary

June 25, 2007

Kevin Drum offers a challenge: “Today’s op-ed in the Washington Post by Emily Yoffe is literally so inane I’m speechless. The last sentence, in particular, deserves an award of some kind. Can someone please give it the mockery it so richly deserves?”

Well, mockery isn’t exactly my specialty, but I’m more than happy to point out how very dumb the op-ed is.

Given Kevin’s description, I kind of expected Yoffe to launch into some kind of Inhofe-inspired tirade, relying on ExxonMobil talking points and Crichton-like analysis. As it turns out, for most of the piece, Yoffe doesn’t disagree with warnings about global warming, she just doesn’t want to hear them.

[A]n essential part of the global warming awareness movement is the belief that scaring us to death is the best way to spur massive change. Gore explicitly compares warming to the Nazis of the last century and terrorists of this one.

And a recent New York Times profile of Gore tells that we are to be flooded with “An Inconvenient Truth.” It is going to be shown in schools; book versions for children and young adults and a children’s television show are planned. The global Live Earth concerts scheduled for July 7 are expected to raise millions, going to a three-year public relations effort, headed by Gore, to deluge us with bad news.

All this talk about catastrophic consequences is apparently quite a bummer. It’s got people worried and anxious to help avoid disaster. Yoffe seems to believe this is problematic because, well, the talk is scaring people. And that’s bad because feeling scared is unpleasant. Yoffe seems to prefer a public-education campaign about a pressing environmental crisis that’s more upbeat.

(Quick fact-check: Yoffe is wrong about Gore “explicitly” comparing climate change to the Nazis. Gore compared a number of global challenges that required a massive, coordinated response. WWII was one of these challenges, as is global warming.)

What about that last paragraph that annoyed Kevin? He’s right; it’s a doozy.

In his new book, “The Assault on Reason,” Gore denounces what he sees as today’s politics of fear. Yet his own campaign of mass persuasion — any such campaign — is not amenable to contradiction and uncertainty. It’s about fright and absolutes. But just because something can be plotted on an X and Y axis does not make it the whole truth.

Ouch, that is dumb.

I’m not annoyed by Yoffe’s column so much as I’m curious about what on earth she’s talking about. On the one hand she believes it’s “necessary” to curb “our profligate environmental ways,” but on the other she sees an upside to global warming (she mentions enjoying meals on a patio when it’s usually too cold). She believes scientists, but questions their conclusions (apparently, in part because weather forecasts are routinely mistaken). She wants more proof, but not the kind that’s “plotted on an X and Y axis.”

Someone help me out here. What’s the point of Yoffe’s argument?

the point of yoffe’s argument, steve, is to prove what a good little contrarian she is.

(alternately, it’s to prove what an idiot she is, but one doubts that was her explicit motivation.)

  • Gore explicitly compares warming to the Nazis of the last century and terrorists of this one.

    Funny she says this – I’ll be charitable and just guess that she hasn’t been paying attention. To wit:

    “Last week, Sterling Burnett – a senior fellow at the Exxon-backed National Center for Policy Analysis – compared Al Gore to Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels.

    “In this weekend’s Washington Post magazine, meteorologist Bill Gray – one of the most prominent climate skeptics – directly compared Al Gore to Adolf Hitler” Source

    “On the March 22 broadcast of Fox News Radio 600 KCOL’s Ride Home with The James Gang, host and KCOL program director Scott James likened former Vice President Al Gore’s “mass persuasion campaign” on global warming to Nazi propaganda efforts. Gore announced the initiative during his congressional testimony on March 21. James’ comments were similar to those of CNN Headline News host Glenn Beck, who on his March 22 broadcast said Gore “sounded a little bit like” Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels.” Source

  • OH PUH-LEEZ!!!!!!

    How about BushCo, with their massive effort to scare us silly about Iraq as a pretext to war?

  • “What’s the point of Yoffe’s argument?” CB

    Al Gore is a pooh pooh head. The less childish response is because Al is a buzz kill and making her feel bad about driving a penis extension.

    (No Apologies to Lenard Skynard..)

    Big wheels keep on turning
    Burning mo gas in my H2
    Stupid flicks on Global Warming
    I read Pollyanna once again
    And I think Al’s a sin, yes

    Well I heard mister Gore write about it
    Well, I heard ole Al warn us now
    Well, I hope Al Gore will remember
    A happy fool don’t need him around anyhow

    Dumb Yoffe Pollyanna
    Where the skies are so blue
    Dumb Yoffe Pollyanna
    Lord, She’s got happy pills for you

    In New Orleans we lost the whole city
    Now we denied what we should know
    Now hurricanes do not bother me
    Does your conscience bother you?
    Tell the truth

    Dumb Yoffe Pollyanna
    Where the skies are so blue
    Dumb Yoffe Pollyanna
    Lord, She’s got happy pills for you
    Here I come Pollyanna

    Now Big Oil corps has got the PR
    And they’ve been known to deny a fact or two
    Lord they get her off so much
    They pick me up when I’m feeling blue
    Now how about you?

    Dumb Yoffe Pollyanna
    Where the skies are so blue
    Dumb Yoffe Pollyanna
    Lord, She’s got happy pills for you

    Dumb Yoffe Pollyanna
    Where the skies are so blue
    Dumb Yoffe Pollyanna
    And the governor’s true
    Dumb Yoffe Pollyanna
    Lordy
    Lord, She’s got happy pills for you
    Yea, yea ExxonMobile’s got the answer

  • Typo alert. Final parenthetical in last big paragraph: “whether” should be “weather.”

  • “the point of yoffe’s argument, steve, is to prove what a good little contrarian she is.”

    It starts with typical media coverage where we are supposed to split the difference between two points of view, one reality-based, and the other a set of evolving, mutually contradictory lies. We’re given the impossible task of trying to find the average of the square root of an imaginary number and the result of infinity divided by zero. Try to plot that on an x and y axis.

    Or like trying to get Republicans to swear under oath – they know their heads will explode and they will burst into flames, or like Giuliani, have god attacking with thunderbolts.

    So the contrarian is left with a tough job. It’s like running the Republican party in California – you can’t find Americans to take the job because it’s so dirty and unappealing.

  • “Someone help me out here. What’s the point of Yoffe’s argument?”

    Best I can tell, her point is simply that people are being too gosh darn alarmist about global warming. She uses many specious and misleading arguments to do so, among them:

    “[A]n essential part of the global warming awareness movement is the belief that scaring us to death is the best way to spur massive change.”

    I found “An Inconvenient Truth” to be very upbeat. At the end of the film, Gore points out that keeping the planet safe and healthy is readily achievable with little pain. If anything, the film should reassure people that this is a fixable problem and one that they can personally help with.

    “she mentions enjoying meals on a patio when it’s usually too cold”

    She doesn’t seem to realize that if the weather changes drastically, she might have a warm night, but not the meal: if the farms of the U.S. become unusable due to warming, sure, we could farm farther north, but in the meantime there could be a shortfall of food – one can’t just uproot the food supply for 300 million people overnight. It’s the transition that will be a real killer.

    “Thanks to all the heat-mongering, it’s supposed to be a sign I’m in denial because I refuse to trust a weather prediction for August 2080, when no one can offer me one for August 2008…”

    Here she makes a classic mistake, confusing the ability to predict microstates of a system vs. macrostates. In physics (as in all scientific fields), it is well acknowledged that the precise state of a complex system cannot be predicted, only average properties and trends. This is what thermodynamics/statistical mechanics is all about. If I’ve got a collection of molecules (a gas) in a box, I can’t predict exactly where those molecules will be in the box at any instant in time (the microstate), but I can speak very well about the overall properties and evolution of the system – the temperature, pressure, etc. (macrostate). Weathermen focus on what the weather is doing on a day to day basis (microstates), while weather researchers are studying the global trends over long periods of time (macrostate). That isn’t to say that researchers can’t be wrong, but weathermen are focusing on a completely different aspect of the problem – comparing them to scientists is utterly absurd.

  • [A]n essential part of the global warming awareness movement is the belief that scaring us to death is the best way to spur massive change.

    Um … that’s funny. I don’t remember Gore or anyone else telling us we must give up all of our rights, detain people without charges, or invade countries on a whim, in order to fight global warming.

    But that’s what Bush has done with terrorism.

    I don’t remember Gore holding hearings and asking people if they were, are, or plan on driving a gas guzzler during the day and leaving all those old incandescent lights on at night.

    But that’s what they did with Communism.

    Sorry, but Gore’s argument relies on widely held facts that can be a bit scary, while Bush and the McCarthyites relied on fear and nothing else.

    Seems pretty obvious which is worse …

  • Mark D wrote: “Um … that’s funny. I don’t remember Gore or anyone else telling us we must give up all of our rights, detain people without charges, or invade countries on a whim, in order to fight global warming.”

    It’s worth mentioning that another flaw in Yoffe’s argument is that she seems to think that making people scared or worried is always a bad thing. I find that extremely silly, unless one thinks that having an ‘Eloi-esque’ society is a good thing. The critical questions that should be asked about giving people frightening/pessimistic news are: 1. Is it being given honestly? and 2. Is it being given for a productive end?

    Gore passes both criteria, since the science is sound, and the goal of giving the info is to get people more involved in the solution.

    Bush fails both criteria, since his scare tactics have been (almost always) based on complete B.S. and the only purpose of his scare mongering seems to be to secure political power for himself.

  • The point is that the only fear that the right wants is the fear of war, destruction, al-qaeda, 9/11, GOP is strong to protect us, we’re all going to die if we let the left (or the people) have anything or make any decisions.

    Why confuse the only GOP fear (ensuring that we are afraid) with something silly (like the fear of our entire planet not being able to sustain life)?

    Anyone read about global dimming? Gotta say, that definitely put the fear of god into me! http://www.globalissues.org/EnvIssues/GlobalWarming/globaldimming.asp

  • ***Someone help me out here.***
    ———————————-CB

    Okay—so how badly do you want me to mock this scurrilous little “She-Limbaugh wanna-be?” Are we talking a Monty Python level of mocking, or do you want the “back-beyond-the-dinosaurs-thermonuclear special?”

    The special comes with its own barbecue sauce (commonly referred to as 100-octane gasoline), a nice bonfire, and the family-sized bucket of popcorn….

  • I think the USGS just registered a spike on their irony monitoring equipment! Teh right accusing Gore of using fear as a political tool! As Mrs. Krabappel would say ‘HA!”

    As I have watched the whole debate unfold I have always wondered one thing, maybe you all can help me. What is the downside to moving to lower pollution and renewable energy? Let’s say the government mandates all 2nd and vacation homes must use solar power. There are roughly 3.5 to 4 million vacation homes in the US and that might require the manufacture, sale, installation, and shipment of something like 5.25 million solar panels (at a +/-2 panel per home average). This is bad why?

    The only people I can seem to find who would lose on this would be Oil/Gas/Coal/Utilities who make a subsidized fortune off our energy addiction.

    Help solve this puzzler!

  • MNProgressive wrote: “The only people I can seem to find who would lose on this would be Oil/Gas/Coal/Utilities who make a subsidized fortune off our energy addiction.

    Help solve this puzzler! ”

    Is this a trick question? 🙂

  • It reads to me like skeptics now realize they can no longer credibly claim the science behind global warming is bunk, so they are trying to say it’s no big deal. Step three is to claim there’s nothing we can do about it. I wrote about this here.

    So, she talks out both sides of her mouth: no, we aren’t anti-reason and anti-science, but just because science says so doesn’t make it so.

  • I couldn’t get past this line:

    One of [Gore’s] devotees, actor Leonardo DiCaprio, is coming out with his own environmental horror movie warning of human extinction if we continue living as we are. This would have a negative effect on the box office, but extinction might be preferable to the future Gore envisions.

    <Jon Stewart>WHHAAA??!?!?</Jon Stewart>

  • Her point?
    Are you kidding?
    The woman’s an ideolgoical scalawag.
    That’s her point.
    Logic, argumentative finesse, factual underpinnings are irrelevant to her pleading.
    She deserves and must get less attention.

  • Dan wrote: “This would have a negative effect on the box office, but extinction might be preferable to the future Gore envisions.”

    To steal another (sarcastic) Daily Show line, “I know I’d prefer extinction to driving a car that gets 80 mpg.”

  • Dan @ 15: The celebrity press corps folk such as Yoffe have had it in for DiCaprio ever since he got an interview with then-president Bill Clinton on global warming in 2000 and for some shocking reason failed to ask him about blow jobs. (You see, sticking to the topic = “unserious reporter”, whereas parroting RNC-generated attack talking points = “serious reporter”.)

  • I think her point is that Gore can’t be trusted because he’s running for president. Oh wait, that’s her point for after Gore announces he’s going to run for president.

    Hmm… Maybe she’s saying that graphs and science are too hard for morons like her, and that there’s some “alternative” climate science we should also be using that involves Jesus and tortillas with virgins on them.

    She’s probably also trying to say that American have every right to be frightened of brown people who might kill a few thousand of us for invading their countries to get their oil, but actual problems that might kill millions of people are just too darn scarey.

    Like every other “tough guy” Republican, she’s saying that it’s better to hide under the bed than it is to piss your pants.

  • What’s the point of Yoffe’s argument

    To unshackle us from our childish insistence on looking for points in arguments.

  • They want us to be frightened enough to vote GOP but not so frightened that we fear the end of the world. That’s what they want, remember? They will already be raptured out of here, so what?

  • You have to use sound analysis:
    You see, Gore‘s plot is on the X and Y (“not Z“) axis of evil.

  • “she mentions enjoying meals on a patio when it’s usually too cold”

    She doesn’t seem to realize that if the weather changes drastically, she might have a warm night, but not the meal: if the farms of the U.S. become unusable due to warming, sure, we could farm farther north, but in the meantime there could be a shortfall of food – one can’t just uproot the food supply for 300 million people overnight. It’s the transition that will be a real killer. -gg

    Two words: Soylent Green

  • 2Manchu wrote: “Two words: Soylent Green”

    Nice… Maybe that explains the border fence – it’s not to keep Mexicans out, but to keep U.S. citizens in. Make the whole country a free-range farm…

  • Shorter Emily Yoffe: Won’t somebody please think of the children!

    Just because something can be read on the Washington Post op-ed page does not make it informed or factual. In fact, chances are it is probably neither.

  • I wonder if this op-ed is just the latest exercise in Yoffe’s “Human Guinea Pig” column she writes for Slate where she does “things you might consider doing yourself, until you reject the idea as outlandish.”

    Maybe the next installment of the series will be about getting a moronic op-ed placed in the Washington Post and then dealing with the inevitable blogswarm of mockery and insults.

    At least I hope that it what it is – because if not, then this is just sad.

  • yoffe’s article reminds me of a funny story.
    i spent new year’s 2004 with some friends of mine in new orleans, back in the halcyon days when it was still above water. a few days into the new year (say, january 3rd), four of us took a trip out of town to visit the abita brewery. we got there a little too late for the tour about to start, so we signed up for the next one and decided to have lunch at the brew pub.
    it was hot that day, like africa-hot. we’d driven out in a convertible with the top down, and our driver, my friend’s new husband, wore shorts. i remember being envious, sweltering there in my jeans, because i hadn’t packed any shorts to wear, because, well, because it was winter.
    as we enjoyed our frosty mugs and waited for our baskets of southern-fried deliciousness, i happened to overhear some folks at another table talking about the weather.
    ‘if this is global warming, bring it on,’ one of them said.

    i wonder if they still feel that way.

    ps i’m not sure why folks are taking yoffe so seriously (especially the folks at the post), since her day job is writing the ‘dear prudence’ column over at slate. don’t get me wrong, i respect and enjoy her work there, but she’s freakin’ ann landers, basically. what is she doing writing op-eds for the post? sure, they own slate, but it seems to me that there’re plenty of heavy hitters over there who’d have something credible to say on the subject of global warming, something a little more substantive than ‘stop scaring the poor children!’ just a thought.

  • 2Manchu, you may think that Soylent Green will be a panacea, but I have an ugly secret to tell you about it–

    SOYLENT GREEN IS PEOPLE!!!!!!!!!

  • I think sarabeth has it. Point? There is no point.

    I suppose it could be “Al Gore shouldn’t be making everyone so scared about something I can’t understand,” but that would be giving her too much credit for taking this writing assignment as something more serious than her usual fluff. The woman wrote a book about living with a neurotic dog, for goodness sake. Point?

    I, however, will always remember this point: If you’re going to make a reference to mathematical terms in an op-ed, it’s probably better if you haven’t previously written about being a math moron.

    The Math Moron

  • … you may think that Soylent Green will be a panacea, but I have an ugly secret to tell you about it–

    SOYLENT GREEN IS PEOPLE!!!!!!!!!

    That may be, but surely you don’t expect us to try and stomach Soylent Yellow or Soylent Red?

  • Why would a wookie, an eight foot tall wookie, choose to live on Endor? It does not make sense!

  • “Someone help me out here. What’s the point of Yoffe’s argument? ”

    I would bet that the point is that she wants to continue to drive her Hummer (or Escalade, or Tahoe, etc..) without feeling guilty. After all, she can afford it, so how dare that scary old Algore try to make her feel bad?

  • Al Gore blew it, big time. X/Y axes are so square. Everybody knows that, when it comes to global warming you use polar coordinates.

  • Emily Yoffe’s point ?

    Simple. To be published in the WaPo and, hence, recognized as a serious person and an important thinker. To acquire the legitimizing symbols of punditry and cash on them.

    That’s about it.

    The country is 100% drowned in bullshit. It’s not that the public discourse is right or wrong or skewed or anything. The American public discourse is just plain bullshit : bullshit in the Frankfurtian meaning of the word : meaningless ersatz of communication for the sake of it. The things that “matter” occur at a purely symbolic level, devoid of any substance. Yak yak yak.

    Hence, someone like Yoffe gets away with writing this kind of tripe and the WaPo gets away with pretending it’s worth publishing

    Only dirty hippies like bloggers still care about substance.

  • We’re given the impossible task of trying to find the average of the square root of an imaginary number and the result of infinity divided by zero. Try to plot that on an x and y axis.

    Brilliant. And what’s worse is that we agree to try to complete that task over and over and over again – in the name of comity or civility or whatever the newspeak is for futility.

  • Who is this twit anyway, other than someone who writes for Slate? Meaning, does she have any actual qualifications to opine on anything?

  • Glenn-

    “Who is this twit anyway, other than someone who writes for Slate? Meaning, does she have any actual qualifications to opine on anything?”

    She thinks she’s clever. That should be more than enough. After all, MoDo is clever and she gets a whole regular column in the TImes. Not that it’s worth anything, either, but there you are.

  • The song was kind of funny, but you should apologize to Lynard Skynard because the group’s name is spelled wrong and the group, well, didn’t write the lyrics. (Also, though I think they hit the “Saturday Night Special” issue right, Watergate bothered me a whole lot, as does my conscience. So, I’m not too sure about their politics.)

    Now, if you’ll give me three steps . . .

  • she’s getting her readers on her side by stating her belief in global warming in order to do a hit piece on gore. when a winger can’t win an argument they question your motives. it’s not what you do it’s how you go about it.

  • Could someone inform me who exactly this bimbo is? It’s like that drooler Elizabeth Hasselbeck on The View – someone who was dumb enough to pass the IQ test low enough to get on Survivor has something to say anyone needs to hear????

  • Someone help me out here. What’s the point of Yoffe’s argument?

    Just that Al Gore is nothing but a big ol’ Mr. Party Pooper!

  • This kind of crap will continue to happen as columnists continue to write political columns about science. Science is a method not an opinion, that is the fundamental flaw of all the political op-eds concerning climate change.

    BTW, I’m not scared by climate change or the ignorance concerning it. Either we deal with it or humans disappear from the planet. I don’t see either scenario as particularly bad for the earth.

  • She’s got the beauty life everything is going just fine for her so get out with your reality. Don’t tell her that things aren’t so good for the rest of us cause that might just harsh her buzz.

  • What Ms Yoffe missed was to mention the concept of polar cities in the future, where people might have to live to survive. See Wikipedia entry and Google for “polar cities”. Scary. Emily will regret her humor later…..but she’s a good egg. Cut her some slack. She meant well….

  • From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

    Jump to: http://climatechange3000.blogsite.com

    Polar cities are proposed sustainable polar retreats designed to house human beings in the future, in the event that global warming causes the central and middle regions of the Earth to become uninhabitable for a long period of time. Although they have not been built yet, some futurists have been giving considerable thought to the concepts involved.

    High-population-density cities, to be built near the Arctic Rim with sustainable energy and transportation infrastructure, will require substantial nearby agriculture. Boreal soils are largely poor in key nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus, but nitrogen-fixing plants (such as thevarious alders) with the proper symbiotic microbes and mycorrhizal fungi can likely remedy such poverty without the need for petroleum-derived fertilizers. Regional probiotic soil improvement should perhaps rank high on any polar cities priority list. James Lovelock’s notion of a widely distributed almanac of science knowledge and post-industrial survival skills also appears to have value.

    Retrieved from “http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polar_Cities”

  • Polar cities in the far distant future to house remnants of humankind
    who survive the apocalypse of devastating global warming? The casual
    reader might think I am an alarmist or a mere scare-monger, but I am
    neither. I am a visionary.

    Polar cities are proposed sustainable polar retreats designed to house
    human beings in the future, in the event that global warming causes
    the central and middle regions of the Earth to become uninhabitable
    for a long period of time. Although they have not been built yet, some
    futurists have been giving considerable thought to the concepts
    involved.

    I know, I know, the very thought of “polar cities” sounds like some
    science-fiction movie you don’t want to see. But it might be
    instructive to think about such sustainable Artic and Antartic
    communities for the future of humankind. If worse come to worse, and
    things fall apart, perhaps by the year 2500 or the year 3000, we must
    might need polar cities. And perhaps the time to start thinking about
    them, and designing and planning them (and maybe even building, or
    pre-building them), is now.

    Here is more food for thought, from an entry in Wikipedia:
    “High-population-density cities, to be built in the polar regions,
    with sustainable energy and transportation infrastructures, will
    require substantial nearby agriculture. Boreal soils are largely poor
    in key nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus, but nitrogen-fixing
    plants (such as the various alders in the Artic region) with the
    proper symbiotic microbes and mycorrhizal fungi can likely remedy such
    poverty without the need for petroleum-derived fertilizers. Regional
    probiotic soil improvement should perhaps rank high on any polar
    cities priority list. James Lovelock’s notion of a widely distributed
    almanac of science knowledge and post-industrial survival skills also
    appears to have value.”

    Oh, I know it’s fashionable to mock global warming alarmists and doom
    and gloom futurists with no credentials except a keyboard and a blog,
    but there’s a method to the madness of thinking about polar cities.
    Maybe, just maybe, if enough people hear about the concept of polar
    cities and realize how serious such a possibility is, maybe, just
    maybe, they will get off their tuches and start thinking hard and fast
    about how we humans are causing climate change by our lifestyles and
    inventions and gadgets and need for cars and airplanes and trains and
    ships and factories and coal-burning plants across the globe — and
    then maybe it won’t be fashionable to mock global warming alarmists
    anymore.

    The future does not look good. But we can do something now. No, not
    building polar cities now. That’s for the future to decide. What we
    can do now is stop what we are doing now and start planning in a more
    sane way for the future of the species. If we even care. I do. We must
    stop all human acitivity that is responsible for emitting carbon
    dioxide into the Earth’s atmosphere. Now. It’s getting later earlier
    and earlier, I tell you.

  • POLAR CITIES ENVISIONED TO SURVIVE GLOBAL WARMING

    Webposted: July 1, 2007

    Environmental activist Dan Bloom has come up with a solution to global
    warming that apparently no one else is talking about: polar cities.
    That’s right, Bloom envisions future polar cities will house some 200
    million survivors of global warming in the far distant future (perhaps
    in the year 2500, he says on his blog), and he’s lobbying on the
    Internet for their planning, design and construction — NOW!

    “Sounds nutty, I know” the 58-year-old self-described “eco-dreamer”
    says from his home in Asia, where he has been based since 1991. “But
    global warming is for real, climate change is for real, and polar
    cities just might be important if humankind is to survive the coming
    ‘events’, whatever they might be, in whatever form they take.”

    Bloom, a 1971 graduate of Tufts University in Boston, says he came up
    with the idea of polar cities after reading a long interview with
    British scientist James Lovelock, who has predicted that in the
    future, the only survivors of global warming might be around 200
    million people who migrate to the polar regions of the world.

    “Lovelock pointed me in this direction,” Bloom says. “Although he has
    never spoken of polar cities per se, he has talked about the
    possibility that the polar regions might be the only place where
    humans can survive if a major cataclysmic event occurs as a direct
    result of global warming, in the far distant future. I think we’ve got
    about 30 generations of human beings to get ready for this.”

    Does Bloom, who has created a blog and video on YouTube, think that
    polar cities are practicial?

    “”Practical, necessary, imperative,” he says. “We need to start
    thinking about them now, and maybe even designing and building them
    now, while we still have time and transportation and fuel and
    materials and perspective. Even if they never get built, the very idea
    of polar cities should scare the pants off people who hear about the
    concept and goad them into doing something concrete about global
    warming. That’s part of my agenda, too.”

    For more information: http://climatechange3000.blogspot.com
    GOOGLE: “polar cities”
    WIKIPEDIA: “polar cities”
    BLOG SEARCH: “polar cities”

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