The Future is Green

Saving Polar Bears in the Bedroom: Free Endangered Species Condoms

You can't make this stuff up.

On Valentines Day the Center for Biological Diversity began distributing 100,000 free condoms in all 50 states using a volunteer army of some 3,000 dedicated souls. Their effort, called Endangered Species Condoms, is designed to educate people about the ways unsustainable human population growth is driving many species to extinction at a cataclysmic rate.

The condoms come in a variety of colorful wrappers featuring pictures of endangered critters, with slogans like, "Wrap with care . . . save the polar bear," and "Hump smarter . . . save the snail darter." Honest to god, I swear I'm not making this up.

According to the organization, their volunteers range from "ministers to grandmothers to healthcare providers to college students and biologists." Each package contains two condoms packaged with original artwork, facts about overpopulation and the extinction crisis, and suggestions on how the human population can be stabilized.

More power to them, I say. Visitors to the program's web site can enter a drawing to win a lifetime supply of free condoms. I wonder how they determine exactly how many you'll need.

Stop buying nonsense from climate change skeptics on a snowy evening

I have a splendid view of snowy treetops outside my living room windows. It is lovely to sit here in my nice warm apartment and watch the sweep of easy wind and downy flake falling lazily from the sky. But it is becoming harder to enjoy the view.

Every time it snows I can just hear climate change skeptics licking their chops, smug in their certainty that we are dumb enough to believe the continued existence of winter disputes overwhelming evidence that the planet is warming.

Must we continue, every time it snows, to ask if there is some mistake in the consensus among 97% of the world's climate scientists? No one who has read any of the literature believes that a warming planet means the end of winter.

As Thomas Friedman, writes in today's NY Times, "The fact that it has snowed like crazy in Washington — while it has rained at the Winter Olympics in Canada, while Australia is having a record 13-year drought — is right in line with what every major study on climate change predicts: The weather will get weird; some areas will get more precipitation than ever; others will become drier than ever."

Friedman's column, Global Weirding Is Here is worth reading.