I don't know if it's Glenn Reynolds who coined it, but about global warming he's said: "I'll treat it like a crisis when the people telling me it's a crisis act like it's a crisis."

I was browsing Snopes.com when I came across this.

My impression was that Snopes was a fairly reliable source, and if it's true, then Bush's Crawford ranch is much more environmentally-friendly than Gore's Tennessee home.

Now Gore uses what are called carbon offsets, which basically involves paying someone to plant trees. The idea is, you gobble up a ton of natural resources and pollute the air, but you pay someone to try to undo your damage. Doesn't that seem a little ass-backwards? Isn't that kind of like littering, but paying someone to follow you and pick up your shit? Why not just reduce your usage in the first place?

When I was in high school I read New World New Mind, which gave a rundown of our evolutionary past, and argued that our nervous systems are evolved to detect immediate threats, like bears, and not slow, massive, building threats like overpopulation, global warming, and nuclear war. They argue the need for us to adjust our cognition to recognize these new, and often more dangerous, kinds of threats. On nukes I wholeheartedly agree. On global warming, I just don't see it.

Maybe I don't understand the science well enough, but I can't bring myself to perceive it as a threat on scale with the use of nuclear weaponry. That still reigns in my mind as the greatest threat.

So should Gore win the prize? Hmm...