Balog was just written up in the Wall Street Journal for his Extreme Ice Survey, which involves a mix of mountaineering and nature photography to capture the effects of global warming. Balog explains:

Q: How did you come up with the idea for "Extreme Ice Survey"?

A: The New Yorker asked me to shoot a story on climate change in 2005, and I wound up going to Iceland to shoot a glacier. The real story wasn't the beautiful white top. It ended up being at the terminus of the glacier where it's dying. That idea gestated in my mind for a year and eventually turned into the "Extreme Ice Survey" in 2006.

Q: How do images of glaciers collapsing bring the idea of climate change home?

A: There were a lot of repeat photos that showed glaciers retreating over a hundred years. That's pretty abstract. I wanted to show a shorter term time lapse that would make people think, "My god, little Emily was in first grade in April and she's in second grade in October. I remember this. It's happening in my life."

The EIS photos are arresting and heartbreaking — they show the icebergs breaking off from the glaciers and going out to sea, and in one case you can actually see an iceberg on a beach where surf and sand meet the deaths of the icecaps. There are some utterly lovely pictures of "meltwater" floating on top of the ice, as well as some disgusting images showing the silt-befouled water encroaching on the ice, over the past few years.

But meanwhile, Balog's site also has a section called "Techno Sapiens" which celebrates the cyborgs in our midst, including gorgeous looking artificial limbs and wearable computers. Back in 1996, Balog talked to Fortune Magazine about it:

On the following pages, photographer James Balog documents what he calls Techno sapiens: fusions of humans and machines that can be found today in American research labs and hospitals, and even on the streets. Add up the images, says Balog, and it's not hard to envision a race of flesh-and-technology beings with electric hands, legs of steel that run a two-minute mile, and perceptual powers unknown in nature. "Imagine you are a traveler from another galaxy," Balog says. "You land in North America today and look around carefully, with fresh eyes. This is what you might see."

It's an interesting contrast, but maybe not a contradiction: He worries what we're doing to the planet, but he's also celebrated the way we're transforming ourselves.

There are tons more photos at the links. [Extreme Ice Survey and James Balog Photography]

Icebergs 200 feet tall, formerly part of the Greenland Ice Sheet, float into the North Atlantic Ocean, raising sea levels as they melt.

Jökulsárlón, Iceland. Decaying ice and icebergs on the surface of the Jökulsárlón in southeast Iceland. The ice drains off the great icecap called the Vatnajökull.

Columbia Glacier, Alaska. Columbia Glacier calves icebergs into Columbia Bay west of Valdez, Alaska. The ice shown in the bergs was deposited in snowstorms 300 to 500 years ago.

Columbia Glacier, Alaska. Contrasts between clean glacial melt water and water laden with eroded silt color these lakes on the surface of the East Fork of Columbia Glacier. Black stripes are erosional debris called "moraines."

Svínafellsjökull Glacier, Iceland. An EIS team member provides scale in a massive landscape of crevasses on the Svínafellsjökull Glacier in Iceland.

Greenland Ice Sheet, Greenland. On the surface of the Greenland Ice Sheet east of Kangerlussuaq, a meltwater stream known by the French word "moulin" (in English it means "mill," as in windmill).

Icebergs calved from Whiteout Glacier, Alaska.

River water and seawater polish the surface of a berg in Iceland.

Meltwater on surface of Columbia Glacier, Columbia Bay, Alaska.

Decaying ice and icebergs on the surface of the Jökulsárlón in southeast Iceland. The ice drains off the great icecap called the Vatnajokull.

Meltwater on surface of Columbia Glacier, Columbia Bay, Alaska.

Kenny's Arm

Breathing Observation Bubble

Wearable computer

1: Pump the atmosphere full of nanomachines to get "smart weather."

In Century Rain by Alastair Reynolds, people seed the oceans and the upper atmosphere with tons of tiny floating machines, "invisible to the eye, harmless to people." They controlled the weather and fixed the climate by reflecting radiation here or absorbing it there. The machines made clouds appear and disappear and controlled ocean currents. And it works — for a while. The climate starts returning to pre-2050 conditions. But then the nanomachines stop obeying orders, and even create an obscene symbol off the Bay Of Biscay "that had to be airbrushed out of every satellite image." The scientists try to release even smarter nanomachines to deal with the first batch of nanomachines and — well, you can guess how well that turns out.

2: A ring of ice.

In the Stanislaw Lem novel Fiasco, scientists launch an artificial ring of ice into the atmosphere of the planet Quinta to reduce temperatures so the oceans will recede and more land mass will be available. The mass of the ice ring is equal to around 1 percent of the oceans' volume. The protagonists speculate that the ring was created by causing lightning in the upper atmosphere to create a kind of ice rail-gun that could shoot the ice up into orbit. This being a Stanislaw Lem novel, the whole thing falls apart due to political wrangling before it can be completed, so huge chunks of ice rain down onto the planet's equator in a never-ending torrent.

3: Use special bacteria.

In the story "Noah's Ark" by Narendra Desirazu, we find bacteria on Mars, with bizarre properties — it hibernates just below the freezing point of water, but when the water melts, the bacteria goes into frantic activity to get the water to refreeze. So scientists struggle with the effort to introduce the bacteria only to the icecaps and other areas where they want to reverse melting — without letting it get into, say, our oceans and stuff. Luckily, there's a happy but "ambivalent" ending.

4: Build a giant sunshade around the Earth.

We build huge space elevators and a massive sunshade in The Night Sessions by Ken MacLeod, causing the dawn light to look all trippy:

The dawn sky glowed innumerable shades of green, from lemon to duck-egg to almost blue, like the background colour in a Hindu painting, and turned slowly to a pure deep blue over ten minutes or more as he watched. He dozed again.

Also, Arthur C. Clarke's Fountains Of Paradise includes a ring of satellites and space stations linked together around a planet's equator by cables and other connectors, which becomes an unbroken wheel of tremendous stability — which presumably can reflect a lot of sunlight. And in Clarke's Childhood's End, the Overlords are able to use polarized fields to "make the sun go out" for a particular region of South Africa, to punish the residents for depriving the white minority of civil rights. And in Venus Of Dreams by Pamela Sargent, colonists cool the planet Venus by using a giant Parasol to shade the planet, plus bombarding the planet with ice asteroids.

5: Take Earth further away from the sun.

The Futurama episode "Crimes Of The Hot" is like a smorgasbord of global-warming solutions. We learn that humans stopped global warming in the 21st century by bombarding the oceans with ice from space. And now that the planet is heating up again, due to the emissions from unsafe robots, there are a few solutions, including a giant space mirror (which goes awry) and shutting down all the robots. But in the end, the easiest solution is to have all the robots emit their exhaust at once, sending the planet further away from the sun — and giving us an extra week in each year, which can be Robot Party Week!

And in the novel The Circle: A Science Fiction Thriller by Harold R. Watson, the High Rulers Of Earth decide to haul the planet away from the sun to put it into a deep freeze for one year. At the end of that time, they'll return Earth to its original orbit. As some of the planet's icy covering melts, it'll have the effect of restoring the ozone layer, and after about five years, enough vegetation will have grown to make the planet habitable again. Suuuure.

6: Hack The Human Genome

It's a radical solution, but it might be the only way. In the story "Dear Abbey" by Terry Bisson, a group of radical environmentalists come up with a plan:

Dear Abbey is a radical, long-range plan for saving the environment that will make Ted Kaczynski look like Mother Teresa. It involves an alarmingly complex but theoretically possible piece of genetic engineering that will, let us say, severely inhibit the ability of humans to degrade the environment. Severe being the operative modifier. You can't call it terrorism because no one will be killed, directly at least, and no one will even know for sure what is happening until it has been operating for at least a decade, by which time it will be too late to undo it. The human cost will be high but not nearly as high as the cost of doing nothing, or of simply continuing with the kind of pointless stunts for which the environmental movement is known.

7: Restart the Gulf Stream

Kim Stanley Robinson is the champion of depicting environmental disasters and geo-hacking projects, and his environmental thrillers Forty Signs Of Rain and Fifty Degrees Below deal with the disastrous effects of global warming. Among other things, Fifty Degrees includes scientists trying to restart the stalled Gulf Stream. The ice caps melt completely, and in the winter, Washington, D.C. hits fifty degrees below. So an enormous fleet of ships ventures out to dump millions of tons of ice into the ocean in the hopes of rebooting the Gulf Stream. A fleet of 3,500 oil tankers is available to transport the salt, and five hundred million metric tons of salt is needed — about two years' worth of total world production.

8: Shut down all our technology

I'm still not entirely sure what happened at the end of last year's "remake" (quotation marks are necessary here) of The Day The Earth Stood Still. Keanu/Klaatu was going to unleash nanomachines to disassemble everything on Earth, because that would save the planet. You know that makes sense! And then he changed his mind and did some kind of EMP-ish thing that made all electricity go out and all technology stop working. So the human race was allowed to survive, but with no technology. Keanu is merciful! All hail Keanu!

9: Open a big hole.

Global warming? No problem! Just open a dimensional gateway and pump all the extra heat somewhere else. That's the scheme that a science whiz comes up with in the Stargate Atlantis episode "Brain Storm" (featuring Bill Nye the Science Guy, among other luminaries.) Of course, it all goes horribly wrong and the gathering of eminent scientists is in danger of freezing to death.


Also, in the Syfy movie Lost City Raiders, the world is flooded due to global warming. And the Catholic Church has the answer — an ancient hole in the ground, which will drain off all the excess water to... somewhere. But you need to find the secret hidden keys to open it. It all makes perfect sense!

10: Kill the aliens who are causing the problem in the first place.

But of course, you know deep down that global warming can't really be the result of our own completely harmless activities. There must be aliens behind it — probably evil dinosaur aliens. In the Syfy original TV movie, Heatstroke, it turns out that dinosaur people have been secretly working to pump out greenhouse gases to raise our planet's temperature and prepare the way for their invasion. But the U.S. government knows about this and sends a secret taskforce (why not a whole army? Budget constraints, I guess) to stop them. The aliens are operating on a tropical island, where an ex-swimsuit model just happens to be shooting a new calendar. It's like synergy! Oh, and there's also The Arrival directed by David Twohy, where Charlie Sheen discovers that weird double-jointed aliens are producing greenhouse gases to mess us up and transform our planet. Good thing it's Charlie Sheen, then.


Oh, and the Silurians in Doctor Who And The Silurians also have a similar idea about raising the planet's temperature, but they don't get very far with it.

Additional reporting by Alexis Brown. This post also would have been a lot harder to write without the never-ending awesomeness that is Technovelgy.com.

Hitfix spoke with star Seth Rogen after learning news of the movie's delayed release date. Not surprisingly, the actor is in full spin mode, or else genuinely happy that his odd ball, little known superhero flick will have to stand toe-to-toe with big-name productions and Oscar bait.

We're both relieved and psyched about the change. It gives more time for post [production], which would have been immensely rushed if we were to come out in the summer. It also affords us more time to promote the film, (now we can go to Comic-Con with more than a car!) and ultimately is a great vote of confidence from the studio. We got the same date that movies like 'I Am Legend' and 'Avatar' are getting, so we're thrilled to be there."

More time to make a decent movie is never a bad thing, and perhaps a bit more exposure is exactly what this film needs. But it still feels like the move from July 7, 2010 to December 17, 2010 was an effort to quietly dump it off into a cold pasture.

Matt Staggs, a literary publicist who specializes in speculative fiction, has put forth a "GreenPunk Manifesto," to define the concept and his hopes for a possible eco-friendly fiction movement:

GreenPunk: a technophilic spec-fic movement centered on characters using and being affected by the use of DIY renewable resources, recycling and repurposing. GreenPunk would emphasize the ability of the individual – and his or her responsibility – for positive ecological and social change.

Rejecting steampunk's romanticism while embracing its focus on approachable, "knowable" technology (as opposed to the "black box" nature of digital tech), GreenPunk envisions a world in which the detritus of consumer culture as propogated by the Elite is appropriated and repurposed by the masses toward the reconstruction of a devastated ecology and the address of social ills.

What Staggs misses, however, is the design component that has made steampunk so popular. Because it's rooted to a particular aesthetic, steampunk is easy to recognize and simple for enthusiasts to replicate. Staggs is trying to compile a list of novels and stories that fit within his definition of greenpunk, but he might do better to work with designers and solicit images as well.

A GreenPunk Manifesto [Enter the Octopus]

British movie The Age Of Stupid, which opens worldwide in September, takes place in 2050, when environmental catastrophes have overtaken the Earth. One of the poor benighted residents of that future dystopia watches footage of people from 2008 arguing about the environment, and wonders how we could have been such idiots. Here's some more gorgeous future disaster art, including a factory farming complex that could be an evil laboratory from a space-horror film:

[Age Of Stupid via Civilianism]

The Enchantment Emporium, Tanya Huff (DAW)

In this urban fantasy, Allie Gale's grandma disappears, leaving behind a strange shop that sells magical supplies to the local witch population. When Allie takes it over, she's suddenly involved in a mysterious struggle within the Canadian magic community. If you ever wanted to speculate about the witch population of modern Toronto, this is your book.

Naamah's Kiss, Jacqueline Carey (Grand Central Publishing)

From the io9 review:

This is a novel of pure adventure, with a kick ass heroine who gets to fight, do magic, and get laid just like the swashbuckling heroes of old. It's a perfect beach read. And the best part is the Jacqueline Carey is extremely clever – don't let her fool you with all that romantic frippery. She manages to slip a lot of interesting, subversive messages into this swords-and-sorcery tale.

The Women of Nell Gwynne's, Kage Baker (Subterranean)

The women of a Victorian brothel are hired to cater to the needs of a party of businessmen holding an auction for a mysterious piece. They find themselves quickly involved in intrigue and espionage, in a story with flecks of steampunk and classic mystery. We reviewed it (along with a couple of other Baker books) here.

Wild Thyme, Green Magic, Jack Vance (Subterranean)

This career-spanning collection of stories from Jack Vance includes a wide variety of genres, including a few science fiction stories about other worlds. Vance's ability to build worlds has been praised by Frank Herbert, Poul Anderson and Robert Silverberg.

Fragment, Warren Fahy (Delacorte)

A reality show crew on a ship stumble on an island ecosystem inhabited by parallel-evolved monsters. From the io9 review:

If you like monsters and mad science - and who doesn't? - this is the perfect book to take on your vacation or on that long plane ride to a remote island. However, if you're looking for characters who move outside of two dimensions, you might want to give this one a pass.

The Year's Best Science Fiction 26, edited by Gardner Dozois (Griffin)

I'm a sucker for well-complied science fiction anthologies, and this one appears to be no exception. Including 30 stories from masters and new writers alike, this collection also has an extended list of honorable mentions. It looks like a pretty hefty resource for the short story geek.

Green, Jay Lake (Tor)

A fantasy / steampunky tale of international espionage and mythology. From the io9 review:

At times unsettling but always compelling, Green abounds with intrigue and adventure. A feminist fable lovingly written with a father's hope and concern for his daughter's future, Green is the story of a strong-willed young woman trying to find her place in a world that would rather ignore her. Green will not be ignored.

A Monster's Notes, Laurie Sheck (Knopf)

This novel turns inside out one of the oldest science fiction stories. The story imagines Frankenstein's monster not as Mary Shelley's creation, but as her companion, consoling her in a time of sorrow. He discusses with her all of the facets of humanity, trying to understand human connection in a world where he doesn't belong. It's a tale of speculative alternate history, couched in a story of compassion and companionship.

Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America, Robert Charles WIlson (Tor)

A speculative future of post-oil America. From the io9 review:

Peak oil has left the world a churchy, early-industrial shambles in Robert Charles Wilson's new novel Julian Comstock. An engaging cross between post-apocalyptic series Jericho and Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, it may be the best science fiction novel of the year so far.

Haze, L.E. Modesitt Jr. (Tor)

An agent of the now-Chinese-run Earth investigates a planet surrounded by a haze of nano-satellites. He finds an eerily familiar world of superior technology.

House of Suns, Alastair Reynolds (Ace)

This book came out a little while back in the rest of the world, but this month marks its publication in the United States. It's a space opera of post-humanity and colonization, with the added twist of relativistic travel. As a result, this novel chronicles a mystery distorted by time. It's certainly nice to see a space epic that explores some of the complexity of actual interstellar travel. We reviewed it here.

The Strain, Guillermo Del Toro and Chuck Hogan (William Morrow)

Master of Horror Guillermo del Toro brings vampires back from their whiney post-Buffy image. From the io9 review:

The Strain is a breakneck thrill ride chronicling only the first four days of the vampire plague that may destroy civilization. The cinematic quality really comes though, making the book feel more like a action blockbuster than a thought-provoking horror novel.

It begins as a girl, born into poverty and ignorance, is sold into slavery by her own father. She's stolen away from the warm land of rice paddies and the timeless rhythms of peasant life that are all she's ever known, and put on a steamboat bound for distant Copper Downs, capital city of the Stone Coast. Copper Downs is a cold, bustling metropolis of commerce and power at the dawn of an Industrial Revolution, populated by even colder people, pale as corpses.

Her culture, her language — even her very name — are all stripped away. The girl is imprisoned in the Pomegranate Court at the House of the Factor, with only the Teaching Mistresses for company. They teach her all manner of domestic skills as well as a plethora of academic subjects, the arts, and the social graces expected of an aristocratic lady. Enduring abuse and humiliation, she must excel at her lessons in order to survive.

A decade passes and the girl approaches womanhood. Her master, the Factor, has deemed her suitable to be sold as a pretty bauble of some powerful lord, perhaps the Undying Duke himself. She is meant to be a "prettypet" to charm the aristocracy at gala balls and in the most exclusive parlors with her exotic beauty and witty conversation. The Factor dubs her "Emerald" and deems her worthy of sale. She rejects this name, calls herself "Green" instead, and swears to be no one's tool. She will be free, she will battle the unjust system that stole her from her native land. Green is twelve years old, pissed off, and has other plans, but so has Fate.

Eventually Green makes her way back to the land of her birth, Selistan (perhaps a pun on "Celestial Kingdom") only to find herself now a foreigner mistrusted by her own people. Impoverished in a society that treats women as chattel, she reluctantly finds sanctuary at the Temple of the Lily Goddess in the city of Kalimpura. This religious order takes inconvenient girl children or women too independent to fit into their assigned roles. At the Temple women can take roles generally reserved for men: law, accountancy, and Martial arts. The most promising fighters are chosen to join the Blades of the Lily, the city's brutal law enforcement.

Free to be themselves, these women rely on each other for strength, understanding, and love. Yes, there are sex scenes involving teenage lesbian warrior nuns that will raise eyebrows among some squeamish readers (like this reviewer). But like his infamous snuff-porn Dwarf Pits in Trial of Flowers (Night Shade Books, 2006,) Lake uses these brief, vivid passages to good effect serving the plot or developing a character; not to shock or titillate.

Although the very believable societies Lake imagines here are loosely based on the China and England of the 19th Century, this world is definitely in the realm of fantasy. Green is set on a flat (possibly endless) plain, with a procession of suns drifting across the sky. We already know Jay has a fondness for impossible cosmologies after visiting the 1:1 scale clockwork orrery Earth in Mainspring and Escapement (Tor, 2007 and 2008 respectively) or the infinite vertical cylinder in his short story "The Lollygang Save the World on Accident" (from Extraordinary Engines, Nick Gevers ed., Solaris, 2008). Another similarity to Trial of Flowers is Lake's treatment of the very real gods in Green's world. These deities are weird and powerful but usually treat with mortal concerns in subtle and inscrutable means. When the powerful try to use the gods to further their own goals, entire populations suffer. The lesson here: let sleeping gods lie; magic may seem like an easy solution, but people are better off relying on themselves.

Green has a mind as quick and sharp as a dagger and possesses an amazing arsenal of skills (she's a great cook, too). Given all these abilities she is still very much a child, alone in an unforgiving world. For all her rigorous education, she has negligible people skills. She feels driven to stop the oppression of women and children, but she has only vague plans involving stabbing and kicks to the head. Green must grow into the role she has chosen for herself. To survive, she must find the strength to endure the crap around her. To succeed, she must develop patience and wisdom to match her passion and intellect.

Jay Lake writes beautifully. His language hearkens back to a more formal age, without disguising the brutal truths of the world he has created. Green is split into three distinct acts with the action, pacing, and fantastical elements ever-increasing to an exciting climax of mythic proportion. Personally, I would have enjoyed more detail about the steam-driven and flywheel technology (to which there are only a few tantalizing references,) but that's how I roll. At times unsettling but always compelling, Green abounds with intrigue and adventure. A feminist fable lovingly written with a father's hope and concern for his daughter's future, Green is the story of a strong-willed young woman trying to find her place in a world that would rather ignore her. Green will not be ignored.

Green hits the shelves at your local independent bookstore this Wednesday.
Or go to Amazon.

Note: A version of this review appeared in last month's newsletter of Borderlands Books.
Commenter Grey_Area is known to the ninja furries as Christopher Hsiang. He is in awe of Mr. Lake who has possibly the largest collection of weaponized Hawaiian shirts in North America.

According to the Biomimetic Design blog:

Morpho butterflies remain a vibrant blue throughout their lives, without ever needing a coat of paint to spruce up a dull finish. The scales on their wings are made of many layers of proteins that refract light in different ways, and the color we see often is due entirely to the play of light and structure rather than the presence of pigments.

The amazing fiber called Morphotex is the firs fiber material that realizes a mysterious color illuination with no pigmentation.

Huffington Post has a list of five eco-friendly fabrics of the future, including Morphotex, but also green rubber, nettles and "victimless leather" grown from skin cell lines. (Plus silver, which I have a really hard time believing is eco-friendly, since silver mining? Not exactly the most Gaia-loving process.)

"As environmental ideas have entered the zeigeist, mostly thanks to global warming—and still mostly focused on that issue—plenty of technology companies are lining up to tell us how they're helping green/save/clean the environment. Advertising agencies and PR firms are delighted to sell us any number of "green" gizmos and they're throwing in some nice self-esteem blowjobs for all of us, using their persuasive talents to assure us that we're enlightened and forward thinking because we just stuffed a green X into our Prius.

"But green blowjobs aren't really my gig. I'm not interested in PV cells, or solar paint, or zero emissions cars, or any of a zillion other objects that companies want to sell us so that we can feel good about ourselves while we roar off the cliff. If I had to think of a couple technologies that I greatly admire, I would say... wool sweaters and long underwear are fabulous. They have a low manufacturing cost and are far more efficient than burning coal for electric heat, or burning heating oil, and they might even obviate the need for a better-insulated house. I remain enamored with bicycles and their gears. These technologies are so wonderfully elegant and do so much while asking so little that I like them quite a lot. And certainly I like the hat and gloves I wear so that I can ride my bike to work in the winter, instead of being tempted to drive my car.

"But the one—the most absolutely key, the rock star green technology—that I champion over all others is birth control: vasectomies, IUDs, the pill, condoms. I don't care which kind you or your family prefers or finds most appropriate, I love them all. Any technology that reduces the absolute number of consumers (and particularly Americans and Europeans who consume the most) now that's a TECHNOLOGY!" — Pump Six And Other Stories author Paolo Bacigalupi, interviewed at EcoGeek.org.

Architect Craig Hodgetts designed this awesome art for a movie of Ecotopia, but he actually put tons of thought into how everything would work. (Look at the captions in the gallery for more info on each image.) It's like peering inside an alternate history, where maglev trains with beanbag seats, and wind-power generating balloons, became commonplace.

In Ecotopia, the Westernmost U.S. states secede and form their own country, with a liberal woman president. Hodgetts says if the movie had gotten off the ground, he would have scrapped much of the storyline of Callenbach's novel and focused on trying to create a kid-friendly movie, with lots and lots of marketable toys and "consumables." Ah, capitalism. It sort of warms your heart to think of it.

More pics, and interview, at the link. [A/N Blog, thanks to Designguybrown]

Orions (Star Trek): Orion slave girls are known for their beauty, their carnal appetites, and their skills in the bedroom. Being with an Orion woman is a common male fantasy in the Federation, and the women feature in many a holosuite program. But the Orion women are more in control than any outside their species realize. They emit a powerful pheromone that turns men of most species into their willing slaves.

Queen Veranke (Marvel): The princess Veranke was sent to a prison planet for having the audacity to question the leadership of the Skrull king, saying that the prophesies foretold the destruction of the Skrull homeworld and the need to find a new planet. When the prophesies come true, Veranke is freed and made empress of the Skrull Empire. She quickly plots and enacts the Secret Invasion of Earth, acting as one of the plan’s early agents by impersonating Spider-Woman Jessica Drew.

Princess Aura (Flash Gordon): Although later media would remove her verdant hue, Princess Aura was the originally green-skinned daughter of Ming the Merciless, the despotic ruler of the planet Mongo. Her attraction to Flash Gordon proved one of the protagonists’ greatest assets, causing her to turn against her father, though she ultimately falls for the rebel Prince Barin, the rightful heir to Mongo’s throne.

Athena (Lost in Space): Few people are fond of Lost in Space’s villainous stowaway Dr. Zachary Smith. But one such person is Athena, the girl from the Green Dimension. Although she at one point hypnotizes Smith into dumping the Jupiter 2’s fuel, hijacking the ship, and taking a walk in space, she later returns to romance the sad doctor, hoping to escape her brutish suitor and bring Smith back to her home dimension.

Miss Martian (DC): M’gann M’orzz is actually a White Martian who poses as a Green Martian to earn a slot on the Teen Titans. But even after her true form is discovered, she prefers her green appearance, though she is plagued by the fear of her more aggressive White Martian nature.

Tak (Invader Zim): The female Irken Tak is far more clever than her nemesis Zim. She has a more convincing disguise, builds a superior robotic unit, and is single-minded in her pursuits. But after Zim’s actions condemned her to 70 years of janitorial duty on the Planet Dirt, she’s also dangerously insane. She aims to steal Zim’s commission by conquering the Earth and stuffing it with junk food for the benefit of the Irken Armada.

Elmira (Space Cases): The warlike Spung were the primary antagonists of Nickelodeon’s lost in space drama. But Elmira escaped her Spung upbringing because of their shoddy treatment of women. Like Aura, Elmira is green-skinned royal who ends up falling for her father’s enemy. She’s also an oracle, and foresees Jewel Staite’s unfortunate departure from the show.

She-Hulk (Marvel): After Jennifer Walters was gunned down by members of a crime family, her cousin Bruce “The Hulk” Banner saves her life by donating some of his gamma-irradiated blood. The transfusions transforms her into the amazonian She-Hulk, but, unlike Banner, she sees the advantages of going green. Her She-Hulk form gave Walters the strength and confidence not only to fight superpowered crime, but also to practice superhuman law.

April the Gorlock (The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius): Genius Jimmy Neutron may have a secret crush on his intellectual rival Cindy Vortex, but his hormones go into overdrive when he meets April the Gorlock. While trying to protect her planet, April performs her people’s seal of trust on Jimmy, which just so happens to be a kiss. Jimmy was happy to lend a helping hand, hoping to earn himself another seal of trust once the planet’s safety was assured.

Oola (Star Wars): Unlike the Orion women, Oola is a bona fide slave, a Twi’lek tragically tricked into becoming a dancer for Jabba the Hutt. There, she was starved, forced to service Jabba, and beaten for any disobedience. Just before she believed she would be rescued by Luke Skywalker, Oola performed one final dance for her master, but when Jabba pulled on the chain around her neck, beckoning him to her, she defied him, pulling back until Jabba tugged her over a trapdoor and dropped her into the chamber of his hungry rancor.

Xylene (Ben 10): Xylene is the carrier of the Omnitrix, a powerful alien device that can transform the wearer into a number of different aliens. When she finds herself under attack, she sends the device to Earth, where it comes into the possession of Ben Tennyson. When Xylene comes to reclaim the Omnitrix, she butts heads with Ben, but reconnects with Ben’s Grandpa Max, her ally and one-time lover.

Updated by popular demand:

Dot Matrix (ReBoot): We were remiss in not immediately including Dot Matrix, the Command.Com of ReBoot's Mainframe. After her father's experiments wipe out most of Mainframe and nearly all the computer's sprites, Dot keeps Mainframe running, fighting off its resident viruses, Megabyte and Hexadecimal, and ensuring the population isn't decimated by incoming games. At the same time, she owns many of the local business and raises her only remaining family, her younger brother Enzo.

Schwartz, who has consulted with oil companies as well as the SciFi Channel, is a master at creating plausible future scenarios for companies and government organizations trying to determine their long-term strategies. He pointed out that peak oil is difficult to determine realistically:

The peak oil people simply don't know what they're talking about, they don't know the facts . . . We really don't know how much oil there is in most of the oil reservoirs of the world. Oil reservoirs are complex geological structures, and most of the data is in private hands, or in state governments, and they are not particularly forthcoming about how much is there.

While his argument sounds like he's being an apologist for oil companies or businesses that want to ignore emissions limits, in fact he's taking a more radically green stance than many peak oil advocates. He's saying, essentially, that we may be nowhere near peak oil, and that we nevertheless need to act now to create greener technologies and foster alternative power sources. Peak oil should not be our argument against oil, he says. Rather, climate change should be:

We are not going to run out of oil before the issue of climate change drives change. It'll be costly oil. But it'll be climate change catastrophes [such as sudden, unexpected displacement of large numbers of people, and massive property damage], and more expensive oil, not the fact that we're running out of oil, that will drive change.

His point, though polemical and brash, is nevertheless a subtle one. He's basically saying that peak oil is a kind of rhetorical strategy. And it's doomed to fail, he thinks, because it's not based on truth. Or at least, not on a truth that can be easily proven.

Therefore, he's suggesting that we come up with a new motivating strategy for companies planning their long-term futures in terms of energy investment. Don't try to convince those companies to go green based on tenuous arguments about something unprovable like peak oil. Base it on science that has a more solid basis, such as the studies that demonstrate climate change is happening right now.

Photo by David McNew/Getty Images.

Peak Oil "Wrong," Says Schwartz [via Cleantech]

The New York Times' Dot Earth blog asked one of the researchers, Simon Carn, to interpret the satellite photos. Carn said:

The images clearly show the high SO2 emissions from sources in northeast China. China is the world’s largest SO2 emitter, mostly due to the burning of high-sulfur coal in its many coal-fired power plants, which lack the technology used in many other countries to remove sulfur from smoke stack emissions. The eastern Europe image shows a few SO2 ‘hot spots’ in Romania, Bulgaria, Greece and Turkey - these are probably also power plants or metal smelters. The hot spot in Sicily is the active volcano Mt Etna - volcanoes are probably the second largest source of SO2 after anthropogenic emissions.

The main region of elevated SO2 in the USA image is the Ohio Valley and SW Pennsylvania, where there is a high concentration of coal-fired power plants (shown as diamond symbols on the image).

The significance of SO2 (apart from as a component of acid rain) is that it is a precursor of sulfate aerosol (sulfuric acid droplets), which is the main ingredient of the haze often seen in polluted regions. Sulfate aerosol is a health hazard, limits visibility, degrades buildings, reflects solar radiation (cooling the climate) and also impacts cloud properties (increasing their lifetime and reducing rainfall).

No word on how the Chinese cloud-seeding techniques to prevent rain during the Olympics are affecting any of this.

What Will Cure China's Sulfurous Skies? [Dot Earth]

Here you can see an industrial area slowly breaking down into nothing. And I love the two images below, which show the greening of a shopping area as it slowly goes back to nature.

Images of the Apocalypse [via Pink Tentacle]

Sure, some conservatives have been condemning Wall-E as green agit-prop. But they're missing the real point, says the American Conservative:

In the film, it becomes clear that mass consumerism is not just the product of big business, but of big business wedded with big government. In fact, the two are indistinguishable in WALL-E’s future. The government unilaterally provided it’s citizens with everything they needed, and this lack of variety led to Earth’s downfall... Staples of small-town conservative life such as the small farm, the “atomic family,” and old-fashioned and wholesome entertainment like “Hello, Dolly” are looked upon by the suddenly awakened humans as beautiful and desirable. By steering conservative families away from WALL-E, these commentators are doing their readers a great disservice.

A side note: Is Hello Dolly really a prized conservative narrative? Being that it stars Barbara "Stalin" Streisand?

Meanwhile, BeliefNet's Rod Dreher hails Wall-E as a film for "crunchy cons." (According to Dreher's book, "crunchy cons" are conservatives who live in harmony with nature, including organic farming, turning off the television and cooking their own food.) He sees the movie as a sort of reverse "Garden of Eden" story, where Eve tempts the humans with an "apple" to get them to defy their false god and return to the garden they've left. Says Dreher:

In another twist on the Genesis story, "Wall-E" contends that what makes us human is labor. In the film's most meaningful iconic image, the Tree of Life on the new earth grows out of an old work boot. You'll recall that when Adam and Eve were cast out of Eden, Adam was cursed for his sin by being condemned to draw his sustenance from the very Earth from which he was drawn. God says to Adam, "In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; you are dust, and to dust you shall return." (Gen. 3:19) In "Wall-E," humanity discovers that it can only complete its own given nature through labor — first agricultural labor, then the labor of building cities.

DailyKos blogger oilpolicy points to some of these right-wing fans of the movie, and then chimes in by calling it a disappointment to progressives, because it lets the overconsuming humans off the hook too easily:

Wall-E is so ignorant of the basics of sustainability and [its] original sin, overpopulation, that it actually has humans, who have somehow learned how to live sustainably on a ship for 700 years, return to overpopulate the earth again in a happy ending! The rest of us had paid good money to see Wall-E and Eve, the new robotic life forms, get their shot at happiness on earth sans humans.

It's totally true. I paid for my Wall-E ticket hoping all the humans would die in the end. And then maybe Wall-E and Eve would do that Flight Of The Conchords song.

Reed Johnson at the L.A. Times chimes in:

In serious science fiction, humans who've degenerated into some sort of new mutation force us to confront the darkest sides of our nature. Think of the cannibalistic Morlocks and the feckless, sheeplike Eloi of Wells' "The Time Machine," one of sci-fi's master narratives. By contrast, the Pillsbury doughboys and girls in "Wall-E" are a bit dim but otherwise sweet, polite, essentially harmless, kinda cute... Apart from the spaceship captain, who rebels against a bullying computer, the humans in "Wall-E" really don't do much to earn their shot at redemption. The movie doesn't make the case that mankind, having fouled its nest, deserves a second chance.

(And yes, Reed is accusing Wall-E of not being a hard core enough science fiction narrative, because none of the supposedly "adult" scifi movies this year are even bothering to tackle the issues Wall-E raises. And since Wall-E is raising those issues, Reed wants it to deal with them in a manner worthy of 2001 and Silent Running. (Personally, I felt Wall-E was a much more serious movie than 2001, but that's just me.)

So will progressives abandon Wall-E en masse because it has an unrealistically happy ending? (Unless you really believe the humans come back to Earth to die. Dreher pins his hopes on those cute ending credits, with the Peter Gabriel song.) Will conservatives embrace the little bot as their new mascot?

Budd says:

The PIMs act a bit like a sponge when hydrogen is around. It's made up of long molecules that can trap hydrogen between them, providing a way of supplying hydrogen on demand.

Imagine a plate of spaghetti - when it's all coiled together there's not much space between the strands. Now imagine a plate of crispy noodles - their rigid twisted shape means there are lots of holes. The polymer is designed to have a rigid backbone, and it has twists and bends built into it. Because of this, lots of gaps and holes are created between molecules - perfect for tucking the hydrogen into.

The holes between the molecules give the polymer a very high surface area - each gram has a surface area equivalent to around three tennis courts. The molecules in the polymer act like sieves, catching smaller molecules like hydrogen in the gaps between them. The holes created in the polymer between molecules are a good fit for hydrogen. Hydrogen molecules stick in these holes and are kept there by weak forces - this means they can be released when they are needed.

Hydrogen is most sticky when it is cooled down to low temperatures. When the hydrogen is needed to power the car, the system would just raise the temperature to free up the hydrogen molecules.

Cascio writes:

The fact of the matter is that, no matter how much greenhouse gas we pump into the atmosphere or how many toxins we dump into the soil and oceans, given enough time the Earth will recover.

But human civilization is far more fragile.

Human civilization could not withstand and recover from the same kinds of assaults the planet itself has shrugged off in eons past. We remain entirely dependent upon myriad Earth services and systems, from topsoil and clean water to carbon cycles and biodiversity. Activities that undermine those critical services and systems quite literally threaten the survival of human civilization. The fundamental resilience of the Earth's geophysical systems simply means that, when we ignore our effects on the planet, we're simply making ourselves disposable, just another passing blip in the planet's long history.

In trying to minimize the harmful impacts of human activities upon the global ecosystem, environmentalism supports the continued healthy existence of humankind.

Earth will be just fine, thank you [Open the Future]

According to Inhabitat, there's good reason to call this building green:

A solar photovoltaic array on the roof provides shade for top level parking and on-site renewable energy. The materials used in construction were recycled and finished with low-VOC paints and finishes. The building envelope utilizes low-e glazing to decrease heating and cooling loads and the mechanicals are energy efficient. A storm-drain water-treatment system helps reduce tainted runoff from directly entering the hydrosphere and greywater harvesting provides for landscaping and on-site facilities.

First LEED Parking Garage [Inhabitat]

States like California, Montana, Idaho and Colorado are already seeing their crops and livestock die off in record numbers. And the climate report predicts that the situation will only get more dire, even if the government responds immediately by cutting emissions. Droughts will become longer and more intense. Rivers and water reserves will dry up, partly because they are usually replenished with melting snow each year. But if the heat continues to rise, there will be no snow — and therefore no runoff into water reserve areas.

Hotter and Drier — The West's Changed Climate [NRDC via TreeHugger]