No wonder global warming has Al Gore so hot under the collar.

His impassioned speech against climate change deniers induced a frenzy of conservative chest-pounding last week wherein Fox News and the usual suspects swore his scatological sermon must be a symptom of dementia. They went on to repeat the same misleading memes the ex-vice president decried in Aspen.

Science, however, is on Gore’s side.

Last month was the fourth-warmest July on record in the United States, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which note  that the nation remains in severe drought. NOAA found only seven of the lower 48 states did not experience elevated temperatures in July.

Another report NOAA recently released concluded that nearly 60 percent of the U.S. shoreline along the Gulf of Mexico is considered “very vulnerable” to sea level rise. Along the coast between Houston, Texas, and Mobile, Ala., an estimated 2,400 miles of major roadway and 246 miles of freight rail lines are at risk of permanent flooding within 50 to 100 years if relative sea level rises four feet, according to NOAA.

Beyond the borders, arctic ice continues to slide into the sea. The average extent of arctic sea ice in July reached the lowest level for the month since record-keeping began in 1979 and it is 81,000 square miles below the previous low for the month set in 2007, the National Snow and Ice Data Center reports.

Still, not everyone is buying it.

A Rasmussen Reports poll taken July 29-30 showed that 57 percent of respondents believe there is significant disagreement within the scientific community on global warming, up five points from late 2009. Only one in four believes scientists agree on global warming. The other 18 percent aren’t sure. Rasmussen polls are known for their conservative slant.

“The notion that there’s a significant debate about this fundamental view of climate science is just wrong,” Houston Chronicle science reporter Eric Berger wrote last week in reference to the Rasmussen poll. “If you disbelieve me, you should get out and speak with a lot of climate scientists. I have.”

Berger writes that “there are indeed some scientists who don’t buy into the climate models, but there are very few active, publishing scientists who do not believe elevated levels in greenhouse gases from human activities are primarily responsible for rising temperatures during the last century.”

The studies climate change naysayers cite actually do blame the earth’s altering climate on those Gore blasted with barnyard epithets: sunspots and volcanoes; or, they claim, the earth isn’t really warming.

One of the central rallying points for deniers recently has been a report put out by Roy Spencer at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. Using data from NASA, he concluded the Earth is more efficient in releasing energy than most models used to forecast climate change have led the public to believe.

“He’s taken an incorrect model, he’s tweaked it to match observations, but the conclusions you get from that are not correct,” Andrew Dessler, a professor of atmospheric sciences at Texas A&M University, told LiveScience.com when asked about Spencer’s new study. “It makes the skeptics feel good, it irritates the mainstream climate science community, but by this point, the debate over climate policy has nothing to do with science. It’s essentially a debate over the role of government.”

“Tom Perriello understands that solving the climate crisis is too important to be put off until after another election,” Gore said in his e-mail appeal. “Time and again, he has shown his commitment to solving this crisis today, through his words and more importantly through his votes in Congress.”

“Considering how hard he fights each and every day to help President Obama end all of the failed policies of the past eight years, Republicans are spending millions of dollars to try and replace him with someone who will turn the clock back. He needs our help today,” Gore wrote.

Gore, who was Vice President under Bill Clinton for eight years, unsuccessfully ran for President in 2000. He won the 1st Congressional District which Heinrich represents by a narrow margin, 48 percent to 47 percent.

Gore won a Nobel Peace Prize for his work on global warming; he is the founder and current chairman of the Alliance for Climate Protection, which says it is “committed to educating the global community about the urgency of implementing comprehensive solutions to the climate crisis.”

Politico also reports that Reps. Betsy Markey, D-Colo., Mary Jo Kilroy, D-Ohio, received fundraising help in e-mails from Gore.

All four supported the American Clean Energy And Security Act of 2009.

Instead, former President Bill Clinton made what The Associated Press is calling “a surprise trip” to North Korea today “amid an international standoff over the country’s nuclear program and concerns about two U.S. reporters imprisoned in Pyongyang since March.”

Clinton’s visit “comes amid heightened tensions over North Korea’s string of nuclear and missile tests in defiance of U.N. resolutions, and calls from Washington for amnesty for the two reporters,” the article states.

The journalists, Laura Ling and Euna Lee, were accused of illegal entry into the country, “hostile acts” and spying. They work for California-based Current TV, which Gore co-founded.

According to CNN, the North Koreans have not responded to the possibility of a visit from Gore or Richardson, but the Obama administration expects that, now that the trial has ended, the North Koreans will OK a visit from one of the two to seek the journalists’ release.

Richardson has a long record as a diplomat from his time as a congressman, U.N. ambassador and even governor. Plus, few, if any, Americans have a better relationship with the North Korean government than him.

Richardson has traveled to North Korea several times throughout his political career, most recently in 2007 when he went there to secure the release of remains of American soldiers killed during the Korean War. North Korean officials have also traveled to Santa Fe to discuss North Korean/American relations with Richardson.

“You sure you don’t want another one on the house?” asks a bartender, handing Shipman a receipt. “Another drink? Another shot?”

Image by: Matt Mahurin

Shipman takes the receipt. “So it’s a big bill, then.”

Political consultants come by to talk to Shipman, along with reporters from other foreign papers, fellow British expatriates and a newly minted spokesman for the Heritage Foundation. Shipman has played a unique role in the life of the city. As one of three Washington-based reporters for the Telegraph — there are four others on the paper’s American staff, based in New York and Los Angeles — Shipman pounded out stories and blog posts saturated with rumors and intrigue from the capital and from the campaign trail. (The Sunday Telegraph and The Daily Telegraph, which vary in their coverage, are different editions of the newspaper founded in 1855.)

“All British reporters bring to their reporting an impish desire to entertain as well as inform,” said Shipman, a graduate of Cambridge University who’s leaving Washington to cover Westminster politics for the Daily Mail. “Britain is very intensive newspaper market and you don’t get anywhere unless you tell your readers something extra. We take the view that politics ought to be fun.”

That isn’t the view of Democrats who have been burned by the Telegraph’s stories. “They use anonymous sources to a degree that makes you wonder if they actually have them,” said Bob Shrum, the retired political consultant who managed the presidential campaigns of former Vice President Al Gore and Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.). “I would have murdered someone from the Kerry campaign if they talked to the Daily Telegraph.”

Democrats have a long list of grievances with the Telegraph, the most recent examples all traceable to Shipman. In the past year he reported that close allies of Gore were pushing him into the Democratic race to end the Clinton-Obama standoff, that former President Bill Clinton warned that then-presidential candidate Barack Obama would have to “kiss his ass” to get an endorsement and that a source close to the new president worried that the insultingly cheap gift of DVDs he gave to British Prime Minister Gordon Brown meant that Obama was “overwhelmed” by his job. Democrats who worked with those campaigns told TWI that these stories were, respectively, “a total lie,” “just not true,” and “something nobody thinks is true.”

Shipman is amused by the criticism. “I never report what I’m not told,” he said. “If I have one source who tells me this, I will write that in.” After the campaigns or furors are over, he said, the stories hang together, “except, obviously, for the bit about Gore.” Since the campaign ended and Clinton staffers dropped their codes of silence, his story is only one of many stories of the former president lighting into the current one.

Since the DVDs-for-Brown story, he can recount conversations with high-level Obama staffers who admit that the White House made a distracted mistake. “The calls I get from other reporters are about 50/50,” he said. “Half of them tell me off, and half of them ask me how I got the story.”

All of this matters to American politicians because the Telegraph, in the age of the Drudge Report, is able to put stories that American media would not run into the political news cycle. The DVDs-for-Brown story was a classic Telegraph success — from Shipman’s conversations, into the paper, onto Drudge, into the cable news and talk radio cycles and into the questions that American reporters posed to the White House.

“Whether or not Obama was ‘overwhelmed’ by his job was debated on Glenn Beck and Bill O’Reilly,” said Shipman. “Glenn Beck advised his audience to send letters of apology to the British Embassy and I’m told that they got hundreds. That story got into the media bloodstream.”

Telegraph stories get into the bloodstream largely through links from Drudge, from RealClearPolitics and from other sites that hunt for political scoops. The “overwhelmed Obama” story, which relied on anonymous sources, was a sensation; two follow-up blog posts about the DVDs-for-Brown affair were promoted by Drudge as “PAPER: Obama ‘just plain rude’ to UK” and “‘Lady Macbeth’ Michelle behind snub to UK?”

“The British reporters are the best,” said Andrew Breitbart, a former part-time editor of the Drudge Report who is now editor of Breitbart.com and its Big Hollywood opinion site. “They have such better attitudes than our guys. They’re less simpering. You read their stories and you want go out and drink beers with these guys. The Left just hates them because they tell good stories and the Left doesn’t want good stories if it means they’ll lose a couple of innings.”

Democrats have other, more particular reasons to bristle at the Telegraph. During President Clinton’s first term, the paper’s chief Washington correspondent was Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, who chased down and reported all manner of rumors about the president, about his sex life, about who killed Vince Foster and about his financial dealings—excoriating the Washington media establishment for not getting there sooner. “Allegations of drug use, sexual shenanigans and misuse of state resources were there for the plucking during Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign,” Evans-Pritchard wrote in 1995, mocking The Washington Post for trying to discredit his reporting.

To the Clinton White House it was clear that the Telegraph was part of—as it alleged in a 331-page report released right before Evans-Pritchard left Washington—“the Conspiracy Commerce Department.” If a story did not pass muster to appear in an American newspaper, it would be laundered to the Telegraph or to another British tabloid. If a story appeared in a British newspaper, that was enough to start reporters or pundits talking about it in Washington.

“A senior Hill staffer told me last week that there was no such thing as a ‘foreign press’ anymore,” said Toby Harnden, the U.S. editor of the Daily Telegraph. (Shipman, working for the Sunday Telegraph, dealt with different editors.) “He was right. The task of foreign correspondents in the U.S. used to be to write about this strange country far away for the natives back home. That just isn’t the case anymore. Our stuff gets read here.”

Phil Singer, a former spokesman for Hillary Rodham Clinton’s presidential campaign, watched the pipeline in action. “Drudge would link to one of these articles,” said Singer. “Drudge would put up a fancy splash banner headline. The American media would see it on Drudge and then chase it.” But in 2007 and 2008, Singer and the Clinton campaign succeeded in neutralizing some sensational Telegraph stories by putting out quick responses online. “The Internet allows you to burst the bubble.”

Eric Alterman, a liberal media critic who has written about the way conservative memes move through the news cycle, agrees with Singer. “In the olden days, these papers carried some authority because people had little idea what they were up to. But now that the prestige of the media has fallen so low, their capacity to do damage strikes me as part of another era.”

“They’re cheap dates,” said one former McCain campaign staffer. “If you give something to the British press you know it’ll make it into their story and then whether it gets around is a matter of whether other people want to take it seriously.” The staffer pointed to the example of a Sunday Times (U.K.) story that quoted McCain staffers, accurately, as saying that they’d talked about a pre-election “shotgun wedding” between Bristol Palin and Levi Johnston. The plan was scuttled, but the gossip was real, so it became a story that bounced all over the political media. “That was a lot of fun.”

It’s all part of how the Telegraph’s correspondents work. “British reporters see themselves as tradesmen who work the angles and occasionally hang out in the bars and dig up the facts by a wide variety of means, some of them occasionally unorthodox,” said Harnden. “American journalism has tended to see itself as more academic profession, on par with the law or medicine and as part of the Establishment.”

“We self-censor less than American reporters,” said Shipman. “It puts peoples’ backs up from time to time. People will say we’re putting out Republican talking points, which is complete bollocks. If anything, Republicans are reading what we write and picking up on it.”

A column by former Richardson press secretary and Knight Ridder national correspondent Richard Parker takes a slightly different look at the first question than many have so far. Instead of just asking if Richardson is taking a lesser job than the more desirable secretary of state, Parker wonders if Richardson would instead transform the position of secretary of commerce into a more prominent position.

Ambitious even for a politician, Richardson will likely seek to transform the job and position himself as the most public Cabinet figure in righting the domestic economic disaster and transforming international trade.In doing so, he will form ties here and abroad that may ultimately write his biography in political history as a senior statesman, if never a president. As a result, more people may be affected by the new secretary than any other Cabinet figure.

Parker wonders if Richardson will attempt to make the Commerce position into one of the more prominent positions, or an “‘A’ position, effectively and even formally alongside State, Defense, Treasury and others.”

So will Richardson use this opportunity to expand the public scope of the secretary of commerce to areas never before seen? Parker thinks that Richardson has the ability to do so.

Still, many media types have focused is on Richardson’s beard — or more specifically his new lack of a beard. The Los Angeles Times’ Adam Tschorn, who admits he is a “seasonal beard-grower,” looks at the facial hair in the Obama administration. The first paragraph calls Richardson’s newly clean-shaven face “another devastating blow to facial hair in the long-running battle of beard versus Beltway.”

For some reason, people are fascinated by politicians with beards. When Al Gore grew his beard after controversially losing the 2000 presidential election, he grew a beard. When Richardson failed at his bid to become president, he followed the former Vice President’s precedent and stopped shaving — much to the reported chagrin of his wife, Barbara Richardson.

Perhaps it is because, as Tschorn notes, no president has sported a beard since William Howard Taft. Beards are more likely to be worn by comedians and musicians than American politicians.

Even President-elect Barack Obama commented on Richardson’s lack of a beard, saying at the press conference announcing Richardon’s nomination for the press secretary position, “We’re deeply disappointed with the loss of the beard.”

News comes that the former GOP vice presidential candidate is heading to the Peach State — Georgia — next week to campaign for incumbent Republican U.S. Sen. Saxby Chambliss.

Chambliss won the most votes Nov. 4, but failed to gather support from 50 percent of those who cast ballots, meaning that he must now appear in a Dec. 2 runoff with Democrat Jim Martin.

The Georgia Senate race is one of two that are still undecided. The other is in Minnesota, which pits the GOP’s Norm Coleman against comedian Al Franken.

If Democrats take both remaining contests, they’ll reach a pre-election goal of controlling 60 Senate seats, which would be a filibuster-proof majority.

That has raised the stakes in the Georgia senate race, and attracted a who’s who of campaigners from both major political parties.

CNN reports:

Earlier this month, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, campaigned with Chambliss, and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney teamed up with Chambliss on Friday.

On the Democratic side, Martin, a former Georgia state lawmaker, has been joined on the trail by former President Clinton and former Vice President Al Gore.

Obama also contributed his voice to the Democrats’ efforts, speaking out in a 60-second radio ad for Martin that hit the airwaves last week.

But do these big-name surrogates make a difference?

“Generally, they can help boost turnout because of all the media attention. Turnout in a runoff election is often very low compared to a presidential election, and each side needs to get as many of their voters to the polls as possible,” said Bill Schneider, CNN’s senior political analyst.

More than $4 million already has been spent on campaign commercials for the runoff election, according to new numbers from the Campaign Media Analysis Group.

The Chambliss campaign and the National Republican Senatorial Committee have spent a little more than $1.7 million in ad time since the day after the November 4 vote, with Martin’s campaign and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee putting out more than $1.6 million, according to numbers from the Campaign Media Analysis Group.

Outside groups account for the remaining $770,000 in campaign commercial spending. The vast majority of that money came from Freedom’s Watch, a group that backs Republican candidates.

“This shows that there is still a lot at stake, this runoff is giving campaign ’08 a final act. Who would have predicted this, a red state Senate race with groups from the political left free spending and groups from the right clearly not taking this for granted?” asked Evan Tracey, CNN’s campaign media analyst and chief operating officer of TNS Media Intelligence/CMAG.

Democrats so far have picked up seven Senate seats in this year’s election, with the Republican seats in Georgia and Minnesota still undecided.

ALBUQUERQUE -– Socialism has been bandied about as a scare word in the run-up to Election Day, but New Mexico author John Nichols embraces it as the answer to the climate crisis.

This is not “old-style socialism or old-style capitalism,” he says, but Declaration of Independence-style socialism that posits “that all living beings on earth have an equal right to exist and must be protected” if earth is going to remain viable for human life.

Nichols, who has published 19 books, three of which have been made into movies, made his remarks Saturday night on the occasion of the University of New Mexico’s acquisition of 50 years of his voluminous archives.

To a small group of about 40 parents of UNM students he delivered with generous doses of both humor and gravity the essay he said he wrote for the occasion on Sept. 30, “…while my Congress people were bickering about a $700 billion bailout of Wall Street, using MY tax dollars, which, thank God, I’m actually going to have to be paying this year gracias to the willingness of UNM to give me some money for my literary archives.”

In keeping with the sustainability theme of UNM’s first Parent Weekend being held at the same time, Nichols’ talk was titled, “To Sustain or Not to Sustain: That Is the Question ” — the obvious answer being that sustainability is the only way the planet can survive.

Known for living simply and inexpensively in Taos, Nichols still works on a table he bought for $20 in New York City in 1965 and says he shops at Albuquerque’s ThriftTown. But Nichols nonetheless says he’s a despoiler of the planet simply due to his literary output:

I am Henry Thoreau, Rachel Carson, Paul and Anne Ehrlich, Barry Commoner and David Suzuki’s worst nightmare. … I have wasted more typing paper than a government bureaucracy in a Franz Kafka novel, and now, instead of being pilloried for my profligate behavior, I am being rewarded for it by the leading academic institution in the state that I love.

All I can say is: May God bless UNM for my bailout.

The author of nearly a dozen fiction works, including “The Milagro Beanfield War” (which was made into a film by Robert Redford), Nichols is also the author of several nonfiction works that celebrate nature in his adopted state. In 1990, he published a photo essay called “The Sky’s the Limit” that he likened to Al Gore’s movie, “An Inconvenient Truth,” in its depiction of the deteriorating environment.

John Nichols signing books at UNM. (© 2008 Photo by Denise Tessier)

And few may realize it, but Nichols is also a naturalist in the classic sense, according to Mike Kelly, associate dean of UNM’s Center for Southwest Research, which will house Nichols’ papers. Kelly said Nichols daily hikes Wheeler Peak, New Mexico’s highest mountain, where he takes temperature readings, tallies the number of elk he sees and records events such as the day the leaves turn to gold.

Nichols says the environmental and social dilemma we are in today is nothing new.

“We have been creating it since Adam Smith published ‘The Wealth of Nations’ and humankind invented the steam engine and the cotton gin.”

More than 160 years ago Thoreau begged humanity to live simply, he says. Over the decades since then, Carson, Commoner and Gore have sounded successive environmental alarms.

Nichols says we all know the problem, but he might as well repeat it “just for the record:”

The growth of human consumption is destroying the biology that sustains us and is creating vast social problems throughout the human community.

The “fat cats” can’t take all the blame, he adds, because “the consumption habits of the average American person create the high crimes and misdemeanors of the fat cats.”

And because, as naturalist John Muir once said, everything in the universe is connected, if the fat cats go down, “we will go down also.”

Which might not be so bad, because “that’s the start of hope. … It should force us all to really start thinking.”

One form of rethinking that has emerged in the past two decades is the talk of a green revolution and sustainability itself, which Nichols defines:

A sustainable industry is one that consumes no more natural resources than can be regenerated in a timely fashion. Thus it is capable of exploiting that resource more or less infinitely.

He then offers by way of example an illustration that is classic Nichols:

A rabbit rancher doesn’t overgraze a pasture; he or she limits the number of bunnies on the land by forcing male bunnies to wear condoms, and rests the land between grazing sessions so it can renew itself, and doesn’t irrigate the land with any more water than what can be replenished annually by natural means.

This infers a limited production of rabbits from the land -– no growth … sustainability.

Of course, for rabbit ranchers to maintain a sustainable operation, society must constrain its consumption of bunny burgers to sustainable levels. Which means people must constrain their own reproductive activities so they won’t create numbers that consume too many bunnies.

Nichols, of course, is talking about limits on growth and reproduction, “about as likely as the chance that George Bush will go back home in January and open a Family Planning Center for rabbits in Crawford, Texas.”

But he makes the case that it’s necessary to talk about these things if we’re serious about the sustainable growth and green industry that Nichols notes are so coolly used in TV ads by “enormous corporations like Exxon.”

Quoting Canadian geneticist and ecologist David Suzuki, Nichols says, “As long as development is synonymous with economic growth, ‘sustainable development’ is a cruel oxymoron.”

“To me, it seems clear that anything less than radical downsizing of world material consumption will be ineffective. … And I don’t think any of this can come about without envisioning and implementing a world of social equality for humankind.”

Nichols says he feels “certain” we will need legislated limits on human procreation and offers as evidence Alan Weisman’s “The World Without Us,” which says the world can only be sustainable with fewer people on the planet. Even if it could be legislated that every woman on earth be allowed one child, by 2050 there would be 5.5 billion people on earth and it would take 92 years -– to the year 2100 -– to reach a world population of 1.6 billion -– “which might make for a sustainable human community.”

Unfortunately, the American psyche has been trained “to eat the earth with an appetite that’s never satiated,” a mind-set that must be reversed.

“Our votes next Tuesday are crucial to beginning those changes, though I doubt that any American president will have the moxie to initiate the radical new world that we need. That will probably come, painfully and at great expense, from the people they govern.”

Changes are happening to the human community just as they are happening to the melting arctic, the extinction of species, the collapsing world ecosystem. History tells us that no civilization keeps going forever. … The cliché is: It’s only a matter of time.

After the talk, Nichols said “socialism is the big bugaboo in this country,” but the Declaration of Independence, with its talk about equality, “is a very socialist document.”

Someday, perhaps, Americans will study it without the negative contexts of communism and oppression and “go back to its idealism.”

“There’s a huge difference between capitalism and democracy,” he added.

Ending on a positive note, Nichols said he’s promised himself never again to write a book the size of “The Milagro Beanfield War,” “The Magic Journey” or “The Nirvana Blues” (his famous trilogy).

“Today I am appalled by those 850-page manuscripts. I mean, what in God’s name was I thinking? They had to cut down a forest the size of New York State to print them. And I don’t even want to think about the bleach from the pulp mills that went into paper for those books.”