EarthFirst Blog Week in Review: March 10th - 14th

It was another busy last week here at the EarthFirst blog. We covered samurai swords, expensive green washed handbags, big business green hijinks by GM and Wal-Mart, expensive gas, the green Pope, “clean coal” crap, and toilet paper. We’ve nailed down the design for the new template which we’ll be rolling out in a few weeks. It looks great and we’re really excited to show it to our readers. Happy reading!

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• Grocery Bills Soar as Retail Food Prices Spiral Up
• The War on Iraq is Costing $4,000 a Second, or About $120,000 in the Time It Took to Write This Headline
• Global Warming Doesn’t Necessarily Mean It Gets Warmer Everywhere All The Time
• Rant: Shut the F*&% Up About High Gas Prices
• Animals vs. Humans: Humanity Gets Pwned
• The Vatican Declares that Polluting the Earth is Now a Sin
• The Three Ingredient Vegan Junk Food You’ve Probably Been Eating for Years
• EcoGeek Kills “Clean Coal” Ad and Calls Them Out for the Greenwash
• Florida Senator Pushing Bill to Require Restaurants to Have “Enough” Toilet Paper on Roll
• GM CEO Rick Wagoner: Vice Chairman Bob Lutz Doesn’t Speak for GM on Global Warming
• Doggie Style Commute: Ride the Bitch Cruiser to Not-Safe-for-Work
• Coal- Cheap. Abundant. Cheap.
• What is RSS and How Can It Make My Life Better?
• Want to Create Jobs? Invest in Education and Mass Transit
• A $360 Cardboard Bag Coated with Water-Resistant Spray with a Leather Handle is NOT Green
• The Friday Video Round Up: Will Ferrell, Big Angry Fat Guys, Al Gore, and the Hummer Hybrid
• Wal-Mart CEO is a Master of the Obvious: Our Company is Not Green
• Japan Steel Works- Builds 600 Ton Parts for Nuclear Power Plants and Samurai Swords
• Eco-Fail! HGTV’s Green Home Giveaway and The Yukon Hybrid

Global Warming Doesn’t Necessarily Mean It Gets Warmer Everywhere All The Time

One of Matt Drudge’s favorite things to do with Global Warming headlines is to set them up against cold weather headlines. One headline will be about a Global Warming protest or meeting, the headline below will shout that it was super snowy somewhere, implying that Global Warming can’t possibly be real if it’s snowing hard in Iowa.

I’ve heard the same arguments thrown out about what’s turned into the snowiest winter in New England’s recorded history. “Global Warming must be BS, we just got 13 inches of snow again”.

To a simpleton that argument makes perfect sense. After all, the second word in “Global Warming” is “Warming”. Doesn’t that mean that every place on the planet should be warm now?

No, actually it doesn’t. Weather and long term cooling and warming trends are extremely complex systems. As the earth warms up due to our love affair with releasing CO2 into the air, the temperature and weather patterns in different places on the globe will fluctuate. It could be a colder winter in one country, a vastly warmer one in another. The overall temperature trend remains going up, but the local weather conditions vary from place to place.

The answer to Maine and New Hampshire’s extra snowy winter turns out to be North Europe, which is coming out of one of the warmest winters on record. Treehugger has it:

Tourism favorites like dog sleds have been “on ice” this year, euphemistically rather than literally. With temperatures breaking records across northern Europe, there is literally no ice for the popular winter tours. Mid-December to mid-January there was only hiking. Recent snows have re-employed the idle huskies, but the weatherman is not as optimistic as the sled owners: February 2008 was the second warmest on record since 1900. Other indicators demonstrate the unusual warm streak throughout the region.

The ice on the Baltic is so thin that ferries running between Tallinn, Estonia and Helsinki, Finnland have been in operation non-stop; no need for the usual pause in services between December and April. The German daily Der Spiegel references Jürgen Holfort of Germany’s Federal Maritime and Hydrographic Agency predicting that this winter will have the least ice in the Baltic Sea since 1720.

Link [Treehugger]

Photo credit: Flickr user BigMcGuire

The Pedal Powered Snow Plow Is Chock Full of Awesome

Great FSM, do I want a Pedal Powered Snowplow. Kudos to designer Kevin Blake for this bit of super smart green design.

Pure Awesome.

Via [Carectomy]