The IPCC Report

There's only a summary at this point, but here's the link for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the report released today. Thus far, I don't see anything new in the summary. Climate change is indeed anthropogenic and the globe faces very serious changes. But this should have more political impact (although here's the American Enterprise Institute / Exxon's counteroffer).

Plus, here's one step the UK is taking:

Children will be put on the front line of the battle to save the planet under radical proposals to shake up the way that geography is taught in schools.

The plans, to be published on Monday, will ensure that, for the first time, issues such as climate change and global warming are at the heart of the school timetable. Pupils will also be taught to understand their responsibilities as consumers - and weigh up whether they should avoid travel by air to reduce CO2 emissions and shun food produce imported from the other side of the world because of its impact on pollution.

RealClimate notices something curious:

...there are some curious patterns in the whitehouse.gov search engine. It turns out that it has been blocked from returning most results if the search phrase includes "global warming" - even if it's from the President himself. For instance, searching for "issue of global" gives as top result the President's Rose Garden speech in June 2001 on Global Climate Change, but searching for "issue of global warming" (which of course is the full phrase used) returns nothing.

On a different weather note, Siberia received orange snow. Don't eat it.

An orange-coloured snowfall in Russia’ s Siberian Omsk region on Wednesday was not radioactive, the Itar-Tass news agency reports quoting the results of the first lab tests made by Emergencies’ Ministry experts.

“At the present moment, we cannot give explanations to the snow which is oily to the touch and has a pronounced rotten smell, and we are waiting for the results of a thorough test on samples,” the environmental prosecutor of the Omsk region, Anton German, said.

“We have requested information about analogous phenomena across Russia. There have been similar cases, but only one of them was man-caused. In all other cases there were natural reasons behind coloured snowfalls: seaweeds, sand, etc.,” he stressed.