Al Gore is in Memphis today to receive another award he hasn’t earned, and he’s brought the Gore Effect with him.

The average high for Memphis on October 28 is 69 degrees, with an average low of 46 degrees. Our record low of 30 degrees came in 1976.

Today’s high is 55 degrees (14 degrees cooler than average), and today’s low is 33 (13 degrees cooler than average, and just three degrees higher than the record).

After today, temperatures are expected to heat back up. Take a look at Tuesday compared with the rest of the week:

Tue: 55/33
Wed: 65/38
Thur: 70/44
Fri: 71/48
Sat: 70/46

UPDATE: Photo added. Yes, that’s actual frost on the ground. First time this year.

The Memphis Liar sent an e-mail this morning promoting its “first ever green issue,” exactly two years after this post. So are they being printed on recycled tapioca pudding wrappers, mesh aborted fetuses, or what? Or perhaps this issue is being off-set with carbon credits to Al Gore’s bank account? Surely it’s not just a regular issue with a heavier dose of global warming alarmism…

UPDATE: It’s the latter, because printing on recycled materials “isn’t financially feasible.” It leads one to question two things: 1. The Flyer’s true commitment to its environmentalist creed, and 2. The Flyer’s credibility in advocating policies that force everyone else to make similarly unreasonable changes.

The Global War on Bags is looking more favorable every day, especially in Los Angeles, where plastic bags will be banned by 2010. And it looks like paper bags won’t escape the wrath either, as they’re getting slapped with a brilliant 25 cent tax. It’s comforting to know the government is protecting us against this insidious foe. Of course, prepared shoppers will still be using bags under the BYOB policy, but if we’re lucky, people will eventually start using their own recycled mesh aborted fetuses instead (emblazoned with a Flyer logo, of course).

UPDATE: This news makes no sense to me; our heroic global warming alarmists and Al Gore wannabes are such winning personalities that I can’t imagine why anybody would object to being permanently glued to their side. It’s not like they’re all a bunch of preachy, hypocritical, ignorant, fascist leeches who want to dictate our every move.

Did you see the announcement by the Florida Marlins this week, that they played a “carbon-neutral” game of baseball?

By the Marlins’ calculations, more than 440 metric tons of carbon dioxide would be emitted during the game, from people traveling to the ballpark, stadium operations and other means. The Marlins, the state and the nonprofit group carbonfund.org said the carbon footprint of the game would be offset through investments in reforestation projects across the Southeast.

That’s right, sports fans. You have endangered the planet with your incessant patronage of baseball.

But you can make good with the environmental alarmist Florida Marlins organization by never visiting their ballpark ever again. And just for good measure, it’s probably best to avoid the Marlins entirely — buy no merchandise, collect no memorabilia and watch no games on television, as any of these activities may release dangerous levels of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

The planet may be in imminent danger until we completely boycott the Florida Marlins.

…when you pry it from her cold, wet nose.

Kroger is saving the planet by letting customers design their own “reusable bags.”

Loyal Kroger shopper that I am, I naturally had the perfect design in mind.

Backstory here.

It reminds me of the old Marxist poem:

First they came for the smokers, but I didn’t speak up, because I wasn’t a smoker.

Then they came for the grocery bags, but I didn’t speak up, because I don’t shop for groceries.

Then they came for the Hurdy Gurdy man, but I didn’t speak up, because I wasn’t the Hurdy Gurdy man.

Then they took a break to smoke medical marijuana, which is environmentally friendly and wonderful.

Then they went to the burning man festival.

UPDATE: I’m crushed:

Thank you for entering the Kroger Reusable Bag Design Contest. Unfortunately, your design entry was not approved. Please try again at www.Kroger.com/green.

Thank you,
The Kroger Co.

A recent post on Senator James Inhofe’s Environment and Public Works blog brings to mind the robust exchange I had with blogger/journalist Chris “Peskyfly” Davis back in May of this year, following his criticism of comments by talk show host Glenn Beck.

Peskyfly had declared Beck’s contention that Al Gore and friends at the United Nations were developing plans for a “global carbon tax” a “batsh*t crazy one-world-government conspiracy theory.”

The post by Inhofe staffer Marc Morano: Global Carbon Tax Urged at UN Climate Conference

A global tax on carbon dioxide emissions was urged to help save the Earth from catastrophic man-made global warming at the United Nations climate conference. A panel of UN participants on Thursday urged the adoption of a tax that would represent “a global burden sharing system, fair, with solidarity, and legally binding to all nations.”

“Finally someone will pay for these [climate related] costs,” Othmar Schwank, a global tax advocate, told Inhofe EPW Press Blog following the panel discussion titled “A Global CO2 Tax.” Schwank is a consultant with the Switzerland based Mauch Consulting firm…

The UN was presented with a new report from the Swiss Federal Office for the Environment titled “Global Solidarity in Financing Adaptation.” The report stated there was an “urgent need” for a global tax in order for “damages [from climate change] to be kept from growing to truly catastrophic levels, especially in vulnerable countries of the developing world.”

The tens of billions of dollars per year generated by a global tax would “flow into a global Multilateral Adaptation Fund” to help nations cope with global warming, according to the report.

This would seem to confirm many of Beck’s suspicions, though some of Morano’s details appear to be incorrect.

For instance, I find no evidence that Thursday’s panel was actually titled “A Global CO2 Tax,” as Morano reports. The U.N. website and materials refer to the panel as a “High-Level Round-Table Discussion on International Technology Cooperation” (archived video of the panel available at the link, though I can’t get it to display on my iBook).

Also, the “new report” referenced by Morano is nowhere to be found in the conference materials online. However, this document would appear to be on the same order, although it is apparently not a product of “the Swiss Federal Office for the Environment,” nor titled “Global Solidarity in Financing Adaptation.”

Instead, the document goes by a more lumbering title, “Review of the experience of international funds, multilateral financial institutions and other sources of funding relevant to the current and future investment and financial needs of developing countries.”

With its 55 pages packed with jargon, technical details, charts, graphs and bureaucrat-speak, the document is a real page-turner, to be sure. But it does advance the same general idea; from page 5 of the report (emphases mine):

13. With regard to adaptation to climate change, the additional global investment and financial flows from all sources (private and public, domestic and international) needed to adapt to climate change by 2030 could be tens of billions of dollars by 2030.

14. Private sources of funding can be expected to cover a portion of the adaptation costs in sectors… with privately owned physical assets, in particular in developed countries. However, public resources will be needed to implement policies or regulations to encourage the investment of private resources in adaptation measures, especially in developing countries. Public domestic resources will be needed to cover adaptation costs related to climate change impacts on public infrastructure in all countries.

15. The background paper concludes that additional external public funding will be needed for adaptation measures. Such additional funding will be needed in particular for sectors and countries that are already highly dependent on external support, for example in the health sector in LDCs, or for coastal infrastructure in developing countries that are highly vulnerable to a rise in sea level. Current mechanisms and sources of financing are limited and it is likely that new sources of funding will be required.

So, to summarize, the UN wants world nations to institute a new tax so that it can send money to developing countires in order for them to comply with global environmental mandates.

In short, that’s a global carbon tax, which is exactly what Beck was talking about.

Morano quotes conference attendee Emma Brindal of Friends of the Earth, who writes this dispatch from Bali: “a climate change response must have at its heart a resdistribution of wealth and resources.”

It’s at times like these when you’d rather be proved wrong than right.

A professor of molecular biology and biotechnology at Sheffield University in England is speaking out about the dangers of sodium benzoate, a preservative used in soft drinks, sauces and pickles.

The professor’s name?

Peter Piper.

John Farmer alerts us that goreal warming causes both more and fewer hurricanes, just as it causes both extreme heat and extreme cold, both hair growth and male pattern baldness. So, since goreal warming is both the problem and the remedy, I say we should start doing more, and less, to solve it. BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE!!!

This post is dedicated to our resident Media Matters lemming / epithet factory. May your blood boil along with your fruitini, in fervent anticipation of the climactic, climatic doom that awaits all your evil, conservative, 30-percentist detractors and those poor soul-less souls that failed to arise and goose-step, hand-in-hand, with all those other formerly-slumbering Americans who are suddenly, and forever, convinced that Satan-eating is the one, true path to Nirvana.

In case you missed it: Here’s the transcript.