​[Insert joke here.] No, but seriously. 2010 ties with 2005 as "the hottest year in the historical record," while also taking home the glory of being the wettest year on record, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's annual teleconference. How can it be both hot and wet? It might be that warm air can hold more water, or it might be something else, say the scientists, but either way, temperature and precipitation were above average. Also, this is definitely a "trend": It's the "34th consecutive year with temperatures above the 20th century average." [via NPR]

​On Monday night, Katie Couric swung from CBS's coverage of the oil spill to the Tennessee floods by saying she was moving "from a man-made disaster to a natural one." That's one big and unproven assumption. How does Couric know that the worst Tennessee flooding in history has nothing to do with man-induced climate change?

Couric was just succumbing to the presumption of virtually all weather reporting in America, which has never adapted to the overwhelming scientific consensus about warming and the extreme weather events that go with it, starting with every form of aggravated precipitation.

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​The Empire State Building will be shutting off its lights tonight for an hour at 8:30 in observation of Global Earth Hour 2010. Earth Hour is an initiative of the World Wildlife Fund, which asks "individuals, schools, organizations, businesses and governments" to turn off or dim their lights for an hour tonight in support of action on climate change. Last year, 4,000 cities in 87 countries went dark, including 318 US cities. The WWF estimates that 80 million Americans participated. This year, New York State has signed on, and so has Brooklyn. Oddly, given our mayor's well-known green tendencies, the city doesn't appear to be directly involved.

Other local landmarks taking part: the Citigroup Center, the Coca-Cola Billboard in Times Square, the Chrysler Building, the New York Life building, the Time Warner Center, The New York Public Library, 7 World Trade Center and the other Silverstein Properties buildings, The Helmsley Building and other Monday Properties buildings, the Grand Hyatt New York, and 39 Broadway theaters.

Public Advocate Bill de Blasio is warning that he wants to more than double the fines for New York City landlords who don't heat their buildings for more than five days in a row.

In 2008, there were 230,000 lack-of-heating complaints logged by the city, and tenants commonly take such dangerous measures as leave their gas stoves on all night.

Of course, there are the exceptions, like the scattered artists and hipsters who purposely leave their heat off for the whole winter — for aesthetic reasons or just because it's, like, really, really cool.

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Fresh from giving the Dead-To-Me-Fredo treatment to Governor Paterson (the Daily News's headline today may as well have said "Piss Off, You!") and anointing Andrew Cuomo the new golden child of Democratic politics in New York, President Obama has nothing less on his plate today than changing the entire world.

The Times printed his schedule this morning, and there's hardly a minute to take a breath. He's already wrapped up a global climate change conference in which he drew sharp contrasts between his illustrious predecessor and himself by, well, giving a crap about the situation. He's also pushing to get emerging economic powerhouses India and China on board in an urgent push to fight climate change. Tall order, to say the least.

That's followed by a meeting with Benjamin Netanyahu and Mahmoud Abbas -- separately then together. Then lunch with African heads of state and a meeting with Chinese President Hu Jintao.

It all wraps up with the Global Initiative hosted by Bill Clinton -- who's now joined the president in suggesting that Governor Paterson "do the right thing" -- and dinner at the United Nations.

If they're going to shut down traffic all across town, isn't it good to at least know that it's probably worth the aggravation.

Sherman, set the Way-Back machine to last November, when we awoke one morning to find our fair city flooded with copies of a painstakingly crafted spoof of the New York Times. The prankster activists behind it, the Yes Men, put the fake Times together to call attention to the war in Iraq -- and now they've struck again.

If you're lucky, you caught a glimpse this morning of a New York Post headline that screamed, "WE'RE SCREWED." Although it may not have even raised an eyebrow -- this is the Post we're talking about -- a closer inspection reveals that the entire issue deals with global climate change. Admittedly, that's the kind of thing the Post wouldn't touch, except to allow the paper's editorial board to break out its awe-inspiring arsenal of four-letter words and aim it at the liberal menace.

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If you enjoyed seeing a dimmer New York skyline during the 2003 blackout, you may get some pleasure from the March 28 "Earth Hour." On that date from 8:30 to 9:30 p.m., several large New York buildings will cut their lights as part of a 1,000-city effort to highlight the climate crisis (though its actual effect on global energy use will probably be negligible). Earth Hour is the World Wildlife Fund's idea. Among the participants are the Empire State Building, Rockefeller Center, and the U.N., whose Secretary-General endorses it as a message of support for earth-friendliness to the December Copenhagen Climate Conference. Citizens are encouraged to take part, too. "So the question is, how the hell are we supposed to entertain ourselves without electricity?" ask the Martini Boys. " The obvious answer: sex with ugly people." Photo via NASA.

In the interests of preserving the world's rainforests, New York State Finance Law 165 names certain tropical hardwoods that can't be used in state business. Among these woods is apitong, which comes from Malaysian old-growth rainforests.

But Rainforest Relief says they've noticed that a contract the Department of Sanitation has bid out -- and for which they've already received proposals -- specifies the use of apitong for the construction of flooring for flatbed trailers at its North Shore Marine Transfer Station. (See the middle of the second page.)

Rainforest Relief's executive director Tim Keating tells us he'd like to "get the city off all tropical hardwood," and has been fighting to get the applicable laws changed to that effect. (The Marine Transfer Station plans include lots of greenheart wood, which is technically legal but, Keating says, enormously unnecessary and wasteful.) In the meantime, they're pressing the city to at least make sure the materials they specify for use aren't overtly against the law.

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During the campaign Obama said his election would presage the "moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal." Today Mayor Bloomberg exempted New York from that forecast. His expert New York City Panel on Climate Change predicts "extreme weather events" over the next century. By the 2020s, rainfall may rise as much as 5 percent, sea levels by 5 inches. It doesn't sound like much, and it's pretty consistent with previous analysis, but even these rates increase the likelihood of hurricanes, floods, and droughts, the panel says, though not all at the same time. And later in the century, the risk of disaster-movie weather increases. (Full report pdf here.)

We console ourselves with the cheering thought that we'll be long dead before things get really bad, but the Mayor feels obliged to think ahead, and says the city's Adaptation Task Force will use the data to "create a plan to protect the city's critical infrastructure and will inform other city efforts to adapt to climate change." So as soon as the stimulus money rolls in, let's all head down to the Battery and to the Rockaways and build up those seawalls.

Mayor Bloomberg's looking to harness the power of the earth, sun, and wind to meet our energy needs. He announced in a speech to the 2008 National Clean Energy Summit in Las Vegas that the City is soliciting firms "with strong track records in producing renewable energy" to send their "best ideas" -- which, he suggested, might include "dramatically increasing rooftop solar power production," "geothermal energy," and "windfarms atop our bridges and skyscrapers."

"I think it would be a thing of beauty," said the Mayor, "if, when Lady Liberty looks out on the horizon, she not only welcomes new immigrants, but lights their way with a torch powered by an ocean windfarm."

Just in case that's not enough, Bloomberg also wants to "increase our capacity of safe and clean nuclear-generated power."