The report of NASA's Office of the Inspector General on the clumsy attempts to censoring climate science makes for a most enjoyable read. We can laugh now that it's over, I mean. There are lots of gems among the overall finding the a small cabal of political appointees in the public affairs office tried to delay or bury new findings on climate change. Here, then are some of my favorites:

...we believe that many of these scientists (and the majority of career Public Affairs Officers interviewed) would argue that the actions of NASA Headquarters Office of Public Affairs -- in delaying, unduly editing, canceling, or converting to lesser media their news releases related to climate change -- were not in keeping with the mandates of the Space Act. In particular, that the Space Act required the NASA Headquarters Office of Public Affairs to disseminate this information to the widest extent possible, but they did not.

All of the NASA climate change scientists and career civil service Public Affairs Officers who were interviewed agreed that some form of political vetting or censorship or suppression existed within the climate change news release process.

Local mirror of NASA's Inspector General's report on censorship of climate studies

Scientists travelling with the troops found major new fractures during an assessment of the state of giant ice shelves in Canada's far north.

The team found a network of cracks that stretched for more than 10 miles (16km) on Ward Hunt, the area's largest shelf.

The fate of the vast ice blocks is seen as a key indicator of climate change.

Burgers, fries, onion rings and milkshakes are popular because don't have to wait long to satisfy your hunger, they taste darn good and they don't cost a fortune. You can't live on them for long, though. Just ask Morgan "Super Size Me" Spurlock. Indeed, fast food is at the heart of one of the modern society's most pressing health challenges: rising obesity rates. And you can't make a McDonald's menu healthy just by adding a salad option. There are more calories in a Premium Southwest Salad with Crispy Chicken than a double cheesebuger (450 vs 440), and that's without the 100-170 extra calories that come with the dressing.

The reality is, if you want to lose wait and reduce your chances of a heart attack, you can't make McDonald's or any of its competitors, a central part of your diet. And so it is with McCain's approach to the climate crisis. While he recognizes the need for actions that "only Congress can enact and the president can sign," beneath all that talk of embracing clean energy is a faith in the free market. And even though McCain recognizes that "the profit motive basically led in one direction — toward machines, methods, and industries that used oil and gas," he continues to insist that profits will supply the way out of the trap they created in the first place.

...

The common theme is the inability of free market forces to do what's in the long-term interest of civilization as a whole, even with the collective talents of industrial researchers and engineers at our (their) disposal. So when you hear McCain proclaim that "the federal government can't just summon those talents by command — only the free market can draw them out," it's probably a good idea to remember that it wasn't the free market that won the last couple of world wars. Or put humans on the moon. Or got rid of small pox. Or laid the foundation of the internet, for that matter. It was all government.

Even if you're not in denial counting on the market to correct itself early is crazy.

Why bother? That really is the big question facing us as individuals hoping to do something about climate change, and it's not an easy one to answer. I don't know about you, but for me the most upsetting moment in "An Inconvenient Truth" came long after Al Gore scared the hell out of me, constructing an utterly convincing case that the very survival of life on earth as we know it is threatened by climate change. No, the really dark moment came during the closing credits, when we are asked to . . . change our light bulbs. That's when it got really depressing. The immense disproportion between the magnitude of the problem Gore had described and the puniness of what he was asking us to do about it was enough to sink your heart.

But the drop-in-the-bucket issue is not the only problem lurking behind the "why bother" question. Let's say I do bother, big time. I turn my life upside-down, start biking to work, plant a big garden, turn down the thermostat so low I need the Jimmy Carter signature cardigan, forsake the clothes dryer for a laundry line across the yard, trade in the station wagon for a hybrid, get off the beef, go completely local. I could theoretically do all that, but what would be the point when I know full well that halfway around the world there lives my evil twin, some carbon-footprint doppelgänger in Shanghai or Chongqing who has just bought his first car (Chinese car ownership is where ours was back in 1918), is eager to swallow every bite of meat I forswear and who's positively itching to replace every last pound of CO2 I'm struggling no longer to emit. So what exactly would I have to show for all my trouble?

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Is eating local or walking to work really going to reduce my carbon footprint? According to one analysis, if walking to work increases your appetite and you consume more meat or milk as a result, walking might actually emit more carbon than driving. A handful of studies have recently suggested that in certain cases under certain conditions, produce from places as far away as New Zealand might account for less carbon than comparable domestic products. True, at least one of these studies was co-written by a representative of agribusiness interests in (surprise!) New Zealand, but even so, they make you wonder. If determining the carbon footprint of food is really this complicated, and I've got to consider not only "food miles" but also whether the food came by ship or truck and how lushly the grass grows in New Zealand, then maybe on second thought I'll just buy the imported chops at Costco, at least until the experts get their footprints sorted out.

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There are so many stories we can tell ourselves to justify doing nothing, but perhaps the most insidious is that, whatever we do manage to do, it will be too little too late. Climate change is upon us, and it has arrived well ahead of schedule. Scientists' projections that seemed dire a decade ago turn out to have been unduly optimistic: the warming and the melting is occurring much faster than the models predicted. Now truly terrifying feedback loops threaten to boost the rate of change exponentially, as the shift from white ice to blue water in the Arctic absorbs more sunlight and warming soils everywhere become more biologically active, causing them to release their vast stores of carbon into the air. Have you looked into the eyes of a climate scientist recently? They look really scared.

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As Adam Smith and many others have pointed out, this division of labor has given us many of the blessings of civilization. Specialization is what allows me to sit at a computer thinking about climate change. Yet this same division of labor obscures the lines of connection -- and responsibility -- linking our everyday acts to their real-world consequences, making it easy for me to overlook the coal-fired power plant that is lighting my screen, or the mountaintop in Kentucky that had to be destroyed to provide the coal to that plant, or the streams running crimson with heavy metals as a result.

While it is easy to say that there is some guy in Chinawhois your carbon-footprint evil twin, it's just as easy to say that there's some guy in Texas, driving his Escalade at 85 miles per hour to meet his tee time at a golf course that sucks down more water than the town it is in who is going to have a round of steaks with his buddies afterwards.

As for the rest of the concerns, that it might be too little too late, no matter what you do and the fact that some courses of action might not actually be helpful but harmful, there's always The Consumer's Guide to Effective Environmental Choices: Practical Advice from the Union of Concerned Scientists.

PRESIDENT BUSH will call for an "intermediate goal" for climate change policy today, although news reports indicate that he will not come out in support of any specific proposals. As such, it sounds like the new goals may not be all that different from the administration's previous endorsement of "aspirational" policy and voluntary actions where carbon emissions are concerned. This despite the protestations of environmental groups that voluntary measures are not likely to succeed.

A Silicon Valley lawmaker is gaining momentum with a bill that would require "climate change" to be among the science topics that all California public school students are taught.

The measure, by state Sen. Joe Simitian, D-Palo Alto, also would mandate that future science textbooks approved for California public schools include climate change.

"You can't have a science curriculum that is relevant and current if it doesn't deal with the science behind climate change," Simitian said. "This is a phenomenon of global importance and our kids ought to understand the science behind that phenomenon."

"The presidential council ratified in its session on January 23 a law according to which the Republic of Iraq will join the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and its Kyoto Protocol," the statement said.

The Iraqis decided to join the pioneering, yet troubled pact almost two weeks after Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was hailing legislative progress on another front. But the AFP report did not get specific on the amount of greenhouse-gas emissions Iraq would seek to cut.

Science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke listed three wishes on his 90th birthday Sunday: for the world to embrace cleaner energy resources, for a lasting peace in his adopted home, Sri Lanka, and for evidence of extraterrestrial beings.