Elsewhere on the Web

At the New York Times's Dot Earth blog, Andrew Revkin looks into an often-ignored potential natural disaster: meteor strikes. Monday marks the 100th anniversary of the Tunguska event, in which a meteor estimated to be as small as a few dozen yards across exploded over Siberia, creating a blast capable of destroying a large metropolitan area.

Gavin Schmidt at RealClimate dissects the media attention over forecasts that the North Pole could become ice-free for the first time this summer. Schmidt, a climate modeller at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, asks "[W]hy do stories about an geographically special, but climatically unimportant, single point traditionally associated with a christianized pagan gift-giving festival garner more attention than long term statistics concerning ill-defined regions of the planet where very few people live?"

Yale's new eco-mag, Environment 360, has a long essay by Chris Mooney blasting the Bush Administration's attitudes toward environmental science. The next president, writes Mooney, will need to get political appointees to back off and let government scientists do their jobs. Mooney, the author of a book called The Republican War on Science, blogs at the Intersection.

EcoGeek's Hank Green has a review of Wall•E, the computer-animated children's movie with an environmental theme. Green points out that the surface area of Wall•E's solar panels would be insufficient for providing power to the robot. (Well, what did you expect from a site with "geek" in the name?)

The Onion's 'Obligatory Green Issue' is out this week, in which the paper offers up recycled stories from its 252-year history. Some highlights: EPA Didn't Know Anybody Was Still Drinking Water, Massive Oil Spill Results In Improved Wildlife Viscosity, and a commentary by a smokestack titled, I'm A Cloud Factory!