National Geographic:

Desertification, drought, and despair—that's what global warming has in store for much of Africa. Or so we hear. Emerging evidence is painting a very different scenario, one in which rising temperatures could benefit millions of Africans in the driest parts of the continent.

Scientists are now seeing signals that the Sahara desert and surrounding regions are greening due to increasing rainfall. If sustained, these rains could revitalize drought-ravaged regions, reclaiming them for farming communities.

This desert-shrinking trend is supported by climate models, which predict a return to conditions that turned the Sahara into a lush savanna some 12,000 years ago.

Bold added because, you know, it's sort of a stunner that this didn't make it into Al's powerpoint slides. [National Geographic photo]

MSNBC Headline:

Antarctic ice nearly size of N.Y. City breaks up

Icebergs calve off after ice bridge stabilizing shelf collapsed in early April

Sounds horrible, doesn't it?  I mean, New York City is HUUUUUGE. It's the center of the world! 

Imagine if they had said "three times the size of Yuma AZ" or something like that?  And here's some context:

Antarctica is the coldest, windiest and driest continent. Since all but 2.4% of Antarctica is covered by ice that averages 7,870 feet (2,160 meters) thick, it is also the highest continent. Antarctica is about 4.5 million square miles (14 million square kilometers) in area, which is about the size of the contiguous 48 U.S. states plus about half of Mexico.

So the fraction of that calved represents about .00000006% of Antarctica's 4,500,000 square miiles of ice that is over a mile thick on average.

As Paul notes, calving is a pretty normal process, something echoed by climatologists

Referencing a paper in the scientific journal Nature last month, New Zealand Climate Science Coalition member Dr Willem De Lange, of the Earth Sciences faculty at Waikato University, explains that, in the vicinity of the Wilkins Ice Shelf that has so concerned Greenpeace, “there was a rapid rise in air temperature 40-50 years ago [but] it has been fairly stable since then.  “There are many factors involved in the destabilization of an ice shelf,” said Dr De Lange. “Warmer ocean waters circulating underneath (moving water melts ice faster than warm air), tidal rises and falls, and wave action all contribute to the fracture and eventually breakup of the ice. Now that the ice shelf is breaking up, it will be possible to sample the underlying sediments and determine the history of the shelf. We do not know if the shelf has undergone cycles of expansion and contraction during the last 10,000 years or has been shrinking since the last glacial period. One thing we do know however is that the break up of this shelf is not solely a consequence of current, or even recent weather changes. It is the consequence of changes over long periods, perhaps 1,000-10,000 years in this case, although we can't tell for certain until the necessary data are collected.

Well, at least MSNBC didn't recycle their photos (this time).

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Where Al Gore & Co. are predicting the end of the world, author Indur Goklany in The Improving State of the World: Why We're Living Longer, Healthier, More Comfortable Lives on a Cleaner Planet shows how much better life is than only a few decades ago.

Relying on a wealth of data, Goklany shows how innovation, increases in affluence, and key institutions have combined to address environmental degradation that sometimes results from growth. The evidence on the use of cropland, trends in air pollution, and diverse experiences in water usage counters the gloomy outlook of some environmentalists. Goklany explains why the state of the world is improving and offers a realistic assessment of the sustainability of the human enterprise, setting priorities for dealing with such challenges as climate change.