It’s hard to quantify, but the number of underground coal fires in this country, estimated at close to 200, and those in the rest of the world are almost impossible to estimate. China alone burns at least 10 million tons of coal in these underground infernos every year. Dan Cray brought this problem to light in a Time magazine article at http://www.time. He says every coal field in the world has these fires, with most in developed or developing countries. The amount of green house gases spewed out by these fires is staggering, with some having burned for 48 years.

You see it time and time again. Stories about climate change are always overwhelmed by deniers about ten to one. If nothing else, they are organized. One is tempted to tell them, "Fine. Keep on polluting and using fossil fuels and don't worry. We can't do anything about it any way. PS, I hope you don't own sea shore property that disappears because of climate change. Yes, it's all Al Gore's fault because he is becoming a billionaire on his movie, An Inconvenient Truth...

A report from Der Spiegel On Line, an electronic version of the German newspaper, reports that a new study by Susan Trumbore of the Max Planck Institute for Biochemistry in Jena, Germany, revealed that the environment, including the oceans and rain forests, are able too absorb far more CO₂ than previously thought. Is this good news?

This morning I read an Op-Ed piece in the NY Times by Seth Shostak, an astronomer with the SETI Institute, those folks who look for extra- terrestrial beings in outer space. The point of his thesis was that the kind of space exploration done on Mars, namely sending robots and cameras, made more sense than sending people to outer space due to the cost and energy it would consume. His term for sending humans into deep space to explore was “a pipe dream.”

The technology, not yet developed, and the cost of fuel required, estimated at...