Life (as always) imitates Iowahawk--In late December of 2004, the word's most famous squirrel smoker satirically wrote:

Washington, DC - Pointing to the devastating weekend Indian Ocean tsunami that left over 24,000 dead, an international blue ribbon committee of climatologists and ecoscientists today issued a stark warning that man-made pollutants have increasingly "make water spirits angry."

The blunt conclusion prefaced a 2300 page meta-analysis of hundreds of scientific studies and computer models detailing links between human industrial activity and wrathful eco-deities. Entitled "Fire Bad: Fire Very Bad," the report warns that the planet faces additional catastrophies unless drastic regulatory action is taken to appease Earthen-furies.

"Unclean money devils anger sacred water spirit Tai-Waku," explained Martin Knudson of Scripps Oceanic Institute. "He now call angry to son the whale, 'make slap with anger-tails! Bring vengeance-surf to villagers!'"

While most empirical evidence supports the theory of wrathful whale-tail slappings, some scientists are exploring alternative hypotheses for the weekend tsunami. Ecobiologist Jane Geary of UC Santa Cruz points to mounting evidence that the ocean spirit-world may have been driven to gastrointestinal rage by gas-guzzling SUVs.

"Thunder-wagon make smoke cloud of greenhouse gas," explained Geary. "hungry Tai-Waku eat smoke from thunder-wagon, pass giant wind with mighty fury."

Peter Novak, chief science officer of the Sierra Club, dismissed Geary's "Divine Fart" theory, arguing it was more likely that SUVs had triggered the tsunami via a spirit underword sexual encounter.

"Wheels of thunder-wagons wake up Big Earth Spirit-Mother, make to crazy tingle in hairy child-place. She now go to water lair of Tai-Waku, make big angry love on tectonic plate," said Novak. "Big Earth Spirit-Mother say, 'if ocean rocking, don't come a-knocking.'"

Although they disagree on the precise causes of the wrathful spirit world, scientists were largely unanimous in recommending immediate global regulatory action. Remedial steps suggested in the report include ratification of the Kyoto treaty, elimination of automobiles, volcanic altars for virgin sacrifices, creation of a sustainable urine-based economy, and improved faculty dental benefits.

"If not act now, it too late," said report editor Paul Erlich of Stanford University.

Erlich, whose 1978 best seller "Ice Time Come Soon" is widely credited with saving millions of lives by warning of the massive age of glaciation that threatened Earth during the 1980s, said inaction might anger the spirit world further.

"Me not know when Tai-Waku make wrath again," said Erlich. "Me need more grant money."

Seamus Heffernan, the senior policy executive of "ICE", England's Institution of Civil Engineers, emailed me a link to his review of An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore's recent agitpropumentary, in which he spotted a similar "Fire Makes Sea Gods Angry" moment from the former vice president:

Lack of panache aside, Gore does outline his case clearly and powerfully. He explains the basics of the science around climate change (bare bones version: greenhouse gases trapped in the Earth’s atmosphere prevent the escape of the sun’s heat) and, in the film’s only real chuckle, drives this point home with an educational clip from Matt Groening’s Futurama.

Having now hooked his crowd, Gore goes to work outlining the real life examples to drive the reality of the situation home. The Darfur droughts, flooding in China, the melting ice caps, the baffling weather all are explained

Unfortunately, this is where Gore loses some of his credibility. He is most certainly safe on many of the examples he cites, but cannot resist going for the glamour shots. Standing before a giant photo of Mount Kilimanjaro, he laments its disappearing snow peaks. Unfortunately, Kilimanjaro has been losing snow for over a hundred years through a reduction in 19th century precipitation, not global warming. Ouch.

Gore goes one worse when he attempts to use Katrina (and accompanying gut-wrenching footage). It was easily the film’s most crass political moment. Katrina was a disaster, and even more crucially for Gore, an American disaster whose wounds have not yet come close to healing. In his rush to exploit this, he neglected homework from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which said that “No systematic changes in the frequency of tornadoes, thunder days, or hail events are evident in the limited areas analysed". In addition, the "challenges globally in tropical and extra-tropical storm intensity and frequency are dominated by inter-decadal and multi-decadal variations, with no significant trends evident over the 20th century." In other words, the jury is out on whether or not global warming made Katrina any worse.

By claiming Katrina was unquestionably caused by global warming, he deftly shifts the blame for its severity onto the current administration (after all, they’re hardly big fans of the global warming hypothesis). Gore lets himself down by both grossly misstating the facts about hurricanes and climate change, while clumsily making the other aim of this film clear: the 2008 elections. Perhaps we should expect no better from a man who was quoted in Grist Magazine as saying it is ‘appropriate’ to overstate the facts related to climate change.

Perhaps.