WE ARE THE ROBOTS, PART 7,602. Weary of merely giving his regular steer to Lileks' tedious jabber at buzz.mn, Ole Perfesser spices it up with a laff at Al Bore:

AL GORE VISITS MINNEAPOLIS:

Brrr. Not complaining; just noting. Flower-slaying frost expected, which really is too soon. All that work, and they perish in a night.

I mean, I don't actually know if Al was in Minneapolis today, I just kind of assumed.

Heh heh! Because of the Gore Effect, see! Heh hehindeed!

Meanwhile in the Arctic Sea:

Large areas of Arctic sea ice are only one meter thick this year, about 50 percent thinner than they were in the year 2001, according to measurements taken by 50 scientists on board the research ship Polarstern. The international team is conducting research on sea ice in the central Arctic Basin.

"The ice cover in the North Polar Sea is dwindling, the ocean and the atmosphere are becoming steadily warmer, the ocean currents are changing," said chief scientist Dr. Ursula Schauer from the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research, who has been aboard the Polarstern for two and a half months...

The thickness of the Arctic sea ice has been shrinking since 1979, and on this trip oceanographers have found a particularly high concentration of melt-water in the ocean and a large number of melt-ponds.

According to the latest computer models, says Schauer, the Arctic could be ice free in less than 50 years, in case of further warming...

If you believe you will be saved, as Perfesser Reynolds does, by a robot Rapture, I guess you can afford to laugh this stuff off. Traditional humans may feel differently.