If the politics of inaction and delay that have triumphed in this country continues for another decade, then Planetary Purgatory in the likely future facing our country before midcentury - probably in your own lifetime.

Would PBS go so far as to give air time to an even more extreme kind of disinformer, a Holocaust denier?

Replacing half of the U.S. ground-transport fuels with hydrogen from wind power by 2050, for example, might require 1,400 gigawatts of advanced wind turbines or more... replacing those fuels with electricity might require less than 400 GW.

The coal plants that will be built from 2005 to 2030 will release as much carbon dioxide as all of the coal burned since the industrial revolution more than two centuries ago.

Bush and Inhofe will go down in history with other leaders such as Herbert Hoover and Neville Chamberlain who were blind to their nation's gravest threats.

Some 3 million years ago, when the earth was a little more than 3°C warmer than preindustrial levels (about 2.2°C warmer than today), Antarctica had far less ice and sea levels were a stunning 25 meters higher than today. If we stay on our current emissions path, the planet will almost certainly be that warm by the century's end.

The best thing about improvements in health care is that all the climate-change deniers are now going to live long enough to see how wrong they were.