In a little-noticed op-ed in this past Thursday’s New York Times (“The Big Melt,” with a tip of the hat to Free Democracy for posting it) , Nicholas Kristoff reported on a conversation with Al Gore in which the former Vice-President said: “I can’t understand why there aren’t rings of young people blocking bulldozers, and preventing them from constructing coal-fired power plants.”

The twin quotes also reflect the urgency of our predicament. As Jay Gulledge, senior scientist at the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, notes in Kristoff’s column, “Over and over again, we’re finding that models correctly predict the patterns of change but understate their magnitude.”