Thank god for the colored fishwrap. If the USA Today hadn’t told me today that “The debate is over: Globe is warming” (link), I’d have to keep posting on Prometheus, hunting for nuggets of insight on the current state of consensus.

My snickering on USA Today headline writing aside (I think I prefer The Onion), Dan Vergano does a decent job of summing up some recent corporate attitudes and actions on climate change. None of it is surprising; a few of us had expected the American corporate machine to start moving on climate change when they realized that their international business interests were at stake post-Kyoto (link). But the article tries to go inside the heads of some affected corporations and includes this pearl from Big Coal:

” ‘On the business side, it just looks like climate change is not going away,’ says Kevin Leahy of Cinergy, a Cincinnati-based utility that reports $4.7 billion in annual revenue and provides electricity, mostly generated from coal, to 1.5 million customers. Most firms see global warming as a problem whose risks have to be managed, he says. ”

This is what some climate/science policy people have been saying for a while. We’re beyond the science and now into the risk realm. That is, we’ve identified a risk, which implies both knowledge and uncertainty. The risk, however you perceive it, isn’t going away. So you better decide whether you want to be proactive or indifferent. This is boilerplate for regular readers of Prometheus, but it is interesting to hear a representative of “the problem” say the same thing.

The article is also interesting for trotting out the now infamous Rick Piltz, attributing to him expertise in energy conservation (he did publish a paper about it in 1989), without really showing whether Vergano actually interviewed Piltz for the article. It will be interesting to watch whether Piltz becomes a recognized and oft-quoted expert on climate change for the next two weeks. (While Revkin gets to sit back and bask in the glory of originality. Nice job, Andy.)