Former wooden President-elect of the United States Al Gore was on 60 Minutes last night, being frumpy and endearing, as is his wont. His new project is promoting a huge $300 million ad campaign by the Alliance for Climate Protection, which is based on the (correct) theory that we Americans are such lazy, brainwashed zombies that we need a shiny, consumer-friendly ad campaign to convince us to stop choking ourselves with carbon dioxide. The 60 Minutes segment showed Gore visiting the ad agency, and even showed a clip of the ad, which is great free media exposure. Too bad its benefit was canceled out by the bitter taste left by the subsequent mutterings of Andy Rooney. Well, let's all hope this ad thing works so we don't die! After the jump, the first ad, which is Gore-like in its earnestness.

Everyone is always destroying New York all the time. Now the damn National Geographic Channel has decided to borrow a page from Animal Planet and direct their focus away from mating gazelles and toward death and doom for us all. The video below popped up on the front page of Dailymotion today. It's a promo for the upcoming NatGeo special "Six Degress Could Change the World," which is about global warming and not how we're all connected to '80s leading men (or Sidney Poitier). Remember: in the event of 25 feet of water drowning New York, stay inland or with Dennis Quaid. [National Geographic]

"Two rainy summers followed by drought have produced a shortage of some Christmas tree varieties in New York, especially Fraser firs, one of the most popular choices, according to growers. 'We've had it three years in a row now. Two with excess rain and now a drought. Mother Nature can't seem to get it right,' said Robert Norris, a tree farmer and executive secretary of the Christmas Tree Farmers Association of New York." Silly old Mother Nature! Also, last week's UN conference on global warming in Valencia concluded that "global warming is "unequivocal" and carbon dioxide already in the atmosphere commits the world to an eventual rise in sea levels of up to 4.6 feet." [AP]

From time to time the news cycle offers up an event of such import and complexity that it can only be comprehended through the medium of musical theater. This week resident composer Ben Greenman says that this musical about Al Gore winning the Nobel Peace Prize was the last one his writers got in before the strike, even though that it has been about eight million years since that happened, but whatever!

A grad student at NYU's Steinhardt school, working on a project called "The New York Institute for the Humanities", recently sent friends and colleagues a letter alerting them to her group's upcoming workshops. It is a letter in which she coined and employed the wrongest analogy we've heard in, like, a week (the internet equivalent of years).

A unified front of left-leaning ice-friendly countries, led by Russia and including Canada and Denmark, has begun to emerge from the once-frosty north. So far, they're just demanding the immediate return of all the ice they lost this summer. (This year, "six Californias" of open water appeared in the Arctic.) But what no one has asked is: Why do these fringey countries like ice so much? Is it because they have nothing else? Unfortunately, now that Canada's dollar is oddly similar to an actual dollar and a donut at any one of the 2,733 Canada-based Tim Horton's costs like four actual dollars, we must listen to their distress. But they are misguided! God's great plan for His world has at last granted Canada a Northwest Passage! Freed from this sad dependence on ice and misery, Canadian sea shipping lane dominance will turn Toronto into the new Tokyo, and Montreal into the new Seoul! Though Regina will still suck pretty bad.

• Ross Gelbspan thinks journalists have been "duped" by the fossil-fuel industry's P.R. people; we prefer to think that they're just lazy. [Grist]
• Or maybe they've got more important stories to cover. [CNN]
• Either way, great journalism is being practiced on both sides of the pond. [Independent]