Scary by any measure: Do you, like us, sometimes forget how long a meter is, and have to Google it just to be able to compare it to a yard, which you can more easily visualize because of, you know, football and yardsticks and stuff? Well, here's a new and terrifying way to help you remember: "A 1m rise in sea levels by 2100 would wash away much of small island states like Tuvalu and the Maldives. Delta regions like Bangladesh, where millions of people live, will be flooded and coastal cities like New York will have to build up defences." And guess what? If sea levels continue to rise at their current (and recently revised upward) rates, this is exactly what will happen. Thanks for the metric system tutorial, Climate Change! Telegraph

Canadian fakin': Canada's conservative Natural Resources minister, Joe Oliver, tentatively sets foot today in British Columbia, the Canadian province that stands to lose the most -- environmentally speaking -- if proposed tar sands pipelines designed to transport crude-saturated bitumen from Alberta to the country's western coast come to fruition. His message to a nervous audience? Basically the same thing that the Titanic's P.R. people liked saying to reporters before the famed ship set sail: "We're accident-proof, people! It'll never happen! You just gotta trust us on this one." Vancouver Sun

Is your peanut butter an orangutan killer?: Our appetite for palm oil, a commodity so abundant and cheap that it has become an ingredient in more than half of all products sold in U.S. supermarkets, is rapidly eroding the environmental integrity of places where the economy is dependent on harvesting the palm trees from which the oil is derived. According to one study, "oil palm plantations over the past two decades have cleared about 6,200 square miles of primary and logged forested lands. Palm oil deforestation and hunting have combined to cut Bornean orangutan populations down to 54,000, half the total of the 1980s, according to environmental groups. At this rate, some predict the iconic animal could be extinct within a matter of years." Washington Post

Decouples therapy: Nearly a quarter century ago, environmentalist and Rocky Mountain Institute founder Amory Lovins coined the term "negawatt" to help people visualize the concept of reducing energy consumption through dramatically increased efficiency. In doing so he also revealed the "perverse incentives structure that rewarded power companies based on amount of electricity sold, not for how much of a needed service it was providing." Now that governments are finally "decoupling" these twinned notions, Lovins' theoretical unit may finally be having its day in the sun. Or its day under a photovoltaic panel. Whatever. Slate

Exhaustive research: A sure-to-be-controversial study published earlier this week in the Archives of General Psychiatry strongly suggests a link between traffic-related air pollution and autism, showing, among other things, that "children who were exposed to the highest levels of traffic-related air pollution during gestation and in early infancy were three times more likely to be diagnosed with the neurodevelopmental disorder than were those whose early exposure to such pollutants was very low." Los Angeles Times

Pyrrhic victory: Much was made of the prediction, proffered by the International Energy Agency a few weeks back, that the United States would muscle ahead of all other oil-producing nations to become the planet's #1 producer of oil by the end of this decade. A closer reading of the report, however, reveals the context for that prediction -- and it ought to make everybody far more frightened than happy. TomDispatch

What doesn't kill it makes it stronger: In a new study conducted by Consumer Reports, the magazine found evidence that harmful bacteria found in pork products may be resistant to antibiotics commonly used to treat people who have become infected. The culprit, just in case you were wondering, is the livestock industry's over-reliance on antibiotics, which are force-fed to pigs (and cows) as a "preventative" measure to keep animals from getting sick. "We have tons of messages out there to tell physicians to stop over prescribing, to tell parents not to ask for antibiotics every time their child has a stuffy nose," notes one expert. "Meanwhile, we're using 29 million pounds of antibiotics for food production. Those examples couldn't be more polar opposites." US News and World Report

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