Good luck with that, Maldives.

An international purchase agreement revealed yesterday that the low-lying island nation of the Maldives has ordered an extremely large number of sandbags from multiple companies in the United States and Europe. A representative of the Maldives government responded to an e-mail question of what the bags are for as follows: “We are expecting a bit of flooding.”

Although it was not immediately clear precisely how many sandbags were ordered due to the complicated nature of the agreement and the number of companies involved, a representative of one such company in Texas said they alone had an order from the Maldives for a “shit-ton” of sandbags. It is unclear if that is an English shit-ton or a metric shit-ton, also spelled shytte-tonne.

With an average elevation of only six feet above sea level, the Maldives could be thinking of holding back rising sea levels on a nationwide scale. The country has 1,192 islands, so analysts say the sandbag idea is completely feasible.

A call placed to the government of Vanuatu, another low-lying island nation that could be threatened by sea level rise in the coming decades, revealed that the Maldives’ approach may be novel. “Wait, would that work?” said the Vanuatu representative before quickly hanging up.

Several months ago the Maldives held a parliament meeting under water in SCUBA gear to call attention to the country’s plight. The country’s vice president, Mohammad Waheed Hassan, said that the underwater meeting “sucked,” and he would rather “just sandbag the crap out of this place” than do that again.

New analysis shows Pachauri not actually a giant ball with a face.

Not so long ago, the TreeHumper investigative team did some in-depth reporting on the ClimateFence scandal. One of our revelations was that the chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Rajendra Pachauri is actually “one half of a set of anthropomorphized testicles.” Like any good journalist or human being, we can man up to it and say: We were wrong.

Look, the guy’s been through a lot recently. The IPCC has been knocked around so often in the last few months it’s starting to look like Tiger Woods on the wrong end of Elin’s 9-iron. There were the hacked emails, there was a general failure of the UN process in Copenhagen, and then the issues surrounding the on again-off again melting of the Himalayan glaciers. And that’s before we get to Pachauri’s personal issues.

He has been accused of having conflicts of interest because of consulting fees paid out by companies like Toyota, and there have been repeated calls for his resignation. But come on — he published a novel called Return to Almora that is apparently just filled to the brim with crappily written sex. In fact, the main character (an engineer/environmentalist in his 60s—CLEARLY no relation to Pachauri himself) loses his virginity with such bosom-heaving description as when he was “overcome by a lust that he had never known before.” Awesome.

Here’s where the TreeHumper investigators made our mistake: we mistook the fact that he LOVES his testicles with the idea that he IS a testicle. It could happen to anybody, really. So we want to throw our support behind the IPCC chair; lord knows he needs it from SOMEone. We would like to see him stick around for the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report, which will take a look at all the updated science on global warming and hopefully not fuck up anything too drastically. Watch your decimal places, boys.

So, Rajendra: We’re sorry we called you a testicle. You’re not. Just keep doing what you’re doing, stay strong, balls out.

In an effort to match President Obama’s show of bipartisanship when he spoke to and fielded questions from Republican House leaders on Friday, Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R—Ken.) took a symbolic and apparently fatal approach.

“The President has put on a big show of going into a so-called ‘lions’ den’ in order to simply speak with some Republicans,” the senator said from the grounds of the Louisville Zoo in his home state. “Well, I’ll do him one better, because our party is firmly committed to doing right by the American people. I’ll go into a real lions’ den.”

With that, Sen. McConnell scaled the fence, threw a ladder toward the other side of the protective moat, and clambered his way into the lions’ area. He walked airily around the enclosure, but after stepping behind a stand of trees screams were soon heard. McConnell is now presumed eaten.

When reached for comment, the other Republican Kentucky senator Jim Bunning said he had encouraged McConnell’s act of courage but admitted it may have been shortsighted. “It was a great act by a great man,” Bunning said. “But I suppose we should have asked the zookeepers if those lions had been fed recently or something.”

Kentucky’s governor will appoint an interim senator until a time when an election can be held. Bunning dismissed the potential for an unexpected swing in parties like what recently happened in the Massachusetts election to replace Senator Kennedy. “C’mon, this is Kentucky,” he said. “Most people here don’t even know the word ‘Democrat.’”

Clearly, this isn't enough to actually do anything for the environment.

A new poll of more than 5,000 people from around the country found that only a majority actually care about protecting the environment. Without the required supermajority, though, it will be impossible to move forward on all planet-saving measures.

“It’s really a shame that we could only get 59 percent,” said Amy Wilson, of South Bend, Indiana. “That only represents, what, maybe 175 million people or something? Obviously with such a small amount of people who care about the environment it will be completely unreasonable to actually do things like stop emitting greenhouse gases or reduce the amounts of dangerous chemicals in plastic bottles.”

The rules requiring a supermajority of the country to care about something in order to actually do it are not found anywhere in the Constitution. Strangely, a poll from 2007 found that more than 85 percent of the country doesn’t know that and wouldn’t want to change the non-existent rules.

In a blog post on his popular polling and policy site fivethirtyeight.com, analyst Nate Silver wrote that the environment poll numbers “seem robust enough to be accurate. I ran a simulation 10,000 times and came out with a supermajority who wanted to save the world only 279 times, meaning there is a very high chance the numbers are right and we’re going to go ahead and kill off thousands of species of animals, raise sea levels until coastal areas are under water and acidify the oceans until they become all but uninhabitable.”

Tom Willoughby, of Houston, said he participated in the poll and voted against environmental action. “I’m glad the supermajority rules are in place,” he said. “Without them, we would get far too many things done. C’mon, just having more than half the country want something should never be enough to actually do it. Am I right?”

A sub-analysis of the poll results also found a surprising number of idiots in Massachusetts.

“Our ancient traditions are being threatened by the Cape Wind proposal,” said Wampanoag spokesperson Simon Culver. “It has been our right since the dawn of time to provide acres of slot machines along with low-limit table games, solid nightly entertainment and a delicious all-you-can eat casino buffet for only $12.95. By building these unsightly turbines only a few miles offshore, we can no longer greet the glorious sunrise from the tops of our money mountains. This is unacceptable.”

The Mashpee Wampanoag do not actually run a casino at this juncture. After formal recognition of their tribal status by the government in 2007, though, they have started the legal processes that will eventually lead to the non-existent Cape Wind turbines somehow being in the way of their ritual greeting of the sun. One tribe member who wished to remain anonymous said that he prefers things to be in the way of the sun anyway. “There’s enough alcoholism here that keeping the sun out of our eyes in the morning should be the greatest thing to ever happen to us. Other than that poker room they’re going to build. That will be sweet.”

Cape Wind proponents say the offshore wind turbines will be capable of providing about 75 percent of Cape Cod’s electricity demands, with basically zero greenhouse gas emissions. The project has been beset by problems from the beginning, though, with powerful enemies including the Kennedy family. The project seemed finally headed for approval, though, until the Mashpee and Aquinnah Wampanoags filed their complaint involving their spiritual traditions.

“There are better ways to take on the challenges presented by oil dependence and global warming than Cape Wind,” said Culver, the Mashpee spokesperson. “And don’t forget: as soon as we get this casino built, we’ve got Ray Romano booked for two straight weeks of stand-up. Stay at the hotel and get discounted tickets!”

You can haz my rath heethan librall! ... Ooops.

Sen. Inhofe has been on most environmentalists short lists for receiving the wrath of God, but as we all know God hates liberals so those prayers have gone unanswered.  In an ironic turn of events, it turns out all it took was one molasses mouthed teabagger’s misinterpreted prayers to off Inhofe (God’s right hand man). See the video below.

Click here to view the embedded video.

God could not be reached for comment, but his office put out an official statement: “DOH!”

In case you are having trouble understanding this tormented patriots words on the video, here’s what he’s saying:

“Our small teabag group here in [INAUDIBLE*] We got our vigil together and took Dr. Coburn’s instructions and prayed real hard that Sen. Byrd would either die or couldn’t show up at the vote the other night… I see one of our members was missing this morning. Did it backfire on us? [TEARFUL] And one of our members died?  How hard did you pray senator? Did you pray hard enough?”

*No idea where he said he was from but he probably said Berkley, Cambridge or San Fran

A scene on the imaginary planet known as Pandora from James Cameron's worldwide hit movie "Avatar."

James Cameron’s new hit Avatar is inspiring a new environmental interest group known as “The Avatarian Society” to seek out their own private Pandora. The group hopes to find a secret, unspoiled area so that they might live in the way of the Na’vi– the indigenous people who live harmoniously with nature in Cameron’s film.

Not since John Steinbeck wrote his famous work Of Mice and Men has there been so much enthusiasm among certain members of society “to live off the fat of the land.” But now a new elite group of environmentalists are pushing the stakes even higher.

“I guess I could say the movie made a big impression on me. Maybe the biggest impression of my life in fact,” said Brandon Murphy, a founding member of the Avatarian Society.

“It allowed me to wake up and see that we’re all just Avatars. This just isn’t real. America isn’t real– it’s all just an illusion. Some people say they like to go camping and hiking to escape reality. I say they’re escaping to reality. The Na’vi had it all right. They knew what was real and what wasn’t.”

Murphy, who lives in St. Louis, Missouri started the group along with several of his friends last month after seeing Avatar for his third time. He explained that the first two times he saw the movie it was in the standard two dimensional movie format. When he finally saw the movie as Cameron intended it to be seen in 3D, Murphy was transformed.

And he’s not alone. After several days of bombarding online social networking sites like Twitter, MySpace, and Facebook with their idea to start a new “hard-core environmental movement,” Murphy and his friends claim that interest skyrocketed.

“People want to go to Pandora. People need to go to Pandora. It’s who we are,” said Mr. Murphy’s girlfriend, Brenda Smith. Not everyone is so excited about the Avatarian Society though and some people say their goal of finding a secret spot on Earth and succeeding as a society is unrealistic.

“Every few decades or so these radical groups turn up and try some new kind of social experiment that is designed so that they will live with almost no environmental impact. Expectations are always high, and people tend to end up disappointed and quit when things don’t work out,” says Dr. Brian Barrow, a professor of sociology at Yale University who also teaches some conservation-themed courses in the university’s School of Forestry. Barrow recommends all young environmentalists read Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance in addition to more popular works like Thoreau’s legendary Walden. Barrow explains that in Blithdale readers can learn from the mistakes made by the story’s characters who try to live unsuccessfully at a utopian commune-like farm.

Despite their critics, the members of the Avatarian Society aren’t alone in their love of Avatar’s themes. Pulitzer prize winning journalist John McQuaid wrote that Avatar’s story closely parallels what is happening with mountaintop removal. He said that Avatar is “no fantasy.”

When asked about his critics’ concerns, Mr.  Murphy shrugged and said, “There will always be people trying to shoot down good ideas. They’re scared. Scared of change. We will find our new home and we will be happy. I’m sorry it took us so long to need James Cameron to wake us up.”

Mr. Cameron was contacted for comment on this story, but did not respond.

Additional Reporting by Jack Metcalf

An Inconvenient Booth

An Inconvenient Ruth

An Inconvenient Loofa

Hockey stick graph my ass.

The deniers have been out in force recently, trumpeting about how the extended cold snap in many parts of the world is evidence that global warming is a myth. I am well aware of the convincing scientific arguments as to why that is utter nonsense, and that the last decade was the hottest ever recorded, and all of that. Really, I am. But I have to tell you: I am just freezing my fucking nuts off right now.

Seriously, have you been outside in the last week or two? It’s terrible! Yesterday I walked three blocks to pick up my dry cleaning, and on the way back I lost all feeling in my left side. I thought I was having a stroke! And I’m mostly confident that I wasn’t.

I understand completely how a few weeks of cold weather in the winter has very little to do with the extended trends of the planet warming, but you have to admit that this is getting weird. I mean, if you were God, and you wanted to convince people that they actually were pretty powerless and that you can raise or lower the temperature when you damn well please, wouldn’t you throw this cold snap in our face just to get your point across? I know I would.

Shit, even Florida is freezing these days! The whole orange crop is going to be lost, or something! I thought there were laws against winter in Florida. The mercury drops another couple of degrees, and we’ll have a state full of frozen old people.

I’d like to believe in global warming. Really. I want Congress to pass an effective climate bill, I want our economy to invest in energy efficiency and green jobs, and I want to help keep carbon dioxide to whatever level that batshit insane McKibben guy crows about. But what I really want is a space heater and a down comforter. I want to feel my face again when I go outside. I want my testicles to finally descend out of their hiding place somewhere near my kidneys. If we have to deal with global warming, I want to feel like I’m dealing with global warming. Until then, I’m staying inside.