A fairly accurate critique of climate advocates and global warming advocacy can be that we can be a bit depressing.  This is not surprising when we are telling a story about how current trends will lead to large portions of the world becoming uninhabitable and sea levels rising to swallow many of our coastal cities and every day another study comes out that shows even the unenforceable and aspirational pledges by our governments will not be met and we face “potentially disastrous consequences.”

But an different and reoccurring theme in work around climate is interesting interaction with “adult” beverages like wine, beer and other alcoholic beverages – and not just because it is tempting to give up and just spend the day drinking (perhaps at a Green Drinks event for environmentalists).

There is the story of a leading climate scientist who is also a wine expert – and therefore the leading voice on the impact of global warming on the production of wine – a very serious matter when you consider that changing climate will undermine the ability of centuries old vineyards to thrive. Similar concerns bedevil the world of beer, where a changing climate endangers the production of the hops that are the heart of quality beer.

But spirits may also be part of the vast bank of solutions that we will need to make the fundamental shift in our economy and society that will be needed to stop our runaway greenhouse gas emissions.  Advanced biofuels, like high energy biobutanol, may well prove to be one of the many tools we will need to power a thriving post-carbon economy and entrepreneurs and researchers in Britain are working on converting distillery waste into that fuel – creating the possibility that brown liquor could helps us to go green and save ourselves from the consequences of global warming like the sea level rise that threatens our beaches and coastal communities.

Two of the best sources of information and dialogue about climate and related issues are the Climate Progress blog edited by Dr. Joseph Romm a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress, author, former Clinaton Administration official and general smart guy (pretty much known to everyone as Joe) who is now assisted by longtime renewable energy writer/editor/video producer Stephen Lacey and the Dot Earth blog maintained on the New York Times website by Andrew Revkin, who started the blog while working as a staff reporter at the Times and has continued with it while moving to a new day job at Pace University (and yes, he is known to one and all, including people who just know him as the guitar player in Uncle Wade, as Andy).

Andy Revkin and Joe Romm often disagree in ways that can be grating and sometimes, less often, entertaining.   So it is striking when they converge on the same topics.

In a Dot Earth post on May 25 Revkin calls out with approval for Romm’s blog post about tornadoes and global warming quoting Joe’s conclusion that:

When discussing extreme weather and climate, tornadoes should not be conflated with the other extreme weather events for which the connection is considerably more straightforward and better documented, including deluges, droughts, and heat waves.

Just because the tornado-warming link is more tenuous doesn’t mean that the subject of global warming should be avoided entirely when talking about tornadoes.

In the same blog post Andy complements another Climate Progress blog post about the full greenhouse gas emissions associated with natural gas use, specifically discussing a new analysis from the National Energy Technology Laboratory (that is not yet peer reviewed) that, “appears to strongly undercut the widely cited conclusion by Robert Howarth of Cornell that leakage and other issues make natural gas a greater greenhouse threat than coal.”

These are two very important topics: the causal relationships that can be seen between global warming and our immediate environment, teasing apart the very real effects of climate change from other phenomena, and understanding the true environment effects of choices we make like increased extraction and use of natural gas.