Pope Francis, at the end of his week-long tour through Asia, delivered a speech Sunday morning at a Manila university in which he declared that man has a God-given responsibility to protect the environment, The New York Times reports. In shirking that duty we betray God.

John Muir was the founder of the Sierra Club and the inventor of the modern American conservation movement. He was instrumental in preserving some of our nation's natural wonders. And now, some top environmental thinkers say John Muir's legacy is stupid.

Edward Lazear, a former economic adviser to George W. Bush, argues today that cutting carbon emissions enough to mitigate global warming is a lost cause, and we are better off pursuing a strategy of "adaptation" to a fiery new world. This is why pessimists should not be in charge.

The water wars that will, in short order, come to consume our nation and the world are growing in intensity. In the earthquake-and-drought cocktail that is California, humans and fish are already locked in a pitched battle for survival.

A new day has dawned, and with it, a new draft of a new United Nations report on climate change has leaked unto the world. Like the turning pages of a calendar as one draws closer to death, the report brings tidings that grow worse, and worse, and worse.

The release of the latest White House report on climate change makes clear that the threat posed by global warming can now be declared to be conventional wisdom. Have we finally reached the point where the money people and the environmentalists unite?

Say what you will about Los Angeles—that it's a hellpit of plastic-enhanced heathens teetering on the brink of seismic annihilation, for example—but give the city this: it has America's worst air.

Once upon a time, a lot of gangsters got together and built some casinos in the middle of a desert. For inexplicable reasons, these casinos were allowed to flourish into a major metropolitan area: Las Vegas. Now, that city is staring down a dry, waterless future.

I do not have the scientific expertise to offer a worthwhile opinion on the practice of "fracking." All I know is: whatever you do, do not worry about all the earthquakes it is causing!

You care about the environment, eh? You want to stop global warming? You support switching cars and trucks and buses to "clean burning natural gas?" Wrong! Our best-laid plans only hasten our demise.

Barring a huge public works project the likes of which the world has never seen, south Florida is doomed. Its end will come not from Bugs Bunny wielding a saw, but from the gentle lapping of waves higher and higher upon the shore. Three points to ponder:

A quarter century ago, the US government decided that Yucca Mountain, Nevada would be where we would store all of our deadly nuclear waste. So where is our deadly nuclear waste today? Oh, just spread out all over the place.