NCAR is going to build a giant new supercomputer, the better to study climate change, which is cool. Indeed, the project has already provided one profound, if wickedly ironic, insight into the problem.

Those who have been reading this column for awhile know whether combating global warming is that my views on global even desirable, given that by the time the warming are a bit askew of world begins to cool several centuries the traditional fault lines on from now, people alive then will have the subject.

Good news! United Nations’ Climate Change Conference of Parties (COP15 to its friends) is teetering (or tottering, as the case may be) on the brink of failure, just when the Boulder intends to send a delegation to Copenhagen!

Heads should roll. And for once, let us state whose: David Driskell, executive director of community planning and sustainability. Charles Ferro, acting land use review manager. Brian Holmes, zoning administrator. Jane Brautigan, Boulder city manager. Messrs. Driskell, Ferro, and Holmes are the City of Boulder bureaucratic cobblers who wrote the 16-page memo on how to deal with medical marijuana dispensaries.

When Norman Borlaug died last month at the age of 95, the Associated Press and most other news agencies wrote obituaries that, almost casually, credited him with history’s most stunning achievement. They said he saved one billion lives.

About this time last year, Charlie at Mesa Plumbing called with the dreaded news: The parts needed to overhaul my boiler were no longer carried by the gift shop at the National Museum of Pre-Columbian Plumbing and Heating.