Over all else, severed appendages equal box office

Starting this summer, carbon-neutral Hollywood will attempt to roll out a series of big-budget films with environmental themes. Many of these movies will cast man as the bad guy and Mother Nature, with her own unique brand of hurricane and melting ice caps vigilantism, as the victim.

This melding of Tinseltown's environmental ethos and box office aspirations has worked in the past -- in 2004, environmental disaster flick The Day After Tomorrow grossed over half-a-billion dollars world-wide and facilitated discussion of global warming. More recently, Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth proved quite profitable.

Although some studio executives are concerned that, partly due to the relative success of Gore's documentary and the awareness it raised, mass audiences will now avoid the parade of environmentally themed would-be blockbusters -- just as they have been avoiding other topical message films, such as Syriana and Blood Diamond.

That calculus provided no hindrance to 300, a movie which just posted the largest March opening ever. 300 tells the tale of Thermopylae, an epic battle in the Greco-Persian war of the fourth century BC. In the end the brave self-sacrificing Greeks, who are considered the fathers of democracy and Western Civilization, defeat the Persians, who are portrayed as homosexuals. A double whammy which isn't sitting well in Iran, the current home of the Persian Empire and the rumored next stop on Team America's tour of democracy.

Of course it's highly probable that, unlike the hyper-sensitive Iranian clerics, American movie goers aren't seeing any parallels to the present; they just like to see guts spilled and heads removed.

Which means, assuming Mother Nature does her share of impaling and braining, this summer Hollywood may be able to have its cake and eat it too.

Mother Nature: Not comfortable with the victim card

Eyebrows have been raised, over the last couple months, as environmentalist and Evangelicals have been increasingly joining forces to fight "global warming."

It doesn't seem like such a odd coupling to me: Evangelicals get tingly when they successfully spread the word on the likelihood of Jesus' return and the planetary doom that would accompany it, just like environmentalists get tingly when they successfully spread the word on the latest climate catastrophe scenario and the planetary doom that would accompany it.

And I imagine all tingly feelings relating to consensus on the coming apocalypse are similar enough.

Since we have already delved deeply into the supernatural and the highly speculative I would like to share a fear I have: I'm starting to worry about how Mother Nature is taking all of this talk of the devastating effects of rising temperatures.

Mother Nature has been around for a long time, and we might be messing with her pride when we claim she will be completely knocked out of sorts by some earthly carbon. Dinosaur flatulence was nothing to sneeze at but she got through that OK.

I see that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi wants to form a committee on "global warming" and even President Bush might address the issue in his next State of the Union.

They might want to hold off. It was about a week ago when California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, amongst much fan-fare, signaled his intention to make fighting global warming one of the cornerstones of his administration.

I hear it's been cold in sunny California ever since.

Maybe it's just a coincidence, but I say it would be best for everyone if all grand declarations on global warming are made only in the dead of summer.