I would love to hear from you if you are a parent who is

committed to raising your teen with effective money

habits and attitudes!

What are you doing that works? Why is this part of parenting so important to you?

Is your teen donating money to a cause that matters to him or her?  What is your opinion about the value of teen philanthropy?

(Reuters) - General Motors Co said on Thursday that it awarded A123 Systems Inc a contract to build battery packs for future electric vehicles, sending A123 shares up more than 40 percent.

A123 previously disclosed that it had a production contract with a major North American automaker. Thursday's announcement identifies the automaker as GM for the first time.

GM did not detail the specific brands or vehicles. The companies did not disclose the value of the deal.

A123 expects to build thousands or up to tens of thousands of battery packs a year for GM, A123 Systems spokesman Dan Borgasano said. The packs will be assembled at A123's plant in Livonia, Michigan.

Gee, I wish I had invested in that company instead of Chinese solar panel company that has seen its stock price drop by 80% despite rapid growth in solar power installation.  Oh well. Some people have a golden touch with investing, not me.

Tropical storm Don is approaching southern Texas, and everybody is happy. Ordinarily we might worry about flooding, but Texas is dry as a bone and everyone there is looking forward to several inches of rain after almost zero precipitation for months.

The real problem is that Don is only going to provide rain for a limited area. The rest of Texas is going to continue to swelter and wither with dying crops and cattle. Sorry Texas, your problem is way too big to get fixed by a single tropical storm.

The drought centered on Texas and Oklahoma is disturbing.  2011 has been characterized so far by too much rain in some places, resulting in serious flooding, and almost no rain in certain other areas.  The "Cloudburst" events of 5 to 15 inches of rain in a localized area in 24 hours or less seem to be growing more common in the USA as well as Europe, which does lead to some disturbing global warming thoughts.  Meanwhile, the arctic floating ice is on track to reach a new low in extent, and we will find out in September if this will be the year for that record to get broken again as it was in 2007.

Little known fact, that one. If you ask people why be afraid of global warming, you get lots of answers, but not that one. The denial crew will say, not me, me not scared. 
The set of people who accept climatology still may not give the right answer. You might hear, extreme weather, or coastal flooding from sea level rise. Those threats are real, but sea level does not rise over night, it takes decades. People have time to get out of the way. Extreme weather mortality is a problem, and many scientists say that it is happening today, that we do not need to wait decades to witness it. But extreme weather does not kill millions of humans, not directly.

Hunger? Yup, hunger kills millions today. If, as expected, global warming makes it worse, more millions dead.

In today's New York Times (June 5, 2011), there is a front page article entitled "A Warming Planet struggles to feed itself."  The article notes that the number of undernourished humans declined from 1970 to 1995, hitting a low of only 800 million. This was due to great advances in agriculture. Then suddenly, after the year 2000, the number of undernourished humans jumped up to nearly 1 billion, forced there by rising food prices. Human populations are expected to climb another 3 billion this century to around 10 billion.  This is not good.

Agricultural scientists for the past couple of decades viewed global warming without great alarm.  Carbon dioxide, the main gas released by burning fossil fuels, is a vital fuel for the growth of plants. The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has risen 40% in the past 200 years, and is expected to double or triple this century. It was expected that this steep nutrient climb would produce massive food increases. But recent experiments call this into question.  When scientists recently sprayed carbon dioxide onto a large field of soybeans, they found that the CO2 yield bump was only half what they expected. Then they tried the same experiment with a crop of corn. That was a surprise; there was no yield bump at all. None.

What if the yield bump is overstated? Okay, then let's posit that global warming's expected contribution of heat waves and droughts is not overstated- weather events which can cause steep decreases in crop yields, or even complete localized crop failures.  If both these things are true, then global warming may become a powerful negative factor in the human effort to feed the 3 billion new mouths.

"The success of agriculture has been astounding" states Cynthia Rosenzweig, a NASA researcher. Problem is, the success of agriculture has to be astounding. If it fails to stay astounding, and the price of cereal grains continue to shoot up as they have the past few years, then those mouths do not get fed.  If those mouths do not get fed, it's not just millions who may die, it's billions.