On a non Climate Change note: I've been working at UC Santa Barbara on a project to plan a whole new Web 2.0 academic social network service. We gathered forty experts from all over the nation to do a one day design charrette. Wanting to get the most out of the day I turned to another expert, this time an expert meeting facilitator: Kris Krug from Rain City Studios in Vancouver, BC.
Kris has done a number of barcamps and other meetings, so I was confident he could keep these uber-nerds on topic for the whole day. With Kris at the helm of the open-space-style meeting day we had probably the best single day meeting most people in the room can remember. At the end of the day one participant said that she'd never had so much fun working so hard. We ended up with seven vision graphic posters and 56 report outs in one day.
Since then a number of participants have asked me how I did it. So I take a lot of the credit whenever possible... :-) only I could not have done it at all without Kris. Kris kept the whole room moving at the speed of conversation. So if you're looking for someone to take control of your next one-day workshop... you know who to call.
I looked at the National Hurricane Center and saw that Gustav is headed directly for New Orleans and should arrive there just in time to remind the nation and the planet how seriously deficient the Bush administration's job was with Katrina, and just how much more of the same we would expect from a McCain administration. We can only hope that the people on the coast are finding safety this time around, although the preparations for the next hurricane might still leave New Orleans swamped again. 
