It's funny -- both funny "ha ha" and funny strange -- that one of the most consistently intelligent and engaging news sources is a half-hour comedy program that runs four nights a week. But we shouldn't be surprised at that. Juvenal knew it several thousand years ago when he wrote "It is difficult not to write satire." (Italics ours.) (Although when Juvenal wrote that, it went like this: "Difficile est satiram non scribere.")

In addition to being a consistently excellent source of news, Comedy Central's The Daily Show with Jon Stewart also frequently features authors, and last night's author has written a book about global warming from his perspective as a historian and anthropologist. The Great Warming is anthropologist Brian Fagan's third volume examining climate change and its impact on human behavior and civilization. It looks backward -- globally -- at the positive and negative result of climate changes in history, and the parallels with what's happening now and what we can expect to happen are striking.