The damage estimates are starting to roll in from the Midwest floods, and they’re staggering.

The American Farm Bureau Federation has put crop-related losses at around $7 billion -- and rising. Iowa alone accounts for more than half of that amount.

Add property damages of $1.5 billion to the total hit, and you arrive at a preliminary flood damage estimate of $8.5 billion.

That's a very low-ball number. And yet, it already puts the Midwest floods of ’08 at number two on the list of the most expensive non-hurricane flooding catastrophes in the US, ever. WunderBlog has that story.

Read it. And when you do, keep this in mind: Despite media neglect, global warming -- in part -- has caused the treacherous rains that have spawned those costly floods, as Climate Progress and many others have studiously catalogued.

On June 23, 1988, Dr. James Hansen provided testimony before Congress, stating unequivocally for the first time that global temperatures had risen beyond the range of natural variability.

To mark the 20th anniversary of the testimony, he's been invited back to the Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming to give a briefing on his vision for confronting the climate challenge, and he's also been invited to a special luncheon at the National Press Club in Washington, where he will also speak.

It will be a day to recognize Dr. Hansen, the science he practices, the courage he exhibits; but it will also be a day for Congress and the nation to realize that in order to depart from business-as-usual and reduce carbon emissions, we must abandon politics-as-usual. We've seen what 20 years of it can do.

Nothing.

And with the last seven and a half years particularly egregious and awash in oil and blood, maybe this time, Congress and the nation will listen to what Dr. Hansen has to say.

Happy anniversary.

From the standpoint of global climate change, nature’s incredible assault on the American heartland this year can be interpreted in one of two ways. Both offer lessons about the challenges of adapting to the climate we have created.

The first is that the tornadoes and floods battering the country with almost unimaginable severity are the early tantrums of an angry planet. The second is that this season’s extreme weather is an aberration that will return to “normal”. So either climate change has arrived ahead of schedule, or this year’s disasters are a preview of the predicted consequences of global warming, a taste of things to come. Take your pick, either way, there’s urgent need for action.

There’s a grassroots organization launching a multi-lingual social networking site today to promote the most important number on the planet.

The number is 350 -- as in parts per million (ppm) of carbon in the atmosphere, the limit of what's acceptable.

And the grassroots group - aptly named 350.org -- is working to embed the number into global consciousness. They're organizing online to have offline results in every corner of the globe, an attempt to redeem the story of the Tower of Babel and unite humanity around a single number.

There seems to be a lot of excitement over the massive, 105-foot-long space-roo that's landed in suburban Melbourne.

NASA's using the white cardboard cut-out to bounce sunlight back into space as part of a new climate change experiment.

But why exactly?