Halloween is almost upon us! Still stumped about the best way to decorate your premises for this spookiest of holidays? We have here a set of six Grist-exclusive patterns to help you carve the perfect eco-pumpkin. Each pattern comes with instructions. Just click on your favorite, print the PDF, sharpen your knife, and get to it.

Then all you’ll have left to do is choose the perfect costume. (Don’t go as Bill McKibben, you’ll steal our thunder.)

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We've got some good news, some less-than-awesome news, and some killer eye candy.

The good news is that 163 wild-and-crazy new species of animals and plants were discovered last year in a single jungle-y region -- known as the Greater Mekong -- which stretches through six countries, from China's Tibetan Platueau all the way to the Mekong Delta in southern Vietnam.

The less-than-awesome news, as delivered by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) via a new report, entitled Close Encounters [PDF], is that most of these fanged frogs, pedestrian birds, and alien-esque geckos are probably on their way out (if not now, then soon) thanks to climate change. (Thanks, climate change!) What with rising seas, creeping saltwater, and increasing floods, drought, and -- gasp -- heat in the Mekong already, accelerating climate change doesn't paint an optimistic outlook for them.

"Rare, endangered, and endemic species like those newly discovered are especially vulnerable because climate change will further shrink their already restricted habitats," said Stuart Chapman, director of the WWF Greater Mekong Pregoram, in the report.

Don't worry too much, though, because starting September 28, the U.N. is on top of it in Bangkok with the next-to-last climate negotiating session before December's talks in Copenhagen. After all, world leaders really accomplished a lot the past week at the U.N. Summit on Climate Change in New York ... right?

Just in case that doesn't turn out to be fruitful ... enjoy a bit of nature porn while these species are still around. Here are eight of the new-to-us plants and animals you should see before impending climate chaos likely wipes them off the map -- and back off our radar.

Thomas Ziegler / WWF Greater Mekong

You can see the Cat Ba leopard gecko (Goniurosaurus catbaensis) give you its orange crazy-eye look only in northern Vietnam's Cat Ba Island National Park. Its alien appearance actually inspired the report's title, Close Encounters, embarrassing Spielberg fans in every galaxy.

David McLeod / WWF Greater Mekong

The Khorat big-mouthed frog (Limnonectes megastomias) shows off its fiercesome fangs and snappy jaws, which it's been known to use for ambushing dinner -- such as birds -- while hanging out in streams in a few remote areas of Thailand. Rumor is Twilight fans everywhere are swooning at word of its discovery.

Markku Hakkinen / WWF Greater Mekong

Believe it or not, this geisha-of-the-plant-world is actually a new species of wild banana (Musa rubinea), only found in a single watershed of western China where it borders Myanmar. We know: it's one hot banana.

Lee Grismer / WWF Greater Mekong

We bet this neon-colored gecko (Cnemaspis biocellata) would fit in at one of those European techno-pop clubs just as well as at its home in the Nakawan Range on the border of Thailand and Malaysia.

Neil Hepworth

This bright ruby-striped fish known as Odessa barb (Puntius padamya) sort of cheats in making this list of "newly discovered" species. It was actually found first in a Ukrainian aquarium (in the fair city of Odessa), but scientisits didn't describe it as a new species until 2008 when they found it swimming the wild waters of Myanmar. Surprise!

James Eaton / WWF Greater Mekong

That's right. Some birds, like the Nonggang babbler (Stachyris nonggangensis), apparently prefer the low-carbon lifestyle of walking and hopping, rather than flying around its rainforest home in southern China's Nonggang Natural Reserve. However, it will fly if you sneak up and scare it, but then, most people probably would too.

Ralph Hendrix

With long, sticky toes and skin that could use some exfoliating, the rough-coated tree frog (Philautus quyeti) might not be the next Cover Girl, but it could probably still charm a kiss or two out of any princesses lurking in the rainforests of Vietnam's Truong Son mountain range.

Lee Grismer / WWF Greater Mekong

The researcher who discovered this tiger-striped pitviper (Cryptelytrops honsonensis) must have missed its piercing orange eye, because his son was the one who pointed out the snake on a rock next to his father's hand. Turns out he was too busy discovering a new species of gecko at the same time, all while on the itty-bitty Vietnamese island of Hon Son.

Two discoveries for the price of one? We should take these guys to Vegas!

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Hoppy Save the Frogs Day!As I've mentioned before, frogs and other amphibians are doing about as well as the global financial system. The good news is that even though the Year of the Frog (2008) is over, we still have the first annual Save the Frogs Day to get hopped up about the plight of amphibians. Happy Save the Frogs Day!

Besides frogs being indicators of ecosystem health, keeping Egyptian Pharaohs in check, and helping create breakthroughs in medicine, I've found another handy reason to support amphibian conservation: saving frogs fights climate change!

Let's examine a list of top threats to frogs:

Now let's look at how addressing these threats fights climate change:

In honor of Save the Frogs Day, learn more about threats to amphibians worldwide, tell your representative that you support strong climate legislation, and blow a virtual kiss to frogs via these and these handy tips for frog-friendly living.

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This weekend, The New York Times Magazine ran as its cover story an article entitled "Why Isn't the Brain Green?" (i.e. why humans don't generally make environmental choices automatically, even though it's good for us in the long term). And a front page Monday story in The Washington Post, chronicled how "going green" could lead to discord in families as, for example, one spouse wanted the heat on and another wanted to shiver for the planet.

I wish this article had included an important point: it's only hard for individuals to be green because our society remains so un-green. Turning on a lightswitch shouldn't be a source of agony - it should come from solar electricity made possible by government support and strict limits on polluting fuels. Consumers shouldn't have to worry about whether or not the fish they buy that the supermarket is endangered or not - supermarkets and restaurants shouldn't be allowed to serve endangered fish like red snapper and bluefin. And we shouldn't have to squint at ingredients labels to find out if our cookies contain rainforest-destroyers like palm oil: it should be banned from import. That's why the greenest thing anyone can do - better even than not flushing - is to organize their communities to demand that their elected officials and corporate leaders make our society go green - so that it becomes automatic for the rest of us.

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This is a guest post by John Hocevar and Jeremy Jackson. Jeremy Jackson is the William E. and Mary B. Ritter Professor of Oceanography at the Scripps Institution. John Hocevar is a marine biologist and the director of Greenpeace’s oceans campaign.

If you like seafood, you’ve probably eaten Alaska pollock, the tender white fish used in most frozen fish sticks, McDonald’s Filet-O-Fish sandwiches, and the imitation crab meat found in California rolls. But the pollock – the world’s largest food fishery – is on the verge of collapse.

The most recent data from the National Marine Fisheries Service show the pollock population approaching the lowest level ever recorded; since 2003, the population has declined from 8.5 million tons to 3 million tons. That’s bad news for fish eaters and fishermen alike, and really bad news for Alaska’s extraordinary ocean ecosystem.

Even as the pollock – and the wildlife that rely on them – have declined, the government has allowed overfishing to continue.  Incredibly, these steep declines do not even meet the government’s definition of overfished.

As a result, two of Alaska’s four pollock fisheries have been closed and a third is just a fraction of its former size.  Until recently, though, the strength of the Bering Sea pollock stock was sufficient to support a billion dollar industry and earn a “sustainable” rating from the Marine Stewardship Council.

But like economics, fisheries management involves too many variables and too much uncertainty for anyone to make precise predictions.  And, as with the economy, when large amounts of money are at stake, managers tend to downplay that uncertainty and hope for the best.

That’s exactly what happened to the Atlantic cod, the pollock’s close relative, and the previous holder of the title “world’s biggest food fishery.” For years, the Atlantic fish industry refused to heed the warning signs that cod was in serious trouble, and tighter regulation was needed.

When policy makers did finally act, in 1992, it was too late – and the fishery crashed to less than one percent of its former level. By 1994, the fishery, which had been active since at least the beginning of the 16th century, had to be closed. Suddenly, more than 40,000 people were out of work and the industry went begging to the government for a multi-billion dollar bailout.

Today, the North Pacific Fisheries Council seems to be repeating the cod tragedy.

Despite the warning signs, including several years of low juvenile survivorship, the Council continues to allow trawlers to kill the fish that lay the golden eggs.  Each winter, factory trawlers brave the stormy Bering Sea to target spawning pollock, killing huge numbers of pregnant females before they release their eggs, or roe. The roe fishery is lucrative but ecologically dangerous even in the best of times. At a time when the pollock population needs all the offspring it can produce – and global warming seems to be putting additional stress on the fishery - it’s just reckless. The Council members (mostly representatives of the fishing industry) persist in saying that we can trust the industry to police itself – and are increasingly sounding like the Alan Greenspans of the sea.

It's still theoretically possible that environmental conditions will allow for a season of epic pollock reproduction that will begin to re-build the stock. If we continue with business as usual,though, it’s more likely that the fishery will collapse, with devastating consequences for the wildlife and people of Alaska.

The next year or two may be our last chance to save the fishing industry from itself. The key will be in taking action before things reach the point of no return, as appears to have happened with cod.  Most immediately, the pollock catch needs to be cut significantly, and the roe fishery should be suspended.

Many of the measures necessary to save the pollock fishery are just as needed in other fisheries around the country that are also reeling from overfishing. Across our oceans, fish have nowhere to find refuge and replenish their population – which is why we need to move quickly to establish a network of no-take marine reserves.

Until we move from simply managing fisheries in a vacuum to protecting the ecosystems that sustain them, fisheries managers will continue to be surprised by one economic and ecological disaster after another – and taxpayers could find themselves on the hook for yet another multi-billion dollar bailout.

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So long and thanks for all the fish

Greenpeace calls on world leaders to stop rainforest destruction

Despite its economic woes, The Los Angeles Times still employs some of the best environmental reporters in the business, including a personal favorite, Julie Cart, who always brings compassion (and great quotes) to her work. Her story about how climate change is devastating Australia ran this week on the front page and it's absolutely first rate.

"What Will Global Warming Look Like? Scientists Point to Australia" is the headline in the online edition, but although the story references the science, it hits home with quotes from ordinary folk -- farmers, suburbanites, shocked patriarchs -- talking about non-climactic matters such as depression, despair, and suicide. One stout farmer named Frank Eddy told her:

"Suicide is high. Depression is huge. Families are breaking up. It's devastation," he said, shaking his head. "I've got a neighbor in terrible trouble. Found him in the paddock, sitting in his [truck], crying his eyes out. Grown men -- big, strong grown men. We're holding on by the skin of our teeth. It's desperate times."

A result of climate change?

"You'd have to have your head in the bloody sand to think otherwise," Eddy said.

Without being heavy-handed about it, the story also brings up an irony about global warming still unknown to most Americans, and quite beyond the mental capacity of deniers. As Kevin Trenberth, a leading scientist for the National Center for Atmospheric Research puts it: "The wets will get wetter, and the dries will get drier." The story also mentions that Australia, a big coal user and exporter, and the highest per capita producer of greenhouse gases in the world, happens to be one of the first industrialized nations to be devastated by climate change.

But the U.S. has no right to be complacent. Although it has not reduced its coal consumption or exports, Australia is making changes ... as Keith Schneider pointed out recently for Yale's Environment 360 site.

Concerned that steadily rising temperatures in south Australia and the recent drought signal a permanent climate shift, a majority of the country’s states have taken the unprecedented step of agreeing to let the central government play the dominant role in managing local water resources. Growing fears of a lasting change in climate patterns has helped generate support for major public works projects to deal with water scarcity. Australia’s 2007 national election, which saw the Progressive Party come to power, was the first national election in the country’s history in which a scientific issue — climate change — played a decisive role.

“It’s testing our people,” said John Williams, the former chief of Land and Water for the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), the country’s premier scientific agency. “These new conditions are forcing people to move out of industries. There are many people making decisions to change radically the nature of their business. There are some industries — rice growing, cotton production — that are just failing and falling away.”

The American Southwest has yet to face these same climatic facts.

In California, for example, no substantial changes have been made in state-wide water distribution in recent years. An excellent report at the end of 2008 put out by a blue ribbon task force commissioned by the Governor has been ignored, even though nearly everyone agrees the system is in crisis, and even though the state is facing a third year of drought.

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The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service this week proposed listing six species of penguins as threatened and another species as endangered, a move that will have little consequence within the U.S. as wild penguins live in the Southern Hemisphere. However, the proposed designations could aid negotiations for international species protections. Species advocates generally praised the decision but criticized the agency for failing to list emperor penguins.

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Officials at the U.S. Interior Department improperly meddled in a number of decisions affecting imperiled species under the Endangered Species Act, a report [PDF] from the agency’s inspector general has found. The Bush administration agreed last year to reexamine a number of decisions made by Julie MacDonald, an ex-official accused of orchestrating much of the meddling. However, the new report found that political interference in species protections was much more extensive than previously thought.

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The Bush administration this week made a major change to the Endangered Species Act by axing a requirement that federal agencies seek independent scientific reviews of planned projects to determine if they would mess with imperiled plants or animals. "These changes are going to result in more species being put in jeopardy," said Jamie Rappaport Clark of Defenders of Wildlife.

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A man convicted of accidentally killing three bald eagles in the 1990s was pardoned by President Bush last week. Leslie Owen Collier of Missouri left hamburger poisoned with pesticide to kill some coyotes, but many of the animals that then ate the coyotes also died, including a red-tailed hawk, a great horned owl, and three bald eagles.

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A new legal quota set Monday for Atlantic bluefin tuna is a "mockery of science" and may cause the tuna population to collapse, green group WWF warned. The 46 member nations of the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas set the annual quota at some 24,000 tons, defying scientists' recommendations that it be lowered to 16,500 tons.

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Due to escalating violence, Congolese rangers have been run out of the country's Virunga National Park, threatening the safety of some 200 mountain gorillas that live there. "There are documented cases of the gorillas getting caught in the crossfire and getting killed," says a park spokesperson. "It's the chaos of war and they are right in the middle of it." Only about 700 mountain gorillas remain in the wild.

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Hawaii's television broadcast signals are going digital a month earlier than the rest of the country in an attempt to avoid disturbing the endangered petrel's nesting season with the destruction of the old transmission towers, which are near the birds' nesting sites.

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