environment Politics: Loren Legarda Philippines rising seas
by Warren
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Year 2, Month 1, Day 19: Wow. An Inspiring Politician. Who Knew?
The Manila Bulletin tells us about Philippines Senator Loren Legarda’s advice to the country and the legislature:
“As we continue to face weather in extremes, public health, energy, water security, our biodiversity, and economic growth are also under grave threat. Most at risk are lives that we cannot put a price on,” Legarda said.
“With all this in mind, we cannot afford to wait for the next screaming headline about death and destruction from typhoons, floods or drought before we take concrete actions. It is critical that the increased attention, interest, and sense of urgency in responding to the challenges posed by climate change and disaster risks are translated to local actions that effectively reduce disaster vulnerability,” she further explained.
The senator stressed the need to make communities safer, more resilient, and even more ready to act when disaster strikes.
“We must build homes for the homeless, but we need to make sure they are built in areas that will ensure safety and security to home owners even in times of disasters. We must construct roads and bridges to facilitate movements of goods and services; but in building them, we will make sure they do not facilitate the demise of lives. We must not train our sights merely on enhancing our capacities to re-build in times of disasters; but rather on reducing risks for our people and building lasting communities,” she said.
I didn’t know about her. I think I have a new hero:
Loren Legarda is a Filipino broadcast journalist, environmentalist, and politician of Visayan ancestry, notable as the only female to top two senatorial elections (1998 and 2007). During the 2004 Philippine general election, she ran for the position of Vice-President as an Independent with Fernando Poe, Jr. as running mate.
Legarda is a notable advocate of Climate Change Awareness and has numerous achievements in the fields of social development and human rights advocacy along with her work in journalism. As a journalist, she has received many awards. In 2008, she was chosen as “United Nations International Strategy for Disaster Reduction Asia Pacific Regional Champion for Disaster Risk Reduction and Climate Change Adaptation”. She was a member of the Philippine delegation during the 2009 Copenhagen Summit.
Wiki
Could we have a few like her in this country? Please?
Anyway, my letter to the Manila Bulletin:
At this point, there is no valid rationale for doubting the danger posed by anthropogenic global warming. Atmospheric heating triggered by the greenhouse effect was predicted decades ago, and climatologists have been refining their understanding of these phenomena since then. It is a cruel irony that through accidents of geography, the world’s wealthiest and most developed nations may the last to be severely affected. These countries are responsible for the vast majority of greenhouse emissions, while the nations with negligible carbon footprints stand to lose the most to rising sea levels, extreme weather, crippling drought and all the other predicted consequences of climate change. The Philippines’ initiative to plan ahead for likely outcomes in a world of climate chaos is an important example to the rest of the world. There are many good ways to prepare for the future — but avoiding the facts is not one of them.
Warren Senders
environment: denialism North Carolina sea levels
by Warren
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Year 2, Month 1, Day 18: Denial Is Flooding
The Charlotte Observer recognizes that rising ocean levels will have significant implications for people who live on the coast.
Rising sea level is the clearest signal of climate change in North Carolina. Few places in the United States stand to be more transformed.
About 2,000 square miles of our low, flat coast, an area nearly four times the size of Mecklenburg County, is 1 meter (about 39 inches) or less above water.
At risk are more than 30,500 homes and other buildings, including some of the state’s most expensive real estate. Economists say $6.9 billion in property, in just the four counties they studied, will be at risk from rising seas by late this century.
The comments on the article perfectly illustrate the point of my letter.
The equations are simple. The atmosphere warms and the ice melts; the ice melts and the sea rises; the sea rises and people lose their land and their homes. It’s only now that US citizens are beginning to experience things that people in Bangladesh (where only a few feet separate “highlands” from “lowlands”) have known for years. And the gradually rising ocean waters are accompanied by another, equally insidious tide: a greater percentage of Americans doubt the scientific evidence for global warming than ever before. Just as our industry adds greenhouse gases to the atmosphere at ever-increasing rates (despite the fact that their effects were predicted over fifty years ago), our media broadcasts the voices of denial, making a mockery of a genuine emergency. When did expertise, training and insight become liabilities in our public discourse? What will it take for us to recognize the danger we’re facing?
Warren Senders
environment: denialism NOAA
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Year 2, Month 1, Day 17: Say What?
The Seattle Times notices the NOAA report (2010 ties 2005 as warmest year on record, breaks the record for wettest year, etc., etc.)
If you’ve been paying attention, you knew by last July that 2010 was going to break planetary weather records. And if you’re still paying attention, you’re anticipating that 2011 will be pretty hot and pretty extreme, too. Unfortunately, if you’re paying attention to climate change, you’re in the minority; most of our fellow citizens have internalized the notion that “the science isn’t settled,” thanks to our media’s readiness to “balance” every genuinely worried climate expert with a smooth-talking shill for the fossil fuel industry. The facts have been in for a long time (for example, a 1953 issue of Popular Mechanics magazine discussed atmospheric warming caused by CO2 emissions). And yet we have failed to act. Addicted to a culture of convenience, locked in cycles of conspicuous consumption, we are unwilling to make the hard choices on which our survival as a species is increasingly likely to depend. Hell, we can’t even talk about those choices and their consequences for our future and the futures of our children.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes denialists idiots
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Year 2, Month 1, Day 15: You Bet Jurassic!
USA Today notes that last year tied 2005 as the warmest year the planet has ever experienced since we began keeping records. I thought I’d use it as a hook to scold some of the deniers, and bring the car-crash analogy out for another run.
Yes, 2010 was Earth’s warmest year in recorded history. As the slow-motion disaster of climate change unfolds, that record won’t stand for long. Along with many who deny it’s happening at all, there are those who claim that humans will thrive on a warmer earth. After all, they say, the planet was a lot warmer during the time of the dinosaurs! Left out is the fact that it took millions of years to build up high levels of atmospheric CO2 back in the Pleistocene — while human industrial civilization is accomplishing the same feat in a century or less. A million years gives life time to adapt; on a geological time-scale, a hundred years is shatteringly abrupt — like hitting a cement wall at ninety miles an hour. Unfortunately, the climate-change deniers in the House of Representatives are going to make sure we’re not wearing our seat belts.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: CIA intelligence stupidity
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Year 2, Month 1, Day 14: That’s CIA, Not CYA
The Miami Herald notes that the Central Intelligence Agency thinks climate change might just be a wee bit of a problem.
It is instructive to watch conservative lawmakers respond to the issue of climate change. Regarded by the right wing as the fixation of an improbable world conspiracy of scientists, Democratic politicians and hippie environmentalists, global warming has somewhat graver connotations when it’s discussed by CIA analysts, who have ample reasons to be worried. There is a direct and robust correlation between climatic and political instability, as the recent series of catastrophes in Pakistan illustrate; the CIA (and corresponding agencies in other countries) is entirely correct to be concerned. The idea that Republican legislators would mock expert authorities is sadly plausible; remember that our nation was plunged into an ill-considered war despite warnings from people who actually knew what they were talking about? Climate change is a real and very dangerous enemy; what will the GOP say to dismiss the CIA’s informed analysis? I’m betting on “now watch this drive!”
Warren Senders
environment: Australia Queensland
by Warren
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Year 2, Month 1, Day 13: Talkin’ The Talk
The Sydney Morning Herald has an excellent article on the need for realism in the climate debate.
The floods that have led to most of Queensland being declared a disaster zone are a disturbing reminder that living in one of the richest countries in the world does not shield us from the devastation of natural disasters.
The footage of death and destruction we are seeing on our TV screens is gut-wrenching. Most dinner table conversations in Australia this week will undoubtedly focus on these floods and their horrific consequences. But while we are talking about the immense loss and what we can do to help, there is another conversation that we should be having: the conversation about climate change.
When we talk about climate change, we mostly talk about complicated economic policy, markets and reports. But we need to start talking about what climate change actually looks like – and we don’t need to look much further than Queensland.
So they get a letter. A new rhetorical flourish here is something I borrowed from a science-fiction short story I read a few years ago. I forget the author (Kornbluth, perhaps?), but it concerned a bunch of different groups involved in weather modification technology and the failure of communications between them. Hence the penultimate sentence of my letter, which is going to appear fairly often as 2011 waddles onward.
To any who’ve been following the slowly unfolding catastrophe of climate change, it’s not surprising that 2010 was a record-breaking year. And likewise, it will be no surprise when this year’s numbers are regularly surpassed. Since the nineteen-fifties, when scientists began talking about the climate-altering potential of increased atmospheric CO2, the consequences were always scheduled for some indefinite time in the relatively distant future. It was always our descendants who’d have to contend with a world in a state of environmental upheaval.
Until now. Queensland’s floods are far from an isolated case; all over the planet the weather is less predictable, more extreme, and more dangerous. For over fifty years, as our greenhouse emissions have steadily increased, we’ve avoided discussing their climatic consequences: everybody’s doing something about the weather, but nobody’s talking about it. This must end; denial is a luxury we can no longer afford.
Warren Senders
environment: assholes denialists idiots ignorance Texas
by Warren
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Year 2, Month 1, Day 13: I’m Gonna Build A Big Fence Around Texas
The Dallas Morning News has a piece on Texas’ ongoing struggle to block the Environmental Protection Agency from doing its job.
In attempting to block the regulatory initiatives of the Environmental Protection Agency, Texas is leading the way. Perhaps the rest of America will eventually follow — but to where? On the one hand, the state’s attempt to limit the EPA’s authority will make it easier for major polluters to continue their ongoing destruction of the planetary environment; increasing greenhouse emissions will soon bring Earth to levels of CO2 last seen hundreds of millions of years ago. On the other hand, the level of scientific ignorance used to justify anti-EPA lawsuits demonstrates that in at least some quarters, prehistoric ways of thinking already dominate. Unable or unwilling to grasp the relevance and reality of climatological data, the conservative groups attempting to stop the EPA’s work are leading Texas backward — all the way to the Carboniferous Period.
Warren Senders
environment: public health tropical diseases
by Warren
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Year 2, Month 1, Day 12: Sick As A Brick
The Kansas City Star notes that a warming climate will bring a change in disease vectors, with a greater likelihood of catching things that were previously the exclusive province of tropical explorers.
The increased prevalence of uncommon diseases triggered by climate change is another example of the long-term consequences of two mutually reinforcing human behaviors: wastefulness and denial. Our efforts to mitigate the escalating climate crisis are hampered by our collective unwillingness to make needed systemic changes in our energy economy — while the rising levels of greenhouse gases in our atmosphere are matched by those of scientific illiteracy in our public discourse. While the scientific consensus on global warming is overwhelming, you wouldn’t know it from the news, where every perturbed climatologist is “balanced” by a petroleum-industry shill, conveying the impression that “the science isn’t settled.” As the world warms, we’ll meet quite a few unpleasant tropical diseases — perhaps when our kids have to stay out of school because of Dengue fever or malaria, we’ll realize that our national ignorance of the facts of climate change has made us sick.
Warren Senders
environment: long-term prediction millennium forecasts Shawn Marshall
by Warren
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Year 2, Month 1, Day 11: The Gift That Keeps On Giving
The Marshall study is an excellent hook for letters. This one went to the Montreal Gazette, which did a pretty good report on the team’s work.
Dr. Shawn Marshall and the rest of his team are optimists, which is hard to remember when we read their study on the likely long-term effects of climate change over the next millennium. Their forecasts presume that our planet’s politicians begin acting like thoughtful adults facing a serious problem, rather than squabbling ten-year-olds attempting to avoid responsibility. If (and it’s a mighty big “if”) our leaders were ready to make genuine commitments to significant reductions in greenhouse emissions, we can expect nothing more severe than Marshall’s best-case scenario (no more Venice, no more Manhattan). Failure to curb our world-consuming ways, on the other hand, may lead to what biologists euphemistically call an “evolutionary bottleneck,” with our own species one of the likely victims. We must act responsibly and rapidly to ensure that the ravaged world of Marshall’s predictions is a worst-case future rather than humanity’s last, best or only hope.
Warren Senders
environment: long-term future millennium forecasts
by Warren
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Year 2, Month 1, Day 10: Y3K Edition
The London Metro reports on a new study projecting climate change’s effects a thousand years in the future. Hint: it’s not pretty.
Obviously, a lot can happen between now and the year 3000, so the scary thousand-year forecasts of a team of climate scientists should not be misunderstood as constituting an inevitable future. But we must recognize that their prognostications are based on a set of best-case starting points in which the entire world community begins to act like a community, reducing CO2 emissions rapidly and responsibly. If Shawn Marshall and his team were to run the worst-case numbers, they would foretell horrifying prospects for our species and our planet. Ultimately, it’s up to us; as private citizens, we must become aware of the climate crisis’ immediacy; as civic actors, we must pressure our politicians to do the right thing for the long term, rather than bow to the inevitable exigencies of the electoral cycle. After all, why make dire predictions if all we do is wait for them to come true?
Warren Senders