environment Politics: assholes EPA idiots Lisa Jackson Republican obstructionism
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Year 2, Month 2, Day 21: Sock It To ’em!
The Las Vegas Sun quite elegantly takes the Republicans in the House to task for scientific illiteracy, bad manners and general douchebaggery. This editorial was a real pleasure to read.
Sent February 12:
The behavior of the Republican members of the House of Representatives is a disgrace to our country and to its institutions of governance. Their reflexive, ideologically-driven hostility to the facts of climate change is both foolish and perilous. While the GOP has routinely positioned itself on the side of industry, its current allegiance to the most extreme corporatist interests has led it to abandon even lip service to scientific expertise. It is quite evident that the Republican legislators who questioned EPA administrator Lisa Jackson not only couldn’t understand the science behind the policies she’s implementing — they brought no understanding to the discussion at all, and her testimony became an occasion for petty theatrics of the most immature sort. These modern-day “know-nothing” politicians would be comical if the threat posed by climate change was not so grave. As it is, their childish petulance poses a danger to us all.
Warren Senders
humor India: commercials vanity
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Wow.
Just wow. Wildstone is apparently a brand of male body products in India. Their TV spots are clearly pushing the boundaries.
Note that according to at least one customer, it’s not entirely satisfactory stuff.
Politics: democracy rants Republicans righteous indignation
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On the floor of the Wisconsin House of Representatives
Republicans tried to pull some rotten business. I’ll let Representative Gordon Hintz tell you about it:
By all accounts the Tea-Party counter-demonstrators experienced EPIC FAIL today; the “support Walker” demonstrations were outnumbered 35:1.
environment: denialists idiots James Inhofe
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Year 2, Month 2, Day 20: I’m Too Young To Marry
The Tulsa Beacon’s publisher is Charles Biggs. He writes a long screed on why global warming is bunk a: because it’s snowing, and b: because scientists aren’t willing to give out certificates of causation. And Al Gore is fat, most likely. He finishes with some unrelated jokes, of which this one was the best:
• There was once a man from the city who was visiting a small farm, and during this visit he saw a farmer feeding pigs in a most extraordinary manner.
The farmer would lift a pig up to a nearby apple tree, and the pig would eat the apples off the tree directly. The farmer would move the pig from one apple to another until the pig was satisfied, then he would start again with another pig.
The city man watched this activity for some time with great astonishment. Finally, he could not resist saying to the farmer, “This is the most inefficient method of feeding pigs that I can imagine. Just think of the time that would be saved if you simply shook the apples off the tree and let the pigs eat them from the ground!”
The farmer looked puzzled and replied, “What’s time to a pig?”
Because Tulsa is part of Oklahoma, I added “James Inhofe” to the tags. Sent February 11:
Dear Mr. Biggs,
May I try?
Let’s start from the beginning. Picture a puddle of water on a hot sunny day. It disappears quickly, doesn’t it? That’s because it evaporated, which means the water turned into water vapor and became part of the air. Air with a lot of water in it is “humid.” Now, what happens when it’s really, really humid? It rains, of course — but only if it’s above freezing. And when it’s below freezing? Well, you know the answer: it would snow. Heavily. You can’t have precipitation without humidity, and you can’t have humidity without evaporation, and you can’t have evaporation without heat.
The term “climate change” is now preferred to “global warming” simply because it is a better description of people’s experience. Ask around; everybody’s talking about the weather (including you!). Big heat waves in Europe, droughts in South America, huge floods and a cyclone in Australia, lots of floods in Pakistan, a massive, paralyzing blizzard in the US. Sure, all of these things have happened before. But never all at once, which is why it might be a good idea to listen to what people who study the climate closely have been predicting about atmospheric CO2 and the greenhouse effect. Since the 1950s, by the way.
Mr. Biggs, you’re wrong about climate change — but I really liked your joke about the pig.
Warren Senders
And a day and a half later, he wrote me back:
Mr. Sanders,
You may be right and I could be wrong. Words have meaning. We just set a record for snowfall AND record low temperatures in Oklahoma. And yet many people (you not included) cling to global warming and that’s what they teach in science classes in high school.
I think you may give mankind too much credit for affecting the weather. A volcanic eruption can affect weather patterns for years and yet we still can’t predict accurately if it will rain Tuesday.
Thanks for your thoughtful remarks.
Charles Biggs
I haven’t responded yet, but I will.
Kudos to anyone who can identify the provenance of the headline.
India Indian music music Personal Warren's music: concerts
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Khyal update
The Chinmaya Center concert went well, I thought. I did a 90-minute set:
Maru Bihag: “Unhi se jaaye” in vilambit ektaal; “Kaahe bajaaye daayi ho Shyam” in tintaal; “Sun sun tori batiyaa” in drut ektaal.
Paraj: “Chandani raat ati bhaave sakhi” in tintaal.
Desh: Tarana in tintaal
Surdaas bhajan: “Ankhiyaan Hari darasan ki pyaasi”
Bhairavi thumri: “Jamuna ke teer”
Chris Pereji played tabla, George Ruckert was on harmonium and Vijaya Sundaram on tamboura and supporting vocals.
This was the longest span of time I’ve sung in quite a while, as I’ve been gradually (veeeeerrrrrry gradually) recovering from an acid reflux condition that’s damaged my vocal chords over the past couple of years. I’m definitely on the mend, which is tremendously cheering.
Chris gave nice supportive theka; George was his usual preturnaturally alert self; Vijaya’s vocal sangat felt lovely. People liked it. I liked it.
The good news is that I got a recording off the PA board.
The bad news is that it (WTF?) has my voice mixed so low as to be inaudible. People in the hall said they could hear me clearly, and I was coming through the monitors nicely, so I’m baffled as to what mix the PA guys were giving me. Dammit. I’m told there was a video recorded; I hope that at least turns out properly.
India Indian music music Personal vocalists Warren's music: concerts
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I am performing khyal…
…a little later on today at the Chinmaya Mission in Andover, MA.
It’s been fun practicing although I have not really had enough time. Many of the techniques that I discuss in Posts About Practicing really come in handy here in the first part of the twenty-first century, with a kid and a house and a global climate crisis occupying my attention. Ten hours of practice a day, which I used to do back in India in the 1980s, really seems like a mythological accomplishment.
Full report later on…
environment Politics: assholes conspiracy theory denialism idiots royalty
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Year 2, Month 2, Day 19: Bonnie Prince Charlie
The UK Sun runs a brief piece on Prince Charles, who’s come out swinging at the climate deniers:
PRINCE Charles blasted climate change sceptics yesterday, accusing them of playing “a reckless game of roulette” with the planet.
The campaigning royal added that doubters are having a “corrosive effect” on public opinion.
He asked: “How are these people going to face their grandchildren?”
Charles hit out at claims people fighting climate change “are secretly conspiring to undermine and deliberately destroy the entire market-based capitalist system”.
This letter was sent on February 10. I used the British spelling of “sceptic.” I may be delusional, but I always feel a greater freedom to use big words and fancy allusions when I’m writing to the British press. Even the Sun, which ain’t no Times of London.
Prince Charles’ comments on those who deny the threat of climate change are entirely apropos. The petroleum-funded media and the politicians they enable (both in the UK and the USA) are playing a very dangerous game: whether fomenting paranoid delusions that the world’s climatologists have formed a giant cabal secretly planning a New World Order, attributing the dramatic uptick in extreme weather events across the globe to “sunspot activity,” or simply refusing to acknowledge the existence of a problem, these individuals and organizations are setting the future of their own descendants, and the rest of us, at risk. One has only to examine their rhetoric to recognize that the term “sceptic” is a terrible misnomer; far from being empiricists committed to the use of reason, logic and evidence, they are so determined to make the world fit their increasingly twisted conspiracy theories that they’ve left Occam’s razor far, far behind.
Warren Senders
environment: assholes denialists idiots
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Year 2, Month 2, Day 18: Taking Advantage of a 250-Word Limit
The Sioux City Journal features a short, ostensibly humorous, piece by one Matthew Ung, trotting out all the standard climate-denial tropes under the guise of satire. Based on the other articles linked on that page, it looks like the paper’s a wingnut outlet, so I suspect I’ll never make it to print. But a fellow can dream, can’t he? And the comments tend to confirm my suspicions.
Let’s examine Matthew Ung’s attempt at humor about climate change, beginning with this gem: “Thanks to Al Gore, we know that our actions directly affect the planet…” First, while Gore brought the subject to popular attention, climatologists like James Hansen and Charles Keeling exposed the link between greenhouse emissions and climate change; second, our actions don’t “directly affect the planet.” Rather, the planet is affected indirectly; the multi-decade time lag between stimulus and response makes this a hard problem to solve.
He subsequently states that “Global warming activists attempt to link the immediate season and snowfall records as an indication of how well we are doing to curb emissions that exact year.” No, they don’t. I have never heard of any environmentalist making such a connection. Source, please?
Scientists have predicted for over a century that adding CO2 to the atmosphere will heat it, with “stochastic” effects: predictable in the aggregate, not in the particular. That is, as the climate changes, the weather will get weirder — less consistent, more extreme.
About that snowfall? Science FAIL. A hotter atmosphere means more water evaporates, so the humidity goes up, which means more rain when it’s hot, more snow when it’s cold. Climatologists have been predicting that for decades, too.
Mr. Ung, like many denialists, fails to grasp the distinction between “weather” and “climate.” Weather is to climate as anecdote is to history. One is short-term and local, the other is long-term and global.
Ignorance, alas, is rising along with the temperature.
Warren Senders
Education environment: assholes denialists Education idiots Wisconsin
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Year 2, Month 2, Day 17: Dumber-er-er-er
The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel notes a newly released study on climate change’s projected impact on Wisconsin: 6-7 degrees of warming by 2050. Sounds fairly dire, no? Now just look at the comments.
Mailed Feb. 8. This is the letter that prompted the obscene phone call of this past Monday.
The failure of our country’s educational system is nowhere more abject than in the areas of science and mathematics — a statement easily verified by glancing through the online comments on the recent study from scientists at the University of Wisconsin dealing with the projected impact of climate change on the state. If our science education had been of higher quality, there would be far fewer people confusing “weather” with “climate.” If our mathematics classes had done their job, we wouldn’t see endless confusions of terms like “average” and “mean,” or such consistent misunderstanding of the statistics of probability. A scientifically-grounded, research-based study projecting a six to seven degree rise in temperature should cause at least a little alarm, even among people who aren’t paying attention. Instead, the alarms are in the minds of the paranoids who suspect a nefarious global conspiracy of climatologists, (led by Al Gore, of course).
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes denialists EPA Fred Upton idiots
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Year 2, Month 2, Day 16: Dingleberries
The Wall Street Journal reports on Fred Upton’s (R-MI) change of position on climate, and notes his eagerness to kill the EPA. Unlike many WSJ pieces, this one allows a spokesman for the Natural Resources Defense Council to have the last word:
Mr. Upton’s draft proposal to block the EPA regulation has drawn criticism from environmentalists, some of whom have accused him of backtracking on past statements in which he described climate change as “a serious problem” and that the U.S. has a responsibility to reduce its emissions.
“The market is tilted in favor of the dirty energy sources, and we’re paying for it with our health,” said David Doniger, an attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council, “Somehow you have to level the playing field so that public health and natural resources are protected from the pollution.”
This was sent on Tuesday, February 8.
Fred Upton’s reversal on the issue of climate change reveals the truth about this congressional power broker: he is, like the rest of his caucus, motivated entirely by political exigencies — which in the case of Republican legislators, translates as “fear of the Tea Party.” This group of anti-science, anti-reality agitators has so intimidated the entire GOP that even the most straightforward factual statements are no longer allowable in their public discourse. To set the record straight, Mr. Upton’s newly-fledged belief that climate change is “not necessarily man-made” is patently delusional. If ever there was a contemporary issue on which scientific consensus is overwhelming, it’s that of global warming. Mr. Upton’s support for crippling the Environmental Protection Agency is likewise a position based entirely on cynical, short-term political calculations; given the ludicrous dysfunctionality of the current Congress, EPA regulation of greenhouse gases is essential to bringing climate change under control.
Warren Senders