environment Politics: Republican obstructionism scientific literacy
by Warren
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Year 2, Month 10, Day 12: The Real Threat is Teh Gayz!
The Boston Globe for October 8 notes that UMass Amherst has also gotten one of the Regional Climate Science centers. Good for them:
The federal government yesterday awarded the University of Massachusetts Amherst a multimillion-dollar grant to host one of eight centers around the country to study the local effects of climate change.
The Northeast Climate Science Center will study how climate change affects ecosystems, wildlife, water, and other resources from the Great Lakes to Maine and down to Missouri. The $7.5 million grant over five years will sponsor research at UMass Amherst as well as at institutions in Wisconsin, Minnesota, New York, and Massachusetts.
I used this as the hook for a generic anti-Republican screed. Bad for them. Sent October 8:
It’s good to hear that the Department of the Interior is still funding scientific research, as demonstrated by the recent award to start a regional climate science center at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst.
During the hysteria of a presidential election season, we can anticipate criticism of the UMass center and its companions elsewhere in the US from the various GOP aspirants. After all, why should the government spend money on researching climate change, a phenomenon which Republican political strategists assure them doesn’t exist?
There has never been a more determined effort to marginalize actual science than we’re now seeing from the conservative political establishment in this country. At a time when America and the world are facing the single most significant threat in human history in the form of a runaway greenhouse effect, the conservatives’ ideological crusade for ignorance and wishful thinking is a suicidal folly.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes denialists idiots James Inhofe Senate Republicans
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Year 2, Month 10, Day 11: Snicker. Snicker. Snicker. Guffaw.
Heh heh heh (the Oct. 7 Tulsa World):
If Norman wasn’t the place to be for weather research in the south, or even the nation, this announcement today should help.
The U.S. Department of the Interior selected the University of Oklahoma to be one of eight regional climate science centers nationwide, school and Interior officials announced Friday.
The center, which will be housed at the OU Research Campus in Norman, will aim to provide a link between weather and climate projections about how to manage federal lands, natural resources and fish and wildlife, according to a release from the OU College of Atmospheric & Geographic Sciences today.
“The nationwide network of Climate Science Centers will provide the scientific talent and commitment necessary for understanding how climate change and other landscape stressors will change the face of the United States, and how the Department of the Interior, as our nation’s chief steward of natural and cultural resources, can prepare and respond,” said Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar.
Every once in a while these letters are fun. Sent Oct. 7:
With the selection of the University of Oklahoma’s Norman campus as one of the nation’s new climate science centers, the irony is thick on the ground. This news surely sticks in James Inhofe’s craw. After all, the Senator is a man who prefers improbable conspiracy theories to observable realities, and who chooses to go on record as denying the relevance of climate science. Perhaps there will be a dedication ceremony when the new offices are opened. It would be a gracious gesture to invite America’s most famous denialist to the reception.
Perhaps he could say a few words?
Or perhaps he could lay aside his petrol-powered preconceptions and listen carefully to what climatologists are actually saying about the threats we’re all going to face in the coming centuries?
Naaaah. Senator Inhofe listening respectfully to climate scientists? That would be even more unusual than an unseasonal snowfall in Washington, DC.
Warren Senders
environment: corporate irresponsibility Keystone XL Tar Sands
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Year 2, Month 10, Day 10: Crude Cash.
The October 6 edition of the Lincoln, NE Journal-Star includes a piece on an upcoming meeting between TransCanada’s big cheeses and Nebraska government officials:
Three Nebraska lawmakers will meet Tuesday afternoon in Norfolk to discuss concerns with TransCanada officials over the route of the company’s proposed Keystone XL oil pipeline through the state.
The meeting was arranged by Speaker Mike Flood of Norfolk, who said Wednesday that the Legislature must move cautiously but deliberately in dealing with the pipeline issue.
The $7 billion, 1,700-mile pipeline proposed by TransCanada would carry oil from tar-sands deposits near Alberta, Canada, to refineries along the U.S. Gulf Coast.
The project has drawn fire from people who fear an oil leak would be disastrous because the pipeline would pass through Nebraska’s Sandhills region and over the massive Ogallala Aquifer, which provides irrigation and drinking water to a wide swath of the central United States.
Just because these people control billions of dollars is no reason to trust them an inch. Sent Oct. 6:
There are a great many factors Nebraska lawmakers should be considering when they meet with representatives of TransCanada, the corporation behind the Keystone XL pipeline. Some are obvious: all pipelines leak, and a proposed route that carries staggering quantities of extremely “dirty” oil over the Ogallala Aquifer is a disaster waiting to happen.
TransCanada officials won’t acknowledge that spills and leaks are inevitable, but they’ll probably offer the stringent regulations they’re imposing on pipeline operators (in Nebraska and other states along the way) as assurance that the project is extremely safe.
Lawmakers should remember that the oil industry has a long and ugly record of ignoring its own protocols, stonewalling investigations, manipulating evidence, and using its financial resources to corrupt the government agencies responsible for enforcing compliance with environmental regulations. Absent a vigorous, well-funded and incorruptible enforcement agency, TransCanada’s promises of safety aren’t worth a single drop of Ogallala water.
Warren Senders
environment: assholes corporate irresponsibility denialists idiots
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Year 2, Month 10, Day 9: Say That To His Face, Why Don’cha?
Michael Mann kicks some serious butt in the October 1 issue of the Vail Daily (CO):
An individual named Martin Hertzberg did a grave disservice to your readers by making false and defamatory statements about me and my climate scientist colleagues in his recent commentary in your paper.
It’s hard to imagine anyone packing more lies and distortions into a single commentary. Mr. Hertzberg uses libelous language in characterizing the so-called “hockey stick” — work of my own published more than a decade ago showing that recent warming is unusual over at least the past 1,000 years — as “fraudulent,” and claiming that it “it was fabricated from carefully selected tree-ring measurements with a phony computer program.”
These are just lies, regurgitation of dishonest smears that have been manufactured by fossil fuel industry-funded climate change deniers, and those who do their bidding by lying to the public about the science.
The highest scientific body in the nation, the National Academy of Sciences affirmed my research findings in an exhaustive independent review published in June 2006 (see e.g. “Science Panel Backs Study on Warming Climate,” New York Times, June 22, 2006, among many others).
Dozens of independent groups of scientists have independently reproduced and confirmed our findings, and more recent work by several groups shows that recent warmth is unusual over an even longer time frame.
They have a 500 (!) word limit. It’s always fun to stand up on behalf of the good guys. Sent October 5:
By rights, Michael Mann should sound a lot angrier than he does in his rebuke to Martin Hertzberg. It isn’t every day that a responsible researcher with a lifelong record of scientific integrity has his work and findings impugned so cavalierly.
Well, let me qualify that. Such irresponsible public treatment isn’t on the menu for most scientists — but it is now the norm for climatologists, whose message appears highly unwelcome to the fossil fuel industry. The giant multinational corporations which have grown rich from building a petroleum addiction/delivery mechanism into our society are naturally resistant to anything that will end their profitability, and they have invested millions upon millions of dollars to build a denialist infrastructure which has successfully muddied the debate, delaying action on what is certainly the gravest threat our species has faced in recorded history.
Provoked by their paymasters, the unhinged voices of talk radio hosts and mendacious professional dissenters have created a working environment in which climate scientists now regularly receive death threats along with frivolous lawsuits and public mockery. Are there any other scientists whose work is treated so badly? The only parallel in recent history is the defamation campaign waged against the researchers who uncovered definitive links between smoking and cancer. It is illuminating to realize that many of the same individuals who spread calumnies about these conscientious investigators are now in the pay of Big Oil and Big Coal — once again taking fat paychecks in exchange for misleading the public.
Considering that his lifework has been derided, his integrity has been impugned, and he’s been subjected to frivolous investigation after frivolous investigation, Dr. Mann’s rebuke to Martin Hertzberg’s misrepresentations is extraordinarily civil. My hat’s off to him; under analogous circumstances, I could never be as courteous.
Warren Senders
UPDATE: And I’m in print, although they decided I was from Medford, Oregon.
environment: Arctic ice melt
by Warren
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Year 2, Month 10, Day 8: “Consumption” Used To Be A Name For Tuberculosis, Remember
The Montreal Gazette notes NASA’s just-released figures on the decline in Arctic ice:
MONTREAL — Sea ice in the Arctic declined last month to the second-lowest level ever recorded, the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration said Tuesday.
Satellite data showed the summertime sea ice coverage in the north narrowly missed the all-time record low, which was attained in 2007, NASA said in a statement.
The Arctic sea ice recedes every summer as the sun’s rays reach higher into the northern hemisphere and sea ice reaches its annual minimum each year in September.
Joey Comiso, a scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, said the sustained low minimum sea ice levels are part of a large-scale decline over the past three decades.
I’m taking a break from chastising idiots; I can’t do it every day without a few minutes of relief. Sent Oct. 4:
NASA’s report on the Arctic’s dwindling sea ice offers us an all-too-visible reminder of the damage wrought by our civilization’s exuberant fossil-fuel consumption. If humanity is to survive and prosper in the coming centuries, we can no longer operate under the ignorant assumption that our consumption-based lifestyles can be sustained indefinitely. While the world’s poorest nations have negligible carbon footprints, their futures in a warming world are far more precarious.
When contemplating a future without fossil fuels, the question is not “if,” but “when” and “how.” The sooner we stop burning our planet’s stored carbon reserves, the more likely we are to avoid triggering irreversible climatic tipping points; we can make the transition willingly and thoughtfully, or have it forced on us by the catastrophic consequences of a runaway greenhouse effect. The choice is ours, and NASA’s news makes it clear that there is no time to waste.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: corporate irresponsibility Keystone XL Tar Sands
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Year 2, Month 10, Day 7: Such Models Of Friendship Are Precious And Rare
The Omaha World-Herald reports on the latest FOIA release of correspondence between a TransCanada lobbyist and his former employees — the U.S. State Department:
WASHINGTON — A group opposed to the Keystone XL pipeline says a fresh batch of emails it released Monday shows the State Department is biased in favor of the project.
In one email exchange from a little over a year ago, pipeline lobbyist Paul Elliott forwarded a press release to State Department official Marja Verloop touting an endorsement of the pipeline by Montana Sen. Max Baucus.
“Go Paul! Baucus support holds clout,” Verloop responded.
Environmental advocacy group Friends of the Earth describes that email as a State Department employee literally rooting for the lobbyist and his effort to win approval of the Keystone XL.
The pipeline would carry 700,000 barrels of oil a day from tar-sand strip mines in western Canada to oil refineries on America’s Gulf Coast. It would cross Nebraska’s Sand Hills and the underground Ogallala Aquifer along the way.
This is the second round of emails that Friends of the Earth has obtained through the Freedom of Information Act and then released. The company behind the pipeline, TransCanada Inc., and the State Department have both said there have been no inappropriate interactions.
Well, they would, wouldn’t they? Sent October 3:
When our political environment has been so thoroughly contaminated by the vast financial power of multinational oil corporations, we shouldn’t be too surprised at an incestuous connection between a lobbyist for the Keystone XL pipeline and his former bosses in the State Department.
This pollution of our political environment is all too likely to find its counterpart in the “real world” of complex interdependent ecosystems. Calling TransCanada’s project a catastrophe waiting to happen is like calling Beethoven’s Ninth a “nice tune.” At multiple scales, from the inevitable leaks along the pipeline’s length to the destruction of vast swaths of boreal forest, and the potential for a devastating escalation of global climate change, the Keystone XL is a symphony of disaster.
It’s distressing that the U.S. State Department and its erstwhile employee turned pipeline lobbyist are singing from the same page. President Obama should revoke the Department’s authority over the pipeline.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes denialists idiots Rick Perry scientific consensus
by Warren
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Year 2, Month 10, Day 6: Please Pass The Brain Bleach.
Another report on the Texas Tornado, this time from the Concord Monitor (NH):
One man challenged Perry about his skepticism of global warming. The man charged that Perry had ducked a question in a previous debate when moderators had asked him what sources served as his evidence.
“I’m ready for you this time,” Perry said, prompting a laugh. He went on to say that in recent weeks a “Nobel laureate of some acclaim,” whom he did not name, had decided there is no definite proof that global warming has been caused by humans. The audience applauded.
“For us to take a snapshot in time and say what is going on in this country today and the climate change that is going on is man’s fault and we need to jeopardize America’s economy,” he said. “I’m not afraid to say I’m a skeptic.”
For “skeptic” read “dingaling.” Sent October 2:
While Rick Perry feels the need to cite a “Nobel Laureate” to bolster his rejection of the near-universal scientific consensus on global climate change, he didn’t mention the hundreds of Nobelists in multiple disciplines who support the findings of the vast majority of the world’s climatologists.
Mr. Perry prefers the contrarian position of Dr. Ivar Giaever, a physicist who won the prize in 1973 for his work with semiconductors and superconductors, and whose climatological experience is limited to participation in a single discussion panel at a convention of Nobel laureates. He’s done no research in climate science and has no published papers in the field, despite a lucrative affiliation with petrol-subsidized conservative think tanks like the Cato Institute.
Mr. Perry’s rejection of science when it’s inconvenient to his political aspirations is contemporary Republican realpolitik at its best. A Nobelist’s opinion? Valid — if it supports his ideological preconceptions. Otherwise? “Junk science!”
Warren Senders
Uncategorized: assholes denialists idiots Republican obstructionism Rick Perry scientific consensus
by Warren
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Year 2, Month 10, Day 5: Some Days These Letters Are No Damn Fun At All
The LA Times for September 30 reports on Rick Perry’s eagerness to embrace climate denial in all its forms:
At a New Hampshire town-hall style meeting, his first of the campaign, the Texas governor sparred Friday evening with a questioner who tried to pin him down on the issue. The man, whom Perry addressed as “Mike,” began by noting a 2011 report from a panel of experts chosen by the National Academy of Sciences, which concluded that climate change is occurring and “is very likely caused primarily by the emission of greenhouse gases from human activities.” The man noted that Perry had ducked—twice–when asked at the Reagan Library debate this month to name the scientists he found most credible on the subject.
Spending more than three seconds contemplating the vile opportunist that is Rick Perry is enough to send me screaming in search of a shower. Sent October 1:
Governor Perry’s rejection of climate change reflects the conservative base to which he must pander. In his public remarks on the subject, he’s frequently accused climate scientists of manipulating data in order to secure remunerative grants. Given the sordid history of Republican data-manipulation, this is projection at best, knowing hypocrisy at worst. Similarly, his readiness to accept the views of scientists when they bolster his preconceptions demonstrates that for Mr. Perry, like other GOP aspirants, ideology trumps reality.
Remember the Cheney doctrine that a miniscule chance of Iraqi WMDs was justification for an invasion? By all rules of logic, a similarly small probability that climate change is a genuine civilizational threat should galvanize us into action. However, since Republicans don’t “do” logic and are motivated only by nonexistent threats, the worldwide scientific consensus on climate change is sufficient only to trigger rhetorical posturing, and a grotesque rejection of genuine expertise.
Warren Senders
environment: assholes denialists idiots
by Warren
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Year 2, Month 10, Day 4: Hats Back On, Gentlemen — An Idiot.
Hey, gang! Want to make fun of an idiot? Check out Norah Flanagan, in the Enid, Oklahoma, “News and Eagle.” You can’t make this shit up. Well, actually, you can:
I would probably be a bit more concerned about belching cows heating up the atmosphere than I am if the people doing the so called tests and crying in their green tea weren’t treating the climate changes like a religion. Every time I hear anything about the subject I get this ultra nasty picture in my head of goofy looking Moonies (that cult that hands out flowers and plays tambourines on streets) I’ve never seen a Moony with my own two eyes, only pictures in magazines and on TV, but these climate people remind me of them. They’re goofy.
Has the weather changed in the last few years? Yes it has. We’re cruising toward three seasons rather than four. Freeze your nostrils shut cold winter, monsoon season, and hot enough to fry eggs in the dirt at 6 a.m. summers. When you take into consideration that this area right here, the Canisteo Valley, was once a tropical rain forest, and that we had a mini ice age back in the Middle Ages, then it doesn’t take a big stretch for a thinking person to figure out that we’ve entered ANOTHER weather cycle. All things have a cycle, there’s light, there’s dark, there’s cold, there’s hot, there’s life, there’s death. Nothing stays the same. Absolutely nothing. So why in the world would people think that the weather should? Besides, Al Gore being the poster child for the Global Warming/ Moony freaks is a good nuff reason for me to shoot darts at the theory. I didn’t trust the guy back when he was Bill Clinton’s number 2 and now that he’s got those wiggly jowel thingies and does a comb over he creeps me out even worse.
When it comes to Global Warming, it’s kinda like God, you either believe or you don’t. I’m just one of those skeptics who like to see the actual data right in front of me. I don’t need a nerd in a lab coat deciphering the numbers for me, I’m quite capable of reading graphs and numbers all by myself, and the last thing that I want to see when I’m looking at data is the word ‘projected’. What? Projected means in the future, not right now. Projected means maybe. I don’t want maybe. I want this is what has happened/this is what will result.
The Enid News And Eagle only accepts letters in the mail — no email. So this one went off on Saturday morning, October 30. It’s been too long since I mocked an idiot.
When it comes to climate change, Norah Flanagan doesn’t need a “nerd in a lab coat deciphering the numbers for me”), and deprecates words like “projected” as meaningless. How does this attitude work in other areas?
One day her doctor finds a suspicious lump, but Norah feels fine — so she doesn’t care.
She reads the numbers on her biopsy results, but doesn’t understand them. A big number is good. Or is it bad?
A “nerd in a lab coat” (who happens, usefully, to be an oncologist) recommends a course of therapy and tells her the projected survival rate. But since she doesn’t want “maybe,” the advice goes unheeded. Plus which, the doctor has “wiggly jowl thingies” so she knows he’s a quack.
I hope she would not be so reckless. Experts spend years mastering a subject or a skill; we trust mechanics with our cars and surgeons with our lives for this reason.
Climate scientists (whom she compares to deluded cultists) have spent years learning to interpret the data on our planet’s health. If an overwhelming consensus of planetary diagnosticians tell us there’s a problem, dismissing them simply because their words are unwelcome (or because they’re funny-looking) is as foolish as ignoring an oncologist’s advice in the face of a metastasizing cancer.
Warren Senders
I will give an Antigravity CD to the first person to correctly identify the provenance of my headline.
environment Politics: denialists idiots National parks Yellowstone Park
by Warren
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Year 2, Month 10, Day 3: Yogi?
More on the dire predictions for Yellowstone National Park, this time printed in the Idaho State Journal for September 27:
According to new climate projections conducted for the report, the average of many models is for Yellowstone National Park summers to get 9.7 degrees hotter by 2070-2099 with medium-high future emissions. With a scenario of lower emissions, the average projection is for summers to get 5.6 degrees hotter. This illustrates that the most extreme effects of climate change can be avoided by taking action to reduce emissions. In fact, even the lower-emissions scenario does not assume new policies to reduce heat-trapping pollutants, and with new policies it would be possible to hold future climate change to an even smaller degree.
The effects of a disrupted climate threaten not only Greater Yellowstone’s ecology but also a $700 million annual tourism economy dependent on the region’s unique resources, says the report, which also notes that surveys indicate visitation could be substantially impacted by warming temperatures.
“What we humans are doing to the climate isn’t just melting polar ice caps, it’s disrupting the places that are nearest and dearest to us,” said Stephen Saunders, RMCO president and lead author of the report. “Already, threads are being pulled out of the tapestries of Yellowstone and other special places, and they are losing some of their luster.”
Variations on the theme. Sent September 29:
There’s nowhere on Earth like Yellowstone. With its rare and unusual wildlife and complex ecosystems, America’s greatest park is now gravely endangered by the ravages of climate change; those unique forms of life are extremely vulnerable to a runaway greenhouse effect.
It’s not just a 9.7 degree rise in predicted temperature that’s so frightening. That single figure conceals complex and unpredictable phenomena: wider swings from hot to cold, more extreme precipitation, and a loss of the climatic stability that allowed a complex ecology like Yellowstone’s to evolve in the first place.
Meanwhile, politicians and pundits irresponsibly assert that climate change is a liberal plot, or a fabrication by an international cabal of scientists desperately seeking funding.
Ultimately, of course, it’s not just Yellowstone that’s endangered, but all environments with complex ecologies. The time for concerted action on the climate crisis is now; there is no longer any time to waste.
Warren Senders