environment: Bad News denialists International Energy Agency
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Year 2, Month 11, Day 13: This Is Not A Test
The New York Daily News (GAAAH!) reports on the just-released warning from the International Energy Agency:
Time is running out to reverse the effects of global warming, according to a new report.
In a sobering analysis of the planet’s energy future, the International Energy Agency said that governments around the world have five years to reverse the course of climate change before it’s too late.
“The door is closing,” Fatih Birol, the IEA’s chief economist, told the Guardian. “I am very worried – if we don’t change direction now on how we use energy, we will end up beyond what scientists tell us is the minimum [for safety].
“The door will be closed forever.”
The World Energy Outlook report, which looks at the future of the planet’s energy system over the next 25 years, revealed that urgent investment in renewable power and energy efficiency is needed to keep global temperature gains at 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, a crucial ceiling set by climate scientists.
Once that door shuts, that’s it. Writing a historically referenced letter to the NYDN is probably an exercise in futility. I’ll paraphrase it and send tomorrow’s letter to the WSJ in a little while, which will put me five days ahead of the curve. Whee!
Sent November 9:
The greenhouse effect was first described in the early 1800s, and first measured in 1896 by Svante Arrhenius, a Swedish physicist. Arctic ice melt caused by increased atmospheric CO2 was postulated in 1953, and climatologists have been studying the problem ever since. Their analyses have been steadily getting more accurate, and their predictions have been confirmed time and time again.
For fifty years environmental experts have been warning American lawmakers about the consequences of our profligate energy consumption, and for the past fifty years we’ve been kicking it down the road for “the next guy” to deal with — a strategy that just ended with the release of the International Energy Agency’s “five-year warning.” The climate-change denialists need to abandon their improbable conspiracy theories and join the rest of us in making a world that’s safe for our descendants.
We can’t say we weren’t warned. We can only say we didn’t care.
Warren Senders
Louis Armstrong’s Sunlit Art
A few weeks ago I finished reading “Pops,” Terry Teachout’s beautiful biography of Louis Armstrong. The book was sitting on a chair in my living room, and I went to put it away. It opened at my touch to the page describing Louis’ recording of “Star Dust.” I read these words:
“Armstrong’s vocal is a paraphrase of Carmichael’s tune and Parish’s lyric, whose words he reshapes with a desentimentalizing freedom that delighted the composer: SometimesIwonderwhyIspendsuchlonelynight (oh, baby, lonely nightnnnmmmmm) / Dreaming of a song (melody, memory) / And I am once again with you. Even for him it was a daringly imaginative transformation, much more so than the instrumental portion of the record, in which he mostly stays within earshot of the tune. The fact that he takes the song at a danceable lope suggests that he was regularly tossing off similar musical miracles on the bandstand in the winter of 1931.”
So I thought, “Well. That sounds like it’s worth a listen or two.”
It is:
Indian music music November 11 Action Personal photoblogging: musicians
by Warren
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Great Concert Last Night
We sold out the hall, and all the musicians played beautifully. Looks like we raised about $1200 for 350.org. (UPDATE: $1191, to be exact)
I’ll post more photos and concert videos soon.
Standing, from left: Robert Labaree (Dünya), Mehmet Ali Sanlıkol (Dünya), Gaurishankar Chandrashekhar, Durga Krishnan, Zaira Meneses, Eliot Fisk. Kneeling in front: Warren Senders.
environment Politics: public health Republican obstructionism
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Year 2, Month 11, Day 12: Now Watch This Drive!
More on the health impact study, this time from the LA Times:
Six climate change-related events taking place between 2000 and 2009 cost the U.S. about $14 billion in health costs, researchers reported Monday in the journal Health Affairs.
Most of those costs — 95% — were attributable to the value of lost lives, they wrote. About $740 million originated in “760,000 encounters with the health care system.”
The coauthors, affiliated with the Natural Resources Defense Council, UC Berkeley’s Boalt Law School in Berkeley and UC San Francisco wrote that their article was “a first attempt to synthesize health data from the literature on events related to climate change and to develop a uniform method of quantifying their health costs.”
The events they studied are the types of climate-related disasters that are expected to occur more often in the future as the Earth’s climate warms, they said.
There. You’ve covered your ass, now.
Sent November 8:
The Health Affairs study on the costs of climate change is particularly important when considered alongside the Department of Energy report released last week which noted a “monster” increase in greenhouse gas emissions for 2010, suggesting that the extreme weather we’ve witnessed so far has been merely a preview of coming attractions. For all their bluster about reducing the deficit, conservative politicians don’t seem to remember the old aphorism, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” When we consider fourteen billion dollars of health costs connected to global climate change, it should be obvious: America needs to prepare for a future in which these environmental disasters are both more frequent and more severe. We must act now to reduce those bills before they come due. A failure to do so is sensible only in a political environment where empty posturing trumps factuality one hundred percent of the time.
Warren Senders
environment: denialists public health Republican obstructionism tropical diseases
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Year 2, Month 11, Day 11: Put It In The Trash With The Others!
The Riverside Press-Enterprise (“THE sources for news and information in Inland Southern California”) runs a story about a newly released study on the probable health impacts of climate change:
A study released Monday looked at six climate change-related events in the United States – three of them specific to the Inland region – and found that the cost of health problems, lost work and deaths totaled about $14 billion.
The work by scientists from the Natural Resources Defense Council, a New York-based environmental action group, and UC San Francisco was published in Health Affairs, a public health journal funded by The People-to-People Health Foundation.
Though other studies have estimated future health costs related to climate change, this is the first to look at the outcomes of specific weather events, said co-author Miriam Rotkin-Ellman, a staff scientist in the health and environment program at the council’s San Francisco office.
The aim of the study, she said, is to prompt policy makers to prepare for future problems. In addition to reducing greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to climate change, the group is calling for such measures as expanding programs for mosquito surveillance and control to reduce the cases of West Nile virus and implementing warning systems for heat waves.
Oh, goody! Another study!
Sent November 7:
Some of the public health effects of global climate change will simply be inconvenient (faster-growing, more virulent poison ivy), and some will be debilitating (increased pollen levels will trigger misery for millions of asthmatics). But it’s not just wheezing and itching. Migrating insect carriers will bring tropical diseases into new and vulnerable areas; catastrophic storms and heavy precipitation will wreak enormous damage on agriculture and infrastructure; droughts will trigger more frequent and more severe wildfires…the list goes on and on.
The UC/NRDC researchers, like most scientists, tend to err on the conservative side; their $14 billion estimate is probably way too low. And also like many scientists, the study’s authors are touchingly naive: they hope their work will “prompt policy makers to prepare for future problems,” when the lessons of recent history demonstrate conclusively that our politicians can only deal with future problems by denying their existence entirely.
Warren Senders
environment: invasive species mountain pine beetle Republican obstructionism tropical disease
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Year 2, Month 11, Day 10: That’s Not A Feature. That’s A Bug.
The Seattle Times has another go at the mountain pine beetle and its continuing assault on the region’s pine trees:
SAWTOOTH RIDGE, Okanogan County — The bug lady scoots through stick-straight lodgepole and ponderosa, and marches uphill toward the gnarled trunk of a troubled species: the whitebark pine.
The ghostly conifers found on chilly, wind-swept peaks like this may well be among the earliest victims of a warming climate. Even in the Northwest, rising temperatures at higher elevations have brought hundreds of thousands of whitebark pines in contact with a deadly predator — the mountain pine beetle — that is helping drive this odd tree toward extinction.
Connie Mehmel, with the Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest, is one of a handful of entomologists struggling to track the beetles’ destructive path.
Mountain pine beetles are probably best-known here as the trunk-girdling devils that have reddened and deadened millions of acres of lodgepole, exposing the Northwest to a greater potential for cataclysmic wildfires. But the evolutionary history of lodgepole pine and beetles is so intertwined that those forests in many places are expected to grow back.
Whitebark pines may not.
I used the invasive species = illegal immigrants angle before, but it’s been a while. Sent November 6:
As climate change continues to transform local and regional ecosystems, we’ll see more invasive species on the move. The dying whitebark pine is one example of a planet-wide phenomenon.
Given conservative Republicans’ near-obsessive fixation on illegal immigration, this would seem to be an issue on which they could find common ground with environmental activists. Few of the unwanted aliens that keep tea-party xenophobes up at night wreak as much havoc on the lives of good honest Americans as the mountain pine beetle. Similarly, when insect carriers of tropical diseases move across our national borders, the public health crises they create are obvious examples of the damage wrought by illegal aliens. Hell, those malarial mosquitoes probably don’t even speak English!
But invasive species like the mountain pine beetle and white pine blister rust are genuine threats, not props for electoral posturing. Which means they’ll probably be ignored until it’s too late.
Warren Senders
environment: corporate irresponsibility Keystone XL
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Year 2, Month 11, Day 9: Why, They Couldn’t Hit An Elephant At This Dist…..!
Dr. James Knotwell of Lincoln, Nebraska, writes a piece for the Wauneta Breeze (NE). It’s a long and thoughtful analysis of why the Keystone XL is full of shit:
In trying to dissect and comprehend the theater that is the current Keystone XL controversy, I’m wondering whether to characterize its genre as comedy, tragedy, or farce; it contains elements of all three, but one must prevail.
It’s comical, for instance, to view the special legislative session as anything but a political move designed exclusively for CYA, but that’s the only way this “development” project could be considered funny.
Similarly, TransCanada’s faux concern for presumed accrual of economic benefits, as Charlie Litton and the Nebraska News Service ably demonstrated in last week’s Breeze posting, reveals the farcical nature of the Keystone XL escapade.
But that the Keystone XL project will end up as surefire tragedy for Nebraskans is a stone-cold, lead-pipe lock.
Of course the pipeline will ultimately fail with the fragile Nebraska landscape bearing the brunt of that failure, it might happen in months, it might happen in decades, but it will happen, and the actual cost then will be much greater than however much of the $4 billion in annual profits accumulates in the pockets of producers, transporters, and investors, who by then will have made themselves invisible or invulnerable anyway.
The real tragedy in this scenario, though, is the further undermining of community sovereignty by industrial investors — those financial overseers located everywhere else but here.
Only a few years back, with the wind-energy frenzy providing the fuel for industrial deception of magnitude comparable to TranCanada and its Albertan tar sands pipe, I found myself an insider in the construction of a private transmission line designed to move the wind-generated electricity of central Texas southeastward.
The procedure for building such a massive piece of linear infrastructure is dubious because it is highly secretive and frenetically paced.
There’s more. You should read it; the guy is very good. Sent November 5:
As Dr. James Knotwell points out, the Keystone XL project is a perfect example of corporate sovereignty trumping the needs of individual localities and regions. Oil company spokespeople say our economy cannot grow without the dirty crude of the Alberta tar sands, when what they really mean is that their balance sheets won’t grow nearly as fast. TransCanada’s advocates cynically trade off the pipeline’s inevitable environmental and health impacts with the sop of a few locally-based jobs.
Dr. Knotwell’s morally-charged analysis gains force when applied on larger scales of place and time. Extracting the tar sands’ oil endangers the environment upon which all earthly life depends; the CO2 released into the atmosphere is going to take centuries to dissipate — and our civilization will be threatened in ways we can barely imagine. An economy in which corporate profits outrank the long-term survival and prosperity of our species is profoundly immoral.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: Bad News
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Year 2, Month 11, Day 8: Good Luck, Everyone. Meet You At The Double Bar.
WASHINGTON—The global output of heat-trapping carbon dioxide jumped by the biggest amount on record, the U.S. Department of Energy calculated, a sign of how feeble the world’s efforts are at slowing man-made global warming.
The new figures for 2010 mean that levels of greenhouse gases are higher than the worst case scenario outlined by climate experts just four years ago.
“The more we talk about the need to control emissions, the more they are growing,” said John Reilly, co-director of MIT’s Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change.
The world pumped about 564 million more tons (512 million metric tons) of carbon into the air in 2010 than it did in 2009. That’s an increase of 6 percent. That amount of extra pollution eclipses the individual emissions of all but three countries — China, the United States and India, the world’s top producers of greenhouse gases.
Well, this should be good for a week’s worth of letters, at least, don’cha think? Sent Nov. 4:
Those who live for the thrills and chills provided by genuinely bad news need look no further than the new figures on greenhouse gas emissions provided by the U.S. Department of Energy. Well, thrills, anyway — since the unprecedented spike in atmospheric CO2 essentially guarantees catastrophic global warming over the coming century.
Afficionadi of extreme weather events like the anomalous October snowstorm that battered much of the North-East will also have much to look forward to. Vicious storms? Destructive rain and snow? Infrastructure-crippling precipitation? Check, check and check. The many fans of wildfires and droughts will no doubt enjoy the spectacle.
One wonders whether the current crop of Republican presidential aspirants will have anything to say about the DOE’s report. Most likely they’ll propose a cost-effective, simple and comprehensive solution: eliminate funding for any such studies in the years to come. After all, what we don’t know can’t hurt us.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: Barack Obama Keystone XL Tar Sands
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Year 2, Month 11, Day 7: We Break It, We Buy It
The Washington Post notes that President Obama is going to “take ownership” of the decision on the Keystone XL project:
President Obama said Tuesday that he will decide whether to approve or deny a permit for a controversial 1,700-mile Canadian oil pipeline, rather than delegating the decision to the State Department.
The proposal by the firm TransCanada to ship crude extracted from a region in Alberta called the “oil sands” to Gulf Coast refineries has become a charged political issue for the White House. Labor unions and business groups argue that it would create thousands of jobs in the midst of an economic downturn. Environmentalists — who plan to ring the White House in a protest on Sunday — say the extraction of the oil will accelerate global warming and the pipeline itself could spill, polluting waterways and causing severe environmental harm.
Anything is better than our hopelessly corrupt State Department. And anything is better than writing another damn letter about Richard Muller. Sent November 3:
In his November 2008 election-night speech in Chicago, Barack Obama offered a vision of the country that extended a century into the future, contrasting the life of a centenarian voter with the lives his two young daughters could expect to lead.
It is depressingly rare to find national leaders in our country who are capable of thinking beyond the next election cycle; America’s great historical figures, by contrast, are the ones who have risen above political exigency to address the needs of our longer-term future. That night in Grant Park, our president-elect showed himself capable of thinking in centuries.
We must remind Barack Obama to start thinking long-term once again when it comes to the oil of the Canadian tar sands. If he addresses the needs of the coming centuries rather than those of the fossil-fuel industry, he’ll recognize that the Keystone XL pipeline is a multi-generational disaster in the making.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: Climategate Koch Brothers Michael Mann
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Year 2, Month 11, Day 6: DFH Activist Judge Edition
The L.A. Times runs the story: a rare bit of good news for the overly-harassed Michael Mann:
A county Circuit judge in Virginia has sided with the University of Virginia’s effort to restrict the release of personal emails from one of its former faculty members.
The decision late Wednesday would allow the university to alter an agreement it had reached with the American Tradition Institute, which was seeking communications between Michael Mann, a physicist and climate scientist, and other scientists from 1999 to 2005, when Mann was employed by the university.
The American Tradition Institute, headquartered in Washington, D.C., and Colorado, is a nonprofit policy research and education group that has close ties to energy interests that have opposed climate legislation, including the Koch Brothers.
Mann, now a professor at Penn State University, is best known for his contributions to the so-called hockey stick graph that has been at the center of warnings that Earth’s temperature rise has been precipitous and historically unprecedented. It has been used as one of thousands of data analyses that have led the vast majority of climate scientists to conclude that man’s emission of greenhouse gases is trapping heat in the atmosphere.
Perhaps the Tea-Party nuts will start finding Gaylord Finch’s got granite countertops, or something. Sent Nov. 2:
It’s always amusing to see “non-profit” organizations that are closely affiliated with some of the most profit-hungry players in our economy. Groups like the disingenuously-named American Tradition Institute exist entirely to carry out the bidding of their funders — people like the Koch brothers. One wonders if the Kochs would enjoy the experience of legal harassment quite so much if they were on the receiving end.
For make no mistake, the ATI’s demand for emails from Dr. Michael Mann has nothing to do with scientific integrity, and everything to do with hindering the work of a climate scientist whose work might affect the profit margins of the fossil fuel industry.
Perhaps it’s true that hostility to science is a long-standing American tradition — but is the self-serving behavior of the extremely rich and powerful really worthy of adulation?
Judge Gaylord Finch’s decision is the correct one.
Warren Senders