environment Politics: hippies idiots mitigation rhetoric
by Warren
leave a comment
Meta
SiteMeter
Brighter Planet
Year 3, Month 1, Day 14: Do The Right Thing?
County legislators in New York are scared to do the right thing, because they might look like they’re agreeing with (gasp!) hippies:
CANTON — St. Lawrence County legislators liked much of what they heard Monday about saving money through energy changes, but stopped short of wanting the projects included in a Climate Action Plan that was shelved earlier for discussion until at least February.
Legislators voted 7-7, with Legislator Vernon D. “Sam” Burns, D-Ogdensburg, absent, not to refer the draft county Climate Action Plan back to staff for revision and then disagreed over whether that meant they wanted to proceed with some of the measures.
{snip}
Some legislators who voted against revising the climate plan — which has been tabled twice — said that the county would be wise to move ahead with cost-saving proposals but that they did not need to be part of a plan they find over-reaching.
The breakdown of the vote was almost exactly along party lines. Sent January 10:
The Republican party’s incessant politicization of science over the past four decades has led to a lot of bad policy decisions. It’s also made it harder to implement good policies. St. Lawrence county lawmakers’ unwillingness to include energy saving strategies under a rubric of climate change adaptation is an excellent example of this phenomenon.
On the face of it, energy efficiency is about the least objectionable policy goal imaginable. But because the word “conservation” has become anathema to conservative legislators and media figures, any move to increase efficiency and reduce waste must be framed in purely financial terms if it is to have any hope of success. Furthermore, any suggestion that such a fiscally sensible policy is in fact consistent with climate change response strategies is ipso facto a kiss of death in the electoral arena.
On the grand scale, Monday’s dispute in Canton may seem small — but it is symptomatic of our broader national inability to act in our own best interests for fear of political consequences.
Warren Senders
environment: Christopher Plummer extinction flora scientific method vegetation
by Warren
leave a comment
Meta
SiteMeter
Brighter Planet
Year 3, Month 1, Day 13: Bless My Homeland Forever
The Scotsman notes a new study on the impending loss of alpine flowers and plants:
A study, involving biologists from 13 countries, revealed that climate change was having a more serious impact on alpine vegetation than they had expected.
The first cross-Europe survey of changing mountain vegetation has showed that some could vanish within decades.
Michael Gottfried, of the Global Observation Research Initiative in Alpine Environments (Gloria) programme, said: “Many cold-loving species are literally running out of mountain. In some of the lower mountains in Europe, we could see alpine meadows disappearing and dwarf shrubs taking over within the next few decades.”
The Gloria team, led from Austria, analysed 867 vegetation samples from 60 different summits across Europe, including in the Cairngorms in Scotland.
They compared results from 2001 and 2008 and found strong evidence to suggest cold-loving plants were being pushed out by species that preferred warmer conditions.
Among species at threat in Europe could be the edelweiss, praised in the song of the same name in The Sound of Music. It is specially adapted to the high-life at altitudes of between 6,500ft to 9,500ft. Its snow white, star-shaped leaves are covered in woolly hairs to protect them from the cold.
Blossom of snow, may you bloom and grow, bloom and grow forever.
Sent January 9. My daughter turned 7 years old today; we love to sing that song.
The news comes in from everywhere: climate change is having a significant impact on local and regional ecosystems. While diverse ecological systems are affected by the global greenhouse effect in different ways, there is one thing that all the reports have in common — one phrase that’s universally applicable, whether it’s describing the Arctic or the Amazon, a Senegalese forest or a Scottish meadow.
“More serious than expected.”
Listening to climate-change denialists, one could easily form the impression that because climatologists’ predictions are frequently inaccurate, there really isn’t that much to fret about. After all, if scientists are wrong so often, why worry? But the sleep-wrecking fact is that when the experts err, it’s virtually without exception by underestimating the damage done. The sudden introduction into the atmosphere of millions of years’ worth of buried carbon has triggered a cascade of consequences, all (you guessed it!) more serious than expected.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: adaptation East Coast New Hampshire
by Warren
leave a comment
Meta
SiteMeter
Brighter Planet
Year 3, Month 1, Day 12: Lead, Follow, or Get Out Of The Way!
The Manchester Union Leader (founded and nurtured by New Hampshire Ur-Wingnut extraordinare William Loeb) runs a press release from the state’s Fish and Game Department:
GREENLAND, N.H. — Coastal New Hampshire is better prepared to deal with the impacts of climate change after a first-ever Coastal NH Summit held the New Hampshire Fish and Game Department’s Hugh Gregg Coastal Conservation Center in Greenland, N.H., in December.
The event, hosted by the Great Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve (GBNERR — managed by Fish and Game), the Great Bay Stewards and the NERRS Science Collaborative, highlighted local climate research and climate preparedness efforts and tools, aiming to identify gaps in information and actions that could help local, state, federal and non-profit partners move forward effectively on this critical issue.
“Coastal New Hampshire is already seeing the effects of a changing climate. The Climate Summit demonstrates that local research and action to understand and prepare for our changing climate are underway. There is work to be done to minimize the impacts to our economy and natural resources. The Summit, through the participation of over 100 attendees from a diversity of sectors and professional fields, will help direct future efforts in the most efficient manner,” said GBNERR Coastal Training Program Coordinator Steve Miller.
I read Kevin Cash’s book, “Who The Hell Is William Loeb?” many years ago. The publisher was a truly despicable man.
Here’s my letter to them, which is quite gracious in tone, considering its recipient. Sent January 8:
It’s interesting to observe the dimensions of the disconnect between regional authorities and national politicians on the subject of climate change. Even as the Republican presidential candidates are vociferously denying either that the climate is changing or human beings have anything to do with it, local and regional agencies are working hard to lay the foundations for the adaptations we’re all going to have to make in a post-greenhouse-effect future.
The facts are simple. If our species is to survive and prosper in the coming centuries, we can no longer afford the luxury of politically expedient denial. The New Hampshire Fish and Game Department understands this, as evidenced by their recent Coastal NH Summit. Does the Republican party? It’s a lot easier to pretend a problem doesn’t exist when you are shielded from its effects — and if there is one word that describes most of America’s politicians, it’s “shielded.”
Warren Senders
humor music: cigars liner notes sweat
by Warren
leave a comment
Meta
SiteMeter
Brighter Planet
Breathe Deep!
I am in the long-term process of digitizing all my lps. Recently I’ve been processing some of my blues records, and I recently came across this gem on the back of a Lightnin’ Hopkins collection. I would call this one of the most, um, evocative liner notes I’ve ever read.
Enjoy:
The Magnificent Montague is a real guy. I think I’m going to get his book; it looks like a lot of fun.
environment Politics: corporate irresponsibility corporate personhood denialism media irresponsibility
by Warren
leave a comment
Meta
SiteMeter
Brighter Planet
Year 3, Month 1, Day 11: Sharks and Cockroaches, Sharks and Cockroaches, Sharks and Cockroaches.
Sigh. Another day, another mess o’ platitudes. Ted Kaufman (formerly D-DE) writes in the Louisiana Advertiser that:
We are beginning a new year, and the silence in Congress is still deafening. Will there ever be a debate about what should be done to deal with climate change?
Oh, you don’t “believe” in it? If you do not, please, suspend that belief system for just a few minutes and take a look at what the major scientific organizations in this country say.
» NASA. The startling timeline chart leads you directly into a summary of why the evidence for rapid climate change is compelling. There are extensive sections documenting sea level rise, global temperature rise, warming oceans, shrinking ice sheets, declining arctic sea ice, glacial retreat, extreme events, and ocean acidification.
{snip}
» Even the American Medical Association, says “scientific evidence shows that the world’s climate is changing and that the results have public health consequences.”
The debate we need now is not about whether climate change is a reality. I hope that, for the sake of our children and grandchildren, 2012 will be the year our leaders finally listen to the scientific community and begin to fashion solutions to protect our world.
All true, of course. But do you notice anything missing? I did.
Sent January 7:
While Ted Kaufman’s remarks on Congress’ failure to address climate change are accurate and timely, he fails to address one of the problem’s most significant components: the influence on American politics, governance, and media wielded by corporations whose short-term profits are threatened by any attempts to move our energy economy in the direction of long-term sustainability.
Even before the disastrous Citizens United decision awarding collective entities the free speech rights of individuals, multinational corporations’ power over what we as citizens can see, hear, and read has increased exponentially — thanks largely to the Reagan-era media deregulation. Combined with the grotesque power exercised by K-Street lobbyists, this has brought us government of the corporations, by the corporations, and for the corporations. In this light, the senator’s role in the financial sector bailout lends a certain irony to his remarks on Congressional dysfunction in the face of a genuine existential threat.
Warren Senders
environment: evolution extinction mass extinctions
by Warren
leave a comment
Meta
SiteMeter
Brighter Planet
Year 3, Month 1, Day 10: I, For One, Welcome Our New Blattarian Overlords
The Christian Science Monitor (which has never yet printed one of my letters, but a boy can dream, can’t he?) notes the work of a Dr. Mark Urban, who has some bad news for lovers of our Earthly flora and fauna:
As climate change progresses, the planet may lose more plant and animal species than predicted, a new modeling study suggests.
This is because current predictions overlook two important factors: the differences in how quickly species relocate and competition among species, according to the researchers, led by Mark Urban, an ecologist at the University of Connecticut.
Already evidence suggests that species have begun to migrate out of ranges made inhospitable by climate change and into newly hospitable territory.
“We have really sophisticated meteorological models for predicting climate change,” Urban said in a statement. “But in real life, animals move around, they compete, they parasitize each other and they eat each other. The majority of our predictions don’t include these important interactions.”
Ahhh, yes — but has he taken into consideration the effect of hybrid sharks?
Sent January 6:
It’s inevitable: the results of the University of Connecticut study will be used to reinforce the notion that since scientists’ work on planetary climate change is often affected by error, the problems of global warming have been rendered nugatory. Nothing could be farther from the truth.
As anyone who’s worked on a committee can confirm, consensus-driven documents are inherently more conservative than the views of the individual authors. Conversely, lone specialists or unidisciplinary teams may apply deep levels of insight to their research while neglecting contributing factors that lie outside their areas of expertise. Both problems are common in published work on climate change, and lend fuel to a “don’t worry, be happy” interpretation that fixates on the existence of errors without noting the simple fact that almost without exception, climate scientists have erred by being too timid. As Dr. Urban’s study confirms, the problem is worse than we thought.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes denialists idiots Republicans scientific method
by Warren
leave a comment
Meta
SiteMeter
Brighter Planet
Year 3, Month 1, Day 9: Morans.
The L.A. Times runs a story on the Pacific Institute’s “Bad Science” Award, which goes to a deserving cast of characters (Murdoch was runner-up, which will give you an idea):
The 2011 “Climate B.S. of the Year Award” goes to the entire field of candidates currently stumping in New Hampshire for the Republican Party presidential nomination, the Pacific Institute announced Thursday.
The awards, in their second year, are intended to distinguish the most active among so-called climate change deniers.
In this case, “B.S.” stands for bad science, according to hydroclimatologist Peter Gleick, president of the Pacific Institute and a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences.
“There’s a lot of very serious pushback in the scientific community about bad climate science being pushed by a small group of skeptics,” said Gleick from his office in Oakland. “There’s plenty of formal pushback in the literature. This was an attempt, really, to highlight some of the most egregious examples over the past year in a way that was a little more lighthearted.”
The Republicans seeking the White House won this year’s contest “hands down,” the institute’s announcement says: “Not a single one of the Republican candidates for president has a position on climate change that is consistent with the actual science accepted by 97-98% of all climate scientists and every national academy of sciences on the planet.”
It gave me a chance to use the China Hands reference again. While this letter works fairly well I am not entirely pleased with it; it could be more euphonious if I had more time to devote to its creation. But it’s 149 words. What the hell. Sent January 5:
It is only in the past fifty years that the GOP has made a rejection of science a linchpin of its policies and electoral strategy. Capitalizing on a long-standing undercurrent of anti-intellectualism in American society, Republican politicians have long stigmatized professors, scientists and experts as “liberal elitists.” While they’ve won applause from constituents, these attacks ultimately redound to the detriment of the country as a whole.
The Republican party’s arrogant rejection of the crucial findings of climate scientists is of a piece with the McCarthy-era purge of “China hands” from the State Department, rendering America’s East Asian policy rudderless in the face of Ho Chi Minh’s Vietnamese nationalism. Ignoring the experts didn’t work out then, did it? It won’t work out well now, either, as GOP presidential aspirants eagerly dismiss scientists’ urgent warnings of runaway climate change. Ignorance may be politically blissful, but it always makes for bad policy.
Warren Senders
environment: biology denialists evolution extinction mass extinctions scientific method
by Warren
leave a comment
Meta
SiteMeter
Brighter Planet
Year 3, Month 1, Day 8: There Is Grandeur In This View Of Life
The Columbus, IN Republic prints an article from the Hartford Courier on evolutionary processes triggered by climate change:
HARTFORD, Conn. — Numerous species already have enough to contend with as climate changes drive them out of their natural habitats; a new study shows that they also have to compete with each other in outrunning those changes.
The University of Connecticut study, to be published Wednesday in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, suggests that the effects of climate change on wildlife are a good deal more complicated than previously thought.
Mark Urban, an assistant professor of ecology and environmental biology who led the new research, said many studies conducted on climate change and its potential impact on wildlife feature complex meteorological models to predict changes in climate.
What they don’t feature, he said, are equally complex models of how wildlife will react to those climate changes. Real-world factors — the different rates at which animals migrate, how they prey on each other and how they get in each other’s way — need to be included for a more accurate picture.
Killing two bird-brains with one stone, eh? Sent January 4:
Darwin-deniers are overwhelmingly likely to be climate-change deniers, and vice-versa; both groups can expect significant learning experiences during the coming century, as global warming pushes countless animal species out of their accustomed ecological niches and into intense evolutionary competition with one another.
However, both groups share the habit of ignoring evidence and embracing dogma, so it’s anyone’s guess how long their entrenched ideological positions will hold out in the face of rapid extinctions, extreme weather events, unexpected crossbreeds (like the new species of hybrid shark recently found off the coast of Australia), droughts, floods, and all the other epiphenomena of a runaway greenhouse effect.
Yes, biological evolution makes some people uncomfortable; yes, the notion that a century spent pumping carbon dioxide into Earth’s atmosphere might eventually have some negative effects is disturbing. But “uncomfortable” and “disturbing” won’t even begin to describe the future that awaits us should we continue on our carbon-burning, fact-phobic path.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: biology climate change corporate irresponsibility economics evolution oceans scientific method sharks
by Warren
leave a comment
Meta
SiteMeter
Brighter Planet
Year 3, Month 1, Day 7: (cue scary theme music)
The Christian Science Monitor, among others, reports on a troubling development: corporations have learned how to swim:
In what is being hailed as the world’s first evidence of inter-species breeding among sharks, a team of marine researchers at the University of Queensland have identified 57 hybrid sharks in waters off Australia’s east coast.
{snip}
“Wild hybrids are usually hard to find, so detecting hybrids and their offspring is extraordinary,” said Ovenden.
Hybridization is common among many animal species, including some fish, but until now it has been unknown among sharks. In most fish species, fertilization takes place outside the body, with the males and females each releasing their gametes into the water where they mix. Blacktip sharks, by contrast, give birth to live young and actively choose their mates, which, as the scientists discovered, can sometimes be of a different species.
Ovenden speculated that the two species began mating in response to environmental change, as the hybrid blacktips are able to travel further south to cooler waters than the Australian blacktips. The team is looking into climate change and human fishing, among other potential triggers.
This is straining a bit for effect, but it was fun while it lasted. Sent January 3:
With the discovery of a new species of hybrid shark in the waters off Australia, we’re getting a glimpse of what the next few centuries have in store for us. In a post climate-change future, Earth’s fauna will respond to extreme weather conditions the only way they can — by adapting under extreme evolutionary pressure. It’s just our luck that the critters involved are vicious, soulless, mindless, predatory killing machines propelled only by the most basic of survival instincts.
Meanwhile, humanity’s attempts to mitigate runaway climate change are stymied by the corporate interests most implicated in causing the greenhouse effect — fossil fuel companies, which could just as easily be described as vicious, soulless, mindless, predatory killing machines propelled only by the most basic of survival instincts. Are twenty-first century mega-corporations the economic analogue to new species of sharks?
Will it ever be safe to go back in the water?
Warren Senders
India Indian music music: genius sarod
by Warren
leave a comment
Meta
SiteMeter
Brighter Planet
78 rpm Records of Indian Music: The Sublime Artistry of Ustad Ali Akbar Khan
Finally getting around to some more 78 rpm discs. Here are two recordings of Ali Akbar Khan’s earlier years. His plangent and expressive tone comes through loud and clear through the surface noise. Enjoy these recordings of one of the world’s greatest masters.
Raga Lankadahan Sarang
Raga Kedar