environment Politics: corporate irresponsibility high temperatures NOAA
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Year 3, Month 6, Day 20: The Rich Are Different From You And Me; They Have More Stupidity
The Wall Street Journal notes that things are getting hot:
The U.S. is experiencing record-setting high temperatures this year, with the lower 48 states hitting an average 49.2 degrees Fahrenheit, five degrees above long-term statistics, according to federal data released Thursday.
The exceptionally warm months between January and May have helped to make the last 12 months the warmest 12-month block since record keeping began more than a century ago.
The month of May, meanwhile, was the second warmest May on record, with the lower 48 states reporting an average temperature of 64.3 degrees, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Reports of record-setting temperatures, which often revive debate over climate change and national energy policies, coincide with efforts by industry groups to overturn rules that curb greenhouse gases and other power plant emissions.
The comments actually have a few voices of sanity, which is unusual for the WSJ. Sent on June 9:
In a recently published study in the journal Nature, 22 climate scientists assess the steadily accumulating evidence and conclude that humanity’s impact on Earth may well bring about dramatic and devastating climatic “tipping points” within our lifetimes. In this context, the news that last year brought record high temperatures in the United States should alarm the American business community.
The NOAA data will probably be dismissed by those more interested in quick short-term profits than in steady long-term returns. In ignoring this and similar findings over the past few decades, myopic corporate entities and their enablers in the political system operate under the delusion that the laws of physics and chemistry are akin to fiscal regulations imposed by governmental fiat, and thus can be violated with impunity. But the greenhouse effect offers no loopholes. It’s time for business to stop ignoring the climate crisis and start working to solve it.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes denialists idiots insurance scientific consensus survival sustainability timescale wildfires
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Year 3, Month 6, Day 19: Double Whammy Bar
Two separate articles in the June 7 issue of the Vancouver Sun:
The Earth’s ecosystems could reach a point of no return resulting in rapid irreversible collapse in as little as 50 years, according to projections by a group of 18 scientists.
Their article in the journal Nature today says that human activities – such as energy use and widespread transformation of the Earth’s surface for habitation and agriculture – are pushing the planet toward a critical threshold for “state shift” not unlike the transition from the last ice age about 12,000 years ago.
Such a shift would create a new nor-mal condition for the entire planet with a new range of temperatures, new ocean levels and widespread species extinctions resulting in an entirely new web of life.
It would not necessarily be a comfortable place for human beings.
“We’ve had a good long run of really benign conditions that have allowed humans to go from cracking rocks together to walking on the moon,” said Simon Fraser University biodiversity professor Arne Mooers, one of the authors of the article.
The number of major forest fires in B.C. will likely increase by 50 per cent or more in the next 40 years according to a recent report on climate change.
Telling the Weather Story, released this week by the Insurance Bureau of Canada, addresses altering weather patterns across the country in the coming decades and urges Canadians to adjust to the realities of climate change.
The study predicts B.C. can expect an increase in wildfires over the average of nearly 2,000 blazes a year between 2000 and 2010. Furthermore, the province will likely see a host of other weather-related issues like warmer temperatures, declining — and, in some regions, disappearing — mountain snowpacks, more intense rainfall during the winter, and drier summers. The number of wildfires sparked by lightning strikes — responsible for nearly 60 per cent of fires — is also expected to rise.
“It’s not a just a possibility,” said Dr. Gordon McBean, the report’s lead researcher. “There’s a very real probability it will happen.”
McBean, a climatologist and professor at the University of Western Ontario, conducted the research with cooperation from the Institute for Catastrophic Loss Reduction, where he also serves as policy chairman.
Read the comments for the full flavor. Sheesh. Sent June 8:
The Insurance Bureau of Canada’s report on the increased risk of forest fires is a localized version of the dire planetary “tipping point” projections just published in the journal Nature. The two articles in the June 7 edition of the Sun reinforce one another in the same way that climate-change processes do. For example, hotter summers set the stage for more forest fires, which release more carbon into the atmosphere in a positive feedback loop; the pine-beetle infestations brought by milder winters can leave whole forests of flammable dead trees — which, naturally, cannot reabsorb carbon as healthy forests do. Thawing Arctic permafrost releases even more carbon, while melting polar ice means less light is reflected back into space, in turn leading to greater heat absorption by the oceans.
Unfortunately, the mechanisms of denial are very strong, and many people will ignore this obvious crisis rather than contemplate changing their convenient lifestyles.
Humanity is a tenacious, flexible and adaptable species. We can survive the consequences of global climate change — but only if we stop denying the existence of the emergency, instead bringing all of our resources, ingenuity and commitment to bear on the problem.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: apocalypse biodiversity denialists extinction sustainability
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Year 3, Month 6, Day 18: Oh, Not HIM Again!
More on the Barnosky study, from the San Francisco Chronicle:
Barnosky, who tracks longtime changes in the fossil record, and 22 other scientists spent two years in conferences and research to produce their review. It is timed for a U.N. conference on sustainable development – known as the Rio+20 Conference – that is scheduled for Rio de Janeiro from June 22 to 24. The conference will mark 20 years since the first “Earth Summit” at Rio, involving delegates from 172 governments, produced the first international conventions on climate change and biodiversity.
In their report in Nature, the scientists say their research shows many combined factors are thrusting the world toward the tipping point they foresee. Among the problems are these:
— The rapid growth in the world’s human population – to 9 billion or more by 2050 and possibly 27 billion by the end of the century – is quickly consuming available resources.
Fossil fuels are being burned at a rapidly increasing rate, increasing concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by 35 percent since the industrial revolution began. At the same time, ocean acidity has risen by 5 percent in the past 20 years.
— Ocean productivity is being diminished by vast “dead zones” where no fish swim, while 40 percent of Earth’s land mass that was once “biodiverse” now contains far fewer species of crop plants and domestic animals.
— More animal species than ever are becoming extinct, and many plant and animal species are being forced by global warming to seek new ranges that could place them at risk of extinction, as well.
— Within the next 60 years, the average global temperature “will be higher than it has been since the human species evolved.”
And look who got the call to be the voice of doubt! Sent June 7:
While the doctrine of false equivalency demands that a nominal “skeptic” be represented in any discussion of the rapidly accelerating greenhouse effect and its consequences for humanity, it’s a measure of climate-change deniers’ desperation that the only climate scientist still available for this role is Dr. Richard Lindzen.
When asked to comment on the study led by Dr. Anthony Barnosky which assembles an impressive (and genuinely terrifying) array of evidence for an imminent climatic “tipping point,” Lindzen remarks that “no one thinks anything terrible will happen in anything like the future they see.” Of course, the report’s 23 co-authors might beg to differ. If Lindzen mistakes twenty-three scientists for “no one,” what does this say about his statistical acumen?
Oh, yes: while it’s irrelevant to the climate debate, it’s nevertheless noteworthy that Dr. Lindzen continues to dispute the statistical validity of another important scientific consensus — the one linking cigarette smoking to lung cancer.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: agriculture biodiversity idiots infrastructure public health
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Year 3, Month 6, Day 17: I Have A Banana In My Ear!
U.S. News and World Report acknowledges that the Public Health picture is far from rosy, in an article entitled “Expert: Climate Change Will Increasingly Become Global Health Issue”:
Previously just the worry of climate scientists, environmentalists, doomsday prognosticators, and gas-price watchers, climate change is starting to worry some others— public health specialists, who say that global warming could affect large swaths of the population.
In a paper published in the journal PLoS Medicine Tuesday, a group of European public health experts write that climate change could alter “patterns of physical activity and food availability, and in some cases [bring] direct physical harm.” Slight temperature increases could also change disease distribution in colder regions and make hotter regions less hospitable to humans.
“Certain subgroups are at more risk—mainly the young, the old, and the poor,” says Peter Byass, director of the Umea Centre for Global Health Research in Sweden. “The middle age and wealthy will be better off. It’s a crude way of looking at it, but it’s not so far off the mark.”
That means more prevalence of diseases that affect the poor, such as malaria and dengue fever, and heat stroke in drought-afflicted areas.
For years, scientists have warned about more extreme hurricanes and weather patterns, but until recently, not much emphasis was put on less noticeable changes.
The comments include much stupidity, in highly predictable formats. Sent June 6:
The public health consequences of climate change are going to be very significant. It’s more than just hotter days and crazier weather; it’s invasive insects migrating to keep pace with environmental transformations and bringing tropical diseases with them; it’s the potential damage to our infrastructure that will make hamper sanitation; it’s allergies and asthma and a host of other debilitating ailments that will make our lives and those of our children progressively more difficult in coming centuries.
But even this does not begin to fully address the problem, for what affects humans will affect other life as well. Many species will be unable to cope, and we can anticipate losing much of the biodiversity that forms Earth’s priceless genetic heritage. Your headline announces that climate change is becoming a “Global Health Issue.” Indeed. It’s not just the people who live on it, but the planet itself that is deeply ill.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: corporate irresponsibility false equivalence media irresponsibility mitigation
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Year 3, Month 6, Day 16: Summer In The City — Back Of My Neck Feeling Dirt And Gritty
Damn. I wonder how the hell this happened:
Major U.S. cities are among the world’s wealthiest and technologically advanced, but they lag behind their counterparts in Latin America in preparing for climate change, a survey finds.
Nearly all, or 95%, of major cities in Latin America are making plans to deal with the adverse impact of climate change, compared to 59% of such cities in the United States. according to a survey of 468 cities worldwide released this week by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The most prepared cities are often those facing the greatest changes in temperature or rainfall, the survey finds. For example, officials in Equador’s mountainous capitol of Quito have been studying the effects of global warming on nearby melting glaciers, developing ways to handle potential water shortages and organizing regional conferences on climate change.
U.S.A.!!!! U.S.A.!!!! U.S.A.!!!! U.S.A.!!!!
Why?
Because Shut Up, That’s Why.
Sent June 6:
It’s puzzling. The United States has been a world leader in science and technology for decades. Our record in innovation is unrivaled; our capacity for responding to crises is second to none.
Or so we claim, anyway. The news that cities in Latin America are far further along than those in the USA when it comes preparing for the inevitable effects of global climate should have a sobering effect on American exceptionalists. It should, but it won’t — because the folks who insist that our country is Number One in Everything are the same ones who’ve swallowed the convenient falsehood that the burgeoning climate crisis is actually a conspiracy fabricated by a secret cabal of scientists and liberals.
Maybe Latin America’s cities are ahead of us in preparation because they aren’t distracted by a clamor of media voices promulgating a false equivalency between climate science and corporate mendacity. Maybe.
Warren Senders
environment: ecologies oceanic acidification oceans rising sea levels sustainability timescale
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Year 3, Month 6, Day 15: …But The Words Aren’t Clear….
Bud Ris, the CEO of the New England Aquarium, has a perspective on the oceans’ message to us that’s definitely worth a read:
As we celebrate World Oceans Day on Friday, it’s worth pausing to reflect on the current state of our oceans and the biggest challenge they face: climate change. This is no longer a problem for the future; climate change is already underway.
We now know, for example, that the heat content of the upper layer of the oceans is on the rise. Just a degree or two of change can make a big difference.
As oceans warm, the water actually expands and takes up more space. This is a basic physics phenomenon called thermal expansion. This means that as water temperatures rise, sea level will rise as well, as it has in Boston by about 11 inches over the last 100 years. (Land subsidence is also a factor)
RelatedMore from The Podium
The data now show that the pace of sea level rise is clearly accelerating, meaning that one to two feet of additional sea level rise by the end of the century is now likely. Much more is possible if ice atop the land masses in Greenland and Antarctica also melts. This has major implications for buildings and public infrastructure along Boston’s waterfront and other major cities. The risks of flooding during storm surges will increase.
Ocean warming won’t just affect humans. The geographic distribution, feeding patterns, and reproductive cycles of many marine animals are sensitive to temperature changes of just a few degrees and to changes in salinity and pH, caused by more freshwater runoff and increased carbon absorption. That may explain why most of the North Atlantic right whales that migrate annually up and down the East Coast didn’t show up in the Bay of Fundy in 2010 for the first time in 30 years — and why now — two years later — we are seeing the result in emaciated mothers and calves and a precariously low birth rate. It might also help explain why lobsters are molting weeks earlier in Maine, and why lobster populations south of Cape Cod are in decline.
Nothing to see here, folks. Move along. Sent June 5:
It’s increasingly apparent that all our planet’s ecosystems are trying to tell us something. Whether it’s bushes transforming into trees in a warming tundra, forests decimated by invasive insects, or acidifying oceans endangering multiple species of marine life, there’s no doubt that the web of life on Earth is under siege.
Why, then, are we seemingly unable to hear the distress calls of the oceans, the forests, or the tundra? Why do so many deny the rapidly accumulating evidence that climate change is an ongoing catastrophe of epic proportions?
While a selfish resistance to inconvenient truths is certainly part of the answer, it’s also true that industrialized humans have separated themselves from the natural world so completely that its messages might as well be in Etruscan. If we are to survive the climate crisis, we must relearn the languages of ecological interdependence along with the hard facts of sustainability.
Warren Senders
Education environment Politics: Arctic biodiversity ecology timescale tundra
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Year 3, Month 6, Day 14: Sixteen Tundras?
The New York Times notes that things are changing in the soon-to-be-not-so-very-much Frozen North:
Even as insect infestations and other factors accompanying warming have led to the “browning” of some stretches of boreal forest between temperate regions and the Arctic tundra, the tundra appears to be greening in a big way, various studies have shown. The newest such work, focused on scrubby windswept regions along Russia’s northwest Arctic coast, has found a particularly noteworthy shift is under way.
In this part of the Arctic, which could be a bellwether for changes to come elsewhere with greenhouse-driven warming, what might be called pop-up forests are forming. Low tundra shrubs, many of which are willow and alder species, have rapidly grown into small trees over the last 50 years, according to the study, led by scientists from the Biodiversity Institute at the University of Oxford and the Arctic Center of the University of Lapland. The researchers foresee a substantial additional local warming influence from this change in landscapes, with the darker foliage absorbing sunlight that would otherwise be reflected back to space. But the fast-motion shift to forests will likely absorb carbon dioxide, as well.
A particularly interesting aspect of this work, to my eye, is how it reveals the potential for fast-motion responses of ecosystems to environmental change in the far north. In work I covered in 2007, botanists found that Arctic plant species were extremely responsive to fairly rapid climate shifts in the past.
Short-term thinking will whack us seriously. We get too soon old and too late smart. Sent June 4:
If you’ve got a short attention span, climate change seems to be offering all kinds of unexpected bonuses in the natural world. When Arctic bushes turn into trees far faster than scientists expected, that’s a pleasing turn of affairs at first glance — after all, trees are good. Everyone likes trees.
It’s only when your perception goes beyond a five-to-ten year span that things take an ominous turn. If climate change keeps accelerating, many plant and animal species will die out, unable to keep up with the rapid environmental transformations. While humans are famously adaptable and have shown themselves capable of survival in very extreme circumstances, we have never in recorded history experienced anything like the chaos climatologists are now nervously anticipating.
But this is only worrying if you think in decades, centuries, and millennia. Our politicians, who do their thinking in two-year election cycles, aren’t worried. They should be.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes corporate irresponsibility hypocrisy
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Year 3, Month 6, Day 13: Sexy Sadie…You Made A Fool Of Everyone
The story finds a few legs in England (not much Stateside, though — gee, I wonder why?):
Some of America’s top companies are spending heavily to block action on climate change or discredit climate science, despite public commitments to sustainable and green values, a new report has found.
An analysis of 28 Standard & Poor 500 publicly traded companies by researchers from the Union of Concerned Scientists exposed a sharp disconnect in some cases between PR message and less visible activities, with companies quietly lobbying against climate policy or funding groups which work to discredit climate science.
The findings are in line with the recent expose of the Heartland Institute. Over the years, the ultra-conservative organisation devoted to discrediting climate science received funds from a long list of companies which had public commitments to sustainability.
Bitch, bitch, bitch. All ya ever do is bitch. Sent June 3:
I can remember the launch of the “New Nixon” in 1968 — a cynical public relations gambit that provided a discredited politician sufficiently shiny new trappings to get him elected president of the USA. H.L. Mencken famously noted that “no one ever went broke underestimating the American public,” an observation verified by countless advertising campaigns in the ensuing decades.
When major American corporations make public statements about the seriousness of climate change, our first instincts should be ones of suspicion: are their words supported or undercut by their actions in the policy domain? The Union of Concerned Scientists’ report confirms yet again that the “corporate persons” exerting such disproportionate influence on US governance are morally deficient hypocrites driven entirely by greed.
As an intensifying greenhouse effect brings us perilously close to a planetary emergency, we cannot afford to let capitalism run amok, crassly savaging Earth’s resources in the service of profit.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes corporate irresponsibility denialists
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Year 3, Month 6, Day 12: New! Improved! To Serve You Better!
Shocked. Shocked, I tell you. Neela Banerjee (yay, Indians!) in the LA Times:
WASHINGTON — Some major U.S. corporations that support climate science in their public relations materials actively work to derail regulations and laws addressing global warming through lobbying, campaign donations and support of various advocacy groups, according to a new report by the Union of Concerned Scientists, an environmental and scientific integrity group.
The multinational oil giant, ConocoPhillips, for instance, said on its website in 2011 that it “recognizes” that human activity is leading to climate change, the view supported by the overwhelming majority of scientific research. Yet in 2009, ConocoPhillips argued against the Environmental Protection Agency’s determination that heat-trapping greenhouse gases were pollutants endangering public welfare.
The report, “A Climate of Corporate Control,” notes that General Electric has backed six environmental and non-partisan research groups that accept the scientific consensus on climate change, including the Brookings Institution and the Nature Conservancy. At the same time, it has funded four organizations that reject or question the consensus, including the Competitive Enterprise Institute and Heritage Foundation. Moreover, it was a member of several organizations that have doggedly fought greater environmental regulation, including the US Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers.
I think I found a new analogical structure here. Hurray. Sent June 2:
So the public statements of multinational corporations are often contradicted by their private actions? Color me unsurprised. It’s cheaper to make advertisements featuring trees, blue skies and happy people than it is to pursue environmentally sensible policies that might incrementally impact profit margins.
This is a private-enterprise version of the crassly theatrical politics which substituted a “Mission Accomplished” banner for a sensible foreign policy and a New Orleans photo-op for a functional FEMA. It is no coincidence that the same individuals move easily back and forth from the corporate boardrooms to cabinet offices. Just as inbreeding brings the potential for horrifying genetic catastrophes, this incestuous interpenetration of the public and private sectors has spawned its own grotesque mutations of responsible capitalism and responsive government.
And this is a tragedy, for responsible capitalism and responsive government are essential if our civilization is to properly address the burgeoning climate crisis.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: 350 atmospheric CO2 CO2 denialists fun with analogies scientific consensus
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Year 3, Month 6, Day 11: We Are The Great Four Hundred
The Columbus (IA) Republic, on hitting 400:
For more than 60 years, readings have been in the 300s, except in urban areas, where levels are skewed. The burning of fossil fuels, such as coal for electricity and oil for gasoline, has caused the overwhelming bulk of the man-made increase in carbon in the air, scientists say.
It’s been at least 800,000 years — probably more — since Earth saw carbon dioxide levels in the 400s, Butler and other climate scientists said.
Until now.
Readings are coming in at 400 and higher all over the Arctic. They’ve been recorded in Alaska, Greenland, Norway, Iceland and even Mongolia. But levels change with the seasons and will drop a bit in the summer, when plants suck up carbon dioxide, NOAA scientists said.
So the yearly average for those northern stations likely will be lower and so will the global number.
Globally, the average carbon dioxide level is about 395 parts per million but will pass the 400 mark within a few years, scientists said.
The Arctic is the leading indicator in global warming, both in carbon dioxide in the air and effects, said Pieter Tans, a senior NOAA scientist.
“This is the first time the entire Arctic is that high,” he said.
A rehash of yesterday’s letter. Sent June 1:
I vividly remember the excitement we experienced as kids when our station wagon’s odometer turned over; on the day we passed 100,000 miles, Dad decelerated a bit and my brother and I called off the tenths of a mile until all the zeroes lined up on the dashboard and the family broke out in cheers. We did a lot of driving in those days — unwittingly, it turns out, making our contribution to a far more ominous numerical landmark.
400 parts per million of atmospheric CO2 is nothing to celebrate. We long ago passed the critical level of 350 ppm, the concentration climatologists consider the maximum level consistent with the continued survival of our civilization, and even if we stopped burning fossil fuels completely, things would still keep getting hotter for decades. The next few centuries are going to be a rough ride for life on Earth. Why are the climate-change denialists in media and politics working hard to keep us from buckling up our seat belts?
Warren Senders