environment Politics: agriculture consumerism economics farms sustainability
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Year 4, Month 2, Day 15: You Can’t Fool Me.
USA Today let us know: the farmers are f**ked:
A comprehensive USDA study concludes rising temperatures could cost farmers millions as they battle new pests, faster weed growth and get smaller yields as climate change continues.
WASHINGTON — Climate change could have a drastic and harmful effect on U.S. agriculture, forcing farmers and ranchers to alter where they grow crops and costing them millions of dollars in additional costs to tackle weeds, pests and diseases that threaten their operations, a sweeping government report said Tuesday.
An analysis released by the Agriculture Department said that although U.S. crops and livestock have been able to adapt to changes in their surroundings for close to 150 years, the accelerating pace and intensity of global warming during the next few decades may soon be too much for the once-resilient sector to overcome.
“We’re going to end up in a situation where we have a multitude of things happening that are going to negatively impact crop production,” said Jerry Hatfield, a laboratory director and plant physiologist with USDA’s Agricultural Research Service and lead author of the study. “In fact, we saw this in 2012 with the drought.”
It’s a hoax! I saw it on FOX! Sent February 7:
As the song puts it, the farmer feeds us all. However, many Americans, raised in a consumer economy where produce sometimes travels thousands of miles to local stores, lack the experience to understand the implications of a phrase like “devastated agriculture.” Industrialized farming has created a food system capable of feeding huge numbers — but only under absolutely predictable conditions. The encroaching threat of climate change is certain to render those conditions anything but predictable. The result? A farm system that decades ago moved to monocropping — taking advantage of economies of scale at the expense of resilience and flexibility — will become enormously vulnerable to changing environmental conditions, rapidly evolving pests, and diseases which can eradicate entire harvests in an eyeblink.
In the late 19th century, Irish monocroppers facing devastating potato blight had two alternatives: die of starvation, or emigrate. What choices will Americans face in the coming decades?
Warren Senders
environment Politics: denialists endangered species extinction regional ecosystems stupidity timescales
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Year 4, Month 2, Day 14: And Because I Love You, I’ll Give It One More Try
The North Andover Eagle-Tribune reports on climate change in New England:
One of the harbingers of change has been the lobster industry, which Wahle called a kind of “canary in a coal mine.”
Maine fishermen have set record harvests over the past few years, perhaps due in part to higher water temperatures and fewer groundfish, which prey on young lobsters. Fishermen off Newburyport have also reported good harvests, with last year being among the best.
Meanwhile, in southern New England, it’s an entirely different story. Mass lobster kill-offs in Long Island Sound have been caused by warming waters, Wahle said, while a disease that infects lobster shells has been spreading northward through the sound and into Massachusetts waters.
“(The disease) seems to have stalled out just south of Cape Ann,” Wahle said.
If the disease spreads further north, it could have a devastating impact on northern New England’s lobster fisheries, Wahle said.
As of Feb. 6, the comment thread on this article was 100% denialist stupidity. Sent, with an optimistic tag:
New England’s not alone in feeling the increasing impact of global warming. While specific symptoms of climate change vary from place to place, regions everywhere around the planet are affected. Whether it’s drought in the corn belt, unseasonal monsoons in Asia, or warmer winters fostering pine beetle infestations in Colorado, the consequences of the greenhouse effect are hitting people painfully. Some communities may reap temporary benefits — like Maine lobstermen who are hauling in a bumper harvest — but since warmer winters may bring an end to the state’s skiing industry, there’s no real positive economic impact on a wider scale.
If there is any upside to the accelerating climate crisis, it is that our species’ future requires us to realize that what we do today in our own narrow corner of the world will affect people thousands of miles — and hundreds of years — away. Only by recognizing that political boundaries and cultural differences are irrelevant in the face of the gathering storm can we humans make a happy and prosperous future for our posterity.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: cowering before the apocalypse existential crisis extinction
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Year 4, Month 2, Day 13: Too Much Confusion Going On, I Can’t Get No Relief
The Canberra Times runs an op-ed by a chap named Nicholas Stuart, who gets the brass ring:
Even if you still believe there is doubt about the specific linkage between carbon dioxide emissions and the rising global temperature – and I do not believe there is – there can be no doubt about the increasing incidence of extreme climatic events. The hottest January on record resulted in terrible bushfires across the nation, while at the same time we’ve suffered devastating floods in the tropical north: Australia can no longer rely on ”global action” to avoid the catastrophe that climate change represents.
Yet you would not know this listening to what passes for political debate in this country. Politicians still seem to believe that all that is required during a natural disaster is for them to tour the affected area, nodding sympathetically and promising relief.
Environmental catastrophe is framed as the ”work of nature” and therefore inexplicable. By pretending we cannot comprehend why this is happening we absolves ourselves from dealing with reality. This means that individuals can avoid the hard choices about the future while society pretends it can still afford to ”nationalise” the losses. A far better way of coming to terms with the way the climate is changing is provided by the internal workings of insurance companies.
Businesses don’t deal in academic theory. They deal in reality. That’s why the cost of insuring against damage caused by natural disasters is climbing, because the companies realise that the chance of these events is increasing. There’s nothing ideological about this and certainly no pro-Labor bias at work.
The opposition needs to explain immediately how it will deal with climate change because the holes in its current program are so large, and urgency so absent, that one inevitably returns to the possibility that Tony Abbott doesn’t believe in climate change at all.
Aye. Sent Feb. 5.
Nicholas Stuart has it exactly right in his description of climate change as an existential crisis. We humans have faced other crises of our own creation before this; the life-shattering forces of war and the morally overwhelming phenomena of slavery and genocide come to mind. But these, all-encompassing and inescapable though they may be, have always played out on a planetary stage that has changed its shape slowly if at all. The climate crisis, rendering our feeble political systems incompetent and impotent, is a threat of an entirely different nature.
War, slavery, and injustice transpire on a historical timescale of decades and centuries, while climatic processes have taken place over millennia, over eons. Now, climatic transformations are happening with the speed of war. With our wasteful consumer economies and our fossil fuel addictions, we have unwittingly an auto-immune response from the natural environment upon which our lives depend. Our species’ continued survival hinges on how rapidly we can understand these facts and their implications.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: Barack Obama fossil fuels Keystone XL Tar Sands
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Year 4, Month 2, Day 12: Bad Guys Finish, Period.
More on the Keystone Clusterf**k, from the West Virginia Gazette:
President Obama hasn’t publicly drawn a connection between climate change and the Keystone XL pipeline, but new pressure is building on him and other officials to connect those dots.
Protests are springing up from Maine to Washington, D.C., to Oklahoma urging leaders to stop the Keystone XL and other oil sands import projects on climate change grounds. The Texas-bound Keystone XL is the biggest of many projects being proposed to connect Canada’s oil sands to U.S. refineries and export ports. Protesters claim the pipelines would commit the United States and other countries to a form of heavy oil that would worsen global warming.
On Jan. 26, some 1,400 people marched through Portland, Maine, against possible plans to move oil from Canada’s tar sands mines to local ports for export. Days earlier, hundreds of people joined solidarity rallies across New England and in Canada, where they picketed outside gas stations, locked arms along bridges, and hoisted signs that read “Tar Sands (equals) Game Over for Climate.” On Monday, indigenous rights activists in Texas and Oklahoma filled public squares to show support for efforts by Canada’s First Nations to block oil sands growth.
“We’re trying to build the social movement” against expansion of tar sands oil extraction, said Sophie Robinson, who organized events through the Massachusetts chapter of 350.org, a grassroots organization that focuses on climate change.
I’m gonna keep recycling the “this ain’t no game” trope till it gets some traction. February 4:
Whether it’s the inevitable spillage and aquifer contamination, the vast acreage of forests destroyed, the reinforcement of a global fossil-fuel addiction, or the devastating impact the Tar Sands oil will make on the already accelerating greenhouse effect, there can be no doubt that the Keystone XL pipeline project is a collection of disasters waiting to happen. But “game over for the climate,” a phrase popular among anti-pipeline activists, gives a misleading picture of what those disasters will do to North America and the world.
The after-effects of a game are limited to the playing field. If your team loses, just wait for next week, or next month, or next year. But more and more scientists are realizing with alarm that the possible consequences of a 4-degree centigrade increase in planetary temperature may include a complete collapse of the agriculture upon which our lives depend. The introduction of Tar Sands oil into the consumption chain will speed that increase, possibly irrevocably.
Earth’s climate is no game, and when it’s over, there’s no rematch, no mulligan, no “wait for next year,” no reset button. It’s just finished — and so are we. President Obama must block the Keystone XL.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes denialists idiots Republican obstructionism
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Year 4, Month 2, Day 11: Zing! Went The Strings Of My Heart!
The Richmond Times-Dispatch (VA) wonders about Republicans:
President Barack Obama’s second inaugural address made specific references to climate change. He called on the country to address the process.
Republicans did not react with enthusiasm. Although he did not scoff at climate change itself, Iowa Sen. Charles Grassley questioned how much the United States could accomplish on its own. Climate change presents a global challenge, he explained; it requires a global response that is more appropriately addressed in negotiations and treaties than in congressional legislation.
Hmmmm.
The last time we checked, the Republican response to global initiatives regarding the climate fell somewhat short of gung-ho. Remember Kyoto?
Specific treaties or protocols must be judged on their merits. They do not command automatic support. Nevertheless, conservatives tend to be skeptical of international agreements that commit signatories to action. They consider them threats to American sovereignty. The other day, Del. Scott Lingamfelter, a candidate for the GOP nomination for lieutenant governor, warned that United Nations’ efforts, supported by the Obama administration, to combat “so-called global warming” assault the rights of Virginians. Republicans who rail against one-world policies are not noted for proposing homegrown plans to address the reality of climate change.
So I took this opportunity to rag on the GOP a bit. Always fun…and always well-deserved. Feb 3:
The Republican anti-response to the threat of climate change highlights the degree to which a once-proud political party is trapped in an ideological double-bind, captive to the tea-party extremism which helped them in the 2010 election, and which now dominates their primary process. Only the most extreme views — on climate, on health care, on gun control, on anything — can pass muster with their anti-reality core constituency.
While the GOP has always been ready to indulge a strain of anti-intellectual populism when it was politically expedient, its doctrinal rejection of climatological expertise is both scientifically and politically foolish. Scientifically — because the overwhelming majority of the world’s scientists are in absolute agreement on the factuality and human origins of the accelerating greenhouse effect; politically — because a significant majority of the American people are in agreement that climate change poses a genuine threat that warrants robust and meaningful government action.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes denialists idiots Republican obstructionism
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Year 4, Month 2, Day 10: Looking Through A Bent-Backed Tulip, To See How The Other Half Lives
The Argus-Leader’s Steve Young discusses climate change’s impact on South Dakota:
South Dakota in 2050 will have longer growing seasons, milder winters and more extreme weather events if national weather experts are correct in analyzing the effects of greenhouse gases on climate warming.
A draft report released earlier this month by the National Climate Assessment and Development Advisory Committee projects that at the current rate of greenhouse gas emissions, the average temperature in South Dakota will rise an additional 5 degrees Fahrenheit by 2050.
That comes as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reports that 2012 was the hottest year on record in the contiguous United States.
What will warming bring to the state? Growing seasons will stretch longer. There will be fewer subzero-degree days in the winter and snow won’t stick around as long. Storms will be more extreme, dumping significant amounts of snow and rain but unleashing precipitation less often.
Wheee! Same basic letter I’ve sent twice already to different states; I’m in a hurry today.
South Dakota’s not alone. The whole planet is finding out that climate change is an abstraction no longer, but a radically disruptive fact. If the weather’s too unpredictable, agriculture becomes impossible, and even the most robust infrastructure can be damaged or destroyed by extreme storms. Once-fertile land turns arid and unproductive under drought conditions, while rising sea levels may simply wipe some island nations off the map completely.
Although the accelerating climate crisis is irrevocably altering lives all over the planet, in the offices of Senate and Congressional Republicans, it’s making no impact at all. These plush chambers aren’t just air-conditioned against the heat — thanks to fossil-fuel corporations, they’re also cash-conditioned against the facts. Anti-science conservatives may come from different parts of the country, but ultimately they all represent the same state of denial. In a time of planetary emergency, South Dakota — and the world — deserves better.
Warren Senders
Education environment Politics: conspiracy theory denialists idiots scientific consensus
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Year 4, Month 2, Day 9: The Paranoid Style
The Detroit News has a pair of columnists, Donald Scavia and Knute Nadelhoffer. They reiterate the danger we’re in:
In his inaugural address, President Barack Obama said, “We will respond to the threat of climate change, knowing that the failure to do so would betray our children and future generations.” It was gratifying to hear the president finally making climate change a priority. The evidence is overwhelming and the time to act has long been upon us.
Make no mistake: The fact that our climate is changing beyond the bounds of natural variation comes from many indisputable scientific sources, including advanced satellite sensing systems, the chemistry of Greenland and Antarctic ice cores, ancient tree rings, shrinking Arctic ice caps and literally millions of ground- and sea-based measurements. The recently released National Climate Assessment draft report and the peer-reviewed science upon which it is built confirm that our planet is warming, droughts and storms are more severe, air quality is worse and the negative effects of these changes are damaging our health and economy. If we continue the unabated release of climate-warming gases, temperatures will continue to climb and extreme weather events will increasingly disrupt our lives and livelihoods.
Historical global warming is incontrovertible and the rate of warming in the Midwest has, in fact, accelerated in recent decades. Between 1900 and 2010, the average Midwest air temperature increased by more than 1 degree Fahrenheit. But it increased twice as fast between 1950 and 2010 and three times as fast between 1980 and 2010. The length of time that ice covers our lakes is decreasing. Winter snow-cover seasons are shorter and interrupted by thaw events.
And predictably they get a storm of denialist conspiracy theorists in the comments. Sheesh. Sent Feb. 1:
The evidence of planetary climate change is not just supported by an overwhelming consensus of climate scientists, but is now visible to the eye, all over America and the world. But this won’t be enough to convince the denialist contingent that the greenhouse effect isn’t a liberal plot hatched in secret meetings between Al Gore, the United Nations, and a non-specified group of socialist scientists.
While these half-baked conspiracy theories laughably fail any sort of inspection, the lack of evidence feeds rather than starves the paranoid mindset. If temperatures are climbing, it’s because of collusion among scientists, or cosmic rays; if droughts are killing off our amber waves of grain, it’s because of sunspots, or environmentalists cutting the water lines — or something, anything, other than what it is — the consequences of drastically increased atmospheric CO2.
While there has long been a vibrant streak of anti-science faux populism at work in American conservatism, the accelerating climate crisis offers these willfully ignorant citizens and their representatives an unparalleled opportunity to damage our nation and our planet irreparably — simply by obstructing reality-based energy and environmental policies. History will not treat them kindly.
Warren Senders
Education environment: 350.org divestment economics Keystone XL responsibility
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Year 4, Month 2, Day 8: I Don’t Want Him To Be Comfortable If He’s Going To Look Too Funny
The Chronicle of Higher Education notes that fossil-fuel divestment turns out to hold little or no liability for college endowments:
College-endowment managers who resist the growing call to divest their holdings in fossil-fuel companies may be doing so for little or no financial reason, according to a new report.
An analysis released on Tuesday by the Aperio Group, an investment-management firm that offers its clients a “socially responsible index,” among other investment strategies, found that while divesting from fossil-fuel companies does not necessarily add value to a portfolio, it does not subtract value from it either, and it increases the risk to investors at such a modest level as to be negligible.
In recent months, student groups at more than 200 colleges across the country have begun pushing their institutions to divest from fossil-fuel companies. A handful of smaller institutions, including Unity College and Hampshire College, have recently adopted strategies to reduce their investments in such companies, but most colleges have responded warily to the notion.
No doubt part of that wariness is that fossil-fuel companies are viewed as reliable profit generators, and divesting from them is seen as a financial handicap, even less attractive at a time when endowments have struggled because of the recession.
Because we won’t be responsible if it costs us anything. Sent January 31:
While it’s encouraging to know that college endowments aren’t likely to suffer from shedding fossil-fuel investments, divestment would be a good idea regardless of its economic impacts on university portfolios. The business model of big oil and coal companies is profoundly destructive, relying as it does on reintroducing millions of years’ worth of fossilized carbon into the atmosphere each year in a geological eyeblink, without regard for the climatic consequences.
While “bottom-line” rationales are popular and convenient, we must remember that one of the deepest goals of higher education is the inculcation of a broad sense of responsibility to and for the greater social good. We do not teach subjects; we teach human beings — and the quality of our teaching is reflected in our students’ commitment to a better future.
And there is no surer guarantee of a worse future than continued support of fossil fuels. They may be hugely profitable, but fossil fuel corporations epitomize an irresponsible disregard for our shared Earthly heritage and the continued happiness and prosperity of our descendants, and colleges and universities investing in them are abdicating their institutional responsibilities to our common posterity.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: biodiversity endangered species extinction
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Year 4, Month 2, Day 7: Does It Mean You Don’t Love Me Any More?
USA Today notes that climate change is happening too fast for the birds and the bees:
From birds in the Plains to bighorn sheep in California to caribou in Alaska and moose in Minnesota, a new study says animals are struggling to adapt to the new climate conditions caused by the burning of fossil fuels, which produces the carbon dioxide that warms the atmosphere.
“Climate change is the biggest threat wildlife will face this century,” says the report released today by the National Wildlife Federation, an environmental group based in Reston, Va.
Though animals have adapted to natural climate variation since the beginning of time, the changes are happening much faster than they are able to respond. “The underlying climatic conditions to which species have been accustomed for thousands of years are rapidly changing, and we are already witnessing the impacts,” according to the report, called “Wildlife in a Warming World.”
I hear that clock a’tickin’, on the mantel shelf. Sent January 30:
When they admit the existence of the greenhouse effect at all, those who downplay the seriousness of climate change like to assert that species will “adapt” to the consequences of our warming atmosphere — a profound misunderstanding of the distinction between individual and evolutionary time. Climate science shows us that while Earth’s climate has undergone radical changes in the past, they’ve unfolded over millennia, giving animals and plants a chance to evolve and adapt to their new circumstances.
By contrast, anthropogenic global warming unfolds within the span of a single human lifetime, a geological eyeblink allowing no time for the gradual processes of biological adaptation. It’s not a coincidence that the same lawmakers who deny the evidence of global climate change also consistently reject the even more overwhelming evidence of evolution. America’s policies need to be based on facts, not ideologically-driven sloganeering. We continue ignoring science at our own peril.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: agriculture coffee denialists
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Year 4, Month 2, Day 6: You’ll See No Potato Juice
The Seattle Times addresses the problems facing the coffee growers of the world:
One of the biggest problems facing coffee farmers in India and elsewhere is climate change. Fluctuations in the weather have always happened, but they come more frequently now and are often more extreme, farmers say.
Like many tropical crops, coffee needs predictable dry and wet seasons and cannot tolerate extreme temperature fluctuations.
“Climate change is hitting us hard,” said Jacob Mammen, managing director of India’s Badra Estates. Three times in recent years, Badra has lost a third of its crop because of rains at the wrong times. Some rains come too soon, causing trees to blossom early; others come as the trees bloom or are ready to be harvested, destroying valuable blossoms or dropping ripe coffee cherries; still others ruin coffee left to dry on outdoor patios.
To protect coffee from the latter fate, nearby Balanoor Plantations spent more than $20,000 for a large cylindrical drying drum last year.
The drinks, and the laughs, are on me. Sent January 28:
American coffee drinkers have had a chance to sample a wide variety of the finest coffees the world has to offer, and selecting one’s personal favorite bean from a huge selection is now a perfectly ordinary part of shopping. But the impact of climate change on coffee growers is going to change this equation drastically. What we’re likely to be drinking in coming years won’t necessarily be the coffee that tastes the best, but that which is most resistant to weather extremes and the various epiphenomena of the greenhouse effect. Of course, it isn’t just coffee that’ll be affected, but virtually everything we eat and drink.
Our politicians, terrified of offending their corporate paymasters, continue to dawdle and delay instead of taking immediate steps to protect our agriculture from the consequences of climate change. But with each year that passes, action becomes more expensive — and less effective. The time for excuses and evasions is past. Wake up and smell the coffee.
Warren Senders