environment Politics: agriculture economics food privilege
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Year 3, Month 12, Day 27: Even A Blind Pig…
The New York Times reports on the threatened truffle:
PARIS — Just about everything in Eduardo Manzanares’s shop, Truffes Folies, is made with truffles. Sausage, cheese, spaghetti — even popcorn.
But during the year-end holidays, the main order of business is fresh truffles, especially the black or Périgord truffle, Tuber melanosporum. The prized mushrooms are used to stuff Christmas turkeys, chickens or capons, Mr. Manzanares said, making Dec. 24 typically the biggest truffle-eating night of the year in France.
But it is also becoming an increasingly expensive tradition. Black truffles and other types of truffles are becoming scarcer, and some scientists say it is because of the effects of global climate change on the fungus’s Mediterranean habitat. One wholesaler says prices have risen tenfold over the last dozen years.
Poor things. I’ve tasted truffles twice and they were/are wonderful. But not at $1200/pound. Sent December 21:
One of the perquisites of wealth is an added layer of protection from natural disasters. Downed power lines don’t hurt if you’ve got your own generator; cracked and crumbling roads mean nothing if you travel by helicopter; disrupted agriculture’s just a blip on the radar if you’ve got two years’ food supply laid up in a private storage facility.
This insulation has allowed many of the world’s richest individuals to ignore the effects of global climate change — unlike the world’s poorest, who daily live with the consequences of others’ consumption of fossil fuels. It’s only when a luxury item is endangered that the threat suddenly seems real to those who’ve used their power to keep climatic reality outside the gates. How ironic that while forecasts of megadeaths and surging sea levels elicit only yawning dismissals, the prospect of disappearing truffles could finally motivate the planet’s most privileged to action.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: idiots media irresponsibility Republican obstructionism scientific consensus
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Year 3, Month 12, Day 26: Hit The Snooze Button Again, Willya?
The Chicago Sun-Times says Americans are finally waking up.
Call it change more Americans are starting to believe in.
A recent Associated Press-GfK poll found that a growing majority of Americans not only think global warming is occurring, but also that it will become a serious problem and that the U.S. government should do something about it.
If this fall’s elections were any indication, average Americans are moving ahead of the politicians on this issue. Serious debate on climate change was a lot less noticeable than the melting polar icecaps, Superstorm Sandy and Midwest drought were.
Fashionably late, that’s us. Sent December 20:
The fact that Americans are only now accepting the reality of global climate change demonstrates two things: first, that the United States has been able to avoid the adverse effects of global warming for longer than many other parts of the world, and second, that our national relationship to scientific knowledge has deteriorated grossly since the 1960s and 70s, when our space program brought human beings to the moon and back with the full support, admiration and respect of an engaged public. That was then.
Now, it’s a different story. Thanks to an indifferent media, climatologists are misrepresented when their findings are complex, ignored when their work is misunderstood, and physically threatened when their results are ideologically inconvenient. Since geographical good luck no longer protects our nation from the consequences of the accelerating greenhouse effect, will America’s politicians, media and citizenry finally accord climate scientists the respect they deserve?
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes Barack Obama denialists Republican obstructionism
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Year 3, Month 12, Day 25: Everybody Gets Coal In Their Stockings!
Time Magazine’s new Man of the Year has a chance to discuss climate:
So it should hearten greens that Obama volunteered in his interview with TIME editors that climate would be a major part of his second-term agenda—at least in part because of concern for his children:
Well, it’s a cliché, but it’s obviously true that for any parent, as you watch your kids age, you are reminded that everything you do has to have their futures in mind. You fervently hope they’re going to outlive you; that the world will be better for them when you’re not around. You start thinking about their kids.
And so, on an issue like climate change, for example, I think for this country and the world to ask some very tough questions about what are we leaving behind, that weighs on you. And not to mention the fact I think that generation is much more environmentally aware than previous generations.
There is that sense of we’ve got to get this right, and at least give them a fighting chance. In the same way that as a parent you recognize that no matter what you do, your kids are going to have challenges — because that’s the human condition — but you don’t want them dealing with stuff that’s the result of you making bad choices. They’ll have enough bad choices that they make on their own that you don’t want them inheriting the consequences of bad choices that you make. We have to think about that as a society as a whole.
That’s a pretty good argument for why we need to act on global warming—though it’s not really clear what the President would or even could do, especially faced with a divided and likely hostile Congress. He’s the Person of the Year, but he’s not omnipotent. (Though he does have options—see this plan from the Natural Resources Defense Council that would use the Clean Air Act to reduce carbon emissions from power plants.)
Have a nice day, everyone. Sent December 19:
While President Obama’s approach to climate change issues is undoubtedly going to be more robust than that offered by his rival Mitt Romney, that’s a pretty low bar to clear. The fact is that at a critical point in our species’ history, we are offered only anodyne strategies to combat a complex and metastasizing catastrophe. This is partly attributable to the gamesmanship of Washington, where politics is defined as the art of compromise; Mr. Obama’s skills at compromising are already well-known. Unfortunately, the accelerating greenhouse effect isn’t going to meet the President half-way. The laws of physics and chemistry are like that — stubborn, unyielding.
But there’s something else in Washington preventing a genuine response to the climate crisis. The Republican party’s complete denial of the overwhelming scientific evidence on global warming makes them as inflexible — and almost as harmful — as the steadily rising count of atmospheric CO2.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: Arctic ice melt cities rising sea levels Storms
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Year 3, Month 12, Day 24: Give Peace A Chance
The Vancouver Star anticipates problems:
METRO VANCOUVER – The combination of a king tide and a surging storm that pummelled parts of Vancouver’s iconic seawall Monday are symptomatic of what climate change and rising sea levels could mean for the region, according to an expert.
Oceanographer Susan Allen said that in coming years, the flooding seen in parts of Metro Vancouver’s waterfront could occur outside a “coincidence” like Monday’s heavy wind and rain that combined with the so-called king tides, which are nearing the end of their month-long peak in British Columbia.
“In the future we won’t have to have quite so high a tide at the time of a storm surge to get exactly what we had today because the water will be a little higher,” Allen said. “The important thing is “and.”
“If you get global warming and a big tide and a storm surge then we (have) problems.”
No argument there. Sent December 18:
As Arctic ice continues to melt, the world’s coastlines are going to be dramatically transformed. And with these changes will come a new assortment of dangers, exemplified in such recent weather disasters as Superstorm Sandy and Typhoon Bopha. Cities up and down the coastline of North America will need to start planning for such events with the certainty of “when,” not the ambiguity of “if.”
This means that a great many things will have to change. Urban planners can no longer assume a business-as-usual model when it comes to the impact of a transformed climate on major population centers. To avoid tragedies of Brobdingnagian proportions during the coming centuries, the world’s nations must prepare carefully and cooperatively. Infrastructure must be strengthened, emergency response mechanisms augmented, and worst-case scenarios prepared for; all these are expensive propositions, until you consider the alternative: gigadeaths on a scale dwarfing all of humanity’s wars combined.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: idiots scientific consensus snow timescale winter sports
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Year 3, Month 12, Day 23: Intestines Were A-Hanging From The Highest Of The Trees
The New York Times notes that winter sports are suffering a bit:
NEWBURY, N.H. — Helena Williams had a great day of skiing here at Mount Sunapee shortly after the resort opened at the end of November, but when she came back the next day, the temperatures had warmed and turned patches of the trails from white to brown.
“It’s worrisome for the start of the season,” said Ms. Williams, 18, a member of the ski team at nearby Colby-Sawyer College. “The winter is obviously having issues deciding whether it wants to be cold or warm.”
Her angst is well founded. Memories linger of last winter, when meager snowfall and unseasonably warm weather kept many skiers off the slopes. It was the fourth-warmest winter on record since 1896, forcing half the nation’s ski areas to open late and almost half to close early.
Whether this winter turns out to be warm or cold, scientists say that climate change means the long-term outlook for skiers everywhere is bleak. The threat of global warming hangs over almost every resort, from Sugarloaf in Maine to Squaw Valley in California. As temperatures rise, analysts predict that scores of the nation’s ski centers, especially those at lower elevations and latitudes, will eventually vanish.
I went skiing as a kid in different places all over New England. It was fun until I broke my leg as a teenager. At that point I said, “fuck it.” Sent December 17:
Thanks to the barrage of weather-related disasters over the past year, more previously dubious Americans are beginning to accept the reality of global climate change; there’s something about tangible evidence that helps nudge people off the fence. The decline in snow coverage on the nation’s ski slopes should amplify this effect, perhaps helping winter sports enthusiasts to recognize both the factuality of the greenhouse effect and the dangers it presents.
But we — all of us — must start thinking in much longer terms and much larger scales. While the economic disruption caused by a collapsing winter sports industry will be significant, it pales in comparison to that triggered by a collapsing planetary environment. While our industrialized society has wrought technological wonders, we are laughably unable to control the havoc unleashed by our profligate greenhouse emissions. Humanity isn’t on the bunny slopes anymore, but careening down a precipice, unknowing, unheeding.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: denialists idiots media irresponsibility scientific consensus
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Year 3, Month 12, Day 22: Can Rat Piss Cure Cancer? Details At Eleven!
The San Francisco Chronicle covers the “More Idiots Are Finally Changing Their Minds” story:
A growing majority of Americans think that global warming is occurring, that it will become a serious problem and that the U.S. government should do something about it, a new Associated Press-GfK poll finds.
Even most people who say they don’t trust scientists on the environment say temperatures are rising.
The poll found 4 out of every 5 Americans said climate change will be a serious problem for the United States if nothing is done about it. That’s up from 73 percent when the same question was asked in 2009.
Wakey wakey! Probably too latey latey, but better late than never. Idiots. Sent December 16:
It’s good news that more people are finally accepting the truth of planetary climate change, now that the consequences of the rapidly metastasizing greenhouse effect are threatening to overwhelm Earth’s ecological defense mechanisms. That the newly converted find actual physical events more persuasive than scientific analyses is also unsurprising. But science offers ways to extend our senses into areas normally beyond human perception; the idea that scientists have become somehow untrustworthy should give prompt us pause to reconsider our media’s handling of science news. Ask any scientist whose work has been covered by broadcast media and you’ll hear story after story of sensationalism, misrepresentation, and exaggeration.
That complex scientific questions are ill-suited to the spectacle-driven news machine should be a motivation to those television and radio outlets to change their approach. When it comes to the looming climate emergency, we need accurate reporting, and we needed it thirty years ago.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes denialists IPCC Republican obstructionism sunspots
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Year 3, Month 12, Day 21: Hush Now, Don’t Explain
The Independent (UK) confirms that denialists just never stop.
An attempt by climate sceptics to hijack the latest UN report on global warming by selectively leaking claims that it is caused by sunspots rather than man-made emissions of carbon dioxide has backfired.
Sceptics described the forthcoming report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as a “game changer” because of its apparent support for the controversial theory that solar activity, interacting with cosmic rays from deep space, can explain global warming.
Alec Rawls, a Republican blogger in the United States who signed himself up as an expert IPCC reviewer, decided to leak the panel’s Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) on the grounds that it is a taxpayer-funded document.
Mr Rawls claimed the report suggests that the IPCC has finally come round to the idea that solar activity – sunspots – is partly responsible for the observed global temperatures rise seen over the past half century.
“The admission of strong evidence for enhanced solar forcings changes everything. The climate alarmists can’t continue to claim that warming was almost entirely due to human activity over a period when solar warming effects, now acknowledged to be important, were at a maximum,” Mr Rawls said.
“The final draft of [the IPCC report] is not scheduled to be released for another year, but the public needs to know now how the main premise and conclusions of the IPCC story line have been undercut by the IPCC itself,” he said.
However, climate scientists pointed out that Mr Rawls has selectively quoted from the draft report and has ignored other parts of the document stating that solar activity and cosmic rays cannot explain the increase in global temperatures seen over the past half century, as sceptics have repeatedly claimed.
There are lies, damn lies, and climate denialist lies. Fuckers. Sent December 15:
Let’s not dignify climate-change denialists like Alec Rawls with the monicker, “skeptics.” Leaking cherry-picked sections of the forthcoming IPCC report is not representative of skepticism, a term which properly describes a profound level of intellectual honesty. Mr. Rawls and others of similar stripe are selectively misinterpreting data and analysis in order to support their ideology. We’re going to see a lot of this sort of behavior in the coming decades, as the evidence for planetary climate change grows from being incontrovertible to being overwhelming.
A good test of self-described “climate skeptics” is to ask them what sort of evidence could change their minds. A genuine skeptic like Dr. Richard Muller put his hypotheses to the test — and promptly changed his tune on the greenhouse effect’s causes and dangers. By contrast, it seems likely that (absent instructions from his petroleum paymasters) Alec Rawls’ mind will stay permanently shut.
Warren Senders
atheism environment Politics: assholes denialists idiots Republican obstructionism
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Year 3, Month 12, Day 20: Can’t Find My Way Home
Two articles in the 12/13 issue of the LA Times. First, David Horsey’s op-ed, “The Blind Faith of Climate Change deniers endangers us all”:
This week’s Newsweek magazine features a couple of essays — one about Jesus and one about climate change — that demonstrate the difference between simple faith in the unknowable and blind faith that denies scientific fact.
(snip)
Yet, even though the consequences of climate change are becoming frighteningly obvious and, as Hertsgaard writes, “scientists at both the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Environmental Protection Agency linked the record heat and drought of summer of 2012 with man-made climate change,” far too many conservatives cling to a blind faith that climate science is a hoax. Doug Goehring, North Dakota’s Republican agriculture commissioner, is typical of them all. Rather than believe the science, he says, “I believe an agenda is being pushed.”
And then Bettina Boxall’s piece on water shortages in the Colorado River Basin:
Water demand in the Colorado River Basin will greatly outstrip supply in coming decades as a result of drought, climate change and population growth, according to a broad-ranging federal study.
It projects that by 2060, river supplies will fall short of demand by about 3.2 million acre-feet — more than five times the amount of water annually consumed by Los Angeles.
“This study should serve as a call to action,” U.S. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said Wednesday as he released a report that predicted a drier future for the seven states that depend on the Colorado for irrigation and drinking supplies. “We can plan for this together.”
Too soon old, too late smart. Sent December 14:
The December 13 Times offers an ironic juxtaposition: David Horsey’s column analyzing conservatives’ unthinking rejection of climate change, and the ominous report on rapidly dwindling water supplies in the Colorado River Basin. How many climate-change denialists live in those seven states? How much evidence must accumulate before they stop shouting that global warming is an ideologically-driven hoax?
Our media privileges the discussion of religion, rationalizing that people are entitled to their own beliefs. True enough. But climate science is no theology, and relies on facts, observation, and analysis. The facts of a warming planet emerge in every day’s news reports. The observations of rising temperatures and melting ice caps are confirmed and reconfirmed. The analysis of climate data shows very strong correlation between our warming planet and the increasing amounts of atmospheric CO2.
Climate change is not a matter of belief, but of understanding — and action. No faith required.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes denialists idiots Republican obstructionism
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Year 3, Month 12, Day 19: Imagine No Pollution — It’s Easy If You Try
The Poughkeepsie Journal has an Op-Ed column which delivers the obvious truth:
This year is on the verge of becoming the warmest one in the nation’s history, something that climate-change deniers undoubtedly would like to chalk up to some kind of statistical anomaly.
Except for this: Seven of the 10 warmest years in U.S. history have occurred over the past 15 years, according to the National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C.
Global warming is real, and it’s causing massive damage and is likely to cause a whole lot more. The overwhelming number of climatologists not only tell us this, they say it is very likely being caused by the burning of fossil fuels.
It’s hard to imagine a scenario under which that would not be the case. Over the decades, emissions from old power plants, factories and vehicles have polluted the air and have contributed to global warming.
Nice little planet you got here. Wouldn’t want anything to happen to it, would you? Sent December 13:
The accelerating climate crisis presents a rare opportunity for our nation to come together in the face of impending catastrophe. For too long we have delayed action until after a disaster mobilizes our energies; while the focused and dedicated response to Superstorm Sandy offers a fine example of what America can do in a pinch, the fact is that we’re going to see more storms and extreme weather of unprecedented scale over the coming decades. And our continuing consumption of fossil fuels is going to make things worse, not better. What’s needed is a country-wide response that mobilizes our ingenuity, optimism and expertise on local, regional, national, and global levels in order to cut our carbon emissions, stabilize excess greenhouse gases that are already in the atmosphere, and prepare for the things we can’t prevent.
The only thing that stands in the way is ignorance and apathy, as exemplified by obstructionist Republican politicians and a news media too lazy to present anything more than he-says/she-says false equivalent. And of course, their paymasters in the oil and coal industries: senators and congressmen are almost as expensive as broadcast networks.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: analogies denialists idiots
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Year 3, Month 12, Day 18: My Sign Is “The End Is Near!” What’s YOUR Sign?
In the High Country News, Megan Kimble writes about her “Date With A Climate-Change Denier.” It’s a good piece:
He nodded and thought this over. “Do you think this whole climate change thing is going to catch on?”
“What do you mean?”
“You know, ‘global warming’?” His voice wore italics and, though his hands didn’t leave the table, his fingers became bobbing quotation marks.
I opened my mouth and paused. He smiled that uncomfortable first-date smile and took a sip of his beer.
Hmm, I thought. Yes. The climate is changing, has changed, and humans are central to the story. Sheets of ice are cleaving away from glaciers and more and more carbon dioxide and methane molecules are swarming through the atmosphere, heating it up, and they will continue to do so whether or not the “idea” of global warming, you know, “catches on.”
My date took another sip of beer and stared at me with the blue eyes that had prompted me to give him my phone number in the first place.
“I think climate change already has caught on?” I said, hating how my voice rose into a question mark. “I think it’s happening? And I think a lot of people agree that, um, it’s a … big deal,” I said.
“Hmm,” he said, and nodded, considering this. He smiled, and in a teasing, flirtatious tone, said, “So you’re all into that, the global warming stuff?”
Some believe that the climate deniers will just die out. Not many in my generation get riled up about interracial marriage, for instance — it is, for most of us, entirely a non-issue — and many say that attitudes toward climate change could similarly shift with time. The academic term for old ideas dying along with old people is called “cohort replacement,” and according to this logic, all we have to do is wait.
According to this logic, however, an eligible young woman does not find herself on a date with a very cute 28-year-old man who puts “global warming” in quotation marks.
“Well … I sort of don’t think climate change is something to be believed in,” I said haltingly. “I mean, it kind of … is.” I hesitated, wondering, should I go further?
This letter was surprisingly difficult to write, perhaps because I couldn’t go with any of the regular formulae that have now become pretty much second nature. Sent 12/12/12:
While it may not be possible to screen your dates for “acceptance of climate change,” as Megan Kimble imagines in her entertaining article on the problems of dating climate-change deniers, there are many reasons to suggest that those who reject scientific evidence are poor relationship material.
Those who deny the ominously accelerating greenhouse effect are choosing to live in their own more convenient version of reality. Uncomfortable facts are excluded, straightforward facts and figures rationalized and massaged, data cherry-picked to demonstrate opposite meanings — these characteristic denialist behaviors are also key ingredients in dysfunctional and abusive relationships. By mocking the overwhelming climatological consensus, Ms. Kimble’s hunky date showed he’s the kind of guy who thinks words and facts mean exclusively what he wants them to mean — no more, no less. It goes without saying he’s hardly relationship material.
Similarly, America’s political and media systems need to end their romance with the well-funded climate denial industry. Both our policies and the public discussion of them must be founded in reality, not rooted in fantasy — and this is nowhere more important than on the issue of climate change, a threat larger than any our species has faced in recorded history.
Warren Senders
UPDATE: This didn’t get into the High Country News, but the article was reprinted on January 12 in the Salt Lake Tribune, so I’ve sent them this letter unaltered.