environment Politics: denialists economics extreme weather insurance sustainability
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Year 3, Month 10, Day 18: No Joke
More on the Munich Re report, this time from USA Today:
5:07PM EST October 10. 2012 – The number of natural disasters per year has been rising dramatically on all continents since 1980, but the trend is steepest for North America where countries have been battered by hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, searing heat and drought, a new report says.
The study being released today by Munich Re, the world’s largest reinsurance firm, sees climate change driving the increase and predicts those influences will continue in years ahead, though a number of experts question that conclusion.
Whatever the causes, the report shows that if you thought the weather has been getting worse, you’re right.
The report finds that weather disasters in North America are among the worst and most volatile in the world: “North America is the continent with the largest increases in disasters,” says Munich Re’s Peter Hoppe.
This letter seemed to fall into two parts. I don’t know if it’s effective, but I write the letters I write, not the letters I wish I’d write. Sent October 11:
The Munich Re report linking climate change with three decades of steadily increasing natural disasters everywhere on Earth provides yet more support for those who maintain that the rapidly metastasizing greenhouse effect is a clear and present danger to our civilization. Despite the absurd mischaracterizations of conservative opinionators, this group (aka the “reality-based community”) isn’t just comprised of liberal environmentalists, climatologists, and hippies, but also includes the American armed forces, the intelligence community, and the insurance industry.
While it’d be nice to discover that the free market system is the most effective way to deal with the consequences of a century of fossil-fuel consumption, the evidence so far suggests otherwise. Today’s loudest advocates of deregulation and laissez-faire economics are also the ones most conspicuously ignoring or denying scientific reality. The accelerating climate crisis demands action on a scale that the private sector cannot possibly encompass — a planetary Manhattan project.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: denialists insurance public health
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Year 3, Month 10, Day 17: Be Sure To Wear Some Flowers In Your Hair
The Burlington Free Press (VT) notes that another big insurance organization has gone all DFH on us:
The number of natural disasters per year has been rising dramatically on all continents since 1980, but the trend is steepest for North America where countries have been battered by hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, searing heat and drought, a new report says.
The study being released today by Munich Re, the world’s largest reinsurance firm, sees climate change driving the increase and predicts those influences will continue in years ahead, though a number of experts question that conclusion.
Whatever the causes, the report shows that if you thought the weather has been getting worse, you’re right.
The report finds that weather disasters in North America are among the worst and most volatile in the world: “North America is the continent with the largest increases in disasters,” says Munich Re’s Peter Roder.
The report focuses on weather disasters since 1980 in the USA, Canada, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands.
Roder says this report represents the first finding of a climate change “footprint” in the data from natural catastrophes.
Take a bath, you lazy flower children. Sent October 10:
How often are we reminded that “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure?” The newly released Munich Re report on the likely impact of climate change should bring that old maxim back to the forefront of our thinking. Insurers are quite rightly anxious about having to shell out big bucks to pay for our national failure to anticipate the disastrous consequences of global warming in our own country and around the world.
Conservative politicians may extol the virtues of the free market, but this is merely rhetoric; their deny-and-delay policies will do incalculable damage to our economy when the bill finally comes due. And what a bill: coping with devastated agriculture, crippled infrastructure, decimated biodiversity, geopolitical instability, and catastrophic public-health impacts is going to cost trillions of dollars. It’s both economically and environmentally sensible to address the climate crisis before it’s too late.
Prevention, not cure.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: denialists drought idiots Republican obstructionism scientific consensus
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Year 3, Month 10, Day 16: Our Love Is Here To Stay?
The McCook Daily Gazette (NE) reports on a panel discussion featuring a bunch of frantic hippies:
LINCOLN, Nebraska — Things are about to start heating up.
So say a panel of five environmental scholars and professionals, who presented “Climate Change and Nebraska: What Does Our Future Hold?” Saturday at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln to warn of the dangers of a potential four-to-10 degree temperature increase in the state.
The speakers examined the scientific evidence for climate change, the impact this could have on the future and the steps that can be taken to assuage it. Robert Oglesby, a professor of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at UNL, said after considering all the factors, the one that is the cause for most alarm in Nebraska is the reduction of snowpack in the Rocky Mountains.
“We need that steady release of water due to the slow, steady melt of the snow in the spring through early summer to maintain river flow of the Platte,” Oglesby said.
Song Feng, of the School of Natural Resources at UNL, offered a study into the effect droughts have had in the United States and the likelihood of their continuation in the future.
“The drought will become the normal condition by the end of the century,” Feng said.
It’s going to get harder and harder to be a denialist in the years ahead. Won’t stop ’em, though. Sent October 9:
While it makes a good opening for an article on the findings of climate scientists, “things are about to start heating up” is a pretty misleading sentence. The mercury’s been rising for quite a while now, as witness this single statistic: July 2012 was the 329th consecutive month to exceed the global average temperature for the twentieth century. While this increase is bad news for us all, we can still make it worse — by rejecting the reality of global warming, and by blocking action until catastrophic consequences are unavoidable.
It’s impossible to imagine a more cynical and destructive approach to governance than the deny-and-delay strategy that is the modus operandi of conservative politicians when it comes to addressing the climate crisis. Self-styled “deficit hawks” who claim that reducing our greenhouse emissions would be prohibitively expensive are essentially telling us that prevention costs more than cure — a notion both logically absurd and morally bankrupt.
We cannot afford further inaction on climate change.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes denialists idiots media irresponsibility Republicans scientific literacy scientific method
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Year 3, Month 10, Day 15: All Right — From Now On, No More Doctor Nice Guy
The Lincoln Journal-Star tells us about some Nebraska climatologists who are speaking out with one well-projected voice:
A warning sign on the first floor directs people to the basement of Bessey Hall in the event of a tornado.
An open door offers a view of an instructor pointing to a video display of the world’s prime monsoon regions.
Upstairs, on the third floor of his City Campus office, Clinton Rowe is dealing with a less familiar task.
He’s explaining why he and four colleagues decided it was time to go proactive, why they needed to issue a joint public statement on the evidence of increasing climate extremes and the potential for more tornadoes, droughts and floods.
The attention they’re getting for raising the alarm about global warming may have less to do with the side they’re on than with their methods.
In his 26 years at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Rowe can’t remember a time when his department has chosen a similar course toward group activism.
“Have we ever done anything like this? Not that I can think of.”
It’s been two weeks since he and four other NU faculty members from climate and climate-related ranks offered their shared view.
“The time for debate is over,” they said. “The time for action is here.”
In the next few decades, they warned, average temperatures in Nebraska will rise by 4 to 10 degrees. Because of diminished snowpack in the Rocky Mountains, flows in the Platte River will drop and Lake McConaughy could become “a ditch in midsummer.”
Enviro-nazis! Sent October 8:
The traditional language of science is restrained and cautious, which is a hindrance for climatologists when it comes to spreading the word about global warming and the dangers it poses to America and the world. When climate experts shout, it’s with careful statements using phrases like “statistically significant relationship” and “robust correlation,” which, while accurate, lack the emotional force necessary to galvanize ordinary citizens into action.
Meanwhile, those who oppose responsible climate and energy policies feel free to misrepresent the science and engage in character assassination, as witness the blizzard of obloquy hurled at Dr. Michael Mann and others who have stood up for the future of our species and our civilization. In the aftermath of their forceful statement on the climate crisis, let’s hope Dr. Clinton Rowe and his colleagues at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln receive respect and gratitude from their fellow citizens, rather than the ignorance and mockery we’ve come to expect from the anti-science politicians of the GOP and their enablers in the print and broadcast media.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes cap and trade denialists idiots Republicans
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Year 3, Month 10, Day 14: I Thought Love Was Only True In Fairy Tales
The Helena Independent-Record (MT) notes incumbent Senator Jon Tester’s support for a tepid cap-and-trade approach, and contrasts it with that of his challenger, a typical Republican denialist twit named Denny Rehberg:
Last week we received a giant colorful postcard from Montana’s Republican Party — no mention of what Congressman Denny Rehberg has done — (What has he done?), but of Sen. Jon Tester supporting cap and trade. Rehberg’s not supporting sensible climate solutions terrifies me.
What is cap and trade? Sightline Institute says: “cap” is a legal limit on the quantity of greenhouse gases that a region can emit each year and “trade” means that companies may swap among themselves the … permits to emit greenhouse gases … Cap and trade commits us to responsible limits on global warming emissions and gradually steps down those limits … Setting commonsense rules, cap and trade sparks the competitiveness and ingenuity of the marketplace to reduce emissions as smoothly, efficiently and cost-effectively as possible.
Peter Pan governance — just clap your hands! Sent October 7:
While a “cap and trade” system for reducing carbon dioxide emissions is a relatively weak approach to the threat of global climate change, Senator Tester’s support for this policy has the advantage of being based on scientific reality rather than the ideologically-driven wishful thinking so prevalent among modern-day Republican politicians and pundits. Their approach to the problems of contemporary society is to assert that when a fact clashes with one’s wishes or preconceptions, the problem lies with the fact, not the preconceptions — an inexcusably irresponsible attitude. While a Southern GOP congressman who believes that modern physics is of Satanic origin is pretty hilarious, science-denial isn’t very funny when it comes to climate change.
The metastasizing greenhouse effect threatens American agriculture, infrastructure, and public health systems, as well as the health of our planet. Rejecting scientific evidence because it’s ideologically inconvenient (or because it threatens the profits of your biggest campaign donors) should immediately disqualify any candidate for public office.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: denialism illness media irresponsibility plagues Republican obstructionism
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Year 3, Month 10, Day 13: Fever!
Charlie Pierce normally writes about politics for Esquire, but he noticed that Hantavirus was showing up in a place it wasn’t expected. You should read the whole piece:
Just to get your weekend off to a happy start, there seems to be an outbreak of the hantavirus in Yosemite, and folks aren’t entirely sure that it will stay there, or that it will be the only little biological horror to visit these shores.
Sent October 6:
The news that climate change has triggered outbreaks of Hantavirus in Yosemite National Park should surprise no one; it is common epidemiological knowledge that a major illness brings minor ones in its wake. The metastasizing greenhouse effect is such an illness, crippling the planetary “immune system” that has allowed both an effulgent biodiversity and a richly complex human civilization to flourish over the past few tens of thousands of years.
Look around carefully and you’ll find similar “sicknesses” at different levels of scale throughout Earth’s interdependent ecologies. Whether it’s acidified oceans, beetle-infested forests, tropical diseases in New England, droughts in Iowa, floods in Pakistan, or methane bubbling from the surface of the Arctic ocean, these manifestations of a grave underlying condition can no longer be denied or ignored.
The widespread rejection of scientific reality in American society is a symptom of another sort, for major illness is often accompanied by cognitive impairment and disorientation. Is not the climate-change denial pervading our media and politics just such a systemic delirium?
Warren Senders
environment Politics: corporate irresponsibility media irresponsibility
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Year 3, Month 10, Day 12: Whenever I Want You, All I Have To Do Is Dream…
U.S. News and World Report asks “Why have Obama and Romney ignored global warming?”:
For an hour and a half Wednesday, Mitt Romney and Barack Obama talked about jobs, the economy, and more jobs—but they didn’t touch on the environment or climate change. A new study suggests maybe they should have: Undecided voters seem to care about global warming as much as Democrats do.
With polls showing a dead heat in the race to woo independent voters and neither candidate doing a great job on climate change (a prominent climatologist told the San Francisco Chronicle earlier this week that “the silence of Gov. Romney and President Obama on climate change is deafening”), could the issue break the tie?
According to a poll by Yale and George Mason Universities, 80 percent of undecided voters believe that global warming is happening and only 3 percent actively deny it. Two thirds of undecided voters say the federal government should do more to address climate change, and 61 percent say it’s an important issue they consider when voting for president.
Both candidates have already acknowledged they believe the earth is getting warmer and that humans are causing it, but neither has campaigned much on the issue. Ed Maibach, the George Mason professor behind the poll, says it’s about time they started to.
About time, indeed. Sent October 5:
The candidates’ extraordinary reluctance to offer the issue of climate change anything more substantial than snarky remarks or cameo appearances is a distressing reminder of the degree to which the interests of fossil fuel corporations coincide with those of the American media establishment. Any American politician who correctly notes that the threat posed by (for example) an expanding budget deficit is miniscule compared to that of a rapidly metastasizing greenhouse effect would be immediately pilloried and ridiculed by print and broadcast journalists, as witness the irresponsible treatment meted out to Al Gore over the past decade.
But these corporate interests’ slavish devotion to the bottom line is ultimately self-defeating. A short-term focus on quarterly profits occludes the key fact of the climate crisis: unless we address the problem both rapidly and responsibly, none of the other issues currently commanding the attention of our media and political establishments will matter.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: denialists economics greenhouse effect Renewable Energy
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Year 3, Month 10, Day 11: Change Is Gonna Come
The Des Moines Register offers an op-ed titled: “Climate Change Is About Jobs And The Economy.” Indeed:
Climate chaos is not a future threat. It’s real, it’s here today, and it’s causing misery in Iowa. Left unchecked, it will get worse.
Iowa is ground central for climate change. Almost 60 percent of the state is in extreme drought, with 80 percent of its soils moisture deficient. Nearly three quarters of the corn crop is threatened, driving the price from $5.50 a bushel last year to over $8.
If food prices climb as predicted, a family of four will spend $600 more next year to buy food.
Hot enough for you? From rivers of dead fish to dry wells, Iowans are experiencing firsthand why America’s decade of ignoring climate science has been a horrible mistake. Both the International Energy Agency and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development warn that unless we implement energy saving practices immediately we will, perhaps as early as 2017, lock in 6 degrees Celsius warming.
The impacts Iowa is experiencing now have come from a 1.5 degree warming. Unless Iowa acts to capture the green economy, it faces a grim prospect, both from the weather and from an economy strangled by its fossil fuel past.
Those old chestnuts are rattling around in my brain these days. Sent October 4:
When it comes to climate change, the old saying is really true: an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Once the greenhouse effect has accelerated, we won’t have very many options left — and the choices will range from devastatingly expensive to simply devastating. To be sure, addressing the aftereffects of our past century’s worth of fossil-fuel consumption won’t be cheap — but it’s going to be a heck of a lot cheaper if we start right away. Waiting until climate change intensifies to the point that its effects are inescapable and undeniable is like delaying therapy until the tumor becomes malignant.
Self-styled “skeptics” who deny the work of the international climate science community are doing America, and the world, a grave disservice. On environmental, humanitarian, and economic grounds, a robust and comprehensive strategy for mitigating the effects of global warming is the right thing to do.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: agriculture fishing greenhouse effect unintended consequences
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Year 3, Month 10, Day 10: You Can’t Tuna Fish…
The Minneapolis Star-Tribune cites a report from the LA Times that as the oceans change, fish are shrinking:
It’s not just fish populations shrinking, according to a new study. Fish themselves will be much smaller within a few decades.
Global warming linked to greenhouse-gas emissions will cause the body weight of more than 600 types of marine fish to dwindle up to 24% between 2000 and 2050, according to a report in the journal Nature Climate Change.
Additional factors, such as overfishing and pollution, will only make matters worse.
Ultimately, the changes “are expected to have large implications for trophic interactions, ecosystem functions, fisheries and global protein supply,” according to the study.
Aquatic creatures grow depending on the temperature, oxygen and resources available in water, according to researchers. Fish will struggle to breathe and develop as oceans become warmer and less oxygenated.
Rush Limbaugh thinks it’s environmentalists doing it, I’m sure. Sent October 2:
Leave aside that industrialized fishing and exploding human populations have already reduced world fish populations to a fraction of their former numbers. Leave aside that as oceans absorb excess CO2, they acidify, creating hostile conditions for much sea life. The news that climate change is affecting fishes’ physical size may seem surprising, but in a larger context it’s one among many unanticipated consequences proliferating in the wake of rising atmospheric CO2.
As we enter the Anthropocene Era, defined by human intervention in the climate, we’ll be facing a lot of surprises. While some will be pleasant (longer growing seasons in Northern latitudes may make farmers happy), the vast majority point to a more difficult life for our descendants, who may well find themselves gasping for oxygen as oceanic phytoplankton die off in record numbers.
Shrinking fish are just one more dismaying facet of a metastasizing planetary crisis, one we ignore at our peril. How many more such news items must we read before we finally act?
Warren Senders
environment Politics: economics GDP island nations
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Year 3, Month 10, Day 9: Your Lovin’ Give Me Such A Thrill…
The Regina Leader-Post (Canada) reports on a new study highlighting climate change’s likely effect on GDP:
Climate change and pollution related to carbon-dioxide emissions are reducing the world’s gross domestic product by 1.6 per cent a year, about $1.2 trillion US, according to a report.
If unchecked, rising temperatures may cut global GDP by 3.2 per cent a year by 2030, according to the Climate Vulnerability Monitor, from by the Madrid-based humanitarian group DARA and the Climate Vulnerable Forum. As the economic impact of climate change grows, so will the cost of curbing it, according to leaders of developing nations who spoke at an event in New York last week.
“What is possible with $100 billion today will cost 10 times more in 2030,” Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheik Hasina Wajed said during the panel discussion, part of the Climate Week NYC conference. Her country is part of the Climate Vulnerable Forum, a group of developing nations threatened by climate change.
A warming planet will have a disproportionate effect on developing countries, especially low-income states such as Bangladesh that have high population density and fewer natural resources.
Low-lying coastal regions also face the prospect of being submerged as the oceans rise, she said.
This will affect food production and drive up prices, she said. Climate change may cut GDP in some developing nations by as much as 11 per cent by 2030.
I would rather replace capitalism by incremental stages as we figure out a better way to do things. I hope there will be enough time. Sent October 1:
Conservative thinkers routinely claim that energy and emissions policies which address the threat of global climate change would be too expensive — an argument which makes sense as long as you don’t think too hard or too long about the issue. But if there was ever an issue which demanded long and concentrated thought, it’s the complex set of economic and environmental forces involved in our civilization’s response to the burgeoning greenhouse effect. Those who deny the scientific reality of global warming cannot expect that their cost/benefit analyses should be taken seriously.
Conversely, the nations represented in the Climate Vulnerable Forum are the ones on the front line of devastating ecological transformation. Their report on climate change’s impact on GDP offers a globally relevant version of some old home truths: a stitch in time saves nine; an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
If we wait to respond until Earth’s climate has transformed beyond recognition, it will cost our species far more than self-styled “fiscal conservatives” can imagine.
Warren Senders