atheism Education environment Politics: armageddon cowering before the apocalypse denialists idiots theology
by Warren
leave a comment
Meta
SiteMeter
Brighter Planet
Year 3, Month 3, Day 21: Only When The Last Tree Has Been Cut Down…
The Tuscon Sentinel notes the frothy mixture of god-bothering and just plain dumb that makes up Senator Santorum’s public statements:
Rick Santorum calls global warming a “hoax.” If he were a scientist, he would be in a small minority.
“The dangers of carbon dioxide? Tell that to a plant, how dangerous carbon dioxide is,” Santorum said at the Gulf Coast Energy Summit in Biloxi, Miss., on March 12. He made similar comments in early February in Colorado Springs, Colo., saying that global warming was a “hoax” and that “man-made global warming” and proposed remedies were “bogus.”
Santorum isn’t the only climate change skeptic, but skeptics are rare among scientists who actually study the climate. A paper published in 2010 by the National Academy of Sciences found that 97 percent to 98 percent of climate researchers “most actively publishing in the field” agreed that climate change was occurring.
To my knowledge, no journalist has yet asked Santorum about his views on apocalypse. It would be a very interesting question…although we already know the answer. Sent March 15:
Just when we thought the 2012 election couldn’t get any more idiotic, we’re treated to Rick Santorum’s recent remarks on climate change. Judging from the former Pennsylvania senator’s eager rejection of scientific research, his backers must be terribly nostalgic for the good old days…when the sun revolved around the earth.
Mr. Santorum’s constituents are ready to ignore the science of global warming for two reasons. First, because they’ve been lied to and manipulated by a group of cynical, profit-driven corporate entities; second, because their collective eagerness for a Biblical Armageddon renders irrelevant any notion of planetary long-term thinking. Ronald Reagan’s Interior Secretary, James Watt, famously remarked, “We don’t have to protect the environment — the Second Coming is at hand.” Mr. Santorum’s theologically-driven ignorance of basic science shows that he’s cut from the same cloth.
Any politician this anxious for apocalypse should never be entrusted with the levers of power.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes denialism Greenland ice melt media irresponsibility Republican obstructionism
by Warren
leave a comment
Meta
SiteMeter
Brighter Planet
Year 3, Month 3, Day 20: Dry Ice! We’ll Sprinkle Dry Ice All Around, And It’ll Freeze Everything Up Again!
The Boston Herald apparently had an empty spot on one of their pages, so they ran an article about climate change and ice melt:
LOS ANGELES — The Greenland ice sheet has a lower melting point than previously thought, with scientists saying not only that it could melt completely at a lower temperature than once believed, but also that the melting process could soon become irreversible.
“Once the process of melting the ice begins, it is very hard for it to change course even if we can lower temperatures in the future,” Alex Robertson, lead author of a new study, said in an interview by email with the Los Angeles Times on Monday.
“So even though melting the whole ice sheet could take a really long time, we will essentially decide the fate of Greenland within the next century.”
The study was published Sunday in Nature Climate Change.
How to criticize them without hurting their fee-fees? Sent March 14:
In a culture dominated by scandals du jour and the rapid-fire programming of a 24-hour news cycle, it’s no surprise that our nation seems to have a severe case of Attention Deficit Disorder. When electoral politics is carried out in sound bites and bumper-sticker slogans, our civilization’s long-term future is invariably trivialized.
Nowhere is this more problematic than in the intersection of scientific research and public policy. By its nature, science requires rigor, attentiveness, and patience — three qualities notably lacking in our political and media environments. The most recent study on the likely fate of the Greenland ice sheet is the result of many years of concentrated study and inquiry — and its findings likewise require more than superficial attention. Politicians and pundits, however, will do their best to ignore its implications for our nation and our planet; it’s far, far easier just to mock what you don’t understand.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: ice melt rising sea levels
by Warren
leave a comment
Meta
SiteMeter
Brighter Planet
Year 3, Month 3, Day 19: Just Look At The Schmuck On That Camel!
The Broward South Beach New Times (FL) wonders about the possibility of the Southern end of their state going underwater:
A giant sheet of ice that covers most of Greenland might be a serious problem for South Florida in a few hundred or few thousand years, give or take.
A new study in Nature Climate Change warns that a 1.6 degree Celsius jump in global temperatures could completely melt Greenland’s ice sheet.
That’s terrible because we’re talking about ice that’s on land — not in the ocean — meaning that sea levels could rise dramatically if the sheet were to vanish.
Bloomberg reports that “the United Nations estimates the Greenland ice sheet contains enough water to raise global sea levels by about seven meters (23 feet), threatening coastal cities from New York to London and Bangkok. Even so, the researchers said it could take thousands of years for the entire sheet to melt.”
Frederick Bloetscher, an engineering professor at Florida Atlantic University, tells New Times that a mere three-foot rise in global sea levels would permanently flood entire areas of western Broward County.
But on the other hand, as one of their commenters has helpfully pointed out, Al Gore.
Sent March 13:
While the prospect of a submerged South Florida is disturbing enough, the fact is that rising sea levels will be taking entire nations off the map; island states in Oceania are already making plans to move their entire populations elsewhere in the likely event that their homelands are lost beneath the waves.
We humans only rarely think beyond a century ahead; far more often our imaginations cannot leap more than a few years into the future. Because of this, the multi-generational threat posed by melting ice in Greenland hardly seems significant compared with more immediate concerns: jobs, wars, health care, civil rights.
But if the warming of the world’s atmosphere continues to accelerate, all of these issues will be rendered irrelevant. If we fail to address the accelerating greenhouse effect, our descendants will have far graver concerns than the petty political dramas that now occupy us so intensely.
Warren Senders
environment: denialists Great Lakes ice loss idiots
by Warren
leave a comment
Meta
SiteMeter
Brighter Planet
Year 3, Month 3, Day 18: Mother Superior Jumped The Gun
The Albert Lea Tribune (MN) runs an AP story on ice loss in the Great Lakes:
DULUTH — A published report says the amount of ice covering the Great Lakes has declined about 71 percent over the past 40 years, a drop that the lead author partly attributes to climate change.
The report published last month by the American Meteorological Society said only about 5 percent of the Great Lakes surface froze over this year.
“There was a significant downward trend in ice coverage from 1973 to the present for all of the lakes,” according to the study, which appeared in the society’s Journal of Climate.
Researchers determined ice coverage by scanning U.S. Coast Guard reports and satellite images taken from 1973 to 2010. They found that ice coverage was down 88 percent on Lake Ontario and fell 79 percent on Lake Superior. However, the ice in Lake St. Clair, which is between Lakes Erie and Huron, diminished just 37 percent.
The study’s lead researcher is Jia Wang of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration lab in Ann Arbor, Mich. He attributed the decline to several factors, including broad climate change and smaller cyclical climate patterns like El Nino and La Nina.
Sent March 12:
The decline of Great Lakes ice is a local manifestation of a global phenomenon. Everywhere around the planet, people are noticing that, climatically speaking, things ain’t what they used to be. Regions that depend on glacial ice melt for their water supplies are facing increasingly arid futures, while the residents of island countries are making plans to evacuate their homelands entirely as rising seas turn sovereign nations into historical footnotes.
But America is unique among nations in the number of its citizens who deny the existence of climate change entirely. No mountain of evidence can convince Rush Limbaugh’s followers that the greenhouse effect’s reality is going to disrupt their lives in unimaginably complex ways.
One can sympathize with their reluctance to accept the facts of global warming (who looks forward to planetary catastrophe?), but future generations on the shores of an ice-free Lake Ontario will not remember the denialists kindly.
Warren Senders
Education environment: denialists Heartland Institute Peter Gleick
by Warren
leave a comment
Meta
SiteMeter
Brighter Planet
Year 3, Month 3, Day 17: I Like Gleick
More on Gleick, this time reprinted from the WaPo in a suburban Chicago paper, the Daily Herald:
Everybody talks about the weather, as Mark Twain is famously quoted as saying, but nobody does anything about it.Many climate researchers are no longer following that adage, noted Michael McPhaden, president of the American Geophysical Union. “Scientists today, they don’t just want to talk about it. They want to do something about it,” he said in an interview. “We’re the trustees of information which, in many ways, is of critical benefit to society.”
Some researchers are taking on a greater advocacy role to confront what many of them consider an existential crisis. But this strategy carries inherent risks, since scientists’ influence stems from the public perception that their credibility is beyond reproach.
That’s why many in the scientific community recoiled when Peter Gleick, a respected hydrologist, admitted he had tricked the Heartland Institute, a free-market think tank that questions whether human activity contributes to global warming. “Integrity is the source of every power and influence we have as scientists,” said Peter Frumhoff, director of science and policy at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “We don’t have the power to make laws, or run the economy.”
Thanks to DK diarist jamess, whose piece gave me the frame for this letter, sent March 11:
Given Heartland Institute’s previous disregard for the privacy of other people’s communications, it should be surprising to hear their howls of outrage after their defenses were penetrated and their internal documents released to the public. It was just two years ago that Heartland published illegally-obtained emails from the University of East Anglia — setting off “Climategate,” a non-scandal that occupied media attention and confused public discussion before being resolved and forgotten.
Let’s compare “Denialgate” with “Climategate,” shall we? First: while the hacker who stole the East Anglia documents has never come forward, we know who got Heartland’s documents: Peter Gleick (who’s paying a significant professional penalty for his deed). Second: multiple independent investigations confirmed the innocence and the integrity of the UEA climatologists… but to believe that any such study of Heartland’s work on climate change would similarly vindicate either their science or their ethics would be breathtakingly naive.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: corporate irresponsibility denialists Kiribati rising sea levels
by Warren
leave a comment
Meta
SiteMeter
Brighter Planet
Year 3, Month 3, Day 16: Octopus’ Garden Edition
Reprinting the Kiribati story in the New York Daily News:
Tong has been considering other unusual options to combat climate change, including shoring up some Kiribati islands with sea walls and even building a floating island. He said this week that the latter option would likely prove too expensive, but that he hopes reinforcing some islands will ensure that Kiribati continues to exist in some form even in a worst-case scenario.
“We’re trying to secure the future of our people,” he said. “The international community needs to be addressing this problem more.”
Tong said he hopes that the Fiji land will represent just one of several options for relocating people. He pointed out that the land is three times larger than the atoll of Tarawa, currently home to more than half of Kiribati’s population.
Although like much of the Pacific, Kiribati is poor — its annual GDP per person is just $1,600 — Tong said the country has plenty of foreign reserves to draw from for the land purchase. The money, he said, comes from phosphate mining on the archipelago in the 1970s.
I’d love to see a floating island. Sent March 10:
No doubt it’s hard for Americans to be overly concerned with the impending disappearance of the Pacific nation of Kiribati. With a quarter the population of Staten Island, the tiny state is to all intents and purposes statistically nonexistent in the larger sphere of international relations.
But the plight of Kiribati deserves our attention and concern. As a poor country with a negligible carbon footprint, it has contributed nothing to the accelerating consumption of fossil fuels that now endangers its existence; as a nation on the front lines of climate change, it offers us a preview of the dangerous times ahead.
While neighboring Fiji may be able to supply the necessary acreage for a hundred thousand climate refugees to rebuild their lives, the tragedy of a homeland lost beneath the rising sea is not something we in the industrialized world should ignore. There are no climate-change denialists in Kiribati.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: climate refugees rising ocean levels
by Warren
leave a comment
Meta
SiteMeter
Brighter Planet
Year 3, Month 3, Day 15: Any Port In A Storm, Right?
USA Today gives us this story, of the Kiribatians who are planning ahead:
Fearing that climate change could wipe out their entire Pacific archipelago, the leaders of Kiribati are considering an unusual backup plan: moving the populace to Fiji.
Kiribati President Anote Tong told the Associated Press on Friday that his Cabinet this week endorsed a plan to buy nearly 6,000 acres on Fiji’s main island, Viti Levu. He said the fertile land, being sold by a church group for about $9.6 million, could be insurance for Kiribati’s entire population of 103,000, though he hopes it will never be necessary for everyone to leave.
“We would hope not to put everyone on one piece of land, but if it became absolutely necessary, yes, we could do it,” Tong said. “It wouldn’t be for me, personally, but would apply more to a younger generation. For them, moving won’t be a matter of choice. It’s basically going to be a matter of survival.”
Kiribati, which straddles the equator near the international date line, has found itself at the leading edge of the debate on climate change because many of its atolls rise just a few feet above sea level.
Naturally, their carbon footprint is utterly negligible. Sent March 9:
When rising ocean levels make Kiribati a danger zone, and the island nation’s population moves en masse to Fiji, will they all become Fijian citizens? Will Fiji donate a small fraction of its total area to the climate refugees, allowing them to re-establish a sovereign state? And for that matter, what’s going to happen to Fiji as climate change keeps melting polar ice over the next century? Given that poor nations contribute hardly anything to the greenhouse emissions that have triggered their predicament, should the industrialized nations take responsibility for the damage they’ve caused?
These questions are novel enough to us now, but the coming decades in a climatically transformed world are going to alter international relationships in new and complex ways. At some point, the world community must realize that the options available to Kiribati’s citizens don’t scale upward; there’s no “Planet B” where we can all find refuge.
Warren Senders
Year 3, Month 3, Day 14: And Twin Peruvian Midgets In Thigh-High Leather Boots….
Well, this is a novel argument. According to the Boulder (CO) Weekly’s Paul Danish, since our children’s children’s children’s…..children will have gotten used to catastrophic post-greenhouse meltdown conditions, there’s no reason to do a damned thing:
There is, of course, no other rational reason for attempting to reduce atmospheric CO2 levels. That’s because if we stopped emitting CO2 tomorrow, it will be two or three centuries before atmospheric CO2 began to drop. Like it or not, the planet is going to keep getting warmer for centuries just on the strength of the CO2 that’s been released up to now. Today’s level of global warming, and then some, is a done deal, yea unto the seventh generation.
So the only reason to reduce our carbon footprint today is the hope that the eighth generation will get something out of it — to do the right thing for posterity, in other words.
Too bad the eighth generation isn’t going to see it that way.
When that glorious day finally arrives when CO2, temperatures and sea level all begin to fall, the eighth generation will be angry beyond belief. They will curse our names and piss on our graves.
The reason why the advent of the global cooling will not be met with huzzas and hosannas is that the eighth generation will have adapted to global warming. Embraced the suck. Learned to live with it. More than learned to live with it. Learned to thrive in it. Learned to thrive because of it.
And they will be horrified by the prospect of having to re-adapt to a colder world, just as we would be horrified by the the prospect of having to re-adapt to ice age conditions.
Ohhhhh-kay. My head hurts. Sent March 8:
It’s tempting to think we clever apes will be able to survive and prosper on a drastically warmed planet. Paul Danish carries this to a surreal apotheosis, stating that should we succeed in slowing the runaway greenhouse effect even slightly, eventually allowing the Earth’s atmosphere to start shedding CO2 and cooling down, our descendants (who will by that time be enjoying life in a climate previously experienced only by dinosaurs) will be enraged at our actions.
By this logic, there is no reason to mitigate any catastrophe, since the survivors (as survivors always do) will adapt to conditions on the ground. But such adaptability demands gradual civilizational changes rather than frantic emergency responses. Humanity will flourish in the coming centuries only if we substitute a sustainable economy for our present consumption-based model; if we don’t start now, our descendants will be too busy struggling for survival to curse our memories.
Warren Senders
environment: birds denialists species loss
by Warren
leave a comment
Meta
SiteMeter
Brighter Planet
Year 3, Month 3, Day 13: The Pelicans In The Coal Mine
The Marin Independent Journal (CA) runs an article on a study detailing the threat posed by climate change to a great many local bird species:
Several bird species in Marin and around the state are at risk because of climate change as the sea level rises and affects habitat, according to a new study.
The brown pelican, western snowy plover and California clapper rail are among the species in Marin that could be affected by changing temperatures, states the report issued by PRBO Conservation Science and the Department of Fish and Game. The study was published last week in the journal PLoS ONE.
The study found that wetland species are more vulnerable than other groups of birds because they are in specialized habitats along bay areas. Those habitats will be threatened as ice caps melt and the sea level rises, which could affect the California black rail, seen along Tomales Bay.
Written in a Boston restaurant close to New England Conservatory; I’m on my way to sing a raga-ized adaptation of “Barbara Allen” at an NEC concert. Sent March 7:
Marin county’s shorebirds are a microcosm of the countless varieties of Earthly life that are threatened by the effects of global warming. Tragically, human beings often seem unable to grasp the gravity of the situation. And no wonder, for what’s needed is a form of wisdom that is in very short supply. Few of us can imagine anything outside our own regional environments, or beyond the timespan of our own limited lives — and climate change is both larger and longer than anything we recognize.
It’s useful to keep this in mind when reading the derisive comments of climate-change denialists, who are increasingly grasping at straws to maintain their locally-based illusions, while the scientific evidence confirming the greenhouse effect’s human origin accumulates. They may use the argument from incredulity (an inability to imagine any human actions affecting the entire planet), the argument from incomprehension (an inadequate grasp of basic science), or the argument from selfishness (unwillingness to give up a convenient and comfortable lifestyle). All the snide put-downs of Al Gore, attempts to resurrect the long-debunked “climategate” non-scandal, cherry-picked temperature measurements, irrelevancies and red herrings — all of these represent failures of imagination, understanding, or morality.
If losing a few species of bird to a changing climate seems no great tragedy, it is because we have chosen to ignore that what is happening in Marin is happening everywhere around the world. Whether we know it or not, our lives are impoverished thereby.
Warren Senders
Education environment: denialists extreme weather idiots
by Warren
leave a comment
Meta
SiteMeter
Brighter Planet
Year 3, Month 3, Day 12: And In Related News…
This letter was prompted by the comments on this article in the (upstate NY) TImes-Herald-Record:
A new report by an environmental advocacy group shows our region has been particularly vulnerable to extreme weather events — driven by what it believes is climate change.
The report, compiled by Environment New York Research and Policy Center, shows our nook of the Northeast has had a high number of federal disaster declarations since 2006.
Numbers from the Federal Emergency Management Agency show Ulster County has had six weather-related federal disaster declarations in the last five years, while Orange County has had five and Sullivan County, four.
Related Stories“Catskill, Hudson Valley, and Mohawk River Valley residents have endured extreme weather beyond the usual cold winters during the last five years,” David VanLuven, director of the Center, said in a statement.
Our region stands out for the amount of federal disaster declarations in the past five years.
I figured I’d write a guide for wanna-be “skeptics.” Sent March 6:
Here’s how to simulate a climate-change denialist’s response to the report linking New York state’s increasingly extreme weather to global warming.
First, assert that the climate has always changed over time, so why worry? Second, note that since the report was sponsored by an environmental group its contents are necessarily suspect. Third, point out that scientists predicted global cooling in the 1970s, so why should their opinions be trusted now? Fourth, claim that the hacked emails from the University of East Anglia show climatologists can’t be trusted. Fifth, raise the specter of a socialist New World Order apparently operated for the enrichment of dastardly tree-huggers. And last but not least, make fun of Al Gore.
Leaving aside the last two absurdities, each of these arguments is simply rebutted. Multiple inquiries absolved the “climategate” scientists from any wrongdoing while confirming their results; a substantial majority of climatologists were in fact predicting global warming in the 1970s; most reports on the environment come from environmental groups (surprise!). Finally, nobody suggests Earth’s climate has never changed — just that if climatic shifts that historically lasted a hundred thousand years are now taking a hundred, that’s not a good sign.
It’s easy.
Warren Senders