Education environment Politics: conspiracy theory denialists idiots Richard Hofstadter
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Year 3, Month 2, Day 13: Get A Brain! Morans!
Aw, jeez. These idiots again? Check it out. The NYT:
Across the country, activists with ties to the Tea Party are railing against all sorts of local and state efforts to control sprawl and conserve energy. They brand government action for things like expanding public transportation routes and preserving open space as part of a United Nations-led conspiracy to deny property rights and herd citizens toward cities.
They are showing up at planning meetings to denounce bike lanes on public streets and smart meters on home appliances — efforts they equate to a big-government blueprint against individual rights.
“Down the road, this data will be used against you,” warned one speaker at a recent Roanoke County, Va., Board of Supervisors meeting who turned out with dozens of people opposed to the county’s paying $1,200 in dues to a nonprofit that consults on sustainability issues.
Oy. What can you do with this kind of dreck? Sent February 7:
In the minds of Tea-Partiers, everything is evidence of a conspiracy. If enough people are riding bicycles that municipal governments incorporate bike lanes in street planning, that’s not simple good sense — it’s a conspiracy. If research suggests that informing people about their energy consumption decreases waste, that’s a conspiracy, too. If the accumulated evidence supporting the existence (and threat) of global climate change outweighs that compiled by deniers by a twenty-thousand-to-one ratio, that’s just proof that the scientists are in on it.
Richard Hofstadter’s analysis of the “paranoid style” in American politics — “…heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy” — has never seemed so accurate. Imagine the benefit to our country if these suspicious zealots could stop obsessing about a Socialist New World Order concealed in an innocuous UN memorandum about environmental responsibility, and instead turned their energy towards making a more cooperative, just, and sustainable society.
Warren Senders
environment: denialists media irresponsibility unpredictable weather events
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Year 3, Month 2, Day 12: Warmer Weather Means More Squirrels! Squirrel! Squirrel!
Papers everywhere are reporting on the wacky non-winter most of us have been, um, enjoying. Here’s an account from the Southeast Missourian:
In the Tot Lot, more than a few children horsed around in short sleeves. Families strolled around the lagoon. A laughing toddler — sans coat — chased after a disinterested dog.
A typical spring day at Capaha Park. Except it was February.
The temperature hit 65 degrees in Cape Girardeau on Thursday, setting a record high for Feb. 2, according to the National Weather Service at Paducah, Ky. The service, which has tracked temperatures locally since 1960, said Thursday’s temperature broke the record high of 62 degrees, which happened previously on Feb. 2 in 1964 and 1974.
“This is great,” said Jason Mulholland, who was at the park with his wife and two young sons. “You could almost have shorts on. If I was out running, I would have shorts on.”
February’s milder-than-usual start follows the fifth-warmest January in Cape Girardeau on record, weird weather that has caused the 17th warmest January in Washington, D.C., the third-warmest in Phoenix and the 13th warmest in Ann Arbor, Mich.
Nothin’ to see here, folks. Move along. Move along. Sent February 6:
When reporting on local weather weirdness, it’s essential to avoid any mention of broader regional, national and planetary patterns. The fact that Southeast Missouri’s winter has been several degrees warmer than usual is no reason for alarm. Nor should we be worried that in Massachusetts, the only significant blizzard this winter was in October, or that Yosemite National Park, normally blanketed, has remained essentially snow-free all winter, or that Texas’ ongoing drought has completely dried up portions of the Colorado river. Australia’s deepening flood crisis may have left thousands of people homeless, but that’s over there, not over here.
Really?
While no single weather event can be unequivocally linked to global climate change (science simply doesn’t work that way), climatologists have been telling us for years that the burgeoning greenhouse effect is going to disrupt weather patterns everywhere around the planet. Perhaps it’s time to pay attention to them.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: economic inequities island nations rising sea world court
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Year 3, Month 2, Day 11: I’d Like To Be / Under The Sea
The Pakistani daily “Dawn” runs an article on the plans of island nations to attempt legal pressure on the irresponsible giants:
UNITED NATIONS: Small island nations, whose very existence is threatened by the rising sea levels brought about by global warming, are seeking to take the issue of climate change before the International Court of Justice.
Johnson Toribiong, president of Palau, said Friday his country and other island nations had formed an expert advisory committee to bring the issue before the U.N. General Assembly. That would allow the world court in the Hague to determine the legal ramifications of climate change under international law.
”If 20 years of climate change negotiations have taught us anything, it’s that every state sees climate change differently. For some, it is mainly an economic issue … for others it’s about geopolitics and their past or future place in the global economy, but for us it’s about survival,” Toribiong said.
”Pacific countries are in the red zone, a swell of ocean where waters have risen two or three times higher than anywhere else in the world. That differential might explain why we speak about climate change so urgently and we look to everyone in every corner of the United Nations to find a solution,” he added.
Michael Gerrard, director of the Center for Climate Change Law at Colombia University and a member the advisory committee, said the idea is to have a court determination compelling developed nations to control emissions of the greenhouse gases believed to cause global warming in the absence of an international treaty.
I would loooooove to see that happen. Sent February 5:
The incapacity of the developed nations to address the looming climate crisis would be pathetic if it did not hold such tragic consequences for the rest of the world. Paralyzed by the overwhelming influence of multinational corporations, the United States and its allies are unable to respond even to an obvious emergency like the plight of island nations. It’s a curious irony that even as countries like Palau, Kiribati and the Maldives unflinchingly confront the rising sea levels that may soon submerge them, the industrialized West is drowning, unawares, in a toxic flood of corporate cash and media misinformation.
Eventually, of course, those petrol-paid politicians and their enablers will discover that in the wake of the greenhouse effect, there is no safe harbor. In a sad reversal of John Donne’s maxim, even those living on the economic high ground will learn: in a climate-changed world, every nation is an island.
Warren Senders
environment: denialists idiots media irresponsibility scientific consensus
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Year 3, Month 2, Day 10: We Don’t Do Long-Term. We Only Do Short-Term. Got It?
The Chicago Tribune writes about the epidemic of stupidity among TV weathertrons:
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.
But weather forecasters, many of whom see climate change as a natural, cyclical phenomenon, are split over whether they have a responsibility to educate their viewers on the link between human activity and the change in the Earth’s climates.
Only 19 percent of U.S. meteorologists saw human influences as the sole driver of climate change in a 2011 survey. And some, like the Weather Channel’s founder John Coleman are vocal in their opposition.
“It is the greatest scam in history,” wrote Coleman, one of the first meteorologists to publicly express doubts about climate change, on his blog in 2007. “I am amazed, appalled and highly offended by it. Global Warming; it is a SCAM.”
Jeebus, I hate these people. Sent February 4:
While there are still minor areas of uncertainty remaining in the scientific consensus on planetary climate change, it’s a fair bet that when television weather tycoon John Coleman calls global warming a “scam,” he is really describing his own work, not that of the world’s climatologists. The evidence corroborating humanity’s contribution to the greenhouse effect is overwhelming; as study after study adds to the collective understanding of climate scientists all over the world, the denialists’ position becomes increasingly untenable.
By advocating for improbable conspiracy theories and the views of fringe scientists, celebrity meteorologists undermine their own credibility. The fact that the denialist position is so common in the broadcast world simply demonstrates the corrosive power of big money’s influence in the media. Mr. Coleman’s term “scam” says more about the behavior of the fossil fuel industry and the info-tainment celebrities whose loyalty it has purchased than about scientific reality.
Warren Senders
Education environment Politics: assholes denialists idiots James Hansen reality-based community sapir-whorf hypothesis scientific consensus scientific method
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Year 3, Month 2, Day 9: There Is No Word For That In Our Language
John Monahan writes a nice piece in Modern Times Magazine (AZ) addressing climate change denial, with specific reference to the WSJ flap. The whole piece is well worth your attention.
Feb. 3, 2012 — What a crazy seven days it has been for the climate change debate. Scientists from both sides of the issue took to the Wall Street Journal late last week and early this week to opine on the merits of the issue and what should be done about it.
But that’s just putting it nicely. What really happened is one side said the other was wrong — knowingly in an attempt to hide the truth — in pursuit of riches.
To say it even more bluntly, each said the other was the ‘real’ greedy liar.
The most important bit is the part where he quotes James Hansen, who is, as usual, right:
“Public doubt about the science is not an accident. People profiting from business-as-usual fossil fuel use are waging a campaign to discredit the science. Their campaign is effective because the profiteers have learned how to manipulate democracies for their advantage,” Hansen said. “The scientific method requires objective analysis of all data, stating evidence pro and con, before reaching conclusions. This works well, indeed is necessary, for achieving success in science. But science is now pitted in public debate against the talk-show method, which consists of selective citation of anecdotal bits that support a predetermined position.”
Simply, Hansen is saying corporations are using the scientific method to bolster an argument that has little merit only because it serves their bottom line. He also places blame upon the mainstream media, calling their need for “balance” a means to validate bad science and support corporate positions.
“Today most media, even publicly-supported media, are pressured to balance every climate story with opinions of contrarians, climate change deniers, as if they had equal scientific credibility. Media are dependent on advertising revenue of the fossil fuel industry, and in some cases are owned by people with an interest in continuing business as usual. Fossil fuel profiteers can readily find a few percent of the scientific community to serve as mouthpieces — all scientists practice skepticism, and it is not hard to find some who are out of their area of expertise, who may enjoy being in the public eye, and who are limited in scientific insight and analytic ability,” Hansen wrote.
They have a 500-word limit; I took about 225 to try and tie all these phenomena together. Sent Feb 3:
Climate-change denial is part of a larger problem, one exemplified by the anonymous Bush official who told journalist Ron Suskind, “We’re an empire; we create our own reality,” and ridiculed those who lived in the “reality-based community.” Conservative politicians and electoral strategists appear to believe in a post-modern universe where measurable reality is just another kind of fiction. Examples of this are easy to spot.
The anti-evolution politicians whose claim that “science is just another religion” serves as a rationale for their attempts to introduce creationism into public school science curricula; the runup to the war in Iraq, in which facts were manipulated and cherry-picked to support President Bush’s martial agenda; the legislators in some Southern states who seek to have any mention of slavery simply removed from history books — the list goes on and on.
Climate change denial is by far the most damaging of these delusions. Human science has discovered and illuminated the laws of physics and chemistry, but that doesn’t mean that the “we make our own reality” crowd can apply wishful thinking to the greenhouse effect. Given enough time, American culture could recover from forced creationism, historical revisionism, and clueless warmongering — but if we fail to recognize the imperative need to address climate change, we’re not going to have the chance.
Warren Senders
atheism Education environment Politics: denialists scientific literacy scientific method
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Year 3, Month 2, Day 8: What He Was Doing In My Pajamas, I’ll Never Know
The Tuscaloosa News runs an editorial stating that “Climate Change Should Influence Politics”:
Azaleas are budding and daffodils can be found in full bloom along rural roads around West Alabama. Is that proof of global warming?
Hardly, but that doesn’t mean evidence of sustained, rapid climate change isn’t mounting.
Consider this: Nine of the 10 warmest years in the past century have occurred since the year 2000, according to the NASA Earth Observatory. More of the Arctic Sea is melting.
And now the U.S. Department of Agriculture has changed the map that helps gardeners decide when to plant flowers and which will grow well here. Tuscaloosa, which used to be grouped with much of northern Alabama, now falls in the zone with Mobile.
Even all that isn’t conclusive proof of global warming. No, but the case for climate change has convinced more than 97 percent of scientists actively publishing studies in the field of climatology.
They agree that not only is climate change real, but the rapid rise in temperatures around the world over the past few decades is due to human activity.
Yep. Sent Feb 2:
At the moment, it seems as though science is just about the only element in American public discourse that doesn’t influence politics. Presidential candidates vie with one another for the approval of conservative religious groups, not to mention the various deficit-fixated, abortion-fixated, gay-marriage-fixated ideological factions which have dominated the national conversation for years. Meanwhile, Republican legislators are working overtime to reduce the amount of actual science taught in our country’s science classes, and to reduce the government’s funding of actual scientists who are carrying out research projects crucial to our country’s future.
But has there never been a Presidential “science debate” or anything more than the most anodyne public statements from the candidates about the value of science in our lives — and that’s a tragedy, for scientific method is by far the most accurate and comprehensive way to find out what’s actually happening in the real world — and policies that aren’t reality-based are guaranteed to fail.
And nowhere is this more crucial than in the issue of climate change. The scientific ignorance of our political culture is a disaster in the making.
Warren Senders
Education environment Gardening: agriculture Gardening timescales USDA
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Year 3, Month 2, Day 7: Don’t Forget To Mulch
The Albany Times-Union runs another piece on the USDA hardiness zones:
Last week, the U.S. Department of Agriculture updated its Plant Hardiness Zone Map for the first time since 1990. This is the colorful map that is on the back of most seed packs that helps gardeners match their region’s climate to plants’ climatic tolerances.
The updated map has many new features, including finer-scale resolution and more interactive technology such as the ability to view specific regions by ZIP code. However, the most notable change is a nationwide shift in planting zones to reflect how climate change is altering our climate and plant-growing regions. The vast majority of the country finds itself in a warmer zone, including large areas of the Capital Region and the rest of New York.
This update makes concrete what many researchers have been saying for some time: that climate change is not just the province of the future.
I have a lot to do this evening, so I just re-used another letter on the same subject — rearranged all the words, used synonyms as appropriate, etc., etc., etc. Sent February 1:
The new map of hardiness zones from the USDA will probably make some gardeners very happy. What’s not to like about locally-grown mangos in Minnesota? But as we change our seed orders to reflect these new climatic norms, we need to remember that they’re only temporary benefits — and they aren’t unmixed blessings.
For every new tropical fruit or vegetable we can grow, we’ll lose some of the resilience and interconnectedness of our local and regional ecosystems. Beneficial flora and fauna may suffer from changing weather conditions or the introduction of invasive insects and plants from hotter regions (perhaps the most genuinely dangerous class of illegal immigrant).
The agricultural infrastructure which provides our corn and wheat is extremely vulnerable to the epiphenomena of the rapidly burgeoning greenhouse effect. The USDA’s map makes for pleasant contemplation in the short run — but the longer-term picture is not a pretty one.
Warren Senders
environment: assholes capitalism climate science denialists idiots Wall Street Journal
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Year 3, Month 2, Day 6: Hats Back On, Gentlemen.
Behold! An idiot. Meet James “Smokey” Shott:
— — More bad news for environmental alarmists came last week when 16 more well-known and well-respected scientists signed on to a Wall Street Journal article titled “No Need to Panic About Global Warming: There’s no compelling scientific argument for drastic action to ‘decarbonize’ the world’s economy,” adding their names to a large and growing list of scientists opposing manmade climate change dogma.
This one was fun. Sent January 31:
“Smokey” Shott tells us that the established scientific foundation of global climate change has been dealt a terrible blow — a double blow, at that. How? First, he notes a piece just published in the Wall Street Journal criticizing the broad scientific consensus on climate change — and written by 16 (sixteen! count ’em!) scientists and engineers (almost none with actual climate science backgrounds). Omitted from his report is the fact that six of the Journal’s signatories have been linked to fossil-fuel interests, or that when 225 (two hundred and twenty-five! count ’em!) genuine climatologists submitted a paper providing scientific facts and analysis of the question, they were rejected out of hand by the WSJ (the paper was eventually published in Science Magazine).
And then Mr. Shott delivers what he clearly believes to be the coup de grace: an article from the UK’s Daily Mail, a paper notorious for its sensationalist, factually-challenged journalism. Quoting “fringe” scientists propounding a thoroughly-debunked “global cooling” hypothesis, the article has already attracted widespread derision in scientific circles.
Getting science from the WSJ is as silly as getting investment advice from a climatology journal. Getting science from the Daily Mail, on the other hand, is as silly as looking for celebrity gossip in the pages of “Global Biogeochemical Cycles.”
Warren Senders
environment Politics: corporate irresponsibility economic inequities economic justice greed scientific consensus
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Year 3, Month 2, Day 5: It’s All About The Benjamins
The Bangor Daily News’ Dana Wilde talks about why Climate Change is real:
Several readers, with helpful intentions I’m sure, reassured me earlier this month with a few pats on the head that climate change, if it’s even happening, is a natural occurrence that’s nothing to do with us and moreover, to jog me out of naivete, that global warming is a hoax. Don’t worry, be happy, we were sagely advised in the 1980s.
Here are some of the points I’ve heard that are meant to reassure me there’s no need to worry about climate change or global warming:
• It still gets cold in winter.
• Earth’s climate has always changed and always will change.
• Global warming is just a theory.
• There is no proof the exhaust from my car hurts anything.
• Scientists are often wrong.
• Scientists fake climate research findings.
• Global warming is not mentioned in the Bible.
• There was no Y2K disaster.
The problem I have with these arguments is that I believe in the existence of computers, cellphones, penicillin, bone marrow transplants and internal combustion engines. I also believe in photosynthesis, DNA, infrared light, blood types, viruses, the theory of relativity and the vibration A440, even though I have never seen any of these actual items or processes with my eyes.
What I mean by this is that the same method of study — namely, what we call “the scientific method” — led to microchips, life-saving chemistry, instant communication and so on. So that method has a certain high reliability. It has been applied to Earth’s climate, and so the findings of climatologists are very likely to be in the same range of reliability.
Now, if the climatologists were disagreeing about the findings, then we would have a situation where the research was incomplete, the matter was not fully understood and global warming would be “just a theory.” In other words, the scientists would not yet be sure whether the proposed explanation was completely accurate to reality or not. Scientists are often wrong about their theories. That’s why they keep compiling, analyzing and checking data until they agree on an accurate explanation.
It’s a good piece. And the comments are mostly full of stupid (don’t these trolls have anything better to do? Or would they all fail Turing tests?). I felt the time was ripe for an OWS-style letter. Sent January 30:
Cui bono? Once conservative media outlets and their allies in politics ginned up a “controversy” about the causes and severity of global climate change, it is appropriate to ask: who benefits from increased support of climate science? And, conversely, who benefits from delay and obfuscation?
On the one hand, climatologists in small teams, angling for (at most) a few million dollars to carry out complex research projects. On the other hand, companies like Exxon, which reported profits of 10.6 billion in the first quarter of 2011 — over two thousand times more than a five-million dollar grant for a typical climate study carried out over several years. Rex Tillerson, Exxon’s CEO, received twenty-nine million dollars last year, over three hundred times the average salary of a climate scientist.
Big oil’s obscene profits won’t survive once America changes its energy economy. No wonder they want to confuse the subject as much as possible.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes hippie-punching idiots Republican obstructionism Republicans
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Year 3, Month 2, Day 4: Nattering Nitwits of Know-Nothingism
The Daily Advertiser (Lafayette, LA) runs another in a series of rueful analyses from former Republicans who’ve broken with the batshit crazies now running their party:
The abuse directed at climate researchers sheds light on a tragic political truth — a cancer is consuming the soul of American conservatism. Conservatism is taking on many of the hallmarks of a cult — one in which information and doctrine are received, without question, from recognized authority figures or sources, and in which dissent cannot be tolerated. The conservative cult views the political process in apocalyptic terms, and sees its opponents as demonically evil. Sadly, climate denial is a key pillar in this cult’s ideology.
Under these circumstances, conservative scientists like Hayhoe and Emanuel are particularly dangerous. They demonstrate that there isn’t a fundamental incongruity between religious faith, or conservatism, and accepting the science behind AGW. They are heretics, calling to other conservatives from beyond the walls of the cult compound. And that’s a mortal threat to the climate deniers, and perhaps to the very existence of the cult itself.
In the end, the bullying and abuse of scientists is a sign of growing desperation. The cult must be defended, by any means. Dissenters must be intimidated into silence. With everything else against them, conservative climate deniers have only one option left – it’s time to get personal, and pound.
So the GOP’s full of crazy, huh? Gosh! Wouldn’t have expected that. Wonder why? Sent January 29:
Michael Stafford’s analysis of Republican cultishness (with particular reference to climate change denial) is exactly accurate. The exclusive reliance on received knowledge, the glib dismissal of ideologically inconvenient facts, the Manichaean mindset in which subtlety is inconceivable and compromise impossible — behold the public face of American conservatism today!
But how did the GOP turn into an apocalyptic, willfully ignorant mob? Mr. Stafford, a former party official, is readier to deplore his erstwhile compatriots’ behavior than to acknowledge the party’s complicity in its own degradation.
It’s undeniable: conservative politicians have long cultivated a virulent strain of electorally useful anti-intellectualism. Demagogues have been elected all over America by railing against “pointy-headed professors”, and “so-called experts.”
Who’d have thought that fifty years spent attacking intelligence, reason and scientific expertise would build an ignorant, unreasonable, and scientifically incompetent constituency? A few liberal intellectuals, perhaps — but their opinions didn’t count. Buncha damned hippies!
Warren Senders