environment: climate refugees oceanic acidification oceans plankton whales
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Year 2, Month 7, Day 13: May You Live In Interesting Times…
AMSTERDAM, Netherlands — When a 43-foot gray whale was spotted off the Israeli town of Herzliya last year, scientists came to a startling conclusion: It must have wandered across the normally icebound route above Canada, where warm weather briefly opened a clear channel three years earlier.
On a microscopic level, scientists also have found plankton in the North Atlantic where it had not existed for at least 800,000 years.
This will not end well.
Sent June 27:
As strategic thinkers confront the looming reality of global climate change, they are sounding a warning call to all of us: the planet’s atmosphere is warming, and we’re going to face a growing tide of people whose homes and countries have been rendered unlivable. In the aftermath of the torrential rains, parching droughts, catastrophic wildfires, devastating floods and other extreme weather events long predicted by climatologists as consequences of the greenhouse effect, the world’s poor and unlucky will be uprooted, left with little hope and fewer resources. It seems that among those climate refugees are some of Earth’s largest and smallest creatures — like the gray whale spotted off the coast of Israel, and the unexpected plankton discovered by scientists in the Atlantic. Individually, these reports are just mildly interesting anomalies; seen as part of a larger pattern, they indicate that our strategists have grossly underestimated the dangers we’re facing.
Warren Senders
environment: climate refugees IPSO media irresponsibility oceanic acidification oceans
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Year 2, Month 7, Day 12: Where Is The Sub-Mariner When You Really Need Him?
The ocean is changing, much faster than anyone expected. The SkyValley Chronicle (WA) brings the news:
(NATIONAL) — What does a large gray whale found in the water off an the Israeli town last year have to do with microscopic plankton found recently in the North Atlantic where it had not existed for at least 800,000 years?
Everything, say scientists who now think the whale and the plankton are linked harbingers of a massive migration of species through the Northwest Passage, and a clear and troubling signal of how global warming is affecting animals and plants in the oceans as well as on land.
A new report in MSNBC quotes a scientist in Great Britain as saying the implications of this migration are “enormous,” because a threshold has been crossed — and that alone is an indication of the speed of change that is taking place across the planet because of climate change.
I had no idea it was going to happen this fast.
Sent June 26:
Seen in isolation, each one of these reports seems almost inconsequential. One whale more or less; a few billion plankton where they have no business being — it’s hardly enough to attract our attention, distracted as we are by the latest celebrities du jour. Perhaps that’s a good thing for our short-term mental health; watching the catastrophic breakdown of planetary ecosystems is going to be very stressful. And the most important thing our media can do is to keep us free from any but the most transitory stresses, right?
Ecologies hundreds of thousands of years old are destroyed in a geological eye-blink by the encroachments of our civilization and its waste. Those anomalous whales and plankton are climate refugees, desperately seeking survival in an ocean whose condition is daily more parlous. And they are harbingers of humanity’s future, unless we find the will and the wit to change our ways.
Warren Senders
Year 2, Month 7, Day 11: Put A Cork In It.
The Woodland, California Daily Democrat for June 25 notes that wine-makers in California’s Napa Valley are now forced to take climate change into effect in their planning for future years:
A Napa Valley winemaker last week traversed a steep hillside to reach a 12-foot white weather station that towers above rows of cabernet sauvignon vines absorbing the midmorning sun.
Curiosity drove him to install the relatively inexpensive device in 1995, said Christopher Howell, general manager and winemaker at Cain Vineyard and Winery in the valley’s Spring Mountain region in St. Helena.
But in the years since, its wirelessly relayed data — along with those of 100 like it now operating in the valley — has become crucial as Napa Valley vintners uneasily brace for a changing climate that they’re sure will come.
The region’s wine growers had long heard of melting glaciers and Arctic ice sheets breaking apart in rising global temperatures. During the 20th century, global temperature increased by about 1.33 degrees Fahrenheit, and a U.N. climate panel estimates that, depending upon carbon dioxide emissions, temperatures will rise an additional 2 to 11.5 F by 2100.
“But we shockingly hadn’t connected the dots and said, ‘Oh my, our world is going to change, too,'” Howell said. “We are as anxious about this as we are about the arrival of any new pest or disease.”
How long will it take?
Sent June 25:
For too long our politicians and media have ignored, belittled or mocked the painstaking research of scientific specialists on the world’s climate. By treating the greenhouse effect as a political issue, they’ve polarized the question, making it impossible to discuss the science without ideological interference. The basic facts of global warming have never been in dispute, despite what our televisions would have us believe, and they have been part of climate science for decades; Arctic ice melt as a consequence of increased atmospheric CO2 was predicted in Popular Mechanics magazine — in 1953! Now the window of opportunity is rapidly closing; denialists have squandered forty years and are still intent on making meaningful action on climate all but impossible. Their radical refusal to take responsibility for our civilization’s greenhouse emissions is now bearing fruit, and as the Napa Valley is coming to realize, it’s going to be a bitter vintage indeed.
Warren Senders
environment: capitalism greed predatory capitalism sustainability
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Year 2, Month 7, Day 10: Go Directly To Jail. Do Not Pass Go. That’ll Be Two Hundred Dollars.
Matthew Kahn, a “guest blogger” at the Christian Science Monitor, embodies much that is deplorable in our culture in these paragraphs in a June 24 article titled “Is There A ‘We’ In Climate Change? Or just an ‘I’? “:
How will individuals, as moms and dads, as consumers, choose to live our lives given the world we have unintentionally created by producing so much GHG emissions? Vice President Gore embraces a “collective” solution that “we” must band together.
A more realistic vision is that people will differ with respect to their ability and willingness to “perceive important and complex realities”. Those who do have these skills will be more likely to thrive in the tough days ahead and they are likely to make $ as entrepreneurs as they anticipate the others’ future suffering.
Well, by Bald-headed Christ, that sounds pretty un-Christian to me. Unless you’re talking about the modern Corporate Jeebus, in which case it’s entirely consistent with what I’ve observed.
Sent June 24:
Matthew Kahn’s response to Al Gore is built around an erroneous framing. Rejecting the former VP’s suggestion that the struggle against global warming requires collective action, Mr. Kahn offers the reassuring thought that people with better survival skills and adaptive capability are “more likely to thrive in the tough days ahead,” and furthermore, can make substantial profits from the suffering of others! Apparently the preservation of thousands of years’ worth of culture is an inadequate motivator; to persuade people to take climate change seriously, they need to know there’s money to be made and suckers to be fleeced!
Effective responses to climate change must be both individual and collective, and greed shouldn’t be part of the recipe. Remember the filling station owner who tripled his prices after 9/11? There’s an example of individual entrepreneurship for you; such attempts to exploit others’ misfortune exemplify the worst aspects of our shared humanity.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: Al Gore Barack Obama corporate irresponsibility media irresponsibility
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Year 2, Month 7, Day 9: Squirrel!
The June 23 Boston Globe reports on the “Al Gore was mean to Obama” kerfuffle:
In a 7,000-word essay posted online yesterday by Rolling Stone magazine, Gore said the president hasn’t stood up for “bold action’’ on the problem and has done little to move the country forward since he replaced Republican George W. Bush.
Bush infuriated environmentalists by resisting mandatory controls on the pollution blamed for climate change, despite overwhelming scientific evidence that the burning of fossil fuels is at least partly responsible. The scientific case has only gotten stronger since, Gore argues, but Obama has not used it to force significant change.
“Obama has never presented to the American people the magnitude of the climate crisis,’’ Gore said. “He has not defended the science against the ongoing withering and dishonest attacks. Nor has he provided a presidential venue for the scientific community . . . to bring the reality of the science before the public.’’
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sent June 23:
While it makes excellent headlines when one important Democrat says mean things about another, the real story in Al Gore’s words is deeper and far more important. The Obama administration’s regrettable timidity and incrementalism on environmental and energy issues is merely symptomatic of a more pervasive problem which Mr. Gore addressed directly in his recent article in Rolling Stone. As long as our news media treat science like political gamesmanship, reporting on climate change will continue to distort the facts and mislead the public. And as long as our politicians treat scientific ignorance and innumeracy as a virtue, our policies will reflect no reality beyond superficial electoral exigencies. While Mr. Obama and his team certainly need to be doing more to combat the gravest threat human civilization has faced in millennia, the blame for our inaction belongs to the corporate forces which control both our politicians and our communications.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: Al Gore Barack Obama denialists idiots media irresponsibility Republican obstructionism
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Year 2, Month 7, Day 8: Like Asphyxiating Fish In A Barrel
More on Gore, from the June 22 Seattle Post-Intelligencer:
Al Gore has gone public with his complaints about President Barack Obama’s environmental record and leadership on climate change – legitimizing a groundswell of grumbling from the left and throwing open the door for more of the same.
(snip)
It’s bad news for the White House – especially coming on the heels of a new poll showing that only 30 percent of Americans say they definitely plan to vote for Obama in 2012.
“President Obama has never presented to the American people the magnitude of the climate crisis,” the former vice president wrote in a 7,000-word essay for Rolling Stone. “He has simply not made the case for action. He has not defended the science against the ongoing, withering and dishonest attacks. Nor has he provided a presidential venue for the scientific community – including our own National Academy – to bring the reality of the science before the public.”
Sent June 22:
While Al Gore’s critique of President Obama makes excellent headlines, the real problem lies elsewhere — in the irresponsibility of politicians and corporate forces which place the well-being of the world’s corporations above that of the world’s people. The readiness of our elected representatives to ignore actual scientific expertise in favor of bizarre conspiracy theories is a symptom of the extent to which the fossil-fuel sector exerts control over our government; the readiness of our media to play a specious game of false equivalency in which every worried climatologist is “balanced” by a paid shill for Big Oil is likewise a symptom of that industry’s influence on our print and broadcast outlets. With rapidly deteriorating oceans, melting icecaps, worldwide outbreaks of extreme weather and catastrophe looming on the horizon, it’s time for politicians, media and corporations to get to work on something more important than protecting profit margins. Protecting us.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: Al Gore Barack Obama corporate irresponsibility
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Year 2, Month 7, Day 7: There’ll Be One Guy Left, But He’ll Be VERY RICH.
The New York Times reports on Al Gore’s June 21 article in Rolling Stone, in which he criticizes Obama on climate:
In the 7,000-word article in Rolling Stone, Mr. Gore says that Mr. Obama clearly understands the threat to the planet posed by global warming and that he has appointed a number of qualified and committed advocates to key positions.But Mr. Gore charges that in the face of well-financed attacks from fossil fuel industries and denial and delay from Republicans in Congress, Mr. Obama has failed to act decisively to alter the nation’s policies on climate change and energy.
Sent June 22:
The contrast is striking: whereas his predecessor was an intellectually lazy faux cowboy, Mr. Obama is a thoughtful, scientifically literate incrementalist. But there are some areas in which incremental progress is inherently unsatisfactory, and our response to the deepening climate crisis is one of these. What with the shockingly rapid deterioration of our oceans (as detailed in the IPSO report), the continuing increase in greenhouse emissions, the collapse of regional ecosystems worldwide, and the dramatic increase in extreme weather events, it is self-evident that tiny steps in the right direction won’t get us out of trouble. We need to move fast, and we need to move dramatically.
However valid Mr. Gore’s criticisms of President Obama, the real story is that the corporate forces controlling the economy won’t abandon their profit margins, despite mounting evidence that this strategy will subject their customer base to what biologists euphemistically call an “evolutionary bottleneck.”
Warren Senders
environment: IPSO Jacques Cousteau oceanic acidification oceans
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Year 2, Month 7, Day 6: La Mer? Merde!
The ghastly news in the IPSO report on our oceans has brought forth a number of articles. Time magazine notes:
But while news of the Earth’s impending doom can sometimes seem exaggerated, there’s one environmental disaster that never gets the coverage it really deserves: the state of the oceans. Most people know that wild fisheries are dwindling, and we might know that low-oxygen aquatic dead zones are blooming around the planet’s most crowded coasts. But the oceans appear to be undergoing fundamental changes — many of them for the worse — that we can barely understand, in part because we barely understand that vast blue territory that covers 70% of the globe.
That’s the conclusion of a surprising new report issued by the International Programme on the State of the Ocean (IPSO), a global panel of marine experts that met earlier this year at Oxford University to examine the latest science on ocean health. That health, they found, is not good. According to the authors, we are “at high risk for entering a phase of extinction of marine species unprecedented in human history.” It’s not just about overfishing or marine pollution or even climate change. It’s all of those destructive factors working cumulatively, and occurring much more rapidly than scientists had expected. “The findings are shocking,” said Alex Rogers, the scientific director of IPSO. “We are looking at consequences for humankind that will impact in our lifetime, and worse, our children’s and generations beyond that.”
Lots of stuff about the ocean now, but not as much as I get when I ask for information on Anthony Weiner’s junk. Sigh.
Sent June 21:
As a kid growing up in America’s turbulent 60s, I remember vividly a certain man on television who was universally respected and trusted. And I don’t mean Walter Cronkite. Reading about the IPSO report on the terrifying decline in the health of our planet’s oceans reminded me of the late Jacques Cousteau. Remembering the diminutive Frenchman who showed us all the beauties of the undersea world, I wonder: what would he say about the acidified seas, bleached corals, ravaged fisheries and polluted ecosystems that humanity has left in its wake? After a few unprintable Gallicisms, I’m sure he’d embark on an activist campaign to persuade the world’s industrialized nations that it was time for them to show genuine leadership on climate change and carbon emissions. Long ago this eloquent and passionate explorer spoke to our current condition, saying “We forget that the water cycle and the life cycle are one.”
Warren Senders
environment Politics: EPA SCOTUS
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Year 2, Month 7, Day 5: As Predicted…
As expected, on June 20 the Supreme Court rejected the 8-state lawsuit against the utility companies, placing the ball once again in the EPA’s court.
In an 8-0 decision, the Supreme Court kills a global-warming lawsuit filed by eight states and environmentalists against the nation’s five largest electric power companies. The court says Congress and the EPA already have authority to make rules regulating greenhouse gases and courts need not get involved.
This one went to the LA Times:
So it’s unanimous: the EPA has the power to regulate greenhouse emissions and toxic pollutants, and the states do not. The lawsuit against major energy companies was always a long shot, and this ruling is hardly a surprise. What remains for us as citizens is to pressure our federal government to do its duty: preserve the environment for the sake of our children and their children for generations to come. If that doesn’t fall under the general welfare clause of the Constitution, nothing does — for absent a livable planet, all the corporate profits in the world won’t do anyone a bit of good. It is time for the EPA to live up to its mandate, and time for the Obama administration to abandon its timid and incrementalist energy policy. We need to move rapidly; the scientific consensus on climate change is overwhelming, and the danger of catastrophe is undeniable.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: 2012 American exceptionalism assholes denialists idiots Republicans
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Year 2, Month 7, Day 4: There Is A Reason The Biggest Tag In My Cloud Is “idiots.”
The June 19 issue of the Christian Science Monitor notes the Republican lineup is filled with denialist dingalings, although they describe it somewhat more politely:
There was a time when Republicans were at the forefront of efforts to investigate – maybe even do something about – the impact of human activity on global climate.
John McCain was an early and persistent supporter of cap-and-trade efforts to reduce the greenhouse gases (mainly carbon dioxide) associated with climate change. So was Newt Gingrich, who went on to make a YouTube video ad – with then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, no less – where he said, “Our country must take action to address climate change.”
Now, Republican presidential hopefuls seem to be racing in the opposite direction – disavowing their past support for policy measures on climate – even any sense that there’s a problem to be addressed.
Sheesh.
Sent June 19:
For all their fulsomely patriotic homilies, Republican presidential aspirants seem deeply reluctant to advocate anything that would restore America’s status as a leader in the world community. Instead, they offer tax cuts and an end to government regulation as universal panaceas, accompanying a vision of the future as myopic as it is dystopic. Since the climate-change crisis requires responsible action on multiple fronts, the GOP’s 2012 lineup prefers to deny that the problem exists, instead taking refuge in bizarre conspiracy theories and liberal-bashing tropes that play well to their anti-science, anti-tax base. A genuinely robust response to global warming is necessary to avoid catastrophic outcomes, and would give an enormous boost to our economy. The Republican platform? Stick our fingers in our ears, reject scientific expertise, and wait for free-market solutions to the laws of physics. Their version of American exceptionalism? We’re number one — when it comes to ignorance and irresponsibility!
Warren Senders