environment Politics: assholes idiots media irresponsibility Republican obstructionism
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Year 4, Month 1, Day 15: Frankly, Gentlemen, I Wouldn’t Want Her To Marry ANY Of You Goyim.
The fiscal cliff is a tragic example of an all-too-common malady: managing by living crisis to crisis. In this case, it was almost entirely a self-created crisis, but the underlying financial problems, such as increasing healthcare costs and entitlement spending, have been building for some time. Waiting until things are really, really bad before acting not only does not to prevent crises, but makes them worse when they do happen (a truth my chiropractor has kindly but insistently pointed out to me when I wait until I can only hobble before getting care for my troublesome back).
But finances (and even to some degree, my bad back) can be repaired. We are in far more long-term danger for failing to address climate change.
Last year, temperatures in the continental United States were hotter than they had ever been in more than a century of record-keeping, government scientists found. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration described the results (temps last year were, on average, 3.2 degrees higher than the 20th century average) as part of a bigger and longer trend of hotter, drier and more extreme weather. Some of it is the result of weather patterns, but human activity—such as the burning of greenhouse gases—is also to blame, researchers found.
Everybody sucks, but some suck more than others. Sent January 10:
It’s easy to point out the myopia of our political class by contrasting their hair-on-fire handling of the “fiscal cliff” with their apathetic treatment of the far more genuine threat posed by runaway climate change. But this comparison, while accurate and convenient, overlooks a similarity between the two crises.
If Congressional Republicans really cared about fiscal rectitude, they wouldn’t have created a deficit crisis in the first place by running up two wars’ worth of debt at the behest of the Bush administration (despite liberal warnings that the bill would be enormous). While we all share responsibility for climate chaos, both lawmakers and media ignored, minimized, and misrepresented the problem during the decades when it could have been forestalled, thereby ensuring that we would ultimately face a crisis of civilizational significance. Both the fiscal cliff and the ongoing climate catastrophe are human-created disasters, exacerbated by human ideology, ignorance and irresponsibility.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: agriculture assholes denialists idiots islands Republican obstructionism rising sea levels
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Year 4, Month 1, Day 9: Maui Wowee?
The Honolulu Weekly notes that climate change has arrived in Hawaii:
For years we’ve been hearing ominous rumblings about climate change and its many implications for the planet, especially Hawaii and other islands in the Western Pacific. The scenarios fueled by a rapidly expanding body of science are sobering: rising temperatures and prolonged droughts, dying coral reefs and dwindling fish stocks. Rising sea levels will eventually, for some atolls and low-lying areas of Hawaii, bring total inundation.
“We have lots and lots of science,” says Jesse Souki, director of the Office of State Planning (OSP). “We have a pretty good idea of what the problem is, and what’s going to happen. The hard part is figuring out what to do about it.”
The islands make a good hook for a standard screed on GOP idiocy. Sent January 4:
Hawaii isn’t alone. Every day, nations, states, regions and communities around the world are find that climate change is no longer an abstraction but a difficult and sometimes dangerous reality. When the weather goes haywire, farmers can’t plan. When out-of-season storms start happening more and more often, the whole notion of “season” goes out the window — along with vulnerable infrastructure. When mountaintop ice vanishes, people in the valleys who’ve depended on glacial melt for their water are forced from the land they’ve occupied for millennia. And when islands are under threat from rising sea levels, tourism may take a back seat to simple survival.
But while people everywhere on Earth are waking up to the threat of climate chaos, there is still one place where the rapidly metastasizing greenhouse effect has failed to make an impact. In the offices and caucus rooms of Congressional Republicans, global warming is still a liberal hoax, not a potentially devastating reality. While these conservative lawmakers may answer to different constituencies, they all represent, ultimately, the same state of denial.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes denialists idiots Michael Mann
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Year 4, Month 1, Day 6: A Sphinctral Fricative
The Pottstown (PA) Mercury runs a column by a professional asshole named Gil Spencer, attacking Michael Mann:
The professor found this sentence written by Steyn to be particularly offensive:
“Mann could be said to be the Jerry Sandusky of climate science, except that instead of molesting children, he has molested and tortured data in the service of politicized science that could have dire economic consequences for the nation and planet.”
Pretty good, huh?
But Professor Mann found it not the least bit amusing. He demanded that Steyn’s snappy critique be removed from the NRO website and when it wasn’t, he sued.I say, Professor Mann is not the Jerry Sandusky of climate science. I say he is the Jerry Falwell.
Sheesh. Have a nice day, everybody. Sent January 1:
Given that every single allegation against climatologist Michael Mann has been debunked multiple times, I’d say he has a right to be angered by the calumnies leveled at him by writers in the National Review. Since Mann first published his findings, conservatives have attacked him and his work, invariably coming up empty in their search for incriminating evidence. While scientific method is entirely built around evidence and analysis, lack of evidence poses no obstacle to the anti-science zealots who routinely reject any data that doesn’t fit their worldview.
Let’s put it plainly: scientists who have spent their lives developing expertise on Earth’s climate think there is a problem, and all of us need to talk about it. Writers and commentators on the payrolls of various petroleum-funded “think tanks” cannot refute the evidence of the climate crisis, and resort to ad hominem attacks instead. Gil Spencer’s column is an egregious affront to the rules of civilized communication, and an insult to the intelligence of your readership.
Warren Senders
Education environment Politics: assholes Conservatives denialists idiots
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Year 4, Month 1, Day 5: They Seek The Truth, Before They Can Die
The Capitol Times (Madison, WI) has a nuanced discussion of climate denial in the educational system. What’s happening in WI is happening everywhere.
The far right dominates the world of “climate change denial,” which Wikipedia defines as: “A set of organized attempts to downplay, deny or dismiss the scientific consensus on the extent of global warming, its significance, and its connection to human behavior, especially for commercial or ideological reasons.”
You don’t even need to leave the state to find one of the nation’s leading practitioners. In a PBS “Frontline” program titled “Climate of Doubt” that aired in October, U.S. Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, R-Menomonee Falls, argued that scientists have failed to convince Congress about global warming.
Which brings me to Casey Meehan, born in Janesville and educated at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. For six years, Meehan taught high school psychology and history in the Janesville and Monona Grove school districts before returning to UW-Madison to pursue a Ph.D. in education.
Meehan has just finished his dissertation on how climate change is taught in Wisconsin schools. You might not be surprised by his conclusion: Unlike most subjects on which there is scientific consensus, with climate change the human role typically is taught as an open question.
Meehan’s initial focus upon returning to school was environmental education, but he says he noticed that not much had been written about the teaching of climate change.
“I started thinking more about how climate change is such an ideologically polarizing topic, and I was just curious about how schools were dealing with that,” he told me in an interview. “How are they teaching this topic that the public thinks a range of things about, but scientists think something very specifically about?”
Yup. December 31:
Once upon a time, political conservatives were simply cautious people who feared change — especially change that threatened their economic security or social position, as witness their early opposition to such mainstays of American society as Social Security. But somehow over the past few decades, conservatism has become resistant, not to change, but to reality itself. While this is evident in their responses to issues like marriage equality and immigration policy, nowhere does it do so much harm as in the politicized discussion of the climate crisis.
Thanks to the Right’s relentless demonization of scientists and environmentalists, even the most anodyne statements about the natural world are now considered too controversial for free discussion in schools, as demonstrated by Casey Meehan’s illuminating study of the problems Wisconsin teachers face in addressing climate change. The fact that educators cannot address scientific reality in their classrooms without risking parental backlash is a sad commentary on the scientific literacy in America — and a demonstration that conservatism has become a grotesque parody of its former self.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes Barack Obama denialists Republican obstructionism
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Year 3, Month 12, Day 25: Everybody Gets Coal In Their Stockings!
Time Magazine’s new Man of the Year has a chance to discuss climate:
So it should hearten greens that Obama volunteered in his interview with TIME editors that climate would be a major part of his second-term agenda—at least in part because of concern for his children:
Well, it’s a cliché, but it’s obviously true that for any parent, as you watch your kids age, you are reminded that everything you do has to have their futures in mind. You fervently hope they’re going to outlive you; that the world will be better for them when you’re not around. You start thinking about their kids.
And so, on an issue like climate change, for example, I think for this country and the world to ask some very tough questions about what are we leaving behind, that weighs on you. And not to mention the fact I think that generation is much more environmentally aware than previous generations.
There is that sense of we’ve got to get this right, and at least give them a fighting chance. In the same way that as a parent you recognize that no matter what you do, your kids are going to have challenges — because that’s the human condition — but you don’t want them dealing with stuff that’s the result of you making bad choices. They’ll have enough bad choices that they make on their own that you don’t want them inheriting the consequences of bad choices that you make. We have to think about that as a society as a whole.
That’s a pretty good argument for why we need to act on global warming—though it’s not really clear what the President would or even could do, especially faced with a divided and likely hostile Congress. He’s the Person of the Year, but he’s not omnipotent. (Though he does have options—see this plan from the Natural Resources Defense Council that would use the Clean Air Act to reduce carbon emissions from power plants.)
Have a nice day, everyone. Sent December 19:
While President Obama’s approach to climate change issues is undoubtedly going to be more robust than that offered by his rival Mitt Romney, that’s a pretty low bar to clear. The fact is that at a critical point in our species’ history, we are offered only anodyne strategies to combat a complex and metastasizing catastrophe. This is partly attributable to the gamesmanship of Washington, where politics is defined as the art of compromise; Mr. Obama’s skills at compromising are already well-known. Unfortunately, the accelerating greenhouse effect isn’t going to meet the President half-way. The laws of physics and chemistry are like that — stubborn, unyielding.
But there’s something else in Washington preventing a genuine response to the climate crisis. The Republican party’s complete denial of the overwhelming scientific evidence on global warming makes them as inflexible — and almost as harmful — as the steadily rising count of atmospheric CO2.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes denialists IPCC Republican obstructionism sunspots
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Year 3, Month 12, Day 21: Hush Now, Don’t Explain
The Independent (UK) confirms that denialists just never stop.
An attempt by climate sceptics to hijack the latest UN report on global warming by selectively leaking claims that it is caused by sunspots rather than man-made emissions of carbon dioxide has backfired.
Sceptics described the forthcoming report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as a “game changer” because of its apparent support for the controversial theory that solar activity, interacting with cosmic rays from deep space, can explain global warming.
Alec Rawls, a Republican blogger in the United States who signed himself up as an expert IPCC reviewer, decided to leak the panel’s Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) on the grounds that it is a taxpayer-funded document.
Mr Rawls claimed the report suggests that the IPCC has finally come round to the idea that solar activity – sunspots – is partly responsible for the observed global temperatures rise seen over the past half century.
“The admission of strong evidence for enhanced solar forcings changes everything. The climate alarmists can’t continue to claim that warming was almost entirely due to human activity over a period when solar warming effects, now acknowledged to be important, were at a maximum,” Mr Rawls said.
“The final draft of [the IPCC report] is not scheduled to be released for another year, but the public needs to know now how the main premise and conclusions of the IPCC story line have been undercut by the IPCC itself,” he said.
However, climate scientists pointed out that Mr Rawls has selectively quoted from the draft report and has ignored other parts of the document stating that solar activity and cosmic rays cannot explain the increase in global temperatures seen over the past half century, as sceptics have repeatedly claimed.
There are lies, damn lies, and climate denialist lies. Fuckers. Sent December 15:
Let’s not dignify climate-change denialists like Alec Rawls with the monicker, “skeptics.” Leaking cherry-picked sections of the forthcoming IPCC report is not representative of skepticism, a term which properly describes a profound level of intellectual honesty. Mr. Rawls and others of similar stripe are selectively misinterpreting data and analysis in order to support their ideology. We’re going to see a lot of this sort of behavior in the coming decades, as the evidence for planetary climate change grows from being incontrovertible to being overwhelming.
A good test of self-described “climate skeptics” is to ask them what sort of evidence could change their minds. A genuine skeptic like Dr. Richard Muller put his hypotheses to the test — and promptly changed his tune on the greenhouse effect’s causes and dangers. By contrast, it seems likely that (absent instructions from his petroleum paymasters) Alec Rawls’ mind will stay permanently shut.
Warren Senders
atheism environment Politics: assholes denialists idiots Republican obstructionism
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Year 3, Month 12, Day 20: Can’t Find My Way Home
Two articles in the 12/13 issue of the LA Times. First, David Horsey’s op-ed, “The Blind Faith of Climate Change deniers endangers us all”:
This week’s Newsweek magazine features a couple of essays — one about Jesus and one about climate change — that demonstrate the difference between simple faith in the unknowable and blind faith that denies scientific fact.
(snip)
Yet, even though the consequences of climate change are becoming frighteningly obvious and, as Hertsgaard writes, “scientists at both the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Environmental Protection Agency linked the record heat and drought of summer of 2012 with man-made climate change,” far too many conservatives cling to a blind faith that climate science is a hoax. Doug Goehring, North Dakota’s Republican agriculture commissioner, is typical of them all. Rather than believe the science, he says, “I believe an agenda is being pushed.”
And then Bettina Boxall’s piece on water shortages in the Colorado River Basin:
Water demand in the Colorado River Basin will greatly outstrip supply in coming decades as a result of drought, climate change and population growth, according to a broad-ranging federal study.
It projects that by 2060, river supplies will fall short of demand by about 3.2 million acre-feet — more than five times the amount of water annually consumed by Los Angeles.
“This study should serve as a call to action,” U.S. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said Wednesday as he released a report that predicted a drier future for the seven states that depend on the Colorado for irrigation and drinking supplies. “We can plan for this together.”
Too soon old, too late smart. Sent December 14:
The December 13 Times offers an ironic juxtaposition: David Horsey’s column analyzing conservatives’ unthinking rejection of climate change, and the ominous report on rapidly dwindling water supplies in the Colorado River Basin. How many climate-change denialists live in those seven states? How much evidence must accumulate before they stop shouting that global warming is an ideologically-driven hoax?
Our media privileges the discussion of religion, rationalizing that people are entitled to their own beliefs. True enough. But climate science is no theology, and relies on facts, observation, and analysis. The facts of a warming planet emerge in every day’s news reports. The observations of rising temperatures and melting ice caps are confirmed and reconfirmed. The analysis of climate data shows very strong correlation between our warming planet and the increasing amounts of atmospheric CO2.
Climate change is not a matter of belief, but of understanding — and action. No faith required.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes denialists idiots Republican obstructionism
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Year 3, Month 12, Day 19: Imagine No Pollution — It’s Easy If You Try
The Poughkeepsie Journal has an Op-Ed column which delivers the obvious truth:
This year is on the verge of becoming the warmest one in the nation’s history, something that climate-change deniers undoubtedly would like to chalk up to some kind of statistical anomaly.
Except for this: Seven of the 10 warmest years in U.S. history have occurred over the past 15 years, according to the National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C.
Global warming is real, and it’s causing massive damage and is likely to cause a whole lot more. The overwhelming number of climatologists not only tell us this, they say it is very likely being caused by the burning of fossil fuels.
It’s hard to imagine a scenario under which that would not be the case. Over the decades, emissions from old power plants, factories and vehicles have polluted the air and have contributed to global warming.
Nice little planet you got here. Wouldn’t want anything to happen to it, would you? Sent December 13:
The accelerating climate crisis presents a rare opportunity for our nation to come together in the face of impending catastrophe. For too long we have delayed action until after a disaster mobilizes our energies; while the focused and dedicated response to Superstorm Sandy offers a fine example of what America can do in a pinch, the fact is that we’re going to see more storms and extreme weather of unprecedented scale over the coming decades. And our continuing consumption of fossil fuels is going to make things worse, not better. What’s needed is a country-wide response that mobilizes our ingenuity, optimism and expertise on local, regional, national, and global levels in order to cut our carbon emissions, stabilize excess greenhouse gases that are already in the atmosphere, and prepare for the things we can’t prevent.
The only thing that stands in the way is ignorance and apathy, as exemplified by obstructionist Republican politicians and a news media too lazy to present anything more than he-says/she-says false equivalent. And of course, their paymasters in the oil and coal industries: senators and congressmen are almost as expensive as broadcast networks.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes Barack Obama denialists idiots Republican obstructionism scientific consensus
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Year 3, Month 12, Day 17: Bring Out Your Dead!
The South Bend Tribune reprints the MacCracken/McCarthy article from a few days ago — two climate scientists respond to the President’s purported invitation to a dialogue — and it’s still excellent stuff:
Having seen the devastating impacts of Sandy, at least a few leaders in Washington seem poised to acknowledge what scientific analyses have clearly shown: Human activities are causing climate disruption. Whether encouraged and forced by regulations, product standards, a cap-and-trade policy, or a carbon tax, we need a national policy to initiate the transition to a low-carbon economy.
Investing in energy efficiency and switching from use of coal, petroleum and natural gas to primary reliance on renewable wind and solar energy is a change that we can make. Switching away from petroleum would also build independence from OPEC and fossil fuel cartels.
According to Bloomberg Finance, the best wind farms in the world already produce power as economically as coal, gas and nuclear generators, and solar energy is proving a good investment in many states. Iowa now generates nearly 20 percent of its electricity from wind energy and Colorado and Oregon more than 10 percent.
We saw inspiring political leadership when Sandy struck. Now we need equally bold and visionary action that taps into the best in ingenuity and technology that our country has to offer. Encouraging both economic development and environmental well-being requires creation of a modern, clean energy system that protects both our nation and our environment.
The scientific community is eager to engage in the conversation the president seeks, but we all must recognize that the conversation must turn quickly from talk to action. This story can have an ending we can live with. It is up to us.
There’s an elephant in the room, though. Sent December 11:
It would be a great thing if President Obama got together with some genuine climate scientists, as Michael MacCracken and James McCarthy suggest. If there’s anything in short supply in Washington nowadays, it’s unvarnished facts and figures. Compared with the genuine emergency posed by the looming climate crisis, the brinksmanship around the impending “fiscal cliff” is absurd and irresponsible play-acting.
But it’s not only the President who needs to show scientists some respect. An entire political party has decided that measurable reality is less important than pouting and posturing. The G.O.P.’s reinvention as a vehemently anti-science party means that America is seriously hamstrung when it comes to dealing with any problem that can’t be solved with a photo-op.
Our country, and the world, deserve better. America cannot be a beacon of hope to the world if half of our government has chosen to live in the Dark Ages.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes denialists Doha climate conference economics
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Year 3, Month 12, Day 14: Because The Sky Is Blue, It Makes Me Cry
Sigh. Another year, another botched opportunity:
DOHA, Qatar — The United Nations climate conference here has settled into its typical doldrums, with most major questions unresolved as a Friday evening deadline for concluding the talks approaches. One of the thorniest issues is money, which has often bedeviled these affairs.
Since the process for the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change began about 20 years ago, countries have been split into two often-warring camps: the small number of wealthy nations that provide money to help deal with the effects of global warming, and the much larger group of poorer states that receive it.
At a climate summit meeting in Copenhagen three years ago, the industrialized countries promised to secure $10 billion a year in funds for adapting to climate change over the following three years and $100 billion a year beginning in 2020. The short-term money has more or less been raised and spent, although some nations have quarreled over whether it was new money or simply repurposed foreign aid. A Green Climate Fund has been established to handle the money after 2020.
Just shoot me. Sent December 8:
It’s not just that wealthy nations “provide money” to poorer nations facing the devastation of runaway climate change, as John Broder suggests in his second paragraph. Those wealthy countries are the ones which “provided” massive greenhouse emissions in the first place. The carbon footprints of Bangladesh and Kiribati are mere statistical noise compared with the output of the developed nations — an effluvium of climate forcers well on its way to overwhelming our planet’s natural equilibrium.
It should be incumbent on societies which have prospered from the uncontrolled consumption of fossil fuels to behave ethically toward those whose gains aren’t correlated with conspicuous consumption. Since wealthy countries have already redistributed their CO2 into the atmosphere, where it affects everyone on the planet equally, a failure to similarly redistribute economic power is both environmentally and morally irresponsible. It’s time for the developed world to take responsibility for the mess it’s made.
Warren Senders