environment Politics: assholes denialists idiots insurance scientific consensus survival sustainability timescale wildfires
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Year 3, Month 6, Day 19: Double Whammy Bar
Two separate articles in the June 7 issue of the Vancouver Sun:
The Earth’s ecosystems could reach a point of no return resulting in rapid irreversible collapse in as little as 50 years, according to projections by a group of 18 scientists.
Their article in the journal Nature today says that human activities – such as energy use and widespread transformation of the Earth’s surface for habitation and agriculture – are pushing the planet toward a critical threshold for “state shift” not unlike the transition from the last ice age about 12,000 years ago.
Such a shift would create a new nor-mal condition for the entire planet with a new range of temperatures, new ocean levels and widespread species extinctions resulting in an entirely new web of life.
It would not necessarily be a comfortable place for human beings.
“We’ve had a good long run of really benign conditions that have allowed humans to go from cracking rocks together to walking on the moon,” said Simon Fraser University biodiversity professor Arne Mooers, one of the authors of the article.
The number of major forest fires in B.C. will likely increase by 50 per cent or more in the next 40 years according to a recent report on climate change.
Telling the Weather Story, released this week by the Insurance Bureau of Canada, addresses altering weather patterns across the country in the coming decades and urges Canadians to adjust to the realities of climate change.
The study predicts B.C. can expect an increase in wildfires over the average of nearly 2,000 blazes a year between 2000 and 2010. Furthermore, the province will likely see a host of other weather-related issues like warmer temperatures, declining — and, in some regions, disappearing — mountain snowpacks, more intense rainfall during the winter, and drier summers. The number of wildfires sparked by lightning strikes — responsible for nearly 60 per cent of fires — is also expected to rise.
“It’s not a just a possibility,” said Dr. Gordon McBean, the report’s lead researcher. “There’s a very real probability it will happen.”
McBean, a climatologist and professor at the University of Western Ontario, conducted the research with cooperation from the Institute for Catastrophic Loss Reduction, where he also serves as policy chairman.
Read the comments for the full flavor. Sheesh. Sent June 8:
The Insurance Bureau of Canada’s report on the increased risk of forest fires is a localized version of the dire planetary “tipping point” projections just published in the journal Nature. The two articles in the June 7 edition of the Sun reinforce one another in the same way that climate-change processes do. For example, hotter summers set the stage for more forest fires, which release more carbon into the atmosphere in a positive feedback loop; the pine-beetle infestations brought by milder winters can leave whole forests of flammable dead trees — which, naturally, cannot reabsorb carbon as healthy forests do. Thawing Arctic permafrost releases even more carbon, while melting polar ice means less light is reflected back into space, in turn leading to greater heat absorption by the oceans.
Unfortunately, the mechanisms of denial are very strong, and many people will ignore this obvious crisis rather than contemplate changing their convenient lifestyles.
Humanity is a tenacious, flexible and adaptable species. We can survive the consequences of global climate change — but only if we stop denying the existence of the emergency, instead bringing all of our resources, ingenuity and commitment to bear on the problem.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes corporate irresponsibility hypocrisy
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Year 3, Month 6, Day 13: Sexy Sadie…You Made A Fool Of Everyone
The story finds a few legs in England (not much Stateside, though — gee, I wonder why?):
Some of America’s top companies are spending heavily to block action on climate change or discredit climate science, despite public commitments to sustainable and green values, a new report has found.
An analysis of 28 Standard & Poor 500 publicly traded companies by researchers from the Union of Concerned Scientists exposed a sharp disconnect in some cases between PR message and less visible activities, with companies quietly lobbying against climate policy or funding groups which work to discredit climate science.
The findings are in line with the recent expose of the Heartland Institute. Over the years, the ultra-conservative organisation devoted to discrediting climate science received funds from a long list of companies which had public commitments to sustainability.
Bitch, bitch, bitch. All ya ever do is bitch. Sent June 3:
I can remember the launch of the “New Nixon” in 1968 — a cynical public relations gambit that provided a discredited politician sufficiently shiny new trappings to get him elected president of the USA. H.L. Mencken famously noted that “no one ever went broke underestimating the American public,” an observation verified by countless advertising campaigns in the ensuing decades.
When major American corporations make public statements about the seriousness of climate change, our first instincts should be ones of suspicion: are their words supported or undercut by their actions in the policy domain? The Union of Concerned Scientists’ report confirms yet again that the “corporate persons” exerting such disproportionate influence on US governance are morally deficient hypocrites driven entirely by greed.
As an intensifying greenhouse effect brings us perilously close to a planetary emergency, we cannot afford to let capitalism run amok, crassly savaging Earth’s resources in the service of profit.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes corporate irresponsibility denialists
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Year 3, Month 6, Day 12: New! Improved! To Serve You Better!
Shocked. Shocked, I tell you. Neela Banerjee (yay, Indians!) in the LA Times:
WASHINGTON — Some major U.S. corporations that support climate science in their public relations materials actively work to derail regulations and laws addressing global warming through lobbying, campaign donations and support of various advocacy groups, according to a new report by the Union of Concerned Scientists, an environmental and scientific integrity group.
The multinational oil giant, ConocoPhillips, for instance, said on its website in 2011 that it “recognizes” that human activity is leading to climate change, the view supported by the overwhelming majority of scientific research. Yet in 2009, ConocoPhillips argued against the Environmental Protection Agency’s determination that heat-trapping greenhouse gases were pollutants endangering public welfare.
The report, “A Climate of Corporate Control,” notes that General Electric has backed six environmental and non-partisan research groups that accept the scientific consensus on climate change, including the Brookings Institution and the Nature Conservancy. At the same time, it has funded four organizations that reject or question the consensus, including the Competitive Enterprise Institute and Heritage Foundation. Moreover, it was a member of several organizations that have doggedly fought greater environmental regulation, including the US Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers.
I think I found a new analogical structure here. Hurray. Sent June 2:
So the public statements of multinational corporations are often contradicted by their private actions? Color me unsurprised. It’s cheaper to make advertisements featuring trees, blue skies and happy people than it is to pursue environmentally sensible policies that might incrementally impact profit margins.
This is a private-enterprise version of the crassly theatrical politics which substituted a “Mission Accomplished” banner for a sensible foreign policy and a New Orleans photo-op for a functional FEMA. It is no coincidence that the same individuals move easily back and forth from the corporate boardrooms to cabinet offices. Just as inbreeding brings the potential for horrifying genetic catastrophes, this incestuous interpenetration of the public and private sectors has spawned its own grotesque mutations of responsible capitalism and responsive government.
And this is a tragedy, for responsible capitalism and responsive government are essential if our civilization is to properly address the burgeoning climate crisis.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes denialists idiots media irresponsibility Republicans
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Year 3, Month 5, Day 31: Sounds Pretty Fair And Balanced To Me….
The West Virginia Gazette-Journal has an editorial by some brave fellow who dares to speak the truth in the midst of Coal Country:
Last year, America suffered historic weather calamities: disastrous tornadoes, severe floods, extended drought, record-breaking snowfall, raging wildfires, etc. Federal agencies say $52 billion in property loss was inflicted, and more than 1,000 Americans died in weather ravages.
This year brought the warmest March ever known, breaking about 15,000 local U.S. heat records. Early tornadoes again left wreckage and death.
Scientists say the violent weather is solid evidence that fossil fuel fumes are girdling Planet Earth with greenhouse gases that produce global warming and climate change. Warmer air holds more moisture, producing more extreme storms.
A new study by Yale and George Mason university pollsters found that 70 percent of Americans now believe that “global warming is affecting the weather.” Yale professor Anthony Laiserowitz commented: “People are starting to connect the dots.”
Read the comments for the full effect. Sent May 21:
On one side of the Great Climate Change Debate, we have almost every single scientific association on Earth. Their overwhelming consensus, built on the integrated results of thousands of different studies and research projects over the past five decades, is that climate change is real, it’s dangerous, human consumption of fossil fuels is a major factor, and doing something about it before it gets worse is both an economic and an environmental necessity.
On the other side, we have the oil-funded American Association of Petroleum Geologists along with a few other scientists (like Dr. Richard Lindzen, who still firmly believes the link between cigarettes and cancer is statistically inconclusive). We have conservative “think-tanks” like the Heartland Institute (recently famous for recklessly comparing environmentalists with mass murderers), a coterie of professional denialists whose voices are heard constantly in our broadcast and print media, and a major political party firmly opposed to science of every sort. Their interpretation of the data? There is no such thing as climate change; if there is, it’s not dangerous; if it’s dangerous, it’s not caused by humans; if it’s caused by humans, it’s too expensive to address. And anyway: Liberals! Socialism! Squirrel!
Warren Senders
atheism environment: assholes corporate irresponsibility denialists Heartland Institute idiots
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Year 3, Month 5, Day 30: Heartland Haz A Sad
Awwwwwwww. So sad. Heartland’s feeling some heat:
In a fiery blogpost on the Heartland website, the organisation’s president Joseph Bast admitted Heartland’s defectors were “abandoning us in this moment of need”.
Over the last few weeks, Heartland has lost at least $825,000 in expected funds for 2012, or more than 35% of the funds its planned to raise from corporate donors, according to the campaign group Forecast the Facts, which is pushing companies to boycott the organisation.
The organisation been forced to make up those funds by taking its first publicly acknowledged donations from the coal industry. The main Illinois coal lobby is a last-minute sponsor of this week’s conference, undermining Heartland’s claims to operate independently of fossil fuel interests.
Its entire Washington DC office, barring one staffer, decamped, taking Heartland’s biggest project, involving the insurance industry, with them.
Board directors quit, conference speakers cancelled at short-notice, and associates of long standing demanded Heartland remove their names from its website. The list of conference sponsors shrank by nearly half from 2010, and many of those listed sponsors are just websites operating on the rightwing fringe.
“It’s haemorrhaging,” said Kert Davies, research director of Greenpeace, who has spent years tracking climate contrarian outfits. “Heartland’s true colours finally came through, and now people are jumping ship in quick order.”
Couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of sociopaths. Sent May 20:
By sponsoring billboards comparing climate scientists to mass murderers, the Heartland Institute proves that bizarre beliefs lead inexorably to bizarre behaviors. This secretive corporatist think-tank has for years invested enormous fiscal and intellectual capital in ideas unconnected to verifiable scientific fact; their plans for the promotion of anti-science curricula demonstrate: this isn’t just ordinary climate-change denial, but near-sociopathic fabulism.
But organizations this disconnected from reality in one area cannot be expected to understand the consequences of their actions in other areas, which is why Heartland’s response to the predictable outrage generated by their grotesque guilt-by-association strategy seems so clumsily pathetic. “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities,” wrote Voltaire, centuries ago. We now have a new corollary to his apothegm: those who believe their own absurdities cannot recognize their own atrocities.
Heartland’s wounds are entirely self-inflicted — yet another inconvenient reality for them to deny.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: agriculture assholes denialists idiots
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Year 3, Month 5, Day 29: Getting So Much Realer All The Time
The Ledger (Lakeland, FL) runs a piece by Charles Reynolds, addressing some implications — and taking a dig at the chuckleheads along the way.
Some people believe the concept of climate change, also called global warming, is a plot cooked up by tree-hugging liberals to get everyone else to stop treating planet Earth like a trash heap. But governments and multinational corporations worldwide don’t think climate change is a hoax.
Among corporations taking an active role in finding solutions for problems caused by ever-worsening weather patterns are Weyerhaeuser, DuPont, Boeing, Georgia-Pacific, Deutsche Telekom, Royal Dutch/Shell, Toyota and Ontario Power Generation. Hardly bastions of liberalism. And speaking of the flip side of altruism, the government of communist China is becoming increasingly concerned about the damage climate change is causing.
The organizations mentioned are, of course, worried about their bottom lines. It’s the world’s biologists, botanists and scientists who are distressed over the effects of climate change on hundreds of thousands of species of plants and animals.
Sent in a rush, 5/19 – getting ready for the Flutes concert.
When confronted with the facts about climate change, denialists respond in one of several extremely predictable ways. By far the most popular is a mix of guilt-by-association and ad hominem attack, as in the endless attacks on the integrity of former Vice President Al Gore. Another “greatest hit” for self-styled skeptics is the argument from incredulity — “it must be impossible, because I don’t understand anything about science.” And, of course, we’re always going to hear from the tinfoil hat brigade, with their increasingly far-fetched conspiracy theories: “global warming is a hoax cooked up by socialists in order to enforce global redistribution of wealth from the hands of the job creators into the pockets of greedy climatologists,” or something like that.
Meanwhile, the researchers who are actually working in the field keep finding more information that suggests the problem is actually significantly more dangerous than had been previously thought. While warmer weather is excellent news for gardeners in the short term, the steady increases in planetary temperature are going to make feeding our civilization exponentially more difficult in the centuries to come — something which should (eventually) engage the attention of the denialists.
Would those who reject the validity of climate science be willing to sign insurance waivers, relinquishing any damages from the effects of global warming? Let’s see them put their money where their mouths are.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes centrism corporate irresponsibility denialists
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Year 3, Month 5, Day 27: You Say Yes, I Say No.
The Calgary Herald has a columnist named Brian Crowley, who is attempting to thread the centrist needle on climate.
The time has come to think differently about climate change.
For too long, the debate has been monopolized by two parties. One is almost religious, fervently believing in man-made climate change, and that only large changes in human behaviour can stave off disaster.
Their opponents argue that the science is uncertain, unsettled and inconclusive, and therefore, that no action is warranted until we possess that missing certainty.
I don’t agree with either camp. In most areas, there is only ever certainty of uncertainty. In other words, both those who believe certainty has been achieved and those who say it has not share the same assumption: that certainty is what we are after and we can get it.
The reality is that long-range future energy, climate, economic and other carbon-related environmental conditions are and will remain significantly uncertain, highly variable and largely unpredictable. Scientists and mathematicians know that the systems involved in the various dimensions of climate change policy are in fact extremely complex and often chaotic, fraught with considerable, irreducible uncertainty.
But contrary to the so-called skeptics, this uncertainty does not license inaction. Most human decisions are made in conditions of imperfect uncertain information. We have to act even though we don’t know everything.
More than the usual denialist bullshit, stuff like this really makes me mad. The Herald did not stipulate a word limit, so I let myself run on a bit. Sent May 17:
In his attempt at a “centrist” position on climate change issues, Brian Crowley sets up and knocks down several convenient strawmen.
One: caricaturing those concerned about Earth’s climatic transformation as “almost religious, fervently believing in man-made climate change” misrepresents both environmentalism and religion by overlooking the simple fact that those advocating for action on climate change would be delighted to learn they’d been mistaken (unlike the faithful, who resist contradictions, facts, and logic with preternatural stubbornness). Those who understand enough science to recognize that our civilization is in deep trouble aren’t persuaded by out-of-context statistics, ad hominem arguments, or pseudo-scientific irrelevancies, which is why there aren’t a lot of “former climate-change believers” around except on internet comment threads.
Two: Mr. Crowley’s dismissal of “policies that promise to prevent climate change.” No such policies have been seriously proposed by any politician anywhere, for the simple reason that those who understand the science know that the changes are already irreversible. Realistic global warming legislation advocates either preparation strategies (e.g., investing in strengthened infrastructure) or mitigation (e.g., ways to reduce greenhouse emissions).
Three: he dismisses the notion that human attitudes and behavior can change, calling it an assumption “that has little or no basis in social science or historical precedent.” Mr. Crowley’s notion that the conveniences of contemporary civilization are somehow permanently fixed in our species’ way of living is risible. Two hundred years ago, most people never traveled more than a few miles from their birthplaces; one hundred years ago, almost nobody on Earth owned a car; fifty years ago, almost nobody owned a computer; fifty years from now, we’ll be out of oil, and living on a grossly hotter planet — and we will have to adapt if humanity is to survive.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes denialists Heartland Institute idiots
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Year 3, Month 5, Day 26: Zippadee Doo Dah Day
More on the Heartland idiocy, this time from the Pocono Record (NY):
The Heartland Institute may be doing climate scientists a big favor through its lastest anti-climate change campaign.
The group is employing a sensational illogic in trying to debunk the theory that the earth is warming, allying repellent criminal characters with an acknowledgement of rising temperatures. It’s an odd marriage, so odd that maybe deeper thinkers will question its merit, as they should.
Recently, the Heartland Institute launched a billboard advertising campaign in Chicago featuring the image of convicted “Unabomber” Ted Kaczynski along with the statement, “I still believe in Global Warming. Do you?”
The so-called think tank announced plans to link deranged murderer Charles Manson and international terrorist Osama bin Laden to global warming, too.
Maybe their idea is that the unknowing public will begin to identify climate scientists as beyond the pale — mentally ill criminals or insanely cruel religious zealots.
So is Defense Secretary Leon Panetta a nut case? Panetta has described global warming as a national security threat.
Is former vice president Al Gore a terrorist? You may not agree with his assessment that climate change is “An Inconvenient Truth,” but should he really be locked up?
I know who deserves to be locked up. Sent May 16:
Given the possible catastrophic consequences of a runaway greenhouse effect, the irresponsibility of denialist organizations like the Heartland Institute is staggering. In cherry-picking from the available climatological research only the few small smatterings of data which support their predetermined conclusions, Heartland’s “experts” engage in a travesty of scientific method. This alone would warrant dismissal of their assertions. But by framing the discussion of climate change with comparisons between climate scientists and deranged sociopaths, the corporate-funded “think tank” has sacrificed any remaining vestiges of credibility.
In reality, of course, the worldwide scientific consensus on climate change is exceptionally robust, and getting more so every day as new evidence is integrated with the old. By preventing or delaying much-needed policy responses to the rapidly unfolding crisis, organizations like the Heartland Institute are far closer to those conscienceless mass murderers than the researchers and environmentalists they have so grotesquely maligned.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes denialists ecologies idiots media irresponsibility sustainability
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Year 3, Month 5, Day 25: The Pitter-Patter Of Little Feet
The Boston Herald (my local Murdoch rag) runs an article from the Seattle Times on a problem with animals:
SEATTLE — As climate change transforms their habitat, some animals are already on the move. But a new analysis from the University of Washington warns that many species won’t be able to run fast enough to survive a warming world.
On average, about 9 percent of the Western Hemisphere’s mammals migrate too slowly to keep pace with the rapid climate shifts expected over the next century, says the study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. In some areas, including parts of the Appalachian Mountains and the Amazon basin, nearly 40 percent of mammals may be unable to reach safe haven in time.
They’ll never print this one in a million years, but it was fun to write. Sent May 15:
If the thousands of mammal species whose slowly-changing migratory patterns put them at risk of extinction just knew that climate change is a hoax engineered by a worldwide conspiracy of scientists and liberal environmentalists, it would undoubtedly make them feel much better about the loss of their irrecoverable habitats.
But only humans are susceptible to the misdirection practiced by conservative news networks, which means that those endangered animals will just have to get used to their newly inhospitable ecological niches, or die. Ultimately, though, it’s not just regional and local ecosystems that are being transformed, but the entire planet. That’s what “climate change” means — global, not local; long-term, not short-term — and the implications of the University of Washington study should be a wake-up call for any still living in the denialist dreamland.
Humans are mammals, too. Where will we go when our habitats will no longer sustain us?
Warren Senders
Ha ha! The joke’s apparently on me. They printed it. And boy oh boy did it attract a fusillade of stupidity in the comments.
environment Politics: assholes denialists idiots Republicans
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Year 3, Month 5, Day 24: We Can Share…
The Idaho Statesman discusses the, um, intellectual foundations of the partisan divide on climate change:
The science that has driven and dominated this debate is the “psychology of persuasion.”
The Heartland Institute is an organization now leading the climate-skepticism campaign, after it ended its efforts to raise doubts about the connection between smoking and cancer. Recently, the group pushed its case with billboards citing “Unabomber” Ted Kaczynski, Charles Manson and Fidel Castro as examples of people who believe in global warming.
It’s not surprising that with the most famous promoter of climate change being Al Gore, the former Democratic candidate for president, many Republicans see the issue in partisan terms.
Generic “Republicans are idiots” screed. Sent May 14:
Devaluing expertise has long been a feature of conservative politics and government. As far back as the McCarthy-era purge of “old China hands” from the State Department, Republican politicians have exploited anti-intellectualism in American culture for their own electoral advantage, reaching new lows in the past few decades with the rise of ideologically slanted news outlets and right-wing “think tanks” dedicated entirely to the avoidance of inconvenient realities.
Call it “veriphobia” — fear of truth — and its greatest potential for long-term disaster lies in the area of climate change and its effects. Future historians will point to the psychological mechanisms of denial as key elements in our national failure to address the climate crisis. Do NASA studies indicate the planet is warming? Do climate scientists agree on the human causes of the greenhouse effect? Republicans would sooner defund NASA and vilify climatologists rather than admit error.
Warren Senders