environment Politics: corporate irresponsibility denialists insurance Republican obstructionism
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Year 4, Month 4, Day 26: The Price Is Right
The Toledo Blade (OH) speculates on climate change’s impact on the insurance industry:
As a meteorologist for FirstEnergy Corp., Pete Manousos’ job is to keep the electric utility informed about any upcoming extreme weather that might cause outages, or hamper repair crews’ ability to restore power.
But the last two years, that job has gotten harder and harder.
“You have to consider that part of the issue for FirstEnergy is our geographical footprint has gotten larger over the last decade. There’s more exposure to events as a result,” Mr. Manousos said.
“That said, for the portions of FirstEnergy that have been impacted since 2011, the frequency of the extreme events have been notable,” he added.
Whether the country is embarking on a pattern of annual extreme weather events, or merely going through a temporary phase, is impossible to know, the meteorologist said.
But one segment that has a large financial stake in figuring out if the weather is growing more violent and extreme is the insurance industry.
To be sure, the insurance industry knows more than a thing or two about calculating risk, and the industry has never been healthier financially, according to the New York-based Insurance Information Institute.
However, the increasing frequency of catastrophic weather events over the last three years — including some that affected Ohio in general and northwest Ohio in particular — are causing some in the insurance industry to adjust their climate-risk models and consider establishing a new baseline for weather events in the future.
Premium coverage! April 14:
Given their significant role in weakening health care reform, it seems strange to wish that major insurers had even more influence on Congress — but these companies might be the only corporate actors able to overcome fossil fuel corporations’ determination to block meaningful legislative action on climate change.
As the greenhouse effect accelerates, extreme weather will increase in severity and frequency everywhere in the world. On a local and regional level, that means more homes destroyed, more agriculture devastated, more infrastructure disrupted, leading to more damage claims — a connection that’s already part of the insurance industry’s calculations. Conservative lawmakers are fixated on the electoral risks of offending their tea-party constituents and the fiscal risks of crossing their Big Oil and Big Coal paymasters; by contrast, insurance companies have everything to lose and nothing to gain from policies built around ideology rather than data.
As do the rest of us.
Warren Senders
atheism environment Politics: assholes denialists idiots
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Year 4, Month 4, Day 25: There’s Idiots, And Then There’s Texas. And Then There’s Texas’ Idiots.
Time Magazine, reporting on the latest embarrassment from Texas:
“I would point out that if you’re a believer in in the Bible, one would have to say the Great Flood is an example of climate change and that certainly wasn’t because mankind had overdeveloped hydrocarbon energy.”
— Rep. Joe Barton (R-TX) at a hearing Wednesday discussing the Keystone XL pipeline, according to Buzzfeed.
Give me a freakin’ break. April 13:
Leave aside that Noah’s Flood is a tribal myth originated in the Fertile Crescent thousands of years ago, for which no actual geological evidence can be found. Leave aside Texas Congressman Joe Barton’s obvious strawman fallacy in asserting that this mythical event is proof that climate change is not exclusively caused by human activity — a notion held by no climatologist ever, and which is equally incorrect on scriptural grounds: if the deluge was God’s response to human sinfulness, then it was as surely anthropogenic as industrial civilization’s greenhouse effect.
Leave these errors of history, science and logic aside, though…and consider Rep. Barton in constitutional terms. A congressman’s refusal to acknowledge scientific fact when it conflicts with a literalist reading of the Bible makes this a theater-of-the-absurd violation of the Establishment Clause. Barton’s buffoonery may win him points with his tea-party constituents, but Texas (and the United States) deserves better.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes denialists Republican obstructionism scientific methodology
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Year 4, Month 4, Day 24: Hitting The Snooze Button For The 2000th Time
The Stanford Daily (CA) notes a new survey from the Woods Institute which indicates that some folks are waking up a bit:
Seventy-three percent of survey respondents predicted that a future rise in the sea level will be a serious problem, and only 16 percent of the public said they would want to wait until the effects of climate change directly impact them before taking action.
“The results suggest that Americans are very supportive of preparing for the effects of sea level rise and storms likely to be induced by climate change,” Krosnick said. “The least support appeared for policy approaches that involved trying to fight Mother Nature, building concrete walls or putting more and more sand along the coastline to keep the oceans back.”
The majority of the survey respondents—62 percent—said that building codes should be strengthened for coastal structures, while 52 percent wanted to enact measures preventing new construction on the coast.
The results also reveal that 82 percent of Americans are supportive of preparing for the effects of sea-level rise and storms, but only 38 percent believe that the government should pay for it. Sixty percent said that people living or running businesses along the coastline should be responsible for funding preparation efforts.
“If they choose to be [on the coastline], they choose to place themselves in harm’s way,” Krosnick said. “The message from the survey is that after the government does this work, the government should pay for it by increasing the property taxes of people and businesses along the coasts rather than increasing everyone’s taxes.”
Awake, but still utterly clueless. Sent April 12:
As extreme weather becomes the new “normal”, it’s no wonder that we’re seeing a major shift in American attitudes about climate change, as demonstrated by the Woods Institute poll. More and more of us recognize that the greenhouse effect’s consequences are happening here and now — and that’s good news.
The notion that people who live in areas threatened by rising sea levels should pay more to cover the cost of reinforcing coastal infrastructure makes a certain kind of sense — at first. Ultimately, however, this viewpoint gets washed away by the simple fact that all of us are at risk. Whether it’s the droughts currently hammering our agricultural sector, the invasive pine beetles turning Colorado forests into tinder, or the battered coastline of New Jersey, nowhere in America (or on Earth) is isolated from the impact of a transformed climate.
With one exception. In the air-conditioned offices of conservative politicians, it’s business as usual; these anti-science lawmakers and their corporate paymasters have ensured that our government will remain toothless and hamstrung in the face of the most significant threat our civilization confronted in recorded history.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes denialists geopolitics idiots Navy Republican obstructionism security
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Year 4, Month 4, Day 23: It’s Not THAT Kind Of Party
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s Jay Bookman has a nice piece detailing Jim Inhofe’s idiotic “cross-examination” of a senior admiral:
Earlier this week, at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing, the senator and the admiral shared a little colloquy on the question of climate change. It went something like this:
INHOFE: “Admiral, I’d like to get clarification on one statement that was I think misrepresented. It was in the Boston Globe it reported that you indicated, and I’m quoting noew from the Boston the Globe now, the biggest long-term security challenge in the Pacific region is climate change. I’d like to have you clarify what you meant by that. … ”
Locklear did not back down, saying that the Pacific Rim is an area of high population growth, and that much of that growth is occurring in coastal or litoral areas, where people would be vulnerable to storms, flooding, rising sea level and other problems. He went on:
“From 2008 to 2012, about 280,000 people died (in natural disasters in the Pacific region). It was not not all climate change or weather-related, but a lot of them were due to that. About 800,000 people were displaced and there was about $500 billion of lost productivity. So when I look and I think about our planning and I think about what I have to do with allies and partners, and I look long-term, it’s important that countries in this region build capabilities into their infrastructures to be able to deal with the types of things … ”
At which point Inhofe broke in:
“OK, I — sir, I’m going to interrupt you here,” Inhofe said, “because now you’ve used up half my time, and we didn’t get right around to — is it safe to say that in the event that this — that the climate is changing — which so many of the scientists disagree with — in fact, when the Boston Globe, coming out of Massachusetts, made a statement, perhaps arguably one of the top scientists in the country, Richard Lindzen, also from Massachusetts, MIT, said that was laughable.”
He then changed the subject to China.
What a turd. April 11:
If James Inhofe didn’t want Samuel Locklear to tell the truth about climate change’s impact on geopolitical security, he shouldn’t ask the Admiral a direct question in a Senate committee hearing. While the Oklahoma Senator is well-known as the GOP’s uber-denialist, his readiness to disregard a senior military leader’s sworn testimony makes a mockery of his party’s ostensible respect for our nation’s armed forces.
The fact is that even if the accelerating greenhouse effect is not causally linked to human CO2 emissions, the world is still getting hotter. Those spiking temperatures are real, and their effects are devastating, as farmers in Inhofe’s drought-plagued home state know only too well. Admiral Locklear gave a direct answer to a direct question, but Senator Inhofe’s refusal to hear an answer that didn’t fit his ideology is further confirmation that the Republicans are now, in Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal’s phrase, the “party of stupid.”
Warren Senders
environment Politics: analogies assholes climatology denialists idiots James Hansen Keystone XL
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Year 4, Month 4, Day 18: Ain’t Got No Mash Potato
The LA Times runs an op-ed by James Hansen, which gets picked up by the Register-Guard (Eugene, OR):
In March, the State Department gave the president cover to open a big spigot that will hitch our country to one of the dirtiest fuels on Earth for 40 years or more. The draft environmental review of the Keystone XL pipeline acknowledges tar sands are nasty stuff for the environment, but concludes that the project is OK because this oil will get to market anyway — with or without a pipeline.
A public comment period is under way through April 22, after which the department will prepare a final statement to help the administration decide whether the pipeline is in the “national interest.” If the conclusion is yes, a Canadian company, TransCanada, gets a permit to build a pipeline to transport toxic tar sands through our heartland, connecting to refineries in the Gulf of Mexico, for likely export to China.
Around the world, emissions of heat-trapping gases like carbon dioxide continue to soar. Australia is now finishing “the angry summer” — 123 extreme weather records broken in 90 days —which government sources link to climate change. Last year, 2012, also was the hottest year on record in the contiguous United States.
More Paul Revere analogies…coming up on Patriot’s Day here in Massachusetts! April 7:
Scientists have been warning us for over fifty years that our CO2 emissions were likely to transform Earth profoundly — perhaps catastrophically. And for over fifty years our elected leaders chose to pass the problem along to someone else to solve. When they weren’t simply trying to keep the scientists quiet, that is.
George W. Bush’s administration censored NASA climatologist James Hansen’s report on climate change, muzzling one of climate science’s most informed and articulate voices. Meanwhile, deranged talk-radio personalities incited their low-information audiences into an anti-science frenzy that brought Hansen and other researchers like Dr. Michael Mann death threats and torrents of hate mail.
Two hundred and thirty-eight years ago, farmers in a few Massachusetts towns hearkened to a midnight call, and our nation’s birth can be traced to their readiness to respond to a clear and imminent danger.
Now, a modern-day Paul Revere is again sounding the alarm. Where will we be in two hundred years if we ignore James Hansen’s urgent warnings?
Warren Senders
environment Politics: agriculture denialists extreme weather fires forests scientific consensus
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Year 4, Month 4, Day 17: Charm Offensive
The Denver Post alerts us to the fire problem:
The hotter, drier climate will transform Rocky Mountain forests, unleashing wider wildfires and insect attacks, federal scientists warn in a report for Congress and the White House.
The U.S. Forest Service scientists project that, by 2050, the area burned each year by increasingly severe wildfires will at least double, to around 20 million acres nationwide.
Some regions, including western Colorado, are expected to face up to a fivefold increase in acres burned if climate change continues on the current trajectory.
Floods, droughts and heat waves, driven by changing weather patterns, also are expected to spur bug infestations of the sort seen across 4 million acres of Colorado pine forests.
“We’re going to have to figure out some more effective and efficient ways for adapting rather than just pouring more and more resources and money at it,” Forest Service climate change advisor Dave Cleaves said.
“We’re going to have to have a lot more partnerships with states and communities to look at fires and forest health problems.”
Reality bites, don’t it? April 4:
Well, 2012 was the world’s hottest year in recorded human history, so it would be a good time for Americans to finally acknowledge the implications of global climate change. The Forest Service’s prediction of increasingly severe forest fires over the coming decades is just one of many ways that atmospheric CO2 is going to impact our lives.
While “global warming” sounds vaguely comforting (everybody likes being warm, right?), the true picture of climate change is one in which dangerous factors are going to be getting worse. Already suffering from droughts? Brace yourself for multi-year water shortages. On the other hand, if you’re already getting rained on, you should brace yourself for massive flooding. And if forest fires are a problem where you live, the next century’s going to give starring roles flames, soot, smoke and destruction.
Climate-change denialists are in a losing battle with the facts of the greenhouse effect.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: analogies denialists heroes media irresponsibility NASA scientific method
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Year 4, Month 4, Day 15: Hardly A Man Is Now Alive
Mind you, this is the same paper that recently shut down its Environment reporting entirely:
James E. Hansen, the climate scientist who issued the clearest warning of the 20th century about the dangers of global warming, will retire from NASA this week, giving himself more freedom to pursue political and legal efforts to limit greenhouse gases.
His departure, after a 46-year career at the space agency’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in Manhattan, will deprive federally sponsored climate research of its best-known public figure.
At the same time, retirement will allow Dr. Hansen to press his cause in court. He plans to take a more active role in lawsuits challenging the federal and state governments over their failure to limit emissions, for instance, as well as in fighting the development in Canada of a particularly dirty form of oil extracted from tar sands.
“As a government employee, you can’t testify against the government,” he said in an interview.
A hero. Resurrecting the Paul Revere meme for James Hansen. April 2:
Two hundred and thirty eight years ago, courageous patriots sounded a call; a midnight ride alerted the Minutemen to the arrival of the Redcoats — and the consequences are both an indelible part of our nation’s history and an irrefutable testament to the value of an early-warning system.
The modern equivalents are the world’s climate scientists, who have been trying to wake up a complacent citizenry for decades.
Dr. James Hansen’s resignation from NASA in order to devote himself to alerting America and the world to the climate crisis is a measure of the trouble we’re in. Dr. Hansen and his colleagues have received opprobrium and insult simply for doing their jobs responsibly. If Paul Revere had faced an analogous situation in April 1775, he’d have to persuade “every Middlesex village and farm” not only that the British existed, but that King George’s army posed a danger to their lives and liberty.
Warren Senders
Education environment Gardening Politics: agriculture bees denialists idiots pesticides
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Year 4, Month 4, Day 12: When We Said We Were “Against Drones,” This Was NOT What We Meant
The NYT’s article on neonicotinoids and bee death has a fine conclusion:
Neonicotinoids are hardly the beekeepers’ only concern. Herbicide use has grown as farmers have adopted crop varieties, from corn to sunflowers, that are genetically modified to survive spraying with weedkillers. Experts say some fungicides have been laced with regulators that keep insects from maturing, a problem some beekeepers have reported.
Eric Mussen, an apiculturist at the University of California, Davis, said analysts had documented about 150 chemical residues in pollen and wax gathered from beehives.
“Where do you start?” Dr. Mussen said. “When you have all these chemicals at a sublethal level, how do they react with each other? What are the consequences?”
Experts say nobody knows. But Mr. Adee, who said he had long scorned environmentalists’ hand-wringing about such issues, said he was starting to wonder whether they had a point.
Of the “environmentalist” label, Mr. Adee said: “I would have been insulted if you had called me that a few years ago. But what you would have called extreme — a light comes on, and you think, ‘These guys really have something. Maybe they were just ahead of the bell curve.’”
If they can say “you told us so,” we won’t say “We told you so.” Idiots. March 30:
Bret Adee’s grudging recognition that tree-huggers’ warnings about the dangers of unrestricted pesticide use were “ahead of the curve” highlights a central dilemma: environmentalists would love to be proven wrong. We’d love to be wrong about pesticides, about pollution, about ocean acidification, and (most of all) we’d love to be wrong about climate change — but denial is not a viable option.
Facts are troubling things, as American apiarists are now discovering. As the dismaying data accumulates on their doorsteps, even the most ardent climate-change deniers will eventually have to face the painful truth that those hippie liberal scientists knew what they were talking about. But environmentalists are a forgiving lot: if erstwhile skeptics like Mr Adee can acknowledge that we were right all along about neonicotinoids, maybe they’ll pay attention to our concerns about the greenhouse effect — before it’s too late for action to be of any use.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes denialists idiots Republican obstructionism
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Year 4, Month 4, Day 11: He Knows How To Nasty
The Tulsa World reports on “Greedy Lying Bastards,” and its star turn for Jim Inhofe:
The movie poster for “Greedy Lying Bastards” features several government officials and other individuals that Rosebraugh targets in the documentary as “casting doubt on climate science” and denying global warming effects.
Among the most prominent figures on the movie poster is U.S. Sen. Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma.
“I was not surprised to see myself front and center on the promotional material for this climate change movie, and quite frankly, I’m proud of it,” Inhofe told the Tulsa World on Wednesday when asked for a comment on the film, which he has not seen.
“As I said in July 2003, when I first called global warming the greatest hoax perpetrated on the American people, science has been co-opted by those who care more about peddling gloom-and-doom fear tactics to drive their own broader political agenda,” continued Inhofe, formerly the ranking Republican on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee.
“Just by watching the trailer, that’s exactly what this video seems to do, as well, leveraging the unknown to incite fear and raise money to make people like Al Gore even wealthier.”
In the film, which is executive-produced by actress/activist Daryl Hannah, Inhofe is reportedly “singled out for his obstructionist rhetoric,” according to the Washington Post.
On the movie poster, Inhofe is joined as a target by former President George W. Bush, former Vice President Dick Cheney, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and the Koch brothers.
What a turd. March 29:
Even while Oklahoma’s farmers are facing one of the worst droughts the state has ever experienced, Senator James Inhofe continues to reject climate change’s existence, severity, and causes. Why such vehement dismissal of expertise, insight, facts and physical reality? The Senator’s motivations emerge from the interactions of two different kinds of fundamentalist thinking: Biblical literalism and crony capitalism. The first appears to have imbued Mr. Inhofe with a profound mistrust of the natural world in all its aspects, while the second has rewarded him amply for services rendered.
Either one of these worldviews by itself is bad enough, but when they combine, the resulting stew is both environmentally deadly and intellectually indigestible. Mr. Inhofe’s readiness to embrace lucrative conspiracy theories at the expense of his own home state’s well-being gives the measure of the man.
As long as his public contempt for scientific expertise keeps getting funds from fossil fuel corporations, Senator Inhofe will continue to be an “enemy of the Earth.” It’s Oklahoma’s misfortune that hefty contributions from big oil can’t relieve its parched and cracking soil.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: denialists hurricane media irresponsibility Storms
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Year 4, Month 4, Day 8: Thar She Blows!
Newsweek revisits the New Jersey coastline months after Sandy’s landfall:
Months after Hurricane Sandy, the Jersey Shore is full of talk of rebuilding, but still struggles to accept the march of global warming’s angry waters. Will we be able to keep living where nature doesn’t want us?
The sand was the thing we noticed first. Mostly because it hadn’t been there yesterday, or any day before yesterday, and now it was absolutely everywhere.
For the first 23 hours after the storm, we hadn’t been able to see much of anything at all. On October 29, 2012, Hurricane Sandy had made landfall just south of Long Beach Island, New Jersey, the narrow strip of coastline where I spent my childhood summers and where my parents have lived, full time, for the past eight years. Now a day had passed, and information was hard to come by. My parents were fine; they had evacuated earlier that week to friend’s place 45 miles inland. But the power was out, and the 18-mile-long barrier island, which is home to 20,000 year-round residents, was basically abandoned, so we still didn’t know how much damage our house in North Beach had sustained, or if there were even any houses left in North Beach to sustain damage. Also, the rumors were starting to spread. The Ferris wheel at Fantasy Island has collapsed. A shark is swimming around Surf City. The waves breached the dunes. The ocean met the bay. Whole towns have been washed out. The rumors were not helping.
And still they deny it. March 26:
“Will we be able to keep living where nature doesn’t want us?” Actually, it seems all too evident that nature has a point. Human industrial civilization has introduced hundreds of millions of years’ worth of fossilized carbon into the atmosphere in a geological instant, essentially breaking the Arctic and triggering consequences that are going to reverberate for centuries to come.
A post climate-change future will bring extreme environmental unpredictability. Optimistic forecasts include the destruction of billions of dollars’ worth of infrastructure and the likelihood of increased geopolitical instability (a polite euphemism for wars). The damage inflicted by Hurricane Sandy is just a preview of coming attractions. The pessimistic forecasts suggest that our carelessness has condemned our descendants to a losing battle against implacable environmental forces.
If we are to secure happiness and prosperity for our posterity, we can no longer afford to irresponsibly ignore the frightening factuality of climate change.
Warren Senders