environment Politics: denialists idiots scientific consensus
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Year 4, Month 3, Day 18: If We Cared Enough…
The Las Vegas Sun is one of many papers highlighting the “biggest heat spike in 11,000 years” story:
A new study looking at 11,000 years of climate temperatures shows the world in the middle of a dramatic U-turn, lurching from near-record cooling to a heat spike.
Research released Thursday in the journal Science uses fossils of tiny organisms to reconstruct global temperatures back to the end of the last ice age. It shows how the globe for several thousands of years was cooling until a dramatic spike in the 20th century.
Study author Shaun Marcott says his data shows that 1900 to 1910 was one of the coolest in the past 11,300 years. Yet 100 years later, the decade was one of the warmest.
Marcott and other scientists say the long-term context indicates global warming isn’t natural but man-made since the start of the Industrial Revolution.
Everything’s fine so far, right? March 8:
If we condensed Earth’s 4.6 billion year history by a factor of a hundred millio, it’d be just under fifty years, and human beings wouldn’t emerge until about four hours ago. And in the last one minute, our species has not only cut down fifty percent of the planet’s trees, but reintroduced the carbon that fossilized over an entire geological epoch into the atmosphere. We shouldn’t need a climate scientist to tell us this is a bad idea.
Every year, our industrial economy burns five million years’ worth of ancient sunlight in the form of oil, coal and natural gas. A 5,000,000:1 ratio is obviously unsustainable, but because humans have for the most part not grasped the large-scale consequences of their consumption habits, we find ourselves hurtling toward the abyss. It is no coincidence that the vast majority of climate-change denialists reject many other scientific findings, preferring the comforting myths of ancient cultures to the disturbing truths of our predicament.
If we want our children and their children in turn to have lives full of hope, beauty and prosperity, we need to face the facts of the climate crisis. Denial is both intellectually and morally inexcusable.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes denialists idiots Republican obstructionism Water
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Year 4, Month 3, Day 14: I Feel Pretty
The Orlando Sentinel considers the question of water supplies, and wonders:
…how might climate change play out at a local level? Will the amount of fresh water in the Floridan Aquifer or the Kissimmee and St. Johns rivers shrink to critically low levels? And which coastal cities’ wells are most likely to become fouled by seawater?
Spurred by that lack of location-specific knowledge, a half-dozen Florida water utilities, along with state water managers and some university scientists, have formed a grass-roots alliance to do what otherwise isn’t being done: Figure out what climate change will do in different parts of Florida and devise ways to ensure enough water for the state’s counties and cities in the years and decades to come.
“It’s a very big concern of ours,” said Rob Teegarden, vice president of Orlando Utilities Commission’s water division. “The world and the nation have no plan for serious climate-policy initiatives. People have their desires, but they aren’t there yet, and we’re trying to seriously figure it out.”
Don’t mention who’s responsible for the “no plan” part. March 5:
By all means acknowledge that climate change will to impact Florida’s water supplies, and that there’s been too little action at the federal level on this issue. But it’s important to understand that there’s been little or no meaningful policy response from Washington on what’s perhaps the most important issue facing America and the world because Republican politicians have adopted such extreme anti-science attitudes that reality-based positions no longer have any place in the legislative agenda.
Scientific method is a great way to develop an accurate picture of the universe and how it works. Since environment and energy policies are implemented in the real world, it makes sense to base them on the findings of scientists rather than hidebound ideologies. But until the GOP stops steeping itself in an anti-intellectual teapot, Floridians are on their own when it comes to coping with the consequences of a radically transforming climate.
Warren Senders
Education environment: analogies denialists idiots
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Year 4, Month 3, Day 12: When It’s Cold Outside, I’ve Got The Month Of May
One at a time, they’re figuring it out:
I was a global warming skeptic. I questioned the validity of the studies purporting to be factual. You see, since the 1970s seawater temperatures along the coastline of San Luis Obispo County weren’t changing to any great extent. If anything, they’ve been slowly trending downward. What caused this condition if the oceans were supposedly warming?
After careful review of the wind data from the Diablo Canyon meteorological tower, I discovered that the northwesterly winds during the spring and summer months have slowly increased from decade to decade. These onshore winds produce greater amounts of upwelling and cooler seawater temperatures along our beaches.
Our northwesterly winds may have increased in response to a more intense area of low pressure that develops over the Great Central Valley of California as air temperatures warm, especially, during the spring and summer months. As that air rises, northwesterly winds flow from the Pacific to equalize the pressure difference between the ocean and the valley.
However, this condition is the least of the changes we are seeing. Record low amounts of ice in the Arctic Ocean, temperature records that fall like bowling pins, prolonged droughts, increasing wildfires and epic storms and floods have convinced me that the planet is warming at an unprecedented rate.
By the year 5013, we’ll finally have persuaded everyone. March 3:
In a heartfelt rejection of his former “skepticism,” John Lindsey offers a metaphor for the greenhouse effect, comparing the alarmingly high readings of atmospheric CO2 to an elevated blood alcohol level, and pleading “let us not further intoxicate our planet.” While the comparison is apt, it is not our Earth that is intoxicated, but our species.
Just as alcohol lowers inhibitions, lessens foresight, and increases risky behavior, industrial civilization’s century-long fossil-fuel binge has left us almost incapable of careful thought about the future. It’s just our bad luck that the greenhouse emissions from our carbon-burning spree are melting the ice-caps and triggering a series of catastrophic climatic tipping points. A drunk never plans for the inevitable hangover, and we humans are still for the most part in the ebullient phase of a night on the town: cocky, aggressive, full of ourselves — and unlikely to plan for a long and painful morning after.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: Arctic ice melt denialists idiots permafrost tundra
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Year 4, Month 3, Day 11: A Monde Is A Terrible Thing To Waste
BREAKING: Idiot half-term governor’s hand-picked replacement is also an idiot:
Before being picked as John McCain’s running mate in 2008, Governor Sarah Palin seemed a true believer in climate change. In September 2007, responding to requests for urgent action, Palin established the Alaska Climate Change Sub-Cabinet to develop and implement a comprehensive Alaska Climate Change Strategy.
But we’ve just learned that, after Palin resigned in summer 2009 and Sean Parnell (a former ConocoPhillips executive) replaced her as governor, the new governor essentially terminated the Climate Cabinet, without informing the Alaska public. Evidently, Gov. Parnell does not think the risk of climate change in Alaska serious enough to continue the Climate Cabinet, or perhaps he fears it may compromise his “drill-baby-drill” economic plan. Either way, this is spectacularly irresponsible.
In establishing the Climate Cabinet, Palin correctly stated that: “Climate change is not just an environmental issue. It is also a social, cultural, and economic issue important to all Alaskans. As a result of this warming, coastal erosion, thawing permafrost, retreating sea ice, record forest fires, and other changes are affecting, and will continue to affect, the lifestyles and livelihoods of Alaskans. Alaska needs a strategy to identify and mitigate potential impacts of climate change and to guide its efforts in evaluating and addressing known or suspected causes of climate change.”
The changer things get, the samer they stay. March 2:
The distance between “should” and “will” is vivdly evident in the cavalier dismissal of Alaska’s climate change sub-cabinet by Governor Parnell. The readiness of self-styled “conservatives” to do anything but conserve would be astonishing if it weren’t so predictable.
Under climbing Arctic temperatures, huge swaths of land will become unrecognizable; ecosystems which developed to fit Alaska’s unique conditions will struggle to adapt to an environment changing too fast for evolution to keep up. Climatologists’ predictions of the impact of an increasingly hotter world have, if anything, underestimated the speed, severity, and complexity of the damage; to willfully ignore science because its findings are inconvenient or uncomfortable is to live in a dream world.
Conservative climate-change deniers in American politics need to visit the real world — a place where superstorms, droughts, heat waves and drastic ecological transformations are already underway. Governor Parnell needs to wake up and smell the permafrost.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes denialists extreme weather idiots James Inhofe scientific consensus
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Year 4, Month 3, Day 10: Between Your Ears There’s Just A Great Big Vacu-um
The Washington Post reports on big snows in the West — in Oklahoma & Texas, no less:
Schools and major highways in the Texas Panhandle remained closed for a second day Tuesday. Interstate 27 reopened between Amarillo and Lubbock, about 120 miles to the south, but the Texas National Guard was still working to clear much of Interstate 40 from the Oklahoma border to the New Mexico state line.
Some other roads reopened as sunny conditions began to thaw ice and snow-packed surfaces.
Just a day earlier, whiteout conditions had made virtually all Panhandle roads impassable. A hurricane-force gust of 75 mph was recorded in Amarillo, which got 17 inches. The heaviest snowfall was in Follett, Texas, with 21 inches.
In Oklahoma, 600 snowplows and trucks worked to reopen roads.
Always happy to poke fun at James Inhofe. Sent February 28:
A blizzard? Cue the triumphant shouts from climate-change deniers, as predictable as the weather once was before the metastasizing greenhouse effect began playing havoc with our atmosphere. That it is arch-denialist James Inhofe’s home state that has to cope with tons of unexpected snow adds an extra fillip of irony to the news.
While it’s indeed counterintuitive that a hotter atmosphere can lead to extreme snowstorms, humanity’s intuitions don’t include imaginary numbers, DNA, or radioactivity either (hence the importance of, and the need for, science). Steadily rising global temperatures’ complicated and unobvious effects include heat waves, extreme precipitation, and droughts like the one currently baking Oklahoma’s ground, blizzard or no.
While Senator Inhofe and his denialist fellow-travelers may not grasp how a hotter atmosphere makes once-in-a-century storms more frequent, their rejection of climate science hamstrings our capacity to cope with a national emergency. Ignorance is no foundation for policy.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: agriculture denialists drought idiots media irresponsibility
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Year 4, Month 4, Day 7: You Get No Bread With One Meat Ball
WICHITA, Kan. — Years of drought are reshaping the U.S. beef industry with feedlots and a major meatpacking plant closing because there are too few cattle left in the United States to support them.
Some feedlots in the nation’s major cattle-producing states have already been dismantled, and others are sitting empty. Operators say they don’t expect a recovery anytime soon, with high feed prices, much of the country still in drought and a long time needed to rebuild herds.
The closures are the latest ripple in the shockwave the drought sent through rural communities. Most cattle in the U.S. are sent to feedlots for final fattening before slaughter. The dwindling number of animals also is hurting meatpackers, with their much larger workforces. For consumers, the impact will be felt in grocery and restaurant bills as a smaller meat supply means higher prices.
Cattle numbers have been falling for years as the price of corn used to feed animals in feedlots skyrocketed. The drought accelerated the process, but many feedlots were able to survive at first because ranchers whose pastures dried up weaned calves early and sent breeding cows to be fattened for slaughter.
Yum. Sent February 25:
Even as the drought hammering the world’s most productive farmland goes into its second year, the anti-science conservatives in American politics and media are still stuck in full-denial mode: there is no drought, and if there is, it’s not caused by climate change, which isn’t happening; even if the climate is changing, it’s not caused by humans, and even if it is, it’s too expensive to do anything about it anyway. Does your head hurt? Mine does.
It’s not just farm states that are waking up to the consequences of an accelerating greenhouse effect. Everywhere across the nation and the world people are realizing that a transformed climate is going to wreak havoc on our food supply, with ripple effects that will radically alter the lives of everyone on the planet.
Eventually, of course, the denialists will have to eat their words. There won’t be anything else left to eat.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: agriculture denialists fruit sustainability
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Year 4, Month 3, Day 6: One Piece In The Shape Of A Pair
Public Opinion, a news outlet in Chambersburg, PA, tells us about a fruit scientist and what he had to say:
Local fruit growers wanted to know about hail netting after Rob Crassweller, Penn State pomologist, finished his talk on climate change.
What color? What mesh?
Crassweller had said very little about hail during his presentation on Thursday to the Franklin County Horticulture Society at the Savoy Restaurant in Waynesboro. It’s a four-letter word fruit growers don’t like to hear or speak.
Crassweller spoke at length to the 40 growers about expected changes in pruning, pests, production and plant diseases.
“That’s something we can handle,” said Dwight Mickey, secretary of the county fruit growers. “You just have to learn to adapt. Those are things we can control, the influx of new insects and diseases.”
Hail on the other hand is unpredictable and usually devastating.
Mickey, Pennsylvania’s 2012 Grower of the Year, lost most of his 2011 apple crop to a hailstorm.
[snip]
Crassweller told growers he would not get into the causes of climate change.
“Things have changed and will continue to change,” Crassweller said. “We know enough that things are going in a different way.”
Indeed. Why ask for trouble? Sent February 24:
As global weather has gotten steadily weirder over the past year or so, the ranks of those rejecting climatology’s conclusions have thinned. But this means only that denialists have moved back to their next line of attack: even if the climate is changing, that doesn’t mean humans caused it.
And given the history of conservative denialists’ behavior, it’s easy to understand why Dr. Rob Crassweller abstained from addressing the causes of climate change when talking with Pennsylvania fruit growers. Nobody wants the obscene phone calls, hate mail, death threats, and frivolous legal actions that have disrupted the lives and careers of climate scientists whose conclusions indicate that anthropogenic global warming is a fact.
But ignoring a truth won’t make it go away. Climate change is real, it’s here, it’s dangerous — and human civilization is its primary driver. The sooner we face the facts, the sooner we’ll start making progress against a profound civilizational threat.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes corporate irresponsibility denialists idiots
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Year 4, Month 3, Day 5: And Yet It Moves!
The Newark Star-Ledger throws down the gantlet:
PSE&G wants to spend a staggering $4 billion over the next decade to harden its electric and gas systems against the impact of severe storms like Sandy and Irene, a sum that works out to about $500 per person in New Jersey.
“This is a cost of climate change, pure and simple,” says Jeanne Fox, a commissioner on the Board of Public Utilities, which oversees the utilities.
It’s a pity we cannot send the entire bill to the flat-earthers who are willfully deaf to the chorus of warnings from the world’s most respected scientists. By blocking political action on climate change, even now, they are driving up the costs of coping.
Flat-earthers. Heh. Sent Feb. 23:
In some ways, climate-change denialists are even more regressive than “flat-Earthers.” After all, the Earth’s curvature is imperceptible until the parochial and uninformed eye graduates to an understanding of vaster distances and the evidence of science. Climate change, by contrast, is sharply evident everywhere around the planet. When flowers bloom a month earlier, agriculture is devastated by drought, superstorm after superstorm clobbers coastlines, and heatwaves make cities almost uninhabitable, these transformations can be recognized by anyone with the wit to look around.
The institutions rejecting the scientific evidence of rapidly warming planet are not driven purely by ignorance, but a far less forgivable motive. The fossil-fuel corporations whose products contribute the most to the burgeoning greenhouse effect will see their quarterly returns affected by a societal move away from carbon-based energy. It is surely a pity that our tax dollars should subsidize such a toxic mix of cupidity and stupidity.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: agriculture denialists extreme weather sustainability
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Year 4, Month 3, Day 4: In Case Of Accident, He Always Took His Mum
More shrill alarmism from the Grey Lady:
DENVER — After enduring last summer’s destructive drought, farmers, ranchers and officials across the country’s parched heartland had hoped that plentiful winter snows would replenish the ground and refill their rivers, breaking the grip of one of the worst dry spells in American history. No such luck.
Across the West, lakes are half full and mountain snows are thin, omens of another summer of drought and wildfire. Complicating matters, many of the worst-hit states now have even less water on hand than a year ago, raising the specter of shortages and rationing that could inflict another year of losses on struggling farms.
Reservoir levels have fallen sharply in Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Nevada. The soil is drier than normal. And while a few recent snowstorms have cheered skiers, the snowpack is so thin in parts of Colorado that the government has declared an “extreme drought” around the ski havens of Vail and Aspen.
“We’re worse off than we were a year ago,” said Brian Fuchs, a climatologist at the National Drought Mitigation Center.
But Al Gore uses a private jet. February 22:
Higher temperatures increase evaporation, bringing higher humidity, leading in turn to a steadily-increasing likelihood of extreme precipitation. But this doesn’t mean all that extra rain or snow’s falling where it’s needed — a lesson farmers in the American Midwest are learning painfully as their land parches and cracks under the ravages of extreme drought. This is climate change.
Warmer winters mean that invasive insect pests like the mountain pine beetle are no longer stopped by below-freezing temperatures, which means the likely death of millions of pines. Thousands of acres of dead forest in a land hammered by drought; a superfire waiting to happen. This is climate change.
The subtle and varied edifices of human civilization are built on the foundation of a benign and stable environment — something far more fragile than anyone imagined. As the land loses its ability to support our species’ numbers, this, too, is climate change.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes Barack Obama corporate irresponsibility denialists idiots
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Year 4, Month 3, Day 3: Let’s Split The Difference Between Catastrophic And Apocalyptic!
U.S. News And World Report gives us a teaser on POTUS’ intentions:
President Barack Obama is tired of waiting for Congress to move on legislation to reduce carbon emissions, and his administration is poised to move forward on actions to do just that—including a move that will effectively eliminate the possibility of any new coal plant opening in the United States, experts say.
“We can choose to believe that Superstorm Sandy, and the most severe drought in decades, and the worst wildfires some states have ever seen were all just a freak coincidence,” Obama said during his State of the Union address. “Or we can choose to believe in the overwhelming judgment of science—and act before it’s too late.”
Climate change has been a controversial public policy issue in recent years, as many conservative Republicans have denied a relationship between carbon emissions and incremental increases in temperatures, which many scientists link to increasingly severe weather events.
But…
…there’s always a but. February 22:
There’s much to cheer in President Obama’s stated intention to push ahead initiatives for combating climate change over the rest of his second term. With American agriculture hammered by drought and extreme weather delivering blow after blow to coastline cities, it’s clear to all but the most willfully ignorant that climate change cannot be wished out of existence. A coherent national and global strategy for addressing the crisis is the need of the hour.
But given Mr. Obama’s desire for common ground, he must recognize that in this struggle, a compromise with his political opponents is no better than abject surrender to natural forces far more powerful than they. His real adversaries are neither the increasingly intransigent GOP or the profit-driven fossil fuel corporations whose executives recently joined him for a round of golf, but the laws of chemistry and physics — immune, alas, to electoral exigencies or soaring oratory.
Warren Senders