environment Politics: assholes denialists idiots Republicans
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Year 4, Month 3, Day 2: I Smoke Fettucini Alfredo, Myself
In breaking news, Chris Christie is an utter idiot:
Did global warming and rising sea levels trigger Hurricane Sandy?
And does it matter?
Gov. Christie says it doesn’t. Whether environmental changes caused the storm is an “esoteric question,” he said at a news conference at the Shore earlier this month. Victims of the storm don’t “give a damn” either – as confirmed by a group of Sandy survivors who applauded Christie’s remark.
But scientists say they all need to start caring. Because regardless of what caused Sandy, even those skeptical about climate change say a Sandy-like storm will happen again. And so, steps must be taken now to prevent loss of life and property later.
The guy gives douchenozzles a bad name. Sent February 21:
We’ve seen this behavior hundreds of times, perhaps in our own families or neighborhoods. A friend has a heart attack, or a relative develops a malignancy — while rejecting any connection to unhealthy habits. Since there’s no way to link a particular cardiac episode to a daily diet of jelly donuts and cheeseburgers, or a particular tumor to a 3-pack-a-day smoking habit, this makes it easier to deny even an obvious causal relationship.
Chris Christie’s doing the same thing in refusing to consider climate change’s impact on New Jersey’s future. The simple fact is that America has developed some very unhealthy habits over the past century; while no single storm can be definitively linked to our fossil-fuel addiction, we’ve tilted the probabilities in favor of more disastrous weather in the years to come. Governor Christie needs to spend more time in New Jersey, and less in a state of denial.
Warren Senders
atheism Education environment Politics: denialists economics sustainability timescale
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Year 4, Month 2, Day 28: Right Now, Over Me…
The Loveland Reporter-Herald (CO) runs a thoughtful op-ed by a smart young man named Reid Maynard. He’s in high school:
Before opening our discussion, let us leave some baggage behind. Let us release prejudices regarding media misinformation, sensationalism and hypocritical vice presidents.
With minds unhindered, let us approach the table and discuss climate change. Much passionate argument emerges in this debate with logic and demagoguery on both sides, but it presents high stakes and sacrifices for all generations: adult, youth and child. Therefore, we must carefully consider the subject without the stain of bias.
The existence of climate change is no longer a debate. Simply observe modern evidence, such as the fact that nations now dispute maritime boundaries in the Arctic as shipping routes emerge where ice once reigned. Today, politicians and pundits argue about causes. Most researchers agree that human activity exacerbates this phenomenon, accelerating change beyond natural pace. Others dispute anthropogenic change and insist that mitigation creates unacceptable costs. Throw in lobbyists, profiteers and screaming extremists and we have painful gridlock.
I could have done without the dig at Al Gore. But rahne do, he’s a good kid. We need more like him. Feb 19:
When it comes to the long-term future of our species, we ignore the voices of the young at our peril. Even as the market-driven consumer economy encourages us to adopt the short-term mindset of immediate gratification, thoughtful young people cannot ignore the damage this is doing to the planet and the environment upon which all of us depend. They see, all too clearly, that a lifestyle based on continuous consumption will end by consuming us all; as Reid Maynard demonstrates in his op-ed column, they understand that there are no easy options.
And what of us, their parents and grandparents? If we are prepared to accept the facts of global heating — no matter how uncomfortable, disquieting, or inconvenient — then we can collaborate with our children in solving the problems of survival and prosperity in a transformed world. On the other hand, if we reject the science of climate change because it conflicts with our preconceptions and ideologies, we are no longer partners, but adversaries.
It’s up to us.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: agriculture assholes denialists idiots Republicans
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Year 4, Month 2, Day 25: A Donkey And A Ditch
The Times-Record-News of Wichita Falls, TX is reporting on drought conditions in Oklahoma – and the fact that the state’s recent minor snowfall isn’t going to help a whole heck of a lot:
OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) — Recent snowfall of 5 to 6 inches in parts of western Oklahoma and lighter amounts in the remainder of the state did little to alleviate ongoing drought conditions, according to a state climatologist.
Still, any moisture is giving hope to wheat farmers as the crop emerges in advance of a harvest that typically begins in June.
“We do have some improvement, both from the rain and the snow,” said David Gammill, who has about 1,300 acres of wheat planted near Grandfield in southwestern Oklahoma, one of the areas hardest hit by drought. “There was from a half inch to .9 rain in the area. It has perked the wheat up considerably in the area.”
Cattlemen, however, “are still in dire need of water” for dry ponds, Gammill said.
The latest U.S. Drought Monitor report shows 87 percent of Oklahoma in extreme or exceptional drought, the two most severe categories, with exceptional drought continuing in the western third of the state and across the northern tier of counties, an area making up nearly 40 percent of Oklahoma. Counties along the far eastern border were in severe drought, the drought monitor reported.
James Inhofe! Feb. 17:
If the parched Oklahoma earth could only watch television, it would have a chance to hear Senator Inhofe’s reassurances that climate change is a hoax perpetrated by world-government environmentalists out to confiscate all our SUVs. If herds of cattle seeking water could only read the news, they’d feel reassured that the ongoing drought that has dessicated huge swaths of American farmland is all a fabrication of the liberal media. If wheatfields slowly baking in the heat only knew “the truth” about global warming…
Of course, wheat, corn, and cows already know that Earth is getting hotter. And as the temperature rises, we’ll experience droughts, heat waves, and extreme weather of all sorts — all of which are going to impact the agricultural sector in ways we’ve barely begun to imagine. The question is, can James Inhofe and other conservative climate-change denialists figure out what the Oklahoma ground is telling them — or are they, quite literally, dumber than dirt?
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes denialists economics idiots infrastructure Republican obstructionism
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Year 4, Month 2, Day 23: Helplessly Hoping…
Another group of socialist hippie treehuggers heard from:
As climate change leads to more frequent and destructive natural disasters and threatens crop yields, bridges and other infrastructure, the federal government faces big financial risks that it is poorly positioned to address, auditors said Thursday.
These risks, along with the threat of gaps in critical weather forecasting satellites that could last years, topped a biennial list released Thursday of federal programs at high risk of waste, fraud, abuse or financial loss.
“The federal government is terribly exposed to this change,” Gene L. Dodaro, comptroller general and director of the Government Accountability Office, said in announcing why climate change made his agency’s high-risk list. “The government needs a much more strategic and centralized approach.”
Not that we’re gonna get one, of course. Feb 15:
If we needed yet another demonstration of how Congressional inaction is causing grave harm to our nation, we need look no further than the GAO report confirming that climate change is a financial disaster in progress. Damage to government infrastructure is only one part of the picture, but it’s a big part — and failure to address the problem in a timely fashion is going to cost taxpayers untold billions of dollars.
In fact, addressing climate change in a “timely fashion” would have required us to get started three decades ago, and the cold equations of a warming atmosphere now leave us no wiggle room. The irresponsible delay-and-deny tactics of conservative legislators beholden to the fossil fuel industry are pushing the price of governmental gridlock ever higher. If Congress can’t lead, they’ll have to follow; if they can’t do either, they’ll have to simply get out of the way. Immediately.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: agriculture assholes denialists Republican obstructionism
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Year 4, Month 2, Day 21: Hey-Ho, Make You Lose Your Mind…
Ann Arbor.com appears to be an online paper servicing (duh!) Ann Arbor, MI. They note big problems ahead with the state’s fruit growers:
As climate change takes hold, Michigan’s orchards may increasingly fall victim to the spring thaw-and-freeze pattern that devastated fruit crops last year, scientists said Tuesday.
The grim prognosis is part of a broader evaluation of the likely effects of a warming climate being developed by federal and university scientists. It predicts that more intense flooding, heat stress, drought and other extreme weather will take a toll on Midwestern agriculture.
“The trends we’re observing are a bit disturbing,” Jeff Andresen, Michigan’s state climatologist, said during a conference in Ann Arbor where he and other experts outlined the latest findings of the National Climate Assessment, which integrates the most recent scientific research on climate change and is updated every four years. A draft is being circulated for public review.
Temperatures soared into the 80s across much of the state last March, causing cherry, apple and other fruit trees to sprout blooms that were killed the next month during a series of frosts and freezes. Crop damage exceeded 90 percent in some areas. Michigan State University estimated losses to farmers at $223 million.
Same damn letter I’ve used before, with the serial numbers filed off. I’m tired and rushed today. Sent February 13:
Michigan’s got company. It’s not just fruit growers, but agriculturalists everywhere in the world who are facing hard evidence that climate change is no future-tense abstraction, but a present-tense fact. And it’s not just orchards and fields and plantations that are coming under threat from the accelerating greenhouse effect and its consequences. Extreme weather will inevitably damage or destroy parts of America’s vulnerable infrastructure — and crippled roads, bridges, and utility systems can hurt farmers just as much as a storm or drought.
However, there are a few places left where the climate crisis is making no impact whatsoever. Thanks to their fossil-fuel sponsors, the plush, air-conditioned chambers of Republican politicians are well-insulated against the facts. Anti-science conservatives may hail from all over America, but the state of Denial is grossly over-represented in our country’s politics. Michigan deserves better. All of us do.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: denialists Deval Patrick idiots power grid
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Year 4, Month 2, Day 19: Can’t Do Nothin’ Without The Man.
The Boston Herald reports that Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick is arguing in favor of buried power lines. Given that the power lines currently have about 200 kg of ice on them, that’s not such a bad idea:
SCITUATE – Gov. Deval Patrick this morning called for a sweeping review of the cost to bury power lines underground as the weekend’s storm left 100,000 Bay Staters still without electricity and more than 1,000 still in shelters.
“I am personally very interested in seeing a real analysis done on the cost to bury utilities underground. I know it’s expensive, but I have to believe that with the cost of recovery, the disruption to personal and work lives over time and given the increased frequency of storms of this severity,” it’s worth a review, Patrick said.
Early Monday, an estimated 100,000 Bay Staters were still without power and approximately 1,500 storm-displaced people were still in shelters.
With fiercer weather events predicted, and the state’s history of long-lasting power outages, the governor said, “We need to start thinking long term about how we adjust. Meteorologists are telling us that we’re going to see more storms like this, and so we are going to have to start thinking, long term, about how we address this,” Patrick said from this hard-hit town’s high school, where more than 100 residents rode out Superstorm Nemo.
But since climate change isn’t real, this is going to cost too much. Sent February 11:
When Governor Patrick, arguing for underground power lines in the Commonwealth, says that “meteorologists are telling us that we’re going to see more storms like this,” what he’s really talking about, of course, is climate change. Rising sea levels and increased atmospheric humidity are going to make the next generation of hurricanes and snowstorms into massive events. The prospect of a Nemo-sized storm once or twice every winter is an excellent argument for putting as many electrical lines underground as possible — as fast as possible.
States on the frontline of the transforming climate will have to work rapidly to avert catastrophic consequences over the coming decades. But there is another strategy which has outlived its usefulness: the attempt by conservative politicians and media to deny the obvious facts of a rapidly transforming climate. Climate-change denialists are on the wrong side of science, and the wrong side of history.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: Barack Obama denialists idiots Republican obstructionism
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Year 4, Month 2, Day 18: Hey Now Baby, Get Into My Big Black Car
The Palm Beach Post wonders if the President is gonna go there:
Climate change — a topic absent from last year’s presidential campaign — has slipped so far down the nation’s to-do list that stakeholders have taken to counting how often the president even utters the phrase.
So when President Barack Obama mentioned climate change in his inaugural address Jan. 21, those observers cautiously took notice. Now they are waiting to see whether the president mentions climate change again in his State of the Union address Tuesday.
“If he were to talk about it regularly, then it would matter,” said Theda Skocpol, professor of government and sociology at Harvard, who recently published articles on climate change policy during the president’s first term. “Public opinion researchers have found that public opinion decays really fast, so you have to keep at it.”
Read the comments on the article and get seriously depressed. Sheesh. February 9:
A storm of unprecedented size hammers the East coast of the USA, destroying towns and causing billions of dollars’ worth of damage. A giant snowstorm drops two feet of snow on the Northeast, leaving half a million people without power. Drought cripples our agriculture; last year is confirmed as the hottest in recorded history — and yet there is still a question as to whether climate change deserves presidential recognition? How bizarre.
Think of it this way: if a terror attack destroyed thousands of homes, wrecked infrastructure, crippled huge sections of the power grid, and threatened the continued safety and productivity of our agriculture, politicians and media would be beating the war drums night and day. But when the same wreckage is a consequence of our addiction to oil, those voices are curiously silent.
There is still hope to mitigate the worst effects of climate change, but there is no time to lose, and none to waste. Conservative commentators who treat “global warming” as a laugh line are on the wrong side of science, and the wrong side of history.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes denialists idiots Republican obstructionism scientific literacy
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Year 4, Month 2, Day 17: Lies From The Pit Of Hell
The Christian Science Monitor extols the potential of new technology for carbon capture:
Global temperatures are rising faster than scientists thought possible even a few years ago. The Arctic icecap is melting at a rate that few researchers had anticipated, and, most ominously, the permafrost is beginning to thaw, which could release vast amounts of methane, a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than CO2.
The situation is indeed grave – but not unsolvable. While the majority of scientists agree that we humans have made the problem, new innovations show that we can also solve it. Climate change is a global problem, but the world looks to the US for leadership and solutions.
There are three reasons for this. First, America is the world’s largest economic power. Second, the US has been the main obstructionist at global climate conferences preventing the tough action that needs to be taken to cut the emissions of greenhouse gases and slow the progress of climate change. Finally, and more hopefully, the US remains the world leader in science and innovation.
I saw proof of this when I visited Dr. Klaus Lackner, the chairman of the Earth and Environmental Engineering department at Columbia University in December. He showed me a palm-sized mockup for an “artificial tree” that mimics the photosynthesis of real trees by chemically sucking CO2 out of the air. A single such tree-sized device left standing in the wind, Dr. Lackner told me, would remove one ton a day of carbon from the atmosphere, the equivalent of the greenhouse gases produced by 36 automobiles.
If horses could fly, they’d be airplanes. Or something. Feb 9:
It’s comforting to think that American ingenuity, resourcefulness, and determination can mitigate the rapidly accelerating climate crisis. After all, we’re the nation that initiated the Manhattan Project, that landed men on the moon and brought them back safely. Surely the threat of global heating can be eliminated with good old American know-how and our iconic “can-do” spirit?
Maybe. But putting all that ingenuity, resourcefulness, and determination to work addressing the climate threat will take money, a taboo subject for the Republican lawmakers currently blocking forward motion on meaningful energy or environmental policy. So much for the “can-do” part of the equation. If we can take their public statements on scientific subjects as evidence, those same legislators are notoriously short on know-how.
Yes, scientific and technological innovations may well provide ways to cope with climate change — but only if our politicians fully accept the science and fully fund the innovation.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: blizzards denialists idiots Storms
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Year 4, Month 2, Day 16: If You Lived Here, You’d Be Home Now
Time Magazine takes another whack at the argument from personal incredulity:
As the blizzard-bound residents of the mid-Atlantic region get ready to dig themselves out of the third major storm of the season, they may stop to wonder two things: Why haven’t we bothered to invest in a snow blower, and what happened to climate change? After all, it stands to reason that if the world is getting warmer — and the past decade was the hottest on record — major snowstorms should become a thing of the past, like PalmPilots and majority rule in the Senate. Certainly that’s what the Virginia state Republican Party thinks: the GOP aired an ad last weekend that attacked two Democratic members of Congress for supporting the 2009 carbon-cap-and-trade bill, using the recent storms to cast doubt on global warming.
(See pictures of the massive blizzard in Washington, D.C.)Brace yourselves now — this may be a case of politicians twisting the facts. There is some evidence that climate change could in fact make such massive snowstorms more common, even as the world continues to warm. As the meteorologist Jeff Masters points out in his excellent blog at Weather Underground, the two major storms that hit Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington, D.C., this winter — in December and during the first weekend of February — are already among the 10 heaviest snowfalls those cities have ever recorded. The chance of that happening in the same winter is incredibly unlikely.
Stupid is as stupid does. Feb. 8:
While the notion that a warming planet could trigger more extreme snowstorms is counterintuitive, the fact is that if nature always corresponded to our intuitions, there would be no science. Our species’ innate intuitive sense of how things work doesn’t include bacteria, DNA, irrational numbers, subatomic particles, or radioactivity — but they’re real beyond any doubt. So, too, are the localized manifestations of a steadily rising global temperature, which include extreme rain and snow, droughts, heat waves, superstorms, and increasingly unpredictable weather everywhere around the planet.
Indeed, many of the processes attendant to global heating are complicated and unobvious, which is why scientific insights are essential. Climate-change deniers, unable to understand the mechanisms whereby a hotter atmosphere turns once-in-a-century storms into frequent occurrences, reject the science entirely, shamefully rendering America’s energy and environmental policies captive to the intellectual failures of our most willfully ignorant and superstitious politicians.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: denialists endangered species extinction regional ecosystems stupidity timescales
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Year 4, Month 2, Day 14: And Because I Love You, I’ll Give It One More Try
The North Andover Eagle-Tribune reports on climate change in New England:
One of the harbingers of change has been the lobster industry, which Wahle called a kind of “canary in a coal mine.”
Maine fishermen have set record harvests over the past few years, perhaps due in part to higher water temperatures and fewer groundfish, which prey on young lobsters. Fishermen off Newburyport have also reported good harvests, with last year being among the best.
Meanwhile, in southern New England, it’s an entirely different story. Mass lobster kill-offs in Long Island Sound have been caused by warming waters, Wahle said, while a disease that infects lobster shells has been spreading northward through the sound and into Massachusetts waters.
“(The disease) seems to have stalled out just south of Cape Ann,” Wahle said.
If the disease spreads further north, it could have a devastating impact on northern New England’s lobster fisheries, Wahle said.
As of Feb. 6, the comment thread on this article was 100% denialist stupidity. Sent, with an optimistic tag:
New England’s not alone in feeling the increasing impact of global warming. While specific symptoms of climate change vary from place to place, regions everywhere around the planet are affected. Whether it’s drought in the corn belt, unseasonal monsoons in Asia, or warmer winters fostering pine beetle infestations in Colorado, the consequences of the greenhouse effect are hitting people painfully. Some communities may reap temporary benefits — like Maine lobstermen who are hauling in a bumper harvest — but since warmer winters may bring an end to the state’s skiing industry, there’s no real positive economic impact on a wider scale.
If there is any upside to the accelerating climate crisis, it is that our species’ future requires us to realize that what we do today in our own narrow corner of the world will affect people thousands of miles — and hundreds of years — away. Only by recognizing that political boundaries and cultural differences are irrelevant in the face of the gathering storm can we humans make a happy and prosperous future for our posterity.
Warren Senders