environment Politics: assholes denialists idiots Republican obstructionism
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Year 4, Month 1, Day 26: There Must Be Some Kind Of Way Out Of Here
The Black Hills Pioneer (SD) has an op-ed piece by Bob Mercer, looking at climate change’s effects on the state:
The most important topic missing from political debate in South Dakota is potentially more harmful in the long run than any semi-automatic handgun or AR-style mock-assault rifle.
The topic is climate change. There isn’t a single piece of legislation in the 2013 session that addresses it.
During the 2012 election campaigns for state Public Utilities Commission and U.S. House of Representatives, there was next to zero public discussion beyond the bumper-sticker level.
That was despite the previous involvement in climate-change matters by two of the Democratic candidates, Matt McGovern and Matt Varilek.
McGovern and Varilek, rather than make their cases, dodged political punches from their Republican critics on the topic.
I pulled out the recently published letter to the Honolulu Weekly, adjusted it, and sent it off. Tra la la la. Sent January 19:
South Dakota isn’t alone. People everywhere around the world are discovering that climate change isn’t an abstraction any more, but a life-changing — sometimes life-threatening — fact. Farmers can’t plan if the weather’s too unpredictable; extreme storms will threaten even the most robust infrastructure. Droughts can turn once-fertile land arid and unproductive; island nations may simply disappear as polar ice melts and sea levels rise.
Yet while the climate crisis is transforming lives all over the planet, there’s one place where the consequences of an accelerating greenhouse effect aren’t making any impact at all. In the comfortably air-conditioned chambers of Senate and Congressional Republicans, global warming isn’t a devastating reality, but a liberal hoax. These anti-science conservatives may nominally represent different constituencies, but ultimately they all hail from the same state of denial. Which is bad news for South Dakota — and the rest of the world.
Warren Senders
atheism Education environment Politics: denialists idiots scientific consensus scientific method
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Year 4, Month 1, Day 25: Here Comes Science!
Now THIS is a damn good idea — Naomi Oreskes, in the Washington Post:
But President Obama can move independently of Congress to address this critical issue: He can mobilize scientists through the U.S. national laboratory system.
There is a powerful precedent for the president to take this route. The core of the national laboratory system was created by President Franklin D. Roosevelt as part of the Manhattan Project to address an earlier threat to American safety and security: the possibility that German scientists were going to build an atomic bomb that could have been decisive in World War II. Scientists brought the issue to the president’s attention and then did what he asked: They built a deliverable weapon in time for use in the war.
While historians have long argued about the seriousness of the threat of a Nazi atomic bomb, there is no question that at the time it was viewed as imminent. Today we face a threat that is somewhat less immediate but far less speculative. An obvious response is to engage the national laboratory system to study options to reduce or alleviate climate change, which the president could do by executive order.
Let’s defuse the Carbon and Methane bombs. Sent January 18:
A national call to scientists is precisely what is needed in the face of the metastasizing threats posed by climate change. A negative consequence of the Industrial Revolution has been the consumption of many millions of years’ worth of fossilized carbon in a geological instant, with concomitant consequences for our biosphere and our civilization. But another consequence is the rapid expansion of human intellectual resources; thanks to leapfrogging technological advances, we’ve made strides of understanding and insight into the nature of our universe that even a few decades ago would have seemed beyond the wildest imaginings of science fiction.
If there are solutions to the greenhouse effect and its destructive epiphenomena, they won’t be found by those so-called conservatives who’ve carried out a multi-decade campaign against scientific understanding and method, but by climatologists, physicists, chemists and other experts working together for the common benefit of our species and our posterity.
Warren Senders
atheism environment Politics: assholes corporate irresponsibility denialists idiots Republican obstructionism
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Year 4, Month 1, Day 23: Preacher Went a-Hunting, Lord, Lord, Lord.
The Miami Herald runs a McClatchy article on the increasing desperation of the people who actually give a shit:
WASHINGTON — Just before he and other environmentalists marched to the White House on Tuesday, climate change activist James Hansen warned he wouldn’t be able to be arrested with them this time. Hansen, a NASA scientist by day and an activist on his own time, had to be available for a press conference in the afternoon announcing that worldwide temperatures in 2012 were in the top 10 hottest ever recorded.
“I’d be honored to be arrested with you,” Hansen said. A few hours later, he declined to discuss politics on a conference call with reporters, but he outlined how he and other government scientists arrived at their calculations as well as their concerns about future warming trends.
But as President Barack Obama approaches his second term, some of the country’s largest and most influential environmental groups and best-known advocates have drawn up blueprints for the White House to address climate change and its attendant problems: rising sea levels, droughts, more severe storms and acidic oceans. Despite doubts from others about how much could be accomplished in the coming years, they’re calling for the president to crack down on big polluters with tougher emissions rules, to reject the Keystone XL pipeline from Canada’s tar sands, and to stick to higher new fuel efficiency standards for cars. Other groups want the White House to encourage energy innovations that would curtail emissions.
And some, like the religious leaders who rallied Tuesday on Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, said there’s nothing left to do but pray. Among their prayers: that Obama would hear their pleas and have the courage to emerge as a leader on climate change.
The prayer angle led me to go Old-Testament cute for this letter. Sent January 16:
While prayers may have benefits for those who are doing the praying, their efficacy in the measurable world remains unproven. Perhaps environmentalists’ fervent supplications will soften the hearts of our corporate and political pharoahs, who have thus far been obdurate in their refusal to consider the implications of a runaway greenhouse effect on the complex civilization humanity has built over many thousands of years. And then again, perhaps not.
Ultimately, our fate will not rest in the hands of a deity, but in our own collective ability to restore sobriety to a society drunk on fossil fuels and distracted by ephemeral entertainment. Massive investments in science and technology are necessary; human ingenuity just might solve some of the most pressing problems of climate change, but only if it’s well-funded — and treated with something other than the arrant disdain showed by the anti-science pharisees now occupying the halls of congress.
Warren Senders
atheism Education environment Politics: assholes denialists idiots
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Year 4, Month 1, Day 22: Just Wait Till Your Father Gets Home
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette joins the chorus of shrill hippies:
Mother Nature is trying to tell us something and every passing year her message becomes more urgent. That is the takeaway from the news that 2012 was the hottest year in the history of the contiguous United States.
The politicized community of climate change deniers will always find a way to deny the obvious, but more and more the obvious just won’t be pushed out of sight. The situation has become a grim variation of the punch line to the old joke: Who are you going to believe, the climate change deniers or the evidence of your own eyes — or, in this case, the temperature of your own skin?
Plainly, something is seriously wrong with the weather and the climate systems that form it. You don’t have to be a scientist to recognize this. In Pittsburgh, you just have to remember the winters of yore when ponds were frozen and winter sat heavily on the landscape for weeks.
As it happens, the world’s scientists are overwhelmingly united in the belief that the planet’s climate is changing and mankind’s release of carbon-based pollution has had a hand in it. The fallback position of the skeptics is that the facts can be explained in terms of natural rhythms that have always occurred. That is progress, the place where a sensible debate might begin.
Shhhh. Sent January 15:
Mother Nature, that tedious scold whose messages we’ve so successfully ignored for decades, is at it again — this time with the assistance of climate scientists: people who’ve devoted their lives to figuring out exactly what it is she’s trying to tell us. And Mom is mad, because not only have we denied any responsibility for completely trashing our home, we’re refusing to help her clean up.
American conservatives have moved so far away from measurable reality that even the most blatant signals from our traumatized environment are misinterpreted. On one hand, climatologists who’ve been predicting for decades that the metastasizing greenhouse effect would trigger extreme storms and anomalous weather — just like the extreme storms and anomalous weather we’ve been experiencing. On the other hand, evangelical preachers blaming it on gay marriage, and libertarians denouncing attempts to avert catastrophe as unpardonable infringements of their freedoms.
No wonder Mom’s angry.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: delay denialists media irresponsibility Republican obstructionism
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Year 4, Month 1, Day 20: If Weather Is Outlawed, Only Outlaws Will Be Weathered. What?
The Duluth Tribune runs an op-ed from George Erickson, advocating that we, um, pay attention and actually, you know, do something:
Some people might argue the distractions of the holidays and the fiscal cliff made the New Year a poor time to address climate change. But neither of those issues was as important as the shocking examples of climate change delivered by 2012 — one right after another.
While the fossil-fuel industries have spent millions on anything-for-a-buck campaigns to continue the status quo, nature has been shouting at us — and often has gone unheard.
In 2012, the U.S. set more than 4,000 daily high-temperate records, and that was just in July. Drought spread across 80 percent of the country, leaving Lake Meade so low the intakes for Hoover Dam’s generators may soon have to be lowered, which would reduce the dam’s generating capacity. Across the West, wildfires blackened 9 million acres of forest, while in the North, Lake Superior reached a record high temperature. Now add the damage wrought by Hurricane Sandy and the abnormal onslaught of 39 late-season tornadoes that prowled the South on Christmas Day.
Sleepers, wake! Sent January 13:
Just as firearms advocates are always telling us not to discuss gun control in the aftermath of a shooting, politicians and media figures have been saying for years that while sometime in the future might be a good time to discuss climate change, we don’t have the political will to do it now. The NRA’s argument loses any moral authority it might have claimed once shootings start happening every day — and those who’ve been trying to delay discussion of the greenhouse effect and our future on a climate-transformed planet must abandon their position once it’s clear that such a future is here already. With superstorms, crippling droughts, devastating heat waves, and anomalous weather events happening every day around the world, ignorance is no longer a viable option.
If we fail to address climate change in a comprehensive and scientifically-grounded way, our children won’t get to address it at all.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes corporate irresponsibility denialists idiots National Climate Assessment Republican obstructionism
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Year 4, Month 1, Day 18: The Very Rich Are Different From You And Me
The Delaware News-Journal discusses the hot-off-the-presses National Climate Assessment:
A new national report flatly declared Friday that global climate change “is already affecting the American people” – making seasons hotter and drier, whipping up more furious storms and floods and threatening global ecosystems and every aspect of human activity.
“Evidence for climate change abounds, from the top of the atmosphere to the depths of the oceans,” said the draft National Climate Assessment, which is issued every four years.
In an opening to the 1,146-page document, described as “A letter to the American People,” the report’s lead officials said: “Climate change, once considered an issue for a distant future, has moved firmly into the present,” with evidence to be found in hotter seasons, increased wildfires, and retreating sea ice.
“Americans are noticing changes all around them,” the report said. “Summers are longer and hotter, and periods of extreme heat last longer than any living American has ever experienced. Winters are generally shorter and warmer. Rain comes in heavier downpours, though in many regions there are longer dry spells in between.”
I was tired of excoriating the media, so I excoriated fossil fuel corporations instead. Sent January 12:
The newly released National Climate Assessment is a sobering read, confirming once again that the consequences of a century-long fossil-fuel binge are already clobbering America and the world, with more heavy blows yet to come. And yet this document will probably land in Congress’ to-be-ignored pile, along with the scores of other such reports on climate change and its effects. Our representatives apparently have more important things to do than address the potential for natural disasters that could cost hundreds of billions of dollars by the decade’s end.
What possible rationale would justify our elected officials’ egregious abdication of responsibility to their constituents? The answer’s a simple one: our lawmakers are no longer beholden to us citizens, but to the oil and coal industries, whose eagerness to co-opt our governance for sake of increased profits is a tragic demonstration that great economic power has a negative correlation with civic virtue.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes corporate irresponsibility denialists idiots media irresponsibility scientific consensus
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Year 4, Month 1, Day 17: Turn Off All Thought, Surrender To The Void
The Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson weighs in on climate change, with an excellent column titled “Hot Enough For You?”:
All right, now can we talk about climate change? After a year when the lower 48 states suffered the warmest temperatures, and the second-craziest weather, since record-keeping began?
Apparently not. The climate-change denialists — especially those who manipulate the data in transparently bogus ways to claim that warming has halted or even reversed course — have been silent, as one might expect. Sensible people accept the fact of warming, but many doubt that our dysfunctional political system can respond in any meaningful way.
The thing is, though, that climate change has already put itself on the agenda — not the cause, but the effects. We’re dealing with human-induced warming of the atmosphere. It’s just that we’re doing so in a manner that is reactive, expensive and ultimately ineffectual.
A slap at George Will in my second paragraph. Ha ha ha ha. Sent January 11:
Climate change denialists have always had lots of excuses and diversionary tactics available for use in the face of Mother Nature’s stubbornness. The climate’s not changing — but if it is, it’s not dangerous — but if it is, humans aren’t responsible — but if they are, it’s too expensive to do anything — but if it’s more expensive to do nothing…well, repeat ad nauseum. Enabled by a complaisant media, anti-science politicians dance attendance on the fossil-fuel establishment, whose profits might be infinitesimally reduced if we took steps to address the accelerating greenhouse effect before it spins catastrophically out of control.
Whether they’re scientifically-ignorant tea-partiers or bow-tied faux-intellectuals, denialists have this in common: no amount of evidence or logic can shake their faith. In this respect, they’re like the NRA: enablers and excusers of a destructive technology, and avatars of ignorance at a time when our society desperately needs wisdom.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: agriculture aquifers denialists Water
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Year 4, Month 1, Day 16: Low Bridge! Everybody Down!
The Ridgefield Press (CT) runs a column on climate change and the problem with rivers:
Dear EarthTalk: How is it that climate change is negatively affecting the health of rivers and, by extension, the quality and availability of fresh water? — Robert Elman
Global warming is no doubt going to cause many kinds of problems (and, indeed, already is), and rivers may well be some of the hardest hit geographical features, given the likelihood of increased droughts, floods and the associated spread of waterborne diseases.
For one, rivers are already starting to lose the amount of water they channel. A 2009 study at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) found that water volume in the Columbia River in the Pacific Northwest declined by 14 percent since the 1950s. This trend is similar in major rivers all over the world.
“Many communities will see their water supplies shrink as temperatures rise and precipitation patterns shift,” reports the nonprofit American Rivers, adding that a rise in severe storms will degrade water quality and increase the risk of catastrophic floods. “Changes in the timing and location of precipitation combined with rising levels of water pollution will strain ecosystems and threaten the survival of many fish and wildlife species.” These shifts will have dramatic impacts, threatening public health, weakening economies and decreasing the quality of life in many places. In the U.S., the number of storms with extreme precipitation has increased 24 percent since the late 1940s-and the trend is expected to continue.
I got them deep river blues. Sent January 11:
The ongoing slow-motion catastrophe of climate change is getting harder to deny. Precipitously dropping river levels are one of the most powerful indicators that in countless ways, things ain’t what they used to be — a realization daily shared by formerly doubting Americans who’ve started to see global warming’s effects first-hand. But despite the burgeoning awareness of the problem, many of our country’s social and infrastructural mechanisms are stuck in the past. Developed in a period of conspicuous consumption and never upgraded, both agriculture and manufacturing sectors waste unimaginable quantities of water every day — water that will soon be recognized as a precious resource, not a disposable commodity.
New technology will be vital in husbanding dwindling water supplies, but the most important changes will be in our attitudes and behavior. We Americans must recognize that the era of waste is ended, and transform our ways of living accordingly.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: agriculture assholes denialists idiots islands Republican obstructionism rising sea levels
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Year 4, Month 1, Day 9: Maui Wowee?
The Honolulu Weekly notes that climate change has arrived in Hawaii:
For years we’ve been hearing ominous rumblings about climate change and its many implications for the planet, especially Hawaii and other islands in the Western Pacific. The scenarios fueled by a rapidly expanding body of science are sobering: rising temperatures and prolonged droughts, dying coral reefs and dwindling fish stocks. Rising sea levels will eventually, for some atolls and low-lying areas of Hawaii, bring total inundation.
“We have lots and lots of science,” says Jesse Souki, director of the Office of State Planning (OSP). “We have a pretty good idea of what the problem is, and what’s going to happen. The hard part is figuring out what to do about it.”
The islands make a good hook for a standard screed on GOP idiocy. Sent January 4:
Hawaii isn’t alone. Every day, nations, states, regions and communities around the world are find that climate change is no longer an abstraction but a difficult and sometimes dangerous reality. When the weather goes haywire, farmers can’t plan. When out-of-season storms start happening more and more often, the whole notion of “season” goes out the window — along with vulnerable infrastructure. When mountaintop ice vanishes, people in the valleys who’ve depended on glacial melt for their water are forced from the land they’ve occupied for millennia. And when islands are under threat from rising sea levels, tourism may take a back seat to simple survival.
But while people everywhere on Earth are waking up to the threat of climate chaos, there is still one place where the rapidly metastasizing greenhouse effect has failed to make an impact. In the offices and caucus rooms of Congressional Republicans, global warming is still a liberal hoax, not a potentially devastating reality. While these conservative lawmakers may answer to different constituencies, they all represent, ultimately, the same state of denial.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: Big Oil corporate irresponsibility denialists
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Year 4, Month 1, Day 8: My Heart Goes Where The Wild Goose Goes
What could possibly go wrong? Time Magazine:
As terrible as the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill was, one element worked in the favor of rescuers and cleanup personnel: location. The Gulf of Mexico is the nerve center of the U.S. offshore oil industry, which made it that much easier for BP and the federal government to respond quickly to the spill. The warm Gulf environment also simplified operations and accelerated the natural dispersal of the oil. As one environmentalist noted at the time, having an oil spill in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico was like having a heart attack in the middle of a hospital. It’s still a heart attack, but at least you won’t have to wait long for treatment.
Now imagine the opposite — a heart attack far, far away from the closest medical care. That’s what’s unfolding this week in Alaska, where a Shell drilling rig called the Kulluk broke free from a tow ship in stormy seas on New Year’s Eve before running aground on the southeast coast of Sitkalidak Island, near the larger island of Kodiak. It’s not clear yet how much if any of the rig’s more than 150,000 gal. of diesel fuel and lubricants might have spilled into the freezing cold waters. And because the ship was in transit rather than actively drilling, there’s no danger of a major oil blowout similar to the Deepwater Horizon spill. But the accident and the struggles that Shell and the U.S. Coast Guard have already experienced trying to save the rig underscores just how difficult and dangerous drilling in Arctic waters will be — which should be worrying since the oil industry and the Obama Administration are counting on the bounty promised in the far north.
Fucking delusional idiots. Sent January 3:
Einstein’s definition of insanity, “doing the same thing over and over while expecting a different result,” is perfectly applied to Shell Oil’s current Arctic debacle. For decades Shell and its Big Oil peers have botched every aspect of their business: exploration and extraction leave gaping wounds on the Earth’s surface; transportation spills toxic crude in oceans and aquifers, devastating local and regional ecosystems; refineries waste huge quantities of raw material as pollution. Meanwhile oil’s business practices enrich a small coterie of executive while feeding at the public trough and fostering a culture of dependency among consumers; oil’s geopolitics leads us into war after war at an immeasurable cost; oil’s PR funds the denial of science and muddies the national conversation on climate change, the gravest crisis in humankind’s history.
Perhaps entrusting the future of our energy economy to demonstrably incompetent and untrustworthy corporations wasn’t such a good idea after all.
Warren Senders