environment Politics: agriculture denialists false equivalence farming media irresponsibility
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Year 3, Month 10, Day 7: Straining Conditions.
The Merced Sun-Star (CA) reports on the problems farmers are facing:
Ten miles outside of Modesto, in the farming town of Hughson off Highway 99, the Duarte Nursery is at the front line of dramatic changes under way in California’s immense agriculture industry.
The family-run nursery, founded in 1976, is one of the largest in the United States, and there’s a good chance the berries, nuts and citrus fruits eaten across the West began their journey to market as seedlings in Duarte’s 30 acres of greenhouses, labs and breeding stations.
The nursery’s owners have built a thriving business using state-of-the-art techniques to develop varieties adapted to the particular conditions and pests that California farmers face.
These days, according to John Duarte, president of the nursery, that means breeding for elevated levels of heat and salt, which researchers say are symptoms of climate change, even if Duarte doesn’t necessarily see it that way.
“Whether it’s carbon built up in the atmosphere or just friggin’ bad luck,” he said, “the conditions are straining us.”
That friggin’ bad luck will get you every time. Sent September 30:
As growing seasons shift by weeks or months, as weather extremes endanger crops, as droughts yield vast acreages of dessicated stubble, far too many farmers are reluctant to recognize the reality of global warming. Why? When it comes to climate change and its effects on agriculture, there’s only one reason growers in America are still unpersuaded: our irresponsible news and opinion media.
When reporting on medicine, TV news doesn’t include an alternative viewpoint on the medieval theory of “humours.” When discussing the space program, talking heads correctly ignore conspiracy theorists who maintain the moon landing happened on a Hollywood soundstage. But when it’s time to discuss climate issues, our print and broadcast outlets bend over backward to ensure equal representation for the fossil fuel industry.
This is accomplished with “false equivalence,” where a genuine scientist (whose genuine data show a genuine problem) is “balanced” by a petroleum-funded spokesperson (whose spurious data don’t show a thing). By confusing the conversation, they redirect the political pressure for climate solutions, preserving the (highly profitable) status quo.
But any farmer knows Mother Nature can’t be fooled forever. By sowing misinformation and confusion, our media and their corporate sponsors ensure a harvest of disaster.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: Al Gore denialists Education greenhouse effect ignorance scientific consensus
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Year 3, Month 10, Day 6: What The Framp?
The Monterey County Weekly runs a devastating piece by Dan Linehan titled, “We are almost completely f%#&ed— Al Gore rallies citizen deputies to break through climate-change denial while there’s still (a little) hope.” Read the whole thing. Excerpt:
If Al Gore’s environmental truth was inconvenient before, now it’s outright uncomfortable.
Last year was the earth’s hottest on record. Ever.
That triggered extremes: A drought-generated dust storm reached 50 miles wide and 6,000 feet tall, engulfing Phoenix, Ariz. Tropical Storm Irene hit Killington, Vt., which has a ski mountain tall enough to see Canada – and it’s not too often you see the words “tropical” and “Canada” in the same sentence. Typhoon Megi dumped 45 inches of rain on Taiwan in 48 hours, forcing more than 350,000 people to evacuate.
And this year has scorched 2011. Over a recent month-and-a-half stretch, the U.S. Department of Agriculture designated 1,692 counties disaster areas due to drought, with about 80 percent of the country’s agricultural land affected. This comes after Russia stopped exporting food due to weather-related crop failures and resulting shortages. The worst drought in more than 100 years hit both North Korea and South Korea. On July 15, Kuwait hit an all-time high of 128.5 degrees Fahrenheit.
National Geographic reports that between 1998 and 2011, there have been 87 severe weather events in the U.S., and each caused at least $1 billion in damages, though they were comparatively modest economically compared to Hurricane Katrina, which topped out at $146 billion. The total disaster price tag nearly doubled the cost of the previous 16-year period.
Severe weather events, like stronger hurricanes, harsher droughts, wilder floods and fiercer firestorms, are happening with greater frequency. Scientists have been warning us that this – the wallop of planet warming hitting harder and more frequently – was coming.
Good, if agonizing, stuff. Sent September 29:
There is no “solution” to global climate change, because the metastasizing greenhouse effect and its epiphenomena are not one, but a multitude of problems. What we face is a richly complex set of puzzles: how to survive in a rapidly transforming environment, how to slow (and perhaps reverse) that transformation, and how to recognize the processes that have brought us to this point in our civilization’s history.
The key, as always, is education. We as individuals and as a society must understand the factors contributing to climate change: the physics of the greenhouse effect, the chemistry of methane and carbon dioxide, the immediate and long-term costs of fossil fuels, the inherent contradictions of an economy built on a model of continuous growth, and the relentless pressure of an increasing human population.
And, while learning, we must act — as individuals, as families, as communities, as states, as nations, and as a species under threat. Oherwise, the climate crisis will offer only a “final solution.”
Warren Senders
environment Politics: denialists responsibility sustainability
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Year 3, Month 10, Day 4: Zing! Went The Strings Of My Heart!
I really like it when very old people start speaking out. Read the entire article by 88 year-old Tom Bell, in the High Country News (CO):
When World War II was thrust on us, we turned our economic system into a war machine as every American agreed to sacrifice in order to defeat Nazi Germany and its allies. That is the model for what it will take to overcome what now threatens our planet.
Hitler and Tojo and Mussolini, however, were human beings with faces, while carbon dioxide is invisible and yet a part of our everyday environment. How can you overcome something you can’t see?
ABC journalist Bill Blakemore thinks one of the reasons Americans don’t — or can’t — accept the threat of climate change is because of the “unprecedented scale and complexity of the crisis of manmade global warming.” And he adds, “It’s new, and therefore unknown, at first. And we’re naturally frightened of the unknown.”
Yet Rob Watson, an environmentalist, likes to say: “Mother Nature is just chemistry, biology and physics. That’s all she is. You cannot sweet-talk her. You cannot spin her. … Do not mess with Mother Nature. But that is just what we are doing.”
You only need a lick of sense to see that something is terribly wrong. Devastating events, attributable to climate change, are destroying people’s livelihoods and taking lives all around the world. Climate scientists tell us it is only going to get worse unless and until we do something about carbon.
To do something about carbon means reducing our dependence on coal and oil, and here in Wyoming, even talking about it is heresy. But we must begin to talk about it before it is too late, and then we must act.
What can we do? Jim Rogers, CEO of Duke Energy-Progress Energy, the largest electric utility in the United States, said this September: “I believe eventually there will be regulation of carbon in this country.” James Hansen, one of the world’s leading climate scientists, agrees. In fact, everyone concerned about climate change believes a carbon tax has advantages over every other approach. Still, every single carbon-tax bill introduced in Congress has failed.
I believe it is past time for all of us — and especially those of us who live in Wyoming, where so much carbon is produced — to face the hard truth. We don’t have a choice: We have to face this crisis as if we were at war, because, unfortunately, that is the bitter truth. We are in a fight for our very survival – and for the survival of the whole planet.
I salute you, Mr. Bell. Sent September 28:
When we think about our children, and their children in turn, it’s natural to foresee them living in a world just like our own — growing up amidst the beauty, and the bounty, of nature. And why not? For thousands of years the essential benevolence of Earth’s environment has nurtured our fathers and their fathers before them, helping the growth of our rich and complex civilization. It’s impossible to imagine the future otherwise.
But global warming is transforming this equation. To those who understand its implications, the research of climatologists indicates that our descendants will no longer be able to take the future for granted. Droughts, extreme weather, radically altered growing seasons, decimated biodiversity and ravaged agriculture are some of the things our generation will bequeath to posterity.
Politicians like to invoke future generations in their stump speeches. But unless our leaders address climate change responsibly, we ensure that our children, and their children in turn, will lead lives of struggle, privation and devastation. There can be no excuse for inaction, complacency, or denial.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes denialists idiots Republican obstructionism
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Year 3, Month 10, Day 3: Soothly!
David Horsey takes on the ignorati, in a brilliant piece of analysis for the L.A. Times, titled “Republicans have a medieval mindset about climate change.” Aye:
In the U.S., some states have begun to prepare for the inevitable. In California, plans are being made for the decades ahead when coastal highways are swamped, Yosemite waterfalls run dry, agricultural areas turn to dust, the San Francisco airport floods and the famous beaches near Los Angeles are reclaimed by the Pacific. But states cannot do it alone; the federal government needs to become fully engaged.
And that will not happen as long as the Republican Party stands in the way. Partly to do the bidding of the industrialists who are their benefactors and partly because they seem to have abandoned belief in science, Republicans have become climate change deniers. Even in a year when the West is aflame in wildfires and extreme weather batters the East, Republicans continue to insist there is nothing unusual going on – just a little blip in the weather.
If we lived in a rational society, any Republican who insisted climate change is not real would be as shamed and ostracized as the backwoods snake-handlers in the GOP congressional caucus who say a woman cannot be impregnated if she is raped. As a country, we should all be embarrassed. Americans, not the Dutch, should be leading the world in dealing with the imminent calamities being brought on by the rise in global temperatures. But we will not be able to take the lead until one of our two major political parties stops shilling for the big energy companies and abandons its medieval scorn of science.
This guy is goood. Sent September 26:
Over the past twelve years, the GOP has effectively abandoned any pretense of intellectual consistency. Policies developed by Republicans become anathema when promoted by Democrats; experts touted as the embodiments of truth and virtue are anathematized should their opinions change; skepticism is heresy, but “skepticism” is dogma. The erstwhile party of Lincoln, Garfield, Teddy Roosevelt and Eisenhower has become an ideologically contorted conclave of true believers, impervious to reason, logic, data or compassion, incapable of admitting (let alone rectifying) error.
This medieval mindset, as David Horsey suggests, evokes feudalism’s cruelty and the Inquisition’s terror — and when it comes to the slow-motion catastrophe of global warming, it’s a guarantee of planetary disaster. When cultish anti-intellectualism stands in the way of any responsible and meaningful response to climate change, it exacerbates a crisis of unprecedented magnitude in human history. To paraphrase Voltaire, by believing absurdities, the GOP ensures atrocities.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: corporate irresponsibility denialists media irresponsibility reality-based community
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Year 3, Month 9, Day 30: Tide Goes In, Tide Goes Out. You Can’t Explain That.
The Minneapolis Star-Tribune runs an AP article by Seth Borenstein, titled “WHY IT MATTERS: Despite the weather, climate change gets little mention in the campaign”:
The issue:
People love to talk about the weather, especially when it’s strange like the mercifully ended summer of 2012. This year the nation’s weather has been hotter and more extreme than ever, federal records show. Yet there are two people who aren’t talking about it, and they both happen to be running for president.
It’s a good read. Sometimes I just want to give in to despair. Sent September 24:
In a political culture with some connection to reality, climate change would be the defining issue of every election, from alderman to President. That the metastasizing greenhouse effect isn’t front and center in the statements of our would-be leaders demonstrates the disconnect between the American electoral process and the real world; when politics fixates on irrelevancies, turned-off voters can hardly be blamed for believing their votes are irrelevant.
But if there ever was an issue that deserved relevance, it’s global warming. With likely consequences ranging from devastated agriculture and massive droughts, to swollen refugee populations and resource wars, the effects of the twentieth century’s fossil-fuel binge will define the twenty-first in ways that our politicians and media are loath to address, lest it inconvenience their corporate funding sources.
It wasn’t so long ago that a Bush administration apparatchik contemptuously told journalist Ron Suskind that he was a member of the “reality-based community,” and went on to say, “We’re an empire. We create our own reality.” That might be true in the insulated atmosphere of the FOX news establishment, but in the real world, the atmosphere is getting hotter and hotter.
It’s time for citizens to demand reality-based politics from our politicians, and reality-based information from our media. It matters.
Warren Senders
environment: assholes denialists idiots
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Year 3, Month 9, Day 29: One False Move And The Bunny Gets It!
The Kennebec Journal (ME) has a denialist jackass named M.D. Harmon weighing in on a debate between various candidates for Senate in the state:
“Democrat Cynthia Dill answered next: ‘The exact opposite of what he said.’ Dill said the evidence is clear and ‘I am also convinced that it is the biggest threat to civilized society.'”
Wow. The chance that temperatures might rise on average a couple of degrees over the next hundred years is a bigger threat to civilization than the chance that Islamic jihadists might get nuclear bombs?
Doesn’t she know it will be a lot hotter at Ground Zero if the Iranians blow up Tel Aviv (or, for that matter, New York) than it might become on a midsummer day in Cape Elizabeth in 2075 because of “climate change”?
As “biggest threats to civilized society” go, one can think of quite a few more immediate worries than Al Gore having his beachfront house in Malibu swamped by a higher tide than he’s used to.
The article added, “Former Gov. Angus King, an independent, disagreed with Summers, too, and pulled up a graph on his smartphone showing carbon dioxide levels rising in the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution. ‘I don’t see how you can possibly avoid the science,’ he said.”
OK, Mr. King. You’re a smart guy, and we both know that carbon dioxide levels have been rising since industrial development began lifting people out of widespread poverty in the 19th century.
But those levels have been 10 or 20 times higher in the distant past, and somehow life managed to continue.
Indeed, it flourished, as carbon dioxide is plant food and nursery owners now pump it into their greenhouses because current atmospheric levels aren’t high enough for maximum growth.
If carbon dioxide increases, so will food crops and trees, and that’s not a bad thing.
Double facepalm. Sent September 22:
As M.D. Harmon demonstrates, the ludicrous climate-change-doesn’t-exist arguments just keep on a’coming. Scientifically aware citizens do grow tired of playing whack-a-mole; there are surely better ways to spend one’s time than in endlessly debunking the same old arguments, exposing the same old strawmen.
Yes, life existed back when CO2 levels were much higher than they are today. No, it wasn’t human life. Yes, given enough time to evolve into new conditions, life is adaptable. No, the accelerating greenhouse effect isn’t going to give us enough time; we’ve got, not millions of years, but a few centuries.
Yes, many world governments are shying away from greenhouse gas reduction treaties. No, it’s not because they’re a bad idea, but because the fossil fuel industry is pouring billions of dollars into misdirection and misinformation.
Yes, a two degree increase seems small. No, it isn’t: two degrees (Celsius, not Fahrenheit) is the now-abandoned-as-unattainable maximum level consistent with sustainable civilization; we’re now heading for an increase closer to six degrees,. And therein lies the difference between climate reality and Harmon’s jihadist-with-a-bomb fever dream: a city or nation might take a decade to rebound from a terrorist attack, but an overheated planetary atmosphere (replete with mass extinctions, whole populations of climate refugees, collapsed agriculture and destroyed infrastructure) may well set human civilization back by millennia.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes Barack Obama corporate irresponsibility denialists idiots Mitt Romney scientific consensus
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Year 3, Month 9, Day 27: Suck On This!
The Bend Bulletin (OR) runs the same McClatchy story on the two campaigns’ approaches to climate issues:
Romney has said previously that he believes climate change is occurring and that human activity is a contributing factor.
During the Republican primary season, though, he said he didn’t believe it was the right course to spend “trillions and trillions” to reduce carbon emissions.
More recently, he said in a questionnaire submitted to Science Debate, a nonprofit organization focusing on science issues in the presidential campaign, that he believes human activity contributes to global warming and that policymakers should consider the risk of negative consequences.
Frank Maisano, a lobbyist whose firm represents energy interests and who has been involved in climate change discussions for 15 years, cautioned not to read too much into Romney’s dig about the rise of the oceans. It was designed to show Obama is “a little bit out of touch,” he said.
“Right now, you need someone who cares about you rather than these larger, soaring rhetorical issues,” Maisano said.
Sheesh. Sent September 20:
So according to a representative of the energy industry, climate change is a “soaring rhetorical issue.” How bizarre. When Frank Maisano suggests that discussion of our civilization’s future happiness and prosperity of our civilization is “rhetoric,” he’s really saying that the short-term profitability of his clients in the oil and coal business is more important than the world our children and grandchildren will inhabit.
When ocean acidification has broken the food chain, when extreme weather has devastated agriculture, when vanishing glaciers have ended water supplies for innumerable cultures everywhere around the planet, when rising seas have wiped entire nations off the map — will Mr. Maisano and his colleagues finally put down their quarterly reports and address the catastrophic transformations they have wrought?
To be sure, we need action even more than “soaring rhetoric.” But Republicans and energy lobbyists offer only a toxic blend of legislative paralysis and mendacious misrepresentations.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: Barack Obama denialists idiots media irresponsibility Mitt Romney Republican obstructionism
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Year 3, Month 9, Day 25: She Said She Said…
The Anchorage Daily News runs a McClatchy story comparing the two presidential candidates’ approach to climate change:
CHARLOTTE, N.C. — It was just six words, but when President Barack Obama gave a shout-out to global warming in his acceptance speech this month, he reintroduced an issue that had all but disappeared from the political debate.
“Climate change is not a hoax,” Obama said, an assertion that brought Democratic National Convention delegates to their feet, as he pledged to continue approaching energy policy in a way he said would “continue to reduce the carbon pollution that is heating our planet.”
In a year when the political debate has lacked nearly any discussion of climate change, some environmentalists have struggled to summon enthusiasm for the Democratic president they helped elect in 2008 in part because of his views on global warming. So they rejoiced when the president rebutted a taunt tossed out by Republican candidate Mitt Romney the week before. Romney had quipped in his own acceptance speech in Tampa, Fla., that Obama “promised to begin to slow the rise of the oceans and heal the planet.”
“My promise is to help you and your family,” Romney added.
It was a rhetorical flourish, an attack line offered to make the point that Romney understands the kitchen table issues that, he says, the president doesn’t. But environmentalists heard it as heresy.
“Twenty years from now, history is going to judge the next generation on how they responded to the destabilization of our climate,” said Michael Brune, executive director of the Sierra Club. “With a couple of short sentences, Romney made clear what’s at stake in this election.”
It looks increasingly improbable that Mitt is going to get anywhere near the oval office. Good. Sent September 18:
It stretches credulity that a significant percentage of Americans continue to reject the reality of climate change. This is both an environmental and an educational crisis; too many of us spurn the evidence of both science and our senses in favor of the comforting untruths peddled by a fossil-fueled media.
Scientific discourse is couched in careful and meticulous language; responsible climatologists will shy away from definitive statements connecting, say, a particular extreme weather event with the burgeoning greenhouse effect. That’s because science deals with probabilities, correlations and complexities — not in polemics. But there’s a reason these specialists are exceptionally worried: the evidence for runaway atmospheric warming is unequivocal and unambiguous, and the likely effects of even moderate warming are devastating to agriculture, infrastructure, and the integrity of local and regional ecosystems.
By steadily ignoring the science of climate change, both our media and politicians have been profoundly irresponsible. A crisis of planetary magnitude demands a commensurate response — and there can be no moral justification for continued ignorance.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: Barack Obama Big Coal Big Oil denialists economics Mitt Romney Renewable Energy Republicans
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Year 3, Month 9, Day 24: You Never Give Me Your Money…
The Macon, GA, Telegraph runs a story on the role of climate questions on the campaign trail. Several paragraphs are devoted to the cognitive dissonance of Republican environmentalists. Let’s all quiet down and stop giggling.
Romney has said previously that he believes climate change is occurring and that human activity is a contributing factor. During the Republican primary season, though, he said he didn’t believe it was the right course to spend “trillions and trillions” to reduce carbon emissions. More recently, he said in a questionnaire submitted to Science Debate, a non-profit organization focusing on science issues in the presidential campaign, that he believes human activity contributes to global warming and that policymakers should consider the risk of negative consequences.
Frank Maisano, a lobbyist whose firm represents energy interests and who has been involved in climate change discussions for 15 years, cautioned not to read too much into Romney’s dig about the rise of the oceans. It was designed to show Obama is “a little bit out of touch,” he said.
“Right now, you need someone who cares about you rather than these larger, soaring rhetorical issues,” Maisano said.
Jim DiPeso of ConservAmerica had the same reaction.
“(Romney) acknowledged that science has shown there is a human role in global warming,” said DiPeso, who represents a national grassroots organization of conservation-minded Republicans who would like to see a fiscally conservative approach to capping carbon emissions.
DiPeso said he hopes Romney’s acknowledgement will give Republicans lower down on the ticket the freedom to talk about climate change, an issue that once had Republican support. Policymakers may differ on how to address emissions, but carbon dioxide molecules are apolitical, he said.
“Because we’ve gotten to the point where a good Republican can’t acknowledge the real science that backs up climate change without being cast as some sort of infidel, or somebody who’s not a real conservative,” he said.
Poor puppies. Sent September 17:
I wouldn’t read too much into Mitt Romney’s statements about the human causes of climate change; the erstwhile Massachusetts governor is widely known for his ability to take multiple contradictory positions on any issue. And while it’s good to know that there are some conservatives out there who are genuinely concerned about the looming climate crisis, it must be hard for them to reconcile their free-market fetishism with the tough transformations the next century will demand of America’s energy economy.
The grotesquely inflated subsidies and tax breaks for the fossil fuel industry need to end. These taxpayer dollars would be far better spent on preparing American infrastructure for a century of devastating storms and increasingly unpredictable weather, and our national investment in renewable energy needs to increase by many orders of magnitude over the next decade. These requirements won’t be solved with the economic pixie-dust of the “free market,” but through the collective will of hundreds of millions of Americans demanding that their government work once again in their best interests, instead of the corporate welfare recipients in the oil and coal industries.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: analogies assholes corporate irresponsibility denialists idiots scientific consensus tobacco industry
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Year 3, Month 9, Day 23: Show Us Your Lark Pack!
The Tri-City News (Vancouver, BC) has an excellent editorial highlighting the venal and mendacious nature of the denial industry:
There were times this summer when I thought I didn’t need science to tell me global warming is real: sweating in my seat at Theatre Under the Stars, watching the frightening heat waves in the east and avoiding golf because it was too hot.
But luckily, most of us base our conclusions about global warming not on anecdotes about extreme summer weather but on scientific research and consensus.
But not my colleague, who, thanks partly to Exxon Mobil, is one of a group of environmental deniers not swayed by the overwhelming scientific consensus about climate change.
Deniers don’t believe the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change; the internationally mandated IPCC, which has, over the last 10 years, compiled four scientific reports based on the work of 2,500 scientists from 130 countries. Each IPCC report warns of the dangers of global warming caused by man-made greenhouse gases.
And deniers don’t believe the body of literature in scientific journals, which, over the past decade, contained 928 articles on global warming, none of which included a scientific denial that man is hastening global warming.
Climate change-denying groups are convinced that global warming is a scientific hoax, a scare tactic dreamed up by environmentalists to frighten us into supporting anti-business laws and regulations.
I agree that there is a conspiracy to misrepresent the facts about climate change but 2,500 environmental scientists from 130 countries aren’t in on it. Exxon Mobil is.
Since 1998, Exxon has doled out $22,123,456 to climate change-denying groups. The Heritage Foundation ($730,000), Frontiers of Freedom, ($1.2 million) and 40 other groups received money from Exxon to help deny climate change. Even B.C.’s Fraser Institute has bagged $120,000 from Exxon since 1998.
Tareyton is Better. Charcoal Is Why.
Sent September 16:
The climate-change denial industry has worked hard for the past couple of decades, spreading confusion and misinformation about the reality, causes, and consequences of a runaway greenhouse effect. These people — the same characters who reassured us for years that nicotine wasn’t addictive and the link between smoking and lung cancer was inconclusive — are skillful, well-funded, and unencumbered by any responsibility to the truth.
But tobacco addiction’s public health consequences were limited to the smokers and their neighbors, with no multi-generational impacts. Climate change is an entirely different story, with effects that will still be felt a hundred, a thousand, or ten thousand years from now. It is as if cigarette smoking brought cancer, heart disease, and emphysema not just to the smokers but to a hundred generations of their descendants. In an odious bargain, the denialists are sacrificing the future of human civilization for short-term personal gain.
Warren Senders