environment Politics: denialists idiots media irresponsibility scientific consensus wildfires
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Year 3, Month 7, Day 19: Strike Anywhere…
The Tehama County Daily News (CA) notes that things are sorta kinda on fire:
LOS ANGELES (MCT) After several years of relatively benign fire seasons, the West is headed into a hot dry summer of potentially ferocious blazes like the ones that have scorched Colorado in recent weeks.
The wildfires that have already destroyed more than 700 homes and outbuildings along Colorado’s Front Range and blackened hundreds of thousands of acres of New Mexico wilderness are not likely to be the season’s last for one simple reason: drought.
“This year, fires are going big,” Tom Harbour, fire and aviation director for the U.S. Forest Service, said last week. “We’ve had some really extraordinary runs … fires that are running 10 miles in lighter fuels.
Fires that are running miles in forested areas.”
A dry La Nina winter and a paltry, quick-melting snowpack in much of the West have set the stage for another incendiary summer, compounding the effects of a long-term drought that has gripped the seven-state Colorado River basin for more than a decade.
“The reason Colorado is burning is they’ve had prolonged drought,” said Bob Keane, a forest service research ecologist based in Montana.
Add the high temperatures and gusting winds that hit the state last week, and you have a recipe for combustion.
Quick and dirty. Sent July 8:
No single event can be unambiguously linked to global climate change, because climate science doesn’t work that way. But any attempt to claim that the wildfires devastating America’s West aren’t connected to Earth’s burgeoning greenhouse effect is statistically absurd.
Climatologists have been predicting for years that the consequences of increased CO2 emissions would include weather that was hotter, weirder, fiercer, and less predictable. And while some of their forecasts were erroneous, most of those mistakes were underestimations of the speed and magnitude of the transformation in our environment.
Despite an ongoing campaign of climate-change denial, the atmosphere is still getting hotter. We’d mock any Colorado residents who refuse to heed the gathering flames — why, then, are climatologists and environmentalists whose decades of predictions on climate change have been overwhelmingly vindicated still treated with derision by the petroleum-funded professionals in our politics and media?
Warren Senders
environment Politics: denialists idiots media irresponsibility
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Year 3, Month 7, Day 18: If You’ll Say “You Told Me So,” I Won’t Say “I Told You So”
The Merriville (IN) Post-Times runs an AP story on the current heatwave:
Horrendous wildfires. Oppressive heat waves. Devastating droughts. Flooding from giant deluges. And a powerful freak wind storm called a derecho.
These are the kinds of extremes experts have predicted will come with climate change, although it’s far too early to say that is the cause. Nor will they say global warming is the reason 3,215 daily high temperature records were set in the month of June.
Scientifically linking individual weather events to climate change takes intensive study, complicated mathematics, computer models and time. Sometimes it isn’t caused by global warming. Weather is always variable; freak things happen.
And this weather has been local. Europe, Asia and Africa aren’t having similar disasters now, although they’ve had their own extreme events in recent years.
But since at least 1988, climate scientists have warned that climate change would bring, in general, increased heat waves, more droughts, more sudden downpours, more widespread wildfires and worsening storms. In the United States, those extremes are happening here and now.
More pounding on the denialists. Sent July 7:
Even as the American Midwest sizzled under a heatwave of staggering proportions, climate-change denialists kept on sounding their message of complacency and inaction. Everything’s fine, they say. The planet’s actually getting cooler. If Earth’s atmosphere is heating up, it’s just sunspots, or “natural cycles.” Anyway, humans aren’t to blame. The climate has always changed. If humans are involved, it’s too expensive to do anything about it. Al Gore has a big house. And on and on.
When politicians and media figures mock “climate alarmists,” it is part of their pathetic attempt to rationalize an unsustainable status quo — one which now promises massive crop failures, droughts and wildfires throughout America.
We owe our nation’s existence to those who woke to the call of a midnight rider bringing the news that the British were coming. Climate scientists are the Paul Reveres of the present day. Will we finally heed their warnings?
Warren Senders
environment Politics: denialists idiots media irresponsibility scientific consensus
by Warren
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Year 7, Month 7, Day 17: DFH! NIMBY?
The Washington Post acknowledges the hippies:
Wildfires? Record thunderstorms? Blast furnace heat? An earthquake, even?
At least that’s what one group of folks is thinking, even if they don’t voice it quite so crassly.
“We don’t want to do it in an I-told-you-so kind of way,” demurs John Topping, who is the president of the Washington-based Climate Institute.
But see, people! This is what all the global-warming Paul Reveres have been shouting about.
Now some are finally paying attention, at least in the Washington region.
“Granted, we’ve only lived in the area for 25 years,” one reader wrote to me. “But the first 15 left an impression that this was not one of Dante’s circles. The last ten: approaching inner circle quickly.”
Apparently, a tree falling on a house hits much closer to home than a melting ice cap.
Because it will be sooooo excellent to be smug while we circle the bowl on our way to the Venus effect. Sent July 6:
For decades, climatologists warned us that increased atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases would trigger chaotic and destructive weather. We’ve were warned of rising temperatures and rising seas, of droughts, invasive species, wildfires, tropical storms — all consequences of global climate change.
And for decades our media and politics have ignored and derided those scientific specialists and their findings. Whether it’s tinfoil-hatted conspiracy theorists convinced that Al Gore is out to confiscate their SUVs, petroleum-backed politicians protecting their puppetmasters, or ordinary citizens with more immediate concerns, the unavoidable fact is that Americans have too long assumed that climate change is a problem for other people, other places, other times.
No more. While we’ll always pay more attention to what’s happening in our own backyards, there is no escaping that this is a crisis of planetary scope and millennial span. Earth is the new neighborhood, and a century is the new now.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: corporate irresponsibility denialists
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Year 3, Month 7, Day 15: Time For A Declaration of Independence?
The Toledo (OH) Blade is shrill:
Searing heat, violent thunderstorms, wildfires, smog, power blackouts, crop losses. These things aren’t new, yet their recent magnitude raises new questions about human influence on climate.
Climate change is real, despite the stubbornness of a denial movement that shrugs off both the problem and the science that documents it. Although such change is partially inevitable, the question of human influence and how to mitigate it demands a central role in this year’s political debate.
Recent heat waves, in Ohio and Michigan and elsewhere, point to greater warming of the Earth. As this part of the country basked in an unusually warm March, northern Michigan’s cherry crop was devastated by early growth followed by frost. Now comes word that 90 percent of that state’s apple crop is destroyed.
Problems associated with climate change are not limited to extreme events. There are more subtle signs. Growth of toxic algae begins earlier, stays later, and becomes more dominant in the western Lake Erie region.
An additional month of dredging is scheduled for the second straight year by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, to keep the Toledo shipping channel navigable despite excessive silt that enters waterways after storms.
Ozone-induced smog, allergies, and diseases transmitted by mosquitoes also drive up costs. Much of northwest Ohio remains abnormally dry or in a drought, even after hail and heavy thunderstorms swept across the region this week.
Lobbyists have convinced lawmakers — at least, those who want to be convinced — that much of the evidence of man-made climate change is merely anecdotal. They have blocked cap-and-trade legislation that would provide incentives to industry to reduce emissions related to warming.
Always good to quote Upton Sinclair. Sent July 4:
Almost a century ago, Upton Sinclair said, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!” His words perfectly describe the politicians who, bankrolled by powerful corporate interests, have been consistently obstructing our progress towards rational energy and environmental policies.
Coal, oil and gas are the energy sources of the past — privileged by tradition and by a false pricing system that ignores externalities: pollution cleanup, health impacts, resource wars, and global climate change. Even if the deniers were right, getting our country onto renewables is the right thing to do, for countless reasons.
But the deniers are wrong, as this incendiary summer confirms to all but the most avariciously self-deluding. It’s time for our politicians to start refusing paychecks from those who would let us burn rather than surrender even the tiniest fraction of their astronomical profit margins.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: alarmism denialists idiots media irresponsibility wildfires
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Year 3, Month 7, Day 14: Liberals Have A Reality-Bias…
The Portland (ME) Press-Herald runs a WaPo article on climate change and the hell-on-earth that is Colorado:
WASHINGTON — Snow hardly fell during winter in snowy Colorado. On top of that, the state’s soaking spring rains did not come. So it was no wonder that normally emerald landscapes were parched as summer approached, tan as a pair of worn khakis.
All the earth needed was a spark.
Colorado and U.S. Forest Service firefighters are battling the state’s most destructive wildfires ever. Lightning and suspected arson ignited them four weeks ago, but scientists and federal officials say the table was set by a culprit that will probably contribute to bigger and more frequent wildfires for years to come: climate change.
In the past two years, record-breaking wildfires have burned in the West — New Mexico experienced its worst-ever wildfire, Arizona suffered its largest burn and Texas last year fought the most fires in recorded history. From Mississippi to the Ohio Valley, temperatures are topping record highs and the land is thirsty.
“We’ve had record fires in 10 states in the last decade, most of them in the West,” said U.S. Agriculture Undersecretary Harris Sherman, who oversees the U.S. Forest Service.
A revision and extension of the letter from two days ago. Sent July 3:
Not too long ago, any public figure who pointed out that a runaway greenhouse effect would have significant negative consequences for humanity could look forward to insults and mockery from conservatives. Anyone who suggested that it would probably be a good idea to stop pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere would be called a “climate alarmist,” an “environazi,” or a “watermelon” (green on the outside, red on the inside — get it?).
The name-calling’s still going on, but some of the climate-change denialists are beginning to wake up. Even Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson publicly acknowledged the fact of human-caused global warming in a recent speech, although his assertion that humanity will “adapt” blithely glosses over the enormous human cost involved. More generally, the fact that America is undergoing a nationwide heat wave has rendered the denialist position harder to sustain.
More than three decades ago, climatologists started predicting that global warming would bring about this type of erratic and unpredictable weather, but politicians and the media have consistently ignored or derided their emergency signals. Such dismissals can now be understood as a grave abdication of the responsibilities of leadership.
“Alarmism” is just a sensible response to an alarming situation; as planetary temperatures rise and smoke billows above a burning Colorado, it’s obvious and inescapable: global climate change is as alarming as it gets.
Warren Senders
environment: assholes corporate irresponsibility denialists idiots sociopathy
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Year 3, Month 7, Day 11: Everything’s All Pacified, Just As You Ordered, Sir.
More on this a$$hole, this time from the Detroit Free Press:
NEW YORK — ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson says fears about climate change, drilling and energy dependence are overblown.
In a speech Wednesday to the Council on Foreign Relations, Tillerson acknowledged that burning of fossil fuels is warming the planet, but said society will adapt. The risks of oil and gas drilling are well understood and can be mitigated, he said. Dependence on other nations for oil is not a concern as long as access to supply is certain, he said.
Tillerson blamed a public he called illiterate in science and math, a lazy press, and advocacy groups that “manufacture fear.”
The oil executive questioned the ability of climate models to predict the magnitude of the impact, and said that people would adapt to rising sea levels and changing climates that may force agricultural production to shift.
“We have spent our entire existence adapting. We’ll adapt,” he said. “It’s an engineering problem and there will be an engineering solution.”
Just collateral damage, folks. Nothin’ to worry about. Sent June 30:
Given that his company has been a generous funder of climate-change denialism over the past several decades, Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson’s recent claim that the public is “scientifically illiterate” sets a new standard in chutzpah. And given that his company has reaped enormous profits while abdicating its responsibility for hundreds of disastrous oil spills all over the world, his glib statement that the risks of drilling are “well-understood and can be mitigated” is breathtakingly arrogant.
But it is his insouciant assertion that humanity will “adapt” to climate change that is the most horrifying of all, as a moment’s consideration of the consequences of an “adaptation” transpiring in a geological instant rather than over many millennia will make clear. Breezily glossing over megadeaths and incalculable misery, Mr. Tillerson’s seemingly benign verb conceals a self-centered immorality that makes the robber barons of the gilded age seem like great humanitarians in comparison.
Evil.
Warren Senders
environment: assholes corporate irresponsibility denialists idiots media irresponsibility
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Year 3, Month 7, Day 10: Would I Lie To You?
Rex Tillerson is very sad. Nobody believes his reassurances. Poor baby.
NEW YORK (AP) — ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson says fears about climate change, drilling, and energy dependence are overblown.
In a speech Wednesday, Tillerson acknowledged that burning of fossil fuels is warming the planet, but said society will be able to adapt. The risks of oil and gas drilling are well understood and can be mitigated, he said. And dependence on other nations for oil is not a concern as long as access to supply is certain, he said.
Tillerson blamed a public that is ‘‘illiterate’’ in science and math, a ‘‘lazy’’ press, and advocacy groups that ‘‘manufacture fear’’ for energy misconceptions in a speech at the Council on Foreign Relations.
He highlighted that huge discoveries of oil and gas in North America have reversed a 20-year decline in U.S. oil production in recent years. He also trumpeted the global oil industry’s ability to deliver fuels during a two-year period of dramatic uncertainty in the Middle East, the world’s most important oil and gas-producing region.
It’s tough being one of the most powerful people on the planet. Sent June 29:
Poor Rex Tillerson. He’s the CEO of a fossil-fuel corporation that has reaped unimaginable profits from the exploitation of planetary resources over the past half-century, one of the most powerful economic agents in the world — and yet he just can’t seem to persuade his customers that he’s really got their best interests at heart. Given that Exxon has done its utmost to confuse the national discussion of energy and environmental policy by providing lavish funding to climate-change denialist organizations, Mr. Tillerson’s criticism of a science-ignorant public is disingenuous, to put it very mildly.
But why shouldn’t the American people trust Exxon’s word? Let us count the ways. This corporate leviathan has a long rap sheet ranging from disastrous spills and long-delayed compensation, to illegal extraction of oil from state and federal lands, to human-rights abuses in Indonesia and Columbia. In this context, Mr. Tillerson’s attempt to persuade us that climate change isn’t something to be worried about sounds anything but reassuring.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: denialists idiots rising sea levels timescale US Geological Survey
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Year 3, Month 7, Day 7: History Is A Bunk Bed
More on rising East coast seas, from the Andover (MA) Eagle-Tribune:
If you think there are flooding problems in the region now, just wait — it’s going to get a whole lot worse, according to a study released Sunday by the U.S. Geological Survey.
Scientists have found that our coastline is part of a unique, 600-mile-long “hot spot” along the Atlantic Coast where sea levels are rising at a significantly faster rate than the world as a whole — three to four times faster. The hot spot stretches down the Atlantic Coast from north of Boston to North Carolina.
“Flooding right now is an annoyance, but it will be more of an annoyance and bad enough that you’ll think twice about parking your car in the driveway if there’s a storm coming and it’s the spring tide,” said Peter Howd, a co-author on the study and a contracted oceanographer with the U.S. Geological Survey.
This letter was inspired by the comments (q.v.). Sent June 26:
When human society pays attention to time spans larger than an individual lifetime, that’s called “civilization.”
For a quick and dirty education in the problems inherent in short-term thinking, watch climate-change denialists’ reactions to the U.S. Geological Survey’s study showing drastic sea-level rises along the East coast. While a few may stubbornly cling to their repeatedly-debunked conspiracy theories (Al Gore’s gonna confiscate your SUV!), the majority will loudly assert that since the problems are predicted to happen over the next hundred years, it’s pointless to worry about them.
Climate change is a significant threat already, and it’s projected to get a lot worse within our lifetimes. Those who use cheap faux-populist rhetoric against the dedicated work of climate scientists undermine the civility essential to public discourse; those who would bequeath our posterity a ruined and inhospitable planet are choosing to opt out of the multi-millennium project of human civilization.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: denialists idiots Republican obstructionism rising ocean levels rising sea levels
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Year 3, Month 7, Day 6: Keep Your Eyes Wide
The Boston Globe:
As temperatures are projected to climb, polar ice to melt, and oceans to swell over the coming decades, Boston is likely to bear a disproportionate impact of rising sea levels, government scientists report in a new study.
The seas along the East Coast from North Carolina to New England are rising three to four times faster than the global average, and coastal cities, utilities, beaches, and wetlands are increasingly vulnerable to flooding, especially from storm surges, according to the US Geological Survey study published Sunday.
“Cities in the hot spot, like Norfolk, New York, and Boston, already experience damaging floods during relatively low-intensity storms,” said Asbury Sallenger, a Geological Survey oceanographer and lead author of the study in the journal Nature Climate Change. “Accelerated sea-level rise,” he said, will add to “the height that storm surges and breaking waves reach on the coast.”
Figured the times were ripe for a little bit of old Prophet Bob. Sent June 25:
The times they are indeed a’changin’. Climate-change denialists must be finding it difficult to cling to their bizarre conspiracy theories in the face of the latest reports from the U.S. Geological Survey, predicting that rising ocean levels will radically alter the East coast of the United States over the next few decades, a forecast entirely congruent with other scientific analyses of the effects from a melting Arctic ice cap.
The insurance industry’s changing its coverage model to account for damages caused by climate change; the American military’s developing new strategic protocols for a post-greenhouse-effect world; US intelligence agencies are trying to anticipate the geopolitical impact of global warming. These bastions of liberalism are all following Bob Dylan’s advice to “…admit that the waters around you have grown, and accept it that soon you’ll be drenched to the bone.”
When will our Senators and Congressmen “please heed the call”?
Warren Senders
environment: denialists idiots rising sea levels
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Year 3, Month 7, Day 3: Today Is The Tomorrow You Worried About Yesterday
The Appleton Post-Crescent (WI) has a shrill editorial from a chap named Howard Brown, titled, “Commentary: Climate change isn’t fictional.” Indeed:
Is it just me, or has it been a little warm around here lately? Or warmer earlier? The early and unusually mild spring here in Wisconsin may be nature’s way of reminding us that the clock is ticking on climate change and we need to take action before it’s too late.
While stationed in Kangerlussuac, Greenland, 50 years ago, I noted my airbase was 4 miles west of the Russell Glacier grinding down from the ice cap. Looking at today’s satellite images, this glacier has retreated to the east toward the ice cap, easily noted from the satellite. The retreat averages 1,000 feet per year, producing a torrent of melt water that flows down the fjord and to the sea.
Glacial retreat is one indicator that global warming is taking its toll. Today, in more populated areas of the earth, disappearing glaciers are responsible for drought, loss of irrigation water and less drinking water. As much as 54 cubic miles of ice disappear each year in Antarctica, 24 cubic miles per year in Greenland. As this ice melts, ocean levels rise and coastal regions flood.
Read the comments for the full flavor. SOS. Sent June 22:
When we listen to climate-change denialists, we hear it over and over again: while the planet’s climate is changing, there’s no reason to worry; it’s all happened before, and anyway, there’s no way humans’ greenhouse emissions could be involved.
Well, Earth’s climate has indeed been changing for billions of years. But in general, those changes have happened over many thousands of years, giving ecosystems a chance to adapt. Fossil evidence and the geological record strongly suggest that when an external event accelerated those slow transformations, the resulting climate change was catastrophic for many of the world’s inhabitants (65 million years ago, an asteroid hit the Earth — and the dinosaurs lost the world they’d lived in for eons). The overwhelming climatological consensus is that we stand on the brink of a similarly abrupt and equally devastating shift.
With our civilization now having transformed almost fifty percent of the planet’s surface, it’s increasingly apparent that humanity has inadvertently crafted its very own asteroid. If we wish to sustain our species over the tumultuous environmental disruptions promised for the next ten thousand years, we can no longer afford the luxury of denial. The dinosaurs probably thought they’d live forever, too.
Warren Senders