atheism environment Politics: assholes denialists idiots Republicans
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Year 3, Month 3, Day 28: Inhofe Is INHERENTLY Unconstitutional
The Bradenton Herald (FL) runs the same piece on Inhofe to which I responded yesterday.
The real hoax is the claim that a scientific debate exists about the reality of climate change. It is promoted by organizations that benefit from our current energy choices and groups that are opposed to any regulation whatsoever, even the most sensible safeguards that help protect our children’s health.
The hoaxers claim climate scientists are “in it for the money,” a ludicrous proposition as pointed out by Jon Koomey. Dr. Koomey used his expertise in mathematical modeling to study the economic impacts of climate change for two decades at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. If Koomey and his colleagues were in it for the money they would have taken their analytic expertise to Wall Street long ago, where their salaries would have been five to 10 times what they can make working for the government.
The hyped rhetoric around this issue is an attempt to convince Americans that accepting the scientific evidence will require taking actions inimical to our shared values of liberty, freedom, community and entrepreneurship.
But one need look no further than the studies of America’s military and intelligence officials who understand how disruptive human-caused climate change could be to our nation’s interests both at home and abroad (in 2009 the CIA established a Center on Climate Change and National Security). Putting our head in the sand about climate change is a sure way to undermine American liberty, economic prosperity and national security. Of all the alterative paths before us to address this problem, doing nothing to reduce the threat of serious climate change is a dangerous and expensive option.
There’s a climate change hoax all right, but it is Sen. Inhofe and his science-denying associates who are trying to do the fooling. We are all going to pay a price if we don’t call-out their campaign of misinformation and get down to the real work before us. The question now is what will be the cost of inaction to our health and our pocketbooks? The longer the hoaxers can prevent serious action, the higher the price we will all pay.
The guy is a disgrace to idiots everywhere. Sent March 22 (80 degrees outside):
Oklahoma senator James Inhofe is egregiously ignorant about basic science. His approach to climate change is equal parts stout denial and hippie-punching; apparently mocking environmentalists and rejecting the existence of the burgeoning crisis is enough to make the problem go away. Inhofe recently stated (on MSNBC) that he used to accept the conclusions of climatologists until he figured out how much it would cost to address the problem, demonstrating that the power of wishful thinking trumps reality every time — in the U.S. Senate, anyway.
Anywhere else? Ignoring your cardiologist’s warning doesn’t mean an automatic heart attack, and driving drunk doesn’t always mean a crash — but your insurance company and the arresting officer know: reality wins.
Mr. Inhofe’s thinking is so steeped in the apocalyptic wishful thinking of Biblical end-times theology that his involvement in climate policy should probably be forbidden under the Establishment clause of the Constitution.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes denialists idiots Republican obstructionism
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Year 3, Month 3, Day 27: More Like This, Please
The Kansas City Star offers a platform to some scientists who have a few words about James Inhofe:
We are scientists who agree with critics such as Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., that there is a climate change “hoax” being perpetrated on the American people.
We just don’t agree on what the hoax is and who is being fooled.
Sen. Inhofe and his associates want us to believe that the science of climate change is the contrived “hoax.” Their claims cannot withstand even the most cursory scrutiny. Does this “hoax” date back to 1896, when Nobel Laureate Svante Arrhenius presented his findings that human activities releasing carbon dioxide to the atmosphere could change Earth’s climate? Did it start when scientists Charles Keeling and Roger Revelle demonstrated in the 1950s that a large part of the carbon dioxide released from the burning of coal, oil and gas was remaining in the atmosphere because the oceans couldn’t absorb it fast enough? Did an evil cabal of “warmists” trick a science advisory panel into warning President Lyndon Johnson in 1965 of the dangers of adding greenhouses gases to the atmosphere?
In 2009, the National Academies of Science of the world’s major industrialized nations (including China, India and Brazil) issued an unprecedented joint statement on the reality of climate change and the need for immediate action. Do those who claim climate change is a hoax expect us to believe this was a put on by an international bunch of con men with doctoral degrees? The U.S. Evangelical Environmental Network tells us that global warming is one of the major challenges of our time, and Pope Benedict XVI has called for coordinated global action to address dangers of climate change – have they too joined the conspiracy?
Of course not.
Always fun to mock one of the biggest idiots in American politics, which is really saying a lot, these days. Sent March 21:
Senator Inhofe recently admitted on national television that he once accepted the scientific consensus on global warming — until he learned how much it would cost to deal with it, at which point he became the go-to guy for climate denial. The idea that ignoring a costly problem will make it disappear is bizarre, to say the least, but entirely typical of much twenty-first-century American politics. The Oklahoma senator has certainly made it pay; he’s handsomely funded by extractive industries apprehensive over the prospect of shrinking profit margins in a sustainable-energy economy.
Mr. Inhofe’s recipe for environmental and energy politics? Equal parts of big oil’s obscene greed and the apocalyptic imaginings of dominionist Christian sects, liberally flavored with hippie-punching and wacky conspiracy theories.
Although addressing climate change now will save trillions of dollars in the future, the Senator’s position has hardened. Don’t burden him with facts; his mind’s made up.
Warren Senders
atheism Education environment Politics: denialists media irresponsibility philosophy
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Year 3, Month 3, Day 25: Voices In The (Vanishing) Wilderness
The Seattle Times runs a dynamite column by William Geer on whether environmental policy should be dictated by polls and media bullshit:
SHOULD elected officials and policymakers let public-opinion polls decide our nation’s future response to climate change? Indisputably, no.
The roller-coaster path of public acceptance on climate change charted by political polls is frustrating to the pragmatists among us. With nearly 98 percent of the world’s climate scientists saying climate change already is affecting the natural world, effective action requires the knowledge we gain from focused investigations and sound science — not political polls.
We should solicit the views of those not subject to political debates — fish and wildlife.
Biologists do that through field investigations on the distribution and abundance of species in habitats that meet their life-cycle requirements. If one habitat no longer will support a species, the species must move to another habitat that does. It cannot debate habitability in the public square and it votes by adapting, migrating or dying.
Read the comments on the article if you wanna get seriously depressed. Sent March 19:
Before we can begin to tackle the interdependent crises presented by global climate change, there’s a question that needs a response.
“What’s in it for me?”
As long as we remain selfishly focused exclusively on our momentary desires, we will fail in our responsibilities to our descendants, and all the life that shares our common DNA. Some are selfish through love of Mammon; their lust for continued profits blinds them to the destruction their exploitation leaves behind. Some are selfish through religion; craving immortality, they rank their own souls above the well-being of the web of Earthly life. For some, it’s political power; for others, the chance at transient fame. Perhaps saddest of all are those whose selfishness is born of apathy; having abandoned any hope of influencing the process, they drift along, watching unhappily as their world is gutted by malefactors of great wealth.
We’re not going to make progress against the epiphenomena of a runaway greenhouse effect until we can start asking, “What’s in it for us?”
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes cowering before the apocalypse denialists idiots
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Year 3, Month 3, Day 24: Dangerous Lack Of Minds
The Springfield, MI News-Leader runs another version of the fact-check on Rick Santorum:
Santorum’s “tell that to a plant” crack begs the question — how dangerous can carbon dioxide be? Too much is definitely a bad thing. Exposure to high levels of CO2 can cause “headaches, dizziness, restlessness, a tingling or pins or needles feeling, difficulty breathing, sweating, tiredness, increased heart rate, elevated blood pressure, coma, asphyxia to convulsions,” warns the Wisconsin Department of Health, “and even frostbite if exposed to dry ice,” which is solid CO2. Poor air circulation in buildings and high carbon dioxide in soil seeping into basements can lead to high levels of the gas.
Plants do, in fact, absorb CO2. But even plants might not like too much of it. A 2008 study conducted at the University of Illinois found that instead of increasing organic matter in soil, higher carbon dioxide levels actually led to less organic matter. Increased CO2 also may limit plants’ ability to cool the air. A 2010 article in Science Daily said that a study by researchers at the Carnegie Institution for Science found that carbon dioxide’s effect on vegetation was causing some of the earth’s warming.
Santorum is entitled to his own opinion, of course. But voters shouldn’t be misled into thinking carbon dioxide isn’t a problem, or that climate scientists don’t overwhelmingly agree that global warming is real and human activities are making it worse.
So I wrote another version of my “Rick Santorum is a dangerous idiot” letter. Sent March 18:
Rick Santorum’s words on climate change demonstrate what happens when American anti-intellectualism gets carried to ludicrous extremes. The former Pennsylvania senator no longer has any need for facts, for the worldview held by his core constituency is entirely conditioned by ideology. No reality need apply.
These hard-line denialist conservatives are eager to believe any rhetoric that reinforces their preconceptions, which makes them easy marks. Let’s look at those preconceptions briefly, shall we? On the one hand, Santorum’s followers are addicted to the convenience of cheap fossil energy; on the other hand, they are fervently awaiting the Biblical apocalypse. In short, they’re a demographic group for whom conservation and long-term thinking are not just pointless, but actively evil.
If Mr. Santorum believes his own words, then he’s just another mark — as gullible as his followers. If he doesn’t, he’s a con artist. Either way, he has no business leading America.
Warren Senders
atheism Education environment Politics: armageddon cowering before the apocalypse denialists idiots theology
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Year 3, Month 3, Day 21: Only When The Last Tree Has Been Cut Down…
The Tuscon Sentinel notes the frothy mixture of god-bothering and just plain dumb that makes up Senator Santorum’s public statements:
Rick Santorum calls global warming a “hoax.” If he were a scientist, he would be in a small minority.
“The dangers of carbon dioxide? Tell that to a plant, how dangerous carbon dioxide is,” Santorum said at the Gulf Coast Energy Summit in Biloxi, Miss., on March 12. He made similar comments in early February in Colorado Springs, Colo., saying that global warming was a “hoax” and that “man-made global warming” and proposed remedies were “bogus.”
Santorum isn’t the only climate change skeptic, but skeptics are rare among scientists who actually study the climate. A paper published in 2010 by the National Academy of Sciences found that 97 percent to 98 percent of climate researchers “most actively publishing in the field” agreed that climate change was occurring.
To my knowledge, no journalist has yet asked Santorum about his views on apocalypse. It would be a very interesting question…although we already know the answer. Sent March 15:
Just when we thought the 2012 election couldn’t get any more idiotic, we’re treated to Rick Santorum’s recent remarks on climate change. Judging from the former Pennsylvania senator’s eager rejection of scientific research, his backers must be terribly nostalgic for the good old days…when the sun revolved around the earth.
Mr. Santorum’s constituents are ready to ignore the science of global warming for two reasons. First, because they’ve been lied to and manipulated by a group of cynical, profit-driven corporate entities; second, because their collective eagerness for a Biblical Armageddon renders irrelevant any notion of planetary long-term thinking. Ronald Reagan’s Interior Secretary, James Watt, famously remarked, “We don’t have to protect the environment — the Second Coming is at hand.” Mr. Santorum’s theologically-driven ignorance of basic science shows that he’s cut from the same cloth.
Any politician this anxious for apocalypse should never be entrusted with the levers of power.
Warren Senders
environment: denialists Great Lakes ice loss idiots
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Year 3, Month 3, Day 18: Mother Superior Jumped The Gun
The Albert Lea Tribune (MN) runs an AP story on ice loss in the Great Lakes:
DULUTH — A published report says the amount of ice covering the Great Lakes has declined about 71 percent over the past 40 years, a drop that the lead author partly attributes to climate change.
The report published last month by the American Meteorological Society said only about 5 percent of the Great Lakes surface froze over this year.
“There was a significant downward trend in ice coverage from 1973 to the present for all of the lakes,” according to the study, which appeared in the society’s Journal of Climate.
Researchers determined ice coverage by scanning U.S. Coast Guard reports and satellite images taken from 1973 to 2010. They found that ice coverage was down 88 percent on Lake Ontario and fell 79 percent on Lake Superior. However, the ice in Lake St. Clair, which is between Lakes Erie and Huron, diminished just 37 percent.
The study’s lead researcher is Jia Wang of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration lab in Ann Arbor, Mich. He attributed the decline to several factors, including broad climate change and smaller cyclical climate patterns like El Nino and La Nina.
Sent March 12:
The decline of Great Lakes ice is a local manifestation of a global phenomenon. Everywhere around the planet, people are noticing that, climatically speaking, things ain’t what they used to be. Regions that depend on glacial ice melt for their water supplies are facing increasingly arid futures, while the residents of island countries are making plans to evacuate their homelands entirely as rising seas turn sovereign nations into historical footnotes.
But America is unique among nations in the number of its citizens who deny the existence of climate change entirely. No mountain of evidence can convince Rush Limbaugh’s followers that the greenhouse effect’s reality is going to disrupt their lives in unimaginably complex ways.
One can sympathize with their reluctance to accept the facts of global warming (who looks forward to planetary catastrophe?), but future generations on the shores of an ice-free Lake Ontario will not remember the denialists kindly.
Warren Senders
Education environment: denialists Heartland Institute Peter Gleick
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Year 3, Month 3, Day 17: I Like Gleick
More on Gleick, this time reprinted from the WaPo in a suburban Chicago paper, the Daily Herald:
Everybody talks about the weather, as Mark Twain is famously quoted as saying, but nobody does anything about it.Many climate researchers are no longer following that adage, noted Michael McPhaden, president of the American Geophysical Union. “Scientists today, they don’t just want to talk about it. They want to do something about it,” he said in an interview. “We’re the trustees of information which, in many ways, is of critical benefit to society.”
Some researchers are taking on a greater advocacy role to confront what many of them consider an existential crisis. But this strategy carries inherent risks, since scientists’ influence stems from the public perception that their credibility is beyond reproach.
That’s why many in the scientific community recoiled when Peter Gleick, a respected hydrologist, admitted he had tricked the Heartland Institute, a free-market think tank that questions whether human activity contributes to global warming. “Integrity is the source of every power and influence we have as scientists,” said Peter Frumhoff, director of science and policy at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “We don’t have the power to make laws, or run the economy.”
Thanks to DK diarist jamess, whose piece gave me the frame for this letter, sent March 11:
Given Heartland Institute’s previous disregard for the privacy of other people’s communications, it should be surprising to hear their howls of outrage after their defenses were penetrated and their internal documents released to the public. It was just two years ago that Heartland published illegally-obtained emails from the University of East Anglia — setting off “Climategate,” a non-scandal that occupied media attention and confused public discussion before being resolved and forgotten.
Let’s compare “Denialgate” with “Climategate,” shall we? First: while the hacker who stole the East Anglia documents has never come forward, we know who got Heartland’s documents: Peter Gleick (who’s paying a significant professional penalty for his deed). Second: multiple independent investigations confirmed the innocence and the integrity of the UEA climatologists… but to believe that any such study of Heartland’s work on climate change would similarly vindicate either their science or their ethics would be breathtakingly naive.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: corporate irresponsibility denialists Kiribati rising sea levels
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Year 3, Month 3, Day 16: Octopus’ Garden Edition
Reprinting the Kiribati story in the New York Daily News:
Tong has been considering other unusual options to combat climate change, including shoring up some Kiribati islands with sea walls and even building a floating island. He said this week that the latter option would likely prove too expensive, but that he hopes reinforcing some islands will ensure that Kiribati continues to exist in some form even in a worst-case scenario.
“We’re trying to secure the future of our people,” he said. “The international community needs to be addressing this problem more.”
Tong said he hopes that the Fiji land will represent just one of several options for relocating people. He pointed out that the land is three times larger than the atoll of Tarawa, currently home to more than half of Kiribati’s population.
Although like much of the Pacific, Kiribati is poor — its annual GDP per person is just $1,600 — Tong said the country has plenty of foreign reserves to draw from for the land purchase. The money, he said, comes from phosphate mining on the archipelago in the 1970s.
I’d love to see a floating island. Sent March 10:
No doubt it’s hard for Americans to be overly concerned with the impending disappearance of the Pacific nation of Kiribati. With a quarter the population of Staten Island, the tiny state is to all intents and purposes statistically nonexistent in the larger sphere of international relations.
But the plight of Kiribati deserves our attention and concern. As a poor country with a negligible carbon footprint, it has contributed nothing to the accelerating consumption of fossil fuels that now endangers its existence; as a nation on the front lines of climate change, it offers us a preview of the dangerous times ahead.
While neighboring Fiji may be able to supply the necessary acreage for a hundred thousand climate refugees to rebuild their lives, the tragedy of a homeland lost beneath the rising sea is not something we in the industrialized world should ignore. There are no climate-change denialists in Kiribati.
Warren Senders
environment: birds denialists species loss
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Year 3, Month 3, Day 13: The Pelicans In The Coal Mine
The Marin Independent Journal (CA) runs an article on a study detailing the threat posed by climate change to a great many local bird species:
Several bird species in Marin and around the state are at risk because of climate change as the sea level rises and affects habitat, according to a new study.
The brown pelican, western snowy plover and California clapper rail are among the species in Marin that could be affected by changing temperatures, states the report issued by PRBO Conservation Science and the Department of Fish and Game. The study was published last week in the journal PLoS ONE.
The study found that wetland species are more vulnerable than other groups of birds because they are in specialized habitats along bay areas. Those habitats will be threatened as ice caps melt and the sea level rises, which could affect the California black rail, seen along Tomales Bay.
Written in a Boston restaurant close to New England Conservatory; I’m on my way to sing a raga-ized adaptation of “Barbara Allen” at an NEC concert. Sent March 7:
Marin county’s shorebirds are a microcosm of the countless varieties of Earthly life that are threatened by the effects of global warming. Tragically, human beings often seem unable to grasp the gravity of the situation. And no wonder, for what’s needed is a form of wisdom that is in very short supply. Few of us can imagine anything outside our own regional environments, or beyond the timespan of our own limited lives — and climate change is both larger and longer than anything we recognize.
It’s useful to keep this in mind when reading the derisive comments of climate-change denialists, who are increasingly grasping at straws to maintain their locally-based illusions, while the scientific evidence confirming the greenhouse effect’s human origin accumulates. They may use the argument from incredulity (an inability to imagine any human actions affecting the entire planet), the argument from incomprehension (an inadequate grasp of basic science), or the argument from selfishness (unwillingness to give up a convenient and comfortable lifestyle). All the snide put-downs of Al Gore, attempts to resurrect the long-debunked “climategate” non-scandal, cherry-picked temperature measurements, irrelevancies and red herrings — all of these represent failures of imagination, understanding, or morality.
If losing a few species of bird to a changing climate seems no great tragedy, it is because we have chosen to ignore that what is happening in Marin is happening everywhere around the world. Whether we know it or not, our lives are impoverished thereby.
Warren Senders
Education environment: denialists extreme weather idiots
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Year 3, Month 3, Day 12: And In Related News…
This letter was prompted by the comments on this article in the (upstate NY) TImes-Herald-Record:
A new report by an environmental advocacy group shows our region has been particularly vulnerable to extreme weather events — driven by what it believes is climate change.
The report, compiled by Environment New York Research and Policy Center, shows our nook of the Northeast has had a high number of federal disaster declarations since 2006.
Numbers from the Federal Emergency Management Agency show Ulster County has had six weather-related federal disaster declarations in the last five years, while Orange County has had five and Sullivan County, four.
Related Stories“Catskill, Hudson Valley, and Mohawk River Valley residents have endured extreme weather beyond the usual cold winters during the last five years,” David VanLuven, director of the Center, said in a statement.
Our region stands out for the amount of federal disaster declarations in the past five years.
I figured I’d write a guide for wanna-be “skeptics.” Sent March 6:
Here’s how to simulate a climate-change denialist’s response to the report linking New York state’s increasingly extreme weather to global warming.
First, assert that the climate has always changed over time, so why worry? Second, note that since the report was sponsored by an environmental group its contents are necessarily suspect. Third, point out that scientists predicted global cooling in the 1970s, so why should their opinions be trusted now? Fourth, claim that the hacked emails from the University of East Anglia show climatologists can’t be trusted. Fifth, raise the specter of a socialist New World Order apparently operated for the enrichment of dastardly tree-huggers. And last but not least, make fun of Al Gore.
Leaving aside the last two absurdities, each of these arguments is simply rebutted. Multiple inquiries absolved the “climategate” scientists from any wrongdoing while confirming their results; a substantial majority of climatologists were in fact predicting global warming in the 1970s; most reports on the environment come from environmental groups (surprise!). Finally, nobody suggests Earth’s climate has never changed — just that if climatic shifts that historically lasted a hundred thousand years are now taking a hundred, that’s not a good sign.
It’s easy.
Warren Senders