environment Politics: denialists economics extinction idiots Republicans
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Year 3, Month 2, Day 15: Problems Of Scale, As Usual
The bigger the political system, the less competent it is to address the problem. The Albany Times-Union:
ALBANY — Seven “hundred-year floods” have hit the Catskills during the last 15 years, and lobsters have grown so scarce in Long Island Sound that lobstermen have given up trying to make a living there.
As a result, it’s time for the humans to start figuring out how to protect the trout, lobsters and countless other species being challenged by climate change.
That’s the problem state and federal environmental officials and scientists are grappling with in the middle of a winter that been virtually snowless in much of New York.
A group gathered at the state Department of Environmental Conservation headquarters Thursday to work on a plan for protecting plant and animal life in the decades to come.
While political pundits may still be debating global warming or the impact of greenhouse gases, a broad consensus of scientists have agreed the climate is changing.
Extinction is bad for the bottom line. Sent Feb 10:
It’s good news that state and local governments are taking action to mitigate the expected effects of climate change. But it is shocking that the federal government remains paralyzed by ideological squabbling in the face of what is arguably the greatest threat human civilization has yet faced. Did I say “squabbling?” Perhaps that’s the wrong word, since all the name-calling, vituperation, and misinformation are coming from one side of the political spectrum.
If Republicans and their financial backers were to consider the implications of climate research objectively, several things would happen. First, they’d stop denying the factuality of global climate chaos, and start working actively to slow it down and to cope with its impacts. Second, they would recognize that preserving the planetary systems on which our culture depends is as important for market capitalists as it is for radical “tree-huggers,” for a profitable economy requires environmental stability to flourish.
Warren Senders
Education environment Politics: conspiracy theory denialists idiots Richard Hofstadter
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Year 3, Month 2, Day 13: Get A Brain! Morans!
Aw, jeez. These idiots again? Check it out. The NYT:
Across the country, activists with ties to the Tea Party are railing against all sorts of local and state efforts to control sprawl and conserve energy. They brand government action for things like expanding public transportation routes and preserving open space as part of a United Nations-led conspiracy to deny property rights and herd citizens toward cities.
They are showing up at planning meetings to denounce bike lanes on public streets and smart meters on home appliances — efforts they equate to a big-government blueprint against individual rights.
“Down the road, this data will be used against you,” warned one speaker at a recent Roanoke County, Va., Board of Supervisors meeting who turned out with dozens of people opposed to the county’s paying $1,200 in dues to a nonprofit that consults on sustainability issues.
Oy. What can you do with this kind of dreck? Sent February 7:
In the minds of Tea-Partiers, everything is evidence of a conspiracy. If enough people are riding bicycles that municipal governments incorporate bike lanes in street planning, that’s not simple good sense — it’s a conspiracy. If research suggests that informing people about their energy consumption decreases waste, that’s a conspiracy, too. If the accumulated evidence supporting the existence (and threat) of global climate change outweighs that compiled by deniers by a twenty-thousand-to-one ratio, that’s just proof that the scientists are in on it.
Richard Hofstadter’s analysis of the “paranoid style” in American politics — “…heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy” — has never seemed so accurate. Imagine the benefit to our country if these suspicious zealots could stop obsessing about a Socialist New World Order concealed in an innocuous UN memorandum about environmental responsibility, and instead turned their energy towards making a more cooperative, just, and sustainable society.
Warren Senders
environment: denialists media irresponsibility unpredictable weather events
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Year 3, Month 2, Day 12: Warmer Weather Means More Squirrels! Squirrel! Squirrel!
Papers everywhere are reporting on the wacky non-winter most of us have been, um, enjoying. Here’s an account from the Southeast Missourian:
In the Tot Lot, more than a few children horsed around in short sleeves. Families strolled around the lagoon. A laughing toddler — sans coat — chased after a disinterested dog.
A typical spring day at Capaha Park. Except it was February.
The temperature hit 65 degrees in Cape Girardeau on Thursday, setting a record high for Feb. 2, according to the National Weather Service at Paducah, Ky. The service, which has tracked temperatures locally since 1960, said Thursday’s temperature broke the record high of 62 degrees, which happened previously on Feb. 2 in 1964 and 1974.
“This is great,” said Jason Mulholland, who was at the park with his wife and two young sons. “You could almost have shorts on. If I was out running, I would have shorts on.”
February’s milder-than-usual start follows the fifth-warmest January in Cape Girardeau on record, weird weather that has caused the 17th warmest January in Washington, D.C., the third-warmest in Phoenix and the 13th warmest in Ann Arbor, Mich.
Nothin’ to see here, folks. Move along. Move along. Sent February 6:
When reporting on local weather weirdness, it’s essential to avoid any mention of broader regional, national and planetary patterns. The fact that Southeast Missouri’s winter has been several degrees warmer than usual is no reason for alarm. Nor should we be worried that in Massachusetts, the only significant blizzard this winter was in October, or that Yosemite National Park, normally blanketed, has remained essentially snow-free all winter, or that Texas’ ongoing drought has completely dried up portions of the Colorado river. Australia’s deepening flood crisis may have left thousands of people homeless, but that’s over there, not over here.
Really?
While no single weather event can be unequivocally linked to global climate change (science simply doesn’t work that way), climatologists have been telling us for years that the burgeoning greenhouse effect is going to disrupt weather patterns everywhere around the planet. Perhaps it’s time to pay attention to them.
Warren Senders
environment: denialists idiots media irresponsibility scientific consensus
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Year 3, Month 2, Day 10: We Don’t Do Long-Term. We Only Do Short-Term. Got It?
The Chicago Tribune writes about the epidemic of stupidity among TV weathertrons:
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.
But weather forecasters, many of whom see climate change as a natural, cyclical phenomenon, are split over whether they have a responsibility to educate their viewers on the link between human activity and the change in the Earth’s climates.
Only 19 percent of U.S. meteorologists saw human influences as the sole driver of climate change in a 2011 survey. And some, like the Weather Channel’s founder John Coleman are vocal in their opposition.
“It is the greatest scam in history,” wrote Coleman, one of the first meteorologists to publicly express doubts about climate change, on his blog in 2007. “I am amazed, appalled and highly offended by it. Global Warming; it is a SCAM.”
Jeebus, I hate these people. Sent February 4:
While there are still minor areas of uncertainty remaining in the scientific consensus on planetary climate change, it’s a fair bet that when television weather tycoon John Coleman calls global warming a “scam,” he is really describing his own work, not that of the world’s climatologists. The evidence corroborating humanity’s contribution to the greenhouse effect is overwhelming; as study after study adds to the collective understanding of climate scientists all over the world, the denialists’ position becomes increasingly untenable.
By advocating for improbable conspiracy theories and the views of fringe scientists, celebrity meteorologists undermine their own credibility. The fact that the denialist position is so common in the broadcast world simply demonstrates the corrosive power of big money’s influence in the media. Mr. Coleman’s term “scam” says more about the behavior of the fossil fuel industry and the info-tainment celebrities whose loyalty it has purchased than about scientific reality.
Warren Senders
Education environment Politics: assholes denialists idiots James Hansen reality-based community sapir-whorf hypothesis scientific consensus scientific method
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Year 3, Month 2, Day 9: There Is No Word For That In Our Language
John Monahan writes a nice piece in Modern Times Magazine (AZ) addressing climate change denial, with specific reference to the WSJ flap. The whole piece is well worth your attention.
Feb. 3, 2012 — What a crazy seven days it has been for the climate change debate. Scientists from both sides of the issue took to the Wall Street Journal late last week and early this week to opine on the merits of the issue and what should be done about it.
But that’s just putting it nicely. What really happened is one side said the other was wrong — knowingly in an attempt to hide the truth — in pursuit of riches.
To say it even more bluntly, each said the other was the ‘real’ greedy liar.
The most important bit is the part where he quotes James Hansen, who is, as usual, right:
“Public doubt about the science is not an accident. People profiting from business-as-usual fossil fuel use are waging a campaign to discredit the science. Their campaign is effective because the profiteers have learned how to manipulate democracies for their advantage,” Hansen said. “The scientific method requires objective analysis of all data, stating evidence pro and con, before reaching conclusions. This works well, indeed is necessary, for achieving success in science. But science is now pitted in public debate against the talk-show method, which consists of selective citation of anecdotal bits that support a predetermined position.”
Simply, Hansen is saying corporations are using the scientific method to bolster an argument that has little merit only because it serves their bottom line. He also places blame upon the mainstream media, calling their need for “balance” a means to validate bad science and support corporate positions.
“Today most media, even publicly-supported media, are pressured to balance every climate story with opinions of contrarians, climate change deniers, as if they had equal scientific credibility. Media are dependent on advertising revenue of the fossil fuel industry, and in some cases are owned by people with an interest in continuing business as usual. Fossil fuel profiteers can readily find a few percent of the scientific community to serve as mouthpieces — all scientists practice skepticism, and it is not hard to find some who are out of their area of expertise, who may enjoy being in the public eye, and who are limited in scientific insight and analytic ability,” Hansen wrote.
They have a 500-word limit; I took about 225 to try and tie all these phenomena together. Sent Feb 3:
Climate-change denial is part of a larger problem, one exemplified by the anonymous Bush official who told journalist Ron Suskind, “We’re an empire; we create our own reality,” and ridiculed those who lived in the “reality-based community.” Conservative politicians and electoral strategists appear to believe in a post-modern universe where measurable reality is just another kind of fiction. Examples of this are easy to spot.
The anti-evolution politicians whose claim that “science is just another religion” serves as a rationale for their attempts to introduce creationism into public school science curricula; the runup to the war in Iraq, in which facts were manipulated and cherry-picked to support President Bush’s martial agenda; the legislators in some Southern states who seek to have any mention of slavery simply removed from history books — the list goes on and on.
Climate change denial is by far the most damaging of these delusions. Human science has discovered and illuminated the laws of physics and chemistry, but that doesn’t mean that the “we make our own reality” crowd can apply wishful thinking to the greenhouse effect. Given enough time, American culture could recover from forced creationism, historical revisionism, and clueless warmongering — but if we fail to recognize the imperative need to address climate change, we’re not going to have the chance.
Warren Senders
atheism Education environment Politics: denialists scientific literacy scientific method
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Year 3, Month 2, Day 8: What He Was Doing In My Pajamas, I’ll Never Know
The Tuscaloosa News runs an editorial stating that “Climate Change Should Influence Politics”:
Azaleas are budding and daffodils can be found in full bloom along rural roads around West Alabama. Is that proof of global warming?
Hardly, but that doesn’t mean evidence of sustained, rapid climate change isn’t mounting.
Consider this: Nine of the 10 warmest years in the past century have occurred since the year 2000, according to the NASA Earth Observatory. More of the Arctic Sea is melting.
And now the U.S. Department of Agriculture has changed the map that helps gardeners decide when to plant flowers and which will grow well here. Tuscaloosa, which used to be grouped with much of northern Alabama, now falls in the zone with Mobile.
Even all that isn’t conclusive proof of global warming. No, but the case for climate change has convinced more than 97 percent of scientists actively publishing studies in the field of climatology.
They agree that not only is climate change real, but the rapid rise in temperatures around the world over the past few decades is due to human activity.
Yep. Sent Feb 2:
At the moment, it seems as though science is just about the only element in American public discourse that doesn’t influence politics. Presidential candidates vie with one another for the approval of conservative religious groups, not to mention the various deficit-fixated, abortion-fixated, gay-marriage-fixated ideological factions which have dominated the national conversation for years. Meanwhile, Republican legislators are working overtime to reduce the amount of actual science taught in our country’s science classes, and to reduce the government’s funding of actual scientists who are carrying out research projects crucial to our country’s future.
But has there never been a Presidential “science debate” or anything more than the most anodyne public statements from the candidates about the value of science in our lives — and that’s a tragedy, for scientific method is by far the most accurate and comprehensive way to find out what’s actually happening in the real world — and policies that aren’t reality-based are guaranteed to fail.
And nowhere is this more crucial than in the issue of climate change. The scientific ignorance of our political culture is a disaster in the making.
Warren Senders
environment: assholes capitalism climate science denialists idiots Wall Street Journal
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Year 3, Month 2, Day 6: Hats Back On, Gentlemen.
Behold! An idiot. Meet James “Smokey” Shott:
— — More bad news for environmental alarmists came last week when 16 more well-known and well-respected scientists signed on to a Wall Street Journal article titled “No Need to Panic About Global Warming: There’s no compelling scientific argument for drastic action to ‘decarbonize’ the world’s economy,” adding their names to a large and growing list of scientists opposing manmade climate change dogma.
This one was fun. Sent January 31:
“Smokey” Shott tells us that the established scientific foundation of global climate change has been dealt a terrible blow — a double blow, at that. How? First, he notes a piece just published in the Wall Street Journal criticizing the broad scientific consensus on climate change — and written by 16 (sixteen! count ’em!) scientists and engineers (almost none with actual climate science backgrounds). Omitted from his report is the fact that six of the Journal’s signatories have been linked to fossil-fuel interests, or that when 225 (two hundred and twenty-five! count ’em!) genuine climatologists submitted a paper providing scientific facts and analysis of the question, they were rejected out of hand by the WSJ (the paper was eventually published in Science Magazine).
And then Mr. Shott delivers what he clearly believes to be the coup de grace: an article from the UK’s Daily Mail, a paper notorious for its sensationalist, factually-challenged journalism. Quoting “fringe” scientists propounding a thoroughly-debunked “global cooling” hypothesis, the article has already attracted widespread derision in scientific circles.
Getting science from the WSJ is as silly as getting investment advice from a climatology journal. Getting science from the Daily Mail, on the other hand, is as silly as looking for celebrity gossip in the pages of “Global Biogeochemical Cycles.”
Warren Senders
environment Politics: denialists media irresponsibility sapir-whorf hypothesis
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Year 3, Month 2, Day 3: Take That, You Bow-Tied Carp-Faced Twerp.
The Washington Post wonders why people don’t use the words they used to use:
What happened to “climate change” and “global warming”?
The Earth is still getting hotter, but those terms have nearly disappeared from political vocabulary. Instead, they have been replaced by less charged and more consumer-friendly expressions for the warming planet.
President Obama’s State of the Union address Tuesday was a prime example of this shift. The president said “climate change” just once — compared with zero mentions in the 2011 address and two in 2010. When he did utter the phrase, it was merely to acknowledge the polarized atmosphere in Washington, saying, “The differences in this chamber may be too deep right now to pass a comprehensive plan to fight climate change.” By contrast, Obama used the terms “energy” and “clean energy” nearly two dozen times.
It’s pretty rich, coming from the paper that’s given George Will a podium for fatuous bloviation for decades. Sent January 28:
“Climate change” was a fortuitous choice of words for Republican strategist Frank Luntz. While he was primarily attempting to dilute public concern about global warming (and the concomitant policy changes that would have endangered the profit margins of Big Oil and Big Coal), his term’s a better descriptor. In the face of mountains of evidence, the reality of climate change is irrefutable. Even “denialists” have shifted their arguments; they now assert that while the climate is indeed changing, human beings have nothing to do with it.
It’s obvious: our politicians and media outlets have failed to address a long-term existential threat. After exploiting virulent American anti-intellectualism for years, there is now no way Republican lawmakers can engage in science-based policy-making without risking electoral reprisals. But in the face of the planetary transformations wrought by the burgeoning greenhouse effect, ignorance is a costly and immoral luxury we can no longer afford.
Warren Senders
Uncategorized: denialists idiots media irresponsibility
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Year 3, Month 1, Day 31: Just The Facts, Ma’am.
The Milford-Orange Bulletin (CT) runs an article detailing the work of a new group, http://forecastthefacts.org/ , which has called out a local TV weatherdude on his denialist stance:
As if broadcast meteorologists didn’t have enough pressure to get their forecasts right during the season of ice and snow, an advocacy group is slamming them for denying climate change. And one of the perceived offenders is Connecticut’s Geoff Fox of WTIC (Fox Connecticut), who in turn calls the people behind the group “zealots.”
{snip}
The group says that’s because the majority of meteorologists don’t believe in it. The online group (forecastthefacts.org) asks the public to sign on to the campaign to hold weathercasters accountable. It has a petition urging the American Meteorological Society to take a position on the facts of climate change and make it known to members.
Fox, a longtime forecaster in the Hartford-New Haven market who also does a science segment for WTIC, said Wednesday, “I’m not a denier, I’m a skeptic. The people who are advocating for global warming treat it like it’s a religion. So it’s like blasphemy (to question it).”
Good for forecastthefacts.org. This one was fun and easy to write. Sent January 25:
When it comes to climate change, there’s one absolutely sure bet: when someone says, “I’m not a denier, I’m a skeptic,” it means he’s a denier. Skepticism is a philosophical stance in which claims without verifiable evidence are rejected in favor of those which can be confirmed. Genuine climate skeptics are extremely rare, because the plethora of available evidence has convinced almost all of them that rising atmospheric CO2 levels are triggering a greenhouse effect, with potentially catastrophic consequences for human civilization. Climate deniers, by contrast, are a dime a dozen. They can be identified by their fondness for unsupported categorical statements, such as Geoff Fox’s, “the people who are advocating for global warming treat it like it’s a religion.”
The comparison is upside-down. Those who ignore the sound science of climate change are rejecting robust but disturbing evidence, in favor of debunked but comforting platitudes. In other words, deniers.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes denialists idiots Republican obstructionism scientific literacy
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Year 3, Month 1, Day 23: Who’s Shrill?
The Washington Post’s Michael Gerson:
The attempt by Newt Gingrich to cover his tracks on climate change has been one of the shabbier little episodes of the 2012 presidential campaign. His forthcoming sequel to “A Contract with the Earth” was to feature a chapter by Katharine Hayhoe, a young professor of atmospheric sciences at Texas Tech University. Hayhoe is a scientist, an evangelical Christian and a moderate voice warning of climate disruption.
Then conservative media got wind. Rush Limbaugh dismissed Hayhoe as a “climate babe.” An Iowa voter pressed Gingrich on the topic. “That’s not going to be in the book,” he responded. “We told them to kill it.” Hayhoe learned this news just as she was passing under the bus.
A theory about the role of carbon dioxide in climate patterns has joined abortion and gay marriage as a culture war controversy. Climate scientists are attacked as greenshirts and watermelons (green on the outside, red on the inside). Skeptics are derided as flat-earthers. Reputations are assaulted and the e-mails of scientists hacked.
Heh. Indeed. Also. Sent January 18:
Conservative politicization of science has borne bitter fruit in the intensifying battle over climate change. It’s worth recognizing that the GOP has been at the center of countless attempts to marginalize expertise for more than fifty years, starting with the McCarthy-era purges of China specialists from the State Department — a electorally expedient move, but one which created a policy vacuum with disastrous repercussions for our later experience in Vietnam. The only experts Republican politicians appear to respect are their political strategists, whose advice on winning elections is often extremely sound.
The problem with climate change is that the laws of physics and chemistry have no ideology; mounting atmospheric CO2 levels and increasing worldwide temperatures won’t vanish when presidential aspirants deny their existence, or ascribe the troublesome measurements to political bias among scientists. A hint to Republicans: if you stop denying scientific reality, scientists may eventually take you seriously again.
Warren Senders