environment Politics: Canada corporate irresponsibility denialists Durban Conference Republican obstructionism
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Year 2, Month 12, Day 21: One Good Letter Deserves Another
The Malaysia Star runs an opinion piece by Guenter Gruber, the German Ambassador:
Changes in the climate destroy the basis on which human life subsists; drought, for instance, leads to shortages in food and water. Rising sea levels are already threatening the territories of small island states and vast stretches of coastland.
Weather patterns are changing. In Thailand, we have just seen severe flooding. Last year, the south of Malaysia was unusually dry. Now, 40% more rainfall than usual is expected.
Climate change is the definitive challenge of the 21st century. However, the international community has to admit that it has not, as things stand, stepped up to this challenge.
Global carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions went up again in 2010, global temperatures are already 0.8°C higher than before industrialisation, and sea levels rose twice as fast between 1993 and 2003 as they did in the preceding decade; icebergs and glaciers are melting at record speeds.
It’s a generic piece, and it gets a generic letter. Sent December 17:
There is no doubt: the climate crisis is not only the gravest threat our species has yet faced, but one which our existing political and economic systems cannot address competently. Just look at the parlous state of American politics, in which oil industry influence permeates the system to such an extent that one of the country’s two dominant political parties is reaping electoral rewards for a complete denial of scientific reality. Similarly, Canada ignores the danger posed to its own Arctic territories by pulling out of the Kyoto treaty and fostering climate-change denial in its own government.
Ultimately, of course, the laws of physics and chemistry will win; they always do, since they are unaffected by public opinion. The responsibility for preventing a runaway greenhouse effect necessarily rests with the world’s industrialized nations, for they are the ones whose CO2 emissions have pushed the planet to the brink of catastrophe.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: corporate irresponsibility denialists economics media irresponsibility
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Year 2, Month 12, Day 19: Hey, I Just Heard They’re Selling iPads For $19.95!
Mike Tidwell analyzes the gloom in the Baltimore Sun, with an op-ed called “The hottest issue: Climate change dwarfs other problems.” Not much to add to this:
An optimist might want to raise a glass as 2011 winds down. U.S. troops will be out of Iraq by New Year’s Eve. The global AIDS pandemic is ebbing. And the U.S. unemployment rate dropped by nearly half a percent in November.
But an optimist would have to totally ignore one really important number to maintain the cheer. That number is 11. It was tossed out by scientists and economists at the international climate talks that just ended in Durban, South Africa.
If we human beings continue to torch fossil fuels — oil, coal, natural gas — without any serious limitations in the next few decades, our planet could warm a full 11 degrees Fahrenheit by 2100. That was the message from the highly respected International Energy Agency in a report just released in Durban.
How much is 11 degrees of warming? For help, let’s inventory the warming we’ve already seen on our planet. Already, the Arctic Ocean has lost 40 percent of its ice mass since the 1970s. Already, wildfires in the American West destroy six times more forest land per year than 40 years ago. Already, the biggest hurricanes come more frequently, and the city of Virginia Beach is starting to plan a methodical retreat from its shoreline due to sea-level rise. Already, Allstate insurance company won’t issue any new homeowners policies in coastal Maryland and Virginia because of stronger storms.
And how much warming did it take to trigger all of the above? How much to trigger the extreme floods and droughts and heat waves from China to Australia to Texas that scientists say are connected to climate change?
Answer: 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit.
I’m gloomy today. Wonder why? Sent December 15:
The climate-transformed planet of 2100 offers, as Mike Tidwell states, little reason for optimism. Further gloom is warranted by the fact that a plurality of Americans have been egregiously misled by the industry-fueled message of triumphant consumerism and climate-change denial prevalent in our media. In the fantasy land inhabited by conservative denialists, the notion of climate change as a liberal conspiracy to enact a one-world government (forced re-education camps for SUV owners!) is more likely than the greenhouse effect, a scientific theory which has been verified repeatedly over the years since its discovery almost two hundred years ago.
In a political culture obsessed with short-term gain and empty symbolic gestures, the systemic changes necessary for the survival of our species (and the countless others sharing our planet) will never be discussed, let alone implemented. Too risky; too costly; too boring. Let’s go to the mall instead — there’s a sale!
Warren Senders
environment Politics: denialists idiots Republican obstructionism
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Year 2, Month 12, Day 18: You Know What Your Problem Is? Your Problem Is That You Don’t Play In The Middle Of The Beat.
The National Post (Canada) offers a forum to a not-completely-insane conservative named Ken Silber, who lives in a dreamworld where GOP voters can be persuaded by appeals to reality:
I have drafted a speech that may help some current or future GOP candidate achieve all of the above. Any candidate who wishes to use the following material is more than welcome:
My fellow Republicans,
I am a conservative and I believe that facing up to reality is essential to conservatism. Today I outline how I will lead our nation in addressing a difficult and complex – but very real – problem. That problem is climate change, and specifically the global warming that is being caused by humanity’s use of fossil fuels such as coal and oil.
There is ample evidence that global warming is happening and that human activities are the key factor causing it. Scientists overwhelmingly agree the temperature rise is real. Moreover, they have examined possible factors ranging from volcanoes, to the sun’s fluctuations to cosmic rays that bombard the Earth from space. There is a strong scientific consensus that fossil fuels are the main cause – as pumping car-bon into our atmosphere creates a greenhouse effect that traps the sun’s energy and heats the Earth.
Science never gives us absolute certainty, but the real uncertainties here are about the future. We do not know how fast temperatures will rise over decades, or the full effects this will have on our world. We do know that the risks are great – for example, large sections of American farmland becoming unusable, coastal cities flooding, 100-plus-degree heat waves, massive wildfires and other extreme events becoming common.
We must address those risks but not by weighing our economy down with taxes and regulations. On the contrary, a dynamic free-market economy is crucial to limiting the risks and managing the effects that do occur. My plan does not involve picking winners among energy companies and technologies with subsidized loans. Nor is it a capand-trade scheme that includes handing out credits to the politically connected. And for that matter, I note that President Obama never actually managed to bring a climate-change plan to a vote in Congress.
My plan is straightforward and honest. We will raise taxes on carbon emissions across the board, while cutting taxes on payrolls and incomes. That means more money in people’s pockets, and more incentives for industry to develop cleaner and safer energy supplies.
Wow. What can you say to that? Here’s what I sent them on December 14:
Ken Silber’s almost-but-not-quite advocacy of a fee-and-dividend approach to reducing carbon emissions is a rare manifestation of sanity in the bizarre world of conservative science denial. The problem isn’t with taxing CO2 — an eminently workable idea that has won the approval of experts from all sides of the ideological spectrum — but with the notion that there are enough conservatives left who actually care what scientists and economists have to say.
For decades, conservatives have employed the language of anti-intellectual American exceptionalism: only liberals pay attention to eggheads. This approach, refined through many electoral generations, has succeeded in producing an entire political demographic that regards measurable reality (all those boring statistics) as the exclusive province of liberals — that is, anathema.
Just as his party’s rank-and-file reject humans’ role in global warming, Mr. Silber cannot accept conservative ideology’s role in making a political environment hostile to science and factuality.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: denialists Durban Conference idiots
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Year 2, Month 12, Day 13: First Off, I Didn’t Borrow It. Second, It Was Broken When You Gave It To Me. And Third, I Fixed It Before I Brought It Back.
New York’s Murdoch outlet runs a fairly even-handed report on the Durban Debacle:
World climate talks are on the brink of failure as several of the largest polluters — including the United States — could block attempts to save the only treaty on governing global warming.
The 194-nation UN climate conference in Durban, South Africa, is scheduled to end later Friday after two weeks of tense negotiations.
Under the proposed deal, the European Union would extend its pledge to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions under the 1997 Kyoto Protocol.
In exchange, other countries would have to promise to negotiate another deal that would include legally binding obligations for every nation — not just for the wealthy, industrialized countries who initially approved the Kyoto Protocol.
The European Union has also maintained it will not renew its pledge, which expires next year, without agreement to begin work to compel all countries to curb their emissions, including the U.S., China and India.
The comments, as usual on Murdoch-owned outlets, are a great outpouring of stupid. Sent December 9:
The scientific evidence confirming the rapid warming of Earth’s atmosphere is growing faster than the glaciers are shrinking. In consequence, the paranoids who once theorized that global temperature measurements were part of a giant liberal conspiracy have retreated; their new position is that while the planet is indeed getting hotter, humans aren’t responsible.
Once the nay-sayers absorb the massive amounts of evidence for human causes of climate change, they’ll assert that climate chaos can only be solved by “the power of the free market,” presumably including tax cuts for the wealthiest 1%.
Let’s review: first they claimed it wasn’t happening; now they claim humans didn’t cause it. The denialists were wrong then, they’re wrong now, and they’ll be wrong in the future. So why are they still determining American environmental and energy policy? The US should lead the world in coping with climate change, not stand in the way of progress.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: analogies denialists Durban Conference scientific consensus
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Year 2, Month 12, Day 1: Maybe We Could Get A Carbon Patch?
This sounds depressingly familiar. NYT:
WASHINGTON — With intensifying climate disasters and global economic turmoil as the backdrop, delegates from 194 nations gather in Durban, South Africa, this week to try to advance, if only incrementally, the world’s response to dangerous climate change.
To those who have followed the negotiations of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change over their nearly 20-year history, the conflicts and controversies to be taken up in Durban are monotonously familiar — the differing obligations of industrialized and developing nations, the question of who will pay to help poor nations adapt, the urgency of protecting tropical forests, the need to develop and deploy clean energy technology rapidly.
I used the cancer analogy yesterday, and I’m using it again today. Sent November 27:
The United States, one of the world’s biggest emitters of greenhouse gases, is acting like a five-pack-a-day man trying to wish away a negative biopsy. Scientists the world over, with increasing urgency, are saying that genuine action on climate change must be taken soon to avoid a metastasizing catastrophe — and America’s politicians are equivocating, because…well, because they’re scared.
Like someone who’s just come out of the oncologist’s office, they’re scared of change, scared of an uncertain and dangerous future, and scared of what it’s all likely to cost. And just as a heavy smoker unequivocally “needs” a cigarette to stay calm while he contemplates his diagnosis, the industrialized carbon-burning nations “need” another hit of carbon energy before they give it up.
We know it’s bad for us, that it’s very expensive, that it has drastic long-term health consequences. And we swear to quit, soon. Maybe next year. We promise!
Warren Senders
environment Politics: Andreas Schmittner denialists IPCC scientific methodology
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Year 2, Month 11, Day 30: I Feel A Tingle…
Look, everybody! Actual, unambiguous good news:
A new study in the journal Science suggests that the global climate may be less sensitive to carbon dioxide fluctuations than predicted by the most extreme projections, and maybe slightly less than the best estimates of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Andreas Schmittner, a climate scientist at Oregon State University in Corvallis, Ore., and lead author on the new study, notes that, while man-made global warming is happening and tiny changes in global average temperatures can have huge and deleterious effects, the atmosphere may not be as sensitive to carbon dioxide change as has been reported.
“We used paleoclimate data to look at climate sensitivity to CO2 doubling in the atmosphere, and we are coming up with a somewhat lower value,” says Schmittner.
How long before James Inhofe suddenly discovers that science is cool and groovy? Sent November 26:
The authors of the newly released study on climate sensitivity very carefully note that while their conclusions suggest lower values than the IPCC’s more extreme projections, this does not diminish either the reality of global climate change or the importance of a robust policy on greenhouse emissions. But since the precise, reality-based language of scientists is incomprehensible to politicians desperately seeking excuses to avoid confronting inconvenient choices in an election season, we can anticipate a chorus of conservative legislators eagerly ignoring their cautionary words.
Andreas Schmittner’s historically grounded examination of paleoclimate data should not be used to bolster the usual denialist shibboleths. Employing these hopeful findings as an argument for inaction on the gravest existential threat our species has yet faced is the twisted logic of a cancer patient who, when told that the progress of the disease is slower than doctors’ worst-case projections, resumes smoking five packs a day.
Warren Senders
environment: denialists International Energy Agency IPCC NASA New York NOAA
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Year 2, Month 11, Day 25: It Looks Like It’s Climbing Clear Up To The Sky
The Gannett News Service for New York’s Lower Hudson Valley is called Lohud.com; they run an article about the study of climate change’s impact on New York state:
If you lost power after the recent nor’easter or struggled with flooding from Tropical Storm Irene, gear up. There’s more to come.
Scientists at some prestigious New York universities say the recent bizarre weather may be a part of a trend in the coming decades as the state faces an outsize effect of climate change because of its northern latitude and geology.
“It’s certainly an excellent example of what is to come,” said Klaus Jacob, a senior research scientist at Columbia University’s Palisades-based Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, one of several scientists who authored a study on the impact of climate change on New York state.
“It has been relatively rare till now. What will be different is that it will be more frequent. Therefore the impact will be more severe,” Jacob said.
This letter was a little longer than 150 words; I didn’t have time to pare it down due to various domestic exigencies. Sent Nov. 21:
The Energy Research and Development Authority study on climate change’s likely impact on New York State is just one of several recently released documents to discuss the shape of our future in a post-greenhouse-effect world. Along with the globally relevant work of NASA, the International Energy Agency, and the IPCC, regionally-focused climatologists have helped build a pile of scientific evidence far higher than your average denialist’s head. The picture they paint of the coming century is not a pretty one.
Those “once-in-a-lifetime” storms are going to be coming once or twice a decade; maybe even more often. More droughts, heat waves, shattered infrastructure, disrupted agriculture — our children and grandchildren may not be able to forgive us our decades of apathy.
While it will take many centuries for excess atmospheric CO2 to dissipate even if we stopped burning fossil fuel tomorrow, there is no longer any time for temporizing if we are to avoid catastrophic outcomes. Our politicians must stop protecting the oil industry’s profits, and bend their efforts towards protecting all of us from the consequences of climaticide.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: denialists idiots IPCC Rajendra Pachauri
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Year 2, Month 11, Day 24: Who’s That Knocking At My Door?
More on the IPCC report, this time from America’s McNewspaper:
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, obtained in draft form by USA TODAY, stresses that expanding cities and populations worldwide, also raise the odds of severe impacts from weather disasters.
“Unprecedented extreme weather and climate events” look likely in coming decades as a result of a changing climate, says the draft report. The final version was released early today by IPCC chief Rajendra Pachauri at a meeting hosted by report sponsors, the World Meteorological Organization and United Nations Environment Programme, in Kampala, Uganda.
Nothin’ to see here, folks. Move along. Move along.
Sent November 20:
Climate-change denialists are sounding increasingly desperate these days, as the volume of evidence and analysis mounts ever higher. Coming hard on the heels of a recently-issued study from the International Energy Agency (which gives us about five years to change our fossil-fuelish ways or risk irreversible damage to the Earth’s climate) is the IPCC report, which offers a sobering preview of what that irreversible damage is likely to look like.
Enthusiastic fans of Armageddon will enjoy the IPCC’s predictions, which include droughts, wildfires, unpredictable storms of unprecedented severity, massive disruption of agriculture and infrastructure, and political instability, often in areas of the world that are nuclear-armed and dangerous.
It’s too bad the greenhouse effect doesn’t come with a scary-sounding name that politicians could invoke to mobilize our nation to action, for all that excess atmospheric CO2 is sure to do far more damage than any terrorist group ever could.
Warren Senders
environment: assholes capitalism denialists greed idiots IPCC
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Year 2, Month 11, Day 22: If You’re So Rich, How Come You Ain’t Smart?
The Wall Street Journal runs a piece on the latest IPCC report, which is chock full of hideous news:
KAMPALA Uganda—Climate change is leading to at least some cases of more extreme weather events across the globe, according to a report released on Friday by a United Nations-led scientific panel on the subject.
The scientific link between climate change and extreme weather isn’t uniformly clear, according to the report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a body established in 1988 to assist global policy makers with climate change.
As usual with WSJ articles, the comments on this piece are a critical mass of stupidity. What’s with these people? Sent November 18, from Logan Airport while waiting for my plane:
You’d think that once a critical mass of evidence has accumulated, climate-change denialists would have no choice but to change their minds. Indeed, it’s interesting to ask self-styled “skeptics” what evidence would suffice to convince them that human-caused climate change is genuinely dangerous. Many say that nothing will alter their opinions — in which case they cannot be “skeptics.” Some require proof so definitive as to be unachievable — in which case they misunderstand both scientific consensus and the nature of the situation.
Even before the most recent IPCC report, evidence supporting anthropogenic global warming far exceeded the critical threshold required for unilateral action in other policy areas. The “Cheney doctrine” held that even a 1% chance of Iraqi WMDs was sufficient to justify an invasion, a level of likelihood acknowledged by even the stubbornest denialists. Our only remaining excuse for inaction is a toxic combination of cupidity and willful ignorance.
Warren Senders
environment: cheer up! denialists extinction nacred ladies Santa Claus is coming to town
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Year 2, Month 11, Day 21: Listen Up, All You Swine!
The Washington Post reports on yet another study, this one addressing a much earlier climate change event that effectively wiped the Earthly slate pretty clean — about 252 million years ago last Thursday.
Ick:
WASHINGTON — During the world’s biggest mass extinction, Earth seemed pretty close to a description of hell — fiery, smoky and explosive — created by massive volcanic eruptions, according to research dug up in China.
In geologic terms, it was surprisingly quick, and it may provide a scary lesson about climate change for our future, authors of the new study say. It was the third of five extinctions in world history, occurring even before dinosaurs roamed.
This extinction killed off more than three-quarters of life on the planet in an event scientists have called the Great Dying. The Chinese dig sites provide new dates and details of the event, which occurred at the end of the Permian Era. It happened 252 million years ago and may have lasted less than 100,000 years, far shorter than scientists had thought, according to the study published Thursday in the journal Science.
I managed to create a nice metaphor. Enjoy it while you can. Sent November 17:
One of the arguments most commonly hurled against those of us who are justifiably concerned about life in a post-greenhouse-effect future is that, after all, “Climate change has happened previously in Earth’s history.”
Indeed. But such rapid climatic transformations are traumatic, to put it mildly. Just because climate change has happened before is no reason to welcome it back; last time, it appears to have extinguished the overwhelming majority of life on the planet.
A related argument is that climate change “…happens all the time.” As with many denialist shibboleths, a tiny kernel of logic is thickly coated with misleading rhetorical nacre. By analogy, the fact that death is universal among living things is no justification for genocide.
The scientific evidence is overwhelming: human beings are causing climate change. If our species is to avoid what biologists coyly term an “evolutionary bottleneck,” we need to change our ways without delay.
Warren Senders