environment: Conservatives denialists idiots Rocky Mountains Water
by Warren
leave a comment
Meta
SiteMeter
Brighter Planet
Year 2, Month 6, Day 27: We Used To Use These On Mountainsides.
The Christian Science Monitor addresses the study of decreasing snow mass in the Rockies:
A blend of natural climate swings and global warming appears to be driving a long-term decline in snowpack along the Rocky Mountains rarely seen in the past 800 years.
In the process, and perhaps more important for the future, the dominant driver behind available snowpack along the continental spine appears to be shifting from precipitation to temperature, according to a study published Friday in the journal Science.
If this shift holds, the study’s team adds, it could represent a change that would accelerate the loss of the West’s natural freshwater reservoirs – if long-term average temperatures continue to rise with increasing levels of industrial greenhouse gases, as most climate scientists are convinced they will.
Ski the Rocky Mountains while you can, kids.
Sent June 12:
There aren’t a great many surprises in the new study of the Rocky Mountains’ shrinking snowpack. Rather, we find evidence that supports hundreds of other studies in the confirmation of a troubling planetary trend. The Earth is warming; human beings are causing it with emissions of greenhouse gases; it’s going to affect ecosystems all around the world in complex and disruptive ways. The Rocky Mountains are one such area, and their decreasing snow mass is going to have significant effects on the water usage patterns of the entire American West. It is a tragedy in the making, exacerbated by an ideologically-based refusal of “conservatives” to acknowledge scientific reality and its implications. In fact, self-styled conservatives are the real radicals when it comes to climate: by advocating a rapid transformation of the Earth’s atmosphere to unexplored extremes, they’re endangering all of us. That’s not conservatism, that’s reckless insanity.
Warren Senders
environment: denialists idiots scientific consensus
by Warren
leave a comment
Meta
SiteMeter
Brighter Planet
Year 2, Month 6, Day 26: Bliss.
A twerp named Bronwyn Eyre writes a generic denialist screed in the June 10 Saskatoon Star-Phoenix:
I know it’s futile to complain about the weather. But are weather researchers fair game?
Last week, it was reported a University of Regina project, led by Prof. Dave Sauchyn, was being awarded $1.25 million from the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) to study the role of climate change in natural disasters on the Prairies.
“Climate is a pattern. One event is weather,” Sauchyn said. “But if you get a bunch of these (weather incidents) from across the Prairies and it happens again and again, we say, ‘Something is going on.’ And it’s probably climate change.”
Sounds a bit like witchcraft reasoning to me.
Look: If there’s a clear pattern of global warming – sorry, “climate change” – that can be proven without skullduggery or obfuscation, most of us will be willing to do what it takes to rectify things. But increasingly, it seems, “experts” are claiming wacky weather simply to advance an agenda.
Sigh. Against stupidity, the gods themselves contend in vain.
Sent June 11:
Bronwyn Eyre’s flip dismissal of climate change relies on facile generalities when an outright misstatement of fact isn’t available. For example, the so-called “climategate” scandal has been debunked, and the researchers’ facts have been vindicated. Repeatedly. When she calls for the “hard, empirical evidence,” what does she mean? A stack of temperature readings and atmospheric CO2 levels, minus the expertise required to correlate and synthesize the data? If I’m really sick and need some tests, do I know how to interpret the results? No; without medical training, I require professional expertise. Climatologists are the professional specialists; it is destructive folly to reject their advice just because it conflicts with one’s ideological preconceptions. Arguing with a climate-change denialist like Ms. Eyre is eerily similar to arguing with a young-earth creationist who dismisses the “hard, empirical evidence” for Darwinian evolution; her glib insouciance is not genuine skepticism, but scientific ignorance and innumeracy.
Warren Senders
environment: denialists idiots scientific consensus scientific method tree rings Water
by Warren
leave a comment
Meta
SiteMeter
Brighter Planet
Year 2, Month 6, Day 25: Look! Bipartisanship!
The June 10 Seattle Times reports on yet another study confirming what we all know:
They looked at the rings of thousands of ancient trees in the mountains above the most important rivers in the West.
What they found may influence how water gets used from Arizona to Canada — and particularly in the Columbia River basin.
Despite odd years like this one, researchers have long reported declines in the mountain snows that power Western rivers. But on Thursday a group of scientists said they now also know this: Those declines are virtually unprecedented throughout most of the last millennium.
Scientists from the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) and University of Washington measured tree-ring growth from forests that included 800-year-old trees. They learned that snowpack reductions in the late 20th and early 21st centuries were unlike any other period dating to at least the year 1200, according to new research published in the journal Science.
It struck me that these results aren’t surprising to either side of the “debate” any more, and I thought I’d address that surprising unanimity of perception in this letter, sent June 10:
Of course the newest study from the U.S. Geological Survey confirms the existence of climate change, and reinforces the predictions of a complex and catastrophic future for our country and the world! Up to this point, both climate-change denialists and environmental realists are in agreement. But the realists expect to see these results because many decades worth of research on climate questions already supports the core hypothesis: climate change is human-caused, and it’s going to have severe impacts on all of our lives for generations to come. Denialists, by contrast, expect these results because they believe scientific research is part of a liberal campaign to take away their SUVs and force them to change their lightbulbs, a laughable conspiracy theory boosted by corporations afraid of lessening their quarterly returns. Sense and survival on the one hand — paranoia and profit on the other. The choice is clear.
Warren Senders
environment: American West Colorado River denialists idiots Water
by Warren
leave a comment
Meta
SiteMeter
Brighter Planet
Year 2, Month 6, Day 21: I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles
The US Bureau of Reclamation has a report predicting…guess what? The Grand Junction Sentinel (CO) has more:
Climate change may result in about a 9 percent drop in average Colorado River flows over the next half-century, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation says in a new report.
Drought frequency and duration are expected to increase under a climate-change model, one of four different water supply scenarios used by the agency in an ongoing study of supply and demand in the Colorado River Basin.
The report says projected changes in the basin include continued warming in the basin, along with snowpack decreases as more precipitation falls as rain.
This let me find out about the nature of a “Class Six” rapid. Scary stuff:
Grade 6: Class 6 rapids are considered to be so dangerous as to be effectively unnavigable on a reliably safe basis. Rafters can expect to encounter substantial whitewater, huge waves, huge rocks and hazards, and/or substantial drops that will impart severe impacts beyond the structural capacities and impact ratings of almost all rafting equipment. Traversing a Class 6 rapid has a dramatically increased likelihood of ending in serious injury or death compared to lesser classes. (Skill level: successful completion of a Class 6 rapid without serious injury or death is widely considered to be a matter of great luck or extreme skill)WIKI
Sent June 7:
The history of the American West could be written from the perspective of rivers, aquifers and wells, for water shortages have triggered innumerable social upheavals and economic disruptions over the past few centuries. To willfully ignore scientific warnings of scientists about climate change’s impact on the Colorado River is to face grave dangers unprepared. And yet many members of our political and media systems are doing just that. By embracing spurious conspiracy theories (Light-Bulb Police! Compulsory Bike Paths!) while rejecting the carefully prepared evidence of experts, climate denialists set the stage for global disasters of terrifying proportions.
Climatologists’ predictions have been coming true with alarming regularity over the past several decades; their principal errors are invariably those of underestimating the magnitude of the problem. Climate denialists’ disregard of the overwhelming scientific consensus is as socially irresponsible as a drunk fratboy’s attempt to run Class Six rapids in an inner tube.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: corporatism denialists floods refugees Republicans
by Warren
leave a comment
Meta
SiteMeter
Brighter Planet
Year 2, Month 6, Day 20: Lie Back And Think Of An Island Nation
The Seattle Post-Intelligencer runs an AP piece on the reality of climate refugees. Yow:
OSLO, Norway (AP) — About 42 million people were forced to flee their homes because of natural disasters around the world in 2010, more than double the number during the previous year, experts said Monday.
One reason for the increase in the figure could be climate change, and the international community should be doing more to contain it, the experts said.
The Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre said the increase from 17 million displaced people in 2009 was mainly due to the impact of “mega-disasters” such as the massive floods in China and Pakistan and the earthquakes in Chile and Haiti.
This letter is part of my ongoing “total capitulation to the forces of evil” theme. Sent June 6:
At some point in the not-too-distant future, the climate-change denialists are going to change their tune. As the atmosphere warms it’ll hold more moisture, which means more precipitation: snow, rain, sleet, hail. More extreme weather events will mean more climate refugees; as people’s homes and regional economies are destroyed, they’ll have to move elsewhere. And the GOP, the engine of climate denial, will be faced with the consequences of its anti-science policies: more refugees crossing borders, more emergencies requiring intervention, more jobs lost and economies undermined. But what changes denialists’ minds will be the realization on the part of their corporate sponsors that the multiple crises emerging from a runaway greenhouse effect offer enormous opportunities for graft, corruption and profiteering. If offering a license to steal is the only way to get the world’s largest corporations to bring all their resources to bear on climate change, I’m all for it.
Warren Senders
environment: anthropocene denialists United Nations
by Warren
leave a comment
Meta
SiteMeter
Brighter Planet
Year 2, Month 6, Day 19: Bad Earth Rising
The Boise Weekly runs a little squib on the UN Climate Change Conference and all the bad news its delegates are confronting:
When delegates from about 180 countries begin meeting tomorrow at a major global energy conference, they’ll be met with a sobering bit of news: The world’s greenhouse gas emissions are hitting record highs and global warming continues to rise.
The new report issued today by the International Energy Agency indicating high fossil fuel emissions is just one of several studies expected to be released this week at the session in Bonn, Germany. This week’s meeting, dubbed a “framework convention,” is in advance of the annual United Nations conference on global warming, which will be held at the end of the year in South Africa.
Yup. Sent June 5:
The world’s industrialized nations have inadvertently set in motion a cascade of climatic events which will affect not only all of humanity, but all forms of life on Earth. The accumulated carbon resources of millions of years are now being burned and reintroduced into the atmosphere with incredible speed; previous “climate change” events tended to take place over spans of millennia — still rapid in geological time, but long enough to allow adaptive evolution a chance. The climatic transformation of the Anthropocene, by contrast, looks like it’s happening in a frame of centuries — the geological equivalent of hitting a wall at 100 mph. The delegates to the U.N. Climate Change Conference have their work cut out for them; they must develop strategies for coping with unprecedented planetary phenomena, while combating a level of ignorance and denialism in the world’s media and political systems that makes effective action essentially impossible. Uh-oh.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes denialists idiots Mitt Romney Republicans
by Warren
leave a comment
Meta
SiteMeter
Brighter Planet
Year 2, Month 6, Day 17: King of Hearts
Mitt Romney acknowledges the existence of climate change. Gosh. The NY Daily News is all a-flutter:
Mitt Romney, the newest Republican to declare himself a candidate for President, sounded suspiciously like a Democrat when he said Friday that global warming is real.
“I don’t speak for the scientific community, of course,” Romney said at a Town Hall-type meeting in New Hampshire. “But I believe the world’s getting warmer.”
Romney then added, “And number two, I believe that humans contribute to that.”
That’s heresy in many GOP circles – and a position the other Republican candidates have not taken in public.
Damned if I know what to think about this. I just used it as the hook for a standard Republicans-are-idiots screed. Sent June 3:
It’s testimony to the weirdness of American presidential politics that a perfectly reasonable statement from a Republican contender is viewed as an unforgivable deviation from the party line. The cries of outrage over Mitt Romney’s words on global climate change are coming from the GOP’s mainstream, which has now completely rejected actual science in favor of increasingly improbable conspiracy theories involving Al Gore and compulsory re-education camps for SUV drivers. The few remaining conservatives who are prepared to acknowledge the overwhelming scientific consensus on the human causes of global warming have been relegated to their party’s “lunatic fringe,” which must be an unusual experience for them. While Mr. Romney’s words confirm that he’s not completely off-the-wall, in an electoral environment which values wackiness over factuality, that won’t work in his favor. Someday Republicans will acknowledge the laws of physics — but it’s not going to happen before the 2012 election. Unfortunately.
Warren Senders
environment: assholes denialists idiots
by Warren
leave a comment
Meta
SiteMeter
Brighter Planet
Year 2, Month 6, Day 15: My Home-Town Paper
The Boston Globe employs a hack buffoon named Jeff Jacoby as its token conservative asshole. And true to form, he’s an ignorant jackass:
THE MAY 21 apocalypse foretold by the fundamentalist minister Harold Camping never materialized, but end-of-the-world doomsaying goes on as usual among the global warmists.
If you really want the full effect, go and read it. My nervous system can no longer stand the strain. Sent June 1:
After reading his latest attempt to dismiss the worldwide scientific consensus on global climate change (a genuine threat of enormous significance), I have a simple question about Jeff Jacoby’s predictive skills. How often has he been right? About Iraq? Gay marriage? The environment? Examining his writings confirms that for decades, he’s been consistently wrong on just about everything. Why, then, should his opinions on matters of science be given any credibility whatsoever?
Although I lack a comfortable sinecure as the Globe’s token conservative columnist, I too would like to make a prediction: the climate is going to go miserably haywire just as climatologists are forecasting, and when Mr. Jacoby eventually does acknowledge the inescapable reality of climate change, he’ll advocate free-market solutions to the greenhouse effect’s destructive consequences — preferably involving tax cuts for billionaires and oil companies. And he’ll be wrong. Why mess up a perfect record?
Warren Senders
Uncategorized: assholes denialists florida idiots Rick Scott
by Warren
leave a comment
Meta
SiteMeter
Brighter Planet
Year 2, Month 6, Day 13: The Florida Land Bust
The Saint Petersburg Times has an excellent editorial citing Chicago’s greening programs as worthwhile models for Floridian cities. Governor Rick Scott, of course, is a typical denialist (and a crook, too!). Poor Florida — soon to be submerged:
As the New York Times recently reported, in 2006 then-Mayor Richard M. Daley embraced climatologist predictions the city was warming at such an alarming pace that by the end of this century Chicago could be facing as many as 72 days a year with temperatures in the 90s, along with increasing precipitation. So Chicago has embarked on a massive green initiative with increased tree plantings, environmentally sensitive building efforts and improved reclaimed water systems. And what of Florida, perhaps the most ecologically sensitive state in the union? For starters, there is Gov. Rick Scott, who doesn’t believe — despite proof to the contrary from the scientific community — that global warming even exists. As sea levels have risen, Tallahassee continues to whistle past the environmental graveyard, abolishing the Florida Energy and Climate Commission and even attempting to repeal the Florida Climate Protection Act on the dubious and misinformed logic it is no longer needed. While Chicago acknowledges global warming and develops forward-thinking strategies, Florida’s leaders ignore scientific reality even as the seas slowly and steadily erode the peninsula.
Good stuff. It’s always enjoyable to mock the twisted thinking of denialists. Too bad they’re for real. Sent May 30:
As the evidence for global climate change piles up ever higher, it would seem that conservative “skeptics” would eventually be won over to the side of science-based policy. To be sure, this does happen occasionally. But in general, this is not the way the denialist mind works. If past history is any guide, a far more likely response will be intensified advocacy of increasingly improbable and complex conspiracy theories. Al Gore heading an international cabal of climate scientists? Check. IPCC Director Rajendra Pachauri secretly planning a One-World Government, complete with mandatory re-education camps for SUV drivers? Check. The ninety-seven percent of the world’s climate experts who agree on the human causes of global warming and the terrifying threats it poses are, in the denialist mind, more likely to be avaricious hypocrites out to make a quick buck than conscientious scientists reporting their findings to the world. Projection, anyone?
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes denialists idiots Republican obstructionism
by Warren
leave a comment
Meta
SiteMeter
Brighter Planet
Year 2, Month 6, Day 12: Pay No Attention To The Man Behind The Curtain
The Austin Statesman runs an AP article on the sudden rash of Republican presidential wannabes jettisoning their previous “well, maybe” positions on climate change, the better to appeal to their knuckle-dragging base:
WASHINGTON — One thing that Tim Pawlenty, Jon Huntsman, Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney have in common: These GOP presidential contenders are running away from their past positions on global warming .
All four have stepped back from previous stances on the issue, either apologizing outright or softening what they said earlier. And those who haven’t fully recanted are under pressure to do so.
It’s an indicator of a shift on the issue among conservative Republicans, who have an outsize influence in the party’s presidential primary elections. Over the past few years, Gallup polling has shown a decline in the share of Americans saying that global warming’s effects have already begun — from a high of 61 percent in 2008 to 49 percent in March. . In 2008, 50 percent of conservatives said they believed global warming already is having effects; that figure dropped to 30 percent this year. By contrast, among liberals and moderates there’s been little movement, and broad majorities say warming is having an impact now.
These people are a clear and present danger to all of us.
Sent May 30:
Republican readiness to abandon any vestige of fact-based policy on climate change is unsurprising; these politicians have without exception declared their preferential allegiance to the short-term profitability of their sponsors in the fossil fuel industry. It’s too bad, for the conservative “base” badly needs to hear some plain talk about the reality of global warming and its implications for this country and the world. While tea partiers eagerly imagine the existential terrors of Sharia law, gay marriage, and universal health care, the genuine threat posed by increasing greenhouse gases is ignored, misunderstood and ridiculed. The facts are in: if the evidence for Iraqi WMD’s was as robust as that for human-caused climate change, we’d have found loose nukes on sale in the bazaars of Baghdad. But no GOP primary candidate dares to acknowledge this inconvenient reality. Our descendants will have harsh words for these willfully ignorant hypocrites and their enablers.
Warren Senders